The Concourses
Type: Location — Undersea Transit Corridors (Kila Vas) Dimensions: Two parallel corridors, each 5,000 miles long, 120 miles wide, 5 miles high Status: Canon (confirmed by creator)
Overview
Two side-by-side undersea corridors stretching 5,000 miles to the northwest from Kila Vas, with their eastern/southernmost point beginning 3 miles offshore from Downtown. Both Concourses terminate at the 300-mile-square Financial District — headquarters to many interstellar corporations, banks, and financial institutions, alongside hotels of every class.
At the midpoint between the two Concourses, connecting to each, stands the Kila Vas Space Port.
Adjacent to the Financial District, to its southeast, lies a group of artificial luxury and themed islands — see Kila Vas Luxury Islands.
The Retail Collapse and the Rise of "One-Customer Marketing"
✅ Confirmed by creator: The Concourses were originally proposed as a mixed retail, office, and residential development. A retail-sector collapse in the late 1990s forced a shift toward more office/ residential/niche-retail focus. Mass-market retail hadn't died so much as transformed: consumer/mass brands largely evaporated, while luxury brands and hyper-niche, high-touch offerings flourished. Restaurants underwent the same split.
In response, Kila Vas corporations abandoned mass advertising entirely, replacing it with niche marketing and even "one customer" marketing — advertising targeted to a single specific buyer, in the extreme literally one person at a time (multiplied across millions of individually-targeted customers citywide). This is explicitly compared in-universe to Blade Runner-style individual targeting, but taken to an even more extreme scale.
Corporations and banks also scrapped chatbots and automated phone-menu systems ("dial zero for X department...") entirely, replacing them with "Customer Advocates" — holographic AI projections that appear as live, fully interactive human representatives, capable of real-time emotional recognition (detecting frustration or confusion and adjusting tone/pacing accordingly) and genuine improvisational conversation rather than scripted responses.
Appearances
- Creator-provided detail
Open Questions
- What lies at the far (northwestern) end of the Concourses beyond the Financial District not yet given
- Means of transit within the Concourses (vehicle type, speed) not yet detailed