The crystals hummed. Not audibly—not with human ears, anyway. Rynn felt them in her teeth, in the fillings that Marcus had installed when she was eighteen, a cheap job that still occasionally ached when the weather changed or the signal got strong.

She held one now in her palm, turning it slowly between her thumb and forefinger. Two centimetres across, clear as glass, and inside her the nano-laser etching had carved lines finer than a human hair. Each line was a word. Each word was a piece of forbidden knowledge.

This crystal contained a recipe for clean water filtration. The kind that could have saved half the people in Chicago's Sector Four. Obsidian Data had classified it as "unstable information" because the water company's algorithm flagged it as a threat to their monopoly.

Rynn placed the crystal in the decoder. The machine whirred, the laser array aligned, and the data bloomed on her screen in streams of green text—hundreds of lines of code, instructions, schematics. She copied it to a personal drive, wiped the decoder's cache, and stood up.

The server farm below her was humming. Dozens of racks, each one packed with recycled processors that kept running long after they should have been replaced. This was the kind of place Obsidian called "cognitive pollution" and the people who lived here called home.