OMNI CORP — EMPLOYEE COMMUNICATIONS CLASSIFICATION: Tier-2 — Personal Correspondence, Routine Review SENDER: Employee ID 0451, Sky City Operations RECIPIENT: [REDACTED] — registered residential address, non-corporate zone DATE: 4093-09-14 NOTE: Flagged by automated filter. Reviewed. No action required. Filed for record.

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Mom —

I know it has been a while. I am sorry for that. The hours here are not what I expected and by the time the shift closes I am usually too tired to do anything except eat and sleep and then do it again. That is not an excuse. I am going to be better about writing.

I am finding my footing. Slowly. But I am finding it.

Sky City is not like home. I do not think I understood that before I got here, I think I thought I understood it and I was wrong. The scale of it is the first thing that gets you. Back home you can see where the city ends and the clouds begin. Here you cannot. It just keeps going in every direction, up and down and sideways, and somewhere underneath all of it there are levels I have not seen and levels I have been told not to ask about. You stop trying to understand all of it after a while. You just find your section and you learn it.

The other thing is the tension. Corporate tension. I do not want to alarm you because I am safe, I am in a desk role, I am nowhere near anything dangerous but I want to be honest with you because you always told me to be honest. Corporate warfare here is not the abstract thing it sounds like from back home. It is present. You feel it in the city. There are days I walk to the terminal and I can tell something happened the night before just by how people are moving. Nobody says anything. You just know.

It scared me at first. Still scares me some days.

But here is what I hold onto, and I mean this, I believe in what Omni Corp is doing. I know that might sound like something they make you say and I understand if you are skeptical. But the Director spoke to the new intake last month and he laid it out plainly. The weapons we produce are keeping streets safe. Our enforcement units go into the radiation zones places nobody else will go to pull resources that keep this city running. We maintain presence all over. We are doing the work that makes the lights stay on and the corridors stay open. That matters. I feel that.

The companies that make it harder - Viro, Rance I have seen enough already to know they are not interested in what is good for this city. Viro turns everything into a spectacle, turns people into entertainment, makes violence into something you are supposed to cheer for. Rance is worse. I do not have clearance to know everything about what they do but what I have seen and heard around the floor is enough. They are not building anything. They are tearing things down and calling it strength. Every time something goes wrong in this city there is usually a Viro or Rance signature somewhere behind it. Omni Corp is trying to hold something together that those two are constantly pulling apart. I believe that.

I have to believe that. It is what gets me up in the morning.

They told us first promotion comes after ten years and honestly I am excited about that. Ten years to learn everything. Ten years to become someone who actually knows what they are doing before they hand you real responsibility. Some of the new intake grumbled about it but I think they are missing the point. I have watched the people here who earned their way up and you can tell they carry themselves differently, they know things, they have weight to them. I want to be that. Ten years is not a sentence, it is a runway. I am going to use every bit of it.

Speaking of learning , I made a friend. His name is Rael. He is a big deal in Unit 44 which is the field operations arm, the people who actually go out into the city when things need handling. He has taken an interest in showing me how things work beyond the desk level. The operational side of things. He says I have good instincts and that I should think about whether I want to stay administrative or eventually push toward field work. I do not know yet. But I am listening to everything he tells me. You always said the most important thing in a new place is to find someone who knows it better than you and stay close to them. I found that person.

Tell Dad I said hello. Tell Asha that I still owe her that call and I have not forgotten.

And Mom, will you please tell Cole something for me? Tell him I am doing fine, and tell him I have been thinking about what he said before I left about wanting to come to the city someday. Tell him that offer is real. If he ever decides he is ready to leave the solar farm, I can put in a good word for him here at Omni Corp. I mean that seriously. He is smart and he works hard and this place rewards that. I know he always had that itch. The city is not easy but it is alive in a way that is hard to explain until you are inside it. If he wants in, I will help him get there.

I love you. I miss you more than I expected to and I expected to miss you a lot.

I am going to be okay.

— H

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OMNI CORP — EMPLOYEE COMMUNICATIONS Correspondence reviewed. No policy violations detected. Filed under: Employee Records / Personal / Routine. Flagged terms: Unit 44 (cleared — general reference), corporate tension (cleared — no specifics disclosed), radiation zones (cleared — public knowledge). No further action required.

PERSONAL LOG — UNSANCTIONED TERMINAL: Floor 7, Station 14 DATE: 4093-07-22 NOTE: Not a formal filing. Not for distribution. I’m putting this down because I want to remember it correctly.

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Word got around the floor that there was a jazz bar in East Borough called The Dive. Not the kind of rumor that comes with a recommendation exactly — more like something someone heard from someone, passed along with a shrug. Me and a few people from the department decided to go on a Friday. We don’t usually go east. There’s nothing pulling us there work-wise, and East Borough doesn’t have the kind of infrastructure that makes it a destination. Retail. Residential. Old blocks that haven’t been redeveloped because nobody’s made the calculation that they’re worth redeveloping yet.

The Dive was real. That part wasn’t a rumor.

It was a good bar. Low ceiling, good sound, the kind of place that’s been exactly what it is for a long time without anyone trying to make it something else. The owner was there — you could tell he was the owner without being told. Dignified is the right word. Not flashy, not performing anything. Just a man who knew the room was his and didn’t need to announce it. He nodded at us when we came in. That was enough.

We had a table near the back. The music was good. I don’t know the names of the players but they were serious about what they were doing and it showed. For about two hours East Borough felt like the best part of the city.

Then the gang showed up.

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We at Omni Corp don’t really think about them too much. They’re a family run gang that usually stays at the street level in East Borough. Since their territory is so small and we usually don’t have much there except retail and residential, most of the corps don’t bother with them — there are bigger fish to fry.

What is known though, and what I think about sometimes, is that while information about them is small, they seem to have tier-3 data for most of their units. The only other gang with that level of classification is Cortex. And civilians haven’t really seen any of Cortex before.

I don’t know what to do with that. I just know it.

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There were maybe eight of them. They came in, ordered drinks, spread around. Talked to the owner like they knew him. The room didn’t change much. They weren’t there to cause anything, they were just there.

We stayed.

At some point I noticed the two men near the entrance.

One of them I’ve actually come across before — an old man in a wheelchair. He looks fairly competent and elegant. The kind of man you look at and just know has seen things. He was watching the room easy, like he was comfortable anywhere.

The other man was with him the whole time. Trench coat. Never left his side.

That guy looked dangerous. I’ve never seen someone look intimidating without ever having a posture that was aggressive like that. He was calm. Almost too calm. Just standing there, not scanning, not posturing, not doing anything that should read as a threat. And yet.

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We left when the set ended. Nobody stopped us. Nobody followed us. The man in the wheelchair didn’t acknowledge us at any point. The man in the trench coat never looked at us directly.

I don’t know who they are. I don’t know why tier-3 data exists on a family gang in East Borough. I don’t know what the connection is between those two things.

I’m filing this because I want it written down somewhere. Not in the system. Just somewhere.

If I’m wrong about what I saw, this is nothing. A Friday night in a good bar.

If I’m right about what I saw, I want there to be a record that I noticed.

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— Personal log, unsanctioned. Floor 7, Station 14. Not for distribution.

PERSONAL LOG — UNSANCTIONED TERMINAL: Floor 7, Station 14 DATE: 4093-06-01 NOTE: This document is not an official Omni Corp filing. It was saved to a personal directory and is reproduced here in full. It has not been forwarded to a floor supervisor.

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I read the Viro Weekly thing. The Forge interview. And I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel watching that and being told that’s the best the Deathbowl has ever looked.

I grew up on DF. The Death Federation. Before the elimination rule, before the kill counts, before Viro Corp turned the whole thing into a product with a face on it. I was a kid watching this thing on a corner terminal with whoever else was around and it felt like it mattered. Like what happened in that bowl actually meant something because it could go anywhere.

You had 10 Ton Hammer. Ten feet tall. I don’t know what he was where he came from but he was dominant. At one point people said he just was born from the radation zone and hell with the way he was built I woud belive that in a heartbeat.

But the only person who ever made me want to tune into DF day in and day out was The Duke.

Duke was the golden era. I’ll die on that. His reign was the only time in Deathbowl history where every single fight felt like it could go either way and I watched every match. Duke and 10 Ton going at it was the kind of thing you don’t get anymore because you can’t manufacture it. You need two people who are actually that and you need a format that lets the story build. No elimination rule meant people came back. Grudges accumulated. Duke didn’t just beat 10 Ton once — they went at each other across seasons, across years, and every time felt like it was building toward something.

Duke had a rogues gallery. The Devil Lord. The Phenom. Opponents who had their own weight, their own story, their own reason to be there. You beat the Devil Lord and it meant something because the Devil Lord was something. You had to actually be better than a real thing to prove you were real.

Elias Forge beats tech suit number three hundred and calls it a dynasty.

Four titles. I’ll give him the four titles. But against what? The field now is thin in a way that the DF field never was and everyone acts like that’s Forge being that good when really it’s Viro Corp having hollowed out the competition to make sure their guy looks unstoppable. The other corps don’t develop their athletes the way DF developed its roster. They throw someone in a suit with a sponsor logo and put them on the floor and when Forge kills them in the second round the Viro Weekly calls it another dominant performance.

The elimination rule killed the Deathbowl. That’s my actual opinion. The kill count became the metric and the kill count favors whoever Viro Corp built for killing. It doesn’t favor stories. It doesn’t favor someone coming back after a loss with something to prove. You’re either alive or you’re not and next week there’s a new tech suit with a different number and Forge dismantles it and we’re supposed to be impressed.

I’m not impressed.

The new Deathbowl doesn’t hold a candle to DF and I will say that to anyone who asks and some people who don’t.

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— Personal log, unsanctioned. Not for distribution. If you found this in the filing system, mind your business.

I started work at Omni Corp around 4091. Originally, I was just a solar farm worker, but I moved to the big city 3 years ago. Hasn’t been so bad around here, other than the gang violence. The police force is usually pretty competent, but sometimes there is some ruckus from the gangs around our area. I’m usually in the business of going through company emails. They have given me tier two access, which is a pretty big deal. My whole goal is to make sure that Omni Corp is safe from the auditors. They are really heavy on thought transmissions being clear to avoid angering the overlords. Tbh, I’ve never seen a single entity above the Director of Omni Corp, so I have no idea what they mean by that, but hey, that’s above my pay grade.