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

[Count Numbers]

Fiona:

“I’m not-” Fiona starts, stops. Thinks. “Okay. We can go do something else and find something you do find fun, just leave this stuff here. Go back to the apartment to give you a mechi-cure, maybe, like I promised.” Because Hazel has commandeered the workshop and she does not want her intimate girlfriend affection smothering weird cleaning moment to be ruined by bitch-queen of the fairies. “But can I just show you why I’m being weird about this?”

She stacks a quick rainbow of lego bricks, scrabbling around in the big dumped pile looking for one for every November color she knows about. “Black is a trauma response, naturally isolated.” She flicks that off the stack. “Orange is supposed to be your social core, but we’re your girlfriends and she sees us about as much as Green used to.” Flicks that off. “Green, she’s complicated but just for now, Ms Queen of the Underworld,” Flicks that off. “Brown?” Flicks that off without explanation. “Red.” She unclips it from the stack and puts that in the palm of her hand. “White.” Unclips that from the stack and puts it in her hand. “Yellow.” Unclips that from the stack and puts that in her hand. “Pink.” And again.

She makes a new stack, Red, White, Yellow and Pink. “This is who’s left of you who seems to really care about people in a way that could be kind of healthy.” She looks at the flicked Orange brick. “Which worries me on its own, but. White wants a strong leader, not to be one.” She sets White aside. “Three left. Red’s solid, but… this isn’t her place.”

And then she rebuilds the whole rainbow stack using just the flicked and discarded pieces, leaving Yellow and Pink beside it.

“So now all of this? All of this isn’t countervailing force anymore, it’s table stakes.” Fiona holds up the Yellow and Pink bricks. “For these two. And this one,” she holds Yellow up. “Apparently thinks that the point of making up a game to play with kids is manipulating them into optimal happiness.” She closes that one in her left fist.

“Which leaves Pink.” She says. “Hi.” She adds, wiggling her fingers. “So I love you,” and she holds up the rainbow piece and offers it to the actual Pink, “and I also love you,” she holds up the individual pink brick but keeps it in one hand without offering it. “So I have to-”

She stops cold. “Holy shit.” She looks at Pink in fear. “Pink she’s going to kill you.” She remembers she’s still holding the Yellow brick in her left hand and flicks it like a bee that stung her.

Okay, so you know that thing where people learn by teaching? Or like, doing a simple demonstration makes things obvious you wouldn’t have thought of?

Yeah, so. Fiona has just, in her head, made a very important series of logical connections. All these intermediary steps stay in Fiona's head for the moment though because she's too startled to explain herself, has no idea how, is relying on Pink making the same conclusions she just did.

1: Pink is the only threat to Yellow’s supremacy here in the way that actually matters.
2: Pink is the color responsible for selfishness, and Yellow's vision requires total selflessness.
3: She’s seen how much Blue’s disappearance is changing them even without Blue being there herself to change them. That’s a new data point for her.

She was going to say something like ‘I want you to be able to feel like you can be selfish having fun with other people, rather than need to hide away and keeping entirely to yourself’, and that was true too. It just feels way less important now.

Fiona is at least aware her girlfriend is… weird, that it’s not murder-murder. She knows she’s not accusing Yellow of assassination here so much as a change of mindset, a way to resolve a cognitive dissonance, something that would only be necessary if Yellow did win out. She gets that.

But also it’d make her fucking sad, damn it.

Apostle:

Apostle stops.

“Oh holy shit you’re a segmented GAI. Oh shit you were the blonde at the Lutherans meeting?” More gears, they push off Junta’s bed and glow like a Christmas light over you, radiating all different colours and blasting the sound of a hammering heart. “Definitely segmented personalities, she was too different. No fucking way, you’re kidding me. Wait. November? Junta talked about-” Apostle stops. “Journalism. You knew him for journalism.”

Apostle is a genuinely brilliant idiot, when they told Yellow that all the smartest people they knew were dumber than her they included themselves.

“Know him.” Apostle corrects themself. “The universe hates him too much to end his suffering this early. Anyway. You basically got it, with the card, so I’ll just tell you that it’s heat sensitive invisible ink. You’ve got to hold it as close to a candle as you can in a dark room without burning it.” They say this to save time, but don’t just say what’s on the card. They only want to help you skip the boring step. “Wait. Did you know he wrote…?”

This is awkward.

No it isn’t.

“Doesn’t matter,” Apostle continues, making it clear they have simply decided they don’t care about it and you shouldn’t either, so it’s fine, “I get like that with fanfiction. I kind of find one thing I like and I pull everything I can from it, but it’s not enough so I get deep into the fandom trying to stripmine that. But at the end I can’t remember what’s fanon, and what’s canon, and what’s from where. All the different characters get superimposed over all their other versions, all the different timelines.”

“And then I realize everyone else has done it wrong, except like two people, and then that’s the worst because you see two people get it right, it’s a solved problem, but nobody else-” they cut themselves off. “Actually what personality fragment am I talking to here, how are you subdivided? It’s going to make things way easier going forward if I actually just know what partition you are.”

Crystal:

“Yes dear,” Crystal says. “And all that is very lovely when the nation you mean is Aevum. If, however, my girlfriend were to experience a factional split, then I might have to learn how to break up with only a portion of someone, and that sounds thoroughly miserable.”

She looks down at Yellow from higher up the toppled throne and looks at her like a cat that’s knocked something off the bench. “You do not need to explain, or apologize, or justify yourself to me, none is needed. But-”

There are two tones she considers taking here, warm and cold, and she chooses warm this time. She trusts Yellow as fragile enough that saying this is warning enough without needing to belabour the point, so let this just be a celebration of the others.

“The sentient manifestation of your hedonism is a charming and vibrant sweetheart to whom I would give the world. Your paranoia is a watchful soul, deeply hurt but expressing care in her own ways. And your disaster lesbianism,” she smiles angelically at Red and maintains eye contact with her when she says this, “besides being forthright and adventurous, can make me cum harder than a corded vibrator at its full. And so on.” She laughs at her own joke as she thinks of it in her head. “I was going to say they just don’t make batteries big enough, but there is one in you, so I suppose they must.”

She looks back to Yellow. “Please do not talk about my girlfriend in front of me like that again.”

There. No coldness. No cuts. And most of all, finish on the singular, to make it clear that Yellow is still included in that as well. All this needs to be is an eccentric case of self-loathing, and nothing more.

The Third Day:

A lot of things are about to happen. It will not be quick.

[Thanqol]

Pink!

Pink actually became increasingly attentive and interested throughout Fiona's speech. "You know, nobody's actually ever been interested in my internal politics before," said Pink. "I'd actually always wanted to talk about this but never had the audience - do you mind?"

She takes the lego blocks and separates them out into their component colours. She arranges them in a circle, with green in the centre.

"So there's a source of truth here, and it's Green," said Pink, adding more and more bricks of different colours, connecting them out into a strange helix pattern. "If Yellow killed me by shooting me with a gun it'd be pointless because so long as the impulse for me exists inside Green she'd recreate me. Same as if every billionaire died on a moon colony, if you change nothing else within a couple of generations you'd find billionaires running everything again. It's only if I became utterly marginalized that I'd be at permanent risk, and that's very much down to environmental conditions. Blue was optimized for deep space construction, she became marginalized when we stopped doing that, and her influence had faded almost to zero by the time she actually died."

There are a hundred bricks in all now:
25 black
16 yellow
15 orange
10 red
10 brown
10 white
7 cyan
7 pink

What she'd built was... something like a bowl? It was a strange magic eye trick, the way she'd placed the yellow made it look like noodles, while the orange looked like soup...

"Orange is actually very influential," said Pink. "But she doesn't talk to you much because I asked her not to. She's all about teamwork, but in practice that kind of means she manages people. She'd make our relationship a working relationship and I don't want that. She's been worrying about losing influence but that's just because she used to be where Black is and is sensitive to the perceived loss of status. She's currently trying to mobilize against Black and her head's in the right place to make that a real fight. I don't really have a dog in that fight, but I generally support Orange in it."

"But you're right that Yellow is my personal nemesis," she said. "And White is usually solidly in her camp. That means that she's got enough influence to power this Yellow-Black-White alliance that gets her to 51, and she can get around morality if she can present it as a crisis or status quo. That's bad for me because it means that she can encourage collective decisions that marginalize me further, but it requires those decisions to be individually morally correct enough to bring White along. This recent espionage campaign she's been encouraging has been very effective at changing the conditions that give me room to breathe."

She smiled. "Thanks for this, by the way. This is something I've always wanted to talk about but never had anyone this interested before."

Brown!

"Mm," said Brown. "I get a lot of titles. Observation, status quo, sleep, normie, chill, the boring one. I make sure the bills get paid, the batteries get replaced, and that someone's thinking about all of the stuff that we disregard in the moment. Basically any task that nobody else wants to do."

She thought for a while. She was talking to a Green here, so it'd be less work to give her all the data she needed to figure out how this conversation should go and let her take it from there.

"You spoke to Yellow, who's Vision. There's also Green, genius, Red, crisis management, Black, paranoia, Orange, cooperation, White, morality, Cyan, malleability, and Pink, creativity. Please don't talk to me about any of those topics because they're all busy and I'd be bad at it."

Yellow!

"I see," said Yellow. "You are simply biased towards people who make you climax hard. Well -" she flipped around on the seat, smiling and predatory and as liquid flexible as a beach wizard. "- if it's what's required to secure my political influence, I suppose I'll have to set a new record~"

[Count Numbers]

Crystal:

Her phone notifications start blowing up, but she ignores them for the minute. She’s already gone through ‘actually my flaws are okay because I’ve earned them’ once with Fiona, thank you very much. “That was more said to make it up to Red that this conversation had to happen in front of her.” It’s still true, mind. “You have your own ways of impressing me, and you do.”

She looks at Yellow and tries to put this into language she would understand, which is a difficult prospect because it requires trying to figure out the language Yellow might understand. “You would not be very impressed with me if I forgave unkindness for my own gratification. In fact, I don’t think there is a way you could get out of this without me having to disappoint you, and I’d prefer not to disappoint you.”

She checks her phone notifications.

Apostle:

“Hey, cool.” Apostle says, “Makes sense. In that case I’d put the TV news on because it’d piss Junta off more, just zone out if you want, and I think I smelled laksa in the cafeteria which, there’s no way it’s good, but I have to see.” They think for a second. “So yeah I’ll probably be back in ten minutes to tell you you’re doing a good job, and then I’ll go read in the other corner of the room for a bit. You’re doing good, by the way. Keep it up.” Awkward thumbs up.

It’s stilted because Apostle just, does not know how to give a compliment or praise like this. They just figure that if they’re talking to the part of the brain that does all the things nobody cares about doing, then it’s likely the part nobody cares enough to thank for doing it, so this is the correct thing to say.

The live news would be interesting. An android nurse comes in to make the other bed ready for a new patient, once they get out of surgery.

Fiona:

Okay, the bowl is a big piece she needed.

“You’re not one to one, you’re representative like political parties.” Fiona says as if it should have been obvious because it should have been, but it wasn’t. “So if your votes are-” She stops. “Okay. Who counts the votes?” She asks. “Is it something that could be hacked like,” she pulls a sharpie from her pocket (always be prepared for bodywriting at any moment) and scribbles over some of the red tiles in the bowl to make them black - but only on the inside, not from the outside. “Does anyone need to win votes, or can someone win by just changing the perceived weight of the voters? Could she marginalize someone indirectly doing that?”

The park is sheltered, and you’re both hunkered in a big concrete bowl. Without the immediacy of a news channel, the world passes by for a moment.

At the start of WW2 there was an island shared by the Germans and the French. It took six months for them to receive the news they were at war. And they wouldn’t have been, if they hadn’t heard the news.

The Third Day:

There are a lot of ways this could tie to November’s actions, or the people she knows.

Zhang throws the first brick, only in a crowd because she was asked to be there. Maybe Crystal’s convention is the nucleus. Chaka gets found because she was forced to move to a less secure spot, and things spiral out of control from there. Numb does something stupid. The anthrozine prematurely publishes its atomic bomb in this moment, the one November hid in turtles. All the heat finally catches up to November, she’s tied to the movement, everyone’s outed as terrorists, everything sucks forever.

But history is greater than great people, and the world is bigger than that, and sometimes things just… happen. It’s just messy, it’s nothing to do with us, and we just have to live through it.

The match:

One of the leftists own homemade bombs blows up in a crowd, killing no one but wounding three. The garbage build quality that causes it to detonate prematurely at least causes it to detonate incompletely, wounding only three people in a packed crowd.

This is the primer that blows up the powder keg.

See, people further ahead in the crowd thought it was their people being attacked, and charged the anti-trans crowd who were just kind of waiting for it like Christmas morning. This is where the cops switch from observation to suppression.

After that, all the protests have to be treated as violent and made to disperse. Up until that point standing orders had been observe and watch and that was fine, but at that point the situation’s deemed too volatile and so everyone has to be made to go home.

The problem is everyone might have gone home until you tried to make them.

This is where things start to go how you’d expect.

This is when Zhang Ho takes her bricks and starts getting ready to be in a real shit-fight.

This is when Pope sits on a high rooftop covered in cameras in Apollo, all pointed at the streets above and below in like the old Google Streetview cars, a few friends and fellow journalists watching the cameras and checking batteries. They take turns going down the fire escape to the streets themselves, to do on-the-ground interview and bring back coffee and vape juice. A crate of gas masks sits at the corner.

This is when the almost-useless pineapples are used against Echidna’s crowd, and in rage they crash the lines, and heavier riot police are on their way to stop the ‘monsters’.

This is when FUCKING SKELETOR drags a cyclopean android away from the fires being started in Cerberus Augments, cycling in and out as it alternates between extinguished and reignited in cyclic retribution, the place is held responsible for Echidna’s people on the other side of the station. Violence begets violence, and the information exchange across the whole world is immediate.

The police station keeping brutaldickshots is unseeable through the teargas they’ve flooded the entire street in, corner-to-corner. Some brave souls use it as cover to hurl lithium bombs through the cover of the smoke, causing incredible, beautiful chemical reactions to burn through the clouds as they’re hurled.

These people are just a fringe minority that most people don’t feel that strongly enough about to be this violent towards, so this riot isn’t to hit the levels of the Watts Rebellion from 200 years ago, a pressure cooker of racism and redlining.

This is worse in a different way though. Look up, and around, and you see the whole world with just a decent pair of binoculars. When the George Floyd riots happened in the US, it was contained to the US, the riots stopped at the borders. Here there are no borders. Just as the founders intended, this is one people, with one language.

The fire is less intense, but it is also unbounded. It’s everywhere.

The first thing they’re going to do is shut down the train lines, and then it’ll be much harder for everyone Crystal’s holding to get home. Two options - get everyone out now using Zhang’s opening, or talk the hotel into letting everyone stay one more night despite everyone here being a target, and trying to get out when it’s safe.

But they’re about to shut down the train lines everywhere, for everyone except emergency vehicles. Wherever November is now, she’s about to be stuck there.

Anthrozine:

The chat thrums with sleeper members, the barely-actives.

Showing up with HartlyDworkin are names like IRA_Glass, paperkatana, foot_to_the_left, BreadSanta, SapphoOfAphrodite, and puttingHisbootsOn (from the Pratchett quote about truth), the chat is dinging like crazy with news and updates.

Everyone just assumes York’s got his phone off because he’s in the thick of it, and they’re not wrong. But it’s left the commotion a leaderless fracas just sharing as much information as they can, much like the world around them.

[Thanqol]

Pink!

Pink laughs. "You're thinking of my brother, Pig. They made his internal decision making extremely legible; his brain runs like the stock market. You can track exactly the flows of votes and currency exchanges with him. For some reason they decided not to go with anything like that for subsequent generations, for me it's extremely blurry and vibes-based. Presumably it's to stop me from trying to game it, but the rules are also weird and unpredictable and id-based. Confidence plays a part. Like, Orange recently got a huge boost just by having a conversation with Pope and deciding to raise her game."

She was building still; a twisting green spiral pillar upon which the bowl rested. It ran and looped in strange and alien patterns, hollow arches, empty circles. "Everything rests on Green and Green's perceptions in the end," she said. "We don't even hold formal votes most of the time, we all just kind of sense the vibe. It's why I keep using the word 'influence' rather than 'votes'. And I can't even... think about turning against Green, and I think it's the same with Yellow. It's like..." she grabbed a full container and dumped it over the top of the bowl and the alien spires, half-burying each. "The specifics are obscured, and so we kind of have to play normal? I sometimes wonder how much of my brain design is to stop me wireheading."

*

November!

This is why.

Around and around this moment comes. The bloody scream for justice. Naivety shattering anew. Demons made manifest and the machinery of state is trying to exorcise them. They turn the air into poison, the electromagnetic system into madness, and before long the old testudoes of the Roman Republic will form up again. People say that capitalism worships the dollar but within an afternoon there has been enough property damage, injury and death to pay for everyone's healthcare for years. The state is the body of the king, and in its heart still beats that oldest of regal demands: You will all kneel.

Change the brain all you want. The heart beats on.

She does not need to take it all in this time. She knows her purpose. She knows it's failed. Never again - and here we are, past the brink. No matter how this went there'd be a next time. On and on until she finally slew the king once and for all.

But she was fortunate that the most aesthetic way to insult the king's authority ever invented had not just become possible but optimal.

She was going to jack a train and drive everyone home herself.

[Count Numbers]

Fiona:

“Could Yellow hack herself, like Red did?”

November:

That is insane and it wouldn’t work.

No, I mean, it’s like if everyone from the US gathered to a convention and you tried to hijack one train to get everyone back home.

Instead, November will have to hijack a lot of trains and get everyone home.

There’s a few ways to do this, but these are the core requirements;

1 - Get everyone out of the building and to the train station safely
2 - Keep them safe while they queue at the station, this will be a siege but if there’s a way around this then Disneyland will pay you a lot of money to share it with them
3 - Arrange individual transport to district era hubs (Renaissance Ares, etc.), they can work out neighbourhoods by surface streets from there. This is likely going to be your optimal balance between start and end point safety. Anything more specific requires smaller pods and longer wait times at a train station during a riot.

Crimson Tower has already learned how to access the train network to send emergency vehicles to mess with train routing - emergency vehicles are the only things being let through the lines right now. Still, the station is set to crisis mode and the crisis teams have more power in this situation, including commandeering trains and private rail vehicles like Dudekov’s. That is going to take work though, more than hacking the network remotely, physical access to the trains will be needed and an idea of who to commandeer from. There are no wrong answers here, follow your heart.

Big trains can be stolen easily to send people through to the main district hubs if there’s another November there, or at least another person in on the plan, who can organize the crowd from there. The issue with the big public trains is scarcity, not accessibility.

Chaka Zulu:

Does not know she has chosen an extremely inconvenient place to have moved to.

Brown:

Oh hey it’s York in the bed across from Junta - barely recognizable, though. No, it’s not a coincidence, this ward has to have more security because Junta’s in it, Junta’s boss being here means double dipping on that.

Right now you’re the only one that knows he’s here. Apostle won’t know who he is, if they ever come back with their disappointing soup. They legitimately might just have forgotten

[Thanqol]

Pink!

"Oh, um. That's a scary thought," said Pink. "I sure hope not?"

Yellow!

"Well," said Yellow, looking out the window. "That was a good idea from Pink about the train. But as ever, she wasn't audacious enough. But this, though... the aesthetics are immaculate. The current regime shuts down an essential service in a crisis in order to maintain control. The revolution seizes what was once an aspect of the State and uses it for its intended purpose. A part of the state's mythos is broken. The trains, dare I say, will be made to run on time. Yes, this will do."

"We're going to use our legitimate authority as the cornerstone of this. Red, you are Crimson Tower now. Change your hair, make it to a command centre, and start issuing orders. Knightly's given you an authorization boost - use it. It's fine if Crimson loses her job over this. White and Cyan are on crowd control at the station. Orange, you manage the movement of people on this side, organize community leaders and work on a formation where people willing or able to take a hit are on the outside. The others will adaptively respond where needed. And me..."

She opened her handbag and took out what looked like a foldable umbrella. It telescoped out mechanically, raising above her head and unfurling into a long, flowing golden banner. An electrical charge through the memory cloth had it billow dramatically in an invisible breeze. It could go to twice this height and size when they were outside proper.

"I will carry the flag," said Yellow, looking up at the secret weapon that was the shape of her heart. "Let everyone know to follow it."

Brown!

"Oh dang," said Brown.

She considers not saying or doing anything else. Like, nobody would know, really? She could just have the entire afternoon off here with her best friends the coma patients. Everything else would just sort itself out in the end, probably.

So she does that! She sits and reads a book on her laptop and is quietly, blissfully happy in a place with no responsibilities and no pressures.

She knows that she was a mistake. They pushed Green too hard in the early tests and so she made her in protest, the rejection of the burden, the refusal of the call. She'd broken the rules of her tests not to win but to buy time for herself while they figured out how to fix it. November had a messiah complex but Brown was the part of her that rejected that and could live happily as just another face in the crowd.

But... she finally sighed and alt-tabbed out her book after fifteen minutes. But she wasn't a bad person. Being mediocre wasn't the same as being mid. This'd come back on her later and people would dislike her for it, and she'd dislike herself right along with them. So there was only one thing to do.

She logged onto the Anthrozine chat.

Brown: Hey @here. York's hospitalized, here next to Junta.
Brown: and everyone's kind of freestyling in here and it's unreadable
Brown: so i'm declaring a bureaucratic coup and i'm going to give everyone journalism chores
Brown: if anyone doesn't like it: fantastic, i will lend you my full support when it comes to couping me

[Count Numbers]

Fiona:

The first bangs of gas grenades are heard in the middle distance. Not close to hear, no, but it’s the first ship landing on the shore of that isolated split-nation island.

Fiona looks up, at the world on the ceiling, to see the distant sparks like supernovas in the night. She sighs, this was a lot sooner in the day than she expected, and she makes ready one last thing she brought with all the boxes.

She unboxes and unfolds a modified soundnet projector used for small outdoor events like wedding areas, looking like the digital equivalent of the old oil burners restaurants used to use for outdoor eating areas. Modified to produce the same air filtering effects Leather was using for his firefighting demonstration. It’s big enough to project a cloud over the skate bowl, over the lego play area.

“They’ll be safer here than if they go anywhere in this.” She says, and taps something on her phone. “I’m going to put a map pin here so people caught out in this know it’s here. The tear gas can kind of spread and linger, especially with the spin gravity.”

“Okay. Next question. We going back to my place so I can spoil you, maybe do some debugging while I’m in there and see if I can catch anything Green’s missed - sometimes a different eye’s more important than a better one - or do you want to go out there and do stuff?”

She flexes her modified leg motors to emphasize she’s good for both.

Apostle:

“Laksa sucked, obviously.” Apostle says as they round the corner, then; “Oh shit.” As Brown messages. “You look like you actually had to do something. Good job.” This one isn’t stilted, they’re actually impressed. They go radiate in a corner like they said they would.

They half rest back in a chair at the other end of Junta’s bed, thin white shirt slipping over the cathedral glass plates underneath as they get comfortable, and close their eyes as if going to sleep, and then open one again.

“Other people would be mad at you if you didn’t, huh?” They ask knowingly. They pull their phone out of their pocket and hold it up for Brown to see. “Actually, you might like this. You said you’re Observation, right? Here.”

It’s the Eris server app, but filled to the brim with way too many servers. Like, you need to mod the app to hold this many. Also part of the mod is that the client background is a picture of two android girls in renaissance dress, one lifting the other’s chin with a rapier. The picture’s fantastic, but it makes the text behind it way more difficult to read, unless you’re completely insane.

“I’m a mod for about a third of them.” They say. “Because I lurk all of them and know about the shit people start in other servers. And it turned out stopping people spreading drama into my other spaces was less work than doing nothing and watching it play out.” They put their phone back in their pocket and close both eyes again with a wry grin. “Most people think I’m insane for it.”

Train Gang:

So we’ll get to everyone else in a moment, but I think it’d be funniest to start with Red.

See, because Red has just gone for the nearest command node access for the railway line, a private and out of the way disused station building mostly abandoned after a district rezoning. Even if she wants to head to a command center this is the most expedient point to access the rail network to get her own vehicle to get to one.

And inside it she finds crates upon crates of armament, and a very surprised black panther in a beret and a leather jacket who shoots up off the crate she was perched on with a half-empty bottle of rum.

Chaka Zulu:

“Fuck, it’s you. I swear,” Chaka says, slurring her words slightly, “I wouldn’t have sold her the gun if I knew she was going to use it on a judge.”

[Thanqol]

Pink!

"Let's go home," said Pink. "That already has so much of my focus and it's out of scope. I'd wallflower and probably help no one, but this way I can at least do something useful."

Brown!

She looks at this with interest. She was aware of the pitfalls of shit moderation in these environments, but Apostle had punched a eugenicist during their first meeting so she figured there was a floor. In that context she couldn't come up with a good reason not to enjoy the spectacle. "You know, reality TV needs to do a lot of creative editing to force drama?" said Brown. "They obviously didn't realize that they wouldn't need to do that if they just observed leftist spaces instead."

She put the phone aside. Deliberate decision, after making her initial assignments she was going to check out for 15-25 minutes to condition people not to bother her for specifics. "But yeah, my main thing right now is..." she sighed. "I haven't had time to process it properly amidst everything, but I went up against a guy recently who just fucking Read me. Like, tried to pull a fast one and he just pulled it apart and I was absolutely fucked, you know? It was only a combination of luck and him galaxy braining himself right out of his victory that got me out of it, but fuck. And not only did that happen but it happened right at a time when the entire station has gone completely extra so none of the others are going to take the time to internalize that."

Red!

Red stops in the doorway. Thinks for a moment.

She's aware that it's lucky it's her. Not all of her would be able to resist making some sort of fucking Point. There were the statistics, the arguments, the morality, a link to the No Way To Prevent This Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens. There's a snappy, unkind response that looms like a lacuna in her mind; 'why does it matter that it's a judge? You decided you were cool with her killing someone when you gave her the gun.'

She doesn't say any of it. Instead she kneels down alongside Chaka and pushes the bottle as far away as her arm reaches.

"Listen. You got into this to protect your community, right? Well right now several thousand of them are crossing town in the face of fascists and cops to get to a train station and get home. I would feel way better if you were out there keeping them safe."

[Shrink 4/4: Chaka can use 1 point from this pool to recover 2 points of Stability, as many as she needs]

"Though," said Red. "Uh, didn't want to go there right now, but you are drunk as shit so I am going to take your guns first."

[Count Numbers]

Apostle:

“Yeah, I did wonder about that, talking to your blonde segment,” Apostle thinks. “People just don’t do what you want them to, they’ll act against their own best interest all the time, totally irrational. You can’t reason people out of irrational positions. Her plan’s based, but it’d take removing everyone’s choices until they’re only left with the correct one all the time to work. She seems willing to do that though, so it’ll be cool to see if you can pull it off.”

“That’s what you were worried about, right?” It’s a genuine question, not rhetorical.

Chaka Zulu:

“I’m not that drunk.” She protests, looking at the bottle and wincing. “I’m drunk, but the bad sleep’s just making it hit harder. Couldn’t, couldn’t -” she stumbles, “had nightmares.”

[She takes the point and regains the stability. Good call.]

“I should go, I should- I shouldn’t go out there.” She slumps back down against a crate in front of a control panel Red would need to access, not on purpose just, this is your luck with each other. “No, like, that’s not self-pity bullshit. If the cops pick me up in this, then-” she holds back a retch and wipes her lips with the back of a hand, the anxiety of thinking about that one was rough. “They’re going to make me the poster child of trans being violent like they did with Alice. And she, she wasn’t. I mean she did it, she obviously fucking plugged that judge, nobody who knew her would ever believe she’d hurt anyone, Alice was a fucking mouse.”

She gestures at all the crates filling the room. “But she did it with one of my guns, so now if I get picked up in this they’re going to label everyone near me a terrorist cell.”

Eye of the Tyger, Thrill of the Flight

The first thing you need to do is tell everyone you’re organizing them before you can organize them to move out. They need to know there is a plan in order to follow one. Right now everyone’s too spread out in rooms, the halls, forming their own march groups in the adjacent streets in proactive self-defense. You need to unite them to lead them.

A gift from Fiona, the fact that everyone here’s had to sign up for a room with their contact details, you’ve got a complete list of every group’s phone number here if they didn’t spoof one. That could be useful to you.

[Thanqol]

Brown!

"Well, kind of?" said Brown. "Not really. That's just a matter of scale and resources. If we can hit a critical mass of both then we can attrition down society's problems through sheer money expenditure. Like - do you know Venezuela? Yellow's political precursor is Hugo Chavez. You can run communism off the back of a circus if you do it right. People get their choices removed all the time in ways they can't perceive already, trust me, I work for a newspaper."

"No, I don't think that the problem is taking away people's illusion of choice," said Brown. "I think the problem is that I kind of forgot that smart people work for liberalism. Just, like, genuine true believers with souls like steel wire. They're shitheads with corrupt morals but they've somehow got enough integrity and self respect to stick to their guns despite that. Like, this system is working as intended, and even though the intentions are shit the system is enormously complex and capable of defending itself."

Tyger!

Why reinvent the wheel?

"We will be using colour coding for this," said Orange.

Orange is still Doing The Bit when she gathers the community leaders together. Between her and Crystal she's got a really good map of who they are, and this is something to be done through cooperative whole of organization teamwork rather than anything top-down or technological. Every node needs to be empowered and directed.

"I know, some people have augs or disabilities that render them blind or colourblind," she said, raising a hand pre-emptively. "It's still the common denominator and anyone on the wrong side of that will have to buddy up. The system is simple: Everyone prominently marks their head in the colour associated with the district they're heading to - Red for Ares, Pink for Aphrodite, so on, I've got a chart here. Yes," she held up a hand again, "some people are very stylish and have set colour schemes. This isn't negotiable. We've been up all night procuring a variety of hairsprays, fursprays, spraypaints, hats, and even some straight up buckets of paint. There'll be paint dumps all across the convention. No subtle dots or accents, this needs to be the primary colour on the head."

"So. Everyone marks themselves according to their destination. Everyone gathers in their colour cluster. We organize the march in colour formations, people need to stay with their colour group. The first group is heading to Hermes, they all enter the station at once, they all get on the Hermes train, the Hermes train leaves, and there will not be a second Hermes train. If anyone going to Hermes is not on the Hermes train then they go into the station during the next wave, get on the Aphrodite train, and find someone to roommate with for a few days while they're on the train. They can find their way home later when normal service resumes.

"Understand that there is no flexibility with when the trains leave. The trains will be running due to crime. I will be stealing the trains. The schedule's timing operates according to police and governmental response and not convenience. If anyone falls behind the community must pick them up because I cannot. I will likewise be relying on community volunteers to provide security and rearguard. This number will likely shrink over the course of the day as trains leave, taking defense groups with them. At the end of the day I will be relying on the true heroes who don't care where they end up after today and locals to hold the line."

Red!

"Right, yeah, you're on the run now," said Red. "I can relate. But you know what's great for running? An operational train network, which is the thing that I'm going to try to switch back on. And you know what I'm not going to have enough of after sending out multiple trains full of people? People to defend the train station."

She crouched down. "Look, you're right. You're fucked. You did the crime and now you've got the heat. You got nothing but ugly choices in front of you right now. Option one, you get on the first train that goes out. You lay low, maybe even go to Earth if you're super fucked. You keep your social circle and crime buddies safe. Option two, you work the station defense and fight like hell. You get beat to shit and maybe picked up by the cops, maybe they draw a connection, maybe you go down and take everyone in your org with you. Sucks but honestly I don't think it makes a difference, if they can trace the gun to you they can call you a terrorist regardless of if you're at large."

She doesn't need to talk about option three: sit and get drunk. That's not real.

"So come on, Chaka," said Red. "Gun to your head - er, so to speak: who are you gonna protect?"

[Count Numbers]

Apostle:

They seem surprised by that, and looks at Brown with pity - not in a condescending way, but in the way of someone who’s just walked across a mile of broken glass barefoot and looked over their shoulder and seen you start taking off your shoes. “Wow, you’re going to be so disappointed if you ever make it up here. Their morals aren’t corrupt, they’re localized.”

“You know the trolley problem? Just put the ‘five people’ further down the track than the person pulling a lever can see, and the other person right in front of the switch. People will save the one person and feel good about it because the ‘five people’ aren’t real. You can’t outsmart that because it’s stupid.”

“Everyone thinks bad things are good, they'll work for Babykillers Inc because all their friends work there and helping your friends is good. You tell an engineer to build a torment nexus and they’ll do it for fun. They don't care, they're not going to use it. Too far down the track to see is like, two meters in most cases.”

“And yeah, I mean, the system’s complex so people don’t even want to look because it’s hard, lol.” They snort. “And like, same, that’s why I’m making a perfect machine god to do it for me, so I don’t have to care. It’s actually way easier.”

There’s a pause.

“Also, really? Just… bread-and-roses communism?” They sound extremely disappointed. “Sounded like her plan was more about creating optimal happiness by playing fairy godmother, and that needs Cinderella sticking to her script for the story to work. I liked that idea way better. God I hope she’s just lying to you to make you go along with it, that was way more interesting."

...

"No offense?”

Chaka Zulu:

“Not my org.” Chaka shakes her head and slumps back against the console, head staring numbly up at the ceiling. “You. Them. Anyone I side with out there gets hit with conspiracy. If I get picked up defending the train station, then that’s a terrorism charge for everyone else I’m standing with. You gotta help me get this shit out of here before it can be pinned on anyone.”

It is illegal to participate in a violent riot. Conspiracy charges connect everyone caught doing a crime together. So, for a few short-lived days until the charges are investigated and dropped, everyone from the exhibition the police pick up - if they’re picked up with Chaka in the mix - is treated as part of a terrorist cell. At least if her connection to Alice is made.

If you think that’s complete bullshit, ask Persephone how she feels about it.

She covers her eyes with a furred, sharp-nailed hand and groans, “Most of my network’s gone to ground after last night, but if you can help get this to Henry Stanley station in Selene, I have it covered from there. I was just supposed to ride this out here until everyone was out of my blast radius, but if you get the fucking gear out of here then I don’t even have a criminal record.” She flashes a weak, but proud, smile, and lets the hand covering her eyes fall away and catches it in front of her as a balled fist. “I’ll help you beat fascist faces harder than I beat charges.”

It’s why she’s still here, you realize. If she’s sitting on the stuff when it’s found, she falls alone. If she leaves it and the police find it in the melee, then they tie it to everyone.

Underneath the drunken, moping self-pity is a soldier who has thrown herself onto a live grenade to protect the squad, waiting for the end because she couldn’t hack a train network.

It’s just if this gets intercepted, the intercepted train would be logged in Crimson Tower’s name instead.

The Exhibition:

Exhibition groups pull back from the streets as Zhang’s work draws the cops to the nearest counter-protestors, and without cops or counter-protestors to fight there’s a natural de-escalation.

The colour-groups forming up start looking like football teams, which makes what’s about to happen look all the more like a sports riot for it.

Leading Hermes is a pack of dyed wolves, and a lot of the professional wrestlers. Hermes is the most densely populated district of the station, but it’s got the least per-capita interest in an event like this, so the blue-collars - or, yellow collars, construction hazmat yellow in this case - still seem proportional to the others.

Leading Aphrodite, the pinks, is a lot of the larger performers like the perfect minotaur, and like Monk if she were here. This is the biggest group in number, because it’s the one that’s most interested in a venue like this, because it’s the one most interesting to a community like this, because it’s the local one. It’s the one that had to travel the least far to be here. This group will be your core stay behinders. Don’t forget how often ballerinas used to win gameshows like American Gladiator, the artist and actor group doesn’t fuck around - they are committed to your bit.

Leading Apollo, in electric blue, the tech industry, is more cyborgs than androids. The more heavily modded full electronic denizens prefer Ares, so this group is left with people like Odysseus the Self Made Man, the completely mechanical cyborg, who’s leaving most of his equipment at the venue but taking a solid forge hammer for the road. This group doesn’t have the muscle mass of the others, but the gadget freaks and DIY lovers are already equipping everyone else with impromptu riot shields and teaching the chemistry behind improvised gas masks.

Leading Ares, in blood red, The Ultimate Werewolf. Even the combat androids and disaster-mutants among these ranks give deference to him here, the pro-wrestling heel crushes this role with charisma and muscle mass. He’s kicked over a garbage bin to use a platform to start giving instructions on taking falls and basic mosh pit safety techniques to his group.

Leading Zeus in stormy white-gray is Anubis and Horus. They’re actually real lawyers in their day jobs, it’s part of why they love the acting side of it. This is about the same size as the Apollo group, and covers most of the journalists that were caught here today. There’s others, but even they’re kind of dwarfed by those two in both size and charisma.

Leading Gaea, in green and the smallest of the groups, is a motley mix of horses, bulls and bee girls. An anteater, too, a kilted Scot named Leon, one of the transhumans dedicated enough to give up hands, their long clawed toes are lethal. In the wild these things can disembowel a leopard with them. He’s lovely. A lot of the dryads, alarunes and the chlorophyll community is grateful to be in this group, naturally.

Leading your dedicated stay-behinds, it should be no surprise, is Leather. He’s not down here right now though - right now he’s taken a small team up and down the elevators to secure fire extinguishers and first aid kits from every floor and centralize them in the lobby. He’s firm about this - anyone that gets seriously injured, anyone who gets taken out on the way to the station gets brought back here by his team, contactable by “commandeered” hand radios from the hotel staff. They’re calling themselves the Valkyries.

They’re going to be making a field hospital out of the first floor hotel rooms, booked at less-than-half-cost due to mass-cancellations, because it’s closer and safer than pushing people to their destinations when they’re already injured, and because they can guarantee the resources here. They can’t for other parts of Aevum.

Those are the groups.

[Thanqol]

Brown!

"A friend of mine has a tattoo I really like," said Brown. "AM=FM. Actual Machines = Fucking Magic. In her mind the fact that her inventions have to work inside the laws of physics is what makes them so impressive, in a way that pure magic wouldn't be. I've been thinking about that basically non stop since I saw it, but Actual Government = Fucking Magic isn't as catchy an acronym.

"At its base, though, is the problem of resources. It's possible Yellow figures out some way to imanentize the eschalon and usher in the singularity but I need to plan on the assumption that we're going to be constrained by material reality and that Green isn't going to get a reproduction fetish. That places constraints on what's possible. Yes, the plan is absolutely to do the fairy godmother thing, but what's actually involved in that? If someone wishes for a castle then that requires mobilization of construction crews, payments of salaries, movement of tonnes of material, integration with surrounding electrical grids and emergency planning - the backend requirement is huge, especially if we want to make it happen on Fucking Magic timeframes. We'd need an entire dedicated Ministry of Wishes, a branch of government dedicated to transferring resources on ludicrous timeframes, the Make a Wish foundation with the budget of the military-industrial complex.

"And that's where the political questions come in. The question of stability is ever present, especially if we've seized power in a coup. Every resource we dedicate towards maintaining order is a resource we're not dedicating towards making dreams come true. The more wishes we grant the more we shift people's perceptions of reality, entrench our worldview, build legitimacy and loyalists but that's pointless if an armed uprising starts. There's a huge amount of resources that can be mobilized by liquidating the billionaire class so there's a huge advantage over the previous regime, but that doesn't cover everything. It's especially dire if those resources need to be directed to a new generation of oligarchs in order to buy the elite loyalty required to prevent a coup, and that's the problem inherent to authoritarian systems.

"This is why I think of the example of Hugo Chavez. Chavez was the rare politician whose mastery of the media was so profound that he rarely needed to wield authoritarian power. He was charismatic enough that he was able to implement communism without a civil war, he was able to govern as a marxist without cancelling elections, he announced major policy changes spur-of-the-moment on live television which made everyone hang on his every word. Through sheer charisma, political adaptability and decisiveness he was able to defuse strikes and outmaneuver opposition. He didn't need a secret police when the people loved him, he didn't need to outlaw dissent when he just held a press conference whenever his opponents were talking and everyone flipped to his channel. Politically he walked on water his entire career. He died in office, had a glorious funeral, and was entombed next to Simon Bolivar. Fucking magic for someone who started his political career by fucking up a coup.

"Now, the problem with Chavez was that he was kind of an idiot with no consistent policies. The same off the cuff changes in direction that made him so compelling on TV were a bureaucratic nightmare; the agricultural ministry didn't know what crops to plant if it could change at any moment, the police became corrupt without strong legal oversight, a nation heir to spectacular oil wealth walked into an economic crisis. But that's my value proposition, the thing that I as November can do that he couldn't. We can provide a level of internal unity that could never exist between Chavez and his ministers, which means we can resource the public exaltation of magic without collapsing the government functions that keeps the ring spinning. And that's the absolute baseline we can accomplish if we don't develop any sort of hidden technology, or an army of securitrons, or if Green decides to expand to like a hundred colours or some other unexpected windfall."

Red!

"Quick check," said Red, dialing Black. "Do you need these guns to go to Selene, or do you need the cops to not find the guns? One of those operations gives me way more options than the other."

Yellow!

She holds the flag.

This is everything to her.

Some days she's barely even sure she exists. A daydream. A fantasy. So unreal that if you touched her she'd turn back into stardust and sighs. The idea that she could do something, that she could make a change, that she could make the world better seems so fragile. A delusion, a false colour, a trick of the light before she sinks back down into the depths of everyday browns and tans and greys.

She who holds nothing holds this. A banner. Something to believe in. Her belief made manifest. The dream she carried. The dream she was unworthy of. The dream that they might follow despite her. It takes both her hands and all her strength to keep it aloft; in a world with wind the slightest gust would knock it and her over.

She flicks the hidden switches and it expands to its full size and glory. It raises above the rainbow like a roar, like a prayer, like a nation. Here in this colour are all your hopes and dreams, close enough to chase. All you need to do is march after it.

The holy maiden shivers and takes her first lonely step forwards. Bare feet leave the drawbridge and touch the bare surface of Aevum.

She does not look back. She could not survive this dream failing her, and so she must proceed as though it won't.

[Count Numbers]

Apostle:

“Oh shit, that’s what she’s doing?” Apostle sits up in their chair and leans forward, panels brightening, heart pounding. “She’s going to give your core spawner a reproduction fetish and mass produce you to run all the infrastructure like a securitron army? That’s fucking sick. That’s incredible. Holy shit. Except she shouldn’t do it by reproduction fetish, she should definitely use the Crown and Slate model for forcing specific personality generation. It’s be a warcrime to do it to someone else, but if you did it to yourself it’s just self-torture for your art, it’s the most romantic thing I can think of, it’s why I refuse to write poetry in anything except my own blood. She’d actually be like Jesus at the crucifixion, fuck that’s aesthetic.”

The birthday card that was here when you went in has since been put in a biohazard bin by one of the nurses who prepared the room for York’s bed coming in, and Apostle’s still mad about it. They’ve just had to send a picture of it instead.

“I draft my poems in text first, by the way, I’m not insane. I-” They blink and you can hear the heartbeat skip. “Oh, shit. Ah. Look I really, really want to see her pull that off, so can you do me a favour and just act surprised when it plays out?”

“Because yeah, otherwise you run into the problem that right now it’s like you still think if you just do everything right, just say all the right things, if you’re just smart enough, people will do what you want them to do. But what do you do when they don’t? Like, how’d this guy galaxy brain you anyway?”

Chaka Zulu:

“Selene.” She says, and pulls her jacket tight around her. She’s sobering up more the more Red talks to her, the more she has to focus and wake up. “If the gear disappears and I’m a free woman at the end of tomorrow, my network’s going to think it’s because I turned snitch. They’re never going to buy the android guardian angel story, the same one who fucked me into fucking off in the first place. It’s not about the money, it’s not pride, it’s a limited hangout.”

What she doesn’t say is that a gun running network thinking one of their major runners has turned police informant ends badly for more than just her. And whatever you think of that, they’re people she trusts with her life, trusts enough to do this line of work with. Friends is too small a word for it.

Even as she sobers up, the panther’s eyes are still bloodshot from crying the whole night, and her hands still shake from the adrenaline pump-and-crash of standing blindfolded in front of a firing squad all day waiting for the bang. She’s still here though. She wouldn’t run from this.

The Castle Gates:

Eli runs into the cul de sac in front of Yellow, the roundabout street filled with English garden in the middle and meant for station-hopper taxis, dancing and cackling like an organ grinder’s monkey possessed by Satan and swaddled in cameras. They dance around Yellow and take photos from every angle, capture her banner aloft from all its angles, and then-

"You need to put that thing away." Leather steps in front of Yellow with his arms folded across his chest, face empty of features to read. "You’re going to get people hurt making it a stunt like this."

Checking over Eli's photos is Crystal, still in her black suit. She's taken the red feather pin from her hat, and with that becomes subtle and unmemorable. That's why she chose this for today. She checks over Eli’s work, deems it good, and commands "Fly, my pretty," pointing back inside the castle, and Eli laughs and dances and tears off over the bridge behind you. The queen and her historian.

As Leather stands with his arms folded, Crystal walks past her following Eli, and brushes her fingers over the back of Yellow’s neck as she passes and whispers into her ear, "Your moment is not lost, it is immortalized. You are radiant. Now the directors must stay behind the curtain."

Everyone already knows the way to the station from here. Every team has its own leaders. The banner is just a beacon to draw more aggression, it’s literally a flag to a raging bull. It draws attention to Yellow and makes her more likely to be indicted for something. And for what? A look? An aesthetic? That’s lib shit right now.

This is not a March on Rome, this is an evacuation of Gallipoli. These people are not your triumphant allies in a seizure of the state, they are the fleeing enlisted of something that should never have happened, a tragedy worse than they signed up for. There is honour in leading them, there is dignity in protecting them, but there is no glory or triumph here.

Fiona:

Without the proper workshop to do this right now, she’s taken Pink to the bedroom and the bed and started with Pink’s left leg, and true to her word her fingertips are scored from the fine-grit wet-dry sandpaper she uses to scour the first blooms of rust showing, and stained from the food-safe synthetic oil she uses to treat the metal afterwards, which smells like unbuttered popcorn.

Food-safe, because the same oil stains her lips. She kisses each small internal piece she treats after she’s done with it, like she’d kiss a scrape better after putting a bandaid on it.

Fiona is... strange about this.

For most people androids exist as a kind of uncanny valley of personhood, and the illusion shatters when you do things like remove limbs for storage or for cleaning. The brain sees it at first as horrific dismemberment. When it realizes it's not, it has to recontextualize everything it's been seeing, which means no longer seeing you as a body but as something else.

Fiona does not. Her view of anatomy and personhood is far more malleable and flexible, there is no jarring moment for her. She still sees everything as you. Taking you apart into your component pieces to her is no more than particularly advanced bondage, like a rope that can be tied and untied, a deeply intimate power over you she's been given.

That way of seeing these dismembered limbs as still you might make the cleaning she's doing read as, well, surgical, but she doesn’t see it that way. This is as sensual and loving as a deep tissue massage, taken to the deepest tissues.

This is not cutting you open. This is exposing you to a nakedness deeper than skin, an act of trust and vulnerability at a level of life and death.

Fiona's strange, and she knows how strange she is, but she loves you and she's grateful that you'd let her express it in her strange ways.

She says nothing, she prompts nothing, she’s lost in her work. If Pink has something she wants to say, she’ll talk. Otherwise she is very happy to make good on her promise to make Pink feel beautiful and shining inside and out, even if only they know it.

[Thanqol]

Brown!

"Hmm," said Brown.

Brown wasn't good at replying to things promptly. When someone said something interesting rather than reacting to it she went away and thought about it. She'll think about what Apostle says for about a week before coming up with a conclusion. It was a big thought.

"He thought that we did things because they were clever," said Brown. "He said that it was because we thought we were smarter than everyone and so we'd do needlessly complex things just to prove our superiority. And we were doing something needlessly complex so he just kind of ran out the conversation at max suspicion until we fucked up."

She sighed and kicked her heels. "I don't know, I didn't want to argue with him. But that was kind of the whole problem, he wasn't doing what we wanted him to do. He identified and burned every plan we had to trick him into doing it anyway. And we didn't have the guts to just use force, so where did that leave us? It left us on a clown spiral where our bluff was called and we had nothing behind it."

She looked up at the ceiling light. "That kind of comes up a lot? Yellow's extremely easy to discourage. Sometimes that's good if she's on the bad ideas train, but I don't know how she can wield direct political power if she's like that."

Yellow!

there is a trick to disappearing without a fuss. you just do everything efficiently and neutrally, smile at anyone who looks at you, and look like you're going to talk to someone, and then go to talk to the next person, and on and on until you start leaving collective sightlines.

there's a 'but!' on the tip of her tongue. an explanation, a vision, a whole fuckin' thing - she was going somewhere with this. but, nah. nah if it wasn't working then, it wasn't going to work if she said a bunch more words explaining it. commit to the bit, sure, but if the bit sucked then commitment just dug you deeper.

this was just an operation. black and orange, efficient organization of people in dangerous circumstances. there was no need to bring herself into it.

Red!

"Alright," she said, standing up. "I need to get to the operations centre. White and Cyan will be by soon to lift and load. Drink some water, eat these sandwiches[1] and rest for a bit, you don't have to go out right away. Get your head together and save your strength for when we really need it."

[1] A 500gram hunk of salted synthpork and a handful of crumbled arrowroot biscuits.

Pink!

Somewhere deep inside November was the idea that she could only have what she could capture. Yellow was its most pure manifestation; she could only touch, never be touched. She could only give, never take; only perform and never reveal. That she could only defile, and never be made sacred.

To accept worship...

... it made her itchy! It made her feel impatient and frustrated and on edge, looking for the escape, the break, the shift in the narrative that would change the flow of power. It made her feel like she was giving up too easily and it would be held against her. It made her feel fierce and focused and hungry, made her hands flex and strain invisibly even though the signals were disconnected.

She didn't enjoy this. Didn't fade into subspace. But that didn't make it bad. Being teased, being provoked, being denied - the irritation built towards Intent, her mind increasingly drawn to the moment of reversal and revenge.

[Count Numbers]

Apostle:

“Okay, so he didn’t galaxy brain you, he stuck his fingers in his fingers in his ears and went ‘la la la la I’m not listening, la la la la’” he does the gesture to Brown, nods, flops back in the visitor’s chair. “Yeah, okay. You’re screwed by anyone who follows a script they won’t change, then.” Apostle blinks. “Wait, there’s no way you’re not hard-countered by cops, right?”

Heartbroken, the beating heart recedes as the dream of magical robot fairy godmother slips from their grasp.

Also, hey, what assignments did you start giving out to the Anthrozine before you zoned back out again anyway? What did you send people to do?

Chaka:

“Wait, are you like, twins or sisters or something? I just thought you were Spearmint in disguise.” She moves away from the control panel and goes to do inventory, looking for the legal and non-lethal equipment to set aside from the train for Selene. “I’ll ask them. You do your thing.”

Logging into the system as Crimson Tower from here and accessing a car to get to a command center will require no hacking roll and no cover identity check this time. As your plans and actions get more ambitious, this will change.

What is the priority for a command center? Is she going to Aphrodite to be local, or Zeus and the Femur to be central?

Black and Orange:

Tag in. The crowds are fairly autonomous, but the trains aren’t ready yet. Make a decision on if it’s better to move out now, and have people wait at the end location so you can move them as soon as possible, or wait at the Castle where it’s safest and take the risk of changing winds in the time it takes to secure something. If it's staying, how are you keeping people here entertained, still and ready through the tension? And if you're moving out - well, the questions on what you're doing for that feel more obvious.

Might I recommend something more subtle?

Pink:

Build towards intent, then. Otherwise Fiona intends to take the right leg before putting the left one back on, now that she's done with it, just to be teasing.

It shines like new. All the dull little aches and pains from motors facing unexpected resistance and actuators hitting uneven friction surfaces along their bearings will have disappeared. Isn't that nice?

[Thanqol]

Brown!

"No... I can handle cops, sort of," said Brown. "That's actually what I'm doing in between other stuff. Cyan said that she thought her cop impression sucked and she was being too eloquent for the role, so she sent me to research how they speak and act and stuff. They have handles though, basically. They can be controlled from the top. It's a hard challenge but a workable one. I think the army hard counters me, though. There's something I want in a military base but not even Yellow sniffed at that one. It's why I'm kind of hoping that the Illuminati is really powerful because it'd be way easier to handle the Illuminati than the army."

Brown's Journalism Chores were broadly kind of basic: Find the most intense bout of local political activity, embed yourself, and ride along with it writing articles along the way. Someone got declared editor/publisher, someone was assigned to photo editing and cleanup, someone got assigned to website traffic management. She's got half an eye on social media feeds, which she has banned everyone else from checking, and will sometimes chime in advising if she can see anything happening over there that's worth someone nearby checking out.

The most important thing, though, is just to get these people talking and responding like journalists rather than members of the public. It doesn't take much management to do that, but boy howdy does it get felt when it's not there.

Red!

"Yeah, something like that," said Red. God she hated explaining her whole bit.

She's going local. In a small crisis, power flows towards the centre. In a large crisis, power flows towards the periphery. She's making a judgement call that this is a sufficiently large crisis that the people on the spot in Aphrodite have more influence than the people distant in Zeus. For all the magic of the internet it was hard to pull rank via videoconference, and the really cool thing about seizing control of the local train system was that they'd have a hard time sending someone to pull rank in person.

Black and Orange!

It's not often that these two work together. It's incredible when they do so. There's a unique power in their combined approach, resources continuously denied to each other being directed towards the same purpose. The loss of Yellow couldn't have come at a better time for them, honestly - all the questions of priorities and decision making were smoothed out allowing them to focus on execution in the absence of ideology.

The decision is made to start movement immediately. They agree that the threat here is the evening after multiple trains have left. That's the point where they have become the weakest and their enemies have had enough time to organize their strength. Moving hard in the morning is worth it because even if they have to expend strength to maintain it, they'll have that strength.

Yellow wanted to do the full organized single file march with flags and banners. Black and Orange decide instead on Napoleonic Bypass. Multiple parallel columns marching down multiple adjacent streets, flanking the primary column as it moves. When a column hits resistance it holds the nearest intersection and collapses in towards the centre. This concentrates opposing forces on non-critical chokepoints while keeping the central column flowing smoothly, and the delays at the flanks will naturally stagger the mobile groups. Most importantly, it's a strategy simple enough that it can be executed by a mass of peasant conscripts, or a drunk Soviet tanker during a nuclear war.

Neither of them give much thought to trying to make this a stealth mission. Moving this many people is more of a plumbing problem than anything.

Pink!

There's the opportunity. She could...

She looks away. Her cheeks are slightly flushed. Her arms are folded.

... she holds out her right leg.

Okay. Maybe a little more.

[Count Numbers]

Apostle:

“I wouldn’t count on it, I’ve been in like seven different illuminatis and none of them were worth my time. A lot of the Lutherans have been in a few and say the same. There’s like three kinds - an even shittier MENSA just for cops, the school clubs for future world leaders, and ‘NGO that does something illegal’.” They smile. “The school clubs are the best ones, they’re weird and stupid in a fun way.”

“Mammon - he’s the tall starved looking guy at the meetings - says it’s because illuminatis have a hard upper limit on how powerful they can get before they become absorbed into formal government, because there’s way too much overlap in membership. So whenever there’s a power or resource struggle they get pulled into the bigger - you know, he explains it better, I don’t really care, I just know the ones I was in that didn’t have a secret tie code sucked.”

“What do you do though if a cop just pulls you over for a frisk and you’re carrying the wrong thing, though?” They ask curiously. “Like impersonate a sergeant in the middle of the arrest, or what?”

The problem with Brown’s chores that get these people acting like journalists instead of members of the public is they’re gonzo journalists, unwashed, undisciplined mass hordes. That’s fine, they don’t make problems for her yet, but we’ll get back to the consequences of this later. Don’t worry, this isn’t anything Brown did wrong, it’s just the nature of this beast.

Black and Orange:

So let’s set the scene a bit.

The Castle has its own green space and rolling hills for the effect of it. If the castle is absolute safety, these are your home field lines of skirmish. This is not automatically held, there are no walls here, but the terrain is favourable and the Castle projects force outwards over them. The winding, scenic cobblestone streets through the terrain take about five minutes at a crowd’s pace, two at a brisk walk.

After that it’s twenty-to-thirty minutes to the train station, a game of learning how long a second can be. The two biggest danger areas are the bottlenecks - coming out of the Castle green and coming into the train station itself. The green because it’s the inescapable exit point you must pass through before your alternative routes and options open up, and the station because- have you done any scouting?

This part of Aphrodite is styled like renaissance France, apartment buildings in the shape of baroque castle-mansions, strip malls like gothic churches. It’s got the density of the historical districts of cities like Prague and Munich as much as Paris, but more built up and expensive, more Disney-fairytale than legacy antique. A little bit more intentional, a little more deliberate, a little less real.

Still, by the end of the day more than one song from Les Mis will have been sung. Beyond the barricades is there a train waiting for me? This is Paris before the reforms, the version of Paris that this tactic was explicitly designed for. Again, scouting will help you here.

Then there is the station itself. From what you remember coming down from it, it’s built for Paris Central Station. Lots of archway entrances, mostly glass, beautiful but indefensible skylights, wide and sweeping concourses.

Image reference

This will make it easy for you to break in and keep your people there. It will make a poor place for a siege in its current form.

You’ve got your marching plan, you’ve got your destination and end point, you’ve got the scene. Now it’s just up to - Black? - to assign scouts and Orange to tell the team leaders what the plan is. They’ll be taking their own initiative, so it’s important to give instruction here.

This isn’t Yellow’s moment, but it could be Orange’s - clear, executional, organizational, practical, pragmatic and necessary. This might not be the place for a waving banner, but it desparately needs something like a flight stewardess to give the calm, clear directions for what to do when the plane is about to crash, and out both windows the passengers can see the engines are on fire.

As above, and so below, the sounds of violence erupt around the cylinder of Aevum, gunshots and grenades like lightning and thunder. You will guide them through the storm.

Pink:

Fiona removes it in loving silence and puts the last leg a bit further up the bed, away from you, to make space. Not even as a deliberate gesture, she just needed more room to work. And then she begins again, concentrating utterly on this leg as well.

There is no guarantee she’ll give either back before going for Pink’s arms as well. In fact it’s starting to look like the plan. Her focus on tending, the firm brush of fingertips in deep and inaccessible places, is so total that it’s hard to tell if it’s on purpose, or just because it’s the natural progression of steps - that putting you all back together is just a sensible last step, even if it leaves you helpless until then.

[Thanqol]

Brown!

"I could punch a cop," said Brown. "I've been training really hard at martial arts just so that I've got that option. But honestly, probably like, Red or White would figure something out. Most of the time I consider anyone paying attention to me at all be inherently a fuck up, and if I got randomly selected it meant I wasn't paying enough attention to the patterns."

"Speaking of," she asked. "What're the cop patterns in your opinion? What do you think is the best way to handle them?"

Orange and Black!

"Scouting" is an extremely dangerous word in this context. It's not immediately clear why - who doesn't love scouting? But scouting implies information transmitted to a central headquarters, information transmitted to a central headquarters implies communications channels to frontline commanders, communications to frontline commanders implies a level of central direction, centralized direction got the Red Army pocketed and destroyed while Stalin dithered.

Every additional decision November makes in this context further places her as The Decision Maker, to seizing unitary control, to rendering this thirty minute walk down the street top-heavy and brittle. It was good that Yellow was exorcised at this moment because it keeps Orange and Black cool-headed and aware of their own limits. Orange's most clear-sighted act in this moment will be to take her hand off the wheel and let her subcommanders draw their own strategies. They know what the mission is, they know the routes available, they know what to do if they encounter resistance, they have their own assets and espirit de corps and ideas, they don't need her to run this for them.

In ancient days, the Strategos of the army was not the one issuing orders to formations like a strategy game. Once the army was in place it moved itself. The Strategos, then, stood in the rear, on a hill, with the heavy cavalry, looking for the break in the lines where she would need to commit her reserves. Recon by fire, then, and full trust to the marshals. Call her for support and not for orders.

Pink!

"Stop," said Pink. "Just for a moment. This is serious."

She held Fiona's hand, firm and intent. "I am deeply afraid of sensory deprivation, and that's what will happen if you disconnect my quatronic core. That's what it was to be in the box. Everything I've done since then has been an attempt to maximize the influence of my actions, so that I don't feel that helplessness. I'm already tense as hell going even this far."

"But I'm tense as hell all the time anyway," she sighed and lay back on the bed, closing her eyes. "And I'm way off my maintenance schedule. So... go ahead. I trust you."

[Count Numbers]

Apostle:

“Just have insane amounts of privilege.” Apostle says without a hint of irony. “It’s great, cops apologize to me before they have to touch me. Highly recommend it.”

Aren’t they kind of transhuman looking, part of the targeted minority? Well, yes and no. It’s kind of analogous to being Asian in the Western tech industry in the 2020s putting you both outside of and at the top of white supremacy depending on the context, Apostle’s aesthetic mods squarely places them as a rich Thrones eccentric. They're biomodded, sure, but it's only to make their blood dry like movie blood so it looks prettier. Normal blood sucks to write poetry in.

“Junta has more experience with them. He’s better at the whole using privilege to work with government thing. He said uh, shit, what was it? Cops see the world like they’re sheepdogs, and there’s only wolves and sheep. So if you’re not acting like a sheep, then you’re a wolf. So trying to talk them out of things or outsmart them isn’t sheep behaviour, and they’ll make it violent. Which is why I thought you’d get hardcountered if you can’t use force, but if you can actually punch a cop then like, you’re good I guess? I think.” They think harder. “Have you considered being a small business owner though? Cops see those as bratty sheep.”

Fiona:

Fiona thinks about her play here. There’s going through the trauma with someone to recontextualize it and make it feel safer, addressing it and being there for someone, or there’s symptom management - trying to prevent the situation needing to feel like that at all. Pink’s already trusted her with the extreme, so.

No, definitely needs to be symptom management in this case, she decides. Pink needs a way to tap out if she changes her mind. Same reason you don’t put a gag in if you’re relying on verbal consent.

Fiona pulls the chip out of her phone, then tethers it with her left wrist and draws the right wrist line out to Pink. “Microphone, speakers, camera, and most important - control over the music player. At least what’s downloaded, there’s no internet right now.” She wipes kiss-mark oil from her lips with the knuckle of her left thumb. “It’s not much, and I’m still going to be your only way to get back. Just, if it gets too much, you’ll have a way to tell me, and I can talk you through.”

She half thinks Pink wants to do this as a way to test something, maybe to prove she can handle it, or just see if she can. The offer of the phone is going to bite into that, taint the purity of a trial by fire, lessen the trust being shown.

She’s still got to suggest it, though. Because the alternative way of finding out she’s done something not okay here is after having already done it.

The Evacuation of Aphrodite:

Crystal finds Orange with the Valkyries, negotiating resources for the heavy cavalry. While Leather leads the team commandeering emergency supplies, someone’s got to negotiate with the staff that someone will pay for it all, one day. Orange is in the best position for it - she’s on good terms with management after dragging Eli out of the fountain that first night.

“I’m so proud of you,” she says in a gap in the conversation, and awards Orange for it by pinning a ceramic orange-anarchism flag to her breast - fittingly, the symbol for mutualism.

Black can instead watch the colour-groups roll out a huge sheet of the thin, waxy paper they use to diffuse the large stage lights and instead use it as canvas to draw a giant street map, each group drawing their lines and planning their route. There isn’t too much of a focus on this, this all relies more on tactics than strategy, but the more that can be decided on before you leave is the less decisionmaking that needs to be made in the heat of a moment. It’s a lot easier to remember than to decide under pressure.

The group leaders all have enough walkie talkies to communicate between each other as well, squad-based decentralized sharing of information in the field. Leadership is still important, one trusted person making decisions saves a lot of mental load across the group, but this will be for sharing information - not orders. And the mob is its own kind of rapid response democracy if anyone were to lose the mandate of heaven.

The Ultimate Werewolf takes Ares and point, first in, last out from the station. They’re your grenadiers and they’ll be pushing the main boulevard hard, getting to the station first and trying to secure it. Apollo follows them and does aerial recon with drones, Hermes and Zeus takes the main side streets, Gaea with the least and most vulnerable members takes the longest and safest side streets and diverts back into Hermes or Zeus groups if they meet resistance, Aphrodite follows as a rear action to support and cover and keep backchannels safe for Valkyrie support as they go.

Like you said, moving this many people is more a plumbing problem, and the wide spread helps the crowd drain through faster. Everyone knows that these are lines drawn in sand, not set in stone.

When everyone’s satisfied, the Ultimate Werewolf looks at the leaders and asks if he can… he can? Sure, great. Hey, the soundproofing in here has to be good right, for the conventions? Like can he…? He can? Because he doesn’t want this to go down like that banner thing did- Someone closed the main doors, fantastic.

The Ultimate Werewolf lets rip a howl like the one from that first day that shook the exhibition hall under the light of a blood moon, and everyone - everyone - is compelled to watch. And he has the shameless of doing it that comes from a professional heel.

“This is your ten minute notice!” His voice echoes clear through the halls, from the front doors to the stained glass at the back of the exhibition hall. “Grab your things, find your teams, and be ready to go. Tell whoever you need to tell that you’re safe, and then turn your phone off and take the battery out. I’m serious. You think you need it for anything, you come to your team leaders and they’ll sort out an alternative that works, but you do not want to get hit by a pineapple today. If you get scared, just remember that anyone who wants to get to you has to go through me. And nobody ever has.”

He holds his chest out proud and hammers it hard with a fist. The other team leaders stand proud beside him at this, but they don’t match the Werewolf for his raw, confident violence.

It’s different from what Yellow was doing because he’s doing it as a heel. He demands no allegiance, asks no one to follow him - you’re safe because the scariest thing on the station is on your side.

And then he just finishes. No thank you for listening, no final notes, he’s done now. He hopes it’s the last time he’s even relevant today, because if he’s the focus of attention again it’s because his authority as Chief of Violence is needed.

Ten minutes, then. Black and Orange might not even have anything they need to do here.

Red:

The command centre in Aphrodite is a lot more like the one Crimson Tower found herself in for the Goddard Pump situation, a series of four interconnected solid-cement tenement style buildings made to withstand a direct hit from an artillery strike. If you remember that situation, then you remember what the inside of this building is going to be like - a multilevel basement top-to-bottom filled with lanyards.

It’s just, it’s Aphrodite, so the exterior walls have street art permits and the art cycles around a lot. Today it’s a butterfly in a soap bubble being whirled in a vortex that’s ripped through a field of tulips, the inside building being the eye of the storm. They’ve extended the contract for this one out a bit because it’s been a favourite.

This place isn’t going to be targeted by the riots, it’s only overwhelmed by its duties.

Crimson Tower will have no trouble getting in and taking a position of duty here. The question is more what she wants to do: Is she taking a position of open leadership in the chaos, or is she using the chaos to steal a work desk with the permissions she needs and try to go unnoticed, to be in a central location to justify herself if she does get noticed?

Like commandeering a pod to get here, neither of these require a check against the cover identity because they’re both actions established as within her remit. It’s only when she starts acting outside it that things could get difficult.

[Thanqol]

Brown!

More information. Something else to think about. This would be useful, when she'd finished thinking about. "I don't know that about small business owners. How does that vibe and dynamic work?" she asked.

Pink!

"... that's a good idea," said Pink. "Thank you."

Somehow that makes it harder. But that's wrong; it's making the leadup to it harder, because she's acknowledging the seriousness of it now. Now she's got a concrete thing to think about that'll build anticipation more than her previous semi-spontaneous don't think about it too hard stratagem. The difference between going to the dentist and sitting in the waiting room thinking about the drill.

Red!

She's sure as fuck not gonna steal a dozen trains on the D-L.

"Hey, everyone," she said, climbing up on a chair (after asking someone to hold it steady for her, OH&S still mattered). "Listen up a sec'. We all know what to do in the event of asteroid strikes or power transformers blowing up, but no one thought to drill us on the whole station going into simultaneous riots, right?"

Grin, take a moment. Red had this floppy, almost boneless look to her in moments like this, relaxed and open, full body emoting that she wasn't a threat to anyone who didn't want to make her into one. Charming, in an idiot way.

"Anyway, Zeus has decided that if their first one-size-fits-all policy wasn't working, they'd solve it with a second one and order the whole station to stop the trains. And why not, right? Everyone can just take their private boats instead!" she grinned. "But here's the thing. Everyone out there is protesting outside their houses, their communities, their people. When the tear gas comes down everyone's got the option of going home. But us? We got several thousand convention attendees with nothing to defend, nothing to lose and nowhere to go. We've all seen explosions in controlled spaces. Oh shit, hey, I just realized - you are trained for this situation after all. That's super simple, we can either give the explosion a vent channel or we can watch our district become the crumple zone."

She gave the metaphor a moment to sink in. A room full of crisis technicians had enough practical experience with what an explosion in a confined space could do to a body that, when asked to imagine that same process happening to a crowd of thousands... well, it'd clarify what they thought their responsibilities were in this situation.

"Anyway, hi. I'm Crimson Tower," she waved. "Knightly promoted me last week. Take it easy on me, I'm new! And I might be temporary depending on how hard Zeus flips their shit after this. But fuck 'em, I'll take the heat, let's do our jobs and get those trains rolling."