Metro: The Warrens

The Warrens:



About 10 years go the corporations that were developing the Huntington / Ashland area found themselves to be swarmed with an abundance of labor and more was coming every month but they had no place to house them nor to put them to work.

A joint project, as much is done within Metro-City, was established to develop a corner of what was then the outskirts of downtown. Though the area has subsequently been circumscribed within the outer ring of the last rail, the almost 80 square block industrial center was, at first, a model of corporate thinking.

Four, five-story buildings were erected in "clover"-like clusters each of which was the size of a city block. Sixty-four of these clovers were arranged in a grid with factories enclosing the entire space at the corners. These factories were low-impact facilities where workers would generally assemble products for later use at other locations (no threat of chemical spills or the like - or so they said). These factory buildings were built taller than the apartment buildings that they surrounded to accommodate for the massive amount of machinery that was needed to put their new "localized" labor force to work. The height of the buildings all but drowned the apartment complexes in a perpetual shadow; only receiving a small amount of sunlight for a few hours around noon. Without the sun, the streets became dingy and trash strewn and the squalor of the corporate dream became quickly apparent.

Then, three years ago, the first of the Cleaners came to The Warrens. The Cleaners are massive machines that are something of a mix between a street sweeper, a trash compactor and a garbage truck. This large machine with its piercing headlights will pass down the street and clean it completely. Cars are not permitted within the Industrial center so anything found in front of the Cleaner is grabbed by two robotic arms (think about the arms used to grab trees) and fed into a mouth-like metallic chipper. As there are no stoops for any of the apartment complexes, the Cleaners can clean the streets from edge to edge. As they pass, jets spray waves of a light-green foam on the street and the buildings that will cut through the grime and dirt and leave an annoyingly strong Pine scent behind.

Each apartment cluster has a trash disposal system but they're almost always broken and rarely will anyone come to repair it since the gangs have started to patrol the streets. People will commonly just put bags of trash out on the street for the Cleaner to pick up the next time it passes through.

Those who live in the Warrens are sometimes called "Pine Cones" due to the overwhelming PINE scent in their clothing and on their person.

-Tom