Santa Monica

Eight square miles that still governs itself, looking down at an ocean it can't use.

The bluffs saved it. When the wave came in in 2058, everything at sea level went, and Santa Monica's expensive half sits sixty feet above the beach looking down at its own dead water. So the city is still standing, still full, still expensive, and still has a view it can no longer swim in.

North of Montana is old money in houses that have been in the same families since before the plague — lawns, hedges, private patrol response measured in seconds. Ocean Avenue is towers with the best and most useless view in North America. The Promenade still trades under new awnings for tenants your parents wouldn't recognise. Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevard are offices, clinics and the businesses that serve people who live here and work elsewhere.

Inland it's a different and larger city. The Pico neighbourhood and Santa Monica's own mid-city are dense, working, and functioning — small apartment buildings, the college, the markets, the churches, the trades. That's where most of Santa Monica actually lives. It came through the last thirty years better than the coast did, because it was never built on the assumption that an insurance policy would arrive.

The bluff is the wall. Sixty feet of crumbling sandstone from the Palisades down to the coast highway, and the city only ever cut a handful of ways through it. Close those and the whole shoreline is sealed without a fence: the California Incline down from Ocean at California, the Moomat Ahiko ramp just north of the pier, the pedestrian underpasses beneath the highway, the Palisades Park stairs, and the pier bridge at Colorado. Six cuts in two and a half miles, all of them gated since 2056, none of them hard to find.

On the seaward side of the highway, north of the pier, is the old Gold Coast — the beach houses that sat directly on the sand, walls of glass facing the water, some of them a century old and famous. Those are the flats. They were evacuated in a week and they are still standing, still furnished, and still worth what nobody can now pay. The Annenberg beach house at 415 is the landmark you navigate by.

Halfway along the strip there's a facing pair everyone gives directions by: one tall and pink and fussy with a century of mouldings, the other flat grey and featureless, shoulder to shoulder behind the same length of cordon fence. Locals call them the Barbenheimers. Nobody remembers why, and the people who would have known are dead.

Santa Monica Place, the old mall at Broadway and Second, was sealed and filtered in the 2040s because a shopping centre already had the plant to do it. It is now the district's indoor high street and the place everybody parks, and a glazed pedestrian tube runs from it down Colorado and out onto the pier's second level so that nobody has to be in the air.

The pier is the seam, and it has its own page, because it stopped being a pier some time in the 2040s and became three decks of ungovernable ground with a view. Its deck starts up at Colorado and runs out over water that is closed, so it straddles a cordon — walk out along it, take the gated stairs down at the far end, and you are standing on sand you are not allowed to be on. Everybody knows that, which is why it's the most-watched structure in the district and still the way most people get down there.

What the crew knows

This district governs itself, and that's rare enough to plan around. Tenant law here goes back to the twentieth century and never lapsed, so when the city government evaporated in 2057 the rent boards, the neighbourhood councils and the elections office were all still running and simply carried on. They hire the patrol contract. They can fire it. They hold meetings about it, and the meetings are minuted.
Consequences here are procedural. A job that goes loud produces a hearing, a contract review and a name in a public record, which is slower than being shot at and lasts much longer.
Santa Monica College, 1900 Pico, is the practical school for this half of the city — trades, medtech, rigging, and thaumaturgy for people who'll never see a university. Half the useful technicians on the Westside came through it and most still know somebody there.
RAND, 1776 Main Street, two blocks off the water by the Civic Center. It has been selling analysis to armies since 1948 and never stopped; these days it sells to anyone who can pay, including every side of the same fight. Runners use it the way you'd use a library, if the library invoiced and asked what you wanted it for.
The pier is half rebuilt and it is not empty. "Tourist" means something different now — nobody flies in, because there is no commercial passenger aviation into this city. What the pier gets instead is three kinds of visitor. Angelenos, in numbers, who come to look at water they are not allowed to touch. Corporate staff on rotation, posted here for eighteen months from somewhere else and shown the ocean on the company's money. And Pueblo day-trippers on weekend permits — not for the tables, because the licensed casinos are theirs and better, but for everything their Council won't license at any price, and for a weekend that leaves no record against a shareholder's account. That last group spends the most.
Which is why only half of it got rebuilt: that is all the trade supports, and the rebuilt half pays for the structure to stay open. The market that runs underneath it after dark needs the pier above to be a going concern, and everybody involved understands the arrangement.
Anything below the bluff line is another country. The fence isn't decorative and the air on a west wind is a real problem.
The airport is the fight this district lost. Fifty years of it, a signed agreement, a closure dated to the end of 2028 — and then the quake took LAX, the closure was suspended as an emergency measure, and the emergency has been in effect for thirty-two years. Residents will still tell you the date. See the airfield, which is a separate world with its own rules.
The rent boards hold the only property records west of downtown with an unbroken chain of custody. Not because nobody digitised them — everybody digitised them. There are five or six Matrix copies of the coast's title map and they contradict each other, because every one of them was re-keyed by somebody after the Crash from whatever they could find. What the boards have is the originals: recorded instruments, wet signatures, notary seals, in sequence, with a custody log going back past 2044 because the boards never stopped operating and never put the vault online. That's what survives a challenge. In a city with no county recorder, it decides who owns the coast.

What "unlicensed" actually means here

Los Angeles has no authority that can license anything, so nothing in this city is illegal and nothing is permitted either. Here is what that actually produces on the pier, itemised, because "you can get anything there" has never once helped anybody plan. Note that "on the deck" now means one of three:

On the deck, in the open, above board as far as anybody can tell:

Clinics. Cyberware fitted without a registration and, more profitably, cyberware taken out without one — which is what somebody from Fun City actually wants, because a serial number on a corporate medical record is a permanent fact and this isn't.
Doctors who won't file. Gunshot wounds, terminations, anything a person needs treated without it becoming a document. See Esther Kwon for the good end of that trade; the pier is the other end.
Magic for hire, retail. Talismongers with stock and no provenance, spirits on commission, warding and hexes sold by the hour, and healers with no board to answer to. Pueblo licenses all of this and audits practitioners; here it's a stall.
Chips. Sim that no ratings board would pass, because no ratings board exists. Personality overlays, unrated and unlabelled recordings, and the illegal end of BTL.
Untaxed everything. Liquor, tobacco, and real coffee.

Under the deck, and keep the scale honest — it's small. This is the most-watched structure in the district, so nothing under it is an operation. A dozen people at a time, on the sand where the stairs come down, trading things that fit in a coat:

Paper. Fake SINs, and better business than that: credentials issued by authorities that no longer exist and therefore can never be checked or revoked. This city runs on those, and this is where you buy one.
Salvage out of the flats, carried by hand — jewellery, small fixtures, wine, medical stock, other people's documents. Furniture goes out the long way, not through here.
Paracritter parts and Tide-strange material out of El Infierno and the lower river, which is where the weird actually pays, and which fits in a jar.
Back-room tables are up on the deck rather than under it, in rooms with doors, for people barred from Pueblo's licensed houses or who can't be seen at them. Not an industry. A room.

What doesn't happen here, and both are worth saying because players will propose them:

Fights. They need floor, seating, sightlines and somewhere for money to be held. That's the Coliseum, four miles inland, and it's a real business.
Boats. No. The pier is the single most observed thing on this coastline — patrol attention, resident cameras, and the entire district's reason to keep an eye on it. Bringing a hull in under this deck is the loudest thing a crew could do with a boat. Twenty-eight miles of cordoned, unwatched, empty coast is where that happens; see the beach cities.

Getting in

Nothing stops you walking in from Venice or down the Wilshire corridor. The friction is inside: private patrol, dense camera coverage on the commercial streets, and residents who call things in because historically that has worked for them. Look employed. Vehicles get logged on Ocean and on Montana.

Don't mistake the patrol for a nuisance. The district's contract is Knight Errant's, so the two officers on Montana are corporate-grade with a residents' mandate: drones, the camera network, minutes of response time near the bluff, and the ability to call in the parent company, which behaves like an occupying force rather than a security service.

The teeth aren't in the stop, they're in what follows. There is no court here, so a detention has no arraignment, no clock and nothing to be produced before — they can simply keep you while they work out what you are. And they are patient: they hold the plate, the face, the footage and the incident file, there is no institution that can clear it and no limitation period on it, and they will still be looking a month later. Officers who prefer paperwork to violence are not officers who let things go.

What actually protects the crew here is the contract itself. The patrol answers to a board that reads incident reports and can decline to renew, so it will go to considerable lengths to avoid a visible mess on Ocean Avenue — which makes publicity the lever, and makes a quiet arrest far more dangerous than a loud one.

Pico and Mid-City are open city and considerably easier to be anonymous in than anywhere north of Wilshire.