District 4
District 4 clings to existence among the shadows of the looming, abandoned industrial past. What were one powerhouses of the city’s economy are now mass conversions into dirt-cheap apartments scarcely more palatable than those in the 5. But they are better, as the residents tell themselves every night, listening to the gunshots and sirens outside.
The 4 is where you start to see cops. The gangs here are usually found behind closed doors except in the blocks they fully claim as their own. A courtyarded apartment block, hung with washing and sputtering neon, might be the sovereign territory of the 16K Triad, or a dingy mall might hold nothing but fronts for the El Liberado. Outside these places, the cops stand a good chance of coming if you call – but by the same token, blatant crime starts to get you noticed, and punished as you head inland from the 4’s poorest neighbourhoods by the walls.
Ramen stands line the roads leading from the transport hubs, crowded by low-level corp employees on their way home from their shifts. These corporate wage slaves make up the bulk of the population, the grey factory workers and industrial drudges who stare at the ground as they shamble to and from their unending shifts. Most of them are working off a multi-year contract. Some of them escaped a life in District 5 – all of them are now trying to escape District 4.
District 4 is the place to come for a cheap, seedy dose of thrills or oblivion. The commercial areas are crammed with bars and clubs that promise music, drink, escape, and live naked ladies. Food vendors, musicians and hawkers form a shadow economy of their own in the neon-tinted shadows of legitimate businesses. Bands of tough kids with ghetto cybernetics hang around grifting, stealing or acting like gangsters. Real gangsters keep a lower profile, hiding just beneath the surface and behind the front doors, taking their cut of every tip, bill and door fee.
Off the strips, the tenements crowd close and high. The apartments are tiny box rooms, their only saving grace that the buildings they’re crammed into aren’t as likely to fall down as the ones in the 5. Rent comes with a healthy surcharge of extortion for whatever gang claims the territory. Some places are sinkholes of drug dens, flophouses and squats. Others hold it together with a fragile sense of community. A few even try to make something better of their city, but roof gardens and block parties can only do so much. You’re still in District 4.
The corps know everyone is trying to better themselves here. Their billboards loom over the district promising new life, a new job, a new body, to skim off the little money these people have in return for snatches of leisure and glamour. Corp recruitment offices sell the idea of corporate indenture as a step on the ladder towards wealth and privilege, ensnaring people desperate for a way out. Elsewhere, the same promise is made by gangs picking up youths who want to avoid the poverty of District 5 and the bleak cruelty of corporate serfdom. Everyone’s looking for a way out. A few even find one.
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