San Diego

Mexico took San Diego in 2050, in the weeks after California was expelled from the Union and every neighbor helped itself. Aztechnology has held it ever since as a naval servicing station, a military installation and an intelligence center, and in 2050 it closed the border and never reopened it.

Two million people were inside when it shut. Nobody outside knows how many are inside now.

What is publicly known is almost entirely geography. The city is a hundred and twenty miles down the coast: two hours, if the road went through. Satellite imagery shows streets, lights in some districts and not others, ships alongside at the naval station, and no visible ruin. Whatever is happening down there is being administered, which is worse than a report of collapse would be.

Where the border starts#

At the old Camp Pendleton reservation, and that's the most useful fact about this frontier. A hundred and twenty-five thousand acres of Marine base already sat between Orange County and San Diego County: seventeen miles of undeveloped coast, one freeway, one rail line, and nothing else. Aztechnology never had to build a border; it inherited one. The three bands of it, who holds each, and the unattended casks at its northern edge are on San Onofre and the Seventeen Miles.

John Wayne is not behind the seal. It's in Santa Ana, forty-five miles north of the line, on our side of everything. What it is instead is the forward airfield facing a sealed hostile city, so it flies military and security traffic and nothing you can buy a seat on. Ares runs it as part of the border contract.

What the crew knows#

• The line is at Pendleton and everybody knows it. You can drive to within sight of the fences on the northern side. People do, on weekends. There is nothing to see.
• Nobody has come out and been believed. No journalists in a decade, no defectors anybody can name, no footage that survives examination.
• Contact is a business, and most of it is fraud. People sell families a word from inside. Some of what changes hands is fabricated and some is recycled from before the seal.
• Rumour, in the three flavors it always comes in: the city is being rebuilt, the city is a garrison, the city is half empty. The rumors don't agree and never have.
• The marine layer over the city stopped burning off the year the border closed. Ten years of May Gray with no June to end it, visible from the county line and from any boat that keeps its distance. Nobody can prove anything about why.
• The people who had family there stopped hearing from them at different times, and no two of them agree on when, because nothing was ever announced. See the setting page.
• Simsense came out of there, invented in the electronics industry down the coast in the twenty-teens and pressed there for thirty years afterwards, with the blanks trucked north to the lots. Hollywood worked out what the thing was for and has recorded it ever since, but the medium and the manufacturing were both San Diego's, and in 2050 both went behind the fence. That is why an industry a hundred and twenty miles north spent the next decade learning to do badly what somebody else used to do well.

Getting in#

You don't, and that's the point of the place. Every route anybody has ever described is either closed, watched, or a story someone is charging for.

Overland is seventeen miles of monitored nothing with a hostile perimeter at the far end, and the two ways through the gap are a shut freeway and a shut railway. By air is Aztechnology's airspace over Aztechnology's military installation. By water is an ocean and therefore theoretically open, except that what's on the other side of it is a working naval station, and that station is why the city is worth holding.

Which leaves the thing that people who want your money will always tell you exists: a way that isn't any of those. Nobody outside has produced one.

Canon reference: San Diego