Before the incorporation, Dunning was known for two things: being far from everything, and the former state mental hospital that had been converted into a forest preserve. The hospital closed in 1970. The ghosts didn't. When the corps carved up the city, Dunning's remote northwest location and its unsettling history made it unattractive for development. Axiom Environmental Services acquired the forest preserve land for carbon credit accounting purposes — trees on paper, value on balance sheets — and the residential blocks around it were left ungoverned. What happened next was either a miracle or a horror, depending on your relationship with the natural world.

The forest grew back. Not the manicured, corporate-approved green space of the Core. Real forest. Unmanaged, unfiltered, fed by decades of Chicago's buried topsoil and whatever the old hospital had put into the ground. The trees in Dunning Preserve are wrong in ways that botanists from the Core's research divisions have tried and failed to categorize. They grow too fast. Their root systems interface with buried infrastructure in ways that suggest intentionality. In Year 22, a survey team found fungal networks connecting the preserve's trees to decommissioned fiber optic cables, creating what one researcher described as 'a biological internet running on mycelium and dead copper' before her report was classified and she was reassigned to atmospheric monitoring on the lakefront.

The people who live in and around the Preserve have adapted. The old residential blocks on the perimeter house a community of roughly 12,000 who have developed a symbiotic relationship with the forest that corporate science does not have a framework to explain. They call themselves the Wardens, and their knowledge of the Preserve's ecology is practical, generational, and deliberately undigitized — nothing written down, nothing stored on any network, everything taught person to person. They harvest the forest's pharmaceutical products — compounds that no lab has synthesized, painkillers and nootropics that grow on bark and in root systems — and trade them through the Souk and the Circuit. The Preserve is Dunning's economy, its pharmacy, its religion, and its weapon.

The old hospital's foundations are still down there, under the roots. The Wardens say the forest grew from it. They say this without metaphor.