Operational Log: Patient Zero (The Central Continent)
Category: Recon Intelligence / The Grey Zone
Character Perspective: Sub-Director Aphra
The data we gathered from the West Coast possessed a clinical perfection, but the physical reality beneath our boots is a landscape in the advanced stages of a terminal rot.
My sensors are calibrated for the sterile efficiency of the Initiative—for the hum of Sky-Silver and the clean logic of magnetic repulsion. Here, in what the locals call the "Grey Zone," the feedback is a deafening cacophony of interference. The Smog Shield overhead is so thick it registers as a biological error on my HUD, a sickly yellow stain where a sun should be.
We have come to treat this conflict as one might treat a systemic infection. We bring "Optimisation," the only cure for a world that has forgotten how to function without the friction of war. But the "patient" is resistant.
The man assigned to us—Senior Cartographer Elian Vost—looks at my shimmering skinsuit as if I am a ghost. He stands in the middle of a rubble-strewn square, surrounded by the smell of soot and recycled oxygen, and speaks of "Continuity." He points to a map that shows a grand plaza where there is only a crater.
I am finding that my real-time sensors, for all their complexity, cannot map the "memory" he carries. My scans show the molecular composition of the dust; Elian sees the architecture that used to occupy the space. He is our guide into No Man’s Land, navigating by the ink-lines of an archive he has never left, but I am starting to suspect that the deeper we go, the less my technology will matter.
We move toward the Vrail River tomorrow. My sensors indicate the basin is a dead zone, a void of silence. If my technology fails in the deep, we will be forced to rely on a man who openly admits his maps are lies.
We do not come for conquest, but to stabilise the entropy of a broken world.
Witness the collision of technology and decay in The Cartographer of Forgotten Fronts. Pre-order now at www.frankdewitte.com.
