- "So I went out into the night and the neon and let the crowd pull me along, walking blind, willing myself to be just a segment of that mass organism, just one more drifting chip of consciousness under the geodesics."
- —Automatic Jack
The Sprawl in the Neuromancer graphic novel. Art by Brunce Jensen
The Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis (BAMA) or unofficially The Sprawl, is an urban sprawl that developed along the east coast of America; it contains New York and other former cities. Midtown Manhattan and outlines of old industrial parks around the old core of Atlanta have the busiest data exchange rate.
Parts of it are covered by Fuller domes and arcologies. Because of the convection and an overlap of the domes, the East side has freak winds. The natural day-night cycle and the weather are not directly observable by the residents, since most of the sky is obscured by domes; when it rains ribbons of water may cascade from a ruptured geodesic. Before dawn the geodesics are lightening into gray and then pink.
Citizens of the Sprawl have a BAMA Single Identification Number.
Armitage and Case arriving to the Sprawl in the Neuromancer graphic novel. Art by Bruce Jensen.
Transportation includes the trans-BAMA local. The local glides booming in along the black induction strip, passing along crowded station platforms.
The atmosphere of the Sprawl is characterized by the smell of fast food and perfume and fresh summer sweat, the sounds of sirens in the distance, as well as periodic underground vibrations by the trains who resonated from its foundations. The northern Sprawl has a railway that leads to an airport. The line passes through a landscape that reminded Case of his childhood: a blasted industrial moonscape with a fusion plant and red beacons warning aircraft away, rusting shells of refineries, broken slag and canted slabs of freeway concrete with dead grass tufting from its cracks.
The youth of the Sprawl adopt quick ephemeral fads. Subcultures like the Lo-Teks, the Big Scientists,the Panther Moderns rise suddenly and last for a few weeks, followed by similar ones.