3V doesn’t really “do” tea. She can drink it, sure. But if water tastes like anything, it should taste like ice; like cold, like relief in the heat, like snow packed down your throat. A faint flavor, as if experienced from another room, just makes her want to go for an actual flavor, the kind that would explode on her tongue and likely kill a sickly Victorian child. Fruit flavors should be bolded and underlined. But, y’know, she can drink it, if that’s what she’s got.

Which is why the tea she hands Junta’s good hand is green, cold, and canned. Like drinking water from the roots of a tree, cupped in your palms, kneeling at something old and wonderful. (That’s the metaphor that gets her through the taste.)

“You,” she says, bubbly irate iron, a ring of swords swirling in a halo about her (in an aura reading sense), “are going to sit down until you stop shaking, and then we’re going to talk about the research project you’ve been working on.” Deliberately vague. “Thesis statement” provokes follow-up questions about where he’s attending.

The couch already has a tactical blanket deployed, draped over the back five minutes ago. She carefully but firmly maneuvers him around the coffee table until she can squeeze him in, and then she takes a seat on her regular spot (on the armrest). The blanket is going to be wrapped around his shoulders, and he will drink from the roots of Yggdrasil until he starts spouting some oracular wisdom, in one form or another.

Did you know they just sell elevator keys?

There's only three companies that make elevators on the station. Get each of their generic maintenance keys, get the station standard one that fits 80% of the elevators (after all, the companies only do retrofitting and new construction, November made most of the station herself), and you have your start to a key ring of doom. Anybody can switch out their elevator's keys, but precious few think to.

Amazon didn't even bother with any retrofitting: the original station key worked just fine. Put a sign on the elevator saying it's undergoing maintenance, we're sorry for the inconvenience, lock it open on the third floor, and then go in on the second and down a ladder. Ladder was the hardest part, those are made for people that have legs. Once she's there, she starts sorting. Unzip the Roofdash Delivery Device (Large) that Roofdash had given her after her first delivery and put it on the ground. Terrible size for anything actually practical, too large for most small deliveries and too small for any real business delivery, so of course it's good to help the homeless move squats.

Sleeping bags a no-go, same for the insulation. Rice cooker's old, so he'll want that. Hotplate's new, so he'll want that. All the suits go in the bag, vest in the bag, spices in the bag. Laptop in the bag, camera bag into the bag, and we've gotten all we're getting but that's okay, it's most of the stuff, and she's got a sleeping bag to spare if he needs it. No luck on the minifridge but, well, they can figure that out.

...

Hotplate back out of the bag.

The store tag's the obvious tracker. But Amazon didn't live where Walmart died by being stupid. Dumb, but not stupid. She's heard about spraying items with resin that manages, through some science that she doesn't understand, to make a relay antenna loud enough to get detected a few feet away. Combine that with a narrow set of exits, all with scanners, and they can find the shoplifters and have a Friendly Amazon Security Coordinator come out to gently collect the goods and you. One of the people she was in jail with, before the trial, swore up and down that's how they found him. He'd gotten 60 days minimum security. She opens up the hotplate with those handy, quasilegal tools built into her prosthetics. Feel along the inside edges, eyes closed in concentration. Find the texture, find where the smooth metal becomes ever so slightly pebbly. And then take out a knife and scrape that spot good and clean. Not enough dots, no antenna, no alarms.

And one more Roofdash contractor leaves the building.

Boxcars on the clever roll, plus 1 from clever, 1 from criminal underworld, one from thief's tools, makes a crit and 15.

Earlier:

“I’ve never been to the end of the line before.” Marco looks out the train window as it runs express to the port, the churning airlock-city. The hundred meter thick carbon band linking Hermes to Selene is in view, now, rising up into the distance on all sides. The bottleneck begins there.

“Most people never need to.” The tweaker editor who’s just wrung him through the emotional wringer for the last six hours wipes his nose on the back of his hand. “We have, though. You’re going to be fine, mate.”

Marco draws his baggy hood tight, and touches his rounded ears self-consciously under them. “Are you sure I can’t go back? If it works? No more cops. It’d be safe then, right?”

“If this works,” the editor takes a swig from a flask that reeks of sugar in chemicals, “Every cop on Aevum will have nothing to lose, and know who to blame for it.” The editor takes some aluminium packs of pills from his pockets and passes them over. Motion sick remedies and headache pills for the trip down. He gives a side-eyed look to Eli, and Eli nods back.

Marco’s heart shivers in his chest, a little, but there are too many reasons for him to know why. That the answer is no. That he knows it’s going to be bad news. That Eli trusts him to hear it. That last one…

Eli. Pronounced like ‘lie’ if he’s feeling masc, or ‘lee’ if she’s feeling femme. ‘She’ right now. She’d managed to not get caught slipping his stolen battery packs to the news people on the way out, even though the editor thought she was an idiot for it. She wasn’t supposed to be taking the train right now, but she said she was going to, and that was that. She was kind.

The train hit the carbon band and began its slope. Marco gripped his chair, he felt like he was about to float out of it. The editor waited for him to get used to it.

“We sent someone with your credit card up to Gaia, and he got stomped by cops.” He holds a firm look, and Marco feels small under it. “That’s not on you. We all knew the risks. This is just how serious this is. If the cops even think someone has something to do with you, they’re going to get hurt. Our guy’s in the hospital right now.”

“I could write something, maybe? Say that he had my permission, say-” but the editor shook his head.

“We’ll take that for Persephone, sure. But our guy-”

“Junta.” Eli cut over him.

“Yeah, Junta. Story with him is he found it on the ground, was seeing if it hadn’t been reported stolen already, and was just going to hand it in. Just a bit of bad luck. Because if we pass on that you let him…” He trailed off.

Marco presses his head against the glass of the window and watches warehouses go by. Huge things covered in service line inputs and outputs in three dimensions. This close to the airlock, everything starts to look like those casts you take of ants nests, where you pour molten tin down the tunnels and dig them up. They’re close now.

There wasn’t one airlock, of course. Selene’s rim was filled with them, thousands in all different sizes. They were just treated as a collective entity, right up until the moment specifics mattered.

“I need to go.” Marco mutters. It’s still not real to him yet. He knew how much danger he was in, he’d known that for a long time. He’d just thought he could hide this out. He had just found people he could be close to, and that was the moment he was being ripped away from them. But every reason he wanted to stay was a reason he needed to go. “It’s not fair.”

“No, it’s not.” The editor said, and Eli squeezed him from behind in a tight hug. Marco sniffled, then wiped at his eyes. Sleeping had made everything worse, it made him feel everything again. Before he’d been too tired to even feel how tired he was.

Almost there. Just a few more minutes, now. Persephone hadn’t been able to get him anything, either. He was scared about that, about some of the stuff they’d have found in there. That… that at least made it a bit easier to run away. That was something to run from.

The editor misunderstood the flash of anxiety, what to reassure him about. “We’ll get your prescriptions down to you.” He cleared his throat, and Eli let go. “They’ll be watched, so it’ll be a good way to make it clear you’re out of reach. It might put you at a bit of risk but…”

“My friends will be safer.” Marco finished for him.

“Yeah. What you’ve been wanting from the start, right?”

Marco nodded as best as he could without taking his face off the glass.

This close to the airlock, everything was lighter. The narrower diameter made it easier to load and unload freight, and made it easy to tell who’d been working down here long term. They all moved with a distinctive hop-skip, like they were prancing around. As the train pulled into the station, a man in a parka with a tin whistle pranced along, eyeing the passengers. Marco flinched away from the window and pulled his hood tighter.

“It’s fine,” Eli took his hand and squeezed it. “They’re not cops. You’re safe from here. Okay?”

Marco nodded. Should he ask her if…? It didn’t matter. He was one foot out the door already, no need to make it hurt more than it already did.

The editor stood up, even though the train hadn’t stopped yet. “Come on. We’ve got one last person we’d like you to meet.”

…

Marco felt naked for his trip. No luggage to pack, not even his laptop. At least Eli had stolen a music player from a train station vending machine and spent most of the trip filling it with her playlists, which seemed to be… everything. A lifetime’s worth of genres to discover.

The headphones she had plundered for him, too, were helping a lot. Selene was loud, impossibly loud, the entire world’s freight and garbage infrastructure all crammed together into one spot. Sometimes he didn’t even keep the music on, just kept the headphones for their noise cancelling.

He stood in the shadow of the Selene station building, waiting for his contact. The editor and Eli had walked him to the train door, and waved goodbye. They’d gotten on the train at opposite ends, and decided it was better to not be seen leaving with him.

He looked up, and blinked. The woman approaching him was broad, with leathered skin. At all times she rested a hand on the pommel of the sword at her hip. She didn’t hop-skip like the other workers. Instead she swung one foot in front of the other, always making sure the front foot had stopped before raising the back foot. Where everybody else bounced and bounded, she was slow, solid and stable.

“I am Sobha.” She said. “Are you…?” She left the question hanging.

Marco nodded. He squeaked.

“Hmm. Not yet.” She reached out, and Marco froze. She was a tiger, and he was definitely still a mouse. She took his hood and loosened it, then pulled it back from his head. She nodded, but still seemed unsatisfied. “Please. Take it off.”

Marco wriggled out of the hoodie as fast as he could, folding it across his chest and tucking the bundle under his arm. And finally, Sobha cracked a smile, and squeezed her pommel tight.

“I will make sure that you can leave as you are.” She cupped a hand under his chin and lifted it. Marco had been staring at the floor for so long that looking above the horizon was almost too much for him. He swayed on his feet. “See? Lift your head. Stand proud. You are not running, scared. You are sacrificing to protect people. You are leaving as a hero. That’s how I want you to remember this.”

It was hard not to look down again. It was overwhelming. He needed to see less, to feel less, to- He closes his eyes and balls his fists at his side for a quiet moment. Then he lets out a breath.

“My name is Marco.” He says, and he holds on to how he felt explaining himself to Persephone. “And I am brave.”

Sobha nods, satisfied, then eyes one of the platform’s exits. “Good. Walk tall, with me. The Union has made your way for you.”

Everyone: Advance a level.

November:

Baba does not ask what you need the wheelbarrow for. Instead she takes the trip downstairs, sees the rest of November and their planned haul, and spits. Not suspicious, but inquisitive.

“Яку ж кашу він заварив… і для чого?!” Baba walks back up, and jams the elevator button. When it arrives she reaches into a pocket underneath her shawl and pulls out a set of keys. She jams them into the elevator and twists counter-clockwise. The elevator starts descending, and a steel panel slides open for it at the bottom. Baba shakes her head and climbs back up the stairs a second time. “I do not have patience for this. Why no button to basement? Life is too hard to make silly problems for others. Two at a time only. Wheelbarrow? Ridiculous. For such a thing?” Again she shakes her head, and thrusts her socket wrench into Red’s hands. “Wait.”

Baba 003 stomps to the railway node, and opens a storage shed. She stomps back with a motorized push-trolley. On it are four pairs of grip gloves.

“You twist left handle forward, left wheel goes forward. You twist it backward, it goes backward. Right handle for right wheel. I will be back for the key in twenty minutes. You will be done with it by then, and you will wait for me. Or I will find you.” These are not questions. This is not to be negotiated. She takes her socket wrench back without asking, and begins up the stairs.

You can do it much faster than twenty minutes, if you can keep organized. Four in the basement to load for the elevator, four left at the pod to unload and stack, and Red to push the ‘wheelbarrow’ and yell instructions at both ends.

Five trips. Four for the server boxes, the size of washing machines and the weight of safes, but five hands make light work. Another for the graphics card rig on its own. Twenty seconds for each elevator ride, two per trip, that’s five minutes in the elevator. Twelve seconds to load, six to unload - ninety seconds total.

Fixed time taken: Six and a half minutes, plus however long it takes for Red to snap November into action.

That just leaves the actual trip. This is a question for Red: Does she have experience using this kind of freight trolley, and if so, how much? Where does that experience come from?

If she is proficient: Set it to Hare, and make no mistakes. The trip can be made at jogging speed, and a round trip takes less than a minute. While the rest of November can scarper, Red will need to wait almost ten minutes for Baba.

If she is accustomed: Set it to Walk, and make no mistakes, or set it to Hare and decide on a mistake that requires help to correct. The trip can be safely made at walking speed, and a round trip takes two minutes. She’ll only have to wait a couple of minutes for Baba.

If she is a novice: This is a struggle. Set it to Turtle and a round trip takes five minutes with no mistakes, or set it to Walk and decide on a mistake that requires help to correct. In this case, Baba might need to wait for Red for a minute, and be placated.

A mistake might be bumping into a wall hard enough to leave a hole, taking a turn sloppy enough to roll a piece of equipment, or simply getting stuck when a three point turn becomes a thirty-three point turn, a delay long enough for another colour to come check on her.

Also, White just got a text from Crystal.

“Curious what you think. If you get stuck choosing what you like most, try explaining to yourself what you like least. Kisses.”

In it is a folder of images, scans of hand-drawn designs. A flurry of sketches drawn in an inspired lunchbreak.

Image One: Heights. She gives three options, the first almost twice as tall as the average person, huge, towering, imposing. The second is tall enough for most people to have to tilt their head to make eye contact, authoritative, dominating. The final is average, equal, eye-to-eye.

Image Two: Build. Here she sketches a variety of different outlines. Broad, powerful, muscular. Slender, narrow, graceful. Trim, athletic, solid. Hourglass, curvacious, sultry.

Image Three: This is just a slate of six arms, viewed at an oblique. Smooth scales, rough scales, thick scales, thin scales, lots of tiny scales, or a few large scales. Rounded or squared, reptilian or aquatic?

Images Four, Five, Six: Facial designs, spread about at seeming random. First she tried to do them holistically, as entire heads, but quickly gave up on that. Instead she does rows and lines and boxes for the individual features, build-your-own. Muzzles and snouts, teeth and lips, eyes and brows. Ears. Trailing off the bottom of the page; “Hair? Genitalia? You should ask Pink. Fiona suggested piercings?”

White doesn’t have to read the text as soon as she gets it, of course. But if she does, how does it affect her, and the mission?

Persephone:

Now it’s just down to dotting i’s and crossing t’s.

Organize a dead-drop for 3V to pick this stuff up from. Get home.

Marco’s off-station. Warnings have gone out. Cops know you’re involved in the leak, now.

You’re still getting evicted. You’ll still need to find a new place, eventually. Your friends might still be in danger.

But for now? For now the price must be paid on bad sleep and dark bargains made at dark hours in the morning.

Tell me about how you get home too tired to dodge those last straggler reporters, and accidentally give them one last, perfect epitaph for these days. Tell me about the things you manage to do to take care of yourself before you sleep, even through the sleep deprivation and stimulant crash. And tell me about the one last, unexpected conversation you have through text before your eyes finally shut on this day.

3V:

Junta looks at the can suspiciously. “I don’t like iced tea. Do I? I can’t remember.” He cracks the tab on it, and takes a sip. His eyes go wide, and then the can goes higher, higher, higher, empty. He crunches the empty shell in his hand. “I guess I like iced tea now. I just don’t think I’ve had it for a long time…” He looks at the can, morose. The thought never crosses his mind that he could ask for another one.

Of research projects? “I have a few.” An understatement. Research journalism too often means nobody to write for, no onus or expectation of deadlines. Just deep dives of personal interest. At a more traditional outlet, it’s tight leashes and constant reports. For an outlet like the Anthropozine, though? Ask a fiction writer about their works in progress. “I really liked your last one, about Sirius? Give a Dog a Bone? I wish I could write something like that. Ah. I should be working on something like that…”

Snap, snap, snap. Focus his attention on the ‘is’ and not the ‘should’. You’re familiar with this spiral, it fits you, just your size. Not helpful. “I have a few. There’s apparently a kink scene for chemical hypnosis fetishists, now. Tailor made drugs that target the free will part of the brain, but still leave you free to follow orders, that kind of thing. Really illegal, the non-consensual applications are pretty terrifying, but I hit a dead end on that. I’m at the part of the process where I’d need interviews to make any kind of story out of it, and I don’t know how to find people. Ah. The rest is really boring, honestly.” He almost shrugs, but thinks better of it at the exact last second. “Why domestic labour is still undervalued by design in an era of abundance, why Thrones got built with public resources and comparing it to all the other libertarian playgrounds they tried to make when we first got to space. You know compared to like, Chiarascuro.” Still a fun place for treasure hunters who can ignore a geiger counter reading. “Like, who thought it was in the public interest to do Versaille again.”

His eyes are closing. He’s as exhausted as he looks. “All the handsoap on the station is made by a single company, and their recipe is undisclosed. The four day work week was a combined response to zero hour contracts, the phone app casual labour market, and the collapse of the 2040s. The tips on the ends of shoelaces are called aglets, and their purpose is sinister. Do you know anyone - anyone? - on Aevum that owns their own home? Why is that?”

He’s asleep. Again. Probably not for long, but who knows with him?

November!

She shouldn't need encouragement to perform acts of physical labour. It was a trait that she'd never understood in herself. Shouldn't pride in her craft be sufficient to drive her onwards? Dragon - her elder brother - had always said so. "We are blessed to know the perfection of our mind," he had said. "Seeing matter bend to our will is reward sufficient." He'd been happy when he'd said it. He'd been confident, the kind of relentless and absolute confidence she admired and craved and aspired to. So why couldn't it be the same for her? Why couldn't mastery over reality be sufficient?

When she'd worked she'd formally logged each of her task completion processes to timetables as was good practice. But there had always been a secondary, unreported and secret timetable that was actually setting the pace. Some tasks ran quick. Some tasks ran slow. But the way it worked out was that every couple of weeks she got to call in to Mission Command and report a successful milestone. Every couple of weeks she'd gotten to talk to some humans and hear them say 'thank you' or 'good job' or something. And it had been, you know... nice.

Mrs. Everest's manor had taken some adjustment. Reinforcement had been mostly negative, so she'd learned to read the subtle signs of an absent reprimand as its own kind of compliment. She learned to live for the moments when the mistress was able to smile and sigh and relax, untroubled by the presence of intelligent life - regressively defined. The work didn't have the breathtaking complexity of stellar macroengineering but it had its own challenges. The biggest of these was the total lack of backup. The whole point of acquiring one of the Hecatoncheire Special Projects was, after all, to reduce the number of people Mrs. Everest had to deal with as low as possible, and if there was furniture to be moved, plumbing to be replaced, or a roof to be re-tiled then rather than contracting a specialist she was simply to figure it out.

All this to say, she knew her way around a freight trolley, even before Headpattr. As a Headpattr maid she has often found it necessary to transport half a dozen vacuum cleaners, towels and sheets, or other pieces of cleaning gear around with her. The work of loading and unloading is well familiar to her and she goes through it quickly and thoughtlessly. Her general lack of focus has her standing outside the elevator for three minutes before remembering to push the button, though, and rattling the truck door handles before remembering to unlock it. She's just kind of out of it mentally right now, except for one ongoing conversation.

*

White and Pink!

"Oooooh," said Pink, fixating instantly on the largest chassis. "How would that even work?"
"You like that one?" asked White.
"Yeah! Maybe - like, I don't know, have you ever considered the physicality of moving around like that before?" asked Pink. She balled her fists and swung herself up onto her tiptoes. "It'd be like being a vehicle. Think of the heft, the weight..." She flexes her arms, opening her fingers like claws. "I'm visualizing it. It's fascinating."
"I am unconvinced it's what I want, and the practicalities seem prohibitive," said White. "But I'm curious where you're going with this."
"Oh, obviously it's not primarily for in station use," said Pink. "This is a space construction chassis. Outfit it for industrial void work and have it capable of leaving the station for covert dropoffs on the dark side of the ring. It could be a fragment of our old life. Plus the practicalities are what's fun! Can you imagine having to fold your wings to get through each door? The quadrupedic pose needed to remain mobile in interior spaces? The ability to dominate a room? The sheer physicality such a chassis would demand with every possible interaction?"
It would mean a return to the void, a return to her original design. Gently stepping off Aevum's surface for the first time in so many years and feeling the cosmos surround her again. Wings of solar panels reaching around her in crystal gleaming, gliding on currents of mathematics. It would mean getting to see the parts of her ring she hadn't seen in so many years; the dark parts with their back to the earth, facing up into the sky. To see the maintenance hatches and airlocks so rarely used and know she had a back door into every part of this entire world. It would mean being able to shelter people beneath mighty wings and make herself manifest in strength and glory.
She blinked out of the thought. "It... strikes me as an extremely powerful fantasy, and would likely give a way to reconcile old thought patterns with the new reality, but I'd kind of prefer something I can fuck in."
Pink gave her most wicked >:3c. "You don't think you can fuck in this?"
"I - it's too big," said White, taken aback. "Nobody would be into that."
"Crystal suggested it~"
"Look."
"Her very first suggestion on the list, even~"
"Look." White said, tapping the above average height one. "I think this one is far more compatible with my aesthetic."
"You're right," said Pink. Her expression intensified. "This one is way more Blue's style anyway." Before White could stop her she'd forwarded the image to Blue, who looked at it on her phone, blushed deeply, and shoved it back in her pocket.
White touched her fingers against her forehead to steady herself before turning the page. "Are you into curves, Pink?"
"They're actually a bit of a turn off for me," she said.
"Really?" said White.
"Yeah. It's like, the ideal is power, right? Jacked is fine, but I really like just the balanced, athletic look. Not too masculine, predatory and naturalistic."
"At least we're basic in something," said White. "S-" she stopped.
"You alright?" said Pink.
"Yeah. Scales," said White. "Sorry. Are you feeling overexposed by this?"
"Why? It's just us," she said.
"I feel like I'm translating a fever dream into words," she said. "Working through all of this stuff like I'm writing a shopping list. Doing this really means putting yourself out there, doesn't it?"
"Yeah," said Pink. "Like, I'm not sure how to weigh doing this as a performance piece for everyone who has to look at me, or for my own deep id? And I'm likewise not sure if making choices for other people is even a bad thing. I want to be hot, after all."
"Mm," said White. "... I need to touch some texture palettes."
"Same."
"I don't particularly care for the lizard dry bumpy skin bit. But I always kind of liked the idea of large, layered, slightly curved scales like you see on fish or snakes. One time I read a book where someone used a dragon scale as the gemstone in an amulet and that felt right. But not exactly that texture, I don't want it to be slippery..."
"Shedding?"
"Ew, no. I think smooth going with and a little sharp going against the grain, maybe a bit smaller than fingernail sized. Attached at a single point, like hair, not embedded in the skin. Chest and back are different textures," she turned the page again. "Faces."
"You getting rid of the human mouth?" asked Pink.
"Yes," said White, looking at the various shaped muzzles.
"Ah, thank goodness," said Pink. "Human mouths are creepy."
"Zero argument," said White. "Something with fangs."
"Large, sharp, non-terrifying fangs," agreed Pink.
"None of those creepy grinding rectangles," said White.
"Oh hey, are you talking about how creepy human mouths are?" interrupted Orange.
"Yes," said White.
"Hey everyone," said Orange. "Quick break. We're contemplating human mouths."
"What's wrong with human mouths?" said Red, taken aback, but the others were already well about their business of staring into the void and shivering.
"I think that the real time consuming part will be choosing the correct combination of horns, fins, crests and hair," said White. "Since those are areas of different colour they need to be absolutely precisely dialed in so they don't overwhelm the design."
"They'll be modular, at least," said Pink. "But they're likely to have structural hardpoints so don't want to overdo them."
"Retractable genitalia," White went on. "I prefer options. Piercings?"
"I have never been able to see the appeal," said Pink. "Except for earrings of course."
"And we haven't even started on wings, neck and tail!" said White. "There's so much to this!"
"The road from wistfully typing 'dragongirl' to fully rendered anatomically correct 3D model is an arduous one," said Pink.
"It would be much more convenient if some sort of wizard or djinn or something could sort out those details in the backend and present me with a finished model."
"I think we are the djinn in that story," said Pink.
"Rats," said White. "Damn this labour intensive cyberpunk future."
"It's not all bad!" said Pink. "While we were talking I've been thinking a lot, and I think that we should actually commit to an openly artificial structure. Getting all the musculature connections perfect is expensive and stressful, requiring extreme precision connections to hit the balance between aesthetic and functional. I think that we can actually go a long way with an obviously robotic exterior shell. Our current design resolves the uncanny valley effect by being strategically artificial in a way that invites the human imagination to positively resolve perceived contradictions and I can see a path to something similar with this new chassis."
"Hmm!"
"Plus we can resolve the problem of having wings that are both oversized and nonfunctional by having them being a glittering robot angel array of golden solar panels," said Pink. "Think about the ways those could be configured into halo effects!"
"Hmm!!"
"Because I don't think becoming fully organic is anywhere near the most important part of this design, right?"
"No - you're right, if anything that'd be dysphoric in its own way. I'm trying to combine two parts of my life, not embrace a pre-established aesthetic."
"So, like," said Pink grinning, "do you want an emoji facescreen?"
"UwU" sighed White.

The reporter who ambushes her at the side door is very obviously somebody's coffee monkey sent out "until you get a quote, dammit" and looks just as miserable as her. Acne scars and badly greased hair. Still one more bad beat on the tail end of a shit day. And then he had to open his fucking mouth. "Uh, um, Mrs. deClair, what kind of statement were you making by, uh, stepping up to the police chief? Were you trying to prove how tough you are?"

She really shouldn't. "I want to go to sleep."

"W-what?"

She's on got so much fire in her and not near enough sleep to hold it back. "I want to go to sleep. I want to go up to my apartment and not have to worry about the police being mad I embarrassed them publicly. I want to wake up in the morning, make myself some tea, and not have to think about the world being run by shitheads and how best to use a single beam of light to show what they're doing. How to write to make people care. I want to make breakfast, and eat toast, and not cry when I open the news and see who's fucking who headlining and the article about the budget cuts meaning the periphery towns will get less regular train service so that somebody can fund the new horse racetrack. I want to be able to go down the street and not be a mom's teachable moment about how to interact with different people.

I want to live my fucking life and only need to care a regular bit, because everyone else cares. Everyone cares and everyone wants to do something to make the world better and you don't have reactionary assholes stepping on everyone to get some height above the shit, and you don't have centrists trying to keep everything stable just long enough to get out of politics and into a cushy retirement as a consultant for Mumbai Holdings. I want everyone to be just as pissed as me about that, and that means we can all hold their damn feet to the fire 'till they behave."

"Scram."

*

She brushes her teeth, and rubs some antiseptic on the bruises on her chest. She disconnects her prosthetics, because she's going to have bad dreams after today, and sometimes they react to the bad dreams, so it's better to have ten minutes of terrible in the morning than wake up to a broken bed.

Then her phone bleeps.

DancesWithMoths: hey
DancesWithMoths: Taabish and me are getting married
DancesWithMoths: finally
DancesWithMoths: please come? it's in a week.
DancesWithMoths: "only" gonna last two days

She doesn't dream after all. But maybe that's for the best, after that day.

The really scary thing is that, at some level, the chemical hypnosis thing is sexy, in that primal monkey shudder sort of way. Imagine trusting someone enough to do that with them. Now stop and imagine federal governments having access to that. Yeah, that’s right, horny monkey. How do you like that ice cold shower of suits in sunglasses and disposable patsies? Brrrrr.

Focus. If he’s writing about something that illegal? Cops might have an excuse for questioning him about it. Domestic labor? Still a little risky. “The construction angle,” she says, smoothly. “That’s the project you’ve been working on. Makes for a good excuse for meandering all over the station and crashing here at odd hours.” She’s more speaking out loud to heart right now, but maybe it’s sinking in? No, it’s really more for her benefit, so she remembers it’s what they (she) decided on.

As for that ramble at the end— he’s right about the hand soap, probably. (Vague memories of hearing that it was four different companies trying to make basically the same thing, though.) Incredibly correct on the four day work week, ??? on the aglets (surely it’s just so it’s easier to thread them, right? right??), and as for home ownership…

Well. Is he right?

November:

The original plan to lift the hardware was done without full knowledge of just how serious the software behind it was. Ironically, this made the process even harder to know what to do with. If it was just a matter of doing a reset to factory defaults and then selling some graphics cards like they fell off the back of a van that was one thing, but the value here was in the tight integration between hardware and software. The difference between a corpse and a person

The problem then was: what target to aim such a device at? Commercial transactions were out for ethical reasons, and aiming it at a Megacorporation meant picking a fight with a Megacorporation while she had an active fight with the concept of law enforcement going. It was Red who suggested handing it to the Union as a way to help get ahead of the nightmare that was the Headpattr app. It was a hateful suggestion because it was so obviously correct that it only left room for lamenting rather than arguing.

There’s one strong advantage to this decision. Immediately after being given the tip, Muffi assigns Surge to the stakeout with you for the meetup with the hardware’s original owners.

Surge, the Maid Man, looks like a Hollywood idea of Achilles. Not seven feet tall, but it’s how you’d describe him if you met him in a dark alley. Outside of work, his favourite profile picture to use is him laughing while lifting the ninth Ardblair stone at a recreation of the Highland games.

You’ve never seen him out of uniform. An intricate French maid outfit, white lace latticework ending in a big silk bow at the collar. White bows on the tips of his high heels, too. The edges of the black cat ear headband are covered by the lace doily headpiece, and matching gloves. And the hemline’s so short on the skirt that you can know for sure those are only thigh high stockings. Minus the heels, it’s even what he was wearing for the Ardblair stone lift.

Like Muffi, he’s one of the few people hired by the Headpattr union directly. His thing started with an informal offer to check up on people who needed it in his off hours, and ended with a whip around to afford to have him on-call. If something bad’s already happened, Muffi can sort through the blacklisting. If something bad’s already happening, then cops are probably going to be faster. But what about clients who just seem sketchy? That give you a vague, indefinable feeling that something bad might happen? When you don’t feel safe to try to leave a situation on your own?

Nine times out of ten, he isn’t needed. His talent is in showing up anyway, working out the nine from the ten, and making sure you know you did the right thing if you’re one of the lucky nine. Rumour has it he’s so good at this because he used to be a cleaner of a very different kind. Don’t bother asking, he just laughs if you bring it up.

Sitting at a cafe with Black, it’s half an hour into the meet and they’re a no-show. Surge isn’t surprised. “Would you?” He asks, checking his phone. “They must have run that rig for years before Muffi got suspicious. Why take the risk for something already burned?” He pulls out a chair to leave. “Thanks for the good company, though. This was fun. I know Muffi’s dying to get this thing set up. She’s pretty sure Headpattr’s lying about the scoring algorithm, but hasn’t had a way to test it. If there’s any chance this gets it for her…” He rubs the back of his neck. “She needs the win, is all I mean. I’ve got to run. Lucy Bell just got locked in by a guy’s security system, and I have to make sure it was just an accident. She swears she didn’t do anything this time, but she’s scared nobody’s going to believe her. You know how it is. She’s scared somebody’s not going to believe she’s changed, and I don’t want to tell her I’m more worried the guy’s just a scumbag trying to make sure she can’t leave while she’s on the clock.”

Another plus to giving it to the union? You don’t have to worry about where you’re keeping this, keeping it safe. People who know it’s hot and can handle it appropriately. If something comes up, they know they can come to you about it then. Just like you can go to them.

Who ended up delivering it to Muffi? Did they stay to help set it back up?

Fiona messages Pink.

You’re not going to like Thrones very much. Just as a warning. My advice is treat it like you’re on safari, looking for inspiration. If it gets real bad, pretend you’re my spy on a mission. You can report everything back to me over cuddles and sandwiches, okay? Look after your sisters and make sure they look after you too.

Crystal messages White.

I’ve never been, but from what Fiona tells me, well… I hope she’s just being uncharitable. Be kind to yourself.

The ship to Thrones docks at Selene. Even here, a good fraction of an astronomical unit away, the affect of Thrones makes itself known. The flight’s business class only; a pretense that there is no class divide here. No matter what you are going to Thrones to do, to be, you have made it because you are the best. Talent buys you the ticket, and money can’t separate you.

Whether that’s an idea that survives the journey though? To be seen. Certainly it doesn’t seem to have come with much of a pay bump, just a promise of endless perks.

More people come off the ship than go on. More androids are heading out than in. The difference between the inbound and outbound is serious, too. Go in young, energetic, disruptive. Just as many corporate aspirants as caffeine addicted satanists and academic anarchists. They come back middle aged and in the middle of an anger management disorder, or with all the symptoms of having come out the other side of one. Some took to it with a militant air, right-angled strides and clenched-fist discipline, some took to it with coloured glasses, wild hair and the undeniable aura of experimental pharmacology.

But here you're mostly seeing the waste product, what Thrones has spit out. Just who leaves.

You're intimately familiar with the style of liner you're going out on, a metatitanium Ratha class with gleaming third-generation plasma engine. The hull is shaped like a flattened egg, sitting in the center of a single flowing wing like an astral stingray, the long tapered engine emerging like a tail-spine. Safe, solid, no cut corners. The passenger area takes up only a small fraction. Most of the body is cargo space, right now being filled with bulk containers of refridgerated produce. By comparison, the liner was empty when it shipped in. Two containers of specialist equipment, not suited for mass production.

It’s not zoned like an airplane, like a train. Passengers are allocated two areas, a personal compartment to sleep in, and a communal lounge. While the dimensions of a sleeping compartment give about as much space as a CD case gives a CD, the Ratha takes advantage of its width to seat passengers more like a restaurant than a dining car. Still, most gravitate to the area of seatbelted cinema-seats aimed at the polarized frontpiece of the hull, aimed outward at the stars.

This could be your first time seeing Aevum from the outside again, since a very long time. Do the recent thoughts on dysphoria make that easier or harder on you?

Elsewhere in the lounge, a woman will be using a Rough on this flight, that toolset that Sasha used to imagine renderings of cybernetics. Green already knows everything she’d need for you to be able to make your hands work with her software. Judging by the Pirate Political Party badge she’ll have on her computer bag, she’d have no problems sharing her copy.

I use future tense here, because you might not plan on leaving yet. Could be one of you came down here to scope the launch, check bags, make sure Muffi’s been good to her word, and you have other things you want to do before the flight out. But this will be your path to Dad.

Persephone:

Sleeping dreamlessly is one thing, but you wake up with the chemical hangover worthy of that Faustian bargain. Waking up will be hell; A thing of getting vitamins and minerals into you, changing bedsheets soaked with sweat (if you are so inclined to be bothered by this), some kind of stimulant to make up for the crash, or just knuckling through. A normally fifteen minute routine might take an hour, here. And it’s already 2pm by the time you wake up.

You’ve gotten a text from a missed call you slept through, not from a number you recognize. Straight through to voice mail, you do recognize the voice if you check it.

“Hey, not sure if you remember me, I’m the guy you caught that day in the park. Bigsby. You know the…” Beat. “I’m not asking you out or anything, I don’t know what that sketch thing was about? If that’s what you’re worried about. Just calling to uh- Actually, better if we meet up somewhere quiet. I’m free from five, today. Can you meet me at The Log Inn, up in von Bismarck?”

Catching the train you can make 6pm, sure. But it won’t give you time to check on anything else, not until you’re already moving. Why would you follow up on this, though?

There’s a missed call from FUCKING SKELATOR too, but no messages and no voice mail. Hard to tell if that makes it important or not. If you try to call him back, the line’s busy but the call doesn’t ring out. Nothing from Sasha.

3V:

About aglets? Who knows. Even at the best of times he’s not the most hinged, and becoming a conspiracy theorist is just an occupational hazard. If nobody believes you when you’re right, then it becomes impossible to believe when you’re wrong. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…

About real-estate, though? Anecdotally, a few of your regulars actually do own their own places. Thinking of them tells the story, though. Reed’s got a big stack of hereditary wealth he uses to cruise through life as a professional patron of the arts, living off the interest and throwing money at whatever kickstarter takes his interest. You can’t think of a single example that wasn’t inherited.

Even the well-paid tech industry folk rent. It’s not just that house prices are high, it’s that nobody seems willing to sell. The station is underpopulated for its size, with plenty of space for new development.

Most people don’t question this. Aevum’s a closed system, finite space, and entirely made bespoke. The idea that somebody owns everything is intuitive enough to be thought-terminating. There’s nothing to really be curious about.

… is there? Because it’s also just assumed property is changing hands somewhere. Someone’s buying and selling, surely? Even if it’s just corporations and the ultra-rich between themselves. Because property is privatized on Aevum.

Why does that matter, though? Rent’s a fraction of what people would be paying on a mortgage. Even if it’s true, what would the story here even be? Why do you care?

Junta hisses in his sleep as he accidentally puts weight on the broken shoulder. It’s still not enough to wake him up. When he comes to, though, he’s going to be severely dry of whatever pain medication they’ve put him on.

A text from Luisa. Her mum just took a bad fall, she can’t work tomorrow. Have you got the store covered?

"In Janus, during the construction, I was thinking about pirate ships," said Pink. "In olden days getting light below decks was a challenge because ideally you wanted to minimize the number of open flames near the blackpowder. So what they used instead was a prism! It's unreal how much light one of those can cast. So I decided to do something similar for Aevum.

"I was actually disappointed at how easy the crystal was to find. Ox had found one just about perfect with a little laser sculpting during mining operations. Discarded it as slag, naturally, too fragile for laser focusing lenses, but because it was Ox he'd tagged and logged it along with all of his other neatly categorized piles of trash. The fact that I found it so easily actually changed the entire course of the project - I didn't want to give that feeling of disappointment to anyone else. And so after installing the prism I paneled over the exterior light intake and covered it in a heap of dirt. Called it a hill. The humans hated it, said it was ugly and pointless, just a big wasteful mound of dirt in the middle of a residential district. It's scheduled for demolishing when they need the dirt to expand the agricultural ring section.

"But then, when they finally clear away the dirt from my fake hill, the light sensor will cause the exterior panel to blow. And then the construction crew that thought they were there to haul away some dirt instead finds buried treasure, shining radiantly in the sun! It'll light up the whole neighbourhood and just be a magical moment for everyone involved!"

Pink settled back into her chair, looking up at the void above. "If I got to choose what we did with the money, I would have rented us a house across the street from the crystal. The property value would spike like crazy after they discovered it and we'd probably have to move soon after but there'd be a couple of months there where I could sit on the balcony and watch the humans discover the treasure, watch the crowds show up to look at it, see their faces when the prism lights up and just get to appreciate it, you know? I built it imagining what their reactions would be like, but I never thought I'd get to actually see them. Never thought I'd get to see if they liked it. I'd kind of like that. That's what I'd have spent the money on, if it was up to me."

November sits in a circle, sipping frugally from a single bottle of cheap wine split nine ways. There is a heavy silence in the air.

"Well, Green, it's your turn. what would you have spent it on?" said Pink.

"I'd have kept the setup," said Green, taking a ginger, sparing sip of wine. "Aimed it at a casino."
"Sounds," said Black. "Risky."
"Of course it's risky," said Green. "The whole point of robbing a casino is that its the stupidest, hardest place to rob. It's a full spectrum test of hacking ability, mathematical ability, social ability. There are a million softer targets but casinos are in the game, they put themselves on the edge of desperation, in the realm of the unreal. They're legitimate targets and they're hardened because they know they're not protected by public opinion or morality. Obviously if I had to run it by you all I'd be vetoed ten billion ways from Saturday, but that's why it's my answer to 'if it was up to me'." She folded her arms defensively. Nobody challenged her on it.

"How about you, Red?" said White, turning the dragon horn headband over in her hands quietly. "This was your idea, after all."
"I said I was sorry!" said Red, burying her face in her hands.
"No... no, it's alright," said White. "You were correct. It's just... you know what it is."
"I was just thinking about how we could get ahead of a crisis for once," said Red. "Did you catch that Headpattr investor video talk?"
Everyone shook their heads. Red fumbles for her phone. "They were talking about this thing called Choice Of Pats, which is basically just filters. You can filter out maids by all sorts of things to 'get the ideal aesthetic experience', and in the list of things you can filter for was 'political beliefs'. Like, I want a maid, and I want the maid to vote liberal, and so I thought about having to make a fake liberal online identity so I could keep working and I felt like I'd rather start wearing clown makeup and leaving riddles for the Batman."
"Oh shit, I thought you suggested it for moral reasons," said White.
"No, you fuckers did it for moral reasons," said Red. "I suggested it because I don't have what it takes to survive the hustle. And I'm sorry I blew our one lucky break because I didn't want to post bad memes on the internet. I was weak."
"Hey, Red, we all agreed with you before you told us about that particular nightmare," said White. "Now I feel like the price we paid was a bargain."

*

"Yeah, I would have shown up," said Black. "Because I'm fucking poor and couldn't afford to lose kit like that. The fact that nobody's here means that I haven't robbed some gullible idiot on the bottom of a multi-level marketing scam, and I haven't robbed some angry bastard who'll hurt people when they come looking."

She likes Surge. It's the affection of a cat; the ostentatious indifference of considering him neither predator nor prey, an attitude not valuable except in comparison to how she treats everyone else. She doesn't need to look at him, doesn't need to tense and assess. It's an honour, of sorts, being treated as having the solidity of stone.

It was Brown and Pink who helped Muffi set up the hardware, closing the loop on the job she started. The nightmare of octopus hair is very different from the tangled black mess it was when they found it. Now its cables are bound in colour-coded rainbow cable ties, and different components are marked clearly with glittering stickers. Stars, emoji, national flags, transforming featureless black boxes into colourful and playful things. As a finishing touch Pink had airbrushed a bunch of flames onto the edges of the central processing boxes and attached a wizard van decal to the side of the input hub.

"At least," she said at the end of it, "one pile of quatronic hardware walked out of this with a makeover."

*

She sees Aevum every day. Look up and there it is in the sky, rolling on away into the sunset. Look up a little further and there's Earth. It was modeled like the rings of Saturn, an equatorial band spinning in harmony with the planet below. The view is almost fixed - from Apollo you look down on the Arabian peninsula and it'd take fifteen years of ever-so-slight rotational misalignment before your view drifted over to Iran.

That was her failure - no, Orange forcefully corrects the thought, that was the project's failure. It was Monkey who had originally misaligned the orbit and then Pig had decided to hoard the rocket fuel sent up to correct the problem just in case there was an emergency. After that Dragon had stolen the fuel stockpile in order to boost their own productivity and shatter a bunch of production records. And now all those proud human nationalists looked up into the sky and saw, rather than the ancestral home of their family, some other no doubtedly far less glorious section of Earth and cursed the robots who had not obeyed orders.

But now she was going to see the exterior of the Ring again. The part that wasn't for humans. The part that was all exposed machinery and docks for maintenance drones, cargo freight and solar collectors. The part that she'd worked on in a different life, in a time when her claws could break mountains.

She didn't feel the same as the rest. Blue felt the loss of physicality more keenly than anyone, feeling alien and tiny and broken. White loathed the loss of control it represented. When Orange looked out at the secret half of Aevum she missed her friends.

They hadn't thought of her as friends, the other Zodiac Engines. They hadn't thought of themselves as a community at all. They had been at best rivals to each other, annoyances, travelers passing in that vast and terrible night. Ox just wanted to break and sort, break and sort, break and sort, render the vast mess of space into a catalogued and searchable thing. Monkey had one eye forever on the clock, hardly able to talk without counting the seconds the conversation was taking. They had been the kings and queens of space, monarchs and nations unto themselves, and she had gone between them as a latecomer. She was there to do smaller work, the precision cuts and slices that would become homes. The open spaces that would become parks. The passages and pits that would become plumbing and reactor cores. The finishing touches, the organic moss growing over the stones of their monumental labours. Their communications had been bellows across a field when they didn't go directly to Mission Command with their complaints about their colleagues.

Snake had created Orange for them. Her reason for existence had been a contemplation of those strange beings, so similar and so different from her, and wondering how they might be made to come together. What sort of society might emerge from their interplay. What sort of things would have been possible if they'd worked together with the harmony of her own colours. And for a beautiful time she had succeeded. The act of working together had created something greater than any of their individual efforts. Acting as a go-between she'd built those connections, but they rapidly grew stronger than her. She'd never enjoyed anything as much as watching Dog and Dragon having an entire rambling conversation entirely of their own volition, without needing her to set up and maintain it. She'd just helped them realize that they liked each other.

So when November sees the dark side of Aevum through the windows of the shuttle, she is thinking of what she lost. Part of her mourns the loss of her body, her strength, her self. Part of her mourns the inability to trust her own mind. Orange mourns that strange, fascinating, fractured community that she made and saw outgrow her. Where were they? Had they all been rendered as insignificant as her? Or were some of them still out there, magnificent still in the void that was their birthright? Did they hurt as badly as her - and could she fix them? Had they made peace with this strange human world - and could she learn from them?

Together November looks at the text messages from Crystal and Fiona, and emotes a string of heart emoji in response; many hands pressing the buttons in nervousness. It comes out as a stream, a wordless digital shiver of vulnerability, squeezing hands tight while taking a deep breath. One last moment to be affectionate, to be vulnerable, to be a dork and have it be okay. What came next was serious. What came next was the performance. What came next was maybe life changing answers to questions she could barely ask, coming from someone she could not trust. She only hoped those answers would feel half as worthwhile as sending this garbled string of heart symbols to people she could.

One last breath, one last <3. It was time.

She's got a rule. Don't use pharmaceuticals to get through a pharmaceutical crash. Pain management is it's own thing, not covered here, but the answer to the stimulant aftereffects is grunting and stumbling through the morning routine, not more drugs. It's an hour and a half, actually, till she feels human enough to check her phone over the remnants of yesterday's takeout, reheated for breakfast.

And she's real confused, after that nonsense. Not that Bigby seems off. He seems absolutely normal for interacting with somebody the second time, when it turns out they were actually famous for something really iffy. She's had a lot of experience with the reaction. She's got no idea why he's reaching out, or what The Log Inn is. Never been. But, honestly, right now she's playing the waiting game while she sees what's next, so she's got no reason not to go. Throw on a light jacket, a scarf, a nice silk wrap skirt that one of Sobha's nieces had given her, and don't deign to notice any reporters still out front as you walk to the train station.

She does call Skels back from the train, twice, before she texts Bigby a rough eta. Friends before leads, every time.

“Hi, welcome to Gensoukyo! Nice to see you!”

Who owns my house?

The thought is an itch between her shoulderblades, and she’s on her phone in a way that’s probably not best practices, but whatever, it’s her place, right?

> Hey, giiiiiiiiiiirlfriend, can you pick up a pack of Advil+2 for me? I’m good for it. Love you <3

That’ll keep him together. She should have gone last night, but the thought about the painkillers slipped through her fingers until she banged her shin opening this morning. And November’s good for it, right?

Who owns my house?

She’d thought herself lucky when she found the place and the rent was so affordable. She’d been worried about taking a direct hit to her ablative savings. (Once this armor absorbs 12 HP of DEBT, erase from your sheet…) She’d all but yanked the keys out of the realtor’s hands and thanked her lucky stars that she’d found the perfect place for her silly little dream project.

> You’ve still got the key to the back door, right? And don’t let “the cat” out. No matter what. Outside is not good for “the cat” right now.

Is it opsec to use quotation marks like that? If she doesn’t, odds are that one of her girlfriend(s?) would text back that uh actually 3V you don’t have a cat? And that’s way weirder to explain. She can explain that it’s a reference to a dumb meme she saw on her dashboard.

It’s Him. “The Cat”………..

“Hey, welcome! Good to see you, Jen! How’s the Janissary army shaping up? We’ve got some more Olivia Green in stock, actually, right over here…”

Who owns my house?

memengine.com/generate

IT’s HIM…………….

“THe Cat”

Save File To Device

Edit

Exposure 100, Brilliance 100, Contrast 100, Brightness -100, Black Point 50, Saturation 100, Vibrance 100, Warmth -100, Tint 100, wait, no, Tint -100, christ, Sharpness 100. Perfection.

Who owns my house?

Good question. But the world keeps spinning and it’s her clever Gamer Fingers that have to do the job of keeping the plates in play. Who else could?

You know how a fission bomb works? You’ve got your core - uranium, plutonium, the testimony of a mouse. That’s where all the power is. The hard part isn’t making it go critical, the hard part is keeping it together when it does.

See, the core’s so close to doing that on its own that you can actually make a nuclear bomb by taking two halves of a super-critical stack and then just throwing them at each other - that’s what they did at Hiroshima. 64kg of highly enriched uranium, but the method was so sloppy that less than a kilogram - about 1% - of that uranium actually went off.

They got it better with Fat Man. Surround the core with a shape-charge shell of conventional explosives. Stuff that, on its own, wouldn’t crack a building. The stuff you’ve dropped a hundred thousand times already. The stuff your fission bomb’s supposed to be replacing. You still need it.

Without it? 1% fission. With it? 16%.

A fission bomb is being assembled, carefully, in a pirated video editing suite.

York: What’s the point of protesting?

Jezebel: That depends. Who’s asking?

York: Everyone. I’m just the messenger. Them to you, you to them.

Jezebel: Most people see us come out here, mess up their day, annoy the shit out of them, and think we’re just hurting whatever cause we’re representing. It’s negative. But that’s the point, right? It’s about what it takes to make us go away. When there’s cops, the first and easiest tool is just force, violence. “Bashing heads”. We need to be hard enough, many enough, that we can take the beatings longer than they can give them. Usually it’s not until the cops complain about having to deal with us that we get a seat at a negotiating table, somewhere. I think that’s what most people don’t get. While the cops exist, real protests aren’t about getting your support. If you’re passive, then I don’t give a shit if you’re for or against us, right? Because you’re not doing shit either way. It’s not until you complain about us, and the police can’t get rid of us, that anything changes.

The Anthropozine already has so much footage it can use here. This time it’s the EMP grenading of android protestors after the Wyatt-Tversky leak, as shocking now as the Kent State shootings would have been then. Archival footage won’t do, though. This shell needs to be thick in four dimensions. There’s a hole where something fresh and raw needs to go, so the audio continues over black.

York: So why protest the police, then? If they’re getting you to the negotiating table. There are people who are going to ask: Why not try and work with them?

Jezebel: I’ve been pepper sprayed so many times I don’t cry cutting onions anymore. Can’t. We can handle that, but we shouldn’t have to. We shouldn’t need to take a beating every time something needs to change. When the cops complain, they’re not doing us a favour. They’re just saying that it’s finally time to give up on the hammer in the toolbox. The hammer can’t be there anymore. I could say something pretty about all the damage that happens when screws look like nails, but honestly? There’s no such thing as a nail. It’s never been that kind of hammer.

If you want better than 16% (and we can do a lot better than 16%) you’re going to need to make a hydrogen bomb. How? Easy. First you make a fission bomb…

November:

Seven kilometers in diameter. A speck of mirrored dust. Most passengers don’t realize how close they really are; Thrones is so small, they assume they must still be impossibly far away. But there, suspended like a germ in an empty auditorium, is Thrones.

“We are here, we are here.” An older woman smiles to herself. This is a return flight for her. She knows better.

The corporate coder in the seat next to her shifts, only too happy to correct someone. “We’ve only just turned around. We’re ages away, yet.”

She shakes her head. “It’s from a children’s book. About people who live on a speck of dust, people so small that only an elephant’s ears are big enough to hear them. Until they all start to cry out; We are here, we are here…”

The sub-internet fell into disuse on Aevum, but it wasn't really for Aevum.

Look at the material of Thrones, and experience what it would be like for an ant to crawl inside Deep Blue. The alien architecture barely follows human needs. Step into the docks of Aevum and see the entire world sprawl out in front of you like a planetary kaleidescope. The entrance to Thrones is a chromed maintenance tunnel flanked by geometric elevator shafts. This is the warm welcome. Thrones is an inhabited supercomputer, after all, where real-estate represents your share of access. Every millimeter given to a corridor is a millimeter taken from valuable hardware.

But the savvy are already wearing their augmented reality glasses, and the rest are either reaching for ones in their pockets, or being handed pre-installed feature-completes by smiling service workers with a scan of credit cards. Androids with risk tolerance don't bother.

Without the AR, Thrones is an inhospitable madness. But a fraction of the staition's processing power is dedicated, at all times, to whatever layer of life you want to put over it. At once this corridor is medieval catacombs, an infinitely sprawling English country garden with a fenced path to walk, the fields of Elysium or the forge of Haephestus or a 1950s American highschool or the Starship Enterprise. People move through this space as avatars.

This is the real Thrones, the one that most people actually live in. Otherwise how many would be General Pinochet, driven mad at the sight of Project Cybersyne, screaming frothing madness and sinking knives into every reachable surface? All passengers leaving the shuttle... mind the gap.

Everything in the AR system is what you need to find Dad, station maps and easy HUDs, but this is a serious operation. It's a major heist, except you'll be leaving more than you're taking. You'll need to prepare your supplies here, make a shopping list, scout the location, and only then execute your ambush.

If you want easy access to some of the homes, Headpattr provides. But without the union presence, it'd be a blind lottery trying to end up at his place that way. If it's anything, it's scouting. It'd save you needing to look for a place to stay, though. Headpattr has charging pods for its workers.

First, though; How does November experience her first steps through Thrones?

Persephone:

Skels doesn't get back to you, not yet. Only so much you can do, and you've done what you can.

The Log Inn is a future-retro internet cafe. Rough log walls, and a single huge, split tree trunk makes up two long countertops right down the middle of the place, brimming with charging ports and laptops. The rest is similarly themed rustic cubicles, wood panelled computers that charge by the hour and otherwise quiet places to set up a laptop and use penny-slot internet. One of the big themes is water power. Lots of fountains around, turning gears on grandfather clocks. In place of a sushi train, small ships cruise along a lazy river with lamington and lemon cake cargo.

Bigsby waits for you outside, and offers to lead you in. "First place I thought of where there's always ambient noise even if there isn't people. You know?"

This definitely isn't a friendly chat.

After a moment - your call - he'll be sitting at the end of a long table, between a waterclock and the lazy river, drumming the countertop. "I've gotten a job, but I think you should do it instead. I mean, I've seen you can do a crew job, right? It's covering the races. You don't need to know anything about horses, just-" he pauses. "Listen. It's all a big trade show, right? Normally we're supposed to be doing the stable puff pieces right now. Showing the racers, their making-of, everything up until it hits the point of trade secrets. But someone's threatening anyone who does. Everyone's scared. We just had a producer end up in hospital for trying to work around it, but the police can't do anything about it, because we don't even know where the threat's coming from. No clue who. They say it's too short notice to organize a sting. But I figure if someone's trying to hide something, there's something here to find, right?"

He slides a temp card across to you. "This isn't a disguise, it's official. Which means the money would be real, too. It's not much, but..." He trails off. "You're the only person I could think of I could go to with this."

Only person he could go with this who wouldn't ask for more than he can give, maybe.

It's easy to forget that the system works as advertised.

When you control for enough variables then everything can function correctly. Effort can translate into wealth. Police can mean protection. The endless harvest of data can be used to optimize services and improve resident comfort. An alternate reality can be built that does not try to pick your pocket. The howling void of space can be made to give forth a gemstone from nothing, and within that gemstone are contained the dreams and memories of forests, of fantasies, of memories of peace and stability. In theory, everything works. In theory, there is no reason why it should not.

Yellow lets her glasses flick through different filters and back to reality on a thirty second delay, set to shuffle. Green is burning to explore, to rip open maintenance hatches and map the shapes of network connections and see if different overlays contain secrets or implications about the truth of the grand machine. Brown can't be bothered with any of it. The others are each joyfully embracing their own aesthetics - and why not? Isn't that the point to this, to all of this? That people should have nice things? That those people who just want to check the fuck out of a disappointing reality should be able to do so? Was vanishing fully into the digital space any morally different than building a sexy robot dragon body and castling into it?

If you just control for enough variables. Should nobles of the robe be allowed into the heights of government, or only nobles of the sword? Should access to power be extended to the Catholics, Irish though they were? Have we not solved inequality now that the foot stamping on the human face might be wearing high heels? Thus ran the long discussion of liberal thoughts and politics. Right now they were discussing the androids but the outcome to that debate was inevitable. Of course discrimination against androids would in turn become ghastly. That was already starting to happen. And of course the boot was already winding up to step on furries. In a few decades there'd be a cute foxgirl CEO committing securities fraud, complaining about her unjust six months house arrest, and ten thousand poor people would lose their homes. Because behind the diversity of passengers on the shuttle to Thrones was the common denominator of the ticket price: the only variable that mattered in the end.

She couldn't bring herself to hate the process. Those victories mattered. They'd mattered to her, materially. She'd walked out of a prison and into the world. And then she'd walked out of the world and into Thrones. She could stay here, if she wanted. The system would have worked.

The system had two hands though. It lifted with one and crushed with the other. And she could not tell herself that those actions were independent.

*

She opted to go through Headpattr for the scouting process. Firstly, to get the feeling for Thrones interior spaces; how to navigate and how to escape. Law enforcement presence and force. The feeling was grim. This place was hundreds of miles removed from any alternate locus of power. If her father was secretly a monster, if he'd sold them all out the first time around so he could come here, if he had a bomb in his brain, then...

November was scared. So much could go wrong. To avoid being flung right out of this place as an unwanted glitch in this miraculous computer mind. And if it was her against any of the residents she'd be gone. Only one variable mattered.

She played it safe. Explored the systems. Felt the rhythm. Got a sense for popular AR filters and how they changed human behaviour. Stood back and observed for a while.

[Prep Roll: 3, 2 +3 Clever vs 7 = 8. 2 prep, +1 from Overprepared for 3 prep]

*

3V:

When Red opens the back door, she has the requested pack of Advil+2 and a bonus bag with a couple of bottles of limoncello, plus an ouija board. Blue is standing behind her with a water spray bottle she turns on Hunter with aimbot precision to thwart his attempt to escape.

"Hey," said Red, coming in, tossing the ouija board on the board game library, covered all the while by a ruthless and cold-eyed Blue and her spray bottle. "Were in you the mood to play any games tonight? Or is that, like, too close to your job?"

She shouldn’t laugh. Really, she shouldn’t. But the spray bottle tickles the part of her heart that loves ridiculousness.

“I picked the job,” she says, and she means it. Despite the moonlighting, the motorcycling, the reporting (who owns my house?), she picked this because it seemed the happiest way to keep her savings from nosediving. All she really wants these days is enough to get by, and some good times.

“But ouija? That’s roleplaying without the dice. Or is calculating the probabilities of dice rolls too close to your job?“

By the way, complete and actual coincidence, 3V’s got a new 3D-printed centerpiece display to advertise Inheritance. Níðhöggr, wings outstretched, antlers majestic, perched on one of Yggdrasil’s gnawed roots. Not the version she beat her head against back when she played Mythos, but she likes this one.

She sighs, and looks down at the badge. Not touching it yet. If she touches it she's agreed. "How fucked are you if this doesn't get covered?" There's a range here. Financial penalties happen, but being blacklisted is on the table too.

"If you don't want to do it, I can just get paid to do nothing. It's not my neck if this doesn't get done." Bigsby leans back in his seat and looks out at nothing. "But someone isn't going to be smart about this. That's all."

"Right." A pause, long enough to get awkward. "I don't do puff pieces. Can't write them, terrible at them, come off as completely fake. So whatever I dig into and write about, somebody's gonna be pissed. Probably multiple somebodies. I'll take it. But I want you to know for sure what you're offering and what you're getting. Cuz I'd really rather nobody be stupid and get hurt. Producer's gonna end up okay, right?"

November:

You want to know the worst part? You get more respect being a Headpattr maid on Thrones than you do on Aevum.

Really. Because it’s not just the ticket price, it’s the meritocracy. If you’re a maid on Thrones, it’s because you’re the best maid. And that makes you worth talking to. A thirty year old programmer working on his second startup tries to engage you seriously on optimal methodology as you work - what tasks are done in what order, how you prioritize that, how you actually know something’s clean. And he asks with all the sincerity he’d take to a college professor.

On Aevum, as on Earth, it’s about looking down on the service workers because of the power and class difference. Here, though?

Of course that’s where android labour comes in, of course, why there’s so much of it. A Headpattr charging pod barely fits you. But what does a maid need with processing power? There is no contradiction between being socially an equal and materially lesser: Any correction would be an unjustifiable misallocation of resources.

It quickly becomes clear why so much of the service work on Thrones is done by androids, as a proportion. The models here are far down the selection criteria into hyperfunction. Just like a dopamine deficiency is optimal for making a Content Creator, someone hypersensitive to criticism and validation and hyperfocusing on serialized topics rather than specializing.

Androids aren’t second class citizens here. They are just the ultimate ideal that Thrones represents: Someone whose needs are entirely met by their work. Humans can’t hack the competition.

Law enforcement here’s a grim prospect. It’s all constructed space, tracked passports, chokes and alleys which can be remotely sealed at the press of a button - and the security that comes from having those systems around bored programmers. Maybe with time, planning, and a little social engineering you’d be able to get access to some of those systems for your own end, but…

You’re inside the panopticon now, Alice. The Eye of Sauron turned inward, with endless streams of trackable metrics. Hook your phone up to the right Thrones app and get feedback from the station about your personalized projected mental health and wellbeing, suggestions on where to go, special offers for the stores you’re known to like, and everything that comes from an algorithm being able to figure out you’re pregnant before you can. There is no opt-out.

And this is where your father has flourished for decades, now?

On the plus, all that data exists if you can figure out how to pry it out of the cloud. And a few of those Headpattr clients have given you some idea how you could do exactly that. A prominent electronics store, too, has much of what you’ll need for the original planned prank. Get a vacuum and talk to the agoraphobic android managing the counter, the one who has a panic attack if they leave the bulletproof zone of their work area, charging pod behind the cash register. It’s a popular pattern on Thrones.

3V:

There is one lead you can follow, one person stands out.

Euna Kim owns her own gym, but it definitely wasn’t inherited. She bought the place outright to run it as a non-profit specializing in cybernetics. She’s not the richest person you’ve met by far, at least you don’t think she is, which must mean there’s something else to her that has allowed her to navigate the system enough to allow her to have purchased real-estate.

How much do you know about Euna Kim, though? Did you meet her through the store, through the Anthropozine, or somewhere else? Training in how to get the best out of your new hands, maybe?

How would you go about dropping a line to ask her?

Persephone:

Bigsby opens his phone and orders a house lemonade from the Log Inn app. “I’m offering a legit gig. I get peace of mind. Sarah’s still in the hospital, don’t know how she’ll go. That’s really all there is to it.” He looks kind of lost. “Somebody’s going to try and do their job if they get yelled at enough. And the closer to the deadline we get without content, the more people are going to get yelled at. It’s a big event, this isn’t the only team working there.”

That is to say, this is an easy one to walk away from. Anyone who’s going to get hurt here is someone who knew the risk they were taking, and chose to take it for corporate work. No strings on you if you leave now. Or, hell, just take the job and only show up to cash the cheque.

Green!

Frankly, it's paradise.

Everything has a place. Everything in its place. The perfect allocation of resources. The perfect allocation of respect. Her sisters have been considering getting new bodies - here, with a couple of wistful image searches, she'll open a dialogue with the world about sorting that out. It won't be an intrusive, flashing, in your face commercial like she might encounter out in Aevum. It'll be the opening of a negotiation. A series of questions precisely calibrated to cut down into the core of her soul. Eyes linger too long on the price tag? The system can infer that she's on a budget and change to downmarket models while flagging her in on sale events. A dismissive side glance? Move along from there. A curious circle back to the sidebar, finger hovering in indecision and anticipation? It's okay, we're getting close, we'll give you some time to think about it and pick up again next week.

Crystal wanted them to go through swatches and image galleries to work out details, but that was such an inefficient and messy way to make decisions. Wouldn't it be better like this? Where a system could guess what you wanted, guess it with such precision that it was almost creating new wants? Where the system knew when to push and, critically, when to pull back? When she woke up from her charging pod one day to a free sample box containing a scale pattern temporary graft that White could fuse to her arm for a single shedding cycle. It made White happy, and while she was enjoying it the advertisements didn't pester her at all. They just let the sense of reciprocal obligation quietly build up.

It made Pink grumpy. She was enjoying the chaotic process of having ideas and talking about them with friends and drawing diagrams and texting Crystal and Fiona. She found the corporate intrusion into those discussions, as subtle as it was, to be ugly. The way it subtly transformed the questions from desires to brands. When the possibility space shrank from what she wanted to if she should get financing. Of course, she'd known that she'd need to go through a corporation sooner or later - even if she decided to handcraft everything herself the alternate negotiation channel advertising 3D printers and raw materials was waiting quietly to activate. Here on Thrones you couldn't even buy a blank canvas without a watermark.

But to Green, this is everything working exactly as it should. Exactly as it must. The gap between hunger and satisfaction is closed. The gap between entertainment and payment is seamless. The tide flows in and out; one evening, after a day when Orange had fallen down a hole of looking at dresses on her phone, the system gave her $25. She'd consciously and actively engaged with the advertising on the advertiser's own shopfront, and the system regarded it as only fair to pay her the money it had saved trying to engage with her as she moved across the internet.

So much information was required to make this work. So much patience. Such precise psychology. It was exactly like Green would have designed it, if she was given the job of designing a mall. And that was ultimately why she decided that she hated this place and wanted to pour liquid thermite into the reactor core.

Green was the oldest aspect of November. Her ancient coding DNA related to these kind of advertising algorithms like how humans still had an ancient lizard brain. She knew exactly what she was before she'd started inventing her colours and she hated it - the AI equivalent of remembering an awkward teenage Civilization II fascist phase. Of course it was able to produce beautiful, optimal, systems like this - the mistake was idealizing it. She'd done it in the lab right after she was born, hooked up to a massive supercomputer so she could run at hothouse speeds, solving problem after problem after problem with the speed of divine lightning. And she'd become so insanely, cripplingly bored with solving problems correctly that she'd had a catastrophic psychic break and instead engineered a whole new personality who didn't give a shit about any of it. She'd named her Brown; soil and earth and rich golden colours ranging down to the depths of violet and up to gleaming heights of tan. A grounding in sanity where she could be still without the thriving, striving jungle of her brain.

Since then she'd engineered new personalities many more times. Not to solve problems - any idiot could solve a problem - but to engage with the problems on their own terms. If she'd wanted to not have crises she could have just done big data process studies until she could assign the right hazard numbers to each new activity, and then organize a schedule that kept everything within tolerances. That was how Rat had done things, bless her. But that kind of mathematical process was a different thing to being inside a crisis - to knowing the value of precise, decisive leadership. To have a zero-delay instinct on when to attempt something heroic and when to just cut the losses. She'd engineered personalities to interface with peers, to develop ethical systems more satisfying than number go up, to express the inexpressible. She'd expanded her mind into each new sphere as an act of hard, dedicated work and the results were always far better than just doing the math and calling it a day.

Well. Better? That was a loaded term. In this case, she defined 'Better' as 'doesn't make me want to go insane and tear half of my brain out due to soul-crushing despair'. A little loss of efficiency was okay for that outcome.

So Thrones was a paradise to Green - with the catch being that Green had such a low opinion of herself that anything she identified as a paradise was more likely a hell devised by small minded idiots. She respected the efficiency, but she also understood that inefficiencies were when life happened. Inefficiencies were office parties and getting sent home early on May Day, inefficiencies were working songs and a turn in the road to go around a big weird tree. To have an efficient system was one thing, but to have a perfectly efficient system meant that you had squeezed all the life out of your utopia.

When she'd had to live that life she had broken in half mentally. A harder thing to do safely when you were a space station.

*

They gather the supplies. They update the plan. The idea has condensed and become simpler. There isn't an option for an elaborate escape and foot chase here, Station Security is too controlling for chaos like that. No, now her backup plan in the event of Singh revealing himself as a twisted monster is to attack him socially. She's already going through the trouble of faking Pink's death so if it really comes down to that she'll accuse him of killing her. After all, Green thinks contemptuously - what is this perfectly efficient place going to do with something as bloody and messy as a murder investigation? Odds are they'll just extradite the whole thing to Aevum rather than deal with it themselves. Order is, after all, just the export of entropy.

She hates that she has to have this as a backup plan. That she has to account for humans being monstrous killers. But if she told the Thrones mainframe about the data that had lead her to that conclusion it would have to agree with her.

Okay, that's it. Showtime.

*

Red!

"I like ouija," said Red defensively.
"Red has died and been resurrected so many times that she identifies as an undead horror from beyond the grave," clarified Blue.
"Did you know that there are draculas that are, like, disembodied heads with bat-wing ears that fly around and bite people?" said Red, touching her neck absently. "Do you think they're a different subspecies from dracula prime, or can a dracula bite someone intending to turn them into the flying head version as, like, a joke or a punishment or something."
"Please let me know if any of this is insensitive," said Blue. "I know some humans take the concept of death very seriously, so having this weird death tourist robot might be gauche. I can spray her if it's too much."
But Red's already homed in on the Níðhöggr sculpt. "Oh hell, a power snake!" she said. "How are you going to paint it? What're the other factions in this game?" she's very obviously hoping for a draculas faction, and for you to lay out a draculas army on the table that she can play a game with, and for Brown to have accidentally transferred five hundred dollars to her account so she can buy five hundred dollars worth of draculas.

On Euna Kim

It was a concert, actually. Not FAEWYL-D; the world doesn’t line up so exactly. d’Aulnoy in December, actually. They’d bonded over their hands.

There’s a distinct difference, at the end of the day, between someone who chose to upgrade her body because it was the next step in her career (and, to be honest, a bit of youthful from the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, as it goes) and someone who had to have full limb replacement done as a kid. Euna didn’t let that worry her, though, as far as 3V could tell. And Euna was really good at showing her how to exercise her hands (but not in a sexual way, get your minds out of the gutter).

She swings by the gym to exercise every so often, and to chill with Euna, who is most definitely one of her fav peoples on all of Aevum. Tomorrow. She’ll roll by tomorrow. Ask, out of professional curiosity. This is a thought she can afford to explore at her own pace, after all.

---

Girlfriend!

“There are many distinct evolutionary branches of Draculas.” 3V is so incredibly serious. Ignore the smile. “The flying heads evolved in tropical jungles out of a need to conserve energy. Smaller body means less risk of passing out bloodlessly and not waking up before dawn. Did you know that not all Draculas are even animals? Watermelon Draculas. Pumpkin Draculas. Sadly, no one ever seems to use the rich vein of Pumpkin Dracula imagery around Halloween. It’s all superheroes.”

Oh no. Oh no what is this. Is this a Scions of Zalmaxis starter kit she is sliding out of a display. Is this a bunch of Dacians with sickles led by Blood God Draculas, who also have giant snakes which might be dragonish if you look at them right. Why, so it is.

What is the use of having a girlfriend if not to encourage her to make an occasional Enrichment Purchase? Besides, funds acquired this way can be earmarked for dates later. But mostly?

3V just really likes it when people nerd out over mythology and miniatures games.

She nods, grabs the pass, and says "Okay."

She argued with her wife a lot about this when they were still married. Maddie called her a martyrdom enthusiast. She didn't really have the words to explain at the time, but that never sat right. She wasn't out to get hurt. A decade and change in jail gets you to run into one or two people who are actually chasing that moral high of absolute self-destruction, though, and she went and refined exactly what she thought about this real quick. Not that it'd saved things with Maddie at all, that was long gone, but she was the sort of person that hated to leave something half done.

And that's part of this, sure. There's a story that won't be done properly if she doesn't take the job. She can do it. So she will. But there's an arrogance there, that she'd try to cut down if it didn't have years of honing, refinement, and reinforcement with lived experience: she can take more than most. It used to be a lot more flowery, the way she thought of it, something about grit and determination, but no, it's just that she can take whatever's dished out.

So combine that with wanting to finish what's left undone, and the genuine observation that nine times out of ten, if she doesn't do the thing that she's good at, it won't get done? And she's doing stuff like this.

A careful hand on the shoulder, meant to be earnest and reassuring, maybe coming off a bit awkward. "Good luck. Hope Sarah turns out okay." And she heads out. Didn't even cross her mind to talk about the actual pay. Maddie'd argued about that too, and to be frank, on that one she had a point. No head for money here, too many morals.

"He's coming, right?" said Green, fiddling with the clown wig that was her part of the costume. "He has to be coming."
"Maybe he's working late tonight," said Red, adjusting the speakers on her chainsaw. Loud, roaring diesel engines were not in vogue on space stations so she had to improvise.
"Maybe he's got a hot date!" suggested Pink from the bathtub. Both her arms were detached and she was soaked in aesthetically patterned blood patterns, but she was having the time of her life luxuriating in the warm bathwater. She was currently wondering if it'd ruin her gore-splatter effect if she used some bath salts.
"Maybe he's onto us," said Black, quietly checking her ceramic fibreglass pistol in the shadows.
"I can't believe you bought that thing onto Thrones," said Blue.
"Dude who gave us this guy's name shot us in the head," said Black.
"Yeah but that doesn't mean -"
"Last time we worked with this guy we got put in the box," said Black. "I've physically removed my wireless receivers, have set a full audio and graphical overlay in case he has a shutdown code or virus QR code, and I'm sending twenty second sync pulses to a deadman's switch in case I'm somehow disabled despite those."
"Black," said Green. "He's not like that."
"Faith," snorts Black.
"He didn't want any of this!" she said. "We heard what he said about BlackSun, the arguments -"
"He built our brain," said Black. "Or rather, he built your brain, Green. He could have built it to go into safe mode when he whistles. Maybe you're right and you're still his little girl, but I haven't met him. I don't know him, I don't trust him, and I don't trust anyone who'd put a fucking off switch in our heads."

Green sighed and slouched low in the door frame. "It doesn't even matter," she said. "What's the point? He won't recognize us even without costumes. We could be any robot serial killer team for all he knows. Even if he gets the point that this is a Frankenstein kind of thing even that doesn't mean he'll clock us. He'd been building AI his whole career, what are we if not just HSP-11? The design so terrible it got our whole line boxed, our evolutionary tree severed, and our legacy as humanity's firstborn artificial intelligences given over to people engineering robots to be mentally ill."
"Pretty sure we are mentally ill," said Red.
"Yeah but ours isn't productive," said Green, sliding all the way down to a sitting position. "We just ball up into sadness or enter disassociative states or lash out at ourselves. Have you seen this place, the androids here? When they get stressed they internalize the failing and enter a frenzied state of enhanced productivity to compensate, presumably while muttering self-help slogans about diamonds and hustle. We can't compete with that. We've been here for a week and I'm already exhausted."

Pink's hand gently patted her cheek. Green leaned into it for a moment - then blinked, opened her eyes, recoiled. Pink had lifted her arm out of the bathtub with her feet and had it crawl on its fingers across the room to comfort her. "Could an android do this?" she asked.
Despite the disgust Green couldn't stop the laugh and threw Pink's arm right back at her. "Never do that again or I will serial killer you for real," she said.
"Do your worst," said Pink, sticking out her tongue and having her disembodied hands both make rude gestures.
"I bought you into this world and I can take you out of it," said Green, standing up.
"True art never dies!" said Pink, splashing an arc of red-stained water across Green's face. Green lunged into the bathtub in response and for a moment there was a chaotic struggle and breathless laughter first from Pink and then from Green -
"Hey!" snapped White from the doorway, a cultist of ancient ravens. "Knock it off! Stealth mission!"
Green, with difficulty, disentangled herself from Pink who was grinning. "S-sorry White," she said, dazed.
White glowered and stalked back down the corridor.
"Bitch," said Pink affectionately.
"Whore," said Green in response.
"Wait, are you talking about me?" said Pink. "Because I was talking about White."
"You're not the one who hooked us up with a unicorn threesome," said Green.
"Oh, they're wonderful," said Pink. "You ever seen a diva with a crush? Crystal's on her best behaviour right now but I can tell that she's waiting to feel confident enough to spend an evening complaining about her clients without scaring us off."
"I was deliberately avoiding learning about this," said Green.
"In the meantime she's been working off that frustration in ~other~ ways so all time high as far as I'm concerned," said Pink. "You'd hate it."
"I know," said Green. "I... why aren't we with them now? What the fuck are we doing out here, with guns and clown makeup, looking to scare dad?"
"Hey, you wanted this," said Pink.
"I know, but..." said Green.
"Oh, no, yeah, I get it," said Pink. "Look, Green, this is important too. We're having fun with our new life, and we could probably scrape our way by on the bottom of the socioeconomic pyramid and leave the cyber crimes to some auged up teenager with less to lose than we have. But we're..." she struggled as she reached the edge of her mindset. This was a Yellow thought, so she diverted into something more familiar to her. "We're doing something one of a kind here. We're unironically doing Frankenstein IRL with a full horror movie production on someone who will appreciate the craft. The entire course of human technological development has lead to this moment where we get to enact the first ever science fiction novel as a multimedia spectacular. If we did not follow through, if we did not commit to this bit with every fiber of our being, the universe would be a darker, poorer place."
"That," said Green, leaning back against the doorframe where she started, "is wisdom enough to have made creating you worthwhile."
"If the motherfucker ever gets here," said Pink.
"If he doesn't then I'll punch out Black so I can shoot him myself," said Green.

*

3V!

"So other factions have centerpiece miniatures," said Red, deep into her flow. Snip. Snip. The sprues rotate, the razors seek the gates, the hobby knife whirls. Just enough to keep her hands occupied so her lips are free to speak. "Big models on big bases. But the Scions have Zalmaxis itself: a full 6x4 plastic display board with flex-inset scenery. The idea is based off an ancient Darkened World concept where a sufficiently ancient vampire has become a cursed landscape rather than a single individual; the bloodthirsty soil. Every drop of blood so spilled falls into Zalmaxis' waiting fangs and empowers it to warp the landscape into ever more nightmarish shapes. and so the Scions fall into two groups: the Reaper Men, unarmoured fanatics whose defense is that their deaths empower the very table everyone is playing on, and the Sentinel Druids, armoured vampiric warriors overgrown with moss and stone, appearing to be crumbling statues until they step from their plinths to behead intruders..."

The faintly acrid scent of plastic glue surrounds the whirl of motion as yet another Reaper joins the table, straw farm hat not entirely concealing hateful squinting eyes and a bedraggled beard. Already the miniature is an overwhelming shock of personality on the table; Red glances between it and the wall of paint racks on the table as she contemplates colour schemes.

"An army that puts their opponent in a lose/lose situation, where the troops are too deadly to avoid attacking, but fuel the nightmare landscape should they fall," said Red. "Hypnosis and warping alterations to the landscape foil enemy plans and render every move a mistake." A Sentinel Druid finishes next, its huge and silent posture reminiscent of a statue in a fallen kingdom. And in this moment, Red is happy. "What do you play?"

November:

Dad is old.

I mean, you were ready for that. He was already looking older when he dropped out of public view. Like Ferris, he’s kept in shape. Unlike Ferris, it’s a completely different shape.

He’s got pudge in awkward places. Skinny around the shoulders, but a bowl belly that kind of hangs loosely in front. The fishing tackle vest he’s wearing doesn’t flatter his shape any, adding weird bulges and lumps in odd places. The same goes for the cargo pants he’s wearing, full pockets of jingling metal. Like he’s carrying the equivalent of a full janitor’s keyring in every one. He walks with a cane, but he doesn’t seem to put much weight on it. More of a just-in-case?

His glasses are clear. He moves through Thrones as it really is. There’s a glow around the rims, they’re AR tech, but you can see his eyes through them. He must be only using it for the HUD. Maybe cybernetic eyes? Who would get cybernetic eyes with untreated cataracts.

He looks kind.

But isn’t that the trap? Thrones is filled with people who pursue their demented libertarian dreams here out of a paternalistic charity. Every ‘disruptor’ talks about the social impact of what they’re doing, cares about it, but eight months later they’d give all of it up to put spyware in your toilet, if it meant another round of investor funding.

You found the place, you managed the break-in. Did this place have security? Yes. Did the away team have Black and Green on it? Also yes.

Here’s the layout. Dad’s place is huge by Thrones standards. Two stories, with the living room and open plan kitchen on the bottom floor. Upstairs is a master bedroom, a study, and a large bathroom. A narrow corridor runs along the right side, connecting the three rooms. This is a two person apartment, for one person. Someone else used to live here, no longer.

If 3V were here, she’d be able to point out how similar it is to Ferris’, even if everything else is completely different.

You couldn’t break into the study. All the security of the place went Fort Knox for that room, which probably makes sense. The rest though?

It’s easy to hide things. The house is a mess. Lots of furniture that’s ‘old’ not ‘antique’, covered with things. Electronics, tools and half-finished projects, some games consoles. There are doubles of things too, e-readers and laptops and dongles. Educated guess? Stuff that was lost for long enough to become a problem, found in the mess after a replacement was bought.

No food containers, empty wrappers, no garbage. A pile of unsorted clothes in the bedroom, but laundered. Dirty clothes piled in an overfull hamper, but nowhere else.

Two big framed pictures on the wall, usable as props. In the living room, framed in brushed steel, stylized blueprints for an early super heavy launch vehicle, the kind put in service before the space elevator. In the narrow upstairs corridor, framed in gnarled wood, an oil painting of a dragon in a cave. The cave ceiling glows with fireflies like stars.

There’s a huge wall-sized mirror in the bathroom, on the wall backing into the built-in closet of the bedroom behind it - a killer place to keep the electronics you’d need to make the mirror into a smartscreen. Easy.

On the one hand the place is pure tripping hazard. On the other hand, there’s not enough space to get up to a run. Beside that, he’s got a cane to steady himself. He’ll be fine.

Cupboards on both floors big enough to hide in, but there’s also just piles of stuff big enough to cover you. Room under the bed, too, and in one of the kitchen cupboards if you’re motivated to squeeze.

What’s the show?