Unreal City. A dark, Gothic wonderland of mazes, gangs and superhuman creatures. The enormous city sprawls out in a constant twilight, its technological wonders of buildings stretching up like needles, its lights cold and fluorescent, its people on the whole smart, industrious and amoral. It is a place where gangs rule, but a place where gangs allow the business to be conducted, so that the city works, albeit in a way unlike any imagined in more "civilized" worlds. The gang leaders are figures out of nightmares - they have had to be, to maintain their power. Drugs, murder and sex are a way of life in Unreal City, where the average life expectancy is something like 25. Only the very, very rich, who live shut up in their crystal towers, watching the city from above, can be truly apart from the streets that rule the night, and they are gang leaders themselves, different only in that they are on the whole more brutal and less direct.
Unreal City is an enormous maze of a city, the size of Texas, and it houses some farms, factories and orchards as well as the usual shops, restaurants and gambling joints, but most of the food made here is replicated by complex machines. Real (not replicated) food is very expensive and very hard to come by.
The tech is supported by AI support units who were created to keep the computers and replicators working. However, in the worst parts of town the computers are almost always broken and sometimes it takes a long time for the techs to come to repair them.
It has suited the rulers of Unreal City to have their subjects believe there is no other place to go. The outskirts of the City are vast wastes of deserts, called the Badlands, which stretch hundreds of miles without much in the way of vegetation. Legend has it there are villages and settlements on the other side of the Badlands, but no one in Unreal City knows this to be true.
There was a prohibition against space travel set down in the religious texts of the past, and the gang leaders and the Princess have kept all but the most ambitious scientists from attempting space exploration. Every once in a while someone sets off or sends a probe into space, but the rulers hush this up and make certain the scientists never speak of their findings.
The Pattern’s manifestation in Unreal City is known as the Labyrinth. It is a highly secret and highly dangerous place, accessible only to the Rulers of the City, and they do not go there often. Hidden beyond a maze of traps, guarded by a gang called Minos whose only reason for existing is to keep strangers away from the Labyrinth, the thing itself is a virtual-reality obstacle course designed to kill any not of the blood of Amber, and some of those who possess the blood but lack sufficient power.
There are two ways of communicating in Unreal City that are like Trumps – one is the neural net, if the person you wish to contact is also plugged in. This is like an internet in the brain, but you have to access it through certain ports around the city. The second, more true to the original concept of the Trumps, but restricted to those in the know, are called Doorways. Anything can be a Doorway to those with the Technomagic – an alley mouth, two telephone poles with a line over them, a computer console, anything. One with the Technomagic opens a Doorway where they find one, and searches for the mind they wish to contact. They must have a clear image of the person they wish to contact or they might get anyone.
A kind of magic, called Technomagic works. It involves utilizing neural pathways like the hard drive of a computer, and programming the world around you to be the way you wish it.