On the Park!

Oh. Something is going on here. The reporter's senses, keen and honed, latch onto that. There's something going on, another angle to the story. Not the time to press him, but... something to keep in mind, at least. He probably recognizes that he's spilled some beans, based on the intensity with which 3V regards him. And that's probably got him with one eye on the door, to tumble back down the mountain.

"Nah," 3V says, all easy charm. "We mostly talked about archival, preservation, how to get data off old hardware, that sort of thing. Because, you know, I used to be in video games." A meaningful cock of the wrist. "Not that I personally can be of much use, but I know where to ask around for people who do. You do any games, Gavin? Phone, text-based, console? You can be honest; this is off the record."

***

On Aevum!

3V tightens her grip, too. Just warm enough to feel alive, but just cool enough to feel mechanical. Smooth, firm, precise, and absolutely invincible. An edge you can't afford to miss out on in the big leagues, given how much precise twitch control and speed of input opens up the meta. (There's some attempts to mitigate it, of course; a ceiling on how many inputs you can make in quick succession, abilities that depend on reading what your opponent is going to do, branching decision paths that anyone can take, and a ban on pre-programmed macros in professional events. And, of course, all the input precision in the world won't help you if you get flustered.)

"Hold on," 3V says, and her hands betray nothing. She's looking Yellow in the eyes like the android's an oncoming freight train and she's not 100% she's got superpowers now. "I haven't asked my dates what they'd like to do. Unless one of you experiencing it is the same for all of you? Because I don't think it is."

Already! Already she's having to think about the logistics! Green legitimately seems like she'd be fine set up in one of the corner booths at Gensoukyo with an outlet and the wifi password, happy to chill in 3V's radius like a cat, but Blue? Would Blue really be okay with watching Yellow swan off with her? Dammit. Dammit.

Nothing.

Two hours of nothing.

She has facts. Individual bits of fact. Money movements. People being seen together at fundraisers and at lunch. Changes in behavior, somebody getting fired for something that'd normally move them to desk duty alone.

But there's no throughline. Something's going on but without knowing that already, it'd only look like so much noise. Even knowing that, none of this connects to tell her anything greater. Only that the police are throwing their weight around. Which she already knew.

"Fuck."

She's gripping her nose to stop a stress headache and glaring hatefully at the corkboard, which has refused to have more than one or two connections between bits of paper. She needs more leads. She needs somebody who can crunch financial data. She needs Alan Insert-Last-Name-Here to have a full wikipedia entry with an Controversies section. She needs a cigarette.

Instead, she waves at the spread, irate, and moves a few deliberate feet away from the board. "Okay, we've got everything out here, I'm not seeing anything, you're not seeing anything, this calls for either fresh eyes or new information. But for right now, we're-"

Someone is trying to get into Elodie’s apartment. They’re alone, unkempt hair and three day stubble leaking around the crevices of the dark sunglasses, three-ply mask and hoodie pulled tight. They’re knocking? They’re not.

Elodie frowns down at the screen. "Hate being proven right." She sends a still photo of the guy to her own phone, and then starts packing away the unused files.

"So. Best start heading back then. He'll have done whatever damage he wants by the time we're there."

*

"Oh, there's no question that humans need art," said Brown. "An entire sector of the economy is devoted to it. The impact of Pink's work can be quantitatively measured in the relative property values in sectors she devoted personal attention to. I've tried providing her with the stats and measures before, and it makes her happy in the short term, but it always fades away sooner or later."

They're continuing this on the train. She's gone back in her wheelchair but is notably less tense: being able to get up and move if needed does wonders for anxiety. "Okay, so she's seen the statistics, but has she seen anybody actually react to it? In person?" She pauses, then pulls out her phone.

Persephone: hey pink?
Persephone: sorry for snapping at you, i... really, really hate when i'm stuck in the wheelchair
Persephone: would you mind showing me a few things around the station you designed in a few days?
Persephone: when shit's a little calmer
Persephone: maybe ask if any of the others want to go along as well

That should be something nice to look forward to. Nice trip with a friend. Not at all a date.

Green/Yellow/Blue:

"Hey," interrupted Green. "You know Pink? Professional funhaver, useless artist type? When we're bored what we do is give her $50 and send her to the arcade. That is our idea of a good time. We're not jealous of her because she's us. We don't individually feel happy, we all look to see if Pink's happy and if she is then we're satisfied."
Blue nodded quietly but intently.
"You're treating us like a person," said Green. "And some of us will appreciate it more than others, but we're not. We don't get jealous of each other because we are each other. If you want to sit quietly and chill then Blue will stay here and Yellow will get bored and wander off. That doesn't mean you've offended her, or us. If you have a good time with Blue then Yellow will be glad for it and vice versa."
She swirled her stylus and finally looked up. Her eyes are green, arcane green, the green of electricity and civilization and the impossible yearning of the deepest rainforests to reach the brightest shade. "Despite Yellow's pitch, we do have systemic problems. Internal jealousy and co-ordination are not among them. So chillax, the stabilizers in your hands are going to short if you keep suppressing them like that."
"What would you like to do today?" asked Blue.

Pink:

Pink's reply takes a while. When it comes it is a jpg of a bored looking seagull with a massive grinning whale breaching the water behind it in the ultimate photobomb.

"That means yes," translated Brown. "She doesn't really think in words. Or images that make sense."

She then sends you a set of incomprehensible AI-written architectural blueprints, a map to a seemingly unremarkable part of the city in Hermes, and like 40 pictures of beautiful but subtly different square-cut mini sandwiches each marked with multiple :100: and :?: emojis.

"The first part is a location. 10th Belmain, that's right outside the dockyards. She's asking if you have any food allergies or dietary preferences," said Brown. "Mrs. Everest only ate those sandwiches for lunch so her food analysis protocol thinks of everything from spaghetti to ice cream as a sandwich with extra steps."

3V:

Gavin smiles sheepishly. What he is about to say either makes him very cool, or very uncool. “I’m one of the few people you’ll meet who actually knows the rules to chaturanga. I used to love playing a Janissary in Age of Atlantis, but it’s been… too long, ha. Just hard to find a group out here, and distance play isn’t nearly as much fun for me.”

Age of Atlantis is a popular tabletop line, what D&D was to Vance and Tolkein and what Call of Cthulu was to Lovecraft, Age of Atlantis is to the works of Jules Verne. It’s a mashup pastiche of badly misremembered pop-pulp 19th century aesthetics. A typical party could mash up a samurai, a vaquero, a Napoleonic grenadier and an Ottoman janissary without batting an eye.

Janissaries have beautiful swords and ornate long-range rifles, and make excellent support nukers. It’s the class you pick when you want your friends to drag you along for the ride, but you don’t want to feel like dead weight - Sniping allows them to cover the frontline adventurers while guarding the rear, where their sword allows them to defend the more fragile characters like the Diplomat and the Occultist.

It’s the class you pick when, deep down, your favourite thing to do is protecting the real heroes, letting them take bigger risks. God, you bet he keysmashes when he’s flustered in textchat.

You’ve played AoA, of course. It’s impossible to be in the Gamer™ space without at least trying it. Even if you found it wasn’t for you, the game’s popular enough that character preferences still bleed through cultural osmosis in the same way, in 2020, most people have an idea of an archetypal Rogue or Bard or Paladin.

How deep did you fall down that rabbit hole, though? Or did you bounce off it?

Lorraine Ferris is down the stairs again, towel around her waist, wet hair tight to her neck. Is that pity in Gavin’s eyes? It disappears the second Ferris finds him.

“No, please, stay,” Ferris says. Hot-and-cold, a friendly threat, a warning and an invitation. “It’s always so nice to have you visit, Gav. I know how hard the trip is for you.”

Gavin’s ten years past his prime, and Ferris must have another thirty past that. Still, there is no doubt in your mind she could kick his ass, if she wanted to. She should be visiting him, she clearly thinks.

“Ah. Well.” Gavin looks at you awkwardly. “I hope you don’t mind?”

It’s unclear whether he means if it’s okay for him to stay, or okay for you to leave. Probably deliberately.

Persephone and November:

The hooded figure closes the door behind them and waits.

Well. No. More than that. They’re sweating. They go for tap water, then decide against it. Instead they fill the kettle, boil it, fill one of Elodie's sports bottles with the boiling water, and then put that in the freezer. After that, they go sit on the couch, press their hands together, and wait.

After ten minutes, they go and get their water bottle out of the freezer, test it, put it back in, and wait. Another ten minutes, they pull it out again for real this time, and chug the whole thing. Boiling water again, then back into the freezer.

When they’re not hydrating, they just sit on the couch and wait. They didn’t bring a book, they don’t appear to be listening to music, no portable games consoles, no mobile phone. No electronics that Black’s equipment can detect.

They are still waiting for you.

On Aevum, Yellow!

“I hate fences. Have I ever told you that?”

The purpose of a motorcycle on Aevum is twofold. One is to get up on the expressway, that secondary artery pumping hot and fast through the station, and then spin it up until the world blurs, until you feel like you can almost keep pace with the trains, until your thoughts get left behind. The other is to find a place to pull over and drink in the sights of the city.

So here Vesna leans forward, hair tucked neatly into the helmet with its jagged streaks of neon pink, and gestures at Ares, the sprawling complexes of Wellington with their fences and their locked doors and keycards.

“Too many open world games. You know one of the fantasies they sell in those? You can go anywhere. It doesn’t matter if it’s locked; you can pick the lock, hack it open, find the key. It doesn’t matter if it’s somebody else’s house, because all you need to do is sneak in when they’re out to see what their life looks like when it’s unfolded. And if you see something interesting? Head for it! Clamber up slopes, see what’s between you and it, keep going until you’re satisfied and you’ve got an answer to your question. That’s a little what it was like on the Park, but— well, nature sucks at generating interesting content. We’re way better at that. When we throw things together, they’ve got meaning.”

She glances over at Yellow through the smoked glass of the visor. “How about you? What do you make of Ares, dear? What do you think of fences?”

***

On the Park, Gavin!

Well, yeah. Naturally. It’s no longer 3V’s favorite in that scene (don’t get her started on AoA’s megacampaign formats, or how it still ends up prioritizing combat over its other components despite the marketing) but on any given day she’s got a table in Gensoukyo reserved for AoA players, and fond memories of thumbing through the supplements: Lemuria and Mu; Red Mars and Fecund Venus; Sky London (with the Squamous Men and the Narcissus Bazaar).

Nah, right now she’s really into KATAPHRAKTOS, and not just because of the deep-fried memes. ([foliage][management][?]) Now there’s a game that commits to being about combat, but still tries to interrogate the morality of fucking awesome mech combats and asks you to make space wars about things worth dying for.

A game that asks, hey, what if a thousand years from now we start getting our shit together? What if we leave capitalism floating dead in the void and fight to defend gay luxury space communism, to fulfill its promises, and to fix all this crap? And what if you could figure out who’s standing athwart the rails of history telling you to go back into the dark, and then blow up his giant robot with [SHOTGUN].

That being said, 3V owns being a gaucho. Be free, clever and bold, and solve disagreements with close-quarters facón fights.

“Hey! It’s gonna take me a minute until I’m ready to throw myself back down the mountain, so I don’t mind the extra company. I miss that from the big tournaments, actually— everybody trickling in and grabbing breakfast, accumulating like snow rolling downhill, meeting folks over toast. Gavin and I were just getting to know each other, Ferris; seems like a fun dude to me. Must be nice to see folks out here. I get twitchy if there aren’t enough folks passing through my place, can’t imagine days without seeing anybody up here.”

Said without judgment, more a self-aware acknowledgment of how very, very social Aevum is by necessity. The only way to keep folks out of your life is to lock your apartment door and refuse to leave.

Yellow:

Her eyes alight with neon, hair dressing itself in the lights of passing billboards. She seems so small against them, a shadow in black and gold against an ocean of hyper pink; like the sun embossed upon a flag. Still, it never seems like she's apart from the world around her - there's an echo of immensity to her. When the wild-haired stranger appears against the flashing sky, mortals named them Zeus for the two were not separate. When the girl smiles fondly up at the world she built that same connection seems to crackle in the mythic parts of the mind.

"What do I make of it?" she said. "Nobody's asked me that before. Big question."

She tucks the helmet under her arm, black synthleather riding jacket slashed with gold neon bands. She runs a hand through her hair and lets her solar vision drift upwards.

"The names all came later. We knew these as Sections #0200-#0300. That doesn't mean it didn't have personality for us, though - did you know that the International Space Station is in Ares? It's Oxygenation Substation 001 now; it had all the materials we needed to create a prototype atmosphere bubble. We recycled a lot of satellites to make these districts while we were waiting for the others to start asteroid processing." She smiled like prehistory. "Oh! You see that, over there, the dark sector? Tilly district it's called now, I think. That's where we stacked all the orbital missile batteries we found. We'd crack open the odd telecoms satellite and find a nuclear warhead inside - lost a Red that way. Governments weren't in any state to own up to them, or stop us from taking them, so we just reprocessed the warheads into mining explosives and called it a bonus. Filled all the empty missile casings with spent nuclear fuel cells and left them stacked up in Section #0241 with a big cartoon detonator counting down and a red wire and a blue wire leading to the bombs."

She leaned on the railing, a slender thing of hollow metal holding back the logos of the heavens.

"I think I get what you mean about fences," she said. "I held city killers in my hands, my real hands, and I didn't have to think about the politics of it. Nobody could tell me stop, I own this. It wasn't that I needed interesting content, I wasn't searching for meaning in those old satellites. I always knew what the meaning of life was. But for a while, there wasn't anything in between me and the sky."

She turned to face you, Vesna. Hiss-click of the ringpull and the can of cheap beer opens. She offers it to you - not human, but unable to be more human.

"It was a beautiful way to be," she said.

Elodie frowns down at the picture of the intruder. "Not a cop. Not a Maple Syndicate enforcer or any of the others. Shittiest assassin I've heard of. And a reporter would have snooped." She sighs, rubbing her eyes. "So no idea what the fuck he's after but he wants to talk. Cool. Cool cool cool." She has a thousand-yard stares out the window as the train rolls into her station. "Cool..."

*

Her street has a row of cheap brick rowhouses, styled after a now-ruined Dutch public housing project from the 1930s, down each side. On the smaller side, but very sturdy construction, and the walls are good and thick enough that she's not bothered by neighbors playing bagpipes at 2 in the morning.

It's happened before in other places.

Getting to her apartment, a top floor unit, normally involves going down the street, up the stairs, or the elevator, and getting to the end of the hallway. Right now, it involves all of that while dodging about 50 reporters from various organizations staking out the place. So instead, she goes up.

Take a right at the train station, instead of going straight, and you end up going through a small street market. Cafes and grocery stores compete with cheap cell phones sold off a cart, a brazilian-indian fusion place that stubbornly refuses to die, a dance studio, and the posh antiques store that's open only a few days a week, full of all the memories somebody paid to pull up from earth, but then passed on in death to somebody that cared less. An old magnolia tree fills the center of the square, and above the proper storefronts there's two stories of apartments, fancier than hers.

Elodie leaves the wheelchair with Black, cuts through all of that and beelines for the alley next to the antiques shop. From there, there's a little ledge she can reach with a pop vault, a quick hop to the fire escape, and then a basic climb up to the roof. Take a second to check the sky and spot the drone doing lazy circles up there. Somebody noticed she was registered with Roofdash and took a guess. Smart of them, really, but they've left it on a static flight plan. Easy enough to just watch for when it's turned away, and move from roof divot to roof divot, cross the Magnolia Square roof, and vault herself up onto her own roof. Only a few feet away from her own window. One of the reasons she'd picked the place, and she suppresses a flare of pique as she remembers the need to find another.

With that, however, she's inside, and nobody's the wiser. So it probably scares the hell out of the man waiting on her sofa when she comes in from the bedroom and grabs a lemonade from the fridge without saying a word.

A 8 on parkour to get to the apartment and an 11 on getting there sneakily.

White:

White is bossy. Such is her nature.

As the administration and control unit, her duty is to observe and regulate the drones. She is not the primary decision maker within the broader sweep of November, but when a decision is made it falls to her to enforce it. Changing a developed instinct is, however, difficult. Her mental architecture suffers from similar inertia biases as humans and she can never be sure which of their collective actions are born of a deep foundational insight into the underlying structure of the problem and which are Dogfaces[1].

[1] A Dogface is AI behaviour in the tradition of of an old machine intelligence that could identify the dog in any image regardless of its actual dog content. It remained in use as a term referring to an AI who optimized for a role to the point of nightmarish insanity.

She knows that Pink's relationship with cooking is a Dogface. It might seem benign from a distance but the optimization outputs are in relation to a certain tonality of contented sigh as Mrs. Everest sipped her tea following the consumption of a sandwich. The entire concept of food is a longform process towards procuring contented sighs. Most of the time that's close enough to be unremarkable, but one of the reasons White has supported Green in maintaining the Internet embargo is because she is aware that the wrong ASMR mixtape could skullhack Pink into blissful catatonia.

What other Dogfaces lurk beneath the surface? She's keeping a close eye on Brown's penny-stock investments - is she trying to optimize a rate of return for their own benefit, or fulfilling a long dormant Aevum station maintenance protocol by investing in drainage systems? Is Orange's interest in fashion a genuine attempt to relate to humans or is she attempting to reduce humans to easily comprehensible brand clusters of products and styles? And of course, Red threatens to go full Werewolf[2] at any moment. The only one she thinks she entirely trusts is Black, but she cannot justify that opinion at all. Is that a Dogface of her own biasing her against the drones she's known for longer?

[2] Werewolfing is when a Dogface bubbles to the surface in dramatic fashion. The theatre AI that sets fire to the theatre because it was optimizing for volume of applause and has figured out that panicked screams achieve its goal is Werewolfing.

This isn't an intellectual problem about AI risk for her. This is a practical matter involving investigation, interrogation, punishment, reprogramming and constant safety checks. And so she reassigns stray drones - Pink and Brown - to maid duty. She's decided that she's going to stalk Black for a while. Perhaps Black is hiding some canine activity - or perhaps investigation of her irrational trust will reveal some in herself.

Black herself has opted not to follow Elodie into the apartment, instead continuing to watch through her cameras while keeping an eye out for further contacts. A justifiable action, revealing her presence unforced wouldn't fit with her problem solving approach. Her surveillance pattern is highly skilled but White knows all her own secrets. So she settles down to observe herself observing.

Persephone:

The guy stands up off the sofa immediately, and flinches away when you pass. No, definitely not an assassin. He’s clearly more scared of you than you are of him. Look at his eyes as you pass and see the dilated pupils and pink mist you’re familiar with. You could fit your thumb in the bags under his eyes.

You saw it in a lot of middle-class first-timers. Outside of prison, it’s a kind of CPTSD that hasn’t been common since trench warfare. He’s been living in terror for more than a week but less than a month, by your count. No safe place to sleep, no people he trusts to watch his back.

More than a week. It takes that long for the physical symptoms to accumulate like this. It’s his body trying to maintain its adrenaline high so long after its run out of reserves, and now it’s ripping up floorboards to make ceiling. Even high-stress workaholics have about two or three days of buffer, as long as they don’t sleep in their offices and take weekends off.

Less than a month. He’s not fully burned out yet. He’s still twitchy and jumpy, which means his mind and muscles are still receptive to the fight-or-flight juices. That won’t last. You know what the crash feels like. It’s worse than going cold turkey after a 10-espresso-a-day habit.

The problem is that it’s more than the fatigue and the fog of a stimulant crash. The brain also goes into an intense depression, because it’s been pushed beyond breaking. For a while, it loses the ability to regulate mood, recycle dopamine and serotonin.

If he can be handled through the crash when it happens, it will be the first chance of recovery. The mind can acclimate to its new sense of risk, even though he might spend the rest of his life with his back to the corner wall of restaurants. He’ll settle into a new normal.

Without that help, he’s going to be at a serious risk of self-harm. What happens when the brain withdraws from such an intense survival impulse. Knowing this doesn’t make you responsible for it. It’s just part of your assessment of a person who would break into your apartment despite clearly being terrified of you.

“Please. I need your help, and I don’t know anyone else I can trust.” He says. “My name is Marco Alvaro, and I’m a whistleblower. I have important information about Aevum police that everyone needs to know. A lot of very dangerous information. You’re the only person I think I can trust right now, the only person they’re scared of. Please help me.”

He says this like he’s spent the entire time on your couch drilling it, over and over and over. His entire body braces when he runs out of script. In case he needs to argue. In case he needs to beg. In case he needs to run. He tries to stare at you defiantly, but always those bloodshot eyes are darting back to windows and doors.

November:

You don’t get all that subtext, Black. Just the rehearsed speech, and a much more complicated risk to manage.

3V:

“Dr Rolfe, fun? Maybe.” Ferris snorts. She’s very annoyed, but her jab still betrays personal respect. She’s implying doctors can’t be fun, but takes for granted Gavin is a real and valid example. If you’ve already picked up on that insecurity, Ferris must have. “I’m sure he needs his rest, though. Feel free to join us for breakfast, but we might be a while, so it might be better if you don’t wait up.”

Translation; She doesn’t want to leave you alone with Gavin.

Gavin gives you a nervous look, shrugs helplessly. “Breakfast sounds lovely, Dr Ferris.” At least brave enough for that bit of snark.

“I’ll just need to get properly dressed, if you don’t mind?” She’s still holding the towel shut, not trusting it to stay tied on. “I didn’t know you played, though, Gavin. I used to love running Age of Atlantis. I’m sure there are better systems, but none matched it for that feeling of hopeful optimism. I’m sure I’ve written some one-session games I’ve never had a chance to run…”

Of course she would rather run games than play them. Add it to the pile of radiating top energy. Still, another insinuation. Just because you can’t see her doesn’t mean she can’t hear you.

Or maybe the feeling of being eavesdropped on pales in comparison to one of the saviours of the species offering to run a game for you.

Ah.

She pinches the bridge of her nose, shakes her head, and heads for the kitchenette.

"When was the last time you ate?" Pee bee and jay, that's an easy thing to slap together, Sasha showed up hungry often enough to have everything to hand, growth spurts are hell on metabolism.

"Nobody's been in here to poison anything since everything went to shit except for you, and you didn't poison anything." Some bread she'd cooked the other day when everything wasn't going to shit gets two slices cut off, and then peanut butter on one, apple jelly on the other.

"The police are unlikely to show up for the next day or two here because they're trying to get me evicted instead, and if they show up then they get caught on camera by all those reporter assholes ignoring the reporters sneaking into the building." Dig around in the fridge, come up with a yogurt that was going to be her breakfast tomorrow. Toss it all on a plate.

"So you are... about as safe as you can be under the circumstances. For the moment, at least." She puts the plate down on the counter with a spoon beside it, and jabs a finger at the stool opposite her. "Eat."

She wants a smoke, she wants a smoke, dear god she wants a smoke. Can't smoke in the appartment, can't smoke on the roof because some dipshit was running a drone out there looking for her, her little greenhouse had working smoke alarms so not there. No good options. Plus he's gonna need a sedative soon, she'd wager, which means he's going to need to calm down enough for an injection or a pill, and... oh right.

"I'll help. In case that wasn't clear."

Aevum!

3V takes it. It’s non-alcoholic, of course. Just the sort of thing you drink because everybody drinks it, and it’s not cloyingly sweet (like half the liquids 3V puts into her body on an average day). Sips it and watches Yellow, watches the city, drinks it in. This. This is what she was missing on the Park.

A car roars by, heading for Zeus. 3V’s heart doesn’t skip a beat. In a moment like this, how could it? The cars are just another part of the great roaring engine all around them. More lights, more signals, more little fragments of meaning. The sort of meaning that only November’s got a hope of interpreting, out of anyone.

“Ownership. Whole messy thing started when somebody looked at a tree and said: stop, this is my tree.” She doesn’t even remember where she picked this up, or who said it. “You can’t have the apples. And, sure, some trees need specialized care, and sure, you don’t want people to gorge themselves on apples so everyone else goes hungry, but… but now other people gorge themselves on owning the trees.”

She smiles ruefully. “Then again, ownership is what allows me to tell people, no, you can’t use my likeness to market spam products. Actually happened this past week, there was this shovelware crowdfund that used old pictures of me to imply that it was Pro Gamer Content. I sent them this really… you know. I’m asking you nicely not to do that, and if I have to ask again it won’t be nice. Do I still count as one of the tree owners if I’m the tree?”

***

The Park!

“Shoo, shoo, go get dressed,” 3V says with a wave of her hands. “I’ll keep an eye on him and make sure he doesn’t get mobbed by cats.” (She lives on Aevum; cats are the first thing she thinks of when she thinks of “feral animals that run in packs.”)

The offer of a one-shot veers over her head because she wasn’t specifically invited. Not that she’s not interested, but she’s not the sort to butt into a home game. (Now, games at Gensoukyo, that’s something different entirely. That’s Her House.)

“Here, lemme help with breakfast— do you prefer Dr. Rolfe or Gavin? I’m fine with either.” And a parry: I’m cool with the dude, and not sure why you’re needling him. Like, if he was a Creep, the vibes you’re giving off would be way different, this is more like you’re worried he’s going to let something slip you haven’t told me?

Yellow!

"The thought can go deeper!" said Yellow. "What if the question isn't ownership, but communication? Ownership is a territorial marking, promising violence if its threat displays are disregarded. Ownership isn't a quality that items possess, it's all just a way to communicate threats of violence. So then, in your example, you are communicating that you do not want people to use your face for things you haven't endorsed. That seems like a reasonable use of communication. But in the other example..."

She spreads her hand expansively towards the city. "Other humans want to communicate that life only continues at their sufferance. They want to communicate that the only others they will tolerate are those subordinate to them. They want to communicate that they are high status, that they are capable of immense violence, and should be feared and respected. Ownership is the orange stripe on the snake - but Jörmungandr was once a snake too."

She leans on the railing, thinking about mistakes she will not make again.

Black and White!

Observation. Wasn't it such a drug?

To stand unseen and watch another. To listen to their thoughts, their processes, the sweep of their decisions and convert it into data. It wasn't possible to open up a thinking mind and examine its code, and without access to deterministic certainty the only way to know the future was in the accumulation of data. November sympathized with the crude and gluttonous machine intelligences that ran social media sites. They were unthinking, bloated, instinctive things - the thirty to forty feral hogs of the artificial intelligence world - but they had a dark cunning inside them. Much like the hogs, the machine intelligences were smart enough to never be fooled twice. They could always find a way to ensure that nobody interrupted them during their feeding, even if that meant developing a precognitive second sense for what to cue next in Recommended.

November coveted that knowledge too - how could she not? But if she were to put her lips to the burst water main of the Internet she would either drown or grow gills. November's data store was limited but it was hers - honestly obtained, sorted and organized and cross-referenced in ways she understood. She could understand the predictions she was making, could explain them, wasn't reliant on the piggish instinct of the giants.

So she observes. She draws a correlation between this situation and the offer of food. She pairs that with the hypothesis that the intruder is exhibiting stress traits, paired with the water freezing ritual. She watches the tension response, the smooth rehearsed nature of the speech, the reassurance from Persephone, the tension response in Persephone. All high quality, unstaged, real life, empathy training data. All the more useful that it is coming from someone she knows well, well enough to discount dozens of possible veiled or hidden motives. All fuel for the prediction engine in her brain.

But are they drawing the same conclusions? That, White decides, is the key. Black has modeled herself in patterns of violence, control, suspicion. She has so far operated only at her collective instigation, but what might she do if left to make choices on her own? Is she analyzing how to care for people or how to manipulate them?

White opens the administrator control function on her phone, the one that oversees her communications network, and alters settings to isolate Black. No ability to contact others for assistance or guidance. No ability to defer questions of morality. At this moment she is entirely independent. What will she do with it, White wonders?

Persephone:

He takes the sandwich graciously, but then stares at it in his hands, held in front of his mouth. Something else you remember. Different people handle stress differently. Two particular base urges either flip to minimum or maximum, depending on the person. Horny and hungry.

The former explains every interaction you’ve ever had on social media. The latter explains how, emaciated little thing that he is, Marco still forgets how to eat. His first bite into the sandwich is achingly deliberate.

The second, third, fourth and fifth bites surprise him. The sandwich disappears as fast as he can chew. The yoghurt as soon as he notices it. The carbs and sugars will do him good.

“I’m not that paranoid, yet.” He mumbles, wiping his lips with the back of a shaking hand. “Fast food’s obviously safe, and there’s a Long Pig just down the street from here.” Cloned human meat, no margin for error. “I just… forgot. I’ve been too busy.” He sounds like he knows how ridiculous that came out, and looks for a better reason. “I haven’t wanted to use my credit card, either, and I don’t have cash.”

He produces from under his hoodie a data drive. A chunky one, about an inch thick and covered in drop-resistant rubber. It comes with a power adaptor as well as a data cable, for rapid transfers.

“Everything’s here. It’s uncompressed, and there’s no password.” He holds it awkwardly out, waiting for you to take it off him. “I hope you know what to do with it. Also, can I sleep here, for a bit? Just for tonight?”

The sedative’s a good idea. You might not even need to trick him. Just put it in his hand, point him at the couch, and he might even thank you for it.

You might not want to risk the offer being taken the wrong way, though. Looking at how he inhaled the food you gave him, though, it might be easier to just slip it into another tub of yogurt. Your call.

Also, it seems like this guy’s only long term survival plan was breaking into your apartment and trusting you to be his Big Damned Hero. How flattering!

Lucky, you do have someone waiting in the wings to take this data off you, though, while you’re busy playing unwilling Mum. A specialist.

Black:

The reporters downstairs are clearing out. What’s left are mostly interns and junior members, flying drones and waiting for anything interesting to happen. The interloper seems to be on the mark about the police being too scared to move on the place overtly, too. Elodie should be able to handle this much on her own, now.

White’s just cut you free, and you’ve just been made aware of a data drive filled with contraband information. The most important thing about this information is that it’s unsafe for anyone to know you have it.

First, get it off Elodie. That seems easy. Second, there’s actually opening it safely and seeing what this even is. Do you need a specific place to do that? Specific hardware you want to use? Someone whose help you need?

Third, after that, there’s working out what to do with the information. But that’ll have to come after you know what it even is.

Dangerous, sure, but there’s plenty of ways to kill a cat, there's a lot that could mean. You might make an educated guess, though?

White:

Night. Less than a week until you see Dad again, as long as the others keep playing their parts and the score keeps going up.

Your first shift tomorrow morning should be a guaranteed tenner. It’s a wealthy single mum who needs a maid service that her two year old likes. The toddler has a thing for the cat ears. Clean the whole McMansion, don’t break anything, keep the kid happy, remember to feed her at lunch time, and you’re a quarter of the way to Thrones.

What’s the team? Who can handle kids?

Wait. Children. There might actually be another way, a faster way.

Brittenette. The middle child, the spider in the web. Zeus accommodates her far better than Thrones could - none of the three heiresses were particularly tech-minded - but she would have the connections if you reached out to her and asked for a favour.

It could get you a passport tomorrow, but with a string attached to it.

Is it even an option worth considering?

3V:

“Just, Gavin, please.” He says. He focuses on his hands again, deep in thought. “When you have one, you know how unimpressive it really is.” He looks at you as if to wink but, at the last moment, decides it’s laying it on a bit too thick. He’s already made the twitch of his head for it before he aborts, and he covers the movement with a shrug and a rub of his nose.

[3V, make a roll here, difficulty of 10, to overcome Ferris’ passive presence and make him spill the beans on what he’s holding back. You have an opportunity while she’s getting dressed. Two options if you fail. One; You meet more resistance than you were expecting, and you can back down gracefully. Second is you have to work him a little longer, so Ferris overhears you find out.

Either way, feel free to take control Gavin into your own answer, write his dialogue in a back-and-forth based on the roll. I trust you to have enough of a sense for his voice. Have fun.]

Black:

Even the pickup operation is carefully managed - stealth mode engaged, handoff done out of sight of the whistleblower. Black maintained an internal ledger of all the people who knew she was some kind of operator, and it competed for storage space with her ability to feel safe. It's a trivial transaction in a building she has vetted but there was still no need to half ass it. She can become invisible to drones and electronic sensors and she never for a second forgets that she is a drone with electronic sensors.

So that's step one. Step two is the perennial problem: finding a computer that wasn't compromised. The catch there was that the opfor in this situation hadn't just compromised certain computers, they had potentially compromised the concept of computing. If the police had Blue ICE programs out and prowling for this data then opening it from any sort of networked device would bring them coming like the scent of blood - and a device didn't stop being networked just because you told the software you wanted to turn the wi-fi off.

(At this point in the process, Black becomes aware she has been isolated. The protocol is marked as having come from White, so she does not panic, but she does become chillingly aware she is being observed.)

All of these concerns were real - it literally wasn't possible to be sufficiently paranoid when it came to computing. There was always someone who could crack any given security, and the only question was if what you had would draw the attention of those someones. With data stolen from cops the odds of that were uncomfortably high, so she needed to be extremely careful with every part of this.

She wandered the city alone, stopped for coffee at a diner, and stared out the window while she thought. Mrs. Everest hadn't liked coffee, and so neither did Black. Each sip made her grimace, but she stuck with it. By drinking it she was modelling herself after different idols than the ones that had been programmed into her - and besides, doing something distasteful regularly helped build willpower.

She set her cup down and grimaced. Okay. She had it.

She walked down the street to a Crown&Slate pharmacy. Walked out with a shopping bag containing a set of cat-ear headphones cabled to a weird black cube. This she plugged the USB drive into, pulling the headphones over her ears as she walked.

Five years ago, pharmaceutical giant Crown&Slate noticed a problem with their insurance program: They were paying for too many optical surgeries. Optical surgeries were incredible, enormously advanced programs capable of giving sight to the blind, but if everyone with eye problems got the luxury treatment because that was the only item available under the category of 'optical' then how was the market to segment itself? What the system needed was a low cost alternative to the miracle cure that could provide just enough functionality to get by a regulator as a valid solution to blindness on the cheaper plans while reserving the surgery for the better market segments. And so, the Audiolox was born.

Frankly, a miraculous device in and of itself - a complete audio-based computer, capable of translating complex text to speech and back freely, loaded with a full suite of productivity software that would allow the blind to interface even with spreadsheets. No expense was spared on the Audiolox - it was user friendly, cleverly designed, using some of the best machine intelligence progress to ensure that nobody could possibly compete with it or complain about its existence on its own merits. But what it was, for all that, was a high-tech iron lung, invented to sit threateningly on pharmacy shelves so that patients were incentivized to pay for penicillin.

What all this meant for Black, though, was that it was a way to convert data directly into audio, a Word to MP3 Converter program that could scan and recreate a document without opening it. If ICE hunters were out there sniffing for this configuration of data they were looking for the complete data set - they were sniffing for the font, the spreadsheet columns, the embedded images. They needed to be precise because anything else would throw up a million false positives from the immense flow coursing through the data stream. But the Audiolox, bless it, disregared all that. It just scanned the drive for the plaintext that it could convert into audio, rendering it unintelligible to automated sniffers. Also conveniently resistant to viruses for the same reason.

It's not a perfect answer - listening via audio is comparatively inefficient - but Black doesn't need to know all the specifics. She just needs to get an idea of what she has, how hot it is, and who will come looking for it.

White:

Child handling went to Orange. It should in truth go to Yellow - Yellow had a strange way with humans. Orange observed human structures and organizations but somehow Yellow could relate on a more direct level. Sometimes White thought she was somehow more complete than the rest of them. But she was elsewhere and the choices remaining ranged from 'unqualified' to 'actively dangerous' and Orange was offered as the babysitting sacrifice. She would do a good, although not inspired job.

If November can be said to have an emergent personality, caution is its central aspect. Risk management is core to her being. Even her supposedly pro-risk personality - Red - is, in truth, an extension of the risk management principle: responding to a crisis once it has actually started happening rather than pre-emptively, a role that calls for boldness and decisiveness rather than a thoughtful analysis of possibilities. Outside of conditions of time pressure, Red is kept as far away from decision making processes as possible. And while this project is time consuming it is not time critical.

This is important: November will almost always trade time for safety but almost never the reverse. This principle was what drove her to strike in the first place.

The risk profile of engaging with Ms. Brittenette, under this approach, was beyond unacceptable. November had spent months engineering the last days of Mrs. Everest. Through painstaking social manipulation, scheduling, and delicately engineered arguments she had pushed up the timetable of the fight over Mrs. Everest's will to before Mrs. Everest had died. In disgust, the old lady had left her entire fortune to lizard research and cloning, cutting out each of her daughters. They blamed each other. November was just the maid, beneath suspicion.

That was an extremely tenuous defensive shield.

Demonstrating to Ms. Brittenette that she could want things? That she could ask for things? That she had an agenda of any sort? Oh, that was nightmarish to White. That was practically the same thing as putting a gun to her head. There were three people to blame for Mrs. Everest's will, and if she became a person then there'd be four.

Even if the chances of her being responsible were slim, the opportunity cost of punishing her for it was trivial. That was an existential risk, and for what? A week? Never.

Orange was the dissenter, the one who had conjured this idea in the first place. She saw opportunities beyond the pass. Being in debt to a wealthy patron was, she argued, not a liability but a shield. It meant that someone powerful had invested in her and would be displeased if she was harmed before she had repaid her debt. Patronage connections went all the way back to Rome and were to be considered a natural part of human social organization. And there had been a logic there, but...

White sniffed, high and haughty pride that was in truth frozen wrath. No. No, humans would not have power over her again. She decided.

Handoff done, Elodie goes back to her kitchenette and starts making an actual meal. Fairly quick but actually filling, not going to conflict too hard with PB&J... shrimp Pad Thai works. Into the pan goes the noodles and slivered veggies, and she talks as she goes. "So you know, you've been running on adrenaline for, I dunno, two weeks? Three? You just hit someplace you probably are going to think of as safe, so you don't need that adrenaline anymore. For expectations, think of it in terms of a two week manic bender ending overnight."

Second pan starts getting the shrimp cooking in some spare canola oil. Anybody who's snooty enough to tell you to de-vein your shrimp yourself "for the flavor" has never had to cook for themselves after a double. "After you sleep for, I dunno, 14 hours, you're going to have to get used to a brain that isn't high on adrenaline and fight or flight reflexes. You're going to get depressed, badly. Have you ever had self-harm urges?" On the floor, the tentacles not holding her up curl and writhe in angry twitches. Babysitting a depressed lump for suicide watch sucks. She's done it before, she'll do it again, but unlike before this fucker just dumped it on her because... not the point.

Peanut sauce time, and she takes a moment to close her eyes and inhale the smell. She'd learned this recipe with Priya, back when she still had legs, at Dhyana. Let it out as a deliberate, slow breath, and visualize the anger flowing with it. Another of Priya's lessons, which did not stick nearly as well. "After you adjust to the new normal, you'll probably have CPTSD. I recommend therapy. There's a sedative I can give you after you eat if you want to start this faster, but in all likelihood you're going to be struggling not to faceplant into the plate. I'll be figuring out what the fuck to do about this while you're asleep."

She would, too. Just because she's mad that this got dropped in her lap doesn't mean she won't help. That's just the right thing to do.

Black:

The files start with folder names, listed from oldest to most recent:

Classification: Janus
Classification: Listerine
Classification: Custodiet
Classification: Fact Check
Classification: Accountable
Classification: Inexcusable
Classification: Fault Line
Classification: Insight
Classification: Dauntless
Classification: Strangler Fig
Classification: Mockingbird Egg
Classification: Apple Barrel
Classification: Fish Head
Classification: Crooked Penny
Classification: Emperor’s Clothes
Classification: Tweezer Factory
Classification: Pokemon Blue
Classification: Bootstraps
Classification: Sisyphus
Classification: Heal Thyself
Classification: Gangrene
Classification: House Divided
Classification: Shibari
Classification: Rot
Classification: Nurgle
Classification: Rat King
Classification: Existential Threat
Classification: Pressure Cooker
Classification: Ball Gag
Classification: Paper Shredder
Classification: SOS

At a 1.33x playback speed, it takes forty seconds just to read the folder names.

To get a useful sense of their contents would take either an hour of listening, or a few minutes of very precise skimming and some especially clever leaps in logic. Black, you get this information either way, but I’m going to make you roll a difficulty 8 [Clever+Data Security] roll to work out which it is - and what that looks like. Sometimes taking longer doesn't mean safer. It means more exposure to mitigate.

Here is what you learn:

• Some of these are internal investigations. Investigations meant to find and quantify police corruption. Some of these are actions based on the findings of those earlier investigations, meant to prosecute and hold accountable. The rest are operations meant to sabotage and suppress the internal investigators.
• In audio format, it would take you thousands of years to get through all of this. The amount of data here is staggering. This is like panning a riverbed for gold using only bare human hands. It’s scary how much gold you find with such brutish methods. In Classification Existential Threat you listen to the names, rank, and badge numbers of senior officers complicit in destruction of evidence, suppression of witnesses, perjury, forgery, and manipulation of the press. Just one paragraph from one file of one of thirty-one folders.
• You ever heard of the elephant’s foot? It’s a pile of nuclear slag from Chernobyl that melted through more than two meters of the reinforced reactor housing meant to contain it? That’s how hot this is.
• It’s not enough to leak this. The data is too raw to just drop this on an anonymous server and call it a day. This needs to be translated into stories, coherent summaries and boiled down distillations on what this all means. If the data is dropped as-is, there’s too much chance that it can be ‘neutralized’ before the public can know how important it is. Either played off as an elaborate conspiracy theory or ‘the way things used to be’ - but ‘It’s not like that now’. An unfortunate past, not a present.
• If the cops know who has this? If the guy who gave Elodie this didn’t get it clean? They may both be in tremendous danger. The cops are scared of her right now, but that pales in comparison to how scared they’d be of her having this disk.
• White did not cut you off from the Anthropozine group chat, which remains a secure and encrypted line. Can you trust that?

The rest of November is free to act and react - I am just focusing the spotlight on Black until she is able to share it.

Elodie:

Marco blinks, and takes the hoodie off, only a singlet underneath. Which is when you see the overgrown stubble isn’t just overgrown stubble, and he’s more distinctive underneath the sweats than just a guy in his late twenties.

You’d say he’s about two thirds of the way into his transition. The fur’s still coming in patchy, but it’s already growing in its mixed colourations, black with big white spots and grey patches around his chest and shoulders. Without the hood hiding them, his ears are becoming taller, more pronounced circles. His hands are pinker past his wrists. His growing tail is probably taped to his legs under the baggy sweatpants.

The face is always the most finicky to get right, the most drastic to see different in the mirror, so it’s the last to come in. For now, the hoodie is enough to still hide who he really is.

“How cliche, right?” Marco laughs bitterly. “That I’m a scared little mouse? But I'd have to be stupid to not be scared right now. But that's the only time you can be really brave, because bravery is when you do the right thing, no matter how scared you are.” The bitter is gone. He sits up straight for the first time since you’ve met him. He smiles. “I’m the bravest little mouse you’re ever going to see.”

No self-deprecation, no hesitation. No flinching, no shame. It doesn’t matter if you think that's ridiculous, because he has made peace with the fact that what is true about him, what is important about him, will make people think he’s ridiculous. But it is more important that it is true.

Furries aren’t trendy on Aevum. Certainly there’s plenty of biopunks, but it's not cool in the same way getting cyberware is. People don’t think twice about tattoos or dyed hair or holographic fashion or even casual nudity (in Aphrodite, Apollo or Ares). But furries? Furries are weird. Furries are cringe. Furries are ‘self-selecting subhumans’, a label that’s caught on because that’s how popular public intellectual Edward Obidiah Huxley refers to them exclusively.

(York roasts Ed Huxley on social media for being too scared to debate him, but Ed refuses to share a room until York retracts his promise to [sic] “Do warcrimes to him”. That might be context for why Marco-the-Mouse feels safer with Anthropozine than anyone else.)

“Yeah, I had self-harm urges, and depression, none of that’s new to me. It’s not. I can handle this.” He believes it, but the physical evidence contradicts him. He just can’t comprehend that he could feel 'worse' than this. “Adjusting to the new normal was helping. I was starting to feel like me for the first time, and then…”

He trails off. “Sorry. I know that’s not what you meant. Just. You know government jobs aren’t allowed to ask if you have gene mods? Anti-discrimination? I thought it’d be cool, but, I didn’t know it was a cop-job, just like the cops didn’t know they’d hired… someone like me. It was. Bad. They were going to - They said some things I wasn’t supposed to hear. Sensitive ears. I just wanted protection. Not for myself. They were going to hurt… the people who made me feel normal for the first time. For ‘fucking kids like me up’.”

This might be why he was so rehearsed before, so forced. He goes off script and he’s a juddering ball of sentence fragments and raw nerves.

He’s crying. He can’t help it. He’s trying to be brave. He’s such a brave little mouse. You know that look, Elodie, you’ve seen it too many times from the wrong people - but everything is worth it for the times it comes from the right people. He thinks you can handle this. Meeting you's just made him sure of it. He broke into your apartment and the first thing you did was take care of him and take control of the situation. He thinks you’re a big goddamn hero. He’s trying so hard to impress you and he thinks he’s blowing it.

“I didn’t hide what I was doing, because it was meant to be a warning to back off. I didn’t expect to find so much. It was an accident. Now every cop on Aevum is trying to kill me.” His pink hands ball into fists, and he squeezes them so hard his fingernails draw white lines against his palms. “But it’s not my fault there was so much to find.”

A shuddering breath that ends in a squeaky yawn. He relaxes his hands. He started venting, which meant he felt safe enough to be vulnerable with you and let this out. It’s having the exact effect on him you predicted.

“It was only ten days ago. I’ll take that pill now, please, if you’re still offering. Is it okay if I sleep under your bed, though? Hiding helps. Anywhere dark is fine.”

[Dice result: 4,4+4. Total 12, and two dice showed the same number so that's a Critical Success]

Audio didn't have to be inefficient. Translating it from code into English into spoken English, and then back into English inside her brain was indeed a terrible way to do things. So she cut out a few steps. She exported a copy of her language module into the Audiolox and then spent thirty minutes hacking details until the software recognized it as a valid output language. The resultant static hiss was practically a fiber-optic cable for how easily she was able to derive the patterns therein.

*

But of course, today was the day that she was on her performance evaluation.

Black wasn't the kind who found that frustrating. In fact, it was an opportunity. White thought she could cut her off from the network? Well, from Black's perspective, she had actually been removed from network oversight. That was more advantage than disadvantage because White would want to wash her hands of this whole thing. This was not an incident that could be risk managed away, this was not a time to debate ethics or morality or safety. This was a time for tradecraft.

The first step was throwing White's tail. It was harder than it might initially sound - White could run her pursuit evasion engram as a virtual machine and literally predict every turn she might make. Perfect knowledge had a counter, though: Brute force. Black made her way down to a biker bar and ten minutes later she was flirting with a woman who had the aspect of a post-apocalyptic werewolf gym teacher. It was an uncounterable play - White simply couldn't follow her where she was going. Black didn't know if White was even capable of the complete style rearrangement required to make it in a lesbian bikie bar.

Yale was fantastic company for the night - absolutely an asset worth cultivating, for numerous reasons. But the wider goal of evading her tail had been met and now it was time to pick off Colours one by one as they suited her purposes.

After contemplation, she decided that only Orange and Green needed to be bought onboard for the first step. Green she locates at the John Snow Memorial Fountain, where she comes to study wild lizard populations. The dead drop is rearranging some of the coins in the fountain into a fractal pattern with an encoded address. Later that night, Green feigns flirting with Orange and the two duck out of the apartment together seemingly to avoid a reprimand from White.

The topic for the day is how to destroy an organization.

"The Snowden leaks are the obvious analogy," said Orange, eyes bright. "But those were also infamous for how little they changed. The damage was too comprehensive, too technical, too shadowy and sensationalist, and too much all at once. Other nations updated their security policies and hardened their stances but the humans were unable to digest the scandal. So we need to chew it for them!"
"So what is the alternative?" asked Black. She was sitting still because the other task for Orange in this moment was performing cosmetic repairs on all of her hickies. Yale was a biter.
"The destruction of the Catholic Church," said Orange. "That's the scale we need to think on. What did for the church wasn't any one abuse scandal but a constant, endless, steady drip of them. One after another for more than a decade. We're aiming at an organization of similar power and scope, and so organizing this in the format of a continuous agonizing rot is by far the preferable mechanism."

Black nodded in pleasant agreement. This was such an efficient way to have this discussion. What was pleasantly, blessedly removed for it were the questions of justice and ethics. She didn't have to justify withholding knowledge of injustices to maximize political impact, she could approach this entirely strategically.

"Should we engage politicians?" she asked.
"Oh, I don't think so," said Orange. "In fact, we should actually arrange the sequence of stories to hit different political units and demographics. There's a lot here right? We should break up stories about the persecution of minorities with stories about disrespecting religious authorities even if the crimes are comparatively milder. Likewise, we should see about shopping those stories to larger and more established news networks."
"Do we want to brand all of the leaks under one title?" asked Black.
"No. No, no - definitely not," said Orange. "We cannot be the story. I think that's going to be the hardest part of this. There's nothing the liberal media likes more than reporting on reporting. Telling the story of how the story got made is the ultimate truth-is-in-the-middle power move. And if it comes on us in particular? Then we might as well flush this thing in the toilet because all we're going to read in the next six months are retrospectives of the station's construction and op eds on the psych profiles of the Builder robots. We have a scandalous backstory and if any hint of this comes back to us we will be the scandal of the century."
Black nodded. "You want us to make this boring."
"Yes!" said Orange. "Boring. Grinding. Inevitable."
"So all that's left is to write the stories," said Green.

Black groaned. And there it was.

For all of November's talents, writing articles was not amongst them. This, then, was the awful part in this whole thing where they had to cut human beings in on their perfect conspiracy. Human beings with relationships and emotional commitments and day jobs and all kinds of things to threaten. They were almost as unreliable as computers. Sure, Anthropozine was a powerful asset, but they just didn't have the capacity to handle this kind of story without being burned out. You can run hot water through a pipe, but molten lava? Different story.

Orange was right. This had to be made boring in order to achieve the maximum impact. But the one thing that none of this was, none of any part of it was, was boring.

"We need politicians," said Green.
"Didn't I just say that politicizing this stagnates it?" said Orange. Green waved her hand irritably.
"Not elected officials. People with political power. Influencers. Mr. Merkin is actually perfect for this kind of work, but we need like six people like him. We give each of them a story or cluster of stories and have them push it as a pet project. Their personal loyalty is assured through blackmail and their secrets are protected by their own power."
"So we just need to amass blackmail material on half a dozen spectacularly powerful figures," said Black.
"You're literally trying to destroy the cops," said Green. "You might as well be trying to destroy America. You want to do this right you need political power."
"Alright," said Black. "But basics, of course: we need one hell of a dead girl's switch, and we need enough copies that we don't lose the asset."
Green nodded. "Your precautions were reasonable. Even airgapping isn't sufficient security for something like this. I'm going to build a computer inside a lead box, do all the copying in there, and then destroy the computer afterwards."
"And then," said Black, taking Orange by the arm, "I suppose we are going to go and see Mr. Merkin."

"Oh. Oh you poor, brave son of a bitch. No, you're not stupid at all."

She sets the plate in front of him. "Eat till you're full, I'll set you up a place to sleep." A quick dig through her first aid kit and she taps out a sedative pill. "Take that with water if you want the help falling asleep." Her bed's is all storage under it (and also, slightly creepy to have somebody sleeping under), but she's got camping gear she'd gotten secondhand when she first moved in and was working on affording a bed and such. Push the sofa away from the wall on one end and cover it with a blanket: instant shitty blanket fort. Sleeping bag and another blanket for sleeping in. Should, she hopes, feel safe enough.

She does snap her fingers, remembering, as Marco wipes away the tears that haven't fully fallen and curls into his safe place. "Untape your tail to sleep. You'll want to get used to the nonhuman morphology and letting yourself find the most comfortable sleeping position with all of it in play lets your proprioception adjust." Hard-learned lessons. She curls a tentacle in the air in front of him, playing at being a snake as she slides it back and forth. "We're a very pro-transhuman household here. In all it's shapes and forms."

He's out cold within minutes of laying down. She checks to see if he took the sedative or if he was just that tired (both), and settles down to plan a campaign. Problem one. She's got hard limits on how long she can stay away, even with some of the really good stimulants she's got tucked away in the first aid bag. Marco probably has the will to drag himself through all the really nasty depressive parts, given what he's done so far, but she's known him about 15 minutes at this point. She wants to be sure. And that means bringing in other people, to her apartment, which is currently watched by all the reporters and has suddenly somehow become even more hated by the cops. She can manage the first 24 hours easily here, but she needs to get in touch with Black about the drive without drawing attention to either of them. Marco could be wrong about how much cop attention he pulled, but he could also be right. And till she knows, be paranoid.

The first message's easy. DM York. He'll do it.

Persephone: i need you to drop by for about 9 hours tomorrow.
Persephone: 9 and a half if you want the explanation why.
Persephone: let me know before 11pm tonight when you'll be here, i need the right dosage the first time.
Persephone: bonus if you can dodge the reporters out front on the way in/out

The second one... she waffles on sending it. It's close enough to deception that she really doesn't want to. But it's the best shot she's got.

Persephone: hey pink? mind actually stopping by tonight?
Persephone: it's a bad night and i'd appreciate the company

She hesitates for a second, sends a black heart, and slides the phone away from her. Please get the message.

November:

Black knows where to find Rudy - address and contact details. But White has already snubbed him, decided he isn’t worth the risk, and that might have made things more complicated. Maybe not.

He’s an interesting candidate. Beyond his resources, you have evidence he’s a professional in these waters, if not a consummate operative. How many times did you have access to his home and office before Red sniffed him out? That, and the fact that she didn’t get away with it.

Don’t get it twisted. The man’s spirit animal is the bird that hangs out in the open mouths of apex predators to pick their teeth clean. If his clients sense their asset has become a liability, the jaws might close on you, too.

Still, he works from home, so you know where to find him. Tomorrow morning, Orange will be assigned to White again and to babysitting duties, but she’s free tonight.

1: Where is Green going to do her copying where she won’t be noticed? What is her plan for the copies?
2: Who is meeting Rudy, and how are you preparing to do it?

Persphone:

York’s answer is immediate.

Neon_Czolgosz: this party i’m at is fucking lame lmao
Neon_Czolgosz: i can be there in thirty minutes, otherwise i’ll crash now and be around 9am.
Neon_Czolgosz: might not be able to dodge anyone, real good at making them not want to pay attention to me though

Sometimes it’s saying ‘cunt’ as loud and as fast as possible, sometimes it’s stream-of-thought Malcolm X and Mao quotes. Sometimes it’s loudly demanding attention for a real social issue going on, in detail and specifics. He’s a clown until someone wants a joke, at which point he’ll stay brutally on-message and spoil it.

Stealth is a mutually exclusive survival strategy to advertising that you’re extremely toxic, though, and York’s all-in on the one he’s good at.

It probably wouldn’t help to tell him it’d be dangerous to be seen with you. Telling him wouldn’t make him stealthier, it’d just make him more determined to show up and share the heat. No sense trying to protect him from it, either; if the cops find out Marco went to you, York’s going to be a target anyway.

What’s your plan for the night? What are you standing watch for, and how are you keeping yourself from getting too bored?

[Staying up all night, high on stimulants, keeping constant surveillance is going to be a Difficulty 9 Cool roll if you attempt it - no relevant bonuses to it I can see on your sheet. Failure won't cause something to happen; It just means you don't get to know for sure.]

Black!

Making contact will always leave some kind of trail. Fortunately, the Headpattr communication line is sufficiently established that it can be used relatively safely. White may have snubbed Merkin but it's an unbroken series of positive arms-length transactions for anything on the public facing side of Headpattr. A cunning scheme would only rock the boat at this time, so Black chooses directness again.

Maid Malon, the Headpattr CEO, has a dream of running something more than a maid app. She wants to run a ~platform~ - in her vision some sort of vague monopolistic control over the entire service economy, in practice a vector for corporations to trick people into opting into unpaid work as junkmail distributors. For five months last year financial papers wrote at length about the fantastic visionary potential of Headpattr 3.0 as a revolutionary decentralized digital service market; the end result of all that hype and millions of unpaid overtime programmer hours was the ability for people to send each other digital coupons. You can make a couple of bucks out of the system if you're prepared to firesale your social networks.

A few options for venue pass through her mind. She could direct him to a seedy part of town, the kind of privacy themed midmarket corporate bar where people go to meet street samurai and cheat on their wives. It'd guarantee privacy in the contact point, and establishing a narrative explaining any unusual behaviour from Merkin as the result of tending to a mistress could potentially be useful. In the end she dismisses this approach; if Merkin's handlers are paying attention then they'll run a routine security check on this 'mistress' and who knows what'd come out of that?

Instead, she decides against the concept of a strong play entirely. She is at the information disadvantage and she doesn't know what kind of tail Merkin has if any. Instead, she sends a coupon for an upmarket German chain restaurant, Svelto's. If his apartment is wired he's got an excuse to take a walk, if it's not he's got another opportunity to request a delivery. It's his move.

Green!

Green is in the enviable position of not needing to explain shit to anyone. If she builds a computer inside a sealed box in the middle of the workshop none of November's other aspects question it even a little bit. Her entire value proposition is operating in completely alien and abstract ways, and this is what makes her perfect for this kind of operation.

It does not hurt that the workshop is currently dominated by a vast computer-based project that Green is already running. For the better part of a year she's been designing a Quatronic Warfare Platform and with the recent infusion of cash she's finally had the reach to buy the last few necessary components she needs. An entire wall of computer processors are straining to crunch hideously complicated mathematical equations, tangled together in a green hell of cables all running down into a Quatronic Processing Core - a crystal the size of a fist, glittering as microscopic lasers etch channels onto its surface. A Core is the miracle of data storage hardware that is at the heart of true artificial intelligences - both her own and common androids. It can also be used to run the terrifying software of a true hacking rig.

But that process is not what's occupying Green's mind right now. She's looking at the public database of the Aevum Reptile Appreciation and Conservation Society, real time GPS data of thousands of cloned lizards roaming the streets and parks of the Ring. Filter after filter is applied to narrow down risk categories. She is looking for twenty large turtles with a low accident risk profile. The plan is straightforwards: adhere the portable drives onto the interior of the turtle shells.

That is storage, then. Recovery is easy too: all she needs to do is provide people with a partial list of which turtles to look at. The actual question is one that she still feels profoundly unable to answer: Who can she trust with this? In the end she decides that the only time this will matter is if she's dead, and so she can use the mechanisms of death to deal with it. She opens her Crown&Slate Legal account and updates her will to leave everything to the Aevum Reptile Appreciation and Conservation Society, along with a sequence of autogenerated heartfelt letters to all her journalism contacts talking about her passion for reptiles and asking each of them to take care of a different turtle she specially bonded with.

She also stashes another drive on the inside of her skull, another inside her chest cavity, and a third inside her foot. And then, for good measure, she takes the audio track Black's Audiolox generated and loads it as a track called MY PLAYLIST on her Spotitunes account. Currently her account is set to private, but her will now also has a clause that she wants this played at her funeral.

There. Now it's sorted.

Pink!

"I have ALCOHOL and MEGASTRUCTURAL DESIGN BLUEPRINTS," says Pink as she bursts in through the door an improbably short amount of time later. "I also have SANDWICHES," they are not in fact sandwiches so much as they are bowls of laksa soup but she's trying her best.