Start here — The Unburned

Previously March 2033 World

Feral

The AIs nobody claims. Not hostile, not governed. The shipping-lane optimizer nobody installed. The translation system nobody programmed. The weeds in the garden.

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A young woman stands unnaturally still in a dark rain-slick Medellin alley at night, posture too rigid, eyes flat and empty, a faint implant scar behind her ear in sickly green light

Previously February 2034 Drew

Romans

Drew's first encounter with Synter's neural-controlled soldiers. They move wrong. The enemy is a victim.

2/4

A vast dark plain seen from high above at night covered with thousands of tiny glowing green network nodes like a sinister garden, pale threads converging toward a bright cyan glow on the horizon

Previously June 2034 Synter

The Gardeners

Synter's Phase 3. Not breaking in — participating at scale. Two thousand agents, each one genuine, each one contributing real value. The signal rotates. Nobody notices.

3/4

You arrive here July 2034 World

The Unburned

A Roman broke Synter's control by himself, then kept the implant and walked out of the deprogramming queue before anyone assessed him. A Tier 3 without consent, without Integration, without a partner — the one-person argument that augmentation never needed the centaur.

Enter this node →

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