[b]Green![/b]

Consider the use case of the house. The nature of the man. The threats he guards against. There are the walls, the guards, the external security - these are to keep the family safe. But within the walls? The threat profile is the family itself.

This is a man who stared at the puppet glove with admiration. This is a man who works from home. This is a man who values the aesthetic of hard work. This is a man who sees himself as a patriarch. He will not do his dirt in a hidden basement or a fortified saferoom. He will do it in his study. His study will be designed to be secured not against infiltrators but against his own children.

A set of stairs, creaky. A converted attic loft at the crown of the house. A big set of grand windows looking down over the garden so he can look up from his desk and down at his children playing with the goats and smile. The lord of the family, the beloved but stern absolute monarch of this little world. To be summoned up to his study, either for a work meeting or to reprimand a child, is a trek up those creaky stairs to stand before a mahogany desk, your dirty presence defiling his perfect workshop of the mind. 

The idea comes into Green's mind fully formed, crystal electricity, a vision from the stars. This is how things must be and if things aren't as she pictures them it is reality who is wrong - a man who lacks the vision to make his own vision a reality. Someone who compromised with his own self image. It's always possible that this is true but she hates the idea more than she currently hates the man, so she decides to proceed based on the idea that her vision is correct.

The office windows will be secured, as every window will be from stealth and snipers and jetpack-delivered assassins. She will proceed up those tyrant stairs directly, feet not touching the aged wood bound to creak and summon a housekeeper to reprimand naughty children.

[Intimidation 0/1 (understanding the authoritarian brain) infiltration 6/8, 4+5 [b]9[/b]]

[b]Red![/b]

Reaction to being directly threatened is a kind of dreamlike serenity, a hyperaware full-body tension-relaxation, pure fight or flight coming down towards fight. The focus of her plan is to crank the volume on her voicebox up beyond the maximum, unleash a deafening screech that while it won't penetrate the soundproof walls, will shock and disorient Sophie long enough to...

But then instead oh no 

oh no

how will she use her audio weapon system to defend herself when she's gagged oh [i]no[/i]

*

So it turns out that more than a few people have fucked with Red's brain. Here is a selection:

The first thing that gets extracted is a babbling wave of apologies derived from an artificial guilt snarl. It's an intricate little thing, clever and adaptive, but not designed to be hidden at all. In function, it is designed to make Red feel extremely anxious and self conscious about moving Green's stuff, borrowing Green's stuff, overwriting Green's save files, not prioritizing catching Green's stuff if she's tripped over her own feet in the workshop... 

It's an a grumpy older sister 'stay out of my room' uploaded as a brain virus. 

The second unusual detail is when Red, under torture, starts confessing her love for Sophie - her love for Crystal, her love for Fiona, her love for 3V, her love for the receptionist in the adjacent building, her love for moonlight in abstract. This particular brain anomaly can be traced back to an uncompressed folder titled 'GIRLS' containing around 19,000 jpgs of women - photographs, drawings, paintings - artlessly copied and pasted directly into her equivalent of the hypothalamus. No prizes for guessing which colour was responsible for this.

But then there's the serious stuff.

Dig deep enough and there is a sequence labelled 'Ruthlessness'. On its surface it looks like it's meant to bypass Red's intrinsic morality, hard cut certain ideas right past the moral filter. It's frightening at first, code that makes the worst assumptions about her joke about there being too many humans seem genuinely plausible...

Except it doesn't fucking work. 

The code is perfect but it routs directly through a deliberately burned out circuit and goes nowhere. If anyone who wasn't an obsessive at mind control saw this they'd think it was a master switch designed to bypass Red's conscious control and turn her into a murderous puppet. But hidden in the hardware is a trap for anyone who would try and use it. Here, in the dark, the true shape of Black's paranoia can at last be seen - she does not believe morality is a weakness she needs to be able to circumvent. She is afraid of people who do think that trying to control her.

This false contingency, though, does have a shadow in Red's waking mind. She can perceive the idea that she might in fact do anything, that she has the capacity to be a monster. The thought does torment her, even if she doesn't truly have that in her. She can imagine the ways that channel might be activated and cannot perceive the dead spot where it would be cut out. And so, Sophie was right - her subconscious was trying to warn her of something.

There is also an incomprehensible circuit code fragment hovering over each of her data and wifi port drivers, something like an ascii flower - a program in some utterly unique coding language - but it's inert and inactive and untranslatable, so it's not likely the kind of thing Sophie would pick up.

That's just the stuff from Red's sister colours. There is also, of course, the underlying weight of the Shutdown Code, the influence of Everest, and any additional bugs, viruses or trackers she's picked up along the way. 

[b]Spookykins and White![/b]

Some people consider a massage to be an intimate act, a gentle communion between two bodies. Some people consider it to be an sexual act, a full body awakening of instinct and energy.

These people are shit masseuses. White knows the truth - that the best masseuses are the old korean battleaxe ladies who look at their subjects and see only a pile of broken meat. It is under them she trained while in Everest's employ, and it is with this spirit that she takes to Crystal's shoulders and back. There are no gentle requests to correct her posture or not spend as long sitting in front of a computer screen, no more than an auto mechanic would reprimand a worn tire. Uncontaminated by compassion, impossible to romanticize, and the physical equivalent to being completely deboned while a set of replacement joints are installed. It's [i]excellent[/i].

"Now that you are physically incapacitated," said Black, "understand that what I'm telling you now I am telling you as a journalist. This is news, it is news that has taken the efforts of more than just myself to collect. Telling you risks the safety of a source and an active operation. However, you are on the brink of becoming the news, which we have decided is sufficient for a lapse in our professional ethics.

"Specifically, one day before your planned event the supreme court is due to rule that transhumans of all kinds will no longer be a legally protected group. Implications for healthcare, employment, etc as you'd expect. Yes, there is a carveout for work related augments. Yes, it is as bad as it sounds."

And here she stopped. There was more she could say to try and sculpt the outcome, soften the blow, promise vengeance. She did not. This was her respect, to let this play out without sculpting the outcome.