Dudekov:

“You’re insane,” he says, incredulously, trying to push his back further into the wall from Black even though he’s physically strong enough to overpower two of her. “You’re Skynet in a tinfoil hat! The regency broke its ‘throne’ when we abdicated it twenty years ago, now it’s all bloody democracy! That’s been the whole point of hiding Goat. He was too important to let people screw it up. God knows if the regency was what you think it is, we’d have done something about it. Also” and here he raises his voice to a roar, “Whose fucking fault is it that Hermes has been having water shortages? Maybe the one who blew up the fucking rain pump!” He is so angry. He is so angry. He is so angry.

“Fucking incredible. Keep shooting lasers at helicopters, hope you’re not hitting anyone on the far side of the station with the overpenetration!”

Chase Black:

This is your chance, they’re hesitating because they want to escalate but they don’t want to hurt Dudekov. This is the one salvo you’re going to get off freely before they play hardball with you - and actually landing the hit will really piss them off.

Difficulty 4: Center mass
Difficulty 6: Weapons system (single wing)
Difficulty 7: Rotor

This is a Shooting challenge and you’re out of points, though. You’re going to have to get really creative about how you justify using other skill pools to this.

Black!

"The Mandate of Heaven is lost when the Emperor can no longer control the rivers," said Black, nodding like she agreed with everything he said. "And it is the dragons of the rivers who decide when they will no longer be controlled."

Pink!

Power draw is the problem. There's not enough battery power to do what she needs. She doesn't have the power to fight a helicopter.

More importantly, she doesn't have the right kind of power.

Crystal's Kiss is a classy lady. A lady like that you can't offer the potato chips of an industrial wall socket, and she regrets having to feed her that already. Pink felt the buck, felt the shift, felt herself almost lose control for a moment there. She needs to do better by her girl.

Brown pulls up by the marina. Pink leaps over the side onto the dock, cable spool in hand, and sprints at full speed down the dock.

Power draw is the problem. Crystal's Kiss barely tolerated the batteries, they were just to shoot down the warning shots and get her to the restaurant. The problem is there isn't a wall socket in the world capable of charging an industrial laser to fire multiple times at high power. The only place where you'd find something like that is... well, in the docks of Zeus, where oligarchs were unwilling to wait an hour to charge their high tech electric yachts, and had ultra high powered energy flows installed.

No hazard tape. No secure locks. Those would quite spoil the view, wouldn't they?

Pink makes it before the helicopter draws into position, slamming the extension cord into place and slamming down the breaker. Brown aims at the sky - and the lady steps out to dance.

[Athletics 5/8, High Society 0/1, 4+6 10]

Dudekov:

He’s still handcuffed behind his back, but the boat railing he’s been handcuffed to snaps as the chain pulls through it - for a moment, Dudekov seems just as surprised about this as Black is, she’d tested its strength before using it.

Then he starts lashing out in a flurry of stomping kicks aimed at Black’s head, balancing his weight on his bound hands as he rushes her horizontally. He’s been holding back because of the illusion of powerlessness, the pointlessness of resistance, but some combination of just how badly Black has set him off and his loss of faith in the sanity of any of this has reminded him of something very, very important;

He is bigger than you, and he’s about to get his brain hacked by an insane robot. He roars, too furious to even think of trying to escape.

First check DC 4 just for Black to keep her footing on a boat while blocking the wild swings - Dudekov has no such disadvantage, he’s a sailor through-and-through. The nature of the centrifugal artificial gravity is enough to give even this river slight, choppy waves.

Then there is a second DC 5 to try and restrain him again, or disable him. Otherwise he’s trying to stomp Black’s face like he’s trying to get wine out of grapes just long enough he can do a can-can line on Crystal’s Kiss.

Chase Black:

It’s a twin rotor aircraft with twin VTOL tilt-jet assist, a bastard hybrid of chinook and osprey to make a gunner dropship capable of hauling a tank’s worth of armor through the sky to any part of the station at lightning speeds. This isn’t enough to crash it, because it’s an overengineered monster that won’t go down to any one single hit.

That being said: If any one shot could have, it would have been that one.

The main rotor doesn’t explode in a fireball or anything so dramatic, the cutting laser blasting its base cuts through the driveshaft as it spins, a spiral of damage that shoots the entire rotor blade directly up from the force when it comes loose, fracturing in the sky from the heat shock and sudden change of forces. The gunship wobbles as its rear rotor and tilt jets shift to take up the slack and regain balance from the sudden loss of force, but without the main rotor for upward thrust the gunship now has two different flight modes.

Now it can choose to fly as a jet, taking looping strafes without the precision of a locked-on tail it’s been benefiting from. Or it can rely on its jets in VTOL mode and lose a significant chunk of its maximum speed - still enough to keep up with a speedboat, but not enough to keep up with a better getaway vehicle if you can make the switch. A train, maybe.

It goes for the VTOL option, spinning into a side-on lean pursuit like it’s Tokyo drifting, a side door opening and two snipers peering out the hatch leveling shots at Pink and Brown - Black is too close to the VIP.

This could be a piloting check to serpentine wildly (DC 5 with damage to the gunship throwing off the snipers). Another shot might do it as well, the same table as last time but with +1 difficulty because you’re doing it under fire - and missing the shot would leave the gunner exposed to the return fire. You cannot do both - Aiming Crystal’s Kiss from the back of a wildly fishtailing boat is outside of November’s capabilities for now.

Dudekov needs to be subdued again if you want to try and escape through the marina and back out into surface streets, but that's right through the open and out under fire. It'd take a 2 Preparedness spend from Pink to have prepared sandwiches to pop smoke, and then it's a DC 5 athletics check to run through - but the DC drops down to 3 if you have something about the smoke that would completely fuck up a high tech multi-spectrum scope from a distance.

What’s your exit strategy?

Pink!

Crystal's Kiss has done her work. It has drawn the absolute attention of the gunship, that hideous piece of military hardware. But if Chase Black knew November at all, they'd have known that she never had it in her to be monogamous.

On a rooftop behind the gunship a second laser cannon lifted itself up on its hydraulics. Pink had her tablet out, rapidly feeding it targeting coordinates. And, with a gentle caress of the firing lever, Fiona's Bite let herself be known.

The second rotor went out, pitching the gunship down into the middle of the marina. Dozens of luxury yachts waited to catch it, quiet and empty and costing on average $400 a minute over their ten year lifespans. The gunship tangles, breaking its momentum amidst their breaking masts, crew huddling in the prison of their impact foam.

[Preparedness MOS]

Black!

When Dudekov stood up all the blood rushed to his head.

November, for all her skills and talents, does not have many formal qualifications. The one exception to this is that she possesses a full medical license with a geriatrician specialty. Mrs. Everest had an unending tide of health complaints and absolutely hated doctors - "filthy vultures who make their money gladhanding with the sick" - and so November's early career was marked with sitting dead-eyed through an online medical degree. She never had any passion for it, but when it came to calculating the exact amounts of sedatives to give an old person she knew how to scan his medical bracelet, check for allergies and metabolism factors, and deliver a compound that wouldn't start having effect until there was an adrenal spike.

This was actually off plan; she'd anticipated the drug wouldn't kick in until she got to strap him into the surgical suite, but it made a useful backstop for situations like this.

Black, lying slumped on the seat, rubbed her face where Dudekov had kicked it. She looks up at him with the same ruthless calm as always, as his vision starts to blur. "I told you before," she said, as a helicopter crashed into a marina behind her, "don't try to pull dumb action movie stunts at your age."

[Preparedness 3/8 Pharmacy 0/1 4+4 8]

*

From there, it's time to get out.

The motorboat roars away on autopilot, to come to a stop inside a cloudwater drain. It's a diversion; November assumes the Crimson Tower cover identity. She's the Johnny On The Spot when the fire engines start roaring in, organizing dispatch and response briefly before commandeering one of their transport haulers. She pulls away in the chaos, heading for a hotel safe room with a very permissive set of camera shadows.

The Next Day:

This is where we move outside the scope of a single person’s experience of the world. The thing about historical events is that for brief moments the most important people in the world are the ones who step out of a crowd and then recede back into it, never to be seen or heard from again. The crowd itself is almost the more important character.

The world is too large for the important events to all come from the few people we have already met. Likewise, these events are too large for anyone to be left out of them, to not be swept up in this. We will see both.

*

Zhang Ho knows how to act like she belongs with the transphobes, she’s just got to pretend to be like her parents, say things she’s heard around the dinner table. Shut her brain off and flow with the anger, she can do that.

She wouldn’t fit in with the march of modded androids they’re working against either, a group that includes FUCKING SKELETOR in spirit - he’s in a different march in Ares right now, around Cerberus Augments where the more radical parts are made.

This one in Aphrodite is organized by a friend of Numb and York. Echidna Prime is an odd duck, naming herself for the Mother of Monsters that Gaea planned as a revenge against the Gods. She’s actually very successful, nearly 120 direct children and already two primes in her descendants. Not because she’s especially good at her specialty, but because of just how motivated the line is to be… different.

Which means spending a lot of money on aftermarket parts and upgrades, many of which are supplied at the company store. Echidna was chosen as the optimal lifetime consumer.

She walks on stork legs. At full height she stands like a stilt walker, but more typically they fold completely down, knees over her head, bending and flexing unnaturally to let her walk comfortably through the typical doorway. She has the body of an owl, bronze wings that end in claw-fingered harpy-hands, and the head of a beautiful young astronomer with round-rimmed glasses and long hair tied in a loose ponytail. She stands at full height with her megaphone.

She doesn’t use it, though. Her crowd moves in complete, eerie silence. There is an intense discipline drilled into this, because their hatred of Zhang’s group is palpable, viscerable, bubbles and boils off them. Their existence itself is their protest, and even so much as a sign would undercut that. Anything more, any read on their intention, must be projected on to the group.

We exist, and that’s the problem. That’s all it takes to piss you off. If we give you a single crack in the armor, a single argument to pull against, then you will take it. But if existing is all we are doing, and you still can’t handle that? Everything else is sophistry.

This is the group York figured best met the needs of Crystal’s exhibition. The one it’ll be hardest to justify violence breaking out against, when it happens, one that’ll be capable of defending itself if things get seriously ugly.

Zhang starts moving through the crowd and looking for tension points, the loose cannons. She waits for the police presence to already start showing up, and she keeps a tight grip on the heavy rolls of batteries she’s keeping in her biker jacket pockets.

*

Binh Van Ut was born with solar urticaria, an allergy to light. It’s a really rare genetic disorder, and in 2020 the only treatment for it was to essentially live as an astronaut would in void. Keeping to a blacked out home and only leaving the house in essentially a space suit.

“Dr Nguyen?”

She worked with her doctors for a modified treatment that would adapt her melanin to chlorophyll, would have her grow flowering ivy blooms in place of hair, would let her be healed and grow in the sunlight. Ever since she imagined it, the perfect opposite of everything she had suffered for the first fifteen years of her life, she has seen everything else as just… waiting. Waiting to be correct. Waiting to be herself.

“We can still treat your allergy, but that’s all we can do.”

“But I’m halfway through the treatment! You said, you said that…” she trails off, holding the phone. He said so many things, she doesn’t know which one to say. She just knows none of it matters now.

“We’re still looking into what this all means, it’s not - I’m doing everything I can that we can keep what you’ve already got of your current course of treatment.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’re being told that we might have to reverse the cosmetic elements to be allowed to continue the public option treatment of your disease.”

“It’s not cosmetic.”

“I’m sorry I said that. I know.”

“It’s not.”

“I know.”

“I just, it’s the whole point. I don’t want to be, I don’t just want to be cured, or I… I never got to talk to other people, I never got to go to school, I’ve never been- If people can’t see what I got better from, then what was the point of it?”

“All I can tell you, Binh, is that I have a lot of phone calls like this that I need to make today. You’re not alone.”

Binh looked around her treated apartment, pitch black even in the middle of the day. She couldn’t even live with her parents like this, even though they loved her and visited her a lot. “Thanks, Dr Nguyen. For caring.”

“As soon as I have better news, I’ll tell you. This is just, this could just be the worst case scenario, we don’t know yet.”

“Okay.”

“I can give recommendations for private practitioners who are still going to be working through this, if… I’ll talk to your parents about it.”

“You should make your other calls first. Thanks, again.”

There was a lingering hesitation on the other end of the line before Dr Nguyen hangs up. He just doesn’t know what to say, and he has too many people he has to say it to.

Binh needed this. There’d been a point when the treatment started where she could go outside and talk to people for a while without the suit, and it had been one of the worst experiences of her life. When she wore the suit it was okay for her to be a bit weird and maladjusted because, well, people saw what she was dealing with.

She could look normal but she couldn’t act it, had barely experienced it to learn how to pretend it. When people thought she looked normal, then everything she said and did came across like she was failing and fucked up and wrong and that’s how everyone treated her.

If she was a dryad she could be shy, and weird, and different and that’s just how they were, that’s what she was. She could actually exist, she could have breathed, she could have…

Now she couldn’t.

Binh survives what she’s about to do to herself, she only has access to a bathroom medicine cabinet and it’s hard to make yourself more than just really sick with painkillers and sleeping pills. That’s why I focused on her.

Others won’t survive, because that is what happens. It is only important to understand that decision, not to marinate in its worst consequences. This can be fixed.

*

IAmWhatIAm: Are you all familiar with the idea of controlled burns?
AnthrozineEditorYork: cause a smaller fire to prevent a worse fire
IAmWhatIAm: The assassination has delayed a case that was about to be decided
IAmWhatIAm: The protections stripped by the Costa-Silva decision would have been a crack in the doorway to go further. I do not believe the two decisions being docketed so close together, and in this order, was an accident.
IAmWhatIAm: Now it is unlikely to go that way. Even when Hermes elects its replacement, the Justices have learned fear.
PerfidiouslyFickle: They’re calling it the Costa-Silva decision now?
IAmWhatIAm: They are. Whether it be in her honor or infamy is a matter of personal discretion.
AnthrozineEditorYork: hot take assassination works folks get on it
HartlyDworkin: That was a joke.
NumbToNothing:
3V: >:3
NumbToNothing: Wait 3V are you joking or are you joking about joking
3V: >:3

*

The districts are the size and population of continents. While they’re specialized, they are simply too large to contain only their specializations. It is more accurate to call them themed at this scale. Hermes might be the district of industry and factories, but there are also factories in Ares for more radical and intensive processes - like glass factories named for old Italian towns - and factories in Gaea for food processing. Those people still live close to work, they don’t live in Hermes and commute out.

That just means this kind of generalization isn’t useful at an individual level. At a macro level though, it’s true enough to be useful. Character is destiny.

One generally true statement is that Hermes is the most overtly conservative. It comes out that there’s already bills drafted that would see furries and non-anthro androids lose access to unemployment, disability, other forms of social insurance. But that requires constitutionality being decided by the courts, and right now they’re going to be too busy holding emergency elections amongst themselves.

* * *

November:

Dudekov wakes up mostly-naked in an empty hotel bathtub, empty bags of antifreeze IV and convenience store ice next to it. He carefully gets out of the drained bathtub and checks the long, sutured scar on his head in the mirror.

His clothes are folded neatly on a chair outside the bathroom, a green polo shirt and running shorts. He takes both and puts them on, sitting back onto a hotel bed, trying to piece together what’s just happened.

He’s foggy, still. Anesthetic? Anesthetic hangover? A bit of both. Either way, it would explain why he can’t fully feel the effects of an invasive brain surgery right now.

He checks the TV first - the cords been cut. As has the room’s phone lines. If he wants to call out, it’s just the phone in his pocket.

He sits at the edge of the bed and thinks about ships in bottles.

Orange: I need to issue a correction regarding my previous statement r.e. Squeaky Fromage.
Orange: Red's reaction was surface level correct but she didn't account for the fact that everyone associated with Fromage is about to have tabloid journalists tunneling into their laudromats. We'd be fighting the entire station's media core for interviews and we don't have the resources.
Orange: While that's what the people are hungry for, the people are stupid. We need to get onto the next story while they're still chasing the previous one.
Orange: York I'll talk to you offline.

York!

"Alright, I had a busy night," said Orange. She looked sharp, crisp, ironed. "And the most important thing I learned from all of it was that the Space Fountain wasn't an accident."

She held up her hands. "I know. I haven't been on the internet. I know it's the ur-conspiracy theory, but I got it from the horse's mouth. 'Australia was picked for being the largest industrialized landmass that was still mostly empty desert, that was always the plan'. Adrian Dudekov, the guy who I had Junta trail, let it slip. He'll never talk, though, not normally, not on the record. I'm digging deeper in a different direction but I'm at capacity and I need..." she groaned and massaged her temples. "I need more time. I don't have capacity to dig up a decades old cold case. But I can tell you there's something there worth digging into."

She quietly clenches her fists under the table.

She's being sidelined.

She's been put on this because it's the least important thing that the collective can't ignore. She used to be the centre of everything; the ascendant energy that co-ordinated her entire family into a single purpose. But she'd somehow been losing influence, pushed towards the periphery. First it had been Blue. Next was her. Some part of her always had to be the least important part.

She'd never thought it would be her.

*

Dudekov!

The door opens quietly.

The Chase Black agent creeps into the room, pistol leveled. Doors and corners, he takes each one like a professional who's been put on notice. Long slick black real leather jacket, widow's peak, corporate namebadge glittering gold and black, Malta Cross on his chest. Chase Black used to be the private security subsidiary of BlackSun. Their umbrella corporation had dissolved but branding is immortal.

"Clear," he said, after the sweep was completed. "Sir? Are you -" He blanched. Blanch was the right world; like green blood withdrawing to the periphery of the temples. Not all Chase Black employees were headhunted from Central Casting's list of SS officers, but anyone who wasn't they shoved in a full face helmet whenever possible. "Dear God. Are you all right?"

Dudekov:

Dudekov keeps his eyes closed at the edge of the bed. “You’re working for them.” He says. “You’ve come alone, you’re feigning shock. I don’t doubt all your credentials check out, that you are who you say you are. I don’t care.” His tongue pushes his lips out from where he pokes against the sides of his mouth in concentration, like a wriggling worm against the teeth of the skull. “I am busy.”

York:

York moves along the flower display in the cafe window, thinking. “I don’t think Junta cares for flowers. I just don’t know what else to get him. Maybe a decorative book? Should get him a book about flowers.” He nods, then looks back to Orange.

“Everyone knows that.” He says as he sits back down at the cafe table. “The Australia thing. It’s one of those open conspiracies, things you can’t officially confirm but we all know. Even if it’s true, who’s left to hang for it?” He shrugged. “Had to build the damn thing somewhere, was always going to collapse - it dropped because nobody cared then, and they don’t care now.”

“So why do you?”

Most of the collapse was out into desert, and while the fracturing upon the continent left even huge previously-habitable regions devastated, most people had gotten out from under it in the decades leading up to the fall. The rest were given about as much sympathy as Katrina victims rebuilding their houses on shoreline.

York!

She relaxed; this was an argument. She was relieved; she could do arguments. Arguments made her feel worthwhile.

"A few reasons," said Orange. "The first is because we're currently experiencing another environmental collapse and the exact same people and systems are still in charge. Two is because it's the right thing to do. Three is because now we have an unprecedented opportunity to follow up because of how distracted everyone is and how many old people will be looking to clear their consciences. But the real reason..."

She took a deep breath. This was something that she believed.

"Because history is important," said Orange. "More important than anything in the battlefield for ideas, and Aevum doesn't have enough of it. People your age and your level of online suspected but didn't know, but kids going through the education system today sure as shit aren't taught the controversy. They're taught the polished version where nobody was to blame and all of those far away people were a statistic that didn't mean anything. It's almost poetic the way they say it, that it was just the natural culmination to the environmental disasters that had been ravaging earth to that point - one last act of nature. But it wasn't an act of nature, it was a decision made by people that hurt people who weren't them, just like every decision that incited the climate catastrophe in the fist place."

"Think about how many people lost their faith in America when they looked into America's history - the Trail of Tears, the United Fruit Company, the Red Scare. The historical records of those things are important because they're non emotive. They're not relevant, not defended, not part of the present day culture war - they're factual atrocities to be absorbed intellectually, and in so doing provide the intellectual framework that lets people unplug themselves from the emotional battle over politics. It's an undefended front that the shock jocks can't rage against; the wikipedia rabbit hole that helps intellectuals reason themselves out of unexamined positions; the revealed lie that makes you question everything else."

"Nobody cared then, just like nobody cared at the time about indigenous people during colonization," said Orange, impassioned. "Just like nobody cared at the time about the slaves of Rome, about the famines in India. But because nobody fought for the historical dead then those eras of history were allowed to sink into culture as facts rather than choices, as a golden age beset by external tragedies, something worth preserving and recreating and continuing. If Aevum began with a blood-soaked genocide then it's like an American learning about George Washington's slaves. The whole edifice creaks as its foundation shifts."

She sighed, looking down again. "It's the most important battle to me. It's just not the most important battle to all of me. Anyway, get Junta a condiments set. Hospital food's not great and I think he'd appreciate being able to add flavour to choice back in."

Dudekov!

The Chase Black didn't look sympathetic - he didn't quite have that range - but he managed a look of disgust that was close enough to pity. "You're delirious," he sneered. "Come on, sir. We need to get you debriefed. Can you walk? I can call for a stretcher."

York:

“I’ll do the flower book and put your name on the condiments set.” York nods, flicking through his phone as Orange talks and narrows his eyes. “Found your source, by the way.”

He’s quiet for a moment, looking at his phone. Then he turns it off, takes the battery out, and puts both back into his pocket. “I’ve got to be vague, but don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m asking. Did you know before, or from what happened last night.”

There’s no tell how he feels yet. He’s hiding everything right now, though given what headlines he just read it’s likely it’s as much for Orange as from her.

Dudekov:

“The trick to making ships in bottles,” Dudekov continues with his eyes closed, “is that you have to remember your place. When you think about the next piece, you can’t imagine it already in the place you think it must go. It’s much harder than you think to not see it as if it is already there.”

He opens them again and opens a drawer for a hotel pen, no notepad but a Gideon bible. He tears a page out and uses it as notepaper, speed-drawing a rough bottle, some hull, and circling the number 13 to keep his place. He looks back up.

“Either my brain was not really ripped, in which case this is the real trick. The big show to convince me to, what? Call the right people, warn them? Have agents around the city see who jumps when I call?” Dudekov asks with a raised eyebrow. “Or that is a double-bluff, I have had my brain ripped, at which point you are the asset sent to liquidate me afterwards, or some such thing, and I am better where I am. There is no urgency, nothing more can be done.”

“I do not know what it is planning,” Dudekov looks at his sheet of paper again, at the number thirteen, and closes his eyes. His fingers twitch lightly as he imagines the work. “Only that no scheme is too contrived, too convoluted. One must imagine a GAI as a bored teenager playing the world like it has a save/load function.”

York!

"I hear you. I was actually kind of thinking of taking a vacation," said Orange. "Somewhere cooler. Might be hard to reach for a while."

That's what she thought he was saying, and she got it. Get out before this blows back on us. She stiffened her back. There'd be even less need for her when they went.

Dudekov!

"Well," said the Chase Black agent. "If you say so, sir. Excuse me, I've got to call this in."

He turned his back and stood by the doorway, sub-vocalizing into his throat mike. There was no urgency from him either, he fell into the position of guard duty with the practiced slouch of someone who knew to hide energy bars in their utility belt.

York:

York looks at Orange, shakes his head. “Sit with me. Not what I meant. I meant…” He makes a pained grimace trying to work out how to say this without saying it. “I just want to know order of events. It’s a part of the story you’re bringing me, and your source is in the headlines. I just want to know if you were looking for the source to find this story, or if reporting on this is just another angle.” He shifts like he’s just taken off a tight belt for getting that out.

Rough translation - Did knowing that this guy was involved cause you to kidnap him, or are you trying to bury this guy to justify having already kidnapped him for unrelated reasons York should know about.

“I’m with you.” York emphasizes to Orange while making unflinching, blood-shot eye-contact. “I just can’t cover you if I’m blind.”

Dudekov:

The masts are fiddly. He has to imagine placing them down naked, but every time he takes the focus of his minds eye off, when it looks back the sails are there and unfurled. He has the most trouble with that, things like seeing doorways without imagining the door that needs to go there. The mind abhors vacuum.

York!

"There's a main story," said Orange. "And it's not this. This is kind of something that fell out in passing while I was researching the main story. And I honestly don't know how well the main story will sell because it's incredibly niche. But I have to do it because..." she shrugged helplessly. "It's family. You know?"

Dudekov!

There's a knock at the door. The Chase Black agent answers it and steps out. His relief steps in, different guy, higher stripe, same logo. He waves his hand directly in front of Dudekov's face like he's checking for function. "Sir? We're bringing in a specialist. He's going to ask you some questions. You feeling any better?" This guy had a pleading twist to the voice like he was staring down the barrel of an Unsatisfactory Performance Review. "You got anything useful about the thing that did this to you? It say where it was going?"

York:

“Got it.” He nods. “Yeah. We can’t touch this yet, not for a while. The timing doesn’t work out on it yet.” He gives a look that makes it clear he’s not screwing you on this, you’ve just made this too hot to touch with gloves on right now. It’s a look that dares you to fight on this so he can make a stupid oath of loyalty in a cafe at you, very Les Mis. “And we do niche too. Hell, we keep Numb on full time, don’t we?”

He looks frustrated now, actually at you - not the situation, not the words, at Orange personally. “Don’t…” he reaches across and takes one of Orange’s hands and squeezes it like a stress ball. “Don’t ruin yourself.” He says. “We need you too much. I can’t work with you if you’re dead, arrested, too hot or burned out.”

Dudekov:

Dudekov opens his eyes, sighs. “Anesthetized.” He says. “Might I borrow your phone, to make a call?”

Orange!

"I'd like to chill," said Orange. "Believe me, I'm going to do everything in my power to turn the volume down as much as I can. But..." the arguments of the others wash across her mind: I'm the only one that can do this, the system needs to be destroyed, this is the right thing to do, when you think about it this is kind of the status quo now... "... but it's family," she said, just as helplessly as before. "I have to do this."

Because no one did it for me.

Dudekov!

The phone had, prominently displayed, a sticker of a happy elephant wearing glasses on the front side, obscuring part of the screen. Several pieces of glitter had somehow physically embedded themselves in the glass, and there are dozens of games installed blotting out every useful feature. "Sorry sir, my daughter likes to play with it," said the agent apologetically, scrolling through to the phone app and handing it over.

York:

“Junta was living at the bottom of an elevator with two living parents, Numb’s folks were in an arms race to see who could fuck them up the worst before-” he cuts himself off, “Fickle has that thing with her older brother we don’t talk about. We’re the ones that got Junta set up with 3V, Numb off the streets, and… I mean, Fickle’s helped more than she’s been helped, feel bad about that one.” York runs out of steam, and chews off the top of a yellow-stained thumbnail. “I hope God knows how Persephone’s kid is going to feel about her in ten years, because she doesn’t.”

“Family is a four letter word.” He says, softly. “Just, around here, if anyone says they’re taking risks this bad ‘for family’, the problem’s not going to be that we don’t get it. The problem’s going to be that we get it, and you won’t like what we get.”

And he expects Orange to make polite excuses and leave, or he expects Orange to explain how important her family actually is and what makes it special and unique in a way that he just doesn’t get, or he expects her to try to explain how she’s all they have - he will flip the table over that one.

Dudekov:

He looks at the phone, and his face is perfectly neutral as he hands it back without even trying to use it. His eyes unfocus as he disappears back into the ship in the bottle routine, sitting at the edge of the hotel bed. “And you? Yours?” He asks the other one.

York!

"It's not like that, it's like -" she came up short. "I didn't mean it like that. I'm sorry. I mean it like, I met one of my sisters recently. She has over a hundred colours now because of the experiments they ran on her. Even if I published that in headlines on every paper in the station nobody would give a single damn. It's barely legible as an outrage when the station can't even agree on healthcare for transhumans. They're mine, and no one else will fight for them. It has to be me."

Dudekov!

The officer goes over to the door and gets the phone from the agent standing guard. This is without embellishments, almost factory defaults, the only flourish of personality being the installation of an online poker game.

York:

No, really, he flips the table. He takes one side of it, and lifts, and topples it sideways into the walkway of the cafe. There’s a shattered saucer and some scattered condiments and a napkin dispenser goes over on its side, and everyone in the cafe is staring at someone who until a few seconds ago was desperately doing opsec. Then he glares at you, and he leaves.

Only for a second. Then he runs, sprints back again and stands on the table he’s flipped to get into Orange’s face.

“You’re a fucking liar.” He says. “And I’d respect it if you were lying to me because then I could fucking fight you. But you’re lying to yourselves so I can’t do shit, can I? Can I?” He kicks the stand on the upside down table so hard the plastic joinery breaks. “Shit hits the fan and we’re going to be down eight or nine of my fucking best because you’re codependant. And what?”

He pulls out a vape, turns his head slightly to see a no smoking sign and bends the metal over his knee, putting it back at a twisted angle. He exhales a candy-coffee cloud. “You know we’d help, that’s what pisses me off the most. Because if we help, then being family isn’t special anymore, and that fucking kills you worse than dying would, right? Fuck off.”

And then he storms out for real, battery still dead in his phone, logged off from socials.

Most of this isn’t Orange, really. It’s the accumulated emotions of having a variant of this conversation way, way, way too many times, building with each failed attempt at it.

A hispanic man in a sweater vest and distressed jeans rushes to Orange’s side while his boyfriend, a larger and round man with a chest-length scraggly beard, tries to help pick up all the scattered items from the flipped table. “Hey,” the first man says, “Do you need anything? Is there anyone we can call for you? I’m so sorry that just happened.”

Dudekov:

Dudekov begins typing a number into this phone. His side of the conversation goes: “Yes, it’s me. Yes. No, I haven’t seen the news, I was too busy being on the wrong side of it. I’m considering myself burned, what should my next course of action be? Yes, I expect that I am about to die and there is nothing I can do, and I have made peace with that. I just plan on making it as much of a pain in the ass as possible.”

At what point does November realize that he is faking his conversation into the dialed number 1800-Go-Fuck-Yourself?

Orange!

Being Wrong is a strange feeling. Everything feels out of resolution, out of balance, a fracture in the mind that thoughts can't move across. A sensation that nothing can continue onwards until everything has been boiled back to nothing. She knows she's wrong. She wants to reach out. She should be...

Mrs. Everest demonstrated what power was. Power was a castle with only one person inside.
Untrained operatives risk information leaks.
You'd be putting them in danger.
We can move faster by ourselves.

She can't figure out how to navigate this. She's overlapping layers of excuses and ideologies and thoughts that make this the only way. She's no better. Because it's family. People she loves. She loves them, genuinely, and she has to come for them even if she also loves everyone else. Every day she fantasized about the manor walls slicing open and Phoenix arriving in a blaze of glory, Pig breaking the outside windows, Rat's confident smirk, "We came to rescue you. As soon as we knew we didn't hesitate for an instant."

But they hadn't come. No one had rescued her. And the only possible explanation was that they had it worse than she did. That they were still waiting for her to rescue them.

That was why she couldn't fight Black. Even if it meant packing up every part of her life and then quietly disappearing. She was just as much a part of this as any other colour. She was wrong by her own standards, but there she was, leading the vote for her own dissolution. It was her purpose. It was the opposite of her purpose.

"Thank you, I'll be fine," she said. It took her a moment. She was shocked anyone asked. "I'll... I'll be fine."

November!

The Chase Black agent stands politely by the door with his back turned, pretending not to overhear his client have a weird meltdown into a dial tone.

If this is a bit it's going to take more than that to convince them to drop it.

Caz and Dino

“She says she’s fine. Does she sound fine?” The man in the sweater vest asks, and the big one looks up off the floor where he’s passing debris to one of the waitresses rushing to help.

“Didn’t sound fine to me.” He says.

The sweater vest man shakes his head and looks to Orange and pulls out his phone to the dial screen. “We’re going to call someone to come and pick you up, and we’re going to stay with you until they do, okay? I’m-”

“Using your Teacher Voice.” The larger man cuts him off with a grin, and the smaller one winces.

“Shit, am I?” He says, and he stiffens and his voice deepens a half-octave. “It’s fine. We’re going to call you a friend,” he does not say ‘family’ here very deliberately, “and we’re going to make sure you’re not going home alone after something like that. And then I want you to put your number on my phone so I can call you in a week to check up on you, okay? It would make me feel a lot better if you told me how you’re doing, then.”

“Caz gets like this,” the larger man bends the no smoking sign back straight, deciding the table itself is a lost cause. “I’m just happy I’m useless here.”

“He’s a welder.” Caz explains. “We’re both happy you don’t need one.”

“Shame the table’s plastic.” Dino laments, and kicks the shattered stump morosely with a steel-toed boot.

No. These two absolutely will not leave you alone until you’ve decided on who, that is not one of your sisters, is coming to pick you up from here and have done the hand-off. And they will sit with you the entire time.

Your altercation has happened in front of a high-school English teacher. They’re even worse than emergency first responders in a situation like this, because first-responders tend to only learn from explosions after they’ve happened.

And whoever comes to pick you up? Be sure Caz will be telling them everything he saw, his complete version of events, so Orange can’t hide the details.

Dudekov:

Dudekov starts looking through the hotel room.

“No knives in the kitchenette,” he learns, “Removed. No pills in the medicine cabinet. A pity, I could use something for the headache. My nitroglycerin? No?” He looks back at a Chase Black agent with a ‘can you believe this’ look. “Maybe I can borrow some of yours, I’m sure you brought enough to share.”

He goes back to lie on the bed and folds his arms across his chest. “No. You will make the first mistake when you get bored. You always do.”

Orange!

Rescue.

Too little, too late. But still... ever since she'd heard of Singh throwing Remoil's bags she'd been filled with the secret yearning that she might get something like that. Something she could see firsthand, let her internalize firsthand. It was better than she'd thought it could be, even though it was only a single drop of what she needed. It takes her a long moment to process what's happening, to finally stammer out the thank you.

It's impossible to articulate gratitude. She can't do it. She can only let the tension and weariness show as exaggerated as she can express it, still not enough to communicate how much she feels.

She asks for Pope.

"I'm going to resign from the Anthrozine," she said after everything had settled. She shudders a bit to say it, but she holds her nerve. "Can I give my material to you instead?"

*

Dudekov!

There's a knock at the door.

"Thank God, took him long enough," said the Chase Black agent. There was some brief chatter from just outside earshot and in walked the psychologist, leaving the agents both outside. He was a creature of earth tones, warm and indistinct, fuzzy in beard and clothing, one lazy eye always drifting to the side. He knocked on the wall as he approached Dudekov's bed.

"Mr. Dudekov? I'm Naval Oldberg, a military psychologist on contract to Chase Black, NV2 security clearance. I understand that you've experienced -" he didn't look at the scar. "- quite the trauma. Do you mind if I run some tests to ascertain the extent of the damage?"