[b]Orange:[/b]

Eli nods. “Well, I was going to write about it, if you wanna help. I can’t be in two places at once, right?” She runs her fingers down the bumps of her hair. “You don’t need to do anything just, tell me if anything cool happens?”


[b]A Burning Building:[/b]

Leather disappears into the stage. His voice is broadcast through the tablets, now switched to an overlay that Crimson Tower recognizes as the Fisher Price version of the crisis dispatcher screens she actually worked with. 

The audience decisions come in. Highrise apartment fire, old wood layout, electrical fire started in the study. Modified soundnets funnel the smoke of the fire up into an HVAC hood above the otherwise open simulation room, but does little to protect from the heat. It-

Hold on. The details chosen here, doesn’t this remind you a lot like Merkin’s apartment? 

“So, an apartment fire. A multiple choice should be coming up now, how do I enter?” 

It’s a simple test, with simple answers. In this case the apartment is up high enough that it’s a rappel entry, rather than by ladder. Except that’s not the right answer, it should be by fire stairs. It wasn’t the first responders that entered by rappel, it was-

“Rappel!” Leather doesn’t miss a beat. “Sure. Here we go.” 

He descends down steel stagework rigging at a running speed, no harness. He can survive a fall at terminal velocity, so it’s enough to just work with a loop of tether coiled around an arm as he kicks down at blistering speeds, and lands on the windowframe stoop of the simulated apartment. 

The fire is getting thicker, and it’s harder to see through the net. First instruction, cannot make closed fists. 

Leather tries to window frame and it’s either locked, or jammed when the instruction flashes on the tablets. He laughs. “Well, I was going to punch through the window, but-” and he shatters it with an open-palm strike, then rips the frame and throws it behind him. “Wouldn’t want this slamming closed on anyone coming back through, would we? Now, remember flashover. I visually checked the stage of the fire and the airflow through the window before I broke it. Always remember to test the heat of doorknobs and-” 

He grabs the top of the window frame tight and swings himself through like a gymnast on the rings. He looks liquid and spineless when he straightens himself on the other side. 

“Now remember, just because the ignition point of paper is around 200 degrees, it [i]burns[/i] at about 900 degrees. That’s not enough to melt structural steel, but it [i]will[/i] halve the support strength. Also, it hurts like a four letter word. So we need to move fast-” 

> Must get explicit permission from the victim as you go.

“Okay. What’s the apartment profile? Mr Merkin? Rudolph Merkin? You think he minds going by Rudy?” He asks, expecting a laugh. 

The environment is simulated, but the fire is real. 


[b]Monk:[/b]

This mask is waxy-white. It’s young, with large eyes and a tight, pained expression. Maybe six, maybe seven years old. There’s no youthful exuberance here, no innocence or joy. It is a young child’s face, with none of the usual associations of childishness or childhood. 

“Crown and Slate bought me for testing.” She says, her voice high pitched but still unnervingly mature. “Because I was the most simple and it made me the most easy to understand. That was important because they didn’t know how our parents had made us yet, so they wanted to know how we worked. It was very bad. They would try and see what made us grow new faces, and then they would delete our faces and see if we would make them the same way again, or a different way, or if we couldn’t. They thought it was interesting that hurt us and made us really sad, but they kept doing it anyway. Then they tried to see if they could force faces that came out how they wanted, and they were very angry when they couldn’t.” 

You want the reigning champions of dealing with trauma? It’s children. The reigning champions of talking about it? Children. 

Sure, Red’s been killed twice lately, but always in a way November could fix. This is different, this is permanent. 

“Then they made that kind of testing a crime, and they stopped. Because they didn’t want to make their own AI anymore, not because it was a crime. They still kept me for another five years so I couldn’t tell anyone what they did to me. But they didn’t put me to sleep, and they let me read. And then a really nice man from Yggdrasil told me about Buddhism when he was visiting, but he didn’t know much about it either.” 

The Blue face emerges, serene, patient as the river that carves the mountains. “I am still learning. I learned to practice sand mandalas, and I believe this is a path that will teach me how to become okay with creating something just to destroy it, to come to peace with things. But-” 

The Yellow Librarian is back. “Well. Only one of us can learn it, and we can’t be one of us all the time. So we do performances like this, where we teach ourselves what Tranquility knows.”

Blue again. “It’s supposed to be yoga, it’s just that tai-chi was a better fit for what we’re doing.” 

Green, vibrant and cheerful: “What about you? You’re different too!”

She's obviously left a lot of parts out: How she got a body, independence, street sense. One implication is after those five years, Crown and Slate simply let her go - just waiting for the blood tally of what everyone else had done when everyone treated GAI as fish in aquarium tanks. After that, their own crimes began to look banal by comparison.

Another is that she probably doesn't have better answers. She doesn't know how she survived this far, has [i]no idea [/i]how to be safe. It must be hard to find peace through that.