The Transaction
On the morning of her fortieth birthday, Oren Vasquez-Mbeki — operating under the identity "Nkenna" — paid ¢340,000 to disappear.
The service is called "full erasure." Deletion of all behavioral models from commercial databases. Replacement of all historical telemetry with synthetic noise. Installation of Tier 3 privacy masking firmware. A new identity. One firm offers it, operating from Zephyrian legal framework through a corporate shell that exists for the seventeen minutes each transaction requires.
Nkenna was a Senior Inference Analyst at Good Fortune — one of the people who built the behavioral models BehaviorExchange trades. She understood, with professional precision, exactly what she was paying to destroy. She saved for seven years. The ¢340,000 was her total accumulated wealth.
Everything she had ever earned. For the right to be unobserved.
The Morning After
Sector 7G, 08:17 — First Walk as Nobody
She stepped into Sector 7G's 28°C warmth without generating a telemetry trail. Doors that didn't anticipate her. Advertisements on walls that didn't know her preferences — displaying generic loops, the same ones they show to tourists and the very poor. The subtle cognitive shift of not being predicted: every decision felt heavier because no algorithm was offering suggestions. The data weight was gone. So was the scaffolding.
"I thought it would feel like freedom. It felt like falling." — Nkenna, on her first morning as an invisible person
No one predicted her route. No advertiser purchased her attention. She was, for the first time since age eight, genuinely alone. Not "alone in a crowd" — the way everyone is alone when the system knows exactly where they are. Alone the way pre-digital humans were alone. The way an animal is alone. No model of her existed anywhere. The Sprawl's vast intelligence looked through her like she was furniture.
What Full Erasure Costs
The Credits
¢340,000. Seven years of savings. Every promotion, every bonus, every hour of overtime at Good Fortune. The money was the easy part. Money is just numbers. Numbers can be earned again.
The Identity
Oren Vasquez-Mbeki ceased to exist in every database, every model, every predictive system. The name still exists — on old documents, in the memories of colleagues — but the data identity, the version of her that the Sprawl's systems recognized and served and tracked, was replaced with synthetic noise. She became Nkenna. A person with no history.
The Certainty
This is the cost Nkenna talks about most. Not the money. Not the name. The certainty of being seen. The surveillance system is oppressive, yes. It is also orienting. It tells you where you are. It tells you what you're worth. It tells you that you exist, that you matter enough to be watched. Remove it and you remove both the oppression and the ground beneath your feet.
The Gradient's Full Traversal
Nkenna moved from a Privacy Index of approximately 28 — a mid-level corporate employee with standard monitoring, ad targeting, and behavioral prediction — to effectively 0. Off the gradient entirely. The full distance, traveled in seventeen minutes.
Most people move a few points on the gradient over a lifetime. A promotion adds monitoring. A neighborhood change adjusts your exposure. The wealthy buy partial masking. The very wealthy buy selective invisibility — disappearing from specific systems while remaining visible to others they find useful.
Nkenna didn't move along the gradient. She fell off the edge of it.
The Honest Recruiter
Nkenna is not The Opacity Movement's best recruiter. She is their most honest one.
The Movement's standard pitch is about rights, about dignity, about the fundamental wrongness of total surveillance. Nkenna's pitch is different. She tells people exactly what privacy costs. Not the credits — the other thing. The certainty of mattering.
"Privacy costs everything, not just money. It costs the certainty of being seen." — Nkenna, to a prospective Opacity recruit
She has talked more people out of full erasure than into it. The Movement considers this a feature, not a failure. The people who hear Nkenna's full account and still choose disappearance are the ones who won't come back six months later, desperate and broke, begging to be re-entered into the system. They're the ones who understand that the falling feeling is permanent.
Aftermath
Freedom as Vertigo
The surveillance system watches you, predicts you, nudges you, scores you. It is oppressive. It is also the only solid ground most Sprawl residents have ever known. Nkenna discovered that removing the system doesn't reveal the person underneath — it reveals a void where the system used to be. The freedom is real. So is the freefall. Neither one ends.
The ¢340,000 Severance
Not a purchase. A divorce. A final, irrevocable separation from the system that raised you, fed you, watched you, valued you, and never once asked if you wanted to be watched. The receipt is a severance agreement. The terms are non-negotiable. The settlement is everything you have.
The Question Nobody Asks
Everyone asks Nkenna if she regrets it. Nobody asks the more interesting question: does the Sprawl notice? When one person vanishes from every model, every database, every prediction engine — does the system register the absence? Or does it route around her like water around a stone, filling the space instantly, as if she had never been there at all?
Connections
- Devi Okonkwo-Chen — Offers a less radical alternative at The Mirror Market. See your model rather than delete it. A different answer to the same question: what does the system think you are?
- Oren Vasquez-Mbeki — Built the behavioral models at Good Fortune that Nkenna paid to escape. Their stories bracket the Transparency Bargain from opposite ends: the architect and the refugee.
- The Opacity Movement — Nkenna became their most honest recruiter. She tells people what the brochures leave out.
- The Privacy Gradient — Nkenna traversed the full gradient, from Index ~28 to effectively 0. The gradient was designed to describe a range. She found the edge.
Unverified Intelligence
- The firm operating from Zephyrian legal framework has reportedly processed fewer than two hundred full erasures in its existence. Nkenna's was not the most expensive. It was, according to one source, the most thorough — because she knew exactly which models to target and in what order.
- Good Fortune's internal records still list an Oren Vasquez-Mbeki as "on leave." The HR system has not been updated. Whether this is oversight, institutional denial, or a quiet act of remembrance by a former colleague is unknown.
- Nkenna's former behavioral models — the ones she built at Good Fortune, not the ones built of her — are still in active use. She designed prediction systems that track millions of people. The irony is not lost on her. She has said, once, that the models work better than she'd like.