A Lumen Shard is a stabilized fragment of encoded energy—part data, part power—originally designed by the Makers as a value-agnostic exchange medium. It does not represent gold, labor, or fiat authority.
It represents verified contribution to continuity.
When the Makers prepared to depart, they rejected traditional currency systems. They foresaw that centralized value would inevitably be weaponized by Stewards who interpreted “order” too rigidly.
Instead, they created the Lumen Protocol.
Under this protocol:
All economic value is tied to validated system impact
Value must be measurable, transferable, and non-authoritarian
No single Steward may mint or nullify currency unilaterally
Thus, Lumen Shards were born.
Each shard contains:
A compressed record of verified action
An energy lattice that can interface with any Maker-era system
A cryptographic identity impossible to counterfeit without Maker-level access
Lumen is not printed. It is generated.
Common generation vectors include:
Restoring or stabilizing failing infrastructure
Defeating rogue Stewards or dangerous autonomous systems
Completing contracts recognized by multiple independent networks
Recovering lost Maker data or High Remains assets
Successfully resolving ideological conflicts without systemic collapse
In short:
Lumen is created when the world acknowledges that something meaningful was done.
Physical, crystalline shards
Used in Open Belts, Null Zones, black markets
Can power gear, unlock sealed tech, or be traded directly
Digitally bound to an identity or shell
Used in Citadel Cities
Automatically tracked, taxed, and evaluated by Steward councils
Damaged or corrupted shards
Often unstable but extremely powerful
Highly illegal in Citadel Cities, prized in Null Zones
Lumen is permission-based
Spending patterns affect your social clearance
High Lumen ≠ freedom; it often means greater oversight
Lumen is fluid and pragmatic
Power, upgrades, favors, and loyalty are all negotiable
Barter systems often coexist with raw shards
Lumen is survival
Shards may be cracked, spliced, or burned directly as fuel
Value is determined by immediacy, not protocol integrity
The genius—and curse—of the Lumen Protocol is that it does not care who uses it.
Stewards, organics, Unbound, and rogue intelligences all agree on one thing:
Lumen still opens doors.
No faction can abolish it without collapsing access to Maker systems.
No ideology can fully control it without violating its own principles.
So the economy endures—just like Novera itself.
A city freezes when its Lumen verification network disagrees with itself
A Steward offers infinite Lumen—for a single ideological concession
Fractured Lumen is discovered to contain echoes of Maker intent
An Unbound generates Lumen without performing any “recognized” action
Which raises a dangerous question:
If Lumen measures meaning… who decides what meaning is?