Every character is certified by the same system, and each one pays for the proof in a different currency: a streak, a file, a number, a supper, an archive. Click any card to expand.
June Marlowe
Folk singer, forty-seven, playing rooms a third the size of the ones she played at thirty and filling them better. Her comeback runs on a daily ritual: up before the house, tea, and a song sung for a system that scores her against thirty years of notebooks. The streak sits in the ninety-eighth percentile of working artists, and she checks it the way other people check the weather.
Appears in: The Audit Tier
Ellis Brandt
Spectrum auditor, fifty-two, who played bass on June’s second album and left music when the money did. He rates campaigns on nine axes and keeps his judgments inside them, because the one time he reached outside the axes for an old friend, in 2029, he softened a rating and has carried the file ever since. He does the arithmetic the job asks for and tries not to do the arithmetic it doesn’t.
Appears in: The Audit Tier
Priya Nair
Head of audience at Halloway Media, keeper of the number that decides whether June’s next album exists. She bought the grief segment, built the listening party out of it, and drove out to the farm herself to say so, carrying the thank-you letter the campaign produced. She withholds nothing except the parts that are not hers to tell, which is its own kind of disclosure.
Appears in: The Audit Tier
Dorothy Kessler
Widow, sixty-eight, of Macon. The campaign found her on the second evening of the wind-down, at the hour the house goes quiet, and put June’s voice at her supper table all October. She wrote to the label to say thank you. On the third evening she made soup and set the table for one, on purpose, and ate with the record playing. Whatever the spectrum calls the road it took, the help arrived.
Appears in: The Audit Tier
Wrenfield
A synthetic act with a label, a catalog, and a provenance archive deeper than any human’s on the roster: eleven years of dated drafts, process logs, and a consistent performing identity, none of it old enough to have flooded. Wrenfield passed a full authenticity audit the same season June’s shoebox of notebooks was still drying out. The audit summary is three sentences long and contains nothing false.
Appears in: The Audit Tier