OMNI CORP — INTELLIGENCE DIVISION
CLASSIFICATION: Tier-2 Clearance
TO: Senior Staff
FROM: Richard Glass — Chief of Intelligence
RE: Sky City — District and Territorial Overview, Current Period
Sky City isn’t a ground city. It was built above the pollution layer — frame over frame, generation over generation, until the air was clean enough to call it a place worth living. The surface below is the underworld. Nobody goes down there by choice.
The frame isn’t solid. There are gaps — pits in the platform where the structure doesn’t close. The largest is the Eye of the Hurricane, sitting between Section Alpha and the eastern docks. Ships use it to descend and pull raw materials up from the surface. Nobody has mapped how far it goes down. That question tends to stay open.
Transit runs two ways. Skycars handle most personal movement across open air. The pipeline network, buried in the frame’s foundation, handles high-volume traffic. Vermont Station is the primary hub. Most people use it without thinking much about what’s underneath it. I find that interesting every time.
Here’s the city as it stands.
Wayford
Civic core. Government buildings, administrative offices, SCPD headquarters under Director Steele. Wayford is the only district where corporate authority doesn’t formally apply — on paper, everything else answers to it.
In practice it’s more complicated than that. The current administration is workable. That’s about as much as I’ll put in writing.
What makes Wayford worth watching long-term isn’t the police presence. It’s the building behind it — foundational city records, infrastructure schematics, civil frameworks that predate every corporate entity operating here. The keys to understanding how this city actually works are in that building. Nobody controls it yet. That won’t be true forever.
Entertainment District
Viro’s territory. Fully. They own the buildings, the broadcasts, the venues, and most of the people inside them. The Deathbowl arena is here — the city’s loudest spectacle and Viro’s most visible asset. Their headquarters sits in the same stretch. Most of what Sky City thinks about itself comes out of that building, which is either impressive or concerning depending on how you look at it. Probably both.
The red light district runs along the lower end. Viro doesn’t officially operate it. They don’t need to.
East Borough
Small. Tucked between the civic center and the industrial zone. No major corporate interests, no contested resources, nothing that makes it worth anyone’s formal attention.
That assessment has a footnote. Unit 44 has a history in that borough I won’t detail here. The standing instruction is to route around it. I’d follow that instruction.
There’s a mansion in the middle of the borough owned by Charles Vander. Further detail on Vander is tier-3.
The Docks
Rance territory. All of it. Heavy industry over open air — loading platforms, manufacturing floors, freight infrastructure that’s been expanding since before most of the current corporate landscape existed. It feels old because it is old. Rance built this district by absorbing everyone else in it until only one name was left over the whole eastern industrial zone.
The Eye of the Hurricane sits beneath the docks. Rance controls it exclusively. Their specialty diving machines go down through the Eye and pull raw materials up from the surface. Cross-continental travel runs on their vehicles. Most of the city’s manufacturing depends on what comes up through that pit. That dependency is noted.
Section Alpha
Home. Our manufacturing floors, our suit production, our hardware output. No corporate entity in this city matches our production capacity and that advantage is maintained here. Unit 44’s primary presence is in the south. The district is fortified because it needs to be.
Tendo Corp operates out of a specially zoned area within our footprint — a logistics arrangement that made sense at the time it was drawn. What they’ve done with that strip of land is notable. They build upward. Significantly upward. Their structure is visible from outside our facilities in a way that wasn’t anticipated when the zone was allocated. Whether that constitutes a zoning violation is under review.
Plan Beta is in planning. Eastward expansion toward the Eye. I’ll leave the details for a separate filing — this document isn’t the place for it.
Vermont
Main residential district. Highest street crime rate in the city, highest SCPD presence to match. Vermont runs from working-class storefronts near the station up to the edge of Grand Heights — two populations in the same district who don’t overlap much.
Vermont Station sits at the center. Primary pipeline hub. Loud, busy, constant. Most people pass through it without a second thought.
The Vermont Megamall is a joint Cytex-Viro venture — Cytex built it, Viro filled it, both take a split. Publicly it’s commercial. Strategically it’s a chokepoint between Grand Heights and the rest of the city. It was built after the Venici accepted their arrangement — unlike the Hawthornes, who didn’t survive the corporate transition, and the Tyriels, who folded into Viro. The Venici chose compliance and kept Grand Heights. The megamall is the reminder of what that arrangement costs if they change their mind.
They haven’t forgotten what happened to the other two families. We haven’t forgotten that they remember.
North Slums
The North Slums used to be something else. Under the Hawthorne family it was maintained, affluent — a proper northern district. Cytex ended that when they absorbed the Hawthornes. What they built in its place is theirs entirely now.
Miles of augmentation infrastructure. Integration centers where residential and commercial buildings used to be. Drug distribution woven into the same network — narcotics that manage the pain of cybernetic modification, chemicals that prepare the body to accept what Cytex puts into it. They call it medicine. The people in the slums call it survival.
Cytex’s stated philosophy is human evolution through full integration with the machine. Once a person crosses the threshold of complete merger they’re plugged into the Cytex net — a closed digital world that Cytex controls. A significant portion of the slum population lives there as much as they live in the physical streets. For most of them, the net is more real than the district around them. That’s not an accident.
The SCPD doesn’t operate in the North Slums. They haven’t for some time. I note that without editorial comment.
Grand Heights
The least documented district in any intelligence file, including mine. The Venici control it completely. They always have. No corporate entity has run an operation inside Grand Heights. None have tried in a long time.
The architecture visible from outside is elaborate in a way the rest of Sky City isn’t. These are the oldest buildings on the platform — built by people who understood the city before it was a city. What happens behind those gates is not something I can tell you, because we don’t have sources inside and the ones we’ve tried to place haven’t lasted.
What I can tell you: the Venici’s enforcement presence is known by result, not observation. Their operatives are called marionettes. You won’t see one coming. Nobody does. The corps know this because of outcomes — not engagements. Nobody raids Grand Heights. That’s not policy. That’s math.
Occasionally skycars leave Grand Heights and move through the city. Where they go is not tracked at this level.
The Venici have a relationship with Wayford’s civil administration that goes back further than any corporate arrangement in this city. That relationship is the structural reason Grand Heights stays untouched. I’ve been studying this city for a long time and the Venici are the one thing in it I find genuinely difficult to get a complete picture of. Make of that what you will.
Assessment current as of filing date. The landscape changes. I’ll update as it does.
— Richard Glass, Chief of Intelligence — Omni Corp