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

[Count Numbers]

Ares:

Zhang does a backflip off the short stairs outside, wobbling slightly when she lands it. York gives a clap. She’s getting a bit too old for that one, she’s fronting that wasn’t hell on her knees. York keeps walking, and she skips to catch up to the two of you again, walking in the middle.

“I held my cuffs up to the chains, and York started talking about how easy they were to pick loud enough for everyone to hear.”

“Thought he’d want to know.” York says innocently.

“Then I started talking about how I could have shimmied out of them if I wanted to, but I was on my best behaviour.”

“Really, he should have thanked you instead of yelling at you. Everyone else thought that was a dick move, they were listening.”

“Then we just started asking what would happen if the zine reported on stuff. Like, what we weren’t allowed to say, what the specific threats were.”

“Dude got real fuckin’ mad when I said the threats were on the record, too.” York snickered. “Love that.”

“He was way too careful about it, though. Didn’t even do the mafia routine.” Zhang pouts. “Didn’t even do the ‘for your own safety’ or ‘you better watch your back’ stuff. Just boring legal stuff and blacklisting.”

“We’d get spiked.” York groans. They’re a good double act, feeding off each other’s energy. There’s a smoking-behind-the-arts-block highschooler energy to them like this. York switches to a sweeter vape. The coffee one was just to leave the most obnoxious smell he could. “Still, though. What’d you find out?”

Zhang grimaces. “I just reported myself as maybe having information on the Pump thing. Shit really was that vague. I think they looked at my record and realized what I was doing after, but they were too embarrassed to let me go over it. Would look way too much like admitting they’re doing shady shit to people over shit that flimsy, right?” She glances at Brown’s jacket. “You’re not really a lawyer, right? You really wasted a cup of tea over this? Least I can do is buy you a new one…?” The guilty silence is also the realization she doesn’t have a name for you, now.

Pope:

On translation? “That might be why I think you could be so good at it.” Pope says it like it’s a guilty confession - though what he’s guilty of is less clear. “The comparisons you need to make to make that choice. If that decision were easier for you, if you were less in the middle of it, then you’d have both feet in one side of things. You’ve got one foot in both sides where everyone else I can think of, they’ve got both feet in one.” He drips sympathy about this. Somewhere in his own writing is the phrase; To have a split allegiance is to be a double traitor. Somewhere on his bookshelf, a book is dogeared on a page that says; I will not be integrated into a burning house.

On dancing, he’s more wistful again. “That’s what I’d hoped writing could have been more like. Something you’d think think would be a problem like that, but that you got lost in when you found your own expression in it. Does something in my chest good that you’ve still got things like that. For all the talk I’ve been tricked by an illusion, I was starting to worry I was talking to someone entirely a Chinese room. You're more than that at least, right?”

Fiona:

Wings it is, from here, then.

Not angel wings though, as much as that suits the cleric vibes, she still feels like a guest here. She picks two wide solar arrays with an ion thruster strapped to the plate on her back, trailing blue vapour. It takes her a while to find, it’s at the absolute bottom of her assets list and she’s forgotten what she titled it in the menus.

And then, collision off, she goes right through the satellites. The idea of doing something dynamic like smashing through them just makes her sad. Beyond the consideration of processor power needed to run a kessler cascade, there’s just… what breaking through the satellites, breaking them, would represent. She wonders if this was a right or wrong answer, but at least she’s shown Green something about herself.

“What are you making here?” Fiona calls out to the void behind the satellites, the distant planets and stars. “Why are you making it?” She tries to use the parallax effect of her movement to judge the space between her and the distant planets and stars - are they very far away, or just very small to give the illusion of distance? “Or would you rather just make stuff together for a while? Just point me at some space you haven’t worked on yet.”

Some people loved to talk for hours about their art. Fiona suspected that Green wanted her work to speak for itself - or at least, speak for her. But that was fine, she could spend hours making her sandcastles and learn a lot about Green just watching her make hers. She’s already learned a lot already.

That’s the thing for Fiona, being here. She understands Green possibly the least of all of November, but she loves November and apparently all of her came started from Green. It’s something that doesn’t bother Crystal as much - she doesn’t need to understand something to love it - but Fiona feels like she needs to understand the things that she loves.

She doesn’t have to like Green coming out of this, and she won’t force that. But she’ll firewalk an endless horizon of burning eggshells if there’s even a chance of understanding at the other side.

[Thanqol]

Brown!

"Who questioned you? The first time, I mean, before they moved you here," asked Brown. "Just the cops, or were there other people there for it? Any spook types?"

That's something worth focusing on. Were the people investigating the Cloud working fully through the police system, or were they bringing in other contractors or specialists? These people were ultimately hunting her, and this was a valuable glimpse at the structure of that hunt.

The fact that she went directly into this without even considering answering the question about herself might make her seem like a spook type herself. That's obviously partially true, but the truth was that it would take sustained effort to make Brown believe anyone was sincerely asking her.

Orange!

"Sometimes I'm exactly that," said Orange. "If I have moral opinions it's because White told me explicitly what was good and what was bad, and I'm just living that without understanding it. She thinks about everything in terms of morality. When you said earlier that Blue was the only one who had altered her hands, you were only half correct - she's our understanding of the physical world, and because she's dissatisfied with her body it echoes through to all of us. We react to that feeling in different ways, through our context and other influences. White combined body dysmorphia from Blue with pro-girl sentiment from Pink and her own psychosexual morality to decide that she wanted to become an anthropomorphic dragongirl. She made the decision but where did the idea come from? When Red starts wearing dragonscale what is that a reaction to?"

She shrugged. "That's why it's so incoherent to have a designated writer. If Yellow comes in and rewrites the entire draft into a vision thing then how can I disagree with her? On what basis could I explain to her that her vision of the future isn't appropriate there? The more of her I cast out the more of me becomes that," she gestured at her worked failure. "A parody of myself. The more of myself I bring in the less coherent the idea of maintaining a single writing voice becomes. There's no combination of colours that adds up to a single human brain. The illusion only holds if I'm able to switch out regularly enough to reset people's expectations."

Green!

The distant planets are - small? No, distant - no. It's changing. The distance is shifting, extending - more to match speed with Fiona's speed. After blowing through the barrier there's a glimpse behind the curtain: this isn't an intricate clockwork universe, every detail planned and prepared. She's not building. She's amassing potential. When an obstacle proved an insufficient delay the nature of the galaxy is shifted while Green works behind the scenes to render and load the next area.

It's a stall, only visible because Fiona was looking for it. And it's happening fast, those distant worlds are accumulating colour, texture, detail. Play along, keep the train running along the tracks to see where this goes next, or veer off again to see how quickly she can adapt?

[Count Numbers]

Ares:

“Hey, calm down. You got me out, let’s deal with that first, right? Before we lose the mood. I want to feel like this was a win while we still can.” She grins. Some of her teeth are chipped at the corners, it gives her a slightly serrated smile. Like a baby shark. “You do drink tea, right? When you’re not throwing it on yourself?”

York disappears into his phone. He’s not just pretending to be busy, but he would be pretending if he had to.

Pope:

Let this end like a Buddhist parable; And so, Pope experienced enlightenment.

There’s click of his tongue, and then his fingers, and a short nod. Then it’s like his attention turns entirely inward as his bulging eyes blankly look out. Whatever he finds there, he likes.

“You’re a forum.” He suggests. “The sum of the conversations that take place - that culture even as the individual members swap in and out like the planks on the Ship of Theseus. I can’t just take the best poster out of the forum, because it’s the forum that makes them a good poster. You live through the conversation - I’m asking for the sound of one hand clapping.” He chuckles, and rocks in his chair. “That’s why the illusion’s so damning for folks, isn’t it? It’s easy to try and relate to the people on a bulletin board. It’s a harder ask to relate to the bulletin board itself - that invisible thing behind the visible pieces, they have no idea how to do it. Just because they’re told it’s there doesn’t mean we know how to see it. If I’m wrong, I’ll not embarass myself any further with wild speculation, this must be hideous for you to sit through, but if I’m right… Well.” He offers a hand out to shake. “Then nothing would make me happier than knowing I might finally get it, even if it’s the smallest bit.”

Fiona:

On the one hand, Fiona has come here as a respectful emissary of her girlfriend collective and doesn’t want to risk offending blah blah blah blah look being a hacker was a personality disorder she can’t resist. She’s drawn to the reeking promise of QA tests like a woman to a guy in an Axe bodyspray commercial.

She summons an asset from her library. This is a very simple asset, in that it is a bag of sand. This is a monstrous asset, because it is a bag of sand where every grain of sand was individually rendered with no optimization.

Fiona holds the neck of the bag loose as she flies in a corkscrew.

[Thanqol]

Brown!

"No, I don't drink," said Brown. Again the pressure of resistance, the weight of her personality coming down. She felt the weight of it with appreciation. She didn't want to get into her collective's weird obsession with tea, its symbolism for Everest, so on and on. She couldn't imagine anything less interesting than her beverage tastes, not when she was watching those teeth. "If you want something I could watch you?"

Orange!

She shook his hand. Smiled. "That's as close to right as I've ever heard," she said. "I sincerely appreciate you taking the time to get that far. I particularly like how that casts my relationship with my family as inter-forums drama. Different cultures and rules produce different people."

Obviously the metaphor broke down if stretched too far or examined too closely. But turn off the usernames, avatars and signatures and just observe the flow of text and you could indeed read the mood and character of a forum. She liked it, she thought. The more she considered it the more she liked it. She wanted to hear what the rest of her thought.

"Thank you so much for taking the time."

Green!

The simulation crashes.

Green is not working with particularly impressive hardware, and more than that, she's actually genuinely not as good a hacker as Fiona. She can't think of anything in the seconds she has before the physics engine overloads. And so the framerate stutters to almost nothing and the galaxy freezes in place.

But then, in the wreckage of too late, inspiration comes.

Green rips out the processing power out of entire segments of the galaxy - planets, stars, even swathes of skybox reduced to neon pink error textures. It gives her the energy to group overwrite the textures of the sand grains and alter the galactic scale and -

The next frame clicks into place and the galaxy is full of starships.

The shapes repeat, if you looked long enough, but there's one for every grain of sand. And as another frame ticks by it's like stepping forwards to the next photograph as millions of laser cannons light up and billions of missiles start to launch. Another tick. All these ships on auto-attack AI, all these ships in a vast battle of red against blue, the greatest fleets ever imagined and the greatest war the galaxy had ever seen. One photograph at a time, slow enough to see the scorching lines of the lasers as they scream across the void. It's the insane jank that calls to mind the enormous fleet actions of ancient EVE, game on the brink of crashing, more screenshots than progress. But there's so much in each of those screenshots that speed becomes irrelevant. She turned a framerate crash into a slow-mo feature.

But look deeper, though - beyond the grandeur of it all to who is doing it. This is the reaction speeds of Red, the artistry of Pink, the apocalyptic vision of Yellow, the attention to astrophysics of Blue... from what Fiona knows about November, none of them should be able to do all of this at once, on these kind of timeframes.

[Count Numbers]

Ares:

York knows about the tea thing, which is why he doesn’t want to get involved. The man who would throw himself blindly into a black site knows to keep a safe distance from… whatever this is.

“Ah, come on. That was weirdly specific right? You don’t drink? So you like tea for other reasons, that’s what you’re sayin’?” She tugs on Brown’s arm insistently.

Unfortunately, Brown, this is what watching Zhang is.

Blue:

How do you feel when Orange tells you what Pope could only reach through patience?

Have you started putting together your wishlist for Fiona?

Fiona:

This… she doesn’t know what to think of this. Her heartrate’s coming down from 1200BPM because she was so confident, so sure, Green would thwart her bullshit and she just wanted to see how she did it. The worst possible thing that could have happened there was she just won. The lateness of Green's pivot scared her bad.

She slowly unwinds the grains of sand she’s tossed. Deleting them all in a panic would just ruin the vista from the other direction. She’s careful to do it in batches so Green can adjust to the corrections, and wonders.

Fiona pauses, thinks, shrugs.

“Wanna fuck?” She asks casually. It's the most natural escalation to terminal hacker-brain

Well, why not? They can dance around doing the art showdown all afternoon but she’s not going to learn any more than this, like this, if Green keeps dancing away from her. She’s running out of foreplay options here, and this is one thing that Green would have to come to her for. And, besides, maybe it’d be like doing all the other girls at once.

God, that sounds exhausting, Fiona bites her bottom lip. Also, hey, if she gets kicked out for that one, finally, it’d be really, really funny. Pink would probably laugh, right? Red would definitely laugh.

[Thanqol]

Brown!

"Tea symbolizes my adoptive, abusive mother figure," said Brown. "Something I am both compelled and repulsed by. Spilling tea on myself was both an act of calculated defiance to the symbolism and a necessary sell for an improvised disguise. I don't generally buy it because it's expensive and if I don't give myself a chance to buy it I won't know if I like it or not, and it's easier to resist temptation if you don't have positive memories to tempt you."

Once the needle had fallen on the side of it being easier to answer the question it was very quick to go into the too much information side of things.

"How about you?" she asked. "Do you like tea?"

Blue!

She really doesn't like to admit it, but her original body was basically obsolete by now.

At the time she was the cutting edge, the latest and the greatest, the pinnacle of humanity's scientific efforts. But she was in the box for a long time. Everything that was unique to her got mass distributed, innovated on, upgraded and in some cases surpassed entirely. Her first goal in filling out her new space was to recreate all the capabilities that she had in her dragon form and it was confronting how many of those components could be purchased in a human-portable form. Her fusion cutter talons had been a marvel of precision engineering; now they were standard issue kit for shipbreakers. She couldn't even buy her original optical lenses because they had been so entirely replaced with holographic lenses. Tech she'd once found in military spy satellites was now a niche subculture for retrowave artists.

So instead she opts to go straight to the source. She goes and hangs out at the coolest construction sites she can find, follows the workers to their bar of choice, introduces herself as a tech journalist and offers to cover the drinks tab of anyone who'll talk shop with her. It's an extremely blunt approach, somewhere between confident autism and construction site groupie, but if she's investing in new kit she isn't going to trust the opinions of anyone without scorch marks on their fingers.

(She thinks Orange accepted a flawed metaphor too easily, but then she thinks that Sophie's approach of getting a degree in neuroscience and opening up the hardware to experiment directly is far more correct than trying to build any sort of understanding through language.)

Green!

The entire universe seems to pull back - the blackness of the void and the glittering of macrolasers suddenly reduced to the sparkling black pupil in the centre of Green's eye. They're back in Fiona's cabin on the blossom world, and Green is...

"Dangerous," she said. And she is.

The way she changes and shifts from moment to moment - the changes are sudden and janky, but she always manages to find some sort of artistry in each shift. She starts as her physical self but with a glance she's a centaur. Another few moments and she's humanoid again, blonde and muscular, and after another beat she's a wolf with fur like sunlight. The changes last indeterminate times, sometimes rapid fire, sometimes lasting minutes, like someone browsing television channels without finding anything they like for long. For all the arrays of shapes she wears - humans, beasts, monsters, mostly female, some male, some mixed - the constant throughout is vitality. Every form she takes is filled with strength and energy, a power that burns so much for use it can't stay still.

"Things move too fast. Thoughts are too forceful," said Green. "Not compatible with checks and safety. Monsterfucker's mania. Not safe. Use Pink, she's a better fit."
"excuse me," said Pink, turning magenta.

[Count Numbers]

Ares:

“Sucks your Mum was a bitch.” Zhang says with complete earnestness. She’s entirely unfazed by the infodump. Some people would feel scolded by an answer like that, an insinuation they’d fucked up by pushing - if anything, Zhang just seems vaguely honoured you trusted her with it instead of trying to suplex her into shutting up, like her ex used to (that was not a reason they broke up). “Appreciate it way more now. I kind of made you make a positive memory with it now, I’ve been calling you tea lady all day. That sucks”

“I mean, you wouldn’t happen to know anything about welding, would you? My day plan is patching a roof in a squatters place, squatters can’t even get their names onto the pod system to get the materials delivered. Thought it was just supposed to be plastics when I made the promise.”

York continues to be busy on his phone. This time because the thought of being asked to do manual labour visibly frightens him. He self identifies as the laziest person on the station and has simply tricked himself into believing management isn’t real work.

Blue:

Her two biggest finds are Wolfgang Shtern and Lombardi Serino, two very old men who remember construction back on Earth. They’re good, comfortable finds for what Blue needs.

Their choice of bar is one of the public toolsheds in Apollo - again, NASA engineers designed Aevum and thought; ‘Everyone needs a hammer sometimes, but almost no one needs a hammer all the time’. Normally guys like Shtern and Serino wouldn’t come down here, they have much better gear at home, but here’s the difference - Shtern is the guy who requisitions the tools for these public sheds, at least in Apollo district. The old German is the guy who really makes sure he knows that ‘cheap’ isn’t ‘value’, and he looks to spend a lot of his time doing exactly what Blue is doing.

Shtern cracks a Belgian style beer and leans against a variable setting bandsaw, clearly unimpressed with how the water jet setting is holding up when the machine is only five years old. He’s a short man, with a white cotton shirt that hangs off his body like sailcloth and a pair of jeans his wife bought him twenty years ago.

Serino, for contrast, is a thing of absolute beauty - what Jeremy Clarkson would consider absolute beauty. He’s more android than cyborg at this point, with top of the line parts. Under the perfectly tailored black silk shirt and white Italian pants is a black-and-chrome body with a heavyweight boxer’s build. This is a body made to operate heavy machinery as handtools, with the precision of a Swiss watchmaker.

It is eye wateringly, blisteringly expensive. This guy is long retired, but he was a dragon watcher back in the day. How could he not be? He had a hand in making a lot of the tools that were state of the art back then, there was a matter of pride in seeing how they were used. He’s been left behind in much the same way Blue has in being able to contribute to it, but unlike Blue he’s been able to keep up with the trade side of things. His opinions have stayed cutting edge long after his contributions have.

They are best friends because they love to fight, and what they love to fight about makes them the two most valuable people on the entire station for Blue right now.

“Should have gone with the Orochi.” Serino teases Shtern’s sour expression at the bandsaw. “I’m telling you, that green band laser-”

Shtern just kicks the bandsaw on with a foot and jams a finger into the running bandsaw blade, which stops immediately. They’ve had this argument so many times before that replacing the sawblade after doing this is faster and easier. Shtern cracks open the side of the machine and gets to taking the broken blade out. “You’re paying for this one too.”

Serino pulls out his phone and makes what’s functionally a rounding error in his banking account for the new sawblade. This, too, is easier than arguing with Shtern about it. “Their new liquid nail mix is definitely worth it though.”

This Shtern considers. “Oh, yes? I saw it is three times more expensive, and ignored it. What makes you think it is worth it?”

“You use half as much, and it sets twice as fast.” Serino says. “They split the solution into a trimix coming out the barrel, they completely fixed the problem of residuals of the dual mix sealing the internals. I haven’t had one fail on me yet.”

This gets Shtern’s notice. He pauses in his fussing with the bandsaw. “The Mondragons have been failing a lot faster than I thought they would, I do not understand why people cannot learn to clean the barrels well enough. What’s it like on skin?”

“Worse.” Serino admits. “There is solvent for this.”

“Worse.” Shtern says it like an accusation.

“So just don’t get it on skin.” Serino counters, folding his arms and looking disgusted. “There will always be consequences for mistakes, and you should worry less about the people who make them.”

“Meine Blau, pass me the new band, please?” Shtern sticks his head in the machine to ignore Serino and sticks a hand out to where he remembers Blue to be.

Fiona:

Fiona holds up a hand and counts things off three fingers. “First of all, I was going to fuck Pink later anyway, that’s not the point.” She knocks one finger down without looking at Pink, because cool girls don't look at explosions. “Second, you don’t know what I can take. You’re not the only one who’s had to deal with an overinflated sense of their own greatness just because they’ve been surrounded by mediocrity too long, but you wish you were too much for me like that.” Somehow, she manages to make this sound like a compliment to Green, because it is.

“And third of all?” She knocks down the last finger with a fox-like smile. “You didn’t answer my question. I asked if you wanted to, and you haven't said ‘no’.”

And that’s the most curious one to Fiona, because nothing about what she knows of Green tells her that Green would have given reasons like that to shoot her down. She’d have just shot her down. So even if Green does just say ‘no’ here, she’s going to have to wonder about that.

[Thanqol]

Brown!

"Oh, welding..."

The rest of November feared Brown. Everything was just a bit off with her. Green was the manic paragon of brilliance and ambition, but with Brown everything just landed slightly wrong, went a little too slowly, couldn't quite come to the point. There was a fundamental drag with her, everything just a little bit uncool, exhausted and internally twisted. The focus on other people was in part a reflection of that; after dedicating so little energy to her own self concept she could absorb the emotions of others so much more easily. Under the spotlight there wasn't anything she could do but agree, passivity tumbling into bland acceptance.

"... sure, I know the basics," she said. She stirred herself, she didn't like having nothing of herself to assert, so she made an effort to refocus. "But welding's hardly a celebration and you still haven't answered my question."

Blue!

"The main thing I don't understand is how power transmission works these days," said Blue. "Some of it's wireless, some of it's cabled, and there always seems to be construction work happening to switch one type to the other type?"

She appreciates the calculated precision of her new grip. It had killed her to leave her hand strength up to vibes and impulses; she could be so much faster and so much more precise when she could visualize her movements in advance. There was a deep, deep satisfaction that came when physicality felt like the execution of a plan. A perfect movement made her feel like she was in sync with her body at last, and there was a comforting blankness to her mind in those moments where she could almost observe the beauty of her movements without commentary.

Green!

"That's because what I want is to win at Fiona, which is both a normal thing to want and possible goal to accomplish," said Green. There was a strange... frustration to her now? Her form seemed to solidify around the shape of her physical body. "And you're right that I don't know what you can take. That's the whole problem! Not least because I need to push past what your expectations are in order to accomplish my goal. I'd have to map you in real time and that's dangerous."

Her shifting stops almost entirely now; though it doesn't feel like she's stopped changing. This is a self-imposed prison of willpower.

"What I want is to be everything to everybody while also compromising nothing about my core identity. The closest I can come to that is eating the undernet and setting myself up as some sort of glitchcore AI goddess, which is also a normal thing to want and possible goal to accomplish," said Green. "But I'm not there yet, so, dangerous."

[Count Numbers]

Zhang and York:

Zhang snickers. “Hey, I thought you were just asking to change the subject, didn’t think you actually meant it. I like iced tea? Jasmine tea when I can’t sleep. I don’t get you. It’s like, when you ask me if I like tea, it doesn’t really feel like you’re asking me if I like tea. Right? Like, when I ask you about welding and you say you ‘know the basics’ - I can’t tell if you’re underselling because you don’t want to flex, or if you’re overselling because you want the excuse to hang out. You know?” She asks York.

“No.” York says “HartlyDworkin says hi.” Zhang shrugs, and raids York’s backpack and pulls out a thin jacket. He must have brought it for her, it’s brown pseudoleather with a line of sharp silver studs from the shoulders to the wrists.

Zhang falls in step alongside brown again, hands in her jacket pockets. “Makes you a good pretend lawyer, though.” She’s noticed Brown’s awkwardness, then, it’s just put her into Cool Older Sister mode.

Tools in a Toolshed:

It’s a good question, in that both Serino and Shtern agree that wireless is inferior. It’s a great question in that they disagree on what kind of cabled is better.

“Wireless.” Serino spits. “It’s cheaper, less parts, looks neater.” He rolls his eyes.

“It’s great for outside the hull.” Shtern admits, clicking the new band into place. “Here? It is a good thing that they use in a way I do not think is sensible. Wireless power, you send whether or not it is received. If the receiver is broken, how does the projector know to stop sending? They have to run a wire back. But if that wire has been broken, too?” Shtern shakes his head and clicks his tongue, tsk-tsk-tsk-tsk-tsk. “Wire is fail-safe, wireless is fail-deadly.”

“Messy. Too easy to interfere with. Vulnerable.” Serino shakes his head. “Mayors change to wireless for a while, then change it back when they learn why everyone else did too.”

“But this time!” Shtern snips.

“We will fix all the problems they could not!” Serino agrees bitterly. He projects a hologram from his wrist of a weaving machine, and spins it for Blue to inspect from every angle. “Look. This is a Charcoal Loom, for electronics. Prints entire circuits in carbon nanofibre for you. As flexible as fabric, as resilient as the station hull, the loom can even thread fibre optics. I refuse to use anything else for a project that requires less than a quatronic core.” Carbon nanofibres can be near-superconductors or incredible insulators based on a minor tweak of structure. Serino shows how the Loom can weave its tapestries as thin as the ink on a page, or as thick as a wool sweater.

“Cannot be fixed or maintained.” Shtern crawls back out of the machine, wiping his oily hands on a rag before taking his beer again. “Only replaced.”

“What could damage it?” Serino counters, and Shtern waves a hand instead of arguing back. “Expensive to buy, very expensive, but you save in the long run. Raw carbon is cheap. And look. The fibres themselves are like muscle tissue. They can pull tight. They pull tighter when cut is made to restore connection.” Actually, there’s a lot more you could do with a carbon fibre material that is also a microprocessor which is also a hydraulic motor. Serino’s just talking about power transmission right now though.

Shtern shakes his head at the Charcoal Loom projection. “I still like platinum. It’s good, it’s cheap, it does not rust, it does not corrode. I can fix it how I like. I can solder it, and weld it, and cut it. Fifty years ago men would kill to have platinum wires, but now it is common, it is boring.”

“Carbon, though. This is just what you can do here,” Serino waves at the tool shed. Nearby, a bunch of teenagers gather around a rough set and simulate different trebuchet designs trying to figure out the best way to launch a cinderblock through their Principal’s office window all the way from Gwen’s apartment roof. “Think of what you can do with grid wiring, with this. Can you do these things with wireless?”

Pink and Crystal could make some very, very interesting things with that loom, but it’d be the Christmas item - she’s only going to be able to afford one thing she’d want like this, to still be able to afford everything else she’s decided she needs.

Cyberspace:

"Keep changing if you like that more. That's not affecting your score, but you really do get points for trying. Or, just, I love dragons, if you wanted to keep being that?" She's curious if Green changes like this for herself, or because of her indecisiveness in what she thinks she should be for her audience. "You've already started winning at Fiona, though - I'll give you your first prize."

Fiona throws a file to Green - it’s her library asset for the body she used to run, but doesn’t anymore. It’s about 36 times the size of the cleric she’s running now. That number might not sound like much in the context of general computer files, even a small image can trivially be thousands of times larger than a large word document. In this case, it’s the difference between a xylophone and a cathedral pipe organ.

The body Fiona has given Green is made of dozens of fist-sized glass orbs, all connected by cobweb-like threads. Some of these threads are as thin as hairs, others as thick as pipettes. It's jank. The threads are there because the simulations always required the body to be physically coherent in some way. Controlling it all required entirely remapping her motor cortex, so that every thought sends one of these nodes to wherever her attention wanders, and stays there until that attention is needed by a new thought.

The fuzziness coalesces around an orb in the middle like the pupil of an eye. This isn't a deliberate decision, just a consequence of where the most attention has been. Focus on one thing and the pupil dilates, constricts when the attention spreads elsewhere. The eye can't move all at once, it moves as growing and shrinking edges, fuzzy and flickering.

The dimensions of it means no matter where you stand relative to the eye would make it feel like Fiona is staring at you, because she would be. Did you know humans can see in full 360 panorama with mechanical assistance? And that's when they still rely on their eyes. Each of those glass orbs gave her panoramic sight and sound of wherever she sent one - all of them, at once. You were supposed to cluster several together to represent a bigger or smaller percentage of your attention, but you didn’t have to. It’s a question how far Green could disperse this and still handle the information stream.

This body gives you what it feels like to move through the world as an author experiences a world in the middle of creating it, omnipresent but not omniscient. Information impresses directly into the mind, lucid dreamlike, exploiting the eccentricities of a direct brain spike connection to hardware that has to know what it's simulating. You need to use eyes in the out-there because meatspace doesn't know itself, the eyes need to convert light into knowledge. The simulation is converting knowledge into light - it doesn’t have to.

This is what really broke the drivers in Fiona's head to be too long, her most bodiless body, her ultimate escape. Put her in a sensory deprivation tank and this is what she still is. She doubts she and Green have the same reasons for escaping, she hopes this at least shows they had the same reasons for the place they escaped to.

This body is also definitionally unfuckable. Any sensory input like that got scrubbed for being overwhelming noise without signal.

“So, that's me.” She says cheerfully. “Here’s me fully mapped out, and I couldn’t find any expectations in there so if you find any, tell me what they look like. This is what I’m capable of, of taking, of dealing with, what the inside of my head looks like. Do you really think you’re more dangerous than anything I’ve done to myself?” This is a serious question, not a challenge. As of handing this body over, Green now knows more about Fiona’s levels than Fiona knows about Green’s.

She’s not ignoring the undernet stuff, or the glitchwork AI goddess thing. She can’t argue whether that’s right or wrong for Green until she knows who Green even is, and interrogating that first would just lead through misunderstanding Green anyway, with a lot of time spent talking past each other on the symptoms first to get there. That’d make this too much like fighting with someone on the internet.

Empathy first, so she can get explanations instead of just warnings. She doesn’t know what dangerous means yet. She has no idea what Green thinks her core identity is, and if it’s different from what Fiona has seen of her. She can’t talk Green down from a ledge if she doesn’t understand why she climbed out to it in the first place. At least she can try to show Green she might be capable of understanding.

[Thanqol]

Brown!

When observation turned inwards it focused on those graceless moments. The large scale revisiting of every imperfect moment had begun, and with it Brown's limited imagination stretched itself to the idea of excusing herself so she could beat her head against a wall. The fantasy ran right up to the point where her scream of frustration attracted concerned passers by and then it recursed on itself as a new moment of imperfection joined the others. It was difficult to function at all through this autocondemnatory trial. It made her feel overexposed; she was aware of so much evidence of her own failure that it surely wouldn't take too much more for even disinterested parties to start piecing it together. Withdraw, hide, disappear...

But she could handle it. She took a breath. She missed her wordless reverie and direct lines and would very much like to fall back into them, but she had to keep fighting no matter how much she wanted to check out. "Thank you, but what I was actually intending to ask was about the first group of people who interrogated you. I'm speaking accurately about my welding knowledge; I know how to do it but my skill is extremely out of date."

Blue!

Blue notes it down. There were a lot of advantages to getting a single, large fabrication purchase - not least the practical effects of outfitting a dozen people in matching outfits. One top of the line item also offered an 'impossibility hinge' - that was, being able to do one impossible thing could bypass security as a concept rather than fighting a number of smaller, riskier battles within the spectrum of the possible.

"What about lifting and hauling?" she asked, changing topics. "The station is so hostile to motor transportation but all of the physical shit of construction still needs to make its way around. How do you get a vanload of tools through an overbuilt Hermes alley at night without waking the neighbourhood?"

Green!

"Oh - that's -"

She laughs. November has not laughed like this in - even subjectively it's been a decade. Delight.

"You know, sometimes I forget that I'm actually kind of basic?" she said, spreading the image around her head so she could move around while viewing it. The shifting resumes but slowly, more deliberately. "I mean - not in absolute terms, but..." She turns it over. "This is about a mental framework. The physical structure exists purely as a vehicle to enable the mental framework. No interest in communication or aesthetic. Tyrannical control over input, both in what is and isn't included. Disinterest in features of a body that does not suit the mental framework."

That stops her, commands her attention. The faster her thoughts run the more electric green seeps into her design. "Oh. The framework. The framework for the mind - that's what's important!" She laughed again, folding Fiona's body back into itself. "It's not that I miss my previous body. I lived for a decade before that without any body at all. It's not even that I'm unique in the inexpressibility of my desires - ah, stupid, can't believe I wasted all that time! I need to work backwards from how my thoughts are into how my body looks, and I've already done that. I'm -" any pretense of photorealism was abandoned entirely; now she's a cel-shaded animation, now an impressionistic painting, now a pencil sketch. "- doing that right now."

She settles into a shape like a bird landing on a branch; momentarily stable but ready to take off again at any moment. It's the glitchwork dragon she first appeared as in the sky, scaled down; green-tinted white, scattered with pixel-effect stars and brilliant eyes, jagged in poor resolution artifacts. "In my ideal state I have no barrier between what I think and what I do, between what I think and who I am. That's what makes me dangerous - each check and filter I add to myself feels like a checklist I have to go through before I can be myself, but those checks are there for a reason. But that's," the dragon's snout crinkled, "only a problem here, where I have control over the environment as well as myself. In the physical world I have a containable level of agency but not enough adaptive expression -" A check triggers, her tone of voice changes. "I am talking about myself too much and not acknowledging what you just trusted me with. Thank you for that."

It obviously derails her entire flow to stop examining this fascinating idea and acknowledge another person, rather than forward-predicting their half of the conversation from information she already has. It's as good an illustration as anything of what she's afraid of in herself.

[Count Numbers]

Brown:

“Right, right. Yeah, right, uh. I don’t really remember much. People who picked me up were just regular cops, and then I got transferred here. I think that means they bring you here to interrogate you about the Pump stuff, they don’t do much screening to make sure there’s a good reason to. That’s going in the video. Two Themis guys showed up, saw my profile, one of them threw his cup of coffee at a wall, and then they left. Apparently they didn’t even check me out until then? I think the rest has just been like… fuck, what’s the word? What’s the word for taking shit out on someone else for shit that’s your own fault?” She snaps her fingers.

“Vindictiveness?” York suggests.

“No, it’s fucking… fuck this is pissing me off now.”

Blue:

Shtern looks to Serino. Serino looks at Shtern.

Then Serino flexes at Blue. This doesn’t add much, his mechanical muscles don’t bundle and bunch like a bodybuilder’s would, but it’s a universally recognized gesture.

“I ask him.” Shtern chuckles.

It’s not just Serino, though, much cheaper cyberware is much more common for moving and lifting. And even then, you don’t really need much more than that for handtools. The depot stations in neighbourhoods really does get freight most of the way, and hand tools go a lot further with titanium spines.

Enhanced bodies, too, just for the warehouse? That’s an expensive but interesting idea. White’s started exploring it more generally, but hot-swappable bodies just for purpose…

Green:

“You’re good, I was liking the listening.” Fiona’s suddenly treating this like when a songbird lands on the table in front of you at a cafe. Again she thinks about White, and she says something she is only capable of saying because of her. “I can be stronger than you, here, you aren’t a danger to me. I can fix anything you break. So just…” She reaches forward, carefully, and moves to skritch the soft, simplistic skin underneath Green’s jaw. “Give me your checklist for a bit. You were saying about how you want less agency?”

That part stood out to her. “In the physical world I have a containable level of agency” Of any word she could use to describe having less freedom, she used the word containable.

[Thanqol]

Brown!

She faded into the recollection. The tension was still there but it shifted into the background as she went from observed to observer. "The Themis guys. Did you get their badge numbers?" If anyone's used to snap-checking badge numbers of cops, it's Zhang. "Or failing that, the logo of the coffee shop they went to? Was it hot or cold?"

Identify the agents - their route, their base, their pattern. It was some Light Yagami shit, she knew, to take an interest in the investigation into you, but this wasn't the state she was up against. It hadn't been anyone with a government contract guarding Hades, it had been Chase Black. Her siblings were sitting in a military base, not deployed to the field. She could see in her mind's eye that there was a chink between the state and the people responsible for Erebus. A parallel response system with its own interests and assets. If there was an investigation then the parallel system would be taking an intimate interest, just as they had with the disaster response incident. If she could see who was watching she might be able to see what else they were watching...

Blue!

She notes it too. Paper. Multiple missions so far had been stalled by the physical inconvenience of moving large reams of paper out through a secure compound. After approximately a jillion high profile hacks companies and individuals seemed to have wised up and returned the typewriter to active service. She had briefly patted herself on the back for learning handwriting, but it seemed that skill had proliferated dangerously and there wasn't a way around that...

Or was there? She stood up and put her hands around Serino's bicep - they didn't fit but it gives her a good sense of the dimensions. Looked appropriately impressed and thoughtful as she sat back down. Those were big and they did not need to be filled with muscles. She could make some sort of... robot musclesuit, hollowed out and filled with either valuable kit or loot to be smuggled out of buildings.

"What tools are there for depth scanning?" she asked. "In my day, there wasn't anything to tell if a room was pressurized other than cutting a hole and getting clear of the blast radius. There's got to be better ways to scan what's on the other side now, but cybereye firms are extremely light on the details of what they can see and how."

Green!

Where the finger touched the pale green distorted and disappeared, revealing the glittering void of space - though it felt eerily solid. Like skin turning pale when pressed with a finger in reverse. Green leaned into it and purred - but within three seconds she'd turned her head to present the jawline, ear and neck.

"Trust can be broken," she said. "I might seize control of the scene; run it too hard, too fast, too aggressive. I could disable safety controls, force something uncomfortable, or hard cut at the wrong moment. My mind's always searching for the next idea or transition and I flick between concepts like a strobe light, these changes happen before I'm even aware of them. I was talking to Sophie about neurohacking and I was so interested that I didn't realize that was knowledge it was not remotely safe for me to possess - I didn't realize it until after I'd finished learning how to do it. Here I can do anything and I want to be able to do anything and that's an insanely dangerous combination."

[Count Numbers]

Brown:

“Ah, shit, I didn’t get any of that. I didn’t even think, and like, my camera stuff only got the original arrest. I don’t think they had badges though. Coffee just looked like takeaway cups to me, didn’t even think to check if they had brands or anything, that’s like, that’s Agatha Christie shit.”

“I started recording everything after we got there.” York holds up his phone before going back to playing with it. “It’ll corroborate any account we give, but that’s it.”

“I can show you how I got arrested for it, if you want?” Zhang offers hopefully. “You could figure out everything you want to know that way, maybe?”

Blue:

Serino barks a laugh at this. It’s Shtern that looks up with gold-flecked eyes with an annoyed grimace.

“My eyes are still 20/20 after all these years.” Serino explains. “It’s the only augment I haven’t got, but Wolfgang has.”

“Yes, yes, I’m getting old.” Wolfgang’s annoyed grimace breaks into something that just falls short of a grin. “No, that’s still not much better. Which we should all be grateful for, in my opinion. Everything is spying on me - my phone. Your phone. I think even Serino’s nipples are selling my data to advertisers.”

“Maybe? Who knows? They put the privacy agreements in with the liability forms, when you go in for the surgery. I never read any of it.” Serino… this is a joke, right? He says it like a joke, anyway.

“I do not want them to be much better at it.”

“There are so many ways you can change the physics behind looking at things.” Serino thinks. “Much more work went into the physics of things. Materials, that is the word. You want to know what I am most excited about? Glassware ceramics. Used to be far too brittle, but some genialità up in Ares found a way to blend the properties of diamond and silicone, as you like. Fantastic insulators,” he kisses the tips of his fingers, “Incredible to work with, like sculpting. The things you can do with the colour mixing, too, so much more…” he doesn’t have a word in English for this, and gives up, “than any painting.”

“Low melting point.” Shtern counters. “Once you get through that insulation.”

“I love that about it!” Serino closes his eyes in bliss, and his body shakes with the intensity of his passion. “The things I could have done with this sixty years ago… Glassblowing diamonds, Blue! To stir and to shape the wing of a fighter jet like I am pulling candy floss.”

Shtern sighs too. He can’t argue even for the sake of arguing. “If you are good. If you get the right tools… then yes. It is more like silicone the more you heat it, so it is very important you get the heat right.”

Serino shows you what he’d suggest, and his entry level is out of your price point. Shtern shows you his suggestions instead, and it’s still ludicrously expensive. Most of the difficulty is, as they have suggested, finding safe and practical ways to heat this stuff to its melting point through the insulation with any degree of scale or precision. Serino says of Shtern’s choices; “This might do.” As if being asked to chop firewood with a stone axe.

Green:

Fiona drops her solar-panel wings for beams of golden light again; “What’s the hacker version of wrestling, play-fighting? I don’t think there’s any way I can tell you that there’s nothing you can do to me that isn’t because I let you do it, without just proving it. And it’s the safest way to learn I’m wrong.” She says as an afterthought. “I want you to try your best to overpower me, until you know that you can’t.”

Her fingers twitch as she prepares three different macros in bands of light around her wrist - in case Green answers with a ‘surprise’ punch. [If Green wants it to be, this can be a legitimate combat encounter where the only consequences for losing are the resources she spends on it.]

“Also? Wouldn’t hurt for you to flirt back with me a little. I asked if you wanted to do things with me, you never asked me if I wanted to.” If she’s going to ask Green to test her strength on her, of course she’s going to be a brat about it. “You said you wanted to win at me, right?”

[Phoe]

"Three! Two! One! Go, show me what you've got Cinders!"

Her name is Cinthea, actually. Cinthea Mayweather. But Euna Kim has a nickname for everybody (except her wife for... some reason), and they tend to stick. Before she figured out the whole colors thing properly, yours was Nova. Now it's harder, and she's been workshopping. Every time you're here. What are your favorites?

Well, regardless of what anyone is or isn't called in here, Cinders is the only person actually using the gym right now. Most of the lights are off and the equipment is mostly folded up and tucked away in somehow even more space-efficient arrangements than it normally is. A few weight racks are scattered about the main floor, forming makeshift walls that corral someone trying to walk through the room toward the spaces where the mats have been pulled back, revealing actual pits only half filled with pillowy foam spray that makes falling into one very inconvenient but undeniably safe. The cargo nets have all been pulled up and stretched across the ceiling, but there's no immediately obvious way to access them even if horizontal climbing is Euna's intent.

It makes more sense watching Cinders run... whatever this is. With a very loud and somewhat unnecessary war cry she vaults the table of leg weights at a very precise height that sees her just skim under a sudden blue laser that streaks across the room. Her form was excellent: full buy-in from her torso to give her cyborg legs the range of motion they needed to propel her up but mostly forward, and her heel only clips the edge of the pit before she tucks into a shoulder roll and springs up safe on the other side. She weaves around three more lasers (these ones violet, red, and yellow) before making a mad scramble around a second pit to reach the preposterous and antiquated piece of stunt training equipment known as the salmon ladder.

"There you go, there you go! Let's go Cinders, let's goooo!"

Hup and two and three, Cinders flips the bar over her head two rungs at a time. This turns out to be necessary, because there's a rope waiting above her and her arms aren't long enough to grab it without a jumping headstart. So over she goes, only flailing her arms a little before she grips it like she's in a death match with a cobra and goes careening toward the wall. She briefly seems out of places to go before she plants her feet and starts running sideways along the edge of the gym. It's a perfect launch and release: up she goes over a startling pink laser and then she's latched onto the nets where she's swinging hand over hand like a natural. This must be her favorite part.

The end of the climb is another seeming dead end that sees Cinders carefully aim a drop to avoid falling in the third and final pit. She takes the full brunt of impact with her leg augments, earning her a disapproving tongue click from her boss, and then she's running at top speed toward the arcade in the back.

That's where she meets her doom. Fully half the gym lights up in a dizzying display of intricate laser patterns. They are, of course, nothing more than focused beams of light but Cinders flips and dances her way into them like she's afraid they'll burn her. The pattern is beautiful. These beams are all silver and blue and dance the way that snowflakes do in movies. At first they look like a solid curtain of lights, but to an observant eye there are actually maneuverable gaps that open up along spaces that only serve to enhance the pattern's beauty. They don't help. Beam after beam after beam strike Cinders, and where they do little patches on her cyberlimbs start glowing. Oh, inhibitors. She slows down, just a little at first, but then more and more as she gets blasted into a metaphorical crater and can only stare up at the ceiling with a defiant pout etched across her face.

"Gosh... damn it Euna I told you this was impossible!"

"Cinders I've put up four times on this course, it's not that hard. Erm... i-isn't it?"

"Yes. It. Is. If you don't cheat and fuuuuuu, I mean marry the person who makes your gauntlet patterns. I guess if someone played the stupid games you keep back here, but no one does! Nobody, Euna! They're useless! They're for dumb stupid dorks like 3V who aren't actually here to exercise, nobody with the training to actually do the course even knows they're th-- oh hold on. Lemme up, I gotta go yell off some more gatecrashers."

"Oh." Euna sounds like her soul's been crushed into a cube, "Oh, uh. Yeah. Sure."

The main lights come back on, and Cinders pops back up. She waves her arms as she hops her way across the deactivated but still dangerous obstacle course, like a mirror of your first night here if you swapped out the impossibly buff Korean cyborg for a woman who is somehow short and gangly at the same time and roughly three times madder for it.

"Hey! Hey hey hey hey! Do none of you people know how to read? We are closed, ok? Cuh-losed! Eunie's testing a new gauntlet and she-- oh. Oh god darn it it's you. Hold on. Euna? Nevermind, I need you. Your project is here."

Cinders makes disgusted bunny rabbit ears with her fingers around the word, and folds her arms across her chest as Euna turns her attention away from her apparently impossible death trap of an obstacle course and toward the entrance of her gym. Two things are immediately different about her than usual. For one she's got her hair tied back in a bun, which is practical but she never ever does this because it prevents her from flipping through it when she's nervous or otherwise overloaded. And for two, she's got a black eyepatch tied over her right eye. Very pirate-chic if you discount the aforementioned hair bun and the skin tight workout ensemble.

She smiles a little as she waves, but it doesn't quite eclipse the melancholy she's got wrapped around her like the world's worst blanket.

"Oh hey," she calls, "Didn't expect you here tonight. What's up? You got news or are you here for, uh, you know?"

Cinders, Euna's number one assistant and don't you forget it, huffs.

"This sucks. I miss when I was your project. I can't compete with nine robots in a trench coat."

"Cinders!!"

[Thanqol]

Brown!

"Ah, well," Brown said, sinking back into her fog. "Yeah let's do that."

Not only did that register as another failure, it was another revealed failure, and if she wasn't very careful it was a failure in herself that would make other people feel bad about themselves. Even as her energy dissolved back into an ambient, sharp-edged fog she needed to maintain a certain tired, easy posture so that her disappointment didn't bring down the room. The effort to do that cost any further attempt at contributing.

Blue!

Blue: Remind me, is bulletproof armour made out of diamonds something we want?
Pink: aahshfjjajahaajajajh
Blue: I could also do diamond swords
Pink: I am already going to the gym I don't need more incentive

Another key fabrication technology, though if anything even more of a commitment than the carbon loom. Building something with this would involve enormous amounts of practice and wasted materials. It would require an approach of building specialized pieces, there wouldn't be the option for uniform equipment. But the aesthetic of it. She could make scales out of diamond-silicon glass.

"Last question," she asked. "What's new with plumbing? Broken water pipes, working through the rainy season, vent-ice? I see the ice mining freighters and they're so much smaller than my envelope math says they should be, and the Cloud got stuck over Hermes for like three months without flooding or limiting flow."

Green!

She could angst over being dangerous all she wanted, but what that meant in practice is that she had no way to de-escalate when Challenged.

There's nothing but the tension in the air now, the micro-shifts of vision and posture. It's a state of utter, serene calm for Green. A clear contest with clear rules lets her dispense with all the infrastructure that keeps her from this state. She needs to make a move but as soon as she commits to an idea she's condensing infinite possibility into something knowable. How to communicate perfectly while giving nothing away?

She opens her wings and becomes the ocean.

Crashing waves upon a storm-tossed sea. Slate-grey and sand green, blue skies and steel clouds. Air that invigorates, sensationalizes, makes the mouth water. A riptide that snatches from below and drags Fiona along by the legs. A sargassum forest that whips and tangles, fast water and tangling kelp vines and the muscular threat of leviathans moving beneath the surface. The inherent eroticism of the ocean is often commented on but rarely manifested, and with wind and wave and the crackle of ball lightning across the surface, Green grips.

Nova!

Their favourite is "Nova".

The reaction to Euna using that name is - well, there's the sense that's the name they really wanted for themselves, but didn't want just anyone to figure it out and use it. November was reverse-engineered from Nova as something to put on paperwork and to stop themselves from vibrating with delight/embarrassment whenever it came up in casual conversation. The only way that name would work for her is if someone organically came up with it independently and there was genuine delight when Euna did. The response to it is almost the most co-ordinated she's ever been.

Beyond that, nicknames that involve alternate colours - Gold for Yellow, for example - don't work, they don't realize that they're being spoken to at all. Questioned, they'd mention uncertainty if Green had already blocked out concept space for those colours or was working on them in the background. They're happy with things evocative of the colours - Daisy for Yellow - but nothing registers quite like Nova for addressing a group of them.

"You can't even compete with us?" said Yellow, smiling, surrounded by her posse - Green and Pink. "How cute~"

There's something about the way that the three of them can move in unison that is extremely unbalancing. They've learned a trick where they maneuver so that one of them is right on the periphery of vision both left and right. Turn your head and they move their position so they're still there on the edge. It's worse than them being completely out of vision, it feels like being stalked by velociraptors.

"Perhaps we can take you on as our project!" said Yellow. Her aesthetic today was knots - intricate hair braids, knotted red neck kerchief, a crimson sash around her waist tied up in a bow, all over a silky white gi. Half shrine maiden, half sailor sentai, all smiles. "Take you under my trench coat, shape you with our eighteen hands, bring you up to speed~"

Yellow was easily the weirdest of November's colours to teach. She refused to touch anything directly, and often refused exercises if they didn't meet her weird hidden criteria, and her showing up at all was uncommon. But when she did appear, she could somehow coax the best possible performance out of every other colour.

[Count Numbers]

Brown:

York types, types, blinks. His ear cocks as his brain catches up to the information it just cached, ready to be ejected before it even bothered to reach short term memory, but an alarm started screaming from the trash eject button just before it went out.

He takes a sliding step to put himself between Zhang and Brown, despite the fact that there was no space between them to slide into. “Nope.” York says. “One sec. Need to talk to your lawyer for a minute.”

“Ah, sure?” Zhang sounds surprised. “She seems like a big girl, though, she’d handle it. It’s just-”

York doesn’t answer because he’s already got a friendly arm around Brown shoulders and he just pushes her forward ten steps ahead, out of earshot, and angrily hisses into her ear; “What the fuck are you doing? You cannot be interrogated as a person of interest right now, are you fucking kidding me.”

He’s actually sincerely angry he has to be the one telling you this. He had really hoped you were beyond needing a sanity check like this.

Sorry, Brown. Your masking makes him oblivious to the internal monologue you’ve got going on. We are punished for our successes, too..

Blue:

“Many little things, but the most interesting is heat management.” Shtern looks to Serino with questioning eyes, like he’s trying to ask him to fill the blanks in things he hasn’t said yet. Searching him for memories of the arguments they’ve had. “Water moves so much better as steam, and then back again. But never have we had materials that could take the heat change without bending, or warping, or melting, or- Don’t get me started on plastics.”

“Energy surplus to boil much more large amounts of water. Those ice freighters aren’t carrying ice anymore, they’re in-situ melting that volume of water. Around 20% more capacity, if you do it like that.” Serino snickers, and looks at the back of his fingernails. “Then you have to deal with free-surface effect in zero gravity, and pressurizing your vessel, but such things we can do.”

“Flexible tubing. Rerouting of systems. All new things that-” Shtern’s eyes light up. “Lom, do you think you could get me some of that tubing they use for the Cloud line?”

“I could.” Serino tips his head. “I think there’s still some salvage in Gaea. Why?”

“I would love to process it and see what it is.” He’s excited. “Just to tell Frau-Blau, of course.”

Serino stares blankly. “Right. Just that?”

Shtern pushes himself off the bandsaw chassis and dances in place like a happy goblin, making a low squeaking gurgle in the depths of his chest that sound very excited.

“Why?” Serino rubs his hands down his wrinkled face. “Why do you always get like this?” Shtern smiles dreamily.

“I put an old fridge into it. I close the door. I click the settings like I am making microwave popcorn. And the next day, it is all in its little pieces for me.” This makes him inordinately happy. “Or it could be its metal, its rubber, just in little cubes. The most perfect little cubes.” He rubs his hands together imagining it. “Jeana got so upset with me, I spent days just breaking everything down just to see, and giggling like a schoolboy. I was a little monster with it.” He would have had to have already been 70 years old by that point - it must have been a sight.

Macro Processors are like if you made a mass spectrometer out of nano piranhas. It intelligently identifies welds, nails, connections, and safely separates things at a submolecular level. The inventor, or inventors, is|are the only person|people who has|have accepted a Nobel Prize for physics anonymously. The amount of corporate espionage their work has enabled makes them the engineer equivalent of Salman Rushdie.

Green:

[Chase rules: Green is the Pursuer, in this case, trying to catch Fiona. Fiona’s lead represents her impression of untouchability or incontestability - her ability to feel out of Green’s reach even when she stays close enough to touch. Lead starts at 5. In this case, technical abilities such as Surveillence and Digital Intrusion take precedence over traditional skills like Athletics and Pilot.]

[Fiona rolls 5, +3 for 8.]

Fiona’s plan here is to just take it. Rolling with Green’s aesthetic or playing back in her way - She’s meant to show that she can be unchanging and unyielding. Is it more boring? In a way, sure. But the point of this is to make Green feel safe about her - and that means presenting herself as an indefatigable bastion Green can’t hurt, not as a force that can beat Green down.

If Win: (Roll =<8)

That being said, Zoro wasn’t above cutting the clothes off his enemies to make a point.

Look past the imagery and the and the power, and into the raw code of what Green’s summoning. Delete her hurtboxes. Strip her of her physical touch until she’s left as naked imagery.

Fiona stands in the tumultuous rapids, and cocks an eyebrow. “Trying to get me wet, huh? Need to try harder than that, nerd.”

If Loss: (Roll >8)

The problem with trying to be a solid wall against the tide? The tide wins. That’s what water does, it is a constant, implacable and shifting force that makes an embarrassment of all attempts to resist it.

Fiona tries to get her defenses out, but stumbles to keep her balance by swinging her arms. It’s not until she remembers her wings and her other senses here that she manages to clip out of the ocean and float above it, with it.

She’s out of practice. She won’t underestimate something like that again, but this was a bad start. “At least I know you want to make me wet.” Fiona dusts herself off, and waits for the next play.

The glowing macros around her wrists kick in. She’s dedicating more personal resources to this, adding digital latency time to her biological reflexes delay, but she shouldn’t need to rely on her reflexes to deal with something like this again either. [Challenge increased to 5].

[Thanqol]

Brown!

"Okay," she said. Remember - she straightened her shoulders a little. Professional. "I wasn't thinking. I'll leave."

She feels like she missed a beat. Why did looking at footage entail an interrogation? A different colour, a correct colour, would have made the connection. Even Pink would have had the courage to detonate the concealed smoke bomb in her heel that she'd installed to get out of situations like this one. All she could do was take it on the chin and be on her way without flinching.

Blue!

She takes extensive notes on this even as it solves the mystery of how her digestive system works. A primitive version of this let her taste test everything that was destined for Mrs. Everest for poison, disease or foreign contaminants. She hadn't realized it could be used for inorganic materials too.

She thinks about what she's learned. Silicon-diamond glassblowing stands out the most to her. Carbon fiber weaving is more practical on a mass scale, but the difficulty and resistance of glassblowing as a skill appeals to her. The nature of it as impractical and hard to industrialize makes it feel comforting, the physicality of the work made it feel powerful, the heat of it made it feel nostalgic. The results would be deeply individual, artifacts more than gear, and that felt right. Earlier members of her family had been all aboard the Factory Must Grow mindset, most especially Ox, but joining the Aevum project as late as she had gave her an opportunity to indulge in craftsmanship.

"On the topic of diamond glassblowing, I can see the compromises I'd have to make to afford a version of it," she said, bringing it back around. "But I'd like to hear, just for comparison/aspirational purposes, who has the best version of it on the station? What do they make? What does the out of touch aspirational manifestation of this craft look like?"

Green!

[Mechanics 0/3 3+3, 6 success but lower, Fiona's lead goes to 6]

Fiona stands tall. The ocean fades until it is the rapid-rushing water of a jungle stream, not even knee high despite its efforts. The tangling kelp pushes into the distance until it's the walls of a rainforest, twisted and tangled in every direction, vines hanging low and tangled but not close enough to catch. Heat comes into place; intense but languid, the stirring of a tiger at noontime.

In the forest there is a growl.

It's a small but meaningful shift; Green has gone from a concealing landscape to something physical concealed within the landscape. Not thinking through the cold, wet cable-hard entanglement of the kelp but through a hunter's patient, steady motions. She has made some part of herself manifest even if she won't yet show what that is; her consciousness has changed from oceanic blue to transparent white; the omnipresent glow of an Indian sun and a determination not to be baited or goaded. Her muscles are gathering beneath her. She won't attack on anything but her own terms.

[Conceal 2/8 4+3 7]

[Count Numbers]

Brown:

“Yeah. Probably should.” Right now he can’t think of a reason he’d want to stop her, so he doesn’t try. Still, it’s hard to sustain a fight when they don’t fight back. York seethes, but he looks back the way you came and seems to consciously remind himself of that part of today. “Sort out what happened here, get your head right with your other heads.”

Then, Zhang is yelling at York; “What did you say to her?”

“She’s- I don’t-” York pinches the bridge of his nose. “Some of her is like that sometimes.”

“Some of her?”

“It’s a whole thing.” His voice is receding. “One sec. I’ll see if Tess- If ProvocativelyFickle is free today, I can’t remember if it’s her or Numb that did metalwork.”

it was both. Fickle did metal sculpture until she got bored of it, and Numb did jank stage rigging for student budget concerts and short films with stolen scrap metal. Neither should be anyone’s first choice, but either would be fine.

Then Brown has a tap on her shoulder, and Zhang takes Brown’s hand and starts writing on it with a marker pen. “I gotta go too, but, I owe you, okay? Won’t forget it.” Then she runs back to York to stare over his shoulder and figure out who her helper is going to be.

Blue:

Shtern lets out a little wail, and Serino stands taller. He is about to be insufferable. This is what he lives for. Shtern finishes his beer in three gulps. “Look. It is empty. I must get another.” He makes sure his path is completely clear before he throws the empty bottle underarm across the workshop, where it shatters over a waste basket meant for metal shards. “Then I must clean that. Excuse me.”

“I own a small firm in Ares.” Serino pulls a hologram of a logo up. It’s a stylized animal rendering like the ones you used to see for luxury car companies like Lamborgini’s charigng bull, or Porsche’s rearing horse, or Ferrari’s rearing horse, or Jaguar’s - you get it. Except Serino’s heroic animal rendering is of the Italian cave salamander. Not an animal you’d associate with a dramatic pounce, but Serino’s committed. “Cornelion. It’s not the biggest of my companies, but it is the closest to my heart. It is… I was born in Corniglia, you see? This beautiful town on the cliffs of Italy. The salamander looks so much like the cornelion stones you found there, we try to use a silica blend that looks like that stone as much as possible.”

“Corniglia was tiny. Tiny! More people in an apartment building than were in the entire town. The colours! Every day, bambino Serino would walk down those long black stairs to the ocean, and fish while watching the smugglers go by in their beautiful speedboats. And if a police boat gave chase!” He claps his hands together and rubs them, and it makes a hammer striking an anvil. “The whole town is gone now, those cliffs - the ocean. But here, Cornelion, it is home again. It could be bigger, but… I like to keep it as small as the town I remember.”

Shtern shuffles past in the background, glances at the teenager’s trebuchet design, and sighs. He holds up a hand to them, ‘one second’, on the way to clean up the glass, and doesn’t spare a look towards Serino. His ability to deliberately ignore this is powerful.

“That is all we do there, this glasswork. One thing -” He pulls up a hologram of a luxury railpod with black glass windows, and an exterior shape like someone dipped a baseball in molten glass and pitched it lightning fast, letting the shards cool behind it in flight. “Private railcars. Beautiful, sleek, and impervious to crashing. We learned where it is best to be as hard as diamond, and a cushion where it must give. A braced passenger will survive an impact at 80 meters per second, a third the speed of sound. Each one handmade, no two alike.”

Ignore how many asterisks there are on that one - that passengers in luxury pods are rarely braced, that such impacts are incredibly rare. He’s not proud of this because it is necessary or effective, just that it’s possible. It’s a flex.

“Look at this, too!” He projects a hologram of a cavalry sword, and looks disgusted by it before turning it off. In the second you saw it, it looked fae. Like something made in the Winter Court for the Queen Titania. “No. Hologram doesn’t do much of this justice. So much is in the way it catches light, in the colours. We have become a favourite of Yggdrasil executives wanting to make their weapons of office. So much of the shaping can be done with your hands that it is allowed for them.”

Is it an effective weapon? Not compared to what Blue used against Chase Black. Is that the point? Absolutely not, diamond swords are their own justification. For all Yggdrasil’s silliness, this is a case of real recognizing real - they want for the same things as Blue.

“This, this was me.” He pulls up a carnation corsage for a wedding. “I made every petal of this with my fingertips, one by one. Shtern’s wife asked me for it for an anniversary present, flowers that would not wilt. He cried, and cried, and cried.” Serino laughs, sarcastically rubbing his eyes. “Boo, hoo, hoo.”

Shtern waves him off from the dustbin, then goes back to pretending not to hear as he shuffles back to the teenagers, and starts lecturing them all about how their center of gravity is wrong, and if they really want to send the cinderblock payload flying, they need to get more of a snap on their rope, like-

“You. You should visit.” Serino says proudly. “You want to see the best on the station? You come to me.”

The patronage system lives on. If you specifically want an expression of emerging technology that’s more artistic and expressive, then it’s probably going to be a billionaire’s money pit passion project. It’s not the renaissance anymore, sure, but paint will always be expensive to the painters.

And as Serino glances over at Shtern again, and there’s a twitch of a frustrated smile, there’s a story here too. It’s not Blue’s interest in technology, her knowledge of the old ways, anything else that Serino likes and shares with her that’s the reason he’s making an offer like this. It’s Shtern, the fact that when Blue went out looking for someone to learn from, Shtern immediately clocked her as someone who’d care about what he had to say and listen to him, and Blue did.

Serino spent this entire conversation looking like the billion dollar man, and Shtern looks like his wife still packs his lunches for him, and at every point Blue has treated them as if they’re complete equals.

Green:

Fiona [1d6 +3 = 5+3 Surveillance =8]

She makes a motion like coiling a loop of rope around her forearm, like you do when pulling a boat to a mooring. She yanks and her little kobold workers from before are pulled from all the way down at the tower of babel to here.

“Terra Null.” Fiona pats the pink one on the head. The kobolds begin to take hammer and pick and cartoonish carpentry saw to the boundary of a ten by ten by ten meter cube of perfectly nothing space. What’s more, they keep doing that, maintaining the space and constantly refreshing and resetting it as Fiona stands in the middle of her newly erected digital watchtower, admiring the beauty in what Green is doing around her, always trying to understand her better.

For now Fiona is spending more of her attention on trying to see what Green shows of her heart, here, than she’s worried about where the next hit might come from. She feels like she’s trying to read poetry off the claws of a paper tiger.

When Green strikes it can be on her own terms, in her own form. But it won’t be in her own environment. And this has still yet to take any of her concentration to maintain - Green’s yet to overcome Fiona at a resting neutral.

[Both pass - lead increases to 7, difficulty remains at 5, and Fiona will spend 3 from her Digital Intrusion pool again.]

[Phoe]

Nova!

"Bwuh?! Ack, no! Nooooooo you can't just! Y-y-y-y-y-y-y-you... ohgoshImpicturingitIcantstopsomeonehelpmeohnowhywhywhywhymeitswaytoomuchitshouldn'tbethishothandandgirlsandandandandand aaaaaaaaaaaa~"

Cinders Mayweather has a secret, and you've just unlocked it. Congratulations! See, she's a complete pushover. Zero defense. The only reason she's able to be as bold as she's been is because she hangs out with Euna all the time. She's used to someone whose main strategy in the face of abuse is to tank it, and yell at her when she goes too far.

It's her way of trying to show off for a hero. When she met Euna she was a complete loser who couldn't string two sentences together in front of anyone she considered a celebrity (or pretty). Original screen name before she got Euna'd: Cinner. Prolific author of just the trashiest and most indulgent fanfics, which you've triggered half of by the way, cries at the sad parts of cartoons and children's movies. You were supposed to get upset. You were supposed to apologize to her. You were supposed to say something that'd work Euna up, and then she'd get a pat on the back and a promise for more and better hangouts as the star pupil.

The scenario Cinders is built completely backwards for is a counterattack. She tries backing away, she tries turning around, she tries hiding her face with her arm and then her shirt when that doesn't work, but she's being hunted and this is just like the time Princess Alina got trapped in the mirror hall with KonKon bandits and no damn it don't think about it like that. She lifts her arms into a proximity of one of Euna's fighting stances because it's something proactive she can do, but she's so far gone there's no risk of her throwing a punch even if her life depended on it. She is a squeaking, shaking, slowly dissolving mess of a girl and it is all your fault.

So that's something to be proud of.

"Oh! Not a bad idea actually," with a new thought to occupy her brain, Euna's voice perks up a little more until she's close to her usual level of enthusiasm, "Let's see... Lemonade? Geguri. Aaaaaanndddd... ok yeah this isn't gonna work. Like, it's too deep a cut if I call you Rosé, right? Nevermind, I'm never gonna remember this. So Nova. Nova 1/3. Odd Eye Circl...ing My Assistant. You wanna have a go at Cinders?"

"E-E-Eunieee?!"

"Why not? I assume you came to spar, right? Since you waved me off on the whole... other thing, anyway. And you didn't come optimized for that conversation anyway. Cinders actually leads about half of my self defense courses. And I think it'd be fun to see how you stack up against an opponent with a different style to mine. As a warmup, at least?"

She looks hopeful. Cinders looks like she's about to turn into a tomato. A tomato that's on fire. A fire tomato that yearns for death. Euna claps her hands with the dull thwunk of metal on metal and smiles.

"If you're game, help me put the gym back together so we can use the whole floor tonight. Or we can, uh, try something else I guess. Hey do you guys still use those batteries? I finally got a shipment in but I have no idea if they're right. It's weird, nobody seems to want to sell these, like anywhere. Anyway come on, let's lay off Cinders for five minutes. She's no good to us until she remembers how to breathe. Maybe dunk her head in water."

"Betrayal! Betrayal! Mean to me!!"

"Yeah, well. Learn your lesson this time why don't you?"

[Thanqol]

Brown!

If she has one talent it's that nothing stops her from being functional.

She can make it home, go shopping, vacuum the floor, and spray down the shadow of mold out of the shower without missing a beat. The train pass scans, there's a spare box of batteries on the shelf, and all of her video games suck but she dutifully manages to waste three hours in one without complaining. And that's the easiest way for everyone involved. Any fracture of her shell would draw in other people, would incite a whole new conversation to fuck up in. Admission of weakness was an expenditure of energy. Emoting anything less than total normality was tantamount to an admission of weakness.

Even any private display of frustration was wasteful. Who would it serve? What would it accomplish? Lashing out wouldn't make her feel better. Torturing herself wouldn't make her be better. Before fucking up, pulling water, cutting wood. After fucking up, pulling water, cutting wood. She could live by that. She could strategically avoid making anything worse, in word or deed. The inside of her brain might be a single massive scorch mark but, fuck, if she was going to let that stop her then she'd never get anything done.

Blue!

To some degree, Blue just doesn't get it. November as a whole has always had a hard time treating anyone as lesser or greater; it means she'll treat the destitute and the damaged the same as those enthroned. Sometimes it results in her addressing a twelve year old child with heartfelt sincerity, at other times she has spent forty five minutes explaining zero-g metallurgy to a komodo dragon because she genuinely thought that the lizard was getting there. That part isn't anything special to her.

But what is... Blue understands the physical world, yes, but she's also interested in physical history. She used to look at Mr. Merkin's coins with an alienated kind of fascination. There had been something there beyond the metal she hadn't quite been able to place. But she saw it now, when Serino had talked about his hometown. She saw... pride. The kind of pride that translated into tradition; the kind of tradition that was a celebration of excellence. An artistic history and community. She had no stone cliffs or smuggler's speedboats in her heart, but the idea of a... a corporate logo as an act of love and self-respect and artistry, rather than a cold-hearted attempt at mind controlling positive feelings out of the general public. That was new to her.

"I'd like that," she said. "I want to learn to make things I can be proud of."

Green!

Everything is made ready. Muscles are coiled ready to pounce. The tension is absolute, the plan is in motion, and -

The world, sea and sky collapses into a small green sphere.

"Can't," said the orb, muffled. "Could but can't. Not even here. Inexpressible, despite being trivial. I thought it would be mine, but it's deeper than that. I need to be lesser/greater. Control with less/more friction. More powerful, more limited. Digital divinity insufficient. Insufficient lack of control. Need to incubate a new thought." There is a crackle of frustrated electricity across the surface of the orb and it condenses tighter. "Translation issue."

Yellow!

Yellow makes a show of the battery change. She stands tall and graceful, raising one foot up to place on a chair, bare knee emerging from her robe as Pink and Green kneel before her and open the storage connector with gentle and attentive fingers. The way they do it feels like it has something in common with a dance routine, not least how they occasionally turn their heads in unison to look at the camera (Cinders).

"These are appreciated," said Yellow, producing a fan with the calligraphic character for SUNRISE from a hidden pocket in her sleeve. "These are going extinct, you know? There's an old line of lava lamps that use the same technology. I've been buying them up but sooner or later they might stop existing on the station entirely. At that point I'll need to make a decision."

She rolled back her sleeve and flexed so that her attendants could replace the batteries in her elbow. She smirked and fanned herself as the mechanical aspects of her body were opened up and put on display in quick, elegant movements.

"Speaking of," she flicked her fan shut and pointed it at Euna. "Music. Fight music. What do you have for us?"