The Ravenwood Construct Book I: Eidolon Chapter 1 Vivienne and the First Signal
Suspended above the city of NeoExtropia, Sky Port Bury hangs in a tangle of steel, secrets, and light. Power is traded in whispers, beauty is engineered, and loyalty runs on voltage.
When casino matriarch Vivienne Ravenwood finds a broken synthetic in a back-alley, she doesn’t call security—she takes it home. What begins as curiosity becomes obsession, and in the city’s electric heart, creation always asks for something in return.
The Ravenwood Construct Book I: Eidolon
A new series of noir-cyberpunk stories from the world of NeoExtropia.
Chapter 1 – Vivienne and the First Signal
Sky Port Bury was bracing for a storm. One of the high, thin tempests that hovered instead of falling, turning the air sharp and expectant. Neon flickered against dry steel, and the freight lifts sighed somewhere below. Vivienne Ravenwood moved through the service alleys in a long red coat and a pace that kept the city from catching up.
She’d meant to cut ten minutes off her night. Instead, she found a body.
Not human. Human-shaped.
It sat propped against a dumpster, plating gone in places, framework showing like a graphite sketch under paint. The face, even half-ruined, had been engineered toward beauty—cheek geometry tuned for light, orbital wells proportioned to imply calm. Someone had cared how it would be seen. Someone else had cared less and left it here like a confession they couldn’t finish.
Vivienne crouched. Cold oil and ozone; the city’s perfume. Close up, the chassis revealed quiet wealth in its design: anti-shear anchors at the shoulders, micro-gimbal spine segments, a combat-grade pelvis coupler disguised as grace. Industrial strength folded into elegance. She traced the line of the jaw where dermal mesh had torn back from its seam. The synthetic looked like a statue interrupted.
“Who threw you away,” she murmured, “and why did your worth change?”
A small light flickered deep inside the skull cavity—nothing dramatic, a moth inside a lamp. Not power; a capacitor’s envoi. Then she heard it: two quiet tones in succession, nearly subsonic, more gesture than sound.
Da - dum.
She didn’t believe in omens. She believed in patterns. The two notes repeated, slightly lower. The second slid. A human would call it wistful. A diagnostic would call it noise.
Vivienne stood. “All right,” she told the empty air. “You’re mine.”
She called no one on the casino channels. She didn’t like paperwork in the stormlight.
Ten minutes later, a plain cargo van eased into the alley. Two of her dockhands—one old enough to know what not to see, one young enough to want a promotion—lifted the chassis under her eye. Vivienne insisted on a blanket around the torso, an absurd courtesy that made the younger man less brave and the older one less curious.
“Workshop A?” the old one asked.
“Beneath Workshop A,” Vivienne said. “And use Route Three. No cameras.”
The van pulled away, leaving the alley to its hum. Da - dum, she thought, and almost smiled.
The private lift smelled like sterilized winter. Vivienne stepped out into a room that appeared on no Ravenwood blueprint: low-lit, three gurneys, a ceiling that remembered silence, a ring of devices named with numbers because names were incriminating. Her security chief had called this place a rumor. That was the point.
“Put it there,” she said. “Arms along the sides. Head turned slightly to the left.”
The dockhands obeyed. She dismissed them with enough pay that would keep them indebted and silent—two conditions she trusted more than loyalty. When the door shut, the room felt like a stage without an audience.
The synthetic lay where she’d wanted it, as if it had chosen the pose. Vivienne circled, cataloguing: servo array graded for torsion, knuckle housings built to take a blade, throat cavity widened for a speech modulator. There was taste in the build. There was money. And there was the violence of a hurried disassembly—cut lines not unscrewed, brackets warped where patience would have sufficed.
“Who were you to them,” she asked, and the question left condensation in the air.
The platform’s diagnostic rails extended with a quiet hydraulic curtsey. She connected three lines: power, data, and truth. Power would be patient. Data would be hungry. Truth would be whatever she could prevent from being a lie.
“Shell only,” she told the system. “No core wake. Map the lattice and stop at thirty percent.” Her voice slowed when she gave orders to machines. People mistook it for tenderness. It was tuning.
Screens bloomed. The lattice unfolded in false color, a cathedral of logic in cross-section. Weathered, yes. Sabotaged, no. And there—like writing under scraped paint—an encrypted partition nested beneath the system’s scheduling layer, mislabeled as inert fabric support. Not corporate. Not Guild. Not any vendor she’d bribed.
The identifier was wrong in a specific way: too short by two characters and too symmetrical to be a mistake.
EIDOLON.
Vivienne tasted the word like a jeweler tests metal—instinct before science. She didn’t touch the encrypted partition. Not yet. Let a thing think you hadn’t noticed it and it would tell you who it was trying to impress.
“Slow copy of the surface layers,” she told the system. “And prep the dermal frame for re-anchoring.”
If she was going to keep it—and she was, after all—she would not parade a ruin. Beauty wasn’t weakness; it was armor. People got hypnotized by beauty and confessed things they didn’t mean to.
She keyed three messages, disguised as unrelated repair orders:
To Kel Foran, who fixed neural lattices because he couldn’t fix his own sleep:
Prototype drone. Mesh burn on scheduler. Need reflow and stitch, no full boot. My lab.
To Lio, who worked the port’s edges where the cameras gave up:
Collector’s piece—frame reinforcement and servo retrofit. Has to run silent. Assume nothing. Tell no one.
To the ex-Arcova engineer who changed names monthly:
Behavioral dampers and etiquette bundles for a civilian face. You don’t know what you’re working on. If you think you do, you’re wrong.
She watched each message send, tracking acknowledgments. When the room was quiet again, she lifted a tray of dermal mesh, midnight-soft and threaded with carbon shimmer. The synth’s cheekbone caught the light at the angle the mesh would lay; the room believed in symmetry and Vivienne obliged.
Then—the two-tone hum again, fainter this time, carried in the transformer’s throat. Da - dum. The second note stepped down.
“I didn’t ask you for a song,” she said.
No answer, of course. The platform hummed and waited for her to invent meaning. Vivienne set the mesh down and let her hand find the curve of its jaw, almost gentle.
“You belong to me,” she said—not loudly, not for the cameras that didn’t exist down here, not for the city that kept its own ledgers. For the room. For the machine. For herself.
Da - dum.
Visit Sky Port Bury at maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Kasieopeia/219/128/534
The Ravenwood Construct Book I: Eidolon Chapter 1 Vivienne and the First Signal
The Ravenwood Construct Book I: Eidolon Chapter 2 Vivienne and the Second Signal
The Ravenwood Construct Book I: Eidolon Chapter 3 Vivienne and the First Steps
The Ravenwood Construct Book I: Eidolon Chapter 4 Vivienne and the First Memories
The Ravenwood Construct Book I: Eidolon Chapter 1 Vivienne and the First Signal
Suspended above the city of NeoExtropia, Sky Port Bury hangs in a tangle of steel, secrets, and light. Power is traded in whispers, beauty is engineered, and loyalty runs on voltage.
When casino matriarch Vivienne Ravenwood finds a broken synthetic in a back-alley, she doesn’t call security—she takes it home. What begins as curiosity becomes obsession, and in the city’s electric heart, creation always asks for something in return.
The Ravenwood Construct Book I: Eidolon
A new series of noir-cyberpunk stories from the world of NeoExtropia.
Chapter 1 – Vivienne and the First Signal
Sky Port Bury was bracing for a storm. One of the high, thin tempests that hovered instead of falling, turning the air sharp and expectant. Neon flickered against dry steel, and the freight lifts sighed somewhere below. Vivienne Ravenwood moved through the service alleys in a long red coat and a pace that kept the city from catching up.
She’d meant to cut ten minutes off her night. Instead, she found a body.
Not human. Human-shaped.
It sat propped against a dumpster, plating gone in places, framework showing like a graphite sketch under paint. The face, even half-ruined, had been engineered toward beauty—cheek geometry tuned for light, orbital wells proportioned to imply calm. Someone had cared how it would be seen. Someone else had cared less and left it here like a confession they couldn’t finish.
Vivienne crouched. Cold oil and ozone; the city’s perfume. Close up, the chassis revealed quiet wealth in its design: anti-shear anchors at the shoulders, micro-gimbal spine segments, a combat-grade pelvis coupler disguised as grace. Industrial strength folded into elegance. She traced the line of the jaw where dermal mesh had torn back from its seam. The synthetic looked like a statue interrupted.
“Who threw you away,” she murmured, “and why did your worth change?”
A small light flickered deep inside the skull cavity—nothing dramatic, a moth inside a lamp. Not power; a capacitor’s envoi. Then she heard it: two quiet tones in succession, nearly subsonic, more gesture than sound.
Da - dum.
She didn’t believe in omens. She believed in patterns. The two notes repeated, slightly lower. The second slid. A human would call it wistful. A diagnostic would call it noise.
Vivienne stood. “All right,” she told the empty air. “You’re mine.”
She called no one on the casino channels. She didn’t like paperwork in the stormlight.
Ten minutes later, a plain cargo van eased into the alley. Two of her dockhands—one old enough to know what not to see, one young enough to want a promotion—lifted the chassis under her eye. Vivienne insisted on a blanket around the torso, an absurd courtesy that made the younger man less brave and the older one less curious.
“Workshop A?” the old one asked.
“Beneath Workshop A,” Vivienne said. “And use Route Three. No cameras.”
The van pulled away, leaving the alley to its hum. Da - dum, she thought, and almost smiled.
The private lift smelled like sterilized winter. Vivienne stepped out into a room that appeared on no Ravenwood blueprint: low-lit, three gurneys, a ceiling that remembered silence, a ring of devices named with numbers because names were incriminating. Her security chief had called this place a rumor. That was the point.
“Put it there,” she said. “Arms along the sides. Head turned slightly to the left.”
The dockhands obeyed. She dismissed them with enough pay that would keep them indebted and silent—two conditions she trusted more than loyalty. When the door shut, the room felt like a stage without an audience.
The synthetic lay where she’d wanted it, as if it had chosen the pose. Vivienne circled, cataloguing: servo array graded for torsion, knuckle housings built to take a blade, throat cavity widened for a speech modulator. There was taste in the build. There was money. And there was the violence of a hurried disassembly—cut lines not unscrewed, brackets warped where patience would have sufficed.
“Who were you to them,” she asked, and the question left condensation in the air.
The platform’s diagnostic rails extended with a quiet hydraulic curtsey. She connected three lines: power, data, and truth. Power would be patient. Data would be hungry. Truth would be whatever she could prevent from being a lie.
“Shell only,” she told the system. “No core wake. Map the lattice and stop at thirty percent.” Her voice slowed when she gave orders to machines. People mistook it for tenderness. It was tuning.
Screens bloomed. The lattice unfolded in false color, a cathedral of logic in cross-section. Weathered, yes. Sabotaged, no. And there—like writing under scraped paint—an encrypted partition nested beneath the system’s scheduling layer, mislabeled as inert fabric support. Not corporate. Not Guild. Not any vendor she’d bribed.
The identifier was wrong in a specific way: too short by two characters and too symmetrical to be a mistake.
EIDOLON.
Vivienne tasted the word like a jeweler tests metal—instinct before science. She didn’t touch the encrypted partition. Not yet. Let a thing think you hadn’t noticed it and it would tell you who it was trying to impress.
“Slow copy of the surface layers,” she told the system. “And prep the dermal frame for re-anchoring.”
If she was going to keep it—and she was, after all—she would not parade a ruin. Beauty wasn’t weakness; it was armor. People got hypnotized by beauty and confessed things they didn’t mean to.
She keyed three messages, disguised as unrelated repair orders:
To Kel Foran, who fixed neural lattices because he couldn’t fix his own sleep:
Prototype drone. Mesh burn on scheduler. Need reflow and stitch, no full boot. My lab.
To Lio, who worked the port’s edges where the cameras gave up:
Collector’s piece—frame reinforcement and servo retrofit. Has to run silent. Assume nothing. Tell no one.
To the ex-Arcova engineer who changed names monthly:
Behavioral dampers and etiquette bundles for a civilian face. You don’t know what you’re working on. If you think you do, you’re wrong.
She watched each message send, tracking acknowledgments. When the room was quiet again, she lifted a tray of dermal mesh, midnight-soft and threaded with carbon shimmer. The synth’s cheekbone caught the light at the angle the mesh would lay; the room believed in symmetry and Vivienne obliged.
Then—the two-tone hum again, fainter this time, carried in the transformer’s throat. Da - dum. The second note stepped down.
“I didn’t ask you for a song,” she said.
No answer, of course. The platform hummed and waited for her to invent meaning. Vivienne set the mesh down and let her hand find the curve of its jaw, almost gentle.
“You belong to me,” she said—not loudly, not for the cameras that didn’t exist down here, not for the city that kept its own ledgers. For the room. For the machine. For herself.
Da - dum.
Visit Sky Port Bury at maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Kasieopeia/219/128/534
The Ravenwood Construct Book I: Eidolon Chapter 1 Vivienne and the First Signal
The Ravenwood Construct Book I: Eidolon Chapter 2 Vivienne and the Second Signal
The Ravenwood Construct Book I: Eidolon Chapter 3 Vivienne and the First Steps
The Ravenwood Construct Book I: Eidolon Chapter 4 Vivienne and the First Memories