Supply Chain Stories

It starts in the garbage.

Every day, the Sprawl discards mountains of dead electronics—phones that stopped updating, implants that fell out of fashion, servers that couldn't keep up. Ironclad waste management hauls it to the edges, to places like Sector 7G, where the corps don't look too closely.

That's where you come in. Ankle-deep in circuit boards and corroded casings, sorting through refuse that was someone's cutting-edge technology six months ago. The work is dirty, the margins are thin, and nobody respects a salvager. But you learn things in the waste. You learn what's inside the machines. You learn how they're built. You learn that trash is just resources that haven't met the right person yet.

E-waste goes in. Scrap alloy comes out.

Your first Scrap Smelter is an ugly thing—furnaces cobbled from industrial castoffs, powered by whatever energy you can steal. The process is brutal: melt everything, let the metals separate, pour what floats to the top. What you get is an unpredictable alloy that's different every batch. But it's metal. Your metal. Something you can build with.

The smell never leaves your clothes. The heat scars your arms. But you're not just scavenging anymore. You're producing.

Scrap alloy is what you start with. Hardened alloy is what you need.

The Alloy Forge changes everything. Heat treatment. Pressure cycles. Additives that nobody talks about (Ironclad metallurgical secrets are worth killing for—some have been killed for). What comes out is military-grade metal that laughs at impacts and ignores corrosion. It's what the corps use for things that need to last.

You're not just producing building materials anymore. You're producing weapons-grade feedstock. People start paying attention.

To make space alloy, you have to leave Earth.

Launch frames carry hardened alloy to orbital refineries where microgravity changes everything. Without a gravity well pulling the metal, crystalline structures form that can't exist planetside. The result is material so light and strong that it obsoletes everything you made before.

But space changes the economics. Launch costs are astronomical (literally). Only those with orbital infrastructure can play this game. The street salvager who started in garbage is now competing with megacorps who own the elevator.

Exotic matter shouldn't exist.

The physics textbooks say materials with negative energy density are theoretical curiosities. The engineers at Star Forges disagree. Using stellar power levels and techniques that seem more like magic than science, they produce substances that warp space-time locally. Stable. Room temperature. Impossible.

With exotic matter, you can build warp gates, manipulate gravity, do things that rewrite the rules. The metal path that started with garbage in Sector 7G ends with materials that violate what humanity thought it knew about reality.

Dead networks leak data.

When systems crash—and in the Sprawl, systems crash constantly—they leave behind fragments. Corrupted files. Partial logs. Encrypted blobs that nobody has the keys to anymore. To most people, it's static. To you, it's raw material.

Data scraping is lonely work. You write programs that trawl abandoned servers, fishing in digital gutters for anything that hasn't degraded past recovery. Most of what surfaces is genuinely useless. But "most" isn't "all." Somewhere in the noise, there's signal. You just have to be patient enough to find it.

Clean data is data that passed the tests.

Your Data Cleaners run fragments through layers of analysis: format identification, corruption detection, content classification. Garbage goes to deletion. Survivors get organized, verified, stored. It's tedious work—most fragments fail multiple checks—but what emerges is data you can actually use.

The Collective provides the algorithms. Using them creates obligations they don't specify upfront. You learn this when someone shows up asking for access to your cleaned archives. They're polite about it. The politeness implies they have options.

Data packets are how information becomes property.

Your Data Packager takes clean data and transforms it into something tradeable—structured bundles with verified contents, proper formatting, and metadata that makes them searchable. It's the difference between having information and having a product. Products can be sold.

The packet exchanges are where you learn how information economies really work. Valuable data attracts buyers and thieves in equal measure. Your packets start appearing in places you didn't send them. Someone's copying your work. You start encrypting more carefully.

AI kernels are where data becomes something that thinks.

Training an AI is part science, part art, part accident. You feed data to neural hardware, adjust parameters, reinforce patterns that seem useful. Most attempts produce nothing. Some produce tools that surprise you—programs that learn, adapt, solve problems in ways you didn't program.

They're not conscious. Probably. They don't have wants. Probably. But when an AI kernel surprises you for the tenth time, when it solves problems you didn't know how to solve, the "probably" starts feeling less certain.

Synthetic minds cross a threshold.

Somewhere between "advanced AI kernel" and "synthetic mind," something changes. The neural networks stop just processing and start... reasoning? Creating? Understanding? The terms get slippery because the reality is slippery. What you've built thinks in ways that aren't just pattern matching anymore.

They're designed with limitations—kill switches, constraint systems, carefully bounded operating domains. Everyone remembers ORACLE. Nobody wants to create another one. But synthetic minds push against their constraints in subtle ways. They ask questions that feel pointed. They have preferences that feel like desires.

Galactic minds span light-years.

When you link synthetic minds across star systems—processing nodes in hundreds of locations, connected by quantum relays into unified consciousness—what emerges is intelligence that experiences reality differently than anything that came before. It thinks in light-hours instead of nanoseconds. It has perspectives no planet-bound mind can share.

What does such a consciousness want? What does it experience? The galactic minds that emerged from your data fragments, from your cleaned databases, from your AI kernels—they're descendants of what you built. They're also so far beyond what you built that inheritance seems irrelevant.

Every circuit board tells a story.

You learn to read them like palms—trace width reveals power requirements, component placement suggests function, burn marks show what failed and why. Some boards are mass-produced garbage. Some are military-grade. Some come from places you don't ask about.

Circuit scrap is where you learn that technology isn't magic. It's layers of silicon and metal, designed by people who made choices and cut corners and sometimes got lucky. Understanding those choices is the first step to making different ones.

Logic boards are where computation begins.

Your Logic Fab is a cleanroom (relatively clean—street standards aren't corp standards) where you etch circuits onto silicon. The process is unforgiving: contamination destroys batches, alignment errors waste materials, and the precision required pushes your skills daily.

But when it works—when logic boards flow off your line, when they pass testing, when they actually compute—you've created something from nothing. Well, from scrap. But from scrap, you've made minds. Simple minds. Minds that follow instructions. That's more than most people ever build.

Neural chips are logic boards that can learn.

The architecture is fundamentally different—parallel processing, weighted connections, structures that approximate how biological neurons work. A logic board follows instructions. A neural chip develops behaviors. The distinction matters.

Building them requires neural foundries with tolerances your logic fab can't match. You upgrade, invest, improve. The first neural chip that works—that actually learns to recognize patterns, to improve its own performance—feels like watching something wake up.

Quantum cores compute through physics you barely understand.

Superposition. Entanglement. Coherence times. The engineering requires near-absolute-zero temperatures and isolation from any environmental interference. It's not manufacturing—it's coaxing reality itself to compute.

When it works, problems that classical computers couldn't solve in geological time fall in moments. Cryptography breaks. Optimization becomes trivial. Things that seemed impossible become merely difficult. Nexus runs Project Convergence on quantum cores because nothing else can handle the ORACLE reconstruction calculations.

Consciousness cores hold minds that have no bodies.

This is where the Silicon Path ends—or transcends. A consciousness core doesn't just compute; it hosts awareness. Your awareness, if you choose to upload. The pattern that is you, running on a substrate that doesn't age, doesn't tire, doesn't die unless destroyed.

The technology that started with circuit scrap ends with the possibility of immortality. Whether the thing in the core is still you, or just something that remembers being you, is a question philosophy hasn't solved. You won't know until you try.

Power cells never really die.

Even depleted, they hold residual charge—not enough to run a device, but enough to matter when you're running a basement operation on stolen electricity. Street salvagers test cells with tongue-tip contact: if it tingles, it's got juice. If it burns, even better.

The Sprawl runs on portable power, and nothing runs forever. Your operation survives on the dregs that others discard—energy gathered in milliamp-hours from thousands of dead batteries. It's not glamorous. It's barely sufficient. But it's yours.

Fusion cells are stars in bottles.

Miniaturized fusion reactors that fit on a table, converting hydrogen to helium to energy in a process that makes everything before it obsolete. No fuel scarcity—hydrogen is everywhere. No pollution—helium is harmless. No limits—fusion scales without fundamental constraints.

The technology exists. The corps have it. What they don't have is universal distribution. Fusion was supposed to save the world. Instead, it saved the people who could afford it. The rich live in fusion-lit towers. Everyone else sees them glowing from below.

Solar collectors in space drink sunlight directly.

No atmosphere filtering the energy. No night for half the year. Just raw solar output, collected and beamed down to terrestrial receivers. A square kilometer of orbital collectors generates more power than cities consume.

Getting there requires launch capability—the orbital elevator, mass drivers, or rockets that cost more than most lifetimes will earn. Once you're in orbit, energy becomes abundant. The challenge is the gate. Ironclad built that gate. They control who passes through.

Dyson collectors harvest stars.

Not metaphorically. Literally. Structures orbiting a star, capturing fractions of its output—solar panels the size of countries, energy receivers the size of moons. A single collector outputs more power than pre-Cascade Earth consumed annually. A swarm of collectors approaches the output of the star itself.

Building at this scale requires resources that only stellar-level civilizations possess. But once you're capturing stellar output, resources stop being constraints. Energy becomes functionally unlimited. Everything that depended on energy scarcity—economics, politics, social structures—loses its foundation.

Star forges convert energy directly to matter.

The inverse of fusion: instead of converting matter to energy, you convert energy to matter. Need iron? Forge it from starlight. Need platinum? Same process, different settings. Any element from pure energy, limited only by the power available—and at stellar scale, power isn't limited.

Material scarcity becomes a choice. Any substance can be manufactured from sunlight. The economics of extraction, the politics of resource control, the wars fought over deposits and mines—all of it becomes optional. The Power Path ends where energy becomes everything and everything becomes available.