QuarktoLabs

QuarktoLabs Advanced Laboratory—QuarktoLabs for short. An institution doing cutting-edge information and energy research, with normal staff, normal access control, a normal coffee shop downstairs.

Its most pressing research line right now is the neural-crystal interface: a chip implanted behind the ear that projects information straight onto the retina, with commands issued by thought. The thing is still experimental and not yet public, and the field in the lower right of the interface is still in the raw form engineers use for tuning parameters. Its security module was rewritten by the founder's own hand, top priority reserved for himself, so that in theory no module runs without his nod.

One other thing was set down in its internal protocols: a private signature called L.K.S._Core, written in 8 months ago, never published, never submitted to the Spectra main library.

Few people in the laboratory know what the founder really is. The assistant who has worked with him for 8 years is one of the few who know he has a setting called "offline status"—once he goes offline he can drop out of contact for days at a stretch, and she doesn't ask where or how long, she just executes whatever he's left her. When he travels far, all he leaves her is one encrypted message saying which items to push back and which to run as usual.

QuarktoLabs' other research line is alternative energy for the Source Stone. In a city with all its energy staked on Source Stone, a subject like that was only ever long-range planning, until stockpiles hit bottom and rationing tightened, and it abruptly became something people wanted.

The founder holds another identity in the city as well: the transport company that accounts for sixty percent of all electricity consumed here has him on its board. A man who has lived too long, long enough that he can no longer count his own years, needs a few signs that let him exist normally inside the main civilisation; QuarktoLabs is the largest of them.

The research it does is real, and the thing it hides is real. Where the line between them runs, even the people inside can't always tell.