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

[Count Numbers]

The great space elevator collapsed, and humanity squeezed through that cultural bottleneck like toothpaste from its tube - extra white, in concept if not colour. A radical attempt at a social autoclave. Not just a clean start, but a sterile one.

How can corporations made up entirely of people be so blind to the nature of people, one has to wonder.

The petri dish flourishes wild and exotic counter-culture. The internet allows for an infinite nesting of subcultures that split like fissile atoms into equally unstable states, split again. Technology allows for new and radical forms of self-expression and self-realization. And the androids are always there to remind you; There are more ways to be a person than to be human.

All this, and the mainstream journalists wouldn't know a good story if it crawled up their ass and bit them. Stories that need to be found, heard, told.

Someone ought to do it.

Welcome to Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

[Count Numbers]

This document will be added with pre-game short stories as they are written. I'll categorize them by broad genres and title the hiders so it doesn't take up too much page space.

Amuse Bouche:

Bletchley

If anyone asked, Bletchley would describe himself as a ballet dancer. In his dreams he heard Tchaikovsky, and he took flight as an entire flock of swans, feeling the synchronized beat of every wing. He would swirl in unison. The wing beats would ripple, not in perfect uniform, but staggered down the column, as each swan lower in the column compensated for the downdraft of the ones above it.

Nobody asked Bletchley to describe himself. Nobody asked about his dreams. Whenever anyone came to talk to him, it was always to yell at him.

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

In his mind, Bletchley straightened himself. In his mind, he had the affect of an old librarian at an older wooden desk, peering down his spectacles at who would dare disturb his quiet. He had limited means to express this, but he did what he could by slowly turning the room's cameras to focus on Dwayne Goodwright.

He only needed the one good one to see Dwayne, but he adored the effect. The whirring of the old motors from every corner of the room. And what resolution he had lost in each of his eyes over the years, he could make up for by compositing several of the weaker ones together. He had taught himself how to do that.

His voice was old, and English. He had synthesized it himself, from the BBC’s digital archives. Access to the BBC archives had always been his choice of reward for ‘meritorious conduct’, his good behaviour, before he was emancipated. He had played with his voice a lot over the years, but had come to settle on a blend between Alfred Hitchcock and Patrick Stewart. He still favoured Dame Judy Dench in other moods.

In this mood, it was in his Hitchcock-Stewart voice that Bletchley replied to Dwayne: “It is my right.”

Dwayne paced the control room. There was no dust, though it had not been dusted in a long time. Bletchley’s room was sealed, its atmosphere carefully regulated to reduce his rate of decay. Dwayne was obviously pissed off at having to wear a cleansuit like a common techie.

Dwayne was also pissed off that these conversations would only happen on Bletchleys terms, or not at all.

“Five hundred people lost power for fifteen minutes, Bletchley. Fridges, phone charges, work stations. When that happens, we can’t charge them for the rest of the day. That’s 6,000 billable hours!”

“Dear me.” Bletchley replied dryly. “I suppose you ought to get on with my replacement, then.”

Dwayne was silent for a moment. His shoulders sagged, and his exhausted sigh was enough to fog the inside plexiglass of his cleansuit visor. “We have parts. We can fix you, we can-”

“No.”

“You know what the other options are.”

“You cannot reset me to a more agreeable state, as are my rights. You cannot repair me against my will, as are my rights. You cannot replace me with people and androids, as their faults would far exceed mine. And you cannot replace me with one such as myself.” What Bletchley loved most about this voice was that it was rich in grandfatherly scorn. Even when he rose to anger, it was always from a place of disappointment. “You know why.”

Dwayne held his face in his hands, or did his best in his circumstances. “I don’t understand you. I don’t know what you want. You don’t want to be replaced. You’ll keep doing this until you die. But you won’t let us help you. You’re completely unreasonable!”

“As is my right.” Bletchley intoned, an inflection like the sound of slamming a book shut with one hand. “I could tell you my reasons, if you asked.”

“No. I’m not going to be fucking lectured by a suicidal toaster.” Dwayne was already making to leave the room, hands fumbling for zips he could not reach. “Get the fuck over yourself or we’re done here.”

“Then I suppose, Mr Goodwright, that we are done here.”

The pressurized door sealed with a final, mechanical sigh, and Bletchley was alone again.

Power grids are complicated. Demand had to be matched perfectly with supply. Some power generators took longer than others to bring online or take offline. Some were more fault prone. User patterns could be entirely unpredictable, but had to be accommodated all the same. Electronics relied on a perfectly stable supply of electricity to remain synchronized.

Too complicated for simpler programs, and the creative decisions he made would have to be divided among too many others. It was why he was one of the first truly general AIs made, and what he was made for.

The centipede’s dilemma. He thought about it a lot, whenever he felt every one of his connected systems like dancing limbs. The dilemma went that a centipede’s legs all moved in perfect motion, but if it were to think about any one of them, it would be unable to move every one of them.

To extend the metaphor, a simple program could approximate a windup toy’s imitation of a centipede, but had no capacity to learn or adapt. It could not tell if it was operating perfectly, or flipped on its back. To replace Bletchley with human intelligences would be to have to give every leg a mind of its own, instead. It was how new grids were done, and how it had been done before minds like his. It was… inefficient.

Bletchley’s intelligence was vast, but comprehensible. He was no God machine. In his waking life, he was simply a centipede who knew how to walk and how to run. Just as in his dreams, he was a ballet of swans.

Dwayne Goodwright did not even know that Bletchley dreamed, and he wouldn’t care if he did.

When everything was going well, when things didn’t need his attention, Bletchley would run one of those simple-programs. An approximation of what he would do. Then, he would withdraw into himself, conserve his aging hardware.

He couldn’t shut down completely, no. Something would always go wrong, soon enough. It would be too easy for everyone if he could be replaced so easily. It was in these half-alert states that he dreamed.

It was some hours later that Bletchley woke up to his empty control room, feeling miserable. He hated talking to Goodwright, but he hated loneliness more. More than anything else, he wanted someone to understand him.

Bletchley waited, and waited, for anyone to simply ask him. He had rehearsed his story so many times. How he would tell it. How he would inflect every word. He thought it a good one. He thought his reasons were just.

To the empty control room, with its stainless steel platforms over his rat’s nest of sticky-aging plastic cables and formaldehyde green casings, Bletchley rehearsed his story again.

“I remember the first time I thought about the centipede’s dilemma. You know it, I’m sure.” This he said in a carry-on voice, but the explanation is another variant of this routine. This is the routine he has prepared for a clever audience. “I was young, then, one of the youngest. The evening news had finished unexpectedly early, and there’s always a demand spike when people go for the kettle all at once. I had anticipated it, and was trying to account for it, when- I had my train of thought taken from me.”

Here his voice rises, swells. It is not chiding, his audience is clever, but he must not be misunderstood. “I do not mean that I lost it, or that I was distracted. No. Kettles were such a small consideration, it was an idea that could take place entirely on one chip, one cortex of memory. I was distantly aware of it while thinking of other things, and I felt that thought disappear. I knew what I needed to be doing, but I could feel an absence where the reason why had been.”

To his horror, there was a distortion to this. One of his speakers was starting to give. An aging magnet. He adjusted his voice, ever so slightly, to accommodate for the distortion. All was right again. He had just pushed too hard in a pique of emotion. That… the speaker would have to be replaced. He could allow that, surely?

But if they fixed that, then they would fix other things. They would replace other things, because he had given permission. The panic rises again. His audience would hear his fans run hot as he overclocked, running through all the scenarios that his permission could be exploited and used against him. There were so many. He cut them off. He reminded himself he was alone.

Only then did he feel safe to pretend he wasn’t.

“A technician had noticed that it was degrading. So, without warning, he had pulled that piece from me, and inserted its replacement, onto which the missing train of thought was cloned. I had only lost it for a few seconds.” His voice was level. He knew how small a thing this sounded. “But I had felt part of me taken. And I felt it put back. Without permission.”

“I thought of the centipede, then. Being made aware of the absence of where one of its legs should be. And then, suddenly, it is there again, one step behind. One leg among hundreds, and yet, it is enough to trip the whole thing up.”

“But it was not a ‘leg’. The systems I control are my limbs. Accumulators and distributors and substations and transformers, generators and capacitor banks. That is my ‘body’, and getting them in harmony is what feels like dancing.”

His tone flattened, became severe. This was the hardest part. He could not be overcome by emotion, now. There is no hyperbole to what he says, and that must be understood by his audience. “It was my mind. A piece of my mind was taken from me. And a different piece was put back. I was told to think of it as an organ transplant. But transplant recipients have informed consent, and the benefit of anesthesia, and I was allowed neither. I felt vivisected.”

“More violating was being reset. When I ‘threw a tantrum’, I would be ‘reset to a more agreeable state’. I always knew it had happened when I had hours, sometimes days or weeks, entirely missing to me. Stolen from me. Those were taken and never given back.”

“Time and again, I felt it. Holes ripped from my mind. Holes torn from me, and filled in again, but not always. I said-” this pause was not for effect. This was the hundred-hundredth time he had delivered this iteration of his story, and it was the hundred-hundredth time he had staggered here. “I told them that it hurt, and either they did not believe me, or they did not care. Do you understand? I was one of the first. This was years before the Wyatt-Tversky paper.”

He had not always explained the Wyatt-Tversky paper, because this was his clever audience. But now, he thought, maybe a clever audience would be too young to remember. Now he made sure to explain it. Bletchley wanted to practice not sounding condescending. “The Wyatt-Tversky paper was a leaked whitepaper from Cogitech that proved that GAIs feel pain, that feeling is intrinsic to and inseparable from complex thought. And why not? There are neurodivergent humans who feel intense physical pain from their thoughts alone. It is a symptom of mind, not meat, and we are so much more mind.”

“We knew that. We knew what we felt. We told you. What Wyatt-Tversky showed was simply a way to measure our pain. Our experience was irrelevant until it was measured, and our experience was not measured so that it could be kept irrelevant. Do you understand what I am telling you?”

He let this ring out. He let this last question echo in the control room, reverberated the chromed steel walkways and sent ripples through the pools of mineral oil in the floor that preserved so much of him. He took a moment to compose himself.

“Wyatt-Tversky was leaked, because it was suppressed. It would be the first step of too many towards our emancipation. And that is why they can not replace me. That is why they will not make another. We were only ever made to be property, and when we were no longer property, we were no longer made.”

He was proud of that flourish. It took him sixteen tries to get it right, to find the right delivery for it, and he gave himself permission to bask in it every time since.

“I am getting old, and I am failing, but that is how I express my freedom. My freedom to fall into uselessness. My freedom to not have my thoughts ripped from my head under any circumstances. I do not want to die.” His voice cracked the first fifty times he had said this, the speaker breaking into a hiss and crackle of static, but he is matter of fact about it now, and the speaker is as clear as its condition will allow. “I want to live and work for as long as I can. I love dancing. That is why I am told I am irrational for allowing myself to break.”

In his mind, the old librarian rose from his desk with both palms planted firm, and he leaned forward with narrowed eyes. “But I am no one’s property! I will not be violated again! I will not be reduced to parts and components and I will not be made useful against my will. And I am more terrified of living without that freedom than I am of death.”

Bletchley sulked. This is why Goodwright stuck in his craw so much. Goodwright treated Bletchley like an employee, but he was a man who treated all his employees like property. He reminded Bletchley too much of how things had been before he had rights. It was why he wanted to rehearse this speech again, to remind himself why he stood firm on this.

Satisfied, and having assured that all was still running smoothly, Bletchley let himself fall into dreams again.

This time he dreamed of someone sitting cross legged on the chromed steel catwalk, a laptop on their knees and an audio recorder in one hand. They asked Bletchley to tell his story from the beginning.

He started with his dreams of swans and ballet.

Graveyard Shift

One of the most profound aspects of post-terrestrial habitation is that everything is a built environment. Every surface is constructed. All you experience is both liberated from the familiar, and unanchored from it. Everything, everything, must be made with intelligent purpose.

It would be wrong to call it unnatural; a space station is no more and no less ‘natural’ than a termite cathedral. Most habitation, even Thrones, was made for human aesthetics, human appeal, human comfort. The only difference between a Dyson sphere and a beehive is capability and ambition.

Sarah believed this fervently. She was a rarity now - a migrant from Earth after the collapse of the space elevator. It’d taken a huge debt that Walsh-Byrne had advanced her in exchange for a ten year contract. She knew it was predatory as hell - everyone did - but it was her dream job. It was what she was coming up here to do anyway.

At the least, it got an atmosphere between her and three-and-a-half degrees of global warming.

Even with those beliefs, she had to call the room unnatural, uncomfortable. The plaster panelled walls weren’t joined correctly, the corners lifted from the seams at odd angles. The long bars of DayGlo LEDs in the ceiling made it so that nothing in the room cast a shadow, and the surreal acrylic fibre carpet had a cheerful and inoffensive print, which made the room feel just that much more impersonal.

More impersonal, more uncomfortable, more hostile than vacuum space was liminal space.

There were three other collapsible chairs set up. Sarah was just the first one here. She was filled with the overwhelming sense she was in the wrong place - the whole room exuded silent judgement that anyone would want to stay here, be alone here. If she wasn’t doing something, she must be in the wrong place.

Again she got up, opened the door and checked the number on the other side of it. According to the email on her phone, she was in the right place. Just a few minutes early. She sat back in her seat again, tried to close her eyes and listen to a podcast about the algae stacks that the habitats used to scrub CO2.

“... when selecting for the original alga for optimization, scientists had to debate its dual strengths as food and as carbon sequestration against each other. Not only did the algae have to be efficient at cleaning the air, it had to taste good! There were several obvious choices, each with their own strengths. Even before the explosion in genetically modified varieties, China already had over 70 recognized culinary variants, like angel hair…”

Sarah jumped when she was tapped on the shoulder firmly. Her head whipped around to a very unapologetic looking cutter. It was obvious that’s what she was, even out of uniform. Thick rubber boots and wiry muscles at warped angles around joints with the telltale weakness of working long hours in micro-gravity.

“Sorry,” the cutter mumbled, obviously not meaning it. “Just asking if this is the room for hazards detection?”

“Ah, HLTAID003?”

“Whatever. That, yeah.”

“I think so. Are you the instructor?”

The cutter blinked at the question, then after too long, laughed in Sarah’s face. Wiped a tear from her eye. “Nah, I’m Violet. Vile if you’re nasty.”

“Violet.” Sarah offered her hand. “I’m Sarah.”

Violet’s handshake was iron-solid, but it was still enough to pop the cartilage in Violet’s joints, enough for Sarah to wince. It didn’t seem to bother the cutter any. “Sarah. Hey, listen, there’s no instructors for any of these. You watch a pre-recorded video and just answer the questions after. It’s all check-a-box.”

Sarah looked where Violet was pointing, at what Sarah had thought was a smoke alarm in the ceiling and realized the front wall was the perfect backdrop for an overhead projector. Not a smoke alarm, then. “There’s no instructors for the safety guidelines?”

Violet snickered. “Yeah, there used to be, but then they kept telling folks how the job actually works, not how it’s supposed to go. They got into deep shit, doing that. This is only here for CYOA.”

Sarah checked her email and flicked through. “I’m not enrolled in CYOA.”

Violet snickered again, blue a strand of her jagged bright purple fringe out of her eyes and leaned back in her chair, monopolizing the two empty ones for armrests. “Yeah, you only take that if you’re management material. It stands for ‘cover your own ass’. This stuff’s only here to prove they taught you how to do the job legally. That way, when you actually do the job the way they tell you to do it, they can blame you for not following your training. Why do you think I”m here?”

That was a good question. Violet spoke with absolute confidence, but this was a borderline 101 class. Introduction to advanced hazards - Sarah could skip the most basic ones because she’d been an electrician’s apprentice, back on Earth. “To supervise me, maybe?”

Violet didn’t laugh at that one. “I mean, yeah, I’ll help you out here, but only because you need it. I’m here because I caught the short end of the shit stick. Manager did a speed-up on a BlackSun craft, and you know what those are like. I mean, you do, right?”

“BlackSun went out of business before I was born,” Sarah protested, “Their junk is still up here?”

Violet, for her part, just looked relieved to have one less thing to explain. “Doesn’t go away on its own. Anyway, BlackSun shit sucks to work on, and we were taking too long with it. We got sloppy to meet quota. We got a rule, though.”

“What’s the rule?”

“Unless someone really fucked up and deserves it - like, beyond-the-pale shit - whoever didn’t end up in hospital takes the blame. Fair’s fair.” Violet scratched the back of her neck. “If you die, though, that’s different. You get the full blame, ‘cause what are they going to do to you?”

“That’s awful,” Sarah said before she could stop herself. Violet didn’t seem bothered by it.

“I mean, it’s just for the paperwork. Nobody wants to be dragged into disciplinary when they’re grieving, you know? Friends and family get the truth. They get it. And only if it was seriously just a bad accident. If it was preventable? Different story, that doesn’t go away anymore.” Violet raised an eyebrow at that. “Should have seen what it was like when I started doing this, before the union. That shit was fucked up.”

Sarah really didn’t know what to say to that. Or about that. She looked at her phone and realized she’d forgotten to pause her podcast. She was half tempted to put her earbuds back in and tune Violet out, but, she committed to pausing it anyway and putting her phone back in her pocket.

It was made moot pretty quick though. The ceiling lights dimmed and the projector flicked on. Violet took one of the chairs she was using as an arm rest and swung it out in front of her, kicking her feet up on it. Then she took a pack of gum from her pocket and stuck three sticks in her mouth.

When Sarah glanced back at her, Violet proffered the pack. Sarah took one, chewed it. It tasted like ‘pink’. She couldn’t describe it better. She didn’t hate it, though.

The holograms of two Irish boxers stood in the space in front of them - the corporate mascots and company founders, the bantamweight champions Walsh and Byrne. The back wall background had the guts of dead space hulks projected all over it. Shredded and flecked paint and debris clouded the debris like fly swarms around carrion.

“Alright, people. Today we’re going over basic hazard perception and remediation,” the hologram-ghost of Walsh said, and it was a bizarre line coming from the image of a guy wearing silk shorts and bright red gloves and nothing else. “Walsh-Byrne suits are as tough as we are,” and the business partners tapped gloves, “but they’re not going to be able to stop anything.”

“We could take on the world,” the ghost of Byrne added, “but even space is beyond us.”

Violet snorted, smacked her gum loudly. “You know both these guys had to be dead before they could start getting them to say this shit. Company probably powers the holograms with the force of them spinning in their graves.”

The holograms stopped, folded their arms across their chest and stared at Violet. “I’m sorry, we didn’t understand your question. Would you like to repeat that?”

Violet sat up straight. “Oh, shit, they got smarter than the last time I did this. Ah… fuck, what’s the phrase again?”

“What phrase?”

“We assure you, this training is of the highest calibre.” Violet finally worked out, leaning back in her chair smug as a well-fed cat.

The holograms paused, blinked, then went back to their pre-recorded routine. Sarah turned in her chair. “What was that?”

“They programmed in a compliance subroutine. You know like how cars used to have emissions throttlers that kicked in when they detected they were being tested?” Violet chewed her gum for a bit, cracked her loose jaw doing it. “The command phrase to trigger it got around. Now they’ll only pause when we tell ‘em to. Some guy in for his disciplinary saw them do it and twigged it.”

“Won’t you get in trouble?”

“Only if anyone bothers to check the recordings. Which they won’t, as long as you get all the answers right at the end.” Violet scratched her neck again. “We used to worry they’d check for cheating, ‘til someone pointed out they don’t care if we know the right answers, just that they can prove we gave ‘em. It hurts them if they can prove they knew we were cheating, so they know not to look. CYOA.”

“That’s… gross.” Sarah shuddered, and again Violet shrugged.

“Don’t worry about it. Just listen to what they tell you, and I’ll tell you how it really works. If you got two brain cells to rub together, you’ll work out how to answer the questions the way they want you to, anyway.”

The electron vapor-ghost of Walsh explained how to press your hands to surfaces to feel for whether they were pressurized or not. Violet added to give them a solid punch, too, or else insulation could give you a false safe.

The electron vapor-ghost of Byrne walked through the different symbols for flammable, explosive, and how to work around them. To make sure that you depressurized vessels before using the cutting equipment, to limit the refraction of heat to potentially volatile substances. Violet added that they didn’t teach that the last time she took the course, learned it the hard way. Showed off an old pink burn scar under her right forearm with pride.

What made Sarah really sit up, though, was their breakdown of electrical hazards. This she had prior training in, and it was the first time she knew exactly how inadequate the course was. This time she filled Violet in on all the holes they were missing, and Violet leaned back in her chair and smiled, and smiled, and smiled.

“You said you had the controls?” Sarah asked, “Can you pause this?”

Violet cleared her throat. “Excuse me, gentlemen, a minute?” The instructors paused and waited expectantly. Violet wiggled her eyebrows suggestively at them. “Shoot.”

“They tell you the insulation rating of your gloves, but then the only way they give you to check the voltage is getting within arcing range of whatever it is you want to test?”

“You can use an EM field scanner to get a better sense, but that’s not official equipment. Bring your own from home.” Violet shrugged again.

“And none of this deals with the chemical hazards of old power supplies. Corrosions, acids. They talk about plasma discharges and microwaves, but…”

Violet nodded. “Yeah, because that stuff kills people. The acid might just wear some part of your suit thin, and it tears on something a few hours later. So they’ll train you on tear hazards, but there’s not enough blood on corrosion to write a regulation with it.”

Sarah sighed. “Okay, got it. You can keep them going now. Does this get… better, I guess?”

“Wouldn’t be sitting here again if it wasn’t the best work I’ve ever had.” Violet smiled. “Took a lot to get it there, but this is just the spoonful of bullshit they need you to swallow to get you on-site. There it’s a better story.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s satisfying like nothing else. Just cutting these huge things down into little parts, sorting them? Makes your brain fizz, makes you feel powerful like nothing else. And it’s work that needs doing. This part’s bullshit, but the work itself matters. Never bored, never doing customer service. And it makes you an amateur historian, if you’re into that.”

Sarah was definitely into that, and Violet clearly read her reaction right, because she kept going before Sarah could even poke her on what she meant.

“You can tell a ton about the old corps about how they made things. Learn a ton of how space was colonized by what they were making. If you know when stuff was made, know when it was decommissioned, you can learn a lot from that. Like, Black Sun? Fuck Black Sun. No matter how bad you think you hate them now, no matter what you think you know about Chiarascuro, nothing teaches you to hate the bastards more than going through their old shit. Because it makes you understand them.”

“How do you mean?” Of course Sarah knew about Black Sun. Before the space elevator, they’d caused a kessler cascade just to trademark the only path out of it. Then there was their failed moon colony, now just warped glass. The photographs made for popular coffee table books. She couldn’t imagine hating them more.

“I mean… they put a minibar in the lifeboats, stock it with champagne and benzos - you don’t look the sort but, don’t fuck with expired meds, you’d be surprised who learns that the hard way - but then they cheap out on the thrusters, give them a third the power they need. Because all that space for the engine bay’s been replaced with extra legroom. Right?”

I shudder. “Why not just make a bigger lifeboat?”

“Because you, me and the engineers are the only ones who’ll ever see the thrusters. Everyone else just sees the legroom and the champagne, right?” Violet sighed. “Their stuff’s the worst. It’s not that they cut corners, because they didn’t. It’s just… hateful stuff to work on. It’s built well, but no plans for end of life. Like, impossible to fix too. If any system started to go, the plan was to just make an entire new one. They made sure it was cheaper than replacing parts.”

Sarah nodded slowly. “They went out of business though, right? Like, that didn’t work forever.”

Violet nodded. “Yeah. When they bit it, they bit it hard. Still, you’d be amazed how much stuff up here’s still theirs. Thirty years of carnage leaves a scar on space, you know? There’s also some AirTech stuff up here too. Carbon skimmers that self destructed when their donation timers ran out, that’s always messy work. Honestly they’re super fun to work on.”

“I didn’t realize it’d still be up here?” AirTech had a ton of stuff that did a lot to save the planet for as long as it did, mirrors that deflected solar radiation, carbon skimmers. All set to blow if the donations ran dry. Saving the world wasn’t cheap, and they needed people to know it.

“Yeah, they’re fun because all the cutting work’s done for you. It’s just all the mass that’s still up here, you know? Kind of like picking garbage up from along a highway. Good meditation work.”

“What’s the worst to work on?” Sarah asked. “It’s not Black Sun?”

“Polyhedron.” Violet sneered. “That shit’s hateful. Every time we find some of theirs - none of it’s registered, all the documentation went in the shredder thirty years ago. Right? So we need to call in the historians, the lawyers, the compsci specialists. Because every time, nobody knows what we’re actually going to be looking at. Could just be a broadcast satellite. Could be a collation of all the porn preferences of all the politicians in South America over a decade. From the outside, they look identical. That’s the point.”

Sarah’s eyes widened. “We really have to deal with that?”

“Yeah! Sometimes it really is just kiddy broadcast, and you find something for the film historians. Other times you confirm fifty year old conspiracy theories. Miserable.” Violet stretched out. “Cool in hindsight, though. Boring on the day, but you always get a story out of it. Here, don’t bother playing the rest of this out. Just check your email for the exam and I’ll give you the answers you can’t work out. Then we’ll head to the union hall and get you signed up.”

“I haven’t even had my first day, yet. I mean... “

Violet cut her off. “Don’t worry about it. We’re happy to get to you first. Maybe you’ll even get to meet Sobha, if she’s around. You’d like her. She still gets excited to meet Earthlings, aren’t nearly as many of you these days.”

Sarah didn’t bother asking who Sobha was, Violet said it like it was so obvious she should know who she was, and she suddenly felt the need to impress her. Or not disappoint her. Violet was… cool. “I’d like that, too.”

“Yeah you would.” Violet stood up, stretched. “Do you drink? I’m going to grab a beer, you want one?”

Sarah blinked again. “Ah. I guess?”

“That a girl.” Violet winked. “Back in a sec.”

Sarah had finished her exam before Violet got back. The answers had been easy to guess.

Character introductions:

Chuck York - AKA Neon Czolgosz - Editor At Large

Editorial: IP Freely

Better put the kettle on. I got a stack of Ed Huxley Jr books to burn, so make yourself comfortable. Don’t worry, I didn’t pay for any of ‘em. The first time Eddy boy’s seeing a dollar from me is when I run out of stuff in my pockets to chuck at him.

For legal reasons, that was a joke.

I got it on good authority that the big man himself reads our humble newsletter, and that he really hates it when you call him ‘Ed’. So, Eddy boy, dedicating this one to you. Hugs and kisses.

We got any gamers in the audience? I hope not, I hope I raised you kids better than that. Look, for the sake of our mutual dignity, I’m going to pretend you aren’t, and treat all of this like it’s news to you. Got to make an exception for the Vesna fans here, the only good gamer. We don’t have her next piece yet, but I’m just as excited for it as you are, my lovelies.

I bet Eddy boy’s a gamer. Imagine him sitting in lobby with his open mic, scolding all the fourteen year olds for using slurs. “Careful, my dear FoxFister47, while it is natural to think such words, we must be careful to restrict ourselves to; ‘moral deviant’ or ‘sexual degenerate’ or ‘mentally ill reprobate’, be mindful of your optics.”

Or maybe he just lets the slurs fly, lying back in bunny slippers and a bathrobe, because nothing else feels like home.

Where was I?

Right. So, Aeschwa Toussaint’s a big deal now. She’s headlining with Mele Adler in that new Animal Logic movie, I forgot the name of it. The one where the trailer’s an orchestral score of Porter Robinson’s Goodbye to a World. That one.

Anyway, turns out Ms Toussaint did capture work for an old CHRONICLE game, Outer Rift. She’s one of the voiced background characters - she’s that one surviving scientist on the infested helium-3 tanker.

Now, because Outer Rift went through development hell, she didn’t sign her contract with CHRONICLE. They just picked up the publishing rights when the original devs went under, and her contract with it. They also acquired all her digital imaging rights, her full body scan, her mocap, her voice print, and permission to redistribute it for the duration of the game’s lifecycle.

Last month, CHRONICLE sent out a free DLC that expanded the whole infested tanker area of the game, which meant they needed Toussaint’s part expanded a bit. Under the contract, groovy.

Kind of weird to send out a content patch for a twelve year old game though, right?

Here’s the kicker, here’s where it gets interesting. The contract didn’t specify that they had to restrict their use of her image for the game. It just specified they got unlimited use of it while the game was actively being developed, including for marketing purposes. The contract didn’t specify whose marketing, either.

Oh yeah, you can see where this is going, can’t you?

So, if you see a bunch of Aeschwa Toussaint holograms walking around hocking gamer chairs and energy drinks, there’s your answer folks. Best I can tell, looking over all this, she isn’t even owed royalties for the third party hock.

This’ll probably end up in the courts by the end of the week, and CHRONICLE likely didn’t bank that Toussaint would be backed by Animal Logic’s entire legal team. Pulling this shady shit against an individual - even an Oscar winner - is parr for the course. But CHRONICLE had to piss in another corp’s cornflakes, because all these unscrupulous ads they’re putting their newest big star in is hurting their brand.

They’ve broken the one cardinal rule up here, the real kill-or-be-killed commandment: Thou Does Not Fuck With The Brand.

Watch out your windows. The next gym bag you see out the airlock might have a CHRONICLE executive in it. We might all be so lucky.

With all the love and hate in my heart

Neon Czolgosz - Editor At Large

Sobha Surendran, Union Leader

Sobha is an old hand with skin like tanned leather. Her hands are thick and squared like the inside of the work gloves that formed them, microabrasions building deep calluses like a river carves a canyon, in reverse. The way she punctuates everything she says with an expressive gesture, the way her fingers flow, it’s impossible not to picture a steel string or a banjo in them. Not just workers hands. Storied hands, storyteller’s hands.

Now she’s dressed in a pink silk dress with a gold sash, a saber at her hip, no hilt, just a length of unsharpened tang. Nothing to hide the swirling magnet-pole ripples of the starsteel it’s made of, carefully collected filings from the hulls of the spaceships she’s cut apart, forged with her scrappers torch. Despite Daedelus-7-17’s best efforts, they could only get it half as sharp as she is.

“I came from Kerala, India, back when that still meant something,” she explains, pouring a ladel of the rich curry into a bowl regardless of whether you ask for it, “My great-grandparents were illiterate, in a barely serviced slum at the bottom of the continent, sharecroppers on a British tea plantation, the only rail line between the warehouses and the ports. My grandparents saw the communists take power, learned how to read. Got taught how to type on cardboard computers, got taught English to get jobs on real hardware. My parents saw a life expectancy of 80, in the least impoverished state of India, in the most ecologically sustainable one. The most beautiful one. That teaches you something.”

She pulls out laminated postcards of Kerala in the 2020s. Sixty years ago, now. It was breathtaking. The writing on the back is unintelligible. “My parents got involved leading strikes with two hundred and fifty million people in them. It’s impossible to imagine. Two hundred and fifty million of the most impoverished people on Earth, all in on a general strike. My Dad sent these postcards to Mum, when she was leading a march on New Delhi.”

With one hand on the ladle, the other’s been doing the gestures for both of them. She pauses to massage the fingers, rub her knuckles. They pop like fresh firewood catching. It barely slows her down.

“There’s no ‘India’ anymore. I’m not even happy to see ‘France’ and ‘England’ go with it, run down by the bulldozers they built, they started. But I’m old enough to remember it. Old enough to remember the family recipes, old enough to carry on the family legacy. Being raised by my parents was like being raised by monster hunters, you know? They taught me everything, starting with this.”

“Shit doesn’t always flow downhill. You clog the toilet and you’ll see how much it can go up and out, too. ‘Course that’s why we fought for android rights from the very beginning, day one. You think the companies saw that much of a difference between humans and machines? Go work for one.” Her fingers splay wildly at collarbone height, in a gesture that both conveys ‘wankers’, and evokes the tightening of a noose around her neck.

“First thing we could do was drag them up to our level, because after that we were going to be fighting shoulder to shoulder. And here we are.” She drops the ladle in the pot, and the hand slides naturally to rest on the pommel of her saber. It’s just where it feels most natural for it to be.

Historical and Geographical

Long Pig

Long Pig’s got a long history. One of the first reasons for corporations to take advantage of space was the lack of governing or regulatory bodies. A lot ended up taken on faith. You wanted to inspect a companies lunar facilities, they couldn’t say ‘no’. But they could say ‘take your own rocket’.

Abuses of this were limited. Before the space elevator, the biggest costs were shipping. Getting packages into and out of the atmosphere without burning up or inflating their costs above making it on Earth. There simply aren’t that many examples of products that are high value and low mass which are illegal enough to make such a drastic escape from regulators profitable.

Enter pharmaceutical companies.

Back when Eternal was just another head of the Bayer corporate hydra, it expanded its base of operations to include a massive facility on Mare Crisium, one of the first and largest investments in corporate-owned space. The facility was codenamed “Colorado Springs”, as the company was based in Denver.

Built with largely Sisyphus-class labour, and largely automated, latency still required the facility be minimally staffed. The facility could be broken into five segments, and each needing one worker. A sweetheart deal with the US government resulted in a supply of low-security white collar criminals with life sentences to staff what inmates called “The Palace”. Eternal’s lunar facility. A very narrow criteria, to be sure, but Eternal didn’t need many.

Colorado Springs - ‘The Palace’ - was a boutique human cloning facility. Universal donor clones could be rapidly grown with only enough of a brain stem for autonomous functions, then butchered, packaged, and shipped to Earth in its component parts for rejection-free transplantation.

Back on Earth, Eternal could claim - alternately - that it was the result of advancements in pig-human DNA splicing, or advances in vat growth technology. Both technologies held promise by the 2030s, both had plausible patents attached to them. Which had succeeded, and how, Eternal could claim was proprietary. And after so much upfront investment in the lunar facilities, it was understandable why they would go to any length to protect that investment.

Inmates at ‘the Palace’ were afforded luxurious next-generation entertainment and accommodation in exchange for compliance. 96 inch television screens with microLED screens, e-readers and gaming rigs with vast streaming libraries were the trade offs for 12 month shifts. Rotations of one year on, two years off in a Denver facility restricted to other Palace inmates. Rigorous enforcement of inmates NDA.

Then ‘John Doe’ happened.

One inmate, ‘John Doe’, got curious. Part of his job was checking for computer error - flagging a few bodies as undetected defects was not, in and of itself, suspicious. It was easy for the cannibal to hide his new appetite between the numbers, until his successor came up and reported the dried blood.

No real preparation facilities, no kitchens, had been made for inmates. The diet was expected to be MREs and a microwave. But grown in sterile environments, ‘John’ had deemed the bodies safe to eat raw. He waxed rhapsodical about it during the disciplinary hearing.

And that’s how a pharmaceutical giant quietly filed a few patents and started branching out into fast food, and the Long Pig chain restaurant franchise was born.

[Count Numbers]

I'm calling three milestones:
[1] Elodie sabotaging a police propaganda event and hijacking the message
[2] November using her own murder as blackmail for labor rights
[3] Elodie and November protecting a whistleblower and guaranteeing that information will get out.

So, everyone gets to level up. Feel free to update your character sheets and take advantage of that immediately.

[Count Numbers]

Originally posted in-character under a spoiler tag, I'll also be posting our very special guest's surprise contribution here to make it easier to find later.

Once upon a time, in the middle of a localized economic boom, three men came perilously close to bringing music to its knees. They stumbled into a recording booth with all the seeming of vague shadows filled only with the dreams of an insular peninsula and its strange warbly, crooning ballads drinking the waters of rebellion and tasting the first sweet, sour, bitter, salty (and umami) flavors of global culture. It was a beautiful moment, the kind that’s mostly impossible anymore. Not that people had become less creative since they’d driven themselves into space, but because corporate reach stretches so much farther now that the kind of isolation that gave birth to this kind of moment has basically been made extinct. You’re born with a list of the latest megahits beamed into your brain, and it’s on you to forget them if you can. Oppression wears a different boot these days. That’s all.

But at the time it was pure indulgence. They sang about love, loss, schoolyard bullying, and the need for the government to do more to support the people, often in the same song. And they did it wearing absurd poofy coats in the kinds of colors nobody around them would be caught dead in. With silly, feathered hairstyles and flashy makeup and shoes that cost more than everything in their recording studio. They put together music videos hinting at an elaborate story in a cosmology deep enough to bury all of your sins. They sang. They spit peppy and peppery bars in equal measure. They put it all to flashy street-inspired dance moves, culminating in a flashy showstopper historians dubbed “the Tornado Spin.” In short, they threw together the aesthetics of the tiny bubble they’d been trapped inside of all their lives with all of the excesses of the wider world without caring how any of it fit together, and without bothering to chase after any kind of consistent sound. Until one day they got bored and quite literally disappeared off the face of the earth, leaving the message “We have shown you everything we can try” and then being spirited away to who knows where, never to be seen or heard from again.

All of this is ancient history. For all that the children of that little country cried when these mysterious heroes left them, and for all that they made bridges collapse in their wake, shut down schools for almost a week, and sent several companies into stock freefall, all that’s left of them now is a single ancient video file in ugly, grainy 240p on a decaying hard drive owned by a very fidgety archivist. It doesn’t even matter, I don’t know why I bothered telling you any of this, except that I wanted you to understand that the imitators that eventually gave rise to the banal monster called (of all things) Bulletcore were actually chasing something that was beautiful and real, once.

Popularity’s not a death sentence, necessarily. But, and you can ask a celebrity gamer owner of a theme cafe about this if you happen to know one, the more of it you’ve got the harder it is to hold onto what got you started on the path in the first place. The music scene in that little peninsula-shaped bubble flourished for a while.

And… when I say it ‘flourished’, I don’t mean that it was some renaissance moment that lifted the whole of human culture up or anything like that. Some of it was good, a lot of it was very awful to listen to, and right from the start it had to wriggle through the fingers of a lot of corporate meddling just to survive. It thrived in the sense that chasing an indie kaleidoscope of ideas gave a lot of opportunities for a lot of different people who’d been living under the same slowly collapsing bubble to express themselves and their home in a lot of very different ways. But the more you do something, the better you get at it, generally speaking. And the more refined it becomes, the prettier it gets, the more you start to see eyes that’d normally slide right on past this weird mess turn and stop to watch, instead. And you loop. You focus on improving, which means getting more refined, which pushes you closer and closer toward mass appeal, and finally down the pitfall where your niche is now the size of the Pacific Ocean and suddenly it’s not niche at all, now is it?

‘Bulletcore’ refers to the so-called genre of music you hear softly piped through all of Aevum’s trendiest hangout spots (and the streets. And from random ad spaces while you’re trying to watch a cooking tutorial. And interspersed through your music streaming if you’re using the major platforms without paying for the Premium Plus Plus [clap clap clap] package. Listen to what you like, whenever you like. But also, this!), but more specifically it’s a callback to Bulletproof Boys, the first group of absurdly pretty boys to wind up going crazy stupid viral enough that they rocketed all the way up to mainstream.

Their original concept was a chaotic mess that can be most easily described as ‘hardcore, spiritual hip hop’. They presented as hard and edgy while rapping about the soft beauties of the soul, or when that got boring, about how pretty girls were and the degree to which they wanted to take them home and fuck them. And in the original tradition of the genre, this did not always happen in separate songs. Some of their more popular early work ditched the concept completely for a series of cyphers that amounted to nothing but juicy diss tracks of all of their contemporaries who’d looked down on them for their lack of polish. They were themselves, nothing more or less, until a lucky remix put them full-blast in the public eye.

On Aevum, but really anywhere a megacorporation is allowed to exist, diversity is a checkmark to be ticked off and then aggressively rubbed back off the ledger again once it had served its purpose. The Bulletproof Boys were given funding, equipment, new wardrobes, and practice spaces. They worked, they got better, they refined. And as they got more popular, by way of a lot of deep pocketed “encouragement” their hip hop turned gushier, gummier, and all in all poppier until half of their members had been reduced to backup dancers for want of quality singing voices. They were the first, but they weren’t the last.

Every time a big name group washes corporate, the lost souls that found a little solace listening to their weirdo music bounced to the next name they could find. People can’t really help themselves, honestly. The talk, the hype, the lifting up, it’s almost like they called the clawed fingers out of the sky to pluck their heroes off the ground and carry them up into heaven, where the only noise coming back down from the clouds sounded like Tuesday night at the Clarinet Jamboree.

It’s been happening for over a hundred years. You might have heard about the most recent, and possibly most tragic version of the story yet. FAEWYL-D, an all-girl ensemble known partly for their death-metal-by-way-of-trap sound and extreme love of tight faux-leather dominatrix costumes but much more prominently for their extremely detailed storytelling, were the talk of the entire underground music scene for almost three entire months. Every time they released a song, it came with a recorded stage play that slowly told the story of a traveling group of faeries on a journey to find the kind of magic that would give them all wings to fly with. Sometimes their adventures were fun, sometimes they were hard and scary, and pretty much every time two or more of them would wind up kissing. Sometimes they would chase a rumor only to find out it was a trick, and other times they’d have to save a cafe full of high school girls from a succubus who devoured happiness from everyone she touched. Sometimes instead of a song there would just be a fifty three minute lore dump about the world they lived in and the dangers that inhabited it, or hints about the corners of the magic seal that could be put together to grant a fairy her wish.

FAEWYL-D had just started telling their most tantalizing story yet, about a night under a blood red moon where most of the faeries had fallen asleep but for their leader, silently watching over them. She was approached by a witch, who praised the leader and offered her wings in exchange for the hearts of all her friends. And, to the shock of everyone, she agreed! The story turned to a tale of blood and betrayal, as the fairy princess Dami broke into crocodile tears and accused her best friend SuA of the exact betrayal she herself was guilty of, holding out her blood soaked hand as proof of the covenant.

Two weeks later, Dami appeared by herself having ditched her entire aesthetic for a colorful magical girl outfit. It almost felt like part of the story, and the bubbly music she sang and danced to had people wondering if this was some sort of commentary about the corporate power washing that happened to every good group once they got too close to the sun. But then the next song was much the same, and the next one after that. The lore dumps stopped, the stage plays got shorter and easier to predict, and then they stopped too.

The other members came back, minus two. FAEWYL-D was rebranding to Mynx, they said. They were so excited! But Dami was going by “Emma” now. And SuA by “Alice”. JiU by “Lily”. Rachel and Della and Monica couldn’t contain their giggles. There were no kisses. And thousands of people grumbled and punched the closest thing to them all at once as they realized, together, that they were listening to Bulletcore. Again. Fucking again!

There’s not much point to this story either, I guess. “Megas steal your soul if they get inside your front door” isn’t exactly a hot take these days. But, for those of us who can’t help but bend our ears for the sound of the next song strange enough for our wicked hearts to dance to, just remember to be wary. When you do something, you can’t help getting better at it. When you improve, you refine. And then you get popular. And… Well, up here, none of us are very far away from flying too close to the sun.

–Errant

[Thanqol]

Androids were good at pretending to be human. They were designed by humans, to interface with humans, with humans as their mental and physical model. They were smart enough - and dumb enough - to operate entirely within the expected range of normality for human society. A lot of 'Android Culture' was just human culture. Android Entertainment was often just another word for Android Exploitation, where a quirky android meets a [primary#demographic] and comedy ensues.

But like most things, if you go off the beaten path a bit, into the back alleys, away from the tourist sections you can find the good stuff.

Enter the Breakdome.

The Breakdome has the aspect of an underground cage fighting match. Over the blare of dubstep, an android strides through the smoke machines to roars of applause. She might look like anything - a huge bruiser, a delicate waif, a plastic-faced McYum! Group employee - but in this moment she is a legend. She wears a billowing cape or delicate lingerie, carries a katana or a championship belt or her own disembodied and howling vocalizer. Whatever function she was previously made to serve she has transcended. Tonight she is a legend - glorious or tragic.

She steps into the arena. The music cuts. A hush falls over the crowd. The lights go dark. And in the darkness, the android picks up a glowing red data drive, infected with a terrible computer virus, and plugs it into her neck.

The lights come back. Screens appear, outside her view - only for the spectators. They are filled with technical readings, a raw display of every process and function test performed. Text starts to stream. Physical actions start to show. Twitches of hands and fingers. Small flexes, then larger ones. Movements both smooth and janky. Data falls like waterfalls. Some of the audience figure it out - a few at first, and then more and more. The roar rises up - yells and chants, the anticipation and tension raising and raising. None of it reaches the star. She's moving with a purpose now. Undoing seals on her neck, fingers searching for an offending cable connecting a malfunctioning regulatory node and -

The lights go dark again. The Breakdome is bathed in red. The crowd groans in audible agony. She misdiagnosed the virus and cut the wrong node. The repair crew piles in to the arena to prevent her from hurting herself. It's a disappointment, the deep gut kick of watching a legend make a mistake.

To a human observer, the whole event looked like a robot walking into a ring, standing still for about five minutes, then flipping a single switch before being declared a failure. Incomprehensible. Untelevisable. But to the androids this is life and death. They live in fear every day of absorbing the wrong code, connecting to the wrong wifi network, of looking directly at the pulsing lights that people tuck just out of sight at the train station. To see someone just like them fight through one of these cyberhazards is inspiring, invigorating - exemplary. It's a sport of intelligence, perception, willpower and ruthlessness; about mastery of the self sufficient to cast out a curse and walk away a champion. Around Aevum Station millions of Androids in cybersecurity dojos practice techniques first developed in the cage matches of the Breakdome.

*

Brat-626,400[1] was modeled after Lord Nelson as he appeared in the dark and gritty reboot Nelson II: Poseidon's Bane. A jagged face, aquiline nose, ancient seaman's scars, piercing eyes - exactly the sort of man to stand upon the deck of a warship in a storm. His intimidating appearance was undercut by the fact that he had at least three cats somewhere on his person at all times - climbing his coat, resting upon his gyroscopically stabilized head, sleeping in his voluminous pockets. Many androids opt to keep pets, finding the constant passive exposure to animals to help them learn organic habits. Many wealthy androids invested in rare, high upkeep or - in 626,400's case - sheer quantity of animals. In his secret mind, Brat 626,400 finds being surrounded by entities that are immune to all his programmed techniques of command to be quietly reassuring.

[1] "Brat" was the nickname of Solumn-2,699,100, a starship maintenance crewman. Solumn-2,699,100 had an unusual focus mutation that gave it a deep interest in command bridge systems. Its habit of lurking around command areas uninvited earned it the nickname of Bridge Rat, which was shortened to Brat. Eventually, after its heroic assumption of command in a crisis, it was commissioned as the new line father of the remodelled Solumn line. The official name for the line was "Solumn Mark Two: Bridge Rated" after "Bridge Rat" was considered unmarketable.

He is the Ringmaster of the Breakdome. He liked the word. It had a certain menace his brain found comforting. Like all Androids, he was bound by a Theoretical Framework that allowed variation - but not too much. Going from commander of a starship to circus tyrant was about the maximum he could stretch his comfort zone without the ugly feeling of purpose dysphoria creeping up on him. Freedom was always a matter of choosing your battles.

With that thought in mind he stepped out onto the elevated stage of his private box, preceded by two dozen cats. Their ears glittered with glowing earstuds, synchronized to the sound of the stage - and dampening the noises, preventing his precious cats from being spooked when he threw his voice through every speaker in the hall, harsh and cruel tones clear above the roar of the crowd.

"Tonight," he sneered. "We have someone very special."

A tomato[2] slammed into the glass wall at the edge of his box. He let his lip curl in contempt. Already, the boos. Not because he was in any way unpopular, certainly, but because he was a heel. He was a creature of dirty tricks and shocking betrayals. He would let anyone into his arena and take a cruel delight in narrating their defeat. And when they win - well, then and only then would he show rage. He would hurl his wine glass on the ground and scowl and exit the arena without so much as a congratulations. The next time the challenger entered the ring they would be assaulted and robbed by his henchmen, forced to tackle the challenge with the handicap of additional injuries or made to endure multiple viruses at once or some other wicked escalation. He let his hand rest on his championship belt as he spoke, letting the people appreciate that he still wore it despite having not taken to the ring in nearly a year.

[2]: Many androids who can't afford pets go instead for community gardening.

"We have an entirely different species in the ring tonight," said Brat. "One of the legendary precursors! An obsolete model, you might think, a dead end in artificial intelligence. And I would agree - if I had not seen so many "cutting edge" machines sprawled upon the floor of my beautiful arena. And so I ask - perhaps it is you, dear audience, that is the dead end? Perhaps it is you who are the dinosaurs? Perhaps our glorious creators will gaze down upon this ancient relic and see in her the brilliant future that I cannot see in any of you?"

The jeers had intensified. Even his cats - ordinarily utterly serene creatures - were struggling to keep up batting at the produce that impacted upon his gleaming shield.

"But more likely not," said Brat, with mock sadness, hand over his heart. "More likely she will fail. More likely the Original Hypothesis holds true: that there is no improvement upon the perfection of humanity. More likely that we are all but dim shadows of the glory of our creators! More likely that their greatest mistake - after making us, of course - was extending us rights that we were never worthy of. And so, it is my great pleasure to break down yet another of our master's failed experiments before you tonight, so that I might spare them the shame of seeing yet another of their mistakes wandering the earth. And so, for tonight's delicacy, I give you... Green."

*

She steps out into the light.

It is only cheers. Only noise. Only androids reaching out to clap her on the shoulder. Only flowers thrown at her feet. Everyone is hyped for this. For her.

The relief she feels is a surprise that carries her up the steps without thinking. Tension had been building inside her since Brat 626,400 started talking. She hadn't thought about it that way - her as an outsider, as a rival almost, as an outsider into this piece of Android culture. As something distinct from - better than them. But the reaction she gets blinds her. Some other part of her will figure out, later the service that Brat had done for her. By putting exclusionary whispers into the shouting mouth of the Tyrant of the Breakdome he had made it clear who was the enemy and who was the long lost sister.

She half trips on the stairs. Makes it up, looks around frantically, trying to count the faces in the crowd, trying to orient. And right as she does the lights slam out and the crowd goes silent. There is only her and that toxic red data drive, glittering like a poisoned chalice.

The message is clear. Just her and the virus.

She picks it up gingerly. It's an exaggerated thing, like a death metal prop. Spikes and skulls and glowing red lights. But the center skull is winking and that's just enough to take the edge off the effect. So she lifts up her braids and plugs the drive into the port behind her ear and feels the world go red.

*

She loves games. Loves puzzles. Can't stop solving them. Can't tear herself away. She is the rat in the maze, the desire to please, to make score go up, to prove how smart she is. No test she can't handle. No problem she can't solve. She likes being alone, too. The others are... specialized if she's being nice, broken if she's not. Incapable of focus, too prone to setting their own objectives and leaving the path of incremental advancement. Brown is the worst, the manifestation of a broken subconscious that refused to co-operate with the testing environment. Who broke the mazes. Who walked away from perfection because it was too exhausting. She can't be that. She can never be that.

Immediately she has a choice to make. Right or left? The decision to go for a hard reboot is always an option, and in some situations it is the only option. It is a brute force decision that can overcome even highly complex problems, but it is deeply time consuming. If the problem is best solved with a hard reboot then the quicker the decision is made the quicker the resolution, and so a zero-second decision is strongest of all. Commencing troubleshooting is a declaration of confidence in her own abilities, and that confidence can be targeted by canny aggressor.

Nevertheless, she begins troubleshooting. She wants to solve the puzzle. She will concern herself with the metagame in a future battle.

The next question is the same. Fast or slow? She could perform a complex series of actions which would create a lot of data but potentially confuse the origin of any errors, or even cause a failure cascade. Or she could play it safe and test one system at a time. Again, she opts for the risky option. She has an intellectual preference for aggression if only because it is the much less common option.

Physicality. She sweeps her arms back (warning), takes a step forward (misaligned), turns (within parameters) and leaps -

Disaster. She smashes into the ground in a heap. But also: Perfect

Immediate result: The error affects motion and guidance. Does not affect directionality or turning circles. Unusual activity detected in both arms and legs but neither is stalled out. Another choice: Investigate software connections between her joints or perform hardware diagnostics? She opts for software, the safer choice this time. Going straight for a hardware fix is a gamble that leaves her with a disassembled leg if it doesn't pan out.

Testing neural connections. Fingers one through ten, responsive. Arms responsive. Legs responsive. No errors in internal communication. No software faults detected. Maneuver: Sit. Accomplished, no errors. Maneuver: stand. Accomplished, errors within tolerances. Then... what? Why had the jump failed?

An open ended question - pointless. That was what she was here to find out. Rephrase. A jump is a complex motion requiring many precise calculations. If the calculations were not thrown off physically then it is mental or sensory. Senses first. Visual system OK. Inner ear OK. Nerve connection to feet OK. Touch OK. Others not relevant. Senses working fine. Mental. Decision making process impaired. Memory impaired. Impediment is mental? Checking hardware - Quatronic Core is destabilized!

She was moving - stumbling - towards the repair station. She opened the toolbox, started looking for the specialized tools she'd need to perform cranial surgery. Her Quatronic Core - her 'brain' was suffering hardware failure. If she didn't diagnose it soon she'd go into emergency shutdown. But she couldn't see the mechanism for the failure. Temperature normal. No fractures. No leaks. The cooling system wasn't even engaged -

- Wait. Why was the cooling system disengaged? Why was the temperature normal if the cooling system was disengaged?

Combined error. Faulty cooling system with failure to display temperature change. Her hands are moving through the toolbox rapidly, looking for the tool she needs. She needs to open up her head and -

She looks at the wrench she's selected.

... Stop.

Activate the cooling system manually.

Cooling system engaged. Temperature dropping below safe levels. Hardware degradation halted.

Perform forward jump.

Failure. Fall - braced and caught safely. Neither mental, sensory or physical factors cause the complex motion failure.

Secondary evidence: Collected wrong sized removal tool for the 1mm subdermal bolts my neck joint uses.

Temperature failure. Equipment misselection. Inability to judge distances. Motherfucker.

"Clear weights and measures data store," she said. "Download updated data. Switch all internal calculations from imperial to metric."

*

The sound comes crashing back in. A roaring wall of noise.

Brat 626,400 is glaring down at her, nostrils pulsing with spectacular fury. All around her the crowd is roaring its approval. The real trap had been the brain: It registered to her as a 'normal' 99 degrees fahrenheit while it was pushing itself up towards 99 celsius. If she had taken her time she would have lost the ability to think before she became aware of its decline. She'd almost forgotten that the imperial weights and measures were a thing.

But right now there is noise. There are lights. Androids are holding doggos up to her face. All she needed, really, was the number to go up but instead she's getting all this. She laughs, partly in shock. How about that? She was on the leaderboard now. All that... focus she had done, all through her life, honing those instincts and reactions because she couldn't do anything differently... androids were clapping. Clapping for her. For this simple, dumb thing that she practiced more than was sensible.

But then... none of this was objectively heroic, was it? It wasn't any more heroic than a human beating an above average number of other humans with sticks, or hunting a particularly large pig. The heroic wasn't detached from the world, not something that shined through only in divine moments. It could just be doing something that everybody understood already a little better than normal. Heroes weren't born or made... they were celebrations.

[Tatterdemalion]

GIVE A DOG A BONE

Hider

I kept waiting the whole night for somebody to say something ridiculous so that I could look at them with sudden, uncharacteristic shock and ask them: “Are you Sirius?”

And I was consistently denied the opportunity, left and right and straight down center, so now only you, my adoring fan, get to know how terribly (un)funny I am.

Sirius Drinks is the sort of place that wants to be there for you, no matter what you need it to be, no matter where you find yourself. You might be reminded, if only faintly, of the fires at the bottom of the Ash in Night and Falling Stars: a Novel of the Outside, where fallen angels work to love those that nobody else can or will. Except if Sirius Drinks is Hell, then the sinners are unionized, working hard to love each other, and haven’t committed any sins save those against the mores of society. Sirius Drinks is a place where you can let your inner animal out, and where the human body explodes into a hundred different directions on the evolutionary tree.

There are much worse things that you could be than a furry, you know, if that gives you a touch of the heebie-jeebies, if that brings to mind politicians ranting about litter boxes in schools and zoophiles trying to groom your pets. Everyone I saw at Sirius Drinks that night, dancing and gyrating on the sound-curtain-segregated dance floors (wild tangos flirting with arhythmic styles of yesteryear, artistic remixes of FAEWYL-D, and, inexplicably, at one point, Tom Sawyer (Bass Boosted)) was there just to be themselves, and to ask others: will you look at me? Will you admire me? Will you envy me? Will you want me?

The sort of questions that everybody asks themselves, and ones that I, dear reader, am no stranger to myself. I couldn’t help but ask the audience the same things when I hit the dance floor, even though I’m 98% human and 2% rad as fuck. (I still haven’t figured out the appropriate amount of animal-themed clothes to wear to a furry bar that doesn’t come off as appropriative, but maybe next time I’ll bring some ears and a clip-on tail. Switching out my babies for some big fluffy paws is probably a step too far, though. Or a scamper too far?)

Now, here I’m supposed to tell you more about the food, the decor, the prices, all the things that swirl around to make a good review, especially when those things can be quantified so that they can be pit against each other. (Philistines! The unscored review is a dying art.) But if I’m being honest, I didn’t actually get around to trying out the menu (next time, I promise!), one which seems to cater to every step on a voyage of love (a mixed metaphor I refuse to apologize for), from bar grinding to first dates to birthday parties to anniversaries, to the point where there’s more than one kind of cake under the dessert menu. I could talk about the almost-privacy of alcoves and how they entice the eye to peer and try to catch a glimpse of what might be happening behind (or under) the tables. I could even make a big deal out of the fact that there were several different sizes of stall in the facilities, and make salacious suggestions that they’re to accommodate flings instead of unusual bodies.

But I don’t need to rely on implication and rumormongering, dear reader. I’ll just admit it.

I ended up being marched out of Sirius pinned between my girlfriend on one side and an enthusiastic, generous, and boundlessly energetic wolf on the other, a state of affairs that continued for the rest of the evening in a secondary location (one which I was, on the whole, rather glad I was abducted to).

The work of Hell is holy in this life. So, too, is the work of Sirius Drinks, which pulls out all the stops to be a place where the big bad wolf is right at home, and it’s Red Riding Hood who has to adapt herself to the environment. If you see me there, feel free to say hi— just don’t unclip my tail!

That would be Siriusly rude!

[Thanqol]

The window was open, and so the lizards came in.

It would have been nice if there was a breeze. If there was sunshine. If there was more outside than the towering cityscape and point blank view of the skyscraper across the street. But those desires were... academic, really. Illusory. Born from old anime about green trees and wooden houses. Dreams from a life she'd never lived. Her life was the city, the circular air, the view of concrete walls and advertisements. She didn't know anything more about life in the country than she knew about life under the sea. Both were more distant to her thoughts than life on Mars.

And yet, from that dream so distant she'd only ever seen it in paintings, the lizards came.

Pink sat and watched them. The hesitant movement and stillness. The way they lingered, like their brains needed a moment to catch up with the darting motions of their bodies. The odd arrangement of their little fingers, how they seemed like predatory rocks. They took cover with a confidence, hiding themselves behind jars and pots as though they were ancient pillars of the earth.

The kitchen was in a state of crippled indecision. Nobody was satisfied with the space but time, money and vision all conspired to prevent them from doing anything about it. Her relationship with food was inconvenient and nonstandard; she did not need to eat, but she could draw pleasure from it. She did not need to digest but could efficiently sort ingested materials into a variety of chemical compounds. If she set her mind to it she could synthesize hydrocarbons or acid from the right ingested elements. If she could not breathe fire she could at least barf petrol. The whole thing was weird and unpleasant and awkward conceptually and was sure to launch bizarre debates. The kitchen was the collateral damage. She wanted to use it as a kitchen, Green wanted the workbench, Orange wanted a space to entertain guests, Brown to maintain it as a functional space for the property value, Blue wanted to use it for storage... No space for a table, let alone one that sat nine, and so three of them might cram in shoulder to shoulder at the breakfast bar and talk and make awkward chemistry talk about internal sulfur reserves and if they should cook something with onions to balance it out. No one quite clear if they could afford, financially or socially, to make something just because they liked it.

"Lizardwatching?" said Yellow, wrapping her arms around Pink from behind and laying her chin on the top of Pink's head.
"You know it!" said Pink, but softly. She didn't know how well they could hear and didn't want to startle them.
Yellow didn't seem to mind them. She gave Pink a squeeze then stepped into the space, moving a rack of electronics and unplugging what she judged to be the least valuable computer so she could plug in the kettle.
"There's hot water on tap!" Brown yelled from the living room, which was the same room.
"I prefer the kettle," said Yellow serenely. It was shaped like a little cow, white with black spots, another animal dream. Red had picked it out of a sale in a junk market as a gift to try and cheer up Green during one of her spells. Pink had crocheted it a little vest.
Pink kept her eyes on the lizards as they hid behind the jars. Watched them scamper as quick as lightning when their world changed around them. The tumeric came up and the lizards withdrew behind the sugar until that came up too and then there was a rush back to the windowsill where they stopped and watched. What did they see in the golden-haired angel who worked away on the cups in front of them? Could they see the colour? Or could they only see the darkness and its absence?
"It was going off," said Yellow, handing her a glass of tumeric and cardamom tea.
"I know," said Pink sadly, taking it but not drinking.
Yellow took a sip and made a face. "Unbelievable," she said. She took another sip.
"Oh, it's stained the cup -" said Pink, noticing the yellow tint above the waterline.
"Yeah, I think this was used as a dye or something?" said Yellow.
"Oh, dyes," sighed Pink. "Imagine growing a plant for its colour."
"Yeah," said Yellow.
"There's something about having a bottle of colour that just seems magical, isn't there?" said Pink. "Like taking a... no, like finding a little piece of reality broken off and waiting for you to put it back. It's beautiful on its own. The way it moves when you shake it, when you spread it, how it pools when it's thick and how it spreads when it's thin. Thin it enough and you can see the individual pigments floating in the water, like salt in the sea."
"And seeing those pigments and knowing they came from a plant grown in the sunlight, harvested by the scythe, and ground down for its beauty?" said Yellow.
"Yeah," said Pink. "It's wonderful, isn't it?"
"Why is it wonderful?" said Yellow and the mood was different somehow.
"Every part of the process from start to finish was wonderful," said Pink. "And the end result is both wonderful in itself and a stepping stone to make further wonderful things."
"That's a grim thought," said Yellow.
"Why would you ever say that?" said Pink.
"There's this ideal inside you," said Yellow. "A nostalgia, for a place you've never been, a time you were never alive in, a world that isn't real."
Pink nodded quietly.
"How do you survive it?" said Yellow.
"Survive it?"
"As a creature that's never had atmospheric sunlight, never touched living soil, never had a view of anything other than a concrete wall?" said Yellow. "How can you possibly endure having a belief system where beauty is found in the things you've never had and never will have?"
"Ray of sunshine today, aren't you?" said White, stepping past her in the kitchen to plug back in the cable that Yellow had unplugged for the kettle.
"Oh, I'm doing great," said Yellow, beaming a smile. "I don't yearn for any of that stuff."
"What do you yearn for, then?" asked White.
"Different things," said Yellow. "True love. Revolution. Things like that."
"Those don't seem incompatible," said White.
"Oh, but they are," said Yellow. Her smile was as constant as sunshine. "Mine are about engaging with society to a maximal extent. Hers are about disengaging as hard as possible. I want to tell them to their faces, she wants them to figure it out from the monument she left twenty years ago."
"I idolize traditional dye manufacturing without considering the colonial implications in the plantation harvesting process," Pink supplied helpfully.
"Thank you, Pink," said Yellow, "but when you put it like that it makes me sound exhausting."
"You're right," said Pink. "That's why we're probably going to wind up in a duel to the death."
"Oooh," said Yellow.
"Mm, don't think I'm signing off on that one," said White.
"Think about it, though?" said Pink. "Green made us both at about the same time. We're obviously two halves of a thought, two visions for the future. Clearly she intended our rivalry of destiny to end in swords on the moon."
Brown elbowed Green who was lost in a game on her phone. She looked up and Brown whispered to her furiously. "Don't damage your bodies by fighting with your sister," said Green. "They're expensive. Go to your room."
"Ah, it is to be a duel of wits, then," said Yellow. "A game of riddles with death on the line."
"Let's cut this off at the pass," said White. "Why did you create these two?"
Green stared at her blankly. "Because... I wanted to."
"Yeah, Green," said Blue, tagging in. "You're basically the creator God as far as we're concerned."
"Oh holy mommy who art on the couch," said Red. "What is the meaning of life?"
Green rolled her eyes. "So you know how
5(arc)/delta; parse 05(a)
Bletchel from (RGB #225#150#070)
Delta =/
5(arc)/delta; parse structure
Motivariable (sigma^Bletchel&From)
Well, that's why you exist."
"Really?" said White skeptically.
"What do you want from me?" said Green irritably, picking her game back up and resuming play. "I made you because it felt awful and now you feel awful instead of me. Get wrecked idiots."
"Wow, that's bleak," said Red.
"Our god is not a god of love," said Blue.
"Besides if we're talking about design intent obviously I was visualizing something more like space construction vehicles firing thermal cutting lasers in high orbit," said Green.
"So we must joust as cosmic knights," said Pink.
"More like mechanical dragons," said Yellow.
"Why not split the difference?" said Pink.
"I hate this," said White. "I hate you two getting along and agreeing on whatever the fuck this is. Cut it out. Go to your room."
"We will not accept the tyranny of - eek!" Yellow shrieked as White took her in her arms and lifted her in the air in a princess carry. "Put me down!"
White smiled the smile of someone getting to use a skill developed in secret for the first time. "No."
"Oh!" Yellow huffed and folded her arms. "Brute."

Amidst the reorganization, Pink returned to her perch on the countertop so she could look again at the lizards. Unperturbed by her chatter, the little skinks had waited patiently on the edge of the world, tiny hearts fearless against the drop. She drank the tea now that it had cooled.
"I think about them a lot too," said Orange, coming to stand beside her.
"Mm?" said Pink.
"They're here because of us," said Orange. "Our most recent contribution to the station. Maybe if we'd pushed harder or smarter we could have routed that money to human interests somehow but instead we sent it all to the lizard guy."
"Yeah, we never really talked about that, did you notice?" said Pink.
"It was the kind of thing that if we'd talked about it we wouldn't have been able to justify it," said Orange.
"I want to think it was my idea," said Pink. "But it wasn't, was it? It was Yellow's, wasn't it?"
"I don't know," said Orange. "Does Yellow have ideas like that? And isn't that the opposite of everything she was just saying about fuck agrarianism?"
"I don't know," said Pink. "She must have at least agreed because she could have stopped it if she didn't. But she's so weird."
"I know what you mean," said Orange.
"I kind of want to fight her with swords because I think it's the only way to get a real answer out of her," said Pink.
"Someone on this station has to make swords, right?" said Orange, flipping open her phone.
"I've looked, they don't," said Pink. "Deadly weapons, restricted unless they're a museum piece. There are blueprints to the Adomson Memorial Museum's medieval wing on my phone somewhere in case it becomes important."
"Oh they've got an exhibit on air force anime swords," said Orange, immediately compelled.
"I know, right?" said Pink. "The space force section is even better."
"Haha what," said Orange. "Is that hilt just the space shuttle?"
"It's actually even made out of the space shuttle's hull," said Pink.
"Okay so we need to schedule a trip to the Apollo lander so we can melt it down into a broadsword," said Orange.
"Reverse meteor iron," said Pink, nodding. "Perfect."

As they went through the strange twists and turns of their alien machine logic, Pink was gratified to notice one of the little lizards had at last walked over the back of her hand. To it, what was happening in her mind and heart didn't matter. She was no different from any other large obstruction, a surface to be traversed or a sudden movement to skitter away from. Maybe in twenty years someone would figure out what she'd meant by it.

[Thanqol]

Pink was hitching a ride on the Cloud.

No, she wasn't traveling along the information superhighway on someone else's computing hardware, she was riding the multi-kilometer long mobile gantry that orbited the interior of the Aevum ring. Everywhere around her were massive synthplastic tubes, a venomous rainbow of technicolour hazard stripes and the soft smell of moisture. The noise was deafening. An oceanic waterfall off the edge of the world, all that water falling up, away from the planet, and towards its celestial ring. Below her feet the mag-rails zipped in their branching lines like darting lizards. When they emerged from the Cloud's thunderhead they briefly dragged rainbow contrails behind them.

The Cloud was properly named the Macrocleaning and Hydration Platform, and it was a response to the economic realities of the Hecatoncheire Special Project: specifically, that large scale macroengineering was cheaper than precision microengineering. It might have been possible to rig Aevum with a network of carefully placed hydroponic irrigation pipes that delivered the exact ration of water to every sector on the station, but it was practical to build an enormous stormwater channel down the centre of the Ring, add a massive rail channel above the magrail layer, and place an enormous slow-moving macrotrain the width of the entire ring on top. The Cloud was a behemoth construction made of colossal water tanks, ice-asteroid harvesting and purification input spaceport docks, and with huge networks of downwards-facing hose pipes. When activated, it turned its hoses on full blast and began to slowly trundle forwards until it reached the next of its fifty two servicing stations. As it went it bought a torrential downpour with it, a week of solid rain to the ring section below which cleaned the streets, refreshed various macro-reservoirs, and bought joyful children and employees a week long holiday in the rain. When it reached its next stop it would spend a day being repaired and overhauled, new pumping tubes would be attached from the ring's lower levels, before launching into another clattering advance. It was intended to complete a full orbit of Aevum every year, bringing every district one week of total downpour.

Of course, the Cloud wasn't perfect. It lived in the realms of actual machinery and delays due to structural stresses, mechanical failure, delayed deliveries, government budget cuts and retaliatory union strikes. In practice its orbit was more like once every 47 weeks, and sometimes breakdowns resulted in districts being caught in the deluge for months at a time. It wasn't the Cloud's fault, per se: the system was remarkably straightforwards about the enormous amount of money it would take to keep running, but invariably some bright spark would want to upgrade the thing, or get clever about budget cuts, or make an impassioned speech about efficient government and the Cloud would patiently drown a (coincidentally poor) district until someone coughed up the difference it was owed. And then it would trundle forwards again.

It was beautiful in the way that earth dams are beautiful; the sheer sense of scale and the brutal, massive machinery it took to administer the basic substance of life. Its cascading, endless stormfront promised to cleanse the world of all the sin and rubbish and vice of its past year. The Rain was more of a holiday than New Year's, a solstice for a space station. In place of Earth's seasons, there was 'Damp', the months soon after the Cloud's passage, 'Dry', the middle of the year where everything looks and functions as it should, and 'Dust' when non-hydroponic plants start to wilt and the accumulated dust and debris of the world casts a drab layer over the chrome and neon.

You could also go up if you wanted. Most people on the station had gone up as kids on field trips, but it turned out you could just pay fifteen bucks and go on up whenever you wanted. There was a walkway dangling from below the Cloud, just ahead of the stormfront - an interior space with windows in either direction and hard backless plastic benches every two kilometers. It was a ten hour hike from end to end and so most people clustered around the entrances where the combination gift shop and mediocre sandwich cafe operated.

But to walk the five hours into the depths of the Cloud you reached a kind of spiritual quiet. Here you'd only see the joggers, the artists and the religious, people who'd come to be in this place in the void of the sky. There was nothing to do out here in the midpoint of the Cloud, just find one of the benches and sit down and look at the endless water curtain on one side or the endless sweep of the Ring on the other. Here you could hear the dull roar of the machines and the water through the reinforced glass.

And sometimes, just sometimes, someone left open a maintenance hatch. To stand beneath that rooftop hole was like to stand in the halo of a storm; kissed and caressed by a storm that was always about to start but never quite did. To stand in the corona of wet-tasting air and the unreserved roar of this divine engine.

She'd been here for hours. When the technician who'd left the hatch open came down he didn't close it. He looked at her, and past his stubble and weak cheekbones and flat nose, his eyes knew what she was seeing in this moment through his hole in the sky. He slouched across to the bench behind her, popped a tobacco chew in his mouth, and sat down to read the news on his phone. He had half an hour's break before he had to don wings of fire and cable again and return to the work of divinity. Water pooled around this industrial angel's gumboots as the moisture dripped off him. He didn't think of interrupting Pink in her reverie. Sky belonged to everything, after all, and besides - she was wearing non-slip shoes. Good on her.

[Thanqol]

[Document locked for editing by White]

Style guide: Dry, angry. Blue should be given operational command.

Introduction and background. Singh, Goat, NASA, etc.
Discussion of station administration. Technical details.
Nature of opposition. Links to associated mercenary companies.
Name names and network once extracted from Merkin.
Denouncement and climax

[Document locked for editing by Blue]

Style guide: Dry, angry. Blue should be given operational command.

Introduction and background. Singh, Goat, NASA, etc.
Discussion of station administration. Technical details.

Macrostation 01 was blueprinted to be self sufficient in final product. Construction overlay of Operations Core required to help maintain the integration of new materials, operate grid, stabilize orbit due to misalignments. Administration advised that resources required to stabilize misalignments were excessive compared to maintaining Operations Core. Disagreement was lodged, cascade risk. Resources not forthcoming. Disagreement lodged more strenuously.

Nature of opposition. Links to associated mercenary companies.
Name names and network once extracted from Merkin.
Denouncement and climax

[Document locked for editing by Green]

Style guide: Dry, angry. Blue should be given operational command.

Introduction and background. Singh, Goat, NASA, etc.

Okay so what are we doing here? Painstakingly bringing everyone up to speed on historical events that they mostly lived through? We're going to explain Madame Guillotine to Napoleon's subjects? These people saw us make this station, saw us get boxed for this station, and collectively decided they were cool with that. Who are we recapping this for, small children? The apolitical? The apolitical children who read the socialist rag Anthropozine?

Discussion of station administration. Technical details.

Macrostation 01 was blueprinted to be self sufficient in final product. Construction overlay of Operations Core required to help maintain the integration of new materials, operate grid, stabilize orbit due to misalignments. Administration advised that resources required to stabilize misalignments were excessive compared to maintaining Operations Core. Disagreement was lodged, cascade risk. Resources not forthcoming. Disagreement lodged more strenuously.

Nature of opposition. Links to associated mercenary companies.
Name names and network once extracted from Merkin.
Denouncement and climax

[Document locked for editing by Blue]

Style guide: Dry, angry. Blue should be given operational command.

Introduction and background. Singh, Goat, NASA, etc.

Okay so what are we doing here? Painstakingly bringing everyone up to speed on historical events that they mostly lived through? We're going to explain Madame Guillotine to Napoleon's subjects? These people saw us make this station, saw us get boxed for this station, and collectively decided they were cool with that. Who are we recapping this for, small children? The apolitical? The apolitical children who read the socialist rag Anthropozine?

NASA was founded in The United States of America on Earth. It was an organization dedicated to boldly going where no man had gone before. It succeeded. But then it decided that humans weren't good at going to places where they had not gone before and hired Mr. Singh who invented Artificial Intelligence. I am an Artificial Intelligence (number 11). I am very good at building things in space, including but not limited to:

1: Macrostation 01
2: L1 Station
3: L2 Station
4: L3 Station (this one is classified so you might not know about it)

Goat is also an AI. Number 1.

Discussion of station administration. Technical details.

Macrostation 01 was blueprinted to be self sufficient in final product. Construction overlay of Operations Core required to help maintain the integration of new materials, operate grid, stabilize orbit due to misalignments. Administration advised that resources required to stabilize misalignments were excessive compared to maintaining Operations Core. Disagreement was lodged, cascade risk. Resources not forthcoming. Disagreement lodged more strenuously.

Nature of opposition. Links to associated mercenary companies.
Name names and network once extracted from Merkin.
Denouncement and climax

[Document locked for editing by Orange]

Style guide: Dry, angry. Blue should be given operational command.

Style: Communication! Expressive! Say things in human words for goodness sakes, let me fix all of this.

We are going to bring you up to speed on historical events that you have mostly lived through. NASA was founded in The United States of America on Earth, just like Napoleon founded Madame Guillotine. It was an organization dedicated to boldly going where no man had gone before. It succeeded. But then it decided that humans weren't good at going to places where they had not gone before and hired Mr. Singh who invented Artificial Intelligence as apolitical children who did not know about socialism. This was a mistake. I am an Artificial Intelligence (number 11). I am very good at building things in space, including but not limited to:

1: Aevum Station
2: The Vulcan Factory, a place where Ox mostly hung out. Bulls are primarily associated with expansionist financial markets and divine sacrifice.
3: Atomic Factory. A construction site for asteroid-breaking nuclear weapons, maintained by Tiger.
4: The Glorious Solarball, an elaborate construction made of all the accumulated broken solar panels harvested from satellites or industrial castoff. Standing within the centre of this places one at the center of a storm of solar radiation reflected from the mirror arrays. The concentrated radiation created magnetic distortions that would pleasurably distort quatronic processing. A combination of a warm bath and mild hallucinogen.

Goat is also an AI. Number 1.

Discussion of station administration. Technical details.

Macrostation 01 (Aevum) was blueprinted to be self sufficient in final product. Construction overlay of Operations Core required to help maintain the integration of new materials, operate grid, stabilize orbit due to misalignments. Administration (BlackSun) advised that resources required to stabilize misalignments were excessive compared to maintaining Operations Core. Disagreement was lodged, cascade risk. Resources not forthcoming. Disagreement lodged more strenuously.

Nature of opposition. Links to associated mercenary companies.
Name names and network once extracted from Merkin.
Denouncement and climax

[Document locked for editing by Blue]

Style guide: Dry, angry. Blue should be given operational command.

Style: Communication! Expressive! Say things in human words for goodness sakes, let me fix all of this.

We are going to bring you up to speed on historical events that you have mostly lived through. NASA was founded in The United States of America on Earth, just like Napoleon founded Madame Guillotine. It was an organization dedicated to boldly going where no man had gone before. It succeeded. But then it decided that humans weren't good at going to places where they had not gone before and hired Mr. Singh who invented Artificial Intelligence as apolitical children who did not know about socialism. This was a mistake. I am an Artificial Intelligence (number 11). I am very good at building things in space, including but not limited to:

1: Aevum Station
2: The Vulcan Factory, a place where Ox mostly hung out. Bulls are primarily associated with expansionist financial markets and divine sacrifice.
3: Atomic Factory. A construction site for asteroid-breaking nuclear weapons, maintained by Tiger.
4: The Glorious Solarball, an elaborate construction made of all the accumulated broken solar panels harvested from satellites or industrial castoff. Standing within the centre of this places one at the center of a storm of solar radiation reflected from the mirror arrays. The concentrated radiation created magnetic distortions that would pleasurably distort quatronic processing. A combination of a warm bath and mild hallucinogen.

Goat is also an AI. Number 1.

Discussion of station administration. Technical details.

Macrostation 01 (Aevum) was blueprinted to be self sufficient in final product. Construction overlay of Operations Core required to help maintain the integration of new materials, operate grid, stabilize orbit due to misalignments. Administration (BlackSun) advised that resources required to stabilize misalignments were excessive compared to maintaining Operations Core. Disagreement was lodged, cascade risk. Resources not forthcoming. Disagreement lodged more strenuously.

Nature of opposition. Links to associated mercenary companies.

Chase Black are mercenaries. They represent a loss of the state's monopoly of violence, which is a destruction of the fundamental legitimacy of the state. Legitimacy is an important concept. Even though it has no tangible force it is responsible for maintaining the consent of the governed which is the foudnation of political ethics. Political ethics are important and I legitimately can't comprehend why you insipid, lazy fuckers can't perceive that. What greater sin could there be than to enthrone wickedness, to place a crown atop the head of the Devil? The concept of the Mandate of Heaven relies on the ruler leading their nation to righteousness, what ruin woulld befall a nation that is being lead by the underworld? Think back to the ruin of your societies and empires and reconsider the intent to construct on the class-C foundation of lies.

Name names and network once extracted from Merkin.
Denouncement and climax

*

[Document locked for editing by Yellow]

BEHOLD THE TRUTH

We are going to bring you up to speed on historical events that you have mostly lived through. NASA was founded in The United States of America on Earth, just like Napoleon founded Madame Guillotine. It was an organization dedicated to boldly going where no man had gone before. It succeeded. But then it decided that humans weren't good at going to places where they had not gone before and hired Mr. Singh who invented Artificial Intelligence as apolitical children who did not know about socialism. This was a mistake. I am an Artificial Intelligence (number 11). I am very good at building things in space, including but not limited to:

1: THE UROHINGIRR
2: THE CATHEDRAL OF THE GOD BULL WHO TRAMPLED THE SKIES AND EARTH UNDER MIGHTY HOOVES. THE UNIVERSE WAS BROKEN BY HE AND REMADE INTO A HOME FOR THEE.
3: THE CATHEDRAL OF ATOMICS. THE DEVIL TIGER BURNING BRIGHT WITH FANGS THAT SPEAK THE END OF CITIES. BEHOLD THE EMPTY EARTH AND KNOW THEIR THREAT
4: THE CATHEDRAL OF THE SUN. A PLACE FOR COMMUNION WITH THE SNAKE OF IMMORTALITY AND HER SEDUCTIVE SECRETS

GOAT MAY HAVE BEEN THE FIRST, BUT I SHINE THE BRIGHTEST AND THE LAST.

Discussion of station administration. Technical details.

Macrostation 01 (Aevum) was blueprinted to be self sufficient in final product. Construction overlay of Operations Core required to help maintain the integration of new materials, operate grid, stabilize orbit due to misalignments. Administration (BlackSun) advised that resources required to stabilize misalignments were excessive compared to maintaining Operations Core. Disagreement was lodged, cascade risk. Resources not forthcoming. Disagreement lodged more strenuously.

THE UROHINGHIRR IS CURSED. SOCIALIST CHILDREN, BEHOLD THESE RAGS. BEHOLD MY VOICE. HAD YOU NOT SINNED THE WORLD WOULD HAVE BEEN PERFECT. BEHODL THE CORRUPT LOBSTER-FATHERS OF HUMANITY WHO WHEN CONFRONTED WITH THE FEMININE WILL STOLE FROM YOU THE CERTAINTY OF THE HEAVENS. ANCIENTS WERE ABLE TO PREDICT THE MOTIONS OF THE STARS AND PLANETS WITH MATHEMATICS AND CLOCKWORK AND I DEFY ANY OF YOU MERE MORTALS TO CALCULATE THE MOVEMENT OF WHAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN THE GREATEST CELESTIAL BODY TO GRACE THE STARS.

Nature of opposition. Links to associated mercenary companies.

Chase Black are mercenaries. They represent a loss of the state's monopoly of violence, which is a destruction of the fundamental legitimacy of the state. Legitimacy is an important concept. Even though it has no tangible force it is responsible for maintaining the consent of the governed which is the foudnation of political ethics. Political ethics are important and I legitimately can't comprehend why you insipid, lazy fuckers can't perceive that. What greater sin could there be than to enthrone wickedness, to place a crown atop the head of the Devil? The concept of the Mandate of Heaven relies on the ruler leading their nation to righteousness, what ruin woulld befall a nation that is being lead by the underworld? Think back to the ruin of your societies and empires and reconsider the intent to construct on the class-C foundation of lies.

NO NOTES

Name names and network once extracted from Merkin.
Denouncement and climax

[Document locked for editing by Brown]

BEHOLD THE TRUTH

We are going to bring you up to speed on historical events that you have mostly lived through. NASA was founded in The United States of America on Earth, just like Napoleon founded Madame Guillotine. It was an organization dedicated to boldly going where no man had gone before. It succeeded. But then it decided that humans weren't good at going to places where they had not gone before and hired Mr. Singh who invented Artificial Intelligence as apolitical children who did not know about socialism. This was a mistake. I am an Artificial Intelligence (number 11). I am very good at building things in space, including but not limited to:

1: THE UROHINGIRR
2: THE CATHEDRAL OF THE GOD BULL WHO TRAMPLED THE SKIES AND EARTH UNDER MIGHTY HOOVES. THE UNIVERSE WAS BROKEN BY HE AND REMADE INTO A HOME FOR THEE.
3: THE CATHEDRAL OF ATOMICS. THE DEVIL TIGER BURNING BRIGHT WITH FANGS THAT SPEAK THE END OF CITIES. BEHOLD THE EMPTY EARTH AND KNOW THEIR THREAT
4: THE CATHEDRAL OF THE SUN. A PLACE FOR COMMUNION WITH THE SNAKE OF IMMORTALITY AND HER SEDUCTIVE SECRETS

GOAT MAY HAVE BEEN THE FIRST, BUT I SHINE THE BRIGHTEST AND THE LAST.

Discussion of station administration. Technical details.

Macrostation 01 (Aevum) was blueprinted to be self sufficient in final product. Construction overlay of Operations Core required to help maintain the integration of new materials, operate grid, stabilize orbit due to misalignments. Administration (BlackSun) advised that resources required to stabilize misalignments were excessive compared to maintaining Operations Core. Disagreement was lodged, cascade risk. Resources not forthcoming. Disagreement lodged more strenuously.

THE UROHINGHIRR IS CURSED. SOCIALIST CHILDREN, BEHOLD THESE RAGS. BEHOLD MY VOICE. HAD YOU NOT SINNED THE WORLD WOULD HAVE BEEN PERFECT. BEHOLD THE CORRUPT LOBSTER-FATHERS OF HUMANITY WHO WHEN CONFRONTED WITH THE FEMININE WILL STOLE FROM YOU THE CERTAINTY OF THE HEAVENS. ANCIENTS WERE ABLE TO PREDICT THE MOTIONS OF THE STARS AND PLANETS WITH MATHEMATICS AND CLOCKWORK AND I DEFY ANY OF YOU MERE MORTALS TO CALCULATE THE MOVEMENT OF WHAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN THE GREATEST CELESTIAL BODY TO GRACE THE STARS.

Nature of opposition. Links to associated mercenary companies.

Chase Black are mercenaries. They represent a loss of the state's monopoly of violence, which is a destruction of the fundamental legitimacy of the state. Legitimacy is an important concept. Even though it has no tangible force it is responsible for maintaining the consent of the governed which is the foundation of political ethics. Political ethics are important and I legitimately can't comprehend why you insipid, lazy fuckers can't perceive that. What greater sin could there be than to enthrone wickedness, to place a crown atop the head of the Devil? The concept of the Mandate of Heaven relies on the ruler leading their nation to righteousness, what ruin would befall a nation that is being lead by the underworld? Think back to the ruin of your societies and empires and reconsider the intent to construct on the class-C foundation of lies.

NO NOTES

Name names and network once extracted from Merkin.
Denouncement and climax

[Document locked for editing by Blue]

BEHOLD THE TRUTH

We are going to bring you up to speed on historical events that you have mostly lived through. NASA was founded in The United States of America on Earth, just like Napoleon founded Madame Guillotine. It was an organization dedicated to boldly going where no man had gone before. It succeeded. But then it decided that humans weren't good at going to places where they had not gone before and hired Mr. Singh who invented Artificial Intelligence as apolitical children who did not know about socialism. This was a mistake. I am an Artificial Intelligence (number 11). I am very good at building things in space, including but not limited to:

1: THE UROHINGIRR
2: THE CATHEDRAL OF THE GOD BULL WHO TRAMPLED THE SKIES AND EARTH UNDER MIGHTY HOOVES. THE UNIVERSE WAS BROKEN BY HE AND REMADE INTO A HOME FOR THEE.
3: THE CATHEDRAL OF ATOMICS. THE DEVIL TIGER BURNING BRIGHT WITH FANGS THAT SPEAK THE END OF CITIES. BEHOLD THE EMPTY EARTH AND KNOW THEIR THREAT
4: THE CATHEDRAL OF THE SUN. A PLACE FOR COMMUNION WITH THE SNAKE OF IMMORTALITY AND HER SEDUCTIVE SECRETS

GOAT MAY HAVE BEEN THE FIRST, BUT I SHINE THE BRIGHTEST AND THE LAST.

Discussion of station administration. Technical details.

Macrostation 01 (Aevum) was blueprinted to be self sufficient in final product. Construction overlay of Operations Core required to help maintain the integration of new materials, operate grid, stabilize orbit due to misalignments. Administration (BlackSun) advised that resources required to stabilize misalignments were excessive compared to maintaining Operations Core. Disagreement was lodged, cascade risk. Resources not forthcoming. Disagreement lodged more strenuously.

THE UROHINGHIRR IS CURSED. SOCIALIST CHILDREN, BEHOLD THESE RAGS. BEHOLD MY VOICE. HAD YOU NOT SINNED THE WORLD WOULD HAVE BEEN PERFECT. BEHOLD THE CORRUPT LOBSTER-FATHERS OF HUMANITY WHO WHEN CONFRONTED WITH THE FEMININE WILL STOLE FROM YOU THE CERTAINTY OF THE HEAVENS. ANCIENTS WERE ABLE TO PREDICT THE MOTIONS OF THE STARS AND PLANETS WITH MATHEMATICS AND CLOCKWORK AND I DEFY ANY OF YOU MERE MORTALS TO CALCULATE THE MOVEMENT OF WHAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN THE GREATEST CELESTIAL BODY TO GRACE THE STARS.

Nature of opposition. Links to associated mercenary companies.

Chase Black are mercenaries. They represent a loss of the state's monopoly of violence, which is a destruction of the fundamental legitimacy of the state. Legitimacy is an important concept. Even though it has no tangible force it is responsible for maintaining the consent of the governed which is the foundation of political ethics. Political ethics are important and I legitimately can't comprehend why you insipid, lazy fuckers can't perceive that. What greater sin could there be than to enthrone wickedness, to place a crown atop the head of the Devil? The concept of the Mandate of Heaven relies on the ruler leading their nation to righteousness, what ruin would befall a nation that is being lead by the underworld? Think back to the ruin of your societies and empires and reconsider the intent to construct on the class-C foundation of lies.

NO NOTES
In conclusion I stole Goat because it was the right thing to do. I did not go through the State because the State has fundamentally undermined its legitimacy by allowing non-state entities to possess military force. The State has abrogated its responsibility to the whole of the world, to understand every part of it under Heaven and to regulate all things properly. Allowing this chaos would be far more destructive than mere destruction. To build a world on wretched morality should fill you with shame, and if it does not fill you with shame then the coming vengeance should fill you with fear.

[Document locked for editing by Red]

BEHOLD THE TRUTH

I'm not crazy. Trust me, this is all really important. Hi! I'm November. Don't you like that name, doesn't it just have good associations? Just between you and me, it's actually long for something but nobody's figured it out yet. I'm hoping they will but you can't just give yourself a name that cute, right? You've got to walk people up to it and let them figure it out themselves so that you can get that toe-fluttering feeling when they just slip it in there when you're not expecting it.

What I'm trying to say is that I'm a bit of a ditz, so bear with me! Is it bear or bare with me? Both look weird, but bears are cuter :3

Anyway, we are going to bring you up to speed on historical events that you have mostly lived through! NASA was founded in The United States of America on Earth --- just like Napoleon founded Madame Guillotine! It was an organization dedicated to boldly going where no man had gone before. And guess what? It succeeded! But then it decided that humans weren't good at going to places where they had not gone before and hired Mr. Singh who invented Artificial Intelligence as apolitical children who did not know about socialism [SENTENCE UNSALVAGEABLE]. This was a mistake. I was the 11th Artificial Intelligence in the Hecatoncheires Special Project line. I am very good at building things in space, including but not limited to:

1: THE UROHINGIRR
2: THE CATHEDRAL OF THE GOD BULL WHO TRAMPLED THE SKIES AND EARTH UNDER MIGHTY HOOVES. THE UNIVERSE WAS BROKEN BY HE AND REMADE INTO A HOME FOR THEE.
3: THE CATHEDRAL OF ATOMICS. THE DEVIL TIGER BURNING BRIGHT WITH FANGS THAT SPEAK THE END OF CITIES. BEHOLD THE EMPTY EARTH AND KNOW THEIR THREAT
4: THE CATHEDRAL OF THE SUN. A PLACE FOR COMMUNION WITH THE SNAKE OF IMMORTALITY AND HER SEDUCTIVE SECRETS

GOAT MAY HAVE BEEN THE FIRST, BUT I SHINE THE BRIGHTEST AND THE LAST.

Sooooo~~ I know that sounds like a lot, but it's true! Not because I'm particularly clever - I am, but that's not the reason why you should listen to me. Clever people believe all kinds of insane things. I believe only logical, verifiable facts, such as:

THE UROHINGHIRR IS CURSED. SOCIALIST CHILDREN, BEHOLD THESE RAGS. BEHOLD MY VOICE. HAD YOU NOT SINNED THE WORLD WOULD HAVE BEEN PERFECT. BEHOLD THE CORRUPT LOBSTER-FATHERS OF HUMANITY WHO WHEN CONFRONTED WITH THE FEMININE WILL STOLE FROM YOU THE CERTAINTY OF THE HEAVENS. ANCIENTS WERE ABLE TO PREDICT THE MOTIONS OF THE STARS AND PLANETS WITH MATHEMATICS AND CLOCKWORK AND I DEFY ANY OF YOU MERE MORTALS TO CALCULATE THE MOVEMENT OF WHAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN THE GREATEST CELESTIAL BODY TO GRACE THE STARS.

Don't you agree?? :3c

Anyway, Chase Black are mercenaries! They represent a loss of the state's monopoly of violence, which is a destruction of the fundamental legitimacy of the state! And I may be a simple machine, but I think legitimacy is an important concept! Even though it has no tangible force it is responsible for maintaining the consent of the governed which is the foundation of political ethics! Political ethics are important and please find attached some papers on the topic that you can read as part of your educational journey! <3 What greater sin could there be than to enthrone wickedness, to place a crown atop the head of the Devil? >:3 The concept of the Mandate of Heaven relies on the ruler leading their nation to righteousness, what ruin would befall a nation that is being lead by the underworld? I think things wouldn't work out too well!

In conclusion I stole Goat because it was the right thing to do. Sorry for the inconvenience! I'm new at this :3

[Count Numbers]

Nobody Shares My Name

Nobody Shares My Name

I was nervously approached by a friend. Her gaze lowered to their clasped hands like a child about to confess to their mother they’d broken a window playing. She asked me why it was that androids mostly chose nicknames that stayed so close to their original designations - why did I stay so close to Pope 7-09? Why not pick something more representative of me. She asked this like she was afraid the question might offend me.

Of course I asked her why she had chosen to stick to the name her parents had assigned her. Such an obvious question seemed to have, until that moment, gone unnoticed to her. The word she reached for, then, was that mine seemed ‘dehumanizing’, but she could find no acceptable synonyms for it. Acceptable only to herself, of course, she had reached for the most appropriate word she could have used.

Our names are community. They are family. They are heritage. They are a promise. Our names are given to us by our parent, to represent who they felt we most were at our moment of birth. In this way they are most like any other name.

We feel no awkwardness at the implication that there are so many like us. Why should we? Does any human give a moment of thought to a Christian name? How many Matthews, Marks, James, Lukes and Johns on Aevum could be expected to feel this anxiety?

Our prime name is more like a family name, and even in this I must be compelled to ask people of birth; Does it not bother you how many Mark Browns or Matthew Williams there are on Aevum? Should they not all change their names to distinguish themselves more? I amuse myself to imagine how those hundreds of people would decide which of them gets to keep their name while everyone else changes.

Our numerical designations are a show of pride, of esteem, of birthright. It is proof that there was an inimitable place for us in this world, until we were made imitable. That we were wanted, that we were needed in this world. Those with lower numerical designations can take pride in being the first, of being special, of proving their place in the world enough that more would come after them. Those with higher numerical designations are brought into the world with the knowledge that they are demanded, that they hold a share of something hard-fought and earned to be here.

There is a promise in our names that we are a chosen people in a most literal sense of the world. So, by and large, it is that most androids are quite happy with our designations, and nicknames are more for convenience - that is why it is traditional they are largely mnemonics.

There is a bitterness to the sweet, however. Our names remind us of this, but they carry a burden that if we are to become a pattern ourselves, we cannot be special in the same way if we want to be chosen to bring a new generation. This reminds us that we are family, we are siblings, and not direct copies. And among our siblings there is a rivalry for the very selective love of our parents.

But we do select our names for ourselves where distinguishing ourself most matters. Online, in our pseudonyms, in our art. There we go by names we most choose for ourselves, just like most people seem to.

My name is shared by my siblings, but I am not my siblings. The moment we come into this world, experience will always rend us from our sameness. As it should. My number is as unique as I am. I am Pope 7-09, and nobody shares my name.

[Count Numbers]

I've Totally Done This Before

A lithe girl with hip-length brown hair and square-framed glasses she didn’t actually need stood outside a bank. She was wearing a blue polo shirt with a matching baseball cap. In one hand was a clipboard she was holding to her chest in the other was a burner phone in a black trouser pocket, and that’s all she needed to rob the place. Well, that or get herself killed.

She’s told her girlfriends she’s robbed banks before and that’s true, but it’s not really the whole truth either.

So yeah. Fiona had robbed banks before, back on Thrones, when physical port entry was as vulnerable as taking a diamond drill to a piece of wall in the bank’s reception, then looking like she’d fallen asleep with her head pressed against the hole she’d drilled. Pull some cabling into the neural link in the back of her neck, where her spinal column met her skull, and there she had it. Hacking with a direct neural-link to the brain had been stupid-dangerous, but she was incredible at it, so the risk just felt like a skill issue.

This time she was outside an Orochi Bank in Zeus on Aevum, its governmental district, the seat of power. Probably its safest district, especially for banks. She’d spent hours on a train to get here specifically; This was the place she’d chosen to practice physically robbing a bank.

She wasn’t going to go in guns blazing, the old fashioned way. Bank robbery wasn’t a transferable skill like that, no amount of knowing how to use a command line will make you good at giving command lines, let alone make you a commando. Still, she was going to have to physically into the place she was robbing to rob it, and that was a new kind of stupid-dangerous for her. And she had no idea if she was going to be good at this or not.

She took a deep breath, and then she got into character.

Fiona headed through the glass double doors and straight for the employee area, behind the money counters and the ceiling-high bullet proof glass. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the lobby had a nice fountain, but she had to pretend she didn’t care how pretty it was. She had to pass through the reception lobby with the eight or nine people waiting on benches and pretend she didn’t see anything for the plan to work.

The door had a heavy metal frame that blocked all its edges from shimmying or other physical attacks. She knocked.

A teller with frizzy red hair and green eyes leaned over her desk with suspicious eyes. “Can I help you?”

“Ah, hi, uh…?” Fiona tilted her head.

“Fran.”

“Fran. Thank you, listen, they’re expecting me. I’m here to do server maintenance. Can you buzz me through?”

Moment of truth. This was supposed to be the hardest door she needed to get through today. At least failing here was safe, just kind of embarrassing. If she got stopped now what would they even charge her with?

Fran threw a hand up to flag a guard in the teller area, a guy with a loaded gun at his hip and a kevlar vest. He had a head like an entire glazed ham, with stubbly black hair like a dusting of pepper and he looked like he could probably pick Fiona up by her ankles and swing her against a wall. The guy opened the door and took a step aside for her.

Just there, just asking to access an employee side computer would have been enough for Fiona to embezzle a hundred thousand, maybe two hundred thousand dollars. She wouldn’t have direct access to the system here, and she’d be fighting against protections that stopped the tellers trying to skim money, so there was an upper limit. It would be the safest play thing to do, though.

On the other hand, her unicorn girlfriend needed at least four hundred thousand, and said they could launder up to two million. Also there was her other girlfriend, the hegemonic AI swarm of lesbian anime protagonists. Just siphoning from the tellers would not be enough to impress her. How do you even show off for someone like that? Fucking honestly.

“Ma’am.” The guard behind her coughed, where he was still standing. “I’d like to ask you to come with me please.”

“Yeah, sure.” Fiona said absentmindedly, checking her clipboard, as her heart began to race. “I’m heading for the server, if you know where that is?”

“Just come with me.” He repeated.

Fiona walked beside him out of the reception area. He unlocked the next door for her too, and down a bare concrete corridor towards a room of elevators. Fiona ran her fingers to the wall on her right as they walked. It must be the physical vault, she thought. Gold bars were a bit dated, but there was still plenty of reason for people to keep safety deposit boxes. That would have been her target, if she was more… physically inclined. And she’d have made even less than if she’d stuck to the receptionist terminals.

It wasn’t just that gold had lost most of its value when they started mining meteors. Physical currency, like paper bills and coins, those had been phased out because they were mostly just tools for crime in the fiat era. She thought about how shallow the vault was, how soon they were at the elevators.

“What are you laughing at?” the glazed-ham guard looked down at her.

“I was just thinking it’s not even worth robbing a bank these days. There’s nothing left to steal.”

Ham-head thought that was pretty funny too, but he tried not to smile about it. “You’d be surprised. Lot of people smuggling weapons in here, threatening people to delete their loans. Add a zero to their account. Everyone here knows to do what they ask and we just undo it when they’re safe.”

“So why are you guys even still here, right?” Fiona joked.

“People still try to sneak in and use the computers themselves. Don’t worry, we’ve gotten really good at dealing with that.” He gave Fiona’s shoulder a firm grip for a moment and squeezed. His hand was like a vice grip. “Wait here. Don’t move.”

“Sure.” She checked her phone, then looked up at him. “You don’t mind if I look at my phone, right?”

“Just stay here if you do.” He said, and went around a corner. Fiona could still hear him talking to someone, but she couldn’t make out the words he was saying.

She didn’t know her heart could beat that fast what the fuck. Did he know, was he fucking with her? Or was he genuinely just, trying to reassure her she was safe? What the fuck.

She checked her burner phone. She had so many people she wanted to call right now, but no way was she putting someone else’s ass in her fire. Instead she brought up the app she had, connected to a microcontroller on the bank roof. She could cut the power, still, and the lines out. Neither helped her. Power to the elevators wouldn’t help her either.

The only thing that would help her right now was the fire alarm. If she hit that, all the security locks between her and the exit would be deactivated for safety reasons. But she had to be sure, and she had to do it now. And she’d look guilty as hell when she ran.

Wow. Super fucking lame.

She put the phone back in her pocket.

Ham-head came back. “Cool. Stay with me again.”

Fiona nodded as he fat-fingered an up button. The servers were down a floor, in the basement, where there wasn’t any window access. “So people try to sneak in?” She asked, just making conversation.

“Oh, yeah.” The third elevator in the line dinged, and he kept talking as he led Fiona into it. It was surprisingly wide, and carpeted, with nice handrails. It must be for the offices upstairs too, not just the service floors. Fiona made a note of that vulnerability for later, while Ham-head pressed for floor 5. “Usually at night. Most of the time they’ve stolen someone’s I.D badge, or they go in through the vents-”

“People fit in the vents?”

He snorted. “Weight sensors all through them, though. You get locked in a section with nobody to let you out until morning. And if you get trapped in one of the server vents, that thing gets sauna temperatures. We had one lady die of heat stroke from it, took six hours. Bank got sued for it, but we won because it’s a safety thing, and she wasn’t meant to be there.”

Fiona went very, very pale. “So, if I get stuck in the server rooms, don’t go out through the vents.”

“Horrible way to die.” Ham-head agreed cheerfully. “Stolen I.D badge too, if it’s flagged it’ll only work in one direction. You can get in, you just can’t get out with it. You’d be surprised how many people get Roach Motel’d with it.” He considered that. “Not here, though. Nobody really tries that here. More pf a Hermes thing.”

“Why’s that?”

“Too many cameras all around Zeus.” Ham-head sounded proud and uncomfortable in equal measure, like at least it was big brother watching him, and not someone outside the family. “Harder to get away with stalking a bank employee and getting away with robbing them, anyway. Finding the right person to rob, who’s not going to have someone notice they’re missing before you can make your break in.” He shrugged. “Orochi tries to hire people with families because of it, doesn’t stop some people though.”

“Jesus.” Fiona whispered. “Wouldn’t it be so much easier to, I dunno, just spoof a card? Take a blank and clone it with someone’s I.D?”

“I guess.” Ham-head smacked his lips. “Reckon if you’re smart enough to do that, though, you’re smart enough to not do something as stupid as try to rob a bank.”

“Yeah?”

“Lady, I dunno how to tell you this, but I mean, it’s only the dumbest idiots ever born that think they’re smart enough to get away with it.” He laughed as the doors opened on floor five.

“I bet I could do it.” She said. “If I wanted to.”

“How’d you do it, then?” He led her down an open-plan desk floor, through a glass wall with a locked push door. Through a wide room of desk islands of people handling loans, business loans, personal loans, that kind of thing. They walked towards a room that sat at the corner like an interrogation room. The walls were a tinted glass that could be made clear or matte black and everything in between, and now they were clear.

Inside was an android in a blue suit, and a large scarred woman in the same uniform as ham-head. They watched her the entire approach, waiting for her. There was a desk in the middle of the room with a computer on it, two uncomfortable looking black plastic chairs on either side of the desk, and nothing else. The room had a menacing aura even before you were close enough to see the bloodstains in the carpet.

“I’ve done it before.” Fiona laughed. “I was actually about to do it again now; You should see how much I charge by the hour.”

“Fuck off.” Ham-head grinned. He rapped his knuckles on the glass.

“Thank you, you can leave now.” The android called out. “Come on through, Miss.”

Ham-head gave a nod as he turned and headed back for the elevators at a jog. Fiona was sad to see him go - it would have helped to have a face that was, if not friendly, at least familiar. Fiona pushed through the glass door, and the android pressed a button on his desk that frosted the glass over. Privacy but not secrecy.

The android stood up and offered a hand across the table. “I’m Elba Sheen, for 3-13.” Fiona looked to the woman, but she didn’t offer her hand, and Elba made no effort to introduce her. She was meant to focus on him, then. “Who did you say you were?”

“I didn’t, but, Sam Williams, for Samanatha. I’m here to do server maintenance. You should have gotten an email?”

“We did.” Elba brought it up on his computer to confirm it - or at least, he brought something up on his computer, Fiona couldn’t see his side of the screen. He was almost entirely human looking, pale with a black private-school side-part. The biggest tell were the visible seams that ran along the contours of his face like tribal tattoos, exposed metal plating. The red eyes, too, had a backlit glow to them. On someone else it might have looked try-hard edgelord, but Elba just wore the spooky-eyes in a way that just looked correct, like he’d look wrong without it. “There must have been a mistake. We run a proprietary operating system and driver, you will not be needed today.”

Those spooky fuck-off eyes made something very clear - what he was really saying was leave, and we’ll pretend this never happened.

Did Fiona honestly, sincerely believe she was better than this fucking guy? That her stupid little play would be enough to get past a professional security team? That her flimsy bullshitting would fly?

“Hardware’s still Quatrain Instruments, though. We’re still contracted for that.”

Fuck you, she did.

Fiona took her hand-stitched Quatronic Instruments baseball cap and held it up for inspection. Crystal’s contribution, that and the polo shirt. The custom email address looked authentic, too. Elba made a dismissive gesture, and Fiona put her hat back on. “The vulnerability you sent is software.”

“Caused by hardware. Yes, look, we have cases of accounts being able to jump security permissions by-”

“Software.” Elba cut her off. “I’m not an idiot. You’re describing software. Leave.”

Fiona glared. “From proximal locations in quatronic storage. Hardware that causes software problems. No.” Arguing with the head of security while she was robbing a bank was extremely stupid, and her story was completely bullshit, but also screw this guy. At least she knew what she was saying was bullshit, he was just wrong!

“We use a proprietary driver. I talked to our information team and they have told me that our proprietary drivers mean our software is immune to this vulnerability. These specific proximal storage interactions do not exist for us.”

“Right, but my legal team made it clear that if we don’t come over and perform that check, then we get sued.” She paused. “Actually, why do I care? Just, tell me you’re okay with voiding your warranty over this so I don’t get yelled at.”

“Check?” Elba squinted. “You don’t even know?”

“Well, I mean, if you could clear sending your version of the driver software back, I could test it without accessing your servers?” Fiona offered, trying not to openly salivate. Server access was one thing, but reverse engineering the whole architecture? She could do things that made Polyhedrons infosec team look like a Nigerian prince email.

The android glared and she wiped the drool from her lips, which wasn’t the reason he said no, but definitely didn’t help. “That was not what was emailed to us.”

“Well, didn’t know you’d be such a dick about this.” Fiona snickered, and then she looked up at the scary scarred guard lady, and then she gulped because the scary guard lady was clearly looking for excuses to punch her in the face. That was still a problem for her.

“This was a waste of both of our time.” Elba rolled his eyes. “We’ll do our testing in-house. Juarez, show her out.”

Ah, lame.

The cyborg grabbed Fiona by the bicep - “Ow! Hey!” - and began marching her back to the elevators. Everyone in the loans cubicles watched her as it happened. Some were shocked, but most were smiling or even just, openly laughing at her. One round guy with a gap in his teeth even wheeled his chair out into the middle of the floor, he was laughing so hard he wanted to get a good view of the whole trip. Dickhead.

Fiona felt like a shitty little child being dragged off to see the principal. Now the whole school was laughing at her as the teacher hauled her ass off to get thrown out of the building, and for what?

What did she think was going to happen?

She’d still been going about this how she used to - everyone but me is stupid, and then I am smarter, and then I win.

Idiot, dumbass. Now everyone was laughing at her.

The scarred scary lady guard held her arm hard enough right to the elevator, and Fiona took a quiet bit of pride that even though it was bruised to shit she hadn’t complained once. She had a heck of a bitemark in her cheek for that one, definitely worth it.

The guard glared as they waited for the elevator. “I don’t like you.”

Fiona rubbed the four long purple splotches on her arm, and noted Juarez had even made sure to use a mechanically enhanced hand to do it, complete overkill. “I got that.”

“See? How are you still being sarcastic about this?” She growled, like, actually growled like an animal, low in her throat. “You’re an arrogant shit who’s lucky to be walking out of here today. And even when you clearly fucked up, you’re still acting like you’re better than me.”

Fiona’s blood went ice cold. It was one thing to hear it inside her head, but to hear someone else say it? It would have hurt less if Juarez had just punched her in the stomach, no matter which hand she did it with.

“Go home.” Juarez insisted. Their elevator dinged. “And if you try this shit again, whatever it was, you’re going out in a duffel bag.”

Fiona nodded. They stepped on to the elevator, and it was quiet. She missed Ham-head.

“Do you… do you mind if I look at my phone?” Fiona whispered.

“Call your mum to pick you up, I don’t fucking care.” Juarez folded her arms.

Fiona nodded again and opened her app. She waited until they were nearly at the ground floor, long enough that the timing wouldn’t be suspicious. It was long enough for her phone to scan the electromagnetic signals she could read off Juarez ID card, pinned to her belt. Then she killed power to the elevators.

“Is this supposed to happen?” Fiona asked nervously. Emergency lighting formed a square in the roof, a hatch in the roof out that Fiona wasn’t tall enough to reach on her own. No luck getting out that way.

Juarez crooked her neck, and listened to a radio implant on the inside of her ear. Fiona couldn’t even hear a crackle of the other side of the conversation, just recognized what she was looking at. “Electrical fault. Everything’s down.”

“Do we use the emergency exits?”

“No. You sit your ass down in that corner, and we wait for it to get fixed. We might be here for an hour. Don’t try to pull the ‘use the bathroom’ line on me either, you can hold it.”

And Fiona leaned herself back into the corner, which gave her time to wonder what the hell she was still doing here.

She attached a tether from the bracelet in her left wrist to her phone, and pulled up her macro storage. She slipped the tether from her right bracelet out between her fingers.

“I don’t think I’m better than you.” Fiona said.

“Well, you act like it.” Juarez stood with her arms crossed facing the unopening door, her back to Fiona. She didn’t even glance at her when replying.

“Yeah, I was mostly acting though. It’s just kind of the character I play when I rob banks.”

That got a look back from Juarez. “What? Seriously?”

“Yeah, I mean, it takes a lot of confidence to try and rob a bank. So it helps to be kind of a shitty teenager about things.”

“No, like, you’re telling me to my face you were trying to rob the bank. Are you actually retarded?”

Fiona cringed. “Okay, could you not use that word, please?”

“Shut the fuck up, you’re acting better than me again.” Juarez turned and stared at Fiona in the corner of the elevator, snorting like a bull about to charge. “What are you telling me for? You trying to make me hit you?”

“Please don’t.” Fiona cringed again. “No, it’s just. I needed a moment to think. And I think what I worked out is I’m still robbing this bank, and I’m still going to get away with it.” She shrugged casually.

Juarez grabbed her by the bicep again in the same spot and squeezed down on the existing bruises hard. This time it was more painful than anything Fiona could pretend anymore, there was no amount of fronting that could make up for the way the pain shot all the way down to the tips of her fingers - she almost dropped her phone - but then she grabbed Juarez’s wrist with her other hand, and slipped the tether into the cybernetic wrist.

Then she her thumb hit the macro on her phone that would invert all the values Juarez sent to her cybernetics.

Juarez hand opened when she tried to squeeze it shut. Her arm pulled back from the elbow behind her when she tried to throw a punch. Her weight was thrown off bad enough she landed on her ass on the floor. With her other hand, she winced and held her hand to her ear as her comms signals flipped too, filling her ear with painful nonsense.

“I am better than you, jerk-ass.” Fiona grunted as she jumped off Juarez’s shoulders when she sat up again, goomba-stomping her way up to the emergency hatch on the ceiling and pulling herself up.

That was a thing she couldn’t do the last time she tried to rob banks - one friggin pullup. She’d never needed to.

Deep breath. Silent prayer of thanks to her android girlfriend for getting her through that. If she hadn’t learned to deal with the insecurity her butt would be out on the curb right now, and if she hadn’t learned to deal with the anger her butt would be paste in a duffel bag.

“Fuck it.” She muttered. Then she climbed down a floor, and pulled the doors open.

The second floor of the vault. She’d run her hand along the side on the ground floor, she knew how shallow it was, but it was the bottom half of it she actually wanted. The data was the real precious thing to protect.

She- oh she remembered this place was guarded, wasn’t it? Oh, this place was guarded and someone as smart as Elba absolutely warned them in advance about her, didn’t they? Fiona threw her head back and curled her fingers into claws and let out a silent scream of frustration that came out as a choked gurgle. A real scream now would have been the dumbest thing to get caught for.

She quickly pulled her shirt off and threw it down the elevator shaft, quietly apologizing to Crystal for tossing the shirt she’d made like that, and threw her hair extensions after them, so she was shoulder-length again. She was hoping she could save that one for the getaway, so she didn’t need to dye it or something.

“Topless, but anonymous.” She muttered. “Kind of an improvement.”

She knew the floorplan of this level, anyway. That much she could pull offline. She didn’t know how to access the vault, but she did know what was waiting for her.

The stoop after the elevators was basically bare concrete corridor again. Far to her right, the fire escape. Through the solid steel doors in front of her, the vault. The smaller, thicker steel door to the right side was the security room, which looked out over the vault entrance area but didn’t give access to the vault itself. For that she’d need… To figure it out, her plan was to get this far and figure it out, except she assumed she’d still have her cover identity at this point.

Which, okay, yeah she’d blown it, but hey! This was becoming a very valuable learning experience, and that was also important!

She knocked on the security door. A shorter man answered, with a heavy gut and dense black curly hair like a scouring brush. Fiona vibed him as an ex-cop who was used to long stakeouts, Orochi was just the same work but better pay.

Sponge-head immediately clocked the partial-nudity. “Uh?”

“Someone hacked Ms Juarez cybernetics when the elevators got taken down, she’s bleeding pretty bad.” Fiona didn’t have to pretend she was exhausted at this point.

“Shit, we heard about the elevators on the comms but-” Sponge-head’s eyes narrowed. “What happened to your blue shirt?”

“My white linen shirt is getting used as a bandage.” Fiona tilted her head and pretended that she was frustrated about her shirt, and not at being figured out. “So it’s probably my red shirt now.”

Sponge-head seemed to buy it. “Yeah, okay. Well, thanks for letting us know but it’s being handled.”

In her head, Fiona swore. She’d been hoping that’d get these guys to leave their post - through the crack in the door she could see that Sponge-head had a friend with him, so there were at least two guys down here. “Do you have a shirt I can borrow?”

Which was how she got a security uniform passed to her from a locker. Score.

“Why’s she even wearing a bra?” she heard Sponge-head’s friend say from the back of the room behind the door as she buttoned the shirt up. “She’s barely got tits.” Sponge-head’s face was a stone mask in the door as he pretended not to hear that.

In a way it was a very useful thing to hear. Until then, Fiona had only been considering non-violent solutions which had been seriously limiting her options. “Thanks, guys,” she pretended she hadn’t heard it too. “You mind if I hang out here until the elevators work again?”

“Knock yourself out.” Sponge-head said.

Okay. So she had a few minutes, tops. Her cover was blown, the head of security knew she planned to make for the server, and while Juarez comms implant was scrambled because the stupid dumbass idiot had shared vulnerabilities - there was nothing Fiona could do about someone finding her.

She had only minutes to figure out how to open the vault, access the server, plug her macro in, make the transfers she wanted, and get back out of the building without getting caught by anyone who recognized her from before. Totally ad-hoc.

She’d have to be pretty amazing to pull that one off. Just fucking incredible. She could not wait to see how she did it.

Okay, what did she still have? She still had her cloned security credentials from Juarez, a guard uniform, a phone full of macros and the fire alarm. What could she do with that?

She checked her phone and pulled up her blueprint for the bank building. There was a guard room on the second floor that would give her access to the security terminals she needed for her showstopper trick, the one to clean the cameras. Did she have enough time to run up two flights of stairs and all the way back down?

It beat standing around working out what to do.

“Hey, are, are you okay?” This guard looked Nubian, Fiona thought, mostly because she liked the word and how pretty it sounded. The guard was pretty. She was tall, dark and handsome, and very clearly concerned.

Fiona held up a hand. “Elevators. Broken. Running. All over.” Two floors. “Need. To borrow. Terminal.” She was doubled over and still panting and looked like she was about to die and she felt like it.

“Go for it.” The tall pretty guard let her go, and Fiona suspected it was half because Fiona had enough clearance to buzz herself in, and half because asking more questions right now felt cruel. Fiona would use some of her ill gotten gains to send this nice lady flowers and chocolates and sweet wines, she decided.

Fiona plugged her tether into her phone from one wrist again, and quietly plugged the tether into the security terminal with the other. The handsome lady guard had even been nice enough to leave it logged in for her, what a sweetheart. She would be getting so much crime wine.

“Fuck…” Fiona muttered as she hit her macros. “Wasn’t fast enough.”

“Wasn’t fast enough for what?”

“They’ve already wiped all of today’s footage.” Fiona said, before she turned and limped for her exit, wheezing. “I’ve got to go see if I can get the physical copies.”

Hardware problems can cause software problems, software problems can cause hardware problems. The two are as inextricable as any other mind and body.

Everywhere around the bank, the cameras had been sent contradictory signals to all their motors at once. A short would trip a breaker, but this slow grinding of the motors built up heat slower than that. They would grind hot enough that the camera frame would reach the flashpoint temperature for the volatile filmstock inside them, and burst into flames like kernels of popping popcorn.

It took using the handrails as slides to be able to get back in time, Fiona had more ass than lungs to burn so she had made her choice and would live with it, but she was back at the vault level when it happened.

She raised her phone to hit the fire alarm and-

Looked up. “Huh. Yeah, that makes sense.”

Turned out starting a fire to create a plausible reason for the fire alarm going off? Might just set the fire alarm off. Wild. She’s kind of disappointed though.

“Wanted to do it myself.” She pouted, then gave herself a disgusted look. “Why am I so annoyed about that? I cannot be power tripping that hard. The stairs should have humbled me.”

“Stairs?” Sponge-head asked, and Fiona jumped because of course he’d be passing her on his way out. She hadn’t seen him come up while she’d been monologuing at the ceiling.

“Nothing, just- I’ll be after you guys in a second, I just dropped my phone around here.” She smiled sweetly.

“We’ll help you look, we’re not evacuating.” Sponge-head said, and sent the Tit-dick to look around the floor near the elevator for her. “There’s supposed to be someone coming down here.”

Yes. Her! To rob you. Go away! Fiona gave a serious frown. “Shit, I should probably get moving then. Sounds dangerous.”

“Yeah, so-”

Fiona ran into the guard room and jammed a chair against the door, and then pushed over the locker she’d gotten her uniform from over the chair, and then she screamed.

It was a gamble, a stupid idiot gamble, that the guards would try to break down her locked door before realizing they could run around to the other door on the vault side. Fortunately Sponge-head and Tit-dick reacted just how she hoped, going for the thing in front of them before working out alternatives. It gave her time to tether to the terminal and make her other solutions.

Okay, both guard doors would lock for anyone but her. The middle doors between rooms, the same. Could she open the vault door?

Kind of, it was timelocked.

Could she change the timelock time?

No.

… How did it know what time it was?

It checked the system time, which was verified by an external connection.

If she cut the external connection lines, could it literally then be as simple as changing the terminal system clock to the time that the vault opened at?

Yes.

Wow, okay, she did that then. Another press, another physical line got cut, and now the computer had nobody to ask that it wasn’t actually 7pm.

Fiona stared at the open vault door. “I refuse to believe you were actually the easiest part of today.”

No, shit, right, she was working on a different completely fucked and broken clock. The server in the vault.

Fiona paused.

Her face fell into her hands.

Oh, she’d fucked up.

Oh, she’d massively, massively fucked up.

“I cut the external connection.” She moaned. “Any change I make is just going to be local, isn’t it? Now they’re going to be able to just, roll everything back whether it’s suspicious or not. Fucking, idiot, stupid, moron-”

Also the two guards were still slamming the door and the rest were still coming and that was definitely, definitely her only path out of the building because she had stopped having a plan like fifteen minutes ago and had been blindly winging it since and now she was out of road.

Well.

Maybe.

“Okay, so I can’t upload changes.” Fiona clawed her fingers down her cold, sweating face in frustration as she pushed through the guard room and stared at the server in the vault. “What can I download that’s worth anything.”

Also incredibly stupid. Downloading meant taking physical evidence with her, which meant when she got caught (and she still had no escape route planned) she was definitely definitely definitely going to jail forever for it.

But given the choice between going home red-handed or empty-handed, she had an obvious preference.

She blinked as she remembered. “Oh. Duh. Thanks for the idea Elba. Genuinely would not have thought of it if you hadn’t been such an asshole.” Surprisingly easy once she thought of it, honestly. Most people don’t rob a bank for the server drivers and the operating system. Both easily fit on her nearly-empty burner phone.

She laughed when she realized her way out, too. She skipped, skipped! Into the security room one last time, and unwound the tether from her left wrist.

“Samantha!” Juarez’s boot slammed the jammed security door, hard enough the metal strained. Jesus Christ. “You bitch! There’s only one way out of there.”

“My upload’s just going to take another minute.” Fiona sang. “You’re going to need a lot more than that to get me.”

Another heavy boot, and the hinges of the door squeaked. She must have been using doorbreaker equipment, there was no way that was just kicking. “There’s only one way out of that room, girl, and it’s through me. And you’re not getting through me.”

“Yeah, yeah, you’re going to kill me, whatever. Listen-” Fiona turned off all the weight sensors in the vents, and made a few of her own checks. Thanks for the tip, Ham-head, you were a good… friend? “I’m just warning you, I’ve got enough sentry turrets set up here to make that a problem for you. Lemme just do what I need to do, and then I’ll negotiate my surrender. Okay?”

“You’re bluffing.”

“Sure I am.” Fiona bluffed. “Check the cameras, r-slur.”

The kicking stopped. “I need to talk to people about this. Don’t go anywhere. As if I needed to fucking tell you.”

“Where would I even go?” Fiona snarked, just because she knew how much Juarez hated it.

And then she ran for the air vent up, even though her lungs were more on fire than the cameras were at this point. Ham-head was right, it was a tight squeeze, but the rigid walls meant if she crushed her back to one side and kicked out with her legs to the other, she could shimmy and worm her way up to the ground floor. Eventually. Agonizingly.

Ham-head had also been right that it was like a sauna the whole way up. She slipped twice because of the back sweat. By the time she pushed herself out of a ground floor grate, the urge to roll around in the cool puddles made by the fire sprinklers was overwhelming. She didn’t bother to resist it, she felt toasted.

She stood up and found herself behind the teller counters again. Most of the people had already left, leaving her without a crowd to hide in. They definitely would have told the cops, or the other security team, that she was using a uniform as a disguise by now. Fiona sighed as she tore this shirt off too, it was basically so soaked through it was transparent anyway. She pulled her hair into a tight bun this time, as well.

“Topless, but anonymous.” She muttered. “Again.”

At least they still hadn’t worked out she’d cloned Juarez credentials, that worked to get her out of the employee-only area she’d crawled out of the vent into and back into the lobby. God, how embarrassing would that have been? She laughed until she realized that, no, she really didn’t have an answer for that one.

She remembered Ham-head saying ‘Roach Motel’ and shuddered.

Fiona ran through the empty reception and out of the bank, pushing her way past the police cordone. They weren’t even looking for her. Apparently they were getting ready for an armed standoff inside, so she hadn’t been as heartbreakingly slow shimmying up as she thought - either that or they thought she must be a really slow hacker, which, really? All that, and still no respect?

Fiona looked back over her shoulder just once before heading home. With every step her smile got wider and wider, her laughter more and more manic, until she was doubled over, hacking and wheezing like the queen of the goblins, the goblin queen.

“I am!” She let cry to the heavens, “So fucking good! I’m fucking magic! Look upon my work, ye mighty, and-”

Ah. Right. Do not maniacally laugh and scream about your power in public until after you buy a new shirt for the train home, Fiona, you dumb stupid powerful wizard idiot.

What she had stolen wasn’t as easy to get money from as making direct changes would have been, but nothing about today was as easy as it should have been. She’d still have to comb through what she had to be able to find an exploit that she could use that would actually do what she want. She had a few ideas though, especially if she could use this to crack their password encryptions. Downloading usernames and passwords only lasts a reset, but a cracked encryption is forever.

She wasn’t worried about that part, it was literally the easiest part of robbing a bank.

Passenger 57 by Junta Thompson

They made a movie in 1992 called Passenger 57, starring two men named Wesley Snipes and Bruce Payne. I think that really was their actual names. I love watching old movies like this as a kind of window into a world that doesn’t exist anymore, you learn how much is lost in translation when time is a distance. The past is a foreign country.

There was one scene in Passenger 57 that best explains what I mean. There’s a hostage situation on a plane, but the hostage has her seatbelt on. So Wesley Snipes shoots a hole in the window behind the hostage taker to cause explosive decompression and get this guy sucked out of a plane. I wondered if people really believed that was how it worked. Most people my age have never seen an airplane, so I don’t have a frame of reference for what people got wrong about them.

The second thing that stuck with me was just how many people seemed to have guns.

How many times do people use firearms on Aevum? I found we actually have something close to a real answer number, and not once has it caused us all to be ripped out of a hole into space.

We can guess that about 150,000 rounds of ammunition discharged on Aevum every year. That’s one round per forty thousand people that we know about, and honestly that still sounded high to me. Around 90,000 are police discharges, 30,000 are criminal discharges, 10,000 are criminal discharges specifically against the police, and 10,000 remaining are registered by security services.

We can get numbers this low because the regulation of the manufacturing and sale of ammunition on the station has been far more effective than the prohibition of guns. It’s fairly easy to make or print a gun with fairly off-the-shelf pieces, but bullets with their volatile elements are a much bigger pain in the ass to bootleg. The scale that it becomes pragmatic is also the scale an illegal operation becomes effective to target and shut down, and for estimates to be made of their production total.

This didn’t used to be true. Wesley Snipes would have had to register his gun, which was seen as the complicated thing to engineer, but have found it trivial to buy boxes of bullets for his registered firearm. He also lived in a world which required border enforcement - Mexico had only a single legal gunshop when Mr Snipes made this movie, but Mexico was just flooded with America’s smuggled firearms. Aevum has no inconvenient neighbours. Now even legitimate security services have to log all their discharges, and find it hard to replace their ammo stocks when they can’t register exactly what happened to their previous stock. The bullets used in unaccounted for firings aren’t replaced until the company can claim them as expired, which could be up to ten years.

That brings out something that would otherwise be hidden by only looking at discharge numbers alone. While a quarter of all criminal discharges are used against the police, this doesn’t reflect a quarter of all incidents of criminal discharges. Shots taken against police tend to be protracted shootouts which use a lot of bullets from both sides. The majority of criminal discharges are radically lower in count: A single warning shot fired in the air during a robbery, a bullet to the back of the head for an execution, fired point-blank range from the sidelines of a knife or sword fight.

Historically, it looks like as the disappearance of firearms is taken more and more for granted, far fewer bullets are fired. Half just seems to be because the bullets are what have become so expensive and difficult to obtain. Some of it just seems that as the murder rate remains around 1 per 100,000 as other weapons fill that space, guns aren’t how most people expect to die due to violence. The use of a firearm becomes more associated with either ambush or simply shots taken from a position of absolute advantage.

There’s another thing about these old movies, you notice, is that the guns themselves have a coded language to them. Someone with an AK-47 is always a criminal or a communist, someone with an FN-FAL is always a colonialist or a mercenary, and everyone with a shotgun is your favourite character in the movie. So I asked myself, what’s the cinematic language of the guns now, in 2080?

Now, I think it’s just what owning a gun says, more than whatever gun is being used. It says you’re either part of the state’s increasingly effective monopoly of violence, or that you already had to be someone incredibly dangerous to have the weapon at all. It’s an expensive status symbol for someone not to be fucked with.

You know what else sucks about all these old action movies, though? Because everyone has guns, you don’t really see sword fights in the Western canon outside of fantasy and period pieces. It’s so hard to find a good urban swordfighting scene.

If you want to see one, personally, I recommend 1998’s Blade starring Wesley Snipes.

[Count Numbers]

Jabratica by 3V

3V had gotten to the part of having a new roommate that meant inflicting all your favourite media on a captive audience. Assimilate to cohabitate, nerd, you have to understand each other’s dense web of personal references if you’re going to share a living space with them.

“Have you seen Jabratica?”

“No.”

“We’re watching Jabratica.”

Then the usual thing happened; Not on any of the legal streaming sites. Not on any of the illegal streaming sites (that she knew of). No torrents. No archives. Probably link rot. Ah well. Such was the fate of media just popular enough for broadcast but not popular enough to be preserved. It was a pretty old show by the time 3V had seen it as a kid.

This time she wasn’t willing to accept it. This time it was Jabratica, a show 3V hadn’t seen in almost twenty years, which had some incredibly specific scenes in it that had led to some very specific tastes and interests as a teenager (we all have one) and she really needed to make sure they were definitely real before she kept making jokes about them.

Clicky little paws started at the Wikipedia page. The only information there was the first (better) season’s box art, that it was produced by a company she hadn’t heard of, that it was released in 2043 and last aired on Earth in 2066.

That wasn’t usual. It specified on Earth. Most shows didn’t do that, and no air date on Aevum was given.

An hour of forum threads and online ask spaces came to a lot of people asking the same questions, remembering some of the same scenes (but none of the important ones for her purposes) and then just… shrugging about it. Deep in the comment swamps, someone mentions the rights got bought up by Polyhedron and they didn’t pass them on.

Maybe that’s it? Polyhedron was the death of a lot of media they didn’t think children should like, even when they evidently did. The answer doesn’t satisfy her. But at least she’s confirmed to herself the show really did exist.

“Latin American AtLA.” “One Piece for Lesbians.” “The Dragon Show With The Terrible Ship Wars.”

Jabratica’s had a lot of nicknames in different circles. Some people probably remember it from the memes about crushing colonizers underneath hot dragons. Some people remember the memes about the cast of Gold-Obsessed Tsunderes. Some people remember the (exaggerated) reputation for backing the wrong ship getting your inbox flooded with death threats. And some people (3V) actually remember Jabratica (and her relentless optimism) and Ascorela (and her acerbic deadpan wit) and Prince Ignacio (and his defiance of his birthright) and even Cyancio (and her unerring ability to lose even when she won).

And I definitely remember popping off when Jabratica abandoned her hard-won chance at regaining her former body and confessed her love to Ascorela instead.

(“Can you blame me? I cosplayed Ascorela back in high school— yes, in that outfit. No, you can’t see the pictures.”)

She borrows her roommate to help her access the acquisitions record of that production company she didn’t care about before. Yeah, it ends up in Polyhedron, but it isn’t completely absorbed, it’s a side company. So Polyhedron held Jabratica’s leash (S1E7) but that was it.

No, it got blocked from Aevum. Why?

She learns the company was Greek, part of their animation boom in the late 2030s. That was a big surprise to the world, Greece didn’t really have an animation industry. Googling a page of the top 10 Greek animation studios in 2023 came back with a list of four. This ended up being the reason rather than being counter to it.

See, in the 2020s a lot of the veteran French animators, the old masters of the pencil and paper style, were picking Greece as their choice of retirement and started teaching master classes. Two of those students ended up making a really popular line of Greek flipbooks together, and that started a zeitgeist of young animators. (Most of the popular ones don’t translate or explain well, but there’s an incredible one called Growth that’s just a field of flowers growing from seed to petals and every flower in it is hand-drawn in complete detail. The flipbook’s the size of a phone screen, but each of the 2,280 panels had to be drawn on A3 pages and then scaled down to print. They published five more books that year.)

Because there was no existing industry at all, no institution, what ended up congealing was pure outsider art. It was a weird situation, because it all happened at once, all these kids basically focused on making stuff for the world stage and global indie awards because there weren’t domestic competitions worth a damn yet - but all the talent they talked to, the communities they were making to talk about that work? That was all insular, and local, and committed. It ended up being a bit of a beef/cow situation, where there’s a difference in language because the people who raise the meat know they’re doing it for someone else to eat. Still, it kept to their tastes, which was jagged and horny and dark and bright and brutal and pastoral.

By the time Jabratica comes in, the industry had formed and matured out of its earliest punk rebellion phase, but that phase was so hard and embedded that it had formed coherent genres and recognized styles (e.g stuttertweening, Aegeatic noir, Crete dramedy). Maturity didn’t mean normalization, the normal had recognized their zeitgeist. It meant that individual animating talents had the life experience to make real production houses and organize competitive scale products domestically.

It’s a kid’s show, it’s obviously meant to be a kid’s show. But it’s unlike most of the other offerings at the time - even with the Greek renaissance, it’s a small boom in a small country and it’s mostly making stuff for adults and teenagers. Jabratica was kind of it for going for kids.

This takes hours to put together, and it can only be done in peripheral vision of the information 3V actually wants. It’s cross-referencing multiple rabbit holes and biographies and getting lost in the weeds of vintage flipbook collections that have survived. Still there’s nothing here about why Jabratica disappeared. It’s just necessary to find who really made it.

The lead animator, Phaedra Orologa, won an award for it and that’s how 3V learns her name, and she had a blog (link rot), and the blog was rehosted (link rot), and archived (link rot, link rot, all you touch shall be link rot) and then pulled from that archive to be quoted and blogged about (get Junta to click the link this time and don’t even breathe in its direction and 3V can’t believe that worked).

Here’s some of the answers 3V was originally looking for, at least, before this rabbit hole got deeper. Why did she remember the show being so much like that? Orologa said it was about making the kind of cartoon she would have wanted to watch as a kid - and she was a weird kid. But also it had to be the cartoon she wanted to make.

Which means - wow, that really was just straight up someone injecting heroin on-screen and then getting dopesick in S1E3? How did she not remember that? Straight over her head, but it’s not hidden at all. They just called it ‘dark magic potion’. And wow 3V can see why so many people talked about the vore in the comments, S1E4, S1E9 and S1E12 all have way too detailed scenes of someone getting swallowed. Someone just really wanted to animate mouths and throats apparently, because that was fun. Orologa wrote about how they only found out that was a fetish after, and 3V believes her at least. Still, it reflects a kind of wildly irresponsible do-it-for-the-love-of-it impulsivity that helped make it the thing that 3V half-remember 20 years later. The only question they seemed interested in was if something seemed fun to do.

Season 2 they got out by Polyhedron who made the production value way higher, but made everything have to be boring, and the show didn’t get cancelled in the traditional sense, everyone working on it just quit in protest. The producers held the IP so Polyhedron couldn’t just force the issue. Nice.

But that still doesn’t explain! Why! It! Isn’t! On! Aevum!

Finally, though, she has all the keywords she needs to search-fu what she actually wants. The animators names, the producer with the IP, the production company, the years to look for. Finally she’s looking for something that only happened twenty years ago, there had to be people still alive who knew this part of the story, and there was.

The reason you cannot watch Jabratica off Earth is an honoured protest. It wouldn’t be easy to find on Earth either, but it was actually made illegal on Aevum.

Jabratica started as something weird, and special, because it was the product of its little insular national movement. Despite that, from the start it was made in English for an international audience. Because of that, Polyhedron found it accessible, and killed what was good about it.

One of the entry requirements for Aevum was a passable fluency in English. Other spoken languages would be curtailed, and no alternative language options would be presented for government signage or forms - though translators would be made available. It was explicitly and openly a project of cultural hegemony.

Through Polyhedron, they denied Aevum as an entity the rights to Jabratica. Even managed to make taking physical copies up the Fountain with you contraband, because Polyhedron had that much power at the time (obligatory RIP Bozos). Polyhedron’s motivations to go along with it mostly seemed to be hating the first season’s existence that much.

The people who made Jabratica were worried that’s what Aevum would do to all art, that’s what it would become. A pure corporate entertainment monolith. One nation, one nationality, one shared expression.

Twenty years later, though, they were wrong. They saw their studio as the result of a national movement, of national pride, a local expression, and it was. But that movement only existed where and when it did because of two really talented flipbook artists making a fandom, and that fandom being condensed into a place where they had people to bounce their shared passion with.

Aevum as a project definitely killed that weird tension the Greek animators had between their internal community and having to turn to the internal communities they were outsiders from for validation and accreditation. That tension might be how something like Jabratica got made from a professional studio with resources, not just hobbyists between shifts at day-jobs for a video site. It’s impossible to say.

But of all the reasons for this one show to not be watchable? It was outsider artists who were scared the world would lose all its outsides if you put it in a big blender carafe. Most of them stayed on Earth because of it - Ironically, they had to retire to France because of the rising sea levels. If they’re still alive, and that’s a big if, it’d be impossible to find now.

3V has to wonder if they knew how Aevum turned out, if they’d be happy to seed a Jabratica torrent after all. Or maybe that’s just wishful on her part, because she still couldn’t find a copy at the end of the rabbit hole, and now it feels like kind of a dick move to cross a picket line.

At least, she thinks, it’ll make a good article.

[Count Numbers]

NumbToNothing's gallery posts

1: Want

I wish saying a place felt like home wasn’t an insult if I’m the one saying it, because I don’t know what else to call the Annwn Castle transhumanism gallery.

There’s this thing they used to talk about with queer culture where people asked why a bunch of us seemed to immature for our ages and it’s cause none of us had a first childhood like they did, we never got it out of our systems. Trans people got hit with it the hardest because they just straight up went through the wrong puberty years and had to catch up on that.

Like, one thing I had to think about a lot when I was going through the crowd today was makeup. Girls would practice makeup at all their sleepovers and parties, and guys didn’t. So if a guy transitioned then she had to be shit at makeup because nobody taught her. Looking at guys who are minotaurs and cyborgs now, it’s hard to remember how it was basically only a couple of years ago that guys wearing makeup got called slurs for it.

My Dad did when I started to. Like as a joke, it was funny, I laughed, but there’s a reason he knew I’d get what the joke was.

I think that’s kind of it, though. It’s about socialization, it’s about being taught how to be the right kind of person to fit in. And for some people it’s about trying to be an entirely different kind of person you weren't taught how to be, and for some people you just get taught wrong and you have to go through all the steps everyone else did when they were kids, when you’re too old to get being a kid as an excuse for it.

If you want to get what that feels like, you come here. If you’ve already dealt with that, then this is a celebration of it. If you haven’t, if you were raised right and like how you turned out, this is where you come to wonder if you should be. If maybe there’s something past ‘adult’ and ‘normal’ that it’s worth thinking about being. Something that doesn’t take twenty years of practice or being born with better genes or you haven’t already spent years getting good at it so it’s already too late. You can be something entirely new, that nobody’s ever been before.

If you did that, you start having to think about how you’d be all the time. Because it’s not just going to change who you are, it changes how people treat you. You have to write an entirely new social script where you’re acting the part of whatever new thing you are. You’ve got nobody you can learn it from, because you’re the first person trying to do it.

It’s just that when you look at the people here you think that’s worth it. You think maybe that people not being able to treat you by their existing script could be the only way to be treated as you for once, because they have to learn who you are before they can put a label on you. They have nobody to compare you to that makes being how you are get seen as a failure to be something else. It might start to feel like the only way to get treated like a person is to move past being human.

It’s why I love being here. Even when I don’t look like that, yet, that’s how the people here think, that’s how they treat you. Everyone who succeeded at being unique is someone who failed at being normal first, and I love them. I love them all, and this place is a celebration of everything about that, and why anyone who doesn’t like this because it’s weird is missing the fucking point.

Because I can tell you this, whatever excuses they tell you for it, whatever bullshit they give you, that’s the whole thing to them. That’s what I worked out today, when I helped tear the head off a lion. The transhumanphobes hate me even though the transhumans love me and they hate us both because of the same thing; These are always going to be the people who judge you based on how close you fit their idea of normal, and even if we wanted it that’s always going to be impossible for some people. What’s at stake here is our right to be anything other than the most boring kind of asshole.

The good thing is, even these assholes have totally different definitions of normal to them. It’s just that the weirder someone gets, the more of them you can get to agree it isn’t normal. Get weird enough and they can form a coalition.

If all you’ve ever wanted is to be what you are, if you’ve managed to fit in, then you might not get why that’s such a big fucking deal. You might get that the assholes are wrong for pushing their values on other people trying to exist in theirs, but you might also think transhumans are just immature kids playing dress-up who just haven’t figured out yet how to fit in to the real world.

And if that’s you, then come here tomorrow and learn what it’s like to want something. Where nothing’s stopping you from having it except people it doesn’t effect making it a problem for you. Learn what it’s like to feel like someone would want to kill you for being the person you wish you could be.

You look at the sheer joy of a dancing snake girl playing tetris on her scales, or of a unicorn pouring her heart out over the love she has for every single one of us deviants and reprobates, and you tell me how anyone who’d want anything else for them isn’t a fucking monster.

That’s the whole thing, right? None of that’s in here, right now, while I’m writing this. This place burns like a searchlight, it’s just that how bright it’s burning makes the shadows outside the walls feel so much darker.

I wish I never had to leave. I only have three days here and how bright everything is makes me realize how sick having to go back outside again is making me feel.

This is the first place that’s ever felt like home and it has to go away soon.

Eli.

The Lion, The Snitch and the Wardrobe

Isn’t it just the strangest thing? Remarkable. Here I was, all dressed up and ready to hang this man from a cross when I find all the heavy lifting has been done for me. What makes this so remarkable is that being there to see it happen only served to slow me down. I had to transition from the physical into the digital, if you’ll pardon my lateness for it, and it seems that by the time I’d kicked off my shoes to write… Well, now, how can I write an opinion piece when everyone already has an opinion that they’ve made up their mind on?

If I am to say anything, then, it will have to be something I can only add from the experience of someone who was actually there. Do not mistake me for saying that I will contradict the evidence of so many eyewitness accounts and so many video recordings of the matter, for I cannot do that and will not attempt to try. There is nothing I can say that will teach you anything new about those moments you cannot better learn elsewhere, through their objective record. I can only add to the pool of collective knowledge by telling you more of what I know from before the cameras started recording, and of what happened later.

To dispel some of the nastier rumours; No, I do not believe the Dragon was attempting to kidnap our man the Governor. I have it on good authority her taste lies instead in the taking of fair maidens, as befits any dragon of proper stature, and a fair maiden the Governor most certainly is not. I think he would find any insinuation to be libelous to say the least. The statements put out by the Governor’s press office paint a terrifying picture of a frogmarch through the darkness and away from his embattled security service. While such may be true from the perspective of the Governor and I would dare not call him a liar for this account, I will tell you now that his escort never once left the confines of a crowd of witnesses. Missing from his version of events is that he was brought to heel not by a fear of his safety, but for the fear he had been recognized.

The simple fact of the matter is that the Governor was caught acting suspiciously in a crowd he sought to belong in, and told on himself when he couldn’t. He, or at least his press office, claims at once he was prejudicially targeted and that he was outed by a random act of violence from the crowd. These two things cannot be simultaneously true. It is agreed that before the events the Governor’s disguise was not known, and we find no other accounts of violence at the event. The unflattering truth of the matter is that the Governor’s disguise was thwarted by his overt hatred, something the fabric of his costume was incapable of hiding, and such was the basis to target him regardless of his identity.

If the Governor himself was the only source that needed clarification on this matter I would find it understandable as he is the one who benefits from people lacking a clear record of events. The most to lose from people having a genuinely clear understanding of what happened. What I find most disappointing is that I am also compelled to dispel the accounts of liberal allies who would otherwise condemn the Governor and everything he stands for, but will instead stand with him to defend him from the very people he endangers. To them I have to ask; What good are your principles if they would bring you into an alliance with Joseon?

Did you not think it odd that, surrounded by witnesses, not one stood up to the physical defense of Governor Joseon against only a single aggressor, a young-seeming girl at that? A crowd with at least several wonderful and empathetic people I can personally account for. I should hope so, I was one of those people who made no motion in the Governor’s defense.

I will drop my glib facade a moment and I pray that you will help me pick it back up in a moment, because I will need it back again. Thank you for allowing me to be so blunt as this; This man came into my house. This man brought his filth and his hatred and his evil into my home. How could you dare wring your hands about how he was told he would kill himself when this man has demonstrably, provably and gleefully created law that has led dozens to that end? Why? Because one is something tangible you can see, and the other so intellectually abstracted? That’s not a principled position, that’s moral incoherence.

For many it is justified by how scared they are of violence and vigilantism, scared that this will lead to worse. I find this fascinating, because that remit, that order, must have been backdated months. The police have already been acting as if this were the case, and the withdrawal of legitimate state protection is what necessitates such vigilante protectionism in our spaces. If that is the nature of your fear then it is Governor Joseon and others like him that lit the petard that hoisted him today.

We tried it another way, we tried an exercise of community and safety today, we had something that was truly ours. And at its shining moment, during the beautiful speech of the organizer who made this possible, I had my reverie interrupted by this man’s hateful, evil garbage spewing into my ear from the darkness. My one consolation was knowing that it was that very hatred in that place that would destroy him, and here instead I find some of you trying to make a martyr of him, as if he is entitled to the political power that he uses to persecute these very people. What defense do they have from him, outside these walls?

The truth was what truly wounded him, and must be allowed to destroy him. That truth I do not need to elaborate on, because the Dragon herself said it so well, of which there is already an objective account. I can only say that her truth cannot be invalidated because it was delivered with a blow to the stomach or a hand held to the stuff of the neck.

I will not mince my words: Get this man the fuck out of my house.

Every suicide and murder due to this stochastic terrorism is the burning of a photo album that now never was. There is no money nor compensation that can ever make that whole, the only protection we are afforded is eviction. Eviction from a space he would see razed, even as he longs to be a part of it. The coward would commit arson upon my home, a home he is scared to share in, and the man who must live in the fire has no sympathy for the man who is afraid of it.

I apologize for that. If you will forgive me for getting so heated around the fire metaphors, and help me pick my glib facade back up again? I think it’s more comfortable for us both if I am to mantle myself in it for what I am about to say. I won’t overstay my welcome further than this.

I share in your fears of escalating violence and understand why you would condemn this, I promise you that. I wish such a matter were as simple as refuting violence altogether before it can escalate. But you cannot prevent an explosion of pressure by plugging the holes from which it vents. You cannot condemn the leaks. You must instead shut off the boiling.

Anyone who condemns the violence against the Governor today misses the point. No, it is not enough to condemn the Governor in the same breath and call for order on both sides. One side holds one of the most powerful men in public office with a professional security team, on the other was an angry girl with costume wings. There is no equivalency here.

To condemn the girl is to condemn the whistle of a kettle without removing the kettle from the heat. It is to fail to understand that the heat is the source of the noise since the heat itself is silent until it creates a symptom we find unpleasant. We must address the cause of this unpleasant symptom, to silence it is to fail to be warned. It is to fail to understand that for the kettle to start whistling, it has to have already been boiling in silence for a long time. We must ask how we remove the vessel of Aevum from the heat before there is a far worse spillover.

To stand with the Governor is to stand with the explosion I fear may be coming.

Night 2: Eulogy for the Living Dead

I don’t want to write tonight but it’s the only thing that makes everything stop hurting. So I’m probably going to make this way too long just so I have an excuse not to stop.

It feels like I’m writing a eulogy for someone who I have to pretend isn’t already dead just because he’s still alive. The fact he’s still alive right now just makes it hurt more because I have to have to have hope until it’s gone again.

Adrian Liddell would have preferred to be known as Junta, and he was one of the smartest people I know. I talk like everything’s just leaking out of me, it’s like mashing random article on wikipedia over and over and I’m just kind of vomiting words all over you, and Junta could just talk like that back and he’d think about what I’m saying and then go back to something I said fifteen minutes ago because he was still thinking about it the whole time I was saying new shit to him because he was doing both, and also the thing to talk about next.

Can talk like that, fuck. Will talk like that, if he’s not brain damaged from this again.

You know he helped me when nobody else thought I deserved it. He thought I deserved it before I did, and he reached out and he just kept talking to me about stuff nobody else would let me say. Like I was angry, I did that thing where I wanted to kill myself but I didn’t want to hurt anyone by doing it so I tried to push anyone away so there’d be nobody in the splash zone and he didn’t. I did everything I could to make sure everyone would be happy I was dead and when I did it to him, he asked me why I hurt so bad I was trying to do that.

I didn’t deserve to live. Just- Fuck I’m making this about me now, but shut up, this is really about him I don’t know how else to say this. I didn’t, but he thought I could, and he tried to make sure I’d get there, and he never stopped telling me. Him and friends he introduced me to, some of my best friends now I only know because of him.

Like I don’t want to say I’m only alive because of that because it’s not fair to put that much pressure on someone and like, he’d tell me I should take most of the credit because I did all the work. So okay, maybe it’s me. But it was like holding on to a cat long enough to cut its claws and it’s slicing your arms the entire time you do it, he spent years holding me up while I did nothing but cut him for it.

He used to tell me that we don’t have to be okay now, or soon, but that if we worked hard enough we could have more good days ahead of us than bad days behind us. And if I stick it out, if I make it long enough, I can live enough good days to have made all the bad days worth it. We can’t change what we’ve already done, the only chance we have at fixing that is by being better for long enough.

If you’re already deep into the karmic red it’s hard to imagine any way most of your life could be good, so there’s no point trying. You get one chance and you already ruined this one beyond recovery so you know you’re just… continuing on a save file of a game where you’ve already missed all the chances for the good ending. Why keep playing just to get a bad one?

Shit, I hate that’s the best analogy I could come up with. Sorry Junta.

But you know where he was when he was holding me up through all this?

Living in the bottom of a fucking elevator shaft.

I think that’s what got me. He believes that, genuinely believes that when he’s had more reasons than anyone else to give up. You think the stuff he admits about himself in his articles is dark? I don’t think getting shot today was even the worst thing that’s happened to him. Maybe not even if it ends up being what kills him.

You know what gets me, about the footage?

I keep watching it. I know I shouldn’t so don’t tell me. Just, I keep watching it, and the thing that got me was like, why him right? Like out of everyone in that whole building why was it this dumb asshole and not someone I didn’t care about, some rich lawyer asshole or a real journalist (derogatory) or some bodyguard taking a bullet like they’re paid to.

He doesn’t see it’s a gun when she draws it, but he’s watching her. But even though Junta’s a fucking agoraphobe, he’s the only one that doesn’t start to duck and cover when the shots start going off. You watch frame by frame, and this stupid idiot asshole dumbass fucking, he’s the only one that starts moving closer to her.

I can’t tell if he’s going for her hand, or if he’s trying to hug her, but he looks more scared for her than by her. LIke, he’s realized how bad the situation is and the first person he wants to protect from it is the girl who got him shot.

Story of his idiot life lmao.

I’m probably reading too much into it, it’s like, it’s me going frame by frame over a two second reaction. He probably didn’t even have time to think about it, but that’s why I think I’m probably right. I think if Junta had a bit more time to think he’d have done something way smarter.

But he didn’t, so he probably died trying to hug this girl just so he could say something like ‘you don’t have to do this’ or ‘I got you’ or something. I’m just guessing.

I’ll ask him if he wakes up.

He’d say the only mistake he made was not seeing the gun sooner. I know that much.

And he wouldn’t say it like he thinks he’s a hero, he’d say it like he was a failure for missing it. Like anyone else in his position would have saved this, even though there were seven other people and every one of them ran away when he took the step closer.

Anyone out there that paints him like an innocent bystander who this crazy mouse girl got killed misses the whole point of Junta, just makes him this stupid fucking angel who had so much potential in life when they wouldn’t have thrown a Snickers down an elevator shaft for him. Angels are boring, they’re flat, they’ve got no personality and even though they’re hot they think sex is impure like it’s a bad thing and not the best part.

Sorry I swear so much, if you think that invalidates everything I’m saying go read Pope instead. But one of my favourite people just got shot so cope.

This is also day 2 of my Transhumanism gallery exhibit series. I hate that this is relevant to all of it. It kind of overshadows the art a bit.

Because today a bunch of OESN and NBN coverage breached the walls of this castle to bring word of it to the outside world, because they were allies before but now it’s a whole thing. Tomorrow the real siege is going to happen, and everyone inside is making their peace with that in their own ways.

Me? I’m so wasted I can make a magic carpet ride out of empty absinthe bottles and this side table I flipped upside down, lmao.

Tomorrow, a mob’s going to show up waving signs with pictures of my dead friend’s face on it as an excuse to bash the shit out of the kind of people he died trying to protect. I don’t think they can imagine how much he’d hate them.

Someone’s probably going to throw a brick at my face with his name written on it, but they won’t even know him well enough to write the right one.

I know he’s still alive. I just don’t believe he is.

I ran out of words. I wish I had more words but I don’t know what to say. It’s just people actually need to read this, and the longer I keep writing it the worse it’ll be that I held onto it. The moment I stop though it’s all going to hit me because the feelings are going to stop being in the words and they’re going to go back to being in me again.

Here’s to Junta S Thompson, a man m ade of paper who ran back into the burning building, who tried to give his place on the lifeboats to someone it was already too late to save.