I swept my hand across the glaringly bright street. We were almost to the base of the 2R, and the crowds—and the commerce—had only gotten denser. Cars couldn’t even drive on the streets down here. It was just an ocean of people surrounded by a neon- and LED-lit canyon of closet casinos, souvenir shops, vending machine bars, single-use joy parlors, and card-operated VR brothels. There were pawn shops with human organs for sale in the windows and pet stores full of animals that were banned everywhere else in the world. There were fight bars, topless bars, drug bars, bars where you paid
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