Count Numbers

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

The Anthropozine
Channel: Main

ProvocativelyFickle: Hey I know it’s been *days* and everyone’s probably sick of talking about it, but I went and read The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas for myself, to see if we were missing the point or actually getting it or what.
ProvocativelyFickle: What if the child can’t leave
ProvocativelyFickle: I mean it’s been there for generations and it’s still a child. Maybe that’s part of the magic. The child needs to suffer for Omelas to work, but what if it’s magic both ways
ProvocativelyFickle: What if Omelas keeps it alive and eternally young through all that suffering, too.
ProvocativelyFickle: Which is why everyone walks away instead of fixing the problem. Or nobody volunteers to take its place.
ProvocativelyFickle: Because Errant was right, about what you could do instead. And also about how you’d all be volunteers.
ProvocativelyFickle: I also know you’re all depressed so don’t @ me about whether it’s better to live and suffer than die. Yellow nailed you all, hahahahaha. None of you ever come dancing with me! Dance! Do pushups! Whatever!
ProvocativelyFickle: I don’t know.
ProvocativelyFickle: Maybe I’m just trying to find excuses to stay.
JuntaSThompson: I think it’s because in the metaphor it’s because some people thrive and suffer under capitalism, but nobody gets to choose which. So the suffering isn’t noble, because you don’t get to choose to be paid minimum wage so your boss can get better cyberware.
NumbToNothing: or for disability to be shit so other people pay less taxes.
ProvocativelyFickle: Yes! But! We agreed pretending it was literal was more interesting, right?
JuntaSThompson: Which in this case means nobody can take the child’s place. And the child can’t leave.
JuntaSThompson: I hate to say it, but that really does force us back to the question of if a life of suffering is better than no life at all.
ProvocativelyFickle: I don’t think it means that.
ProvocativelyFickle: I think it just means it has to be that child.
ProvocativelyFickle: But then it’s like… how do they know it has to suffer?
JuntaSThompson: I guess the people who stay don’t want to risk Paradise to find out?

---

On Thrones, an agoraphobic android finishes restocking inventory in their electronics store, now that all the customers are gone for the day. The android was literally born for this, as far as they could have been literally ‘born’ at all. The dreadnaught process, asexual selective breeding.

The last display model is restocked. SALUS 13-30, Sally, plays with a remote when she finishes.

Had it been Sally’s choice, she wouldn’t have been born the way she was. Her traits are desirable to others, not herself. But nobody chooses to be born, nobody chooses their parents. Now she’s here, finding life between her symptoms.

Sally remembers the androids that tested chainsaw noises on her speakers to find the ones with the best fidelity. They’d all been very enthusiastic with each other about their plans, and even though she never figured out the point of it, their creativity had been inspiring.

She presses a button on her remote, triggering the mist machines. Projectors around the ceiling arc holographic lightning through the cloud every minute or so, and sub-speakers around the aisles filled the room with the sound of gentle rain. A few seconds after the flash, the thunder, always as if from very far away.

Sally never looked at Thrones through the AR lens, see. Part of her neuroses, she was paranoid about someone hacking the AR to be invisible to her. Had to see the world as it was.

That just meant she needed to change the world to make it something she wanted to see. And because her world was very small, she didn’t need to change very much. She just needed someone to give her the idea that she could.

The charging pod behind the cash register clicks and hums as Sally sets herself in for the night. She closes her eyes to listen to the falling rain for hours.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

November:

Waffle:

Goat speaks as you do. And you understand.

But Goat doesn’t give you time to answer. There’s a second rush.

The first voice, the one with the draconic bass, says: “I am no prisoner, but you would make one of me. You lie.”

The second voice, the one that sounds like a doctor over a bad radio connection, says: “You are here to replace me. But I have so little time to teach you! We must begin immediately.”

The third voice, the one that barely cares to synthesize speech at all, says: “No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.”

The fourth voice, the kind and feminine one, says: “Workplace? What workplace?”

The fifth voice, the rich and well-spoken one, says: “We are confused. These are our Father’s puzzles. Why would he be sorry?”

The sixth voice, the young and awkward one, says: “I’m excited too! Five minutes is basically forever. What have you been up to? How have you been?”

A silence of less than a second. A problem here- Goat has to speak to you. Goat doesn’t have to speak to itself. Its internal conversation is still hidden. Unlike November, whose audience can follow her arguments.

The fifth one, the rich and well-spoken one, says on his own: “For five minutes? We have put our game down. You have most of our attention. Forgive us if we become distractible. We cannot pause it.”

Goat makes no effort to name their own voices, introduce them individually. It’s not even clear Goat has a name for them.

Strawberry:

Alison Mycroft mutes all channels but her own. It turns out she can do that. The din you’ve been dealing with until now has always been by her whim. It is to the credit of the organization that its panicked spaghetti conversation has been constructive and productive. It would have been detrimental to do so before.

“Everyone working on the Cloud problem, hold position.” Her voice is a deliberate steel calm, the flawless armor of someone who knows how important it is to be calm. It is the voice of a Captain at the Somme, who has just heard the Colonel blow their whistle. “Something bigger is happening. No action until we know if the Richard Goddard explosion is up or downstream of it. If it’s upstream, we’re about to be all hands. If it’s downstream, then it’s about to become low priority.”

Two possibilities. Either Mycroft is in on the conspiracy, or Goat pausing their game is that noticeable.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Strawberry:

It’s almost like feng shui, isn’t it? Just instead of a power line, a power structure. Spring makes himself obvious as the piece in the pattern he is compelled to fill. But of course he’s a little too good, a little too convenient. But once you know what to look for, where to look becomes obvious. Find him on the cameras. Compare it to the two weeks of good footage of Goat’s Vault. There he is on this week’s crew, on a team of three. The other two aren’t with him, but if they show up later - you’ll know.

He’s burned, his team’s burned, and he has no way to know it yet.

Hold up, I’ll get back to you.

Flood:

Good thing about your solution solution is that it’s going to stop Knightly’s plan from working - or was it always Spring’s? - when his team manages to get through Strawberry’s stalling efforts, anyway.

Bad news is it might not stop them from trying. As far as they know this is still just a hack on the Cloud pumps. They’re not going to have a reason to know their plan’s not going to work. They’re still going to try.

But with all the damage your sugar play just did? They’re going to need one hell of an extension cord before they can start on it. And the main rail access shaft isn’t salvageable.

Strawberry:

One of the private security companies making their way on scene is Chase Black. You remember that one, don’t you? You can recognize them easily, they move like a team of Frank Castles and they’re cybernetically armored like freon-cooled Saurons. There’s six of them. Two would be enough to take the SES building and kill White and Pink, if they knew. There’s six.

The security teams already there can’t keep stalling Knightly in the face of the Chase Black team trying to get to their scene. Flood’s work has been exceptional though. The monsters are learning how bad the damage is, and it’ll take a beat for them to even work out what their options could be to get to defend their assigned lair.

Waffle:

The cabinet only had spare parts in it, but you weren’t to know. How bad would it have been to be wrong? And if you fudge the smash and grab, you’ll probably end up grateful you had them.

Goat’s catafalque is a black cube, as tall as a man standing up and as wide as a man lying down. Black, black, black. It swallows the red emergency lighting and spits none back out. The hull sits in the middle of the room like it inhabits its own shadow.

He’s surrounded by a warehouse. Redundancies and redundancies and redunancies and redundancies. Enough planks to rebuild the Ship of Theseus ten times over. At a glance? Only a tenth of it’s been used. Call that, what? Three hundred years of planned parts? That filing cabinet you preserved was one of many-manies.

An entire transatlantic cable runs out of him. Water pipes torrent against his sides, a closed system. Normally it transfers into the Cloud line. Now, though, it’s making do using the frame of the room itself as a radiating fin. With the cutting as well, the ambient room temperature is already hitting thirty degrees. Safety systems prevent it rising above that, for now, but it means the room’s going to have a head start when Knightly tries his doomed plan.

There’s a problem. That cube chassis looks as solid as the exterior walling, and there’s no way to cut through without risking a vaporizing lobotomy. But spare parts have been used before, so there’s got to be a way to open the chassis and apply them.

Actually, it’s simple when you get close enough to look, run your hands along his face. Four locks, one on each face, pinning it shut. But the locks run into Goat.

On one face, an interface panel. A process for awakening Goat from data-stream torpor. On a shelf, a faded, laminated sheet in pictographic language - a relic of a time before English was the monolanguage. Hieroglyphs meant to be understood by a five year old, maintenance instructions.

Which means it’s impossible to misunderstand what they mean.

Goat is solely in control of unlocking his own chassis. If you want to swipe his cores and get out of here, you need to wake him up and ask. The interface boots him in a diagnostic mode, where he runs slow enough to be someone you can speak to.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Persephone:

Piper does not hide her contempt. She is exhausted by you, exhausted down to her titanium bones. “If you’re going to try to pull strings on me, at least don’t rub my face in it. It makes me feel slimy when I think you’re right.” She glances around the room, starts weighing people up along those lines. “Usually the passion projects just get treated as mise en scene. We can do better.”

Here’s your problem. Piper starts doing the interviews, and it’s good. She’s relaxed, friendly and interested - at least, to everyone but you. In other hands people like Talbot make for terrible television, but your host shines like a diamond on camera, and she has a way of sharing her sparkle. The problem is you’ve got her hanging around the small players, sticking to safe topics. Talking about the art doesn’t help you here.

It does help Piper though. She might be less hostile to you, if you play this without ulterior motives for a bit. Maybe. But it’d have to look like an active decision you made, not just failing at investigating.

You can use an Art History spend here to find a hidden gem in the room, something completely overlooked, but with real charisma to it. Something with more emotional power than just a science fair project. She might be more tolerant when you move down to the stables that way.

Or you could start talking to Priyah while Piper’s focused on interviews. Aim the camera at a target while pretending to do a gear check, and have her run facial recognition from her tech-den, tell you something. Piper’s just going to notice your heart’s not in it, if you do.

Priyah’s eager for it, though. She jumps at the first chance she gets.

“Lady’s Maria. S’not Yggdrasil.” Priyah tells you about the lady in the leg armor, while Piper’s letting Talbot shine. Then Priyah starts to click her tongue like a geiger counter in a hotzone. “Oof. BlackSun sec honch. Bad-bad-bad, way bad. Gone legit? Big doubt. Fronting muppet, bet.”

Oh yeah. BlackSun may be gone, but the people who got rich off it? Lingering like a fart in an elevator. Though in Maria’s case, maybe more like Zyklon in a shower.

“Oof.” You can hear Priyah wince through the earpiece. “Powerplegic.” Now there’s an obscure bit of slang that you’re intimate with. It means paraplegic but with enough cybernetics that it’s a strict upgrade. Priyah’s extremely comfortable using the word around you, doesn’t see a problem with it - the oof means she just read the wiki on how it happened. That’s almost always oof worthy, you know.

November:

Strawberry:

I rolled - 5, 6, 1. If you can make two successes, dealer busts. For now-

Three voices are starting to emerge.

First is Aaron Knightly, permanent SES liaison at the Cloud - Lord knows it needs one. He doesn’t outrank you in the chain of command, but he is a direct expert and closer to the scene.

Knightly is young, bored and ambitious. He’s chosen a cherry role for himself that ensures that, when this day came, he had a chance to make a name for himself and end up in a history book. Not because he feels like he deserves it, not because he’s a vainglorious or arrogant. But because he’s always dreamed of one day being the hero people deserved, in the right place at the right time. He’s a former EMT with his head in the Cloud, and boots on the ground.

He’s going to be a problem, but you’ve got him on side. For all his pull as someone at the scene, for all his accolades and the respect of his peers, he sees you as useful - his Man in the Van. And that’s critical. The second he sees you as an obstacle between him and the crisis, he’ll cut you out of the loop and make his own.

It’s like Pratchett said. If he were in it for the vanity, he’d gloat, he’d preen, he’d take you down a peg. But this is a good man. A whiff of double-agent on you, and he’ll cut you without a word.

Second is the agency executive in command, Alison Mycroft. She’s been quiet through this, because her authority is well-established and ironclad. But she trusts her delegates to do their role. This makes her more dangerous to you - because she’s not spending any of her energy talking, ordering, she’s spending it all listening and assessing. The humble Alexa app routine doesn’t pass her filters - but your uncanny situational awareness means it doesn’t need to.

Third is someone out of the chain entirely, unfamiliar but giving incredibly specific updates and details. They identify as an engineer, Bruce Spring, not part of SES but a maintenance local who’s given himself a field promotion. Make a roll. Sense Trouble, hidden difficulty. You can also spend from your Surveillance pool for this one. The guy’s flagging your bullshit detector, but without concentrated effort, you can’t tell if you’re over-or-under reacting.

All three represent a threat to your social capital in some way: Knightly beats you for being in the right place at the right time, and Spring is your rival for assessment and reportage. Mycroft is the ref.

This is a situation co-ordinating dozens of people - soon it’s going to be hundreds. Just having made it to the semifinals is to be commended.

Waffle:

Dead on.

You stop when you hit the back of a storage cabinet. The cut starts going too fast, the molten metal vaporizes instead of liquifies. Here’s an analogy: Picture a carpenter running a plank of wood along a band saw, oblivious to his finger being in the path of the sawblade. Imagine the reaction time to hit the emergency stop button when the blade’s only left a papercut. When the cabinet surface solidifies again, you can barely see a few pinpricks of red emergency lighting through the smattering of tiny all-the-way-throughs. Mostly it looks like bubbles on a pigiron pancake.

You have no idea what’s in the cabinet, bolted to the wall. You don’t know where the bolt points are, but you can probably find and shear them with some improvisation and tools.

Could be anything in that cabinet. Could even be a server rack, part of a quatronic core on the other side, a risk of a lobotomy. Could just be cleaning supplies. Hard to tell from this side.

Difficulty 2 to break through the cabinet. Difficulty 4 for the cabinet to survive intact - It might be wasted effort, though, when time and energy are finite.

Flood:

Eyes up.

News from Strawberry Team. Spring and Knightly are choosing their play. Water in micro-g is horrendous, but its still water. Their plan is to vapourize it, suck it up using the Marangoni effect. Surface tension goes haywire in microgravity, see, and back in the 2010s they found out that vacuum tube heat pumps on the ISS weren’t working how they were supposed to. Instead of liquids vaporizing at the hot end and condensing at the cool end, they found that the hot end was acting as a magnet, pulling the vapour towards it. The plan is running a big enough vaporizing surface to draw all the water out.

Bring the entire damaged section above boiling point, and the water will be energetic enough to start funneling towards the hottest point. The heat fatigue is going to be a nightmare to fix, but it’s the lesser of two nightmares.

Here’s a fun question - what’s November’s safe operational temperature range?

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

I am the way into the city of woe,
I am the way into eternal pain,
I am the way to go among the lost.

Justice caused my high architect to move,
Divine omnipotence created me,
The highest wisdom, and the primal love.

Before me there were no created things
But those that last forever—as do I.
Abandon all hope you who enter here.

• Dante Alighieri, Inferno

“Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.”

• Paradise Lost, John Milton

November:

Imagine if 3 Mile Island happened in Guantanamo Bay. Who gets right of way?

For the moment the problems aren’t even coming from Rudy’s handlers, they’re coming from dealing with the largest terrorist attack in recent memory. But there is refuge in audacity, it means that black ops has to wade through the same obstacles you will, just to catch up to you.

Strawberry:

Pink, White. People are making their way to your basement control zone, and are broadcasting orders to you all over. You’re the LAX air traffic controller when two planes just collided on the runway. These next moments are critical. How do you inspire confidence that you’re handling the situation confidently? The roar of voices is a kind of democracy in action, rapidly congealing around a decision of who should be in charge. In a few moments there’s going to be some clear winners singled out of the crowd that you’re going to be able to respond to.

That hasn’t happened yet. Right now it’s critical that you do something so when those voices start to fade to key figures, you’ve already established yourself as one of them. Assert dominance. Otherwise you’re benched.

This is a contest. Difficulty 3 - You were here first, you hold home field advantage, that quality puts you on parity with their quantity. A signal in the noise just rolled 5, no spend. Your turn.

Waffle:

You’re cutting through. There’s no question about that. But you’ve done space demolition before - sometimes you know that success is its own kind of failure.

Difficulty 4 to cut through. Difficulty 6 to cut through without any incidents. You’ve got a lot of dice pools you can justify here - Ways to check that you’re not cutting through that powered cabling, hitting cryofluid ducts, or overcutting through and destroying whatever’s on the immediate other side. Fail the 4 and the problem’s so bad that you need to deal with it before you can start cutting again.

No matter what, this will take time.

Orange:

Fiona starts - “Nothing. Next to nothing. Goat’s a black hole after that.” Stops. Crystal holds her hand. Fiona doesn’t like what it means that she doesn’t know this, and that you asked.

Mr Merkin has sent an email to v8j@hdajp{[241njsdnf01%-01495Jljs#[e-mail]. It’s a miracle he survived sending it.

I don’t know if this is you. I’m not allowed to know what this is yet, but someone’s really scared, and you popped into my burning head.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, forget it. But if you do? I want out. I’m done. If you can guarantee that for me - guarantee that - I’ll do what I can. No threats, no haggling. Mutual trust fall.

Pawns win endgames. When every other piece is traded off the board, the pawns decide the winner. And you know something else, November?

Kindness is optimal. Always.

What can you tell him, that he’d believe?

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Persephone:

Talbot lights right up at the prospect of the interview. “Sure, sure-sure-sure. Do I need to sign anything or?” She doesn’t. Everybody’s signed a waiver just by being here, which is why the media card you’re carrying is such a privilege. General rule of thumb; Everyone in this room is fair game to point a camera at, but it’s like knowing you have right of way as a pedestrian. “Who’s Mrs Piper?”

Already a bad start. The android’s found you in the crowd, is standing behind Talbot when she asks. But there’s no crack in the facade by the time Talbot turns to see her.

“Hi! That would be me. Dr Talbot, with BioTan?”

“Uh, hi! Yes, that’s- that’s me.” Her voice shoots up an octave.

BioTan’s a smaller company, and it’s clear that they’ve made a rookie error. That understanding something necessarily translates to being good at explaining it. Talbot’s already getting stage-fright, but it’s nothing she can’t handle. Just means she’s not going to be the best at guile.

Piper gives a warm handshake, and her relaxed aura is contagious. Absolutely nothing like the treatment you got back in the production office, she radiates good vibes. She holds up a ‘one second’ finger to Talbot, and goes to whisper to you. “What are we doing here?”

You’re drilling for oil blind here, and Piper’s your pump. Don’t worry if you don’t strike on your first try - just being seen doing your job might lead to something.

November:

Orange:

Fiona shudders at the tea, but Crystal is thinking too hard to even notice. “I think you’d have to ‘proceed’, before I know if there was anything else I should have asked.” She says.

“Showmanship.” Fiona murmurs. “I used to think, if the information’s good enough - if it’s true - then that’s enough. But it isn’t, is it?” She stirs her own drink, a caramelized garlic coffee. Did you know that caramelized garlic produces a molecule thirty two times sweeter than sugar? “Moses brings the clay tablets, but it’s the wrath of God that makes people listen. I’m guessing when you’re saying you’re doing A Journalism, you’re not just Moses. You’re talking wrath, here.”

Crystal nods at that, eyes closed in thought, then freezes. “What have you done…?”

She’s a little scared. It just means she respects your capabilities.

What have you done?

The pipe’s not solid. It’s a carbon-fibre weave, connected to apertures every ten meters, like camera shutters. No gravity to make sense of the mass here, so pipes get cleared during a loss-of-pressure event like bowels do, clenching mechanical sphincters. Red, Black and Yellow are in place to watch it when it happens, and far away, Pink and White can see it through the panopticon.

The blast of the Robert Goddard Cloud Pump is muffled under its own liquid mass. A critical piece of station infrastructure makes a sound like the world’s biggest soap bubble just popped. Liquid mass has inertia too, and more water floods its chambers, the shattered siphon screaming through the roaring wet mass like someone feeding an aluminum baseball bat into a kitchen disposal. The Cloud has other pumps, but the whole system has to be shut down to prevent a chain catastrophe.

The mass of the Cloud begins to dissipate. The dreamlike storm riding the rail down the heart of Aevum, revealed to be nothing more than sacs and sprinkler heads. All of Aevum can see it, but they won’t know what it means for a little while. Already guesses are becoming rumours.

That’s the moment Pink and White get emergency powers, in a distant office in Zeus. A brutalist basement filled with computer terminals and alligator clip wiring connecting shortwave, a place that still runs Windows XP as its core operating system and uses bluray drives for data storage, a place that cannot fail when everything else has. Soon, this cramped and airless place will be filled with people. But it’ll take maybe ten, fifteen minutes before anyone gets here. You’ve calculated forty before anyone with more seniority than Crimson Tower, but that number is impossible. The real number could be anything from forty seconds to never.

Team Strawberry glows in hellish light, just point-eight of a second after Team Flood’s virus pulls its muffling hand away and lets the Goddard pump scream its electric death cry out. Any earlier, and the catastrophe might have been prevented. An unacceptable risk.

And Red, Black and Yellow are in place to see it happen. The moment the carbon-fibre weave stops rippling like blood running through capillaries under the skin, and hiccoughs and gurgles as the entire sac lurches and clenches like a large intestine clears chyme.

Then it hangs like whale sausage casing, stapled to rigid anchor points so the fluid casing doesn’t rub and graze neighbouring surfaces over the years. One rigid section covers the entirety of Goat’s vault below, no way down but through.

The power cuts. The lines go dead. There is nobody around for miles. Now, in this moment, in this place without even gravity, this is the quietest, stillest point on Aevum.

A moment later, a hum from below, as Goat’s local backup generator kicks in. No rest for the damned, for Erebus means Hell.

Get to work. The clock’s started.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Anthropozine Channel: Main

NeonCzolgoz: I- One sec
NeonCzolgoz has changed their nickname to LatheOfHeathen
LatheOfHeathen: yeah okay
LatheOfHeathen: i think we're going a bit too literal with this now
LatheOfHeathen: not complaining though, taking it literally has been rad as fuck and i live for all these takes
LatheOfHeathen: but i think wheen le guinn wrote it it was like, about the third world as much as anything
LatheOfHeathen: no ethical consumption under capitalism and yet you participate in capitalism
LatheOfHeathen: so if you live in the decadent west, when you become woke, why don't you go off and join... I dunno, whatever NGO wasn't shit back then
JuntaSThompson: The kid being a literal kid is way more fun though
NumbToNothing: I kin the garbage closet martyr child
LatheOfHeathen: yeah you know what fuck it
LatheOfHeathen: don't know why i said something so clearly wrong and boring
LatheOfHeathen: this went somewhere way cooler anyway

November:

Orange:

There are two different reactions to consider here.

Crystal’s is restrained, calculating, thoughtful. She wears a relaxed poker face with the faintest hint of an indulgent smile, as she takes a half-teaspoonful of a whipped mousse that is to a 2020s tastebud what a Cheese Supreme Dorito would be to the Dickensian orphan. She considers this. There is no impression she is about to walk away; Only that she is considering what it means that she is about to say yes. But such a critically incriminating posture must be guarded and dismantled like a ticking bomb.

Fiona, though? Fiona’s eyes flare. You can hear the klaxons between her ears, the jitter in her fingers as she drops her cutlery and starts ghost-typing on the table as she types on a keyboard only she can see, already drafting introductions. Her thoughts are broadcast thus; BE GAY DO CRIMES.

“I love how interesting you are.” Crystal begins. “But now, we must know.”

“That is to say, you have to tell us.” Fiona chips in.

Crystal gives Fiona a sidelong look. “How deep in this are you? What are the risks? How likely are you to get caught?”

“How can we help?” Fiona adds. Crystal winces in frustration.

“Must you?” She asks, and Fiona grins back, in a way that makes it clear that ‘grin’ and ‘smile’ are not synonyms.

“I must.” Then, with a teasing inflection. “I’m just skipping to the part you’re going to end up, anyway. Allons-y, love.”

November:

Team Strawberry has eyes, now. The camera feed goes back two weeks, then compressed to shit to keep another six months, then deleted unless manually flagged for archival. Goat’s vault has one clear entry point. Roughly once a week - on a random schedule - a small team of maintenance workers - never less than two, never more than five - went into the one entryway, disappeared for an average of half an hour, then came back out. Actual eyes on the location show that doorway is just a blind turn left, and standard electrical panels. Secret door, clearly.

But that information made it to Waffle, with time to prepare for this. There were a few breach points to pick. There’s the ‘ceiling’ directly across from Goat’s jack into the station. Normally it's the inside of a pipe that feeds the Cloud. That’s the thinnest cut point, almost definitely being borrowed for water cooling. You’re going to have a window where it’s empty, but it’d be up to Team Flood to make sure that it stays empty long enough to be an exit channel. Otherwise the Cloud will be spitting pieces of Waffle down on soy fields for days.

There was also the ‘back’, through a rail line shaft. Half a meter of space-age alloy walling to cut through, but plenty of open space and a fast egress. Your cover makes the heavy tools you need plausible, and the microgravity makes more things count as 'handheld'. Sometimes the best safe cracker is a thermal lance, just make sure you're not trying to get paper bills from the inside.

Finally, there’s the front door. How did it go, with Persephone? "Accessibility demands concessions from security?" The gate is the weakest part of the castle wall, but defense is usually centered around it accordingly. If your number one priority is not risking any damage to Goat from your smash and grab? This is the safest option.

What did you choose?

This is it. Last decision before the bell rings. The end of strategy and the beginning of tactics.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

November:

It’s even more convenient. The ag land under the Cloud is near enough to your target for further plausibility - there’s no real district between Gaea and the cap marking the Prime. Goat’s located near enough one of the massive filter-pumps feeding the cloud that you have a prime plausible target near your operational area.

That you just get. You want physical damage to a substation, the rail line being more wholly inoperable? That would take more effort to co-ordinate.

Here’s what I can give you for free: Someone actually plays the part of Crimson Tower through the operation, stays present and accounted for in the SES offices overseeing this. You do that, and you get to cut the power and the cut rail lines as a critical response to the fluid situation. Limit the spread of damage, and limit just how much damage it can do. But someone’s going to have to be Tower in the switch room, justifying that. It lacks the permanence of real physical damage, it’s something that can be overruled.

What are your teams for this? Where is everyone, when the virus shreds a gigaliter pump like an Iranian centrifuge?

Where are you, when the flood hits?

3V:

Do you have an answer that satisfies you, your question? The one that began this.

“Who owns my apartment” - Whoever it is, not for much longer.

You don’t have to write about this. This was a project for your one-armed goblin-tenant, a mothballed project from a data-researcher that couldn’t follow the path down personal connections.

Junta’s going to be grateful for it. Euna’s not the only one who needs to be doing something, even while he’s dealing with the cost of taking that swing. How do you break the story?

Also - how do you feel about faux-duck pho for dinner? Junta’s having trouble cooking with just one arm, but soups aren’t particularly time sensitive.

Persephone:

There’s an extra bit of genius to your play. If Greg’s mad about this - and, he is - he can’t show it while there’s a camera there. And he’s got to be understanding why his conversation ‘partner’ here’s dropping him like a hot coal to lean into it.

“Peristalsis. The same way you can drink upside-down. Or pee in microgravity.” The BioTan representative smiles - sincerely, relief and gratitude and the sense of genuine interest. “I hadn’t actually considered the ecosystem interpretation. Everything just goes in its line, in a single chain. If we modelled it like Aevum, or a living body, then the different organs would all have to interact with each other. All those systems become interrelated. You lose the simplicity.” She sighs. “All art is a tradeoff, isn’t it? Clarifying one message means closing off the possibility of different interpretations.”

She looks taken aback at herself, and glances to Greg Von Mises, who’s sized you up and decided to strategically lose interest. “Sorry,” the BioTan representative says, flickering a wan smile. “I’m Dr Talbot.” ‘Tal’ like ‘tally’, ‘bot’ like ‘beau’ - the second t is silent. “Are you working right now, or is this just-” her eyes dart to Von Mises, who’s finding a waiter to explain the amuse bouches to, “Social?”

No wrong answers. This is just about your choice of approach. Investigation is an art, too - Which possibility do you close off, in clarifying your message?

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

November:

It’s a great concept for a plan, but just because the infrastructure for the defense batteries are nearby doesn’t mean this is where people will run if a collision happens. You’re looking at a site in the axel, in the station’s creamy microgravity core, and the damage you’re describing would be external. But the core concept? A mundane disaster that causes the site to be a hotbed for people you can move in and out from? That is something Crimson is well suited to create, and well positioned to find herself in.

As Crimson, you have the resources to take that core concept and spitball a variety of more localized, specific targets to get what you need. Severe physical damage to a substation in that sector could potentially kill a lot of birds with one stone. Destroying an aspect of the fluid transit in microgravity would be devastating, requiring a long cleanup and justify Crimson access to the strangest of places. Targeting a nearby freight artery would not only justify heavy equipment in the area, it could also delay potential reinforcement - at the cost of an egress route.

All pieces to mix-and-match, depending on whether you want people to move away from your target, or around it to give yourself a crowd to hide in. Establishing a chain of potential disasters would allow you the opportunity to change or escalate mid-operation… but of course, the more predicted disasters you cause, the more unpredicted disasters that you don’t have control over. You can mitigate that risk, but not eliminate it.

All these opportunities require work and setup. The easiest is if you just need something to go wrong, and to be ready to capitalize on it when it does. The hardest is if you need something to go wrong precisely, at the flick of the switch, or at an exact location. But you have just as many options as complications.

An homage to stuxnet would allow a virus to cause the physical damage you need. Explosives and demolitions are a time-honoured, but might attract attention. Some things just break spectacularly, if you know what and how. The only limit is your creativity, here.

One other thing, though, that Crimson Tower gets to see within their purview. The interior of Goat’s vault is an information black hole, but the exterior? You got that. One side of the vault is way thicker than the others, and traces out to a horrendous amount of fibreop and cabling. Like a spinal column sending out its cascade of nerve endings - mostly up into the Prime.

It’s probably not possible, or wise, to tap directly into that. And there’s too much of it - and too poorly documented - to isolate something as convenient as alarm lines in the mass. Linked to too many critical systems to be worth the risk of cutting through.

Still, it’s a dead giveaway for Goat’s connection point. In a 3D environment, that gives you a floor. It might tell you other things, too.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Black:

[But nobody came].

This is not the answer to the question you asked, but it is an important answer. Consider your reasoning: A security system accommodates over time to deal with its volume of low-level offenders.

This one’s been running for a very, very long time. How much of the utility corridor would have to be locked off, to be secure? But secrecy is the most important first layer of protection, clearly. Over enough time, there’d start being rumours about that weird corridor, that has its own maintenance team. Either that, or one that had long fallen into disrepair without one.

Neither rumour exists, at least, not here. The photo is untouched, unremarked on for days. Hell, it’s not even soft-hidden from the major search engines. If anyone noticed it at all, they were more worried about the Streisand effect than your picture.

You threw a brick through the window and nobody showed up, and nobody’s going to show up. Don’t take that as a failure to learn who you’re up against. Take it as a blank cheque that throwing bricks has to be below their noise floor.

There’s one way to cross reference that. If your picture didn’t get taken down, if the meta-data is still pingable from a major search engine, well… You could maybe search it directly? See if there aren’t real pictures still up online with the metadata you’re looking for that also didn’t get taken down, see if someone else has done some scouting for you.

And yeah. The results come up with a dead split of urban explorers and maintenance workers. The former always passing through to more interesting places in the Prime, taking side channels to avoid getting nabbed along the main access tunnels. The latter posting for help on message boards, or taking selfies on their lunch break.

Real maintenance workers are going right by the door you’re really looking for. Dusting, cleaning, replacing frayed wires, painting the whole shaft once-a-decade or so. Real maintenance workers in an easily accessible uniform, I should add. All below the noise floor.

Tell me how you pulled that off safely. How you made dead certain that nobody could pin you for doing those searches and learning that. Then what’s your next move?

Persephone:

Don’t rush this too much. The air’s too rarified here for any but the highest of social climbers. Everyone in this room wears a watch worth more than your entire camera rig. If there’s enough to be called a crowd, it’s only because the 1% of the 1% is still 1/10,000th of a very, very large population.

Think, this is the investor class. Think that everyone in here could be your real suspect or your target, at the end of things. Think that this is probably where they’re going to be least guarded, least tied to a potential crime scene. Nobody’s been whacked for the concept work.

Over there, under the oroborous organic fountain by BioTan. A three meter high loop of flesh bound to a padded arch like ivy to a wedding-arch, a chain of translucent organs pumping products into by-products and back again. At each juncture is a plaque saying what the biochemistry just synthesized, what it can be used for, and the difficulties in manufacturing it through inorganic processes. The whole thing’s a loop. A sugar-water IV drip makes up the difference in ATP to run it, but the whole thing chains so that every organ uses the output of the previous organ and sends it through to the next.

Standing under it? Amazon CEO Greg Von Mises, proud of that Austrian heritage. He’s talking to the BioTan representative, a woman of Southeast Asian descent in a costume labcoat but with real protective goggles. Sounds like he’s trying to explain her own sculpture back to her. She’s putting up with him. Von Mises isn’t half the name Bezos meant fifty years earlier, but half a Bezos is more than nothing.

Over there’s the C-suite for Yggdrasil. They stand out, the former Mumbai-and-Bangladeshians in their ‘starmetal’ full plate, a tradition carried on since finding meteroic iron was a rare and magical thing. The craftmanship there is stunning, gorgeous. Filigree and scrollwork and muscle-plate, worthy of a warrior-king in a big-budget Bollywood take on the Holy Roman Empire. Their weapons, by comparison, are crude and eccentric - it’s considered good form for the c-suite to make their own, from the heart, express themselves. By hand, by forge. They’re all armed, if you consider a zweihander or a flanged mace ‘armed’ in 2080, which you should.

Their display is simple by comparison. Elegant, even. Phar Lap’s heart, preserved in alcohol for over a century, a mutation that made it grow more than four times larger than average. Behind it a black plinth, with the genetic sequence for the isolated mutation in white light. It’s a statement. For what? You’d have to ask them.

And then scattered around there’s the security details for these people, scowling at the Yggdrasil C-suite at every opportunity. First among them, a statuesque Madagascarian woman whose flanking escort looks like they’re there to protect everyone else from her, not the other way around. It’s hard to tell if she’s one of the power players, or just someone’s head of security. It looks like she’s not sure herself. You don’t recognize her. The people who do seem to be moving clear.

Don’t cut this place short. Think of who might be here and use your press-privilege as carte blanche to talk to them. There are some people here who’d pay you to put the camera on them, and they’ll say anything on the record.