“
Baseline is a model city. We all love City City, but we can’t all afford to be in City City. But everybody can afford to be in Baseline. That’s why it’s called Baseline. Baseline is an opportunity. Baseline is the future for the people who can’t quite reach the future, but want to be the future.”
Baseline is a small southwestern data city[note 1] on Palisade that was built by, and is under the control of, the Frontier Syndicate. Following a failed revolution by Baseline's residents, the Frontier Syndicate begins to build other cities in the Baseline model around the planet, named Baseline-A, Baseline-B, and so on.
History
Original Baseline
It was created as a model city by the Frontier Syndicate, which advertises it as a more affordable variation on City City.[1][note 2] Of course, the "affordability" comes with its own price:
“
Baseline is a data town, sort of like the doom towns of atomic test sites, these like, incredibly clearly fake places, except people [...] “get to,” quote/unquote, live there for free, in exchange for being subject to an endless array of social, medical, and psychological experiments, none of which they get to be informed about. They sign away their right to be informed and to consent to individual tests in order to live here for free and have tests run on them.”
Gucci Garantine orders the Blue Channel to go to Baseline for their next sortie after the mission to capture a VIP named "Gem". Devotion commands Cori to build a church to it in Baseline during the same sortie.[2] Instead, the Blue Channel disobeys orders and goes to the Isle of the Broken Key.[3]
Failed Revolution & Subsequent Baselines
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Spoiler warning! This section contains major spoilers for PALISADE 27: Resentment and Frustration Pt. 2. Tread carefully! |
Residents of Baseline attempt a revolution that badly fails.[1] Many people are killed,[4] including Ce Gull and Broadleaf, and the Frontier Syndicate's plans for Baseline succeed: within weeks, new versions of Baseline are popping up all over the planet.[1]
Each of these new cities is built in a concentric circle around a massive central structure that is a sort of power station, similar in aesthetic to other Frontier Syndicate architecture: "showrooms with large windows and big steel curvature ... almost like luxury car headquarters." From each structure emerges an elongated egg-shaped and egg-coloured smokestack, except rather than emitting fumes, they somehow suck hard, low-poly, black clouds out of clear sky. Enabled by the Frontier Syndicate's harvesting of the final Fundament node, these refineries are siphoning Motion out of the Kalmeria in the air in a project meant to resurrect her.[5]
Footnotes
- ↑ In "Today Is a Monday" Austin describes Baseline first as a "little town" and then a "city".
- ↑ City City is, in fact, an output of experiments done in Baseline.