Red-Light District

The Red-Light District occupies a part of the city that has gone without daylight for a very long time. Cheap hotels, bars, sealed entertainment venues, and narrow alleys are stained red and violet by dense neon. Wet pavement reflects the signs after rain, though no employee is ever seen replacing a tube or cleaning a window. Booths, stages, counters, and backstage corridors remain inside the buildings, and sound systems sometimes play fragments of music by themselves, like nightlife that dispersed long ago but never ended. Not every figure in the streets is a resident. Entities affected by the city's calming influence imitate pedestrians beneath the lights, pause at shop windows, or sit in businesses with no staff. When the neon suddenly goes dark, their movements often recover their original urgency and hostility. The alleys still join the Endless City's continuous road network, but stable landmarks are scarce, so old files never established the district's precise relationship to other parts of the city.