=Elysium= 
//<Violet Perdido, Firewall Sentinel>//
When I came back from the dead, I took up work as a whore. I had other choices of employment, but none of them were interesting. Do you know what coming back as an infugee is like? They put you in a simulspace and send you to job interviews. There is a noxiously bubbly social network involved in the process, as well as various skills assessments. In the end, a company rep sits you down and tells you how hard they’re going to fuck you. Sign on the dots, or back to dead storage for you, my lamb. I looked at my menu of choices. Actuary. Paramedic. Psych Liaison. Surveillance Monitor. “Adult Entertainment Spec” had the shortest term of indenture. Could the choice have been simpler?
It amuses me that Elysium is a crack in the ground. Coming in on the train, one doesn’t normally glimpse the scope of it. One has to be flying. Hyblaeus Chasma is an immense fissure, ten kilometers across at its widest. Covering the canyon rim in a great arc are thick panes of glass and water, held in place by a framework of supports styled as Victorian ironwork and pillars dropping all the way to the chasm floor. The canyon is compartmentalized like a ship to forestall decompression in an emergency. Walls of more faux wroughtwork and glass panes with hatches here and there to allow traffic through stretch from wall to wall and floor to roof. To the west, there is a final wall, and then the fissure opens out into the wide basin occupied by West Elysium, a great network of souks, [[domes|mini-domes]], and surface buildings.
By day, the city is blue, green, earth tones. Busy people fly to and fro like jeweled birds, selling sin and collecting its wages. On pleasant days, hypercorp luminaries and politicos stroll the Plaza Dei Cigni in Palazzo, conducting their business in the open air via mesh. By evening, Elysium is red and black. Its streets breathe the night people like opium smoke. If one walks around Chinatown at night, the assault of AR graphics, chat requests from hustlers, designer pheromones, visual sex memes, and transhuman awfulness/ loveliness is unrelenting.
===Sidebar=== 
Sure, there’s some out there who looked at the project of Elysium and said, “What is Zevi thinking? Zevi is crazy building out there.” Mes amis, nine million hustlers, dreamers, and beautiful people live here, because they realized what I did: in an atmosphere this thin, good old solid common sense sublimates into a gas quick as dry ice on the 4th of Mesha. Inspect a topo map; I’ve already built a beach house where the water line will be in 200 years. And in the mean time, my city is fucking sexy.” —//Zevi Oaxaca-Maartens, CEO of Experia, in an interview with blogger Olivie Ndembe//
==Culture and Demographics== 
Skin. Red or white, young or not so, this town is positively devoted to skin. You don’t see so many sleeved in synths here; they tend to be only in jobs that are both manual and invite a fantasy of clinical sterility. You know: biowaste disposal, recycler mucking, vatmeat harvestry, or anything where you would want a biomorph to have a long shower after, before they walked the streets. Pods are common. I expect to be in one for a while. Pod or biomorph, everyone in this city is very, very pretty—to the point where it’s wearying.
We also have quite a few ghosts living in the machines here, which may cause consternation to visitors from far-off gothams. Most are human infugees, and most of these are indentures. There is a small population of limited AGIs here, though, and Mr. Zevi goes to some lengths to keep them from attracting attention. There are perhaps 100 of them, registered in the mesh as private citizens, with addresses in an Experia arcology and no indication they’re not real. But research by networks of people who’ve had mesh contact with them suggests they are almost certainly AGIs, not human infomorphs. The corp media hasn’t caught onto this and most likely never will, unless Zevi decides it’s finally time to let his AGI experiments out of the closet.
Commonly spoken languages include Hindi, English, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Bahasa Indonesian. Hollywood and Bollywood helped shape this city.
The large Indonesian population resulted from a deal between the Oaxaca-Maartens family and the former Indonesian government to rifle the Indonesian national backup files for 250,000 able-minded construction workers and their immediate families. Quoted at the time, Zevi said, “The Indonesians—yes, I got quite a good deal on them.” They are a culturally persecuted underclass, and though most of the Indonesian workers have worked off their indentures, they don’t have opportunities. The Movement has a strong foothold in this community.
||||~ Elysium Demographics ||
||= Population ||= 9,000,000 ||
||= Synths ||= 10% ||
||= Pods ||= 25% ||
||= Biomorphs ||= 55% ||
||= Infomorphs ||= 10% ||
==Neighborhoods== 
Three major roads, Northern Arterial, Southern Arterial, and Western Arterial, with two-lane flyways above them, connect the city’s main regions. Together these roads are known as the E90. E90 South eventually connects to what is left of the M-5 that once ran to Olympus.
===Central=== 
Palazzo is the government district and the seat of the Oaxaca-Maartens family. The architecture here is palatial; you’ll see a bit of American federalist, a hint of Chinese New Imperial, and enough baroque Austrian to choke a flight of cherubs. Elysium describes itself as a constitutional monarchy, with the Oaxaca-Maartens family and their scions as hereditary monarchs. It is a strong monarchy, with the head of the Oaxaca-Maartens family (Zevi) holding important executive powers including a veto over the legislature, extraterritoriality for all of his family’s holdings, the ability to write binding executive orders that can only be countermanded by two-thirds of the parliament, immunity from prosecution for him and his family, and immunity from subpoenas for his and his family’s forks and backups.
North and west of Palazzo is Hyblaeus City, a large neighborhood of offices and studios. Thirty percent of the entertainment content created in the solar system originates in this neighborhood. Busy night and day, this district is also home to a large number of bars and Victoria Terminus, the city’s main maglev rail station.
===North=== 
Corinth Parkways, just north of Hyblaeus City, is where all of the good people live, if you want to deconstruct Consortium propaganda quite literally. Close to downtown are townhouses and staid mansions, the province of the small, buttoned-down segment of Elysium’s wealthy. Further out are modest but comfortable apartments and houses, interspersed with shops and other businesses. A word to investigators at play in this town: do not ignore this neighborhood simply because it looks so plaintively normal. Corinth Parkways is a favorite spot for identity thieves, black clinics, and drug labs to set up shop. A criminal outfit might rent a townhouse in this neighborhood, use it for a month, then pack up and move to cover their trail. Les Goules are thought to have moved bodies through here, and it’s rumored as well that a large portion of Conduit’s bandwidth comes from a swarm of self-replicating antenna bots that were loosed on the rooftops of this neighborhood.
Bainbridge is a canyon twisting off the Northern Arterial where a great many poshly compensated scenario writers, programmers, producers, engineers, and senior production people live. There’s a lot of what passes for brainpower in Elysium living here. Parties can be interesting. I once entertained for an evening in a robotic exoskeleton that joined with six others like it to form a giant robot. I was a left arm for about two hours. Engineers can be so imaginative. Security in this neighborhood is extremely high and the residents often armed, as hypercorps feeling a tad stabby like to lash out against one another’s intellectual property. Interesting fact: members of the Screenwriter’s Guild Marksmanship Club have a hit ratio in firefights twice that of the average EPM beat cop. Of course, the lovely gentleman I heard this from was an SGMC member.
Dulcimer Canyon is a disused stretch of road in a winding canyon that climbs almost to the surface, ending some 20 meters below the dome lip at the top of the canyon. To reach this place, one has to drive through Bainbridge off onto Dulcimer Canyon, which is a spur twisting off of Bainbridge Canyon. The road is blocked with a traffic barrier, and AR graphics advise that the area is off limits per the Elysium People’s Militia. A kilometer past the barricade is Lost Horizon, a shared workshop once operated by the Lost Horizons Society, a group of tinkerers and citizen scientists, most of whom lived on Bainbridge Canyon. Although all of the men and women involved worked for entertainment hypercorps, many in R&D or engineering work, the work performed at Lost Horizons was that of hobbyists exploring their pet areas of curiosity. Two years ago, someone’s AI experiment got out of control, and the workshop had to be abandoned. The plague of wild artificials was suppressed when a series of controlled EMP bursts were released along the canyon, but rumor has it some still survive. Dulcimer Canyon has been quarantined since, and the eight members of Lost Horizons were arrested (and later disappeared, it seems) and their families relocated.
===South=== 
Kirs-Brookley is the glamorous neighborhood immediately south of Palazzo, a high-security fairyland of beautiful people and voluptuously furnished recreations of Uruguayan Dominion period architecture. Many of the wealthiest entertainers, producers, and media strategists live here. This neighborhood is watched constantly by overhead surveillance drones, and the typical home here is a walled, enclosed compound with private security and hardened infosec. Chinatown is the entertainment district, partly encircling Kirs-Brookley to its south. The Drag along the South Arterial is an orange tree-lined parkway with nightclubs, simulspace parlors, twenty-four hour augmentation shops, and tea houses running most of its length.
===West=== 
Most of West Elysium consists of working-class housing in modules and mini-domes abutting on twisting souks. Highway and rail come through on elevated pylons, barely interrupting the sprawl. On the fringes of this district are nameless slums where the city’s poorest live around clusters of synthmorph service businesses. Palembeng is a neighborhood at the mouth of the Hyblaeus Chasma where the souks are dense. It is heavily Indonesian, with high unemployment, and is a hotbed of sympathy for the Movement. Several of the community’s leaders are also low-level officials in the Tharsis League. An entertainment district fronting on the West Arterial is the most visited section of this neighborhood. The rest of Palembeng can be dangerous at any hour; several flocks of gangsters have divided the territory among themselves.
==Law and Order== 
The Elysium People’s Militia (EPMs) are the main police force here. They are humorless and hostile to anyone having a good time. I urge you to avoid them unless you truly need their services. The EPM is competent and brutally efficient. A riot in Palembeng last year was broken up by baboon squads and hallucinogen grenades. Most of their patrols are in flying cars or on bicycles. Their tactical squads do not have a stellar reputation, however.
The Portmanteau Rangers are the local League Rangers, responsible for patrolling the no man’s land between Elysium and the Titan Quarantine Zone. They operate from the town of Portmanteau 50 kilometers south of Elysium on the maglev line to Hellas. Unlike the EPM Tacs, the Portmanteau Rangers are seasoned security forces, experienced in handling wild artificials and even exsurgent threats.
===Sidebar: Direct Action Private Wiki: Elysium People's Militia=== 
Elysium’s lack of readiness in conflict situations is reflected in its first responders, the EPM’s Tactical Squads. EPM Tacs are widely considered some of the most inexperienced and under-trained in the planet’s major cities. In conventional warfare, they would be a danger only to green, lightly equipped troops.
In addition, they have not seen combat with dangerous artificial life or puppets of the TITANs since shortly after the Fall. Military observers have also questioned the units’ skills with weapon systems key to combating hostile nanoswarms or femtobots. These units cannot be considered reliable support in the event of a TITAN resurgence or a major nanoplague.
==Personalities and Factions== 
A little oligarchy of people and organizations positively hogs the spotlight among Elysium’s wheels.
===Zevi Oaxaca-Maartens=== 
It’s Zevi’s city. If he allows you to play in it, you must play by his rules. The deathless gerontocrats of Noctis and New Shanghai are largely subtle masters. Oaxaca-Maartens and his family are anything but. They’re oligarchs unafraid to be open in their exercise of power and influence. Zevi seems particularly fond of giving responsibility to his many nephews, birthing the phrase, “some nephew,” for referring to a favored appointee in city government. The family owns several hypercorps other than Experia, including the law firm Oaxaca, Hyannis, & Wales, specialists in biotech law; the security company Rittermark; and Ectomorph, an exclusive resleeving, backup, and egocasting company catering to rich clients with unusual security needs. Zevi and his family favor exalt and sylph morphs—heavily upgraded, one assumes.
All of the Oaxaca-Maartens enterprises rely heavily on AIs, AGIs, and infugee indentures for labor. Zevi himself pioneered the now-illegal technique of indenturing an ego to do administrative work in an office simulspace for three years, then running an arbitrary number of forks of the person (the record was 103 simultaneous instances for one worker) and merging them at the end of the contract. Most would agree the settlement money received by the victims did not go far enough.
Hector Oaxaca is a senior partner at Oaxaca, Hyannis, & Wales and one of the few family members to openly serve in a high-ranking post at a family-owned company. Hector files intellectual property lawsuits at the same pace most men turn oxygen into carbon dioxide.
Leandra Maartens is Zevi’s granddaughter and currently one of the most popular media figures on Mars, with a name recognition of 94.6% among the public (more people could successfully identify her than the Governor General of Valles-New Shanghai). She appears mainly as a talking head on pundit shows and in Scoff, a wildly popular reality vid show in which Leandra takes people to dinner and then says rude (and sometimes funny) things to them throughout the meal.
Manisha Maartens was a doctor in a resleeving clinic when she met Alaric Maartens, one of Zevi’s favorite nephews. Alaric was assassinated a year ago—an act that included an unprecedented successful attack on the Oaxaca-Maartens house backups. Since then Manisha, a virtual stranger to many of the family and previously accustomed to a quiet life, has been kept in a continual media spotlight. I’ll be surprised if the poor woman doesn’t go mad within another six months.
===Mayor Cormac LaPorte=== 
Mayor LaPorte is tall, quite handsome, and beefy. By beefy, I mean fat: a willfully red-cheeked, corpulent man lumbering like a juggernaut through all of us Elysian stick figures. LaPorte is Zevi’s token foil, a political sideshow act who occasionally interferes with Oaxaca-Maartens’s plans, but is tolerated mostly to convince the populace that something called “politics” is still going on in this town. Cormac LaPorte was legitimately elected during a period of public outrage over police handling of a demonstration. LaPorte has partially succeeded in reining in the police force, having put a friendly new chief in place, but at the precinct level he still faces a lot of opposition. LaPorte is given to long-winded speeches on holidays and blustering populist sound bites any time of year.
===Experia=== 
The Oaxaca-Maartens family is not [[Experia]]. Although Zevi remains CEO, and the Oaxaca-Maartens are the majority shareholders, they are not an iron fisted presence in the executive suite. Zevi sets policy and lets his people do their work. Experia is a strongly influential company but not a large one, employing only about 75 people directly. Everyone else is a subcontractor, from security to vid production crews. Aside from news and entertainment, Experia does a great deal of R&D. From Firewall’s point of view, their research into AGIs and memetic warfare are two areas of concern. AGI research focused on creating a seed AGI might be taking place under Experia’s R&D program; the risk of this needs to be investigated further. Some Experia business partners might also be conducting unorthodox personality fork research, which would be illegal if not of great interest to Firewall.

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