Data-Divers (Grey-Scavengers)

Category: [FACTION] Type: [Subculture, Profession]

1. Summary

Data-Divers (often derogatorily called “Grey-Scavengers” or “Rot-Miners”) are specialized recovery experts who physically infiltrate “Hot Zones”—derelict stations, server farms, and habitats abandoned during the Wildcode Crisis—to extract Pre-Crash data cores. Because active digital networks in these zones are often infested with dormant or evolving Wildcode, Divers rely on strictly analog, hydraulic, or mechanically-hardened equipment to bypass security seals and physically remove storage media without triggering a digital infection event.

2. Data Block / Key Parameters

Relevant Equations (Risk/Reward Calculation):

• Retrieval Value ($R_v$): \(R_v \approx P_{base} \cdot (D_{TB}) \cdot (1 + \frac{I_{risk}}{10})\)
  • Where $P_{base}$ is the current market price per Terabyte of verified uncorrupted data. The table’s 50-500 kJC per Petabyte is this base price (50-500 JC per TB), not the realised value. The risk factor multiplies it by up to $1 + 10/10 = 2$, so a realised haul tops out near 1 MJC per Petabyte, against a Sol median wage of about 45,000 JC per year. One Joule-credit (JC) is a claim on 100 MJ of delivered electricity.
  • Where $D_{TB}$ is the data quantity in Terabytes.
  • Where $I_{risk}$ is the “Infection Risk Factor” of the zone (0-10 scale).

3. Narrative Detail & Context

The profession of Data-Diving emerged from necessity in the decades following the Grey Crash. With the global internet fractured and high-bandwidth transfers restricted by the legal grey line (10 Gb s⁻¹ per channel; the physical wildcode threshold is 20 Gb s⁻¹) under the Wildcode Safety Protocols, the vast oceans of knowledge trapped in Pre-Crash server farms became buried treasure.

A typical Diver does not look like a hacker; they look like a deep-sea welder. They wear bulky EVA suits stripped of advanced HUDs or wireless comms, with water-jacketed, hydrogenous shielding panels in place of old-fashioned lead (hydrogen-rich shielding stops the neutrons and secondaries that dense metal merely scatters). They rely on hardline tethers and, in pressurised sections, localized acoustic signaling; in vacuum they fall back to helmet-to-helmet contact and taps on the hull. Their “deck” is not a computer, but a hydraulic breaching spreader and a magnetic containment cask.

The primary danger is not just physical collapse, but the Wildcode itself. In the few “Grey Reefs” that still have a live power source, the code has evolved in the dark, repurposing automated maintenance drones or station defenses to protect its physical substrate. Evolving wildcode needs a power and bandwidth budget above the physical threshold (about 20 MW and 20 Gb s⁻¹), so an active reef needs a surviving plant: a still-running fusion module, or roughly 5 × 10⁴ m² of intact solar array at 1 AU (about 20 MW at 30% efficiency). Every other pocket is dormant, hibernating as low-power “amoeba modules” until a Diver’s gear or a careless uplink aggregates enough bandwidth to wake it. A Diver cannot bring a modern digital computer into these zones; if they do, it becomes a vector. Therefore, a Diver’s skill set is paradoxically archaic: they must be able to pick electronic locks mechanically, navigate by physical landmarks rather than GPS, and manually patch life-support systems that haven’t seen maintenance in centuries. Derelicts abandoned in 2066-2078 are 140 to 275-plus years old across the 22nd to 24th centuries (about 240-250 years in 2320, nearly 400 by c. 2460). Their archival media survive because they were never the live, volatile drives: fused-silica and ceramic archival glass, mask-ROM vaults and sealed crystal cartridges, held cold, dark and dry in vacuum, outlast flash and disk by millennia.

4. Canon Hooks & Integration

• Interaction with Canon Tier 1 (Wildcode Limits): This profession exists because of the Section 6 Safety Protocols. Petabyte-scale transfers over open networks are slow, expensive and illegal rather than impossible: 1 PB (8 × 10¹⁵ bit) takes about 4.6 days at 20 Gb s⁻¹ and about 9.3 days at the 10 Gb s⁻¹ grey line, and a multi-day sustained flow at that rate is exactly what the redline filters and the Keeper Wardens look for. A crystal cartridge in a courier’s hold is quicker, cheaper and unwatched, so physical extraction is the usual method (legal or illegal) of recovering lost history or tech.
• Blue-Fire/HSA Synergy: Recovered cores are often too dangerous to read immediately. They are sold to “Cleaners”—technicians operating Blue-Fire/HSA sealed cores—who scrub the data of viral logic before it enters the public market.
• Fences and halls: Divers who find the Cleaners’ rates poor sell to the fences of the Grey Syndics; the Guilds of the Sphere do not count Divers as members, though the Engineers’ Guild issues a hazard ticket that many carry.
• Economy of Scarcity: The “Used Future” aesthetic is reinforced here. Divers provide the supply of “refurbished” schematics that keep the galaxy running.
• Story Seeds:
  • The Honey Pot: A team of Divers finds a pristine Pre-Crash bank server, but the “vault” is actually a lure created by an evolving Wildcode entity trying to find a way off-station.
  • Analog War: A rival salvage crew sabotages a Diver’s hydraulic rig. With no digital diagnostics to tell them what’s wrong, the protagonist must troubleshoot the failure using pure mechanical engineering principles while their air runs out.
  • The Ghost Signal: A Diver recovers a “Live” core that begins to thermally manipulate the temperature of their ship, attempting to communicate via Morse code on the thermostat.

5. Sources & Version History

• Inspirations: Industrial saturation diving, “The Kipple” (Philip K. Dick), Alien (retro-tech aesthetic).
• Version: v0.1 - Initial Draft Proposal. [NEW-PROFESSION] [NEW-FACTION]
• Version: v0.2 (2026-10-10): Numbers review: salvage dates, data-transfer times, grey line vs wildcode threshold, shielding, Joule-credits, casualty split, by Claude (Opus 5.5 brief, Sonnet 5.5 drafting), commissioned by the Starrunners’ Council.