=Noctis-Qianjiao= 
//<Moxie Harper, Firewall Sentinel>//
Aside from Firewall, I’ve got two jobs, and they overlap nicely. One is cool hunting, and the other is being a cab driver. For both of these, I like the Qianjiao Skyport run. You get to see all these trim Loonies coming in, and glam types off the orbitals. Even more interesting are the ship crews. You want to know about rolling the micrograv life in style, check out an icepusher crew some time. They look like gypsy authentics after a closet collision with Uranian freebooters.
Skyport’s the biggest sprawl of elevated flat ground clear of the canyon walls they could find, just north of the Qianjiao [[domes|dome]]. Hit the flyway from there, and you’ll get a great view: the huge domes of Qianjiao on the northwest bank of the River Noctis; Noctis City on the southeast; and the souks, trains, and roadways in between. Three immense bridges span the 200-meter width of the river, but rather than just being road or rail, they’ve been built upon, so that when the river freezes solid at night, the light from the souks above twinkles off the ice. Above you is the endless curve of the canyon walls, broken only in the far distance by the Cut, a massive ramp on which trains and road traffic climb the two kilometers from the valley floor to the Tharsis plateau. Here and there on the canyon rim are blinding points of light—mirror arrays angled to point more sunlight at the city’s domes and the river. I recommend following the warning your entoptics will flash at you to not look directly at them for too long. Stretched out around the city are the Noctis Tablelands, a chaotic terrain of small mesas and weird hoodoos intersected by deep alluvial cuts.
New Shanghai’s big, and Elysium’s glitzy, but Noctis is where we get shit done. It’s a pricey place to live (hence my two jobs, not counting Firewall), and this town has a higher proportion of people in biomorphs than any of the big cities on Mars. The crazy landscape surrounding the city is an attraction, but the chance to strike it rich in the Martian design industry is a bigger one. Within the domes, and even the souks (which are better kept than in other cities), Noctis oozes design from every micron of matter. You won’t see even a meter of chaos in the street plan here; the entire street layout and land-use scheme was meticulously drawn up by the famous Dutch urbanists Enckl and Vonderhaar. Where the streets twist charmingly, it’s because they’re meant to, and where they don’t, they’re a perfect grid. The duck pond in the city park is also a rice paddy—worked by the ducks, with just a little help from agriculture bots that look like mossy logs when they’re not working. Grip loops and posts on the Metro use active ergonomics to reshape themselves to the hand of any rider who grabs onto them. My taxi has special footrests that fold out to be comfortable for people with prehensile feet (added those myself; neo-hominids love ‘em!). That’s only a small sampling, and it’s the result of 13 million transhumans constantly, obsessively redesigning their environment and all of the objects in it.
==Culture and Demographics== 
Noctis has a lower population of synths and a little higher population of infomorphs than other Martian cities. Partly this is because there are so many AI and robotics firms here (RiseRobots, Tetsuo, and O’Connor are notable ones). Many of the jobs that might be filled by infugees in synths elsewhere are performed by expert systems in robotic bodies here. Also, using synths for menial labor isn’t tasteful here, unlike in New Shanghai, where apparently it’s okay to show what a big swinging member you’ve got by keeping a staff of liveried synths.
The top languages are English, Hindi, and Bahasa Indonesian. Like anyplace, there’s a strong Chinese influence, but a lot of Europeans ended up here, too; you’ll hear more German and Dutch spoken in Nieuwedam than anyplace else in the system. Seriously, have you heard Dutch? It’s so fucking cute; it sounds like a made-up language.
||||~ Noctis Demographics ||
|| Population || 13,000,000 ||
|| Synths || 15% ||
|| Pods || 20% ||
|| Biomorphs || 60% ||
|| Infomorphs || 5% ||
==Neighborhoods== 
This is a city of industries and interests divided by neighborhood. You’ll find entire sections of town devoted to one or another type of microfacturing, retail, or design. The reason is mostly social; density spreads ideas just as well as diseases. Streets are often very narrow in the older parts of town; early life support policies here were complemented by strong anti-sprawl laws and the aforementioned meticulous planning. Getting around by car can really suck unless you’re rich enough to own a flyer, but every major street is served by the Noctis Tram (sometimes called the Night Train). Arterials either have tracks running down the center or overhead rails strung from pylons; the cars are designed to operate either on the ground or suspended, depending upon traffic engineering and the geography of the neighborhood. Both domes are hilly—they needed all the flat ground for the Skyport—so the tram takes some crazy turns. There are bicycles everywhere. Half the city gets around this way; even corp execs have gotten into it. Just about everybody has the same bike: the ubiquitous beat up, black Qianjiao fixed gear. Few have brakes, which is fine once you get the hang of it, because doing a skid stop is easy at .36 Gs. You’ll see some crazy configurations on the street from time to time—pennyfarthings, stacked-frame recumbents, unicycles with 3-meter seat posts—but you’ll never see them parked on the street. In Noctis, everyone is a bike thief.
When parkour really caught on, shortly before the Fall, the city designed a whole series of rooftop courses that crisscross the city. Real, hardcore parkouristas think these are a joke, and the fad for them waned, so that they’re now little-used. But they’re still there, and they’re still a great way around town for a decent freerunner. Even better, people tend to forget they exist.
===The Bridges=== 
Kledingsbrug is the center bridge. The lower deck carries a suspended tram line and the QB4, the arterial bikeway connecting the two domes. The souks and arcades above and below are the garment district, stretching from the headquarters of the prominent Galliato fashion house astride the bridge entrance in Noctis to the Dumont Building in Qianjiao, a massive retail and microfacturing complex housing hundreds of independent clothing companies. In between, you can try on just about anything, from club wear made solely of AR graphics to one-morphology-fits-all knitwear designed to be worn by both bipeds and uplifts. On the high end, you find Lunar haute couture priced so ludicrously that it makes me throw up a little in the back of my mouth. At the other end of the scale, you’ve got designs from the Trojans and Main Belt spread out on rugs at street corners, sold by vendors who care more about your [[anarchists|anarchist]] rep than your cred (although they still want your money; the only free things in this town are FeO2 and bad advice). Kledingsbrug is probably the hottest daytime social spot in town. Whether you’re made of glitter or pond scum, the garment district is the place to make connections.
Renrakubrug is the southwest bridge. It’s a tech bazaar with a serious nerd bent. High precision 3D print shops, augmentation parlors, and security consultancies jostle for space with vintage part shops, data archeology specialists, and pricey boutiques selling geek-oriented Earth artifacts like comic books, toys, and antique game consoles. If you want a truly surreal experience, there are even a few recreations of early twenty-first century maid cafes, mostly peopled by creepy gerontocrat otaku and their protégés. Some pretty shady tech moves through here, as well, although major weapons deals and the like usually go down out in the privacy of the tablelands. Biobrug (pronounced “bee-oh-brug;” non-English speakers have no idea why this is funny, so no smirking at your hosts) is the showcase for Qianjiao’s third big export: biodesign. Need a tiny robot with a microbial fuel cell stomach that lives off the chewing gum and crisps people drop in the back of your taxi cab, aquarium fish that tweet you when their water needs changing, or neon legwarmers that purr and glow green when your date rubs your leg? Yeah, Firewall agents can be frivolous with their cred, too; I got all this stuff on the Biobrug. I’ve also caught a strain of the common cold engineered to dodge basic biomods, nearly had my face eaten off by a school of land piranhas that got out of their cage, and been harangued by a seven-foot annelid with a voice synthesizer module. (Want some local color? Wiki “Feng the Worm” some time. Do not give him any handouts; he’s been using the “need spare cred to turn myself back into a biped” story for years). The rumors that Les Goules have a big operation in the market are exaggerated, although if for some reason you want to do a deal with them, it’s a good place to find them. They definitely have fingers in the pie here, but they neither run the place nor do they have any front businesses hiding a large operation. Not enough space; too much surveillance. Their black kettles are out in the souks.
===Noctis City=== 
On the southeast bank of the River Noctis is the larger of the two domes, Noctis City. Noctis holds slightly more than half of the population. Landmarks here include the huge Centrum Park at the dome’s center; Watertown, the financial and media district; Gastown, the entertainment district, which wraps around the Noctis end of the Kledingsbrug; and the maglev railyards. Also located here is Pembroke Gardens, a working-class neighborhood reputed to house a large number of Guanxi front businesses, including darknet facilities and illegal fighting pits where combat morphs square off against weird transgenic creatures created across the river. Noctis has one neighborhood, Tito, that’s all TTO offices, half of them empty since terraforming efforts shifted south and east. These are in a district housing a lot of other League offices and infrastructure.
===Qianjiao=== 
Qianjiao houses the garment district, centered on the Dumont Building; Kuypers-Lalley, a dense neighborhood where a lot of design and engineering firms have offices; Osiris, a neighborhood in Qianjiao centered around Osiris Medical Center; and support facilities for the nearby Skyport. Qianjiao also hosts all of the major academic institutions in the city, with the exception of IIT Mumbai. Landmarks here include Wizard Alley, a red light district; Peg Towers, a famous block of reconfigurable modular housing and shops that look like stacks of children’s interlocking blocks in bright, primary colors; Bleeker Straat, a busy, partly subterranean artery lined with microfacturing shops; and Tufte Square, an open-air market in Kuypers-Lalley centered on a statue of a famous twencen infotect. The TTO’s ops center is on the outskirts of Qianjiao, facing the M-4, the highway running up the Cut toward Olympus.
==Law and Order== 
The NQPD is one of the sanest on the planet, which is to say they just might try to ascertain if you’re doing something wrong before they cuff you, slam you to the street, and beat up your weird-looking friend who happened to be standing nearby. Basic it’s got to do with economics: police brutality exists in inverse proportion to the number of poor, desperate people needing to be kept in line, and our city happens to have fewer poor people. Standard beat uniforms are blue and black. Tacs wear dark gray urban camo. NQPD tacticals rival the OIA Tacs in the shiny toys department, but they’ve got no experience equivalent to the OIA’s patrolling for wild artificials in Fuxingmen. This wasn’t always how it was. The old NQPD chief, Brighde (“Bridey”) Sheets-Patel, used to send the tacticals on regular scout patrols of the TQZ periphery. She had the job under a mayor who was beholden to trade unionist elements of the Tharsis League. Her replacement, Jad Singh, is a PC man through-and-through. He adopted a policy of leaving the TQZ to the military and the Noctis Rangers (the League ranger department for Noctis Labyrinthus). NQPD tacs theoretically have the tools to contain an exsurgent outbreak, but they might not now have the needed experience.
==Cultural Forces and Clades== 
Big Martian cities have so much going on that a lot of residents have felt the need to fabricate some fairly rigid style expressions and group mores to stay sane. I don’t blame these people; life’s a confusing cup of scum. It pays to know the protocols for working with different groups, though, because all the rep in the world isn’t gonna get your foot in the door if you don’t understand why people are doing what they’re doing. Clades aren’t factions; they don’t have the wide appeal or political clout. However, many clades line up with one or more factions. Tibetans, for example, tend to be either autonomists or reclaimers. Some clade members are very secretive, though. Members of fabber undergrounds, for instance, don’t trumpet their presence in the RNA network. Being in with a clade can help out with networking inside a faction that’s got a lot of people from that clade in it, or it can hurt if an antagonistic clade is well represented. All of the following cultural clades can be found elsewhere on Mars, but many of them sprang up or found themselves here in Noctis.
===Authentics=== 
Like you might expect, a lot of people have latched onto one or the other old Earth cultures as a way of having some norms for behavior. Often these are groups that had some kind of outsider status on Earth. Interestingly, most authentics don’t really care whether you have a bona fide background with their clade (be that through ethnicity, family history, or the like). If you’re running their memes, and you’re running them right, you’re accepted, because it’s the stabilizing cultural familiarity that they’re after. One can’t pose, though; an authentic walks the walk twenty-four-and-a-half by seven. I already mentioned the sufis among the Barsoomian nomads. Some other authentic clades you might run into include Roma gypsies, tinkers, Jews, Lunar Mormons, Technotologists, urban primitives, Ismaili Muslims, and Tibetans.
===Bike Vs Buggy=== 
In Qianjiao, in the smaller El Barrio de la Ciencia, cars are forbidden. Can’t tell you how many drunken ride home fares I’m missing out on because of the kids in this neighborhood; it’s a dense neighborhood. Ciencia’s the center of the Bike vs. Buggy meme. I can’t decide whether it’s a fad, a political movement, or just a good wholesome urge to pedal in large groups so that you can check out lots of other people’s butts. Supporters usually talk about the hit to air quality inside the domes from hydrocarbon vehicles, the benefits of exercise, and the benefit to our psyches from a reduction in traffic noise. Whatever; it’s taken root. The streets in Noctis-Qianjiao teem with bicycles. If you have to, say, leave someplace quickly, possibly while being pursued, do not rely on a car in this town. You’ll end up doing eight to ten in dead storage for organic damage on the cyclist who you will hit. On the other hand, bikes can be a fast and discreet way to get around. The whole city is designed for them to get around quickly, and traveling in a big pack of other bikers (paths tend to be fast-moving but crowded) gives you some anonymity.
===Bioclubs=== 
Bioclubs are social and technical societies for people interested in designing transgenic organisms. Most members of bioclubs aren’t professionals, they’re cab drivers or librarians or something. But most of the equipment involved is easy to get and cheap, and everybody remembers a few tricks from their high school genetic design classes. People in bioclubs treat genetic design like it’s arts-and-crafts time; they make organisms that are interesting rather than being useful. These can now be found all over town, but the first ones seem to have come about from bored medical personnel trying some things out off-duty. For a while, bioclubs operated very openly, until (the rumor goes) a member of a club in Gastown accidentally engineered a microbe that emitted a virulent airborne toxin. The stuff got into the ventilation system of his apartment and nearly killed 28 of his neighbors. Now, while not illegal, they’re a lot more underground.
===Fabber Undergrounds=== 
The fabber gangs, on the other hand, are definitely criminals by the city’s book. Started by engineering students in Qianjiao, fabber gangs aim to create private, unrestricted fabricators, able to run open source blueprints. Then they want to put them in the hands of anyone on Mars who wants one. The hitch, of course, is that this is totally illegal, and if any of them get caught, the authorities are going to lock them in a room and throw away the room. Fabber gang members have workshops in their homes or, if they’re lucky, in no-tell rental buildings they’ve anonymized. About half the group are hackers and infosec people whose job is to keep the project hidden, while the other half are tinkerers and engineers of various stripes. They’re not interested in selling fabricators; this would only risk compromising their operation while they perfect the models they have. Fabber underground-built fabricators often malfunction, but they have two major advantages over normal fabricators: they emit very little energy, making their operation difficult to detect, and they don’t keep any internal log of what they’ve built.

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