Chez grew up in District Seven (D7)—the city’s rusted artery where clean circuits go to corrode. D7 is where half-finished infrastructure meets illegal relay nests, where grease is currency, and air is laced with solvents no filter bothers to scrub. It’s the underside of the lattice, noisy and forgotten, but alive with people who hack survival into the seams.
The Nest is less a workspace and more a shrine to entropy: mismatched monitors glowing like aquariums, fans howling, rackmount corpses scavenged from server farm graveyards. Chez hides here not out of cowardice, but necessity. His talent—reading ghosts in code, tracing anomalies that shouldn’t exist— makes him too dangerous for public work and too valuable for the wrong eyes. So he vanishes underground, soldering junk into signal until the signal talks back.
D7 doesn’t tolerate prodigies. Every skill is a price tag. Chez learned early that his ability to map anomalies in code was less a gift than a beacon—drawing hustlers, syndicates, and corporate black-baggers. The basement shields him. It eats sound, leaks heat, and keeps him below the scanners that roam the streets for unsanctioned signal.
The Nest is Chez’s rebellion and his confession booth. Every fan blade, every mismatched monitor, is a talisman. When he stumbles on the Canvas Protocol anomaly, it’s not just data. It’s proof that ghosts burn, flesh wakes, and the empire built on compliance is flawed.