Geartown is what Corktown became when Ford Motor Company — or rather, the entity that emerged from Ford's 2144 merger with three autonomous vehicle startups and a military robotics firm — chose the neighborhood as its global autonomous vehicle testing campus. The name stuck because the locals refused to call it the Ford Autonomous Mobility Innovation District, which is what the brass plaque at Michigan Avenue and Trumbull says. Geartown. Where the gears turn. Where they turned you out of your house to make room for a parking algorithm.

The old neighborhood — Detroit's oldest, settled by Irish immigrants in the 1830s — is unrecognizable. The historic homes were bought, preserved as facades, and hollowed out to serve as sensor calibration labs, AV routing substations, and the kind of office space that looks like a living room but costs Φ40,000 per month. Michigan Central Station, the grand ruin that became a symbol of Detroit's decline and then its rebirth, now serves as Ford Meridian's primary AV command center — a gorgeous, vaulted space filled with holographic traffic models showing every autonomous vehicle in the Great Lakes Metropolitan Zone as a point of light. Eighteen million points of light, moving in patterns no human mind can track without augmentation.

The testing ground extends six blocks in every direction from the station. Public access is restricted. Autonomous vehicles of every configuration run continuous test loops — freight haulers, passenger pods, military platforms, emergency response units, and experimental configurations that don't have names yet, just serial numbers. The vehicles are silent. The neighborhood is silent. The loudest sound in Geartown is the whisper of tires on smart-surface roads and the occasional distant clang from the maintenance bays where human technicians still do the work that robots can't. The irony of a neighborhood full of autonomous vehicles that still needs human hands to fix them is not lost on the technicians. It's the only job security they have.