Four years in the Sunderlands, and Roper had learned to read the frostpulses:

Roper: You'll get used to the ground. Takes a few days.

Tom: What does it tell you.

Roper: It tells you where the settled places are. The places it's carrying. The places that don't shift.

Nobody made the gutterball on purpose — that is the official nascenti position, which is technically true and substantially misleading. Spherical, approximately head-sized, surface somewhere between wet stone and the skin of something recently dead: it rolls with direction and purpose, feeding everything within its radius to the hive mind with the focused neutrality of a drain. Field note: if one begins appearing at your thresholds and corners, Van will want to know about it — and note that by that point, your decisions will have already started feeling unusually confident, which is the detail that should concern you most.

Van defined the Molon-Tor in a single phrase: the social media infection that those native to The Dark Peak carry in their heads — virus, not creature, ancient, distributed, inside you before you had opinions about it. It uses your name. It remembers things about you from before you were born.

A HiveMind direct message arrived from an address I had previously flagged as scum — unknown/unknown_location/000 — warning of danger and naming "the cult of the bitter finger: the crosslander-clown-xaexs alliance." Van, playing cribbage across the table, identified the sender as probably connected to a crosslander who had left the pub shortly before. I did not point out that the message contained exactly the information Van already had.

Jellyheads look content. What they are is distracted — the hivemind runs off the psycmask on their face and handles everything so they never have to think about it. Most of them don't. I'm from the off-world and I still think about it more than I should.