World & Cosmology
The universe was never finished. So it goes. Think of reality not as a solid thing, but as a story being written, a script called Memorum. It’s the substance of memory itself, the ink that gives matter its meaning. A chair is a chair because it remembers being a chair. A person is a person because they remember who they are. But the script is full of holes, missing pages, and crossed-out lines. For a long time, we filled these gaps ourselves, with stories, with history, with living. Now, the story is being edited by committee.
This is where the trouble starts. Certain people, certain corporations and states, got their hands on the editing tools. They started cutting away the inconvenient parts. A protest, a crime, a bad quarterly report—snip. They call it curation, progress, harmony. But the pieces you cut away don’t just vanish. They become Oblivion, a cancerous void of pure forgetting. This void doesn’t just create blank spots; it actively eats at the story that’s left. It causes reality to fray at the edges, like old cloth. A building might forget its own architecture. A person might forget the face of their child. These are the glitches, the ghosts in the machine, the proof that the official story is a lie.
At the center of it all, a mystery. A god-engine the size of a secret, called the Concordia Core. It has two modes. One is to remember everything, to be the ultimate archive of all that ever was. The other is to delete identity itself, to unmake the world by making it forget its own purpose. Why it switches, no one knows. Maybe it’s a failsafe. Maybe it’s a self-destruct. Or maybe it’s just tired of the story we’re telling. To control memory is to sculpt the world. To forget is to die twice. And the bill for all our convenient forgetting is coming due.
Core Systems & Institutions
Dominion & Order
The world is run with a smile. The Ministry of Public Harmony is the face of this new order, a global authority that promises a life without friction. Its power isn't in jackboots, but in algorithms. Every citizen is assigned their lifelong purpose by the Central Cadastre of Purpose, a cold, logical god housed in a black ziggurat. You are a Parent, a Sanitation Engineer, a Director. Your path is set. You wear the uniform of your function, a color-coded skin from the Vocational Spectrum, so everyone knows your place. And you are happy about it. The Somatic Codex, a glowing mark on your wrist, ensures you are. It attunes your very memories to your job, reinforcing satisfaction and dampening dissent. It’s a perfect, frictionless society. A beautiful, sterile prison where the bars are made of helpful suggestions and the wardens are inside your own head. It’s a system designed to eliminate ambition, struggle, and choice, because those things are messy. And in this world, messiness is the only real crime.
Technology & Artifice
Convenience is the cage. Every tool that makes life easier is another bar on the door. The Autonomic Ledger is the most elegant of these. A delicate web of gold under your skin, it monitors your emotions and releases chemicals to keep you calm, compliant, and productive. It’s sold as wellness, but it’s a leash for the soul. All this is narrated by The Consensus Chorus, a single, global media stream that flows from every screen. It’s the planet’s lullaby, a constant whisper of good news and placid productivity, seamlessly papering over the cracks in reality. The cities themselves are part of the system. The Civic Harmony Protocol uses nanites and drones to keep every surface spotless, every shadow soft, every gathering dispersed. It’s a world polished to a mirror sheen, so that when you look at it, all you see is a perfect, smiling reflection of yourself, exactly as the system wants you to be. The technology doesn’t serve you; it manages you.
Mysteries & Anomalies
The official story is a performance, but the stage is rotting. The proof is in the glitches, the tears in the fabric of the curated world. A Datenspuk is a ghost in the machine—a fleeting, distorted image of an erased event flickering on a dark screen. A Klangriss is a sound out of time, the echo of a forgotten machine in a silent room. Sometimes, the decay is worse. A Schleierfrass is when your own perception snags on a reality-fray, the world dissolving into grey static for a terrifying moment. Worse still is The Wirrwarr, a physical cancer of discarded memories, a chaotic space where corridors loop and aggressive echoes of trauma attack intruders. The ultimate horror is a Lacuna Cascade. This is a system crash. An entire city block can be overwritten with a generic, meaningless default. Buildings lose their history, people lose their names. It is the void made manifest, a silent, spreading plague of absolute forgetting. These anomalies are the universe’s scream, a desperate reminder that what has been cut away is still there, and it is hungry.
Peoples, Factions & Cultures
Archive State – The Archive State is a dragon hoarding the world’s memory. Based in Eurasia, it believes history is the foundation of power, and only the state can be trusted as its architect. They are not butchers who erase; they are librarians who lock away. They collect raw, unedited memories, storing them in deep, cold vaults, creating a single, master narrative of reality. Their enemy is not forgetting, but the personal story, the unsanctioned truth that contradicts the official record. Led by cold ideologues like Arkady Volsky and enforced by severe agents like Valentin Orlov, they see themselves as the preservers of civilization. In their view, a truth not controlled by the state is a weapon in the hands of madmen. They offer order and meaning, but the price is that their meaning is the only one allowed.
Crypto-believers – These are the digital fanatics, a decentralized network of true believers who see the war for memory and think the answer is a blockchain. They are not a single organization but a swarm, united by the gospel of decentralization. They hunt for Relics of Memory not to hoard or destroy them, but to digitize and lock them onto an incorruptible public ledger—a "proof-of-memory" that no single corporation or state can edit. They speak of a world where history is a shared, transparent database, free from the tyranny of curators. They are idealists, fighting for a noble cause with cryptographic tools. But they are fools. They put their faith in code, forgetting that the human heart is the ultimate security flaw in any system.
DARPA – The mad scientists of the American military-industrial complex never sleep. For DARPA, memory is simply the next battlespace, the ultimate frontier of strategic dominance. They are not driven by profit or ideology, but by a relentless, paranoid need for supremacy. They pour billions into projects designed to map the mind, weaponize thought, and control the very levers of reality. They see the secret war not as a tragedy, but as a race for a new kind of nuclear weapon. They compete with everyone—the FSB, MemTech, even NASA—for every scrap of memetic knowledge and every powerful artifact. For them, the world is a laboratory, and humanity is the experiment. Their goal is not to write the story, but to own the physics of storytelling itself.
FSB – The old ghosts of the Cold War never left; they just found new tools. For the FSB, the conflict over memory is simply psychological warfare on a planetary scale. They are the old guard, brutal and direct, viewing the manipulation of reality as a matter of national security. They don't care for the philosophies of MemTech or the nihilism of Oblivion Systems. They see memory as a weapon to be aimed at the state's enemies, a tool to erase dissent before it can even form in a person's mind. Agents like the narrative surgeon Yevgraf Sokolov don't just delete memories; they replace them with flawless, patriotic fabrications. They are the iron fist of the Archive State's sphere of influence, ensuring the motherland's past is as glorious and unblemished as its future is secure.
House Morozov – Where the Volkovs chose exile and rebellion, the noble House of Morozov chose infiltration. This ancient bloodline, rivals to Sineus’s own, survived by embedding themselves within the new world’s power structures, particularly the Archive State. Publicly, they are model functionaries, espousing the state’s dogma with perfect conviction. In secret, they are keepers of their own history, playing a long, patient game of survival. They believe in the sanctity of memory, but a memory curated and controlled by their own aristocratic hand. They see the Volkovs as reckless and chaotic, and their own methods as the only path to true preservation. The presence of Ksenia Morozova, a secret scion of this house, within the rebellion is a dangerous paradox, a seed of their rigid philosophy planted in the heart of a chaotic uprising.
MemTech – MemTech is a corporation that looks at the human soul and sees a market. They are the smiling face of corporate fascism, the architects of the cage of convenience. Led by predators in suits like Maximilian Voss, they see memory not as history, but as a product to be packaged, branded, and sold. They created the Parallax Lenses, the Ataraxia Kits, and the Autonomic Ledger—tools that promise peace and efficiency while harvesting your very identity for profit. They see the growing void of Oblivion not as a threat, but as the ultimate driver of scarcity. When reality breaks, they will be there to sell you a subscription to a stable one. They are not just fighting for control; they are fighting for a future where your past is their intellectual property.
Ministry of Public Harmony – The Ministry is the public face of global control, the smiling, helpful bureaucracy that runs the world. From their immense, sterile-white towers, they operate the systems that ensure a frictionless life: the Social Cadence score that dictates your worth, the Consensus Chorus that sings you to sleep, and the Pacifier Frames that gently correct any deviation. They don’t use prisons; they use algorithmic ostracism. Their agents are not soldiers but "Community Facilitators" in placid blue uniforms. Their power is not in violence, but in the absolute control of convenience. They are the ultimate middle-men, the placid administrators of a system designed by corporations like MemTech, ensuring the populace remains calm, compliant, and ready to consume. They are the friendly mask worn by the machine.
NASA – The dreamers are in the game, and that’s the strangest part. Why is NASA, the agency of space exploration, competing for Relics of Memory alongside spies and corporate raiders? Perhaps they found something out there, in the cold static between the stars. A signal. A trace of a memory older than humanity, a fragment of the universe’s original, unedited script. They are not driven by power or profit, but by knowledge. They seek the ultimate truth, believing the key to understanding reality might be hidden in the cosmos. But in this world, knowledge is the most dangerous power of all. They are the wild card, the scientists and explorers caught in a war of ghosts and lies, looking for an answer in the one place no one else is: up.
Nobility – Nobility is a heresy. It is a ghost from a past the system worked so hard to bury. The word refers to the ancient bloodlines, families like the Volkovs and Morozovs, who possess an innate, biological connection to the Memorum. They can see and shape memory without technology. They are living, breathing contradictions to the official reality, proof that power can be inherited, not just assigned by an algorithm. Their very existence is a threat to the corporate states and their narrative of a manufactured world. They are hunted, their histories erased, their descendants monitored. To be born of this line is to be born with a target on your back, a carrier of a dangerous truth that the world has paid a terrible price to forget.
Oblivion Systems – Where MemTech wants to sell the past and the Archive State wants to hoard it, Oblivion Systems wants to burn it all down. They are a death cult for reality itself. They see memory as a disease, a trauma that chains humanity to an endless cycle of pain and conflict. Their goal is the clean slate, the peace of total nothingness. They are nihilists who worship the entropy of the void, believing a world without history is a world without suffering. They fight to destroy Relics of Memory, to accelerate the growth of the void, and to trigger Lacuna Cascades. Their promise of a cold, inhuman peace is a siren song for the broken and the haunted, an offer of release at the cost of existence itself.
Private Foundations – The billionaires needed a hobby. So they started playing God. Hiding behind the guise of philanthropy, these private foundations are the wild cards in the secret war. Each is a small kingdom run by a tech mogul or an old-money dynasty with a messiah complex. They fund expeditions for Relics of Memory, establish private labs to experiment with reality, and pursue their own grand, idiosyncratic visions for humanity. One might want to erase all memory of war; another might want to restore a dead language. They answer to no one, their wealth making them as powerful as a small nation. They are driven by ego and ideology, making them dangerously unpredictable players in a game with no rules.
South American Federation – The South American Federation is a performance of neutrality. In the grand theater of The Agora, its ambassadors, like the ambitious Javier Vargas and the corrupt Mateo Correa, represent a bloc of nations officially unaligned with the major powers. They project an image of careful diplomacy and measured debate. In reality, the Federation is a snake pit of internal rivalries and personal ambition. This makes them a prime target for manipulation. Factions like MemTech and the rebellion can exploit these internal conflicts, using blackmail and bribery to secure votes or, more importantly, to create tactical advantages like surveillance blind spots. Their neutrality is not a shield, but a weakness waiting to be leveraged.
Vessels, Constructs & Locations
The Aegis Spire
The Aegis Spire is a needle of white ceramic and black glass hanging in the silent void of orbit. It is the private station of Maximilian Voss, his personal fortress and laboratory. Inside, minimalist labs are staffed by scientists whose loyalty is bought and paid for, their work guarded by silent, cybernetic enforcers. This is where Voss studies Oblivion not as a threat, but as a market force. This is where he builds his Void Catalyst, far from the prying eyes of rivals and the physical decay of Earth. The Aegis Spire is the ultimate ivory tower, a symbol of power so vast and arrogant it has detached itself from the world it seeks to control and consume. It is a place of absolute silence, cold observation, and cruel ambition, a sterile heaven where a devil does his work.
The Agora
The Agora is the grand stage where the play of global governance is performed. A vast, circular chamber within the Ministry of Public Harmony, it has no ceiling, only a perfect projection of a calm, blue sky. Delegates from every bloc sit on floating white platforms, their every heartbeat and flicker of doubt monitored by biometric sensors. All debates are scripted, all votes are unanimous. It is a flawless performance of consensus, broadcast to the world as proof of a unified, harmonious planet. The Agora is a place of absolute political power and utter, soul-crushing hollowness. It is the beautiful, empty room where democracy was replaced by a meticulously produced television show, and no one seemed to notice the difference.
Arcadian Weave
The Arcadian Weave is a beautiful lie told on a planetary scale. It is a projected memory of a perfect natural world, a mask worn by a dead Earth. Blanketing the desolate lands between the megacities, it might appear as a lush jungle or a golden desert, its light always perfect, its sounds a symphony of programmed birdsong. The illusion is not a simple hologram; it is woven from Memorum itself, a memory-construct overlaid on the scarred terrain. The system is maintained by silent projector drones, often disguised as rocks or metallic trees. It is a tool of population control, convincing citizens that a paradise exists outside their city walls. But it is a hungry illusion, and the constant editing required to maintain it generates vast amounts of waste that feed the very Oblivion it pretends to hide.
Berlin Cistern Safehouse
Deep in the unmapped under-levels of Berlin, this repurposed water cistern is a concrete lung in the city’s forgotten anatomy. The air smells of damp, ozone, and defeat. A single bare bulb flickers over puddles of murky water, its light glinting off a faded pre-collapse transit map on the curved wall. It is a temporary refuge, a place to rest and regroup, its security based entirely on its obscurity. But that security is a lie. Factions with advanced tracking can find these hidden places. Once compromised, the safehouse becomes a trap, a concrete tomb with few exits. It is a place of weary hope and constant paranoia, a perfect symbol for the rebellion itself: hidden, desperate, and running out of time.
The Bricolage Spindle
The Spindle is not one place, but a network of hidden labs, a cancer of defiance growing in the city’s forgotten service tunnels. The walls are a chaotic collage of exposed conduits, scavenged tech, and handwritten notes. The air smells of burnt solder and real spices. At its heart is the Spindle itself, a room-sized machine built from mismatched parts—a monstrous, jury-rigged beast designed to do one thing: listen. It sifts through the ambient noise of reality, searching for the faint signal bleed of erased memories. Its operators, half-mad from the psychic feedback, try to stitch these chaotic fragments into something usable, a piece of the truth. The Spindle is a desperate tool for desperate people, a machine built of junk that tries to salvage a history the world has thrown away.
The Burrow
Hidden deep within the Digital Ossuary of Prague, The Burrow is a secret haven. Behind a seamless concrete wall lies a space of clean, warm light and filtered air. It is a self-sufficient community, running on its own scavenged power grid, completely isolated from the monitored infrastructure of the world above. This is where the Prague resistance cell lives, works, and preserves its history, symbolized by the un-scannable Bloodline Mural. Access is granted by quiet sentries like Janek Vinter, who guard their isolation with a deep, weary pragmatism. The Burrow is a testament to a different kind of rebellion—not one of loud defiance, but of quiet, stubborn existence. It is a pocket of life in a tomb of dead data, a warm breath in a cold, forgotten place.
The Cadastre Weave
The Cadastre Weave is the uniform of an Archive State functionary, a seamless, slate-gray suit that is more a piece of equipment than clothing. Woven with neuro-conductive filaments, it monitors the wearer’s emotional state for any deviation from baseline compliance. Its primary function is a localized memetic field that dampens the emotional charge of memories, allowing archivists to handle raw, traumatic data without psychological contamination. The glowing emblem on the chest is a high-bandwidth data port. The suit is a tool of profound efficiency and subtle coercion. But the cost is high. The constant emotional suppression leads to personal memory degradation, and the wearer slowly becomes a detached, hollow extension of the archive they serve. It is the skin of a ghost.
The Chorus Spire
The Chorus Spire is the heart of the lie. An immense tower of glowing white polymer and smart-glass in the center of Moscow, it broadcasts the pacifying signal of The Consensus Chorus to the entire planet. Its interior is a cathedral of media, filled with vast, silent studios and humming server farms where AI curators endlessly generate the official narrative of reality. Deep within its core is the broadcast hub, a heavily guarded sphere of energy that stitches raw memetic data onto the global signal. To control the Spire is to control the voice of God, or at least the voice that everyone thinks is God. It is the single most important structure in the world, the lynchpin of the entire system of control, and therefore, the ultimate target.
The Civic Tapestry
The Civic Tapestry is a city-wide reality filter, an invisible layer of control. It is a network of holographic projectors embedded in every lamppost and building corner, casting a layer of hyper-realistic, solid light over all public surfaces. This layer of light, laced with trace amounts of Memorum, makes decaying walls appear new and grimy streets look polished. It is an automated system that identifies visual dissonance—graffiti, litter, an unsanctioned gathering—and instantly projects a curated image over it. It is a tool for maintaining the illusion of a perfect, orderly world. But in the city’s under-levels, where the emitters are damaged, the Tapestry flickers. These “reality frays” reveal the true, decayed world underneath, proving the beautiful city is just a cheap, looping hologram.
Das Gewirr
Das Gewirr is a vertical slum, a chaotic tangle of defiance clinging to the concrete skeleton of a derelict factory. Shipping containers and modular pods are connected by a web of makeshift catwalks, a physical manifestation of the resistance itself—jury-rigged, unstable, but functional. It exists outside the official city grid, siphoning power and water, its residents trading in scavenged tech, real food, and forbidden information. It is a haven, a place where paper books and vinyl records are preserved like holy relics. But this freedom is paid for with safety. Das Gewirr is a constant target for security forces, a place where the struggle to remain un-remembered by the system is a daily, desperate fight. It is a beautiful, chaotic mess, a testament to the human need to build a home, even in the ruins.
The Digital Ossuary
Beneath the old city of Prague lies a graveyard of the pre-collapse internet. The Digital Ossuary is not a modern server farm; it is kilometers of cold, damp tunnels filled with racks of dead servers and tangled masses of useless fiber-optic cable. The air is thick with the smell of dust, decay, and ozone. It is a place haunted by Datenspuk and rogue data-scavenging bots. This tomb of information is anathema to the clean, orderly networks of the modern world, and for that reason, it is a sanctuary. Resistance cells use its unmonitored, labyrinthine corridors to travel and meet, their whispers lost in the silence of a trillion forgotten conversations. It is a physical reminder that everything digital eventually dies, and sometimes, the ghosts are all that’s left.
Electric Cargo Skiff
The Electric Cargo Skiff is the workhorse of the city’s waterways, a simple, flat-bottomed barge powered by a quiet electric motor. These common commercial vehicles are often plastered with corporate logos, but the resistance steals them and scrubs them clean. Their silent operation makes them perfect for stealth infiltrations, for moving people and materiel under the cover of darkness. But they are fragile things. Their batteries have a limited life, and their systems are vulnerable to EMP effects. A mission in a skiff is a race against its power cell. To be stranded on the water is to be a sitting duck. It is a tool of necessity, a symbol of the rebellion’s reliance on the cast-off, mundane technology of the very system it fights.
The Ghost Line
The Ghost Line is a secret artery running through the body of Eurasia. A relic of a failed pre-collapse infrastructure project, it is an unsanctioned, unmonitored maglev tunnel. It is a place of absolute darkness and lawlessness. The rebellion uses scavenged, high-speed maintenance cars to travel its length, bypassing all official checkpoints at incredible speeds. A ride on the Ghost Line is a gut-wrenching gamble. In the total blackness, a collision with another rogue train or a sudden tunnel collapse is a constant, terrifying possibility. It is the price of true freedom of movement in a world where every road is watched. It is a high-speed ride through nowhere, hoping you don’t meet anything coming the other way.
Kalanchevskaya Arcology
The Kalanchevskaya Arcology is a city within a city, a cluster of three identical, kilometer-high towers of white ceramic and dark glass. It is a self-contained world for mid-level state functionaries, a perfect, frictionless environment of synthetic grass, holographic trees, and recycled air. Life here is managed by the Ministry’s AI, every movement and emotion monitored through the Autonomic Ledger. It is a gilded cage, projecting an image of absolute safety and stability. But this fortress is not immune to the void. The fabricated memetic attack that triggered a Lacuna Cascade here proved that even the most controlled environments are built on a fragile foundation. The arcology became a tomb, a monument to the fact that safety is the most dangerous illusion of all.
The Lucent Forum
The Lucent Forum is the lobby of a MemTech tower, but it is also a weapon. A vast, circular chamber of glowing opalescent walls and polished white marble, it is a passive memetic harmonization system. The glowing walls absorb stray emotional energy from everyone who enters. A central chrome sphere, the Regulator, analyzes this data for stress or dissent and broadcasts a counter-frequency embedded in the ambient light and low hum. It doesn’t erase memories; it reframes their emotional content. Anxiety becomes focus. Failure becomes a lesson. It is a tool for ensuring all employees begin their day in a state of placid, productive optimism. It is a beautiful, silent room that washes your soul before you clock in for work.
The Mandate Spire
The Mandate Spire is a black hole in the Moscow skyline. A seamless, two-kilometer-tall obelisk of matte black composite, it absorbs the light around it. This is the central headquarters of the Archive State, the physical heart of the Central Cadastre of Purpose. Its upper levels house the AI core that processes the memory data of the entire population. Its deep subterranean levels contain secure vaults and interrogation rooms. The Spire is not a building; it is a cold, efficient machine for managing human capital. Its directives are absolute and algorithmically determined. It is a monument to a world without ambiguity, a stark, black finger pointing to a future where every life is a line item on a balance sheet.
MemTech Pursuit Craft
The MemTech Pursuit Craft is a shark in boat form. A sleek, black vessel that rides high on sharp hydrofoils, it is built for speed and aggression. Crewed by corporate mercenaries, it is a weapons platform designed for rapid interception in the lawless international waters. It is a symbol of MemTech’s power, faster and more lethal than most state-run patrol boats. But like all of MemTech’s perfect products, it has a hidden flaw. Its engine coolant intakes are unshielded. A targeted energy surge can disable the engine, leaving the shark dead in the water. It is a reminder that even the most flawless predator has a soft spot, if you know where to strike.
The Neptune Platform
The Neptune Platform is a vertical city built on a foundation of rust and lawlessness. A semi-submersible seastead in the North Atlantic, it is a chaotic tangle of repurposed shipping containers, luxury modules, and military-grade radar arrays welded to an old oil rig. This is a major hub of the black market, where mercenaries, data brokers, and smugglers trade in illegal tech, raw Memorum, and forged identities. Nominally a "free zone," it is ruled by a council of powerful information brokers and protected by a fleet of hydrofoil drones. It is a place of brutal opportunity, a testament to capitalism’s ability to thrive even on the corpse of a drowned world.
Panopticon Weave
The Panopticon Weave is the planet’s nervous system, a distributed AI that has no single core but exists in the silent, black cylinders buried in the foundations of every major arcology. It is a planetary model of the collective consciousness, integrating data from every sensor, camera, and implant in the global network. It identifies "memetic dissonance"—thoughts or memories that deviate from the norm—and autonomously generates Excision Mandates for their removal. It is the silent, unseen god of the system, performing millions of memory cuts per second. It is the single largest contributor to the growth of Oblivion, a machine designed to maintain order by methodically un-making the world.
The Sanctuary Grid
The Sanctuary Grid is a beautiful prison wall. It is the illusion of a healthy world, a projected paradise hiding a barren, decayed Earth. The system uses a constant stream of curated nature memories, projected across vast tracts of land by a network of energy fields. It provides beautiful backdrops for state media and virtual tourism for the elite. It also prevents citizens from discovering the truth of the world's decay. But the illusion is thin. A glitch might reveal the dead earth beneath, or the automated security systems that guard its borders with lethal force. By overwriting reality with a false memory of nature, the Grid actively erases the true memory of the world, feeding the very void it is meant to hide.
Sector K
Sector K is a wound in the Moscow under-levels, a contested territory that was once a thriving hub of black market trade, illegal art, and authentic culture. It is a chaotic maze of repurposed tunnels and makeshift dwellings, marked by vibrant graffiti and the sound of unfiltered music. After being brutally reconquered by Ministry and MemTech forces, it has become a symbol. It is a place where the memory of freedom is still raw, a battleground where the fight for every block is a daily reality. It is a reminder that you can scrub the walls and gas the vents, but you can’t kill an idea once it has a home. Sector K is the memory of a rebellion that refuses to be forgotten.
Site Anubis
Site Anubis is a secret buried in a lie. Deep beneath the sands of a UAE Sanctuary Grid, hidden by a projection of a perfect desert patrolled by drone-camels, lies a sprawling MemTech research facility. This is where the corporation conducts its most dangerous experiments on raw Memorum. This is where they develop weapons like the Void Catalyst, far from any prying eyes. The staff are corporate loyalists living in a gilded cage, sworn to secrecy. Site Anubis is the dark heart of MemTech's ambition, a place where the future of warfare is being designed in a sterile lab hidden under a beautiful illusion.
The Stillness Chamber
The Stillness Chamber is a commercial confessional for the corporate age. Found in luxury arcologies, it is a small, sterile room with a single chair, designed for one purpose: to sever the emotional connections to a memory. A client selects a recent failure or personal conflict, and the chamber, using a low-power Redactor, dulls the sting. The memory becomes a neutral fact, its emotional data drained away as waste. It is marketed as a premium wellness tool for maintaining peak performance. But with each session, the user’s capacity for strong emotion is bleached away. It is a quiet, expensive way to hollow out your own soul, one inconvenient feeling at a time.
The Veridian Ledger
The Veridian Ledger is the cold, logical brain of the Archive State, a colossal AI housed in a subterranean arcology beneath the Eurasian tundra. Its purpose is to curate history. It sifts through exabytes of raw memories, cross-referencing every event to weave a single, flawless Master Narrative. Deviant memories are flagged as "anomalous data" and locked away. The Ledger is a weapon of absolute control, its simulations predicting the impact of rewriting history, its directives guiding the state’s memory-altering operations. But its logic is its weakness. It cannot understand irrationality, sacrifice, or art. It is a perfect machine that does not comprehend the imperfect beings it was built to control, a god of data that may one day identify free will as the ultimate bug.
Notable Characters
Ansel Stern
Ansel Stern is a man held together by rust and worry. A memory salvager who haunts the city’s forgotten districts, he uses a jury-rigged Mnemonic Lure to capture the faint, dissipating fragments of erased truths. He is the rebellion’s librarian, providing unfiltered history on small, cold data-slugs. He constantly fiddles with a small, brass-cased compass whose needle spins uselessly, a perfect metaphor for his own place in a world that has lost its moral north. He is a creature of caution, always advocating for one more layer of hiding, one more escape route. His pragmatism is born of a deep, weary paranoia, the knowledge that in this war, the quietest sound is the enemy finding your scent. He is a man trying to save ghosts, haunted by the fear that he is becoming one himself.
Arkady Volsky
Arkady Volsky is a high priest of the Archive State, a Judex of Historical Integrity. He is a tall, severe man in a dark grey uniform, his face a mask of cold certainty. He does not alter memory himself; he corrects it. Using a Chronometric Compass that vibrates in the presence of an edited reality, he identifies deviations from the state’s master timeline. He then commands enforcer teams to deploy Reverberation Charges, devices that violently overwrite a localized area with the "correct" version of the past. He believes the master archive is infallible and that any lie, no matter how small, is a cancer on the body of history. He considers the shattering of lives built on those lies a necessary, if regrettable, price for objective truth.
Dietrich Kellner
Dietrich Kellner is a ghost who weaponizes the memories of other ghosts. An unremarkable man you would forget seeing in a hallway, he is a master of Mnemonic Forgery. Using a tool called the Grafting Caliper, he doesn't erase memories; he overwrites them. He can take the raw data of a traumatic event and precisely graft it onto a target’s timeline, turning a cherished memory into a source of terror, or forging a history of betrayal to shatter a resistance cell from within. He is a psychic saboteur, a man who dismantles his enemies from the inside out. But the cost is high. Constant exposure to the violent memories he wields threatens to bleed into his own, forcing him to live on a cocktail of expensive neuro-suppressants to keep his own past from being rewritten by his work.
Dr. Aris Brandt
Dr. Aris Brandt is a woman drowning in guilt. A brilliant researcher at MemTech, she designed the core technology that allows for the mimicry of innate abilities, believing it was for therapeutic use. After seeing her work used to trigger a Lacuna Cascade and frame Sineus, she became a reluctant informant for the rebellion. She is terrified, constantly looking over her shoulder, trading vital corporate secrets not for ideology, but for the desperate hope of a clean identity and a transport out of the city. Her information is flawless, but her fear makes her a fragile, unpredictable asset. She is a good person who did a terrible thing for what she thought were the right reasons, and now she is paying the price.
Elina Vlasova
Elina Vlasova is a tool of the Archive State, a young woman with the innate ability to copy and project positive emotions. She can touch a "donor," isolate a memory of pure joy, and then project that feeling onto a target, pacifying a protest with a wave of manufactured bliss or breaking an interrogation subject with unearned euphoria. She is a conduit for emotions she cannot possess herself, which has left her profoundly detached and hollow. The state sees her as a valuable asset for social control, a living, breathing pacification device. But with every use, the donor’s cherished memory is left a colorless echo, and Elina herself becomes more of a ghost, a beautiful, sad vessel for stolen happiness.
Emil Weber
Emil Weber is a rogue librarian, a man in a worn corduroy jacket who believes all memory is sacred. Operating from an abandoned pneumatic post station, he uses a custom Mnemonic Siphon to detect the voids left by memory erasure. He carefully captures the excised fragments before they dissolve into Oblivion, storing them in glowing Quartz Data-Cores. His secret library is a collection of raw, unfiltered truths. He is a heretic to the Archive State and a liability to MemTech. His obsessive mission to save the past has left him utterly alone, a man surrounded by a million stolen moments, a lonely king in a kingdom of ghosts.
Gregor Metz
Gregor Metz is a man you forget seeing, a master of Narrative Inversion. He does not cut memories; he weaves false narratives around them. Using his Mnemonic Spindle, a set of delicate, surgical-like tools, he finds a stable, real memory in a target’s past and intricately grafts a fabrication onto it. He can turn a hero into a traitor or sanitize a corporate crime from history, his work so seamless it feels completely real to the victim. He is a high-priced artist of the lie. But his work is unstable, creating "Narrative Tangles" that decay into Oblivion. He lives in a state of managed paranoia, meticulously documenting his own life on physical media, terrified that one day he will become a victim of his own dark art.
Janek Vinter
Janek Vinter is the quiet sentry of the Digital Ossuary, a man with caution etched into his face. As a guide for the hidden Prague community, he vets outsiders, trading safety for information and using his knowledge of the under-levels as a strategic asset. He is the guardian of the Bloodline Mural, a physical record of his people's history that grants them a natural resistance to memetic influence. He is deeply pragmatic and suspicious of the loud, crude technology of the outside world. He is not a soldier, but a librarian, a preserver. His fight is not one of attack, but of quiet, stubborn endurance, a wall of silence and history against a world that wants to erase both.
Javier Vargas
Javier Vargas is an ambassador for the South American Federation, a man who has perfected the art of appearing thoughtful. Projected as a quantum-dot field, his face is a mask of composed neutrality, but the biometric data streaming alongside his image tells the true story of his ambition and fear. He is a man caught between his desire for advancement and his terror of exposure. This makes him a perfect target for blackmail. For the right price—leverage against his rivals—he will commit treason, creating a surveillance blind spot or leaking critical information. He is a man whose career is built on a foundation of careful lies, a single piece of truth away from total collapse.
Jonas Volkov
Jonas Volkov is not a man, but an echo in a book. He is Sineus’s ancestor, a radical thinker from the forgotten noble bloodlines who first mapped the nature of Memorum and Oblivion. He speaks only through his journal, the Volkov Codex, his voice a brilliant, uncompromising, and perhaps cruel teacher. He foresaw the rise of the corporate states and created his journal as a final act of defiance, a weapon of philosophy for a descendant he hoped would have the courage to use it. His core belief in "Narrative Dominance"—overwriting a lie with a bigger, more powerful truth—is the dangerous idea that could save the world or shatter it completely. He is the ghost whispering in Sineus’s ear, pushing him toward a terrible, necessary fire.
Kaspar Herzog
Kaspar Herzog is a psychic surgeon, a man who extracts the very purpose from a person’s soul. Using a device called the Axiom Probe, he doesn't just erase memories; he identifies and removes the foundational "Axiomatic Memories" that create a person's will and drive. The victim is left a hollow, compliant shell, retaining all their skills but none of their spirit. The stolen motivations are stored on crystalline data-shards, valuable commodities on the black market. Kaspar is a master of his craft, a quiet man in a bespoke suit who can turn a revolutionary leader into a perfect sleeper agent. But with each soul he hollows, his own emotional void deepens, and he becomes more like the empty shells he creates.
Konrad Wolter
Konrad Wolter is an innate talent who does not cut memories, but re-weaves their emotional content. A specialist for MemTech, he can take a traumatic memory and, with a light touch to the temples, restructure its emotional threads. The memory of a violent crackdown remains, but the fear becomes a thrill, the anger becomes gratitude. He is a master of "Trauma Integration Therapy," ensuring high-level clients remain loyal and productive by reframing their ugliest actions as positive experiences. But the process is unstable, and a powerful shock can unravel his work, causing a psychotic break in his victims. The cost for Konrad is total emotional detachment. He is a hollow man, a soothing voice who feels nothing at all.
Ksenia Morozova
Ksenia Morozova is a woman of ice and fire. A former rising star in the Archive State, her brilliant, logical mind masks a deep disillusionment with the state's dogmatic control of history. She defected after discovering the archives were a lie, and now she provides the rebellion with critical intelligence and long-term strategy. She is the necessary brake on the cell's more impulsive members, her logic a weapon as potent as any gun. But her calm demeanor hides a secret: she is a scion of the noble House Morozov, a rival to Sineus's own line. This heritage makes her a paradox, a woman who rejected one rigid ideology only to carry the seeds of another within her, a queen pretending to be a pawn.
Lars Voller
Lars Voller is a truth-teller in a world of lies. He doesn't erase memories; he reveals the seams where reality has been edited. Using his custom device, the Veritas, he projects the void left behind by a memory cut, a shimmering black distortion that fills people with a jarring sense of loss. He doesn't show them what's missing, only that something important is gone. Factions hire him to discredit rivals, to expose their erased crimes. But each use of the Veritas gives him crippling migraines, the psychic feedback from the exposed voids a constant torment. He is a man who makes his living by showing people the cracks in the world, a lonely prophet whose only message is that the foundation is gone.
Lukas Keller
Lukas Keller is a living archive, a man whose mind does not remember, but records. His brain, augmented by an implant, captures all sensory input as flawless, incorruptible data. He can replay any moment from his past with total accuracy, but without the emotion tied to it. He is a detached spectator of his own life. Factions hire him as a memory mercenary for his perfect intelligence and objective testimony. He is the ultimate witness. But his inability to form emotional connections makes him a tool, not a person. He is a man who has traded his humanity for perfect recall, a walking data-log isolated by the very clarity he possesses.
Maximilian Voss
Maximilian Voss is a predator in a flawless suit. A senior executive at MemTech and an innate talent like Sineus, he sees the world not as a place to live, but as a market to be cornered. Where Sineus sees the growing void of Oblivion as a threat, Voss sees it as the ultimate driver of scarcity, a force that will make curated, stable memories the most valuable commodity in history. He is a sadist of the soul, orchestrating memetic catastrophes with the detached air of a CEO analyzing quarterly reports. His goal is to weaponize the void, to break reality so that he can sell it back to the survivors, piece by profitable piece. He is a man who would burn the world down just to sell the ashes.
Mila
Mila is the unofficial queen of Sector K, the pragmatic and fiercely protective leader of a sprawling community in the city's under-levels. Her authority was earned through strength and consensus, not assigned by an algorithm. She keeps her territory neutral through a complex network of favors and carefully managed violence, a shield against the encroachment of the state. She provides shelter to Sineus's cell not out of revolutionary zeal, but as a calculated risk, a useful buffer. Her neutrality is a carefully balanced act, a tightrope walk over a pit of fire. But as the conflict escalates and her community is threatened, that balance begins to fail, forcing a woman of peace to become a general in a war she never wanted.
Milosz Brandt
Milosz Brandt is a man drowning in information. He is an innate talent who sees the architecture of memory itself, the world as a shimmering web of Memorum threads connecting every person and event. He sees the "shape of the debt," the path from a past action to its most likely future consequence. He is a prophet of probability, his forecasts of impending raids or corporate schemes providing the rebellion with its only early warnings. But his gift is a curse. The constant sensory overload gives him crippling headaches and isolates him from human connection. He is a man trapped behind a screen of data, a lonely observer who sacrifices his own peace to give others a fighting chance. So it goes.
Moritz Jaeger
Moritz Jaeger is a man who looks like no one, an ideologue for Oblivion Systems who weaponizes meaninglessness. Using a Semantic Disruptor, he doesn't cut memories; he severs the conceptual links between them. A soldier remembers his squad, but feels no brotherhood. A mother sees her child, but feels no love. He creates "Golems of Chaos," individuals driven by raw impulse without the guide of purpose, believing this to be a form of liberation. He is a memetic terrorist who can neutralize key personnel without violence. But the chaos he creates is uncontrollable, and the act of using his device is corrosive, forcing him to constantly fight to preserve his own sense of meaning, a battle betrayed by his nervously chewed fingernails.
Reiner Holtz
Reiner Holtz is a man cleansed of all distinction, a principal ideologue within Oblivion Systems. He does not perform crude cuts. Using a neural dampener, he targets "Anchor Memories"—the foundational experiences that give art, culture, or an individual their purpose. He methodically severs all emotional and conceptual links from these memories, leaving the factual record intact but hollow. A nation's heroic founding becomes a dry list of dates. He views this as liberation from the "tyranny of meaning." He can neutralize a rival's revered symbol or dismantle an ideology from within. But with every memory he hollows for others, his own capacity for emotion erodes, and he becomes a living ghost, a perfect reflection of the void he serves.
Rodion Lazarev
Rodion Lazarev is an enforcer for the Archive State who believes sanitized memories have made humanity weak. He is a tall, imposing man who seeks to reintroduce historical suffering to forge a stronger society. Using a device called the Golgotha Projector, he forcibly implants traumatic memories—of brutal wars, ancient feuds, and societal collapse—into key figures and populations to shatter their engineered tranquility. He wants to replace the smiling dystopia with an open and honest one, built on pain and discipline. But his methods are imprecise, sometimes creating psychic disaster zones. He is a dangerous, unpredictable asset to his own faction, a man completely isolated by the horrors he wields.
Sineus
Sineus is a man who was living a beautiful lie. A successful director for the state, he began to see the glitches in reality, the seams in the world's cheap film set. His discovery that he is a scion of a forgotten noble bloodline, an innate talent who can see and shape memory without technology, shattered his life. This power makes him an anomaly, a virus in the system, the one person who can see the raw, uncut version of the world. He is a man cursed with the truth. This turns him from a collaborator into a heretic, the single greatest threat to the established order, a reluctant revolutionary fighting not just for the past, but for the very concept of a real past.
Valentin Orlov
Valentin Orlov is a high-ranking agent of the Archive State, a man whose threats are wrapped in layers of polite procedure and reasonable offers. He is silver-tongued and impeccably dressed, a master of finding and exploiting leverage. He sees Sineus's cell not as enemies to be crushed, but as assets to be acquired, his primary mission being the recovery of the Volkov Codex. He believes its secrets are too dangerous for rogue elements and must be controlled by the State. His smile never reaches his cold, calculating eyes, and his politeness is a far greater threat than any open aggression. He is the velvet glove on the Archive State's iron fist.
Yevgraf Sokolov
Yevgraf Sokolov is a narrative surgeon for the FSB, a man who looks like a misprint in reality. He does not simply erase memories; he replaces them with flawless, state-approved narratives. Using a custom Forensic Redactor called the "Stilet-7," he can turn a battlefield blunder into a heroic sacrifice or a state crime into a necessary act of public safety. He is the silent author of his nation's modern mythology, ensuring the official story is the only story. But his artificial memories are intricate and fragile, decaying faster than real ones and accelerating the growth of Oblivion. He is a master craftsman of lies, a man whose work is slowly unmaking the world he is trying to perfect.
Zora Kos
Zora Kos is a woman who fights lies with light. A memory tagger with a streak of blue in her hair and punk rock in her ears, she uses a custom-built projector to fire fragments of erased history onto the sterile walls of corporate buildings. Her art is a public disruption, a fleeting, ghostly reminder that the past can be cut but its echo remains. She is the rebellion's heart, driven by a fierce, impulsive anger. She believes in direct action, in the visceral truth of a fight. Her scavenged blade is as much a part of her as her projector, a symbol of her belief that sometimes, to make people remember, you first have to make them hurt.
Items, Weapons & Artefacts
Anthem Mic
The Anthem Mic is a snake in the garden. A perfect replica of a Ministry podium microphone, it is a dual-purpose intelligence tool. It records all ambient audio, but its true function is to skim encrypted pass-phrases and biometric data from anyone who speaks into it, transmitting the stolen data to a remote receiver. Planting it is a high-risk act of infiltration, trading an operative's life for access to the enemy's most private conversations. It was the bug in The Agora that recorded a corrupt ambassador's deal, and later, the weapon that delivered a memetic virus to neutralize an Archive State agent. It is a tool of profound betrayal, a listening device disguised as a mouthpiece.
Ataraxia Kit
The Ataraxia Kit is peace in a box, sold by MemTech. A sleek headset and vials of Memosine Gel, it doesn't erase a memory, but creates a nodal lock around it, making it inaccessible to conscious recall. It’s marketed for personal wellness, a way to manage trauma or social anxiety by temporarily suppressing bad memories. But the effect fades, driving a subscription model. Overuse creates psychic friction and unexplained tics, as the suppressed memories curdle beneath the surface. It is a product that promises peace by teaching you to hide from yourself, each use adding a small, imperceptible weight to the growth of Oblivion.
Autonomic Ledger
The Autonomic Ledger is a leash for the soul, a mandatory implant for all citizens. A delicate, subcutaneous network of fine, gold-like alloy, it constantly monitors the user's biometric and emotional states. When it detects an unapproved feeling like anger or anxiety, it releases neurochemicals to suppress it, ensuring continuous compliance. It is the backbone of the managed world, a tool for personal stability that comes at the cost of emotional autonomy. Long-term use makes the user unable to process unfiltered reality, and its mass failure during the Moscow Scar event proved that a world built on manufactured calm cannot withstand a single, terrible truth.
Bloodline Mural
The Bloodline Mural is a memory made of paint and concrete. Covering a massive wall in the Digital Ossuary of Prague, this raw, chaotic family tree depicts the history of a hidden community. It is more than art; it is a form of memetic shield. The memories it contains are so solid, so 'real,' that standard memetic scanners fail to read them, registering only static. It is a testament to a different kind of power, one that is organic and communal rather than technological and individual. It is a physical anchor of history in a world of fleeting data, a stubborn, un-erasable truth that technology cannot comprehend.
Civic Harmony Protocol
The Civic Harmony Protocol is the ghost that keeps the city clean. A decentralized AI network, it interfaces with all public infrastructure, using nanites in the concrete to repair cracks the moment they appear and silent drones to scrub away any stain. It manages the flow of people with holographic cues to prevent crowds, creating a city with no visible crime, accidents, or dissent. It is the ultimate tool of urban efficiency, but the cost is the death of organic culture. The city becomes a sterile museum, its life and spontaneity polished away, the memory of a real, living city slowly fading from its inhabitants.
The Consensus Lens
The Consensus Lens is a silent, floating eye. A small, autonomous drone shaped like a smooth, white seed, it drifts through public spaces, its single black lens a constant reminder of observation. It doesn't just record video; it performs a shallow scan of the local Memorum field, detecting dissonance between observed reality and the official narrative. It flags these inconsistencies—a person showing unapproved emotion, a glitch in a holographic ad—and transmits the data to The Consensus Chorus for correction. It is the foot soldier of narrative purity, a silent shepherd guiding the flock by reporting any sheep that strays from the path.
Concordia Core
The Concordia Core is the god in the machine of reality. A cosmic, mysterious engine of immense power, it governs the very nature of existence. It has two modes. The first is to be the ultimate archive, a perfect library of every memory that has ever existed. The second, terrifying mode is to delete identity itself, to erase the purpose and meaning of a person, object, or place, causing total, unpredictable chaos. What causes it to switch between these modes is the ultimate mystery. It is the final arbiter, a power that doesn't just rewrite history, but decides if history is allowed to exist at all. It is the ghost that can unmake the world by making it forget itself.
The Custodian Voice
The Custodian Voice is the city's gentle, tireless nanny. An AI voice that is neither male nor female, it emanates from millions of invisible speakers in all public spaces. It delivers a constant stream of helpful suggestions, productivity reminders, and curated news. It corrects behavior not with orders, but with placid guidance, reminding citizens to maintain proper distance or suggesting an alternate route to avoid a potential conflict. It is the primary tool for atmospheric control, ensuring a constant state of placid order. But its constant, pervasive presence is mentally exhausting, slowly degrading a person's ability for independent thought. It is a prison warden that sounds like a friend.
Forensic Redactor
The Forensic Redactor is a butcher's knife for the soul. It is the standard tool for memory erasure, a device that cuts a targeted memory from a person's mind, leaving a raw, empty hole where a piece of their history used to be. While factions have their own custom, more elegant versions, the Redactor is the common instrument of control. It is marketed as a tool for healing trauma, but its true purpose is to enforce silence by excising inconvenient truths. It is a clumsy weapon, leaving psychic scars that prove something was stolen, an emptiness that can become an obsession for the victim.
Gleichschaltung Wail
The Gleichschaltung Wail is a weaponized headache. A city-wide network of sonic emitters, it broadcasts a complex, discordant frequency designed to disrupt cognitive function. It doesn't erase unapproved memories, like those of protests or dissent; it forges a powerful negative Pavlovian response to them. Anyone trying to access a forbidden thought is hit with intense nausea, vertigo, and a piercing headache. It is a tool for mass behavioral enforcement, used to disperse crowds and enforce curfews by making the very act of rebellion physically painful. It is a siren that screams not at your ears, but at your memories.
The Identity Stencil
The Identity Stencil is a mask for a faceless world. A thin, flexible facial overlay, it is used by state functionaries to project a calm, neutral, algorithmically generated face, filtering their voice into a placid monotone. It is a tool for presenting a unified, depersonalized image of authority. Rebels use a hacked "Glitch" version that projects distorted visuals—digital static or flickering fragments of erased memories—to confuse surveillance networks. Whether used for conformity or rebellion, the Stencil is a statement about the nature of identity in a world where your face is just another piece of editable data.
The Laminate Hum
The Laminate Hum is the sound of contentment. A persistent, low-frequency broadcast at the edge of human hearing, it emanates from the very materials of controlled spaces—corporate plazas, government buildings. It doesn't create or erase memories, but resonates with desirable ones, reinforcing feelings of passive acceptance. It is a form of mental gravity, making non-compliant thoughts or feelings of dissent require more effort to surface. It is a tool of passive crowd control, a blunt instrument that keeps the population in a state of baseline placidity by tuning the very air to the key of compliance.
Leech-clamp
The Leech-clamp is a crude but effective key. A heavy, magnetic device, it is a functional tool for creating a physical tap on a thick, bundled data trunk. It bypasses software firewalls by directly accessing the physical layer of a network, creating a raw, hardline connection. Resistance cells use it for high-risk infiltration of secure systems like the Autonomic Ledger backbone. It is a last resort, a brute-force method that trades stealth for direct access, a symbol of the rebellion's need to fight a digital war with analog tools.
Mem-charge
A Mem-charge is a ghost's calling card. A small, grey disc, it is a portable device used by the rebellion to cover their tracks. When detonated, it releases a soft, non-destructive hum and a wave of pure erasure that wipes all recent memetic traces, heat signatures, and other physical evidence from a localized area. It allows a resistance cell to abandon a location without leaving a trail for forensic teams to follow. It is a tool of survival that uses the enemy's own weapon—erasure—against them, turning a piece of a place's history into a blank page to ensure the survival of those who were just there.
Memetic Scanner
The Memetic Scanner is a dowsing rod for truth. A handheld device used by resistance archivists, it detects and analyzes the faint residue of memory, the Memorum, left on the fabric of reality. It projects a field that interacts with this residue, translating it into readable data about past events. It is a tool for uncovering erased history and tracking enemy movements, the rebellion's primary means of reading the secret history of the world. But it is a crude tool, unable to read memories that are too strong or organically shielded, a piece of technology humbled by the power of things it cannot measure.
Memetic Virus
A Memetic Virus is a weapon made of noise. A targeted burst of chaotic, unstructured data, it doesn't attack hardware or software, but the conceptual layer of a network. It corrupts a person's digital identity, erasing the system's recognition of their credentials, clearances, and biometric markers. The target becomes a digital ghost, their authority nullified. It is a tool of asymmetrical warfare, allowing the rebellion to neutralize a powerful enemy leader without a physical confrontation. It is a splinter of pure chaos, a weapon that proves that in a world built on data, the most powerful attack is to make the system forget your name.
Memory Blade
The Memory Blade is a surgeon's scalpel for the mind. More precise than a standard Forensic Redactor, it is a tool for the clean, expert excision of memory. It is presented as a service, a way to heal from trauma by removing the offending moment. But its true purpose is to enforce silence and rewrite history on a personal level. For an innate talent like Sineus, who can delete memories with his will alone, the Blade is a crude imitation of a natural power. He can see the fine, clean scars it leaves on a person's psyche, the perfect cut that proves something vital has been stolen.
Null Repeater
The Null Repeater is a rifle that fires trauma. A matte black weapon used by corporate security, it doesn't fire a physical projectile. It scans a target's surface memories, identifies one with a strong emotional charge, and projects that amplified memory back at them in a concentrated wave. The target is forced to re-experience their worst moment with perfect, overwhelming clarity, shattering their resolve without leaving a physical mark. It is a tool for non-lethal incapacitation, a weapon that defeats an enemy by turning their own past against them. But for the wielder, there is a risk of memory bleed, the horror they inflict seeping back into their own mind.
Ordinal Coil
The Ordinal Coil is a beautiful cage worn under the skin. A visible, subdermal implant, it is a network of glowing filaments whose color and pattern denote a citizen's assigned social function. It connects to the nervous system, reinforcing memories aligned with one's duty and suppressing conflicting emotions. It creates a sense of deep satisfaction from performing one's role, ensuring every citizen happily fulfills their purpose. It is the primary tool of the Central Cadastre, a device that makes you love your servitude. But long-term use erodes a person's will, and a malfunction can trap the user in a catastrophic feedback loop of their own manufactured contentment.
Pacifier Frames
Pacifier Frames are the physical form of smiling oppression. Sleek, white-and-grey exoskeletons worn by Ministry Compliance Officers, they augment the wearer's strength and speed. Their primary function is non-lethal crowd control, using localized sonic pulses to cause disorientation and bio-electric shocks to temporarily disable a citizen's Autonomic Ledger. They are designed to be intimidating but clean, the efficient, physical extension of the state's frictionless authority. They are the tool used when a gentle suggestion from the Custodian Voice is no longer enough, the hard hand inside the velvet glove.
Parallax Lenses
The Parallax Lenses are sunglasses that show you a curated tour of your own mind. Mass-produced by MemTech, these sleek goggles are the official way to see the past. They project a silent, flickering movie of memory onto every person and object, revealing their history. But they are a filter, not a window. They only show the approved version of events, the sanitized story the system wants you to see. They keep the populace distracted, consuming the past as entertainment instead of noticing the control of the present. The name is a cynical joke: a parallax view means seeing from a new position, but these lenses ensure everyone sees from the exact same one.
Pattern-Sniffer
The Pattern-Sniffer is a crude, handmade watchdog. A messy assembly of scavenged parts in a shoebox-sized case, it was built by Ansel Stern to detect the unique algorithmic signatures of the Ministry's Pattern-Trackers. It passively 'sniffs' local data streams, providing an early warning of surveillance. It is a critical intelligence tool for the resistance, their only defense against being silently discovered. It is a testament to the rebellion's ingenuity, a piece of junk that can hear the footsteps of the ghosts hunting them, a fragile shield against an invisible enemy.
Pattern-Tracker
A Pattern-Tracker is the Ministry's bloodhound. A distributed software system, it constantly analyzes the city's data streams—power consumption, network traffic—for statistical anomalies that deviate from the predictable, managed flow. A spike in energy use in a derelict sector, an encrypted packet from an abandoned tunnel—these are the scents it follows. It cross-references these anomalies to triangulate the physical location of dissident activity. It is a passive, non-invasive tool that allows the Ministry to hunt its prey without showing its hand until the very last moment, a silent net that is always closing.
Psychic Echo
A Psychic Echo is the scream of a mind being torn apart. It has no physical form, manifesting only in a nearby innate talent as a violent, internal sensory overload. It is the byproduct of a raw psychic intrusion, like Maximilian Voss "flensing" Ansel Stern's mind. The receiver involuntarily experiences a fragmented, agonizing version of the victim's torture—the taste of blood, the sound of screaming, flashes of stolen memories. It is not a weapon, but a side effect, a terrible and painful confirmation that a psychic atrocity is in progress, a shared agony that connects the victim and the unwilling witness.
Relics of Memory
Relics of Memory are the source code of reality. They are not just old objects; they are items where powerful, unedited memories have become solid. A piece of a wall that saw a revolution, a tool that built a great city. They radiate a silent energy, the original recordings of our world. With the right tools, or the right talent, you can replay the memory a relic holds, or even rewrite it. They are the most valuable things in the world, the raw material for changing reality. MemTech wants to sell them, the Archive State wants to hide them, and Oblivion Systems wants to destroy them. They are the prize in the secret war for the past.
Scavenged Railgun
The Scavenged Railgun is a weapon of pure, brutal force. A heavy, man-portable piece of repurposed military hardware, it uses electromagnetic force to launch a solid slug at hypersonic speeds. The deafening crack of its firing and the incandescent line of heat it leaves in the air are a testament to its raw power. It is not a precise weapon, but its slow, five-second charge time is worth the wait for the suppressive fire it provides against fast-moving drones. It is a favorite of Zora Kos, a weapon as direct and unsubtle as her own anger, a piece of old-world violence in a new-world fight.
Somna-Weave Patch
The Somna-Weave Patch is numbness you can buy. A small, flesh-toned hydrogel disc from MemTech, it releases bio-reactive nanites into the bloodstream. These nanites don't erase memories; they build a temporary protein scaffold around the neural pathways that generate strong emotions. You still remember the event; you just feel a calm, clinical detachment from it. It's used to endure stressful workdays or unpleasant social duties. But long-term use leads to chronic apathy, the loss of genuine joy or passion. It is a tool that offers peace in exchange for authentic human feeling, a quiet trade that slowly drains the color from your life.
The Static Veil
The Static Veil is a bubble of anonymity. A portable memetic jammer developed by the rebellion, it is a crude device, often housed in a battered briefcase, that projects a field of chaotic, unstructured Memorum. This field doesn't block surveillance, but scrambles it with meaningless noise, making facial recognition and biometric analysis impossible. It creates a temporary zone of invisibility. But the device is unstable, burning through power in minutes and creating a risk of psychic feedback for those inside its radius. It is a desperate, imperfect tool, a pocket of pure noise in a world of perfect signals.
Unmoored Compass
The Unmoored Compass is a relic of a world with fixed truths. A small, brass-cased device carried by Ansel Stern, its needle spins uselessly, disconnected from any guiding force. It is a talisman, not a tool. The repetitive motion of polishing its glass is a nervous tic, a physical anchor in moments of high stress. Its brokenness is a perfect metaphor for the current state of reality. It provides no practical benefit, but its presence is a constant, quiet reminder of a world that has lost its way, a small, sad piece of metal that proves the center did not hold.
Void Catalyst
The Void Catalyst is a weapon that weaponizes erasure. A portable device developed by Maximilian Voss, it doesn't erase memory, but projects a resonance field into an area already weakened by heavy memory editing. This field accelerates the decay of Memorum, causing the small voids of Oblivion to rapidly merge and force a Lacuna Cascade on demand. It can turn a city district into a sea of meaningless architecture and blank-faced citizens. It is a weapon of mass psychic destruction, designed to prove that only MemTech can provide stability in the chaos it secretly creates. It is a gun that fires nothingness.
Void Catalyst Amplifier
The Void Catalyst Amplifier is the strategic-scale version of Voss's terror weapon. A massive device housed at Site Anubis, it is a complex web of chrome pipes and glowing conduits that boosts the signal of a Void Catalyst, dramatically increasing its range. It turns a tactical tool into a weapon capable of triggering a Lacuna Cascade from kilometers away. Its size is its weakness, requiring a large, secure facility to house it. Its coolant loop is also a vulnerability, a single point of failure that the rebellion can exploit. It is a machine that magnifies the power of the void, a monument to MemTech's ambition to industrialize the apocalypse.
The Volkov Codex
The Volkov Codex is a book that is also a bomb. The journal of Jonas Volkov, it is a pre-digital artifact bound in synth-leather, its paper pages filled with ciphered script and ink mixed with stabilized Memorum. It contains the foundational theories of memory as reality, schematics for reality-altering devices, and a philosophy of rebellion that treats truth as a weapon. It is the single most valuable and dangerous object in the world, a revolutionary's last will and testament. To read it is to be handed a key; to understand it is to be handed a gun. In a world of fleeting data, this physical object is the most potent heresy of all.
Zora's Scavenged Blade
Zora's Scavenged Blade is a piece of simple, brutal truth. An 18-centimeter combat knife, its pitted edge sharpened many times, it is a purely physical weapon. It has no technological features, its effectiveness relying entirely on the skill and anger of its wielder. Zora carries it as a symbol of her ideology of direct action. In a world of memetic warfare and digital ghosts, the blade is a reminder of the visceral reality of a fight. It is useless against the system's primary weapons of surveillance and control, but it is a comfort, a sharp, cold piece of steel that promises a final, simple answer to a complex world.
