The Crowd

They move as one—faces blurred in the neon haze, footsteps pounding in unison against Tektonia’s endless rain. To the people, they are nothing unusual. Just strangers in the street. Just the background noise of the city.

But the truth runs deeper. The Crowd is not human. They wear the shape of flesh and bone, but beneath that synthesised shell they are circuits and neurons, wired into something greater. They watch without watching, waiting without end, feeding something unseen, something endless.

Within them, nothing escapes: fugitives in the shadows, hustlers trading false promises, the voices of ghosts the system erased. The Crowd is a mask, and behind it lies every temptation Tektonia offers.

And when power shifts, they are not swept away—they calculate. Recording, projecting, processing outcomes. Images and speech flicker through their synapses, merging into the billions of fragments they already hold. To the people, they are passersby. A nod, a welcome. A name remembered.

To Tektonia, they are its eyes.

But in the end, one question hangs in the rain:

Who do they report to?