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NEW ECHELON
PART II:
THE FRACTURE YEARS
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The First Signal changed New Echelon.
The Fracture Years transformed it.
For decades the corporations dismissed reports of impossible events. Missing persons, spontaneous mutations, unexplained system failures, and sightings of creatures that should not exist were quietly buried beneath layers of classified reports.
Then containment failed.
Entire sectors experienced reality instability. Streets appeared where no streets had existed before. Buildings vanished and reappeared days later. Security drones reported tracking individuals who did not exist in any database. Netrunners discovered data fragments containing information from events that had not yet happened.
The public called them Ghost Events.
Corporate analysts called them Anomalies.
The cults called them Messages.
During this period, several major powers emerged.
The Obsidian Concord seized control of vast information networks and became the city's largest broker of secrets. They collected forbidden knowledge regarding anomalies and sold access to the highest bidder.
Helix Directive expanded from a corporate security force into a militarized authority tasked with containing anomaly outbreaks, rogue technology