The poor were ferried into vast orbiting reservations to live like rats in a warren. The mad, the suicidal, the desperate were encouraged to join the Circus. When there weren’t enough people crazy to die, there was a lottery. Saakaar Chaturvedi had won such a lottery. He had drawn Bullet Hell,a cat and mouse chase. When they came for mandatory recruitment, it was necessary to sedate his hysterical wife.

They peeled Saakaar’s nervous system from his body and wired it in an acceleration damper pumped with nutrients and amphetamines. The ship was a squat and ugly junkyard job leaking malevolent fan-shaped glyphs of sentient code. Saakaar interfaced the onboard mathematics and in a burst of neurochemicals, was taught to pilot the Ignatz.

The Circus is a brutal holovid entertainment jamboree of quantum tech war games whose subscribers are tech geeks with hardons for old school gaming analogues. Their q-bit hardware allowed homebrew codes clever enough to troll zeptoseconds.

Krazy Kat came after The Ignatz.