San Diego

Mexico took San Diego in 2050, in the weeks after California was expelled from the Union and every neighbour helped itself. Aztechnology has held it ever since as a naval servicing station, a military installation and an intelligence centre, 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 somehow worse than a report of collapse.

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 didn't have to build a border. It inherited one.

Three bands, north to south:

First the buffer, which is Orange County — not Los Angeles, not Pueblo, not Aztechnology. The coast from the harbour down to Pendleton is a militarised strip nobody has claimed and everybody watches, because owning the ground beside a sealed city is a liability and having a presence on it isn't. Ares holds the security contract, paid for by the Corporate Court and the corporations with harbour interests, which is why Knight Errant is thick on the ground from Long Beach south. Inland of that, Pueblo. And in the middle of all of it sits Orange County's money — Fun City — doing very well out of being the last place with no obligations before the line.

Then the gap, the old reservation itself: seventeen miles of scrub and coast with no towns in it. The I-5 corridor and the rail line run through and both are closed: Aztechnology's perimeter faces north at the southern end, Ares watches the northern end, and the middle belongs to neither. Sensored, overflown, and not somewhere to be on foot.

And at the northern edge of the gap, San Onofre — the storage yard whose casks failed in 2056 and poisoned our coast, sitting unattended in a no-man's-land neither side will enter to secure.

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, which is why it flies military and security traffic and nothing you can buy a seat on. Ares runs it as part of the border contract.

Canon reference: San Diego on the Sixth World Wiki, for the published version. Where it and this page disagree, this page is what happened here.

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 flavours it always comes in: the city is being rebuilt, the city is a garrison, the city is half empty. The rumours don't agree and never have.
• 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.

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, which is the whole reason 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.