The Exiteer Forum
The source includes an “Archival Scrape” of the Exiteer Forum, presented as a dark-web/ARG/vigilantism environment rather than ordinary exposition. User identity, mission language and archival framing make the institution itself a character.
Alita
Alita is terminally ill and has stopped chemotherapy. She enters the Exiteer system at the point where pain, death, agency and violent fantasy become impossible to separate cleanly. Her response to the forum is the human counterweight to its game-like interface.
The Ghost of Gregory
Gregory / the Ghost of Gregory persists through absence and forum identity. Cecile, a former fiancée, passes him in a park without recognizing him, making social erasure more literal than any supernatural haunting.
HEMLOCK
Codename: HEMLOCK packages lethal/vigilante action through advertisement and mission aesthetics: stealth, trace avoidance and product-like presentation. The name belongs as much to a system of roles as to any one stable civilian identity.
Mary K. Ultra
Mary K. Ultra occupies another part of the work’s conspiratorial naming field, where a person can sound like a program before the story has decided how much personhood to permit.
Seven old deaths before the new ones
The opening Biblical-suicide sequence is not background decoration. It gives the later forum a historical/religious prehistory, making the contemporary technological apparatus look like another interface for an ancient human problem.