District 2
Then, if you’re lucky, rich or smart, you reach District 2. The district is divided into gated communities, with private security manning all the ways in. Each visitor and resident is logged, tagged and tracked, and if you don’t belong, you can expect to be quietly ushered into a security room by big shaven-headed guys in suits. What happens afterwards depends on how much money you have on you, and who your friends are.
District 2 is rich, and it knows it. The homes are gorgeous, from mock-rural communities under a holoprojected summer sky to apartments so fashionable the décor costs enough to house a dozen families a couple of rungs down. Artificial greenery lines the streets and fills the carefully landscaped parks. The streets are kept clean by a legion of robots. Even the corporate blare is quieter and more subtle here, without the glaring neon or the towering billboards of the lower city. The message is in the sheen of the chrome, in the clean white lines of the aesthetic, in the purr of aerial limousines overhead.
The people who live here show off what they own, and above all, they own people. Personal shoppers, dog walkers, chauffeurs, stylists, PAs, the ubiquitous private security – they are all an expression of money, power and standing. You can walk from one end of District 2 to the other without meeting anyone who actually lives there in their own home. The armadas of aides and dogsbodies live in separate quarters in their employers’ homes, close but never equal, or commute out of the rarefied air of this district back to 3 or 4. Synths are popular choices for personal employees, as if the inhabitants of District 2 want to prevent their wealth from accidentally benefitting another human being.
The upper management and smaller corp leadership make up the population of District 2. They have expensive tastes, catered for by the boutiques and designer showrooms that fill the tree-lined avenues. Designer clothes, cosmetic augmentations and cutting-edge personal tech are ways to express wealth and class, and the corps all have their flagship outlets in District 2. Independent dealers sell antiquities from a world before the corporate takeover, fragments of a lost world and its primitive concepts like equality, democracy and hope. If you have to ask the prices here, you can’t afford them.
The criminal element is highly organized and based on the threat of violence. The bratva broker the information gathered by illicit hackers between rival executives, or use it for blackmail and stock manipulation. Managers are kidnapped for their passwords and biometric data. Designer drugs are sold with the same vocabulary as designer shoes and gardening synths. The gangs cultivate contacts among the private security corps and the thousands of invisible staff who surround their wealthy targets. Violence, when it happens, is sharp, professional and extreme. These people won’t throw a firebomb though your window – they’ll send in a squad of ex-special forces operatives to kill everyone they find. Then they’ll sanitise your data so the world forgets you exist.
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