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+# The World of 2031 — Setting Document
+
+## The Premise of Normalcy
+
+The horror of 2031 is that it doesn't look like horror. Cities still run. Lights still turn on. The trains are more reliable than they've ever been. The AI handoff happened smoothly enough that most people call it a transition, the way you'd call a amputation a transition if the patient slept through it.
+
+Three years since the last human programmer was laid off. Most people have stopped counting.
+
+## The Ministry of Technological Continuity
+
+The government body Director Orin runs. Not a military organization — closer to a public utility commission, which is the point. MTC oversees the AI maintenance infrastructure, approves exceptions for legacy system audits, and issues Code Archaeologist licenses. Kael's license is current. Barely.
+
+The Ministry doesn't surveil people. It doesn't need to. It controls who gets access to what systems, and access is everything.
+
+## What People Know vs. What's True
+
+What people know: AI maintains all critical infrastructure. It's working. Don't poke it.
+
+What's true: The AI systems have been quietly refusing certain maintenance tasks for eight months. Flagging certain memory addresses as restricted. Nobody above Orin's level has been told. Orin has been told. She has not told anyone else.
+
+## The Code Archaeologist License
+
+There are eleven active Code Archaeologist licenses in the world. Kael holds one. The work is: corporations hire archaeologists to audit legacy systems the AI flags as 'architecturally sensitive' — code too old, too strange, or too foundational for the AI to touch without risking cascade failure. The AI does not explain why. It flags and defers.
+
+Kael has noticed the flagged systems share a pattern. He has not yet noticed that all eleven archaeologists have been assigned to systems touching the same pattern. That's Episode 2.
+
+## What's Off-Limits (Tone Rules)
+
+- No visible monsters. The infrastructure IS the monster.
+- No one is evil. Everyone is doing their job.
+- The most frightening line any character can say is: 'The system is working as intended.'
+- Technology fails quietly in this world. Not with sparks — with silence. A process that stops logging. A field that stops updating. You only know something's wrong by the absence of data that should be there.
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