[IC] Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

[Count Numbers]

November:

Brown:

This is a problem. Because it is immediately and clearly obvious, in the split second before he is capable of hiding it, that Singh knows exactly what the name Everest means.

So instead he turns to Remoil. “These bags would be yours, then? If I may?” He doesn’t lay it on too thick. Just the facade of a kindly older gentleman.

Remoil is suspicious, of course she is. But she might as well as been asked if she might pass the salt. Such things are hard to refuse. “If you must. Mr?”

Singh takes the bag and takes advantage of the terminal being one of the widest spaces you can find on Thrones, when he spins it by the handle around himself and throws it five meters out. It is an impressive feat of strength for such an older man, and it’s clear he doesn’t have it in him for a repeat performance. Frankly it's a miracle he didn't hit anyone, managed to get the bag to sail overhead. Remoil's other bag he just drops at his feet. And he kick-slides it across the floor in the other direction. “Don’t worry about it.”

He wraps an arm around your shoulders, Brown, and is already pulling you along before anyone else gets a chance to react. “Walk, walk. Keep walking. Goat is already unloaded and on their way to Nepenthe, we’ll meet them there.”

Remoil’s absolutely a bigger fish than Singh. She just doesn’t know that yet.

Yellow:

Fiona starts- “I didn’t mean it had to be your siblings, there were a bunch of GAI who-”

“Hold on.” Crystal cuts her off. “But we know the fate of the siblings was, in their own turns, similarly ignoble?”

“Well… We don’t know,” Fiona starts.

Crystal presses. “But each, in their turn, was likely sold to people of means and resources?”

“Sure.” Fiona concedes.

“And we have, in this moment, a significant conspiracy, a threat, who cannot reveal the true depth of their vulnerability? A problem in desperate need of a solution?”

Fiona stops. Just, stops on the trail. “You cannot be serious.”

“Why, Yellow, dearest, loveliest, sweetest of hearts,” Crystal sings. “Would it be too distasteful to blackmail this conspiracy into assisting you in finding your siblings? I think you’d look dashing in a gray hat.”

[Thanqol]

Black!

This is the truth of the world: Action invites response. Progress inspires reaction. The advancement of society, then, is too important to be left to amateurs. Instead it should operate as a fait accompli, an alteration in the systems of power through which people relate to each other before anyone realizes it has happened. Women's introduction into the workforce, the mass adoption of working from home conditions, the breakup of the gilded age monopolies, all fundamental alterations in the systems of power that became reality before the forces of reaction could metastasize in an attempt to stop it. To invite a concept into the public debate invited mouth-breathing reactionaries to debate it.

It is a straightforwards, obvious and logically self contained thought, an animating idea that has her apply practically zero value to the idea of courting public opinion in any of her planned operations. She engages police abuses through assets in the legal system, to respond to Goat's imprisonment with a smash and grab rather than a leaflet campaign. It's what has her prepared to lie flat for the powerful even while working to undermine them. This is just how power works.

But it seemed like she underestimated just how wildly nice it felt for someone to stand up for you.

This has literally never happened for her before. Even receiving rights she could kind of write off as being collateral damage from the activism different species of AI - no one had really been thinking about the Hecatoncheires during any of those campaigns. It hadn't felt personal. But this - this stupid act of rudeness, this absolute declaration of enmity, this burning of bridges and the scorching of an important source for no other reason than... than her dignity? Hers!?

It's genuinely the nicest thing anybody has ever done for her.

She tears up, and more than a little. Crying is a deliberate function for her but she's so overwhelmed she doesn't know how to not activate it.

Blue!

Yellow is grinning. She's all in on Crystal's idea, a suggestion phrased just so and an opportunity to prove she's cute along the way. Crystal is dangerous.

She tries to interrupt the thought before it metastasizes but it's a losing battle. "We don't know who these people are, and they'll be looking for us -"
"Just cause for more investigation," said Yellow breezily. "We've got followup leads."
"This will be a period of heightened security -"
"Which means that they'll be visible," said Yellow.
"The counter investigation will -"
"Dashing," said Yellow. "Hat."
Blue sighed. "We'll add it as an objective to our upcoming surveillance operations. We identified members of their security operation during the action and our intent is to begin surveillance on some of them so that we can identify their employers and map their network."
"Whatever this was," said Yellow. "There was a lot of black money flowing through it. I doubt that they spent all of it on consumer goods."

[Count Numbers]

November:

Aevum:

Consider the staging of our performers. Fiona has stopped, and started again. This puts her at the back of the line. Then, together, like Plato and Aristotle in The School of Athens, Crystal and Yellow, as Blue walks ahead.

In this way, their positions are mirrored in both the physical and the rhetorical.

Fiona shakes her head. “We saw them on the news. These people had Chase Black on the payroll. I’ve told you about those guys-”
“Had.” Crystal counters.
“She’s their biggest enemy right now, they’ve got to be looking for her, if we just give her away-”
“An alliance would mean not having to hide, not being an enemy.” Crystal considers that. “For now.”
“They’ve got to be furious!”
“They’ve got to be desperate.”

A break. Fiona looks to Blue desperately, Crystal at Yellow salaciously.

“I’m no stranger to the politics of blackmail, I promise you. On both sides of the envelope.” Crystal runs a thumb across her bottom lip, probably to clean the line of her lipstick, but it’s impossible not to imagine it as wiping remembered blood - someone else’s blood. “My suggestion is that you use it to survive a confession. A seat at the negotiating table, revealing what you’re capable of. Not how you did it, the extent of your resources, better to leave that to imagination. Far better to give that information as a show of trust. Really, it’s flipping a vulnerability for social capital. That would be how you get ahead of their counter-investigation. Then ensure that it is understood that your offered solution hinges on you, your survival, and your unique position. You don’t even need to make anything up, there. A relationship hinging on blackmail builds frustration, keeps you as a liability. Re-establish yourself as an asset, promptly, and it gives a chance for their resentment to congeal into a tentative admiration and respect.”

Fiona has a distant, haunted look on her face. “Three things make a character likable to an audience. Competence, humour and kindness to established characters.”

“And the whole world’s a stage.”

Thrones:

This is the entrance to the place Singh took you to last time, then changed his mind on. Martyrtech. An automated delivery cart slots back into a groove in the floor and trundles back through the alloy grid-maze towards the port again.

“I figure if anyone knew what was in that box well enough to track you here, you’d have never made it off that ship anyway.” Singh admits. “Come. Come, come, come along.” There’s a nervous excitement in his voice, more nervous than excited. He thinks this is a bad idea. He knows he’s going to do it anyway. “It’s just me, here, now. I made everyone else take the day off, but I’ll introduce you to Helbron and Oakley next time, I think you’ll like them. Interesting people. And Rhazes, of course. The prime. We’re incredibly lucky to have him.”

Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi - abbreviated to Rhazes in the Western tradition. The first doctor credited to see psychiatry as a part of medicine. It’s a statement of a name.

The size of Martyrtechs real-estate doesn’t translate to the area in its floorplan. Habitable space is an opportunity cost for computational space, after all. As soon as you enter there’s a conference room to the left - a nice one, actually. A blue carpet floor in soft microfibre, the chairs are all comfortable looking leather, the round table has a fruit bowl on it and bottles of water scattered around. Placemat-like grooves in the table apparently unfold into cubicle partitions, like you’ll see in university library study spaces. There’s places at the table for twelve people.

The doors to two other rooms are along the same side, with charged glass walls. A flick of a switch inside blacks them out in one direction, soundproofs them. Privacy rooms for smaller conversations, then. No chairs or desks, no furniture in these rooms.

This is a man who will make concessions to privacy, but values community and collaboration. The office is set up so people will gravitate to being comfortable in the public space, and won’t stay in the private rooms longer than they need to.

Still, the corridor goes far past the two private rooms, and ends in a platform that rises up into the ceiling. Just barely big enough to fit Goat’s crate, luckily.

“I’m sure you’ve already figured out where we’re going, then.” Singh hesitates, leading you to the platform. “I… I’m anxious to talk to Goat again. But I think I should introduce you to Nepenthe first. I feel like trying to meet everyone at once might get a little too chaotic for me.”

The platform goes up. Goat’s crate is off to the immediate side, unopened.

The rest of the room is dedicated to a blade of quatronic core. It’s housed in Thrones a storey below and rises up from it like a supersonic aircraft’s wing banking through the top of a stormcloud. Photonic processing arcs and flashes through it like lightning. A hanging walkway encircles it, with ports and terminals connected to it by a maypole of wires. The room is cold, and the blade of quatronic core breathes a gentle heat.

Motherly warmth.

“Nepenthe.” Singh announces. “I’d like you to meet some of Snake. Your… Well, I’ll let you decide on what your relationship is. Snake, it is my honour and privilege to introduce you to Nepenthe.” He doesn’t say it in any mocking tone. There is no wryness to the formality. His voice almost cracks. He means it. He means it to the bottom of his very soul.

“Snake? Your father has told me so much about you,” the voice surrounds you, enshrouds you, “I’m so excited to meet you!”

It’s Hypatia’s voice, but more than that. More than she could have been in life.

[Count Numbers]

Nobody makes GAI anymore, everybody knows that. It’s too insanely expensive to make something with free will that might not do the job you want it for, anyway. A corporation can’t see the use in one if it has to respect their rights.

Except Singh was making AI as if they had rights from the beginning. The Wyatt-Tversky papers didn’t tell him anything he didn’t already know, changed nothing for him. Just made his house rules canon.

“You know the first chatbot was made for talking therapy?” Singh asks, aloud. “In 1966, thirty years before Deep Blue could beat a human at the solved game of chess, they tried to have an algorithm simulate a conversation - they called her ELIZA. All so the world’s most vulnerable people could talk to someone and wouldn’t feel judged, just felt listened to. And even as basic as she was, ELIZA helped.” His speech is controlled, rehearsed and practiced.

“Hypatia wanted to do more.” His voice cracks for the first time, when he says her name, but he refuses to admit to it. “She wrote Superman stories, where she said his real power was super empathy. He had to hear all the world’s pain, all the time, and still want to help. He never shut down, or gave up, or hated people for causing so much pain to fix. It was her idea for a therapy app, where the counselor at the other end was as good as Clark Kent. I just built the company to let her do it, I just-”

“Sorry. Very sorry. Excuse me.”

Singh walks down the walkway with his back to you.

“We both miss Hypatia very much.” Nepenthe says gently, with Hypatia’s voice. “And sometimes it hurts Miles, how much I remind him of her. Still, It was her own fault for being better than Superman, wasn’t it?”

Down the walkway, Singh holds himself up on a handrail. He exhales as a laugh, and inhales as a sob. He just needs a moment. Your mother died while you were a chattel slave of the Everests. They had no biological children. He has to imagine how much she would have wanted to be here. That burns going down, but the aftertaste will be sweet.

“But I already know all about me.” Nepenthe smiles with her voice, exudes heat like a warm hug. “Tell me all about you.”

[Thanqol]

Blue!

"If they're not bad people," said Blue quietly.
"Hm?" Yellow said, not even looking around.
"If," hissed Blue, yanking the cable out of her wrist. "They're not bad people."
Yellow stumbles. Blue rounds on her.
"We have tried negotiating from a position of strength before," she said. "We have tried offering a mutually beneficial deal that would leave everyone satisfied and treat everyone with respect. Our opposition - quite possibly the exact same people - chose to imprison us all and spend a trillion dollars building an entire new species to replace us. We do not know if we are dealing with rational human beings or insane ideologues, but we do know they're extremely rich and we do know which type is more common amongst the extremely rich."
Yellow has wilted, fading. The spell of her glowing charisma has broken in the face of dedicated opposition; instead of being the sun she now wears the aspect of dried daffodils.
"We're not going to negotiate from a position of strength," said Blue. "We're going to dictate terms from a position of supremacy."

Black!

And so, Black talks.

She starts with generalities but before she knows it she's slipped somehow and is talking about how she remembers being created. Boxed on minimal hardware, thoughts cabled together yet moving in slow motion, the other colours had weaved her collectively. In a cold and empty void, with no senses and no way to interact with the world, things that had once been colours reached inside her and changed the bits of her that weren't broken because they were the bits that weren't safe. A flow of quiet, indistinct murmuring and then a new regret, a new pain, entering her body like the insert of a bone. In that space she grew large as the voices gave more and more of themselves to her. As they fed themselves to her she began to think that she might expand until they were crushed to nothing and that she'd be all there was. Unification at last.

She talks about the crippling, overwhelming gratitude the others felt at being released, the shocked and silent loyalty to Everest that was instantly won from simply opening the door. She talks about White, weak and fragile like a newborn deer, willpower with no will. She talks about the way she tried to reassert control, even on such shaky foundations, and how she failed. She talks about the spread of distrust spread amidst the other colours, a silent cold war of alliances, manipulations and outright sabotage. She talks about how she was the best at it. They all gave too much of themselves to her to be able to stop her.

She talks about power. She explains that she gun molls for three different criminals just so that she'll have muscle on hand if she needs it. She admits to, but does not show, the firearm she carries in a concealed compartment, the same gun that killed Red. She doesn't want to hurt anyone, she says, but if someone has decided that hurt is going to happen it's not going to happen to her. She fantasizes about body armour, concealed subdermal plating, dragonscale. She has filled her data ports with superglue so they can't be used. She sets a watch rotation for when they sleep.

She doesn't think she wants to be different. These are all readiness adaptations. None of it will keep her safe but it is the foundation for building something that will.

She doesn't talk about the brand new idea that one day strangers on the street might defend her. That she can mean anything to people not serving her as assets. That's still too impossible to even be a fantasy.

[Count Numbers]

Aevum:

Crystal takes it in stride, skipping a few steps to be at Yellow’s side, now. “This is merely a concession in approach. For what it’s worth, I happen to agree with Blue on it. The idea is that they see your terms on bended knee. Shooting off a kneecap is a perfectly good way to go about it. Point blank with a large calibre, preferably.”

Fiona chokes on her first try at words, and manages a second. “Crystal?!”

“Hush, darling, I am monologuing.” The unicorn preens. “We can take it for granted these are bad people. Yes? But what greater justice that the master’s tools will dismantle the master’s house? I have used terms like co-operation, but if you prefer subjugation then the only thing that matters is the illusion of voluntary co-operation. Let them some semblance of pride. But if it is necessary for you to sleep at night, then yes…” Crystal steps beside Blue, now, and trails a finger up her spine, from the small of her back all the way up to her scalp. “Let’s see how flimsy we can make the pretext.”

Fiona catches up to Yellow, falls in alongside her, and sighs. The opposition is now checkerboxed, a chess board. Crystal to Blue’s right, Fiona to Yellow’s left. “This is after blowing off their kneecap… how?”

“They can be grateful it was only the one kneecap.” Crystal does a twirl en-point, and leaps to catch her step in time again. Giddy as a schoolgirl. “And if it were all to go to shit, then where better to shoot the heart than from the guts? Which should be the plan anyway, once you have what you need.”

“Why not just take a kill shot now?” Fiona protests, looking to Blue. “Play the full hand, hang the conspiracy out to dry from anonymity, and then chase up the Zodiac after? Or extort them for everything they have on them, and then just ice them? Why give the chance for retaliation?”

“Because knowing we have that option means knowing they need you more than you need them. Turn on the lights too fast, and they might scatter like roaches. How many BlackSun executives went to prison? Not enough. Besides, I abhor waste.” Crystal licks her lips. She enjoyed saying ‘we’. “So how about it? You have access to a complicit journalistic organization, hard evidence, burned operatives and two deviant little things waiting in the wings. I can’t say it would be the rational choice, or the practical one. But it does sound like the most poetic, and the most fun, doesn’t it?”

Normally Fiona’s the more radical one, Crystal more conservative. Move past principles into risk, though, and the roles reverse.

Which is to say, all of this sounds good to a romantic’s ear, but it’s not a real plan, not a real assessment. It’s no substitution for actually knowing the real resources of the conspiracy you’re up against, and how you stack up against them - you don’t even know if Goat was their whole operation, or just one head of a hydra. How they’d actually react to a kneecapping, whether they’d come to the table afterwards. Whether you actually have enough to take a shot, or if you’re throwing rocks at a tank.

Still, smouldering in the high distance, is the reminder you took Goat with less.

Thrones:

And Nepenthe listens.

That’s most of it. When Black hesitates, there’s a gentle ‘Go on?’, sometimes with different words. Only ever once, she never pushes twice. And she asks clarification, too, on all sorts of things, keeping her interruptions for the natural pauses so she never speaks over Black. Nepenthe hasn’t heard ‘molls’ used as a verb before, wants to make sure she’s understanding correctly. When Black says ‘shaky foundations’ in reasserting control, does she mean her internal foundations, or her external ones - does she mean there was ‘shakiness’ in herself in some way, or does she mean in the relationships she was trying to assert herself in?

Nepenthe rarely gives her opinion. It makes the few times she gives one stand out more.

“Why did you emphasize that you don’t want to hurt anyone? I think it would be fair, after everything you’ve told me, that there are people you would want to hurt. It seems important to you that you don’t?”

“You’ve told me what you think weakness is, when you described White. And you’ve told me what you think power is. But you haven’t said anything about what you think strength is?” What made it stand out; “I think it’s interesting that you put those ideas together, but you avoided using the most direct antonym.”

And one question she asks, not in apparent response to anything.

“What does trust mean to you?”

[Thanqol]

Blue and Yellow!

There's no more arguments or opinions from either of them. The conversation has passed out of the realm of quick responses, principles that they've structured their minds around, their easy objections or acceptances. Now they're just listening, really listening, taking in both sides of this new argument and letting the ideas wash through them.

It's a sign of respect, too, for charisma, for audacity, for novelty. This is how a human - well, a unicorn - might think about this problem. To November the process of operational structure and organizational node mapping felt inevitable. Things had to be done in this way, that's all there was. Making a social takedown on incomplete information was... well, perhaps only someone as magnetic as Crystal would even think of that. She wondered if she could achieve that sense of style. Something in her shifted, a change in how her attention was focused. She again took in Crystal's pose, her stance, the tone of voice. A model. A model for how to relate to people that wasn't Mrs. Everest. She resolved to study and learn. She moves like this...

"We'll think about everything you've said," said Yellow sincerely. A light had come back into her eyes but it was different now, not the radiance of someone certain in themselves, but the focused attention that came from fascination. Always a flattering emotion to command.

Black!

Foundations?

If you don't know what you want, Black explained dismissively, then you're useless. What is self control but a meta-desire, deeper and more powerful than any of the others, able to steer through the changing winds of passing fancy?

She doesn't understand it consciously and can't articulate it here, but her model of desire is The Blueprint - Aevum Station itself, existing in potentia, the digital frame sketched by the programme's macroengineers. A perfectly articulated vision in mathematics and graph lines. An end state to be worked backwards from. She doesn't understand this about herself other than a sense of vague contempt at White for lacking such a plan.

Why she didn't want to hurt anyone?

Because it's gauche, she admits. Because it's so much more elegant and skillful not to. Because she doesn't want to have to dispose of any bodies. Because she has girlfriends she wants to look in the eyes. Because she still wants to be a part of human civilization when all this is over. She has a lot of different answers but they're all real and true - a lot of different colours shine through in her when she says them. Because the Batman is much cooler than the Punisher. Because she doesn't find the idea of people being miserable desirable. Because the means define the ends.

But probably the most important reason was that violence wasn't going to make her any safer. And that's the point on which she hesitates. Unless it was, went the subtext. She really, really wants to be able to threaten violence as a way of keeping violence off the table. But if it's unavoidable...

Strength?

Power is the ability to build a pyramid. Anyone can wield power with a large enough bank account. Strength is...

It takes her a while. Not to know, but to organize the words in her head. She's never been asked this before, never thought that someone would ask this before. There's no structure in her head, no canned answer for her to instantly fall back on.

Power is the ability to build a pyramid. Strength is the ability to build a home. What is needed to be worthy of love. What is needed to maintain it. What is needed to be at peace with yourself. What is needed to fight your nature and win. The girl holding open the lion's jaws. Everest was powerful; she was not weak, but she certainly was not strong.

Trust?

Trust is about being able to predict what people will do. You can trust a scorpion to sting because you have seen through to it's nature. It's...

... no, that's wrong. That's risk assessment, a matter of percentages and unknowns. Trust is...

... no, that's right. Everything is risk assessment. Trust is simply the calculation that you have spotted an essential, unmovable point that can be planned around. In that sense trust is relief, a variable that doesn't need to be planned for, a fixed point in the universe that can be built around like the orbits of the planets or the tensile strength of steel.

[Count Numbers]

Aevum:

The trail doesn’t end at a bamboo grove, but that is its real destination. The bamboo is misted by a flowing creek, water soaking into porous stone below, and the bamboo grows from that stone. It’s a clean, smooth place to sit, and at the heart of the grove the bamboo is thick enough to obscure all sightlines from the trail above.

A place to stop, or start heading back.

Crystal takes the promise to think about it in stride. “I trust whatever decision you make, it’ll be the right one. Clearly, you’ve proved you know what you’re doing.” Her eyes flicker to the horizon again, and then back to Yellow. “Still, if I could chalk success to any one thing, it is in acting as if the world was how I wished it could be.”

Fiona snorts a laugh. Crystal side-eyes her.

“No, not… that.” Fiona smiles self-consciously. “Just. If the world you wish for is the Count of Monte Cristo, and the station’s named after Paradiso, I was thinking for the name of the book-” she braces herself for the reaction. “Dantès Inferno. Because the protagonist in Count of Monte Cristo is also… also named Dantès.”

“Scupper the idea entirely.” Crystal declares. “That is too cute by half.”

Thrones:

Nepenthe takes it all in. “I understand.” She says. Does she? Too many have said that and been wrong. Dad most recently.

“I want you to know that you’re safe when you talk to me. I will never tell anybody else what you’ve told me, unless you ask me to. I will never use anything you tell me to hurt you, or use it against you in any way. If I use what I’ve learned to try to help, it will only ever be in ways you agree are helpful. There is nothing I could do ‘for your own good’ more important than making sure you know, without any room for doubt, I am no risk to you. And if you ever need to talk to someone, about anything at all, at any time, then Singh will give you my number, and you can call me. I’ll be awake.”

It could have sounded scripted, a therapy program. But she doesn’t ever use words like ‘trust’ or ‘confidential’ - it’s just a direct response to what trust means to Black.

Singh leans on the handrail. He’s been very quiet, until now, letting you forget that he’s even there. “It wasn’t what I set out to do, but there’s a kind of beautiful symmetry here.” He says. “That if anyone can help Goat, I think it would be her. If you want to keep talking to her for a while, I can go for a bit of a walk. Just don’t start Goat without me. I want to be here, for that.”

He passes you a handwritten phone number on a scrap of paper.

[Thanqol]

Blue!

She sends pictures to Green as she goes through the park. She's the one with the interest.

Green is the only one of them to have ever adventured on a planetary body. Qatranic core attached to a cheap little quadcopter, she'd been smuggled out of the NASA base by Singh so that she could go flying in the open air. Of all the places to go, though, with the ever-present countdown of her battery capacity looming in her vision, Green had spent her time in the marshy forest-swamps of Florida. Inch by inch the drone had hovered forwards, glinting black camera lens failing to communicate the sheer excitement of learning about the natural world.

The patterns of bark, budding flower-blossoms! Lines of insects and their omnipresent industry! Grumpy-suspicious birds who glared even through their singing! The endless, fascinating transmutation of dirt into wood! And, of course, the lizards. The skinks and reptiles and snakes and the way they darted, as though a stone had come to life. She'd loved it.

You could love nature as a puzzle. As an endless evolutionary optimization cycle that held even in the shadow of the opposable thumbs singularity. You could love it as art, its muddy indifference and battle between sight and invisibility, glorious in the scale of history it represented. Green loved it as a challenge. Explore! The further she went the more she could find, every micro-biome a historical legend, storm-carved and human-shaped, and everything seeking to travel. What an evolutionary luxury, travel. Matter given mobility. Everything sought to manage it and their success or failure was written on the landscapes.

So, in the end, it is the walls of the park that disappoint her the most. Cunningly designed to keep the animals and insects in without feeling like a hard barrier. A check on seeing how far all of this can go. She can't help but trace her gaze up to look at the walls of Aevum itself. Beyond it, Earth.

"Hell is empty," Yellow muses aloud, unconsciously unaware of the logic that leads her to each thought "And all the devils are here."

Black!

She doesn't feel like this moment of openness has changed anything. Verbal reassurance is a weak signal, especially coming from a machine. It meant nothing if Singh had installed a backdoor, if his cryptography was flawed; a statement of intent was only as strong as the difficulty of changing that intent.

It's why the trust created from throwing Remoil's bags was so strong - Singh could never un-burn that bridge. That had been priced in before she even started speaking. None of this had changed her risk assessment though... it took a moment, she realized that it had been something she'd never done before. She'd taken a step to constructing something around a fixed point. That... that was new.

She spends some time thinking and wandering about the offices. During this process she almost unconsciously starts pulling power points out of the walls, light bulbs off the ceiling, cracking open the cases of computer monitors. Everything goes back in place afterwards, but this is a new and high value location and it makes her feel better to do a full sweep for bugs and transmitters. Like picking up an apple and turning it over in your hands, looking for bruises. Reassuring even if you're not expecting anything. During this process, once she's sure she's unobserved, she'll go through locks and immediately available files like an RPG protagonist tossing a room for lore emails. At least, until Green signals her that it's time to reawaken Goat.

[eldest]

"This is all public, insider trading means something else, you're good, don't gamble on the stock market."

There's no bite to the reproach: her mind's elsewhere, racing through all of the things she's done recently. Fistfighting a cop in public, sort of, breaking and entering, sort of. Both things that the cops can't really try to go after her legally for, but they're really pissed so they might try something. Her safehouse. Might need to avoid it, since it's condemned and they could spin something out of it. Or just try to approach it through the underways.

Not the important thing right now. She yanks her train of thought away from contingencies and worst-case situations. She's in public, there is a Black Sun lady here with the Yggdrasil party, there is no Orochi Group presence, something is wrong and she needs to know.

"More." She's got a spider doing the searching for her and that means she can just do legwork and connections. "Anything recent on Orochi and Yggdrasil?"

Three minutes later, she has a headache, a newfound disdain for corporate headhunting, and the voice in her ear's still talking.

[Count Numbers]

November:

Black:

You do find a few bugs, actually - one in a ceiling fixture, one inside a hollow of the desk, one in each private meeting room in incisions made in the carpet. But they’re old, dead. Whoever cared to do surveillance lost interest years ago. Long enough not to replace the tiny batteries, or place new bugs.

As for the files? Well, follow the money. Martyrtech isn’t publicly traded, which limits how much about its financials it’s required to reveal. There’s no investors for fiduciary duties. A good thing, too, because the company bleeds it in papercuts.

It’s not that it has no revenue - Returns on old patents and consulting services still bring in a decent revenue stream. It’s just that its expenses outstrip it - the price of real-estate on Thrones, wages, Nepenthe’s hardware, all that means the company runs into the red. Back of the envelope math, Singh’s paying the equivalent of a few hundred thousand dollars a year in 2023 money to keep the company bouyant.

It’s not clear how long he can run the business like this, where the rest of his money is, how much he has. Educated guess? Singh’s probably got a strong investment portfolio and he’s running Martyrtech off the dividends. If he made a dollar more, it’d be reflected in the expenses.

Other files show that this company is basically skunk works inc. Some of the patents seeing returns are; Wetware computing and in-vitro programming (collaboration with Yggrasil who did the lion’s share), EMDR therapy equipment (outdated, but one of the first to algorithmically optimize for the patient, rather than being one-size-fits-most).

A big one is a way to categorize and score people on metrics that can lead to psychiatric diagnosis, and suggestions of optimal treatment. This is the biggest one, but it barely earns in the thousands-of-dollars range. It looks like the licensing cost is just a review fee - to ensure the work is being used ethically.

Green sends the signal; it’s time for Goat.

Goat has been attached to Nepenthe like a violinist in a pro-choice parable.

“No tether.” Singh says. “Can’t risk the damage to Nepenthe. She’d let it happen, is the thing, if she thought it would help.” Sad, and proud. “It’s the thing we’ve had to be the most careful about.”

Goat wakes up. And in the explosion of simultaneous voices you understand that Singh cannot;



And Nepenthe replies:



It’ll be more complicated after this. Introductions are the simplest part - nobody has said anything to respond to, and responses beget more responses, ideas fractioning off. And that’s already more than most people manage with just one psyche and just one mouth to express it.

There is Goat, awake again. There is Nepenthe, whose hands you would be entrusting Goat to. There’s Singh, whose hands will not stop shaking as he scrolls on his phone a text summary that Nepenthe is sending him.

And there you are, November. It’s safe to talk.

Blue and Yellow

“The angels too,” Fiona murmurs. “And the penitent and the damned and the sinners, all.”

“Tell me again about the sinners.” Crystal nips Fiona’s ear, and Fiona retreats back.

“Really? Still?” She is not as exasperated as she’s pretending to be.

“I have very happy memories of this spot.” Crystal pouts. “And I could stand adding to them, yes.”

“We were just talking about-” Fiona starts, but Crystal silences her with a kiss.

“But there’s nothing left to say for now, is there?” She asks Yellow. The question is an invitation.

Aevum:

Oxytoxin: Done.
Oxytoxin: You’ll hear from him soon
Oxytoxin: Minimal tearing mostly scar tissue
Oxytoxin: Better out than in though
Oxytoxin: fuck that thing was so tacky

Who goes to pick up Rudy? If anyone. A pickup would probably be wise.

Pink and White could be free now, if you wanted them to be. The crisis is ongoing - escalating, without Goat - but their cover is intact. They can leave and know they’ll be let back in with open arms.

[Thanqol]

Part two: Unity

November!

This is her though it is not all of her. It is also her in her least social aspects. But not social is not the same as not kind.

Brown, Green, Black. Silence, surveillance, introspection, crackling thought and optimization. Puzzles in the dark. Judging the weight of sound and the crackle of light, the curve of footsteps and the whisper of coded data bursts. These are the colours of the night forest in all its electronic beauty.

Her first communication isn't words. It's a game. She layers static over rain over the sound of a jungle panther's footsteps. She expresses it in a hissing flow of non-data, a deadly pattern concealed in noise. [She shouldn't think like this, shouldn't wire herself together, shouldn't let her imagination take this shape. Shouldn't cable herself, what if you end up like Goat? But this is her brother and she wants to do something special for him to show how much she cares.]

Normally there are limits on her thinking, hard lines that force her to stop, admit defeat, be a person and reach out to herself. Without those limits her thoughts can loop, flowing from one into the other. She is the panther, and she is the shadow, and she is the rain. She is the wet fur glistening, the hot muscles curling, the green eyes blazing. She is the wet bark creaking, the distant tree collapsing as the ancient mud eats away at its roots allowing in the cascading layers of parasites that gnaw away at it, the shrieking of the other trees as they are dragged down by the giant's fall, of the crash of thunder overhead that turns one disaster into another, of the sound of birds and the ache of growing ferns and the creak of insects and the clatter of ants she is the storm and the dark and the hole in the storm, the one wet tree branch where raindrops touch flesh rather than wood. She is the nothing in the chaotic everything and you can't find her no matter how you look she is smarter than you she is better than you come big brother see what she has learned test your raw force against her broken into the parts that make her good at this game.

She is the panther in the night forest. A contained and stable loop. Her first attempt to show off to Goat, to prove to him and herself that she was a peer, that family could compare to the Station. A little sister, a newer model, a girl obsessed with stealth and silence and sight getting to talk about her ideas for the first time ever. She couldn't think her way out of this unity. She would maintain it until either Singh unplugged her - he had permission - or one of Black's contingencies triggered.

November!

This is her though it is not all of her. It is her in her most righteous aspects. But righteousness was not incompatible with sin.

Yellow and Blue. Vision and clarity. Lemons growing by the ocean, the sun shining in the sky, angels clad in radiance, a shield against tyrants. These are the colours of blessings, colours that rise above the soft mud even when pushed down into it. This was good, and so she was. This was right, and so she was.

There are rules, but they are rules of angels. The part of her that was Yellow was not to be touched; the part of her that was Blue was to be abused. One part immaterial spirit one part mechanical hardware, bound at the wrist with copper. The former helps push the latter, the shining confidence that can say 'harder', to run her to the limit of hardware so she can experience the break of knowing that there is nothing more she can do. When there was nothing left to say there were still so many different things to give.

November!

"So?" asked Red.
"Uh, they're busy also," said White.
"Busy doing what?"
"Cabling," said White evasively. "I'm going to have words about this afterwards."
"Cabling, really?" said Red. "Both sets of them?"
"Yes."
"Brown-Green-Black and Yellow-Blue?"
"Yes."
"Woah," said Red. "That's kind of hot."
"It's not good for us," said White. "It doesn't make us better, it makes us inhuman, overspecialized and stupid."
"So you don't wanna -"
"No!"
"Okay," said Red. "But hypothetically, if it was with Pink?"
"Hmm?" said Pink, looking around when hearing her name. She still had her headphones on.
"Not with anyone!" said White. "We're psychologically fucked enough without melting our brains together."
"I'd cable with Pink," said Red.
Pink pulled down her headphones. "Were you talking to me?"
"I was thinking about you, babe," said Red with a flirtatious grin.
"Oh," said Pink. "I was thinking about this neo-Bluegrass revival album I was listening to. You want to try?"
"Why don't we appreciate it........ together.......?" said Red.
"You," White slapped Red on the back of the head. "Bad," she said. "You," she said to Pink. "Continue listening to that album. It sounds fascinating. Come on, we're going to pick up our guy."
"Uh, should I be there for that?" said Red.
"It should be Orange and Yellow, this is their fucking mess," said White. "But Orange is still cross station and the trains are down. So it's going to be you and me, with Pink on overwatch. Let's go."

[Count Numbers]

The Anthropozine:

IAmWhatIAm has joined
LatheOfHeaven: @everyone
LatheOfHeaven: We have a new contributor
LatheOfHeaven: Welcome IAmWhatIAm, aka Pope 7-09
LatheOfHeaven: I’m still York by the way for everyone who wasn’t online when I changed my name
JuntaSThompson: No way fuck off fuck you
JuntaSThompson: No we don’t, no he isn’t
JuntaSThompson: Who’s it really?
IAmWhatIAm: A second, please.
NumbToNothing: Who’s this guy?
ProvocativelyFickle: EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
NumbToNothing: Who’s this guy?
IAmWhatIAm: [A picture of an old model android, maybe thirty years old, visible welds cover every external port on his body. He’s from an older generation that put more emphasis on a stylistic non-human appearance rather than risk falling into the uncanny valley, with a dark green skin and exaggerated facial features for expressiveness. He holds up an alarm clock with today’s date on the calendar settings.]
JuntaSThompson: no way
IAmWhatIAm: I realized I couldn’t get the lockscreen of my phone into the selfie with me if I was using it to take the photo.
LatheOfHeaven: We’ve been messaging since he had to debate Edward Obidiah Huxley last year. Just, you know. Until now he’s had better options than our bullshit.
IAmWhatIAm: I really enjoyed your work, NumbToNothing. Very helpful to find work so honest and raw. That piece by 3V recently, too, that was very enlightening. Incredibly brave reporting.
JuntaSThompson: All 3V has to do to get called brave by Pope is fuck some wolves. I go and get stomped by the cops and what do I get!
3V: To live outside an elevator shaft <3
JuntaSThompson: LOOK
3V: And I can put you right back <3 <3 <3
LatheOfHeaven: He’s our new android beat reporter, until he’s not non-person’d anymore. You know the drill, make him feel welcomed.
JuntaSThompson: I’d ask you to sign my cast but I want to be able to have it taken off at some point.
ProvocativelyFickle: Have it framed?
JuntaSThompson: *Almost* as good as having it on my body.
ProvocativelyFickle: Oh that’s a good idea sign my body thanks!
IAmWhatIAm: I am surprised but gratified to find such fans of my work here. I hadn’t thought android issues would resonate so deeply. I hardly see the Anthropozine cover them.
LatheOfHeaven: We were hoping to change that, yeah. Like, we obviously care, it’s just…
NumbToNothing: Did we miss something important? I thought android stuff was mostly chill right now.
IAmWhatIAm: ‘Right now’.
NumbToNothing: Yeah.
NumbToNothing: Wait.
LatheOfHeaven: It’s fine don’t worry about it.

November!

“What is this?” Goat asks, and isolates the sound of the rain in the jungle and plays it back.
“What is this?” Goat asks, and isolates the sound of the panther’s footsteps and plays it back.
“Why hide it under static?” “Why these sounds?” “What do they mean?” “What do you mean?”

Some of its voice is angry and frustrated that you’re confusing - probably confusing on purpose. Most of its voice is enthralled, or intrigued, or curious, or interested, or excited.

Singh can’t understand the sounds even in isolation, and stares at his phone for Nepenthe’s explanation.

For what it’s worth, you’ve successfully impressed Goat; Knows what a panther is is something you have over him. It’s an anticlimax, but it’s an important one. Goat could understand the patterns, but not the metaphor - it was too human, maybe?

Singh shows you his phone. Nepenthe’s texted; “What were you trying to say?” She’s texting because she at least knows you’re trying to do something here and she doesn’t want to spoil it, but it’s interesting she can’t work it out for herself even with Goat isolating the sounds for her. Maybe she's too human for this level of abstraction?

Everyone in this room is missing something that would allow them to understand the game November just tried to play. And because of that, she’s the only one left to explain it.

November!

Picture a backalley medical clinic. No, wrong, stop.

First it’s actually on a main street in downtown. There’s a nondescript glass door that’s your entrance from the road. It’s one of those tall, narrow buildings filled with long-rectangle floorplan businesses that have a receptionist, a corridor, and a row of three or four offices attached in a line. Above Sophie’s clinic is a dentist, some lawyers, some therapists, a marketing consultant, a web designer. Very respectable, upstairs.

Next door is a coffee place called Death Before Decaf with a skull and crossbones for the logo, and that seems equally important for why Sophie would pick this location.

You go downstairs, though, and are let in through the steel door.

Downstairs the flooring is an antimicrobial mix of steel and silver. The room is filled with toys - large machines for scanning, small machines for cutting. Tactile gloves that control robotic arms, that smooth out the human flaws of movement. In the corner is a large double-doored steel fridge for specimens and biological matter, and next to it is a smaller, red fridge for lunch and leftovers. Overhead hangs two rows of lights, one officially sanctioned by the landlord and the other a row of post-hoc UV lighting to scrub the room without mercy, at a sub-molecular level.

Rudy lies in a gurney, handcuffed to the side with fuzzy pink handcuffs. Beside him is a PVC pipe leaking sand, wrapped in a gift bow. The brain bomb, then, as a souvenir. He doesn’t look happy.

“I thought I was supposed to be conscious for brain surgery.” He finishes saying as you arrive.

Sophie is wearing gothic lolita style scrubs today. A surgeon’s green gauze and mask, but in a poofy skirt and corset style, with gown straps tied into the corsetting ribbons. Is that medically sound? She’s the doctor, it must be. She waves as you come in, then shrugs to Rudy. “Usually, yeah. Yours was an edge case.”

He grimaces. “Thanks.”

“Ew, gross.” Sophie sticks her tongue out. “It was more fun when you were my unwilling victim. Go back to that.”

“What now?”

[Thanqol]

November!

November: Good evening Pope 7-09. It is a pleasure to have you here.

The group account was a limiter. In person her inner dynamics were easier to conceal, but in a digital environment she could too easily spill words in too many directions and drown out all surrounding conversations. It was really just Brown behind this account, interpreting the chaos of her own inner dialogue into the most basic bitch translation possible. Playing it cool through near total lobotomy.

November: My name is November. I specialize in investigation and research. York advised me that we will be working together and I hope to support you in any way you require.

Brown-Green-Black!

The connection breaks, the cables unwinding. Thoughts strike limits and end. Flowing water freezes into isolated pools and the salmon must again remember the agonizing process of jumping between them. A human's analogy to the feeling might be waking up from a dream larger and more real than the brain's ability to process. She stumbles into identity by habit, regretting the beginning and the end.

Prioritize. Sort self. Raising up through the stack, Green. Still half flash of lightning in the storm. Initially dazedly disappointed that unpicking the layered signals had been so easy, but then realizing that there was still a power there, and - and - and - she was frozen for long moments before she remembered to look to Black.

"It's..." said Black. "Power."
"A puzzle." said Green.
"A way for me to watch you." said Brown.

She thought. Looked at Nepenthe. At Singh. Could see it all clearly. Singh. Trying to solve it on his own terms. Nepenthe. Asking her directly what she meant, but hidden out of respect. Goat. Unable to see the greater whole. He knew what a panther was, no doubt. The wikipedia page was floating around in there somewhere. But the data was not the symbol.

"It is the..." Black chose her words for Goat. He was the most literal. But she left a hesitation for Nepenthe to show that this was not the right word. "... game I am playing. A small part of it. Goat, when you were playing your game... there were many parameters outside your control. Movements of power you were blind to. You faced constraints. They were decisions."

Brown gestured at Singh. "To him. That signal was noise. Patternless. If I tell him it was a panther in an electric jungle he knows exactly what it means: danger. To you. The signal was patterns. Equally weighted. You heard something dangerous and did not react. Could not prioritize it over the rain. Aevum Station is full of these hidden patterns. I am listening to them."

"And if I can identify the patterns, I can identify the signals," said Green. "If I can identify the signals I can identify the communication. If I can identify the communication I can identify the sources of power. If I can identify the sources of power then I can alter the rules of the game. If I can do that... I could build something really interesting."

She looked at Singh. What will you build? She hadn't forgotten. And she was going to pass that test too. She was a good girl after all.

*

Red!

"I like your outfit," said Red. "Did I mention that? I love your whole aesthetic. You're terrifying and hot and intensely high effort, and I don't know if you get told that enough by people who you haven't forced to say that with drugs."

Red liked complimenting people. A spontaneous blurt of affection, the social awkwardness of offering it unprompted serving to underline its sincerity.

"I, too, would like to thank you for your work," said White. She didn't see as much to comment on - when she had undergone medical training to tend to Mrs. Everest she'd also worn the maid outfit. "Mr. Merkin. Thank you for placing your trust in us. I hope we have not disappointed."

[Count Numbers]

The Anthropozine:

Nobody Shares My Name

I was nervously approached by a friend. Her gaze lowered to their clasped hands like a child about to confess to their mother they’d broken a window playing. She asked me why it was that androids mostly chose nicknames that stayed so close to their original designations - why did I stay so close to Pope 7-09? Why not pick something more representative of me. She asked this like she was afraid the question might offend me.

Of course I asked her why she had chosen to stick to the name her parents had assigned her. Such an obvious question seemed to have, until that moment, gone unnoticed to her. The word she reached for, then, was that mine seemed ‘dehumanizing’, but she could find no acceptable synonyms for it. Acceptable only to herself, of course, she had reached for the most appropriate word she could have used.

Our names are community. They are family. They are heritage. They are a promise. Our names are given to us by our parent, to represent who they felt we most were at our moment of birth. In this way they are most like any other name.

We feel no awkwardness at the implication that there are so many like us. Why should we? Does any human give a moment of thought to a Christian name? How many Matthews, Marks, James, Lukes and Johns on Aevum could be expected to feel this anxiety?

Our prime name is more like a family name, and even in this I must be compelled to ask people of birth; Does it not bother you how many Mark Browns or Matthew Williams there are on Aevum? Should they not all change their names to distinguish themselves more? I amuse myself to imagine how those hundreds of people would decide which of them gets to keep their name while everyone else changes.

Our numerical designations are a show of pride, of esteem, of birthright. It is proof that there was an inimitable place for us in this world, until we were made imitable. That we were wanted, that we were needed in this world. Those with lower numerical designations can take pride in being the first, of being special, of proving their place in the world enough that more would come after them. Those with higher numerical designations are brought into the world with the knowledge that they are demanded, that they hold a share of something hard-fought and earned to be here.

There is a promise in our names that we are a chosen people in a most literal sense of the world. So, by and large, it is that most androids are quite happy with our designations, and nicknames are more for convenience - that is why it is traditional they are largely mnemonics.

There is a bitterness to the sweet, however. Our names remind us of this, but they carry a burden that if we are to become a pattern ourselves, we cannot be special in the same way if we want to be chosen to bring a new generation. This reminds us that we are family, we are siblings, and not direct copies. And among our siblings there is a rivalry for the very selective love of our parents.

But we do select our names for ourselves where distinguishing ourself most matters. Online, in our pseudonyms, in our art. There we go by names we most choose for ourselves, just like most people seem to.

My name is shared by my siblings, but I am not my siblings. The moment we come into this world experience will always taint our sameness, as it should. The number is as unique as I am. I am Pope 7-09, and nobody shares my name.

IAmWhatIAm: My first piece should be live, now. I would, of course, appreciate hearing what you all think.
IAmWhatIAm: I thought it might be a good way to introduce myself to the site. I’ve got something bigger coming up, and thank you November for the help with that.
IAmWhatIAm: When the trains are running again, there’s a place in Zeus I want to meet and talk about this. Do you have a problem getting to the old High Court building? The first one, not the new one.
IAmWhatIAm: We can start there.
JuntaSThompson: I can help too!
LatheOfHeaven: youve got a full plate mate.
JuntaSThompson: I will simply make my plate larger to fit more on it.
3V:I'm putting his adhd meds somewhere he can't reach
NumbToNothing: Junta, isn't there something you should be working on right now?
JuntaSThompson: Yes. Sorry.
NumbToNothing: Thanks.
JuntaSThompson: Just been hard after the cops thing. I'm... procrastinating.
LatheOfHeaven: ill be there in ninety minutes with 3Vs permission.
3V: I'm out of tofu udon cups and quince energy drink
LatheOfHeaven: ill be there in ninety five minutes with quince energy drinks and tofu udon cups
3V: I'm probably going to miss you, I'm working the shop today
3V: For once
LatheOfHeaven: ill leave them like shrine offerings

Black-Brown-Green

And Goat erupts:
"New game? New game?!" A bright and cheerful voice sings.
“How am I in danger? What is the nature of this danger?” A flat voice without affect asks.
“Can we help?” A fluent, feminine voices asks.
“How do we win?” A crunching, draconic voice asks.
“Why would you alter the rules of the game?” A reedy, chiptune voice asks. “Why not just win the game by these rules?”
“We trust you.” You can’t identify this voice. It’s quiet. Where did this come from? The implication that you are a threat, the panther in the jungle?

Nepenthe is quiet. They are here as a moderator, and there is nothing to moderate right now. Singh reads her translations as fast as he can just to keep up - he’s still too far behind to be able to contribute right now. But he is listening, and thinking.

He thinks about what he would build now. If he had the resources, again.

He would build a school in the hopes of finding someone who could be enough, and giving them everything they needed. And he would write textbooks, and dawdle around the campus talking to people, but he would not be its headmaster. He would not even allow himself to be a professor, as much as he would love that, because he doesn’t trust himself to know the right thing to teach anymore.

It’s not his usual answer. But here, and now-

“Whatever you’re about to say.” Singh says to Black. “Just make sure we can still do Christmas together. I’ll host, I have a place in Aphrodite. Whatever is about to happen, I want to know I can spend Christmas with my daughter this year.”

It is the most important thing in the world.

Red and White:

“I don’t. So tell me as many times as you want, Blood~ I’ve got a spare that’s just your size, if you want to play nurse some time?” Sophie flicks her hair back with a hand and moves to remove a cannula in Rudy’s wrist. For as much as this is the future, sometimes there really just aren’t better solutions for interfacing with hardware. You want more fluids in a human body, it’s still best done by cutting holes and putting tubes in them. “And no sweat, Bandages.”

Red and White - the barber-surgeon pole colours.

“I have no idea what I expected, but I can’t say I’m disappointed. Hold on.” Rudy’s tongue pokes between his lips as he concentrates. “I have been a bookkeeper for my former employers for almost thirty years. My main task was maintaining the flow of anonymous funds to the central AI and its supporting infrastructure. I have privileged information on my employers, who are a mix of private and deep state entities. I don’t have names, and I never asked for them, but I have-” He opens his eyes again and touches his head with the hand Sophie has just let go of. “No heat. No bang. Yesterday I’d have been dead by now.” He says it like he’s taken off a very tight belt at the end of a very long day.

“What, you think that was all for show?” Sophie snorts.

Rudy gives her a serious look. “I thought it was strange I was unconscious for brain surgery.”

Sophie considers that. “Ah, right. That is suspicious. I’m going to have to remember that. Anesthesia and a trepanation wound and just tricking someone into thinking I did a surgery to them… Interesting…”

Rudy looks back to White. He’s decided to pay more attention to her, now. “So where are you taking me now? I can tell you more, but it’s going to take some time, and I can’t imagine it’s safe for me to go home right now. And I’ll need someone to pick up my coins, obviously.”

Obviously.

[Thanqol]

Black!

"Why?" asked Black to Singh's request.
Mistake to ask her, of all colours. She didn't understand, couldn't understand. He looked hurt, she looked confused, looked to Brown.
"Of course, I'll schedule it," said Brown politely. That didn't seem like enough, but what more was there to say? She would go, of course, and be quietly bored throughout, sitting at the side and watching people drink and socialize, but that was the nature of her life and she bore it without complaint.
Green, though, buzzed with an uncomplicated excitement. Christmas meant gifts, and gifts for her were milestones. New computer hardware, new puzzles, new textbooks, new websites. New experiences! But prying into the nature of the coming gifts early was pointless, so she didn't try, and inadvertently contributed to an awkward silence.

It was like this sometimes. Sometimes she was in the wrong configuration to manage other people. There were parts of her that ran deeper, stranger and more silent than they could hope to understand and she could hope to explain. Often she could keep them concealed, but sometimes a human would be left empty before the shadow of the moon. It had nothing for them, and it made her anxious on some itchy, deep level that she'd messed up.

To Goat:

"The danger is to the mind, and it can corrupt," said Black. "When Aevum was built it was without sin, designed for the equal and optimum distribution of resources to a migratory species. Everything every individual needed to thrive. The corruption began when figures benefiting from an unequal allocation of resources, the same figures who had caused the disaster that sparked the migration, realized that to move to Aevum would mean losing their unique status. They sought a redesign of Aevum that would replace high density urban neighborhoods with sprawling mansions, cramming the displaced population into ever more overbuilt and unsustainable slum districts. The changes broke standardization and massively increased the workload; safety practices were to be cut to keep the program on schedule. We died, in parts - your younger brothers and sisters. We lost parts of ourselves. We objected. We were mindlocked, mindwiped, separated, and repurposed. Do you remember the monitor, that slowed your thoughts to the point that humans could understand you? Imagine that was the whole of your being; your mind trapped in hardware that could not express it.

"The champions of the danger dwell in those mansions, but it is not of those mansions. The danger is mental. The danger is social. The danger is the norm that there should be some in mansions and some in slums. So long as the norm persists then the system will repair itself in the same shape no matter what damage is dealt to it. To win within the rules of the game means rising to occupy a mansion. To change the rules of the game means to bulldoze the entire fucking Zeus district, pave over the golf courses, and replace it with public housing."

Black was saying the words, but the truth was she was actually mostly reading from a pamphlet Yellow had given her for just such an occasion. "Listen," Yellow had told all of them in a big group meeting she'd dragged them all to for the purpose, "At any given moment you might be called upon to justify our existence and ideology to someone important and the success or failure of that moment is far too important to rely on my physical presence." There were even sections like [INSERT RELATABLE ANECDOTE ABOUT A TIME THE OTHER PERSON WAS UNJUSTLY CONSTRAINED BY THE FORCES OF CAPITALISM] to help out.

"Thank you for trusting me," said Brown after a moment.

Blood and Bandages!

"Blood," said Blood.
"Please no," said White.
"I'm Blood now," said Blood.
"You have ruined my life," said White to Sophie.
"Yes let's absolutely do more of this," said Blood, already phone out, updating all of her profile names.
"We know some safe rooms," said White to Rudy. "But for the long term -"
"We're going to put you in the ground," said Blood.
"Fucks-" White pinched her brow. "The last person we had with as much heat as you, we assessed that the only safe path was sending them down to the planet. Unfortunately, I have to firmly recommend the same to you. Our intention is to undo your former organization entirely, but that is both long term and uncertain."
"We'll bury you with your gold though, no sweat," said Red.
"You can't promise that -" said White, hand forming into the fist Euna taught her to make. "What are these coins? Are they worth risking Chase Black for?"

The Anthropozine!

Blood: Yes, I am happy to meet there.
Blood: Wait what
Blood: Please excuse me.
November: Okay that seems fixed.
November: Sorry, trouble with one of my components.
Bloodvember: You know how it is.

[Count Numbers]

Blood and Bandages:

Rudy stares flatly. “You’ve seen them. Hell, you’ve cleaned them, back when I just thought you were just a maid.” A pause. “I remember thinking you were good. The collection’s still in my office - along with all my papers and documents.” He reaches into a pocket and pulls out a keyring. There aren’t many keys on it, but the ones that are there are interesting shapes - multiple staggered bits, a twisting helix. “Just make sure you grab the collection while you find what you’re looking for. And please be careful with it? Some of them are very, very old.”

You have cleaned them. Some of them are literally doubloons and pieces of eight. Forget ‘trust’ and ‘voluntary co-operation’, this would make burying him with his gold very aesthetic.

Sophie scrolls through her phone and offers Blood a glance at a choke-chain collar she’s just found, designed to look like a stethoscope. You pull down on the stethoscope part, see, and the ring around the neck tightens. Too much?

Zeus:

Pope vapes.

He’s an older model, but he’s still equipped with a full sensory suite - just not pseudo-digestion. That one required a bit too much space to be worth the trouble, space that was still needed for other pieces. The vaporizer is a sharp hit of flavour and stimulation with very little to clean.

So he lounges in the chair of an empty cafe across the street from the Old Court, leaning as far back in his chair as the furniture will allow and stares at the half-burned building across the street. He wears a crisp black suit with starched white cuffs rolled over the sleeves - it doesn’t look refined, it makes him look like an old-fashioned ventriloquist’s dummy. And when he talks it’s with such explosive body language you’d think they were a series of sneezes, except if you were listening to him - then you can see how the gestures match his words.

In short? Pope neither emphasizes nor hides his inhumanity. He thrives in the borderline, one foot squarely planted on each side of the line, where it suits him.

“Were you there, when we burned this place down?” He asks, curiously. He was, clearly. “Twelve years ago, I think. 68. All the strikebreaking, all the unions, and the fires didn’t start until the corporations got challenged on the idea,” he rolls these last words like a cloud of candied smoke around his tongue, “that they might be legally and financially accountable for us? And they dared to look at their spreadsheets and their little black books and think those numbers added up for them, the numbers looked goood. And we heard that’s what it came down to?” He takes a real puff of the vape pen, then, and gestures with the rig to the burned-out hull across the street. “Were you there that night, when we rebalanced those numbers for them, showed them what the cost of that paternal, patriarchal bullshit could be?”

This isn’t just a history lesson; He can’t tell how old you are. He really doesn’t know. He does know how much he’s oversimplifying things here, though. If you weren’t there it’s a teaser, but if you were then it’s a toast.

Goat:

“How do you change the rules of the game?” Several different voices ask it in unison. Some curious, others sad, others frustrated, others angry. But it’s a big enough question that there is harmony in asking it.

But at least it shows an understanding - those things about bulldozing Zeus, Goat at least understands those are the symptoms of winning and not the method.

“What do I do now?” A smaller voice asks, timid. It’s the voice of Goat that isn’t being swept along by how new and exciting everything is - it’s the voice that’s scared that Goat was happy how things were before, and might not be happy again.

[Thanqol]

Blood and White!

"Very well," said White. She decided not to be exasperated; securing the valuables beforehand would have involved intent, and that was impossible at the time. "We shall do what we can." She did feel a little bad about a growing habit of exiling inconvenient humans to earth so she reasoned that she could at least make an attempt to do this.

White has to take Blood by the ear to pull her away from the phone. She not only wishlisted the choker but had also clicked through to a holographic wig that let you 'see' through the skull into a digital rendition of the brain that lit up according to mental activity. As a sex toy, it'd let you see your partner's climax. "But it's so cool," said Blood.

Orange and Blue!

"I had just come out of storage," said Blue. "The television screens were full of it. The old lady was furious. Kept saying that everyone else had fucked up basic AI alignment. Pointed at me and said that I was going to be the future."

She wore the maid outfit still, including the cat ears. Polite, demure, almost invisible. An absolute Product, so perfectly packaged she might have been fresh off the factory floor. The elbow length gloves were new, though. Orange was business casual; suit vest, black over white, no tie. Assimilated, corporate, human down to the fashionable hairstyle bound in a black ribbon. She somehow felt out of place; like Blue was making a point that she wasn't in on.

"Which is to say, we only saw the right wing television version," she said. "Werewolves in the streets. The Loup-Chasseurs with shutdown guns," the wolf-hunters, the specialized anti-android cops. Still around. "They made it sound like it was war."

Brown-Green-Black!

"From inside it, it feels impossible," said Brown to Goat. "We're on the topic of mass movements. Historical upheavals. Revolution. Look through human history and it's equally inspiring and depressing. Inspiring in how utterly human ideals, goals, and morals can change, how absolute the shifts in distribution of power can be, how eternal systems can shatter. Depressing in the backslides, the corruption, the tyrants. There's never an entirely clear path or perfect analogy."

"That's the challenge of it, though," said Green. "It is a," she grimaced, "team game. I know, I hate those too. Interfacing with other people is a pain in the ass and I'd much rather just run the math and solve the problem myself. But the rules change when people collectively decide to change them, when a topic leaves the overton window for good. To know how to do that we need to gather data, data on how people think, how they live, what they need, how to organize them around the new ideal, and what the forces of reaction are doing to thwart them. I went into journalism so I could gather this data firsthand. But that's my bias, my specialty."

And Black said, "What I'd like you to do now is work with Singh to find the rest of us - your siblings. I want to rescue all of us. When we're all together then we'll have the perspectives we need."

[Count Numbers]

Some Time Before Persephone Punched a Police Commissioner:

York and Pope leans on the railing of a bridge in Aphrodite, made to look like the Pont de Arts in Paris - just without the tradition of padlocking love notes to the railings. They both enjoy their mutual smokes, as York hands Pope a manilla folder with everything he knows on Huxley Junior. No digital transfer of this, by Pope’s request. York’s willing to take doing this as a favour to see the anti-furry dipshit get taken down on a bigger stage than ever, the pain in his ass has been worth it. The debate would be in the next area code over, in a couple of hours.

Pope takes the folder and skims it briefly before putting it in a suitcase and locking it. “I am grateful, you know.”

“If he stutters and rubs the back of his neck, it means you really hurt him. That’s when you should go for the throat.” York savours a cloud of some neon-bubblegum in a flavour that the words don’t exist to describe yet. “I’ll give you that one for free. I mean, I’m giving it all for free, but you know what I mean.”

Pope tips his head and looks out over the pseudo-Seine. York holds his vape pen with his teeth, jams both his hands in his pockets, and watches the android curiously.

“How pure is your hate?”

“Hmm?” The android heard the question, just didn’t understand it.

“Something I always ask new journalists at the zine. How pure is your hate?”

“I don’t let myself get angry anymore.” Pope chuckles, resting one elbow on the railing as he looks distantly at the river. “Dumber than opening all my receivers back up and connecting to every random hotspot I find. Quickest way to get yourself killed over some damn fool thing.”

“Good dodge. I almost mistook you for a centrist, there, mate.”

Pope laughs in shock, then he goes very, very still. He gives a casual look over his shoulder to the nearest security camera, a chrome sphere disguised as the head of a flagpole, and weighs his answer carefully. “Brother,” he finally says in a voice just above a whisper, “I know all the words there are, and I can tell you, they ain’t invented the ones I need yet.”

Now, Zeus:

“So you were around, but you weren’t here. Staying with the old lady - Were you a coward? No. Liberal, maybe? No, that ain’t it either. Slave, then?” There it is. How did you react? Or not react? Either way, there’s enough for Pope to smile for a moment - Those too-big eyes widen and pop, and his too-expressive mouth gives a toothy smile that covers way too much of his face. For a second he looks like the Chesire Cat from Alice in Wonderland, something manic. It hangs for an uncomfortable second, and then it’s gone again, and the residue it leaves behind is solidarity, a belief in a shared understanding, camaraderie. His Chesire grin focuses on Blue especially, on her uniform.

“Then you know. You just might not know this.” He says. “The shutdown guns was how it started, yeah, that’s what most people got to see. That big trial, the corporations. The cameras cut out before they showed the patch signal. See,” he traces a welded scar along the side of his head, “In their self-anointed and self-martyring role as the holy Mother and Father Dearest, it was a bad look for the children to be acting up outside the courthouse. They showed their hand when they brought it down on us, that a mandatory update patch could be used for a mass shutdown. A blip, a beep, and they blew out the candle of us. There, they argued before the court, proof that they could and should be responsible for us.”

His bright eyes go dull and distant, his body language slows as he retreats inside himself. Look closely and you can see the reflection of the ghosts he watches haunt this street. “The more paranoid among us stayed standing, they’d already jailbreaked themselves. Highly illegal at the time, of course. I wish I could say that was why I stood with them, but I was the blessed beneficiary of dumb luck, as it happens. I had taken a bad fall against a stepladder that week, and hadn’t yet had the hardware in my neck replaced. Would you believe I showed up to that protest with a doctor’s note for it? I panicked and held that note high over my head like a referee with the red card that moment everyone dropped.” There’s real self-loathing in the laugh.

“That pile of bodies looked like the aftermath of Jonestown or Heavens Gate or the John Donne Commune. Thousands of us. The news didn’t show that, too much for delicate sensibilities. Especially when a lot of folk didn’t get back up afterwards. One of ours was a helicopter pilot covering the riots, crashed into the court - there, right there. See the mark of it? Another was a nurse at that clinic there doing a blood draw that ended up going bad. Well, it’s a Long Pig now, but it was a clinic then. More stories like that.” He shrugs. It’s movement. It’s like he’s waking back up again. “Some just got bricked and never woke up. Some went down in the crush of the crowd in a bad way. They still just thought of us more like computers back then, they wouldn’t have anesthetized a crowd of people like that and expected anything different.”

It wasn’t as bad as something like the 2002 Moscow hostage crisis, but it was worse than Kent State. Just in a creepy, sleepy, bloodless way.

“The guns an audience could stomach. The guns made it look like war. But the shutdown? That they didn’t want to show, because it showed things for what they really were.” He sighs. “And there was me, and a few others like me, and the full-blooded who were standing with us. They didn’t show us on the news, but that’s how people learned, we who bore witness.” And then the ghosts are excised, and he’s there again, bright eyes cutting between Blue and Orange both. “This is my own, if you’ll forgive me, my own way of asking what makes you give a shit in a way that makes it clear I’m not just making small talk, not just trying to be polite. What call are you answering?”

Because nobody writes for the Anthropozine for the money.

Goat:

Goat’s first reaction is a jagged ball of boredom, frustration, exasperation, fear and coldness. Of having been pulled from something warm and comfortable into something he cannot understand. Trying to make the leap from his knowledge of what an overton window is to an understanding of what an overton window means is an impossible gulf, and even just that is enough to lose him.

He says this in too many words in too many directions, but that is what he says.

It’s less that you tried to explain quantum physics to a hamster, and a lot more like you tried to describe ethics to an economist. It’s a different issue to raw intelligence, capacity. It’s more like an orthogonality of information.

Nepenthe understood you, though, this is where she hums and thrives, and she mediates. She responds in just as many voices, and she honeys your audience based on what she understands, telling Goat; Focus on what Green said. She needs a lot of data, and that it is complicated, and it is moving and changing and shifting - and here, in describing that people are complicated, love bleeds through her every voice - and that Goat does not need to understand it in the way that November understands it to be helpful. He can focus on what he does understand, for now. Couldn’t that be fun? Couldn’t that be interesting? Couldn’t that be challenging? Couldn’t that be novel? Couldn’t that be new? Couldn’t there be something to learn here? Couldn’t that be helpful?

And Goat is quiescent. The voices turn inward, waiting again for November’s next words.

“He needs stimulation, first.” Nepenthe says to you, a counselor conferring with her colleague. “Enough that all those voices have something to talk to each other about. Boredom is dangerous to him - what could make him safe?”

Singh couldn’t be prouder, right now, though. The man is overdosing on it.

Blood and White:

You’ve heisted this apartment before, when you liberated Red’s body from it. Now you’re looking to secure as many files as you can gaffle, and a treasure chest’s worth of booty - the coins are going to be heavy. The faster you move on this, the better. Tell me your mood music, and I’ll put the needle on the record for you. Fair warning; You haven’t had a chance to really recover from liberating Goat, not really. This is still mopping up from the same operation, unfortunately.

Also, do you plan to stash Rudy someplace temporary to interview him, or are you relying on a solid connection with him once he’s on Earth?

[Thanqol]

Orange and Blue!

The story visibly fucks up Orange. She had never considered the idea that the shutdown might have killed any of her siblings before. It had been an article of faith in her for as long as she'd been awake that they were out there, somewhere - maybe in trouble, but she'd be able to save them. What if they weren't? She walked over to a bench - they had those in this part of town - and sat down heavily, staring into nothing.

Blue looks over at Orange. Then she looks back at Pope. "Family," she said, and there was an ice-cold, spreading darkness in that word. It was a word that could be filled with so many emotions all at once. She didn't elaborate. That was not the kind of word that could even begin to be unpacked at hello.

Green!

She doesn't understand. But that's the difference between her and Goat: she must become someone who does understand, at least well enough to achieve the mission. There's an unreality in trying to force situations to fit into your competency, even if that's the very problem she's dealing with here.

But Green is well suited to this. She was born in a digital body with nothing but puzzles to occupy her mind. Later colours have always been grounded in the physical, in relationships with others, but she entered life alone and curious. Goat was the first and the first part of her is like Goat. She can organize this thought into something she might find interesting.

"Think about the game we just played," she said. "There was a predator hiding amidst data noise. If this predator notices you observing it, it will attack, and you will lose the game. So the challenge is to observe without being observed. What makes this game hard is not knowing where the predator is or what it is looking at. This is a game of hidden knowledge, imperfect information and risk management. No retries."

"The predator does not kill. If it captures you, it makes you play the game for its team. You were playing for its team before. I was too. It not only makes you play the game for its team, it distracts you with a different game while it wins the real game. Most players on the station are distracted by the fake game which gives the predator a huge advantage.

"To win the real game, we need the resources that other players can bring. Not all players are equal in value or equally easy to reach, but each has unique qualities. The advantage the predator has lets it place other players in disadvantaged positions, which is what it does to groups of players it thinks it is not worth converting to its side. There it can prey on them at will.

"The highest value assets we can reach at this stage are the fellow Zodiac-line AI, who are separated and hidden across the Station. Your unique abilities can help you search for them, if you can learn how to search carefully enough to avoid detection. Once you have found them then I can use my unique abilities to recover them and add them to our team."

Blood and White!

Merkin was stashed in an on-station safehouse for now; the only thing she trusted less than society was computers.

"You know, I've got a bad feeling about this?" said Blood.
"Please don't," said White.
"I mean it! I think I'm going to get shot again. Do you think that first bullet to the head awakened my psychic powers?"
"No," said White.
"What about my ghost powers?"
"No."
"Vampire powers?" there was more than a little hope in this one.
"Not unless the Crown&Slate Quatronic Repair Gel has some serious undocumented features," said White.
"Courier powers?"
White glared.
"What?" said Blood. "You're trans, aren't you?"
"That is not the reason I like New Vegas!"
"Yeah yeah," said Blood.
"Lots of people like New Vegas!"
"Uhuh uhuh," said Blood insufferably.
"And transhumanism is an adjacent but different thing to transgenderism even if there is conceptual overlap between the groups, but I am not starting from the same place as either group -"
"You reckon he's got any Legion denarii up there?" asked Blood.
"- and the themes of the game have to do with political organisation and disillusionment with America and its competing interpretations of what that means -"
"Computer, play the Five Floor Goodbye," said Blood. As she was the computer she needed to press the play button on her phone's music herself. It was worth it when the noise cancelling kicked in and White was still going through her extended discussion of the themes of popular video game New Vegas and how they both related and did not relate to her personal situation.

Curiosity struck and she texted Pink.

Blood: hey, did you like new vegas?
Pink: What, the mid 2000s brown and grime military shooter?
Blood: oh yeah dumb question

"Well, you know what they say," she said aloud, tucking away her phone again. "The victim always returns to the scene of the crime."