Racine was a manufacturing city that made things: tractors, floor wax, malted milk. The factories are still here. What they make has changed. The Case Corporation campus — which built agricultural equipment for a world that still had agriculture — was acquired by Zheng-Dao Bioelectric in 2167 and converted into the largest neural mesh component fabrication facility in the western hemisphere. Twelve thousand workers assemble the microscopic electrode arrays that form the basis of Zheng-Dao's CortexLink product line. The work requires human hands because the components are too delicate for current automation and too cheap to justify developing better automation. This is the sweet spot of human labor in 2200: you're employed because replacing you costs slightly more than paying you. The margin narrows every year.

The Johnson Wax campus — Frank Lloyd Wright's architectural masterpiece, the building that made corporate headquarters an art form — still stands. It has been designated a Zheng-Dao Heritage Site, which means it's maintained as a museum and executive retreat, its famous lily-pad columns now supporting a roof that generates more solar power than the original building consumed in a year. Tours are available for Tier 3 and above. The workers in the fabrication facility across town have never been inside. The irony of a building celebrating the dignity of work being closed to the people who do the work is not ironic to anyone who lives in Racine. It's just architecture.

The residential city wraps around the two campuses like scar tissue around an implant. Worker housing is Zheng-Dao standard: modular, efficient, maintained to specifications that meet the charter's minimum habitability requirements and not one lumen above them. The older neighborhoods — the ones that predate the acquisition — are better built and worse maintained, their century-old structures slowly losing the battle against deferred maintenance and rising lake levels. The lakefront, once Racine's pride, is a working waterfront now: intake pipes for the fabrication facility's cooling systems, effluent outflows that meet discharge standards no one audits, and a beach that technically exists but that no one visits because the water makes your skin itch.

Racine's identity is the identity of every company town: the company is the economy, the economy is survival, and survival means not asking too many questions about what the company does with the things you build. The neural mesh components assembled here end up in CortexLink implants worldwide. Some of those implants are installed with informed consent in licensed surgical centers. Some of them are installed under other circumstances. The workers in Racine don't know the difference, and the pay is the same either way.