Getting Around
Where a vehicle can go, where it blends in, where you can carry, how not to be followed, and how to lose a team that already is.
One question governs all of this, and it's never "is this legal." It's whose ground am I standing on, and what have they arranged. That decides whether you can drive there, whether anybody notices the car, and whether the gun on your hip is a fashion choice or an international incident.
Where a vehicle can go
Los Angeles was built for driving and mostly still is. What changed is that the network now has holes in it, and the holes aren't where you'd guess — the freeways largely work.
Normally driveable, with no more thought than fuel: the whole basin surface street grid. Downtown, Koreatown, Mid-City, the Westside, the Valley floor, the harbour cities, the central freeways. Maintenance is uneven and potholes are somebody's problem that nobody owns, but you can get a van from Van Nuys to San Pedro without asking anybody's permission.
Driveable with a reason at a gate — anything with a fence and a list. The studio lots, Century City's underground parking, Bunker Hill, refinery and aerospace sites, the Getty's tram base, the Santa Monica airfield ramp. The road is fine; the gate wants a name.
Driveable, but you'll be the only one out there: the emptied places. Beach-city streets in the cordon are intact, wide, and completely clear — which is exactly the problem, since a moving vehicle there is visible for a mile in any direction. Ash country's canyon roads are worse: mostly passable, one lane in and out, and if a fire closes the highway below you the road you drove up ceases to exist as an exit.
Not driveable at all:
- Anything past a Pueblo checkpoint without a permit. It isn't a barrier, it's a refusal, and it's the only hard stop in the region. See Pueblo.
- South past the old Pendleton reservation. The freeway is closed and sealed with concrete. See San Diego.
- The stacks, interiors and upper floors of the subdivided districts, Oceanwide Plaza above the podium, and most of the cordon's plant interiors. Everything above street level is a walking problem.
- The river channel, unless you know the ramps, in which case it is the best road in the city and the worst place to be caught. See the river and the tunnels.
Where a vehicle doesn't stick out
This is the more useful map, because getting somewhere is rarely the hard part. Arriving unremarkably is.
| A vehicle is invisible | Because |
|---|---|
| Downtown and Koreatown, any hour | Constant traffic, no residential parking regime anybody enforces, and a van at the kerb is somebody's business, somebody's home, or somebody's delivery |
| The harbour and the Alameda Corridor | Freight moves at all hours and nothing without a container on it is interesting. Panel vans and flatbeds are the local dialect |
| Any hospital or clinic approach | Ambulances and private medical transport come and go constantly, and nobody delays either |
| The studio-adjacent streets in Hollywood | Production vehicles, honey wagons, generator trucks and grip trucks park where they like, and a truck with a call sheet on the dash is furniture |
| Grand Central Market, Dodger Stadium on a market day, any of the big informal markets | Loading and unloading is the whole point of the street |
| Shift change at a plant fence in the cordon | Company buses and worker vehicles in volume, twice a day, on a schedule anybody can read |
| A vehicle is conspicuous | Because |
|---|---|
| The cordon's residential streets | Nobody lives there. One car is the car, and salvage crews already know each other's vehicles |
| Ash country canyons | Same, plus a single road means anybody below you knows what went up and hasn't come down |
| Santa Monica and West Hollywood residential | Resident-funded patrols that actually respond, and an unfamiliar vehicle parked overnight generates a record rather than a shrug |
| Malibu and the bluff-top streets | Long sightlines, almost no through traffic, and neighbours whose entire hobby is noticing |
| Corporate campuses and the tower districts after hours | Everything legitimate is inside a structure with a barrier. A vehicle on the street at 2 a.m. is the only data point available |
| Anywhere within sight of a Pueblo checkpoint | Cameras that log plates as a matter of course, because the crossing is a business with records |
Two rules worth stating plainly. First, the anonymous vehicle in this city is a mid-size panel van, unlettered, ten years old, because it reads as work everywhere except a gated residential street. Second, the fastest way to make any vehicle invisible is to give it a reason: signage, a manifest, a hazard placard, a magnetic door sign. Nobody checks. The sign is the check.
Going armed
There is no gun law in Los Angeles, because there is no legislature to write one and no court to enforce one. Which sounds like freedom and isn't.
Five tiers, and the crew should be able to name which one they're in without thinking:
Unadministered. Carry openly; nobody official cares. Koreatown, Westlake, Pico-Union, Mid-City. El Infierno outside the plant fences. Ash country and the canyons. The dried suburbs out past the aqueducts. Nobody is coming, for you or for anybody, and visible hardware is a normal part of how people dress.
Community-regulated. Carry, but be known. Watts, Compton, Inglewood, Boyle Heights, East LA, Huntington Park, Pacoima. Nothing is illegal here either, and that is not the same as nothing being enforced. These neighbourhoods have parishes, families and associations, and an armed stranger on the block is the block's problem to solve. Walk in openly carrying and unknown, and the response won't be official, won't be immediate, and won't be forgotten.
Contracted — concealed, and a stop is a procedure. Procedure is not the same as gentle. West Hollywood and Santa Monica, the two districts with security that answers to residents. Concealed is workable; openly armed gets you stopped.
Santa Monica's contract is Knight Errant's, which means the patrol you see is corporate-grade with a residents' mandate rather than a neighbourhood watch. Response on the bluff or the pier is minutes. They have drones, they have the district's camera coverage, and they can escalate to Knight Errant proper, which is a different animal entirely.
What restrains them isn't softness, it's the contract: they answer to a board that reads incident reports and can decline to renew. So they'd much rather take you quietly and completely than have a firefight on Ocean Avenue — and quietly and completely is the part with teeth.
- They can hold you, and there is nobody to produce you before. No court, no arraignment, no clock. "A name in a record" is dangerous precisely because there is no institution that can clear it and no limitation period on it.
- They don't lose you. They have the plate, the face, the gait and the footage, and they will still be looking in three weeks. Getting away in the moment is not the same as getting away.
- They will use force and are perfectly willing to. They just prefer not to do it where the residents can see, in a district that is paying for the appearance of calm.
Corporate soil. Don't. Bunker Hill, Century City towers, the studio lots, UCLA's sponsored buildings, the Getty's upper levels, refinery and aerospace fencelines. Crossing a lobby line armed isn't a crime, it's an armed trespass into another country. The response is detention on their ground, a lawyer instead of a cop, and no clock running in your favour.
Bordered. Declare it or leave it. Union Station's border hall, and Pueblo territory beyond. Weapons are a permit class. Pueblo is a real nation with real licensing, so an undeclared weapon at a checkpoint isn't a firefight, it's a customs offence with a file attached. The same goes for the port: nobody in the harbour shoots, everybody in the harbour logs, and hardware needs a manifest reason.
Two places follow their own rules.
Oceanwide Plaza, where weapons come in freely and the convention that nobody starts anything indoors does the work a law would.
And the Santa Monica airfield ramp, where getting caught with a weapon is a paperwork event rather than a security one — and that is worse, not better.
Here's why. The field runs on a stack of emergency extensions layered over a signed closure order, so any use of force out there risks the legal review that could shut the place down. Nobody wants that: not the operators, not the corporations shipping through, not the people whose freight the manifests describe imprecisely. So the ramp crew does not draw on you and does not detain you. Somebody writes it down, and you walk out. Which feels like getting away with it, and isn't:
- A security event ends. A record doesn't. Nothing happens today. There is also no institution anywhere in this city that can clear the entry, and no limitation period on it.
- That log is read by everybody with an interest in the field, and there are a lot of them — operators, the district, Knight Errant, the corporate tenants, and the smugglers. One entry distributes your name to every party at once. You didn't get past a guard, you got added to a mailing list.
- It hands those parties a private reason to manage you. The thing that could close SMO is documented irregularity, so the people who need the field open now need you to not become a pattern — and since they can't act officially, they don't.
- Nobody tells you any of this. A stop informs you that you've been stopped. A logged weapon informs you of nothing, and you find out three weeks later when a job falls apart for no visible reason.
The way around it is the same as everything else out there: have a reason. A weapon on a manifest, in a case, consigned to somebody, is freight. A weapon on a ramp badge holder doing a job that plausibly involves one is equipment. Either of those is a line nobody reads twice. A weapon in your coat is a line somebody files.
Comms
Whether you can talk to each other, and who else hears it, changes by district as sharply as everything else does. The general rule: commercial service works nearly everywhere you'd expect, and almost nowhere does it reach anybody with an obligation to help.
| Where | What works |
|---|---|
| The ordinary districts — downtown, Koreatown, Mid-City, the Valley floor | Everything, and nobody is listening. There is also nobody to call: no police contract, no dispatcher, no number that reaches somebody who has to come |
| Corporate soil — lots, towers, campuses, plant fences | Their network, their credentials, their logs. Assume attributed to whatever badge you're carrying, and assume reviewed later rather than watched live. The delay is your margin |
| Contracted districts — Santa Monica, West Hollywood | Everything works and the patrols do respond. Being recorded is the normal state of affairs |
| The cordon | Patchy to nothing. Public infrastructure was abandoned in 2056; what exists belongs to the plants. Salvage crews use radio and shout |
| Ash country and the canyons | Nothing above the flood line. Nothing has been maintained up there in years |
| Below grade — the channel, the drains, the tunnels | No signal, no exceptions. Grade separation cuts both ways |
| Pueblo, and anywhere in sight of a checkpoint | Works, and is logged as a matter of routine, because the crossing is a business that keeps records |
| San Diego | Nothing. The zone was closed to communications in 2050 and has stayed closed |
Two habits worth having. Agree what happens when somebody drops off comms before you go anywhere, because in half these places it will happen and mean nothing. And remember that anything worth moving usually has to be carried — in most of this city the reliable way to get a thing from A to B is still a person walking.
Not being followed
A response team is the loud problem and the easy one — see below. The expensive problem is the tail you don't notice, and there are three kinds. Assume all three are running at once and that the people using them are not in a hurry.
Physical
- Plates are the whole game. Pueblo's checkpoints log them as routine, the contracted districts log them overnight, the studio gates log them at the barrier, and the port logs everything. A vehicle used on two jobs connects the two jobs, and that is how most crews get built into a file.
- So run more than one. A vehicle for going somewhere, and a different one for coming back. Swap where nobody logs anything: an unadministered street, a stack's ground floor, a market loading bay.
- Faces travel too. Camera coverage is thick on the commercial streets and nonexistent four blocks away. If you have to be recognisable somewhere, be recognisable in the district where you already live.
- Habits are the tell nobody plans for. Same coffee at the same hour, same route to the same fixer. Fontaine works a market stall precisely because everybody's routine is invisible there and nobody's is a pattern.
- The channel and the drains beat the street, because they are grade-separated from every camera in the city. They also flood. See the river and the tunnels.
Digital
- Your commlink is the tail. It associates with everything it passes and those associations are stored by whoever owns the host. Off is not enough — off with the cell out is enough.
- A DocWagon monitor is a subscription to being tracked, continuously, by a corporation that also knows the minute your heart rate spiked. That's the trade and it's a real one: see The Basics.
- Credsticks. Certified sticks are anonymous and that is the entire reason to accept worse terms. A registered stick puts a name and a time on every transaction, forever, and a registered stick spent near a job is worse evidence than a witness.
- Attributed queries are the trap on corporate soil. A query made on a borrowed badge is attributed to that badge and reviewed later rather than watched live. That delay is the margin, and it is why deck work on a lot is safe for hours and never safe for weeks.
- There is no deleting. Corporate logs are somebody's asset. Assume the record exists and work on not being interesting enough to look up — which is a different discipline from hiding, and cheaper.
- Nowhere has coverage everywhere. Half this city has no service at all, which cuts both ways: a gap in the record is also a shape in the record. Being untraceable for exactly the ninety minutes that matter is louder than being ordinary all evening.
Magical
- A ritual needs a piece of you. Blood, hair, a possession you've owned a long time. Which makes the mundane countermeasure the effective one: don't leave anything behind, and don't let anybody keep a gift.
- Your aura is not a face, and that's the useful half. A watcher spirit set to find you needs a description or a link. Sent after a body, it can be given the slip by ordinary means. Sent after a link it holds, it cannot.
- A magician on the crew is visible to other magicians at close range, and being assensed is not something you feel. Assume any room with a practitioner in it has read you.
- Background count is cover. The cordon, the lower river and ash country all run high enough to make astral work unreliable — which hides you and hides them, and neither side gets to choose which.
- Spirits are cheaper than surveillance teams and worse at boredom. Nobody watches an address for three weeks with a spirit. They watch a door for one night. Change the door.
And the rule that covers all three: you cannot be untraceable, so aim to be unlinked. Every one of these is about breaking the join between two facts — this plate and that gate, this stick and that hour, this hair and that name. The file gets built out of joins, not out of facts.
Losing a response team
Corporate response teams are professional, equipped, and expensive to run. That is the weakness. Five ways to end a pursuit, roughly in order of reliability:
1. Cross a jurisdictional seam. The best one, every time. A response team's authority ends at the edge of its employer's ground, and past that line they are armed foreigners in a city that has no police to call and plenty of people who resent them. Step off corporate soil onto a public street; better, cross into West Hollywood or Santa Monica, where a resident-hired patrol will treat an armed corporate squad as exactly the intrusion it is, and file about it.
2. Go vertical into a stack. Koreatown, Westlake, Mid-City. Lightwells, bolted stairways, roof-to-roof, and a subdivided walk-up that a team in armour physically cannot move through at speed. Every landing has residents who don't want them there. Density beats equipment, and it beats drones too.
3. Get somewhere everyone's interests are tangled. Oceanwide Plaza, the Queen Mary, the port, the Getty's public plaza. Not safety — expense. In places where several corporations hold assets or deposits, nobody will authorise a firefight, because the first one to do it explains itself to the other seven. You are not protected. You are merely not worth it.
4. Become paperwork. An air ambulance nobody delays. A shift bus through the cordon. A permitted crossing at Union Station. A ramp badge. A pursuit that has to force a checkpoint the crew legitimately cleared turns into a review, and reviews are the one thing every party at that checkpoint is trying to avoid.
5. Make them visible. Corporate teams need deniability as much as the crew does. Get into a crowd that is recording — the pier on a Sunday, Grand Central Market at noon, the Coliseum on a fight night, a Brotherhood meal in Westwood — and their own rules of engagement shut the pursuit down. The audience is the weapon.
Two more that work and cost something: the cordon on a bad wind, because their vehicles' filters and their employer's liability both object; and the river channel or the tunnels, which are fast, unobserved, grade-separated from every street in the city, and occupied by people and things with their own opinions. Watch the mountains, not the sky.