“Two hundred years ago, humans destroyed the planet, and the Corporate Council shipped us out to live in hellish off-world colonies. They called it the Restructuring. Our one role––to mine the resources necessary to restore Earth. Our one comfort––the VR, a utopian construct of Earth as it once was in modern times … and as it never was in modern times … free of pollution, prejudice, and inequality. Everything our real lives are not. The VR––the ‘bread and circuses’ meant to anesthetize the masses against insurrection. But the masses are starting to wake up.”
All of the colonies are divided into the Corporate Holdings (the haves) and the Free Zones (the have-nots -- stateless people, "free" of corporate citizenship).
The Free Zones
These hyper-crowded slums with distinct languages evolved over the 200 years after the Restructuring. The Free Zones of Mars-Baltimore are divided into five sectors populated by distinct ethnic and linguistic groups (whether by design or not the Corporate Council will not say):
— West (sector 1) (Russian, Eastern European, Chinese and North and Central African); language - Zeefa; dialect - Runaen patois
— Southwest (sector 2) (Tibetan, Indian subcontinent, SE Asian); language - Hamaru
— Southeast (sector 3) (Polynesian, South African, Australian Aborigine and South American); language - Akuwame
— Northwest (sector 4) (North American and Middle Eastern); language - Biz-mantuq
— Northeast (sector 5) (European); language - Uberlingua, commonly referred to as lingua
