a ghost robot world

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DISTRICT 10

District 10 was a central industrial and factory center of Palomar City. Many of today’s concerns with skynesting and immigration were born in District 10. In the 1990s, close to one million immigrants from China set out for America due to political shifts in their homelands. Hundreds of thousands landed illegally, with a majority arriving first at the ports of District 09, which marked the Great Population Boom. These immigrant workers were then funneled on foot, in containers or trucks and transport trains, through a series of interconnected factories and warehouses, into District 10.

Because the Gates had essentially created a walled-off ghetto of cultural and ethnic concentration, the flood of immigrants into District 10 did not readily travel throughout the city. As the District’s population swelled in the mid-’90s, factory owners and landlords faced with being unable to expand housing laterally, began to build vertically. The new construction on top of existing buildings created dormitories or even full, thriving, city-like communities of immigrant families high above street-level – this became known as skynesting.

The City got its first glimpse of these “shanty-towns in the sky” after hundreds died in multiple devastating fires. The demands for oversight were raised, and so was an army of opposition, not just from factory owners but from the immigrants themselves. The threat of regulation put fear and contempt in these seemingly juxtaposed groups’ hearts and minds and formed a dangerous symbiosis.

In 2000 the Culture Clashes began in the heart of District 10. When a fifty-strong STRC Force unsuccessfully stormed the Yangon Building. After the dust cleared, between both sides, 15 were dead, and for the next ten years, the District fought to gain control of its border and Gates. The ultimate result was that more power shifted to the local leaders to govern their Districts, including control of the gates themselves.