Power Tap Network

The power tap network was not designed for crawlers. It was designed for BART trains drawing from an integrated metropolitan transit grid maintained by a municipal authority that no longer exists, funded by a tax base that no longer files. The junction boxes were service access points for technicians with diagnostic equipment and repair schedules. The fact that a crawler operator can now attach a cell to one of these boxes and sometimes receive charge is not engineering. It is coincidence hardened into dependency.

Approximately 340 taps are catalogued between the southern terminus and the northern extent of the Rail. Of these, 187 delivered current during the most recent survey cycle. Forty-three delivered current that matched the voltage rating stamped on their housings. The survey was conducted by the Lamplighters in 2182. No survey has been conducted since — their final report noted that "conditions change faster than we can walk," and nobody has disputed this.

Without taps, every journey on the Neon Rail has a fixed range measured in cell capacity and a fixed outcome when it runs out. The network is the only recharging infrastructure on the route. This is the foundational fact of Rail travel, and the foundational vulnerability.

Coverage Report

Near inhabited stops — Rivet Town, Gaslight Station, a handful of others where enough people live to justify the effort — taps appear roughly every mile. These are maintained by Lamplighters or by locals who've claimed the junction box as a concession. Standard fee: five to fifteen credits per charge cycle, depending on who's asking, who's answering, and whether the person asking has visible alternatives. A crawler operator who arrives at a tap with 4% cell life pays more than one who arrives at 60%. This is not posted policy. It is physics expressing itself as economics.

In remote sections, taps thin to one every eight or twelve miles, then fewer. A junction box exposed to thirty-seven years of atmospheric corrosion, seismic micro-shifts, and scavenger attention does not improve with neglect. Some taps present green indicator lights — the original BART status LEDs, still drawing power from the grid connection they're supposedly reporting on — while delivering zero charge to any cell connected to them. The light means the circuit is closed. It does not mean the circuit is useful. This distinction has stranded an estimated seventy-plus crawlers in the past two years, according to Lamplighter recovery logs. The logs note that most operators trusted the green light.

In dead zones, the network simply stops. No junction boxes. No grid connections. No current. The map shows the route continuing. The taps do not.

The Maintenance Question

The Treaty of Shared Infrastructure declared power systems neutral in 2171. Targeting them is prohibited. Maintaining them is, technically, everyone's responsibility. A responsibility shared by everyone is a responsibility owned by no one, and the tap network degrades at the precise rate that reflects this.

The Lamplighters maintain taps near their own operations — grid junctions they need functional for reasons unrelated to crawler traffic. A tap that serves both the Lamplighters' grid work and a passing crawler gets fixed. A tap that serves only crawlers does not. The Lamplighters are not hostile to Rail operators. They are understaffed, overstretched, and realistic about what fourteen people can maintain across the Bay Area Sprawl. Their internal maintenance priority index ranks taps by grid significance. Crawler utility is not a field in the index.

Concession operators near inhabited stops maintain their taps because the taps are their income. A dead tap is a lost concession. A concession operator whose tap dies will sometimes walk three miles to the next junction box, test it, claim it, and reroute crawlers to the new location. The old tap remains on every route map until someone updates it. Route maps are updated by people who travel the route. People who travel the route trust the route maps.

Lamplighter operational briefs describe this circular dependency between map accuracy and travel safety as an "ongoing informational challenge." Not a problem. A challenge implies someone might fix it.

Implications

The tap network offers recharging infrastructure to anyone traveling the Rail — no credentials, no faction affiliation, no fee beyond what a local operator chooses to charge. Energy independence from any single power broker, theoretically available to all.

In practice: reliability cannot be determined until the moment of use. An operator who plans a route around catalogued taps is planning around 2182 data and the assumption that nothing has changed. Taps fail silently. Green lights mean nothing. The gap between map and territory is not annotated. Every journey into a remote section is a wager on conditions nobody has verified, made by someone who has no alternative to wagering.

What Nobody Can Explain

• Three tap clusters in the southern dead zone began delivering charge intermittently in late 2184. No Lamplighter crew claims the work. The grid connections those taps feed from were listed as severed in 2179. Nobody has gone to look.
• Concession operators near Gaslight Station report that taps in their section are claimed and fee-posted faster than new operators arrive — suggesting someone is scouting and staking taps ahead of the public survey data. The Lamplighters have not identified the party.
• The 2182 survey team's final log contains one entry that was redacted before the report was distributed. The entry's timestamp corresponds to a section of the Rail with zero catalogued taps. Whether that means they found nothing, found something, or found something they weren't authorized to report is unknown.