Deep South Sprawl
Pre-Collapse Identity
San Jose was the largest city in the Bay Area by population, a fact that surprised everyone who thought San Francisco was bigger. Santa Clara had tech campuses and a university. Sunnyvale had Lockheed Martin and Yahoo. Milpitas was where people lived when everywhere else was too expensive. It was suburban, sprawling, and unremarkable in the way that only a million people living in tract homes can be.
Current Character
Wholesome's domain — and the most unsettling sector in the Sprawl, not because of its danger but because of its normalcy. The Deep South Sprawl presents an illusion of suburban life that would be comforting if it weren't so clearly manufactured. Vertical farms rise in geometric rows. Agri-domes glint in the sun. Parks are maintained. Community centers host programming. Children attend schools that teach approved curricula. The Greenhaus, Wholesome's massive glass-and-steel agricultural campus, produces enough food to feed a million people, and that production capacity is the trap — Wholesome controls food production and distribution for the entire southern Sprawl, which means they control who eats and who doesn't, which means they control everything.
Terrain & Atmosphere
Valley floor — the Santa Clara Valley, flat as a table, stretching south into agricultural zones and the distant desert Wastes. The terrain is suburban-flat and deliberately maintained: roads are repaired, landscaping is groomed, and the visual presentation of order is a corporate priority. Vertical farm towers create a distinctive skyline — green-glass columns rising from the valley floor, their grow-lights visible at night like emerald pillars. The further south you go, the more the Sprawl gives way to open agricultural land, and eventually to nothing.
Corporate Presence
Wholesome controls comprehensively. Their infrastructure is everywhere — distribution centers, processing plants, agri-domes, community kitchens, and the food logistics network that makes every meal in the southern Sprawl a transaction with Wholesome's ledger. Helix BioTech maintains a southern corridor presence, operating gene clinics and biotech distribution. The two corporations coexist because Wholesome feeds Helix's employees and Helix provides the genetic modifications that make Wholesome's engineered crops possible.
Key Locations
The Greenhaus (Wholesome Corporation HQ — massive agri-campus), the Vertical Farms (food production infrastructure — green-glass towers), the Community Grid (maintained suburban infrastructure designed to project normalcy).
Sensory Detail
The air smells green — chlorophyll, fertilizer, and the damp earth scent of hydroponic systems venting. Sound is curated as carefully as in the Heights: birdsong (engineered, scheduled), ambient community tones, and the absence of alarms, sirens, or the mechanical grinding that defines the Sprawl's industrial sectors. The light is natural, or close enough to natural that your body believes it. At night, the vertical farms glow emerald, and the Greenhaus becomes a beacon visible from the marshlands to the north.
Daily Life
The food is free, the schools are open, the parks are clean, and you stopped asking what it costs about three meals after you arrived.