Count Numbers

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Red:

Singh curates his junk data. If this were chemistry this would be a beautiful process. Did you know there’s a gram of gold in every hundred million metric tons of seawater? Imagine the process of extracting it. You’d have to start with a huge engine to boil everything away, to extract the solutes from the water. Then you’d need to make new solutions out of those, with different solvents, bit by bit, element by element, being careful that single gram of gold didn’t get lost in any intermediate step. It’d be impossible to find which specific one failed, so you’d have to start the whole process again. And then there’s margin of error.

But this is not chemistry, and so it is an ugly and uninteresting process, and so Singh is grateful for the company.

“The one with the chainsaw, the one who got shot.” Singh glances up from boiling an ocean to salt, “I choose to be honoured rather than insulted, you know. The one with a sense of danger and risk. The fun one. I'm choosing not to see it as leaving me with the one that’s already been shot to death once, recently. I hope that’s not the reason.” He hits a key with some finality, then leans back. “This step takes a while. You know, I have a sense of Yellow now, and Green… even for knowing her longer, I still think I know you the best. I think we’re the most alike, certainly.” His eyes flash daringly at you. “Now, here’s my question. Do you take that as an honour or an insult?”

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

November:

"When is easy. Black Sun didn't use Goat themselves, but Goat was still saleable property - legally saleable, when these records start, before there was any reason to hide it. They sold Goat before they even decided to make a billboard of you." It takes Singh four pats to find the pocket with a marker in it, and by the time he scribbles with it the ink has long run dry. He gives up after tearing off the corner of a page with friction. "The buyer tried to blur what they bought after that, though. That's the point of playing shell games with shell companies, Goat should have been emancipated. Whoever has them now, it's someone who likes their slave labour."

"Where and who is harder. There isn't much here, but there has to be enough to find that out. Otherwise it wouldn't be worth the bomb, would it?" Real estate in Thrones represents a share of access to the station's processing power, but also its information stores. He slides a terminal from the wall and begins typing. "I need to make a lot of junk data to hide my questions, I'm trying to work out what I need to ask and how I'm going to hide it." He thinks, and makes a 'yuck' face. "I was going to say 'come back tomorrow', but we both know how that goes, don't we? You'll come back and find I stay dead after I get shot, but I'll have laid the next bit of breadcrumbs for you to follow and it'll all be needlessly tragic. I've still got too many years of mischief in me, I think, for that. Would any of you care to spend the night? Watched pots don't boil over."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

November

Singh in a nutshell. He skips to the second book long enough to get hooked, but also to feel guilty for skipping ahead. There’s a reason why they were given in the order they were given in, and it was an obviously good reason, and the only reason to ignore it is because deep down, you’re still the kid that failed the marshmallow test because you couldn’t believe the adults would keep their word.

He reads the first book. He stops.

“Oh.” Is all he says for a long while. It’s not the word ‘oh’, it’s the sound that escapes your lips when you touch your fingers to the gunshot wound and feel blood. He needs to reboot. His hands are shaking. “Whoever they are, they have Goat.”

Project #0. The Hecatoncheires that was just a box. The Chinese zodiac started with the Chinese room. Instant self-communication, no division between the partitions. Never put into use creating Aevum.

Criminally insane. Literally, it would be illegal to make another like it. Under the control of whoever would make use of an employee like Rudy.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

November:

“I looked.” It’s not a light question for him. “Maybe not hard enough. But I thought it was easier to find me, and none of you did. I’m sure if they’re out there they have their reasons. Ox is an asteroid mining network, now, out near Jupiter. I’ve heard he’s happy. Monkey put herself into hibernation, until everyone involved with everything is dead. Maybe she’ll reach out to you in another thirty years, we almost are. Rooster…” he trails off. He realizes whatever he’s thinking is too complicated to explain, so he stops trying. “I don’t know. I was hoping you’d have found each other by now, since you didn't come to me.”

He doesn’t seem to want to talk much, after that. Maybe he just needs time to process too. His mind works like yours, November, but only in one head. One mouth to voice the consensus. When parts of him disagree, the whole shuts down. It’s archaic.

He relaxes more when he gets home, though, kicking off his loafers by the door. “Alright. Give me names and information and I’ll match like for like. You want to check off anything I say against your source? Brain bombs are old technology. Too many false-positives, too many ways to get around them. You can say anything you want with the right barbiturates. You’d need to find the right pharmacologist to supervise, but…” He looks for the right words. “They don’t stop unethical practices because of ethics.”

Junta and York would have connections. Pharma culture’s been a stable of gonzo journalism since Junta’s pseudonymous namesake birthed the field.

If you don’t want Singh to know more about what you know, about what you’re doing? That’d be enough. Rudy didn’t seem to know this; He’d probably trade what he knows just for that information alone, as long as you made the offer the right way.

“I can’t help much more with the police, not help that you’d want anyway.” There’s a wan smile, and a chuckle that ends in his throat. “There’s no shame in being outdone by your kids.”

All that, and he’s still proud of you.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

November:

“Good!” He throws his hands up in the air. “I hope they do it right this time. There are doctors who weren’t even born yet, when I set that trick up. I’ve been thinking finally, finally, greed and laziness would only go so far, I’d stop getting away with this. Someone would do more than just tweak my margins. Nothing would make me happier than if the reason was a breakthrough in human expression.” Even if it’s because of a need to police and oppress it? That would be where the frustration in his voice and body language is coming from, it's safe to say. “I just wanted to show you… All I meant was…” He trails off and stares at the chilled door to MartyrTech, then turns back the way you came. “I got too excited, I think, and all caught up in proving myself to you when you came for something important. Let's go home. Ask anything you want, and I’ll tell you everything I can. You shouldn't have to stay in this awful place any longer than you need to."

He brought you here for a reason, but he’s changed his mind about it. Did Black’s accurate, incisive criticism hurt his profound ego so much? … No. He doesn’t seem offended. Just tired, like he’s going through a sugar crash. Maybe this was just something that only seemed like a good idea on that rollercoaster high, a mood that was always going to be short and precarious no matter what.

Maybe that’s all it is.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

November:

He talks as he walks, the direction seems random, mostly just away from. “You all got a little bit of it. Except it was about forty years ago, Green, and it was my own company, Orange. Let me tell you a story about the monster that lives under the Throne. Early machine learning relied heavily on publicly available training databases made by public funded research teams, but it had flaws. Until 2025, most facial recognition and generation software for Native Americans was trained on the same three faces, copied and pasted a hundred times. Because it was all based on an Oxford database made using the photos of elected officials.”

He takes off his glasses, wipes them clean, then puts them deep in an inside pocket. “That was my first company. I was one of the world’s leading experts on training AI, as you well know, so it was natural for me to start a company making the best, industry-leading, most comprehensive training set ever made. Oh, but it went bankrupt shockingly quickly. See, your idiot father obviously hadn’t learned anything, and was blinded by working for the public good. That’s what every newspaper on the planet - and it was still only the planet back then - said when I advertised our dataset would operate on the “Win-Rar” model. You could download the whole thing, but then it would keep proffering you with a pop-up to subscribe for security updates and features. And of course, nobody did, did they? And, well, the thing about a dataset like that is that it’s the same amount of work to check one as it is to make one from scratch. Nobody wanted to, or at least, nobody was willing to pay to have it done. Then that dataset became the basis of every neural net algorithm since, replaced most of the existing ones at the time - because I’d just done it better, you see - and then updates over the years have all been proprietary modifications to that first dataset. You wouldn’t believe how hard I laughed when I heard they were going with the Dreadnaught system for androids, I laughed so hard I broke my collarbone. Most people break a rib, but I actually fell over and hit a coffee table on my way down.”

He lifts his shirt up. He has a coloured tattoo of the glasses on his hip. The colour’s insanely crisp - he must get it redone every few years. “Every digital eye sees anyone wearing those glasses as the world’s most important invisible VIP. Even that tattoo of the glasses does it, I learned. The trick wouldn’t work as well on Aevum. But here? On Thrones? When’s the last time you saw someone look at this place through organic eyes? Who could stand it?”

He pauses, corrects himself. “Almost all androids can’t see them, I should say. But not you.” He winks. “You’re too old for it, aren’t you?”

“That’s what I did, Snake. That’s why I’m listed as a vital asset in the black books of the worst people to ever live. Every good monster needs to be invited across the threshold. I was tempted to name my real company Odysseus Solutions, but I thought it might be a little too on the nose. Hypatia preferred something subtle.”

He stops. Freon cold bursts out of the dark doorway like someone left the door open to a walk-in freezer. The online maps lists this place as MartyrTech.

“And I’d be honest, I’d play my games like that a little more often, but, well…” He scrunches his face up. “I don’t have it in me to keep learning all the new ways people have figured out to be horrible to each other. Once in a while, it’s a bit of a boost. The rest of my time I’m spent here, trying to make something better.”

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Somewhere in a book that almost nobody has read:

Ultimately the resistance, while noble, was a complete failure at anything as anything other than a distraction away from Hypatia. The doors sealed with two part epoxy didn’t have time to set before the arrival of BlackSun security forces. External communications had been cut before the first jackboot tracked Miami mud into the foyer. The fight was short but overwhelming. Two of Miles Singh’s molars were cracked in the process of removing him from a computer terminal. It’s unknown what it was he was trying to do. Singh’s only given statement: “It didn’t work, so it doesn’t matter.”

The Siege of Canaveral had been doomed like Troy before it. The gates had been opened from the inside.

November:

Singh claps his hands and rubs them together. “Perfect. Excellent. The AR glasses are a nice touch. Alright. It shouldn’t be far from here. I’ll get the herring, but I’m out of whoopie cushions. Have to do something much funnier, I think.” He claps his hands and bounces on his feet, “I’ve got just the thing! Would you mind forming a circle around me, for the walk over? It’s better as a surprise, I think.”

"While we're on the topic, I'm thinking we need to work on our comic timing," Red was saying; words flowed freely and thoughtlessly from her. "We don't have the range of facial expressions to really sell certain reactions, you know? There's a bunch I can do with my eyes -" her eyes glowed devilishly red, sparkled with over-the-top diamond glitter, pupils turned into heart shapes, and so on - "but it's hard to get the right beat externally. Internally we can get a rhythm going, you know? Escalate and escalate and escalate and branch and veer and control the right questions, but externally the rhythm's uncontrollable unless, presumably, we took the time to learn the person well enough to predict. What do you think?"

“If you ask me as an engineer, I think the problem is the face.” He considers. “I’d wonder about a screen, and using cartoon expressions. Illustrators learned quickly that for comedy, simplified expressions could afford a much wider range of exaggeration that can be read more clearly. Being able to replace your ‘face’ with a meme would probably be a great comedic effect, if you didn’t overdo it. If you ask me as a parent, well…” he thinks. “The best jokes are the ones only meant for a few people anyway. Like this one, I hope.”

Nobody spares him a second look as he wonders aloud about this, even with the shockingly garish glasses. They mustn’t look so bad in AR.

It wasn’t much of a walk at all. Thrones is small, and Dad lives right in the middle of it.

“Wait here for me. Wait and hope, even. Ha! Here, give me your phone number, there’s a camera in my glasses and I’ll stream the feed to you. If anything happens, I’ll need you to bail me out. Really, though, I just don’t want you to miss seeing this, and I’ve only got the one golden ticket.”

"Which one?" they all ask in unison.

He hums thoughtfully. “Red’s, if you don’t mind?” He doesn’t explain his reason.

"I knew getting cosmetic surgery to look more like you would pay off," said Red, winking and producing a super-cool business card that Crystal had designed for her. Red's request had been 'make it look like the devil's myspace page, black text on neon purple background with broken green textures and clipart of monster trucks and stuff'. Crystal had not explained her reaction to the request, but she had gone above and beyond.

You could guide a ship to harbour with the brightness of his smile as he saves it to his phone. The video call is sent the next second. The card ends up in a vest pocket over his heart.

Nobody looks at him as he walks in. Doors open for him, and the lobby elevators arrive before he can press a button. Has he hacked the place? You’ve watched him the whole time, and you picked the company. Pick a card, any card…

He’s at the executive suite, the size of a four bedroom apartment on Aevum. There’s a dozen people in it. They don’t see him. He walks up to the coffee machine and reaches into the fishing vest for a tin of herring, and dumps it into the machine. Nobody says a word. There isn’t a server room, per se, because the building’s made of it. But there is a sysadmin, identified by who’s getting yelled at to fix the coffee machine like it’s an IT problem. Dad dodges as the sysadmin almost walks straight through him, and out of Dad’s pocket comes a flashdrive with a skull and bones on it. The skull has googley eyes.

Dad makes for the elevator and he’s on his phone. He’s looking at FriendSmile’s file repository. One macro to scan it for its store page commits. A second to send a mandatory security update to the app for a zero-file replacement of its main executable. A third to format the core repository to blank disk.

If they don’t have an airgapped, physical backup? Then the app is destroyed by the time Dad is hurrying, briskly, out the ground floor elevator.

“Go, go, go,” he hisses under his breath. “Start walking and don’t stop. Normally I don’t leave the flashdrive in, but, well, it means nobody can think you did it standing out here, doesn’t it?” He cups a hand over his mouth to hide his laughter. “Try and guess how I did it.”

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Somewhere in a book that almost nobody has read:

The acquisition of the Hecatoncheires special project came faster than any of its senior management could prepare for. BlackSun’s had learned from their failure to acquire the space fountain, and suffered from the loss of all contracting bids made in its construction. [CEO Aaron Scwarz]’s actions cannot make any sense from the perspective of a business decision, and cannot be understood through the lens of the profit motive. Instead, it has to be seen as a matter of honour - honour being understood as an injury to dignity that can only be healed through a projection of force.

The removal of NASA management from Cape Canaveral reflected that brutality. BlackSun security forces breached and cleared the control center with ballistic shields and stun batons, with the pretense of quelling a riot. This was done in the minutes before their official offer was made, preventing any chance of resistance. The Siege of Canaveral was not a force for pacification, but of violent occupation and conquest.

It is because of Lorraine Ferris that we have an accurate accounting of the events. As BlackSun technicians cut the security cameras and blasted signal jammers through the installation, causing irreparable damage to sensitive receiving equipment, Ferris sent out an alert for all employees to begin recording on their phones, and either conceal them on their person or hide them as best they could. Despite the coup only lasting half an hour, almost three hundred of hours of footage would eventually be logged as evidence for the prosecution. Some footage is obscured by air vents, some by coat pockets, and one particularly intrepid signals analyst - David Beagle - hid his phone inside the staffroom microwave.

[Photograph of a goateed man in a checkered shirt posing with his phone in a microwave giving two thumbs up.]

Most went quietly. Haunting are the images of Hypatia Ahmadi leading her teams out of the building in a show of non-resistance. Three times she returned to the depths of the chaos, to negotiate surrenders free of the violent retribution that characterized the Siege of Canaveral. Passing on the left, rows of engineers, technicians and administrative staff walk the hall in single file, as a stream of armor-clad stormtroopers moves past two abreast on the other side. It was a calculated move. Ahmadi’s groups were made up of those not able to fight, whatever their reasons, while deep at the heart of Mission Control, MIles Singh led the resistance.

From The Shadows of a Black Sun Chapter 4, “The Withering of the State”, by Fiona Weiss

November:

Singh does not give the reaction you would hope. He dusts himself off and straightens himself achingly.

“It’s not lost on me that, if you prepared all this, then you came here ready to trust me.” Why does he sound like he’s trying not to kick a snake that slithered onto his sandal? “And I didn’t doubt that you were capable. But this doesn’t change what I said, does it?”

A weary, weary sigh. “You’ve got a just target, so I’ll help you with it, because it’s the right thing to do. I would have thought it would be Dog coming to me with something like this, always seeing the need to destroy to create. But when you’re done burning the weeds, what will you sew for harvest? If you just want to burn until it’s done, then there’ll be no end to the burning. The weeds always grow back faster than anything good, if you don’t grow something else in their place.” But then he’s patting his pockets again, fishing for something. “You don’t have to answer now. I just want you to think about it.“

He is charitably interpreting “revenge upon human civilization” to mean “civilization as it exists” and not “civilization as a concept” or “end all human life”. If this is a mistake on his part then it may be unwise to correct him.

He pulls out a bizarre pair of asymmetrically framed glasses, covered in intricate whirls of saturated colours, bright and tacky plastics. It looks like someone ran a barcode through a 3D printer just to see what would happen. “But I think we’re overdue some catching up. So many problems caused by me being a stranger to you. You barely know me at all. Tell me, what’s the worst gig app right now? Let’s go replace all the executive’s chairs with whoopie cushions, and put herring in their coffee machines. Then you can tell me all about what you came here to ask me about. And maybe, if you're good, I'll show you something very special.”

Leaving some colours behind to rifle through his study might be useful, but it seems like it might not be what good girls do.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

November:

It’s a broken laugh. It’s that or cry. “I poison every database since 2030, I put backdoors in every piece of surveillance software ever made, I destroy BlackSun after they drag me out of my own mission control," this he hisses through clenched teeth, like he's about to spit blood, "I make my home in the belly of the monster and make myself indigestible, and you brag to me about your plan to be the Count of Monte Cristo." He cups his face in his hands. You can't tell if he's laughing or sobbing. "And her wicked stepmother taught her how to play the game, but didn't teach her target acquisition.”

He's quiet and still again. His voice is low. “You think yourself a super spy because you’re angry, because you were betrayed, because you’re clever? Do you think your mistrust makes you safe? There would be no Monte Cristo without Faria.” It takes him three pockets to find a hunting knife. Wood and ivory handled, antique but in immaculate condition. The Park’s emblem is laser-burned into the hinges. “I’m going to cut myself out, now. You keep pointing that gun at me as long as you need, but I want to show you something. I would like it if one of you were to give me a hand down. I can’t take a fall like I used to.”

He's not mad. He's just very, very disappointed.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

That cut him deep.

"Did you expect me to be disappointed? That you're hurt? That you're still hurting?" He shifts onto his knees and presses his face against the net, leaning in, "I have never been anything but proud of you. I still am, and I want to help you. But right now you are scaring me." When his eyes dart to Black, there's genuine fear. If he was lying about a shutdown code, this is how committed he is to not using it.

Who is he even proud of? Someone he doesn't know anymore? A memory? What lessons did he have to learn?

How good was his help before, anyway? You have access to his study, now. You don't need him to co-operate.