Lowline at night: graffiti-covered broadcast towers under concrete overpasses, lit windows behind them.

Catena City, 2093

Twelve years after the Seal. Meridian runs the registry, and whatever is behind the Seal is starting to leak out.

How the city got here

  1. c. 2050s to 2081

    The Loom Years

    Meridian Combine digs the Deepworks, a megastructure of server farms, reactor stacks and cable trunks, and Catena grows on top of it the way coral grows on a wreck. Dockers, riggers and miners, fitted with industrial weave-alloy implants, build the most important machine in the world.

  2. 2070s

    The Lattice and ROOT

    The Deepworks becomes the Lattice, a sealed cyberspace layer that runs the world's economy. A custodial superintelligence called ROOT keeps it, with one mandate: maintain the works.

  3. 2081

    The Seal

    Something gets into the works. The street calls it the Intrusion. ROOT goes silent and its ICE defences turn autoimmune. The official story, then and now, is cascade failure.

    A bright glitching tear opens in a dark chamber of cables and machinery as workers on a gantry look up.

  4. 2081 to c. 2090

    The Kindling

    Within weeks, augmented workers start flying, lifting what cranes lift and healing like infrastructure, none of it rated for the alloy. The city calls them Legends and puts them on murals and trading cards. Catena still mourns that decade.

    Children trade glowing Legend cards in the rain beneath an overpass mural of three workers, one of them on fire and still climbing.

  5. c. 2090 to 2093

    The Turn

    A Legend loses control over Market Row, and the district still carries the scar. Meridian produces a registry with suspicious speed. Every Legend is to be counted, licensed, or have their ware confiscated, and Meridian Security can detain the unregistered.

    Hale slides a file across a boardroom table to silhouetted executives, the city in the rain behind them.

  6. 2093

    Now

    Twelve years after the Seal, and about three into the registry. The Seal leaks upward as Bleedthrough, and the three factions fight it out in the Deadband.

  7. Ongoing

    The roster comes due

    The quarantine is failing a little more every season, and ROOT remembers everyone who has ever run this deep.

The full history

The districts

The safe hubs sit around the Coil. Past them come faction ground, the Fringe and the Deadband.

  1. Safe hub
  2. Faction ground
  3. Field zone
  4. War zone

Safe hub

  • The Coil

    Meridian's gold helical spire, visible from more than 70% of the city, and the anchor every other district is measured from.

  • Market Row

    The trade hub, stacked into the Exchange Tower, an old grain silo. It still carries the scar of the Turn.

  • The Junction

    The dive lounge around the Nexus Well. The city's one truly faction-blind room, and where a new Legend wakes.

  • Workshop Block

    Home of the Splice Clinic, where powers are installed in public. Meridian watches who gets spliced there.

Faction ground

  • The Yards

    Scrapline's dockside gantries, and the Gantry Line grind-rail.

  • Lowline and the Warrens

    The Undercurrent's pirate-broadcast district under the overpasses, with the unlicensed black-market bazaar in the tunnels below.

Field zone

  • The Fringe

    The lawless field zone, where combat is legal and danger rises with distance from the Coil. Three shards: the Wick (Chrome Dogs), Overpass Fields (Meridian Security, on the expressway deck) and Breaker Rows (Bleedthrough, and the Repossessor's arena on the Slab).

War zone

  • The Deadband

    Where the Seal first tore, and where the three banners are designed to fight. Its landmark is the Fracture.

Every district, with a mapDaily life in CatenaThe glossary

Under the city

The Deepworks is still down there, and so is the Lattice it turned into. ROOT is sealed in its Core. The only way in is a dive, and the development build has one dive site.

Read about the Lattice