INT. HACKER SPACE — NIGHT
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?