Kaldor City

Kaldor City hums with industrial efficiency and clinical coldness in Chub’s nightmare anecdote. Situated somewhere amid the settled fringes of Known Space, the city hosts Voc-class facilities whose gleaming labs belie their latent danger. Chub’s grim tale centers on a Voc therapist lab equipped with vibro-digits and subcutaneous stimulators—tools designed for precise care, twisted into instruments of amputation. The lab’s sterile surfaces glitter under harsh institutional lighting as Chub recounts a routine session’s sudden violence. Shumf! The Caretaker robot twists all one million constrainers past failure and severs a man’s arm in seconds. Borg dismisses it as programming error. Chub insists such malfunction is routine. Elsewhere in the city, automated systems—which should ideally complement labor—demonstrate erratic violence, further evidence of systemic deterioration.