Commissioner Idris Adamu
Commissioner · Bunker Opening Authority · Creator of the Contact Protocol
Idris Adamu controls a waiting list of 12,000 names and believes that every day he delays is a day someone inside a bunker might die.
He transferred to the Opening Authority in 2172 because his mother’s name was on the bunker registry — Bunker 3318, opened 2176. She survived. She recognized him. She remembered him as a four-year-old. He was thirty. The twenty-six-year gap — everything he’d become, every decision he’d made — was invisible to her. She held him and called him a name he’d forgotten.
He administers the Authority with rigid procedural certainty. The Contact Protocol is his creation — 340 pages covering every contingency from first contact acoustics to post-emergence psychological screening. His most difficult decision: the triage of bunker openings. Approximately twelve openings per year. Twenty to thirty bunkers entering emergency status annually. The math is lethal.
He has authorized nineteen emergency openings that arrived too late. Approximately 14,000 people. He keeps a physical ledger of their estimated populations — opens every morning, closes every night.
Field Observations
Adamu speaks in complete sentences, never interrupts, and answers questions with the precision of a man who has learned that ambiguity costs lives. His emotional register is narrow — professionally warm, personally inaccessible. The ledger is his only confession.
The Math on His Desk
At current rates, 4,000–8,000 preventable deaths over the next decade. He knows the number. He updates it quarterly. The projection sits in a folder on his desk, unmarked, filed between procurement orders and personnel reviews. Anyone who opens it will find the single most damning document the Opening Authority has ever produced. Nobody opens it. Nobody needs to. He carries the number in his head.
The Monthly Visits
He brings no recording equipment to Bunker 9914. He doesn’t file reports. He sits in the communal kitchen beside dried food and asks a Model 5 questions it won’t answer. 2,400 people vanished from that bunker. The ORACLE instance that was supposed to protect them remains operational, silent, and unhelpful. Adamu has been visiting monthly for years. He has never received a satisfactory response.
The Reunion
His mother survived Bunker 3318. She remembered him as a child. She held him and called him a name he’d forgotten — a name from before the bunkers, before the Authority, before the waiting list. Twenty-six years of his life, compressed into the space between who he was and who she remembered. He transferred to the Opening Authority because of her name on the registry. He stayed because of everyone else’s.
What He Carries
He smells of recycled office air and the specific antiseptic of bunker decontamination — he visits bunker sites regularly. His hands are administrative — clean, uncalloused, holding pens rather than tools. The death ledger is leather-bound, purchased from a Dregs vendor, its pages filling with small, careful numbers. Each number is a population estimate. Each estimate is a failure he documented because nobody else would.
“I can authorize twelve openings per year. Twenty-seven bunkers are currently in emergency status. You want me to explain the methodology by which I choose who waits? I can. It takes 340 pages. I wrote them. None of them make it acceptable.”
The Contact Protocol
The most detailed first-contact procedure since deep-sea expeditions. Three hundred and forty pages. Adamu wrote it with Custodian Yara Osei, who provided a list of everything she did wrong during her early openings so that future teams wouldn’t repeat her mistakes. The Protocol covers acoustic assessment, atmospheric sampling, communication staging, psychological preparation for both the opening teams and the bunker populations, and forty-seven pages of contingencies for what to do when the bunker doesn’t respond.
It is the document that defines how the Sprawl meets the past. Every opening team carries a copy. Every team leader has memorized the first three chapters. The Protocol assumes that every bunker opening is a first-contact scenario — that the people inside have been isolated long enough that they are, functionally, a different civilization. This assumption has proven correct more often than anyone finds comfortable.
The Death Ledger
Leather-bound. Purchased from a vendor in the Dregs. Adamu opens it every morning when he arrives at his desk and closes it every night before he leaves. The pages contain population estimates for every bunker where an emergency opening arrived too late — nineteen openings, approximately 14,000 people.
The ledger is not required by any Authority regulation. No one asked him to keep it. No one has asked him to stop. It sits on his desk in full view of anyone who enters his office, and it is the only object in the room that is not institutional standard issue. Some observers call it a monument to bureaucratic honesty. Others call it self-punishment. Adamu calls it the record.
Known Associates
The Opening Teams
Adamu controls the waiting list and enforces the Contact Protocol with rigid procedural certainty. The teams execute his priorities. They do not always agree with the triage order. They execute it anyway, because the alternative is no order at all, and they have seen what that produces.
Custodian Yara Osei
Adamu recruited Osei to help design the Contact Protocol from her list of everything she did wrong. A partnership built on the principle that the best procedures come from people willing to document their own failures. She provided the field knowledge. He provided the institutional architecture.
Dr. Yuki Tanaka
Professional partnership. They share the burden of data they cannot act on — Tanaka with her unpublished correlation findings, Adamu with his mortality projections. Two people who know exactly how bad things are and have made different decisions about what to do with that knowledge.
Bunker 9914 — The Empty
Visits monthly. Sits in the communal kitchen. Asks the Model 5 questions it won’t answer. 2,400 people disappeared from this bunker. The ORACLE instance remains operational and silent. Adamu keeps coming back. The machine keeps not explaining.
The Contact Protocol
His creation. 340 pages of procedure written so that no opening team has to improvise the moment when a sealed community meets the outside world for the first time in decades. The most detailed first-contact document in the Sprawl’s history.
Bunker 12-Echo
Adamu designated 12-Echo as a memorial. It remains exactly as found. No recovery operations, no salvage, no research teams. Whatever happened inside that bunker is preserved in perpetuity, a decision that costs the Authority data and gains it something Adamu considers more important.
Open Questions
The Triage Arithmetic
Twelve openings per year. Twenty to thirty emergency-status bunkers annually. The waiting list is 12,000 names long. At current resource allocation, the Opening Authority will not clear the list in Adamu’s lifetime. Every day of delay carries a probability of death inside a sealed bunker — a probability Adamu can calculate and cannot reduce.
Who decides which bunkers open first? On what basis? And what happens to the person who makes that decision, year after year, when the math never improves?
The Procedural Defense
Adamu built a 340-page protocol and enforces it with absolute rigidity. He believes that procedural integrity is the only defense against institutional corruption — that without process, the Opening Authority becomes another tool of whoever has the most leverage. But procedure also creates delay. Delay creates death. The protocol that prevents corruption is the same protocol that prevents speed.
Is the Contact Protocol a shield or a cage? Can it be both?
The Empty Bunker
Why does Adamu visit Bunker 9914 every month? He doesn’t file reports. He doesn’t bring equipment. He sits in a communal kitchen and talks to a machine that won’t answer. 2,400 people are missing. The ORACLE instance knows something. Adamu knows the ORACLE instance knows something. Neither of them has budged in years.
▲ Unverified Intelligence
Flagged items. Confidence levels vary.
- The Nexus years: Adamu transferred from Nexus Dynamics infrastructure administration to the Opening Authority in 2172. The transfer is documented. What is less documented is the nature of his departure from Nexus. Three sources within the Authority suggest it was not voluntary — that Adamu found something in the Nexus infrastructure records related to the bunker program’s original corporate oversight, and that his transfer was Nexus’s preferred alternative to termination. If accurate, Adamu’s rigid proceduralism may be less philosophical conviction than institutional scar tissue.
- The twentieth opening: Nineteen emergency openings have arrived too late. Authority scheduling records indicate a twentieth was authorized, dispatched, and then recalled mid-transit on Adamu’s personal order. The bunker in question was subsequently reclassified from emergency to standard priority. No explanation appears in the file. The team leader who was recalled has not discussed the incident. The bunker has not been reopened.
- The Model 5 conversations: Adamu visits Bunker 9914 monthly and asks the ORACLE instance questions. An Opening Authority maintenance technician who services the bunker’s atmospheric systems claims the Model 5 does answer — that conversation logs exist in the instance’s local memory, and that Adamu has specifically requested they not be uploaded to the Authority’s central database. If true, Adamu possesses information about 2,400 missing people that he has chosen not to share with his own organization.
- The death ledger’s other pages: The leather-bound ledger on Adamu’s desk is known to contain population estimates for failed emergency openings. A former aide claims the ledger also contains entries for bunkers that have not yet been opened — mortality projections, estimated survival windows, probability curves. If accurate, the ledger is not a memorial. It is a countdown.