A coordinated explosive attack on Tessera Corporation's Relay Tower 7 in The Circuit killed nine people and wounded thirty-four others at 7:22 PM last night, destroying a critical node in Tessera's proprietary data infrastructure and knocking NovaMind BCI service offline for an estimated 600,000 users across the city's eastern grid. The blast, triggered by shaped charges placed on three structural columns at sublevel two, was sophisticated enough that security analysts are ruling out amateur involvement. Tessera's head of security, Admiral Renne Cho-Petrov, called it 'a criminal act of mass terrorism targeting the connected lives of every citizen in Meridian.' Among the dead are six Tessera engineers, two contracted maintenance workers, and one Ferrogate Transit technician present for routine infrastructure work.

A communiqué distributed via pirate broadcast within two hours of the blast claimed responsibility on behalf of a group calling itself the Meridian Liberation Compact, describing Relay Tower 7 as 'a node in the surveillance architecture Tessera uses to monetize and control every thought transmitted across its network.' The message referenced Tessera's controversial 2111 BCI data-harvesting settlement, in which the corponation paid 240 million quanta to resolve allegations of selling unencrypted neural metadata to third parties. Tessera has denied any connection between the settlement and the attack.

The Axiom News Network has confirmed that Tessera is cooperating with Meridian Security Directorate investigators, who have identified at least one person of interest connected to The Collective, a worker cooperative with a history of anti-corporate activism. Collective spokesperson Dara Mensah-Oyelaran issued a statement this morning unequivocally condemning the attack. 'We are not a violent organization. We grieve for the workers who died in that tower.'

Relay Tower 7 served as a major routing hub for the eastern grid's BCI network. Tessera estimates full restoration will take forty-five days, leaving hundreds of thousands of residents with degraded neural interface access — a hardship critics note falls disproportionately on lower-income users who depend on public BCI relays.