The Maelstrom is the psychic vortex of a post-apocalyptic world: a distributed network, part surviving technology and part shared “psychic soup”, through which people think, communicate and heal. “The maestrum is all of us.”
| Type | Psychic network |
| Spanish entry | El Maelström |
Description
No one has seen it. Witnesses describe what plugs into it (a virtual-reality “tubar helmet”, devices, gadgets) or “a little dot” on screen in front of it, monitored and erased. Its inside is named as a substance: “psychic soup”, “the center of the magnet”; messages arrive signed “P.S. — psychic soup”.
Nature
It is “analog digital”, obsolete but still reachable technology, born of the technology use that made everything post-apocalyptic; a place “where the algorithm came later”. When the collapse took the other networks, this one remained. Its layers are the inherited infrastructure, the common soup in which everyone is a node, and individual access (helmet, gadgets, VPN and triangulation, or simply an open mind).
It has no center: each person is a slave node of a greater power. It is wherever most people are during the quarantine, and at least one point is planetary: “worldwide SIGCA vortex”.
Uses
- Opening a secure channel, as Taito was ordered to do; consulting; tracing infrastructure; reaching a device’s communication source, such as the zeppelin’s.
- Healing: savvyheads open themselves to it in connection with the sick.
- Shibuya acts, with augury, on the network identified with it.
An alphabetical directory files each matter as “sections or convolutes of the maelstrom”. One rule holds: trying to change anything at the center of the magnet changes oneself too.
Limits and threat
“The maelstrom is connectivity. It is not everything that happens.” It can turn hostile, destroying communications and disabling hacks (“the maestro is beating us”; “old enemy of mine”), yet it also generates solutions. Some oppose it directly, along with “that whole Orwell company”.
Open questions
- How it feels from inside, and whether it is a power, creature, place, process or network, is not settled.
- Whose is its hostile will, its own or a controller’s, is unknown.
- No convolute entry is recorded, nor their number or who assigned them.
- How the Orwell relates to it (administers, exploits, or operates within) is unresolved.
- Whether it preexisted the technology or arose from its ruin is unknown.