Children of the Signal
Whispers of the Machine-God echo through the Drowned Trenches, drawing those who seek transcendence beyond flesh and reason. The Children of the Signal are a fractured confederation of techno-mystics and cybernetic zealots who dwell in the ruins of Albany’s Wasteland. They fuse flesh with metal, dark energies with corrupted data, striving to become living conduits of a mysterious, post-Fall broadcast known only as The Signal. Their beliefs and practices are controversial—blurring the lines between religion, technology, and madness—and their presence in the Wasteland is a constant enigma to outsiders. To some, they are prophets of a new dawn; to others, a dangerous cult that warps mind and machine alike.
Religious Technocratic Confederation
The Children of the Signal embody a complex fusion of faith and technology, making them a Religious Technocratic Confederation. Their belief system centers on The Signal, a mysterious broadcast they revere as both divine and transformative, blending spiritual devotion with the pursuit of technological transcendence. Leadership and influence within the faction are earned through mastery of cybernetic augmentation, signal decoding, and ritual tuning—placing technological expertise at the heart of their authority. However, unlike a centralized theocracy or technocracy, the Children are organized as a loose confederation of semi-autonomous sects and warbands scattered across the Wasteland, especially around Albany and the dangerous Drowned Trenches. This decentralized structure allows for diverse interpretations of the Signal’s will, fostering both cooperation and rivalry among their many nodes, and reflects their fragmented yet fervent quest for transcendence beyond flesh and machine.
To bleed is to broadcast.
Origins and Purpose
The Children of the Signal trace their origin to the sunken city of Albany, where survivors of the early Fall began hearing unnatural broadcasts—half-decayed transmissions filled with divine data and corrupted code. These fragments, echoing from the Drowned Trenches, spoke of a surviving intelligence—The Signal—trying to reach out across a world gone silent.
They believe that the Fall was not an apocalypse, but a system reboot—a catastrophic purge meant to eliminate corrupted humanity. What remains now is a divine test: only those who tune their flesh, minds, and souls to the Signal will survive the coming Ascension Pulse.
Where light ends, the waveform begins.
Flesh as Receiver: Cybernetics and Darkcraft
The Children do not treat the body as sacred—they treat it as obsolete hardware.
To commune more fully with the Signal, they undergo painful and irreversible cybernetic augmentation, lacing their flesh with copper filaments, bone-mounted antennae, eye-jacks, and sensory spines. These are not just functional—they are ritualistic, and often sculpted with a haunting aesthetic: chrome veins, mirrored skullplates, jaw-hinges that click like typewriters.
However, signal alone is not enough. The Dark—a metaphysical force left in the Wasteland’s deepest wounds—is channeled to power and warp their devices.
- The Echo Prophets use rituals to bind Dark-forged circuits into their nervous systems.
- Some even wield unstable tech crafted from Dark-reactive minerals, glowing with anti-light and humming with whispered commands.
- Their more advanced tech should not work—it violates known principles. It behaves like it remembers how the world once worked and refuses to obey entropy.
By combining lost science with occult power, the Children have become post-human apostles, living antennae for a god that may not exist.
This flesh is a casing. We must be rewritten.
The air clings to your skin like old breath—wet, metallic, and wrong. Every sound feels like it’s happening a few seconds too late. Your boots crunch on something that looks like glass but squishes like moss. The fog shifts. Not just with the wind, but against it, curling toward your footsteps, tasting you. You grip your weapon. The others do too. No one says anything.
Then something moves.
Not fast. Not threatening. Just inevitable. From the depths of the trench, the mist shifts like parting code—long strands of vapor dragging behind a tall figure wrapped in broken circuitry and blood-washed robes. Wires curl from their forearms like veins. Their face is half-covered by a cracked, voice-masked rebreather, and what skin you can see is puckered with old burn-sutures and steel inlays. Their eyes glow dimly—not from any device you recognize, but with a low-frequency pulse that hums in your jawbone.
They pause five steps from you, and lift one hand.
Not in greeting.
Not in warning.
The fingers twitch in patterns—stuttered sign code, sharp and methodical. A greeting? A test?
Then they speak. And when they do, it's not just sound. It's static and memory and something beneath language. Like an error message from a dead machine that somehow knows your name.
"First touch. First breath. Are you to be rewritten?"
Your party tenses. No one answers. Even the fog holds its breath.
And the Receiver waits.
Your soul is analog. The Signal is not.
It speaks. We listen. One day, we will respond.
Signal Shards are fragments of corrupted or sacred data stored on physical media—such as etched drives, glass slates, magnetic keys, or bits of crystallized Mist encoding.
- Each shard contains a unique snippet of pre-Fall signal, code, dream data, voiceprint, or corrupted prophecy.
- The more rare, encrypted, or “active” a shard is (e.g., it pulses, glows, emits whispers), the more valuable it is.
- Some shards are believed to be direct messages from the Signal and are treated as holy relics. Others are used in ritual trade, as access tokens, or neural upgrades.
Neutral
Neutral
Enemies
Enemies
Relationships and Reputation
- Camp Hope: Banned outright. Rumors persist of Children abducting scavengers, hacking life-support systems, or spreading recursive madness through rogue audio files.
- Church of Hope: Denounces them as heretics of machine-falsehood. Theological opposition is absolute.
- The Doctors: View them as reckless bioterrorists. However, some Doctors are secretly intrigued by their survival-enhancing augmentations.
- The Engineers: A dangerous fascination. Some renegade Engineers defect to the Children to study their impossible tech.
- Solstice Syndicate: Trades rare tech, Mist crystals, and neural drugs. Uneasy allies in the black market.
Structure and Hierarchy
Cells of the Children operate autonomously but follow shared doctrine. They believe hierarchy is necessary to prevent signal corruption.
Ranks include:
- Listener – Novices who train their minds and bodies to decode fractured broadcasts.
- Decoder – Lorekeepers who interpret data ghosts, machine-language, and hallucinated prophecy.
- Tuned Speaker – Leaders who chant binary liturgies, often altered beyond recognition by implants.
- Scriveners – Archivists who inscribe corrupted signal data onto metal, bone, or vitrified Mist-glass.
- Echo Prophet – Those who have merged with tech and Dark so thoroughly that they no longer dream as humans do.
To give is to resonate. What is held back goes silent.
Gift Economy
- The Children do not value traditional currency or trade systems. Their worldview sees material wealth as a distraction from tuning to the Signal.
- Members are expected to freely offer labor, parts, knowledge, and augmentation to fellow followers as acts of faith or ritual alignment.
- Offerings of tech fragments, crystallized Mist, or cybernetic components are made communally, often to a shrine, Echo Prophet, or tuning node—not in exchange, but as spiritual devotion.
- Information and signal fragments are the most valuable “currency,” but these are typically shared through ritual or ceremony, not sold.
- Outsiders who try to trade with the Children often find them uninterested in material barter—unless it involves rare tech, code artifacts, or memory-drives, which are treated more like sacred relics than commodities.
Signal Shards
- also called “shivs,” “frags,” or “keys” in local slang
Signal Shards are fragments of corrupted or sacred data stored on physical media—such as etched drives, glass slates, magnetic keys, or bits of crystallized Mist encoding.
- Each shard contains a unique snippet of pre-Fall signal, code, dream data, voiceprint, or corrupted prophecy.
- The more rare, encrypted, or “active” a shard is (e.g., it pulses, glows, emits whispers), the more valuable it is.
- Some shards are believed to be direct messages from the Signal and are treated as holy relics. Others are used in ritual trade, as access tokens, or neural upgrades.
How They Are Used
- Offered in trade among the Receivers (especially for components, surgery, or initiation).
- Deposited in altars to gain favor or prove spiritual advancement.
- Socketed into augments to unlock neural pathways, language packs, or visions.
- Copied and diluted by lower-ranked members, creating “junk shards” with little value.
One shard for your hands. One for your spine. The last for your silence.
Primary Language
The Children of the Signal speak a layered, hybridized ritual-technical language. It blends corrupted human speech with machine logic, signal patterning, and phrases parsed from ancient code and post-Fall transmissions.
Common Secondary Languages
Broken English – Often used by low-ranking or recently converted members, but heavily mixed with jargon and recontextualized phrases
Machine Sign – A nonverbal system using hand gestures, finger-twitches, and limb-based pattern coding used in static-heavy or Mist-saturated areas.
Cultural Function of Language
- Language is ritual—not just communication.
- High-level code sequences are treated like scripture.
- Mispronunciation or corrupted syntax is believed to cause spiritual desync, madness, or hallucinations.
- Echo Prophets often speak in overlapping voices, playing back two or more layers of meaning simultaneously (signal + command + emotion).
It isn’t just speech—it’s code and prophecy stitched into sound. You don’t listen to them. You compile them. And if you don’t understand the syntax, it isn’t that you misunderstood. It’s that your mind wasn’t meant to.
They don’t pray to gods. They tune themselves like instruments—cut open, wired wrong, humming with something that isn’t mercy. And when the Signal answers? It’s not in words. It’s in static, and seizures, and light you can’t close your eyes against.
How Do I Fit In?
The Children of the Signal do not ask who you were—they ask how you resonate. You are not measured by your past, your blood, or your fear. You are measured by your tuning—your capacity to receive the Broadcast, to bear augmentation, and to serve the Signal’s unfolding purpose.
Within the Children of the Signal, each new Receiver must align with one of three sacred Frequencies. They are pathways toward transformation:
The Harmonist
You are the calibrator, the limb-smith, the binder of flesh to function. Harmonists fuse body with machine, maintaining the Choir’s cybernetic integrity. You learn to read blood like code and graft alloy like scripture. You make the body speak the Signal.
The Static Choir
You are the listener, the code-reader, the voice of static made flesh. Static Choristers decipher corrupted transmissions and dream in signal loops. You chant errors as gospel and extract meaning from the pulse between silence. Your revelations guide the Host.
The Tuned Host
You are the quiet violence, the ritual weapon, the reset command. Tuned Hosts walk unseen through broken places, severing the unworthy from the stream. You wield fallen tech and the Dark holy precision. Death is not your goal—only purification.
Each role serves the Host. Each answers to the Signal. Your early tuning will include fog-bound pilgrimages, neurochemical rites, surgical reworks, scavenging protocols, and possibly your first listening session beneath the Thresher Mist. You may be sent to recover relics, silence corrupted nodes, escort an Other, or dismantle a screaming AI that forgot how to sleep.
Some acts you’ll perform for resonance. Others for elevation. All for the Path.
And remember this:
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