West LA

The Westside proper, and the most unequal ground in the city over the shortest distance. Century City is a cluster of corporate towers behind checkpoints, and it is where the operations actually are — the corporations left downtown for these buildings decades ago and never went back. Bunker Hill kept the authority; Century City got the work.

Brentwood and the Bel-Air edge are walls and hedges. Then you cross Sepulveda into Sawtelle, which is dense, cheap, working, and has the best food on this side of the river.

UCLA is still there, which surprises people, and it is still a real university — that's the part that matters. What changed is who pays.

The state stopped. California was thrown out of the Union in 2050 and threw Los Angeles away in 2057, so the government that owned the campus no longer governs the ground it stands on. State money had been a thin slice of the budget for a century anyway; when it went to zero, what was left was the hospital and the research contracts, and both of those have customers. The sponsors who kept the lights on took board seats in exchange, which is how the Regents came to be appointed by the people writing the cheques rather than by a governor.

The visible result is that the campus has internal borders. A sponsor who funds a building holds it under the Business Recognition Accords, so some of those buildings are corporate soil — you can cross a national boundary walking from one lecture hall to the next, and the map of which is which is not posted anywhere.

The Wilshire corridor is the strange part: a wall of residential towers built for people who mostly left. Some are full and guarded. Some are half empty and the management company has stopped pretending otherwise.

What the crew knows

• Century City is a hard target and an easy meet. The plazas and restaurants are public. The buildings are not.
• UCLA is the most reliable place in the city to find someone who can explain a magical problem to you, and the second most reliable place to find someone who reports you for asking.
• The medical centre is the largest working hospital west of downtown and it is privately financed. In a city with no public health authority that makes it the only real trauma system on this side of town, and it will treat you, and it will bill you for the rest of your life.
• Ask a professor who funds their lab and you'll get an honest answer about a foundation. Ask who funds the foundation and the honesty runs out — not because they're lying, because they don't know.
• The Brotherhood is all over the Westside. That self-improvement outfit with the meeting houses — free classes, meals, meditation, a chapterhouse within walking distance of anywhere over here. It started at UCLA about seven years ago and has grown at a rate that makes people either enthusiastic or uneasy. Respectable people belong to it.
• The West LA veterans' campus at Wilshire and Sepulveda is three hundred and eighty-seven acres that no government is left to own, and it is not abandoned — it's occupied. The land was deeded in 1888 on the condition that it be used permanently as a home for disabled soldiers, and that condition is a property instrument rather than a law, so it outlived the United States, the UCAS and California in turn. Nobody has the standing to break it because the courts that could are all gone.
• So the campus runs itself. Veterans of the Ghost Dance war, the corporate armies, the 2050 invasion and the 2057 massacre, administering three hundred acres of the most valuable dirt in Los Angeles under a Victorian deed and a committee. They are armed, they are trained, and they are the only community in West LA that no corporation has found a way to buy. The Sawtelle Free Clinic operates out of two of the old wards.
• The encampment along the wall outside is a different thing from the campus inside, and the people inside will tell you so.
• The Getty sits on its ridge holding everybody's originals. One tram up.

Getting in

Sawtelle and Westwood are open city. Century City is credentialed at every garage and lobby, and the checkpoints on Avenue of the Stars log plates — the towers are a separate problem from the district. Brentwood and the hill roads are private patrol and one-way-in geography.