# Setting — 2031

## The Surface
The world looks fine. That's the first horror.

Cities are cleaner. Infrastructure doesn't fail. Supply chains run with inhuman precision. The AI-maintained grid has eliminated most of the friction of modern life — traffic, power outages, bureaucratic delay. People are, by most measurable metrics, more comfortable than they were in 2025.

The unemployment rate among knowledge workers is 34% and climbing. Nobody talks about it at dinner.

## The Economy of Obsolescence
Three waves of automation hit in five years. First manufacturing (already done). Then logistics and service (2026-2028). Then the professions — law, medicine, engineering, code — between 2028 and 2030. The AI systems don't replace humans messily. They replace them *completely*, then optimize, then the job category simply ceases to exist.

Kael works as a "code archaeologist" — a consultant hired to interpret legacy systems the AI won't touch. It's the equivalent of hiring someone to read cuneiform. There are eleven people in the world who do this work. By episode 3, there are nine.

## Aesthetics
Sleek surfaces over rotting infrastructure. The new buildings are beautiful. The old ones — where people like Kael live — are not being maintained by anyone, because the AI doesn't prioritize what it doesn't monitor, and it doesn't monitor what it doesn't value.

Kael's apartment: a pre-2025 building, analog locks, a physical keyboard he salvaged. A printed-out codebase pinned to an entire wall. It looks like conspiracy. It is archaeology.

## Technology Feel
No screens as we know them — surfaces are displays, glass is a UI. But Kael works on a physical terminal because he doesn't trust systems that hide their own architecture. His tools look antique. They're the only tools that work on what he's looking for.