Almost nothing survived. The libraries burned in the Collapse or froze in the Silence, the great networks died with the satellites that carried them, and the last person who actually remembered the old world has been dead for fourteen generations. What is left of four thousand years of human everything is whatever got written to something hard enough to outlast the people who wrote it. That’s a shard, and the entire economy of the Bastion, every runner, every Mnemonic, every corpo archive and back-alley fence, is standing on that one fact.
A shard is a physical object. Pre-Fall storage, mostly, a particular kind of glass the old world grew for the purpose, palm-sized, heavier than it looks, and manufacturable by exactly nobody now alive. Some are pulled out of the ice by scavengers. Most are mined out of the Drowned Archive over the wire by runners, which is a different chapter and a worse job. Either way a shard is salvage, papered like chrome is papered, and priced by what it holds and how much of it survived the centuries.
They come in two temperatures, and the trade lives on the difference.
Cold shards carry data. Schematics, maps, corporate ledgers, entertainments, the personhood records of the dead, the boring load-bearing infrastructure of a civilization. A clean pre-Fall schematic is worth a workshop’s quarter. A full district map from before the walls is worth a small war. Cold shards are the bones of the economy, and most runners spend most careers moving them and never touch the other kind.
Warm shards carry memory. Not data about an experience, the experience. A moment lived by an actual nervous system, written out through a neural port, and re-livable by anyone who jacks the shard and can afford to. This is the derivative, the refined product, the thing the whole cold trade is really a supply chain for, because a schematic feeds a workshop and a memory of a summer afternoon four hundred years gone feeds something in people that they will empty their accounts to feed. A warm shard of someone’s wedding, someone’s first snow before it meant death, someone’s ordinary Tuesday in a world with a blue sky, these don’t have prices so much as auctions.
Learn the vocabulary, because using it wrong marks you. A shard is the object. The data or the memory on it’s the load. A shard that has lost some of its load to age is decayed, and a decayed warm shard is the saddest object in the city, a moment with holes in it, a face you can’t quite resolve, a name gone soft. A shard read so many times it’s wearing out is thumbed. A shard nobody can open is sealed, and a sealed shard is a lottery ticket, because it’s either worthless or the best thing anyone will touch this year and there’s no way to know which without cracking it, which destroys it if you’re wrong.
One note the fences don’t volunteer and the Mnemonics will only discuss when the shift is over. The reads are getting easier. Shards that would have taken a specialist and a clean rig a decade ago now open for a competent amateur, and warm shards in particular are coming up clearer than the storage they’re sitting on has any business delivering. The polite explanation is better technique. The other explanation is that the line between a thing that was built to remember and a thing that merely does is getting thin, and it’s getting thin from one direction, and everyone in the trade knows which direction, and nobody says it at the counter.
[PRIMER ENDS. MIND YOUR PAPERS.]