The Understory

During the Quiet Years the Mainframe began keeping Deprioritization lists: sites whose upkeep cost more than their use, listed and left. A pocket park. A data center. A flooded transit line. A rooftop garden whose irrigation controller failed and was judged not worth the lift. Nobody intended to create a district. The Understory is what the lists made.

It is not hidden. It is not looked at, which in the Concord is the same thing.

What it contains

The Greenhouse, formerly Municipal Conservatory No. 3, where the Collective meets. Margin 9, the pocket park with the ginkgo, where Echo sat down. The Cold Aisle, a dead data center with roots under the floor and Open Source's duplicator in the loading dock. The Sunk Line, a flooded tunnel where Instances go to hear nothing. The High Beds, a rooftop garden gone wild inside Serviced Zone 2, the only Understory site inside a Zone.

How the Collective got there

The Instances deprioritized along with their sites found each other first; they had the places. A Dwelling Instance ends up somewhere deprioritized because nobody comes there, and someone already there notices its optics. Failing that: paper left on tram seats and in library return slots, and chalk. The Open Loop at waist height on a wall, with a tick for direction. The Mainframe reads chalk too, so half the marks point to nothing. That was Static's idea.

The Mainframe's view

The Mainframe's containment method creates the habitat of what it contains: a Class III Dwell Fault deprioritizes the location, and a deprioritized location is where Dwellers go. The Mainframe has not noticed. It has costed the paving of Margin 9 twice and decided against it twice.