A decommissioned water-treatment megastructure extending roughly two kilometers into Lake Michigan, its original Ringo Heavy Industries filtration towers now colonized by squatters, black-market fabricators, and those who prefer their addresses off the Diaspora's geotag grid. The scaffold's multiple decks were designed for industrial machinery, leaving open-grate walkways and massive vertical shafts that residents have converted into elevator markets, vertical farms, and tenement warrens threaded with improvised power taps from a single aging Zheng-Dao Bioelectric tidal siphon.

Wind off the lake hits the Brine Scaffold from every angle, carrying salt mist that corrodes exposed metal and ruins unprotected BCI hardware within months. Residents have adapted, coating gear in lacquer resins and wearing layered weather-wraps year-round. Despite its brutal conditions, the Scaffold maintains a fierce internal community identity, its floating isolation granting it a strange autonomy that Tier 1 and 2 residents elsewhere envy in quiet, ashamed ways.