Linked Pages

Kai enters carrying two coffees. Elara hasn’t moved from her screen. The knowledge graph now fills a wall-mounted display — thousands of nodes pulsing softly.

KAI How big is it?

ELARA Twelve thousand pages. Cross-linked. Every document references others — backlinks, citations, provenance trails. It’s like someone built an entire second internet and hid it.

Kai sets the coffee down, leans in. His glasses reflect the graph.

KAI Who built it?

ELARA That’s the thing. The metadata is stripped, but the link structure… look at this.

She zooms into a dense cluster. Red nodes pulse at its centre.

ELARA These twenty pages? Every other document in the archive connects back to them within three hops. They’re the foundation. And they all reference something called “Project Loom.”

KAI (quietly) Loom. I’ve heard that name. Ten years ago, before they shut down the Civic Data Initiative.

He straightens up. His expression has changed — no longer curious. Worried.

KAI Elara, who else knows you found this?

Kai's Apartment

Kai’s Apartment

Kai’s modest one-bedroom above a bookshop on Tenth Street. Bookshelves cover every wall. A corkboard by the desk still holds pins and string from his last investigation — a story on the Civic Data Initiative that was killed before publication, three years ago.

First seen in Opening.

The Hacker Space

Elara’s basement apartment, repurposed. Three monitors, a wall-mounted 65“ display for graph visualisation, and more cables than furniture. The windows face an alley. Good for privacy, bad for ventilation.

The ISP connection runs through a chain of anonymising relays, but the physical address is on Elara’s lease — the weak link that forces their evacuation in The Trace.

Primary setting for Opening, The Archive, and The Trace.

Backlinks

Kai's Apartment The Hacker Space Elara Voss