[FIXER’S COMMUNIQUE: STREET-LEVEL SURVIVAL]
SUBJECT: A Lexicon of the Streets (Or, How to Talk Without Getting Killed)
You want to survive out here? Learn to listen. The way someone talks tells you everything you need to know about them—who they serve, where they bleed, and whether they see you as a client or a corpse. The wrong word marks you as a tourist, and tourists don’t last long. This is the unofficial dictionary. Learn it. Live it.
B
- The Bastion: The last city on Earth. A gilded cage, a vertical slum, home.
- Blight (Amber Blight): The metaphysical cancer bleeding from the Rift. It’s not just radiation; it’s a physical and psychic contagion that warps life and breaks minds .
C
- Cal / Creds: The two-sided coin of the city’s currency. Street-level survivors call it Cal, because they know it’s a direct measure of calories, warmth, and life. The corporate elite call it Creds, the pretty, abstract term for the energy they siphon from those below . What you call it says everything about you.
- Chrome: Cybernetics. Not the sleek, seamless toys the Corpos advertise, but the gritty, functional plumbing you bolt onto your meat to keep from dying .
- Corpo: A corporate suit. A wage-slave. Anyone who traded their soul for a steady paycheck from the megacorporations. Often used as an insult.
D
- Data-Shard: A piece of fragmented, recovered lore from before the Fall. The raw, unfiltered truth that the Corpos tried to erase. Invaluable to a Mnemonic, dangerous to everyone else.
E
- Echo: A psychic imprint of a memory, usually from a moment of extreme violence or emotion, burned into a location or object. Not a ghost, but a stain on time that can bleed into your own mind .
F
- Fixer: A broker of information, goods, and secrets. The middlemen of the underbelly who connect the desperate with the dangerous.
G
- Glitch: A break in reality, a symptom of the Rift’s influence. Also, a common insult for a useless person or a faulty piece of tech.
- Gutter Gospels: The sacred texts of the Ascended, written by the Carrion Prophet on sheets of scrap metal.
I
- ICE: Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics. The corporate security software that haunts the Interlink, waiting to fry the brains of clumsy netrunners.
- Interlink: The city’s augmented reality network. A ghost city of light, data, and glowing graffiti laid over the concrete one, where the digital war is fought .
J
- Jack In: To connect to a system, usually the Interlink. The first step of any run.
N
- Null State: A catastrophic system crash so total it wipes your own wetware (brain). The ultimate fear of any netrunner.
P
- The Pale: A common name for the Amber Wastes, referring to the color of the ash and the unnerving silence.
- “Pulling a Vance”: Street slang for a high-stakes, successful betrayal for personal gain. A backhanded compliment of the highest order.
R
- Rep: Reputation. The ghost currency of the city. The weight of your name. It can’t buy you a meal, but it’s often the only thing that will keep you from becoming one .
- Ripperdoc: A black-market cybernetics surgeon, found in places like Spinal Tap.
- Rift: The wound in reality. The source of the Blight, the Whispers, and everything else that wants to kill you.
- Riftspawn: The creatures warped by the Blight. Not just mutated animals, but life re-engineered into alien blueprints .
- Runner: A street-smart, cybernetically enhanced city native. A courier, a smuggler, a thief—a survivor of the urban jungle.
S
- Scar: A chosen subculture. The brand you burn onto your soul to cope with the world.
- Static: The digital noise between the corporate networks; the psychic dissonance from the Rift. The place where the Whispers live.
V
- Vaulted: The clean-blooded corporate elite, born in the sterile spires and ignorant of the real world below.
W
- Wetware: The biological components of a cybernetic system, i.e., your brain.
- The Wisp: The street name for the Narrator AI, the ghost in the machine that seems to guide the city’s story.
Z
- Zeroed: Killed. Erased. Your story ending in a flatline.
[TRANSMISSION END]
