The twenty-plus lanes of the J.G. Ballard Memorial Freeway roll through a landscape of shattered skyscrapers, vast, weather-scoured hoodoos of the urban badlands. Ramps split off in bewildering knots of elevated roadway, weaving crazily through the maze of buildings. The tallest of these, the golden bank tower now known as Big Active, stands directly in the Ballard's path, but the freeway rolls straight through with barely a thought. Its lanes merely spread out slightly, with the six innermost of them driving straight through the heart of bank tower, around the tenth floor.

The resulting thirty-meter-long tunnel is garishly lit along its length by sodium lights that turn everything a monochromatic yellow. The blacktop is cracked but otherwise in surprisingly good shape. Along one side of the tunnel the walls are bare concrete, the floors on this side of the building housing ventilation and other vital systems. On the other side is a row of five gigantic doors that open into a garage. Above the doors - and above the tunnel entrance at either end, white and purple neon spells out the words "JG's TO QUE-N-TANK". Squint a bit and it says "TORQUE", but the R is burnt out.

Inside, the smell of oil and ozone and unspeakable solvents hangs thick, and the air is filled with the whine of servos, the hiss of pressurized air, the purr and roar of combustion engines. Vivid yellow sodium light spills in from the highway tunnel outside through the wide garage doors, mingling with the mercury lamps above. The Torque is a row of five yawning repair bays, two of them big enough to handle a small airplane. Each bay is fitted with microgravity generators and all manner of vehicular restraints - magnetic grapples, tractor beams and good old-fashioned chains and cables. Multi-jointed robot arms and tangled black hoses hang from the walls, bristling with fittings for washing, painting, sandblasting and fueling.

Drones of all sizes with a dozen segmented tentacles apiece skip and swing baboon-like from any convenient pivot, whirling through the air in a chaotic dance. Their spherical bodies are dented and grimy, and often bear multicoloured stripes of misfired spraypaint. Now and again two collide in midair with a clang, but more often they grapple and shoot past one another as though exchanging secret greasebot handshakes.

An office takes up one corner of the garage, its walls papered with faded parts ads and calendars featuring vehicles and robots in provocative poses. Papers and tools spill from the shelves and across a rusted desk, and pyramids of empties are stacked in the corners.

Directions

From the Nexus: go to Down, up the stair, then follow the Ballard toward the Big Active.

Or: go to Down, enter the tower, then take the elevator to the Toque-n-Tank.

---

Attractions | Downwarp