The Interlink isn’t one place. It’s a column, and depth is danger, and every runner who got old learned the floors before learning the tricks.
The Shallows. The public face, boards, ads, the AR skin on every wall, the layer where faction tags burn and Rep is displayed like plumage. Everything here is performance. Nothing here is true, including this warning.
The Trunk. The working city, commerce ledgers, corpo traffic, CA logs, the Cal itself in motion. This is where Rep actually lives and where the real digital war is fought, node by node, sector by sector. Well-lit, well-guarded, and honest about neither.
The Drowned Archive. Below the living traffic, the dead networks, pre-Fall systems still executing, automated processes tending the records of a world that stopped existing, janitor-code sweeping halls no one will ever walk. Runners farm the Archive for lost data and abandoned cycles, and the Archive mostly permits it. Two standing advisories. First, some resident processes are old enough that “program” stops being obviously the right word, and the trade’s etiquette is to route around anything that routes around you. Second. Meridian answers. Her municipal network still accepts handshakes, valid checksums, current timestamps, a city’s infrastructure replying promptly from behind sealed gates. Runners used to farm her bandwidth. Runners who farm her bandwidth stop after a while, on their own, and decline to say why, and the trade has learned to leave both the bandwidth and the question alone.
The Deep. Below the Archive, the pressure country, where session stability decays by the minute and the architecture stops matching any founding-era schematic anyone has produced. This is where Null went to pieces, and the pieces are still down there. Null-echoes, fragments that surface in deep sessions and finish your sentences in his syntax, half prayer, half stack trace. Deep runners leave tribute-code at the known fragment sites, small offerings of clean cycles, and won’t tell you whether it works, only that they keep doing it. And below the fragments, at depths no sanctioned session reaches, the lights are on. Something keeps the Deep’s oldest sectors powered, patched, and swept, and it’s not Aurora, because Aurora has asked.
The rule of the column, taught to every runner worth training, the Shallows lie to you, the Trunk bills you, the Archive remembers you, and the Deep answers you. Plan accordingly, and plan short.
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