Cyberpunk 2026: A Trip Around The Bay

The job begins with a very puzzling message. Azrael receives a direct inquiry from a woman she does not know: 

Dr. Simone Yao, a young physics professor with Eddings University. 

There is no obvious reason she should know how to reach her. No intermediaries. No visible trail. Just a request for an illegal recovery operation in the San Francisco ruins. Yao arranges a meeting at a small coffee shop near the Eddings University campus. When she arrives, it is immediately clear she is not part of the underworld. She is intelligent, precise, and visibly uncomfortable with the mechanics of negotiation, but she is not naïve. She understands enough to know she needs professionals; she simply has no idea what that costs.

Her request is straightforward in outline, if not in scope: The target is the surviving research archive of Dr. Jamal Caldwell, a minor but persistent SFSU physicist whose work was dismissed during his lifetime as speculative, unfalsifiable, and increasingly unorthodox. His research focused on gravity and spacetime under conditions that did not behave according to accepted models. Over time, his work became internally inconsistent, abstract, and difficult to classify. Funding dried up, peer review cooled, and Caldwell’s reputation settled into the category of “brilliant but unreliable.”

His later research was grouped under an informal internal label: Project Rabbit Hole. Officially, Project Rabbit Hole was an exploratory framework for modeling extreme spacetime discontinuities and anomalous gravitational behavior. In practice, even sympathetic colleagues could not clearly determine what Caldwell was trying to prove. The surviving material is fragmented, recursive, and structurally unstable in its logic, filled with references to nested systems, self-referential assumptions, and boundary conditions that “refuse to remain closed.” The material was left behind during the evacuation and subsequent collapse of the Bay Area academic infrastructure after the 2031 nuclear strikes. She believes it still exists somewhere within the SFSU-affiliated "Deep Future Archive" beneath Thompson Hall on the Peninsula.

Dr. Yao does not fully understand the work. She only believes it may fill critical gaps in her own theoretical research. She initially offers a payment that is clearly absurdly low for the risk involved. It is not an insult so much as a miscalculation; she does not understand the economics of this kind of work. If pressed, she is willing to negotiate upward to a reasonable sum, but admits she will need time to properly assemble the funds. She is not attempting to cheat anyone; she is simply out of her depth. She will not explain how she knew to contact Azrael. The only answer she offers is indirect and incomplete: “My father is a lawyer. He suggested you.” 

Dr. Yao provides what limited documentation she has, including partial technical schematics of the archive system, a probable location beneath Thompson Hall at SFSU, and a mechanical access code for the bunker door. She also provides a portable university battery pack to support field access equipment. Dr. Yao takes no role in operational planning beyond this. Whatever the PCs decide to do next is entirely their responsibility.