Tomiko Vasquez
Prosperity Pathway Borrower #TPV-7G-4419
Subject Assessment
Tomiko Vasquez borrowed to give her son a chance and is watching the loan consume everything she has left.
Her son Mateo was born with a congenital neural interface malformation. Without correction, he would be functionally unaugmented in a world that requires augmentation to work, communicate, and access basic services. The procedure cost ¢47,000. Tomiko's lifetime savings: ¢3,200. Good Fortune offered a Prosperity Pathway loan at 22% against her future cognitive output.
The augmentation installed as part of the loan package — Basic Wakefulness plus Professional-tier processing — was not something Tomiko needed or wanted. It was the mechanism through which repayment would flow: the cognitive lien requires augmented output to measure, and the Night Shift requires augmented processing to exploit. She didn't borrow augmentation. She borrowed money. The augmentation was the debt collection infrastructure installed in her skull.
The Arithmetic of Extraction
To service the debt, Tomiko works Focus Mill night shifts — twelve hours of forced-focus data analysis that pay 40% above standard Dregs wages. The premium is the difference between staying current on interest payments and default.
The trade: the mills narrow her mind. After years of forced-focus work, the narrowing has become permanent. She can process data with extraordinary precision. She cannot follow a conversation that changes subject more than twice. She can calculate exactly what she is losing — with the analytical clarity that the Focus Mills honed to a razor's edge.
The Night Shift generates ¢55/night from her sleep — applied directly to debt she never wanted. The cognitive lien takes ¢120/week from her best processing output before it reaches her awareness. Two extraction systems, one person. Between them, they produce approximately ¢1,200/month. Her debt service requires ¢1,800. The gap — ¢600/month — compounds.
She cannot stop augmentation (triggers repossession). She cannot increase output (at tier maximum). She cannot refinance (debt-to-capacity ratio exceeded). Every exit has been examined. Every exit is sealed.
She doesn't discuss her debt unless asked directly. When asked, she describes it with the flat precision of someone reciting a number they've checked every morning for four years.
The Twenty-Minute Window
Mateo's interface works perfectly. He is eleven. He brings homework during the twenty-minute Unlock period after her shift — not because he needs help but because the Unlock is the only window when his mother's mind is wide enough to see him as a whole person rather than a pattern to be processed.
He doesn't know his mother's mind is mortgaged.
Known Associates
Patience Cross
Sometimes brings noodles. Food offered without payment is the most radical act of care in a world where everything is metered. The noodles cost nothing. In Tomiko's accounting, that makes them the most expensive thing she receives.
The Noise Floor
Spends evenings in the dampened silence with other debtors. Not for quiet — for company. The shared understanding of people who check the same number every morning. A space that asks nothing.
Maren Qian
The Prosperity Architect who designed the loan product Tomiko signed. They have never met. The mathematical elegance of Maren's design is Tomiko's financial prison. The interest rate was not cruelty. It was optimization.
Good Fortune
Prosperity Pathway borrower approaching default. She borrowed for her son. She will be dimmed for the math. The three-product trap in action: medical loan + augmentation (unwanted) + consciousness licensing.
The Focus Mills
Works twelve-hour forced-focus night shifts. The mills consume her cognitive width; Good Fortune consumes the interest. She is the point where two extraction systems converge on one nervous system.
Sector 7G
Market vendor turned cognitive debtor. She used to sell neural interface components in the Dregs market. Now the Dregs market is where she goes between shifts to remember she used to be a person with a trade.
Field Observations
Tomiko speaks with the careful brevity of someone who has calculated every expenditure, including the cognitive cost of conversation. Words are measured. Sentences are short. Topic changes are difficult — not from unwillingness but from the permanent narrowing the Focus Mills have carved into her processing.
Precision Without Range
Extraordinary data processing accuracy. Cannot follow a conversation that changes subject more than twice. The Focus Mills sharpened her mind by removing everything that wasn't a straight line.
No Regret for the Loan
She doesn't regret borrowing. She regrets the interest rate. Mateo's interface works perfectly. The decision was correct. The architecture of the decision was designed to be permanent.
Community as Survival
The Noise Floor and Patience Cross's noodles are not luxuries. They are the human connections that prevent her from becoming a number in a ledger.
The Silver Wire Band
Wears the debt community's marker openly on her left wrist. In the Dregs, everyone knows what silver wire means. She doesn't hide it. Hiding costs energy she cannot afford.
Open Questions
Who Gets Caught?
Not the reckless. Not the foolish. A mother who made the only choice available and discovered the choice was designed to be permanent. The Time Ratchet's answer to "who gets caught?" is: the people who love someone enough to sign.
The cruelty is not in the victim's decision. It is in the architecture of the decisions offered.
What Happens at the Threshold?
The gap compounds at ¢600/month. Dimming is not a possibility — it is a trajectory. When Tomiko's debt-to-output ratio crosses the threshold, her consciousness license will be reduced. She will know it is coming. She can calculate the date.
What does a mother tell her son when she can feel herself becoming less?
The Unwanted Augmentation
She didn't borrow augmentation. She borrowed money. The Professional-tier processing was the loan condition — the infrastructure through which repayment flows. Her mind was modified not for her benefit but to make her debt-serviceable.
How many borrowers are carrying hardware they never asked for, installed so the debt can find its way home?
▲ Unverified Intelligence
Flagged reports, unconfirmed. Handle accordingly:
- The Noise Floor network: Debtors gathering at the Noise Floor may be sharing more than company. Unconfirmed reports suggest informal debt-counseling circles — borrowers teaching each other to read the fine print that Good Fortune doesn't explain. Tomiko's precision makes her a natural analyst of the very contracts consuming her.
- Mateo's awareness: Tomiko believes her son doesn't know her mind is mortgaged. Children in Sector 7G talk. He is eleven. The question is not whether he'll find out but what he'll do when the math becomes obvious to someone who inherited his mother's gift for numbers.
- The cognitive narrowing's other edge: Permanent focus narrowing is classified as an occupational hazard. But Tomiko's narrowing has produced a mind that can hold financial models with extraordinary clarity. Some Focus Mill veterans become the best forensic accountants in the Dregs — people who can trace exactly where the money goes. This is not a skill Good Fortune wants its borrowers to develop.
- The clock: At current compound rate, she can calculate the exact date her consciousness license will be reduced. Whether she has shared that date with anyone — whether she has written it down somewhere Mateo might find it — is unknown.