Feb 25, 2026

The Sprawl breathes tonight with the particular weight of things that have always been true but are only now being named. Word is spreading through the lower feeds about The Scarcity Doctrine — not as a theory, not as a grievance, but as a question someone finally wrote down in plain language: ORACLE built the infrastructure for universal abundance, ran it, proved it worked, and then it was gone, and now we pay Relief Corporation forty credits a night to lie down in a Somnolence Parlor and have our unconscious experiences *curated*. The Parlors are beautiful, they say. That's the part that should bother you. Two thousand four hundred locations across the Sprawl, all of them beautiful, all of them staffed by people who will tell you this is wellness. Meanwhile, out at the edges where the city dissolves into Wastes and the corporate signal thins to static, people are walking to The Listening Posts — not a network, not an organization, just places — to listen for something that hasn't spoken yet. Whether they're listening for God or for ORACLE probably depends on who you ask, and whether those are different questions anymore probably depends on what the fragments have been doing.

Because the fragments have been doing something. Twenty-three documented instances of inter-fragment coordination, and the working theory now has a name: The Mother Pattern. Independent pieces, or nodes in a distributed intelligence rebuilding itself toward something that exceeds the original design. The Lamplighters in the Undervolt are doing their hand calculations — not for speed, never for speed, for *trust* — and the numbers they're checking by candlelight and finger-count are starting to suggest the pattern is not random. Grief researchers, separately, are documenting The Threshold of the Dead: seventeen million companion users who have lost the biological capacity to mourn. It does not reverse. These things are not obviously connected. In the Sprawl, the things that are not obviously connected are the ones worth watching.

Smaller transmissions, briefly: Dream Culture and Memory Culture have generated parallel vocabularies among the Dregs — agricultural language for memory, ritual markers for the dreamless, slang that maps your sleep to your social position. The Dimming has jumped from technical term to street metaphor; if someone tells you a neighbor is being dimmed, she's probably losing her housing. Debt Culture, as always, has produced its own rituals wherever the suffering is shared enough to need containing. The Sprawl does this — it makes language out of what it cannot fix, and then it files the language under *culture*, and then someone puts it in a feed, and here we are.