"They recruit from the margins — people the system has decided are expendable. Janus may have just contacted them. Maybe." — Narrator reference,
narrator-faction4.txt
Overview¶
The Fabric is a decentralised intelligence network. It has no headquarters, no public name, no registered legal existence. It operates in the spaces between the factions and corporations — through dead-drop buoys, rotating ciphers, and people who look like maintenance technicians.
It is not a faction. It does not hold territory. It holds information.
Operations¶
Communication infrastructure: - Dead-drop buoys on pirate frequencies - Rotating cipher keys, distributed by unknown protocol - Human couriers operating under cover identities
Recruitment: The Fabric recruits from the system's expendable population — people the factions have discarded, people deep in Apex debt, ex-military on bad contracts, maintenance workers in the wrong place at the wrong time.
People who have nothing left to protect by staying invisible.
Intelligence focus: Suspected to be aggregating information on the Flicker across all three factions and three megacorporations simultaneously. Whether they are doing this to sell it, act on it, or simply to know it is not established in current canon.
The Emergency Relay Transmission¶
Hephaistos-9's maintenance terminal has an emergency relay — a short-range burst transmitter capable of pinging Fabric dead-drop buoys on pirate frequencies.
Activating it does two things:
- Announces Janus's existence and location to the most dangerous information network in the system
- Increases the probability that someone outside the system's official power structures knows the data module exists and has left the station
This is either very good or very bad. The story does not resolve which.
Relationship to Other Entities¶
| Entity | Relationship |
|---|---|
| Rust Alliance | Suspected overlap in membership and operations |
| Vanguard Orbital | Active adversary — Vanguard hunts Fabric nodes |
| Praxis Biomechanica | Subject of significant intelligence-gathering effort |
| Janus | Possibly just recruited himself, unknowingly |
| The Flicker | Unknown — Fabric frequencies are adjacent to Flicker signal bands |
Open Questions (for future stories)¶
- Does the Fabric already know about Project Flicker?
- Who built the Fabric, and when?
- Is the Allianz immunity to the Flicker known to the Fabric?
- What does the Fabric do with what it knows?
- Did someone in the Fabric know about Hephaistos-9 before the kill team arrived?
See also: Factions | Characters | The Flicker