Eight feet of armoured, four-armed, silent competence — a Xaexs mercenary is the kind of asset you only notice after you've already lost whatever you were trying to protect. They operate alone by preference, communicate via telepathy, and are believed to reside deep in the murk when not in Hellsborough on assignment. Whether they can fly is a matter of speculation; the Xaexs have declined to clarify.

Rarely glimpsed but theoretically everywhere, the nascenti run Hellsborough the way a landlord runs a property portfolio: through surrogates, through the infrastructure, and through a story so well-rehearsed that most tenants believe they're free. According to their preferred lore, they forged humans in their own image — revisionist biology that requires considerable faith in both their aesthetic standards and their capacity for modesty. Their strongholds lie beneath the reservoirs; their eyes are the organic network itself.

¢hits — Hellsborough's murk-charged cryptocurrency — do not look like money in the physical sense; they look like a quality in the space around you that is slightly denser, slightly warmer, slightly more organised. Accumulate enough of them and you risk becoming what the old players call a crypto-blub: a murk-entity so saturated with ¢hit-charge that the distinction between what you are and what you own becomes, as the manuals put it, "technical rather than practical." The murk notices the transfer. The murk always notices.

Pip's working hypothesis — written down, so it counts — is that consciousness is a quantum state and the soul its emergent property, which means that barghests and murk wraiths are only theoretically possible if consciousness survives death, and consciousness only survives if the quantum mechanics hold. Multiple copies of a person would produce multiple souls, linked by entanglement in the way that nothing inconvenient in Hellsborough ever fails to be linked to something else. Sophie Hinchcliffe was reconstructed from DNA with no access to her prior memories: whether what returned was Sophie, or merely a very accurate guess, remains an open question.