The Founders

Matt is the person who can't walk past a broken thing without imagining six better versions of it. In the old world he was a writer by trade, but his hands never stayed still, and he became a builder of parts - the wheels, the tracks, the small refinements that make a rough machine run true.

The parts he makes carry their own mark, known on the routes as Doogs, sought by builders who want their machines to run truer than the salvage allowed. Where others file one relic, Matt files ten, because every subject sparks three more ideas before he's finished the first.

His mind runs fast and wide, and the Registry is better for it, filled with the odd, whimsical, endlessly inventive work of a man who simply cannot stop making. In the old world they'd have called him restless. Here, they call it a gift.

Jake came to the Registry believing it was about the machines. He learned quickly it was about the people who kept them lit. His trade, in both worlds, is conversation - the careful design of how people talk, gather, and stay connected.

Where other surveyors chase relics, Jake maps the connections between them: the settlements that trade parts, the crews that share a mark, the words that pass between them. He files subjects like anyone else, but his real work is stitching scattered builders into one record, one network, one long conversation.

In the old world he shaped how communities formed and how people found each other. Some things survived the Silence. That was one of them.