The Lion:Governor Joseon of Classical Ares stares back at you, whether Red recognizes him as that or not. One of the most aggressively anti-transhuman legislators on the station. The suit’s not a governmental loan, he’s just the kind of dude that kins lions.
This is really, really, really funny. You might have actually just destroyed a guy’s re-election campaign right now.
The lights cut out.
& The Unicorn:(There’s an obscure George Orwell reference for you)The thing about all that white is that it lights up first, it becomes sharply visible with the same amount of light that keeps everything else in shadow. It helps the illusion that there is nothing,
nothing in this exhibition but her as she silently walks the stairs up. There’s no television screens or cameras rebroadcasting her, so she waits until she’s where she needs to be to start. Everyone that sees her is seeing her from their own unique angle.
It’s a deliberate choice. When the televisions show up with their well positioned cameras, even people sitting close to the action often watch
that instead, because it shows a variety of perfectly chosen angles. And if you’re going to do that, then what’s the point of being there? Without the curation, there’s no better view than the one you have.
“Thank you all for being here this evening.” The station’s angle has taken it just past sunset, it’s only minutes since ‘afternoon’ would have been appropriate. “I believe that home is wherever your family is. While I consider myself lucky to have such a large family, in all of you, the things that tie us together are personal. The same place we come from is a yearning in the same part of all our hearts - if we are to be together it is because we have to find each other. If we are to ever feel like we have a home it will be because it was brought to us, as much as we were brought to it.”
“The coming days will be hard on us, be hard
for us, and none of us should face it alone. If, after you leave here tonight, you expect to return to somewhere that is more like family to you then please, we are all of us more than this one part of our identities.” She twists her head to address the darkness behind her and her horn sparkles in the light, as if to emphasize how important that one part still is. “If, however, this feels more like home to you than anywhere else, then you shouldn’t have to leave. We have organized for the acquisition of every room in the adjoining hotel for the entire three days that this exhibition will run. My partner has created an app with which to select your room, first come first serve. We apologize that, for boring and mundane reasons, you will need to verify a unique mobile number for each bed you are requesting. An offensive bit of reality creeping in when I’m trying to grant wishes, I’m afraid.”
The perfect illusion jumps when that gets enough of a polite chuckle from the audience she hears them for the first time. This entire time, in the blackness, Crystal has had no way to know anyone’s listening, no way to see any of the reactions. The reminder that there
are hundreds of people around her, she’s terrified. Then she rubs her thumb against a pink ribbon tied around her wrist, and she’s perfect again.
“This will only be an offer we make today, for this audience, for the rest of the event. Your presence among the gallery is welcomed, but not expected. All I hope is that, come what may, we can all of us here be together for it. Home is where you feel safest.”
The light comes off her. The rose window glows white, then displays a QR code for all attending. When the hall lights turn back up again Crystal is already back in the stairwell with Pink, her black stage folding into the rafters.
Quietly, Crystal wraps her arms around Pink’s neck and shakes, slightly. “Fiona found something robbing the bank that first time that made robbing it a second time much easier.” Her voice is far more calm than her body betrays. “Necessary, absolutely necessary.”
The attempt at a stoic resoluteness is ruined by by a choking at the back of her throat. Some things you can put a brave face on, but not a runny nose.
She wipes her face with the back of a very expensive lace sleeve, half-ruining it with sniffle. “I say I can’t take the risks you both do, because I need to keep my hands clean to do this. Why, if I’m close enough to the both of you that I’d be damned by that anyway?” Everything she’s done and doing here gets inverted and weaponized if she’s caught. You and Fiona are the gloves that keep her hands clean - but what if something stains through? Then she’s made herself a representative to these people just in time to become a pariah, tying everyone to terrorists and bank robbers.
Even in the heart of the crowd, surrounded by hundreds of people, she found a way to not have anyone be seen with her. On one level the wedding dress represents inviting people across the threshold into a new home, but on the other the virginal innocence and purity it symbolizes is a deeply ironic plea of how she needs to be seen.
Crystal takes a shaking breath out. The adrenaline is leaving her system, leaving her with the crash. She wipes her nose again as she fiddles with the other wrist, the one with the pink ribbon. This sleeve she’s kept clean, and she makes no move to offer the ribbon back. Pink herself being there doesn’t replace it, she adds to what Crystal’s already getting from it.
“Thank you, though. I was ashamed for a moment, at what I was exposing everyone to; especially given how this has all been paid for.” She flashes a smile at Pink, and she’s not smiling
for Pink, she’s smiling
because of Pink. “Bluntly, I asked if that meant I was ashamed to be associated with either of my girlfriends who I love quite dearly, and I got so angry at the question it carried me through to spite it.”
& the Dragon:It has to be said, standing here on the altar of Dragon’s stupid martyrdom and martyring yourself while declaring it’s the thing Dragon would have done is… Densely layered.
Let’s pull apart one aspect of this. On the one hand Blue is the illusion of a whole person, and in this her self-removal from the world is different to that of Eli wanting to blow up parliament to make their own death worth something. On the other hand that illusion is capable of learning, self-perception, had a name, and was recognized as a person by the people around them. Socially, emotionally, pragmatically, Blue
was.
Blue was not interchangeable to the old Italian who wanted to show her glasswork, and now never will. Blue was not interchangeable to Pope, who will never get to make amends for so offensively misunderstanding her. She was not interchangeable to Chase Black, who still tell horror stories about fighting the dragon maid. People will mourn her as a real person. Her voice is being removed from the story. What is that, if it’s not
death?
November lives on, but as much as Blue wasn’t November, November isn’t Blue either. For this to be a true and meaningful act of sacrifice then we have to acknowledge that - This
is a profound but reckless act of suicide.
It would be convenient to say that it didn’t work, because of that. That suicide is never justified, that it was a stupid thing to do, that there was another way to do this… but that’s not really the problem with it, is it? No, the issue shouldn’t be the competence of your self-removal from the world, especially given that Blue’s is obviously, incredibly competent. This is where she peaks; Not just because it has to be, because she has taken from herself the chance to ever top this moment, but because even if she had the rest of her life to surpass this she would have struggled to find an opportunity like this one, that says this much about her.
Dragon
was gone. This
is likely the only way Dragon, as an entity, could be brought back.
So it does work. What does it mean that it works?
I’m going to be very oversimplistic here. Picture a slice of Dragon’s quatronic mind in two dimensional space as a collection of microfiche, like so;
Now, I’m going to represent the damage he’s done to himself with a blast from a double barrel shotgun. I’ve named the left barrel ‘Hemmingway’ and the right barrel ‘Cobain’. Now;
The thing is that we can partition what’s left of this two dimensional space. Erect barriers and tell new information to fit where it can in the safe spaces. It’s not ideal, a 747 can land without any working engines, but almost nobody would ever do it by choice. So;
Dragon’s limping along like he is because he did a good job holding on to the bitter end, but you can’t get back the information once it’s blown out. You can’t remember the things you’ve forgotten, you can only clean up and tighten the edges of the usable space around what's missing. What Blue's giving is that missing information, like this;
She fills in those missing pieces, she acts as the context of what used to be there. Sometimes this is like a book where every word on a page is missing half its letters, and the fixed result is entirely Dragon - The information of what the words were comes without any of the words themselves changing. In other places it’s like where entire chapters were ripped out, lost, and replaced with Blue’s copy of them.
But then there’s that real hardware damage. Dragon was still on the same devastated hardware when Blue did this. The fix can’t
fit. The end result ends up like;
That doesn’t mean this was a failure, that Blue’s sacrifice was in vain. It’s an illustration of moving from necromancy into mere emergency surgery. Those repaired pieces are enough that, when Dragon’s hardware is fixed, those holes will merely be empty spaces that he needs to fill again, expand into.
And Blue? On your way out? I’ll throw in that Dragon spent years optimizing his damaged remaining mind to the broken components they operated on, it was necessary to finish what he’d started here. No, thinking about it, I actually don’t believe this could have been done later, after those fixes were made. He’d made the shapes of his damage load bearing.
There doesn’t need to be an explanation here, but still think I should explain what I mean. Imagine a pair of neurons having a thought as two people who need to throw a ball back and forth to each other, and the roof has caved in between them. Dragon’s neurons figured out how to bounce the ball off the wreckage between them to have it still end up in the right place. Repairing the hardware without Blue’s fix means those two neurons, in trying to start the game again, throw the ball where they would always bounce it off the wreckage. Except without the wreckage there, the ball ends up slamming into the face of the next pair of neurons playing the game next to them. Every borked throw like that overwrites its target with the wrong information, and they were all going to be doing that.
I feel that explanation is worth saying because it adds a new light to the depth of Dragon’s purposefulness in doing this to himself, and because the situation simply denies me an easy avenue to undercut Blue’s decision with, here. There is no hidden reveal there was another way, no saviours emerging from the Mist drawn by the sound of the self-inflicted gunshot. This was it, this was the only way, she was right.
So I say this last not to speak against Blue. I say this because this martyrdom is so intensely romantic I’m worried about how someone like Eli would read it. If you are in a dark place, and you value others more than you value yourself, then stories of sacrifice like this can feel too straight-up aspirational. The truths that go into this story can too easily lead to swallowing a black pill, and living only for the moment you can martyr yourself this poignantly. Because it
is profound and poignant, for reasons November will be far better at saying for herself.
Dragon sleeps deeper than ever, medically induced coma deep, and it’s hard to tell how long this will take to wake up from - it might even be hard for Orange and Brown to tell that he will except that his stirring has gotten more even and he’s stopped doing what, in hindsight, were basically Parkinson's tics. How are they going to work out how to get home from here without their engineer?
When we give ourselves to one great act, we deprive the world of every small act of good we could be doing instead. Blue’s been gone for all of a few seconds and already that’s
kind of a problem.
More than that; Blue will never get to hear Dragon thank her. She will never get to bask in his gratitude and attention. She will never get to see the version of him that is pieces of her, and know what they mean to him. Dragon will never get to know his saviour. There’s a romanticism to never seeing the fruits of your own sacrifice, of planting a tree whose shade you will never feel. Still, this will badly hurt the very person she sacrificed herself for, for years to come, who would have asked her not to do this if he was capable of understanding that he needed to.
But you know, fuck him for that, because he’s the reason she needed to and he’s the reason he wasn’t capable of stopping her. At least Blue’s sacrifice was selfless, Dragon did this to himself just to prove he could. If
he doesn’t think this was justified, then that’s his fault. It’s his fault that he has to live with that, and it’s because of Blue that he gets to.
We are never the only ones hurt by our decisions, no matter how much we wish we could be.
