[b]Brown![/b]

"No, I don't drink," said Brown. Again the pressure of resistance, the weight of her personality coming down. She felt the weight of it with appreciation. She didn't want to get into her collective's weird obsession with tea, its symbolism for Everest, so on and on. She couldn't imagine anything less interesting than her beverage tastes, not when she was watching those [i]teeth[/i]. "If you want something I could watch you?"

[b]Orange![/b]

She shook his hand. Smiled. "That's as close to right as I've ever heard," she said. "I sincerely appreciate you taking the time to get that far. I particularly like how that casts my relationship with my family as inter-forums drama. Different cultures and rules produce different people."

Obviously the metaphor broke down if stretched too far or examined too closely. But turn off the usernames, avatars and signatures and just observe the flow of text and you could indeed read the mood and character of a forum. She liked it, she thought. The more she considered it the more she liked it. She wanted to hear what the rest of her thought.

"Thank you so much for taking the time."

[b]Green![/b]

The simulation crashes. 

Green is not working with particularly impressive hardware, and more than that, she's actually genuinely not as good a hacker as Fiona. She can't think of anything in the seconds she has before the physics engine overloads. And so the framerate stutters to almost nothing and the galaxy freezes in place.

But then, in the wreckage of too late, inspiration comes.

Green rips out the processing power out of entire segments of the galaxy - planets, stars, even swathes of skybox reduced to neon pink error textures. It gives her the energy to group overwrite the textures of the sand grains and alter the galactic scale and -

The next frame clicks into place and the galaxy is full of starships.

The shapes repeat, if you looked long enough, but there's one for every grain of sand. And as another frame ticks by it's like stepping forwards to the next photograph as millions of laser cannons light up and billions of missiles start to launch. Another tick. All these ships on auto-attack AI, all these ships in a vast battle of red against blue, the greatest fleets ever imagined and the greatest war the galaxy had ever seen. One photograph at a time, slow enough to see the scorching lines of the lasers as they scream across the void. It's the insane jank that calls to mind the enormous fleet actions of ancient EVE, game on the brink of crashing, more screenshots than progress. But there's so much in each of those screenshots that speed becomes irrelevant. She turned a framerate crash into a slow-mo feature.

But look deeper, though - beyond the grandeur of it all to who is doing it. This is the reaction speeds of Red, the artistry of Pink, the apocalyptic vision of Yellow, the attention to astrophysics of Blue... from what Fiona knows about November, none of them should be able to do all of this at once, on these kind of timeframes.