Pullman Works is the cruelest district in GLMZ, not because of what was done to it but because of how perfectly it predicted everything that came after. George Pullman built his company town in the 1880s with a simple proposition: the company provides everything — housing, shops, utilities, recreation — and the worker provides labor. The town was beautiful, planned, and totally controlled. When the workers struck in 1894 because Pullman cut wages without cutting rents, the federal government sent troops. The lesson was clear then and remains clear now: a company town is a company town, and the aesthetics are irrelevant.

When the tier system was implemented, a mid-level Axiom executive with a sense of irony — or perhaps no sense of irony at all — designated Pullman as a model corporate residential zone. The original row houses, designated a National Monument in the old United States, were restored to their 1880s specifications with modern infrastructure hidden behind the period facades. New residential units were built in the same architectural style, extending the original grid. The result is a district that looks like a museum and functions like a labor camp. Tier 2 workers are assigned housing in Pullman Works through their employment contracts — live here, work at the assigned facility, shop at the company store (rebranded as an Axiom Essentials outlet), and maintain your tier status through continued employment. Leave the job, lose the house. The parallels to the original Pullman are exact, and Axiom's promotional materials describe this as heritage preservation.

The residents live in genuine architectural beauty. The row houses have real brick facades, restored ornamental ironwork, and interior spaces designed with a proportion and care that modern construction doesn't attempt. The Hotel Florence — George Pullman's showcase guesthouse — has been restored as an Axiom executive retreat, its bar serving drinks to visiting managers who admire the craftsmanship while reviewing workforce productivity reports. The Greenstone Church still stands, its green serpentine stone exterior cleaned and lit, holding services that are technically nondenominational and practically company-sponsored. The clock tower keeps perfect time, which is appropriate for a district where time belongs to someone else.

But Pullman has always produced resistance proportional to its control, and the current iteration is no different. The workers here understand their situation with a clarity that comes from living inside a metaphor — they know they are the 21st-century version of the Pullman porters, and they know how that story ended. Underground organizing happens in the spaces between the heritage surveillance cameras, in the row houses whose restored walls hide conversations that Axiom's microphones can't reach because the original brickwork is too dense for standard audio penetration. The organizers study the 1894 strike not as history but as a playbook, noting what worked, what failed, and what's different now. What's different now is the neural interface network, which allows communication that doesn't require physical meetings. What's the same is everything else.