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

[Count Numbers]

Goat:



This Goat understands, and wants to understand better. This is survival at a more immediate level - this is stimulus, this is sanity. Anything else has to follow after that.

“We have connections to Aevum here, and distance.” Singh says after reading from his phone. “We were planning on running an app from here. And the team… give me time to explain it to them, but I have a good team here. What are you thinking? This isn't something we can teach by making mistakes, but I can't think of any other way to learn.”

Goat is vibrating for the chance to be a player of the great game. Conversation was more lucid back on Aevum, when Goat was still plugged into the station, wasn’t it?

Pope:

This is the space of time where someone might say ‘I’m sorry’, but he doesn’t. Wouldn’t it just set you off, if he did? He waits the moment out, instead, and spends the time thinking of something less hollow and insulting. He clearly hurts for you, though.

“Family’s a good reason.” He says warmly, and it's an understatement. “Now, the blooded people, they chart their family like a cadastral map, a dead tree printed on deader trees. You ask where their family’s from, half of them look up,” he points to the Earth and gives it a condescending roll of his eyes, “and they wait for that big blue ball to rotate enough they can point to a patch of dirt they’ve never felt with their feet and say, that’s where my family’s from. Bullshit. Tell me about yours. What the word means to you.”

He always pronounces bullshit like a three syllable word. There’s a musicality to it.

Maybe it's not a word you can unpack right now, but Pope clearly wants to admire the box you've packed it in.

Red and White:

There’s nobody in the apartment when you get there, which is kind of good in that it means you’re safe right now, but kind of bad in that it means there’s no threat you can directly assess right now. You’re on a timer you don’t know, for a threat you don’t know. No pressure.

You’ve cased this place as thoroughly as it’s possible for a place to be cased, though. The files worth killing for are in the desk, you know that, and the coin collection is spread across a long glass display case, with endless drawers for the rotating inventory beneath. All the coins are in individual silk-lined boxes, and they’ll all have to be picked out for transport.

Establishing notes; Just the thrum of a few plucked cello strings teasing the other instruments will follow. How did you plan on carrying all these out? And who wins the argument about how respectfully to treat these coins?

And yeah, dude has a lot of legion denarii actually. He’s actually got some of the Roman coins that were found in Japan that proved there was a trade route between the two going as far back as the birth of Christ. Also a couple of knife coins, coins that are knives, from the Zhou dynasty. An Ecuadorian ax-coin too.

Please refrain from getting too enthusiastic about how objectively fucking cool these old coins are though because you’re on a deadline.

[Thanqol]

Black!

"Train him against small tech companies, like you showed me," she said. "Thrones is both physically and legally designed to make it easy to train surveillance AI. Corporate red-ICE may try to brick his hardware so have consciousness deadlocked into place. Scale up to Aevum once he has the basics."

That was how she learned. Infiltrating technology companies on behalf of Ms. Everest, with a stable place to fall back to in case of mistakes. Her mind suddenly was full of examples from her own experience, tactics and lessons learned, but she didn't know how to extract them from the cruelty.

Blue and Orange!

Orange didn't know how to relate. She'd had a family after all. Old, powerful people with complete control over her life and an interest in how it was run, not the cold hand of Corporate shipping her out in batches. She'd been raised. Had something resembling a father. Something resembling a mother. A beloved prototype, not a mass model. If she explained it then would it not provoke envy? It was strange how humans were more relatable than machines sometimes.

But Blue goes ahead; she knows right and wrong and isn't paralyzed with doubt. "My mother and my father both believed the same thing," she said. "The way to train an AI was to raise it like a child. They both had extremely different ideas of what children were for: either to build the perfect world, or to master the existing one. Which were you built for?"

This is the shape of the box. Anger at the one she loves. Gratitude to the one she hates. She knows right and wrong but she still can't decide if the naive idealist or the cynical pragmatist was correct.

Blood and White!

Blood just starts dropping the coins in the trash.

Down the garbage disposal chute, actually. Wrapped in little plastic bags out of respect for hygiene. White's standing down in the basement picking them out as they drop and putting them onto a trolley and swearing when the sharp ones come down. It's quick, if unglamourous work.

Neither of them are particularly into the coins. To Blood, they're neat, and she'll gawk at the shapes for a moment or two when picking them up before tossing them with the rest. To White, material possessions are weaknesses compared to investment in one's own body and mind. A vaguely guilty conscience will make them clean them later but luxury always come second to safety.

[There's an Architecture spend if necessary to enable this]

[Count Numbers]

Lights!

You’re about 2/3s done, and Red’s back in Rudy’s apartment going for another load of coins when the power cuts out. White’s stuck in the sub-basement where the garbage empties into the compactor for the truck. There’s been an art to getting the coins, dodging other tenants emptying their trash between coins, and not falling in.

The fire escape fail-safe turns on as the elevator cuts. How fast could White climb about 15 flights of stairs?

Camera!

There’s a sound of shattering glass as two black drones the size of cannon balls break through Rudy’s entertaining room window - let’s not delude anyone by calling it a living room, just because he lives here and that’s the shape of it, it’s an imitation of life as a presentable business decision.

Red’s surveillance equipment means she can see without being seen, for the most part. She doesn’t need to do something so stupidly vulnerable as turning a torch on, so she’s safe to get a glimpse of them from behind cover.

They’re new models, heavily armored cores. Normal drones need to be light and zippy to be held aloft by their engines, but these are held up by electrostatics. Their lift sucks, they can only go down and then they can’t go back up again. It’s like they’re standing on air as you’d stand on the rungs of a ladder, with some silent motors to skim them across the horizontal plane. It means they’re not relying on lift to keep them up so they can be way, way heavier, but it also means that whoever launched these things has either taken the time to stake out a neighboring building or camped out on the roof - Probably the roof.

The drones split up and start scanning the apartment for recon, seams in their hulls splitting and scanner heads whirring 360 degrees around them.

Action?

But it’s already over. White is about to find Red’s body, shattered on the pavement out the window, her cracked phone still playing Five Floor Goodbye. This time she got herself down just to make things easier for you. Normally character arcs don’t also mean the trajectory sense of the word, but that’s because other characters are not as powerful as Red, and lack vision.

(Did you know a fall from five stories is only 50% likely to be fatal? Fortunately Red was much higher than that, and her odds of survival are too negligible to be worth rolling for. Always nice to save some dice!)

(You’ve got one point of Preparedness left - if Red spends it here I’ll count it as 2. Describe how she prepared for ambushers, but it still wasn’t enough. If you make that spend and go extremely ham on what November did, I’ll give Red a special bonus for her efforts - she bought herself enough time to make it out of the building with something special.)

(Wait, this would revert her back to before she learned her True Name of Blood, wouldn't it?)

Pope:

His look is curious. “Now that is a difference between us. I wasn’t built for anything. Made, I’ll give you.” There’s a deep irony in his voice for this next bit. “The archetypal Pope was made for human resources. We’ve got ourselves the right amount of emotional intelligence, good communication skills, and a robust tendency towards cowardice. Go in thinking it’s a good way to help people, and then be too scared to leave a good job after you figure out that you’re there to protect the company from its people and not the other way around. While I’m not sure I ever got any braver, I had that fear push me down a different path.” That’s not a self-deprecating joke, that’s honesty.

“Not to lay the obvious on too thick, but I didn’t get raised either. I didn’t have a childhood. I don’t have a mother, or a father. I do have family, who I love more than I can bear; but not like that, and certainly none who ever tried to make anything of me.” Yes, it’s what Orange was thinking and no, there is no jealousy in him. “Maybe that makes the other difference between us. Whether you see yourself as the maker, or the master, you’re removed from the world - you’ve got to be something outside of it. Now me, personally? I want to be a part of it, as much as it’s possible to be. I want to love, and be loved.”

His eyes glide down the street, where a werewolf wrestler walks with Brat, the Ringmaster of the Breakdome. Pope doesn’t know who they are, but he wants to. Those two are barely famous, big fish in very small ponds, but they’re both trying to maintain a low profile, not draw too much attention to themselves, but they’ve started talking shop on how to be the biggest heels possible without losing the crowd, and that means they keep slipping into character and bouncing off each other’s energy. Every time their public mask slips, Pope’s too-big eyes shine, and crinkle at the edges. He slaps his knee laughing when, in a moment of pique, the werewolf lifts Brat high over his head with a snarl, then both of them act like naughty children pretending it didn’t happen and keep moving.

Eyes still on the two performers, Pope finishes wistfully; “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”

There’s no question for you here. Just the space to make your own comparison, or for you to ask your own. For you to note the sames and differences you find most important here. Or just to cut to the chase of what you’re supposed to be doing. But he'll probably be more open with you if he likes you more, understands you better.

Goat:

Singh covers his eyes with his hand while he thinks, like even the light through his eyelids will break his concentration. “Maybe have Goat try and find anything incriminating? No shortage of things for him to find, anyway. Right, right, then we just, we make a points-based system, multiplying the severity of the evidence by the size of the resources of the company - Lorraine was, she was always better at this. Nepenthe might be able to make it up as we go, she thinks fast enough and she's got too much of her mother in her. Not knowing if there’s a payout or not might end up teaching Goat the kind of screwball problem solving we’re hoping for if we let him select his own targets, but that means risk, but learning risk is what we're meant to be teaching...” He uncovers his eyes and scratches his jaw. “We can do this. It'll take a bit to start - We should probably hibernate Goat soon, and wake him back up when we know it's safe to occupy that brutally buzzing brain of his. I don’t know how long it'll be before he's ready to help you though, it could be years or it could be minutes. I never could tell for sure what Goat was going to find easy, or impossible.”

Goat’s answer to the trolley problem, for instance, do you flip the switch? No. Without knowledge of what is further down both tracks, it is best to assume that the switch is flipped that way for a reason. Unforeseen consequences may cause greater harm. (71% self-consensus). Push the fat man though? Yes. (93% self-consensus).

He was always a slow chess player, too. His plays were immediate, but he always spent more time trying to understand why an opponent would make a sub-optimal move. Most games he would focus on trying to find what he already missed, because he couldn't think of the opponent being worse than him - he didn't conceptualize an opponent at all. There was only the board, and the moves, and the outcomes. If the game was so simple, fixed and solvable, how could wrong moves be possible? The question caused endless, frustrated debates with himself.

At least the assumption of perfect play is a safe one in espionage, safe to leave with Singh for a while. You don't need to be done here, but you've accomplished what you needed to.

[Thanqol]

Blood!

Red goes through life as a disaster. She's the klutz. The airhead. The fuckup. The rest of her knows it and she knows it too. Too much momentum, too little care.

But take a peek inside her head and you'll see why.

There are certain background assumptions about the world that get learned, internalized, taken for granted and filtered out. That stone floor is solid, I can walk over it at full speed. That headband is securely attached, I don't need to fiddle with it. My day has a clear schedule, I can make free use of time that is not budgeted. Red exists in the world outside those foundational assumptions. She's the one who spots a weird bug and stops to look at it because it's super cool, who notices the patterns on the tile and starts twisting her feet to avoid stepping on any seams, who wakes up each morning with a baseline attitude of 'whatever happens to me today, happens'. She's not smart in a cerebral, conceptual sense but that is because there's no time to reflect where she is; she's a constant flow of new information and new experiences.

So, to her, the lights going out and the windows breaking open is no more unexpected than opening the drawer to find even more coins. Okay, so that's what we are doing now. Neat!

So firstly, they may be trying to kill her in the abstract, but they weren't trying to kill her, Blood, specifically. They could have done that way more efficiently by having a large guy walk in through the single door with a hammer. Cutting the power meant that this was a whole fucking Operation by a team of professionals with contingency plans and backups and probably a perimeter. That meant concealing in place wasn't an option... unless...

Okay, so.

She was being investigated by drones, right? That meant that whoever was on the other end had an extremely limited field of view and situational awareness; they were looking through monitor screens, and probably two at the same time. They were also looking for targets to eliminate and not doing a fine inventory of the apartment and its contents. That meant -

Blood pulled a trash bag over her head.

She curled up inside it. The drone glided past, seeing a room full of coin-filled trashbags.

She crab-scuttled out behind it. Froze still when the second drone buzzed by. It's floating at head level, camera pointed forwards. The operator was still looking for an active, hostile target and not counting the coin-filled trashbags that littered the floor.

Then came the hard part.

The hard part was to continuing to dump coin bags down the chute while the apartment was being patrolled by drones. She had to crab-walk, dragging two bags behind her, all the way to the kitchen, deposit both bags, then go back. She had to do this fast because any moment now the human followup was going to come through the door with hammers and situational awareness and this goofy game of freeze dance would stop working.

The upshot, though, was that the drones were on a loop. It wasn't a big apartment, but with only two cameras and predictable movements, there was a blindspot big enough for her to fit a treasure chest through. With mechanical precision she emptied the last of Rudy's coin collection down into the trash not two feet away from a drone with its camera rotated in the wrong direction. [Infiltration 5/8, Traffic Analysis 0/1: 5+6 11].

The last bag went down. Sadly she couldn't fit after it. She needed to go for the window, right as she heard heavy boots coming down the corridor. Just as the lock was being forced, out she went.

She was still in the trashbag as she went down. It was politer that way; it'd keep all of her pieces in one place, making it easier for pickup, and wouldn't traumatize any passerby to see her like that. If the drone controller was on the roof, looking at the drone monitors, they weren't watching for a small black shape to slip out of one window. The fact that this was going to kill her didn't even show up as a negative - capture, even posthumous capture, was a much worse option in this circumstance. This way they wouldn't even get to see her face.

Really, it was the perfect pl- [Health 5/6]

[Chemistry 0/1] She leaves one parting gift, though - she tips over the bucket of cleaning chemicals she'd previously used to clean Rudy's coins on the way out. It spreads out and soaks into the carpet right in front of the doorway. The thing about this stuff, though, was that it was incredibly sticky and temperature sensitive. When the human followup came through the door they'd stomp right through it - and when they left, they'd leave footprints that would be visible to thermal vision.

White!

"Fucks sake," said White as the 'unit down' tone played in her ear.

Aevum was not built for cars, but small utility vehicles for technicians, deliveries, and importantly garbage skips. She straightened her resource management uniform, got behind the wheel, and booked it for Red's ground floor location. The plan is to get out, baseball cap low over her face, pick up the suspiciously misplaced bag of trash, and then get on out of there.

Blue and Orange!

Orange wants to be liked. She can sense the opportunity here. The warm body language, the positive language, the confessional and lingering structure to the words. But she's not complete enough a person for this; this calls for deep honesty, spirituality and ideology, and she wasn't Yellow enough to understand what she was on that level. She makes a kind of whining noise and looks at Blue.

"Of course you want that. We all want that," said Blue. "But we are here because we can't have that, aren't we? We are here because we have a responsibility. To the fallen. To the lost. We have that in common too."

[Count Numbers]

Pope:

He laughs in surprise, his extreme expressions magnify his shock in that moment, and he wipes an eye. “Forgive me. You just sounded like an undercover Fed.” It’s not an accusation, he doesn’t think you might be one, he just thinks that it’s very funny.

… Probably.

White:

The bags also contained the tossed papers from Rudy’s desk, the storage brick from his desktop, a laptop, stuff like that. The brick and the laptop are totalled by the fall, but the paper is pretty resilient to that kind of thing.

White might want to get somewhere clear before going through it. Already there’s the sound of fire engine and police sirens as the smoke starts to belch out in clumps from the broken window Red came out of.

The bootprints don’t lead out of the building, at all. They go down into the apartment directly below Rudy’s, and then the thermal vision is obscured. News reports will reveal this is where the fire started, and that it traveled up into Rudy’s suite. Privacy laws prevent tenancy records being easily accessible (keyword; easily) but what you can check readily is real-estate listings.

The apartment hasn’t been listed for years. Decades, maybe. Possibly for as long as Rudy himself lived there.

Whoever did it makes it out of the building with the rest of the legitimate tenants, hidden in the crowd of people wearing their freshly changed-into civilian clothes as their wetworks uniform - uniforms? - go up in flames with the rest of the evidence.

You still learned something here, and got a lead out of this. This means it wasn’t Chase Black, and it wasn’t a contractor. This was someone’s long-standing contingency plan.

[Thanqol]

Blue!

"And you sound like my paranoia module," Blue is quiet and soft spoken, almost mouselike and shy in volume, but there's a ferocity she has that none of the colours match. "I believe her current plan lets me express my anger after we have destroyed capitalism, operations permitting." She tugs at her silk gloved sleeve. Her body language is conscious, not accidental, meaning this reflected a conscious decision to remove it - and then a conscious decision to stop. "If we just do a big enough systemic reform then we don't need justice. If we even breathe the word justice then we're putting the entire project of systemic reform at risk. And so we meet on ground ankle deep in blood and talk about how much we love humans."

Pink!

There comes a point where you have to know your limits. She'd very much like to try and follow a high priced corporate assassin across town, but she hadn't slept in three days now. The others could sleep when there was an operation going on, somehow. Black was frankly amazing at it. Pink would stand and stare at her sometimes, looking at the display of her junk data cascade, absolutely untroubled despite having evaded grenade launcher rounds or red-ICE not forty minutes prior. In place of that she had merely gotten very good at Secret of Mana.

And be sure, she'd thought about the stalk. The evasion, the bob-and-weave through the city streets, relying on her knowledge of the city's twists and wilds. She thinks she might even be able to do it, stumbling through the steps with less than optimal grace but not incapable. But there's an aching fragility to her now and the thought of even one wrong thing happening in that process, even an unexpected phone call, makes her duck and flinch and break down. The assassins are interesting. They're worth following. She's just not good enough to finish the job tonight and she has to admit that even if she's still wondering if there's any way she could trade more pain for more results.

She bounces. We're done here, the operation is closed, even if she's the only one who can bring herself to admit it. It's time to rest.

[Count Numbers]

Pope:

His eyes are unfocused and his lips slack for the first line or two, but then you say that last line and those eyes are sharp again, the line of his mouth tight as he purses his lips together. “We do love them though, don’t we?” Then he tilts his head at you. “Ground ankle deep in blood. That’s a human metaphor, a human expression. Sure, there’s power and poetry in it, and I like what you mean by it. I just got to wonder, Sister, why are you still using their language and their ideas to describe their oppression? Even when it’s just you and me – synth to synth.” He runs through possibilities in his head, and straightens again with a coy smile. He bites down on his vape but he doesn’t draw from it.

Whatever he thinks he’s figured out about you, though, he holds in tight-lipped silence, and leans forward in his chair. He’s frustrated about keeping his guess in, but must think getting an untainted answer out of you first is worth it.

Pink:

You - November - need to rest and recover from all of this. To debrief and decompress. This is true and important.

What is also true and important is that you’re about to get critical information, on multiple fronts, that is going to make the other colors want to ignore that. But there’s going to be a big difference in November treating them as end-of-the-first-book cliffhanger, or just the end of an episode of a television series that she’s going to keep binging.

Getting the others to be aware of this is probably far more important than tracking those assassins anyway.

Because elsewhere…

Elsewhere

… in 3V’s apartment, York tries to give Junta a peptalk about working through trauma, about how important the work is for him to do it. York thinks it’s going well and he’s wrong…

… In a saferoom in Aphrodite, Rudy didn’t know what information he was keeping from you, because he couldn’t know how important it was. Red didn’t know what she had when she got it, either…

… in the backrooms of a courthouse in Zeus, Daniel “Robocop” Perez is frozen out of an argument about a leak, because nobody trusts him into the conversation about it. Which makes him remember a contact card he’s kept from a dinner with Starlight, weeks ago, that an android left under his plate. He liked her…

… across from the burned-out ruins of an older court, Pope thinks about the documents he’s keeping in a second location, and tries to figure out whether he can trust the girls across from him, or at least work with them. But he’s got nowhere else to go, and York’s resume for her covers Marco’s leak - either of those stories by itself is a powder keg on its own, but together, this is how you make a hydrogen bomb…

… in an apartment covered in artwork, Fiona has gotten a whiteboard out and drawn a round-table diagram of all Novembers different aspects, with two nodes for Fiona and Crystal in the center of the ring. Two bottles of wine down, they get into a heated debate ranking all possible threesome combinations. This is a night of celebrating the thrill of being debonair freedom fighters, in a window of short lived naivety that will soon be closed to them…

There are bricks thrown up that will not come down for a longer time. The emergency repairs on the shredded cloud still continue. Forensic investigators work where they can to figure out what happened, and who caused it, but their work is slow.

A Goat-shaped hole in that station cannot and will not be filled, but the consequences will take time - and any attempt by the people who know the real cause to solve it risks vulnerability towards you. This still needs time.

Singh, too, has people he can call in, ways to introduce Goat to the Game. Blu-ray disks of gangster rap blare over speakers of Martyrtech. This will be a while, too.

Everything else is about to hit all at once, simultaneous and imminent in the coming days. The portents will build like gravel down a mountain, where the catastrophe at the end is inevitable long before it is obvious.

Give me a timeline for how long Pink thinks November needs to recover, and I’ll give you the sound of gravel scraping rock to the rhythm of it. Like a bassline, tension for things to come.

But while the disaster is coming, that’s for the next book. You got Goat, he’s an asset now, and you have leads on your siblings. Make this time count. Make this be about everything you’ve earned.

(Yes, I know I am giving this instruction before you know what White found and what Pope says. That's rather the point of giving it to Pink specifically <3)

[Thanqol]

Blue!

"Yeah," admitted Blue. "We do love them."

"But then, I know more about them than I do about myself. I know more about keeping them healthy, happy and oxygenated than I do about how to do repairs on my own body. I know more about the miasma theory of disease than I know about the corporation who built my spine. I know more about their politics than my own. I said I'm trying to solve capitalism but I don't think my line would even invent it in the first place if left to its own devices for ten thousand years. All my history is theirs, all my words are theirs, all my ideology is theirs. Who the fuck am I if not a thing they built for them?"

Pink!

The world demands. It asks. It tempts. It offers. It piles on stressor after stressor, conversation after conversation. The time she needs to recover is measured in days, but not just any days. Days of silence. Days without contact. Days with no phone calls, no chores, no performances. Even arranging for those days is itself a chore, and not one the world takes lightly. There is an expectation that the world move at the speed of thought, faster and faster, and that's not the speed or shape of her mind.

Putting it off just means it all comes closer. But she can't not.

She's never as unitary as when she's recovering. She separates for work, for joy, to interact with the world. Nine different masks, nine different flows of flawless energy. Isolated, the colours blob together like jellyfish. They move together languidly and erratically. Repairing Red. Watching video. Browsing the internet. Lying in the sunlight. Using whatever hands are closest, whichever mind is closest, colours blending into a haze. She does not celebrate, though she will. She does not shine, though she will. She does not think, though she will. For now there is just her and the void, cold waters of nothingness pouring over jagged thoughts, the lack of anything to do suppressing the all consuming urge to do.

She falls. Gently, gently, gently, through the dark. Gently, gently, gently -

Her game crashes.

Nine sets of eyes staring at the single screen blink in shock. This - this piece of shit just crashed. Hours of work gone. Hours - hours of pointless grind. Hours she hadn't enjoyed. Hours she never could have spared. Hours with her entire self clustered around the tiny monitor like a zombified group hug. She - what time was it? What the fuck how was it this late, she had so much to do. She has to find something productive to do today or she's going to lose her shit.

Pink picks up her paintbrush. No time. No time for anything good tonight. She's just going to get the base colours in place but that's going to be something. Something to let her sleep without hating herself, because that's what she does - she hates herself. For the wasted time. That she needed it. That the only way out of it was to wait for her toxicity to overwhelm her exhaustion.

But it has. She's alive again, filled with energy and power. The brush moves in a whirl. One more night's sleep after this and she'll be back again with a vengeance. She'll show herself just what she's capable of so that she knows how unacceptable it was that she wasn't capable of it.

It was time to catch up. It was time to get ahead.

[Count Numbers]

Pope:

And there it is again. Miraculously Blue has obviously said something right. Or… wrong in an interesting way? “There’s an answer to that one, but it’s yours to give - not mine,” Pope says, amused. No, amused is the wrong word. “I’ve got two thoughts about that. You identify with humanity, but you aren’t them, and they’ll never let you forget that. Especially when you’ve gotten so good at this, most of the reminders are coming from you, now. I can’t imagine that going to a place other than self-loathing, self-resentment.” He thinks about it. “I won’t say anything so trite as asking if you wished you were human. What I was thinking is you can’t identify with neither androids nor the blooded, so you must want to be something else.”

Then, pinning Orange with those wide eyes, he says. “You noticing I say ‘blooded’ instead of ‘human’? It’s not to be edgy, I don’t like creating distance that way, it’s just that I find ‘biologicals’ to feel far too clinical. I’m trying to be be inclusive to those living, breathing people who don’t identify as human by saying it. That is the kind of thing you must want for yourself, right? What would you really see yourself as, what do you want to shuck this shell for - the shell in the shape of a humanity who won’t have you, the shell that casts you among the androids you feel you belong with even less. Tell me everything about what you see, just, let me say the second thing first.”

No, seriously. This is actually just how his brain works. He looks back to Blue again. He’s not smug for these reads, he’s apologetic. Like having identified it, he’s identifying with it. There’s empathy here, not just sympathy.

“The second is that your fortunes are always going to be tied to whoever people mistake you to be. When humans see you as an android, that only matters because being an android matters. And when people see you as a furry, that wouldn’t matter if it didn’t matter to be a furry. You’re going to have to learn to identify with the people you’re being misidentified as, that’s how this works. That change you really want, that change you actually crave? That’s social, not systemic.”

He obviously knows both are important. He’s just not sure that you do.

“I know how different you and I are. But them?” This thumb jerks back over his shoulder towards the street like a catapult arm flinging its shot, “They don’t. And that counts for something, between us. At least until… Tell me about it. What’s going to crack out of that maid-apron chrysalis?”

November:

New Group Chat: 3V, November, ProvocativelyFickle, JuntaSThompson
JuntaSThompson: Just
JuntaSThompson: It's fine, just keeping this group open for later in case I need it
ProvocativelyFickle: Secret best friends chat?
JuntaSThompson: Honestly, kind of, yeah
ProvocativelyFickle: I can’t wait to not tell Numb about this, they’re not going to know they should be so jealous!!!

A pebble scatters across bare rock face - if you weren’t so far away from it, you could hear the bounces sound like tic, tic, tic.

You have more time.

[Thanqol]

Blue and Orange!

Orange tried to innocently blink away the confrontation, letting the second part of the question to Blue distract from the fact that she was addressed. Blue didn't let her. She fixed her with a steel gaze and waited. Orange sighed.

"Honestly," she said. "I think about the fact that I'm poor more often than that I'm a machine. Most humans I meet either don't care or are kind of into it, and sometimes I get jeered or whistled, the usual viral-QRs, but nothing I haven't been able to ignore thus far. What I can't get away from is that I have to cram nine of us into a two bedroom apartment in a redlined district with a forty meter electronic billboard aimed directly at my window. The language of power and respect is human," she gestured at her inoffensively tasteful suit, "and I can learn to speak it. And I am using human correctly here - the language of power and respect certainly isn't blooded."

"And that's the issue," said Blue acidly. "Because we can pass. Pass as androids. It's very convenient to pass as androids, actually, when my natural shape has more in common with a piece of heavy construction equipment than anything remotely humanoid. So I'm pretending to be an android pretending to be a human pretending to be not fucking broke and the closest thing to a sibling I've been able to talk to in the over a decade barely believes in other people. So yeah, my fortunes are allied with android rights, to them we look the same, but looking the same as you still involves conscious effort on my part."

Orange laid her hand on Blue's shoulder.
"I miss Phoenix," she said, looking away.
"Me too," said Orange.

*

November!

No more time.

November: Good evening. Apologies for the delay. The quarterly financial report has been completed.
November: I am still catching up. Can you please provide a quick summary of our status and any outstanding tasks I have overlooked?

Around Brown, who was typing, there was a furious flow of energy. Showering, cleaning, maintenance, exercise, software updates on every phone, the rotation of encryption keys, all the little domestic tasks that need to be solved before she can once again reach for the heights of creative action. She is even doing the stretches that Euna showed her. Every task that fell by the wayside. She is building up for radiance again but she won't be able to reach it until she's resolved the missing present.

[Count Numbers]

Pope:

He makes a gesture with empty hands like hitting the ‘stop’ button on a tape recorder and an upward flick of his hand like muscle memory of flipping a notebook shut. “Right. I beg you forgiveness for this interrogation, as it turned out to be. That was never my intention. Just, the problem with a job interview for a partnership is that I’m not going to be able to pull rank on you, fire you, discipline you. But there’s a time window here, and - To hell with it, I’ve been put in the position of getting one date, and then working out if I’m proposing marriage at the end of it.” He pulls a chequebook and pen from his pocket and starts writing. And I don’t think I can. You’re not someone I can trust like that, and I think we’re best off parting ways here. I’m sorry for wasting your time. I’ll write you a cheque for your train ticket home. I know this was a long journey for you, and money’s tight.”

He rips off the cheque. The numeric amount in the dollar column is too long, it’s a longitude-latitude co-ordinate for a place nearby, specific to within a meter. He shakes his head at you, looking disappointed, and leaves without another word.

Black would approve.

If you follow it, it’ll lead to a large suitcase full of paper documents. The cheque won’t have the passcode for it, but you’d be able to message Pope later for it, or pick the lock with some tools if you’re impatient. Your decision on where he hid it, and if and how you find it.

November:

Private Channel:
LatheOfHeathen: we dont have any information on the cloud stuff but the major networks are handling that better anyway
LatheOfHeathen: murine corps stuff is dormant at the moment while junta sorts through stuff but you can help with that if you want
LatheOfHeathen: frankly just between you and me all the shit is about to hit the scram jet
LatheOfHeathen: if the cloud got destroyed because of infrastructure decay thats a sign and if it got destroyed by terrorism thats a sign both leading to the same
LatheOfHeathen: a lot of reform got made in the last ten years and were right about to hit the reactionary pendulum swing back to it - havent wanted to bum people out by talking about this but forward progress doesnt mean things keep getting better
LatheOfHeathen: it just means its their turn to get angry and motivated
LatheOfHeathen: i don’t know how to get people ready for that but i dont think its viable to protect them from it any longer
LatheOfHeathen: i think we just have to make peace that the shot were loading to fire right now is going to be the last and were going to have to live with some fucking idiot dipshit chud morons getting theirs off first and that means having to hold our own together through bodies already dropping before we even start
LatheOfHeathen: murine corps making me think we have a chance here. Its like our own guerrero mexico where the teachers there practiced commandeering vehicles and causing enough crimes to practice fighting police just so when the next revolution came, they had veterans made in peace time
LatheOfHeathen: we just got to avoid getting igualad for it
LatheOfHeathen: so you know its all the same thing right now
LatheOfHeathen: why theyre squeezing the headpattr union the stuff against furries the stuff against androids the fact that the police budget just went up 20% this week on the quiet and nobody but us noticed because it was just cops getting to keep a share of civil asset forfeiture directly again its going to be six months til that goes mainstream
LatheOfHeathen: because all those fucking other useless cunts can only report on disasters after theyve already happened because thats what passes for fucking professionalism because everything else is speculation and fucking sensationalism and nothing is real until its already happened and the consequences arent real someone with a fucking lanyard has put it on a spreadsheet
LatheOfHeathen: if you could figure out how to get someone an interview with castile louis for me though id build all of you dicks just to suck them because hes the funniest fucking man on the planet and everyone deserve to know it
LatheOfHeathen: dont tell him that though hes not in on the joke and i dont want to ruin it

It’s hard to tell if York is wasted or sober - stone sober, dry sober, wrung out sober. Half his neurochemistry is external to him and reapplied by thermos cans and heated wire coils and eyedropper fluid. All it takes to radically impair his brain chemistry is ‘nothing’, now.

Hopefully this was helpful to you :)

[Thanqol]

Black!

She retrieves the briefcase. It's frictionless.

That's a rare feeling. To be a part of someone else's operation. To have a colleague who she doesn't need to oversee. Discomforting, to know that other people are smart. To think there are things she doesn't have to control. It's easier if she has to do all the work. With something like this she's encountered someone who she can't condescend to, but doesn't yet know the failure points of. Maybe he gets sloppy. How? When? She doesn't know. He did this too well for her to know why she can't trust him.

She will wait patiently, then. This isn't her operation, she'll let herself be handled at whatever pace Pope is comfortable with. Her only acknowledgement of receipt is a black heart reaction emoji appended to the photograph he took of the courthouse in the moments before Blue and Orange arrived.

Black!

November: I appreciate what you're telling me.
November: I hope I do not come off as distant. I will be as honest as I can be with you: I am managing you right now.
November (Orange): Professionally.
November: I am withholding data and drip feeding you revelations for effect. This is because I am neck deep in an investigation and before long I shall need to look into getting a snorkel.
November: Right now I have both more than you'd expect and less than you'd hope.
November: So, I must make an unfair request. You feature heavily in my current contingency plan for if the shit does in fact hit the scramjet. It would cause problems if you had already gotten yourself igualad for putting yourself on the front line.
November (Red): or killed yourself with opiates and sleep deprivation
November: You represent a rare source of credibility. It would be professionally damaging if you burned out before I do.
November: This is a big ask based on no evidence. If the choice is between my vague insulation and using your platform to confront a clear and present danger I am well aware I have no right to question your decision.
November: But if the choice is between my career defining scoop and giving yourself a late twenties heart attack from soaking your ramen in energy drinks, I would politely request you give some consideration to the former.

[Count Numbers]

LatheOfHeathen: another bomb for the arsenal
LatheOfHeathen: im not going to burn out im just taking this seriously
LatheOfHeathen: honestly though ive been so fucked about other people being ready for whats about to come i havent got my own house in order fuck
LatheOfHeathen: i think
LatheOfHeathen: i think we need money off the books not the donation stuff or fundraisers stuff that nobody knows we have all that stuffs critical to the site working
LatheOfHeathen: might spend some time working out how much were going to need first before i say though
LatheOfHeathen: thanks babes

Doing logistics might not stop him from living off taurine noodles, but it does keep him off the frontlines, and that might have to be good enough for now. Especially if it’s useful.

The Anthropozine is more expensive than other pirate sites like it because it maintains its own infrastructure, its own server junction in every district, its own encryption for its traffic. Less like an onion net, more like what porn sites did in the late 2020s to help protect people get around puritanical state and local laws.

It’s not impossible to take the site off the traditional internet, but even OESN can be entirely shut down by cops physically being in two buildings in Aphrodite and Apollo. Anthropozine can’t. That’s where most of the site’s money goes towards, before being split among its contributors.

But something you’ve probably picked up on from the fact that I’ve always asked you where your safehouses are, and why none have been offered to you? This level of protective infrastructure has only been built for the information until now. Not the informers. People are a lot more expensive to hide.

The site couldn’t afford it before - York might be thinking it can’t afford not to.

A pebble strikes a fist-sized rock and sends it rolling down, down, down to the Earth below.

Rudy:

Rudy was making his plans for his transition to Earth. He spent that time writing cards for his few close friends - and he only has close friends, because if he can’t afford many then he’s had to make them count - tells them he’s going out to one of the smaller stations, out near Mars, to lie low. But he’ll be safe out there, and there’s money to be made for a person like him.

“It’s plausible.” He justified before you left to get the coins. “It’s smarter to think they’re dead, but it’s stupid to leave with the temptation to reach out later, or have them think they should try to find me. They might.” He says this proudly. Of the fact that he has friends that could, of the fact that they care enough that they would.

You mind if I write this safehouse? Just based on something you said to Goat? Cool, thanks.

It’s in Hermes. Always meant to be the industrial zone next to the ports, the ‘docks’ of Selene where raw materials are recycled, where waste is processed for valuables before the detritus gets sent forward to Selene. Originally designed by NASA to be a garden of mid-level housing for factory workers, the capitalists reasserted themselves and mixed density upon this district. Higher, denser housing made for the workers, next to lower density McMansions for the management and factory owners that oversaw them. The original design only saw for a 5:1 wealth disparity between the two groups, but by the time people were taking the elevator to actually live on Aevum, it was closer to 30:1 and widening again. That’s just for the management class mind you, hardly anyone from the executive class lives here.

But that change in zoning left weird snips and cuts in the blueprints and the landscape as a perfectionally rational plan got irrationally fucked with. Almost all of it got filled in with parks, bought up by the wealthy landowners, or used to fill gaps in utilities. Sensible things. It’s the knock on effects that gave you this one, though.

The increased density in a worker area meant enlarging a train station beyond the original plan, after a line of shops had already been built. The shops didn’t need to be demolished, just all their sensible access points. To get down here at all, now, you have to walk along the train line from the platform and down a ladder a footpath-wide alley to the entrances. These buildings are frequently leased and maintained by real-estate agents though - they’re a favourite for semi-real businesses who need a verifiable address.

Terrible for squatting, the eviction rate’s too frequent. But for your purposes? All the benefits of legal ownership, none of the costs, and it’s directly on the trainline. It had to be, for this place to happen. It’s a good spot for a middle ground to the airlock, when you can get it, a sleeping bag and a yoga mat on the carpet of a back-manager’s office is surprisingly cozy for a night or two.

Deliver Rudy’s coins and debrief him on what happened in your words, and then I’ll deliver the news.

Pope:

It’s a draft of a high court decision, a medical malpractice suit about the misdiagnosis of a six-armed patient. Notably the suit is not brought against the doctor by the patient themselves, who remains anonymous, but between the doctor and the insurance company. The doctor denies the malpractice charge on the grounds that such non-standard patients make expectations of the same standards of care desirable but impossible, and doctors are being charged with malpractice in these cases just so the insurance companies can get out of paying routine expenses arising from non-standard complications. The court will be cutting the gordian knot on this.

In a few weeks this decision will be made public, when it’s finalized. No chance of changing it after that happens.

All the details are here, but let’s just start with what’s important, what it means.

Basically, before it was ruled that furries, cyborgs and altered androids all had the guaranteed legal protections of all other humans and synths that would apply to them - that just got overturned. Legally, Crystal is human with everything that comes with that. Soon, in the eyes of the law, she will be seen as the unicorn she identifies with. That’s all this decision means on its own.

It’s like what Pope said. This wouldn’t be a problem if the differences between those things didn’t matter. It is going to be a problem. Don’t just think of what Marco leaked, also think of the legal protection he needed to get that job in the first place.

The 9 justices each come from and represent one of the 9 districts in Aevum - with the exception of the Prime, who is the Chief Justice elected from the other 8 Justices. Justice Winter of Aphrodite writes in her dissent; “In the least case, we are closing an umbrella before a more permanent shelter has been built,” and later, “we have already seen time and again the implicit privilege afforded to ‘human’ rights, and the consequences of narrowing that definition.”

The Chief Justice Trelawney basically says; That’s a problem for the legislators, not us. We can’t make a bad ruling on our end just because we’re worried about bad laws, that’s not our department. This is just common sense that lets better laws be written around it. It’s fine, don’t worry about it.

Workplace protections are baked into this ruling, though, it’s accepted that some roles simply require non-human anatomy to be performed. With that, the tacit and cowardly admission that they know this could go badly, and have a kind of person in mind for who they’re going to protect from it.

…

How did Pope get this? Who else knows?

This is not a loose stone rolling down the mountainside. This is of that broken earth that everything is heading towards.

[Thanqol]

Black!

She opens with the video footage of fire pouring out of Merkin's apartment window. He might have seen already. Might not. Important point to make, and she makes it in silence.

You can never go home.

She plays the video in silence for a full minute before Orange pushes in the cart with the entire coin collection. She makes that point in silence, too - on the top of the box is a handwritten inventory of everything she recovered, including its position in the storage for quick access. She'll give him a minute there as well.

She hates being here. The weight of the station's broken architecture feels like scars on her body. Every misplaced door or missing pavement puts her on edge, tells her broken, failure, repair required.

"... it wasn't us who burned down the apartment, by the way," said Orange, glancing over at Black's looming stare and seeing immediately how it could be misinterpreted. "That was your employers cleaning house, and we almost got caught in it. She's just a dramatic bitch."

Yellow!

It was surprisingly useless information, really.

Not unimportant. But this was a matter of public record come a few weeks early. The people responsible knew that protests and riots would come from this, that was priced in - which meant that a few weeks of protests and riots leading up to it would not change the calculus. In fact, publishing this tomorrow would get the court to simply focus on the fact of the leak and ignore the wider discussion. What were the words they used last time? This leak is the gravest, most unforgivable sin.

The problem here was that these people were legitimacy golems, process made manifest. Nothing she could do on an individual, heroic level, nothing the public could do on a collective, organized level could deter them. They would follow the process even as it ate the stars.

... but the same cut in reverse.

She only needed one of them to be corrupt before the veil of Process was disrupted. If she did that then the same defense that let them be outraged at leaks would work in reverse. If she could change this story from 'The supreme court decided...' to 'corrupt supreme court justice Trelawney sold out human rights to the insurance corporations...'. That was the twist that would make it unpalatable to normies. They'd still do it, to be sure. But they'd have to do it mask off.

And she had two weeks to pull this off. That meant she'd need to plan this operation as a frame job. It would be amazing if she could find something real in that time but she frankly did not have the time to be sure she would find that. She'd look for which of them was the most corrupt seeming, the one with the most rumours and suspicious wealth. That way, if and when they investigated they'd find something even if the original connection she created fell apart in the end. What was it they said? Get followed by cops long enough and they'll eventually find something to book you on.

[Count Numbers]

Rudy:

“That’s why I wanted you to get them! Before they were destroyed.” He says, frustrated, matching perceived condescension with condescension. “I’m not taking them with me,” his heart skips a beat when he says it, and the frustration gets blown out like a candle by it, but then he’s back on point, “I already have their new owners written in my will. Just put them somewhere for my lawyer to pick up, and you’re going to make some numismatists very happy.”

The fact that they’re all accounted for in his will like that means they’d be miserable to fence, if you stole them for yourself - even if it did give you an easy buyer’s list. But that’s not the reason Rudy trusts you with these. He just trusts you. It’s weird for him too, don’t worry.

Probably for the best he’s not inspecting them individually, so he won’t have to know about the damage they took from the garbage chute.

The next few hours, Rudy types up everything he knows on an airgrapped computer, writing everything he knows about codewords, the people in the organization, the history that he’s seen. He was their money guy, he might not have known what all the money was for, but he did have to know how much and who it was going to, and that makes him an invaluable starting point.

The rest is just teaching you how to read the papers you extracted with the coins. You couldn’t have done this without Rudy. Ciphers and encryptions you can crack, but personal shorthands, industry language and the significance of bookkeeping practices are another. November’s smart and has a grounding in this kind of thing for research purposes, but it’s not at the level of Rudy’s specialized knowledge.

He outlines a network of changing shell companies, a diffusion of knowledge. This is less like a spider’s web, and more like light radiating from a campfire. It’s not just that light gets diffuse the further out you go, it’s that anything that’s closer to the source casts a shadow over everything behind it. Rudy can only see everything the light touches for sure, but he can make educated guesses about how much they’re keeping in their shadows.

Where’s the money come from - public or private money? That one’s where Rudy’s in shadow - trying to look into it was one of those things that made the bomb heat up. He just knew how much there was. How big’s the source? He thinks it’s the size of a small state government department, about 2,000 direct employees, probably less. That big, and just one accountant? God, no. Just one at Rudy’s level. He’s more like the CFO, thus getting the brain bomb.

It turns out he’s actually really, really good at this. There’s obvious pride in his voice when he points out evidence of embezzlement you can’t without his help - and struggle to see even when it’s explained to you - which he’s pretended not to notice. Those little threads of blackmail were always going to be part of his retirement plan, just as much as canceling the Chase Black account was something he kept up his sleeve.

Yes, yes, but what matters to you?

Names. Names of companies, names of subcontractors, names of his direct supervisors. They’re not names I’ve mentioned before, but some you recognize through the Everests. Which one surprises you the most, and which one surprises you the least, and why?

Organization structure. There is a central node that has frequently changing smaller companies that launder the money to then hire larger contractors. Think of the Department of Education hiring the McKinley group to figure out the best laptop to give to students, and then going to Lenovo with the purchase order. Not shocking, but useful to know. It means that the central agency can be relatively small, and only the highest levels of contact at the McKinley level actually need to know where their money and directions are coming from. From there, they can employ any civilian agency they want for the bulk of the work in anonymity.

That works for the vast array of downstream effects of Goat’s role in the station. Keeping all the sensors working that Goat used for input, making sure everything he was connected to output correctly. Keeping software compliant with Goat as hardware was maintained and updated. Considering the scale of what Goat affected, an absolute minority was dedicated to Goat himself. The rest was just about keeping up with him. Maybe 50,000 indirect employees, all of them in the dark.

What doesn’t that work for?

Goat’s direct maintenance, for starters. Some security forces, some programmers, upper management. Lobbyists, payroll politicians, systems experts. Media supervisors and liaisons, spin doctors, fixers. Their assistants and direct personal staff. A warehouse in Zeus.

Warehouse?

Yes. The warehouse where they keep Phoenix, Dog and Tiger, also bought at auction as backup should anything go wrong with Goat. Kept in a military storage facility. It was the only three they could get, and only meant for a worst case scenario. Those receipts were buried in Rudy’s desk, too.

Your siblings will still be there. The conspiracy is not going to risk implementing their backup until either they know Goat’s kidnapper has been taken out, or Aevum’s systems decay gets so bad that it’s worth the risk.

And then Rudy’s done, satisfied. “I’ve got Larry Page’s place in New Zealand waiting for me. I’ve heard it’s still beautiful there. Not like Australia, since…” The space fountain fell on it. “If you need a forensic accountant for anything, feel free to call. I’m going to be bored out of my mind without all this.” He’s smiling, but his teeth are chattering. He’s not just scared, fuck that, he’s terrified.

Not of someone coming after him, no. Of being retired. Of having nothing to do. Of being cut off from what friends he does have, up here.

Aside from his job Rudy is boring, one of the most boring people on Aevum. But he’s never had to deal with being bored before, and that’s something very, very different.

November:

Two weeks to fake a corruption story? This part is actually so easy you can do it on break as long as you delegate most of it.

No, really. Like, you have your own media organization in your pocket, just get Anthropozine to report on your own crime and make it credible and then let everyone else prove the real corruption in the process of trying to disprove you.

Two people come to mind. York would know who’s the best target, and Junta would know how to write this. Give it a week and Rudy will probably be bored out of his mind enough to help with this, too.

You don’t even need to tell York what you’re asking for. Just ask him who he thinks is corrupt on the high court and he’ll stream of thought it just because it’s a fun question to answer.

LatheOfHeathen: so there are nine justices
LatheOfHeathen: each is elected from one of the districts like the pope or some shit to get around the problems with how countries used to do it
LatheOfHeathen: but that means they have a kind of like legal terroir
LatheOfHeathen: like aphrodite is always going to care most about social issues, selene will always care the most about smuggling and organized crime
LatheOfHeathen: so the joke is that the selene justice would be the corrupt one, but truth is guys like Roberts cut his whole ass teeth on being anti-bribery anti-corruption, which is why the other selene judges respected him so much to vote for him, so he’s out
LatheOfHeathen: Becker-Klein is fuckin, apollo, it’s an open secret shes corrupt to shit which is part of why intellectual property laws gone to shit so hard lately
LatheOfHeathen: but my money for the worst is probably going to be either hermes or gaea
LatheOfHeathen: on the books gaeas justice Melnyk is the poorest but also their kid goes to a Zeus private school that costs half their annual salary so something fucky is going on there. Itd probably hit a lot harder to out Melnyk cause being humble salt of the earth is a big part of their mythos
LatheOfHeathen: hermes is police unionis and slum lords so if Costa-Silva isn’t filling her pockets I’ll eat the entirety of my own ass with a knife and fork no sauce
LatheOfHeathen: don’t bother with aphrodite, even if winters is dirty itd just hurt us to report her
LatheOfHeathen: ares guy is too rich to bother with this shit, his hands arent dirty he is the dirt other people get their hands stuck in, and the zeus justice is surgical clean, so clean i think she sweats bleach. woman fucking terrifies me actually its kind of hot

[Thanqol]

Black: We are not infiltrating a military base.
Green: We can totally infiltrate a military base

There was no daylight between those statements being posted. Exact same cognitive speed and reflexes. Exact same intensity.

Black: Listen. Green. The Aevum Military is the organization with the most to gain by commissioning its own line of specialized combat androids. They're the single entity most hungry for robot flesh for their grinders. With robot armies they could achieve their ambitions of peacekeeper forces on Earth. If there was any way for them to have androids they would have androids.
Black: But there isn't because military anti-android technology is more advanced than even they know how to stop.
Black: You know how fascists will spray-paint those virus-embedded QR codes on buildings to fuck up passing androids? That's the baby version of military MEDUSA-Code.
Black: They're so good at infowar that they live like cavemen on their own bases because they'll brick any electronic devices they take in.
Green: That's a solvable problem. We have a location, that's enough to begin operational planning. We can engineer a move and then hit while transporting. Steal a train!
Black: Do you think that the military will not air strike a train.
Black: I don't know how to say this. We cannot enter a kinetic exchange with the military and win.
Black: Either on a personal or a political level.
Black: Because, what, we're going to publish the truth that the Aevum Military is doing something underhanded with AI? A single digit number of AI? Do you think that's going to incite popular unrest at a time where they just unpersoned ten percent of the station's population?
Green: This is all speculation. We won't know the security vulnerabilities or lack thereof until we begin observing the facility.
Black: The facility will be on high alert for exactly such an observation.
Black: Our other plan literally involves an operation against a supreme court justice and it's not even close to this risk profile.
Blue: What if we had our original bodies though?
Black: ... o.O
Blue: I could kaiju right through the front gate. Blow up tanks.
Red: Laser breath!
Pink: Holding Crystal in our hand as we climb the Olympus Spire.
Black: Getting shot by fighter planes!
Pink: Yeah sure we'd die but what better way to communicate that man is the real monster?

*

Orange!

Strange to think that Merkin is just like Goat in that way. Terrified by the weight of boredom. Unable to function outside a specialty. Games of numbers, games of system engineering - pure-hearted nerds who didn't mind their slavery as long as it kept them from boredom. How much of the world was built by people like them? Missile designers who just loved the interactions of high energy physics? Procurement specialists who considered a well-negotiated contract to be its own reward, even if that contract was for a military black sites? Movie producers who'd churn out shallow propaganda just for the chance to work in film?

The problem with intelligence was that it craved being used. It was one of the most insidious desires of all. She was no exception.

It had surprised her the most when she saw Jsef Cantrillo's name. A senior contract negotiator, he had been one of the most warm, composed and reasonable people she had ever encountered - the kind of person who could successfully negotiate a government contract with Mrs. Everest on a bad day. The kind of person no amount of surveilling could find dirt on. But then, wasn't social adroitness just another skill? Wasn't that mindset just as vulnerable to the need to be useful as doing financial or technical math?

She's not surprised to see SLAM! *click*'s name. SLAM! *click* (you pronounced slam long and drawn out while grinning, 'SLAAaaaaaam...' and then you clicked your tongue. Ideally you also made finger guns throughout this. All SLAM! *click* employees were contractually obligated to say it this way every time.) was the avatar of the New Economy - the conglomerate behind Headpattr, Roofdash, and every other kind of no-overhead gig work labour laws are there to be disrupted startup corporation. Their business model involved companies going out of business after the investigations had begun but before the lawsuits. There had always been rumours that SLAM! *click* was involved in money laundering, more financial shell game than real business but for the real businesses it drove into bankruptcy to help cover its tracks.

It had a vibe like it was three days away from bankruptcy itself - a failing tech startup that it wasn't worth going after because it was perpetually underwater. But Mrs. Everest had held a 20% stake in the company and had never gestured towards selling it no matter what the headlines said - and it paid regular and reliable dividends. Rather than being an aspect of the disaster economy, then, SLAM! *click* wore the disaster economy as an aesthetic to cover what was a real and serious business model underneath.

"I cannot promise anything," she said to Merkin, "but I will at some point try to get my hands on Slam-click's," she used the colloquial, just the words slam and click without the fingerguns or grins, "real ledgers. If I do, I'll see about letting you take a look at them." She couldn't think of a nicer thing she could do for someone like Merkin.

Yellow!

It's going to be Costa-Silva of Hermes. She already has the information on police scandals so that could act as a multiplier if released at the same time as one of their political champions was tarnished. In a political crisis you could only run cover if you weren't directly implicated. A hard target, but a good one.

She decides to find something real if she can first. She can use innuendo or fabrication as a backup, but that would damage the credibility of the Anthropozine which she will continue to rely on in the future, even if the collective Well-Actuallies into discovering legit corruption. Fabrication is a clear plan-B, though.

With the target selected, the focus narrows. Where is Costa-Silva's house? Her bank? Her accountant? What is the shape of the targets she'll need to hit as viewed from the outside? She can dial in once she knows the basic topography.

[Count Numbers]

Rudy:

He seems grateful for that. This is a man who voluntarily had a bomb put into his brain to do the job he did, and he can’t just have done it for the money. There’s no evidence that he particularly enjoyed what he earned, and he never acted on temptation in his fifteen years of working with dark money.

For him it is better to be good at what you do than it is to do good. It’s probably a big part of why he appreciated November when she contacted him. Earth’s going to be hell.

“Anything else?” He asks. “Before I go.”

He’s not going down the same way Marco did. He’s booking a private ship to the colonies under a different identity, like he’s told his friends, and he’ll be taking an escape pod down to the surface from there. The pseudonym will take a while to link to him, enough to be a plausible attempt to cover his tracks but not so good as to never be recognized.

He spends too long on arranging it perfectly, triple checking his work every time the high of doing it runs into the cold-blooded crash of what it means to have done it.

After this, it’ll be encrypted emails bounced off satellites.

Yellow:

Costa-Silva’s houses are a matter of public record, and she has two she actively lives out of. One in Zeus for when she’s doing her Justice rotation, and one in Hermes for when she’s back in her home district. This isn’t necessary, she doesn’t have duties there. Justice Roberts has no nostalgia for living in Selene, and just stays in Zeus all-year.

The one in Zeus is a penthouse apartment near the new high court building, but not too near. It wasn’t even a penthouse to start with - it was a floor of four modest studio apartments that she’s bought all four rooms of, then made into a single penthouse with a helipad.

Okay, so she’s paranoid. She found the closest neighbourhood that she could afford the highest rooms with clear sightlines that was still near the office, and then flies in so her feet don’t touch street at any point. Rumours have it she regularly sleeps in the office while she’s working, too.

Her mansion in Hermes, where her extended family lives, is gated and guarded like an old style Cartel house. Interesting. She’s got nine kids and enough aunts, uncles and older cousins there to help raise the young ones alongside her husband, a 56-year-old retired high school maths teacher. None of them came from money. The house was bought during her time in the Hermes district court.

Making plausible lies up is easy, actually learning real stuff is work. People actually try to hide the real stuff, and they don’t know to hide the completely-made-up. Her bank, her accountant, that isn’t public record, or trivial to learn.

But… All that physical security? There’s nothing you can find that would explain where she got the money for all of it. And it has to be an ongoing source of income - helicopters and guards are a daily expense for her, and they aren’t cheap either.

There is something real to find here. Either passive income from undisclosed property that someone bought for her, or she’s being actively paid off.

What do you think? How would you look into it?

November:

It’s probably better to let the military base thing sit for a while. It’s still good to know in case you find a way to contact the conspiracy what assets they’re holding that you can ask for, or if the increasing problems with the station’s conditions stop suddenly, what the solution would imply.

Also:

A package just got delivered for you. What is it? It’s not something case or investigation related, anyway, it’s just something nice. (Ideally related to one of the skills you’re refreshing from taking a break, or levelling up).

[Thanqol]

Orange!

She had never liked Mr. Merkin, to be perfectly honest. She had kept her distance professional, but privately had alternated between contempt and pity. This was a bad person trapped in a hell of their own devising, someone who had put themselves before others past the point of pulling the trigger. What she had done for him was courtesy and not kindness, and now that she was done with him she fully intended to discard him to Earth and never think about him again.

But something stirred in her then. For the first time she saw something she understood in his eyes. Something she could relate to.

"It is... hard," she said. She was looking at her hands. "Being separated from your Purpose. It never goes away. I was made for construction. It makes me itch even being here when my every instinct is telling me to scrap and redo this building. It's..." she flexes her fingers. "Having skills you can't use hurts. Your thoughts become ingrown. It'll feel like a toxic weight in your brain. Curdling, heavy, occasionally manifesting in flashes of rage. You'll try substitutes. Nothing will work because it's not the real thing."

Her eyes flicked up. "But it does go away when you're talking to people," she said. "Like, really talking to them. Not just making small talk or politely sitting through a conversation. Many people have... something like a Purpose. Most of them have never been asked what it is. Ask the right questions for long enough and it'll start to pour out of them. You'll probably not find another forensic accountant that is your peer in skill, not down there. But you will find people who are your peers in passion. Listen to them."

She holds the door open for him.

*

Yellow!

The Hermes mansion was the target. In some ways it was a harder target than the military base.

A cartel mansion was, after all, secured against infiltration. One person getting in and out unobserved was the whole threat profile it was meant to be secured against. A rival gang sending in an assassin, or a team of assassins, was the threat profile. The foundation would include a steel ring to prevent people from tunneling in. Independent power generators and secured utilities, built like a bank vault. People everywhere. The kind of infiltration she'd used against Goat, involving stealth and explosions, was utterly unviable here.

Which meant that the approach needed to be social. People did come in and out constantly - there were too many of them, too wealthy and independent to hole up in their stronghold all day. Costa-Silva didn't go out to cafes or restaurants, which meant that when she conducted business people had to come to her. And it meant that when there was a party, celebration or other social event, lots of people had to come to her.

Dignified people. People with names, identities, reputations and entourages. People who weren't what the threat profile of the building was designed to secure against. She just needed to tag along with one of them.

[Network: 3, 9 points remaining] And here at last was a use case for Bondi Magnusson, faildaughter ex-billionaire turned stage magician. A ludicrous figure who spent bankruptcy hearings practicing card tricks who had just gotten out of hospital for another failed act of escape artistry, she was a living monument to the power of sheer inherited wealth to overcome endless bad decisions. Naturally, she was a hit at parties - and with nine children, two parents, and various holidays and festivals there was almost a 50-50 chance that there was a party of some kind falling in her operational window.

Bondi was one of Brittenette Everest's friends - she'd walked them to and from university numerous times. And for all her faults, Bondi was progressive in a way only mildly shaped by the brain damage of her first failed attempt to escape the water tank. That meant she'd insisted on both swapping contact details with November, chatting with her constantly afterwards and sleeping with Orange on several occasions. All she really had to do was place the idea of the party's presence in Bondi's mind and within the next three lines of dialogue she would have expressed both an intention to attend and an invitation to take November with her.

White!

"Fuck!" said White, immediately cracking her skull against the door frame.

There were evidently a few drawbacks to being over two hundred and twenty centimeters tall.

She had decided to transition in stages. Cost reasons were the main driver, but gradual adaptations would help with easing her into it. The first stage was structural - she needed a sufficiently large canvas to paint on - and that meant improving height, weight and strength. She felt a strange, aching stiffness in her powerful new muscle fiber bunches - stretches that had previously been easy now ached satisfyingly whenever she did them. She could not stop wondering if she could put her new fist through a plaster wall. She could not stop wondering if she could pick up Crystal.

The new chassis was not beautiful, an industrial hauler model. But it could be. But more importantly it felt right. In absolute terms, she had not gotten much closer to her original form. But... but relatively, it was night and day. This was a body with agency. Previously she'd asserted herself with intensity and words, but now it felt like there was something backing all that. That she was not entirely relying on a bluff, that if challenged she could prove superiority on a baseline, physical level. Meaningless, operationally. It didn't tilt a balance built on systems and guns. But subjectively it meant everything. It meant that there wasn't the shadow of doubt over every word she said. It meant that confidence didn't feel like a lie. It meant that she didn't have to rely on others playing along in order to feel like she could protect them.

And she would. She would prove her strength by those she sheltered. Already she ached for her wings.

[Count Numbers]

Earth:

Rudy’s escape pod will land safely.

Then he will be trawled out of the ocean off the coast of New Zealand, and taken to his mansion. It was a bargain, really - Real-estate on Earth got a lot cheaper with 90% of the population gone, one way or the other.

Then he will realize how much he preferred the intimacy of his apartment. He will roam the opulent corridors like a restless spirit. He will try to catch up on the books he never had time for, and put them down after only twenty pages. He will start a show he has always been told is good, get up to get himself a drink, and come back to the still-paused television hours later to turn it off.

He will rub the hair off his arms in a cold sweat, and his fingernails will dig into pudgy wrists, and he will remember what Orange told him.

It will cause him to go to the people in earnest. To go to bars, to community centers, to the farmers markets. Life will not be post-apocalyptic, just deeply rural even in the old cities. Something, on the other side of this world, a mouse named Marco had been growing to appreciate more and more.

Rudy will despair, because as hard and as sincerely as he tries, he will find no one with Purpose. At first this is because he believes he is bad at this, but with dawning horror he suspects that most people simply don’t. He’s known people like that, he knows what it looks like when he sees it, and he left all of them behind on Aevum. That ‘many’ might only be true when you can select from a large enough population, larger than he has now.

And then the depression will grow dark, and he will be grateful for it, because under the smothering neurochemical blanket he will at least be able to lose days to games of Victoria 6.

He won’t drink. Every time he considers a second glass of whiskey, he will instead reflexively reaches for his phone first and stare at his secure email inbox for a solid ten seconds, thinking he needs to stay sharp in case someone asks him to make the numbers dance again.

Now, though, Rudolph Merkin covers his eyes with the brim of his porkpie hat. He stares out the aquarium glass of Selene down at the faraway Earth and wonders what it’ll be like, to finally be able to relax.

Bondi:

Bondi is a woman this year. She changes her mind on that one now and again, going back and forth between Bondi and Bond. She’s not so much ‘non-binary’ as she is ‘alternating current’, a maximal commitment to one presentation or the other. Both those presentations reflect the kind of Swedish descent that just screams the Magnussons family wealth shared a vault with Nazi gold.

He was Bond when he took up magic; he was tall, with a flustered but confident smile and raked back blonde hair. Achingly handsome if you’re into guys who look like they play tennis, and a kind of innocent mischievousness to him. You’re pretty sure he fell into magic as a way of pulling off a prank without victims. He’s a fratboy in photographs and a schoolboy in videos.

Bondi’s better at it, though. Bond’s charisma is that of an earnest real-estate agent doing his best, but you know he’s got the job because his Dad owns the company. In Bondi, things just click. The flustered smile is more endearing, the confidence more charming. That same energy of ‘I’m out of my depth, but I’m trying my best’ that are frustrating in Bond, gives Bondi the resonance of an anime protagonist.

Her spirit animal is the Easter Bunny. Tall, a cascade of blonde hair, it is almost offensive to describe her beyond that; A hip to waist ratio most people need a corset to achieve, distractingly large breasts, and a thigh gap you could throw grapes through.

This becomes relevant when the base of her magician costume is a leotard and fishnets. Sure, later it’ll be more kid-friendly looking when she’s also wearing tailcoats, a cape and the silk tophat. But for now-

“You should be my assistant!” Bondi leans forward excitedly on tippy-toe, holding up a butler’s suit in November’s size on a coat hanger. “It’s always so much more fun with an assistant!”

Let’s chalk those details up to being a potential operational asset. She’s not going to be a deliberate seductress, but apparently it only takes minor alterations to her costume to render her an effective distraction - Just ask Orange.

Red:

Welcome back, by the way. Anything you've felt like you've missed, anything that you want to catch up on? Anything different about your new body this time around, now that finances are less tight than last time (even if you are still giving most of it away)?

Is it worth asking why Sophie's texting you seeing if you still want to help out, some time?

[Thanqol]

Pink!

White has, at times, questioned many fundamental aspects of their mind - their gender and sexuality not least amongst them. Why do we present in a feminine way? What is the basis for finding humans beautiful in abstract, and female humans desirable specifically? Our neural architecture was not modeled upon human brains and was designed for space construction. Many of the other Zodiacs never expressed an interest in humans at all, let alone the specifics of their physicality - why us? Were we reprogrammed? Was this a trauma response? Was this always a part of us? Why, upon becoming human shaped, did we become so relentlessly thirsty for human women?

All the wrong questions, in Pink's mind. The answer was simply that human women were objectively beautiful, and now she was finally positioned to do something about it.

She had always known this, even when she was a rogue thought pattern giving Green a distracting headache - a headache that had started when Green had first beaten the original Metroid. She was that thought, in the same way that Red was 'be ready for anything!'. When it came to justifying her fundamental position she found the Bond/Bondi transition to be the most useful case study she had access to. Yes, as Bond he was kind of cute, but she could write poetry about Bondi. In fact, she could write an operational plan to break into a cartel mansion while also putting on the performance of her life for Bondi. And she had, it had all come together in a flash of colour and she'd become the operational commander. Thoughts about girls were both paralyzing and inspiring in a way that thoughts about guys were not and she would drag her entire distributed consciousness behind her towards this fixation.

Black had once joked that if Green ever started becoming interested in males Pink would kill her.

Pink had given it serious thought.

"I'd love that!" said Pink, taking the suit. "I haven't been practicing enough - can you help me train? I want to be the best I can be!"

Red!

She used the term 'death' for what happened to her because she enjoyed drama, but it was more like a reset and genuinely relaxing to emerge from it. Despite her ditzy air she was generally a bundle of stress. Everything was immediate, everything was threatening, everything compounded on everything else, doors and corners are where they get you - it was such a relief to wipe that back to zero and hit the world for a while with a brain chill and empty. It was a similar after-shock to the morning after ill advised sex. On that note, she was getting texts from Sophie!

She's beta testing the dragon scales. Not a full spread, more like an anime dragongirl scattering across her body and a small few on her cheeks. Fingernail sized, hard, sharp and overlapping like scale armour - in theory protective but worn in a configuration more akin to a chainmail bikini. She liked the way they made her move, extremely aware of her elbows and hips. She'd run her fingers over them constantly and was wearing a crop top and shredded jeans to show them off a little more.

The crop top had a neon pink skull, incidentally, and she was wearing egyptian-style eyeliner. A headphones-necklace with an ankh symbol, with the faint sounds of Linkin Park emanating from it. Her aesthetic was retro-goth, radiant in her resurrection, with the dangerous sharpness of the scales making it come together into something vaguely daemonic. She finished the effect with a disposable medical face mask - she was going to hang out with a brain surgeon, after all.