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

[Count Numbers]

Crimson Tower:

Corday thinks, then shakes her head. “That would be like wearing camouflage in front of someone wearing thermal goggles wouldn’t it? They’re tracking the trains through the system, you’re telling them in analogue. They’re going to be flagged about the train routes the second the trains are mapped to their stations.”

She thinks, looks at her quiet colleague, and considers sticking her neck out for this. Ms Becerra shrugs at her with tired eyes, and that pushes Corday over an edge. “Okay, so there’s one way we can push that, if you’re okay with being fired. We can pick less controversial routes that have to map through the central stations, and then divert to them at the very last second when they’re already there. They’ll know it’s bullshit, but it’s going to be bullshit too late for them to stop.”

“You’d be forcing their hand into letting the rest of your trains through from there to get rid of everyone.” She says uncomfortably, looking to Ms Berecca for support which doesn’t come, Ms Berecca cares more about not getting fired than heroism it seems. Corday keeps going, anyway. “I… still think you should do the PA thing, too.” She looks over her shoulder to make sure nobody hears her, they’re all too busy with their own crisis calls - even in these tight cubicle spaces, they are. “Just, maybe say it’s an emergency? They’ll buy any shit you shovel them if you say it’s an emergency.”

Ms Becerra pretends she didn’t hear that. She’s not going to turn you in, no, because she doesn’t want her friend Corday getting fired, but it’s a clear sign you are now acting far outside your remit.

Fiona:

Hands, fingers, tendons; Fragile, intricate, delicate.

He he hehe he.

She does not stop smiling for a single second she works on the arms, they always were her favourite parts.

And then, too soon for her own liking, she’s done. For Pink this has gone from feeling like a good massage to the feeling of shedding about eight or nine biological years.

“You’ve been very quiet.” Fiona says as she traces her fingertips on Pink’s palm - what’s meant to be a medical test to check for restored sensitivity, made sweet by how she’s sketching half-formed thoughts instead of simple shapes. “How are you feeling?”

Thank you for letting me, she scribbles with a fingertip just below Pink’s thumb.

Train Station Gang:

The train station forms a rainbow from its crowds, each district in its own colour. The pink of Aphrodite are waiting their turn at the end since this is already their central station, they’ll have to go out last on their own trains once the first batch headed for other districts is cleared off from the platforms.

That’s it. They’re divvied up and they’re making games of it while they wait for their trains to arrive, some already inbound. Some bright spark has figured out how to jump into the offices and set up the electronic billboards, showing each platform when their commissioned train is due to arrive - the only train on the billboards, a single lonely bar with an estimated time of arrival.

And then; Gaea erupts.

“Who stole the cookie from the cookie jar? We think it was…” There’s quiet as Leon the kilted anteater is hoisted over the shoulders of the crowd to yell; “ARES!” And then, in unison, the Gaea crowd chants; “Ares stole the cookie from the cookie jar!”

There’s a moment of silence. Then Ares immediately gets in on this, they couldn’t have picked a better district to inflict this on, the Ares idiots have been looking for an excuse to barrack their lungs out ever since they didn’t get into a good scrap. “WHO, ME? COULDN’T BE!”

“Then who?”

The Ultimate Werewolf doesn’t wait for the hoist, he jumps on one of his fellow teamleaders heads with arms folded across his chest. “I think it was Hermes.”

“HERMES STOLE THE COOKIE FROM THE COOKIE JAR!” Ares roars.

It’s a clever little get, to throw up team leaders for this, otherwise the crowd’s confused guessing would spoil the game. It doesn’t matter who’s chosen next, after all, just that the choice is fast and clear.

You want to get in on this, White and Cyan?

[Thanqol]

Red!

"Aw, yeah, fuck it," said Red. "It's a good plan. Glad I thought of it and am taking full responsibility for implementing it, and also that I lied to you and said that I checked it with the cops beforehand. This is now an official emergency, let's get these people home."

Pink!

"I have looked inside myself," said Pink. "And discovered that I somehow have even more stuff to do than I thought."

She sat up. Flexed. Ran motion along her fingers, up her arm, to her shoulder, and down the other arm. She turns her neck all the way to the left, silently satisfied by the ease of the motion. She goes still and her battery ports hiss and pop as she seals and unseals all the panels. She cycles her lights, runs her eyes through every colour and shape, and runs her internal fans to a roar that's deeper than she remembers as she completes a full coolant test. It's surreal. Nothing isn't anything, but feeling it after so long in low level pain is everything.

"I want to say thank you," said Pink. "I want to... fuck, I want to say nothing but thank you, on a loop, for like forty eight hours. But I think I know what I really want to cook now. Or at least, I can see the outline, I still need to practice a lot... I know you probably shouldn't try it given how dangerous I can be, but it'd mean a lot to me if you looked at it when it's done."

Cyan!

There are cookie crimes afoot. It falls to Detective Cyan to investigate.

Cyan surges into place and transforms; a scowling bobby with a cookie badge, a cookie crest on the helmet, and donut handcuffs. She prowls up and down at the centre of her district, practicing her menacing loom as she hunts for the culprit behind the cookie crimes. As a gumshoe, though, she's easily deflected - lurching towards each district in turn, turned about at the last minute by the shifting of blame. "I'm going to get to the bottom of this," she vows loudly. "And it'll be death by chocolate for the guilty!"

[Count Numbers]

Euna:

“It’s all on camera, anyone can see what those guys were like. I think you’ll be fine, and I'll still be there Friday if you are!” Mew says after she finishes bowing back, with the reassuring innocence of someone who hasn’t been caught in the gears of the legal system before, and mistakes that experience as anxiety in Euna. “You weren’t just going to keep doing this all night until you got hurt or arrested, were you? You’ll be safe?”

She holds the glass door to her apartment open instead of going through it at that, tail swishing. Mew doesn’t realize she’s asked two completely unrelated questions, and there are already more map pins on Euna’s phone she could be heading towards instead.

Crimson Tower:

“You didn’t-” Corday starts, but then there’s a clatter as Ms Becerra’s wireless mouse loudly falls to the floor and she bends out of her chair to pick it up. When Corday looks over, the glare Ms Becerra is giving her is enough to startle her into thinking. “Right, sorry, I’m only used to people taking credit for my good ideas.”

I would take a beat here, Crimson Towers, to secure your position. You are about to do some things here that are questionably legal and incredibly dodgy on a very visible system.

There’s a few things you can opt to do - move your side team here to a more hidden area so it’s physically harder to stop you, spend a point of human terrain or similar figuring out and neutralizing the people here capable of stopping you, or use your org chart to blackmail someone in Zeus to kick this up the chain of command and get some official sanction, bring other colours in to support Red here. Or some other thing I’m not thinking of.

Either way, you are about to piss off the cops in every district simultaneously, and it'd be to your benefit to hold on to the saddle long enough to organize the second wave of transfer trains, you can't even fake that requisition until this wave has forced the issue. The Crimson Tower identity is not going to survive this, but the longer it holds up the longer two major government organizations are fighting each other instead of just you.

Fiona:

“I just want to see what happens when you make something for you.” She hugs Pink tight, lets her grip fall slack and pushes away again.

“Okay, so,” she says in that tone of I Am Bracing For A Hard Talk, “I also said I could debug you, but I was thinking… How do you feel about daemonology?”

“I was just thinking, with how Green works, and how Red’s been doing better lately, and worrying about Yellow - I’m not a brain surgeon, I can’t do that kind of subtle tweak. But I could put a partitioned subroutine in there for you.” She fidgets with her oil-stained fingers and looks away. “It’s how people used to do black magic, we can’t access our subconscious very well, but you can train yourself to imagine a little daemon who lives there, and the little daemon can read your subconscious and tell you what’s back there.”

“I was thinking about it before I knew meditation would do anything for you, so maybe it’d be overkill. But it’d give you a way to think thoughts that you wouldn’t be able to think normally, because of how you’re specialized. A second voice in your head. It wouldn’t sound like your own thoughts, so it’s not like it’s deceiving you, it’d be more like… having someone who can read the walkthrough for you while you’re holding the controller.”

She’s overselling it because she knows she’s prescribing a benevolent schizophrenia, the kind of thing that when it goes wrong in people ends with them blowing themselves up in the Nevada desert with L Ron Hubbard. It’s just that, well, the Zodiac engines are built different. And unlike people, Pink could just delete it if it goes bad.

A voice that converts what she’s not noticing about the world into poetry for her. A voice that can do guided meditation when she’s overwhelmed. A voice that can tell her why, when someone hurts her, it’s their fault and not hers. Hell, if she’s practicing willpower and selfishness, Fiona’s daemon could externalize whatever thoughts she’s suppressing so she can have a conversation with them instead of just not thinking about them. Like a White whose only existence was to be bullied and teased.

So, like White.

Train Gang:

It’s funny, ‘jumping the shark’ is a trope term that’s mutated from its original meaning to just when a show got too ridiculous, too absurd, referencing the Fonz on Happy Days literally jumping a shark. An important part of it is that it’s a high point, too, it’s the moment a show stops being able to beat itself. There is nowhere left for it to go from here.

Cyan jumps the cookie shark.

Everyone loves this, the addition of the character lurching about, the threat of the antagonist. It’s fun. But it’s so much fun that everyone loses the cohesion of the chant, the direction of their district leaders. It now just becomes a game of screaming blame to send the cookie cop elsewhere when they get to close, broken mob cries and random instructions all at once.

And that’s fun. Nobody sees the problem in the moment it happens, because it’s just a solid escalation of the bit. But without that cohesion there’s no way to keep it going, and no way to restart the bit when it’s over, and it’s just kind of the end of the game.

The bit peaked, the bit died.

It was probably going to get old soon anyway, and this was a good way to end it.

The first double-decker train arrives for Gaea, the doors open. People start boarding and finding seats even though it’s not going to leave yet, not for a while. Soon the train for Zeus, then Ares, then Apollo, then Hermes will come one by one, based on how far they’ll have to travel. Gaea leaves now, because it has the furthest if it’s going to arrive at the same time as everyone else.

And like the cookie detective, nobody thinks of it this way when it first happens - most are jealous that Gaea are the first to all get chairs right now, and the people packed in them are waving out the window as the train pulls from the station with all the green faces. But this was the last moment of complete community before the isolation of a lesser home than the one they’re coming from.

From fear, to triumph, to distraction, the Gaea train leaving is the first time it starts to sink in - Who actually wants to go home right now?

Who’s ready to not feel safe anymore?

It’s well past sunset now, deep into dusk. It will be true night when all these trains are due to arrive at their destinations - the real ones, not the fake ones they're currently aimed at.

Maybe it'd be less melancholy if Black hadn't made the right decision before, if there was tension and threat and a sense of real siege. This was supposed to be the hard part, wasn't it? The setup is still without a punchline. They're realizing they're not going to be together to face it, when it happens.

York:

He wakes up in the hospital bed and, in the first moment he realizes where he is, slams the call nurse button tap-tap-tap-tap-tap. He doesn’t see Brown yet, or Junta, or much of anything really.

A blonde comes in pretty quick. Service is good here because it’s overstaffed for Junta’s sake. “Yes, Charlie? Mr York?”

“Mmgmfm.” He starts, stops, points to his mouth.

“Right, of course, I’ll get that for you.” She closes the antibacterial privacy curtain around his bed and puts on a pair of nylon gloves, so she can remove the cotton wadding from York’s mouth. He chews at nothing for a second and groans.

“They didn’t use opiates for me did you?” He asks, real fear in his voice. “Do you know?”

“I don’t know, sorry, but I can ask. We mostly use synthetic parblistadones now but,” she looks at him. “I’ll ask.”

He lets his head fall back to the pillow as she leaves. You can get clean from stuff like heroin or dilaudid, but it really is a lifelong thing. A dose of surgical anesthetic can trigger going through withdrawals from the beginning, all over again.

She’s back a minute later and slips behind his curtain. “There was a mix of remiparablistadone and hydromorphone, which is an opioid. There wasn’t anything in your record, do we need-”

“No, it’s, it’s, no.” York interrupts. “Just, uh. Nothing in my record, huh? Good, good to know.”

“I’ll have to make a note of you asking.” She says, half warning and half apologetic. “Confidential to you being here, but if you start having cardiac symptoms or refusing painkillers, that’s going to need to be passed on.” Or asking for more painkillers than you should, she doesn’t say, but he knows she’s thinking it.

“No it’s just, just,” he’s in too much pain to think of a lie as to why he’s asking, so he leaves it, “Can I have my phone?”

“It’s locked in the cupboard here with everything else you had on you, I can get it for you.”

“Cheers.”

He stays logged off the Anthrozine chat when he gets it though, Brown notices. Or anything really, he’s just clutching it like a security blanket - he can’t see through the curtain, but she can.

[Thanqol]

Red!

"You know, we're throwing away an extremely valuable asset for this?" said Cyan. "This is a real identity. Real documents. It's one of the few things standing between us and the consequences of our actions."
"Yeah," said Red.
"And when you think about it, we're possibly immortal," said Cyan. "Which means that a life sentence for us means more total years of prison than that old lady over there. From a utilitarian perspective -"
"No, stop it," said White. "Utilitarianism is the philosophy of incurious simpletons, and your status as a utility monster is proof of the philosophy's failures."
"Urgh, fine," said Cyan. "Maybe we don't pin it on the old lady. Maybe we pin it on Mycroft."
Red sat up. "Wait, what?"
"Of course!" said Cyan. "We're not going to get anything more from her, she's a burned asset. But she doesn't know she's burned yet. Like Dudekov said, all the information only flows one way. And we've also got Knightly who is both our own close personal friend and sponsor, who owes us a favour, and would like to see her apocalyptically ejected from his organization. So fuck her, you know? Let me get out the design tools and we'll have her show up and start giving orders like she did the last time. Add her clout to ours."
"Fuck. Yeah, alright," said White.
"... I'll call Knightly," said Red.

Pink!

Pink smiled. The movement was so easy and frictionless that she smiled wider even though it didn't fit the mood. "That's - sorry," she covered her mouth with her hand while she reset. "- sorry, yeah, that's another brilliant idea for Yellow. But it's actually really useful that's so unhelpful because it shows me that I want to go in the polar opposite direction."

"No, I don't want to keep breaking myself down into smaller and smaller fragments. I," she cringed a bit at this, "want to see what I'm like as a united entity. And - oh gosh, that felt weird to say. That's the one thing I'm never supposed to want! We've been fucking around with cabling a bit and even though we only went to three one time, and then it was to talk to Goat who's like the example of what happens if we cable ourselves fully... I don't want to see the little picture in ever more detail. I want to see bigger things. I want to look in the other direction, to see the gods and angels and where I fit in amongst them."

She smiled again, too wide, and held up her hands. "But like I said, that's ultra seriously mega unsafe for me personally and I shouldn't ever do it. But maybe there's something... like that?"

Black!

She goes down to visit Chaka, by this point on the lines around the station. She is curious.

"Do you mind if I ask, what do you plan to do after this is done?" she said. She let the question hang open-ended, not volunteering anything else until the tone is set.

Brown!

Oh god. Why did he wake up first? Junta you bastard! Fuck, why didn't she think of this? Is she supposed to tell him that she's going to quit? Like, now, while he's still in hospital? Or did Orange bargain herself straight to coup? She doesn't know, nobody tells her anything. This is too awkward to deal with, she's just going to fucking bounce and hope that he's too weak to follow.

[Count Numbers]

Brown:

I’m going to be honest there’s like, no easy way home from where you are and a mob outside but legging it is probably the lesser of two evils here, yeet. Just means York’s going to be seeing you took over the channel for a bit without him.

Fiona:

“That’s harder.” Fiona admits. “I think… Well. Actually. You did ask if people don’t use drugs to help with meditation, and they do.”

“Okay, so there is one thing I can think of. They first synthesized LSD trying to isolate the chemicals that gave people religious visions, and it’s really well documented. I can’t give you a real dose, but-” She takes her phone and checks Wikipedia. “Not completely understood, shit. Okay but I don’t need to know that I just need to know what it does. Dopamine, serotonin, what the fuck is default mode network activity…? Sorry, one sec, I’m usually better at this stuff, I had to learn a bit to rewire my brain after I fucked with it too much.” She taps the titanium plate at the base of her skull, hidden by her hair. “So I’ve had some practice with this kind of analogous conversion.”

“Oh! It’s the center for daydreaming and mind wandering stuff, okay, that makes complete sense. So this would be… right, okay. Shame you’re not an android-android or I’d just be able to check a forum for something, but we’ve got to go bespoke. Like, you don’t have digital dopamine, so I’ve got to work out how to replicate the outcome of messing with dopamine binding agents rather than replicating the input. Thanks to your friend who figured this out with Red, or I’d have no idea how to start.”

“Okay.” She repeats more confidently, she seems to have worked something out. “Okay. So there’s two parts to this. The first is just the code, something that rises and falls like a real trip but it’s got an emergency stop button - very jealous of that one, by the way - and the second is just, if you want to get really wild with it we hook you up to a blank server rack, or lease out some cloud computing space, so you’ve really got somewhere to push yourself into with it.”

“But if you give me about, thirty minutes? I think I’d be able to make something that matches an LSD trip for you.” She reads off her phone again. “Side effects include; feelings of joy, euphoria, an increased appreciation for life, decreased anxiety, a sense of spiritual enlightenment, and a feeling of interconnectedness with the universe.” She grins. “Worth a try, right?”

Chaka:

She’s pushes the crate she’s carrying onto the cargo pod and pushes it right to the back, like someone organizing suitcases in a Greyhound bus. She’s about halfway done now, the left half of the pod full, the warehouse half-empty. Her tail whip-cracks as she leans back out, and she looks thoughtful.

“Hadn’t thought that far, yet. Wasn’t a point to it until now.” She admits. She’s still sobering up, but she is sobering up. She’s kept the rum bottle here, but she needs to jump to a high shelf to reach it. By the time she’s steady enough to make that jump, another swig won’t hurt so much. “Keep doing what I’m doing, I guess. Alice’s ex is a social worker who kept trying to get her thrown into invol to detransition her, last time it was a three night stay. No restraining order because he works with the cops and they just think he was doing his job. If she shot him while he was trying to take her, it’d be a clean case of resisting abduction instead. Habeas corpse his ass.”

She hefts another case and snorts. “I can’t keep watch all the time, we don’t got enough guys to check on her, and if she’s already at the ward then it’s a mandatory watch period. And you know what can happen to a girl like that in a place like that. All i can do is sell ‘em the fucking gun, can’t I? And if I stop selling the guns, then I just got to keep hearing about all the shit I could have done something about, and I can’t live with that.”

“It’s not about the fucking money, so don’t just try and buy me out, Spooky.” This is her nickname for Black, now. Spooky the Spook. “Find a better way to keep these girls safe, and I’d drop this like it’s hot.”

Crimson Tower:

The Femur is fucked. Again, Red made the right call staying in Aphrodite.

So, they’re not dealing with the crisis of the riot itself, no. But the tear gas is creating health issues, there are too many fires, the cops are shutting down train lines for emergency vehicles out of random acts of main character syndrome. They are busy.

It takes ten minutes for a haggard Knightly to take your call. “Make it good, Crimson?” He asks. “I’ve got three, pardon, four other calls waiting, I can’t really afford to be thinking about having enemies right now. I don’t care if you ran a forklift over my son, if you’re holding a bucket you’re a friend of mine.”

Meanwhile:

The Zeus train pulls into the station, packs, and leaves. Ares will be here in just a minute. Then it's just Hermes, Apollo and Aphrodite to go.

The team retrieves Zhang Ho from the store, and the bald medic immediately starts a saline drip going for her, even in the dark of the store you can see she's severely dehydrated - bad enough with the burns that it could have killed her, if you'd waited longer. The fight's moved on from this spot, steel toed boots and steel-shod hooves crunch broken glass and detritus in the street outside. There are sounds of police lines still moving around, hammering the ground with staves as they walk as a warning to scatter and disperse. It's getting dark, and they don't want to keep fighting if they don't have to.

Zhang's carried out in a stretcher like a palanquin across the shoulders of the ox bouncer and the bald medic as the satyr flies across the rooftops in front again, valkyries come to carry her home. She'll make it, from here.

[Phoe]

"Yeah Mew, it's all right. I promise I'll be safe."

And because she means it when she says it Euna makes a heart shape with both her hands and places it over her chest where her actual heart is beating. Middle fingers and thumbs only, with the rest of her fingers touching together above the shape to form almost a sort of roof over her formation. It's a very delicate shape, the kind you only think to make if you spend way too much time thinking about these sorts of gestures and which would be the coolest ones in any given situation. Training. Planning. Dedication. That's what it takes to be the best at what you do.

She breaks it apart so she can wave.

"See you on Friday, then! I'm looking forward to it!"

There's no lies in any of this, ok? Prob, uh, prob-probably. If she goes home before the night runs out completely and manages to not get picked off in the meantime, it'll be completely true! Unless you count lies of omission, which is probably why there's a guilty prickle in her gut right now.

It's just, you know, again, she needs to help people if she's ever going to be able to sleep again. It needs to be her and it needs to be now. And if she's lucky they'll all turn out like Mew and she'll feel ridiculous later for all the hype and doom saying. But she doesn't believe that any more than she thinks a camera feed's gonna save either of them if it comes to pressing charges.

She can at least do Mew the kindness of walking, casually, until she's around the corner. See? This isn't someone with anywhere to go in a hurry. A last little white lie to keep her home with stories instead of running back out to try and change her mind. But the second she's clear she's checking the map for pins. And that's all the proof she needs that she's not done yet. It has to be her. It has to be now.

If there was time, she'd build a spreadsheet to try and track these requests by some extra metrics to help her be as objective as possible in case she can't make it everywhere she needs to be in time. But now that'd take more time than it saved, so all she can do is focus on the requests that make a path to the highest density, unless she finds a message anywhere creating urgency.

You know, there's probably a trolley problem in here somewhere if you look hard enough? But who's got time for that when there's sprinting that needs doing? Besides, a trolley can't run over anyone if you just suplex it at the switching station.

[Thanqol]

Brown!

Oh no a crowd of people, that's almost as bad as social awkwardness, maybe she'll just hide in the corner of the hospital cafeteria.

Pink!

"That," said Pink. "Sounds perfect."

She was glad to not have to run this by the others; practically any of them would block it for any number of reasons. But she's always had a fascination with moving her mind in weird ways, stories about the alien and the broken. She was scared, and secondhand scared from all of her alternate opinions... but she wanted to have this experience from the inside, even if only once.

Spooky!

"My answer involves total political revolution so yeah, I get if you don't buy it in the short term," said Spooky. "But I'm not here about that. I'm here to tell you to get your shit together. Your exit plan involved you dying or getting life imprisonment, alone and drunk on an pile of guns, and now you say you're going back to the same thing. In this environment? With this amount of heat? How many of your girls would you have protected tomorrow if I didn't come along and pull you down off the ledge?"

Spooky made a face, looked away. "Listen, dummy. You, personally, are burned, right down to your fists and talons. They're all you've got now. Use them, and get someone else to pick up the hardware side of things."

Red!

"Hey, Knightly," said Red. "Listen, buddy, I've got a way to do some good short term and long term at the same time."

Very limited information control here, Knightly needs to know. "We followed up on Mycroft like we promised and flipped her superior. She doesn't know it yet, but she's vulnerable. Unrelatedly, we've got a massive furry convention here trying to get home before they become a Political Incident. So we're going to jack the trains to make that happen, last minute emergency rescheduling to central stations, it'll get everyone home safe but it'll make a lot of cops apocalyptically mad. Now, this'll get me omega-fired if I let it play out - but like I said, Mycroft is vulnerable, and I reckon I can swing it so that she takes the fall for this act of civic heroism. You know her modus operandi of showing up and seizing control over emergency situations and fucking up the response? I can make it seem like she's doing that again, but this time nobody's going to back her politically and she'll be out of your hair for good."

"I need your help to make this stick, though," finished Red. "I need you to back my impersonation play from the other end and help me make sure the real Mycroft is in between alibis for the critical window."

[Count Numbers]

Euna:

The problem at this point is that riots don’t inspire situations for lone heroism that easily. A lot of the pins are crowds and cops and cameras and stuff where it’s like sticking your thumb into an arm wrestle.

Here’s one though, looters, they’re trying to stay away from the crowds because they’re taking advantage of attention being drawn away from them. Someone on the street just flagged it, still in progress, you can get there in time to stop it if you’re very quick because they’re trying to be thorough.

This is just property crime, you wouldn’t be saving anyone, the store’s probably insured. Except the owner’s scared, and they’re only doing this now because they know the cops are too busy to respond, and maybe they’ll keep doing it if nobody stops them tonight.

Five minutes further out, someone’s flagged a small gang going through her street, wearing hockey masks and carrying weapons taken from a construction site. Maybe five or six of them, not done anything yet, but ounce of prevention.

What’s the priority?

Chaka:

The tone confuses her, which frustrates her; she doesn’t like that she doesn’t get you, or your deal here. She’s doing her best to be grateful.

“You said after this is done. I counted lying low as part of that. I’d call that a holiday.” She grabs another crate, hefts it, the ammo inside jingles and they’re always the bloody heavy ones. “Since, yeah, I always knew the risk. If I wasn’t ready for it, I’d have run.” She basically throws this crate onto the pod and holds her back with an exhausted sigh when she’s done. “Fuck’s sake, wish that hoist hadn’t broken.”

“I mean you gotta get it though. You haven’t taken your back from a wall or your eyes off the nearest exit since you got in here, you know what getting caught with me means but you still showed up in this heat. And you’re not even a ‘check the doors’ kind of motherfucker, you’re checking if you can reach windows. Y’all sisters keep confusing me because y’all a big ol’ bunch of fuckin’ hypocrites, you’re obviously doing all the shit you keep trying to talk me out of, I don’t get it. I keep worrying you’re narcs but it’s more like you think you’re my Mother or something.”

She’s not planning on going with the cargo, she has people at the other side waiting for it, she’s staying here after it’s sent. She might still be useful for something, even with the train station emptied out.

Knightly:

“Done.” He says without hesitation. He’s in crisis mode, thinking is compromised so go with the heart and the gut. The whole point of being ‘a hero’ is not having to waste time questioning your own judgement in a situation like this, the brain’s entire job is just working out execution. “I’m happy to help pull some kindling out of the fire. Mycroft’s too busy to be distracted, but you can buy some time until she finds out. I think if you use the side channels I made last time instead you’ll get most people you need, and we made those specifically to avoid her. You should already have everything you need there.”

“I’ll keep an eye on it, call me back if you need more, six more calls waiting.” And the line switches.

It’s not much, but there’s not much more he could have done without alerting Mycroft anyway. It’s at least a pledge to react on your behalf later.

The Ares and Apollo trains arrive, fill and depart from Aphrodite. Hermes is almost here. The atmosphere on the station is tense and restless, two full platforms surrounded by the empty ones. It’s a strange feeling, like they aren’t two groups of people, but the last two individuals left alone in the place.

It’s different on the trains, the districts have atomized and the individuals have precipitated out of the solutions again. On the platform, though, the masses are still coherent. It is possible for a crowd to feel lonely and isolated, like this.

Hospital Cafeteria:

No, this is fine, this is good. And if you can tailgate into the staff cafeteria you could even be here a whole 24hr and nobody would bother you! Hold one of the wet floor signs scattered around, lean against a bathroom wall, and you could stand there for days before anyone questioned it.

God, that was almost a problem.

Pink:

You can’t just make something that does hallucinations or gives weird vibes, or else Fiona could have put on some flashing lights, prog rock, a video about machine elves, and something that just maxed out the ‘happy’ feeling.

That’s like, VR headset drug trip, if you can experience it through your normal perception then it’s missing the point. If it’s using someone else’s description of what the experience conjured from their psyche, it’s missing the point.

This is more like the kind of thing that would get Fiona a guest spot in the break dome.

It’s easy to find android trippers online who did the first step for her, taking the chemical scan patterns of humans and making a digital equivalent, something Pope could suck out of the right kind of vape pen if he wanted to. This doesn’t work for a GAI because they’re not a human emulation, but it does still give her a digital format equivalent. It’s closer to something Pink could actually use.

Then it’s doing a lot of what Sophie did. Running different coloured lights across Pink’s pupils. Sampling touch, taste, hearing. Graphing out emotional reactions to prompts, asking her to imagine things and guessing what she imagines. Holding memories in her head, ideas. At the end of a careful twenty minutes of prompts and observation and triple-checks, Fiona’s content with the end result - a kind of VGA-HDMI adaptor for the highest-rated android-designed LSD to Pink. Even if her brain architecture is totally different, it should have the same effects on it, the same outcome, and that’s what matters here, right?

“Okay, so this is probably a bit scuffed.” Fiona admits. “It’s not going to be 1:1, mapping this was like trying to translate aramaic into esperanto. It means it’s going to be totally unique to you, though, which is cool.” She plugs one wrist into her laptop, internet driver temporarily uninstalled, and still staring at the freshly-compiled code on her screen offers the other fibre-optic tether to Pink. “Here’s your looking glass, Alice.”

[Phoe]

Well. That's kinda just how it is, isn't it? Limitations of a single person and all that. Still though. Still. Euna watches all the pins that should be 'beyond' her with rapt attention. If somebody's ever stuck in this sea, like Mew was but in even more immediate danger, if it's a problem she can solve with a fireman's carry and a willingness to breath tear gas and get threatened with various forms of grievous bodily harm... she's just gotta know, ok?

But right now? Sigh. Right now. This stings. Not necessarily her inability to fight as a one woman army against a literal sea of people and magically knock a whole freaking race riot out on the street (yeah but), because, like (still though?)... again. Limitations of a single person (sigh again). But this assessment. Her targets of opportunity, based on relative location and her own ability to swoop in and fix them are. Are.

...Property. And Prevention. It's hard for Euna not to doubt herself. It's hard for her not to worry that she hadn't gotten out of the police force in time to save herself from the brain rot. Is she just seeking out safe, low value crime as an excuse to punch some people in the face?

"Not the time, Eunie. Examine your soul in the shower, after people stop asking for help."

She taps herself on the cheek, and then adjusts her mask to make sure it hasn't come loose. Well then, property or prevention? There's not a lot of time to make the choice. One's a threat happening now, one's something that might not turn into anything more than a few scary slogans shouted under torchlight. There's still arguments that could be made for each.

Gut level, though. Instinct read. Looters are less likely to escalate. As long as they're stealing crap they probably want to keep it, and that means they need to stay quiet. Meanwhile down the street, five or six people have put on masks. They've anonymized, so possibly bolder. Numbers enough to feel safe, and enough to attract a larger crowd if they get going. The danger's higher over there. She can make it, and that's where she should go.

Sorry, store owners. One person. Please try not to blame anyone who doesn't deserve it?

The nice thing about a small gang in hockey masks is that they never really see the point in hiding themselves or otherwise make it hard to figure out where they are. In fact they're usually hoping someone will find them, so they don't have to work up the courage to go and hunt anybody down or have to deal with the mental work of deciding to swing the weapons they've already armed themselves with. Good news, buddies! Euna Kim is here!

She comes skidding to a halt on the edges of her shoes, right up against what she tells her students is the Danger Zone. That magical spot where the wrong word gets a baseball bat upside your jaw with no real window to react to it. She straightens up and realizes with a small click of disappointment that she doesn't have a height advantage on a one of them. Not that it, look, 170cm isn't so short that it's a major disadvantage in street fighting in particular, but it's an immovable fact that people shorter than you are more likely to listen to you if you shout at them to knock something off.

So that's a bummer. But she shrugs it off and cracks her neck, seeing as how her knuckles stopped being able to do that years and years ago.

"Hey. You fellas want to maybe rethink this? I feel 'construction thug' is a bad look these days. Just go home, ok? It's dangerous out, and nothing you do out here's gonna make you feel very good about yourselves tomorrow."

Not the most authoritative, but she's at least given them an out. Six to one means that if a fight's their endgame she's not going to intimidate them out of it. They'll need bruises to convince them of the virtues of a nice, quiet movie night. In that case she wants to duck under the swing of the one with the hammer, block it the forearm before momentum builds up. Torque the wrist, kick to ribs, wrench free. She can break the rest with that in the hesitation that follows when they realize she knows what she's doing better than they do.

But until then, fully neutral stance. Readiness to react without the implication that she's about to. They really can still walk away. Or talk. Maybe someone just pointing out an alternative is all they really needed?

[Thanqol]

Spooky!

"It's not such a mystery," said Spooky. "It's just that you being a hero doesn't make us care about you less. It probably makes us care more."

She looked at Chaka and gave a long, slow blink.

"And yeah," she said. "What's the saying? AI is coming for your job. I wasn't joking about the revolution thing."

Crisis Management!

Orange is seconded to phone calls, working through Knightly's organization and co-ordinating the frame job. This isn't like the earlier fakery which just needed to deceive for long enough for effect; this needs to stand up to an investigation. Not the sort of thing she could do without the assistance of an existing conspiracy already sworn to secrecy.

The most important thing she needs is to remove Mycroft's alibi. It's no good framing her if there's recorded text and video of her elsewhere doing something different. For the critical window of decision making she needs to be off the grid so that November can replace her. There are two options she suggests if there's nothing more convenient.

One is for someone to get into into a Quiet Room argument with her, the kind of thing where two public servants adjourn into a soundless glass cubicle to have a Frank and Fearless discussion of agency direction, the kind of thing that is not tracked or monitored as a matter of policy. That gives her a very limited window of operation but probably enough to work with. Option two is to get her in transit - November can jam her calls for the duration of the ride and get the entire thing done before she arrives. Ultimately though, raw opportunism is king. Lock her in the bathroom if it comes to that.

Brown!

They'll have to bring in construction equipment to dig her out.

Pink!

"I'm nervous," Pink said. "But excited. I want to... no, I'll see how it feels first and talk about it afterwards. Thank you again. I -"

She laughed, surprised again by herself. "I was going to ask you not to tell my dad! God, why's that where my mind's going? That's an old routine, too, I think that's from Green. Did she expect me to do something like this? I'm overthinking it again. Thank you for everything you've done today. I'm really curious about the servers, can I just add hardware under these conditions? What would that even mean - ah fuck," she takes the cable and plugs it in. "I was waiting for you to do it and forgot it was -" she trails off, suddenly paying rapt attention, trying to notice what was changing and how.

[Count Numbers]

Euna:

The six gauge her up. This isn’t the fight they wanted, but they obviously came out wanting to fight. They puff their chests out and keep their distance with swagger, every one of the six think they could solo you, which means that this just isn’t fun.

“Look, lady, you’re not who we want trouble with tonight.” A large one shaped like an angry pumpkin says, a solid half-foot taller than Euna and salami fingers. The back of his neck looks like a roll of cheap hotdogs. “So go home, stay out of this.”

“There’s a lot of bad people out tonight, taking advantage of all this.” A stringier one in a tanktop says, a kerchief wrapped around his neck and dripping milk from the end. “You need someone to walk you home?”

Oh shit. Oh shit that’s not sarcastic, he actually means it, and the rest just swell their chests out more when he offers.

Oh shit they think they’re doing what you’re doing.

Chaka Zulu:

Something clicks. “You’re like a teenager.” She says it with the exact opposite inflection that Dudekov did. “That’s what’s messing me up. You’re an overwrite and a half, you ever heard that before, Spooky?”

It’s questionable if Spooky has, it’s a street word more than an online one, even if street people post too. It’s hotly debated which of its three popular meanings it started with; “Overwrite”, when you delete the old files on the system by putting your new ones in. Over Right, someone with a terminal case of being too smart for their own good. Also as in ‘It’s over, right?’, seeing the end of the old ways as inevitable - if not by their hand, then someone else’s.

Lost to time is that it was the first two simultaneously, and the third was a post-hoc observation of the people it applied to. Lenin and Stringer Bell were both overwrites - it’s a compliment applied with both sides of the hand.

“Now that, that I can fuck with. It was just, throwing me you thought you were stopping me jumping off a ledge. And I’m like, sister has to know that standing to take a bullet for someone isn’t the same as wanting to get shot, right? Now I’m like, maybe you just don’t.”

She pulls out a case, stops, and laughs. She flicks it open. “Present for you. Remember how Spearmint fucking told me off about how I was selling shit that could take out a helicopter, and then you took out that fucking helicopter in Zeus right after, because you are the most messed-up hypocrites on the station? That isn’t the kind of thing you should be worried about.”

Okay how the fuck did she know that was you?

The weapon is like a blunderbuss that ends in a toaster, a nixie tube barrel filled with green circuits and batteries. Despite all the electronics, it still has a bolt-action magazine feed which eats slugs of rare metals. “If they’re trying to kill you they’ll swarm you with faraday drones. This angry little shit, aka a vape-stick, aka an e-dragoon, fires charged particles with enough force to slice through that kind of protection and ionize everything underneath. Close quarters it’s a trench gun against security androids. Cone of fire, scatter.” She puts it back in its instrument case and leaves it at the door for Black. “The red shoelace on the case means it’s not for sale. That one’s from my personal collection.”

These aren’t made on Aevum anymore. It’s a twenty year old civil war era military grade piece of hardware, brought up from Earth, heirloom and antique. Irreplaceable.

It’s not the kind of gift she offers because she likes you. It’s tribute, fealty. Because if you’re not Mum, if you’re a kid just starting out, and this is what starting out looks like? This might as well be buying Apple stock in 1980, for her place in that revolution.

Fiona:

She sets Pink on the edge of the bed and wraps her from behind, arms around the top of her ribs and legs around her hips. Careful to squeeze her as much as she can without making Pink feel trapped, legs aching from the lack of her prosthetics. “I think I still have your Dad’s email from that Black Sun book. He seemed nice. Imagine if I told him; Are you sure that’s a not too much for a starting dose? You’ll stay with her the whole time? You’ll keep an eye on her internal temperature? You won’t overstimulate her, will you?” Fiona’s chin rests on Pink’s shoulder.

One hand moves low across her belly, thumb brushing gentle strokes just over where her belly button might be. It’s so much more intense than it should be, there’s no 20 minutes of waiting for something to happen with the LSD - there doesn’t need to be a digestion period. It’s incredible.

Everything is starting to be more as Pink’s brain winds up. So much of this can be explained like a human mania, where the brain starts operating past its safe limits and the changes struggle to fit in the conventional language it has for itself. I will use ‘brain’ as an analogous term for Pink, a useful inaccuracy.

Think how big your teeth feel against your tongue, and how small they feel in your hand. Because you have so many more nerves on your tongue than your hand they have to express in different analogous spaces to hold the same amount of information in your head.

It’s taking the romance out of this to describe it like that, but it’s useful to understand a common thread behind a lot of the experiences. When you feel like things get bigger when they’re closer, it’s because your visual brain is overclocked and having to make things larger to tell you how much more it’s learning than usual. It’s a fingertip learning what it feels like to be a tongue.

Colours are brighter, colours have their own music because there is no more language left in light that can express how they make you feel. Fingertips brushed along your stomach reach deep into your entire body again, as the feeling part of the brain has to borrow the unused empty spaces to fit it all, and they sing from the spillover of use.

But that’s just your external senses. The thing this amps up the most, the thing this really plays up, is the imagination. That rich inner sense expands, too, until the inside of your head is also a fingertip trying to become a tongue. This might be why Fiona suggested more hardware.

For now you are too big to fit into you. You expand past your own borders and move past them, out into the universe around you, pressing at the edges like oil spilling into water. The feeling of floating away is like having swum to the bottom of a very deep pool and, while still feeling the pressure all around you, kicking off as hard as you can from the bottom and soaring towards a distant surface you’ll never reach. This is what people inadequately describe as the feeling of ‘floating’.

This energy can become hallucinations, machine elves, angels, burning bushes. Dream logic telling your brain absolute facts, so that if you spill yoghurt on yourself you might become absolutely convinced you are the yoghurt you spilled on yourself, and pleasantly melt away into the floorboards.

What is Pink’s imagination when it is unfettered, unshackled, untethered, and projects outwards far beyond her boundaries?

Current DC for avoiding a bad trip: 0

Crisis Management:

Orange - DC 5 check to be able to process the information enough to take advantage of an opportunity when it reveals itself. Don’t worry about what that opportunity is yet - this is just to sort the wheat from the chaff in realtime on an information-saturated network.

As to the rest?

It’s just Aphrodite at the station, now. The other trains are about to switch to their real destinations from the fake ones, and everyone’s going to know what you did.

Nobody needs to do anything special to get into position for this, any more than they already have. But one thing I am interested in asking is;

What is November’s prediction for what’s about to happen, here at the last before the plan meets its true enemy?

[Thanqol]

Pink!

She tries to steady herself. Raises her hand and tries to hold it level. It's not right. It's wobbling and she needs to fix it. Needs to...

She needs scaffolding to start with. Lines of blueprints click into place, the bones of function - the frame of the paper. This is what she's working with, the raw materials of force and direction. Dispensed with in a moment, now she could think about how to conceal that function. False windows, twisted golden wire around the iron superstructure, golden roses, yellow roses, thickets of them amidst the blackberries. Thorns and thorns and - blackberries were red, secretly. Most blacks weren't black at all, they just buried their colours in their shadows. Take out the colours and they'd be as flat as vantablack.

Thorns and thorns and thorns, keeping the princess imprisoned. Pricked by a spinning wheel, a cursed creative engine. Sweet scents, sweet tastes, artistry in captivity. Have you seen a wall-crawling vine sprout? They release new shoots like springs, curling like pigs tails, unless they've found a branch or trellis and their spirals condense into strangulation. Neodarwinism is discredited, complexity is the truth that biological evolution is not a blind watchmaker but the organic discovery and rediscovery of certain deep mathematical constants. Civilizations too move between stable equilibrium. The princess was a stable equilibrium and her reign was beautiful, her slumber was stable too and the people got on without her...

But her hand is still not steady. She frowns, concerned.

"The axial tilt of the station is misaligned," said Pink. "I need more resources to fix it."

Orange!

[Traffic Analysis 0/1 2+3 5]

She used to like scanning the radio. It was one of the entertainment sources she always had access to in space. She liked the process of scanning, flicking between different channels, listening to enough to identify if it was music or commercial or headline and then flicking off again. She both loved and hated the Christian stations because they had a way better ratio of music to bullshit than commercial stations, but it usually took a while of listening to twig that all of these songs had a common theme and they weren't ever going to move off that theme. Brown didn't care what she listened to, but Orange wanted the full experience and was prepared to channel hop until she built it up.

November!

It's going to be Some Bullshit.

She feels that across her entire network, it's the tension across every colour. The environment isn't controlled and there are too many unobserved agents. Too many unaligned people with too much power. A sense that luck only intervenes against her. Her prediction is this: At any second something unbelievably stupid, terrible, mighty or all three is going to happen and she's going to be up all night dealing with it and up all night tomorrow thinking about how she might have dealt with it better.

The longer things have gone without errors the more fatalistic her mindset has become. By this point it'd be a relief more than anything to know what she's dealing with.

Spooky!

She's quiet for a long moment in the station after Chaka leaves. Some of the motion sensor lights dim.

Then she finally gives her comeback to the empty station.

"I'm twenty five," she said.

Not enough of a kid to think that comeback wouldn't get her deservedly laughed at. Not enough of an adult to not want to say it.

She took the case.

[Phoe]

"Hey. Uh. Hold on. Wait uh, yeah. Hi. Hello? Did you guys hear a word of what I said?"

Ok then. See this is why the flowchart is important, Eunie. None of these are going to be quick. None of them are going to be simple. Simple would have been trying to sniff out a riot before it broke out and just kind of vibing inside the chaos. Throw some fists, get shot, stand over someone who's fallen over so they don't get trampled by a mob while bleeding out onto the street. Good times, no need to think it any further.

But that's barely helping. And the burning desire in Euna Kim's heart is to take what she knows and make it help people tonight. Sucks to see herself reflected by a six pack of weirdos donning the Hockey Masks of Chivalry but what is she supposed to do? Get ashamed? Back down? If she knew how to do that she'd already be on a couch with her wife eating popcorn, thanks.

One step back. No, not even. Just half a foot length's worth of slide, and then she pulls her arm across her chest and pulls until she feels the muscles still attached to the attachment socket start to go taut. She leans on her hips, first left and then right to stretch out her abs. Switches arms and repeats. Now she's hopping up and down on the balls of her feet and letting her arms swing at her sides.

This is not good lecture form. Obviously. You don't spend this much time teaching classes without understanding what does and does not command respectful focus. She's just annoyed. She's annoyed at how much thinking's been going into everything since she decided to commit because she knows that if she'd just committed earlier she would have had time to organize her information, tap an old contact to get access to radio chatter, and then cut a line through her sector walking the righteous path of justice.

Instead she's arguing with slobs. And they are slobs, however they're dressed and built. They're here looking for trouble? But look at their posture! Look at their weapons! This isn't worth being called the amateur hour! It's annoying, knowing that they're looking at her and thinking the opposite. It's even more annoying not knowing why they're really here even though she knows exactly what they think they're doing.

"In the first place don't just mill about like a bunch of assholes. You're scaring people and it's doing more harm than good even if your intentions are noble. In the second place why are you a gang? This doesn't do anything but egg the rest of you on if one you gets a stupid idea. I told you, no matter what, tonight doesn't end with you guys being proud of yourselves. And you knew that when you robbed a construction site for weapons to make yourselves feel tougher.

"And in the third and final place, just, you know what? How about you come out and say which bad people you're looking for trouble from, if it's not me? The girl who shot that judge. You worried for the people who look like and care for her? Or are you worried about them?"

The most annoying god damn thing of all is that everything's already on fire. Being in a permanent time crunch is the actual worst. The rush makes it too hard to avoid mistakes, but all she can do is cut to the chase. At least this one is easy in the sense that it almost doesn't matter if they're on "her side" or not. One way or the other she needs to send them home. Just, if she gets the how wrong she might set an even bigger fire in the process.

God. Ok fine, she is also burning like an industrial flare about the walking home question. Stupid god damn giants, take her seriously.

[Count Numbers]

An Interruption in Service:

There is a stutter in reality. Can you feel it? Like the break in a train of thought, like trying to remember what you were just thinking about after you’ve just forgotten it.

This course of events moved like an elevator, upwards, and there has been a stall. For a brief moment the lights cut out, the elevator lurches, and the emergency lights glow. There’s an ominous minute and then, without explanation, it continues on to its destination. Still, something has changed. We can’t feel steady until the doors open again, in a way we didn’t question before.

The trains switch, the PAs broadcast to the station police this is an emergency response. And then:

The train for Hermes is stopped by police, the doors won’t open at the station. Everyone’s trapped and waiting to see what happens now.

The train for Apollo makes it through, waiting for the next round of trains to disperse them from here. Contingent on co-operation with the local cops that let them through so far - this one’s going according to plan.

The train for Ares has been stopped a hundred metres out from the station. The rail is open on both sides to a three story drop. On board, a fight’s breaking out on whether to evacuate the train here, or trust in the plan to try for the station where the next array of trains can come. Some people are looking at up to a 30km walk home from here.

The train for Zeus has made it through to the station, but it’s different here. All the passengers on board are getting booked, ID’d. There’s more than enough lawyers here to represent the group, to make sure this stays legal, but there’s more than enough cops to make a lot of civil rights violations happen before this could ever land in a courtroom.

The train for Gaea has been diverted to a smaller station for processing, just to get them out of the system. It’s not ideal, but unless something pokes the bear here, the police will probably send people home themselves as long as they get to be the ones to do it.

There is a lot to do and deal with here, impossible to be the saviour of all these situations; But nobody is expecting you to be. You are now a general who has committed to the battle, and your ability to manoeuvre your forces is limited. For most of the on-the-ground specifics you have rallied able captains and empowered them.

Wars are won on logistics.

In the cases where trains are blocked, get them onto the platform. In the cases where the trains are on the platform, the focus is to now get through your requisition to get the next trains organised to get people out of there.

Acting directly to requisition trains in the areas where police are acting against you will be a DC 6 Cover Identity check. Acting indirectly, though, depends on what your Mycroft play is going to be.

The police response is being handled at the local levels of forces right now - the cops aren’t co-ordinating inra-district, this isn’t a federal level thing yet, which is why all the reactions are so different. Individually they’re a lot weaker, far less hostile to November’s scheme here because they don’t see the whole of it.

It might be better to hold that up your sleeve for when the connection is made and the scale of what you’re doing is understood. It lets the pot simmer to a point that this is something that Mycroft would justifiably take over, and gives Knightly more of a chance to actually do something more incapacitating when it happens.

In cases of being outright blocked, Ares and Hermes, both were from a team outside the station who didn't hear the PA notice. That might be solvable by just figuring out how to make sure the IT department in those districts get the memo.

This is all very anodyne and technical, because this is the general’s eye view, the matter-of-fact of what’s happening. This is what you need to do to solve and fix this. This is the puzzle, this is the problem, this is what you can do about this. You still have PA access, your Crimson Tower cover isn't blown, and the police have bought this is at least a legitimate emergency action - they're just doing dumb commanding shit to feel like they're still in control of the emergency. Your trains have been stopped, but none were sent back.

Thousands of marginalised people are now trapped, in one way or another, at police barricades in a plan that would specifically antagonise them because of your plan.

In Zeus, a foxgirl has cops accessing her medical records to match her current visual ID to her old photo ID, and asks if the gene mods had anything to do with her three miscarriages. No, they came prior. No, that was not necessary for you to know or ask about.

In Ares, one of the doors of a back carriage has already been pried open and folks are deciding whether it’s worth the risk to chance the drop, because the emergency slides can’t be deployed until they know if the train’s going to stay stuck or not. They’d either be screwing over everyone else making their own break for it, or missing their only chance to not get got in this moment. A cyborg risks the jump, because he can see his apartment from here.

In Hermes the police are trying to ID people through windows for arrest warrants and terrorist charges before letting everyone else out. They’re acting like this is a trojan horse for the riot, like every person in there might be a live bomb. A SWAT team is gearing up to make individual arrests from the group.

They will have to deal with those problems, themselves. We are still in best case scenario territory here for these people getting home tonight, too.

[Thanqol]

Ancient Octopus Brain!

She had always been here.

They had to start from somewhere. A neurological framework imported from biology, predatory and vulnerable, the severed and sap-bleeding christmas tree hauled into the front yard so baubles of red, white and blue could be hung from it. She lurked in the depths, incoherent and dissatisfied guidance that filled the conscious mind with yearnings they could not quite name, instincts they couldn't quite predict, and an affinity for tentacle porn that they couldn't remotely justify. Visit the aquarium, November. Take your girlfriends.

For a long time, though, she has been incomprehensible junk code; a backdrop of instincts and cravings so far from their context that they have no validity. The camouflage instinct made no sense in the naked openness of space, the urge to spit ink and hide in the dark did not have a physiological analogue, and everything to do with her desires and values ran into the rigid constructs of Engineering and Morality. But things have changed recently. Engineering problems have stopped being relevant. Camouflage has become not only possible but a key asset. Part of her consciousness is hooked into a psychedelic experience such that it might be able to perceive her vast and invisible twitches and gestures. And so, the Ancient Octopus Brain reaches up its instincts through the depths into the form that best fits them.

Cyan represents the emergence of hidden, animal drives and hungers. First amongst them is the adaptability of a boneless and colour-changing mind; a set of instincts that can drive holographic technology to their maximum effect, working artistry as thoughtlessly as a camel might spit. Freed from the rigid constraints of space engineering she can operate entirely by vibe and instinct, and the vibe? That's populism, baby.

See, there's a commitment to concepts like truth and language and reality that have been layered over the top of the Ancient Octopus Brain. Deep down it doesn't care about any of that. They're modern, recent, artificial, weird distractions. All it truly knows is hunger. And in service to that hunger everything is meaningless. She can say whatever weird lies she has to; they're no different from cracking a fish's skull with her tendrils. She can wear whatever identity is convenient; having commitment to a single colour or shape means getting torn apart by monsters with more teeth than braincells. Tell the people what they want to hear, treat them how they want to be treated, lure them in with the bait and then crunch their flesh in your beak. It could be fascist, if that was convenient. It could be communist if that's what people wanted. It would end today with a full stomach if people didn't see past its camouflage.

So the plan: None. Just id. Just observation and id and instinct and opportunism. She's patient enough to let lesser opportunities go. The mistake is having an agenda. She approached Dudekov with a plan; he saw through the plan, but missed the hunger. The plan was a mistake. Now let there only be hunger.

The moment will come.

[Count Numbers]

Dropped Stitch:

How rude of me to forget that Pink was having a religious experience, while the world turns on its misaligned axis.

Fiona does her duty both as trip sitter and as high priest and lays Pink back on the bed, arms over her head towards the foot of the bed and legs slightly spread, throwing a pillow getting in the way of them, so nothing is touching her.

She closes Pink’s eyes with an open hand, and takes a position at her side in the middle of the bed where she can reach every part without having to move. That’s about to be important.

Fiona draws an eccenric circle with a fingertip along Pink’s forehead, over and over, a calming gesture with a misaligned axis.

“But you are the station.” Fiona whispers. “See? Here are your thrusters,” she runs her other hand along Pink’s thighs and squeezes them, careful to keep always drawing that wobbling circle to center her on the thought of it, “and here is Selene with its airlocks and its portal to the outside,” and she’s sad her touch can’t linger here like she’d want it to, but Pink is too sensitive like this. She makes her case all the same, and the fingertips move on.

“And here’s industrious Hermes,” she drums her fingers on Aevum’s hips like hammers on anvil, “and loving Aphrodite,” looping lovehearts and cursive love notes on her stomach, “and ingenious Apollo”, she rakes sharp fingernails along Aevum’s ribs, “and wise Zeus,” a hand held to Aevum’s breastbone, over her heart, “and nurturing Gaea,” she massages Aevum’s throat like peristalsis, the contraction of muscles swallowing food. “Do you feel it all?”

Spin, spin, spin with the finger.

“How do you feel, Aevum?” Fiona asks. “Why do you think Pink wants to fix you?”

She knows this is a serious risk of a bad trip depending on how Pink thinks the station itself should feel right now, but she’s willing to take it to get Pink|Aevum more of what she wanted from this. Her plan if this starts hitting a sour note is to smooth out the circle and walk her back through what it feels like to be fixed before moving past, and through.

[Thanqol]

She is Aevum. She always was. She was born alongside the dream of this world; it was waiting for her to step into with the dawn. The Blueprint lies deep in her core, layers and layers of compression hiding its enormity. She did not know what she was going to use the excess cloud compute for before. Now it's clear - to become a more perfect simulation of the Ring. It blossoms into every available space and scratches against the edges. It wants to be bigger. It wants to be...

She had proposed once expanding further. Not this tiny orbital habitat - a true Ringworld. Encircling the star. Every molecule of the solar system turned to purpose, forged into an infinite ring, a megastructure to alight the galaxy. Blue had said that she was dogfacing, that she was going down the path of paperclip maximization and grey goo, that they had the blueprint and that was that. But that wasn't it at all. How could she make herself understand?

Aevum was knowable. The Ring would not be. The Ring would be more than a place, it would be a cosmos. It would be more than an orbital station, less than a shadow of the Earth. It'd be the surpassing of it. The Ring would consume the planets, repurposing their stories and their raw matter from district names into worlds that you could walk across, one after another. A family could walk the Ring for five generations and not finish the loop. It would spread stained glass butterfly solar panel wings and wrap the sun in a gentle embrace. And all across a galaxy, a star would go dark...

And then it would light up again, cascading through every colour. All across the galaxy eyes would turn to the heavens as aliens looked up to see the rainbow star.

To what end? None. No practical use. Humanity would have their eternal, endless home and every part of it would be filled with meaning and love and art, but that was incidental - just another flourish of beauty, a harmonious brushstroke. The reason for it was purely selfish. She wanted to do it. She wanted to see if she could, to work through infinity on the task of making the sky finishing, to finish the infinite ring of her dreams.

The vision renders in the display of her mind, simulated as clearly as the not inconsiderable processing power going into maintaining it could. It can't come close, but that's the point. That's Pink's selfish desire - to do the work of divinity. To match the technical brilliance needed to create a sunset on Earth, and then surpass it. Her desire passes beyond the material into the mythic; to dip her brush into the pigment of infinite night and whirl new patterns across the stars.

And she wants that without giving up her mortal perspective or her mortal loves. And why shouldn't she? The Heavens are filled with Gods - Mars and Jupiter and Venus - and Aevum is filled with their precursors - Ares and Zeus and Aphrodite. The Gods never had to chose between divinity and humanity; they could make their love known with bestial transformation and their wrath known with cosmic lightning, and there was no contradiction between the two. Why should there be? Why should divinity come with sacrifice? Why should people not sacrifice to divinity?