Transitional states are the parts of the planet that have stopped being Off-Grid without yet being On-Grid. They sit between the two dominions as a bureaucratic and geographic layer — territories whose people have voted to pursue Grid membership and whose infrastructure is being slowly rebuilt to qualify. The visual register is the clearest read on the category: transitional zones look like an older Off-Grid town with a Grid Network checkpoint at the edge of it, scanning equipment at every road, rail, and footpath, and a Blueprint-standard factory quietly going up where the old workshop used to be.
The craft belt ¶
Every transitional state carries the same characteristic structure at its On-Grid-facing edge. A belt of craft workshops where Off-Grid weapon smiths, armourers, and vehicle fabricators continue to work under the old rules — because the Grids allow the craft to continue and because the output is part of how the transitional economy pays its bills. A traveller crossing the belt inbound to the Grid is scanned. Weapons can be left behind at the base camp or stored in the Off-Grid directly; they can never cross into the Grid proper. The belt is also the layer that can be closed down in minutes if the Grid detects a threat worth sealing against. The whole economy of the transitional state depends on that belt, which is why both sides treat its rules as non-negotiable.
The checkpoints ¶
The experience of approaching a Grid from a transitional state is deliberately heavy. Trains run on Grid-standard rails but the signage changes character as you get closer. Warnings. Sector markers. Notice-of-search requirements for the passengers in the carriage. A line of checkpoints, each of which runs a light version of the deep scan the Grid perimeter will run on you as you cross. The author notes that the buildup is part of the psychological onboarding — a transitional state is not the Off-Grid, and the journey is meant to feel like a transition. You arrive at the Grid's edge already half inside it.
Why they matter ¶
The transitional category is how the Grids expand without the conquest that the Off-Grid fears and the Grids have committed not to attempt. A transitional state is a choice — taken by a population voting under Off-Grid rules — that the Off-Grid cannot undo by force without starting the kind of war every side of this fiction has agreed to avoid. The Northern Dominion watches transitional states it cannot prevent. The Grid scientists watch them because a transitional state is where a Grid can observe what living-quality improvement actually does to a population that had no access to it. C2's post-Judgement Day village sat in this category for most of its existence. Most of the cases that will come next — quietly — will arrive the same way.