A gambling hall in Chicago's Chinatown that only accepts physical Quanta chips and has an absolute ban on electronic devices of any kind. You check your BCI-connected hardware at the door — phones, implant controllers, smart clothing, all of it goes in a locker — and you enter a space that could exist in any century. The games are traditional: poker, blackjack, dice, and a regional variant of mahjong that's been played in the corridor for decades. The tables are wooden, the chips are ceramic, and the dealers are human beings who do math in their heads. In an age of neural-feed everything, The Blind's anachronism is its luxury.

The owner, a woman known only as Mrs. Zhao, has operated The Blind for twenty-three years and has never appeared in any public database, which is either admirable operational security or evidence that she doesn't technically exist. The clientele is a mix of high-rolling Spire executives who find the digital-free environment thrilling, Shelf gamblers who prefer a game they can trust, and professional card players who have been banned from every electronic casino in the corridor for various creative forms of cheating. The Blind's house rules are enforced by a team of staff who are conspicuously large and conspicuously alert. Cheating is not punished by ejection; it's punished by a conversation with Mrs. Zhao, which is reportedly worse.