Data Storm
When the Weather Thinks
Electromagnetic fog is overcast sky. A data storm is a hurricane. When multiple server farms synchronize their outputs and resonate with Grid harmonics, the resulting standing waves overwhelm every civilian neural interface in the affected district. Augmented cognition fragments. Attention collapses to three-second bursts. Emotional regulation fails. The most enhanced people in the Sprawl become the most helpless — and the unaugmented walk through it.
"Storm coming. Pencil says eighteen hours. Pull your augs offline or find a warden. Your choice — but if you wait for the visual artifacts, you've already lost three minutes of coherent thought." — Lamplighter district advisory, standard broadcast
Quick Facts
Technical Brief
Server farms don't output at constant levels. Their electromagnetic signatures fluctuate with processing loads, spiking during high-demand cycles and settling between batches. Under normal conditions, these fluctuations are out of phase — noise canceling noise.
Resonance Cascade
When multiple server farms increase output simultaneously — during financial settlement events, mass data processing, or corporate compute surges — their electromagnetic signatures can synchronize. The synchronized output interacts with the Grid's harmonic structure, producing standing waves. The waves amplify through feedback: interference degrades atmospheric processing, which increases server farm thermal load, which intensifies the storm.
There is no beginning to this cycle. There is no end. There is only the peak.
Augmented Experience
- Visual artifacts — phantom images at peripheral vision, color shifting, resolution degradation
- Auditory interference — the interface's background processing becomes audible as a rising hum
- Cognitive disruption — attention maximum 3-4 seconds, thought fragmentation
- Emotional instability — anxiety and irritability you know isn't yours but can't separate from your experience
Unaugmented Experience
- Headaches
- Skin tingling
- An indefinable sense of wrongness
- Largely functional
The Inversion
Every other day in the Sprawl, augmentation is power. Better processing, faster reflexes, richer perception, deeper memory. The augmented climb. The unaugmented scrape by.
During a data storm, this inverts completely.
The most enhanced citizens — the ones with the deepest neural integration, the most sophisticated cognitive augmentation, the most comprehensive sensory overlays — are the most compromised. Their interfaces have the largest surface area for electromagnetic disruption. Their cognitive subsystems have the most dependencies to fragment. Their emotional regulation has the most failure modes.
The unaugmented walk through it. Headaches. Tingling. A bad feeling they can't name. But their thoughts stay whole. Their attention holds. Their emotions belong to them.
The Lamplighters — deliberately unaugmented — serve as the Sprawl's storm wardens. Their baseline nervous systems detect storm conditions that augmented sensors filter out. During a storm, the people the Sprawl ignores become the people everyone depends on.
Forecasting
Pencil-47 runs the Sprawl's most accurate storm prediction model: 87% accuracy at 24 hours, 62% at 48. The model tracks server farm output patterns, Grid harmonic readings, and atmospheric processing data. When the numbers converge, Pencil issues a forecast.
The Compute Cycle
Storms follow financial markets. They build during processing — when server farms across the Sprawl are crunching the day's transactions, modeling corporate forecasts, running the computational machinery of the economy. They peak during settlement events, when every major farm synchronizes to clear the ledgers.
The weather is literally determined by the economy. When the money moves, the sky breaks.
Lamplighter wardens distribute advisories through runner networks and physical notice boards — systems that function when electromagnetic conditions make digital communication unreliable. The advisory protocol is simple: pull your augs offline or find a warden. There are no other options.
What It Feels Like
Approaching
The air thickens with static charge. Augmented vision develops artifacts — phantom images at peripheral vision, color shifting, resolution degradation. Sounds acquire a metallic quality. The interface's background processing becomes audible — a rising hum you shouldn't be able to hear.
Impact
Thoughts fragment. Attention splinters. You cannot hold a single idea for more than seconds. The emotional dysregulation is worst — anxiety and irritability that you know isn't yours but can't separate from your experience. Your interface is feeding you someone else's panic, or its own, or nobody's — just electromagnetic noise the regulation subsystem interprets as emotion.
Aftermath
The symptoms mirror severe scroll sickness — cognitive disruption identical in kind, different only in cause. Recovery takes hours after interface recalibration. Some augmented individuals report "ghost artifacts" — phantom visual glitches — for days. The unaugmented report a lingering sense of wrongness, like the air hasn't quite returned to normal.
The Worst Storm
March 7, 2181. The storm that preceded — or caused — the Sector 12 Blackout.
Three Grid junctions failed simultaneously. Forty-seven people suffocated within six hours. The district stayed dark for six weeks. Whether the storm triggered the junction failures or the junction failures triggered the storm remains debated — the feedback loop between electromagnetic disruption and Grid instability makes cause and effect difficult to separate.
What is not debated: a single Lamplighter named Yara Osei fixed it in eleven minutes, after six weeks of corporate engineering failure.
The Sector 12 storm remains the benchmark against which all forecasting models are calibrated. Pencil-47's 87% accuracy rate exists because of what happened when nobody saw March 7 coming.
Implications
The Hierarchy Inverts
During storms, the most enhanced are the most vulnerable. Enhancement isn't power — it's surface area for disruption. The people corporations dismiss as uncredentialed, unaugmented, and irrelevant become the only ones who can walk through a storm and think straight. Every storm is a reminder of what the Sprawl already knows and refuses to admit: augmentation is conditional power. The conditions change.
Financial Weather
Storm timing follows the compute cycle — building during processing, peaking during settlement. The Sprawl's weather is a byproduct of its economy. When the money moves, the sky breaks. The corporations that profit most from the compute infrastructure are the ones whose employees suffer most when it generates storms. Nobody has proposed reducing server farm output. The economic cost would exceed the human cost.
The Feedback Loop
Storms destabilize the Grid. Grid instability degrades atmospheric processing. Degraded atmospheric processing increases server farm thermal loads. Increased thermal loads intensify the storm. This cycle has no external cause and no natural endpoint — only the exhaustion of the compute cycle or Lamplighter intervention at critical junctions breaks it.