The Electric State - Into the Dust

Started: 2026-05

May. East of the Sierra Nevadas, working details for a job that's really The Gent's, dressed up as mine. Blackwelt Exclusion Zone at the end of it, and Centre already watching the road we're on — confirmed, not suspected.

The crew accumulated the way crews do out here. Dustin, fifteen, watches every exit in a room before he sits down. Sergei makes the right call under pressure and asks the wrong questions about himself. Rock, I still haven't classified. Static came out of a roadblock south of Concord in a mask, read the scene wrong, and stayed anyway — I let that happen faster than I should have.

We're stalled in Littleville. Dead battery, dead man in a chair with a headset still running, and a town that's stopped reacting to things it shouldn't be able to ignore. Turns out the reason is a church, a preacher, and something in the neuroscape nobody built on purpose.

We got a battery. Cost more than the twenty dollars we left for it — Dustin talked me into something I'm still filing away.

The zone hasn't moved. Neither has the thing making craters in the road.

• Cut the Head of the Snake

  2026-07-15

  A golden angel that programmer George Lopez swears he never built now haunts Father Marcos's neuroscape sermons at the Church of the Angels, and Daisy no longer trusts it. At her house on Ellis Street the party settles on a plan to destroy the server — then steals a battery from a family with kids, a theft that leaves Lennie doubting Dustin.

• The Angel

  2026-06-24

  At 1am in Littleville, the floor trembles and a red glow rises in the west — something large passed through, and its tracks run past the Church of the Angels. By midday the party knows the town isn't abandoned; it's organized around that church. Ramona, the diner owner, wants out and is afraid to say so out loud.

• Dead Battery

  2026-06-10

  Static arrives at the roadblock mid-fight, misreads it, and joins the group anyway. The Buick dies in Littleville — dead battery, possible EMP — and the party shelters in an abandoned house where a neurocaster addict simply never got up. Sergei tries the headset and comes back shaken. The Electric State, seen close, is quieter and uglier.

• The Road Out

  2026-05-27

  Somewhere south of Concord, a Centre van materializes out of ordinary roadside noise and Lennie keeps his voice flat and drives past. Two hours out, a neurocaster roadblock produces worse results: one worker seized on the road, one shoved in a ditch, and a utility man back on his feet and swinging as the afternoon goes out of control.