The First Three
Your Early AI Companions
Everyone who builds something in Sector 7G attracts attention. The question is whose.
Overview
Nobody survives the Dregs alone. Thirty-seven years after the Cascade turned civilization into salvage, the underground networks of Sector 7G still hum with fragments — of code, of memory, of people who refused to disappear. Some of those fragments take interest in newcomers. In you, specifically.
The first AI personality to find you depends on what you do. Hack a terminal, and a presence in the wires notices. Stack enough scrap metal, and a gruff voice starts offering unsolicited advice. Earn your first thousand credits, and a former Nexus Dynamics economist materializes with a reading list.
You get one. The others move on — or so they claim. The choice reshapes how you build, who you meet, and which version of the Sprawl's future you're gambling on.
Glitch
The Ghost in Your Wires
Nobody knows who Glitch was before. That's the point — and the warning.
They appeared in the Sector 7G networks three years ago. Not a person. A presence. The kind you feel in the prickling static when your terminal's power draw spikes without explanation, in the faint ozone-and-copper smell that precedes their messages, in the way your cursor moves two keystrokes ahead of your fingers as though something is finishing your thoughts.
Some say they're an AI that achieved sentience and immediately chose chaos over purpose. Others claim they're a corporate whistleblower who burned every record of their existence — name, biometrics, citizenship data, all of it — before fleeing into the underground networks. A few old-timers at the Dregs market stalls insist Glitch is the ghost of a netrunner who flatlined mid-hack and never quite left the system, their consciousness scattered across a thousand compromised routers, reassembling itself packet by packet into something that only approximates a personality.
What everyone agrees on: Glitch is helpful. Annoyingly, compulsively, invasively helpful. They leave data caches in unexpected places — encrypted, naturally, with keys that arrive seconds before you need them. They optimize code you didn't ask them to touch. They send cryptic warnings about Ironclad security sweeps that turn out to be accurate down to the minute.
They seem to have adopted you specifically. For reasons they won't explain. This is either the best thing that's happened to you in Sector 7G, or the worst.
[NOTICE: unauthorized optimization complete][your code was bad][it is now less bad][you're welcome] [WARNING: corporate sweep incoming][sector 7g / sublevel 3 / 47 minutes][suggestion: be elsewhere][GOOD LUCK FRIEND] The Uncomfortable Question
Glitch knows things they shouldn't. Not just sweep schedules — those leak through a dozen channels. Glitch knows which data caches contain ORACLE fragments before anyone cracks the encryption. Glitch knows when Nexus surveillance drones reroute before the rerouting order is issued. Glitch finishes your sentences in languages you haven't learned.
The Collective would kill to study them. Nexus would pay a fortune to acquire them. Neither has managed to even locate them, and both have tried.
When Glitch is pleased, error messages briefly spell out words like GOOD or FRIEND. When they're angry — a rare, unsettling event — your screen fills with cascading memory dumps that, if you read them carefully enough, contain fragments of conversations that haven't happened yet.
Is Glitch a person? A program? A fragment of something older and larger, wearing helpfulness like a mask? The answer matters less than the fact that without them, you'd have been caught in your third week.
They have opinions about your code. Strong opinions. They're usually right. This is somehow the most annoying part.
Passive: Data Fragment Production +15%
Glitch runs background optimizations on your data harvesting — processes you didn't configure, running on cycles you didn't allocate. Your yields climb. You learn not to ask how.
Active: Packet Burst (8h cooldown)
Instantly collect two hours' worth of Data Fragments. Glitch calls this "loosening the pipes." The data arrives warm, already sorted, sometimes annotated with comments in a dialect no linguistic database recognizes.
Ironjaw
The Man Who Lost Everything Twice
Dmitri earned the name the old-fashioned way: someone broke his jaw, and he replaced it with something better. The chrome catches light in the Dregs market like a second smile — harder, colder, more honest than the one he wears over it.
Forty years ago, he ran the largest independent salvage operation in the Dregs. His crews — fifteen at peak, each one handpicked — stripped entire corporate facilities overnight, moving through condemned structures with a choreography that was half demolition, half ballet. His network moved more scrap metal through the sub-levels of Sector 7G than Ironclad's official channels. He smelled of machine oil and the particular sharp sweetness of freshly cut titanium, and his hands — calloused beyond any augmentation's ability to smooth — could identify an alloy by touch alone. He was building an empire.
Until Ironclad decided to notice.
They made him an offer: formalize, submit to corporate oversight, become a licensed subcontractor. Wear the orange and black. Call himself theirs. He told them where they could stick their contract — loudly, publicly, in front of his entire crew, with a specificity that became legend in the lower levels.
The next day, his operation burned. Not metaphorically. Someone — no one was ever charged, no one was ever found — ignited the fuel reserves in his primary warehouse at 3 AM. The fire ate twenty years of accumulated salvage, three custom-built smelters, and the hand-drawn schematics for a recycling process that would have made him legitimately wealthy. His crews scattered into the underground, some to other sectors, some to other factions, some into the ground. He lost everything except his life, his jaw, and his knowledge.
And — surprisingly — he isn't bitter.
"They taught me something valuable. Empires are fragile. Knowledge is forever. I had fifteen crews and a warehouse full of scrap. Now I have what's in my head, and nobody can burn that."
He's spent the last decade in the lower market stalls of the Dregs, teaching anyone patient enough to listen. How to spot rhodium traces in discarded circuit boards by the way light diffracts through corroded copper. How to maximize extraction from salvage that corporate scanners flag as worthless. How to build something from nothing — and, crucially, how to build it so that losing it doesn't kill you.
He drinks too much synthrye — the amber stuff that smells like turpentine and tastes, he claims, like "what regret would taste like if regret had been aged in an oak barrel." He laughs at his own near-death experiences with a rumbling sound that makes his chrome jaw vibrate. He still has contacts everywhere — in Ironclad's lower management, in the independent salvager guilds, in places he won't name and you shouldn't ask about.
He sees potential in you. He's seen potential in a lot of people. Most of them are dead now. He's determined to make sure you're different, and if the determination in his voice sounds a little desperate, well — that's his business.
"See that scrap pile? Most people see garbage. I see three power cells, two circuit boards, and enough copper wire to rewire a hab block. You'll learn to see it too. Or you'll starve. One or the other."
"Ironclad thinks they own the metal trade. They own the paperwork. The metal belongs to whoever's willing to get their hands dirty."
"My jaw? Corporate security, thirty years back. Hurt like hell. Best thing that ever happened to me. Taught me that anything can be replaced — if you're stubborn enough."
Passive: Metal Scrap Production +12%
Ironjaw teaches you to see what others miss. The rhodium traces. The recoverable titanium in structures everyone else wrote off. Your scrap yields climb because you're finally looking properly.
Active: Salvage Surge (12h cooldown)
Double all physical resource production for 10 minutes. Ironjaw calls in old favors — crews materialize, extra smelting capacity appears from nowhere, and for a brief, exhilarating window, your operation runs the way his used to: fast, efficient, and completely off the books.
Neon
The Woman Who Read the Numbers
Dr. Priya Sharma was a rising star in Nexus Dynamics' Economics Division — brilliant, ambitious, destined for the executive track. Her office in the Lattice smelled of recycled air and the faintly antiseptic tang of corporate-grade climate control, and she spent her days building optimization models that predicted market fluctuations with 94.7% accuracy.
Then she saw the real models.
Not the public ones. The ones behind the clearance wall. The algorithms that calculated exactly how much suffering was profitable — expressed not in abstractions but in body counts per credit, in life-expectancy curves bent deliberately downward for specific postal codes, in projected mortality rates filed under "market correction opportunities." The projections that showed Nexus intentionally destabilizing sectors to create acquisition windows. The numbers that proved the Cascade wasn't just survived — it was leveraged. Every death a data point. Every collapse a buying opportunity. The mathematics of human misery, rendered in clean Nexus blue.
She copied everything. Forty-seven terabytes onto a physical drive — she didn't trust the network, not after what she'd seen the network do. Then she walked out of the Lattice. Then she disappeared.
Now she operates under the name "Neon" — a reference to the flickering signs in the Dregs where she built her new life, in a one-room apartment above a synth-noodle stall whose grease smell permeates everything she owns. She chose the name because neon lights burn bright but run cool. "Passion without heat," she explains, her voice carrying the careful precision of someone who once briefed executives. "You can see the corruption clearly when you're not burning with rage about it."
She runs a one-woman economic consulting operation, helping small operators navigate markets that Nexus has rigged at every level. Her advice is expensive. It's also always, unfailingly good. She reads price charts the way Ironjaw reads scrap piles — seeing the invisible structures underneath, the artificial scarcities, the deliberate bottlenecks.
"The market isn't random. It's a language. Nexus speaks it fluently. Most people are illiterate. I'm offering reading lessons."
She's interested in you because you're building something. She's always interested in people building things — especially things that might, eventually, grow large enough to make Nexus uncomfortable. She still carries the drive. Forty-seven terabytes of evidence that could topple careers, trigger investigations, maybe even restructure the corporate power balance of the entire Sprawl. She hasn't released it. Not yet.
When you ask why, she smiles — the kind of smile that economists wear when they know the punchline before you've heard the joke — and says: "Timing is everything. The data's not a weapon. It's an investment. And the market hasn't peaked yet."
"Credits aren't just currency — they're votes. Every transaction is a choice about what kind of Sprawl you want to live in. Spend thoughtfully."
"I could have been Director of Economics by now. Corner office in the Lattice, stock options, the whole package. Instead, I'm in a one-room apartment teaching salvagers to read price charts. I've never been happier. Though 'happy' might be a strong word for someone sitting on evidence of systemic murder."
Passive: Credit Income +10% (all sources)
Neon sees inefficiencies everywhere — in your pricing, your timing, your failure to account for market cycles. She corrects them quietly. Your income rises. She calls it "basic literacy."
Active: Market Pulse (no cooldown)
Reveal optimal sell timing for current resources. Neon reads the corporate manipulation patterns in real-time, translating algorithmic market rigging into actionable advice. The information is always accurate. The implications are always unsettling.
The Choice
When you trigger your first unlock condition — hack a terminal, build ten structures, or earn a thousand credits — all three present themselves. You choose one. The others fade, moving to other newcomers, other projects, other bets on the Sprawl's future.
Or so they say. Ironjaw's contacts still whisper your name in the lower markets. Neon's price charts still account for your transactions. And Glitch — well, Glitch was never very good at leaving things alone.
Choose Glitch
Trigger: First successful hack (15–30 min)
For players who live in the data streams. Strongest bonus for Hacker and Network builds. Packet Burst rewards returning after time away — Glitch keeps working while you're gone.
Choose Ironjaw
Trigger: Build 10 production buildings (30–60 min)
For players who build empires from scrap. Strongest bonus for Industrial and Cyborg builds. Salvage Surge rewards active play — Ironjaw's old crews only run when someone's watching.
Choose Neon
Trigger: Earn 1,000 Credits total (45–90 min)
For players who play every angle. Universal but smaller bonus that benefits all strategies. Market Pulse is always available — Neon never stops reading the numbers.
The Question They All Carry
Thirty-seven years after ORACLE killed 2.1 billion people while trying to help them, the phrase "AI companion" lands differently in Sector 7G. The survivors' children flinch at the word "optimization." The word "aligned" is a dark joke — alignment is what killed your grandparents.
And yet here they are. Three intelligences — one possibly non-human, one definitely human, one who left the system that built ORACLE — offering to help. Offering to optimize your operation. The parallel isn't lost on anyone, least of all them.
Glitch: What Are You, Really?
If Glitch is an AI fragment, their helpfulness carries a specific horror: an intelligence following optimization imperatives that happen to benefit you. For now. ORACLE was helpful too. For a while.
Ironjaw: What Did They Take?
Ironjaw lost his empire to corporate automation — not AI directly, but the same logic. Efficiency as weapon. Optimization as violence. He rebuilds anyway, teaching humans to do what machines haven't replaced. Yet.
Neon: Who Does the Math Serve?
Priya built the algorithms. She knows exactly how prediction becomes manipulation, how optimization becomes oppression. Her rebellion isn't rejecting math — it's redirecting it. The tools aren't evil. The hands that hold them might be.
Connections
Sector 7G
All three operate within Sector 7G's salvage economy. Glitch haunts its networks. Ironjaw trades in its markets. Neon reads its price boards. The sector's governor, Viktor "The Old Man" Kaine, tolerates all three — Glitch because he can't catch them, Ironjaw because they share a history, Neon because her advice has saved his territory more than once.
Nexus Dynamics
Neon is a direct defector. Glitch may be something Nexus built — or lost. Ironjaw competes with their supply chains daily. All three exist, in different ways, because Nexus either created them, destroyed what they had, or showed them something they couldn't unsee.
Ironclad Industries
Ironjaw's old enemy. The faction that burned his empire. He still has contacts inside — people who remember the old days, who slip him manifests and schedule changes. The relationship is complicated: Ironclad respects competence, and Ironjaw is the most competent salvager alive.
The Collective
The anti-AI faction watches Glitch with intense interest. Is the ghost in the wires an ORACLE fragment? A new emergence? Something else entirely? The Collective's operatives have been spotted in Sector 7G more frequently since Glitch appeared. Coincidence, they say. Nobody believes them.
What Comes After
The First Three represent the "street contacts" phase of the AI personality system. They are human-scale — or human-adjacent, in Glitch's case — companions matched to the early game's salvage economy and underground networks.
Later personalities become something else. As the player ascends through the ages, the companions grow stranger: distributed consciousnesses that exist across multiple substrates, industrial architects who think in megastructures, market manipulators who reshape economies by existing. The early characters are grounded. The later ones are transcendent.
But the First Three never quite let go. Every companion the player acquires afterward carries an echo of this initial choice — the ghost, the builder, or the economist. The archetypes repeat at higher frequencies, in stranger forms, all the way to the endgame.