The Rim Gate
Embarcadero edge · in the shadow of Nexus Dynamics · avoiding Nexus Central
The smuggler entrance to the bay floor — a descent from The Rim into The Dregs. Where the Embarcadero's edge drops away into the drained bay, someone cut a passage through the seawall decades ago. The crawler has to navigate a steep, crumbling ramp down fifty to eighty feet to reach the bay floor below.
Arrival
The Great Divergence in a single view: look up and the corporate towers of
Nexus Central catch the sun five kilometers away, glass and money gleaming
at the sky. Look down and the old bay floor opens fifty feet below the
Embarcadero's ragged edge like a wound in the earth — the drained seabed
where 180,000 people live in permanent shadow on corporate maps that
pretend they don't exist. The Rim Gate is a smuggler's cut through the
seawall, hacked twenty years ago in a hurry and reinforced since with
stolen Ironclad girders, the concrete ramp crumbling under every crawler
that takes the descent. Neon graffiti marks the entrance in symbols that
mean nothing unless you're running the Rail. The crawler groans on the
grade — thirty to seventy percent depending on which switchback you trust
— and below, the Dregs wait with the patience of a place that receives
everything the corporations throw away. Including people.
Talk to people
- Rim Gate Lookout
"Nexus towers are right there — see? Five kilometers of glass and money. Down here, we live in the shadow of what they built. That's the Great Divergence in one view: look up, look down, pick which world you're in."
- Ramp Engineer
"Take the descent slow. The ramp was cut in a hurry twenty years ago and nobody's maintained it since. Lose a drive module here and you're walking the bay floor."
- Dregs Scavenger
"Welcome to the bottom. Fifty feet below The Rim and a whole world below that. Everything the corps throw away ends up down here. Including people."
Steel thread: st-great-divergence