Three strangers each hold one piece of proof that Arcadia's water is being poisoned on purpose, and the team has to chain the pieces and move them somewhere the Calderwood Foundation cannot bury, before VERDANT's suppression queue scrubs the trail and the city's disclosure law puts the carriers in quarantine.
The Situation
Cedar Row has filed water-taste complaints for three months, and Helen Okoro's council folder holds eight years of the same handwriting. The Calderwood Foundation, which by Arcadia charter runs every contamination investigation in the city, answers each complaint with a maintenance tag and a VERDANT readout that calls the water clean. The water is gray at best. The Foundation and its SCA exchange researchers seed the watershed at night to grow an independence network, and someone has taught VERDANT to intercept every biological alert in three thousandths of a second, faster than a night-shift tech can read it off the board. Three people in three districts each caught a different edge of the truth this week, and none of them knows about the other two. The team has the gap between now and the next Foundation lab sweep to put the three together.
Objectives
- Primary · Chain three linked pieces of proof that the contamination is deliberate, and hand the chain to a venue the Foundation does not control, before the suppression queue erases the source data. Say it plain at the table: prove the poisoning is on purpose, then get it somewhere they cannot tag and quietly file.
- Secondary · Keep the three sources out of a quarantine hold, and get a sealed copy to the Understory so the truth survives even if the team is taken.
The Clocks
- Main · The Suppression Queue. A burn counter from 0 to 6. It ticks up one each time the team runs a VERDANT query, transmits environmental data, or trips a faction's notice. At 3 the Foundation lab collects Lindberg's samples and Kovic's pipe housings for testing, and that physical evidence is gone. At 5 the alert logs scrub from the live system. At 6 the city's own records no longer hold the proof, and only what the team physically carries still counts.
- Disclosure · The Two-Hour Rule. The instant the team carries physical contamination evidence, a soil sample, a pipe housing, a hazard-marked container, Arcadia law gives them two hours to report it to the Foundation or stand as criminals. Run it as a four-segment clock that fills as they cross district lines. Fill it before they reach a safe venue and a Civic Authority interdict drops, with a fourteen-day quarantine hold waiting on the other side.
- Tail · The Liaison. The Cedar Row council liaison records meetings on a personal device and reports up. Work two sources in the open and the Foundation tail picks the team up. From then on, every Action in a monitored district adds one extra tick to the Suppression Queue.
Evidence Chain
The proof sits in three hands. Any single piece gets spun: natural adaptation, a retiree's nerves, a software tuning rule. Chained, it holds. The team gets three clean Actions before the burn forces the run to the venue. An Action is one of: work a source, run a query, or hit a site. Each Action delivers one piece and feeds a clock, so the table decides which piece to take clean and which to grab hot.
- The Signature (Dr. Maren Lindberg, Cedar Row, retired soil chemist) · three months of chemical signatures off Cedar Row tap water that match nothing in any Pacific Northwest database. Proves the contaminant is engineered, not native. A Foundation rep already came to her door about her soil, so working her in the open puts the tail on her.
- The Map (Ranger Kaya Whitfield, The Watershed) · injection sites logged on paper at exactly fifty-meter intervals, too regular for nature. Proves the contaminant is placed by hand on a grid. Getting it means a Watershed run, forty minutes out, thin comms, and chemical exposure near Station 2.
- The Buried Alert (Kenji Taniguchi, VERDANT night shift) · the classification rule that kills biological alerts in 0.003 seconds, with an override signature riding on it. Proves someone built the cover-up into the city's own AI. This is the keystone. Pulling it is a VERDANT query that ticks the burn hard, and Dr. Lian Zhao maintains the suppression queue herself.
Leverage Points
- Pavel Kovic's pipe housings (The Root) · four months of biological samples he sent to the Foundation lab three times with no result. A fresh, independent housing is hard physical proof, but carrying it starts the two-hour rule, and Kovic believes he is already exposed.
- Taniguchi's override signature · the name on the 0.003-second rule is the keystone and a face for the climax. Pull it and Dr. Zhao gets flagged, and Zhao can either hand over the detection patch she has drafted or close ranks to protect VERDANT's name.
- The Understory (Alicia Fonseca, Drift District) · they will push the chain to every district board in one night, which makes the truth impossible to bury and impossible to steer. Leak before the chain is complete and the Foundation accelerates the timeline.
- Sergeant David Park (NAF Civic Authority, Core) · his anomaly reports keep getting suppressed, and he found SCA hazard markings on a container he never filed. Worked straight, he kills one interdict. Used, he decides the safe move is to hand the team in.
- Zhao's detection patch · deploy it and VERDANT sees the organisms and timestamps the whole network, which turns the AI from the cover-up engine into the best witness the team has, and tells the Foundation exactly who flipped the system.
Opposition
- Calderwood Foundation contamination team (Calderwood Foundation) · runs the legal machine: maintenance tags, sample collection, the disclosure law. Wants sixty quiet days to critical mass. Flips to open pressure the moment the chain leaves their control. Folds if the override signature goes public before they can pin it on a scapegoat.
- Dr. Rafael Moya (SCA Technical Exchange, Station 2) · true believer finishing the network, will sign off on collecting any sample that reaches a lab. Will not negotiate. Right now he is hunting an internal traitor after finding Dr. Solberg's unauthorized data cache, so his attention is on his own people, not the team, until they surface.
- The Cedar Row liaison (NAF Civic Authority) · records council meetings on a personal device and reports up for the transfer he wants. Not a believer, a careerist. A credible story or a better offer turns him.
Climax Variable (d6)
Roll when the team commits to delivering the chain to a venue outside Foundation control: a Liberty Media journalist Miranda Calderwood flagged, a live council session, an Understory broadcast, or NAF federal.
| d6 | Twist at the delivery |
|---|---|
| 1 | The two-hour rule fills early. A Civic Authority interdict drops across the district line now, two segments ahead of the team's count. |
| 2 | The suppression queue hits 6 mid-run. Source data scrubs live, and any piece left as a digital copy is gone. Only what is in hand still proves anything. |
| 3 | Sergeant Park makes his call. Worked straight, he kills the interdict and walks the team through. Used, he is the badge at the door. |
| 4 | Dr. Zhao surfaces with the detection patch and offers to deploy it live. It proves everything, ends her career, and paints the team as the ones who turned VERDANT. |
| 5 | Moya works out the team holds the chain, not Solberg. The Foundation seals the venue inside a fresh contamination quarantine the team has to talk or cut its way out of. |
| 6 | The piece the team handed Fonseca already leaked. The truth is loud but unproven, the Foundation runs open pressure, and the team needs the keystone alert in the next scene or it all reads as rumor. |
Breadcrumbs
One thread pays off at the delivery: the override signature on Taniguchi's 0.003-second rule. Whoever's name sits on it is the authority that can quash the chain at the venue and the same authority that can drop the interdict. Pull it early and the climax has a face. One thread runs past the mission: the off-manifest container Moya signed for personally, wet inventory the manifest never lists, and the unknown buyer shipping biological material out of Arcadia to an SCA port. The poisoning does not only run inward. Someone is exporting the organism, and that question stays open when the session ends.
The Not-Line
This is not a whodunit with a hidden culprit. It is a timed race to chain proof that already sits in three people's hands and move it past the city's own suppression machine, before the disclosure law turns the people carrying the truth into the criminals.