Glossary

Anchor also: anchor couch

The medical and neural support system that keeps a Vector's native body alive, stable and monitored while their attention is elsewhere. An anchor isn't the connection itself — it's the life-support bed underneath it. Losing a good one is its own kind of danger.

Cinder formally: CNDR

The colloquial name for operators of Britain's original remote-manoeuvre programme — soldiers who fought wars through Frames stationed millions of kilometres from their own bodies. Thomas Rook is a Cinder. The programme's later, more stable successor is a very different thing, and the difference matters to everyone who served in the first one.

See also: Successor · Crown

Common Dawn

A movement, part political and part violent insurgency, built on the argument that Concordance has made ordinary people dependent on infrastructure they will never be allowed to own or control. Its methods are not endorsed by anyone in this story. Its diagnosis is harder to dismiss.

Concordance

The network technology — built on matched, unique cores — that allows instantaneous connection across distances that would otherwise take light itself years to cross. Concordance is the wiring. What travels through it, and what that does to the person on the other end, is the rest of the series.

See also: Continuity

Continuity

Not the network — the person using it. Continuity is the persistence of a self across embodiment: whether the mind that wakes up in a distant Frame is still recognisably, legally and psychologically the same person who left the native body behind. It's easy to move a body. It's not always easy to bring a person with it.

Cross-framing

Moving directly from one connected Frame into another without a full, stabilising return to the native body first. Faster. Also considerably more dangerous — overlapping body-maps, phantom limbs, and the occasional uncertainty about which body you're actually in.

Crown

Shorthand for the British military and governmental chain of command that originated the Cinder programme and now runs its successor. Colonel Strake answers to it — or believes he does.

See also: Cinder / CNDR · Successor

Frame

Any remote or engineered body a person can occupy through Concordance — from a purpose-built military platform to a piece of industrial salvage equipment. Not every Frame was built to hold a person. Some hold something else.

See also: Primary · Vector

Hard return

The abrupt, unplanned snap back into one's native body after a Frame is destroyed or a connection is severed without warning. It is rarely gentle, and it often brings the last few seconds of the lost body's experience along for the ride.

See also: Severance

Native body

A Vector's own original, biological body — the one waiting behind, tended by an anchor, while its owner's attention is somewhere else entirely.

PED

Colour-coded emergency stimulants used by Cinder operators to sustain performance — in a Frame or in native flesh — well past where the body would otherwise give out. Effective. Not free. Everything a PED buys, something else eventually collects.

Praxian Praxian Systems

A transnational commercial power with interests across freight, underwriting, Concordance certification and continuity medicine — and, less publicly, an armed expeditionary branch of its own. Praxian answers to no single government, which is precisely the point.

Primary

An individually calibrated Frame built for one specific person's sustained, long-term use — the closest thing to a second body a Vector can have. Losing one is not the same as losing equipment.

See also: Frame

Severance

The forced, deliberate cutting of a Concordance link — as opposed to an ordinary, planned withdrawal. Where a hard return is an accident, a severance is a choice someone made.

See also: Hard return

Successor

The later generation of Crown-engineered operators, designed to avoid the instabilities that came with the original Cinder programme. Newer, steadier and — depending on who you ask — missing something the first generation had.

See also: Cinder / CNDR

Titan Crown Meridian

The distant industrial power that holds a near-monopoly on manufacturing the matched cores Concordance depends on. A very small polity, made indispensable to the rest of human civilisation by what it alone knows how to build.

Vector also: vectoring

A person actively embodying a Frame through Concordance — and the act itself. To vector somewhere is to send your attention, not your body, and trust the difference won't cost you anything. It usually does.

See also: Frame · Native body