Passthrough
A woman who works off-grid hires Cal to find a stranger she recognized as her younger self — before the city finishes turning her into a product.
She did not give me a last name. I did not need one.
She put the retainer on the desk before she finished explaining. I asked her to finish explaining. She did. I took the case.
The client runs an analog practice in the quiet lanes off Neon Han. No cameras. No recording. Devices left at the door. Got out of a trade she will not describe, some years ago. Came in about a woman she met once, in passing, and could not stop thinking about.
The woman she was looking for had gone quiet. Neither of them is on any network, which is the point, and the problem. No digital trail means no standard trace. The client had no name to give me, no last known address, no social connection that I could pull.
What she had was a face, seen for approximately four seconds, in a transit corridor in the lower Mezzanine. And a recognition she described as absolute.
I asked recognized as what. She said: as me, ten years ago. Then she put the retainer on the desk.
The client and the investigator of record.
Iris
A working name. She did not give me another and I did not need one. Runs an analog practice in the quiet lanes off Neon Han. No cameras, no recording, devices left at the door. Got out of a trade she will not describe, some years ago.
Cal Rowe
Private investigator, licensed, Neon Han office. Works off a debt to a fixer named Rook. Prefers paper records. This case ran in my own district, where my tools work and a manifest comes back when I pull it. That should have made it easier. It made it worse. There was more to find.
Neon Han is my district. I know where the cameras aren't. I know which routes don't log.
That's how I found her. That's how she had stayed unfound.
Neon Han runs between the lower Mezzanine and the service corridors above the transit hub. Night markets, analog services, and the kind of commerce that functions specifically because it is not on any network. The district has a density that makes it easy to disappear. It also has a memory.
People who work off-grid in Neon Han know each other by proximity and by pattern, not by name. The woman I was looking for had a pattern. Consistent routes, consistent timing, consistent service windows. She was disciplined about it. That discipline was the thing that let me find her.
It took two days of walking routes and asking questions at analog service windows before I had a location. On the third day I had a face-match from a market vendor who had been watching the same corner for eight years.
The woman was not in danger in the way the client had feared. She was in a different kind of danger. She had been recruited — slowly, carefully, over several months — by a placement service that operates in the lower Mezzanine under a corporate licensing flag I will not include in this file.
The placement service identifies women who work off-grid and have a specific profile: no network presence, no institutional affiliation, demonstrable service skills. They are offered work that is framed as analog and private. The work is not. The clients are corporate, the logging is continuous, and the women who sign on do not know either of those things until the contract period has passed.
The woman I was looking for had been in the recruitment pipeline for six weeks. She had not yet signed. She was being given time to consider. The consideration period is designed to feel like agency. It is not.
I documented the operation and gave it to the client. The client made her own decision about what to do with it. I am not going to describe that decision in this file.
I handed her the file. She read it once. She folded it and put it in her coat.
She did not say what she was going to do. She didn't have to.
This case was straightforward in the technical sense. I have the tools for this district. The woman I was looking for had not gone far. The operation I uncovered was not subtle once you knew where to look.
It was not straightforward in any other sense.
The client was right about the recognition. I do not know what to do with that. I know what I found and I know what I handed her. I know she left my office without telling me what she was going to do with it, and I know I did not ask. I am a PI. That is the job. But some cases leave a mark regardless of whether you did the job right.
This is one of those cases.
Passthrough is a side chapter of Crosstalk. A short narrative adventure set in the same world as the main game. Free for early supporters and demo players.