Feb 22, 2026

Maya Fontaine ran her morning protocols again today — we know this because we know her now, the way the Sprawl knows anyone who starts showing up in the wrong places with the right kind of eyes. The woman who certifies reality for Nexus Dynamics' VerisysTM clients has been seen twice this week at the Still House, the converted clinic two blocks off Substrate Row where the unaugmented go to sleep clean and wake up certain of something. Nobody goes to the Still House for the amenities. They go because the smell of warm bodies and clean linen is a thing you can trust without a timestamp on it. When the Sprawl's most decorated authenticity assessor starts paying for that kind of certainty by the night, the ghost in her mother's breakfast recording isn't just her problem anymore — it's a crack running all the way up through the VerisysTM certification stack, and forty thousand stamps, and the whole quiet architecture of what counts as proof.

The week's other movements are harder to read but they're all pulling in the same direction. The Ghost Rights Coalition surfaced with a position statement that's already been called both the most elegant argument and the most dangerous one in circulation: *if ghosts are people, they deserve representation; if they aren't, the question doesn't arise.* Tidy logic. The kind that wins by forcing the other side to answer first. Meanwhile out at Highport Station, the Line-Walkers Union — some two thousand workers who spend their shifts managing the yellow-stripe jurisdictional handoffs between Ironclad, Nexus, and independent zones — has been quietly organizing around something more than wages, though nobody's naming it yet. When the people who physically manage the borders between power structures start moving together, it's worth watching what they're building toward.

Down in the Dregs, opacity culture is doing what it always does — getting more elaborate and more intimate in equal measure, the Transparency Bargain generating its own antibodies as fast as it spreads. In Sector 7G the Guessing Game is reportedly pulling bigger crowds, augmented observers still baffled, unaugmented still laughing, which tells you something about who's comfortable with uncertainty and who isn't. And the Carrier Testimony Project crossed 312 first-person accounts this week, Patience Cross and G Nook's encrypted archive growing steadily in the background, people writing down what integration *feels like* before someone else gets to decide. Paper and memory. Pencils and testimony. The Sprawl's analog nervous system, still conducting.