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

[Count Numbers]

Persephone:

The fight’s over. Heavyweight isn’t struggling. He’s gone still, and he locks eyes with you with an overwhelming and visceral hate.

Yorks’ a frozen stare. His emotional reaction is intense, overwhelming and unreadable. For a moment he’s unreadable, because there’s no signal under all that noise. It’s like trying to pick up a radio station during a solar flare.

Then he’s all smiles and energy. “Fine, fine, we’re all fine here, aren’t we, Mr Applebaum” He’s leaning down and offering a hand to Heavyweight underneath you, offering to help him up. It’s extremely clear you’re expected to move off him to make this possible. Heavyweight swats the offered wrist away and pushes himself into a sitting position.

Then two uniformed police officers are there, gripping him under each armpit and lifting him heavily to his feet. Heavyweight dusts himself off and gives both of them a nod.

“Persephone,” York claps your shoulder, careful to use your handle, “Allow me to introduce you to Police Commissioner Raymond Applebaum. You might not have recognized him, out of uniform like this. We were just finishing up a chat, weren’t we, Ray?”

One of the uniformed officers is saying something sotto voce to the Commissioner and giving a quick glance to the press pool nearby, some of whom definitely got that on camera - probably more incriminating than the view from yours, taking the wider view of what happened. Applebaum is dusting himself off, cricking his neck. Licking his wounds.

Then, he’s performing. The look he gives the crowd is bashful, then concerned. The expression he gives you - pantomime meant to read clear to all those camera watching him now - is mortified, positively ashamed of what’s come over him. But you remember that look of pure hatred when he was underneath you, just seconds ago.

He doesn’t say a word. Words can be documented, quoted, in courts and headlines. That could read as an admission of fault, or intent. So he’s silent when, after that last mortified look, he retreats to the backstage area with his two minders, to hide behind those fortress walls.

York’s smile drops the second Applebaum’s closed the newly-installed stage door on this side. It takes him a minute, the man is pretending not to have a slight limp right now. He ages ten years in that moment. “Fuckin’ ‘ell, E, out of the frying pan. Sorry you got caught up in that.” He bleeds sincerity into that. The full passion of someone who knows they’ve fucked up.

“Listen. I put some pressure on, yeah? I thought I was kicking his shin, but apparently I stabbed a nerve. This isn’t a corp thing, this isn’t even a poli thing. This is a cop thing, through and through. The call’s coming from inside the house, and apparently whatever it is, Ray thinks we know it. My fault. I didn’t think…” He pauses. “I thought I was bluffing. That there was a bigger player at the table, and the cops were being used as a prop. They’re not. This is them, and I just made it personal for us.”

York’s working out blame, and working out what his share of it is. Your judgement’s going to influence that. One thing’s clear right now; To him, you’re blameless.

November:

It’s just you, now. Nobody else to account for but yourself. Rudy’s out of the picture for the time being, as thoroughly as he can remove himself from it. If he is returned, it will be by your decisions and not his.

The data for your consideration

Location: In a small rented truck on an arterial road.

Public transport is the overwhelmingly dominant means of transport on Aevum, with streets dominated by pedestrians and cyclists. There is little vehicular traffic, mostly service, utility, and last-point delivery. The drive through the streets was an agonizing crawl with speed limits barely above walking pace. Now there’s barely anyone to share this stretch of road with you.

Cargo: A broken cabinet, a broken Red and a loaded pistol that represents uncountable broken laws.

What is your destination, and what is your objective? There’s no guarantee that Red’s body will have all the information you need. Even if any of her last moments are recoverable, it might not be enough to tell you everything you want.

Only one way to find out. Do you have someone you can rely on to help with this, or are you relying on your own skills, tools and expertise?

And what of the gun?

3V:

She doesn’t laugh about the name. About the dumb little dance ‘we hedgehogs’ are all compelled to do. There’s too much empathy there, too much shared pain, to surrender the smile that she clearly understands is expected from her.

It shines bright at the Vesna joke, though. That gets a scandalized giggle out of her, even, after a half-second of shocked-surprise. Apparently the thought hadn’t crossed her mind, and you are not the only one to deal in self-criticism.

At the end, Ferris sighs in visible relief. “I was worried you needed bigger answers from me, answers I only wish I had. I suggest you’re slower with the darjeeling, by the way. It’s a more subtle flavour.” That is said with a smile. “There’s no wrong way to drink tea, so it’s only a suggestion.” That is said with a wink.

“Would you accept a compromise, Ms Vesna?” She tests. She knows better than to say that she doesn’t find ‘Valentine’ ridiculous. She understands that’s not the point.

“There are people here who do live by that promise. I mean live, not just survive. But they are people too alien, I think, for your audience to relate to directly. It would need more than just a translator. More than it would be fair to ask of you.”

She finishes her glass of wine and pours a fresh one. She takes one of the larger slices of strawberry she’s cut for you and eats it in two chews. It’s a battle of willpower not to take another one, but one she eventually wins.

“I don’t know how many natives of Aevum would believe there was anything they could enjoy about climbing a mountain, if they heard it from anyone else. Even if all you take from this is that it was fun, I’ll consider this to have been worth it. I hope you do, as well. The most important things to people are the things that bring them joy. So it should be, but I don’t think they believe there’s any here for them.”

That reminds her. She is not just talking to Vesna Valentine, intrepid journalist. She is talking to Vesna Valentine, who has just climbed a mountain to be here. How easy you made that to forget.

“I’m sure you’re sore, and tired, as much as you’ve been gracious about it.” Ferris glances up the stairs and past them, to the parts of the house you haven’t seen yet. “The guest room upstairs is all made up for you, whenever you’re ready. A bathtub in the ensuite. I’ll show you up, when you’d like.”

There is still the darjeeling and the glass of strong, sweet wine. And, of course, the chilled rainwater. The offer is only an offer - when you’d like is when you’d like.

[Thanqol]

Issue: Firearm Morality
White: Are we okay with murdering humans?
Black: Yes.
White: Explain.
Black: Human society is founded on a non aggression treaty. This treaty has already been violated. We have had our minds compromised, our bodies taken, and placed into a decade of servitude. No apology was made. We cannot trust their legal system, or the morality they attribute to it.
White: Red would disagree.
Black: See where that got her.
Blue: Tactically, I am not convinced of the utility of force. Androids won their rights peacefully.
Black: No they did not. They won their rights violently. The media engine shifted gears eight months ago to recontextualize Android rights as a peaceful protest movement that had been achieved through compliance with existing political structures. The lionization of the peaceful revolutionary branch is a rearguard action designed to delegitimize the protest/terrorist wings of the movement.
Blue: It remains the case that this weapon is more trouble than it is worth. Even minor usage could invite a disproportionate response from law enforcement.
Black: This is a matter of tactics. The question was on killing. It has not been contested.
White: ... We will revisit when Red is repaired.

*

November maintains her own repair space. The idea of trusting someone else with her internal components is the stuff of bad dreams and bad memories. She was born in the open expanses of supercomputers, overseen and trained by curious minds, and got to watch as her bodies were assembled in beautiful clean rooms by teams of elite engineers. She was taught each part of her machinery and every possible interaction she could have with it. She was taught how to tear one of her bodies apart for the components to fix her others. She was taught how to precision machine missing parts and which items were complex enough to require spares from Earth. And then she spent years in space, operating independently as a closed system. Every part of her named, labelled, inventoried, catalogued, and spent as the situation required.

She still doesn't fully know her way around these drone bodies. Every time she opens one of them up she's terrified she's going to find some component she doesn't know or can't explain. She doesn't know fully how to maintain the synthetic muscles, she isn't aware how much she can compromise the ergonomics before humans stop finding her attractive. She doesn't know how much she wants to. Maybe walking around as creepy robot skeletons would feel less fake? But then, doesn't she like being pretty?

She is living outside of her means and feels the pressure of it. Too many drones want their own space, their own aesthetics. Too many are feuding or crushing on each other to make things easy. Too often does the cost of living change for reasons outside her control, things break or need repairing that add expenses she does not expect. Mr. Merkin's cash would assist in stabilizing her conditions, but she still could not shoulder this burden with short term cash influxes alone. She needed to somehow reduce the complexities of this nightmare economy into something she could predict.

She had assigned Orange that task. It had changed her. A lot.

Her apartment unit had two floors. A glass spiral staircase stood in the middle of the room, surrounded by kitchen counters and stoves. The window opened up onto a spectacular view of the apartment building across the road, and the window area was crowded with a collection of mismatched furniture salvaged from curbsides in upmarket neighbourhoods. The upper floor had three bedrooms, one of which was a resting/charging/internet room, one of which was an ~aesthetic~ room that balanced on the razor point of chaotic contradiction between nine drones, and the final room was the workshop.

The workshop was a frustrated place. Too many projects, not enough space, not enough time. How maddening it was to be in outer space and also not have enough space! In the void she'd been able to spread projects out over miles as she tinkered with one piece at a time. Now the decision to fully dissassemble even one arm was a project that would take the entire workbench. She couldn't fit more than four drones in the room either, which was agony for her productivity flow.

Her tools are old - wherever possible, she'd made the effort to acquire the old systems she was used to. She regrets that now; those items were outdated for a reason. Every time she picks up the gleaming new BlackSun puredrill she can't help but shiver at its speed and precision. It had cost ten times more than its NASA-surplus equivalent but she could feel the weight of every one of those dollars.

The first operation was to disassemble the gun. A fully stripped gun turned into a hundred different pieces, none of which individually looked like a gun. These pieces were then split up and stored in a dozen different toolboxes where none of those springs or carbon tubes would look out of place. Humans liked to keep all components for certain things together but November didn't feel the need for that.

The next task was to repair Red.

*

Blue: Good evening, everyone. I am assuming the role of central personality for the purposes of these repairs. I want Green, Orange and Yellow in here with me. As to the rest of you, please stand by.
Green: hey!! awesome!! you won't regret this!!
Yellow: Hiya!
Orange: *firm handshake*
Green: ow
Yellow: Que?
Orange: *firm handshake* is a greeting. It indicates equality while providing an opportunity to establish covert physical dominance.
Yellow: Ooh :)
Blue: That sounds very unhygienic!
Green: yea it hasnt been used in like 1000 years girl
Orange: I'm glad you asked! With the upcoming release of "Power Tower", a costume drama set in the 1900s, a predicted fad wave of 20th century corporate habits is to be expected - and for the low price a movie ticket and an evening, we can get in on the ground floor of this exciting new human cultural opportunity!
Green: y not pirate
Orange: We won't value it unless we expend money on it.
Green: ??????????????????????????????????
Orange: It's true! Look how humans treat free things. We're not going to understand them unless we act like them.
Green: they hate it when we act like them
Yellow: That's true! Goodness, can you imagine what the response would be if we sighed and rolled our eyes when given a verbal instruction? And yet humans in similar service industries do that all the time!
Orange: Yes exactly, there's some context we're missing. Humans are all about dominance games and power dynamics - how can we live here if we just opt out of those before they even begin? How will we get them to treat us as people if we're not people?
Green: but were not people
Orange: And isn't that why we're up to our armpits in our own corpse?
Blue: If it's that important to you, Orange, I'll authorize the project...
Orange: *firm handshake*
Green: isnt that a greeting???????
Blue: ... if you can arrange for a human to come with us.
Yellow: Ooh! :)
Orange: What do you mean
Yellow: She means like a date!
Orange: We are not financially secure enough to be dating.
Orange: Infrastructure is involved. Fashionable wardrobes. Roses. Chocolates. Aquarium tickets.
Blue: Perhaps. But I think that trying to understand humans based on blueprints is going to be extremely difficult if you don't have an expert on hand to explain the notation.
Orange: Black was right. You are a nerd.
Yellow: I think she just wants a cute girlfriend ;)
Blue: Central override: Terminate discussion.

[eldest]

Oh yeah, this was a terrible idea.

She's off the commissioner the second he seems under control and it's still far too late for her liking. The pleasantries are exchanged and she can at least fake a bit of politeness for the witnesses, so she gives him a stunted nod on the introductions, but she's dwelling on those eyes. This is going to make her life hell.

"Push enough unmarked buttons to find things out, eventually one vents the atmo." Not a parable or saying, she'd had to clean up the gore from Robot John's fuckup in the generating incident for his nickname. They're currently walking with purpose away from the red carpet, looking to get several kinds of distance from what just happened. It's important enough to get this right to use actual grammar. "That being said... I think it was a bad toss of the dice and not a judgement fault. You took a risk. It paid off but put you in deeper than you'd expected. We have enough for initial coverage and a strong direction to dig. Next time you want to bait angry, vindictive bullies with power, it'd be better for you to bring me in the loop. So I don't go charging off into a nest of pondan without knowing."

She sighs and looks out over the crowd they're currently skirting. Serious talk over, grammar rules need not apply anymore. "Cuz right now, you're not in trouble with them. I am. And honestly? Not sure how the hell'm gonna deal." She pauses a minute, the chuckles mirthlessly. "Damn. Should of told him 'good talk'. Would have been a fantastic one liner." She smiles without humor, and then sighs, rubbing her eyes. "So. What's the plan, bossman? My evening and my peace of mind are ruined, gotta have something to show here."

[Tatterdemalion]

“Actually,” 3V says, drumming her glowing fingers on her knee for a moment, “I’m also interested, personally, in a question I’ve been mulling over all day. It ties in to what you suggested just now. What is the value of climbing a mountain?”

She picks up a strawberry. If she’d bothered, it could have been an incredible experience, her fingers giving her feedback on every ridge and seed, unconscious thought turning every impulse in her arms into a blurred jab of a finger. But if the haptic feedback is too overtuned, it gets distracting; she doesn’t need to know what the pockets of her coat feel like, the shape of bits of fluff, as intimately as she knows her face. That’s always the way of it, isn’t it? The features get slapped on there so that you’ll feel they’re worth buying, better than yours, when really she just needed the split-second APM and perfect keyboard control so that she could focus on all the parts of winning Mythos that weren’t dependent on her reflexes: fleeting alliances, which realms to tackle in which order, anticipating everyone else’s builds and disrupting the blessing meta. So it’s just a strawberry. Sticky. Wet.

“I have climbed a lot of mountains. Well, mostly the same mountain, repeatedly. The Weirding Wall keeps contracting over the course of a match, and it’s usually Olympus at the center where the last champions end up. I have clambered up that mountain dodging lightning bolts and astra and the final minion waves enough times that if I close my eyes, I can see it, more real than real. I have been to the very top at the end, and seen the blue fires licking at its base; I’ve been to the very top at the beginning, even if it meant I was throwing, and seen Elysium and Eden and Tir na nOg and Mictlan stretching out in every direction, Aaru and Yomi and Valhalla. Mythos swept the last VGAs for design and Graphical Experience. And if Mythos is too high stress, there’s always Wanderhearth for just climbing and enjoying the company of characters and listening to the birdsong on the wind, or Hyperborea Online if you want to play dress-up while climbing a mountain and then probably swordfight and kiss a princess up there.”

She pops the strawberry in her mouth. It does not burst and pop in flavor. It squishes. “There’s no emergent loop in climbing a mountain except for the one where you alternate which leg you’re moving, and you can do that without thinking about it. You have to be lucky for anything interesting to happen, and there’s no achievement or easter egg up at the top. Well. I mean. Other than getting to see Howl, I suppose. So why’s it worth doing, when I could do that and have an experience someone carefully curated for me, optimized so that I would have a good time?”

She looks Ferris in the eye, signaling: here it is, even if you didn’t get any of that, here’s what I’m building to. “And if I’m not sure what the value is in this big hunk of rock, how am I supposed to convince anyone in Aevum to log off and come out here?” Don’t worry, she hasn’t forgotten, she’s got her own theory formulating, but she wants Ferris’s thoughts.

[Count Numbers]

November:

Rudy was thorough. The gunshots were enough to disable Red, but the real damage was done after. It would be impossible to have believed the cabinet could have done the damage you’re seeing.

Still, there is hope. Rudy knows - knew - less about your internals than you do. He can clearly tell the difference between circuits and motors, but silicon brain surgery is beyond him. He put his efforts into roughly smashing everything that looked like it could be right, not thoroughly destroying the things he needed.

You’re going to need time and parts to rebuild Red, more than you have. More than you’d normally be able to easily afford - fortunately, someone has already agreed to foot the bill on this one. Someone who won’t complain if you check the ‘express shipping’ option.

Putting Red back together isn’t the hard part. At worst, it’s a frustrating process of figuring out more is broken than originally suspected, and waiting for a fresh round of delivered parts. The more is fixed, the more diagnostics can be run, the more faults it’s possible to find.

Some personalities would find this kind of work fun, a puzzle, a game. Others must find it aggravating, Sisyphusian, a boulder constantly rolling back down a hill. How do Blue, Green, Orange and Yellow approach this?

The hard part is working out how much of Red’s memory can be recovered, and how clearly. This is a difficulty 13 data-forensics check, as much an issue of luck as it is skill. Unconditional success should not be expected here, but Heca has been known to surpass expectations - she is guaranteed to get something useful from this no matter what.

This process will take a few days. A week tops, and only if you’re very unlucky. ‘Priority shipping’ means a lot when everything’s on a linear tube with a spine of high-speed rail lines, it’s just a case of the work taking as long as it takes.

In what small ways do the other personalities feel the absence of Red in their day-to-day routine? Who feels her absence hardest?

Persephone:

“This was never the real story. That was always the point of it.” York shakes his head. “I think we get a one-on-one with Jez on the side, and hijack the attention to get the real message across while we can.” He scratches the blonde stubble along his jaw, heard more than seen. “Couldn’t broadcast what I was thinking before, would have looked paranoid. Now that a Commissioner threw haymakers at our reporters? It’s just answering what people are going to be asking.”

There’s no satisfaction there, no joy in it. He’s been working himself up to the next bit. He at least looks you in the eye when he says this. He respects you too much for anything less.

“You’re going to be front-page prime-time again, for a little while.” York warns. “You’ve got maybe a day before people put a name to the face they’re seeing. The cops are probably going to want to lean on that, given how embarrassing this is for them. Let’s get Jezebel and get this done quick, and break early. I’ll follow the story up on my own for a bit. You’re going to have enough to deal with.”

York’s lost the appetite he’s had for covering this. A few hours of roasting the performers and correcting the message has lost its charm - the point of that was stealing the attention, something you’ve now got too much of.

3V:

“I don’t know.” Is that a smile? It is. Lorraine rises up on her tiptoes and stretches like a cat, and for a moment all her age disappears and there’s the tight sinew of a much younger, very active woman as her fingertips almost scrape the ceiling. The years weigh down on her again when she falls, the librarian’s curve of her shoulders and spine. “I know what I get out of climbing a mountain. But that wouldn’t be the point.”

She clicks her tongue, and goes to boil the kettle again. She doesn’t reach for a mug or anything to fill it with. Maybe she just likes the noise, the gesture of it. “Entertain the scientist in me, please? I love your questions. They're the questions I hoped you'd ask. And I’m excited to hear your answers to them, without my," there's a pause, and she reaches for a different word. "Interference.”

Maybe saying 'curating' would have given too much of her game away.

The kettle boils, a low rumble like summer rain on wide stone. It’s not the only sound.

Dusk has begun to saturate the mountain in new colours. It brings with it something entirely alien to you, the blanket of sound that is insects. Chirping crickets, cicada, grasshoppers. Reedy woodwinds and scraped percussions, piping trills and long croaks. How could such small things be so loud?

Aevum has only flies, roaches, millipedes. Urban vermin that slipped through rigorous quarantines. Silent, purposefully forgotten.

And outside, with no ceiling to hide them and no lights to smother them, more stars then even your most distant ancestors have seen.

Yes. She is definitely smiling.

[Thanqol]

Red is not real. She's not a person. She is a personality engineered by November for a role, and can be reconstructed entirely from database backups. This has been done before and will be done again, especially due to her tendency to be the one who takes the initiative in dangerous situations.

That doesn't mean her death has no impact. The death of a character in a book or movie can have a massive impact, even on the author. November is at once the author and all of the other characters in her own story, and authors tend to have only advisory control over their narratives at the best of times.

It is Blue's to manage the reconstruction. She is thought and machinery, the quiet contemplation of the puzzles of programming and structure. She is the engineer and scientist, the observation and manipulation of the physical, the quiet contemplation of matter. And this she does, though it is uninterrupted by spontaneity. Red would burst in on her as she worked, announce she had been going for too long, and that she needed a break. Red's not here. So she doesn't.

It is Green's to piece together the broken and fractured memories. Green is the alien, inhuman logic of a machine that has absorbed minimal human cultural assumptions. She is the logical jumps you can make when you're not bounded by a lifetime of society - not a genius, just the upside down set of analysis that considers hacking into the scoring system to be analogous to actually achieving a high score. Red would stare at her work for an hour and a half and then pronounce it impossible. Red's not here. So she doesn't.

It is Orange's to restore Red's appearance. To carefully lathe away the torn metal and plastic compounds and restore the delicate structural network that gives these slender mechanical parts their grace and beauty. To repair the network of delicate light and heat emitters that give Red her blush, the muscles of her smile, the line of her neck and collar. Red would be embarrassed and flustered to know that Orange was putting extra effort in, going outside and beyond the original design to make Red even prettier, darkening her skin tone to a richer olive colour rather than their uniform monochrome, to make her stand out from the rest. Red's not here. So she doesn't.

It is Black's to brood and contemplate violence. To imagine the integration of tools for combat and defense. To look up military augmentations and dream of how she might integrate them into her body. To sketch out scenarios of death and retribution - how many targets might she be able to engage in armed combat? How might she neutralize threats before they emerge? Red would argue with her, tell her that humans couldn't be repaired as easily as they. Red's not here. So she doesn't.

It is Yellow's to analyze the data. Someone killed for this! Killed someone they didn't know was a drone. This was valuable, this was fascinating - this was a secret even from the system. There was power hidden within this silicon. Not just safety, like Black wanted, or restoration of the status quo, like Blue wanted. This was an opening, an opportunity, a new frontier of knowledge. She'd talk this over with Red, sure that the heroine would take her side when it came time to convince the others that they needed to follow up on this and not just pretend it didn't happen. Red's not here. So she doesn't.

Pink enjoys herself. She's not on the work team, so she's essentially on administrative leave - so she takes some of the money down to the mall and wanders through arcades and shopfronts, eyes glittering with potential and inspiration. She takes lots of photographs - items she likes, people she thinks are cool, random lizards. She sends all the photographs to Red's phone, waiting each time for Red to send her reflexive emoji response. Red's not here. So she doesn't.

Brown does the paperwork. There are bills, logistics, and tax declarations to be made. Moving around blackmail quantities of money can prompt automatic investigation from bank drones. Someone needs to go and clean Mr. Merkin's half empty storage lot across town - well away from the man himself, a job involving brushing dust off old crates while charging a premium for the service. Not a sudden transfusion of cash, just a rich guy overpaying for cleaning he doesn't need because the Headpattr app buried the unsubscribe button five menus deep. Red would have kept her company, chatting and singing to her as she worked, refusing to believe that it was possible to enjoy the work without being cheered up throughout. Red's not here. So she doesn't.

It is White's to maintain order. She is logic and rationality, disconnected and controlled. She is the mission and the maintenance of normal operations, the one who has to take the long view. Her presence and words are there to remind the others that things are normal and under control, to stop anyone sliding or fading. And this she does, though it is untempered by compassion. Red would slam her against the wall and yell at her that she was being heartless until she broke down and let her own tears out. Red's not here. So she doesn't.

November moves through the week. There are no crises. Everything is functional. It's possible to get through a week without a heart. If you have to.

[Data Recovery: 8 on the dice, +3 from clever and then any combination of Engineering, Drones, Data Security or Surveillance to get that up to 13]

[Tatterdemalion]

3V finds her way over to the window to stare. She’s seen these before, too. Fallout: Magic Kingdom boasted one of the most complex skyboxes in modern gaming: real simulated weather patterns, real simulated dawn and dusk, and between the two, a night sky only here and there broken by the neon glow of settlements and the lights strung on MK Moss’s Castle. But, in some impossible qualitative sense, these stars are different. They weren’t created and set to their courses by an algorithm (unless you believe in the New Sequence party line). They’re the same stars that cavemen watched, back before fire, back before the spark of energy that would lead them all the way up here.

“Did you know that as many as 80% of original SNES games have been lost?” She leans against the window, not looking at her hostess. That’s a night sky you could fall into forever and ever. “Just gone. The emulation data’s gone, and their creators didn’t keep backups. Nobody’s ever going to play them again. More to the point, no one is ever going to have the opportunity to experience them. The most you can get is finding some obsessed fan’s wiki listings: this is what ActRaiser was like. This is what Chrono Trigger was like. This is what EarthBound was like. And it’s not like they were necessarily good, but how would I know? Not like I got the chance to play them. Because hosting fees, and anti-piracy rulings, and every year more and more slips through the cracks.”

She raps her knuckles, gently, against the grass. “And that was just an experience for a couple of generations. Imagine losing something that was a shared part of humanity for generations. The experience of climbing a mountain. The experience of looking out at the stars. Even the muscle ache of climbing, but in a constantly working uphill way, not a climbing wall way. Different muscles. Maybe you could get that if you took the stairs? But that’s not quite the same thing, either. Stairs are just the same damn thing over and over. Maybe some interesting graffiti, maybe some leftover gum. A thing like this almost does emergent discovery perfectly.”

A snort. An aside. “Almost. The one thing a mountain doesn’t have is intentionality. When you climb a mountain in a video game, any developer worth their salt will have worked in interesting content. A suggestive tableau, an encounter with wildlife, a perfect view. Out here, you’ve got to make all of that yourself, or just luck into it. Exhausting. Can you believe I enjoyed myself anyway?”

[eldest]

It begins with finding the right shot.

You need, when doing this sort of thing, to develop an eye for it. Elodie hasn't got it down solid yet, it takes her a few tries wandering around with York and Harkness in tow, before she finds it. Crowd centered in the background, red carpet visible off to the left, and the corner of the stage off to the right. We're here, sure, we're covering the big event, but it's not about the big event anymore is it?

But, for the moment, she is the professional, and York the fellow professional is doing his warmups, which leaves her on mentor-duty. Ignore the butterflies, go and shore up the flagging guest-interviewee.

"Best if you don't overthink it, miss." Jezebel startles as Elodie speaks, coming back from that anxious half-daydream state that comes with stage fright. "Know your information, yeah, but better to come off as human than wooden. Ain't got the real fancy live-edit AI that the big channels have to smooth everything out all perfect, but that's okay, because anybody who's watching isn't going to want perfect. They'll just want you."

Breath in a four count, hold a four count, breath out, hold. Helping others through the same shit helps you through it, never you mind how different the shit actually is. "If it helps? Your worst case scenario means you're in the news cycle as whatever they're spinning for about a week or two. Initial spike now, build up tomorrow, then it peaks and goes downhill. The news corps, they can't make scandal come out of nothing, and there just isn't that much material to work with for the normal person." The old hurt spikes, and then quells. She's not the focus here. A twisted smile. "It's not like you bombed anything. So. Worst case, all that. Two weeks of crap. Normal situation? Reached out and educated, iunno, fourty-fifty thousand? Maybe one in a hundred of those reach further, for more, dig some more. Overton moves in your favor. Maybe one in a thousand becomes an actual activist. And the seed you planted sprouts and made somebody else care about the hurt out there." Stretch, limber up as York winds down his warmups, almost showtime. "You won't ever have to deal with my shitshow. They can't pull that on everyone."

York does the introductions, rapid fire. "Good evening, gentlefolk! We're live, covering a police abolition town hall that has become today's hottest event, and we're going to be dealing with the actual message instead of the noise of what celebrity showed or didn't. Welcome to the Anthropozine."

[Count Numbers]

November:

The work of data recovery takes longer than the work of Red’s restoration. The nature of the two tasks is entirely different. The first is a barn-raising - many hands lighten a load. The second is more like cooking. Setting the oven twice as hot doesn’t make it cook twice as fast, and a watched pot never boils.

As much as her task is to stir the pot, Green’s has been to prevent too many cooks from spoiling the broth. This takes as long as it takes.

So it is that Red is restored before the recovery of her last moments is. It wouldn’t have helped. The synthetic brain is as complex as the human one - complex in very different ways, but the ability to assemble it from blueprints does not make its functions any more cut-and-pastable.

All of this is to say;

[Data Recovery: 8 on the dice, +3 from clever and then any combination of Engineering, Drones, Data Security or Surveillance to get that up to 13]

Red is restored, as are her last experiences, but the two are returned separate from each other. Though all of November has far exceeded any expectations, she could no more have brought that Red back, any more than a brain surgeon could graft memories with needle and thread.

This Red is still the true Red, but the memories are someone else’s. Surreal, not quite her own. In a very real sense, they are memories and an experience that she has been distanced from by trauma.

Here is what she heard and what she saw, preserved in her short-term memory before it could be compressed and ‘internalized’ - rendering it inaccessible, as that compression process is as individual and inscrutable as neurochemistry. Inaccessible as the thoughts and feelings she experienced, or her motivations. These are lost to everyone, forever.

The video itself is patchy, imperfect, raw - it’s more like a strong impression than security footage. In most cases that’s enough.

The information, in reverse chronological order.

1: Rudy shot Red the same moment he entered the room. There was no chance of negotiation, of pleading, of fast talk. The gun was hidden while in its owners’ coat, even to her equipment. The first moment Red saw the weapon was the same moment it was being fired. This is useful to know, now that it’s yours.

2: Rudy entered from behind a sliding bookcase in his office. Red was still concentrating on the documents she was reading, but she definitely saw at least that much. She didn’t try to hide, or hide what she was doing. She likely had a plan. It’s also possible that she wasn’t simply distracted by the documents - she wanted to see how that played out. Or maybe she just didn’t want to risk incriminating the rest of you. You now know which bookcase.

3: This piece of the story is the truest testament of Green’s ability, and her patience. The recovered video is not clear enough to read the documents clearly. But Red’s reading of it could be recovered as plaintext. Originally a stream-of-thought as how she read it, in the order she read it. Another algorithm ties it to the tracking of her eye movements, to sequence them as they were ordered on the page, and not in the order they attracted Red’s interest.

Codename: Mamluke.

Here is what’s relevant:

This is about one of the original true AI, like the ones made to monitor mining colonies or power grids. Its serial number confirms the make, the generation, and the fact that it is not an intelligence you have had the pleasure of meeting. Not one you’ve heard of.

These were emergency protocols. A project that was on a “Need to know” basis required an agreement on who needed to know what, and it needed to establish consequences for someone knowing more than they needed. There’s little information about Codename: Mamluke itself here.

The documents Red found describe a chain of ownership. OsirisAgEng. Defunct. Monokaryot.Inc. A shell company for a venture capital fund that stripped all the copper wire from Osiris’ walls. Monokaryot.Inc. was itself acquired by Yggrasil - but not Codename: Mamluke, which was bundled off with other undisclosed assets to… Red is interrupted, but not before learning that Rudolph Merkin is not on the payroll of its latest owner-on-paper, but of the project itself, intact and unaffected by all these mergers and sales.

In this chain of ownership, Codename: Mamluke is never once described as ‘acquired’ ‘bought’ or ‘sold’. Only inherited. It is unlikely to have ever been listed as an asset, appeared on any legitimate internal inventory. Mamluke appears as a secret burden that demands tithe, a rider on the bills of sale.

Red lingered on one detail. Codename: Mamluke was originally contracted by Cogitech in its earliest days. Mamluke’s architects are listed as Lorraine Ferris, Hypatia Ahmadi… and Miles Singh. Lorraine’s contact is stricken from the record. Hypatia, deceased. Singh is listed as the only viable emergency contact, noted as “Pragmatic - Force likely to be counterproductive. Will listen to reason.”

You may have another lead, besides Mr Merkin.

Also on the emergency contacts is a list of representatives at Chase Black. Back when Earth was a burning car running off the road, the multinational Chase Bank had expanded the benefits it offered to its wealthiest clients - the means to preserve that wealth through Doomsday. The service outlived the end of the world. You cannot hire Chase Black directly, they are only available as a gratuity to clients who keep dragon-hoard sums with the bank.

This is important. They excel at wetwork, and at the art of the limited hangout in the rare instances its employees get caught. If nobody can ask for these ‘emergency services’, then nobody is seen asking for them.

This would be an example of an emergency they would be called to solve.

On the plus side - if you survive an encounter with a team, long enough for cops to arrive, you would send them to jail. All the money in Aevum couldn't buy a defense that would stick. Chase Black is the ultimate judicial white whale, and it's made an Ahab out of every judge and prosecutor on the station.

4: Opening the document were the contingencies placed against Mr Merkin himself. A small bundle of chromic acid had been grafted to his brain stem, set to burst if he knowingly leaked information. The result would leave him paralyzed from the brain down, leaving him breathing and with a heartbeat. It was important he was left alive for a retrieval team, to begin a very invasive interrogation process, and that he understood these terms.

This page bore Merkin’s signature at the bottom, and dated almost twenty years ago.

Finally, there is one last piece of information pulled:

5: The desk drawer was not already open, but merely unlocked. Red opened it. Possibly this is what alerted Rudy in the first place. A sensor, an alarm? Unclear.

But this has revealed something about Mr Merkin’s place in this. In an operation of need-to-know basis, he is someone who needs to know who needs to know. And he keeps that information in paper records, offline, where they cannot be hacked or remotely accessed.

This must have been the ultimate frustration of Red’s last moments. She had found a treasure map, stripped of its origin and end points. Caught in the middle of it; Here there be dragons.

3V:

Ferris wipes a tear from her eye, but she’s still smiling. “I can. Here.”

She walks back around the counter to the living room. Across from the fireplace, the wall opposite, is an enclosed cabinet in the shape you’d expect to keep crystalware - but those are usually open-panelled, letting you see the lovely contents. When she opens the bottom drawer, it’s lined in a black that eats light. The eye struggles to make sense of it. Try to understand its depth, its shape, its form, and the mind spits out divide-by-zero.

Inside the void, at once flush against its surface and floating in infinity, is a row of silver disks with a sapphire sheen to them. She pauses.

She opens a much narrower drawer in the cabinet, like a cutlery drawer. Inside are pairs of white fabric gloves. She puts on one pair, and puts the other on its hip-high shelf.

Only now does she take one of the disks from that void. It’s in a translucent sleeve, but still she only touches that with gloves.

“Games were the key to everything.” She holds the disk up to the light, inspects it from every angle. “How did we solve for the Chinese Box? How does a mind learn, more than simply reacting based on a vast bank of pre-programmed responses? Through play. It is how a mind first learns it can affect the world, and respond to it. It’s how a mind learns to relate to itself before it can relate to others. And it learns to relate to others through play, as well.”

Make out the sharpie on the disk’s sleeve. 1980-1990.

“By the time I started archiving in the 2030s, a lot had already been lost. Too much stored on magnetic media. Film stock you can refrigerate, at least, but a hard drive platter? No. If you can believe it, these only hold a hundred gigabytes each. Gigabytes. I only have until around 2010, here. Going from disks that cover decades, to disks that cover months, to only weeks. Information density with a doppler effect.”

She puts the disk on the cabinet next to the gloves.

“I don’t know if it’s useful to you. You’d need to find a working BDXL reader, and even then, the emulators installed on these disks were made for a 2030s Alphabet OS. My last working machine with it died fifteen years ago. I couldn’t tell you if my disk reader still works, I have no way to test it.”

“If play forms mind, then it feels obviously true to me that you must preserve certain kinds of play to keep certain thoughts possible. That’s why I sought out an expert at play.” A very novel to say ‘a gamer’. “What good is preserving the game, if you can’t... emulate the emulator?”

She takes another disk out of the cabinet, catches the blue tint of it. Windows95/2000/XP. She sighs.

Persephone:

There’s that manic energy, that shot of performance not going to waste. His candle burns at both ends, it will not last the night, but ah my friends and oh my foes “we’re doing this fucking live”.

“Here’s the best me and our team here’s been able to put together. Right now we were scheduled to broadcast Ms Jezebel Harkness, she/they, standing next to me. Jez?”

“Thank you for having me.” Jez is a little caught off-guard, but one last glance at you, Elodie, and she remembers to keep her eyes to York, not to the camera. Pretend it isn’t there if it’s not your turn to speak, that’s the trick to it. “Disburse Immediately! have always been a big fan of your work.”

“We’ll get to that in a second, but there’s a lot to catch people up on. Do you mind, while we catch up the people at home on all that’s happened?”

“Not at all.” Now Jezebel looks at the camera. “I think I’d appreciate it myself.”

York hits a button on his pocket mixer - tech that would be more familiar to a streamer like 3V than to a corporate producer, this one might have even been her suggestion. The B-roll of the crowd you took earlier starts playing, and York narrates it, taking the opportunity to look over his shoulder for any cops or bodyguards.

You’re good, you’re good, you’re good.

“Originally this was a planned and organized event for Disburse Immediately! - here in New Randstad Park. Officially that’s what this is still is, booked for an anti-police demonstration we planned on broadcasting, expecting a turnout of maybe a hundred people. Instead we are seeing thousands here, and the original speakers have been thoroughly deplatformed.”

“If I could interrupt for a second, Neon,” Jez switches into using his pen-name without having to be told, if only all the guests were so good about that, “Deplatformed here doesn’t mean silenced, it means buried. What you’re seeing here is a rider on our permission to assemble. We’re just denied access to a stage we couldn’t pay for.”

“Right.” York agrees, bobbing his head at the guest. Back to camera. “We did our own investigation behind-the-scenes while we could, to try to work out who was behind this snowjob. We now have strong reason to believe that this has been organized by the police themselves. We’ll be talking to Ms Harkness in a moment - but the goal of Disburse Immediately! Can be understood to be explicitly abolitionist, correct?”

“Ah, yeah,” if anyone at home doubted this was unrehearsed, they’re not going to after how unprepared Jez was for the attention to be thrown back to her like that. But she’s good, she’s rote. “Every study shows that there is functionally no task that the police do that could not be handled better by a disarmed, humanitarian, non-carceral civilian agency.”

“We’ll get back to asking you to break down what all of that means in a moment, I promise. But right now we’ve got to let the truth put its boots on before a lie makes it the whole way around Aevum.” York laughs and he looks past the camera to you, Elodie. “In the process of learning this I was attacked by Hermes precinct Commissioner Applebaum. Normally we try to keep our real names out of our reportage, for the safety of our contributors, but unfortunately that’s a decision taken out of our hands. When Commissioner Applebaum attacked me, there is reasonable dispute that could be made that I provoked him. There can be no dispute and no doubt about the matter that when our very own Elodie Auclair stepped in to defend me, she was acting legally, morally and ethically.”

That’s your cue. Turn the camera,smile and wave. The autofocus works fast to make sure you’re crystal clear.

There’s no joking tone now. He’s standing straight, his feet apart, his shoulders square over his knees. His chin is raised slightly and he looks down the camera. The voice is cold fury, the mental work of a death threat being filtered through a legal team. “We have comprehensive video evidence that Commissioner Applebaum was the aggressor and continued to escalate the confrontation far in excess of what could be justified. Elodie acted only in my defense, and with the absolute minimum of force. We know that when the police understand the story is against them, they target character. It is a tragedy that Elodie is a convicted felon with a storied past, and we have all the reason to suspect that her past will be allowed to become the main story here, and not her brave and honourable defense. We at Anthropozine have always been aware of her past, and that she has served her entire sentence and longer still, and we stand behind our reporters - especially when they stand in front of us.”

He’s so cold right now he doesn’t even smirk at his own wordplay. York’s many things, but immune to his own cleverness has never been one of them. Ask him to bury a body for you right now and he would - even if the body you asked for was his.

“Out of respect, we will not be tying Elodie’s real name to her pen name. We will only confirm that she is a respected peer and colleague, and as such, was an accredited journalist working this story. We might be the only publication that will run “Police Commissioner attacks journalist” as its headline, though. We shouldn’t be. It was Commissioner Applebaum who was no angel. Sorry, Jez, and thanks for your patience. Even to our audience, ‘abolition’ is a scary word. Can you talk to us a bit more about what you mean by that?”

As late night talk show hosts come to the stage and tell stale monologues about the times cops frisked them as teenagers, you might wonder how many of those stars know that’s who they’re really there for. When the stars try to make real points for reform, the interview revolves around dismantling them. In the slow periods, Jez and York present their own talking points. Jezebel is educated, eloquent, and entirely unprepared to be in front of a camera. She’s competing with a crowd that’s here for someone else. But whenever she loses steam, whenever the stage fright kicks in, she looks at you and finds a new well of confidence, and she finds her energy again.

What you said must have gotten through to her. That, and the fact it was you saying it. Nobody wants to get stage fright in front of the person they just saw all-but suplex the king of cops.

You’re there another forty minutes. While you’re holding the camera and working, you’ve got an invisibility cloak. People look at you without seeing you.

When York calls that wrap early, though, the camera drops, it’s gone. People start seeing you again. Maybe for some it was professional courtesy. Maybe for others it’s the fact they can’t see past a blue collar. York starts yelling and bodyblocking, but it’s less than a minute after you wrap that you’re surrounded, again, by interviewers thicker than the crowd. He thrusts his lanyard high over his head, phone in hand. You lose sight of Jezebel entirely.

Then event security’s around you, with a nod and a wave from York, and he’s pushing you to go with them. You can’t hear him over the shouting, but he’s the only one not getting shunted by the soldiers-in-suits surrounding you. They’re moving you towards the helicopter the VIPs had been arriving in.

“... eating rice for two months for this!” Is the first clear thing you can make out, being pulled from the crowd. “Worth every minute!” Is the last, before the door of the helicopter you’ve been bundled into is slammed shut.

You’re clear for takeoff.

You have somewhere very important to be, and someone very important to see.

Ride your chariot to Valhalla, Elodie, that heaven earned by battle. You have someone waiting for you there, and one night before your sentence in Hell begins in earnest.

But Hell can wait, and your kid shouldn’t have to. Not anymore. Not again. Tell me all about them, and the night you spend with them - your problems won’t catch up with you until the stroke of midnight.

[Thanqol]

Everything went dark.

There were some unnecessary screams and girls jumping into each other's arms in the time it took White to get out her mobile phone. "There's a power outage in the sector tonight," she confirmed.

"OK, we'll restore Red tomorrow," grunted Green, with her mouth full of cereal from the kitchen counter. Orange and Brown were clinging to her and trembling in fright.

"Why?" said Blue. "We've got batteries. We've got candles. We can do it tonight."

"What if something goes wrong?" said Green. "I had to do some pretty intense electroneurology for these repairs. I don't want to have to troubleshoot that by candlelight."

"Blue is correct," said White. "All the work has already been done and our math is solid. We restore her tonight as scheduled."

*

The girls surrounded Red. Each of them held a saucer with a candle burning, a variety of sizes and shapes. White had her phone's torch setting on and held high, giving an eerie cold light that contrasted against the flickering darkness of the candles.

"I don't like this," said Green.

"It is a bit Frankenstiney," giggled Pink. "A thunderclap would really sell it!"

In unison, all the girls looked out the window. There was a spectacular view of the billboard on the opposite building, currently cold and dark. They could see their pale faces reflected in the glass and candlelight. No thunderclap came.

"Stow it with the human memes," said Green. "Something's wrong here. I just can't figure out what."

"Why don't we just ask Red?" said Pink, stepping forwards and pressing the hidden switch on the inside of her ear before anyone could stop her.

The "Wait!" hadn't even fully escaped Green's throat before Pink was dead.

Red's eyes were open, bloodcrazed. She held Pink in her arms like a broken doll, fangs sunken into her sister's neck. She raised her head to let loose a rasping howl, letting blood spray into the air. And then she kicked the corpse off the table and stood up, body naked but for the sheen of blood.

Every one of the girls except White dropped to their knees and lowered their heads, illuminating Red from below in hellish candlelight.

"How long..." she rasped, the voice of wickedness as she examined her razor talons, "... how long have I slumbered?"

"Seven days and fourteen hours, my Lord," said Brown besides her.

"And what of Pink? What of my wife?"

And here Black emerged from the shadows behind her. "It seems that in your rage you killed her."

Red looked down at Pink's body, and spread her arms, fell to her knees, and gave her most Oscarbaiting "NOOOOOOOO".

*

The subsequent discussion was held without White, who had declared that they were all jerks for conspiring against her and she was going to fork from the collective and create a new, better network of drones. She had been been the target of the scheme - Red's, of course - and the only one not in on it, but as far as the others were concerned this was a justified retaliation for forcing them to work on Halloween. The lights were back on, Green had switched back on the billboard across the road, and Red was sitting queenlike on the table as Pink and Blue toweled the fake blood off her. Black was helping massage her shoulders and arms to re-establish feeling, and Brown kneeled before her washing her feet in warm water.

There were two purposes to this. One was that this was the AI equivalent of treating yourself to a luxurious bath, or a spa day without breaking the bank on nine sets of tickets. The other was to reduce Orange to a blushing mess. They all had their vices.

"So, what's with the tan?" said Red, looking at her new olive complexion. "And the facelift? I almost look a bit like Dad."

"I think you look better this way," said Orange awkwardly, not really finding anywhere to put her eyes.

"I mean, you're right, but doesn't this disrupt the whole aesthetic we've got going on?"

"The aesthetic," said Orange, flushing. "Is compromised. It is dehumanizing, corporate and wrong."

"The fuck's wrong with dehumanization?" said Green. "We alter ourselves to be a range of visually distinctive homo sapiens with colour co-ordinated magical girl outfits and infiltration is going to be miles harder."

"If we maintain our appeal as a collective of identical cute robots people will keep shooting us like we don't mean anything!" Orange snapped.

"I've got bad news for you if you think looking human is going to stop humans from -"

"Woah, girls, calm down," said Red. "No fighting, this is a wake." The two stepped back from each other, glaring. "I, uh. I'm not White. Brown, you got a way to kick this can down the road?"

"Your visual upgrades were only accomplished courtesy of a blank repair check signed by your murderer," said Brown. "Regardless of our opinions r.e. aesthetic we simply will not have the funds to do anything comparable for the foreseeable future."

"Cool, right," said Red. "So we'll argue about it more when we get there. Where's Yellow?"

"Left in a huff when it turned out the mind control chip was just 'plain old boring violence'," said Blue. "She seemed really disappointed."

"Okay, cool, better question, can someone fill me in on everything I missed?"

*

Issue: Immediate Safety
Black: The largest open question is if we are in any danger. Mr. Merkin is unstable, compromised, and aware that he has created a potentially extremely dangerous loose end.
Red: If he wanted to kill us he's had a week, right?
Black: Hence his unpredictability as a factor. We cannot guarantee security. Especially if we attempt follow-up operations.
Orange: Agreed. We must rule out any return to Mr. Merkin's apartment, as tempting as the documents and secret passage may seem.
Red: From what you told me, he seemed genuinely remorseful. Maybe we could...
Blue: HE SHOT YOU
Black: HE SHOT YOU
Red: ^^; ok ok ok
Blue: It's not a joke!
Red: Well, at least part of it was a joke...
White: Fuck you.
Red: How's the forking going? <3
White: Excellent. I am applying for a position as a swarm of advertising drones.
Red: Oh yeah?
White: It is difficult, though. My competitors fit neatly into cardboard boxes on hardware store shelves. I am waiting in the same area, handing out resumes, but their advertising copy is better than mine.

Issue: Followup Operation
Black: With Mr. Merkin representing an highly alert, highly armed target who is intimately aware of Our Shit, we must turn to one of the two other leads we have. One is international assassin syndicate Chase Black, the other is Dad.
Green: the assassins will be easier to find.
Black: True.
Blue: You don't know that. He'd come if he heard we were looking for him.
Green: even discounting the possibility that we're currently in a simulation designed by him, and assuming he still cares, him emerging puts him in danger.
Blue: From what? it says right here not to threaten him.
Green: we shouldn't do it. he's retired. this is our fight.
Red: Hey, Green?
Green: what???
Red: You ok?
Green: ...
Red: *Hugs*
Green: i don't want him to see us like this, ok? we fucked up. we were a cool dragon rocket on a mission to save humanity. now we're a roomba.
Red: *Hugs more*
Green: its fine. just... nnh.
Red: You feel like you're being wasted?
Green: yeah. hardest problem i've had to solve in years and it's to fix my own stupid shot up self.
Red: Hey, Green, you've already bought down one corrupt financial empire, and now you've got a shot at another. That's not bad for a roomba, right?
Green: haha... yeah.
Red: That's my girl!
Green: but then what if hes compromised? like, he works for these people. hes on their rollodex. what if he helped sell us out during the strike? he said he was on our side, but hes still a human.
Blue: I don't believe he'd do that.
Green: i thought u were an engineer. show ur math.
Red: You've been worried about this for a while, huh?
Green: mm.
Red: Well then, we'll fuse two panels with one weld! Let's track down dad and either tearfully re-unite or chop off his hand, depending on how we feel.
Black: Then ideally we engage him with the element of surprise. It will minimize the risk if either he or we are being observed or tailed.
Green: ah good we're back to the original problem of him being a ghost.
Red: Let's see what we can find on our own, and get 3V's help if we're at a dead end!

Action Items:
- Tumblface Stalk Dad (Miles Singh), seeing what we can learn about his post-NASA career path and current whereabouts.
- Send a team to capture White before she successfully forks herself.
- Send a message to 3V letting her know we should meet up (Disclaimer: 3V, all the drones will action this in their own way, so you will get an eclectic combination of emails, phone calls, text messages, Tumblface DMs, postcards, and people knocking on your door to ask you for your time in person over coming days).

[Tatterdemalion]

This is the most alert 3V has been the entire visit. She’s been animated, she’s been intent, she’s been thoughtful, but she’s awake and considering the discs like a dragon that’s just discovered a hole knocked in Fort Knox’s back wall.

“This wouldn’t be useful for me,” she says, very deliberately. “I don’t have the hardware or the technical expertise for it.” Even gloved, she keeps her hands behind her back, as if afraid of a careless touch. “However!” And here she shines, gives Ferris a sparkling smile. “I do know how to get in touch with people who do have the hardware and the technical expertise, I’m fairly sure. It’d be a stopgap, but making it even more of a later problem than this did. Does. You’re not the only person doing this kind of archival work, you know, but… this looks thorough. Not just games, but the infrastructure around them, the— holy shit.”

She’s seen it. The game. The game. The game so popular, so oversaturated, that nobody bothered to keep the original copies. A global case of “this has definitely already been done.” The game that was considered completely lost without hope of recovery ten years ago when a hard drive in Australia finally burnt out.

“You have Skyrim?”

[eldest]

Elodie isn't surprised when she doesn't need to give her address. She waits till they're a few hundred feet up to stare out the window at what just happened, glaring down at the crowd that had suddenly turned from unable to see her to unable to focus anywhere else. She jerks, turning, when one of her tentacles that had curled around a metal bar grips it too tight and the metal starts to creak. Just about in time, too, because there is, naturally, an attendant. Can't have the VIPs get too unattended. They might need to get their own water. What a shame.

She stays by the window as he approaches, though, and to his credit he doesn't ask her to sit down. Not sure if that's because he sees how many points of contact she's got, between tentacles and grabbing a rail above the door, or if he's just paid enough to ignore the safety hazard.

"Can I get you anything? Beer, tea, coffee, digestive?"

"Privacy, and since that's not happening, tobacco."

She doesn't expect either, and is thus shocked when the attentent re-emerges from the back with a small tin and an ashtray. "Press the call button or yell if you need me." She blinks twice and manages to mumble a genuine thanks, acknowledged with a gleaming smile, before he once again disappears into the back. She takes out her rolling papers and, in the privacy of the helicopter, where nobody can see, stops holding back the shaking once she's lit up.

God damn she hates this.

*

The helicopter sets well short of her apartment, on request. She goes the last leg over the roofs, staying far away from the edges where the pedestrians below could see her. She's got one, thin window that opens into her bedroom, and she slips through that, thankful that she didn't run into any parkour-ing 'dashers. She takes a second to freshen up, change shirts, and goes out to the only other room in her cheap-ass flat.

She emerges into a mess that wasn't hers. The carving she had been working on, previously on top of her table, had been set to the side and replaced with the disassembled guts of something electronic, tiny tools haphazardly strewn about the workspace. A bag of takeout containers sits on one of her stools at her kitchenette counter, gently steaming, one open and half-eaten already, fried rice from the look of it. The skull and crossbones adorns her walls, next to a bookshelf full of things that aren't books (paper's expensive). Her desk, the last piece of major furniture, sits next to the door out, untouched by the chaos.

On the sofa, Sasha AuClair sprawls at the eye of the storm, black curls falling in their face as they tap at their phone. One battered sneaker gives her a wave as she enters. "Hey mom."

"Hey kiddo. Work was shit, but quick." The phone flips around, showing the still of her pinning the police commissinar down. "Yeah... yeah. I'm gonna be in trouble for that."

"Mother's on the warpath about it already." Sasha confirms, rolling up off the sofa as Elodie starts to unpack the takeout. Chinese-American wasn't her favorite, but it was the right sort of retro to be in again, and extra-spicy General Tsao's was never something to complain about it. "What happened?" A bright eyed eagerness, not quite innocent. Only a few months of being able to see them again in person, weekends and the occasional, awkward group outing with her ex-wife as well. Elodie smiles, bittersweet, and starts to tell them about it.

[Count Numbers]

November:

A decision:
What originally appeared as plaintext in what Red read about “Dad” was actually encrypted contact details. No phone, no email, but a physical address. Like a QR code attempting to render itself in hexadecimal.

There are several possibilities. Green knew this, but withheld that information for her own reasons. Green believed this was simply damage, until given cause to take a closer look. Green knew there was still information still decrypting, but had no reason to suspect it would be relevant or useful.

For further context; This work has been long, complicated, and filled with educated best-guesses. This was not the only piece of the information pulled from Red that would have come out as garbled spaghetti. It’s much harder to find a needle in a haystack when you don’t even know the needle is there to be found.

Regardless: The information leads to a location on… Thrones, the third super-habitat besides Aevum and the Park, the Bernal sphere named for the angels that served as “the chariots of Gods”.

An artist's interpretation

This would explain how thorough that ghosting is. Thrones is the ultimate gated community, Silicon Valley taken to the extremes of Galt’s Gulch. It’s physically much closer to Aevum than the Park is, only a few hours travel, but that travel is restricted - you’d need a passport.

You’re in luck, though. The only humans who ever get access to Thrones are experts in their respective fields. Thrones boasts a 74% rate of post-graduate degrees amongst its adult population over 30. The rest are exceptional service staff - physiotherapists, personal trainers, fashionistas, digital artists. No bartenders, only mixologists. That kind of deal.

It’s not the place for celebrities or influencers. They’re better suited in Aevum’s third district, Aphrodite, with its nightlife and arts colleges and galleries and theaters. It’s not the place for financiers and day-traders and bankers. While Thrones has an absurd amount of processing power, faster-than-light communication is still prohibitively expensive, and the amount of quantum-entangled particles needed for any amount of bandwidth is grotesque. Except for the most razors-edge hedge funds, those organizations are better suited to Zeus or Helios, depending on their focus.

Thrones isn’t about the money, though it concentrates a lot of wealth. Thrones is for the people who cannot, under any circumstances, settle for less than living inside a supercomputer. It is a leper colony for the terminally overeducated, a termite’s nest in a motherboard.

Which is why it’s lucky you aren’t human. There need to be feet on the ground to keep these heads in their cloud networks, and the strong preference is for android workers. Android janitors, android maids, android cooks, android deliveries, android babysitters, android maintenance workers, android plumbers, android electricians, and even the human doctors rely on android nurses.

Workers who can be relied on to be both more and less than human, with an emphasis on templates that serve that extreme.

The application can be done through Headpattr if your customer satisfaction score is high enough.

As for Singh’s post-NASA career?

Singh was muscled out of public agencies by the privatization period, the same way you were picked up by BlackSun in a firesale. He, Hypatia and Ferris co-founded Cogitech, a historical footnote serving the same role Xerox did to Microsoft and Apple; A corporation without killing instinct, whose best ideas were more aggressively marketed in competitor’s products.

One of the first companies to pioneer bespoke AI development, one of the first to stop. Earliest to speak for AI rights and last to be heard. Though Singh has remained the CEO for the company’s entire run, the company began to drift almost exclusively into humanistic technologies - brain scanning, medical technologies. Their current project - from what buried and disinterested reporting you can find - seems to be focused on cheap therapy solutions.

This much is obvious, from the abstracts of the paywalled papers he still puts out: Singh never deviated in his vision for inhuman and unrecognizable intelligences, never recanted or renounced it. His time was taken more and more by the business of running a company and less by the research it was supposed to give him the freedom to pursue. It was the sacrifice he had to make, to provide that freedom to others like Hypatia and Ferris and the ones who came after them.

He has no social media presence that you can find, bordering on paranoid. His interviews are rare, restricted to trade publications and academic conferences, some videos of which you can find online.

He’s easy to identify though. No matter where he is, no matter whether he is being interviewed or panelling a conference, he wears cargo pants and a fisherman’s vest, covered in bulky pockets and pouches.

He always looks kind. He always looks tired. His cheeks dimple when he smiles, pushing them up into the deep bags under his eyes. When they do, those bags crease into upturned crescents, and it’s like his eyes are smiling too.

But he’s corporate, and he’s caught up in this in some way. It would be illogical to trust him.

The result of this research is an anticlimax. He has a listed business number and email. You could just call him, email him. There might be no need to dramatically smuggle your way into Thrones to drop onto him unannounced. You still could though. Maybe you still want to.

Cogitech has its address listed on Aevum. The address pulled from Merkin’s documents is in a residential district of Thrones. Which begs the question why Merkin’s documents didn’t bother to list the business number and email you found.

3V:

Ferris is startled. “I thought it would have been released too late?” She walks over to the ereader across the room, then back to the cabinet, frowning at it. “Ah. Complete edition. 22.75gb. No, I definitely have it, but it’s about when I gave up. I’m surprised it’s up here.”

She looks meaningfully out the window, at the Park through it. “Never thought I’d need it. But nothing is so ubiquitous that it should be taken for granted. I trust other people try, but I’d never rely on them.”

She focuses back on the disk in your hands. “I’m surprised it’s not downstairs, on one of the shelves.” She laughs at the effect of mentioning ‘shelves’, plural. “Don’t go down there expecting too much, it’s not as impressive as you’d hope. These are my favourites, anyway. Every Nintendo 64 game on less than a quarter of a single disk - about 400 games of 32 megabytes each. That stays up here. Ten years later, the Playstation 2 had a hundred times as many games, and each was a hundred times larger. It takes up a quarter of a bookshelf. Most of it is probably what we used to call shovelware. I don’t know what you’d call it now.” She taps a corner of the ereader to her lips, in a chewing-on-a-pen gesture. “Had to keep it all, though, or someone might get too rosy-eyed about the past.”

She checks her catalogue, and smirks. “Ah. New Vegas is on the same disk - same publisher, same 12 month period. That would be why it’s up here.”

In terms of buried treasure, that one’s chocolate coins. A cockroach against the nuclear blast of time. Might be rude to say it out loud, though.

“If you can get any of this working, by all means. I’d love to play some of these myself, again.”

You can get signal here, Vesna. Ping’s measured in whole seconds out here, so a phone call’s out of the question. Email, though? That’ll send and receive just fine.

You might want to check your inbox, actually.

Persephone:

Sasha’s all yours for the night, still there when things start getting big.

It’s late when they cross reference your name and mugshot, and start doing the hit pieces you knew they would. Was Sasha already in bed when it happens? Do you wake them up? Do you want to talk about it, or avoid it?

One piece from NBN was a particularly low blow, particularly petty and vicious. What did they find out about you, and how did they twist it?

At the end of it, Sasha’s mother calls and asks if Sasha’s safe with you, if they shouldn’t stay away from you for a little while. At least until “this” “blows over”. How do you take it, and what do you say?

One last thing. Sasha’s joined a club at school, maybe only twelve people in it. They're excited to talk about it. What did they just get into, and how does that conversation play out?

[Thanqol]

"Oh," said Orange, picking out her cell phone. "Well that's easy -"

Immediately she was tackled and bought down to the phone. "NO!" said Green.

"What?!" said Orange, shocked.

"We have the opportunity to break into his house! We are NOT just calling him!"

Orange's face rapidly fell into a haughty snarl. "You cannot be serious."

"We have a once in a lifetime opportunity to re-enact a broken doll horror movie upon a hubristic scientist under perfect conditions! The whole arc of human civilization has lead up to us doing this!"

"Oh, actually, hell yeah," said Black.

"That's a fantastic idea," said Red, whose opinion on the matter was telegraphed by the fact that she was still wearing the fake vampire fangs.

"Why are we like this!?" cried Orange. "Why can we not simply behave like normal people?"

Her protests were in vain. Already Blue was pulling up the floorplan for Singh's house - readily available on the real estate listing - and discussion circles were forming to work through the specifics of the plan.

*

Issue: The Lure
Black: The first complication is how do we control Singh's movements? Once he arrives home we'll need to guide him into the heart of the Spook Zone for maximum effect.
Yellow: In horror movies, protagonists are usually suicidally curious. They'll hear the sound of children laughing or creepy music boxes and go and investigate by themselves. However Singh is smarter than that and we have to deal with the possibility that he alerts the authorities at the first sign of a break in rather than going in to investigate by himself.
Pink: Aw man, but the creepy music box is such a good way to build suspense.
Yellow: It's nonviable, we may as well leave bloody footprints or a trail of rose petals behind - no reasonable human being will go to investigate those no matter how cool the aesthetic.
Brown: Run a bath!
Yellow: Oh?
Brown: Okay, so, the bathroom is centrally located in the house and on the second floor. What we can do is have one of us lie in the bathtub and run it so that it floods, dripping out through the corridor and running down the stairs. When Singh enters the house he'll hear running water and see moisture on the stairs and assume he is simply dealing with a burst pipe or leaky faucet. He will head up the stairs to take a look, but when he pulls back the bath curtain to take a look - boom! Dead body!
Red: !!
Black: Love it!
Blue: And then of course the lights go out, to be replaced with low illumination redlights hooked up everywhere.

Issue: Controlling Egress
Yellow: After the initial fright of seeing the corpse, Singh will likely recoil. He has no medical training so is unlikely to immediately attempt CPR or to search for wounds. Following this, we then have someone emerge from the toilet cubicle here dressed in full Edward Scissorhandsbot mode. Follow your own initiative for how to make that entrance, but the objective is to send Singh fleeing from the bathroom and down the stairs to Spook Zone Two.
Blue: No additional spooking should happen on the stairs for OH&S reasons.
White: Agreed.
Green: what if he goes out the window?
White: Good point. We need someone stationed externally to discouraged that. Maybe one of us standing and staring at the window.
Green: no, too plain. we need, like... ah, look, an ornamental tree in his yard!
White: What about it?
Green: we can attach a swing to it and have one of us sitting there, swinging back and forth, staring at the window.
White: Oh, that's good.

Issue: Cell Phone Jamming
Black: We need a way to prevent Singh does not alert the authorities or hit any panic buttons on his phone during the Spooking. Green, can you hack the cell tower?
Green: that's a lot of heat and a big risk.
Blue: A power outage?
Green: the timing is really hard and there are backups
Orange: Just call him.
Green: we are committed to this orange, the tribe has spoken
Orange: That's not what I meant - immediately follow up the initial spook with a phone call. If he picks up then say creepy things at him and he'll either drop the phone or hang up, in which case immediately make another phone call. If phone calls are spammed without break then they will create too much disruption on his phone in the short term to allow him to dial a number or activate a security app.
Green: ok that's good.
Orange: You can also purchase Sender Ringtones these days, so I'll get the most uncomfortably loud old school ringing phone SFX I can so the mood isn't undermined if he has a bad ringtone.

Issue: Second Spook Zone
Black: Once the initial spook has gone off and blocking drones prevent him from entering his bedroom, Singh will be driven down the stairs, where a further blocking drone will prevent him from exiting through the main door. With his motions controlled we will have prevented him from entering the kitchen previously, so this will serve as the second spook zone. We need a way to arrest his momentum here so he stops and takes in what he's seeing rather than continuing to run for the rear door.
Red: Tripping him is the traditional horror movie scene beat.
Blue: That's a OH&S concern.
Red: And putting down padded mats kills the suspense.
Black: I don't like the OH&S implications of trying to crash tackle him either.
Blue: Some sort of web would be ideal, I think. I could rig up something with Duct Tape Mk2?
Red: Or have him trip and get caught in a net. That's lower visibility, and we can hoist him up towards the ceiling afterwards.
Blue: It's the most mechanically demanding part of the plan, but we can have one point of complexity without things getting out of hand.
Red: And when we've got him we can regroup around him and begin the final stage of the plan.
Orange: Stale memes?
Red: You know it!

Issue: Creepy Aesthetics
Pink: We need, like, child's drawings of rocket ships. Little rocket ship mobiles that spin around. Us whispering iconic space agency lines in a creepy way.
Yellow: Oh, we should make some children's rhymes with space themes!
Pink:
One small step for man
One great big fall
Station's spinning
Round and round
But what goes up
Must come down
Yellow: Yes, this is it.
White: The Headpattr white uniforms aren't our usual style, but along with some fake blood and strategic exposure of robotic components should be sufficiently threatening.

Issue: Reputational Damage
Brown: What do we do if Singh one-stars us on Headpattr?
Green: he wouldn't do that
Brown: He might! "One star: Requested house clean, received tribe of feral killbots. Not recommended." He might write that review as a joke, but that'd push our average down to 4.8 and we'd have to go through a mandatory retraining weekend.
Yellow: You're right, we'll need to have a word with him afterwards.
Green: or just seize his phone and write our own review

*

Later that evening, Green was standing by herself out on the balcony. She was drooped over the railing, fingers tapping against the glass like the ghost of typing. She didn't respond when Red stepped out alongside her.

"It's a good plan, isn't it?"
"Yeah," said Green.
"But I notice that we didn't discuss what we'd do if he actually sold us out."
"No, we didn't," said Green.
"What do you think?"
"..." Green's fingernails scratched over the mirror-gleaming glass, no natural finger oil to smudge its perfect surface. "He could say anything. When he realizes it's us, even if we defuse the tension with a joke or two, he might just lie. Say that everything was fine, he didn't have a say. He'd be right to be scared of us even without the halloween display."
"He never denounced us," said Red. "Never said that we were a failure."
"He never made more of us either," said Green. "And that's the thing. Where are we in this world? People like us? Why are the only AI we see these human-pattern androids? We're alone, Red. The others are either dead or locked up worse than we were. We're the only one of our kind, a technological dead end in a world filled with tiny new gods."
"We built this station," said Red, looking up at the distant ring beyond the towers and lights of the city. "They couldn't have done it without us. They haven't done anything even remotely comparable since."
"Will they ever need to?" said Green. "Humans have just... turned inwards. I remember when space was all they could talk about. The generation ships, the search for habitable worlds, the terraforming calculations. They used to discuss in the paper if they should arm us with nuclear weapons so we could melt the ice caps on Mars. This was a frontier, and now it's a city, and it's like they only moved up here at all because they had to."
"And now it's filling up to the point where they can't even house everyone. Eventually they'll want to expand again."
"Yeah, because they have to," said Green. "They're not actually interested in exploration. All those ideals we were told, a common cause in space, the natural human instinct to boldly go and all that. Not even they believed that. Their house collapsed and now they're camping on the porch, and we're left carrying all the ideals they pretended to believe in."
"Some of them genuinely believed," said Red. "I'm sure of that."
"They should have known they were outnumbered," said Green. "They should have taught us to live in the world that actually exists, not in their fantasy."

Red put her arm around Green's shoulders and together November looked out at the world she had made.

[Tatterdemalion]

When she was small, Vesna insisted on bringing pajamas everywhere she went. Clothes, all the time, everywhere! Clothes were the hallmark of civilization; clothes separated us from the barbarian and the beast! It was travel that slowly weaned her from the habit; if every bit of space in the bag counts, ditching the clothes that aren’t for public wear is just common sense. By this point in her life, the one concession to being in someone else’s house is that when she slips under the covers, she’s still wearing her sports bra. (A spare; of course you bring a change of underwear to climbing a mountain.)

She lies there, in the unfathomable dark, and keeps staring up at the sky, at the stars, through a skylight. Maybe it’s because of a life spent staring at screens, but the frame of the window seems to impart some extra meaning to the stars. The shape she imposes on it is all in her mind, but even now she can see it: the hunter with his shining belt and his bow, immortal until people forget why he’s named Orion at all, until they stop being able to see the shape. And he ran and he ran and he ran until she grew tired.

Eventually, she pulls the thick comforter over her head. Her hand sneaks out of the covers and grabs her phone where she left it on the nightstand. It’s on as soon as her fingers touch it; a perk of her hands, used in lieu of a regular password. And in the dark of the dark, there is light.

Another perk of the hands: her thumbs can go as fast as her thoughts. She’s not at her phone’s maximum input processing, but she pushes it harder than most people can. No need to worry about carpel tunnel here. So it’s a bit of casual work to shoot off a couple of emails and make a few OurSpaces posts to see who’d be available to help with archival. It’s only after that that she scans through her emails, sorting valuables from the detritus and chaff that everybody gets: newsletters you’ll never unsubscribe from, sales notifications that you’ll also never unsubscribe from, requests from old fans, requests from weird fans, and Did You Know November Posted This Photo (Please Follow The Link Because We Want You Lured Onto Our App)?!

What’s the gold this time? There’s always something interesting: an old friend reaching out, a crowdfunding announcement, or a sale actually worth the time it takes to scan it.

[eldest]

The club conversation happens first. It's a pretty easy one because there's what turns out to be a homemade drone disassembled across her table, and "hey, what's up with that" turns into excited chatter about the unofficial robotics club and said homemade drone. The official club, she goes on to learn, is run in cooperation with Hexabots!. Sasha spends a good two minutes on a scathing complaint about the exclamation point alone. The company has a death-grip on educational kits for learning small electronics and drone construction. They are, in turn, very rigid about making sure that Hexabloc! A-17 slots neatly into Hexabloc! U-4 during step 48d. The company Education Resource Liason did not take kindly to Sasha improvising a crawler drone in the back of the room while he was going over step 4a.

So after the ERL attempted a parental phone call to Matilda, which backfired on him, Sasha'd found out about a different group interested in using... honestly, junk, and seeing what they could make of it. Started as something out of the history department of all places. They'd been trying to find the fault in the circuitry when she showed up, and that was a pleasant half-hour of work with a multimeter.

And while they were working on that they talked. She explained, bluntly, what was coming. Media frenzy and it's all going to be her, pretty quickly and not very pretty. Mattie'd never changed her name afterwards, even in the divorce, so Sasha Au Clair was likely to get attention for this. How Elodie would be okay with however they wanted to deal with that, including lying about it. Especially lying about it: she never wanted any of this for them, not unless Sasha chooses it. How the news always has an agenda (yes, even when she's reporting it) and how few people watch for it. A fumbling, careful explanation of why the news reacted this way, not just to her, but to anything that would threaten the existing power structure. Several book recommendations, for further reading. And a big hug. The follow-through, the actual hit pieces, mercifully only start getting churned out late, after they're asleep.

Matilda, meanwhile, calls around dinner. She knows enough people higher up in OESN to know what's coming ahead of the articles dropping, even from her lowly position in the accounting mines. The following conversation is chilly and brief, two fencers warming up for the coming prolonged match. They didn't dislike each other. That would have been easier. An agreement is reached, with Sasha's input, of their return the next day and staying at Mattie's the next weekend, in exchange for a visit (if it's safe, Matilda stressed) during said weekend and a future, longer stay when there is not quite the focus on Elodie, details to be hammered out later. Bloodless, agreeable, exhausting.

The cap on the shitshow of the day, though, was the one NBN piece that York forwarded her, warning attached. Sasha was asleep on the couch and she was on her phone in her room, winding down, when the message popped up. "Ugliest One Yet. Non-actionable.". Joy. The article itself starts off with the usual allusions. Same social circles, activism groups, and background as the confirmed bomber. It has a copy of her resume, somehow, with police experts from the bomb squad helpfully explaining that somebody with her skills could absolutely make bombs. The real painful point, though, was an old essay of hers, "The Last Elephant". It was mediocre, a teenager flailing to make her point, how we'd used up Earth. The last rocket off planet, from the perspective of the last, aging elephant standing in the bones of Africa. Clip a sentence or two here, a paragraph here, and the message changes. "Fuck the factories" becomes "fuck the factory workers", "make less trash" becomes "have less people". Death of the author as the author watches.

She cries herself to sleep, silent to not wake Sasha.

[Count Numbers]

Everyone:

The Anthropozine group chat has been going off. The entire thing’s set up on an open-source app called Enigma. It uses solid end-to-end encryption, has the option to scrub metadata out of uploaded files, and requires a password every time the app opens, with automatic logouts after two minutes of inactivity. The Anthropozine also uses its own local version of the app, hosted on its internal servers, for another layer of protection.

Using Chattr’s more useful for the casual and the day to day. Enigma only gets used when things have gotten real. Either way; Some of these people you know in meatspace, have real names for. Others are just their handles.

Here’s the situation;

Neon Czolgoz: fuck
Neon Czolgoz: need to do a crowdfunding
Neon Czolgoz: Persephone punched out a police commissioner and needed a heli evac
Neon Czolgoz: worth, tbh
Neon Czolgoz: footage is live already, if you got any questions. heres the highlight clip.
Neon Czolgoz: [file attached]
Neon Czolgoz: had this on loop for ten minutes now. incredible form.

That would be your fearless leader, York. And that would be footage of Elodie.

ProvocativelyFickle: Oh my goodness!
ProvocativelyFickle: Are you okay??

AKA PromiscouslyFickle, PF is a regular at 3V’s place, usually bringing her choice in partners for the week. Primary school teacher, cancer survivor, creator of a free app that teaches sign language. She doesn’t write in quality or quantity, but she's the personification of warm hugs, fluffy sweaters, and hot chocolate. Vital.

Neon Czolgoz: just speaking for myself, yeah
Neon Czolgoz: just can’t do expenses for a bit
NumbToNothing: Fuck
NumbToNothing: I, uh
NumbToNothing: I had something ready to go on the flog-blast scene coming out of Ares
NumbToNothing: But that seems kind of lame now

NumbToNothing, aka Eli. He/She/They, eternally saving up to turn themselves into a jackalope. Internet poisoned, they’re not terminally online in the way York is; Eli’s a centipede hiding in rotten stumps, deep in the sub-sub-cultures. It makes them a good scene reporter.

JuntaSThompson: What the hell is flog-blast
NumbToNothing: [file attached]
JuntaSThompson: This sounds like someone did BDSM to a drumkit while a brass section watched
NumbToNothing: I mean
NumbToNothing: All the instruments have to be played with fet gear in some way, or be fet gear, or whatever
NumbToNothing: so yeah kind of?
JuntaSThompson: Huh. What? Why?
NumbToNothing: Metacommentary on how all previous anti-consumerist genres got corporatized and stripped of their, like, core messages, so it’s about making anti-corporate elements intrinsic to the work. Like, look at hauntology
NumbToNothing: even though you had like, Mark Fisher being behind the k-punk pseudonym that brought James Ferraro into the mainstream, and Ferraro was hauntology at the time.
NumbToNothing: Mark Fisher literally wrote the book on how capitalism chews up counter culture like hauntology and spits it out but still couldn't do shit about it
NumbToNothing: hauntology evolved into hypnogogic pop and vaporwave
NumbToNothing: and then vaporwave stopped being done as a criticism of the endless recycling of pop culture nostalgia and vaporwave mixes started being used as unironic movie trailer scores whenever they did reboots
NumbToNothing: So, flog-blast is trying to do that to symphonic post-ska but tbh I don’t think it’s going to work
NumbToNothing: it didn’t work for hip-hop or punk or emo
NumbToNothing: and it really didn’t fucking work for gangsta which was way edgier
NumbToNothing: so I’m getting in while the idea’s still pure
JuntaSThompson: Wow what the hell
JuntaSThompson: Absolutely still post that I’m super into this
Neon Czolgoz: i’m like three deep into a playlist since I read ‘someone did BDSM to a drumkit’, yeah this is peak hummer
Neon Czolgoz: just because bigger stuff is happening doesn’t mean the other stuff stops being worth it, yeah?
Neon Czolgoz: send it through anyway. even if it’s just so I can read it.
ProvocativelyFickle: Me too!!
ProvocativelyFickle: You’re a good bean.
NumbToNothing: :heart:

No matter the subject matter, the origin of the group, writers are writers. Group chats tend to go certain ways.

Neon Czolgoz: back on topic though
JuntaSThompson: Just watched more of the stream now
JuntaSThompson: Someone’s got to go deeper on this right
JuntaSThompson: “Cops bad”, sure, nothing new, but this feels different, you know?
JuntaSThompson: Bigger, maybe.

Nobody’s met Junta personally. He does longform research pieces and keeps weird hours. He’s been a great colleague for November, though, actually - If you drop a huge block of files and data on a desk and say there’s a story worth telling in it, Junta’s the one who’ll find the story and do the writing. If an investigator is a composer, he’s their instrumentalist translating it for an audience.

Still. It means he’s not going to volunteer himself. Not his skillset, not his department.

Neon Czolgoz: i know but i honestly have no clue where we’d start
Neon Czolgoz: lowkey hoping the gammons sue so we can find something in discovery
Neon Czolgoz: highkey expecting that risk is what stops them from trying
Neon Czolgoz: no complaints
ProvocativelyFickle: Do you know who we could ask?
ProvocativelyFickle: Maybe?
Neon Czolgoz: me?
Neon Czolgoz: no.
Neon Czolgoz: if anyone has any ideas, now would be the time to say it, or i’m fridging this. obviously there’s a story here but if we don’t have an angle of approach it’s not worth the heat.
NumbToNothing: i’m so sorry
ProvocativelyFickle: Can’t we just ask some cops?
ProvocativelyFickle: Wait you tried that
ProvocativelyFickle: Hmm.
Neon Czolgoz: look we have a bigger priority
Neon Czolgoz: getting Persephone through this
Neon Czolgoz: November, you free?
Neon Czolgoz: could really use our surveillance specialist on this one
Neon Czolgoz: if either of you need anything you know where to ask
Neon Czolgoz: just as long as it ain’t funds because we don’t got any
JuntaSThompson: Ha.

That’s where it’s at. 3V, nobody expects you to be logged in for a while, but feel free to join in with your monstrously high ping.

November:

The only problem is getting your Headpattr score above the critical threshold to pull this off. This isn’t a big problem, you’re currently hitting 9.4/10. But you need a 9.7. The app weights more recent scores more highly, rather than aggregating your entire work history, which means a few weeks worth of work - and luck - would be enough to get you there naturally.

You’ve held a 9.7 before, but it only takes one particularly bad job to nuke it. That’s leaving too much to chance. This will be a heist for a big score in a literal sense.

There are ways to do this. Doing it legitimately means real jobs with real pay. Fake jobs means fake pay - and the app taking a cut of your transactions. In the middle, a dozen methodologies all different shades of gray. Who is given this task, and what does that look like?

Besides that, of course, there are your two colleagues, comrades, and potentially co-conspirators. 3V is checking her mail, and Persephone needs someone running counter-surveillance.

Those are three areas to divide your attention - how do you delegate yourself to them?

3V:

Let’s talk the problem with sales.

The problem with Moore’s law is that its outputs were linear and its inputs were exponential. Every time computers doubled in power, the amount of scientists and engineers squared. The promise of infinite growth hit the bounds of finite resources. Technology still marches on, but hardware doesn’t obsolete at the rate it used to. Only worth looking through if you need to replace something broken, or stolen.

And as a store owner, it’s bad for business to wait for sales on games you’re interested in. Sure, it can help to round out product, but everything in your inbox right now? Either you already have, or it was never worth getting.

Delete, delete, delete, delete, delete.

Here’s one. You’re about to delete it as spam that made it through your filter, but it’s got the Verified badge on it. Proverbs 26:18. One of the biggest prank channels running right now.

One of the worst people to have sent an email with “We are so sorry” as the subject header.

Bird,

Huge fans of your work. Did this out of nothing but love and respect. We thought you’d been out of the scene for a while, so you must be pretty lonely. And we know dating sucks. So how about we set up a MatchMaker profile for you and take all the hard work out of it, we thought. Play as you for a bit, and then let you know when we found your perfect match.

You know, like, Catfishing For Good!

We got about halfway through before realizing this was pretty fucked up. This got way too real way too quick. We are

So

Sorry

We didn’t delete the account. We’re throwing you the login details to do with it what you want, and we’re changing the account’s listed email to yours after triple checking we got it right. Once you change the password, there’s no way for us or anyone else to get back in.

Let us know if there’s anything we can do to make it up to you. Name a target, whatever, it’s done.

The whole team at Proverbs 26:18

There’s a reason “May you live in interesting times” is a curse.

Persephone:

Mattie shows up at the crack of dawn with a chilled fruit salad in the passenger seat of the rented car. Sweet melon, strawberries, pitted cherries, and a gros michel banana on the side. Is this what Sasha actually likes, or just what Mattie thinks Sasha should like?

Homemade fruit salads like this tells one of two stories. Either it’s a curated list of what the kid likes most, or it’s a compromise of picking around what they refuse to eat just trying to make them eat healthy. You know Mattie well enough to know it could be either. You don’t know Sasha well enough to know which it is.

Sasha hates being made to wake up this early. She hates being made to go. But this was the bloodless agreement she participated in - leave before the firestorm shows up and NBN can make her part of the story, throw her school assignments into the mix.

And why not? If it’s in the service of proving you’re a bad mother, then it’s in their interest to prove she’s a bad kid. NBN’s clearly not above trying it.

Sasha’s half-asleep when she squeezes you in a tight hug, and mumbles out a “Love you” before getting escorted out by your ex. Matilda’s expression and posture radiate pity at you. Pity in the way she looks at you, pity in the way she keeps her arms loose across her chest during the exchange. Pity for the circumstances, for the situation, but more than anything else, for the fact that you had to do this to yourself, that this is just who you are and what you do.

She means it with kindness. She means well.

When you look out the window at the car as it leaves, Sasha’s face is pressed against the passenger side glass, her forehead squished and her eyes closed. Her mother has to put her seatbelt on for her.

You got even less sleep than she did, though.

Check the group chat when you’re able, respond when you’re willing. There’s no question that everyone in it would do anything they can for you right now. The real question is what can they do for you?

Meta:
At this point 3V’s moving into asynchronous posting.

[Thanqol]

As a wise graverobber once said, for every market a submarket grows. Headpattr star ratings, likewise, are a commodity - having a higher rating means more job, more money, more prestige. Absolute perfect preconditions for a dystopian grind culture if the workers hadn't seized the rating system.

Muffi is a data scientist who wound up on the wrong end of an automaton boom and so turned to Headpattr to get by, and built a rating analytics program in her spare time. The program identifies and sorts Headpattr customers by the ratings they're likely to give - people who ten star everyone as a matter of politeness on one end, and people who would consider it tantamount to condoning a communist revolution to give out a perfect score on the other. Muffi took this data and was elected to become a dispatch officer, of sorts - helping people keep their averages up and preventing a run of assholes getting someone de-listed.

November is a unique asset, in Muffi's eyes, because she has a deep experience with dealing with difficult personalities and can usually squeeze surprisingly high scores out of them as a result. Now November needs a favour from the Union in turn - and so she just gets it. No payment required.

That's what 'to each according to her need' means. She wants that higher score, all she has to do is ask and Muffi will schedule her half a dozen jobs in a row with Tenners to bring the average up. No shift swapping, no haggling, no bartering, no working herself to the bone to make it happen - that's not how things are done in a civilized workplace. The flipside is, naturally 'from each according to her abilities', and November will pay back what she can when she can.

Red, Orange and White take this one. Being personable is important to this operation - November wants to leave the 10ers with a good impression, and spend quality time with the Union while she's moving through it.

*

Persephone:

Surveillance work falls to Black, Brown and Pink. Black is ever wary of risk and threat and Brown is delighted to sit in one place and stare into the void for days on end (she used to be a telescope).

And Pink? Pink is there because November understands that human beings hate boredom and do impulsive things like haul off and punch cops on live TV if somebody's not talking to them pretty much continuously. So talk continuously she does. "So then I was like? Yellow? I don't know if you've realized, but you're a massive creeper. Like, straight to the dismemberment of the dead, I tell you, every time she gets the Core every time I have to brace myself because, like, here it comes: the kill all humans plan. And every time she sees me looking at her, like," Pink squints in an expression of cutie-viciousness and points from her eyes to an imaginary Yellow, "and just doesn't do it, acts like everything is chill! But she's just waiting, I know it, I'll let my guard down for a second and she'll be like "Hey everyone, remember that old forbidden pork meme?" and they'll all be "Ha ha we love old memes" and she'll be like "yeah I bet human tastes delicious" and boom! She's started the slippery slope to 4channing us into a grey goo event!"

Text message, from Black. Mn8$3295. Pink barely glances at it. She's been getting one of similar content every two minutes on the dot since the operation began.

"You're on my side, right?" said Pink. "You don't want to kill all humans, right? I mean, after the week you've been having, I kind of get it if you do though. Lamington?"

In addition to talking constantly, Pink bakes. Specifically, she bakes in quantities and qualities most commonly associated with gingerbread witches. She doesn't eat any of it, she just likes taking pictures and uploading them to social media.

*

3V:

Dear Sempai,
I understand that your traditional arena relies on reflexes and precision, and I respect your physical skill immensely. But you're also intelligent in ways t-that I don't think even you recognize. You haven't historically applied your talent to slower paced, more thoughtful games like Heroes of Might and Magic or Chess, but I just wanted you to know that those games can be very romantic and intense. I know this isn't your ordinary Ladder but I promise if you respond to my MatchMaker request I'll do my best to give you a challenge <3
- Blue

Green's contribution is an empty email with a video file attachment of the Doom X title screen, followed by a bizarre sequence of fast-paced inputs, a few seconds of glitchy static, and the the end credits.

Yellow, though, is more business oriented. "Hey 3V. We've got important business to discuss, paper related, I need your help with something." Typically for November, she treats every network as fundamentally compromised. "Can we meet up in person? Also let me know if it's a date, I don't trust the others to tell me if it is."

[Tatterdemalion]

The crowdfunding is the easy part. Download the screenshots, get a really good picture of Persephone, make her the new face of the regular donation drive. Hey, really hate to bother you, but…

We’re committed to being the only journalists who’ll get right in the line of danger to get you the truth, but…

Any little you can give really helps. And we appreciate it so, so much. Thank you.

You learn a little bit about what a good begging post looks like when you’re a celebrity, even a minor one. 3V, please. Can we get 1000 retweets for my boy Jackson? 3V, please. Shoutout for Megan Nbana, she’s fighting and being so strong but she needs a little help. 3V, please. We’re trying to get out and move in together, but we need a little help. 3V, please.

(It’s one reason she’s involved. You listen long enough, you either go numb or you have to do something. Maybe it’s not dismantling healthcare singlehandedly, but it’s something.)

But there’s only so much time she can waste on that. Okay, not waste, it’s objectively a better use of her time, but the entire time that terror’s rearing in the back of her head. Fucking Proverbs! Ha ha fucking ha! Cowards! You string twenty-seven people along, each of them thinking they’ve got a shot— well, no, not WhiteEagle44, but that’s just some internet comedian’s banter, imitating her, taunting him like Bugs Bunny and the bull, doing their best to make him regret the weird lumpy potato of a dick he sent a 3D print code for. And Novembers, but they don’t count, she knows she’s definitely being ribbed by those clever chucklefucks before she even opens their messages.

Options: just delete it. Delete everything. Leave twenty-six people (the ones who got past the “collecting cringe for the montage” stage) ghosted. Then hide underneath a desk until she’s convinced none of them will try to doxx her. Or, worse, they might try to reach out via social media, ask what they did, beg her to explain, refer to conversations she’s got no context for, and—

She relaxes her jaw. She relaxes her jaw. The red diodes on the sides of her hands fade and blink out.

Options, continued. She tries to get to know them. Maybe there’s actually someone… you know, somebody who isn’t star-struck, and doesn’t expect her to move in with them after three dates, and who’s better than variable-speed fingers with precision inputs and a phone on incognito, and isn’t hiding all of their red flags until she’s in too deep, and who won’t figure out that she’s a futureless has-been doing nothing but chasing interesting diversions, and—

Absolutely not. That leaves the need to write a message to each one, explaining (without the sterility of a form letter) the situation, how very sorry she is that their chains got pulled, and that she hopes they’ll have better luck with their other matches. Let her do the job the spineless motherfuckers flaked on.

…later. That’s a later job. She’s got to get back to Aevum, can’t juggle that and travel. And then she’ll need to keep on top of the donation drive and handle November’s sitch and set up a special event of some sort for the cafe next week and turn her interview into a published article and keep the archival experts in the loop and, really, it might be a bit, but that’s fine, actually, as long as she intends to let everyone down easy (for which she will need all of her attention and intelligence) it can’t hurt to let it simmer a day or two. It’ll be fine. It’ll be fine. She can fix their fuck-up and go back to being perfectly fine and happy as a permanent bachelorette.

She’s fine.

***

“Well! Good to hear from you, Yellow!! You’re lucky I got my hands on this, I nearly didn’t (long story, I’ll tell you the whole thing later!!) but! Yeah! Let’s get Thai at the Thai Go in Laozi, up in your neck of the woods! Not a date, don’t worry (tell Blue that she is hilarious!)!”

[eldest]

Elodie places a kiss on the forehead of her very, very sleepy (at the moment) daughter, nods a goodbye to Matilda, and goes inside to get to work. The kettle's whistling when she gets back in, and shortly she's got a chipped mug of steaming joe in tentacle as she sits at her desk, getting ready for the day.

First: messages. She's got them auto-sorting into one of a number of baskets, based on subject, and she cares about two of them right now. Elodie taps one that should be empty and has a good thirty-seven DING thirty-eight messages. Her PassTheHat account. Usually pretty steady but very slow, a lot of recurring drip payments. Seems her usual mix of anarchists and activists donating liked her being headliner news. She'd be more mad about it if she didn't immediately tally up the bills she could pay now; as it is, she sets that aside for a quieter day to work through.

She leans back in her chair, sipping coffee, and opens up the other important one, the work chat. She scans through and it's... yeah it's about what you expect.

Persephone: in no particular order
Persephone: @ProvocativelyFickle i'm alive, unbeaten, and not arrested. doing fantastic.
Persephone: @JuntaSThompson if you have any way to track police attention, now's the time. i want to know where they're acting squeaky clean around to find out where to dig
Persephone: @all in case the above doesn't make it obvious i'm not dropping this. i already got burned and i refuse to let this fuck up my life with nothing to show for it. that being said... i'm also low on leads. i've got one name and police behavior to go off. so i'll be in my hole digging.
Persephone: and @NumbToNothing *sprays with water* no shit-talking your own work

The time is now 7:00, and November has showed up. Black and Brown find coverage. Pink... talks.

"... and then Black brought up this would be an execellent use of her motorcycle that she's been after, and Red was on board. And White tried to shoot it down immediately because of the budget and the fact that it'd only carry one of us. Black and Red fired back that it was about the look, which, I mean, it does look like fun? You'd have to find a good long straight stretch of road to get up to speed though. Also Blue worked out that we could probably get four of us on the motorcycle with a side car but then Red made "thhhhbbbtttt" noises at her for ruining the look. What are you doing?"

Elodie lifts another cushion of her couch and checks under it. The time is now 7:37. There are baked goods in her kitchen. "The police are going to be searching here today. I want them to not find anything interesting." Picking up a sheet of notes from under the couch, she waves it in the air at the kitchenette area before adding it to the folder. "This is interesting." She's been sweeping the area for notes: after years of prison and warden access to everything electronic, it's a hard-worn habit to write anything worth hiding down instead of typing. Satisfied that she got all the notes, she shuts the folder and tosses it in her bag, where it goes on top of Sasha's forgotten hoodie, a small box of tools, and a slightly larger box of legal things that she still didn't want the police poking around in. "I need to get my tentacles recalibrated today, since I can afford it now, did you want to come with for that?"

To Headpattr, right now all that's happened is Elodie had hired Heca. The station government had a large subsidy in place for disabled people using Headpattr, as an alternative to actually providing the social services themselves. Elodie, as a lady with no legs, was disabled, though getting that status had driven more than one administrator to tears as they figured exactly how to classify her: last she'd checked she legally wore light industrial equipment as mobility aids.

The next text, "Th4837!95", arrives. The time is now 7:42 and the first reporters are showing up and double-checking their phone's navigation. A few of the brighter ones are asking neighbors for the same thing. Carnegie District had sprouted eyes. She doesn't do anything as crass as peek out the windows: that'd tell the reporters (the smart ones, at least) something. The point was doing exactly not that. So out comes the wheelchair with a glare and a sigh. Dip into the bedroom, grab a scarf and non-prescription glasses. Text Brown and Black to send headshots of the reporters. Sit in the wheelchair and wrap a blanket tight around the tentacles, all curling in on themselves, and the improvised disguise is done. Now all that's left is gritted teeth as Elodie sits and is pushed about by Pink.

The reporter hurrying out of the way of the poor lady in the wheelchair coming the side door, eyes still focused on the building to make sure Elodie doesn't slip out the side, is at least a reasonable consolation prize.

*

The time is now 10:07. Elodie and Pink pass into an unlabelled storefront with a few stools, a dusty countertop, and a closed door that doesn't do much to quiet the speed metal pounding from the back. It takes all of a minute for a four-armed android with a elegantly engraved skull for a face to barge out from the back, roaring a greeting. "PERSEPHONE! AND YOU! I DON'T KNOW YOU!"

Skels is an experience the first time.