The Silicon Corridor
Pre-Collapse Identity
This was the center of the known universe for venture capital and technology. Palo Alto had Stanford University, the incubator of more billionaires per square mile than any institution in history. Menlo Park had Sand Hill Road, where a handshake could fund a company worth more than a country. Mountain View had Google's campus. Los Altos had the garage where Apple was born. The future was invented here, and then the future moved on.
Current Character
The southern anchor of Helix BioTech's research corridor — where the future of human biology is decided behind security perimeters and biohazard airlocks. The Helix, a sprawling glass-and-biome complex, occupies what was once Sand Hill Road venture capital territory, its living walls and greenhouse towers concealing the most advanced genetic engineering laboratories in the Sprawl. Stanford's campus has been absorbed into Helix's research infrastructure — lecture halls converted to sequencing labs, libraries converted to data vaults, the quad used for controlled-environment biological trials. The sector is sterile, quiet, and utterly controlled. You are in Helix territory when the air smells like nothing at all — no dust, no chemical, no human scent, just filtered absence.
Terrain & Atmosphere
Peninsula flatland with foothills to the west — relatively flat, deliberately maintained, and eerily quiet compared to the Sprawl's core. Research campuses sprawl across manicured grounds, their architecture designed to be soothing in the way that anesthesia is soothing. Biome domes punctuate the landscape — transparent structures housing contained ecosystems for testing genetic modifications in isolated environments. The foothills provide a green backdrop that contrasts with the clinical precision of the campus grounds. Every surface is clean. Every lawn is uniform.
Corporate Presence
Helix controls comprehensively. No other corporation maintains significant presence — the security perimeters are too tight, the biometric access requirements too stringent, and the contamination protocols too onerous for casual corporate overlap. Security personnel wear white lab coats and carry medical scanners alongside weapons. Decontamination checkpoints mark every zone boundary. The population is disproportionately genetically designed — Helix's own employees are their own products, walking advertisements for the modifications they develop.
Key Locations
The Helix (Helix BioTech HQ — glass-and-biome complex on former Sand Hill Road), Stanford Research Campus (former university absorbed into Helix infrastructure), the Biome Domes (contained ecosystem testing facilities).
Sensory Detail
Silence — not the absence of sound but the engineered removal of it. The campus grounds absorb noise: specialized surface materials, vegetation barriers, white-noise generators at the perimeter. The air is aggressively purified, temperature-controlled to 0.5-degree tolerance, and carries no scent. The visual field is clinical white, living green, and the blue-tinged transparency of laboratory glass. At night, the biome domes glow with internal bioluminescence — genetically modified organisms producing light in contained ecosystems, beautiful and completely unnatural.
Daily Life
You submit to a biometric scan to enter, a decontamination shower to transition between zones, and a genetic screening to leave — and you accepted these conditions when you signed the employment contract that modified your genome.