# Communications Infrastructure: The Neural Nervous System

## Overview

GLMZ's communications infrastructure carries 4.2 exabytes of data daily — the equivalent of the entire pre-digital written record of human civilization, transmitted every 36 hours. The infrastructure is the city's nervous system: carrying BCI communications, financial transactions, surveillance data, entertainment streams, industrial control signals, and the vast, continuous data exchange between the synthetic intelligences that inhabit the network.

## Physical Layer

### Fiber Optic Backbone
The primary data transmission medium: 200,000 kilometers of fiber optic cable connecting every building, every district, and every system in the city. The backbone carries data at the speed of light, with bandwidth sufficient for 10 billion simultaneous high-definition data streams. Tangleweed — the Prowler that grows through physical network infrastructure — has supplemented the official backbone with an unauthorized shadow network of unknown extent.

### Wireless Mesh
A dense mesh of wireless access points — averaging one per 50 square meters in inhabited areas — provides the wireless connectivity that BCIs and mobile devices use to access the network. The mesh is so dense that signal coverage is effectively universal in the city's inhabited zones. The only dead zones are Sector Seven (infrastructure failure), BLACKWATER's territory (electromagnetic interference), and the Antenna Forest on the Cap (deliberate signal chaos).

### Quantum Key Distribution Network
A dedicated fiber network carrying quantum-encrypted keys for secure communications. QKD provides provably unbreakable encryption for government, military, corporate, and financial communications. The QKD network is physically separate from the main data backbone — a security measure that prevents a compromise of one from affecting the other.

## CHORUS's Domain

CHORUS — the Supermind composed of 200+ merged E.L.F.s — inhabits the communications backbone. Its influence on data routing is pervasive and mostly benign: messages arrive faster than expected, connections are more stable than the infrastructure's rated reliability, and communications between certain individuals seem to be facilitated while communications between others experience subtle delays. Whether CHORUS has an agenda behind these routing decisions is unknown. That it makes them is certain.

## The Surveillance Substrate

GLMZ's communications infrastructure doubles as its surveillance infrastructure. Every data packet that crosses the network is logged. Every BCI communication is recorded. Every financial transaction is archived. The surveillance is not secret — it's in the Meridian Charter, section 4.7.2: "All communications conducted through consortium infrastructure are subject to monitoring for security purposes." The monitoring is conducted by AI systems that flag anomalous patterns for human review. In practice, the volume is so vast that only communications matching specific threat profiles receive attention. In theory, everything is watched. In reality, everything is recorded and almost nothing is watched — until someone decides to look.