Short Walk to the Exclusion Zone

I was playing GTA4, something I haven't done in over 15 years. I was driving around its highways which had more lanes than I remember in a variety of cars. I was struggling to keep to reasonable speeds or stick to a lane which bothered me.

I decided to start a new story. This time, Nico is being set up in Liberty City by a well-dressed old rich dude, probably some Russian oligarch. The first mission is to buy new clothes. Taking a westward road, the left-side is taken up by rides from a travelling fun fair. I am told they are closed for half the year but somehow have the rights to remain on the land anyway.

After around 5-10 minutes of walking, we (there is no game anymore, it's now me and a bunch of others who have joined me - it appears we're all high schoolers judging from the uniform) find the city has ended and a large plantation is spread on the hills and basin ahead of us. It appears to be terraced. I don't know what's grown here, it feels oddly artificial. One of my companions notes how that's a characteristic of Glasgow (which seems to be where we are now) in that the countryside is so close by. This isn't what Glasgow is like IRL.

We keep walking and soon reach a stunning landscape ahead of us with rugged hills and deep river valleys. To the north however, everything is extremely flat and smooth. A patchwork of fields can be seen over there but they look as if someone has created a series of straight and curved lines and used a fill tool to colour in the blocks. We start heading in this direction.

We encounter a fissure in the ground and we descend into it. At the bottom, it's noted that ahead appears to be something like an exclusion zone. Light is streaming in ahead of us from the top of a ladder and strange vegetation can be seen on the floor, such as a purple tentacle like plant. Some of this stuff warps the light causing the air to quiver in places. I mention how these remind me of anomalies (like from Stalker).

A girl climbs the ladder first and I follow. At the top is the wreck of a car which covers our exit. We hide behind it as we survey the area. There are train tracks in front and tunnel openings close to our right and far off to the left. From the left appears a machine on the rails, it reminds me of a train crossed with an excavator but it's far more advanced than that. I understand it to be autonomous. We continue hiding as it passes into the tunnel on the right. We'll probably be in serious trouble if we get caught here.

Jump cut to a group of soldiers with some kind of advanced equipment under red lights. The lift doors have just opened in some underground facility. It seems like something has gone wrong here. The dream ends here.