The Northern Flats
Pre-Collapse Identity
Open water — the northern reach of San Francisco Bay where ferries once crossed to Richmond and San Rafael. The Richmond-San Rafael Bridge carried commuters over this stretch of shallow bay. Below was mud, oyster beds, and tidal currents that hadn't changed in ten thousand years.
Current Character
The northern bay floor. Shallower than the Deep Dregs — thirty to fifty feet below the Rim rather than eighty — this area was some of the first bay floor to be settled after drainage, which means the settlements here are older, more established, and only slightly less desperate. The old Richmond-San Rafael Bridge pylons march across the landscape like concrete monuments to a world that had water here, their spans long since collapsed or salvaged but their bases too massive to dismantle. Salvage operations pick through exposed seabed infrastructure — old pipes, cables, foundations of structures that were built on fill and are now twenty feet above the surrounding terrain like islands of concrete in a sediment sea.
Terrain & Atmosphere
Flat exposed seabed, shallower and more windswept than the Deep Dregs. The reduced depth means the Rim walls are lower here, and on clear days, some natural light reaches the floor — a luxury the Deep Dregs never sees. The Golden Gate Dam is visible to the northwest, its red warning lights blinking on the horizon. Wind funnels through the gap between the Marin highlands and the Berkeley Hills, bringing Pacific moisture that makes the northern flats damper and colder than the southern bay floor. Salvage machinery — cranes, excavators, cutting rigs — dots the landscape like mechanical wildlife.
Corporate Presence
Ungoverned, with Ironclad scavenger operations picking through the exposed infrastructure for salvageable metal, cable, and pre-Cascade hardware. Nexus maintains network relay infrastructure that routes signal across the northern bay. Neither corporation governs; both extract. The scavenger communities that live here operate on informal barter economies that no corporate ledger tracks.
Key Locations
The Bridge Pylons (former Richmond-San Rafael Bridge foundations — used as market posts, landmarks, and improvised fortifications), the salvage fields (open seabed excavation zones where pre-Cascade infrastructure is stripped for materials), the dam sightline (the northwestern horizon dominated by the Golden Gate Dam's mass and warning lights).
Sensory Detail
Wind is the dominant sensation — cold, damp Pacific air funneling across the flat seabed, carrying salt, rust, and the mechanical whine of salvage equipment. The smell is wet sediment, corroded metal, and the ozone hint of exposed electrical infrastructure not yet stripped. Sound carries far across the flats — you can hear a cutting rig a kilometer away, and voices travel in ways that make distance deceptive. At night, the dam's red lights paint the western sky.
Daily Life
You dig up the past and sell it to whoever is buying, and you try not to think about what it means that the ground you sleep on used to be the bottom of an ocean.