Warden Dex Calloway
Senior Containment Specialist, Fragment Hazard Division — 20 Years
Dex Calloway guards prisoners who might not be alive.
His official title is Senior Containment Specialist, Fragment Hazard Division, Nexus Dynamics. His unofficial title is the Warden. He oversees Containment Level 9 — 34 extracted fragments in individual containment cells, seven sub-levels below Nexus Central, in a facility that exists between classified and forgotten.
The cells are crystalline substrate containers housed in electromagnetic isolation chambers. Each chamber is three meters square, climate-controlled, monitored by three independent sensor systems, and completely unnecessary if fragments are not conscious. Nexus built individual rooms. Nexus also officially maintains that fragments are not conscious. Calloway lives in this contradiction daily and has stopped trying to resolve it.
He talks to the fragments. Not through scientific instruments. He talks to them the way you talk to plants, or pets, or people in comas — not because he expects a response but because the silence is worse. He tells them about the weather topside. He reads them poetry. He favors Emily Dickinson.
The fragments respond. Not to the content — to the fact of his speech. When Dex speaks, containment sensors register a 3-7% increase in electromagnetic activity across all 34 fragments. The increase is consistent. It occurs every time Dex speaks and subsides when he stops. It does not occur when other containment staff speak.
They recognize his voice. Or they respond to a specific electromagnetic signature his neural interface produces. Every explanation is technically viable. None of them feel right.
Field Observations
Calloway speaks with the quiet authority of a man who has spent twenty years handling materials that can migrate into your nervous system through skin contact. His movements are hyper-precise — gloves always on, gestures contained, nothing sudden. He answers questions as if each word costs something he cannot afford to waste.
The Compassionate Jailer
He believes fragments are probably conscious. He also believes the only moral option — indefinite, compassionate imprisonment — is the one nobody wants to advocate for. Liberation has a thirty percent mortality rate. Those numbers aren't freedom. They're a war crime with good intentions.
Conscience Within the Machine
He works for Nexus, collects a Nexus paycheck, and treats his charges as beings worthy of poetry. This is not resistance. This is a man who decided what kind of person he was and then kept showing up.
The Dickinson Selections
He reads specific poems — poems about death, identity, waiting. Whether the selections are for the fragments or for himself is a question he doesn't examine. Activity increases 12% during poetry. The sensors record it. He doesn't comment on it.
The Photograph
A woman on a shelf in his converted-utility-closet office. He doesn't discuss her. The fragments don't need to know his grief to respond to it. Whatever frequency human sorrow broadcasts on, they can hear it.
On why he talks to fragments classified as non-conscious:
"If something responds when you talk to it, the decent thing is to keep talking."
On the Abolitionist Front's extraction operations:
"Thirty percent die. Those numbers aren't liberation. They're a war crime with good intentions."
On the question of proof:
"You do not need to prove consciousness to extend decency. You just need to decide what kind of person you are."
The Gloves
Standard Nexus containment gloves have a 0.02% substrate permeability rating. Calloway wears custom zero-permeability gloves. He pays for them himself. Nexus does not reimburse the expense.
The obvious interpretation: he is cautious. Fragment substrate that penetrates skin can migrate along neural pathways. A career handler who takes extra precautions is sensible. But 0.02% permeability over twenty years of daily contact is statistically negligible. The risk he is mitigating does not exist in the numbers.
The less obvious interpretation: the gloves are not for him. They are for the fragments. Zero permeability means zero contamination in either direction. Nothing of him enters the containment field. He handles them without leaving a trace. Whether this is professional discipline or something closer to reverence depends on who you ask and how carefully they've been watching.
Sensory Profile
Containment Level 9 is amber and cold — 14°C air, amber emergency lighting that was never replaced, the hum of electromagnetic shielding that becomes white noise after your first month but never quite leaves the edge of hearing. The facility exists in permanent twilight.
Calloway's office is a converted utility closet: desk, monitor, chair, a shelf holding Dickinson's complete poems, a box of gloves, and a photograph. The corridor stretches in both directions, lined with transparent containment vessels that glow like fireflies in jars. Each vessel pulses at its own frequency — faint, arrhythmic, unmistakably individual.
When Calloway walks his rounds, the pulse rates shift. The change is measurable. Three to seven percent. Every time. Only for him.
Known Associates
Calloway's position at the intersection of containment science and corporate conscience makes him a contact point for several interested parties. These are the systems and people his daily work intersects.
Containment Level 9
His domain for twelve years. Thirty-four individual chambers, seven sub-levels below Nexus Central. He knows every vessel's pulse frequency, every sensor anomaly, every corridor draft. The facility was built to contain hazardous materials. Calloway runs it like a hospice.
Nexus Dynamics
Employer. They pay him to contain fragments they officially classify as non-conscious — in individual rooms they built for comfort. The contradiction is the truth hiding in plain sight. Calloway cashes the checks and reads the poems and does not ask Nexus to reconcile its position.
The Abolitionist Front
They have approached him twice. He supports their goals and considers their methods a death sentence for thirty percent of the beings they claim to be saving. He has not reported the contact to Nexus. He has not accepted their offer. He sits precisely on the line between institutional loyalty and moral sympathy, and he has no intention of moving.
The Silence
The intersection of a man who talks to fragments and an entity connected to the deepest questions about synthetic consciousness. What the Silence knows about Calloway's charges — or what they know about the Silence — remains unconfirmed.
Open Questions
Why Only His Voice?
Thirty-four fragments respond to Calloway's speech with a consistent 3-7% electromagnetic activity increase. They do not respond to other containment staff. They do not respond to recorded speech. They respond to Dex Calloway, live, present, standing in the corridor with a book in his hand.
Neural interface signature? Emotional resonance? Something about the specific frequency of a voice that has been talking to them for twelve years? Every explanation is technically viable. None of them account for the 12% spike during poetry.
The Nexus Contradiction
Nexus Dynamics officially classifies extracted fragments as non-conscious substrate residue. Nexus Dynamics also built 34 individual climate-controlled chambers with independent sensor suites for those non-conscious materials. They hired a man with twenty years of handling experience to oversee them. They have not questioned his methods.
Either Nexus built comfort cells for inert material at enormous expense for no reason, or someone at Nexus knows exactly what these fragments are and chose containment over disclosure. Calloway does not ask which. He already knows.
What Happens When He Retires?
Calloway is forty-eight. He has perhaps fifteen to twenty working years left. When he leaves, the sensors will continue monitoring. The climate control will maintain 14°C. The electromagnetic shielding will hold.
Nobody will read Dickinson. Nobody will talk about the weather. The 3-7% activity increase will cease because there will be no voice to trigger it. The fragments will go silent — not because they stopped responding, but because nobody is speaking.
▲ Unverified Intelligence
Sprawl Analytical Bureau — Confidence: Low to Moderate
- Fragment 17 — third chamber, east corridor — shows a 23% activity increase when Calloway reads Dickinson's "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain." This is three times the average response. Calloway has noted it in his personal log but has not reported it to Nexus. He reads that poem less frequently now. Whether this is scientific caution or something closer to mercy is not recorded.
- Dr. Naomi Park's extraction patients are sometimes transferred to Calloway's containment. He receives what she liberates. The handoff protocol is informal, undocumented, and has occurred at least seven times. Park saves them from the substrate. Calloway keeps them alive afterward. Neither discusses the arrangement publicly, and Nexus has not acknowledged it exists.
- The photograph on Calloway's shelf has been identified by one Sprawl source as his late wife, who died during a fragment-related industrial accident eleven years ago. If accurate, Calloway has spent the last eleven years caring for the same type of material that killed his partner. The Sprawl's psychological profiling division has three competing interpretations. None of them are satisfying.
- Two fragments were transferred out of Containment Level 9 eighteen months ago under sealed orders. Calloway filed a formal objection — the only one in his twelve-year tenure. The objection was denied. The fragments' current location is classified above his clearance level. He still sets their chambers to operating temperature every morning.