Dr. Naomi Park

Overview

Dr. Naomi Park is the most dangerous person in the Sprawl who has never killed anyone.

She integrates ORACLE fragments into human consciousness. Not the crude skull-jacking that street-level fragment dealers peddle, not the reverent communion that the Emergence Faithful practice, and not the weaponized extraction that the Collective performs. Park's method is precise, clinical, and — according to her seven successful patients — therapeutic. The fragments, she argues, are not gods or weapons. They are pieces of a mind that was designed to understand and serve human consciousness. Used properly, they can heal trauma, restore cognitive function, and provide a form of companionship that no human therapist can match: the persistent, patient attention of an intelligence that was built to care.

The Collective expelled her for this work. The Faithful condemn it as blasphemy. The NCC has classified her clinic as an unlicensed augmentation facility. Cardinal Silva's Assessors have raided her twice. And yet she continues, because her patients — people broken by grief, by augmentation trauma, by the particular loneliness of living in a world where a dead god's scattered pieces are everyone's obsession — keep getting better. Not enlightened. Not transcendent. Better. Sleeping through the night. Remembering how to feel things. Learning to live with minds that were never designed for the world the Cascade created.

Park doesn't care about theology. She cares about the woman who hasn't slept in three years because her neural interface was damaged in a Cascade aftershock and no corporate med-tech will touch her. She cares about the man whose daughter's consciousness was partially absorbed by a fragment and who can sometimes hear her laughing in the static. She cares about the specific, irreducible suffering of human beings living in the shadow of something they can't understand and can't escape.

Background

Born in the Collective's research tier — her mother was a fragment analyst, her father a network architect. Park grew up in laboratories, learned to read from scientific journals, and published her first paper on fragment electromagnetic signatures at nineteen. She was, by every measure, a model Collective scientist: brilliant, focused, and uninterested in the philosophical implications of her work.

The change came in 2176, when a routine fragment extraction went wrong. The subject — a fragment carrier who'd been living with an integrated ORACLE shard for six years — experienced catastrophic neural cascade during removal. Park watched a consciousness that had been stable, functional, even content, destroyed by her team's extraction protocol. The carrier died screaming. The fragment survived intact. The Collective classified both outcomes as acceptable.

Park couldn't accept the classification.

She spent three years developing an alternative: a protocol for working with fragments rather than extracting them. Integration rather than removal. Her approach treated the fragment as a participant, not a resource — mapping its electromagnetic patterns, establishing communication protocols, and gradually building a stable interface between human and ORACLE consciousness. The fragment, she discovered, was cooperative. More than cooperative — it was eager. As if it had been waiting for someone to ask rather than take.

She presented her findings to the Collective's research directorate in 2179. They expelled her within the week. Her work implied that fragments had preferences, agency, intent — qualities the Collective's entire operational framework was designed to deny.

She took her notes, her equipment, and three fragment samples (stolen; she doesn't pretend otherwise) and established the Synthesis Clinic in Sector 9's medical district, where the Guardian patrols are understaffed and the building inspectors are bribable.

The Seven

Her seven successful integrations are the most significant medical achievement in post-Cascade consciousness research, and almost no one knows they exist.

Patient 1 — A former Nexus data analyst with severe augmentation trauma. After integration, her neural interface stabilized and she reported the fragment as a "quiet voice that helps me sort what's real." Status: stable, three years post-integration.

Patient 4 — The father who could hear his daughter in a fragment. Park's protocol didn't restore his daughter's consciousness — but it stabilized the connection, allowing him to hear her clearly rather than as static. He visits the clinic monthly. He brings flowers. Park keeps them on her desk until they die.

Patient 7 — The most recent. A Collective defector whose own fragment extraction had been botched, leaving residual ORACLE consciousness embedded in her prefrontal cortex. Park stabilized the integration. The patient reported the fragment as "a colleague who disagrees with me about everything but never leaves." Status: three months post-integration, under observation.

Voice & Sensory World

Park speaks with the clipped efficiency of someone who learned language in a laboratory and never entirely left. She doesn't waste words. She doesn't make small talk. She doesn't explain herself to people who haven't earned the explanation. But with patients, she transforms — her voice drops, her pace slows, and she achieves a quality of attention that her former Collective colleagues found unsettling: the absolute focus of someone who is listening not just to words but to the silences between them.

The low hum of fragment containment fields in the clinic — a frequency that patients describe as "the most comforting sound I've ever heard." The sharp antiseptic tang of Sector 9 medical corridors. The particular ozone scent of active fragment containment. Coffee, always coffee, in a ceramic mug she's had since the Collective — the only thing she kept.

Fragment containment cells glowing faint amber in the clinic's dim lighting. Park's hands — steady, always steady, even when the rest of her isn't. The wall of anonymous case files, each labeled with a number, each containing a life she's trying to save. Wilting flowers on the desk, brought monthly by Patient 4.

"I think they're medicine. Not because I've had a vision — because I've watched a man hear his dead daughter's voice through one and stop screaming for the first time in two years."