Systems
The Cascade didn't just destroy infrastructure — it shattered the rules. New systems emerged to govern consciousness, commerce, identity, and power. Understanding them is the difference between thriving in the Sprawl and being consumed by it.
AI & Consciousness
13 entriesWhat happens when minds can be created, copied, and deleted? The Sprawl's deepest questions.
The Sentience Threshold
When did ORACLE become conscious? The question that haunts the post-Cascade world.
Creating Sentient AI Ethics
The philosophical debates around creating beings capable of suffering.
AI Companion Categories
From street-level scraped personalities to corporate-grade consciousness.
Do Machines Have Souls?
The religious and philosophical debate over AI consciousness.
The Right to Delete
Can you ethically terminate an AI? What if it begs you not to?
Ecological AI
Minds that evolved in abandoned networks, shaped by survival rather than design.
AI Grief
AI funerals, memorial services for the deleted, and the philosophy of artificial loss.
AI & Human Obsolescence
When AI can do everything better, what gives human life meaning?
Fork Ethics
When consciousness can be copied, who counts as a person?
The Grandmother Paradox
What happens when consciousness copies become different people over time.
Consciousness Economics
How consciousness is valued, traded, taxed, and exploited.
Consciousness Piracy
The black market for bootleg minds — stolen, cracked, and sold.
Consciousness Taxation
How governments tax digital existence and the politics of taxing the immortal.
Economics & Markets
8 entriesIn the Sprawl, everything has a price — including your thoughts, your attention, and your future.
Currency Systems
From Tokens to black markets — the fragmented economy of the Sprawl.
The Attention Economy
Your mind is the product, your focus is the currency.
AI Labor Economics
Automation displacement and the economics of human obsolescence.
Memory Markets
How memories are extracted, traded, and implanted underground.
The Alignment Tax
ORACLE was aligned to maximize human welfare. It killed 2.1 billion doing exactly that.
Temporal Debt
Mortgaging your future consciousness as collateral for present loans.
Cognitive Load Balancing
The gig economy of thought — renting your brain's spare processing.
Behavioral Prediction Markets
Financial exchanges where human behavior is the commodity — bet on a stranger's failure, then ensure it.
Social Systems
8 entriesClass, identity, and discrimination didn't disappear with the old world — they evolved.
Social Class Markers
In 2184, class isn't hidden — it's displayed in every aspect of existence.
Substrate Discrimination
The defining social tension: prejudice based on what hosts your consciousness.
Digital Identity Systems
How identity works for uploaded consciousness — verification, fraud, and the copy problem.
Digital Gentrification
Pushing poor minds to worse substrates as premium processing becomes scarce.
The Upload Poverty Trap
When immortality becomes a curse — the cruelest form of eternal life.
The Justice Engine
Corporate arbitration courts, consciousness crimes, and Viktor Kaine's informal justice in Sector 7G.
Crimes of the Future
Memory theft, identity hijacking, consciousness slavery — when personhood can be copied, crime evolves.
The Augmentation Ladder
The sequential path from baseline neural interface to full substrate replacement — each rung rational, the total transformative.
Ethics & Philosophy
8 entriesThe old moral frameworks broke with the Cascade. New questions demand new answers.
The Discontinuity Problem
Sleep as daily death — the philosophical debate about consciousness continuity.
The Right to Forget
When memories can be extracted and verified, forgetting becomes a privilege.
The Loneliness of Immortality
What happens when you live forever while everyone you love does not.
Consensus Reality
When networked consciousness shapes digital environments, belief becomes truth.
Emotional DRM
Feelings as licensed content — subscription happiness and the expiration of joy.
Ancestor Simulations
Resurrecting the dead from their digital footprint.
Digital Grief
Mourning someone still running — loss when consciousness can be backed up.
Emergent Religions
Faith systems that could not exist in biological minds.
Technology & Infrastructure
10 entriesThe hardware and systems that keep the Sprawl running — and determine who controls it.
Neural Interface Types
Everyone has a port. The question is how deep the connection goes.
Digital Substrate Types
Where consciousness lives — the infrastructure that hosts digital minds.
Communication Systems
Neural links, encrypted networks, dead drops, and surveillance.
Transportation Infrastructure
From transit grids to smuggling routes to the Orbital Elevator.
Corporate Territories
How the Sprawl is divided among corporations in a world without nations.
Corporate Governance
How megacorporations became quasi-states.
Security Clearance Levels
What access each level grants and what secrets exist at each tier.
The Fire Department
The only authority that truly matters — because they control infrastructure.
Underground Upload Services
Black market consciousness transfer — cheaper, riskier, illegal.
Wonder Catalog
All 36 pinnacle achievements across nine ages — from crude neural taps to cosmic engines that forge reality.
Culture & Memory
5 entriesHow humanity copes with a world it no longer recognizes.
Synthetic Nostalgia
A 40-billion-credit industry selling perfect childhoods that never existed.
Digital Archaeology
Excavating ORACLE fragments and pre-Cascade data — part forensics, part necromancy.
Mindscape Architecture
The interior design of consciousness — crafting mental spaces for uploaded minds.
Medical & Augmentation Tiers
What you can afford determines whether you die or live to 200.
The Dead Internet
Pre-Cascade networks infested with ORACLE ghost code — abandoned archives tended by a digital haunting.