The Open Cities

The Open Cities. The Open Cities are the Americas that rejected the ring-fence: the United States outside the Laurentian north, and everything south of it except Patagonia. Each city is governed by an elected council and every adult votes, but there is no limit on what money may spend on a vote, so fortunes win most of them. For their seat in the Anchorage, the city councils choose one delegate together, each council's vote weighted by its city's population. They have had small Vaults of their own since the 2150s, split among the cities and their owners (see below). They moved first in the Mirror Race and lost a mission in the Tolstoj Burn of 2387, caught up on the designs leaked in the Halcyon Breach (2418), and the Caloris Runaway was one of their seeds. In the 2460s, with Vault engineers hired away from the Settlement and the Parishad, they linked their small Vaults for the first time, and have grown rapidly on their designs since. The Vaults advise; they do not screen the cities' laws. They keep telling the cities to increase equity and curb corruption, and the reforms they pass are written so that the rich do not have to sacrifice for the many. Both levels of protected network access are paid; the only generally available free access is to the Wild, which many poorer residents use for ordinary communication and information (see Who pays, in Everyday technology). Voting is available without a subscription through civic terminals and polling places. The votes never touch the wild networks. Each city runs them inside a civic hull, a walled network like a corporation's, but the Open Cities also allow unlicensed AI inside their walls, so their hulls leak: a cheap voting device can be quietly steered by a feral or a vote-broker, somewhere an election is hijacked every few years, and each scandal fades faster than the last. Some say this is fairer than the Settlement; it is certainly more unequal. Settlement citizens see the Open Cities as places of vice: illicit experiences, unlicensed AI and sex tourism. The Open Cities see the Settlement as a polite oligarchy that exports its costs, and the Mandate as the same oligarchy without the politeness. Since the 2490s both have sanctioned them over the birth cap (see Economy).