Waukegan was an industrial city before the word 'industrial' became a euphemism for 'expendable.' The lakefront that once hosted a naval training station and a pharmaceutical campus now hosts the northern terminus of GLMZ's automated cargo logistics network — a sprawl of container yards, drone maintenance hangars, and processing facilities where Lake Michigan's cargo platforms offload goods that will be distributed throughout the Corridor. The work that remains for human hands is the work machines can't do cheaply enough yet, which is a category that shrinks every fiscal quarter.

The old naval station — Great Lakes Naval Training Center, decommissioned by the remnant federal government in 2158 — was acquired by Ringo Defense Solutions in the sovereignty charter fire sale of 2161. Ringo converted it into a regional security operations base, which means the northern edge of Waukegan is a walled compound where private military contractors train, refit, and stage for operations throughout the upper GLMZ. The base employs 12,000 people and contributes exactly nothing to the surrounding community except a perimeter wall, a no-fly zone, and the occasional sound of live-fire exercises at 3 AM.

Between the cargo yards and the Ringo wall, the residential district survives the way organisms survive in extreme environments: by adapting to conditions that would kill anything designed for comfort. The housing stock is a mix of 20th-century bungalows — some of them literally a hundred and fifty years old, patched with whatever was available — and modular refugee housing units dropped by the GLMZ Metropolitan Authority during the Gulf Coast Displacement crisis of the 2070s. The modulars were supposed to be temporary. Temporary, in municipal planning, means 'until someone allocates a budget that will never be allocated.' They're still here. The people inside them have made them home, which is what people do.

The lakefront itself is poisoned. A century of industrial runoff, compounded by the cargo platform chemical discharge that nobody regulates because the platforms operate in federal — now corporate — waters, has made the shoreline a dead zone. The water is technically Lake Michigan. The color is not.