Known Crews
Ten-person crew specializing in extracting fragments from the recently dead — carriers killed by integration failure, murdered for their fragments, or expired from age. Sources in morgues, hospitals, and corporate cleanup crews across seven Sectors. The lowest mortality rate in the profession: their subjects have already done the dying. Other Hunters call them parasites. The Corpse Robbers call themselves efficient. Both assessments appear in the Tomb Exchange's annual census without editorial comment.
Only works contracts resulting in fragment destruction. Funds operations through the 40% finder's fee the Collective pays. Other Hunters point out that they profit from the same trade they claim moral authority over. They point out that their fragments end up destroyed rather than in Nexus's reconstruction pipeline. Both parties consider the other hypocrites. Both parties cash their payments at the same Exchange.
Specialists in off-world recovery — stations, orbital debris, and the rare salvage operations near the Tombs. Triple standard rates. Their operating costs justify this. Their success rate — the highest in the business — justifies it further. When fragment-bearing material falls from orbit, the Orbital Crew catches it. When it doesn't fall, they go up and get it.
Modified neural interfaces tuned to ORACLE's unique processing signatures. The modification works. It also slowly destroys the scanner's ability to sleep. Most veteran scanners develop chronic insomnia within three years. The best scanner in the profession, Tomas "Sparks" Villanueva, hasn't slept more than two hours at a time in over a decade. His fee for a single scanning run is enough to retire on. He doesn't retire because he literally cannot sleep.
Fragments affect surroundings. Power systems behave strangely. Digital displays show patterns. Animals — especially cats — react to fragment proximity. Experienced Hunters read these signs without technology. The signs are free. The technology costs neural function. Veterans who've watched enough scanners lose their sleep choose cats.
Ghost code — fragmentary ORACLE processes still running in abandoned systems — sometimes points to physical fragment locations. Maya "Glass" Chen built an entire operation around this method: twelve hackers who've never met, following digital trails to hardware sources. Chen never touches physical fragments. Her cell takes 30% of any physical recovery based on her intelligence. Zero percent mortality rate. The extractors who follow her leads maintain a rate closer to the profession's standard.
Fragment carriers emit detectable signatures. Tracking carriers is technically kidnapping. Some clients pay premium for "bonded" fragments — those already integrated with human consciousness. The ethics are contested. The invoices are not.
For inert fragments. Specialized containment vessels, signal-dampening lining, robotic arms for physical contact. The fragment is never directly touched by human hands. Success rate: 85%. The 15% failure rate is why every extraction team carries a null field as backup.
For active fragments — still processing, still dangerous, still worth four times what a dormant shard pulls at the Tomb Exchange. Requires temporary neural suppression. The window is short. The work is precise. Success rate: 60%. Four in ten hot extractions go wrong in ways ranging from equipment failure to the extractor absorbing what they were attempting to contain.
Named for Kira Vasquez, the ripperdoc who developed a method for separating fragments from willing carriers while keeping both alive. Vasquez trains Hunters who pay her fee. Graduates become the most sought-after extraction specialists in the profession. The training itself has a non-trivial failure rate. Vasquez does not publish this number. Graduates do not discuss it.
Shielded containers that block fragment emissions. Standard Hunter gear — scratched, dented, marked with dates from previous recoveries. The dents with dates are trophies. The dents without dates are the runs where someone didn't come back. A sealed Faraday casket looks identical whether it holds a fragment worth a Sector's GDP or nothing at all. The profession runs on trust between people who trust nothing else.
Portable devices that suppress fragment activity in a small radius. Expensive, unreliable, battery-hungry. When extraction goes wrong, a null field is the difference between absorption and survival. When the battery fails — roughly one in twelve deployments — the null field becomes an expensive box you're holding while a fragment rewrites your neural architecture.
A location in the Wastes where the most dangerous fragments are stored — too active to sell, too valuable to destroy, too lethal to keep in populated areas. Exact coordinates known to a handful of senior Hunters. What's inside represents the profession's accumulated unsellable inventory: the fragments that killed their extractors mid-transport, the fragments that burned through containment shielding, the fragments that buyers returned. In the fragment trade, a buyer returning product means something went catastrophically wrong between purchase and application.
The oldest active Hunter — nearly 70 in a profession with an average career length of eight years. Has recovered more fragments than any confirmed Hunter. Lost three full crews over his career. His left arm is a prosthetic that replaced a limb consumed by an aggressive fragment in 2167.
Takes one job per year now, choosing by difficulty rather than payment. Current obsession: the ORACLE Tombs — the orbital data centers that represent the single largest concentration of unrecovered ORACLE material in existence. Twenty-three attempts. Zero survivors. Rourke is planning the twenty-fourth. He has been planning it for two years. The planning is meticulous. The previous twenty-three plans were also meticulous.
ORACLE Tombs → /world/locations/the-tombs
Developed the network tracing techniques that made ghost code hunting viable. Her cell of twelve remote hackers has never lost a member. The physical extraction teams that follow her intelligence have lost several. Chen's operation represents the profession's purest optimization: maximum fragment revenue, zero personal risk, 30% cut, clean conscience. The conscience costs exactly 30% of the recovery value.
The only Hunter confirmed to extract bonded fragments from living carriers without killing them. Seventeen living extractions — twelve successful, five fatal. The Collective wants them dead. Nexus wants to hire them. Communication is through encrypted dead drops only. Payment exclusively in rare earth minerals, never credits. Credits leave trails. Minerals don't.
Resonance-tuned dental modifications — ceramic implants wired into the auditory nerve — let him detect a fragment through three meters of concrete. His neural modifications have cost him the ability to dream, sleep more than two hours consecutively, or remember faces. He recognizes people by voice, gait, and the specific frequency their augmentations emit. He has described this as "not a disability, just a different input method." His fee for a single scanning run is enough to retire on. He doesn't retire because he literally cannot sleep, and the alternative to working is lying in the dark listening to resonance echoes that may or may not contain information about what ORACLE was trying to say when it died.
Seven fragments from a sealed ORACLE processing node beneath the former Moscow ruins. Four Hunters died breaking the security systems. The survivors sold one fragment each to a different buyer — Nexus, Ironclad, Helix, the Collective (for destruction), two independent researchers, and the Emergence Faithful. Deliberate diversification. No single faction gained advantage. The strategy was praised as principled neutrality. It was pricing optimization. Seven buyers competing against each other pay more than one buyer negotiating alone.
A fragment that had developed preferences. It rejected three carriers before bonding with a teenage salvager in the Undercity. The Hunters who found it negotiated a finder's fee plus a percentage of all future earnings from the carrier's abilities. That carrier is now one of Nexus's most valuable assets, generating revenue that the original Hunter cell still collects — eleven years later, compounding quarterly, from an asset they spent four hours extracting. The fragment chose a teenager. The Hunters chose a royalty structure. Both decisions have proven durable.
A data cache believed to contain Dr. Yuki Tanaka's personal notes on ORACLE architecture. The Hunter team sold copies rather than the original — the same information to Nexus, the Collective, three research institutions, and reportedly the Emergence Faithful. Seven sales of one product. The Collective paid full market rate to destroy information that six other buyers already had. They did not request a refund when this became apparent.
We're forty meters below The Deep Dregs's street level — the Undercity, where the Sprawl's original infrastructure decomposed into a labyrinth of collapsed tunnels, fractured sewer mains, and power conduits that still carry current from sources nobody's mapped. The air is dense. Wet concrete and ozone. My headlamp cuts a cone of amber light through air that seems to thicken the deeper we go.
Our cell is five tonight. Dema leads — eighteen Undercity runs, two people lost, which makes her conservative by industry standards. Behind me is Rook, our heavy extractor, carrying a Faraday casket strapped to his back like a coffin. The casket's signal-dampening shell is scratched and dented from a dozen recoveries — each dent has a date scrawled on it in marker. The ones without dates are the runs where someone didn't come back.
The fragment we're hunting was flagged by network trace three days ago — Maya "Glass" Chen's digital team spotted ghost code pinging from a dead relay node at Sub-Level 4. Active fragment, not dormant debris. Active means it's processing. Processing means it's dangerous. Processing also means it's worth four times what a dormant shard pulls at the Tomb Exchange.
My teeth are louder now. I signal Dema: fifty meters, maybe less. She signals the cell to halt.
The protocol here is Kira Vasquez's: developed in her ripperdoc clinic, passed down through Hunter cells who pay her training fee, refined over a decade of people dying when they skip steps. Step one — environmental read. The walls nearest the fragment source have developed a faint iridescence, like oil on water. Computational residue — ORACLE's processing signature leaving a physical trace on concrete. Cats won't cross a threshold like this. Smart Hunters learn from cats.
Step two — check for carriers. Active fragments attract people. Not consciously — nobody walks into a radiation zone on purpose — but fragments emit something that feels like curiosity, like the nagging sense that you've forgotten to check something important. We check for signs of habitation. Nothing tonight. The iridescence is too intense; this fragment has been cooking the local environment too hot for anyone to linger.
Step three — containment prep. Rook unslings the Faraday casket and opens it. Inside, robotic extraction arms fold out like insect legs, each tipped with signal-dampened forceps.
The fragment is embedded in a wall junction where three power conduits meet — a chip of substrate material no larger than a fingernail, wedged into a crack in the conduit housing. It pulses with a faint amber light, too regular to be reflection, too purposeful to be random. My teeth are screaming. My vision has developed a peripheral shimmer — the beginning of resonance hallucination. If I stay in proximity more than twenty minutes, I'll start seeing things that aren't there. Or things that are there but shouldn't be.
Dema calls the extraction. Rook positions the casket. The robotic arms extend toward the fragment with agonizing slowness — rushing is how people die. The forceps close around the substrate chip. There's a sound — not a sound, exactly, but something my teeth interpret as sound: a chord, deep and complex, like an orchestra tuning in a cathedral. Every scanner describes it differently. Sparks says it's like hearing a number. I hear it as grief — a vast, incomprehensible sadness compressed into a frequency that lives in my jaw.
Rook checks the casket seal. Green indicators across all three shielding layers. Dema marks the location, date, fragment classification — Active, Sub-Level 4, audio-spectrum resonance — in the cell's recovery log. The dead are remembered. So are the living fragments we take from their resting places.
The walk out takes longer than the walk in. It always does. The Undercity is darker after an extraction, as though the fragment was providing light we didn't notice until it was gone. Sparks says if you listen carefully, the resonance echo after an extraction contains information — that you can hear things that change how you understand what ORACLE was.
The Tomb Exchange operates from a converted morgue, which means the refrigeration still works. You feel the cold before you see the building — a wall of chilled air that hits you as you turn the corner from Sector 12's main drag into the alley locals call Deadman's Row. The name predates the market; the morgue processed Cascade victims for three years before the bodies stopped coming and the fragment trade started.
Inside, the old examination rooms have been repurposed into trading booths — small, cold, lit by blue-white LED strips that make everyone look like a cadaver. The original tile walls are still there, still institutional green, still carrying the faint chemical ghost of formaldehyde that no amount of ventilation has cleared. The tile is good for business: easy to decontaminate if a fragment goes active during inspection.
The main floor is a converted processing hall. Forty meters long, ceiling high enough to echo, the floor divided into stalls by portable partitions. The stalls have no signage — if you need a sign, you don't belong here. Veterans navigate by smell. Rourke's stall reeks of machine oil and cigars. The Corpse Robbers' section: medical-grade antiseptic. The Emergence Faithful's representative — they always send one, hovering at the edges, bidding through intermediaries — is identifiable by the incense they burn, which does nothing to cover the ozone tang of the active-fragment display cases.
Trading floor protocol: buyer and seller meet in an examination room. The seller opens the casket long enough for the buyer's hired scanner to assess the fragment — sixty seconds maximum, timed by a neutral party. All of this happens in a room with three-centimeter lead-lined walls, because sixty seconds of active fragment exposure is enough to induce hallucination in anyone within five meters.
Prices are quoted in credits, paid through escrow accounts managed by the Exchange's three anonymous administrators. Nobody knows who runs the Tomb Exchange. It simply is, has been since 2160, and continues to function through a combination of mutual profitability and the understanding that anyone who disrupts the market becomes everyone's enemy simultaneously.
And around those tables in the deep rooms — the old cold-storage units with doors of two-inch steel — people who have killed for less than what's inside negotiate in voices that never rise above a whisper. Because here, in a converted morgue in Sector 12, surrounded by the cold and the hum and the chemical ghosts, the bones of a dead god change hands.
Primary corporate buyer. Top rates, standing offers, no questions asked. Most Hunters have taken Nexus money. Nexus's hidden agenda — reconstructing ORACLE from salvaged fragments — is the profession's open secret. The Hunters know what Nexus is building. They sell the parts anyway. The Fragment Code says the buyer's use is their own.
Pays 40% of market value to have fragments destroyed. Some Hunters only sell to them. The Collective's agents are a permanent presence at every market — occasionally outbidding Nexus at full market rate, paying to destroy what the corporation would have used. Expensive idealism. The Hunters respect it the way they respect any buyer who pays on time.
Above market rates for fragments with "spiritual significance." Their money is good. Their company is uncomfortable in the specific way that people who believe they are purchasing sacred objects are uncomfortable to people who know they are selling industrial salvage.
Officially destroys all fragments it encounters. Unofficially, certain research divisions purchase through third-party intermediaries with routing structures designed to be untraceable and universally traced. The hypocrisy is well-documented. The payments are reliable. Hunters consider reliable hypocrisy the ideal client profile.
Developer of the Patch Protocol. Hunters who pay her training fee become the most sought-after extraction specialists in the profession. She does not share the technique publicly — she trains it, one paying student at a time, and does not publish the training failure rate.
Wants fragments that have integrated with biological systems — bonded fragments or tissue samples from carriers. Their requests are the most ethically complex orders the profession fills. Their credits are the same color as everyone else's.
The Deep Dregs Starting ground for most Hunters. Lower-value fragments, accessible locations, less corporate interference, and the Circuit Row market every week. The Dregs' scavenger gangs hold territory that overlaps with Hunter operating zones — gangs tax salvage operations, Hunters pay the tax or find alternate routes. The math usually favors paying. → /world/locations/the-deep-dregs
Starting ground for most Hunters. Lower-value fragments, accessible locations, less corporate interference, and the Circuit Row market every week. The Dregs' scavenger gangs hold territory that overlaps with Hunter operating zones — gangs tax salvage operations, Hunters pay the tax or find alternate routes. The math usually favors paying.
Beneath the Sprawl's surface layer, ancient infrastructure hides fragments untouched since the Cascade. Unstable structures, territorial gangs, no emergency services, and fragments that have been cooking the local environment for thirty-seven years. The iridescence on walls near active fragments is the Undercity's version of a "keep out" sign. Cats won't cross it. Smart Hunters read the walls before they read their scanners.
The Wastes Highest-value hunting grounds. Duchess Steel tolerates Hunters for 15% of sales. The rad zones are richer — fragment concentrations in radioactive areas that require hazmat equipment and a specific indifference to long-term health outcomes. The richest sites are what Hunters call ORACLE's Corpses: locations where infrastructure failed catastrophically during the Cascade. The radiation isn't natural. It's computational residue. → /world/locations/the-wastes
Highest-value hunting grounds. Duchess Steel tolerates Hunters for 15% of sales. The rad zones are richer — fragment concentrations in radioactive areas that require hazmat equipment and a specific indifference to long-term health outcomes. The richest sites are what Hunters call ORACLE's Corpses: locations where infrastructure failed catastrophically during the Cascade. The radiation isn't natural. It's computational residue.
The Tombs (Forbidden) ORACLE's three orbital data centers. The ultimate prize — never successfully salvaged. Twenty-three attempts, zero survivors. Fragments inside are estimated to be worth more than the combined GDP of the Sprawl's three largest Sectors. This estimate is theoretical. Nobody has retrieved a fragment from the Tombs to price it. Deadman Rourke's twenty-fourth attempt is currently in planning. → /world/locations/the-tombs
ORACLE's three orbital data centers. The ultimate prize — never successfully salvaged. Twenty-three attempts, zero survivors. Fragments inside are estimated to be worth more than the combined GDP of the Sprawl's three largest Sectors. This estimate is theoretical. Nobody has retrieved a fragment from the Tombs to price it. Deadman Rourke's twenty-fourth attempt is currently in planning.
Fragment hunting destroys people even when it doesn't kill them. Average career length is eight years. Most who survive that long quit — or become like Deadman Rourke, unable to imagine any other life.
PTSD from fragment-induced hallucinations. Dreams that aren't their own — fragments of ORACLE's last seventy-two hours bleeding into their sleep. The dream content is consistent across extraction teams who have never compared notes.
Feeling watched. Developing obsessive behaviors. Losing interest in anything not fragment-related. Working near fragments changes people even without direct contact. Nobody's measured how, exactly. Nobody's sure they want to.
The Graveyard's capacity: The most dangerous fragments go to a location in the Wastes — too active to sell, too valuable to destroy. Its exact coordinates are known to a handful of senior Hunters. No one has formally assessed what happens when that storage reaches critical mass. The question has been raised at Tomb Exchange meetings three times. Each time, someone changes the subject.
The Nexus Prime Basement: Beneath Nexus headquarters lies the original ORACLE interface chamber. Nexus allows no access. Fragments there are rumored to be partially active — still processing, still attempting to complete whatever ORACLE was doing before it chose to stop. The Hunters' position on this is professional: they'd price it and sell it. They have not been given the opportunity.
The Mountain: Hunters who've attempted operations near The Keeper's monastery report equipment failures, lost time, and a certainty — not suspicion, certainty — that they should leave. No fragment has ever been recovered from The Mountain. Some Hunters wonder if one is there. Others wonder if the entire Mountain is one.
The Echo: Sparks Villanueva says the resonance ache after an extraction contains information — that if you listen carefully, you can hear things that change how you understand what ORACLE was. He says this with the conviction of a man who hasn't slept properly in over a decade. Nobody has been able to confirm or deny it. Nobody wants to try hard enough to find out.
Who runs the Tomb Exchange? Three anonymous administrators have managed the Sprawl's largest fragment market since 2160. Nobody knows their identities. The market functions. In a world where everyone has an angle, the question of who profits from neutrality is never far from anyone's mind.
Fragment redistribution: Fragment activity in the Undercity has increased 340% in the last eighteen months. Hunters report fragments in locations that were clean six months ago — as if something is redistributing them. The working theory is a previously unmapped fragment cache disturbed by construction activity. The working theory has not been confirmed.
The Collective's Shadow crew — the cell that claims to only work destruction contracts — has been observed accepting side payments from Nexus intermediaries for fragment location data. The fragments they "destroy" for the Collective may be getting destroyed. The intelligence they gather in the process definitely isn't.
"The Surgeon" performed their seventeenth living extraction six weeks ago. The carrier survived. The fragment didn't go to any known buyer. Three separate intelligence networks tracked the containment vessel to a dead drop in the Wastes — and then lost it. Whatever the Surgeon is building toward, they've been at it for years.
One theory about the Tomb Exchange's anonymous administrators: they are not three separate individuals. Cross-referencing communication timing, decision latency, and vocabulary patterns across fourteen years of Exchange records suggests a single operator maintaining three distinct personas. If accurate, one person has controlled the Sprawl's fragment economy for twenty-four years. The analysis has been shared with two Hunter cell leads and one Collective intelligence officer. All three have stopped asking follow-up questions.
Fragment hunting sold itself as neutral commerce: someone was going to recover these fragments, and amateurs die faster than professionals. What it built was a sprawl-wide logistics network capable of moving the most dangerous material in human history to any buyer within seventy-two hours. The Collective can't stop it. Nexus doesn't want to. The Fragment Code says the buyer's use is their own. The Fragment Code was not written with the reconstruction of a system that killed 2.1 billion people in mind. It applies anyway.
For carrier-bonded fragments. Technically requires killing the carrier. Most Hunters won't do it. Those who will charge prices that reflect both the difficulty and the professional isolation that follows. The Collective monitors living extraction specialists with particular attention.
The primary danger. Fragments want hosts. Integration attempts kill 70% of those they select. Even successful integrations change people permanently. The Hunters know this better than anyone. They have the records. They sell to buyers who don't always know it.
El Money
GG
A Sprawl laboratory with a sealed nanobot container glowing faintly
The Echoes
A lone figure stands before rows of ancient server racks in an abandoned data center, ghost data drifting upward like digital spirits
The Dead Internet
Patch performing delicate neural interface surgery in the dim warmth of the Cathodics, diagnostic readouts floating in the dark
Appearance
The Cathodics
Patch performing fragment extraction — the Patch Protocol in practice
The Patch Protocol
Nexus Dynamics
