STRATA

STRATA by James Moore

When a massive sinkhole swallows part of Lower Manhattan, emergency drones reveal the impossible: beneath modern New York lies another city — alive, crowded, and locked in the year 1976.

Civil engineer Mikey Maguire, a specialist in underground infrastructure, is recruited to join the first official descent into what scientists soon call the Strata: a vast vertical world of buried New Yorks, each layer exactly twenty-five years further back in time.

Below 2001 Manhattan, the Twin Towers still stand.
Below 1976, the city burns in fiscal crisis and graffiti-covered subways.

Below 1951, Cold War paranoia simmers beneath polished postwar optimism.
Deeper still, skyscrapers shrink into brick, then dirt roads, then colonial outposts, then forest.

The further down you go, the younger the world becomes.

But these are not ruins.

Each layer is a fully functioning reality whose inhabitants have no knowledge of the surface above — or of the countless people who have fallen into their world across centuries.

When Mikey discovers evidence that his long-missing brother passed through multiple layers years earlier, the mission shifts from scientific exploration to desperate pursuit. As his team descends through increasingly unstable eras, they uncover a hidden vertical civilization living between the layers, a secret society that has guarded the Strata for generations, and an illegal underground city where immigrants from dozens of historical periods coexist in secret.

Yet the deeper they travel, the more dangerous the descent becomes.

Time itself begins to resist them.

Memories of the modern world start to fade.

Their bodies age out of sync with reality.

And beneath the oldest human settlements, Mikey learns the terrifying truth:

The Strata were never natural geological formations.

They were built.

Not to preserve history.

But to contain it.

Because somewhere below the first cities, below the first civilizations, below even the first human footprints…

something older is waiting.

And New York may only be the entrance.