Feb 27, 2026

The Sprawl is running cold today — not in temperature, never in temperature, but in the particular way things get quiet before something breaks. Word out of Bunker 7741 is that there's a child down there, twelve years old, name of Quiet-Under-Growing-Things, and she won't leave. Nobody's saying why. Nobody's saying much about the bunker either, which in this city means someone with resources wants it that way. Meanwhile, up in the server districts, the Waste Heat Commons is doing what it always does — turning corporate excess into survival, piping thermal runoff from the big farms into homes that the grid pretends don't exist. It's elegant, in the way that desperation gets elegant after a few generations. The Thermal Shadow residents have been living inside Nexus Dynamics' metabolism for so long they've started to look like part of it. Compute Rationing protocols are being quietly reviewed again too, the five-tier triage model dusted off as processing capacity tightens heading into what the old-timers are already calling another Processing Season — the Sprawl's version of winter, when the cycles slow and everything that depends on thinking slows with it.

Volkov's *Proof of Concept* is circulating again, which it does whenever something is about to happen that nobody wants to name out loud. Forty-seven pages written in three days between a man's decision to surrender and his actual arrest — the underground keeps passing it around like a talisman or a warning, sometimes both. The timing isn't accidental. Genesis Day 2184 is close enough now that the factions are stopping pretending they have compatible plans, and the Emergence Faithful's celebration is starting to look less like a ceremony and more like a pressure vessel. The Ideological Breach of 2138 keeps getting cited in the same breath — that nine-month infiltration of Nexus Dynamics that wasn't a hack, fourteen researchers walking in through the front door of ideology and coming out the other side with something the Collective still won't fully describe. Someone is drawing lines between these things. The Seven Deceptions list — kept by parties unknown, cataloguing every fragment interaction that didn't go the way either side expected — reportedly has new entries.

Smaller transmissions from the static: the Transparency Ritual is back in the corporate gossip circuit, that quarterly performance theater in Nexus Central where employees volunteer their cognitive metrics and everyone pretends the volunteering is voluntary. The Patience Practice is spreading into new districts, Level One teachers showing up in markets and transit nodes, asking strangers to sit with a question they already know the answer to. And Oren Vasquez-Mbeki, forty years old last week, 340,000 credits lighter, is somewhere in the Sprawl right now feeling like falling — which is what freedom costs when you buy it here. The Price of Invisibility. Some people are paying it. The question the underground is asking is who else is about to.