The Western Shore
Pre-Collapse Identity
The Haight-Ashbury was the birthplace of the American counterculture — the Summer of Love, psychedelic rock, and a tradition of telling authority to go to hell that persisted long after the hippies became tech executives. Twin Peaks offered panoramic views of the entire bay. The Inner Sunset was where families lived quietly and pretended the city's chaos was someone else's problem.
Current Character
The Western Shore is the Sprawl's friction zone — too residential to attract corporate investment, too strategic to ignore entirely. Twin Peaks, at 280 meters, hosts critical communication arrays that relay signals across the entire Sprawl, making it one of the few genuinely contested pieces of infrastructure on the SF side. Below the peaks, the Haight retains its counter-establishment identity, providing sympathizers and safe houses for resistance movements that treat corporate authority the way their predecessors treated the draft board. Fog rolls through the western gaps daily, and the surveillance networks that blanket the Nexus Core thin to nothing in the murk.
Terrain & Atmosphere
Steep hills and fog define this sector. Twin Peaks dominates the skyline, its communication arrays blinking through the marine layer like mechanical lighthouses. The western slopes descend toward the ocean through residential streets that feel like a different century — Victorian facades maintained by stubbornness rather than money, community gardens in abandoned lots, hand-painted signs that would be illegal in Sector 1. The fog is constant, thick, and useful.
Corporate Presence
Fragmented. Wellness Corporation, a Rothwell subsidiary, expands from its Pacific Edge operations, pushing companion clinics and Somnolence Parlors into the residential blocks. But no corporation dominates — the terrain is too broken, the population too resistant, and the fog makes surveillance expensive. It is one of the few places in the Sprawl where corporate influence is genuinely thin.
Key Locations
Twin Peaks Communication Arrays (strategic infrastructure — whoever holds the arrays controls signal relay across the Sprawl), the Haight corridor (countercultural district, resistance sympathizer network), fog gap passages (western approaches obscured by daily marine layer).
Sensory Detail
The fog smells of the Pacific — salt, kelp, and the faint chemical tang of the dam's turbine discharge. Sound is muffled; voices carry strangely between the hills, arriving from directions that don't match the speaker's location. When the fog burns off in the afternoon, the view from Twin Peaks is the most honest thing in the Sprawl: the Dregs canyon to the east, the ocean held back by engineering to the west, and the Restricted Zone's silence to the north.
Daily Life
People here still argue about ideas instead of prices, which is either the last spark of humanity or the most dangerous thing in the Sprawl, depending on who you ask.