Southern Bay Floor
Pre-Collapse Identity
Open water — San Leandro Bay and the shallow tidal flats extending toward the Hayward shoreline. Fishing boats, recreational sailors, and the brown pelicans that hunted anchovies in the shallows. The water was already polluted. The draining just removed the dilution.
Current Character
The southern extension of the bay floor Dregs — shallower and more exposed than the Deep Dregs of Sector 9, transitioning from the dense canyon of the central bay toward the marshier south bay. Forty to sixty feet below the Rim, the settlements here are sparser, the infrastructure more improvised, the density lower. This is where the Dregs thins out — fewer stacked towers, more horizontal sprawl across hardened seabed. The old San Mateo Bridge is visible to the south, its pylons marking the administrative boundary of the fully drained zone. Beyond it, the ground gets soggy and the settlements get desperate in different ways. People come here when even the Deep Dregs is too crowded, too dangerous, or too visible.
Terrain & Atmosphere
Flat exposed seabed at a shallower depth than Sector 9, which means the Rim walls are lower, the canyon is less claustrophobic, and more natural light reaches the floor. The terrain transitions from hardened sediment in the north to increasingly soft, unstable ground in the south as the bay floor approaches the marshland. Old infrastructure pokes through the surface — pipes, cable conduits, the foundations of structures built on bay fill that are now exposed geological features. The wind reaches here in ways it can't reach the Deep Dregs, making the southern floor colder and more exposed.
Corporate Presence
Ungoverned. Ironclad runs scavenger operations picking through the exposed seabed for salvageable materials. Wholesome sends outreach teams from the south — food distribution that maps the population and builds dependency. Relief deploys medical teams. None of them govern. All of them harvest.
Key Locations
The San Mateo Bridge pylons (visible southern boundary marker — a line of concrete columns marching across the landscape), Containment Level 9 (deep sub-bay facility in the old shipping channels near the Sector 9 border — what's being contained is classified), the Transition Zone (where hardened seabed gives way to marsh).
Sensory Detail
The wind is the first thing you notice — no tall structures to break it, no canyon walls to contain it, just flat seabed and exposure. The smell is brine, sediment, and the faint sulfur of decomposing organic material trapped in the clay. Sound carries across the flats with nothing to absorb it — conversations, machinery, and the occasional crack of structural failure as improvised buildings settle unevenly into unstable ground. The light is better here than the Deep Dregs, which means the poverty is visible.
Daily Life
You build on ground that wasn't ground a generation ago and you hope it holds, because there's nowhere further to be pushed.