Case File

Central Concord is a federal district, four storm-drowned towns fused into a megacity under corporate administration. Seven million people. Nine sectors. One network that connects everything, tracks everyone, and answers to the corporations that built it.

To live here, you need augments. Neural interface. Commlink. Data jack. The Baseline Augment Dividend covers the surgery if you live in a Revitalization Zone. It does not cover what happens when the hardware ships broken.

Netsurge MicroComm, the dominant commlink manufacturer, shipped multiple production batches with dev firmware enabled. Carrier signal routing without safety limits. Internal QA documented the defect. Internal QA was overruled. A whiteboard note in their Docklands lab read: "Ship w/o throttle, fix in OTA."

The OTA fix never shipped. The casualties started.

Juna Park received one of those implants. She walked into a bodega on a Tuesday. A spike hit. The shopkeeper, seventy-five years old, collapsed behind the counter. She stood there for five minutes, alone, watching him die.

She is not a criminal. She is not a weapon. She is a person who bought a commlink to stay employable and got a product that is killing everyone around her.

On trust

She doesn't trust him. Not yet. She follows his lead because she has no alternative, not because she believes in him. When he gives a direction, she hesitates. When he moves too fast, she hangs back. She watches him the way you watch someone who hasn't proven anything yet.

But I've noticed it shifting. Small things. She warned him about a patrol before he saw it. She stopped apologizing for asking questions. Once, in a safehouse, she corrected his route, and he listened. That matters more than any of them realize.

The question isn't whether he'll protect her. Any thug with a debt can do that. The question is whether she'll let him. Whether he earns it. Whether he understands that earning it means stopping when she says stop.

On movement

They can't use the network. Her presence scrambles every device in range, transit hubs stutter, surveillance feeds corrupt, commlinks spike. The city's compliance systems are looking for the source. Spectrum sweep teams converge on anomalies.

So they move through the blue lanes. Analog corridors the Paper Saints marked years ago with graffiti, chalk tolls, and tungsten bulbs. No network coverage. No surveillance. But not free, every blue lane has a toll, a favor, or a witness who decides whether you pass.

I've watched Rowe read a city block like a weather report. Density, patrol timing, coverage shadows. He picks the route. She stays close, or doesn't, depending on how much she trusts the call. When a spike hits mid-route, the whole plan changes in seconds.

On the investigation

Rowe's a PI. He knows how to build a case. Insurance archives in Atlas Heights. E-waste labs in the Docklands. Transit control hubs. Corporate subbasements. Every site they visit produces evidence, documents, hardware, testimony, and every piece of evidence points somewhere.

Intent: the corp knew. Harm: people died. Technical: how the implant works and how to fix it. Cover-up: the system buried it. What they find determines what they can do when the time comes to act. Not all evidence is created equal. Not all routes are open without it.

Her condition is deteriorating. Broadcast radius expanding. Spikes more frequent, more violent. The investigation is a race.

When they have enough evidence, they'll have options. Remove the implant, stop the pain, lose her digital life. Retune it, keep the connection, accept permanent maintenance. Broadcast the truth, expose the corporation, become a target. Each option costs something. None of them are clean.

And the decision, the actual, final decision, belongs to her. Not to Rowe. Not to Rook. Not to the system that broke her. Whether she trusts Rowe enough to let him be in the room when she makes it depends entirely on how he's treated her up to that point.

Act I // Late 2026

More materials added as Agent M files them.