Vortex Neural is the most powerful megacorp in Neo-Ventris. Founded by a visionary billionaire, it designs and operates the Ventral Core AI that governs the city, controls infrastructure, utilities, and basic resource distribution, promising utopia through perfect algorithmic governance. Publicly, Vortex Neural propagandizes that the Ventral Core has eliminated crime, poverty, and pollution through precise data-driven governance. In reality, the corporation uses the AI to manipulate markets, manufacture consent, and eliminate competitors. Dissenters simply cease to exist from official records, their digital and physical footprints mysteriously erased. Those who investigate Vortex Neural’s dark secrets too closely find their homes’ environmental controls turning hazardous, their financial histories retroactively altering to display criminal records, or their neural implants malfunctioning with inconvenient timing.
The corporation maintains an elite security force called Nexus Veil Initiative who respond to any “system anomaly” with brutal efficiency. They utilize advanced tech that interfaces directly with the Ventral Core’s surveillance network, tracking “threats to civic harmony” through the city’s omnipresent sensors. Nexus Veil operators receive their directives through neural links, experiencing the city’s data streams as synesthetic overlays that allow them to anticipate and neutralize threats before they fully form. Their black armor bears no insignia, merely pulsing light patterns that ripple across surfaces like digital oil slicks.
Currently the Nexus Veil is lead by a man named Argus. He is a cold and calculating man, equipped with the latest cybernetic enhancements which are only available to the highest members of Vortex Neural and the richest of the rich. These enhancements give him enhanced reflexes, a direct neural link to the Ventral Core, and optical implants that can detect lies and emotional states. Argus operates on pure logic, not emotion, on duty, not desire, and dismisses philosophy as a pointless indulgence. To him, the universe is a series of equations, and any variable that refuses to compute properly must be eliminated.
