The Dregs Projections
Post-war audit found the projections pessimistic by a meaningful margin (20–30%); the authors have never addressed the discrepancy
Overview
The most consequential document of the post-Cascade era is thirty-one pages of hand-set figures with a coffee ring on the signature page, and it was wrong.
Composed across the Dregs Accord's three Memorial days, midway through the Three-Week War's final week, the Projections modeled the Sprawl at one month, three months, and one year of continued war: infrastructure decay curves, food-web collapse, the compounding arithmetic of two corporations grinding each other's load-bearing systems. The numbers were apocalyptic. They were designed to be read by boards that had ignored honest numbers for a week — and they worked where honesty had failed, both boards folding within a day of reading. Post-war audit found the projections pessimistic by twenty to thirty percent. The eleven have never addressed the finding. The finding has never dented the document's reputation, because the Sprawl long ago concluded that a lie that stops a war has better epistemics than a truth that doesn't.
They were printed by hand — the Data Purge, six days earlier, had made couriered electronics a threat vector both sides agreed on, the war's only successful arms-control regime being mutual distrust of files. Paper, hand-set, duplicate sets carried uphill in person. The medium survives in the Sprawl's institutional memory as deeply as the message: to this day, when a negotiator wants a proposal understood as serious, it arrives on paper, and everyone knows which pages are being quoted.
Provenance
Drafted April 1–3, 2171, in the coffee shop; carried to both towers on April 3; foundational to the Treaty of Shared Infrastructure, whose drafting committee's articles are, structurally, these pages with seals. The Corpo-Nations historians rank the pages above the treaty itself: the treaty is what sovereigns signed; the pages are what moved them. One duplicate set passed to the Arbiters with the treaty original. The second set — Ironclad's board copy, by most reconstructions — has never been recovered, a fact that would be a footnote except for what is written in its margins.
| Authors | The eleven of the Dregs Accord; marginalia in a twelfth hand |
|---|---|
| Contents | Projections of the Sprawl at one month, three months, one year of continued war |
Physical Description
Thirty-one leaves, hand-print cream, columnar figures in projection ink. Page thirty-one carries the summary and eleven signatures. Throughout the surviving set, marginal annotations in violet — a twelfth hand, matching none of the five identified participants, correcting figures, tightening assumptions, and in one place supplying a datum: a reference to the evacuation of a Southern Bay Floor terminal, days before the Anvil Demonstration made that terminal the most analyzed ruin in the Sprawl. The audit that found the projections pessimistic also found the violet corrections were, uniformly, the accurate ones. Whoever the twelfth hand belonged to was not exaggerating. Everyone else was.
Appearance
Thirty-one pages, hand-printed on a thermal unit running low, so the later pages fade toward the color of weak tea. The axes of every chart are hand-drawn — ruler, no stencil — and the sight of those shaky grid lines is, survivors of the meeting said, what made the numbers land: machine-set doom reads as someone's deliverable; hand-ruled doom reads as someone's evening. The pages still smell faintly of the coffee shop, burnt espresso soaked into cheap stock, and page 31 carries a ring stain where a cup sat while eleven executives decided the war was over. The texture is fragile now. The Consortium keeps the originals in nitrogen, like something alive.
Known Handlers
- The eleven — Authors, carriers, decliners of credit
- The twelfth hand — See the Accord's mysteries; see the war's; see, the Dregs would say, the chair
- The Arbiters — Custodians of the surviving set
- The treaty's drafting committee — The first plagiarists
Marginal annotations appear in a twelfth hand matching none of the five identified participants; one annotation references the Southern Bay Floor terminal's evacuation before the Anvil Demonstration occurred
Two duplicate sets were made; the Arbiters hold one; the second has never been recovered
