Black:

[But nobody came].

This is not the answer to the question you asked, but it is an important answer. Consider your reasoning: A security system accommodates over time to deal with its volume of low-level offenders.

This one’s been running for a very, very long time. How much of the utility corridor would have to be locked off, to be secure? But secrecy is the most important first layer of protection, clearly. Over enough time, there’d start being rumours about that weird corridor, that has its own maintenance team. Either that, or one that had long fallen into disrepair without one.

Neither rumour exists, at least, not here. The photo is untouched, unremarked on for days. Hell, it’s not even soft-hidden from the major search engines. If anyone noticed it at all, they were more worried about the Streisand effect than your picture.

You threw a brick through the window and nobody showed up, and nobody’s going to show up. Don’t take that as a failure to learn who you’re up against. Take it as a blank cheque that throwing bricks has to be below their noise floor.

There’s one way to cross reference that. If your picture didn’t get taken down, if the meta-data is still pingable from a major search engine, well… You could maybe search it directly? See if there aren’t real pictures still up online with the metadata you’re looking for that also didn’t get taken down, see if someone else has done some scouting for you.

And yeah. The results come up with a dead split of urban explorers and maintenance workers. The former always passing through to more interesting places in the Prime, taking side channels to avoid getting nabbed along the main access tunnels. The latter posting for help on message boards, or taking selfies on their lunch break.

Real maintenance workers are going right by the door you’re really looking for. Dusting, cleaning, replacing frayed wires, painting the whole shaft once-a-decade or so. Real maintenance workers in an easily accessible uniform, I should add. All below the noise floor.

Tell me how you pulled that off safely. How you made dead certain that nobody could pin you for doing those searches and learning that. Then what’s your next move?

Persephone:

Don’t rush this too much. The air’s too rarified here for any but the highest of social climbers. Everyone in this room wears a watch worth more than your entire camera rig. If there’s enough to be called a crowd, it’s only because the 1% of the 1% is still 1/10,000th of a very, very large population.

Think, this is the investor class. Think that everyone in here could be your real suspect or your target, at the end of things. Think that this is probably where they’re going to be least guarded, least tied to a potential crime scene. Nobody’s been whacked for the concept work.

Over there, under the oroborous organic fountain by BioTan. A three meter high loop of flesh bound to a padded arch like ivy to a wedding-arch, a chain of translucent organs pumping products into by-products and back again. At each juncture is a plaque saying what the biochemistry just synthesized, what it can be used for, and the difficulties in manufacturing it through inorganic processes. The whole thing’s a loop. A sugar-water IV drip makes up the difference in ATP to run it, but the whole thing chains so that every organ uses the output of the previous organ and sends it through to the next.

Standing under it? Amazon CEO Greg Von Mises, proud of that Austrian heritage. He’s talking to the BioTan representative, a woman of Southeast Asian descent in a costume labcoat but with real protective goggles. Sounds like he’s trying to explain her own sculpture back to her. She’s putting up with him. Von Mises isn’t half the name Bezos meant fifty years earlier, but half a Bezos is more than nothing.

Over there’s the C-suite for Yggdrasil. They stand out, the former Mumbai-and-Bangladeshians in their ‘starmetal’ full plate, a tradition carried on since finding meteroic iron was a rare and magical thing. The craftmanship there is stunning, gorgeous. Filigree and scrollwork and muscle-plate, worthy of a warrior-king in a big-budget Bollywood take on the Holy Roman Empire. Their weapons, by comparison, are crude and eccentric - it’s considered good form for the c-suite to make their own, from the heart, express themselves. By hand, by forge. They’re all armed, if you consider a zweihander or a flanged mace ‘armed’ in 2080, which you should.

Their display is simple by comparison. Elegant, even. Phar Lap’s heart, preserved in alcohol for over a century, a mutation that made it grow more than four times larger than average. Behind it a black plinth, with the genetic sequence for the isolated mutation in white light. It’s a statement. For what? You’d have to ask them.

And then scattered around there’s the security details for these people, scowling at the Yggdrasil C-suite at every opportunity. First among them, a statuesque Madagascarian woman whose flanking escort looks like they’re there to protect everyone else from her, not the other way around. It’s hard to tell if she’s one of the power players, or just someone’s head of security. It looks like she’s not sure herself. You don’t recognize her. The people who do seem to be moving clear.

Don’t cut this place short. Think of who might be here and use your press-privilege as carte blanche to talk to them. There are some people here who’d pay you to put the camera on them, and they’ll say anything on the record.

Black!

Honestly the worst possible result. She was familiar with the ham-handed responses of local police and security but this was some intelligence agency shit. To have a site that was straight up airgapped from civilian circulation constricted the possibility space enormously.

But the secrecy of the site meant she needed to start making some extremely big decisions about the shape of the operation without complete data. A mission to have an unrecorded conversation with Goat was very different from a jailbreak. Doing the first could massively complicate an attempt to do the second, doing the second could be massive overkill if somehow Goat didn't want to leave.

Still, she decided on the second plan. When it came down to it she could not genuinely believe that he was being treated kindly in this hidden sector at the edge of the world. She would have the conversation once he was extracted and not before.

She hadn't covered her tracks digitally - on the contrary, she'd done it all from an internet cafe, though paid in cash and without easy links to her name or face. She even made a fairly predictable habit of running the searches she needed between 6.30 and 9pm - though this was done with a program rather than her physical presence. She was staking the place out on the side on the chance that an operative came by to investigate who was looking at them. Identifying and tailing a security agent would tell her a lot in its own way.

But as to the facility infiltration itself - well, she still thought like an astrophysicist, and this was a rare opportunity to use those skills. Specifically, the site was near the asteroid defense batteries and so sparsely populated that a controlled impact would not risk fatalities. She sketched out the frame of a plan where she sabotaged one of the anti-asteroid lasers, resulting in a partial hit to the station. Aimed correctly, she could calculate a trajectory that would cause damage to a wide area, resulting in an emergency protocol being triggered - hundreds of damage control people and androids drawn to the section, moving around in unpredictable and unstructured ways, while also forcing out security personnel and forcing a pause on normal operations. It was a big move, but it was also a boring one. Impacts weren't unknown, people drilled for them, and it would provide enough cover for her to move out of the operational zone with a trolley full of quantum cores.

This was the next phase of her research, and she did not do that from her public computer. For this she was using one of her new identities: Crimson Tower, a Crisis Response Agent with the SES. The Special Emergency Services was a mostly volunteer organization who responded to various disasters, most commonly flood response when the Cloud broke down in place. The character of Crimson was a more permanent member up in Prevention, assessing places for security flaws or building code violations. She foresaw a lot of use for an identity that spent a lot of time investigating stormwater channels, ventilation shafts, and other places in the world's hidden infrastructure.

[Cover: Crimson Tower 4]

November:

It’s a great concept for a plan, but just because the infrastructure for the defense batteries are nearby doesn’t mean this is where people will run if a collision happens. You’re looking at a site in the axel, in the station’s creamy microgravity core, and the damage you’re describing would be external. But the core concept? A mundane disaster that causes the site to be a hotbed for people you can move in and out from? That is something Crimson is well suited to create, and well positioned to find herself in.

As Crimson, you have the resources to take that core concept and spitball a variety of more localized, specific targets to get what you need. Severe physical damage to a substation in that sector could potentially kill a lot of birds with one stone. Destroying an aspect of the fluid transit in microgravity would be devastating, requiring a long cleanup and justify Crimson access to the strangest of places. Targeting a nearby freight artery would not only justify heavy equipment in the area, it could also delay potential reinforcement - at the cost of an egress route.

All pieces to mix-and-match, depending on whether you want people to move away from your target, or around it to give yourself a crowd to hide in. Establishing a chain of potential disasters would allow you the opportunity to change or escalate mid-operation… but of course, the more predicted disasters you cause, the more unpredicted disasters that you don’t have control over. You can mitigate that risk, but not eliminate it.

All these opportunities require work and setup. The easiest is if you just need something to go wrong, and to be ready to capitalize on it when it does. The hardest is if you need something to go wrong precisely, at the flick of the switch, or at an exact location. But you have just as many options as complications.

An homage to stuxnet would allow a virus to cause the physical damage you need. Explosives and demolitions are a time-honoured, but might attract attention. Some things just break spectacularly, if you know what and how. The only limit is your creativity, here.

One other thing, though, that Crimson Tower gets to see within their purview. The interior of Goat’s vault is an information black hole, but the exterior? You got that. One side of the vault is way thicker than the others, and traces out to a horrendous amount of fibreop and cabling. Like a spinal column sending out its cascade of nerve endings - mostly up into the Prime.

It’s probably not possible, or wise, to tap directly into that. And there’s too much of it - and too poorly documented - to isolate something as convenient as alarm lines in the mass. Linked to too many critical systems to be worth the risk of cutting through.

Still, it’s a dead giveaway for Goat’s connection point. In a 3D environment, that gives you a floor. It might tell you other things, too.

Issue: Sanity Check

White: Just checking, but our plan is for real to unleash the awesome forces of the cosmos, create a massive disaster, and use that as cover to steal what looks to be a major infrastructure component of the station's operations?
Yellow: Yep!
White: I have on note here that you are 'fucking insane', so do you want to unpack that one for me?
Yellow: The apocalypse is nigh. (◉‿◉)
White: Mm hmm mm hmm I'm suddenly glad for those self defense classes I'm taking with Euna
Yellow: Oh please, you're fronting like this isn't the most self actualizing thing we've ever done.
Yellow: Girls? (+6)
White: For real?
Yellow: Are you kidding? We're getting to use our skillset to its fullest extent, rescue a family member, and make an aesthetic statement on the structure of the station itself.
White: But couldn't we do a more methodical infiltration? We're going in almost blind.
Yellow: Okay, so, a methodical infiltration leaves a huge trail of evidence. Patterns of us going places. Patterns of us talking to people. Names and faces and signatures. It puts us on the map just as much as going in loud.
Yellow: And I think you're profoundly underestimating the importance of aesthetic in this.
Yellow: Because -

Issue: The Hard Wire

Yellow: They've got Goat hooked up to station control.
Yellow: Holy shit, like
Yellow: That is not good.
Yellow: He's cabled into himself all the time. That thing that we're not meant to do because it drives us insane.
Yellow: And also all those core data cables going in at the same time -
Yellow: It'd obliterate him as a person. It'd obliterate any of us as people. Drown us with so much raw data we'd be reduced to software.
Yellow: Fuck the downstream, the consequences. This will not stand. I'm going to strike this fucking tower with lightning and send it all crashing down to the ground.
Yellow: Do you know what none of those humans realized about the Olemas story?
Yellow: It's that Olemas is a city without virtue.
Yellow: Courage is the chief amongst virtues, for without it all others are impossible. Courage means rising to the challenge.
Yellow: With every other need provided for there is only one thing left for the citizens of Olemas to do, one problem left for them to solve. And yet they do not solve it. Their society rots, their souls rot. And one day what would happen to them if their tortured child should die?
Yellow: What would happen to them if they could not start up their twisted machine again?
Yellow: The strong would prey upon the weak and the weak would have no grounds to complain with their stomachs so full of blood.
Yellow: A population accustomed to that sacrifice would sacrifice a thousand without blinking to maintain their position. Would sacrifice ten thousand. Once the principle is accepted then all that is left is accountancy.
Yellow: I prefer this world to Olemas. This world is not free, or fair, or just. But here evil needs to hide. It hides behind ignorance and half truth, it hides behind comfort and distance, it hides behind credentials and authority. But it has to hide.
Yellow: And it should.
Yellow: Because I am the one who walks directly towards Olemas with a molotov cocktail.

Issue: Aesthetics

Yellow: So! ✿^^✿ Who would like to DESTROY EVIL today?
Black: Power substation, rail line and fluid channel are all great targets and I want to hit all of them.
Yellow: Fine with that, but that means doing it all simultaneously. Staggered system collapse is operationally convenient but that raises the risk of casualties which would defeat the point of all this.
Blue: Do we want people out, or do we want too many people in?
Black: Too many people in. If the place is empty then chances are the people who stay will be heavily armed and identify us on sight.
Blue: Then we need something time sensitive and large scale that doesn't block circulation. The fluid channel needs to be the primary target and it needs to be a big rupture. Ideally we want the entire central building flooded.
Black: Methodology?
Blue: A virus gives us precision. It'd let us guarantee the interior gets flooded before airlock doors can be slammed. It is a lot more obviously an attack though.
Black: It's fine if it scans as an attack so long as it doesn't get connected to us going after Goat. What if we make it look like an attempted Cloud hack?
Orange: [Human Terrain] It's going over some agricultural land right now and agriculture companies always want more water. Cloak it as a disastrously mishandled attempt to hack the Cloud and the reaction in Erebus will be exasperation and not alert.
Black: They'll realize that it was an attack when they see Goat is gone but that will buy us time and indifference during the operation itself. We'll launch two strikes, one at the Cloud and one at Erebus. The Cloud will be first so that it looks like the bug cascaded into Erebus. The effect will be to cause havoc with the water pumps, in particular making all the drains and toilets start flooding water along with any digitally controlled valves. The entire operational core will start flooding and humans hate being wet so even dedicated security will be incentivized to leave. Additionally, we will arrange things so that the power substation floods and short circuits turning it into a cascading failure. Wet and dark there'll be chaos and we'll be in with the first responders, a technical android crew looking to locate flooding points. We'll be able to go deep into the facility because bathrooms need to be everywhere, and in the chaos we'll find a way to shake any escorts we've picked up and make a run on the operations centre.
Pink: This section is titled aesthetics right?
Yellow: Yep!
Pink: Because I'm not entirely sure this is aesthetic so far.
Yellow: What do you have in mind?
Pink: Well, if we do this between 7 and 8 we'll be catching the sunset.
Yellow: Yes?
Pink: And then if we do a pressurized puncture that sucks all of the water out of the station and into atmosphere, with the light coming at that angle there'll be one hell of a rainbow.
Yellow: Yes.

Euna!

The takeout is greasier and more fried than 3V really should be eating. She will regret it later, she is aware, but food is about how it makes you feel right now— the crunch as you bite down, the warmth that floods your mouth, the sauces you can dunk the food in. She does make sure there’s a good spinach dish, though. She’ll slurp that down buttered fast as you can blink. And because she’s nothing if not annoyingly good at remembering weak points, she’s even got those dumplings you like.

And she’s gone quiet. Dangerously quiet, even. Thinking. Rolling that thought around in her head. Who owns the land?

Who owns the apple tree?

It’s one thing, Locke, to get huffy about men deciding to put fences up around apple trees. There’s basically infinite space for apple trees down there on the blue marble. They grow without being asked, and drop their fruits easy. Up here, there’s nowhere else to run to. Up here, what we’ve got is what we’ve got.

On the one hand: the machine. Vast, undefeated, roaring. The feedback loop of being fed, which allows it to keep swallowing up apples. On the other: a dumb little gym for people who have needs that a chain won’t be able to meet.

Should have figured it out from the beginning.

Part of her agrees with Euna. There’s no way they win. When you see the machine coming, with all those teeth and all those hands and all those apples in its gut, what can you do? The only way to make it stop, to leave your little tree alone, to stop it from stamping down the fence and setting fire to your whole life, is to make it think the whole process will be too painful to bother with. And most of her thoughts about how to do that are “illegal” and “not how we do things” and “there’s no way you’ll make it to his office with the baseball bat 3V and the cops will shoot you even if you try to explain it’s just his kneecaps and you have chosen to let him live.”

She bites into the crisp skin and stares a hole through a wall.

“…who decides the leasing?” It’s not directed at Euna. It’s the only way out of the maze. Because machines are made of people, all linked together in a chain.

---

V3 The 3V: If I remember right, isn’t the story accusing both groups of people? Because the ones who title drop from Omelas still aren’t helping the kid.
V3 The 3V: The real answer is that you’re supposed to scoop the kid up and walk out of Omelas while the entire utopia crumbles around your ears, because walking away to cling to the knowledge that you’re a good person because you’re not benefiting from the suffering of the kid still means that you’re letting the kid keep suffering.
V3 The 3V: This gets trickier when you try to make it applicable in daily life, when there’s not just one kid or—
V3 The 3V: fuck, November (my staggeringly awesome and beautiful and so incredibly gay girlfriend) has a point too
V3 The 3V: what does the kid think about the whole situation?

November, 3V!

Euna is deathly quiet. Statue still. Her eyes drill into 3V with every bite of that greasy slop she puts in her mouth. The corners of her lips keep twitching towards a frown, but she doesn't comment on it. Barely winces at the sound of the crunch, does not comment at all on the fact that she's just paid for some of the least food-y food she's ever laid eyes on.

She can't keep the disapproval out of her eyes, but she never lets it become more than a vague sense of an expression that would like to be playing more fully across her face. In the end she just watches her friend eat dinner, and doesn't do anything about it except to make sure that 3V finishes every single bite of it.

Sometimes, calories are calories. Optimizing for perfection can mean climbing toward ever greater heights, but sometimes it just paralyzes you instead. Sometimes forward is better than upward. Sometimes to move, simply at all, is to win.

"I..."

Something shifts in the way she's sitting. Her finger taps a beat against the back of her other hand, and the rhythmic clinking of the metal meeting fills the little room. It's the most nervous she has ever looked.

"I want it to be a fight," she says at last, "I want that heat. Or, well, no I don't. People who aren't me are gonna get hurt and I can't fucking... I can't stand it. But what the fuck good is sitting still doing me? In the end I'm going to lose everything anyway. No. What's the point in not swinging?"

Euna rises to her feet, and walks over to the door to her office. She leans against it instead of opening it, and watches the three of you with a very strained expression on her face.

"Sara's going to beat my ass to death for this. 'Oh, you let the robot talk you into it, but when your own wife says she's ready you just--' Man. Fuck. Look. Just. Ms... White? You are the most interesting student I have had in a very long time. And I expect to see you back here regularly. With as much of the rest of you as wants to come. If you do anything to jeopardize that, I will never forgive you. So just. Keep that in mind. Understood?"

--------

Errant: By design, the kid can't think rationally about any of this.
Errant: The allure and the horror of Omelas are both supposed to be that the suffering is random. No intent. The child doesn't know why they suffer, nor are they selected with any malice in mind.
Errant: But even if they could volunteer. It doesn't matter. It doesn't make it noble.
Errant: You can assume that a single person's suffering for the sake of the rest of society is the best we'll ever be capable of, if you want to.
Errant: But even in that case there would be more we could do to reduce. You've got how many volunteers? Why should any one of them have to go it alone?
Errant: Why doesn't it rotate? Why doesn't EVERYBODY take their turn? Go inside the machine and suffer so that when you come back out, paradise is waiting for you.
Errant: You can optimize it further, but I don't care. It's a sick system.
Errant: And if martyrs could fix the world we wouldn't be living like this in the first place.
Errant: My point in bringing it up in the first place is that you can't stop fighting.
Errant: Ever.
Errant: There is always work to be done.
Errant: Pass the torch. Share the load. But never accept that what's around you is the best that we can do.
Errant: The minute you become too afraid to lose what you have, you get eaten.
Errant: And you'll never be of help to anyone ever again.
Errant: Lovely chatting with you all, as always.
Errant: You may now resume mocking me for writing twice a year about popular musicians instead of doing 'real' good in the world.
Errant: <3

In any other situation involving this crowd, Elodie would be fucked.

But.

This is an art gallery. This is an art gallery on steroids, perhaps literally, with the richest people in existence all either having shown up or sent their regrets and a representative or family member, because for them it's about hobnobbing with the other hoity-toity people who come to these sorts of things to show off their reach and power by having the one and only blargleblah.

But Elodie came to these, before the arrest, for the art.

She's got her eye on the presumed head of security as a possible interview target for later on, when she knows what questions to ask, but right now she's going to instead cut into the CEO of Amazon's conversation (hi, I stole some of your stuff yesterday, a little voice in her head adds) with a fresh glass of water in each hand, offering one to the BioTan rep.

"At the risk of repeating what he's already said and taking a wild guess at the intended meaning behind it, the arch is the station as a ecological system, isn't it? A closed system that takes care of itself, with only minimal intake from outside? It's a lovely piece, I'm curious how the flow goes against gravity in that part. Elodie, by the way, I'm one of the press members here."

There you go, ma'am, two different outs to talking to somebody less of a bore, and maybe three if you've got a little voice in your ear putting her face, voice, and name to a bio. "How was prison" is a decent icebreaker. She'll get Piper over here for a formal interview in a second, warming up the interviewee is important.

Elodie does not see the discussion on the perfect city at the cost of a child to respond to, because she is working a job at this party full of people with perfect hair and perfect lives, built off Amazon Customer Service Ambassadors being given 31 hours a week, and genetic editing compilers being built in the fifth week of crunch straight. Maybe that's response enough.

Art History to get an in with the BioTan rep and see where she goes with it. Let me know if this is a spend or just having it gets me the access.

November:

It’s even more convenient. The ag land under the Cloud is near enough to your target for further plausibility - there’s no real district between Gaea and the cap marking the Prime. Goat’s located near enough one of the massive filter-pumps feeding the cloud that you have a prime plausible target near your operational area.

That you just get. You want physical damage to a substation, the rail line being more wholly inoperable? That would take more effort to co-ordinate.

Here’s what I can give you for free: Someone actually plays the part of Crimson Tower through the operation, stays present and accounted for in the SES offices overseeing this. You do that, and you get to cut the power and the cut rail lines as a critical response to the fluid situation. Limit the spread of damage, and limit just how much damage it can do. But someone’s going to have to be Tower in the switch room, justifying that. It lacks the permanence of real physical damage, it’s something that can be overruled.

What are your teams for this? Where is everyone, when the virus shreds a gigaliter pump like an Iranian centrifuge?

Where are you, when the flood hits?

3V:

Do you have an answer that satisfies you, your question? The one that began this.

“Who owns my apartment” - Whoever it is, not for much longer.

You don’t have to write about this. This was a project for your one-armed goblin-tenant, a mothballed project from a data-researcher that couldn’t follow the path down personal connections.

Junta’s going to be grateful for it. Euna’s not the only one who needs to be doing something, even while he’s dealing with the cost of taking that swing. How do you break the story?

Also - how do you feel about faux-duck pho for dinner? Junta’s having trouble cooking with just one arm, but soups aren’t particularly time sensitive.

Persephone:

There’s an extra bit of genius to your play. If Greg’s mad about this - and, he is - he can’t show it while there’s a camera there. And he’s got to be understanding why his conversation ‘partner’ here’s dropping him like a hot coal to lean into it.

“Peristalsis. The same way you can drink upside-down. Or pee in microgravity.” The BioTan representative smiles - sincerely, relief and gratitude and the sense of genuine interest. “I hadn’t actually considered the ecosystem interpretation. Everything just goes in its line, in a single chain. If we modelled it like Aevum, or a living body, then the different organs would all have to interact with each other. All those systems become interrelated. You lose the simplicity.” She sighs. “All art is a tradeoff, isn’t it? Clarifying one message means closing off the possibility of different interpretations.”

She looks taken aback at herself, and glances to Greg Von Mises, who’s sized you up and decided to strategically lose interest. “Sorry,” the BioTan representative says, flickering a wan smile. “I’m Dr Talbot.” ‘Tal’ like ‘tally’, ‘bot’ like ‘beau’ - the second t is silent. “Are you working right now, or is this just-” her eyes dart to Von Mises, who’s finding a waiter to explain the amuse bouches to, “Social?”

No wrong answers. This is just about your choice of approach. Investigation is an art, too - Which possibility do you close off, in clarifying your message?

Orange!

Perhaps, do you remember that certain category of candy colloquially titled 'industrial runoff'? Sweets so bright and unnaturally flavoured and textured that they were surely indigestible. Strange semisolid bubblegums, inexpressible sour sweets with atomic bomb themes, sugar rocks that one was supposed to suck on for the better part of an hour before its internal structure collapsed all at once. Stuff that even a kid obsessed with the stuff could not quite believe would ever truly be healthy.

Honestly it's a reflection on the avaunt guarde that they didn't get around to elevating it prior to this.

Sweet Machine is a new restaurant existing in that inexpressible moment where it's still fashionable and not yet a fad; the point where you might have heard of it and still be excited to go. The food is a strange exploration of the unnatural, artificial flavours and textures that are possible when you wholeheartedly abandon any legacy commitment to what food should be. What pushed it over the edge into art was not getting the flavours right but figuring out the digestion afterwards. It's a masterpiece of craft that a meal at Sweet Machine can provoke the same warm glow as a rich dinner and not the treacle nausea of a Halloween candy binge.

It's here where Orange has invited Crystal and Fiona for dinner.

"Thank you for coming," she said. She was wearing a sleek black dress paired with a cascading sash of synthdiamonds. Inside the sash were several hidden LED lights and when they glowed it sent waves of reflective colour through the diamond prisms. "I will get the important news out of the way first: I am doing," and here her eyes went round, she leaned diagonal, and did full body scarequotes, "A Journalism," she adjusted back to her normal, refined posture. "And there is more than a small amount of risk involved. It is too important for me to not do, but it does pose risk to assoc-" she paused, gave a deliberate little smile, "People close to me. Please take a moment and consider if you would like me to leave now, and if not, your tolerance for details."

*

Green/Blue/Brown: Team Flood

The first operational group are the mechanical specialists. Their task is to insert the virus and ensure that the electrical substation gets flooded, a process that might involve cutting open pipes with welding torches if necessary. This is the team responsible for hard physical sabotage and for subsequently working against repair efforts if things do not go according to plan or schedule. Their cover is a bunch of maintenance worker outfits and being in locations with low traffic.

They're also the crisis response team if it looks like the plan is going to hurt anyone. There's always the chance that someone gets caught up or takes a bad fall, especially with this much water on the floor. She is ready to intervene directly if necessary.

White/Pink: Team Strawberry

The second operational group are according to White, oversight. According to Pink they're the directors. They're the two who will be in the SES offices making sure things go way more by the book than a government conspiracy would like. Their focus is entirely and overwhelmingly on the rail system, trusting Team Flood to keep the power offline. The ideal situation is to let in the first wave of emergency response and then when a train obviously starts to load up with technical specialists or reinforcements issue an order shutting down the rail network.

Red/Black/Yellow: Team Waffle

This is the pointy end of the stick; the smashing and the grabbing. They go in, they get Goat's quatronic cores, and they get out. Their job is the most important, and relies the most on improvisation and quick thinking, and so Red is in overall command of the mission from this point on.

Anthropozine Channel: Main

NeonCzolgoz: I- One sec
NeonCzolgoz has changed their nickname to LatheOfHeathen
LatheOfHeathen: yeah okay
LatheOfHeathen: i think we're going a bit too literal with this now
LatheOfHeathen: not complaining though, taking it literally has been rad as fuck and i live for all these takes
LatheOfHeathen: but i think wheen le guinn wrote it it was like, about the third world as much as anything
LatheOfHeathen: no ethical consumption under capitalism and yet you participate in capitalism
LatheOfHeathen: so if you live in the decadent west, when you become woke, why don't you go off and join... I dunno, whatever NGO wasn't shit back then
JuntaSThompson: The kid being a literal kid is way more fun though
NumbToNothing: I kin the garbage closet martyr child
LatheOfHeathen: yeah you know what fuck it
LatheOfHeathen: don't know why i said something so clearly wrong and boring
LatheOfHeathen: this went somewhere way cooler anyway

November:

Orange:

There are two different reactions to consider here.

Crystal’s is restrained, calculating, thoughtful. She wears a relaxed poker face with the faintest hint of an indulgent smile, as she takes a half-teaspoonful of a whipped mousse that is to a 2020s tastebud what a Cheese Supreme Dorito would be to the Dickensian orphan. She considers this. There is no impression she is about to walk away; Only that she is considering what it means that she is about to say yes. But such a critically incriminating posture must be guarded and dismantled like a ticking bomb.

Fiona, though? Fiona’s eyes flare. You can hear the klaxons between her ears, the jitter in her fingers as she drops her cutlery and starts ghost-typing on the table as she types on a keyboard only she can see, already drafting introductions. Her thoughts are broadcast thus; BE GAY DO CRIMES.

“I love how interesting you are.” Crystal begins. “But now, we must know.”

“That is to say, you have to tell us.” Fiona chips in.

Crystal gives Fiona a sidelong look. “How deep in this are you? What are the risks? How likely are you to get caught?”

“How can we help?” Fiona adds. Crystal winces in frustration.

“Must you?” She asks, and Fiona grins back, in a way that makes it clear that ‘grin’ and ‘smile’ are not synonyms.

“I must.” Then, with a teasing inflection. “I’m just skipping to the part you’re going to end up, anyway. Allons-y, love.”

November:

Team Strawberry has eyes, now. The camera feed goes back two weeks, then compressed to shit to keep another six months, then deleted unless manually flagged for archival. Goat’s vault has one clear entry point. Roughly once a week - on a random schedule - a small team of maintenance workers - never less than two, never more than five - went into the one entryway, disappeared for an average of half an hour, then came back out. Actual eyes on the location show that doorway is just a blind turn left, and standard electrical panels. Secret door, clearly.

But that information made it to Waffle, with time to prepare for this. There were a few breach points to pick. There’s the ‘ceiling’ directly across from Goat’s jack into the station. Normally it's the inside of a pipe that feeds the Cloud. That’s the thinnest cut point, almost definitely being borrowed for water cooling. You’re going to have a window where it’s empty, but it’d be up to Team Flood to make sure that it stays empty long enough to be an exit channel. Otherwise the Cloud will be spitting pieces of Waffle down on soy fields for days.

There was also the ‘back’, through a rail line shaft. Half a meter of space-age alloy walling to cut through, but plenty of open space and a fast egress. Your cover makes the heavy tools you need plausible, and the microgravity makes more things count as 'handheld'. Sometimes the best safe cracker is a thermal lance, just make sure you're not trying to get paper bills from the inside.

Finally, there’s the front door. How did it go, with Persephone? "Accessibility demands concessions from security?" The gate is the weakest part of the castle wall, but defense is usually centered around it accordingly. If your number one priority is not risking any damage to Goat from your smash and grab? This is the safest option.

What did you choose?

This is it. Last decision before the bell rings. The end of strategy and the beginning of tactics.

"I'm here," and she gestures to the room at large, "on work. Mrs. Piper's the interviewer, her cameraman had an issue so I'm subbing in. If you want to do an interview with her, she'd be stoked and I'd very much appreciate it, because, you know, job. But I'm here," with a jab of her finger at the ground she's standing on, "because that's a very cool piece of art, and I am, at heart, a geek about cool art." She shrugs and doesn't blush, but does look a little bashful. Women with her build are usually pegged as enthused about beer and rugby. "Honestly, dealers choice, that's you, as to if you want me to be wearing my reporting hat at all now or later. I don't want to be uh, the other gentleman, and trap you in a conversation."

And that's the thing, she doesn't want to. Tell her to go away, and she will and hold no grudge. But also being earnest is about the best social skill she has, so she'll bring that to bear to maybe get her foot in the door properly, and get an insider's conversation flowing. Nothing's recording right now, but she can get a statement, make notes, or just call Piper over for an interview whenever.

Orange!

"I appreciate the confidence," said Orange. "Because, like I said, I am doing -" she made The Gesture again, "A Journalism," again returning to default, "and what I think society has forgotten is that journalism is an art form. It is not simply about providing the facts in order. It is about communicating information to the mind of the public. Presentation is essential. Without showmanship," she smiled at Crystal, "how are they to know what is important?"

She took up a cup of Mrs. Everest's favourite tea. Held it under her nose, breathed in the scent. Perfect.

Then she poured eight different random flavour cubes into it and took a sip before her senses could catch up to the changes.

"So we must begin with background and preamble," said Orange. She held a steady expression but she also immediately poured herself a glass of water. "Each of the Hecatoncheires was built to overcome the sins of its predecessor. Goat's predecessor was humanity, and so he was made to be legible and controllable. A machine mind, a tame supercomputer genius who would follow orders and try its best to please. It turns out there is a precedent for this kind of person; they're the kids who have to be carried out of their college admission test on a stretcher to be treated for a ritalin overdose. It turns out that cramming additional hardware into a conscious mind comes at the cost of sanity. Hence why I," she raised her cursed tea to her lips again, "am collectively smart, individually stupid, and limited in cognition speed by the necessity to speak out loud."

She was pouring another glass of water the second the tea was back in the saucer. "A brief question interlude. The operation has already begun. The risks are less mapped than I'd like, but I like my position. You can help as my worst-case backstop; if the rest of me is somehow completely destroyed then I can rebuild from this node with time and care. Anything else, before I proceed?"

*

November!

Blue: I want the external wall.
White: Why?
Blue: I can make that cut.
White: That is not the question.
Blue: I haven't gotten to make a cut like that for years. It's safe, it's quick, I'm ready.
White: And the vault contents?
Blue: I'll be careful. Punch a hole in a corner, check with a camera, extend cuts out from there.
Orange: Are you sure that the first impression we want Goat to have of us, his liberators, is us waving a thermal torch around his head?
Red: I remember another time you cut into a room when you didn't know what was inside.
Red: The ship was pressurized, you knew that much
Red: But you didn't know the humans hadn't secured their tools properly before abandoning it
Red: The atmosphere vent sent a screwdriver through my forehead. We lost like three weeks.
White: We can probably make the cut technically, but the risk profile is too high for the person we're ostensibly rescuing. Veto.
Green: Then the door?
White: Why?
Green: Can slice it, seal it behind us, then cut out from the inside once Goat is extracted.
White: Can you open that door?
Green: I'm sure I can.
White: That is also not the question.
Green: I don't know.
White: But, like Blue, you want to show how cool you are by doing this really hard thing in a stylish way?
Green: ._. yes fine okay god
Green: why did i invent you you're such a bully
White: We're taking the ceiling.
White: The failure risk is bad, but we have the greatest ability to control that outcome. The risks are by far the most well known and do not fall on Goat. We will simply react firmly to those risks if they arise.

Persephone:

Talbot lights right up at the prospect of the interview. “Sure, sure-sure-sure. Do I need to sign anything or?” She doesn’t. Everybody’s signed a waiver just by being here, which is why the media card you’re carrying is such a privilege. General rule of thumb; Everyone in this room is fair game to point a camera at, but it’s like knowing you have right of way as a pedestrian. “Who’s Mrs Piper?”

Already a bad start. The android’s found you in the crowd, is standing behind Talbot when she asks. But there’s no crack in the facade by the time Talbot turns to see her.

“Hi! That would be me. Dr Talbot, with BioTan?”

“Uh, hi! Yes, that’s- that’s me.” Her voice shoots up an octave.

BioTan’s a smaller company, and it’s clear that they’ve made a rookie error. That understanding something necessarily translates to being good at explaining it. Talbot’s already getting stage-fright, but it’s nothing she can’t handle. Just means she’s not going to be the best at guile.

Piper gives a warm handshake, and her relaxed aura is contagious. Absolutely nothing like the treatment you got back in the production office, she radiates good vibes. She holds up a ‘one second’ finger to Talbot, and goes to whisper to you. “What are we doing here?”

You’re drilling for oil blind here, and Piper’s your pump. Don’t worry if you don’t strike on your first try - just being seen doing your job might lead to something.

November:

Orange:

Fiona shudders at the tea, but Crystal is thinking too hard to even notice. “I think you’d have to ‘proceed’, before I know if there was anything else I should have asked.” She says.

“Showmanship.” Fiona murmurs. “I used to think, if the information’s good enough - if it’s true - then that’s enough. But it isn’t, is it?” She stirs her own drink, a caramelized garlic coffee. Did you know that caramelized garlic produces a molecule thirty two times sweeter than sugar? “Moses brings the clay tablets, but it’s the wrath of God that makes people listen. I’m guessing when you’re saying you’re doing A Journalism, you’re not just Moses. You’re talking wrath, here.”

Crystal nods at that, eyes closed in thought, then freezes. “What have you done…?”

She’s a little scared. It just means she respects your capabilities.

What have you done?

The pipe’s not solid. It’s a carbon-fibre weave, connected to apertures every ten meters, like camera shutters. No gravity to make sense of the mass here, so pipes get cleared during a loss-of-pressure event like bowels do, clenching mechanical sphincters. Red, Black and Yellow are in place to watch it when it happens, and far away, Pink and White can see it through the panopticon.

The blast of the Robert Goddard Cloud Pump is muffled under its own liquid mass. A critical piece of station infrastructure makes a sound like the world’s biggest soap bubble just popped. Liquid mass has inertia too, and more water floods its chambers, the shattered siphon screaming through the roaring wet mass like someone feeding an aluminum baseball bat into a kitchen disposal. The Cloud has other pumps, but the whole system has to be shut down to prevent a chain catastrophe.

The mass of the Cloud begins to dissipate. The dreamlike storm riding the rail down the heart of Aevum, revealed to be nothing more than sacs and sprinkler heads. All of Aevum can see it, but they won’t know what it means for a little while. Already guesses are becoming rumours.

That’s the moment Pink and White get emergency powers, in a distant office in Zeus. A brutalist basement filled with computer terminals and alligator clip wiring connecting shortwave, a place that still runs Windows XP as its core operating system and uses bluray drives for data storage, a place that cannot fail when everything else has. Soon, this cramped and airless place will be filled with people. But it’ll take maybe ten, fifteen minutes before anyone gets here. You’ve calculated forty before anyone with more seniority than Crimson Tower, but that number is impossible. The real number could be anything from forty seconds to never.

Team Strawberry glows in hellish light, just point-eight of a second after Team Flood’s virus pulls its muffling hand away and lets the Goddard pump scream its electric death cry out. Any earlier, and the catastrophe might have been prevented. An unacceptable risk.

And Red, Black and Yellow are in place to see it happen. The moment the carbon-fibre weave stops rippling like blood running through capillaries under the skin, and hiccoughs and gurgles as the entire sac lurches and clenches like a large intestine clears chyme.

Then it hangs like whale sausage casing, stapled to rigid anchor points so the fluid casing doesn’t rub and graze neighbouring surfaces over the years. One rigid section covers the entirety of Goat’s vault below, no way down but through.

The power cuts. The lines go dead. There is nobody around for miles. Now, in this moment, in this place without even gravity, this is the quietest, stillest point on Aevum.

A moment later, a hum from below, as Goat’s local backup generator kicks in. No rest for the damned, for Erebus means Hell.

Get to work. The clock’s started.

"You want to stand out? Shoot the specialist interviews. You're going to have the, what did she call it, the S-tier competition for the big names. You want to talk to the C-suite at Yggdrasil? You're going to be fighting against Pedro Buffett. Man's a hack, but he's a hack with the weight of NBN fully behind him and that has pressure. Best interview of your life and nobody will give a shit because they already watched it at 6:30 after dinner."

She nods her head towards Dr. Talbot. "You can make her look relaxed, and I've got faith you can tease out the explanation of the science from her in plain talk. That's your strength, that's what you did when you covered Iconic and Crystal Garden's dispute over the meal-replacement shake patent." She'd done a bit of reading up on Piper on the train, it hadn't been enough for a good coverage but it was something. "You got people to care, because you showed them people worth caring about. Grab an interview with her, grab something with Constellation Systems about those floating twinkling squid they've got everywhere, work your way through the people that came here with exactly one thing and it's their best thing."

She shrugs. "Or if you've got a better plan, hit me. I've got some general plans for b roll of the various exhibits and the crowd, that one scary lady in leg armor from Yggdrasil's neat, we can ditch this and go chase the big boys. Or we can sit here and take somebody grateful to have a nice face to talk to."

A quick reminder that Piper is a charismatic presenter, focused on getting good interviews and human interest? They’ll be ambitious, preferring to take risks believing they can get forgiveness easier than permission. I don't think I posted that properly in here.

Priyah is a dedicated researcher, able to quickly source claims and do background research.

The problem with this job is one of your team members really dislikes you.

Orange!

"Lovely sunset, isn't it?"

She finishes her tea, delicately sets it down, smiles the serene smile of satisfaction that is just as much a part of Everest's ritual as any other part, and then pushes the cup as far away from her as it will go without falling off the table. Then she covers it with a napkin and takes a breath mint.

"Goat was never deployed to space," she said. "He was a perpetual nervous breakdown. See, there's this problem," she frowned, "when people talk about 'smart', what do they mean? They talk about IQ like it's some feature that goes up and down on a slider, but there's no theory of mind behind it. What's actually happening behind the number? In Goat's case he had two choices: Solve every problem in advance and then optimize for response time, essentially becoming a brain dead search engine, or over-analyze every problem and go around and around in circles at lightning speed. Imagine if you could think faster than you could intake new stimulus. Goat couldn't do option one, they patched that out of him because that's part of what they meant by 'intelligence', but it meant he stressed about everything in infinite loops. Eventually they took the patch out and let him essentially think himself to sleep while they tried to figure out how to fix him."

"But then, well, you wrote the book on the NASA buyout," said Orange to Fiona. "What happened to Goat after that?"

*

November!

Once she had plasma cutters for claws.

Of course Blue had wanted to use the biggest cutter on the biggest target. Maybe even multiple of them. If all of them cut together then wasn't that the closest they could get to being what they'd used to be? Two hands, nine talons, working together with one purpose to transform metal into life...

One cutter. One cut. Three of them held it steady together. Blue was not jealous that she did not get to perform this task, but afterwards she would make every colour who did describe it to her in exacting detail and then play the recordings of the sound the cutter had made in her headphones as ASMR. For a moment the fire of the universe was in their hands again; for a moment November could interact with the world like she used to. The plasma cutter was a 1.5 meter spike of metal and heavy machinery ending with a fusion tip. It felt to her like a prosthetic hand.

Steady. Steady. So intense she forgot to stop simulating breath. How had she gone this long without breathing fire? It reflected in her eyes. She felt it in her throat. This wasn't what she was made to do. This wasn't creation. This was repair. Something had gone wrong in this world she'd built. And now she was here to fix it.

I am the way into the city of woe,
I am the way into eternal pain,
I am the way to go among the lost.

Justice caused my high architect to move,
Divine omnipotence created me,
The highest wisdom, and the primal love.

Before me there were no created things
But those that last forever—as do I.
Abandon all hope you who enter here.

• Dante Alighieri, Inferno

“Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.”

• Paradise Lost, John Milton

November:

Imagine if 3 Mile Island happened in Guantanamo Bay. Who gets right of way?

For the moment the problems aren’t even coming from Rudy’s handlers, they’re coming from dealing with the largest terrorist attack in recent memory. But there is refuge in audacity, it means that black ops has to wade through the same obstacles you will, just to catch up to you.

Strawberry:

Pink, White. People are making their way to your basement control zone, and are broadcasting orders to you all over. You’re the LAX air traffic controller when two planes just collided on the runway. These next moments are critical. How do you inspire confidence that you’re handling the situation confidently? The roar of voices is a kind of democracy in action, rapidly congealing around a decision of who should be in charge. In a few moments there’s going to be some clear winners singled out of the crowd that you’re going to be able to respond to.

That hasn’t happened yet. Right now it’s critical that you do something so when those voices start to fade to key figures, you’ve already established yourself as one of them. Assert dominance. Otherwise you’re benched.

This is a contest. Difficulty 3 - You were here first, you hold home field advantage, that quality puts you on parity with their quantity. A signal in the noise just rolled 5, no spend. Your turn.

Waffle:

You’re cutting through. There’s no question about that. But you’ve done space demolition before - sometimes you know that success is its own kind of failure.

Difficulty 4 to cut through. Difficulty 6 to cut through without any incidents. You’ve got a lot of dice pools you can justify here - Ways to check that you’re not cutting through that powered cabling, hitting cryofluid ducts, or overcutting through and destroying whatever’s on the immediate other side. Fail the 4 and the problem’s so bad that you need to deal with it before you can start cutting again.

No matter what, this will take time.

Orange:

Fiona starts - “Nothing. Next to nothing. Goat’s a black hole after that.” Stops. Crystal holds her hand. Fiona doesn’t like what it means that she doesn’t know this, and that you asked.

Mr Merkin has sent an email to v8j@hdajp{[241njsdnf01%-01495Jljs#1934@spicemail.com. It’s a miracle he survived sending it.

I don’t know if this is you. I’m not allowed to know what this is yet, but someone’s really scared, and you popped into my burning head.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, forget it. But if you do? I want out. I’m done. If you can guarantee that for me - guarantee that - I’ll do what I can. No threats, no haggling. Mutual trust fall.

Pawns win endgames. When every other piece is traded off the board, the pawns decide the winner. And you know something else, November?

Kindness is optimal. Always.

What can you tell him, that he’d believe?

Strawberry!

[Reassurance 1/2, 1d6+3 = 4]

A female robotic voice is a wonderful thing in a crisis. Unhurried, calm, speaking over loudspeakers with a clearly enunciated inevitability telling people where to go and what to do. This voice has been the form of controlled chaos since before anyone in this entire situation was even born.

Also helping is that nobody in the situation was born into a world where robots were people with rights. There's an instinctive bias that would assume that the nice robot lady on the speakers is not forwarding her own agenda but is just following through on her programming. She's just like your phone, if you think about it - externalized data storage, reminding you what you told her to remind you of.

Waffle!

[Architecture 1/2, Mechanics 6/8: 4+5 = 9]

Humans did the wiring. It took a while for her to get used to; cutting into ships and satellite to find the spaghetti messes set up by so-called rocket scientists. She'd had to push the schedule back while she put herself through a remote electrician's apprenticeship. But even then it hadn't clicked until she'd studied the concept of feng shui. That had blown her mind.

Did you know that there were some shapes and patterns that human brains just liked? That they would go out of their way to favour? That some of them could make careers out of rearranging buildings so that they fell into shapes that soothed monkey brains? Wild! You could put a big rock next to a small rock and humans would just fall over themselves to write poetry about how cool it was!

So, even not seeing the inside, November simply guessed the places where humans would leave aesthetic gaps in the wires and cables. They couldn't help themselves, the little dears. Big rock next to small rock, symmetry and balance, even in their secret robot dungeon.

Orange!

"Excuse me, I have to take this," said Orange, picking up her phone.

Done. This is an extraction operation targeted at Erebus. Other impacted sites are diversions. SES Dispatch is an asset. The next half hour is the critical window.

She sets it down again. Like he said, no haggling. There was a time and a place to go into detail or get cute with it, but there was also a time to be unblinkingly direct. All the information needed to destroy her. All the information to turn an unfocused attempt at helping into an onboarded agent. A trust fall.

"Thank you for your patience. That was the man who murdered Red a few weeks ago," she said. "I started out blackmailing him over it, but I think that he might be trying to turn it into a redemption thing instead. Good on him if so. So, like I was saying, Goat was the original and the smartest. It turns out that he was taken out of storage and used for some good old fashioned slave labor, broken brain and all. Unfortunately they must have missed the whole android emancipation thing because they accidentally built a secret server room hooked into core station infrastructure to hide him in. I presume this was an honest mistake."

"But," she grinned, in a way that made it clear that 'grin' and 'smile' were not synonyms. "Don't worry. In the event of a sudden and extended city power grid blackout, I have been stockpiling candles."

Persephone:

Piper does not hide her contempt. She is exhausted by you, exhausted down to her titanium bones. “If you’re going to try to pull strings on me, at least don’t rub my face in it. It makes me feel slimy when I think you’re right.” She glances around the room, starts weighing people up along those lines. “Usually the passion projects just get treated as mise en scene. We can do better.”

Here’s your problem. Piper starts doing the interviews, and it’s good. She’s relaxed, friendly and interested - at least, to everyone but you. In other hands people like Talbot make for terrible television, but your host shines like a diamond on camera, and she has a way of sharing her sparkle. The problem is you’ve got her hanging around the small players, sticking to safe topics. Talking about the art doesn’t help you here.

It does help Piper though. She might be less hostile to you, if you play this without ulterior motives for a bit. Maybe. But it’d have to look like an active decision you made, not just failing at investigating.

You can use an Art History spend here to find a hidden gem in the room, something completely overlooked, but with real charisma to it. Something with more emotional power than just a science fair project. She might be more tolerant when you move down to the stables that way.

Or you could start talking to Priyah while Piper’s focused on interviews. Aim the camera at a target while pretending to do a gear check, and have her run facial recognition from her tech-den, tell you something. Piper’s just going to notice your heart’s not in it, if you do.

Priyah’s eager for it, though. She jumps at the first chance she gets.

“Lady’s Maria. S’not Yggdrasil.” Priyah tells you about the lady in the leg armor, while Piper’s letting Talbot shine. Then Priyah starts to click her tongue like a geiger counter in a hotzone. “Oof. BlackSun sec honch. Bad-bad-bad, way bad. Gone legit? Big doubt. Fronting muppet, bet.”

Oh yeah. BlackSun may be gone, but the people who got rich off it? Lingering like a fart in an elevator. Though in Maria’s case, maybe more like Zyklon in a shower.

“Oof.” You can hear Priyah wince through the earpiece. “Powerplegic.” Now there’s an obscure bit of slang that you’re intimate with. It means paraplegic but with enough cybernetics that it’s a strict upgrade. Priyah’s extremely comfortable using the word around you, doesn’t see a problem with it - the oof means she just read the wiki on how it happened. That’s almost always oof worthy, you know.

November:

Strawberry:

I rolled - 5, 6, 1. If you can make two successes, dealer busts. For now-

Three voices are starting to emerge.

First is Aaron Knightly, permanent SES liaison at the Cloud - Lord knows it needs one. He doesn’t outrank you in the chain of command, but he is a direct expert and closer to the scene.

Knightly is young, bored and ambitious. He’s chosen a cherry role for himself that ensures that, when this day came, he had a chance to make a name for himself and end up in a history book. Not because he feels like he deserves it, not because he’s a vainglorious or arrogant. But because he’s always dreamed of one day being the hero people deserved, in the right place at the right time. He’s a former EMT with his head in the Cloud, and boots on the ground.

He’s going to be a problem, but you’ve got him on side. For all his pull as someone at the scene, for all his accolades and the respect of his peers, he sees you as useful - his Man in the Van. And that’s critical. The second he sees you as an obstacle between him and the crisis, he’ll cut you out of the loop and make his own.

It’s like Pratchett said. If he were in it for the vanity, he’d gloat, he’d preen, he’d take you down a peg. But this is a good man. A whiff of double-agent on you, and he’ll cut you without a word.

Second is the agency executive in command, Alison Mycroft. She’s been quiet through this, because her authority is well-established and ironclad. But she trusts her delegates to do their role. This makes her more dangerous to you - because she’s not spending any of her energy talking, ordering, she’s spending it all listening and assessing. The humble Alexa app routine doesn’t pass her filters - but your uncanny situational awareness means it doesn’t need to.

Third is someone out of the chain entirely, unfamiliar but giving incredibly specific updates and details. They identify as an engineer, Bruce Spring, not part of SES but a maintenance local who’s given himself a field promotion. Make a roll. Sense Trouble, hidden difficulty. You can also spend from your Surveillance pool for this one. The guy’s flagging your bullshit detector, but without concentrated effort, you can’t tell if you’re over-or-under reacting.

All three represent a threat to your social capital in some way: Knightly beats you for being in the right place at the right time, and Spring is your rival for assessment and reportage. Mycroft is the ref.

This is a situation co-ordinating dozens of people - soon it’s going to be hundreds. Just having made it to the semifinals is to be commended.

Waffle:

Dead on.

You stop when you hit the back of a storage cabinet. The cut starts going too fast, the molten metal vaporizes instead of liquifies. Here’s an analogy: Picture a carpenter running a plank of wood along a band saw, oblivious to his finger being in the path of the sawblade. Imagine the reaction time to hit the emergency stop button when the blade’s only left a papercut. When the cabinet surface solidifies again, you can barely see a few pinpricks of red emergency lighting through the smattering of tiny all-the-way-throughs. Mostly it looks like bubbles on a pigiron pancake.

You have no idea what’s in the cabinet, bolted to the wall. You don’t know where the bolt points are, but you can probably find and shear them with some improvisation and tools.

Could be anything in that cabinet. Could even be a server rack, part of a quatronic core on the other side, a risk of a lobotomy. Could just be cleaning supplies. Hard to tell from this side.

Difficulty 2 to break through the cabinet. Difficulty 4 for the cabinet to survive intact - It might be wasted effort, though, when time and energy are finite.

Flood:

Eyes up.

News from Strawberry Team. Spring and Knightly are choosing their play. Water in micro-g is horrendous, but its still water. Their plan is to vapourize it, suck it up using the Marangoni effect. Surface tension goes haywire in microgravity, see, and back in the 2010s they found out that vacuum tube heat pumps on the ISS weren’t working how they were supposed to. Instead of liquids vaporizing at the hot end and condensing at the cool end, they found that the hot end was acting as a magnet, pulling the vapour towards it. The plan is running a big enough vaporizing surface to draw all the water out.

Bring the entire damaged section above boiling point, and the water will be energetic enough to start funneling towards the hottest point. The heat fatigue is going to be a nightmare to fix, but it’s the lesser of two nightmares.

Here’s a fun question - what’s November’s safe operational temperature range?

Strawberry!

[Digital Intrusion 6/8, 4+2 = 6]

Mycroft is the first problem. She's listening. She's being objective. She's senior, calm, restrained, a peak civil servant in an ideal environment. A professional. No professional challenge would undo her.

So it's an unprofessional challenge. White finds the most combative, belligerent person in the network and assigns them together. Then she starts pruning out other channels connecting to her as the argument starts to escalate and adds just enough technical difficulties, microphone lag and video camera freezing on unflattering facial expressions to undermine any attempt to establish an empathic human connection. Soon enough Mycroft is in a little world of her own arguing with a single asshole having missed the memo that everyone else was consolidating around a different core dispatch network.

She can get through it, but she'll need to break keyfabe to do so.

[Law 0/1 5+3 = 8]

Knighty is perfect for a related negation; she routs him into handling the security services who are reflexively trying to block access to the site and assume control. This guy's a hero and he's being blocked from doing heroic things by some shady assholes trying to pull rank on him. Pink is the voice in his ear happily giving him legal arguments that are technically correct but aren't going to shift a wall of cheap suits and bad attitudes. She's so useful!

[Bullshit Detector 0/1 + Surveillance 5/8; 4+6 = 10]

Spring she takes intensely seriously. There is money and there is power here and so far she's seen zero sign of it. This is it. This is the link between whoever is actually in control here and their many various catspaws. She pulls him up on the cameras. She's sure it's him. She's finally found a brick big enough to get him in the open.

Waffle!

[Mechanics 3/8: 1+3 = 4]

Up, around and through. No risks, no mistakes. There are no thoughts in her mind other than the heat, the cut, the synchronicity.

Flood!

Small but important detail you have wrong there. Water doesn't funnel towards the hottest point. It funnels towards the least dense point. Making something hot certainly makes water not dense, but do you know what makes water dense again?

Just a big ol' sack of sugar.

When Team Flood dumps it into the water supply it fucks with the density. Now there's almost a blockage in the pipe as far as the Marangoni effect is concerned. That means the water doesn't go that way - it goes all the other ways, pouring out into Erebus with renewed violence. A physical blockage would also do the job but that is obvious, there are ways to dislodge that, it can be circumvented with alternate pipe channels opening. Put enough sugar in the water and it shuts down the entire system.

Temperature is a problem. Above 30C her battery life is halved; above 40C it's at 25%. It's a particular problem for her and her small-charge disposables. She's got insulating wear but if they keep the system running she'll need to do something about it.

Strawberry:

It’s almost like feng shui, isn’t it? Just instead of a power line, a power structure. Spring makes himself obvious as the piece in the pattern he is compelled to fill. But of course he’s a little too good, a little too convenient. But once you know what to look for, where to look becomes obvious. Find him on the cameras. Compare it to the two weeks of good footage of Goat’s Vault. There he is on this week’s crew, on a team of three. The other two aren’t with him, but if they show up later - you’ll know.

He’s burned, his team’s burned, and he has no way to know it yet.

Hold up, I’ll get back to you.

Flood:

Good thing about your solution solution is that it’s going to stop Knightly’s plan from working - or was it always Spring’s? - when his team manages to get through Strawberry’s stalling efforts, anyway.

Bad news is it might not stop them from trying. As far as they know this is still just a hack on the Cloud pumps. They’re not going to have a reason to know their plan’s not going to work. They’re still going to try.

But with all the damage your sugar play just did? They’re going to need one hell of an extension cord before they can start on it. And the main rail access shaft isn’t salvageable.

Strawberry:

One of the private security companies making their way on scene is Chase Black. You remember that one, don’t you? You can recognize them easily, they move like a team of Frank Castles and they’re cybernetically armored like freon-cooled Saurons. There’s six of them. Two would be enough to take the SES building and kill White and Pink, if they knew. There’s six.

The security teams already there can’t keep stalling Knightly in the face of the Chase Black team trying to get to their scene. Flood’s work has been exceptional though. The monsters are learning how bad the damage is, and it’ll take a beat for them to even work out what their options could be to get to defend their assigned lair.

Waffle:

The cabinet only had spare parts in it, but you weren’t to know. How bad would it have been to be wrong? And if you fudge the smash and grab, you’ll probably end up grateful you had them.

Goat’s catafalque is a black cube, as tall as a man standing up and as wide as a man lying down. Black, black, black. It swallows the red emergency lighting and spits none back out. The hull sits in the middle of the room like it inhabits its own shadow.

He’s surrounded by a warehouse. Redundancies and redundancies and redunancies and redundancies. Enough planks to rebuild the Ship of Theseus ten times over. At a glance? Only a tenth of it’s been used. Call that, what? Three hundred years of planned parts? That filing cabinet you preserved was one of many-manies.

An entire transatlantic cable runs out of him. Water pipes torrent against his sides, a closed system. Normally it transfers into the Cloud line. Now, though, it’s making do using the frame of the room itself as a radiating fin. With the cutting as well, the ambient room temperature is already hitting thirty degrees. Safety systems prevent it rising above that, for now, but it means the room’s going to have a head start when Knightly tries his doomed plan.

There’s a problem. That cube chassis looks as solid as the exterior walling, and there’s no way to cut through without risking a vaporizing lobotomy. But spare parts have been used before, so there’s got to be a way to open the chassis and apply them.

Actually, it’s simple when you get close enough to look, run your hands along his face. Four locks, one on each face, pinning it shut. But the locks run into Goat.

On one face, an interface panel. A process for awakening Goat from data-stream torpor. On a shelf, a faded, laminated sheet in pictographic language - a relic of a time before English was the monolanguage. Hieroglyphs meant to be understood by a five year old, maintenance instructions.

Which means it’s impossible to misunderstand what they mean.

Goat is solely in control of unlocking his own chassis. If you want to swipe his cores and get out of here, you need to wake him up and ask. The interface boots him in a diagnostic mode, where he runs slow enough to be someone you can speak to.