The city of Pest in the White Lake embargo is the remains of the former city of Budapest. Nearly all of Buda for several kilometers from the former banks of the Danube River was consumed by the White Lake, as was much of Pest, and much more of eastern Pest is effectively unusable “soft land” riddled with nanite tunnels.
Today’s Pest is an embargoed but vital part of the NovSlav economy, for the diamonds it collects and smuggles, used at all levels of the NovSlav economy, from microcircuitry to deep mining; for the carbon it removes from the atmosphere; and for the carbon inflow the Lake brings, which permits the biodiesel fields in a fifty kilometer ring around the White Lake to be unusually productive given their size and climate.