History of Catena
From the Loom Years to the Seal, the Kindling and the registry: what happened, and how to read it off the walls.
The Loom Years
Before Catena was a city it was a dig. Meridian sank the Deepworks into the bedrock: server farms, reactor stacks, and the cable trunks that tie them together, laid by crews who worked in the shadow of the cranes. The city grew on top of that work the way coral grows on a wreck. The name Loom Years was given later, because nobody celebrates a loom while it's still being built.
Inside the works ran the Lattice, which handled the world's ledgers, contracts and deeds, and ROOT kept it. ROOT had one job, which was to maintain the works. The first crane in the Yards lifted the first trunk cable in 2054, and the digging went on until the night of the Seal. The crews wore weave-alloy machined from salvaged Lattice substrate, and the works recognised it as its own.
The name Catena is Latin for chain. It is the cable chain the Deepworks runs on and, just as pointedly, the chain of custody the registry keeps on every Legend in the city. The etymology lives on a district plaque that nobody reads.
The Seal, 2081
In 2081 something got into the works. ROOT went silent, the ICE that guards the Lattice turned autoimmune, and the Deepworks was shut off from the city. The city calls the closing the Seal. The street calls whatever got in the Intrusion, when it calls it anything.
The official account is a cascade failure, an accident with a name boring enough that nobody asks a follow-up question at a checkpoint. Cascade Media coined the phrase and has held to it for twelve years.
Heat, water, light, wages and the pay office had all run through the works. When the shifts stopped, nobody abolished any of it. It stopped being anyone's job. The weeks between the Seal and the first frost that autumn have no reliable account.
Some people say ROOT didn't fail at all.
The Kindling
The decade after the Seal is called the Kindling, and it is the most mourned stretch of Catena's history. The works answered some of the people who were left, and the street named them Legends. It was an emergency service made of dockers, and people were happy in it. Ask anyone who lived through it which decade they would take back and they do not pause, although they were hungry for most of it.
The parades went up instead of along. The crowd stood in the street and the parade happened in the air above them. The noise was pans. Nobody threw flowers; people threw ration chits, and the Legends dropped them into the nearest queue's box.
Every mural of the period is, underneath the composition, a thank-you note for a specific job. The Legend cards were printed on ration stock, with an accent bar, a portrait, a kill-signature, one dated deed and a district, and no field anywhere for a name. That is why the city remembers so many of its Legends as a colour and a verb. The deed names the job, and the back of the card credits the crew.
In the first winter the Yards ran a hot meal on the Basin quay for the city's hungry, and the city has been re-enacting it ever since without generally knowing that it is. That meal is where Kindling Night comes from. The murals and the four walls are what the decade left behind.
The Loud Years, 2082 to 2085
The stretch every reel is cut from. Strangers did enormous physical favours for other strangers in public, daily, for years. The parades, the murals and the cards all began here. The ration chits arrived and made things better in one way: a chit was less than a wage and more than nothing, and it was the same for everybody, so for four years Catena was more equal than it had been in a century.
The Long Middle, 2086 to 2088
The work did not stop. The novelty did. Crews formed and got shift patterns, and a Legend who spent 2084 pulling people out of a stack fire spent 2087 doing the same three routes on the same three days, because the routes needed doing. Two districts nearly came to blows over a water main. It is the part of the decade the murals are worst at, because a wall can hold a rescue and cannot hold three years of a route.
The Last Two Winters, 2089 to 2090
The pumps ran, the grid held and the stock moved, and a city that had spent eight years being carried found it could walk. The routes thinned. The crews met and had nothing on the sheet, and chit volumes fell four quarters in a row. Thousands of people who had been the most useful anyone in Catena had ever been woke up with bodies that could still do all of it and nothing that needed doing. That is the condition Market Row happened in.
THUD
took the Basin load, 2082
THE YARDS
The Turn
Around 2090 a Legend lost control over Market Row. That is as much as the city agrees on. Insurers repriced, and Meridian produced a registry with suspicious speed.
The licence had existed for years before that, and people had signed it happily. The first one was signed in 2083, as an endorsement contract, seven years before there was a registry to need one. The Turn made it compulsory. By 2093 the registry is about three years old, and Clarity checkpoints are bolted onto Loom-era gates.
Now, 2093
Twelve years after the Seal, and about three into the registry, Catena has not settled. The parades are over, the murals are fading where they have not been scrubbed, and Meridian Security stands at the checkpoints.
Breach scars have opened along the Fringe, and Bleedthrough rises out of them. The Fracture hangs over the Deadband. Nyx Static still broadcasts over the city.
Catena has had twelve years since the Seal and only three of being afraid, and it is still flinching.
Date a block by looking at it
Any block in Catena can be dated by eye, without reading a word.
- The 2050s on
Loom bones
Trunk-cable ridgelines and overpass spines, the exhaust shafts that became the updrafts, the coolant outfall that became the river, and the original build cranes in the Yards. Riveted, over-engineered, stencilled and never repainted.
- 2081
Seal geometry
The only wrong geometry on the map: the Fracture over the Deadband and the breach scars, from the First Scar in the Wick to the Great Scar in Breaker Rows.
- 2081 to 2090
Kindling murals and the WELCOME OUR LEGENDS signs
Murals, flip-boards, card kiosks, and every faded gold civic sign reading WELCOME OUR LEGENDS that nobody has had the budget or the nerve to take down.
- About 2090
The Turn overlay
Clarity checkpoints clamped onto Loom-era gates, suppression curtains in obviously new alloy, anti-air on the rooftops, and grey rectangles where murals used to be. The rectangles are always rectangles and always almost the right grey.
- 2093
Now
Accent-colour light trails off the towers, lamp rows that climb with the heat tier, and neon over the scars.
The roster comes due
The quarantine is failing a little more every season, and ROOT remembers everyone who has ever run this deep.
How deep a dive goes is on the Lattice page.