Inside the lattice, illumination and transmission are the same event, and every useful signal is also a beacon. Light stabilises perception, reveals geometry and slows identity loss, and it broadcasts the Operator's position to anything listening. Darkness conceals the carrier and accelerates identity loss, because it removes the visual references T-Link uses to verify a mind.
The flashlight is a carrier-wave transmitter. Motion such as sprinting or boosting leaves a transient path trace.
Entities and light
The Banshee is docile until lit. The Specter is displaced by direct light. A lit Reclamation takes up and mends nothing. The Sounding puts every light in the ring out, the suit's included, each time it sounds.
In other hands
CALIBRATION operatives carry the Carrier Lamp, the Mark VII's carrier flashlight turned into a tool: a held carrier-wave beam that burns what it lights and resolves it at once. Contractors on Recovery contracts strike cutting torches whose light stops at walls, and anything standing in it is easier to hit, including the contractor holding it. On the surface, the guards beneath the lit floor carry lamps whose beams can be watched, and a scavenger who switches off the headlamp is harder to find.
The fixed trace
The transient trace has a counterpart. An operative that holds its coordinates transmits a steady trace, and the breach reads it. See the fixed trace.
See also
Records cited
- LP-MAN-1993-S7, canonical incident record
- The setting bible, section 5.1
- Critical Response field manual, WEAPONS