The Corridor
Pre-Collapse Identity
San Mateo was suburban normalcy — strip malls, chain restaurants, and families commuting to tech jobs in either direction. Redwood City had a courthouse and a movie theater. Foster City was a planned community built entirely on bay fill — land made from nothing, which turned out to be prophetic. Belmont had hills and high school football.
Current Character
The northern portion of Helix BioTech's research corridor — a landscape of sterile campuses, controlled-access roads, and the constant hum of laboratory ventilation systems. The Corridor connects Helix's southern HQ in Sector 21 to its northern distribution networks, and every block between is optimized for the movement of biological materials, research personnel, and the proprietary data that Helix guards more fiercely than any physical asset. Foster City, built on filled marshland, has partially reverted to wetland at its edges — suburban ruins standing in shallow water, their foundations undermined by the ground remembering what it used to be. Relief operates The Harbor from this sector, a facility that looks like a hospital, functions like a hospital, and also functions as Rothwell's most productive intelligence-gathering operation.
Terrain & Atmosphere
Peninsula flatland — the easiest terrain in the Sprawl to build on, which is why it was built on so relentlessly before the Cascade and why Helix chose it for their corridor. Bay-adjacent marshland encroaches at the eastern edges, creating an eerie transitional landscape where parking lots meet reed beds and laboratory buildings overlook shallow tidal pools. The air is filtered to laboratory standards within Helix campuses and carries a marshland dampness outside them.
Corporate Presence
Helix BioTech controls the research corridor comprehensively. Security is biometric access control, environmental monitoring, and contamination protocols — framed as safety, implemented as control. Decontamination checkpoints mark the boundaries between campus zones. Relief, the Rothwell subsidiary, operates The Harbor in the sector's residential margins, providing medical aid with data-collection strings attached. The conflict between Nexus and Helix simmers here — corporate espionage, defecting scientists, sabotaged experiments conducted behind locked doors.
Key Locations
The Harbor (Relief HQ — hospital and intelligence-gathering operation), Foster City Wetlands (suburban ruins partially reclaimed by marshland), the Research Corridor (Helix BioTech campus chain stretching north-south).
Sensory Detail
The sound is ventilation — the constant white-noise hum of laboratory air handling systems that you stop hearing after the first day and miss desperately when you leave. The air inside Helix campuses smells like nothing at all, which is the most engineered sensation in the Sprawl. Outside the perimeters, the marshland smell intrudes — salt, decomposition, and the methane burp of organic material trapped under fill. Foster City's flooded edges creak with the sound of structures slowly surrendering to water.
Daily Life
You badge in, you decontaminate, you work in conditions so controlled they feel like a different planet, and then you badge out into marshland fog and remember that the Sprawl is still there.