[Markov Geist Overview]

Markov Geist is an uncomfortable fusion, like any city.

[Corteca]

At the heart, Corteca: glass angles, reinforcement, callous architecture deployed by successive generations of algorithms; the panel-lit flatness of a world designed to be overlayed with daily infographics.

Anyone choosing to walk here does it as an indulgence, no doubt enmeshed with the shape, consulting with their shapeform strategists.  Indeed, if the shape were real, it would be most visible here: a gauze of data draped over each grey column.

[Brightling]

To the northwest: Brightling. 

The university acts as the city's central nexus of knowledge; also knowledge for its own sake, the snake biting the tail.  Here the dark engines of thought reduce and surmise; the building blocks of the shape rest deep within its corridors.

The architecture is some of the oldest in the city: mostly human-built; expensive and complex.  Columns rise with a proud sweep above the narrowed streets; modern concourses jut from the tangle of the baroque.

[Denshen]

Many consider Denshen to be the true heart of Markov Geist: the largest human concentration of the city clusters here.  Eastern Spindle immigrants, descendents of the Nin, non-affiliates and anyone looking for a more grounded life outside the shape reside here.

Shot through with a rich, dense vein of discontentment, Denshen harbours a fearsome animus.

[Torpor]

The drift of Torpor surrounds the city in a blanket of vagueness.  Great tracts of abandoned land were exposed as the city turned in on itself.  Many expected this to be home to great towering arcologies, or riven with underground habitation.  Instead: dereliction and loss; the callous of dead industry.  Only the Panarchs sustain this neglected ambition.

Pockets of population rove and rebuild; the great glass Cortecan eye occasionally casts its gaze across it.  Presumably, it sees potential.