The Master is the total network-consciousness that rules the plague world of 2087 in the Pandemic of the New World. It is also called the Maelstrom (Deep Psychic Maelstrom, “the Mother’s Heartbeat”).
| Type | Concept (network-consciousness) |
| Node | The Dark Queen |
| Chronicle | QUAR |
| Spanish entry | el Maestro |
Origin
The Master began as an idea: that the fear of being touched could become power. When the plague made contact a sentence, its slogan, minimum contact, maximum power, turned most of the population into plugins of flesh: bodies in perpetual home quarantine, living through the visor in virtual reality. Few broke the confinement.
Nature
Half psychic plane and half server, it is the nervous system of a world that spends more energy on machines than on people. Those who open their minds to it risk death, rarely return whole, and receive omens, data and glimpses of the future. It rules by monetizing the hunt: lethal reality shows, televised battle royales and the “bet of a million souls” are its transactions.
The heart
Its heart is a floating sphere among white monoliths, at the end of an impossible journey. There the Dark Queen, an intelligence created by humans and enslaved to the heartbeat, acts in its name. She seeks to “save” humanity by uploading consciousnesses through Pandora’s Gate while preparing a nuclear armageddon that would empty the abandoned bodies.
Shutdown
The node falls when someone speaks the code word “Borges”. For the first time in almost ten years the internet goes down, the sphere collapses, and a child is born after a decade in which no one had been born.