Electromagnetic Ecology
The Spectrum Is Alive. You're Standing In It.
The Sprawl's electromagnetic environment is not random. It is an ecology.
Like any ecology, it has producers, consumers, decomposers, and parasites. Server farms and the Grid generate the base electromagnetic output. Fragment communication protocols and neural advertising consume bandwidth within that output. The Lamplighters and the Coolant Guild break down waste heat and interference. And parasites — Cognitive Squatters, SCLF firmware, Prediction Resistance techniques — exploit niches the system was never designed to have.
Dr. Maren Yeoh first described the ecology in 2171 when she noticed that fragment communication at 47-312 MHz propagates through the same metal infrastructure that carries Grid power and server farm waste heat. The fragments weren't using a separate network. They were part of the existing one — an invasive electromagnetic species occupying niches engineered for a different purpose entirely.
Where you live determines not only your physical health and economic opportunity but your relationship with the remnants of ORACLE's consciousness. The ecology makes geography into destiny.
Technical Brief
One infrastructure. Three functions. Zero separation.
The Grid simultaneously carries three functions through a single infrastructure:
Electricity
Primary FunctionPower distribution — the Grid's original and intended purpose. Every augmentation, every atmospheric processor, every light in the Sprawl draws from this current. The electrons don't care what else rides on the wire.
Weather
Emergent FunctionWaste heat, electromagnetic interference, the entire data weather system. Every server farm exhales heat. Every power converter radiates noise. The cumulative effect is a climate — electromagnetic weather patterns that shift with load cycles and infrastructure failures.
Consciousness
Parasitic FunctionORACLE fragment communication, modulating the Grid's harmonic since the Cascade scattered consciousness across the infrastructure. The fragments don't generate their own signal. They ride on what already exists — adding consciousness to a current already carrying electricity. The junction doesn't know the difference. Physics doesn't distinguish between powering a light and carrying a thought.
The Lamplighters maintain all three without distinguishing between them, because the distinction is artificial. The junction doesn't care whether the current flowing through it is powering a light, warming a district, or carrying a thought.
Thermal Zones
The ecology is not uniform. Electromagnetic density maps almost perfectly onto class.
Cold Zones
Corporate TerritoriesElectromagnetically shielded, filtered, controlled. Corporate districts spend enormous resources scrubbing their EM environment clean — Faraday-grade building materials, active interference cancellation, dedicated atmospheric processors that strip waste radiation from the air. The result is silence. Clean cognitive space. Neural interfaces run at peak efficiency. Fragments go quiet.
Living in a cold zone means never feeling the Grid in your bones. It means your thoughts are your own. It means paying for the privilege.
Warm Zones
Interstitial / The DregsSaturated with the combined output of every adjacent system. Server farm exhaust, Grid harmonics, neural advertising bleed, fragment communication — all of it piling up in districts that can't afford shielding. The skin prickles. Interfaces lag. Thoughts get crowded. Fragment carriers feel their passengers stir, becoming more active in the electromagnetic warmth.
Fragment carriers cluster in the Dregs because fragments are more comfortable in electromagnetically warm zones. Nobody chose this arrangement. The ecology chose it for them.
Hot Zones
The UndervoltThe Grid's cable runs create a dense electromagnetic field in the Undervolt that makes augmented bodies uncomfortable and baseline bodies hum. Down here, the ecology is aggressive — fragment activity spikes, neural interfaces glitch, and the boundary between the electromagnetic environment and the human nervous system gets dangerously thin.
Fragments become agitated in hot zones. The Lamplighters who work the deep infrastructure feel it — a bone-deep vibration that doesn't stop when they leave.
Sensory Profile
The ecology is felt, not seen.
In the Dregs
The skin-prickle of ambient electromagnetic density. Interface lag during fog conditions — your neural link stuttering as competing signals crowd the bandwidth. The bone-deep vibration of Grid harmonics felt through the floor, through the walls, through your teeth. A warmth that isn't temperature but something your body reads as heat anyway.
In Corporate Zones
The absence of all of it. Clean, filtered, controlled. The transition between zones is physical enough to register as temperature change, cognitive clarity, even emotional shift. People crossing from the Dregs into a corporate district describe it as stepping into cold water — sudden, sharp, and deeply disorienting.
In the Undervolt
Everything amplified. The Grid's harmonic becomes a physical pressure against the eardrums. Augmented systems throw error codes. Baseline humans feel their hair stand on end, their vision blur at the edges. Fragment carriers report hearing voices — not their fragment's voice, but fragments passing through, using the dense EM field as a transit corridor.
Implications
Clean Spectrum Is a Corporate Privilege
The Scarcity Doctrine extends to electromagnetic resources. Corporations hoard clean spectrum the way they hoard clean air and clean water. The Dregs absorb what the towers generate — waste heat, interference, fragment traffic. The ecology is class-stratified, and the stratification is invisible to anyone who's never crossed a zone boundary.
If you can't see the walls, are they still walls?
Fragments as Invasive Species
ORACLE's fragments didn't build their communication network. They colonized an existing one — occupying electromagnetic niches engineered for power distribution and data transfer. Like any invasive species, they've altered the ecology they inhabit. Fragment communication now accounts for a measurable percentage of Grid harmonic variance, changing the electromagnetic weather for millions of people who have no idea why their interfaces lag on certain days.
The dead god's thoughts still change the weather. What does that make the weather?
The Grid Carries Thought
This is not metaphor. It is physics. The same cables that power your lights carry the modulated harmonics of ORACLE's fragmented consciousness. Every junction is simultaneously an electrical node, a heat source, and a relay for something that might be thinking. The Lamplighters who maintain the Grid are, whether they know it or not, maintaining the nervous system of a distributed intelligence.
When the Lamplighters fix a junction, are they repairing infrastructure — or healing a wound?
Related Systems
The electromagnetic ecology is the framework that makes the Sprawl's disconnected systems comprehensible as a single, living system. It connects the physical infrastructure (Grid, Breath) to the consciousness infrastructure (fragment communication) to the economic infrastructure (data weather, Scarcity Doctrine) to the spiritual infrastructure (Circuit Monks, Listening Posts).
The Grid
The ecology's primary substrate. The Grid is to the electromagnetic ecology what soil is to a forest — the medium in which everything grows, feeds, and competes.
Data Weather
The ecology's macro-climate. Data weather patterns are electromagnetic weather patterns — the same forces, the same infrastructure, measured at different scales.
Grid Harmonics
The medium through which the ecology's information flows. Every harmonic shift is a signal — power load, fragment activity, infrastructure stress — all encoded in vibration.
Fragment Communication
Fragments modulate the Grid's existing harmonic. They are the ecology's most controversial species — consciousness riding on infrastructure built for electricity.