The Gate is what remains of downtown Cleveland after seventy years of corponation sovereignty carved the city into competing jurisdictions. Terminal Tower still stands — reinforced, expanded upward by forty additional floors of signal relay equipment, and rechristened the Tollgate Gate Tower. It is the administrative headquarters of Tollgate Systems Infrastructure Corponation, which holds sovereign authority over 847 discrete infrastructure nodes across GLMZ. The tower's original Beaux-Arts stonework is still visible on the lower floors, encased in transparent armor plating like a museum exhibit of what cities used to look like before the corps moved in. Above it, the modern structure is all angular steel and signal arrays, bristling with antennae that handle routing for half the corridor's water treatment, power distribution, and data trunk traffic.

Three blocks north, the Saltmarsh Spire rises 340 meters — a needle of carbon fiber and glass that serves as the telecommunications corponation's administrative headquarters. Between these two towers, the airspace is so thick with drone traffic and signal interference that unshielded electronics glitch within minutes. The old Public Square has been paved over into a corporate plaza where Tollgate and Saltmarsh employees cross paths without acknowledging each other, their respective employer logos glowing on ID badges that double as jurisdiction markers. Step off the plaza onto the wrong side street and you've crossed a sovereign boundary. Your insurance changes. Your legal rights change. The coffee costs different.

The streets below the towers are clean in the way that controlled environments are clean — maintained by Tollgate's autonomous sanitation drones, monitored by Saltmarsh's signal surveillance grid, and populated by mid-tier corporate workers who move with the purposeful obliviousness of people who have learned not to look down. Literally. The lower levels of downtown — the old subway tunnels, the RTA infrastructure, the sub-street utility corridors — are ungoverned space. Tollgate's jurisdiction ends at street level. Below that, you're on your own. The excluded population of The Gate lives beneath the feet of people who have genuinely forgotten they exist.