The Beacon Protocol

[SPOILER — Reveal conditions: investigated via Katana companion arc or discovered through Technopolis data cache.]

Beacon is Prospect's most valuable product that officially does not exist. The corporation built and operates the city's unified security-camera and sensor grid — a public-safety infrastructure project underwritten by City Administration with municipal funds. Beacon is the access tier that was never disclosed to Administration.

For a subscription fee, corporate clients, foreign investors, and political operators receive real-time feeds, facial-recognition queries, and movement-prediction analytics for any point in the city covered by the grid. Which is most of the city.

What It Means

Beacon converts Prospect's infrastructure monopoly into a surveillance-as-a-service business. Every faction that doesn't know about it has been operating under observation. Operatives who assume their routes are clean are in the system. Dead drops, safe houses, and clan leadership meetings that occurred near any licensed security terminal are retrievable.

The revenue stream is secondary. The primary function is leverage.

Key Personnel

Midas finances the network expansion under a series of infrastructure investment vehicles that appear on no organizational chart connected to Beacon.

Katana became aware of Beacon through a discrepancy in a logistics report — a data trail that shouldn't have existed if the program were operating within Prospect's stated mandate. She is investigating internally, which means she is investigating herself. She has not yet decided what she will do with what she finds.

Lidrak handles physical security for the primary data nodes. He is aware of Beacon's existence and considers it a tool, not a concern.

Status

Active. Expanding. The player's discovery of Beacon triggers Katana's companion crisis arc and the faction response chain.