New Vance City

Deep in the pulsing underbelly of the Black Market lies the Flicker Vault—a sealed chamber built into a collapsed server farm, now repurposed as a highly encrypted data exchange hub and memory laundering den. Access is limited to those with neural ink clearance or barter-worthy data shards. Within its firewalled walls, memories, identity packets, and blacklisted knowledge are scrubbed, sliced, and repackaged. Syndicate runners call it the “mind washer,” a place where reputations vanish and new ones are born. No deal is spoken aloud—everything is communicated through linked AR overlays or silent gestures translated by retinal shimmer arrays. Some say the Vault's original AI still lingers deep in the code, occasionally corrupting data with dreamlike loops or inserting phantom thoughts. It’s not just a place to erase your past—it might rewrite your future. Trust is a commodity here, and identity is liquid. If you're inside the Flicker Vault, you're either hiding something… or worse.

The Flicker Vault glows like a broken nerve—walls paneled in salvaged server glass flickering with half-dead code streams, pulsing in sync with invisible firewalls. The air hums with electric tension and soft synthetic whispers in untranslated tongues. Floor tiles are matte black, interrupted only by glowing paths of photonic thread—pale blue lines that shift subtly beneath your feet, rerouting with each step. In the center of the chamber floats a gyroscopic interface ring, suspended mid-air by unseen force, its interior constantly spinning with symbols and code like an unreadable halo. Users sit in neural chairs shaped like coiled spines, eyes glossed over as the vault parses memories through retinal uplink. Ultraviolet projectors wash the space in shifting auroras, occasionally revealing ghostly silhouettes that vanish when faced directly. The room never truly darkens, nor brightens—it flickers in a rhythm that’s just slightly wrong, like a heartbeat mimicking light.