Mika Vasquez-Osei
Thermal Cartographer · The Undervolt · Unaugmented
Mika Vasquez-Osei maps the invisible.
Thermal cartography did not exist before the Sprawl’s compute infrastructure created thermal conditions that needed mapping. Mika’s work produces three-dimensional heat models of the interstitial zones — temperature gradients, electromagnetic density, air quality, and the boundaries between corporate-climate-controlled territories and the ambient conditions of the Dregs.
Her maps are beautiful and devastating. They show what everyone in the Shadow knows and nobody with authority has documented: the thermal infrastructure creates a permanent geography that determines health outcomes, economic opportunity, and life expectancy. The color system runs from blue through green, yellow, orange, to red. Her mother invented it. Mika inherited it the way she inherited everything — through teaching that no institution provided.
She is twenty-nine years old, unaugmented by choice, and she lives in the Undervolt because it holds steady at 28°C. Thermal stability matters when your body is your primary instrument.
Field Observations
Mika speaks in the practical vocabulary of engineering — temperature differentials, gradient slopes, thermal coefficients. She learned her mother’s diagnostic method: press a palm against a wall and read the temperature gradient, stand in a corridor and feel the air flow, listen to the hum. Her mother was a pre-Cascade HVAC engineer who maintained atmospheric systems during the Scavenger Years. The skill lives in Mika’s hands.
The Mother’s Method
Press a palm to a wall. Close your eyes. The wall tells you its temperature, its material composition, how long since something on the other side changed state. Mika has mapped the northern Sprawl this way — every known thermal infrastructure point recorded through the nerve endings in her hands. In a world of sensors, she trusts her body.
The Unpublished Maps
Mika knows what her maps become when overlaid with mortality data: court-ready evidence. A direct line from corporate processing decisions to human death. The last thermal cartographer who provided evidence was deprecated within a month. She keeps the overlay separate from the maps. She keeps the maps close.
The 2182 Drought
Her thermal predictions enabled early activation of the Dropout Protocol. Eighty-nine people are alive because she read the heat before the heat became lethal. Nobody gave her a commendation. Nobody put her name on anything. She does not need them to.
The Workspace
The Undervolt’s consistent 28°C, the electromagnetic hum that doesn’t bother her baseline body, hand-drawn maps covering every wall in a color system her mother invented. Her tools: a salvaged surface-temperature probe, a hand-drawn map of every known thermal infrastructure point in the northern Sprawl, and the palms of her hands.
“Heat is information — it tells you everything about the system that produces it, if you know how to read it.”
The Inheritance
Mika’s mother maintained atmospheric systems during the Scavenger Years — the chaotic period after the Cascade when infrastructure existed but nobody understood it. HVAC knowledge from that era is rare. The people who held it are mostly dead. Those who survived passed it down through family, not institutions.
This is the same transmission model as the Lamplighters — competence moving through personal networks because the formal channels were destroyed or co-opted. Mika didn’t choose this inheritance. It chose her the way all inherited knowledge does: by being available at the moment she needed something to hold.
Her mother’s HVAC knowledge includes details about ORACLE-era atmospheric algorithms that Nexus has since classified. Mika uses these methods without knowing their origin. She doesn’t know what she inherited. She just knows it works.
Known Associates
Thermal Cartography
The discipline she developed and practices. Before Mika, nobody was systematically mapping the Sprawl’s heat geography. The profession exists because the conditions demand it and because she had the inherited knowledge to respond.
The Thermal Shadow
Her primary mapping territory. The Shadow’s thermal conditions are the subject of her life’s work — the place where heat becomes geography and geography becomes fate.
The Undervolt
Home. Chosen for its thermal stability. When your body is your primary instrument, you live where the baseline doesn’t shift.
The Dropout Protocol
Her thermal predictions enabled early activation during the 2182 drought. Eighty-nine lives. The Protocol’s operators trust her data because it has been tested against death and held.
The Lamplighters
Her maps move through the Lamplighter network. They carry information the way Lamplighters carry everything — by hand, through trust, outside institutional channels.
The Counted
During extreme weather, Mika’s maps appear on Counted boards. Temperature data becomes survival data. The Counted don’t ask where it comes from. They ask whether it’s accurate. It is.
Open Questions
The Evidence Paradox
Mika’s maps, overlaid with mortality data, constitute proof that corporate processing decisions kill people. She has created the overlay. She keeps it separate. Publishing it would save future lives. Publishing it would end hers. The last cartographer who shared evidence was gone within a month.
How long can someone hold evidence that could change everything and choose, every day, not to release it? What does that do to a person?
The Classified Inheritance
Her mother’s HVAC knowledge includes ORACLE-era atmospheric algorithms that Nexus has classified. Mika uses methods she doesn’t fully understand, inherited through practice rather than documentation. She maps the Sprawl using techniques whose theoretical foundations are state secrets.
What happens when someone discovers the origin of her methods? What happens if Nexus discovers she’s using classified atmospheric models without knowing they’re classified?
The Body as Instrument
In a city that trusts sensors over skin, Mika reads temperature with her palms. Her methodology is pre-digital, pre-Cascade, inherited from an era when people understood infrastructure through physical contact. The Sprawl produces more thermal data per second than she could process in a lifetime. Her maps are still more accurate than anything the sensor networks produce in the interstitial zones.
Why? What does a human body detect that a sensor array misses?
▲ Unverified Intelligence
Flagged items. Confidence levels vary.
- The overlay exists: Mika has already combined her thermal maps with Ayari’s mortality data. The resulting document draws a direct, undeniable line from corporate compute allocation to human death. She keeps the overlay in a separate location from her maps. If both pieces were found together, they would constitute the most damaging evidence against the Sprawl’s thermal infrastructure operators since the Cascade.
- The mother knew more: Mika’s pre-Cascade HVAC knowledge includes atmospheric algorithms from the ORACLE era that have since been classified by Nexus. Mika deploys these methods intuitively, without understanding their provenance. She doesn’t know she’s using classified techniques. The knowledge is in her hands, not her files — which makes it harder to confiscate and harder to trace.
- Eighty-nine is the official count: The 2182 drought number — 89 lives saved through early Dropout Protocol activation — is the figure the Protocol’s operators documented. Unverified reports from the Shadow suggest the actual number may be higher. People who evacuated based on Mika’s maps before the Protocol was activated are not included in any official count.
- The distribution question: Her maps move through Lamplighter networks and appear on Counted boards. Somebody is copying them. Mika produces originals by hand. The copies circulating in the southern Sprawl are reproductions she did not authorize. She has not tried to stop them.