Rezo Thorn

◈ Walk the strata — interactive cross-section →
24 codex locations · story routes · best on a larger screen

the horizontal geometry · 11 rings · 384 sectors · one address, two numbers

Seen from above, the city is a lattice of 384 hexagonal sectors in eleven concentric rings around the Spine, and every address in Rezo is just two numbers: a level and a sector, L= for altitude, S= for position. The rings are why the pyramid steps: each ring caps out at a lower altitude than the one inside it, so the outer city is always the lower city. The sectors overlap deliberately, every one lapping its neighbours by the same structural factor; the rhombic envelopes where they overlap are not wasted space but the footprints of the mega-columns that carry the city.

L1251–1750 · 5,000–6,996 m · durable capital over volatile celebrity

Apex.md

Architecture grown, not built

The narrowing interior of the Thorn: living walls veined with bioluminescence, obsidian and bio-wood, light that shifts clinical-white to amber on occupancy. Here prestige is durable: cleanest air, strongest signal, the heaviest gating. The Heights below are the volatile-celebrity tier, where prestige is bought with light and sightlines: real glass, actual sunlight, solar-view suites above the cloud sea. Above everything, unmanned, run the 375 service decks of the Technical Apex; only the Spine climbs that far, and its Terminal Apex shuttle gate is the city’s one door to orbit.

Here: the Apex Suites (L1723-S1, the Spine penthouse) · the Menagerie gala (L1712-S1) · Gwen's Opulence Tower (L1321-S4).

L752–1250 · 3,004–4,996 m · the city in the clouds

Midtown.md

The first light above the overcast

Lower Midtown is the first stratum fully above the permanent cloud: dense, congested, permanently crowded mass (in Rezo, congestion itself is a class signal). Climb into Upper Midtown and the Thorn's taper begins: commerce corridors, ad towers, AI enclaves, and the Trendplateau Exchange, the certified meme-asset trading floor where attention is priced.

Here: the Magtrain Terminal (L753-S5) · Jeda Worlds Plaza (L1150-S9) · the Trendplateau Exchange (Upper Midtown).

L751 · 3,000 m · the cloud-break · “the city inside a city”

The Lost Level is a single transitional civic floor, neither Midtown nor the Vaults: the last lit remnant of the older city the Vaults used to be, and the first place on the way up where reliable daylight breaks the cloud. You can read the boundary in the walls, where the depths’ wet Geocrete gives way to carbon-laminate panel; the social boundaries are kept deliberately elastic, but the physical one is solid and blatant. The Dandelion Security Node (L751-S5) is its customs post, an EQUIV-grade checkpoint where citizenship is validated for passage: a fast lane for the counted, a full-scan lane for everyone else.

Pressed against it in Sector 46 sits the Trendplateau ground, the district the trend platform was named after, not the other way round. The locals call it the Kill Zone, dressed up as a carnival: bootleg emotions and black-market memories, noise-fountains running evaporating liquid data, living billboards with surgically altered voices, and the broken theatre spire standing over all of it. One column further down the same sector, the carnival’s salvage shadow: the Cannibal Gardens sit directly beneath the Kill Zone at L724-S46. Carnival above, cannibal warren below.

The market hall of the Trendplateau, and the Sector 46 theatre spire on the Lost Level: the seam where the lit upper city meets the dark.

L251–750 · 1.0–3.0 km · inside the cloud, skyless · formerly “Upper Downtown”

Vaults.md

Where social death becomes spatial

A two-kilometre decayed overbuild atop the industrial root, drowned in the permanent cloud: skyless, wet, perpetually dim, the lower bands flooded. This was once Upper Downtown, the city before the narrative economy; it was never demolished, only built over, and its ghost infrastructure now houses the ghost population. Most of Proof of Human lives here.

The signal is the sentence. Vault hardware is SUB-grade: strong enough for the bedrock currency, sanctuary residency and the meme-church, but too weak to carry a personhood re-attestation handshake. That is the structural lockout that strands the ghost class; down here nobody can prove their way back up without physically climbing to an EQUIV-grade node first. Personhood is not socially decisive in the Vaults. Survival, barter, bandwidth and shadow affiliation are.

L1–250 · 0–996 m · the 332 km² industrial base

Stacks.md

The thermal & water heart

The 332 km² hexagonal base the whole megacity stands on: factories, refineries, desalination, power — the city's thermal and water heart, where water is made and rationed upward. Mass Portland concrete and carbon-steel rebar, centuries weathered, the lower 100–200 m flooded (the "crying walls"). Not lawless but corporately sovereign: by charter, things illegal elsewhere are permitted here, most visibly the licensed blood arena of the spectacle economy.

Here: the Stack-106 arena, the Coliseum (L240-S106) · BCB Event Operations (L199-S106) · the descent gate above (L251-S106, the Vaults boundary).

The crying walls

Down at the waterline

Between the mega-columns the base runs out to standing water: flooded service canyons where the only daylight is a thin shaft from kilometres above, sodium lamps stud the concrete, and water sheets endlessly down the walls. This is the waterline the whole vertical city is built to climb away from.