Berlin's transformation was agricultural, which means it was Ironclad's. When the Soil Collapse of 2138 destroyed conventional farming across the Midwest, the Fox River corridor through Berlin became one of the few surviving riparian zones capable of supporting modified crop production. Ironclad Agrisystems moved in before the dust settled — literally, in some cases — and converted Berlin's tanning district into a bioprocessing hub for synthetic protein production. The leather tanning infrastructure, it turned out, was chemically adjacent to what Ironclad needed: vats, chemical handling systems, water processing, and a workforce already accustomed to biological material that smelled terrible. By 2150, Berlin was producing forty percent of the synthetic protein paste consumed in the Fox Cities Nexus, and Ironclad had signed Nutrition Work Covenants with most of the population.

The town is bifurcated. North of the river is Ironclad sovereign territory — the bioprocessing facility, worker housing, the Harrow garrison, and the distribution hub where protein shipments are loaded for transport east to the Nexus. South of the river is what locals call Freebank — the remnant of old Berlin that Ironclad never formally claimed, inhabited by the people who refused Covenants, the families who aged out of them, and the small community of Ho-Chunk descendants who've maintained continuous presence in the area since before European contact. Freebank has no corporate services, no grid connection, and no legal standing. It survives on subsistence agriculture using pre-Collapse seed stock that the Ho-Chunk community preserved, supplemented by whatever falls off Ironclad's trucks — sometimes literally, sometimes with help.

The Native American mound sites south of the river have become something unexpected: sacred ground in a world that forgot what sacred meant. The Ho-Chunk community guards them, and the mounds have become a pilgrimage site for people seeking something the corridor's optimized, branded, surveilled existence can't provide — meaning, history, connection to land that wasn't manufactured. Ironclad has made three attempts to survey the mound sites for potential bioprocessing expansion. Each attempt was turned back by a combination of Ho-Chunk resistance, Freebank solidarity, and the inconvenient fact that the Harrow garrison commander's grandmother was Ho-Chunk and he keeps finding reasons to delay enforcement orders.