Geographic realities of MC

Monitor City is actually an existing town. A small one. Near the Canada-U.S. border. A river probably divides the two, but I'm unsure about that.

There is a central core of the city that is the old city hall from the original town, plus a few extra heritage buildings. Those buildings are now server farms. Then within the same 2-block grid are the hubs: giant server and switching buildings filled with hundreds and hundreds of fibre runs that connect the city together, and to the outside world.

One of those buildings has been renovated into the "firewall house", which is a big set of boxen dedicated to keeping the outside would out of MC. Which reminds me:

There is a big difference in speed between what goes on inside MC and what goes on outside. Because a lot of the websites of the world are hosted within MC, if you live there, you tend to not have to connect to the outside world much. And because so many people stay inside the MC intranet so much of the time, the bandwidth requirements on sites start to increase. Things that people in Montana can only dream about suddenly become real, but at the expense of compatibility. So the W3C, trying to cater to the rest of the world without pissing of MC, certifies a bunch of translation programs that convert the fanciness of MC-based websites into more blah CSS 6.3 sites. And those processors are all in the Firewall House, chugging away to make the world a better place.

Anyway, beyond that core space, there are the developments of apartment buildings that connect MC. They are divided into blocks (A, B, C, D and Z ... dragonball fans, y'know), but for the first 5 "layers", the blocks don't matter much. It's when you get to layer 6 in blocks C and D that you see the class structure of MC start to emerge.

At 6-C/D, you have the warehouses that were going to be built as repeater stations for the main hub. The warehouses ended up not being used (the technology in the hubs was upgraded), and soon the "untouchables" of MC moved in. The l4m3rZ, the talentless, the ravers. The people who fancied themselves free enough to live in such a place, but who had no real skills to be allotted an apartment and console. These people live --- well, party --- in the crazy euphoric unreality that only MC can give you. And then they grow up a little, maybe overdose a few times, and move back to wherever they came from. But there's always a steady supply of them.

Gamers tend to own Z-block from 6 out, and the apartments in A from 8 on get a bit bigger and posher (so richer citizens go there). The B block is primarily the business district, with a big portion used for the MCCS, but other places like pizza shops and delivery-only grocery stores. C and D have the mixed population, but a lot of troders live there and you can't always be sure you'll be safe at night.

So that's the outline. I'm going to upload an image detailing this a bit more, and then I'll start laying in more information later.