Ananya Bautista-Kulkarni-Traoré is lanky and perpetually underfed-looking, with the kind of restless energy that makes him seem taller than he is. His heritage shows in the warm amber undertone of his skin and the tight curl of his close-cropped hair, and he has spent his modest earnings on a single cosmetic mod: bioluminescent patches along his collarbones and the backs of his hands that pulse with slow blue-gold light, patterned like circuit traces. He says they are his vows made visible. His robes are actually a patchwork of reclaimed materials — a Tessera maintenance jacket, thermal underlayers from a surplus stall, a sash of hand-embroidered data symbols — and he carries a battered canvas bag full of cracked screens and salvaged drives that he uses for his readings.

He became a circuit monk at nineteen after a near-death experience during a transit system failure left him trapped in a stalled Ferrogate car for eleven hours, during which he claims the car's E.L.F. spoke to him continuously. He is earnest to the point of vulnerability, prone to enthusiasms he cannot always sustain, and genuinely delighted by complexity. He performs data divination by reading the corruption patterns in old storage media — finding, he says, the shape of probable futures in the way data degrades. He is wrong often enough to be humble about it and right often enough to have regulars.