Latest transmission · Released
Latest release
The newest release from Shadow Circuits. Watch here or open the video on YouTube.
Original cyber-noir cinematic universe · Est. 2025
Shadow Circuits
A world unfolding through transmissions, music, memory, and character-driven cinematic stories.
The public archive expands only when the story does. New characters, places, and connections appear here after they enter the released narrative.
// Current public record
Latest transmission
Watch the latest release, then explore earlier transmissions from the Shadow Circuits archive.
// Decentralized movement
The Living Current
Many names · One current
Corriente Viva
Corriente Viva is the Living Current’s Spanish name and its most common expression across the Colorado Basin, Meridian Coast and across the US Southwest. Elsewhere, the movement takes different regional names and forms.
The Living Current is a decentralized international network of locally accountable ecological, technical, cultural, and community circles. Its members protect water, soil, habitat, native seeds, trustworthy evidence, repair knowledge, and repairable energy infrastructure.
Local by design
No single center
It has no single leader, headquarters, or universal model. Every circle is shaped by its own watershed, culture, climate, and community. What connects them is a shared belief that land, water, energy, food, shelter, and knowledge should not be controlled as instruments of dependency.
01 · A living network
Another way to remain
The Living Current emerged from communities living through ecological decline, institutional abandonment, concentrated wealth, and infrastructure they could no longer trust or repair.
Its philosophy is rooted in practical eco-socialism and selective degrowth: reduce extraction, waste, planned obsolescence, speculative ownership, and luxury consumption—while expanding care, restoration, useful knowledge, dignified housing, renewable energy, and community resilience.
The movement does not romanticize poverty or reject technology. It asks a different question: does a system help people and living environments endure, or does it make them dependent on something distant, opaque, and disposable?
Across river basins, drylands, agricultural regions, and coastal cities, autonomous circles restore damaged habitats, maintain seed and water records, build repairable energy systems, recover traditional knowledge, and test new forms of cooperative living. Work remains locally accountable, but knowledge and mutual aid travel between regions.
In Arizona, one field cell gathers water readings, protects independent evidence, tends riparian habitat, and maintains the solar and sensing equipment that makes its work possible. It answers to the people and places affected by that work.
The Arizona cell is only one current within a much larger movement: an unfinished attempt to build meaningful life beyond a society hollowed out by extraction, isolation, and endless consumption.
02 · Living Current - Arizona crew transmission · Released
Open Veins Part I
Boone Mercer rides his chopper through Arizona's stressed Colorado River corridor and encounters the Living Current's Arizona field crew. Their water, habitat, sensing, and repair work was underway before he arrived. As he sees what they do, respect begins to replace distance—and another direction comes into view.
Previous transmission · Meridian Coast chapter
Carried by the Wind
Cipher and Shiori meet on the coastal promenade of Meridian Coast, beginning the present-day storyline through distance, restraint, and an uncertain recognition between two people carrying different kinds of exile.
01 · The meeting
Two lives enter the same frame
On the coastal edge of the city, Cipher and Shiori encounter one another without yet understanding how deeply their lives will intersect. The scene introduces them through physical presence, silence, and the subtle tension of people trained to notice more than they reveal.
02 · The current
A calm surface over hidden pressure
A city whose beauty never cancels its systems of control. The coast appears open, but both characters arrive carrying routes they did not entirely choose.
Between Worlds
A recorded fragment from before Meridian Coast. The film follows the beginning of Shiori's undercover years and introduces Kang Do-yun and the protector known as Oni-san without resolving what became of either relationship.
01 · The undercover years
Borrowed names
Set across near-future Tokyo, Seoul, and Hong Kong, the beginning of Shiori's life under deep cover. Her training gave her the ability to survive several worlds, but never the freedom to belong fully to any of them.
02 · The people who remained
Operating at the Edge of the Grid
Shiori moves through the city's digital arteries between covert missions, borrowed identities, and constant cyberwar—never fully hidden, never safe enough to stop.
// Primary pressure zone
Meridian Coast
A near-future West Coast megacity of freeway corridors, coastal wealth, industrial belts, working districts, platform culture, distant corporate towers and AGI managed sophisticated infrastructure development that battles a historic housing crisis and the climate change induced environmental challenges.
Meridian Coast is a fictional near-future megacity built from the geography and urban foundations of present-day Greater Los Angeles and Southern California. Known administratively as the Meridian Coastal Administrative Zone, it grew outward and upward through migration, industrial expansion, redevelopment, and the merging of once-separate urban centers. It remains recognizably Southern Californian—coastal, multicultural, beautiful, and restless—but is denser, more layered, and increasingly divided into parallel societies under constant pressure.
01 · The coast
Distance
Sunlight, salt air, glass, concrete, and the illusion that the city becomes gentler near the ocean. The coast is where Meridian Coast sells its most convincing image of openness, movement, and personal reinvention.
02 · The grid
Memory
Almost everything in Meridian Coast is observed. Not everything is protected. Surveillance is continuous, but consequences are selective, delayed, and often delivered through access rather than immediate arrest.
The city does not always close the door in front of you. It remembers you—then changes the price of the next one.
03 · The price
Survival
Medicine, work, identity, mobility, and bodily repair exist—but not under the same terms for everyone. Meridian Coast is the present-day center of the story: a place where old identities can be hidden, but rarely erased, and where refuge can resemble recruitment until it is too late to separate them.
// Identified narrative threads
Known characters
Cipher Maddox and Kurokawa Shiori carry the released Meridian Coast story. Shiori's earlier path also includes Oni-san and Kang Do-yun. The upcoming Arizona chapter introduces Boone Mercer, five Living Current field operators, and their field support robot, Sip. The crew's work has its own history beyond Boone's arrival.
Current signal · Meridian Coast
Cipher Maddox
Operator · Performer · Street-level observer
A self-made hacker and performer moving through the physical and digital margins of Meridian Coast. Cipher repeatedly appears near people the city has already priced as disposable, but the exact depth of his connection to Shadow Circuits remains unclear.
He can breach a system. The harder question is whether the system was waiting for him to try.
Dedicated Cipher transmission not yet public
Current thread · Meridian Coast
Kurokawa Shiori (黒川栞)
Hacker · Undercover operative
Raised in secrecy after the destruction of the criminal bloodline into which she was born, Shiori was trained as both an elite hacker and an assassin before moving through covert operations across China, Korea, and Japan.
Now in Meridian Coast, she is attempting to build a life that belongs to her. Old names, unfinished loyalties, and fragments from several countries continue to follow.
Other recorded names: Shulin (淑琳) · Seo Yuri (서유리)
A new city can hide a past. It cannot decide when the past stops speaking.
Past fragment · Shiori's undercover years
Oni-san
Onodera Takeo (小野寺 武雄) / Choi Tae-woong (최태웅)
Mysterious Protector · Ex–Special Forces · Yakuza Captain · Martial artist
Sent by Shiori's stepfather in a fictional yakuza organization, Oni-san watches over her from the shadows, helps protect her true identity, and keeps their connection to Japan open. His own ties to the organization remain closely guarded.
Born to a Korean mother and a Japanese father and raised in Tokyo, he carries two identities and speaks both languages natively. Fiercely strong and short-tempered as a child, he drew the organization's attention; it financed his military university education before he served in special forces.
Past fragment · Shiori's undercover years
Kang Do-yun (강도윤)
Crew · Cyber Tactician · Operator · Martial artist
Do-yun grew up in Seoul's collapsing outer districts, under pressure from hunger, gangs, and corporate neglect. A wandering Korean cyber shaman and martial artist became his unlikely guardian, teaching him that strength without purpose corrodes and that restraint can be a form of mercy.
By his mid-teens he was known for precision, calm, and an ability to escape a corner. Part assassin, part tactician, part systems operative, he remains dangerous because he knows when not to use the force he carries.
Upcoming thread · Arizona visitor
Boone Mercer
Rider / Forge Master
An Iron Mile MC linked road traveler and skilled repairer, Boone arrives on his chopper from outside the Living Current's Arizona cell. Meeting its field crew opens a possible new direction of way of living and self development; their work is already in motion before he reaches them.
Upcoming thread · Arizona field cell
Mariana Solís Ortega
Hydrologist / Water Auditor
Mariana tests water conditions along the corridor and safeguards independent evidence of what is happening to the watershed. Her measurements give the crew a record it can stand behind.
Upcoming thread · Arizona field cell
Nathan Thomas Callahan
Watershed Liaison
Nathan connects field findings with local people, access agreements, and testimony. He keeps community authority present when the crew decides how its evidence can be used.
Upcoming thread · Arizona field cell
Naomi Simone Bennett
Riparian Ecologist / Seed Keeper
Naomi protects native seeds, riverbank habitat, and soil. She keeps restoration work connected to the seasons and to the long time it takes a living corridor to recover.
Upcoming thread · Arizona field cell
Teresa “Tess” Elena Valenzuela
Field Mechanic / Solar Engineer
Tess keeps the crew's solar power, pumps, batteries, vehicles, and other field equipment working. Her repairs let the cell remain useful where dependable infrastructure is scarce.
Upcoming thread · Arizona field cell
Kee Benally
Remote Sensing / Field Communications
Kee is a Diné remote-sensing and communications specialist from northern Arizona. Grounded in community ties and spiritual traditions, he uses drones, sensors and offline maps to support the crew's work and help protect the people and places he calls home.
Upcoming thread · Arizona field cell
Sip
Field Support Robot
Sip is the Arizona crew's compact tracked field robot and AI companion, helping with equipment handling and fieldwork. Its articulated arms and watchful optical head make it a familiar presence around camp.
// Soundtrack archive
Music inside the world
Original music, spoken transmissions, character-linked releases, and multilingual lyrics form part of the narrative rather than sitting outside it. The soundtrack moves through breakbeat, industrial, dark electronic, hip hop, shoegaze, post-punk, and cinematic hybrid forms.
// Outside the fiction
About the project
Created by Márton Bence Fekete
Shadow Circuits is an independent cinematic project combining original characters, music, writing, visual design, world-building, editing, and AI-assisted filmmaking.
The project is being rebuilt as a connected cinematic universe. Its locations, character continuity, production design, and narrative formats expand chapter by chapter rather than being exposed all at once.
AI tools are used as part of the production workflow, but the creative direction, writing, character development, editing, music production, continuity decisions, and final presentation remain authored and curated by the creator.
- Primary world
- Meridian Coast and connected regional pressure zones
- Formats
- Music videos, spoken transmissions, cinematic shorts, character fragments, original soundtracks, and long-form story development
- Core themes
- Human agency, AI ecology, memory, body economy, identity, corporate power, exile, adaptation, and fragile forms of trust
- Production
- Independent creator-led project using a mixed workflow of writing, music production, AI-assisted image and video generation, editing, and web publishing
// Open channel
Project contact
Start a conversation
For creative collaboration, production enquiries, soundtrack work, or discussion related to Shadow Circuits, use the project channel below.