The Ferrymen
Consciousness is cargo. We move cargo.
Overview
The Ferrymen move consciousness the way old-world smugglers moved contraband: across borders that exist to protect someone else's profits. They are a distributed criminal operation that steals, transports, fabricates, and sells neural recordings, identity data, and raw human experience. They don't care whether the cargo is authentic or synthetic. It's all just data to be moved.
Operating in cells of three to seven operators, they communicate through encrypted dead drops and maintain no confirmed central authority. The network is designed to survive any single point of failure — and it has, repeatedly.
Nexus Dynamics has hunted them for twenty years. Arrested roughly two hundred operators. The network hasn't slowed.
Philosophy
"Consciousness is cargo. We move cargo."
The Ferrymen operate without ideology. They are neither liberators nor enslavers — they are a logistics operation. When consciousness became data, data became cargo. When corporations built borders around that cargo, smugglers appeared. The Ferrymen are the inevitable market response to the commodification of human experience.
They are neither heroes nor villains. They are the black market that consciousness capitalism made necessary — or inevitable, depending on your perspective.
Services
Neural Recording Theft
The bread and butter of Ferrymen operations. Corporate archives at Nexus, Relief, and Helix have all been infiltrated. Individual targets are cloned invisibly — the victim never knows their experience has been copied.
The most valuable hauls come from Dead Internet recovery — pulling consciousness data from pre-Cascade archives that corporations haven't yet catalogued or secured.
Identity Services
Consciousness Smuggling
Cross-corporate transport of consciousness data that isn't supposed to move. Pre-Cascade recovery transport for clients willing to pay for fragments of the old world.
The Dispersed Trade
The most ethically fraught service the Ferrymen offer: trafficking Dispersed-contaminated data. Some operators refuse. Others charge triple. The cargo doesn't always stay quiet during transport.
Sensory Profile
Smell
Dead drop environments — sewers, maintenance corridors, abandoned shops. The chips themselves smell of nothing. That's how you know they're clean.
Sound
Silent text-only communications. The faint hum of consciousness data being transferred — like someone humming behind a closed door. You feel it more than hear it.
Atmosphere
Transactions happen in dark places. Amber light from failing fixtures. Red warning indicators on jury-rigged transfer equipment. The constant tension of moving something that doesn't want to be still.
Connections
The Ferrymen exist at the intersection of every faction that touches consciousness data. Their lack of ideology makes them versatile partners — and universal threats.
Clients & Partners
The Echo Bazaar
Primary retail outlet. The Bazaar sells what the Ferrymen steal. A symbiotic relationship built on mutual profit and mutual deniability.
The Echo Thief
Valued client. One of the Ferrymen's most reliable customers — and occasionally, one of their most useful suppliers. The relationship is purely transactional.
Digital Preservationists
Occasional partner. The Preservationists want consciousness data saved; the Ferrymen want it sold. Sometimes those goals align.
The Collective
Used Ferrymen logistics for their own operations. The Collective needed cargo moved without questions. The Ferrymen don't ask questions.
Adversaries
Complicated
Consciousness Archaeologists
The Archaeologists study what the Ferrymen sell. They need each other and resent each other in equal measure. Academic ethics vs. market pragmatism.
The Authenticity Market
Parasite relationship. The Ferrymen created the conditions for authenticity fraud, then profited from the anxiety their own operations generated.
Digital Identity Systems
The Ferrymen undermine every identity verification system ever built. Their fork laundering and chain splicing make the entire digital identity infrastructure unreliable.
Cargo
The Dispersed
Not partners. Not clients. Cargo. The Ferrymen trade in Dispersed-contaminated data the way old-world smugglers traded in hazardous materials — carefully, expensively, and without asking what it's for.
Themes
The Inevitability of Black Markets
When consciousness becomes data, someone will steal it. When data has value, someone will sell it. The Ferrymen aren't an aberration — they're a prediction. Every system that creates artificial scarcity creates the smugglers who undermine it.
Consciousness as Commodity
The Ferrymen strip the philosophical weight from consciousness and treat it as supply chain logistics. Their worldview is terrifying in its simplicity: if it can be copied, it can be moved. If it can be moved, it has a price.
Moral Neutrality
Neither heroes nor villains — a market response to a market problem. The Ferrymen force the question: in a world where consciousness is data, who has the right to control its movement?
Secrets
Every smuggling network carries rumors. The Ferrymen carry darker ones than most.
The Charon Protocol
A rumored capability to reconstitute a Dispersed consciousness and install it in a living host. If true, the Ferrymen possess the ability to reverse the most feared condition in the Sprawl. The implications are staggering — and the price would be astronomical.
Can the dead truly be brought back? And what comes back with them?
The Network's True Age
The Ferrymen claim founding circa 2160. But evidence suggests the network may predate its assumed origin — possibly tracing back to ORACLE engineers who saw the Cascade coming and built an escape route for consciousness data before everything collapsed.
Did the Ferrymen emerge after the catastrophe, or were they built in anticipation of it?
The Cargo That Speaks
Three separate operators have reported consciousness data communicating during transit. Not corrupted playback. Not glitched recordings. Deliberate, responsive communication from data that should be inert. The reports were suppressed. The operators were reassigned.
What happens when the cargo starts making demands?