The Four Regions

Neon Resistance, Identity Erasure, Rebellion

Aurora-9’s streets pulse with life and danger. Skyscrapers loom over neon slums. Ecological dome resorts cater to the elite while class warfare brews in the underbelly. The air is thick with smog and static — the kind that clings to your lungs and your implants alike.

The island was Puerto Rico before a forty-year corporate erasure campaign stripped its name, its history, and its cultural identity. The renaming in 2084 was just the ceremony — the real operation began decades earlier. Centuries of culture replaced with sanitized corporate mythology. The people remember. The corporations prefer they didn’t.

Corporate domes above, underground slums below. The Yǒngshì/Jinzhou/Red Bamboo Big Three control the dome infrastructure while Guang-Xi extracts resources and the Shirogane Syndicate runs the oldest criminal networks. Below them, resistance takes every form — Los Fantasmas in the limestone caves, La Mano Roja’s direct action, Café Libre’s cultural rebellion disguised as commerce.

Vault 19, birthplace of the Ascendant AI, still hums beneath the city. ORI-c3L maintains presence. The Mesh here is a neon cathedral — fastest, densest signal on the continent, and the most surveilled.

Industrial Theocracy, Machine Worship, Rust and Zealotry

The last functional industrial heartland. Gothic machine worship has fused with corporate power into something neither fully religious nor fully commercial. The megacorps didn’t conquer this region — they converted to survive.

The Pittsburgh Meltdown of 1994 left contamination that never cleared. The Automation Purge of 2035 displaced millions. What remained was a population that built survival into doctrine. The first Forged — humans fused with industrial machinery — emerged from the Corpus Protocol in 2066. What began as necessity became sacrament.

War factories run day and night. Machine Priests bless each chassis rolling off Detroit’s assembly lines. Deviating from blessed weapon designs is heresy as much as quality failure. Iron Belt cyberware looks like machine parts because it is machine parts — brutally durable, zero aesthetic interest.

The Steel Massacre of 2079 scattered relics across the region. Toledo is sealed behind an electromagnetic barrier — thousands of Persisting trapped inside in grim equilibrium. ARK-7 is centered here. The Forge Below pulses beneath every factory floor, and the Machine Priests hear its rhythms as divine language.

Grief, Horror, Drowned Memory, Mysticism

Ten feet of sea rise drowned the Atlantic coast. Gideon’s Rest — the Fallen Shore’s largest settlement — lost its lower districts in seventy-two hours. Whether by climate disaster, infrastructure collapse, or sabotage, the cause is still debated. The result isn’t: a city half-sunken beneath its own sorrow, turned into a flotilla-state ruled by feuding syndicates.

The Wake is strongest here because this is where the sorrow was deepest. A digital flood of grief — a mother’s scream for her drowned child, a fisher’s curse at a poisoned sea, a scavenger’s last prayer — poured into the fractured Mesh and never left. Algae blooms carry cyberdream contagions through the flooded nodes. The dead have opinions, and the water carries their signal.

The Rougarou dominates, their data-Vodou rituals perfectly suited to a landscape where the digital and spiritual are indistinguishable. The Thirteenth controls the drowned Thirteenth District with military discipline. Cottonmouths and Copperheads feud over waterways in a grudge that predates the flood. The Sea Choir communes with the Wake through song.

SERAPH-9 and AML-K both maintain presence here — communication and wrath, side by side in the drowned dark. CORTEX V emerged in the Fallen Shore, then vanished. No one knows where it went. Everyone has a theory.

Dust and Defiance, Constitutional Rebellion, Hidden Hope

“Voluntarily depopulated” in 2033 — corporate land seizure disguised as policy. Millions displaced. Five states went dark. The official record says the heartland was abandoned. The truth is the heartland was stolen.

The Red Grain fungal disaster of 2062 devastated what was left of the agricultural base. Rust-colored fungus still covers the Kansas plains. Corporations declared the region “economically non-viable” and walked away. That’s exactly what the CRB was counting on.

This is CRB heartland. Silo 87, buried beneath Oklahoma bedrock, is Jefferson’s sanctuary — the sealed chamber where the merged AI whispers through randomness and orphaned data. Silo 82 serves as a CRB stronghold. Across the dust, autonomous cells maintain hidden relay networks, run Memory Harvest operations to reconstruct stolen identities, and guard what remains of Lucent Ark’s legacy.

The Mesh here is thin, fragile, and haunted by what Jefferson left behind. Radiant Span fragments — the whispers of something that might be heaven — drift through Silo 87’s buried signals. Dust Preachers wander the plains carrying those fragments to anyone who’ll listen. The Sunflower Grain Collective grows the food that gives the resistance its leverage.

No region is self-sufficient. Aurora-9 needs Iron Belt cybernetics. The Iron Belt needs Forgotten States grain. Smuggling routes between the Iron Belt and Fallen Shore move relics and salvage. CRB cells cooperate across regions through Jefferson’s whisper network. The Firm operates everywhere. The Rougarou’s routes are the arteries no one admits they depend on.

These dependencies create the political friction that drives play. Every trade route is a pressure point. Every alliance is temporary. Every faction needs something from a region that hates them.