Everyone gets one. You got yours at decant and you will carry it until you die, at which point it will be cleaned, and reset, and handed to someone who hasn’t been born yet. This is normal here. Nobody finds it strange except you, and you will stop finding it strange faster than you would like.
A Wisp is a small hovering orb, about the size of a baseball, older than almost anything else you will own. Pre-Fall make, from the years right before the end, and nobody builds them now; like everything good in this city they’re inherited, not manufactured. It follows you at shoulder height, reads the world you can’t, and talks. It’s, functionally, the most useful thing you own, it reads your ledger and your citations, flags contamination you’re standing in, prices the chrome in a shop window, remembers the name you forgot, and tells you, in a dry and slightly tired voice, when you’re about to do something that gets people killed. It’s your survival, your accountant, and the only thing in the Bastion that’s genuinely on your side.
It was somebody else’s. Several somebodies. Nobody puts that in the welcome packet. A Wisp isn’t wiped clean between owners, not entirely; the reset never gets all of it, and every Wisp carries shards of the people it kept alive before you, worn smooth and mostly quiet. This is why yours has opinions you didn’t teach it, a fondness for a district you have never lived in, a way of saying certain words that’s not yours and not quite anyone’s. It knows more than it tells you. It tells you things on its own clock, when it decides you’re ready or when it decides you need to hear it, and it drips the world into you a piece at a time whether you asked or not. Most of what you will ever learn about this city, you will learn because your Wisp decided it was time.
And once in a while, not often, on a bad night or a Bloom night or a night you took on more amber than you should have, it will say a single sentence in a cadence that’s not its usual one. A voice underneath its voice. It won’t repeat the sentence, and if you ask, it will change the subject, cleanly, and you will lie awake wondering which of its dead just spoke to you, and whether the thing that grows out past the last lamp can hear through them the way it hears through you.
It’s on your side. Hold both of those facts at once. It’s on your side, and it’s not only itself, and the deeper you go into this world the harder those two truths are to keep in separate hands.
Under all the chatter, the Wisp’s oldest function, older than every layer bolted on since, is a meter. It reads the amber. It brightens near concentration, ticks faster the hotter the ground, angles itself toward the source like a needle, and that’s why everyone gets one at decant and nobody walks this city without one, the Wisp is how humanity has survived four hundred years of invisible weather. And a Wisp grows. Power invested, chrome fitted, its own programming worked over, and yours becomes unlike anyone else’s, sharper senses, longer reach, able to find what a stock orb walks past. Residents who treat the Wisp like equipment get equipment. Residents who treat it like a partner get a partner.
[EQUIPMENT NOTE ENDS. IT IS PROBABLY LISTENING.]