One Big City
Each Man is named NULL followed by numbers. They occupy SRO-like metabolist capsules, wake to assignments delivered by briefcase, and technically work for EOS — the Eunuchs Operating System, an overworld for a city the narrator says does not “actually” exist. The joke is not simply simulation. The source immediately makes the reader argue about what actually means.
Three male factions
O.B.C. has split its men among blood-combatants, fashion enthusiasts and competing dog-breeder cabals. The categories are deliberately disproportionate: combat, clothes and dogs become equivalent social orders. Combatants refuse work to fight, gamble, strangle and perform spectacular risk; dog ownership supplies purpose to creatures who were never children and supposedly never die.
The stolen dog
NULL0, “the First Man,” receives a desirable courier assignment and brings his treasured Trusty Rusty. A fashion enthusiast spawned into a tower bloc is assigned paid dognapping by a blood-combatant warlord. NULL0 recruits NULL1933 to pursue NULL??????, the withheld-number culprit. The formal world-description then cuts into a more immediate detective dialogue beginning at 51st and Serra in the old Guitar District.
The tap-water rule
At intervals the tap water is infused with entheogens; bottled water is forbidden. It is exactly the kind of world-rule the corpus likes: simultaneously enormous, administrative and tossed off as though it merely explains the plumbing.
Adaptation inside the source
The story presents itself again as DIGITAL GODDAMN presents a SAURIAN SKIES adaptation of JQD’s Guy Stole My Dog, followed by “INITIATE! SAURIAN 03.” The source therefore contains its own adaptation frame: synopsis/world bible first, performed dramatic object second.
Serial status
The title says 1.1, establishing a serial chassis, but no later NULL⁰-numbered installment is presently published in the main chronology. The open numbering is part of the object without requiring imaginary missing episodes.