The World

Post-2077. The corporate wars are over. Helix Industries won — not through military victory but through the more durable victory of becoming infrastructure. Its augmentation technology is embedded in millions of bodies across the city. Its surveillance architecture is embedded in everything else. The backdoors that Helix deploys in its neural implants and cybernetic hardware are not a vulnerability. They are a feature.

Street level is where everyone Helix doesn't need lives. The neon never stops — the sun hasn't been visible through the smog layer in a generation. Corporate towers run their branded lights through the permanent overcast. Below them: Amunations and its three mechanical locks, the eastern industrial district with plasma scoring on its concrete, the freight elevator platform where certain conversations happen without walls, the coastal shipping yards that smell like salt water and machine oil and old decisions. The safe houses built by someone who expected to die doing it and built them to outlive her anyway.

Technology operates in this world the way a revolver operates in a 1940s noir. Not explained. Present. Working on people. The neural implant, the augmentation registry, the surveillance architecture — these are furniture. You absorb them through context. That is intentional. The world is not a puzzle that requires solving. It is a place people live in.