The Deep Dregs
Pre-Collapse Identity
This was the San Francisco Bay — open water, shipping lanes, and the currents that connected the Pacific to the Sacramento Delta. There is no pre-collapse identity. This land was created by drainage. The seabed was never meant to hold cities.
Current Character
The heart of the Dregs. When the bay was drained, humanity's overflow was poured into this sunken canyon — miles of improvised housing, stacked towers called The Stacks, markets built from salvage, and a population that no corporation formally claims and no government effectively governs. The Rim walls tower on both sides — San Francisco to the west, Oakland to the east — creating an urban canyon fifty to eighty feet deep that traps heat, pollution, and desperation in equal measure. The Trench runs through the deepest old shipping channels, eighty feet below the Rim, a subterranean corridor beneath even the bay floor settlements. No natural light reaches the bottom. No corporation sends patrols. What law exists here is enforced by the people who live here, and it changes block by block.
Terrain & Atmosphere
Flat exposed seabed — industrial clay and sediment hardened over decades of habitation, with no natural drainage. Water pools in the old channels during rain, creating seasonal flooding that turns The Trench into a river of chemical runoff. The air is thick with particulate matter pushed down from the Rim — recycled, rebreathed, tasting of industrial exhaust and water treatment chemicals. Ventilation depends on massive industrial fans and the natural chimney effect of heat rising between tower clusters. In the deepest Dregs, you may never see unobstructed sky. Light is blue-gray, filtered through kilometers of overhead infrastructure, bridges, and the shantytown superstructures that have been built upward for decades.
Corporate Presence
None officially. Every faction operates here in the shadows. Nexus runs data cables through the bay floor; Ironclad maintains the physical infrastructure — ventilation, drainage, structural supports. Good Fortune's predatory lending reaches the deepest blocks. Relief sends medical outreach teams that collect biometric data from every patient. But no corporation plants a flag. Claiming the Dregs would mean responsibility for the Dregs, and that is an expense no balance sheet can absorb.
Key Locations
Sector 7G (the colloquial district name persists from the old numbering system — the lowest, densest settlement), The Stacks (vertical shantytown towers built layer upon layer), Anchor Town (the bay floor's largest settlement, built on and around grounded ship hulls), Treasure Heap Market (largest open-air market on the bay floor — salvage, trade, stolen goods), The Undervolt (settlement built around scavenged power infrastructure), Rust Point Radio (pirate radio station broadcasting from the old Bay Bridge pylons).
Sensory Detail
The smell hits first — recycled air, industrial exhaust pushed down from the Rim, the chemical tang of water treatment, human density compressed beyond what ventilation can manage. Sound is layered: the bass hum of ventilation fans, the clatter of improvised construction, voices echoing between tower walls. When it rains, water cascades down the Rim walls in curtains, and the flooding takes hours to drain. The temperature is five to ten degrees warmer than the surface — trapped heat, trapped people.
Daily Life
You survive, or you don't, and the city above you will never know the difference.