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

[Count Numbers]

York:

“No~” York says sweetly. “I’ll fill you in on my lunatic improvised scheme while you walk with me, because we’re in a hurry. Fast talking you was just slightly less shitty than saying there’s no time to explain.”

And then he gets up, leaving the tablet and the badge for Brown, and starts walking out the cafe hoping you’ll follow. And here’s the thing - he needs you for this, but it’s likely he’ll try something without you anyway. He’d respect the hell out of not helping as a power move, though.

Juan:

Two guards do a sweep of the downstairs, checking all the rooms. The door opens and slams on the bathrooms, the archives, the study, each in their turn. A man with a serrated knife showing through the lining of his jacket looks directly at Green without seeing her, then closes the door and heads off again. That trick will work down here as often as you need it to, now, in case you need to use it again.

“Clear. Still no sign of Juan, either.”

Then they go again. You hear the stairs close over again after them.

Juan is silent when you meet up again at the shelves, finger to his lips he points at the door to the stairs up, mimes a guy with a gun, and holds up one finger. He’s even breathing quieter, now.

He’s miming that one guard stayed behind, just in case. Even if you snuck past him in an almost empty room, there’s no way he wouldn’t notice the stairs opening again. Short of blowing a hole in the ceiling, though, it’s your only way out.

Luis:

“I did think about that.” He says, very seriously. “Names are very important things, and there are the names we choose for the audience and the names we choose for the story we want to tell. And I was thinking it was very unlikely that, given your audience…” He smiles. “No, I don’t think even the oldest have had the patience for The Tempest. If you had chosen Melquíades from One Hundred Years of Solitude that would be another story,” he says a touch proudly, thoughtfully. “I’m glad to know there was such purpose to it.” And then, dangerously, he really does seem to think about what Pink has said. “Are those usually the names you perform under?” He asks, curiously, “Or was it just for today?”

Bondi jumps on the chance to be helpful and cover for you here. “Today was their first performance, actually! So we’re still trying things out, we don’t have a ‘usual’ yet. I promise, though, when we come back for Gwen, even if we change the routine up, we know to come back with Ariel and Caliban.”

“Thank you.” He says, gratefully. Still, what Pink’s said is whirring in his brain still. “First performance? Really? I could hardly tell, you worked so well together. What…”

“Yeah! Yeah, we used to work together a lot more back when we were dating, but it got a bit awkward after Caliban broke up with me. Ariel thought this would be a great way to catch up, and it was! We had a fantastic time, putting this together. I think it was very special.” Bondi’s cherubim smile and enthusiastic lean forward onto her tip-toes has all the sincerity of someone telling the truth.

“I see. Why did you break up, then?” Luis asks on curiosity auto-pilot but it’s enough for Bondi’s feet to touch ground again and her smile to falter. “I just meant, if you’re still working together-” He shuts up. The man knows this is not a hole he can dig up from.

Bondi isn’t going to field this one. She wants to hear Orange’s answer to this one, too.

[Thanqol]

Brown!

Brown watches faces. Men and women, the air of tension, the performance of control. She listens to the rustle of belts and fabric, sweat stains shaped by the edges of the hard vests underneath. The smells of sugars and fats and coffee, infusions of raw toxic energy. She falls into reveries of silent watching easily. Time disappears when she watches and she can indulge the straightforwards bliss of holding a position of power while utterly inactive.

In the silence she opens her holotop[1] and starts to work.

[1] A holotop is a pencil sized holographic display panel that will project a screen and a keyboard, the modern version of a laptop. They're often dirt cheap, underpowered and have terrible battery life but Brown finds it easier to work around the flaws than to go through the process of replacing hers.

She looks into incident reports, browsing through them until she find Zang's. She opens another tab and starts cross comparing it to relevant case law. Looks into background files - if Zang makes a career out of getting arrested she must have a seriously high powered lawyer in her back pocket, so she looks back in the files until she finds that person and reaches out to them. She takes her time to understand the situation properly and work it right.

If York wants to play silly buggers with the cops and gets arrested, then she'll provide for him the same level of service.

Green!

The staircase closes. The vents re-open.

People suffocate in poorly ventilated panic rooms - which this essentially is - especially if you have to, say, pack a dozen or more family members into it. When the staircase goes up it pressurizes the space, and when the room's carbon dioxide sensor - that Green has directed Juan to blow hard onto - registers a high level of carbon dioxide then its automatic system decides that the security risk of an open vent is less concerning than having its manufacturers' name listed alongside the casualty report.

Not to worry, though - the system will pulse in a rush of air and then seal again automatically, a cycle so quick that it wouldn't present an opportunity for an intruder who didn't want to get cut in half - unless there was, say, a buildup of rust from a leaky water pipe on the key internal gear that slowed it down. Unrelated, did you know that hydrogen peroxide is a common household cleaning product, and mixed with table salt and vinegar it can rapidly rust metal?

Green gestures to Juan to go first. "Piece of advice," she said. "Always make sure the door can't lock behind you."

[Mechanics 3/8, 5+5 10]

Orange!

"Ah, my fault," said Orange. "I'm just not... a complete enough person."

And that was kind of it. Bondi loved Orange - and didn't comprehend November. She couldn't take the idea of Orange switching out for a more relevant colour and had sincerely tried to express to Orange that she was special, unique, and if she just believed in herself she could be a real girl all on her own. And the sentiment had been flattering. She'd tried. She'd tried hard, but...

There were holes in her mind. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn't fill them. Maintaining a single perspective and personality took all her energy. Concealing the rest of herself from someone felt like trying to pour her light through a pinhole. Talking was all she was, and isolated it was all she could be, so many thoughts running to into dead ends and flaring out. The experience gave her an intimate understanding for the inner lives of the Stepford Wives, as that was essentially what Orange was without her collective.

It still hurt, though. So she's a bit cruel when she turns it around. "It's why I'm envious of humans," she said. "Nine children! You must love your wife a lot. It's a shame she couldn't make it."

[Count Numbers]

Brown:

Here is what you learn from looking deeper into your missing lunch buddy:

Zang Ho is just a little bit taller than most women, with short, sweaty hair that makes her look like she’s come out of the rain. She’s not cybernetically enhanced, but she’s not vanilla. In the 2060s, Yggdrasil nailed a synthetic testosterone compound that made it easier for women to build the muscle mass of men without also growing facial hair. Subdermal armor under her skin flexes with the movements of her arms, a metamaterial weave that will limit bleeding and spread force around when she takes a hit. Her chest meets her neck at an odd angle, where her collarbones have been drawn in to a less vulnerable position.

All of that is below the surface, though. She hides what she really is, what she’s ready for, so she doesn’t risk getting profiled for it. Her surface is so malleable that it probably doesn’t matter anyway..

Put her in a white pinstripe suit and heels and she’d pass for an executive, someone with a corporate gym card membership and who would walk through you rather than around you if you wandered into her path. Put her in a bomber jacket and surplus steel toed boots and she’d be a heartbreaker at a punk rock concert, bloody makeouts with broken lips and headbutts delivered with a wicked smile. Put her in sweatpants and a grey singlet, and she cracks beer bottles open by biting on the lid while she watches a hockey game.

Zang doesn’t have a lawyer, she’s broke as shit.. She relies entirely on public defenders, comprehensive video evidence, and the fact that she’s always in the right - what windfalls Zang has gotten have gone into the augments that help her survive the next arrest. Which means if she’s being illegally detained in one of the black sites Marco’s leaks turned up, she’s fucked.

Juan:

Juan looks at the vent nervously and whispers; “I guess this is it? I should probably go, I don’t want you getting caught because they’re looking for me.”

He doesn’t say half of what he wants to - he’s trying too hard to look cool, and grown up. Cool guys don’t look back at android bombshells.

The vents are clear, though. What’s your exit strategy from there? You have a feel of the place, now, but it’ll be a difficulty 6 to not get noticed getting outside after they stop looking for Juan. That’ll only get you outside too, exfiltrating from there will be more complicated without Orange and Pink running interference.

Luis:

Not even a fleck of paint comes off the armor - He brightens that he’s out of his hole at least. “They’re all mine, too, if you can believe it. Not a cuckoo in the nest. No, this is just how it is. We’ve all made our peace with that.”

Listen to how his voice changes. ‘Not a cuckoo in the nest’, he says bright and whimsical, it’s a joke he’s genuine about. Then ‘This is just how it is’, he doesn’t even sound like he’s talking to you, it sounds like an answering machine message. And ‘We’ve all made our peace with that’ is so performative that it must have been insincere from the first time he said it, a thousand times ago.

Pink doesn’t understand this, but Orange speaks Stepford Wife; Carmen must be work. They do love her, but she is stressful. The limited time she spends here makes her attention and relationship special, but there is relief when she’s not here - honestly it explains a lot about the kids.

At least he doesn’t want to ask any more questions. One last bit of misdirection. “Sorry, thank you, I won’t take up any of your time. I’m sure you’re all eager to rest, and Lorenzo will be enough of a hassle as he is.”

Now to be babysat in the exit depo and hope Barrera finding Juan is enough to stop looking for Green - Bondi’s not going to want to leave before Green gets out though.

[Thanqol]

Brown!

Without friction, she closed her holotop, walked down the street, and into the cheapest clothing store she could find. She'd gone out wearing her Headpattr maid uniform after all - she always wore a copy of it, it was more convenient than maintaining a varied wardrobe. Previously it had been an incredibly obvious problem with York's stupid plan but now, well... it was now less work going with it than figuring out a new plan.

Dressed now in a cheap brown suit, she pins the lawyer badge to her lapel. She takes a final sip of her tea and then spills the remainder over the front of her suit, staining it instantly. With the illusion of the discount public defender in place she goes in after York.

Green!

"Thanks," she said sincerely, "and good luck."

The idea of undercutting his moment of cool doesn't occur to her. They have been solving a puzzle together and no one knows more than Green the value of alternate perspectives. Juan has been invaluable and he's found an opportunity to go out impressing her, the least she can do is look impressed.

She's missed the window of the show to cover her exfiltration but the station hopper is still there. She just needs to cover the distance and the gauntlet of security without being seen. Stage one she does by simply booking it. The best way to evade a search pattern was to get outside of its area before the perimeter secures. [Athletics 3/8, autosuccess]

From there she signals Orange and Pink. She just needs an opening...

Orange!

She gets the signal. She triggers the release. Inert capsules in four stomachs start releasing drugs.

And the goats go wild.

Smelly, Bitey, Atticus, and Stomp are goats, and goats love psychedelics - Psilocybe semilanceata, or magic mushrooms in particular. They'll not only scarf down magic mushrooms wherever they find them, they will get in headbutt fights with humans who try to take them away. When interacting with the goats at the beginning of the evening she'd slipped them the drugs, capsules set to release on a radio signal. It had been a bit of a task calculating the correct dosages but the proud Costa-Silva family had entered their goats in a prize show a few years back that had seen them all weighed publicly.

Speaking of headbutting humans, the smell of magic mushrooms covered the guards. Well, it covered everyone - she'd released a cloud of it amidst the fireworks show - but then she and the children had been drenched with water. Luis is the first target of their affections, having sat out the festivities, but when the guards move in to assist him from being licked to death by hungry goats they'll be greeted just as enthusiastically. It's chaos - but animals, what can you do?

It's enough for Green to slip aboard the station hopper undetected in the midst of the chaos.

[Preparedness MOS]

[Count Numbers]

Former Team Bondi:

You’re out.

On the way home, Bondi has one condition after she takes off her face; “Just make sure that when this gets out, it looks like someone else did it ages before we showed up yesterday.” She looks back at the compound. “Nobody’s ever wanted me back for an encore that bad before. Gwen would be crushed, did you see how she looked at Caliban? And imagine what it would do to Isabella if she found out Ariel was there to hurt her parents.”

How are you going to do that? And who do you trust to write this story, this time? Pope would definitely be interested that this is what you did with the leak he gave you.

Brown:

York holds one nostril, hocks phlegm and spits a chunk of blood on the pavement he’s just picked himself up from. He shakes himself off and notices Brown out of the corner of a blackening eye.

“Fantastic, here’s Ms Go’s legal counsel, let us in.”

The open front door to the site just looks like the entrance to a brutalist highschool gym. No boom gates or extra rings of razor wire here, no ceremony or anything that draws attention to this spot more than any other. A kind of makeshift E.R triage of folding chairs and mall-popup store counters is visible through the crack in the door that York just got thrown out of, evidently after picking the locks. His press pass jingles on a lanyard around his neck - he fucking hates wearing that thing, especially openly.

The cop that laid York out looks a lot like Don Cheadle did, he’s wearing tracksuit pants and a skintight lycra tanktop, like there really is just a gym in there. York’s done enough MMA and MDMA that if he took the hit that bad, it was either total surprise or a choice, and Brown can’t tell because she wasn’t here to see more of what happened. Cop Cheadle cocks his head at Brown and opens the door slightly wider, and York immediately presses into her side.

“Wait here. Stand up when your client’s name is called.” He looks over his shoulder, at nothing in particular. “Hope you brought something to do, because it’s going to be a while.”

[Thanqol]

Orange and Blue!

They're back with Pope. Professional courtesy, not to change anything up from one meet to the next. He's the obvious and correct choice.

"Our source on this is highly sensitive and vulnerable," Blue is saying. "And we cannot risk their safety. We're only giving this to you because we respect the caution you've shown so far, you need to convincingly fabricate the chain of events that lead you there. Speaking of, there's a link you should use -"

She rummaged in her bag. "Someone talked about a friend getting 'necklaced'. Looked into it and it turned out it was a journalist. Gorush Castro. Used to be a friend of the family, whoever did him had an eye for history. He knew the truth and was keeping it quiet." She produced a stack of printed papers, ugly jpg scans of a singed paper notebook. "They scanned it into evidence, but if you don't know what you're looking for then it doesn't look like anything. Make a few leaps of intuition, place a few meetings in historical context, and pin the reveal on a dead man."

[History 0/1]

That's the tradecraft stuff, but Orange looks more wistful. "I wish it could have been something more impactful," she said. "But the truth is I just got mad. I got mad and I wanted to burn down one of the people responsible. I couldn't think of anything else to do."

Brown!

She can't wait to start waiting. She sits down and zones out almost instantly, fading into her sunlight reverie. Human children often enter states of reverie - do you remember staring into the grass, or the sky? Watching bugs or running water or the movements of lizards? Hours can pass by in silent contemplation of simple things. Little tracing patterns. The way people move, the way they change their stance, shifting the weight from side to side. How regularly they go to the bathroom, how often they pat the pocket with their wallet, how often they glance at their phone. She loved the small details, the flexes of the arms, the strain of fabric against bicep. She stared at the little black bulbs concealing camera angles in the rooftop. She watched the chairs until the intricacies of their construction came apart for her; the cheap hollow metal, the corporate makers mark, the mold line down the side where the stamping machine had been misaligned...

Her holotop is open in front of her, streaming with words and documents and video but she isn't focusing on any of it. It's there to make her look busy, its cheap semitransparent holographic screen not blocking the tracking motion of her eyes. She's a daydreaming kid in a classroom, the faint breeze making its way in through the door feeling to her like the breath of the divine, the motion and smells and sighs and coughs of the world around her passing endlessly through her unfocused focus.

The path of least resistance involves sitting quietly and soaking in every detail of this room. She could do it forever. She used to hack her box in NASA so she could look at the telescope feeds, escaping the tightest security they could come up with so that she could stare into the glittering eternity of space.

[Count Numbers]

York:

York, meanwhile, is weaponized chaos.

The reception area has two barred doors in the back left and right corners, and the reception booth is normally totally unmanned. York starts his shift by grabbing two bars and holding unflinching eye contact with a cop on watch. This moment of silent psychic violence is broken when the cop starts yelling at York to sit the fuck down, but that only makes York’s grin hornier.

Then, suitably upsetting the guard enough to find someone to complain to about you being here, York starts doing anxious pushups against the floor. He runs into a wall and kicks off it hard enough to bound back across the room like a tennis ball and do it on the other side, when he gets enough air to slap the shitty popcorn’d ceiling and bring dust down all over the countertops.

Then, finally, red-faced, panting, but satisfied he sits next to Brown and starts texting on his phone. Every thirty seconds it’s a different word document, messaging app or email inbox. A different vision of childhood. Over the next two hours, three other lawyers enter the reception, looking like they’re stepping into a country fair haunted house and waiting for the actors to jump out at them. York hands every one of them business cards and manages to look trustworthy long enough to pump their hands.

Two hours, it’s two hours before someone yells Ho! York jumps up immediately, and gives a two-fingered salute to the the only other lawyer left. Two of the others were made to leave, about half an hour after they arrived. They tried it on Brown, too, but didn’t manage to get her attention through York eyefucking them into giving up. Now that you’re moving on, York stands as close to Brown as it’s physically possible, like she’s projecting a shield bubble and he’ll die if he stands outside it too long.

The unnamed site isn’t a prison, it wasn’t really made for this from the outset. What looked like a multi-story building on the outside is just a warehouse with a high roof, with chain link pens like dog cages set in macabre cubicles one by one, where prisoners have no bathrooms, food. A lot of them are tied by fibre leashes to the chain links, but the woman you recognize from the tablet is walking around in handcuffs instead, looking quietly pissed off.

When she recognizes York, though, and then looks at Brown, she bounces to the front of the chain links and throws herself against it so it rattles, like a puppy hearing the car pull into the driveway scratches at the front door. “Hey! Paper boy and coffee girl! You came for me, right?”

Cheadle-Cop stands breathes down your neck. He’s got too much of a circumstantial bonus against York, it’s hard to be unsettled by a guy whose face you already broken once today. So he’s who you got.

Pope:

This meeting happens in Apollo, in the office of a subsidiary newspaper of OESN - like if CNN also owned Jacobin, Huffington Post and the Daily Wire, this one’s closer to Jacobin, called Stańczyk. It’s a place where you’ve both got plausible reasons to be here, no cameras, and there’s a private meeting room. Pope’s already been published here, and it’s reasonable November might want to be.

The room you’re in is mostly for job interviews. A plastic fern sits in one corner, the inoffensive blue carpet was luxuriently soft once, and the plastic table and chairs clearly spend more time in storage than in use. This is where Pope wanted to meet, though.

“Just so you know.” He says amiably. “They’re always watching me. I am genuinely under a constant, and I mean total, surveillance. It just wasn’t safe to mention it the last I talked to your kin, but she handled herself brilliantly. Just be careful about being seen with me, or being seen going to the same places as me, especially with anything as important or as indemnifying as this.” He looks over what he’s been given. “This is good, though. You struck gold and you’re still wishing for diamonds. Sometimes - if you’ll pardon my language a moment? Sometimes you’ve got to burn a motherfucker just because you can. They don’t usually burn.”

“What was it you were looking to really do, here?” He asks. “And why’s that something you want done? First thing I need to understand, helping you write this; authorial intent is everything. First I must know why you need to tell this story. Why you need it, and why it has to be this story.”

[Thanqol]

Brown!

"It's tea, actually," said Brown, looking at the stain on her suit.

She is thinking about botany. The hydroponics bays in Gaia where the cascading tea leaves fall in waterfalls, the yellow and white flowers in full bloom making them look like rivers of honey cream. She's thinking about the sound the water makes as it runs through them. She thinks about these things in the face of the ugly inhumanity of these cells, not because she's untouched - quite the opposite. In the face of horror, beauty. Beauty in the smallest things, even in the scent of tea from her stained shirt. Beauty was stability, was sanity.

"Can you open the door please?" Brown said to Cheadle. "Are we free to go, or does the state intend to press charges?"

It would be interesting to hear a 'yes'. The inhumane conditions alone would undercut any prosecution's case and attract media attention, so the fact that she'd been let in at all meant that they'd likely decided to wipe their hands of the case. Failing that, she'd at least have the next stage of the conversation in a private room.

Orange and Blue!

"I can do something about that surveillance," said Blue immediately. "Whoever's at the other end, if they've got that many assets pointed at you I can trace it back. I can -"
Orange held up a hand. "Blue, no."
"Why not?" she snapped. "Like he said, we can -"
"Stop," said Orange. "Okay. Before going full psycho mode, answer his question first."
Blue glowered darkly, folding her arms. "Because - Green had it right. Imagine being on the Supreme Court - being the Queen of Justice - and being this fucking mid. Do you understand what a powerful idea justice is? How hot it burns? It's -" she took off her glove.

The hand beneath was mechanical. Monstrous. Fusion cutter talons, shaped like the claws of an industrial beast. She rested it on the desk, tracing it back and forth. Not carving grooves into the wood took visible self control.

"That day in front of the courthouse, do you know what I was looking at?" said Blue. "The Goddess of Justice. Sword in hand. Something greater and more pure than mortal politics. But her blindfold stopped her seeing she was ankle deep in blood and her high priestesses were rotten to the core. I wanted to see the scales fall from her eyes. To turn towards the courthouse rather than facing away from it. I want her to break with the system that claims to speak for her."

[Count Numbers]

York and Zhang:

“We can detain Ms Ho for another three hours without having to press charges.” Cheadle looks at a clock high on the wall, making no motion to open the door. “Two hours and thirty minutes, now.”

“You didn’t say that.” Zhang falls with her back to the chainlink. It’s rattled, she isn’t. “I can chill another two hours, easy, if you just tell me.”

“Eight hours is the limit. Zhang was arrested 12 hours ago, now, 2am.” York holds up his phone with a disgusted squint at it. No signal. The buildings inside a faraday cage and the walls are lined with metamaterial retroreflective paint, invisible to the eye but fucks up attempts to record around it. He pretends he’s just checking the time as he hits the audio recorder. “Twelve hours and thirty minutes.”

“Says who?” Cheadle checks the papers. “She was detained at 9am, that’s what the booking says.” He shrugs. “Second detainment, anyway. First pickup was just a transfer, we don’t count that.” That would be 7 missing hours.

“That’s bullshit, right?” Zhang looks to Brown hopefully. “Yo, tea lady. That’s bullshit, right?”

Pope:

“I like that. It’s a good angle. I’m going to use that imagery in the piece. There’s a vividness to it. Thing is - I know I’m preaching to the choir, but stay with me a moment. Lady justice isn’t real. She’s an ideal, but she isn’t your audience.” He thinks about what he means, drumming his fingers on the table hard. “It helps. Tells me that the angle can’t be tearing this one woman down, it’s got to focus on tearing down everything that allowed this to happen without being noticed. Should have been a long time ago, and it shouldn’t have needed you. Who do you want to get riled up, though? Think of this like billiards, where Justice is the pocket you’re aiming at, and this piece is the cue ball. You got to sink a different ball into the pocket, or else you’re just sinking the cue ball. Everyone’s going to hear about this eventually, but who do you want to make sure listens to this one?”

“As for surveillance? Themis.” He says. One of Aevum’s equivalents of an FBI, the name being the Greek goddess of justice that carried the sword in one hand and the scales in the other. They’d be the ones investigating the blown up pump right now, actually, that’s the kind of crime they’re supposed to exist for. “Couldn’t tell you why, and the not knowing kills me as much as anything else. But what can I do about it? Call them up and ask?”

He’s done this, actually, but he doesn’t remember. He was baked - that is, intentionally operating above 75*c to mimic the effects of being stoned into the stratosphere - and just called a Themis internal line and asked. There’s a recording of him high as a kite, laughing his ass off, asking what the point was:

“C’moon. Tell a brother. Is it because I’m an android?” — “We cannot confirm or deny any ongoing operations or interest in any persons or people at this time.” —“You got two fuckin’ jabroneys out that window snappin’ pictures of me from the place across the road. ‘Cause if that ain’t your guys I got problems, right?” — “If you would like to report-” — “Is it because of who I fuck?” — “Mr Pope?” — “Is it ‘cause I’m an android, or ‘cause I fucked a catboy?” — “Mr-” — “Because you know I love me some of that boy pussy?” — “Pope!” — “Boy pusssaaaayyyy.” — “Are you okay, sir? Do you need help? Would you like me to send someone?” — “Sure! Just tell me how I’m supposed to recognize ‘em. Am I allowed to ask the two you already sent? Hello? Hello? Jabroney hung up on me.”

Definitely a good thing he doesn’t remember.

[Thanqol]

Brown!

Brown stared for a moment, then sighed. "Law enforcement officer, badge number 502-332, was your interpretation of detention periods outlined in the Crime Prevention Act 2055 your own, or was it given to you by a supervisor?" she said in her most android voice. "In either case, I would like to speak to them, and a copy of the facility's policy as you understand it in writing."

There's no direct threat there, no attempt to monster him with legal action, no need for cunning recording plays. They both know that's bullshit, he's a cop, the system is on his side in any trial. What she can do that will ruin both of their days is Karen this. Asking to speak to the manager. Getting everything down in writing. Making all of this a formal process with receipts and written statements and getting called up as witnesses in some low energy public defender trial. That threat is credible - after all, she's just been told she has to stand around for hours, she might as well make those hours as unpleasant as possible for everyone involved.

Blue!

"The -" Blue is startled by the question. She's like that - so singularly focused, vision so clear in her head, that she doesn't know that she needs to explain it. No matter how many times she learns she can't know. "The lawyers. They're the audience. There's not a future that doesn't involve them, but they need to feel their house is rotten."
"So that makes you Lady Justice then?" Orange cracked.
She looked immediately concerned at how thoughtful Blue looked.
"Maybe not..." said Blue. Orange relaxed. "... a lady?" Orange looked panicked. "In a monster way, not in a not-girl way," said Blue hurriedly. "I don't want to get axe murdered by Pink."
"... still concerning, but you definitely put the threat profile in perspective there," sighed Orange. "Look, I'll raise looking into your surveillance detail with the collective. Let us know if the urgency shifts at all and we can prioritize."

[Count Numbers]

York and Zhang:

“I’m just telling you what I was told,” Cheadle says, “The supervisor’s off-site, but I can get the files for you on your way out.” It’s clear he’s not going to do it. Nobody is, nobody’s coming. The point is just to promise something agreeable you can’t argue with. What paperwork does exist probably exists in a circular filing system. No matter how you follow up on this, his answer will always be; “Of course you’ll get that later, I already promised that.”

Zhang’s happy though. “Total bullshit,” she grins. Everyone’s eyes close a bit when they get this happy, but a thin scar on her left eyelid keeps it open a bit wider. It makes her smile a little more one-sided on her face, makes her look she’d have been a dashing pirate born in the wrong era. “Don’t worry about it tea-lady. They won’t even leave a mark on us here, I can wait the two hours.”

You know where the real origins of the term ‘throwing the book at someone’ comes from? If you punch a restrained person through a heavy, soft covered book the force is spread out so much it doesn’t leave bruises. This is grim on the face of it, but there’s an important caveat to it - shit like that only gets done because someone cares about the bruises, and there’s accountability at some level. It matters that this place shouldn’t exist.

York looks around, though. “How many of these people have been here longer than you?”

“A lot of them.” Zhang admits.

“Mind if I talk to them?” York asks Cheadle.

“You stay right here.”

“Hey!” York calls out without moving. “Stomp a foot or something if any of you have been here since yesterday.”

A few foot stomps, and someone barks a laugh. Cheadle grabs York’s shoulder with wide, furious eyes.

“Stamp your foot if you’ve been charged with anything- Ah, fuck. Ow, ow, ow.” York swears and way fewer feet stomp. “Nobody’s talking here! Can’t quote that, it’s off the record.” Cheadle’s still pissed, but it does surprise him that York’s been a smartass on his behalf here.

Because it wasn’t for his recording, he was proving a point for Brown and Zhang - Zhang’s 2 hour release exists because you showed up. Brown might have already suspected it, but Zhang didn’t.

Brown, you have a chance to influence what Cheadle does here. What York just did actually likely broke a law, but this place is obviously a Calvinball zone. What Cheadle does here is probably entirely down to what you can make him feel is the smart play.

Pope:

“Smart. So we don’t go through the Anthropozine for it, we write for something more up-market.” He looks up with a self-deprecating smile. “Something like Stańczyk is probably a good bet. I think Olympia might be better, which means I write this like an Olympia article.” Olympia could be considered a kind of synthesis between The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, also under the OECN arm, headquartered in Zeus. It’s a lot more liberal-conservative than Stańczyk, but it’s widely read in Zeus and very receptive to longer think pieces and investigative articles, as long as you can write engagingly. If Michael Lewis was still writing in 2080, this is who he’d be writing for.

The Olympics don’t happen on Aevum, by the way. The nationalist and internationalist aspects of the events just didn’t really translate, and without that you’re just left with a bunch of sports that people wouldn’t normally watch.

“That gets you the lawyers, their friends, and Zeus.” Pope nods his head and types a note on his phone. “I’ll pitch the article to them now, so they’ll be ready for it by the time I’m finished writing it. Actually, speaking of that, speaking of the collective.” He laughs. “York showed me the last time you submitted something, and asked me if there wasn’t anything I could do about it. I think he described it as watching a clown car crash. My first advice is going to be to pick who has the best vision for what you want to achieve. Any time you describe something, you betray your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything. Contradict that too much, and you can’t describe anything.”

He looks between Blue and Orange seriously. “I’d say representational democracy might be the best solution here. Who would you pick to be your writing voices? One writer and a partner, maybe, just as long as it’s only one pair of hands on the keyboard.” He takes a significant look at Blue’s. “One voice telling the story might be more appropriate, and a sounding board.”

“You decide on who that's going to be, and we’ll go over writing this piece together for practice, the Carmen Costa-Silva one. I'll write it, and you tell me what you'd do different, and I'll tell you why I did it how I did. I think that'd be the best place to start.” He says. “We’ll make a writer of you yet - some of you anyway. Otherwise you’re going to have to trust someone else to tell your story, November, and I don’t think anyone else is going to understand you unless you’re the one that makes them.”

It’s clear he means this as very high praise. Though, didn’t Fiona say she wanted to try? She might be worth asking for a second opinion, if you want to get a second opinion.

Crystal and Fiona:

Crystal massages her temples with both hands while she holds a phone against her ear with a shoulder.

“Odysseus, I already have the fire coverage, but it’s only rated for 600 celsius. If you wanted to get a 1200 degree forge you should have - yes, I know nothing good melts at 600 degrees, that’s probably why - No, I know your act. Can’t you - You have personal coverage for it? Excellent, that’s all I ask then. No, I’m sorry for bothering you, I’ll let you get back to - Yes, send pictures. I’m glad you’re excited. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Yes. Yes, it will. Thank you, okay, goodbye.”

She gasps for air and throws the phone away from her, collapsing on a cushion.

Fiona looks up from her decryption work. “Which was that one?”

“Odysseus is the self-made one.” Crystal turns her head slightly so that her mouth isn’t muffled by the couch cushion. “The one with all the exposed gears and such.”

“Him!” Fiona lights up. “The steampunk guy! I love him.”

“The ‘steampunk guy’, yes. He plans to have a blacksmithing workshop set up and make his components live. Which means organizing a live blacksmithing demonstration in the middle of an exhibition hall. The hammers. The safety cordone. The fire, obviously, as you heard. The safe transportation and installation of an anvil.” Crystal shudders at that last one. The OSHA of the homemade anvil was actually worse than the fire.

“I mean, fair enough, right?” Fiona got up to check for any leftover ‘sandwich’ in the fridge, but Crystal had beat her to the last of it. She grabbed a premade protein shake instead. “It’s one thing to know he made all his own parts, it’s another thing to watch him do it. You just tell someone they did blacksmithing and they’ll assume they cheated with a fabricator or something, or used modern tools to do it. Seeing him work is-”

“He already has an agent, dear, he doesn’t need another one.” Crystal growled, and Fiona waited for her to feel bad about that on her own, which didn’t take long. “Sorry for being snippy. That wasn’t fair.”

“Coffee help?”

“God, yes, please.”

Fiona put the machine on for them both. “I figured out how to make a new account on the system that’ll guarantee it’s stored in the right part of the physical server infrastructure. I spent the last of our savings on renting a DDoS attack on Orochi Bank that’ll add a few zeroes to the dummy bank account when the voltage spikes, then immediately dump that all into buying your art, which will just look like it’s trying to exchange for physical assets with high resale value as fast as possible. Best case scenario, because it’s a hardware glitch, they don’t see what we’ve done. Absolute worst case scenario, I just made your listed art worth $2 million because that’s what someone already paid for it, and we flip what we can. I think the account gets flagged, but the law says the bank has to eat you keeping the money.”

“You spent our savings on-” Crystal panicked. “When does this happen? When do you know?”

Fiona checked her watch. “Thirty minutes ago. Mr 436f2d6f7264696e617465732035312e35303 732c2b0204e2c20302e31323736c2b02057 should have put the money in your account.”

Crystal scrolled through her phone notifications. There, in the 172 notifications she’d been ignoring from the day she found it. They were millionaires. “Heavens.”

“It won’t work twice.” Fiona chewed her bracelet and brought their coffees back ot the table. “Just, you have enough stuff to worry about without having to worry about laundering it. I handled everything with the listings earlier, so it just looked like you were desperate to raise money.”

Crystal sips her coffee. Then she downs it, burning hot. It scalds her throat the whole way but she desperately needs it inside her in that second. “What do we even do with the rest of it?”

Fiona looks awkward. “I kind of had an idea about that, but I’d kind of need most of it.”

“Of course. It’s your money, as far as I’m concerned.”

“It’s just, I mean if you add up all the times you’ve shouted RoofDash and stuff, and the mortgage-”

“It would come to a number far less than the $600,000 you’re giving me, yes.”

“Don’t you mean-” Fiona blinked, and Crystal gave a significant look. “Right, $600,000, got it.”

Fiona texts Green, and Pink.

TalesFromDecrypt: So I’m going to lease a workshop near our place, because I think being able to make and fix our own tools is going to be really important.
TalesFromDecrypt: But I’m really way more of a software expert, so I was hoping Green would help me out with that a lot? I need to know what machines are the best value to buy with our budget. I figure hand tools will be a drop in the bucket after that.
TalesFromDecrypt: Soooooo I was thiiiinkiiiiiiing thoooough
TalesFromDecrypt: Since I’m leasing this place that’s much closer to ours to do it
TalesFromDecrypt: And it’s going to have all these maintenance tools there anyyywaaaaay
TalesFromDecrypt: You want to move in? :3
TalesFromDecrypt: (Making it somewhere you’d want to live is Pink’s job right? I’m asking the right one?)

“Fiona Diane Weiss, I do not like the tone of your giggling one bit. What have you done?” Fiona tosses Crystal her phone, and Crystal reads the messages before tossing it back. “Nine is simply too many to live with, but she’s too much to live without, isn’t she?”

“I just wanna build her a little backyard where she can run around, and play, and make me illegal heist-crime catsuits."

[Thanqol]

Brown!

It was possible to bring Brown a long way if you let her stay standing exactly where she was.

"Excuse me, sir," said Brown, with the same energy as before but now actively talking over any interactions with York and physically interposed between him. "I understand that the supervisor is off site, so could you please confirm that makes you the ranking officer on this location? So you are claiming full responsibility for everything happens here?"

She's still going through the boring Karen routine unaltered, but now it's clear that this is a play. This whole thing is a play, a scene, a setup - a stunt. It's clear that Zhang and York are feeding off each others energy, they want to be here - Brown is just a flimsy shield of decorum who is there to stall and witness anything blatantly illegal. York already has a bloody nose from before she showed up - was that bait? Because now even if he's lightly shoved it'll look dramatic for the cameras.

Her play is to make him it feel like this is a trap, and that neither she, York or Zhang are particularly interested in leaving quickly. So releasing Zhang isn't letting her go, it'd be kicking her out.

Blue and Orange!

They humour him. It's clear immediately that they are humouring him, and that they're extremely well practiced at humouring people who want to get them to focus. Write a piece from the perspective of just a single colour, easy, that's just about not doing something right? Each of these colours are so real they must have some aspect of Truth to them, deep down, that just needs to be supported and encouraged. Select one colour to learn this skill and then have the others focus on different things, so simple it's surprising she never thought of it before.

She'll make a good college try. In places it might even seem like they're making progress. They can certainly follow instructions and repeat certain words, use certain sentence structures, even - if a steady hand is kept - finish an article in a very C+ student way. An adequate transmission of factual information. Getting that to be something worth reading? It's unclear how you'd even start.

Neither Blue nor Orange volunteers anything throughout. They're just patiently waiting to see how stubborn Pope is going to be over this.

Pink and Green!

Green: Blue is hardware.
Green has left the chat
Pink: uh
Pink: Don't mind her >.>;;
Pink: She hasn't liked anyone we've dated
Pink: I'd be delighted though!
Pink: Actually do mind her a bit, Green's been intensely weird for ages now.
Pink: She's been going on super deep megaverse dives and is only really half present mentally
Pink: She's got this like, thing
< a fifteen minute gap of 'Pink is typing/backspacing' >
Pink: Trying to figure out how to say 'superiority complex' without implying you might relate <.<;;
Pink: Kind of like, she's bored in a really toxic way?
Pink: Nevermind. Undercutting a good moment. Would love to see the space, and thank you so much for the offer <3
Pink: I've been thinking about getting into sewing! You interested in modelling for me?

[Count Numbers]

Ares Site:

Cheadle isn’t fazed by this either. It’s obviously not the first time this line’s been tried on him. “Nope. Don’t know who’s ranking at the moment. I’m just a corporal. Just means I’ve got enough to get someone else to throw your friend here out for me.” As soon as he says this, he loses all motivation to be the one to deal with York. His shit can roll downhill. He lets go of York’s shoulder and gives him a warning look while he makes some hand signs over his head, and some officers on a mesh catwalk up and behind you acknowledge it without doing anything.

“Something I noticed watching these guys.” Zhang says to Brown in a low voice while York tests his arm’s range of motion. “No accountability means no discipline. They’re free to do what they want, so it’s hard to make them do stuff they don’t want to.” She laughs to herself about that. “Which, like, right?”

Corporal Cheadle looks at her out of the corner of her eye. “What are you laughing at?”

“Saying we ain’t so different, you and I, coppa.”

The corporal feels insulted and squints at Zhang while trying to work out how. He’s distracted when York starts holding a conversation with someone down the line in sign language and starts working out what to yell at him for there instead. York’s too happy about someone else knowing sign language here to care.

Zhang looks to you while Cheadle’s gone. “What do you think, tea lady? Is it worth suing over this? Why hasn’t anyone brought a case, yet?” There’s a weird mix of cynicism and utopianism in her, conflicting right now. She’s been through all sorts of illegal arrests, sure, but she keeps taking them because she keeps thinking it just takes the right kind of perseverance to make it matter - and she’s been right about that enough that experience has empowered her as much as blunted her.

What she’s really asking is; Is this a fight that can’t be won, or just a fight that nobody’s tried hard enough to win? Does the difference matter to Brown?

Pope:

“There’s writing and there’s writing. I’m not teaching you writing, I’m helping you write, here.” He chews that over for himself. “Listen, I read that last piece of yours, and I got a bit of a sense of how you work together. The problem is that your collaboration is a betrayal of your own voice. You start off with something lacking, but everything you add to it like this is like another knife in Caesar’s back. And I could talk to all of you, but you’ve all got your own voices in there - and so I’d tell all of you something completely different, what works for each of you. Then you’d go and compare notes and trip each other up again.”

He gives an awkward shrug. “I see figuring out how to get one voice into one microphone at a time an easier proposition than nine microphones without interference. I’ve seen what happens when all nine hold the microphone at once, and the Andrew Sisters you are not.”

Pope sees this more like an issue of wanting to write vent pieces when he’s angry and ruining it if he's happy, or being entirely unable to write an erotic scene while dealing with feelings of shame. Each colour might be as incomplete as a person only experiencing one mood, but at least there’s something to picking a writing mood and just letting the rest of your experiences inform it.

Fiona:

TalesFromDecrypt: With Green, like, I get it. I mean, I do relate. I’m just working on relating less. I’ve just got to do it in my own head, I can’t make new heads to do it for me. Tell her I’m jealous. I hope she likes that.
TalesFromDecrypt: So locking in a ten year lease on this place, it’d be 1,600 square meters with two office spaces, and $540,000. That’s the best deal I can get.
TalesFromDecrypt: I want dibs on one of the office spaces for a bedroom. Also I’ve earmarked $60,000 for like, repairs, painting, pest control, checking the plumbing and stuff like that. And a proper hot water system so we can take showers and stuff there.
TalesFromDecrypt: I’d be giving you $600,000 and the space would be yours and Blue’s to play with, decide on how you want to split that. I at least want the stuff to kind of be able to get some augments done off the books, but I have no idea where I'd find a black market surgeon hahaha
TalesFromDecrypt: …
TalesFromDecrypt: Sorry I was figuring all that out while you were typing and deleting I just didn’t want to interrupt.
TalesFromDecrypt: Yes. I would love to model for you. I was kind of hoping I could ask about that too. Do you take requests??

[Thanqol]

Brown!

"What do I..."

Brown trailed off. Stared blankly. Then turned on her heel and walked away.

"Nothing happens if I don't make it happen". It was Green's most toxic trait. She was fundamentally dissatisfied with any level of control over the situation less than deification, and she'd passed it on in the form of an absolutely awful organizational culture that made her an overstressed, overachieving neurotic wreck. What the fuck was she doing here? Why shouldn't she just walk out of this situation she clearly had no control over, no ability to influence, and not a single fuck to give? Why did she have to see this and decide it was her problem?

... Why was she trying to cause a distraction while adjacent to the two most distracting people on the station?

The supervisor wasn't in her office. Free lunch. Brown walked right through an employees only exit and into the administrative core of the building. This wasn't designed as a prison so it wasn't fortified. It'd be fine. Everyone here was used to ignoring lawyers.

Orange and Blue!

"We're not -" Blue massaged her temples in an imitation of Everest's favourite display of frustration, "- different voices."
"Blue, this could be useful advice -" Orange said in a halfhearted attempt to defuse.
"It's not! It's the same advice we always get!" said Blue. "I don't know how to explain it. Do you?"
"... we can give it one more try?" said Orange.
"Augh!" said Blue. "We're not people! We're not even emotions! It's a trick! You're just projecting how your weird brain works onto us!" She stood up, went to storm out. "This is why I hate being in this fucking human body!"
Orange watched her go. "... Sorry about that!" she said politely. "I'm happy to continue if you are."

Pink!

All of that for a key.

She sits in the light and looks at the key, the little twist of metal. Barely a stopgap until a better security system was installed; a padlock was all that it took to defend nothing. She would have thought there'd be a deed, a physical piece of paper, something to sign, some ceremony - but no, just a key, and a promise that nobody would fuck with her in that location. This little serration of metal contained the promise of...

Of what? She couldn't conceptualize it yet. A space of her own. A fragment of the space she yearned for, but perhaps enough to breathe in. To let her thoughts spill out of the corner they were trapped in. No wonder people wanted more of it. No wonder they were fucking psychos to steal it from others. It felt like there was an emotion that had been bottled up inside her, a scream that could only start to be expressed now that there was slightly more space to move around in. Inside a sliver of metal and a name on a database was the promise of silence, for the first time ever getting to be away and apart from everyone else. More canvas, and the quiet to work on it. How was blank paper so scarce?

She wanted to think about this more before she even walked in, before she even looked at it. She wanted to finally start composing ideas she'd never thought she could think. She wanted to go into it with intent. But she knew she'd need Green.

Pink: Hey, Fiona, could you help me with Green actually?
Pink: I do need her for this and I can't figure her out on my own.

[Count Numbers]

Ares site:

You’re right about the distraction, but really you were more there to be a shield. Still, that’s three tanks pulling aggro without anyone playing the objective. Fuck it, we ballin’. This area is built like the staff area of a highschool, it’s very easy to navigate.

The administrative center really isn’t doing much administrating. This is a place that balances the need to generate enough paperwork to be functional but not enough to be indicting. The supervisor really is off-site, management here really is as unaccountable as possible, and that means there’s nobody to give an order that Brown shouldn’t be there as long as Brown acts like she should.

Ignore the security room with the steel door and the camera feeds, ignore the armory and the alarms for the riots and escape attempts, ignore the cafeteria. A few interrogation rooms with old bloodstains - all the way from the door, people bleeding from when they already got here. Likely just an intimidation tactic. Nothing good here. The staff locker room could be better, but there’s no exterior door, and constantly in use. No way to act like you belong in there.

The problem is that there are two rooms that might actually be useful to you, but both are locked, and both have uniformed cops watching. You could pick either of them, but it’d be a matter of doing it without being seen or distracting the cops here or just hiding what you’re doing. You’re right, if you do this well enough to pretend you have the key they won’t question it - but that’ll take a check of 6 with a relevant skill. Remote locks, too - they could be hacked as well as picked, a double vulnerability.

In any case. The two rooms are the (empty) warden’s room and an accounts office. That’s the one papertrail here you can sort of guarantee will be accurate; the budget.

Pope:

He watches Blue leave, and the look he gives Orange is one of private amusement. He understands, at least, reactions to prejudice and unhelpful assumptions. He also understands the tensions of internal contradictions and self-knowledge. These may not be the correct understandings he needs, but they’re the ones he projects onto the situation.

"Do you contradict each other? Do you make decisions that the others wouldn't? Can people recognise you from each other just from the words you say?” He watches for Orange’s reactions to the questions without waiting for answers to them. “Do you all want the exact same thing?" Pope lets this last ring out and leans forward for emphasis. "I don't think I'm wrong in the way she thinks I'm wrong. I'd ask her why she's the only one of you I’ve seen that expresses herself with hands like that. Because that's all this is really about, expression."

"Great writing is about knowing what you need to say, and I believe you have different needs? It’s fine if you think that just means this isn’t for you, though. It isn’t for most people. Some days it isn’t for me." He tips his head again and squeezes his fingernails into his palms and looks desperate for a moment, but it passes. “I want to give you a weapon here, November. Something more than that, something better than that, but something that is at least that. Maybe I’m giving the wrong diagnosis, the wrong solution, because I really am that wrong about you. Take what I’ve said about what writing is, what you think I’m right about for the problems here, and tell me how you’d want to solve this? How can I give you this thing?”

Fiona:

TalesFromDecrypt: Anything. Why me?
TalesFromDecrypt: I mean, what kind of problem are you having that you think I should be the one to help with it?

[Thanqol]

Brown!

It takes a lot to be a human. Every day the cleaning, brushing, shaving, makeup, dressing. Personal time is tight and putting effort into appearance is so unrewarding. Taking the time out to get a tattoo is...

She picks up a sharpie from the office supply cabinet and draws a fish skeleton on her arm. It'd look fake on a human, but against her artificial skin it looks like a decal.

Then she goes for the warden's door. Raises her coffee cup. "You fish?" she said.
"Hell yeah I do," he said.
"Cloud or farm?" she asked.
"Cloud!" he laughed. "Why do you think I joined the force?"

The enormous water reservoirs of the Cloud keep having fish mysteriously released into them. People with access - Cloud Angels, cops, paying "tour" groups - offer the community service of throwing their lines into the tanks to try and clear them out. Legitimate fishing farms are much nicer, more curated experiences designed to emulate old earth, but there's an authenticity to Cloud fishing - standing amidst massive industrial equipment, hearing the distant roar of the pipes, the lurching motion that makes waves flow across the surface, the faint sense of the illicit about the whole thing. Only sometimes does a citizen have a fish fall out of the sky into their face.

"You hear there's a Pink Snapper pod in Tank 4?" said Brown, sipping her drink.
"Get outta town," said the guard, though he was interested. "I'm surprised to hear that from you. Not many androids into fish."
"I'm half telescope on my mother's side," said Brown. "Gives me the patience for it." He laughed. "Mind if I -?"
"Hah, sorry, I still haven't seen you before -"
"I'm Warden Knoplier's lawyer," said Brown. She gestured at her lawyer badge.
"Oh! And what're you doing here?"
"You really asking?" said Brown.
"Aw shit, really?"
"You really asking?" said Brown. "Look, buddy, give me a dollar and I can fill you in, but then you'll know."
"Yeah, I get it," he said. "Shit."

[Notice 0/1 Disguise 0/1 4+4 8]

Orange!

"Oh don't worry about any of that that - I think you figured it out. I'm sure of it!" said Orange. "I'll do my best to apply it! Let me take one more try!"

Her writing takes a nosedive. It's not even writing any more, barely on topic. Orange writes like an insecure gossip - fascinated by what everyone said to everyone else, desperate to be liked. She tries to talk about herself in a way that is flattering and cool, while also humbly undercutting herself so she doesn't seem like she's bragging. She can barely stay on topic at all. She'll incorporate sentences from Pope whole, diligently trying to reflect lessons learned back to him in a way that's at once flattering and indicates that she did not connect to the substance of what he asked.

The issue here is that writing is an expression of thought. November's colours have internalized certain habits and skills from each other, but they cannot finish a thought on their own. Orange can only take into account the social angle; it's all she's interested in and she regards objective facts as vaguely annoying externalities. She's extremely focused on the social dynamic between herself and Pope and is trying her best to make him like her by demonstrating traits that she thinks he will find praiseworthy.

"This is something I'm uniquely capable of," she said after an hour of this, suddenly serious. "Leaning into failure as a communication tool. Does this help you understand?"

Fiona!

You dive into a world of colour.

Unbound from the omnipresent layer of grime, dust and imperfect lighting that saturates everything in the physical world colours can become something more. More real than real. In this world Green has built, every colour is in relation to every other colour; each highlight is the centre of a storm, each shadow runs like oil.

She has built a planet here. Mountains and valleys and endless black-trunked, pink-leafed trees, thick with cherry blossoms. The clean, dark rivers are heavy with clumped petals and lily pads. And above...

The stars run in rivers. Flashes in the void, an endless waterfall, glyphs in heaven. Distant suns burn in different colours, red and blue and pink, so close and large that they might crown the moon.

Pink waits under one of the trees, staring out at the landscape. At first she seems her normal self, wearing a breezy sundress - but no, both of her arms are sleeved not with fabric but with glittering metallic tattoos. They form an intricate pattern of machinery, like the arms of a mecha painted onto her body. She smiles and waves.

"She built all of this place down here," said Pink. "Harvested the raw material out of defunct MMOs. There are dozens of planets up there like this. I could never..." she sighed. "No, I don't want to undercut this. She's incredible. But she's getting more and more withdrawn into this space, and tetchy when she isn't here. We're all a bit afraid of her, is the thing, and I want you here because I think you're the most capable of dealing with that."

[Count Numbers]

Ares Site:

The fishercop looks at the door and frowns. “Hey, what do you need? I can’t let you in, but I might be able to get it for you.” He pauses. “Just don’t tell me why you need it, okay? I don’t want to know.” He pauses again, then reaches for a key fob and waves at a corner. There’s a sound like a buzzing fly as a camera too small to see picks a different direction to look. “Actually, you know what? I don’t want to be involved. I don’t want to know. I’m going to take a trip to the head, just lock the door behind you before I get back and nothing happened here.”

What, really? He’d just let you in unsupervised? Isn’t that… weird? Well, yeah, but if the supervisor is never in, then it’s taken for granted that sometimes people just need to go in and grab something. And nobody wants to get their hands dirtier than they have to if there isn’t something in it for them. For this guy the fishing permits just get him to the door.

The supervisor’s room looks stunningly like a highschool principal’s office, but the decorative education books on the shelves are about criminology instead. Student records are prisoner files instead, also in paper so it’s harder to hack and easier to burn. Still a desktop workstation with its data crystal mounted under the desk.

What are you here for? Where do you begin?

Down the hall, Cheadle is screaming at York for something, and York’s irrepressible laughter echoes down the concrete corridor like an inmate running the asylum. Don’t worry, it just means he’s figured out what you need him to be doing. Any mess is justifiable if it keeps you free to clean it up on the way out.

Pope:

He appreciates this, sincerely. He sits through the entire hour of demonstration just so he can watch and better understand Orange’s side of the problem. His patience for the ‘failure’ is exhaustive. If he said anything throughout the hour, it was only to ask little questions about what caught Orange up, why she did something the way she did. And when she gives an answer, his only response is to nod and make a thoughtful noise.

“Okay, so you’re more gestalt than you make it look.” He says when Orange asks if this helped him understand. “None of the pieces hold together for long outside the whole. That’s going to be a problem when the whole can’t work because it’s interfering too much with its own pieces. I hoped limiting you to a pair might help, but I figure that’s not going to be enough.” He thinks, shrugs. “Back at where we started, then. Unfortunately that probably means I’d have to teach you all how to work as a writer’s room, like how they write games, and I was hoping it could be simpler than that. Would that be something you’re interested in, instead?”

He gives an exhausted, weary and sympathetic smile. It seems like he grows bags under his eyes, something impossible for his antique frame to do. Maybe it’s just a trick of the light, but it’s a good one. “And pass on my utmost sincere apologies to Blue, won’t you? She’s right, I don’t know you how I’d like to. I know what it’s like to have to explain, time and time again, truths about yourself everyone will not understand about you and I hate to put you in that same position. She’s trying to tell me things I’ve got to hear for the first time, she’s already said it for the millionth, and that’s not a fair thing to do to you even if I did get it right. Just, if I can say another word for why I care so much about this?” He drums the fingers of his right hand on the table, hard, in a DVORAK pattern that matches the words he says. “This is a way you’d only have to explain yourself once. Just once. That’s part of what I mean when I say that this is more than a weapon I want to give you.”

And there’s something else there, too. Pope has adjusted to fame, to life under total and absolute surveillance as a price he’s willing to pay to be known and understood.

And because it is Orange that has stayed, I’ll add another bit of insight to the fluctuations between rapture, desperation and exhaustion that Pope’s been going through while proselytizing here; he identifies a lot with November, and he is projecting because of it - Blue was definitely right about that. But he’s projecting because he sees in his own misunderstanding of November as how he’s been treated and misunderstood, and he’s desperate to be the person to her that he wishes he could have had for himself. He is trying to help himself twenty years ago through her.

Those who were never helped have no examples to draw from when they try to be helpers.

He knows he doesn’t understand her, he knows he doesn’t really get her. If he thought he could, he would just write on her behalf. Bearing effective witness for others? That’s his whole thing.

That might be useful to figuring out the kindest way to tell him to fuck off without him taking it personally.

Fiona:

The nostalgia hits Fiona immediately. This is a place she has had to get to through the port in the back of her skull, not just the tethers in her wrists, and immediately that gives her physical memories too.

Her own worlds were different. Skies and vista did nothing for her, not planets or vastness. She is not a creature of space, she is a creature of Thrones tunnels. She built libraries and intimate cathedrals under an endless mountain - though the stained glass always glowed as though hit by a perfect sunset. She-

She should tell Green about this, actually.

Fiona is a cleric here. She used to radically change her body, take different forms, be anything but herself. Now she’s just wearing silver plate mail and a green tabard, and she interacts with this place through magic. She casts spells like Vancian magic, memorized strings and intricate motions of her fingers as she navigates invisible menus. Her hands glow when she casts a NoClip prompt that she renders as flying, her feet lifting slightly off the ground and her body moving weightlessly.

That’s performance. This isn’t an animated avatar here, this is her projected into this place. Most people would just walk on empty air like a catwalk, or not bother to hide that they were inputting the command. This is like the inverse of an AI practicing to move their chest like they’re breathing, it’s a kind of respect for the space she’s in that Fiona inhabits it with her actions, not just her perception. She cares that she is part of what makes this environment authentic, and subconsciously shows what must be thousands of hours drilling the muscle memory that reflexively makes natural every unnatural gesture, doing these things even in private and for her own sake.

All while her real body rested in an electrostimulating gel pod that prevented bed sores and complete atrophy from setting in, but even that couldn’t do anything for the malnutrition or the other consequences of total abdication. The increasing dysphoria between the way her mind moved her different bodies so naturally here, and the way her spasmodically massaged muscles became worse and worse at understanding or obeying the inputs she gave them. Incapable of climbing stairs not just because of her weakness, but because the drivers she ran for moving her body had become incapable of operating the atrophied meat she only used to go back and forth to the bed and bathrooms.

Coming back here was like watching someone die on a bike, it’s something you never forget.

She’s not going to relate any of the body stuff to Green is the thing. She’s not sure any of that’s going to translate in a way that matters, except in understanding her motivations for escaping here better. It just means she’s not as overwhelmed by the overwhelming beauty of the place like she might have been. Drilled as deep as the subconscious mastery of the space is a Pavlovian aversion to it.

“I can find her on my own, from here.” Fiona tells Pink. “What should I say to her? How do I get her attention? Is she going to be mad I’m here?” She pauses. “Actually. No. Let her find me. I think that’ll be better.”

Fiona begins making her sandcastle. She takes an axe from behind her back and begins to cut one of the trees much like the one she’s found Pink under, and runs a glowing hand along its length to form it into planks. She could have just made planks, but she’s long ago learned to grow bored of making things without making things.

Sure, she’s just running a script that converts the log asset to a plank asset from her own library, just like Green has harvested the raw materials of MMOs to put all of this together. It’s swinging the axe and running a divine hand over its length as she finds an asset that most closely matches the wood that makes what she’s doing more than that.

And then she begins to make a little cabin here with them, under the skies where the stars run like rivers, and wonders if she’ll finish it before the master of the domain notices. She takes her time. Finishing it isn’t the point. The point is saying; I have made a place in this world, too, so I’m invested in it. See me as a friend who would want to give something to this space I am sharing with you, and not as an invader who would take you from it. Come talk to me because you want to, when and if, and not because I’m making you.

If staking territory here just pisses Green off? Well, there probably wasn’t anything they could have said to each other anyway, then. It’d just be frontloading the irreconcilable and save a lot of walking on eggshells, right?

[Thanqol]

Brown!

See, all this stuff was worthless. If she took it, it was legally inadmissable. If she journalismed it, it could just be denied and purged before an investigation. A bunch of physical shit wasn't a pattern of behaviour. No, she'd get them on the coverup.

Brown's move here is to put a bug on the phone and hide a camera and microphone in the light fixture, angled with a perfect view of the chief's desk. Then she made the place look tossed - re-arranged a bunch of stuff, left a couple of files open like they'd been photographed, opened up the computer to expose the data crystal like she'd scanned it. The thing about paper files being easier to burn was that it didn't matter what was on them if there was video of them getting burned and audio of the captain ordering the burning.

[Electronic Surveillance 0/1, Conceal 3/8 1+5 6]

Orange!

"Pope," said Orange. "Let me demonstrate something for you." She picked up a pencil. "This pencil's name is Sarah. She has a family."

Orange snapped the pencil.

"Part of your soul just died when I did that," said Orange. "That's the main point. Human brains process information in a certain way, and part of that is assuming that other things think like them. I don't, I process information in an extremely alien way. A combination of clever software and physical design goes a long way to inviting you to assume my brain works like yours, but it doesn't. Why is this hard and other skills aren't? Because writing is about asking me to express an idea and that original clown car draft is what my ideas look like. I think you'd understand if you saw me talking to my siblings; all our colours talking at once, and some of our nodes are on the brink of coming to blows even if we're overall agreeing. If I had a united mind that could express ideas without being in conflict I'd be like Goat, and my entire upbringing was about teaching me not to be like Goat."

She drummed her fingers on the table, mirroring his pattern. "I can churn out functional, basic writing if I have to. But writing from the heart? To make my heart comprehensible to humans I think the path lies in, like, meditation, xenoanthropology and goetic sorcery more than a writing workshop."

"Speaking of," She looked down at the pencil. "Don't tell Pink about Sarah."

Green!

The channels of stars in the sky run faster, so fast that they seem unbroken blinding arcs of white light. They stretch all across the heavens, a constellation the size of the sky. And then that vast and vaunted heaven, that masterclass in dark blue and violet and glittering stars, fills.

Like, instantly. Like someone got the MS paint fill tool and clicked it into a black area, overwhelming the perfect night sky with a vast single block of a green-tinted white. The sensitivity on the fill tool is turned all the way down, too, making the points of stars and constellation lines surrounded by jagged pixelated auras of darkness. The effect is jarring and ugly in stillness - but then it moves. And in motion the poorly filled stars become a glittering network of scales, the fades around the eyes like eye shadow, the computerized motion more fluid than the sky itself could be. Claws and wings emerge from that undifferentiated silhouette of white, only the edges of cheap computer fill acting as the suggestion of life and motion.

Claws descend towards the cabin.

She moves one of the windows, dragging the hole across the surface of the wood like it's a decal. She changes the rooftop to tile, and then smothers it in moss, and grows wild flowers from the moss. A slash across the ground and drop of glittering seeds and a moment later half the house is covered in heavy ivy, thick red and purple leaves. She adds a chimney and twists a cloud into a smoke asset.

Then she raises back up into the sky, lags for a second as an undo command is processed, and the fill of white clears away leaving the night sky and its rivers of stars again.

"Well, you got her attention," said Pink. "Um, maybe not her respect yet."

[Count Numbers]

Ares:

Fishercop comes back to see the tail end of it, and he looks at Brown, and he looks at the office, and then he says the smartest thing he will ever say in his career; “Did you see who did this?”

And just like that, none of this could have been his fault.

Still, the overreaction you’re hoping for doesn’t happen, won’t happen. This wouldn’t even be the first time something like this has happened - but the people here are just as aware as you are of the consequences to this for the most part. If something was taken it’s inadmissible, if it’s leaked it’s deniable. Probably.

Maybe the people doing the sweep for bugs, though, will let slip something interesting before they manage to find it.

What does happen now is that because you didn’t do this, someone else had to. Which means now the site has to be on high alert for someone trying to do a data breach here, check the outgoing packets on the desktop, a lockdown…

Cheadle Cop panics at that as you’re pushed back to Zhang and York, because enforcing a lockdown on you means being locked in here with York and Zhang until it’s over. “Nope. Not having that.” He says simply. He fumbles for his belt and unlocks Zhang’s cell without another word or explanation, and then her cuffs, and starts pushing all three of you out for the front door. “Time’s up. Get moving. Go, before I change my mind.”

York takes the most obnoxious rip of a coffee vape he can manage as Zhang throws her arms around the back of Brown’s neck as they get forced out, and kisses her on the cheek from behind as the incredibly muscular woman bends Brown’s knees under her weight as she drapes herself like a cape. “Holy fucking shit, tea lady, what did you even do?”

Pope:

And Pope nods. He looks disappointed at first, but after that, resolute. “I must admit this to you, but I had hoped that this would be a thing I could teach you to do for yourself, because I fear that I am entirely inadequate to the task. And if we are to get through the coming years, I see this as a thing that may need to be done. Not just on your behalf, but…” he cuts himself off, and bites a finger to stop it from drumming. The typing ceases. “No. I will not burden you with speculation before its time. Just know I have my reasons, all the same. I will instead say that I was told that you searched for - and you bear witness to - the forgotten AI of the world, the true AI. If we could have had in you a bridge of this unfathomable gap in understanding, if we could have had a translator…”

He thinks, but does not say, what is the point of a time capsule that nobody knows how to dig up?

He instead says this like it’s a peace offering; “You’ll be happy with how this article turns out. I’ll make sure the Costa-Silva piece has the effect you need it to.” How can someone smile sarcastically, ironically? Like this, apparently. “This story I understand completely. This is as predictable and as intimate as a jitterbug. I- Tell me, do you dance, Orange? For any reason other than you were taught to?”

The room is small. There is no music, yet. But these table and chairs are easily pushed aside, and there are any number of ways music could fill this space. The answer to this question does not have to be with words. It’s well known (to his eternal chagrin) that Pope’s as gay as Christmas, too - the question is only the question, and nothing more.

Do you dance, Orange?

Fiona:

Fiona’s a lot more optimistic, though. She looks up at the sky, hands on her hips, and then grins at Pink. “Are you kidding? I was scared she’d just stomp it, or undo this back to tree.” She appreciates the ivy and the smoke. “Okay, well, I wanted to save talking about this with Green but, I think you’ll appreciate this more anyway.”

She’s getting into the flow as the muscle memory reasserts itself harder. She snaps her fingers and an obsidian marble dais forms in the ground a respectable distance away from her ivy-annointed cabin. She rubs her fingers like she’s sprinkling salt to navigate a texture wheel behind her eyes, until she finds a mapping of the marble that’s weathered and thick with overgrown moss. Then she puts the burning pentacle on it.

“If something was too big to do by hand, I’d have my minions.” She tells Pink. “They’ve each got just enough of a simple language model in them to understand basic commands, and it’s just a bit more interesting than babysitting everything. Also it gave me someone to yell at when something went wrong. Always nice to have someone else to blame.” This she says while pointedly not looking up.

Sometimes they’re imps, sometimes they’re dwarves. Out of respect for the host, this time she runs little waist-high kobolds with mining helmets and pickaxes half-again their size, little dragonoids with brightly coloured scales - one green, one yellow and one red. They emerge from a flicker of fire out of the summoning pentacle with sharp salutes that make their little bodies fall over, overbalanced by their pickaxes.

“One Tower of Babel please? Quick smart.” She raises an eyebrow down at them, and they tremble in fear of her. As is correct and proper of them. “Ancient ruins variant, this time, minions.” They stared at her and Fiona rolls her eyes and claps her hands. “Now.”

They bumble off to a clear space nearby and start to rapidly build a Tower of Babel. It’s a column of a spiral staircase made entirely of flying buttresses, like a corkscrew into the sky made of stone in the pattern of dripping candlewax, if you removed the candle underneath it. The green kobold scrubs the stairs with a brackish bucket that cause entire chunks of it to be overcome by two thousand years of wear and tear and water damage.

Then Fiona starts to climb up into the sky. Well, Green came down to say hi first. This isn’t intruding, this is just… moving her chair a bit closer, just to make the conversation easier.

She could have just NoClipped her way up, is the thing. Maybe she even should have. But everyone has their power fantasies, and Fiona’s is walking up as many stairs as she fucking likes without getting tired. It puts her in a much better frame of mind for this.

[Thanqol]

Brown!

"What did I do?" asked Brown. "What did you do? York hasn't told me anything about what any of this is."

It's a dodge, a redirect, but it's not in bad faith. What she did was pointless and mediocre, a weak ass improv that took too much profile for too little gain. Discussing it would be exhausting. But Zhang? She's interesting.

Brown is keen to the way she needs to shift and balance her structure to avoid crumpling beneath her weight, aware of the subdermal plating, conscious of the warmth of her lips and the gentle coolness they leave behind. She doesn't bend beneath her presence but she's aware of how much it takes to keep herself from bending. She appreciates it and wants to learn more. And that means she needs to let someone else's legend breathe without filling it with her own words.

Orange!

"Translator," said Orange. "That's a strange concept. Aevum took a lot of pride in wiping out that profession. For all I'm interested in this civilization and its people, some part of me has always wondered if once I have my family back we might just leave." She fidgets. She's never talked about this. "I don't know on what basis I could begin to choose between those two worlds."

"Do you dance, Orange? For any reason other than you were taught to?"

Memories flash. "Yes," she admits. "Bondi took me to a club. I told her I needed Red to learn this, but she insisted..." she smiles. "It was a disaster until I went limp and let her spin me like a doll. And normally I'd hate that, but that time... it felt really safe. Really loving. She was right, then. It did need to be me."

She looks out the window. The curve of Aevum cuts the stars. It's impossible to tell where her eyes rest.

Green!

There is a rumbling of thunderclouds, pixellated flashes of lightning cutting through the HD sky. Green knows the proper response to a tower of Babel, but she can't let herself be shaped that easily. The stormclouds pass and Fiona ascends beyond the atmosphere on dreamlike feet.

And there she sees the rain of satellites. Tens of thousands of them, marked with the flags of all the nations of Earth, including those who never reached space on their own. They circle the world in a massive orbital ring, the echo of Aevum. They fly so densely clustered they amass onto each other like compiling junk, more satellites than ever existed or could exist. Upon them is inscribed all the languages of humanity - or at least, the best impression that ten minutes of frantic behind the scenes coding could manage. The satellites are glitchy and floaty and their physics are crude, collision is broken, but for something that Green managed on the fly in response to a statement it's impressive. The real artistry of it is how the jank is part of the style, a retro glitchwave energy where broken code mixes with ultra high quality assets. Of Green herself there is no sign, but the ring of satellites is placed such that it serves as a moat perilous. How high can this tower go?