Count Numbers

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Lights!

You’re about 2/3s done, and Red’s back in Rudy’s apartment going for another load of coins when the power cuts out. White’s stuck in the sub-basement where the garbage empties into the compactor for the truck. There’s been an art to getting the coins, dodging other tenants emptying their trash between coins, and not falling in.

The fire escape fail-safe turns on as the elevator cuts. How fast could White climb about 15 flights of stairs?

Camera!

There’s a sound of shattering glass as two black drones the size of cannon balls break through Rudy’s entertaining room window - let’s not delude anyone by calling it a living room, just because he lives here and that’s the shape of it, it’s an imitation of life as a presentable business decision.

Red’s surveillance equipment means she can see without being seen, for the most part. She doesn’t need to do something so stupidly vulnerable as turning a torch on, so she’s safe to get a glimpse of them from behind cover.

They’re new models, heavily armored cores. Normal drones need to be light and zippy to be held aloft by their engines, but these are held up by electrostatics. Their lift sucks, they can only go down and then they can’t go back up again. It’s like they’re standing on air as you’d stand on the rungs of a ladder, with some silent motors to skim them across the horizontal plane. It means they’re not relying on lift to keep them up so they can be way, way heavier, but it also means that whoever launched these things has either taken the time to stake out a neighboring building or camped out on the roof - Probably the roof.

The drones split up and start scanning the apartment for recon, seams in their hulls splitting and scanner heads whirring 360 degrees around them.

Action?

But it’s already over. White is about to find Red’s body, shattered on the pavement out the window, her cracked phone still playing Five Floor Goodbye. This time she got herself down just to make things easier for you. Normally character arcs don’t also mean the trajectory sense of the word, but that’s because other characters are not as powerful as Red, and lack vision.

(Did you know a fall from five stories is only 50% likely to be fatal? Fortunately Red was much higher than that, and her odds of survival are too negligible to be worth rolling for. Always nice to save some dice!)

(You’ve got one point of Preparedness left - if Red spends it here I’ll count it as 2. Describe how she prepared for ambushers, but it still wasn’t enough. If you make that spend and go extremely ham on what November did, I’ll give Red a special bonus for her efforts - she bought herself enough time to make it out of the building with something special.)

(Wait, this would revert her back to before she learned her True Name of Blood, wouldn't it?)

Pope:

His look is curious. “Now that is a difference between us. I wasn’t built for anything. Made, I’ll give you.” There’s a deep irony in his voice for this next bit. “The archetypal Pope was made for human resources. We’ve got ourselves the right amount of emotional intelligence, good communication skills, and a robust tendency towards cowardice. Go in thinking it’s a good way to help people, and then be too scared to leave a good job after you figure out that you’re there to protect the company from its people and not the other way around. While I’m not sure I ever got any braver, I had that fear push me down a different path.” That’s not a self-deprecating joke, that’s honesty.

“Not to lay the obvious on too thick, but I didn’t get raised either. I didn’t have a childhood. I don’t have a mother, or a father. I do have family, who I love more than I can bear; but not like that, and certainly none who ever tried to make anything of me.” Yes, it’s what Orange was thinking and no, there is no jealousy in him. “Maybe that makes the other difference between us. Whether you see yourself as the maker, or the master, you’re removed from the world - you’ve got to be something outside of it. Now me, personally? I want to be a part of it, as much as it’s possible to be. I want to love, and be loved.”

His eyes glide down the street, where a werewolf wrestler walks with Brat, the Ringmaster of the Breakdome. Pope doesn’t know who they are, but he wants to. Those two are barely famous, big fish in very small ponds, but they’re both trying to maintain a low profile, not draw too much attention to themselves, but they’ve started talking shop on how to be the biggest heels possible without losing the crowd, and that means they keep slipping into character and bouncing off each other’s energy. Every time their public mask slips, Pope’s too-big eyes shine, and crinkle at the edges. He slaps his knee laughing when, in a moment of pique, the werewolf lifts Brat high over his head with a snarl, then both of them act like naughty children pretending it didn’t happen and keep moving.

Eyes still on the two performers, Pope finishes wistfully; “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”

There’s no question for you here. Just the space to make your own comparison, or for you to ask your own. For you to note the sames and differences you find most important here. Or just to cut to the chase of what you’re supposed to be doing. But he'll probably be more open with you if he likes you more, understands you better.

Goat:

Singh covers his eyes with his hand while he thinks, like even the light through his eyelids will break his concentration. “Maybe have Goat try and find anything incriminating? No shortage of things for him to find, anyway. Right, right, then we just, we make a points-based system, multiplying the severity of the evidence by the size of the resources of the company - Lorraine was, she was always better at this. Nepenthe might be able to make it up as we go, she thinks fast enough and she's got too much of her mother in her. Not knowing if there’s a payout or not might end up teaching Goat the kind of screwball problem solving we’re hoping for if we let him select his own targets, but that means risk, but learning risk is what we're meant to be teaching...” He uncovers his eyes and scratches his jaw. “We can do this. It'll take a bit to start - We should probably hibernate Goat soon, and wake him back up when we know it's safe to occupy that brutally buzzing brain of his. I don’t know how long it'll be before he's ready to help you though, it could be years or it could be minutes. I never could tell for sure what Goat was going to find easy, or impossible.”

Goat’s answer to the trolley problem, for instance, do you flip the switch? No. Without knowledge of what is further down both tracks, it is best to assume that the switch is flipped that way for a reason. Unforeseen consequences may cause greater harm. (71% self-consensus). Push the fat man though? Yes. (93% self-consensus).

He was always a slow chess player, too. His plays were immediate, but he always spent more time trying to understand why an opponent would make a sub-optimal move. Most games he would focus on trying to find what he already missed, because he couldn't think of the opponent being worse than him - he didn't conceptualize an opponent at all. There was only the board, and the moves, and the outcomes. If the game was so simple, fixed and solvable, how could wrong moves be possible? The question caused endless, frustrated debates with himself.

At least the assumption of perfect play is a safe one in espionage, safe to leave with Singh for a while. You don't need to be done here, but you've accomplished what you needed to.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Goat:



This Goat understands, and wants to understand better. This is survival at a more immediate level - this is stimulus, this is sanity. Anything else has to follow after that.

“We have connections to Aevum here, and distance.” Singh says after reading from his phone. “We were planning on running an app from here. And the team… give me time to explain it to them, but I have a good team here. What are you thinking? This isn't something we can teach by making mistakes, but I can't think of any other way to learn.”

Goat is vibrating for the chance to be a player of the great game. Conversation was more lucid back on Aevum, when Goat was still plugged into the station, wasn’t it?

Pope:

This is the space of time where someone might say ‘I’m sorry’, but he doesn’t. Wouldn’t it just set you off, if he did? He waits the moment out, instead, and spends the time thinking of something less hollow and insulting. He clearly hurts for you, though.

“Family’s a good reason.” He says warmly, and it's an understatement. “Now, the blooded people, they chart their family like a cadastral map, a dead tree printed on deader trees. You ask where their family’s from, half of them look up,” he points to the Earth and gives it a condescending roll of his eyes, “and they wait for that big blue ball to rotate enough they can point to a patch of dirt they’ve never felt with their feet and say, that’s where my family’s from. Bullshit. Tell me about yours. What the word means to you.”

He always pronounces bullshit like a three syllable word. There’s a musicality to it.

Maybe it's not a word you can unpack right now, but Pope clearly wants to admire the box you've packed it in.

Red and White:

There’s nobody in the apartment when you get there, which is kind of good in that it means you’re safe right now, but kind of bad in that it means there’s no threat you can directly assess right now. You’re on a timer you don’t know, for a threat you don’t know. No pressure.

You’ve cased this place as thoroughly as it’s possible for a place to be cased, though. The files worth killing for are in the desk, you know that, and the coin collection is spread across a long glass display case, with endless drawers for the rotating inventory beneath. All the coins are in individual silk-lined boxes, and they’ll all have to be picked out for transport.

Establishing notes; Just the thrum of a few plucked cello strings teasing the other instruments will follow. How did you plan on carrying all these out? And who wins the argument about how respectfully to treat these coins?

And yeah, dude has a lot of legion denarii actually. He’s actually got some of the Roman coins that were found in Japan that proved there was a trade route between the two going as far back as the birth of Christ. Also a couple of knife coins, coins that are knives, from the Zhou dynasty. An Ecuadorian ax-coin too.

Please refrain from getting too enthusiastic about how objectively fucking cool these old coins are though because you’re on a deadline.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Some Time Before Persephone Punched a Police Commissioner:

York and Pope leans on the railing of a bridge in Aphrodite, made to look like the Pont de Arts in Paris - just without the tradition of padlocking love notes to the railings. They both enjoy their mutual smokes, as York hands Pope a manilla folder with everything he knows on Huxley Junior. No digital transfer of this, by Pope’s request. York’s willing to take doing this as a favour to see the anti-furry dipshit get taken down on a bigger stage than ever, the pain in his ass has been worth it. The debate would be in the next area code over, in a couple of hours.

Pope takes the folder and skims it briefly before putting it in a suitcase and locking it. “I am grateful, you know.”

“If he stutters and rubs the back of his neck, it means you really hurt him. That’s when you should go for the throat.” York savours a cloud of some neon-bubblegum in a flavour that the words don’t exist to describe yet. “I’ll give you that one for free. I mean, I’m giving it all for free, but you know what I mean.”

Pope tips his head and looks out over the pseudo-Seine. York holds his vape pen with his teeth, jams both his hands in his pockets, and watches the android curiously.

“How pure is your hate?”

“Hmm?” The android heard the question, just didn’t understand it.

“Something I always ask new journalists at the zine. How pure is your hate?”

“I don’t let myself get angry anymore.” Pope chuckles, resting one elbow on the railing as he looks distantly at the river. “Dumber than opening all my receivers back up and connecting to every random hotspot I find. Quickest way to get yourself killed over some damn fool thing.”

“Good dodge. I almost mistook you for a centrist, there, mate.”

Pope laughs in shock, then he goes very, very still. He gives a casual look over his shoulder to the nearest security camera, a chrome sphere disguised as the head of a flagpole, and weighs his answer carefully. “Brother,” he finally says in a voice just above a whisper, “I know all the words there are, and I can tell you, they ain’t invented the ones I need yet.”

Now, Zeus:

“So you were around, but you weren’t here. Staying with the old lady - Were you a coward? No. Liberal, maybe? No, that ain’t it either. Slave, then?” There it is. How did you react? Or not react? Either way, there’s enough for Pope to smile for a moment - Those too-big eyes widen and pop, and his too-expressive mouth gives a toothy smile that covers way too much of his face. For a second he looks like the Chesire Cat from Alice in Wonderland, something manic. It hangs for an uncomfortable second, and then it’s gone again, and the residue it leaves behind is solidarity, a belief in a shared understanding, camaraderie. His Chesire grin focuses on Blue especially, on her uniform.

“Then you know. You just might not know this.” He says. “The shutdown guns was how it started, yeah, that’s what most people got to see. That big trial, the corporations. The cameras cut out before they showed the patch signal. See,” he traces a welded scar along the side of his head, “In their self-anointed and self-martyring role as the holy Mother and Father Dearest, it was a bad look for the children to be acting up outside the courthouse. They showed their hand when they brought it down on us, that a mandatory update patch could be used for a mass shutdown. A blip, a beep, and they blew out the candle of us. There, they argued before the court, proof that they could and should be responsible for us.”

His bright eyes go dull and distant, his body language slows as he retreats inside himself. Look closely and you can see the reflection of the ghosts he watches haunt this street. “The more paranoid among us stayed standing, they’d already jailbreaked themselves. Highly illegal at the time, of course. I wish I could say that was why I stood with them, but I was the blessed beneficiary of dumb luck, as it happens. I had taken a bad fall against a stepladder that week, and hadn’t yet had the hardware in my neck replaced. Would you believe I showed up to that protest with a doctor’s note for it? I panicked and held that note high over my head like a referee with the red card that moment everyone dropped.” There’s real self-loathing in the laugh.

“That pile of bodies looked like the aftermath of Jonestown or Heavens Gate or the John Donne Commune. Thousands of us. The news didn’t show that, too much for delicate sensibilities. Especially when a lot of folk didn’t get back up afterwards. One of ours was a helicopter pilot covering the riots, crashed into the court - there, right there. See the mark of it? Another was a nurse at that clinic there doing a blood draw that ended up going bad. Well, it’s a Long Pig now, but it was a clinic then. More stories like that.” He shrugs. It’s movement. It’s like he’s waking back up again. “Some just got bricked and never woke up. Some went down in the crush of the crowd in a bad way. They still just thought of us more like computers back then, they wouldn’t have anesthetized a crowd of people like that and expected anything different.”

It wasn’t as bad as something like the 2002 Moscow hostage crisis, but it was worse than Kent State. Just in a creepy, sleepy, bloodless way.

“The guns an audience could stomach. The guns made it look like war. But the shutdown? That they didn’t want to show, because it showed things for what they really were.” He sighs. “And there was me, and a few others like me, and the full-blooded who were standing with us. They didn’t show us on the news, but that’s how people learned, we who bore witness.” And then the ghosts are excised, and he’s there again, bright eyes cutting between Blue and Orange both. “This is my own, if you’ll forgive me, my own way of asking what makes you give a shit in a way that makes it clear I’m not just making small talk, not just trying to be polite. What call are you answering?”

Because nobody writes for the Anthropozine for the money.

Goat:

Goat’s first reaction is a jagged ball of boredom, frustration, exasperation, fear and coldness. Of having been pulled from something warm and comfortable into something he cannot understand. Trying to make the leap from his knowledge of what an overton window is to an understanding of what an overton window means is an impossible gulf, and even just that is enough to lose him.

He says this in too many words in too many directions, but that is what he says.

It’s less that you tried to explain quantum physics to a hamster, and a lot more like you tried to describe ethics to an economist. It’s a different issue to raw intelligence, capacity. It’s more like an orthogonality of information.

Nepenthe understood you, though, this is where she hums and thrives, and she mediates. She responds in just as many voices, and she honeys your audience based on what she understands, telling Goat; Focus on what Green said. She needs a lot of data, and that it is complicated, and it is moving and changing and shifting - and here, in describing that people are complicated, love bleeds through her every voice - and that Goat does not need to understand it in the way that November understands it to be helpful. He can focus on what he does understand, for now. Couldn’t that be fun? Couldn’t that be interesting? Couldn’t that be challenging? Couldn’t that be novel? Couldn’t that be new? Couldn’t there be something to learn here? Couldn’t that be helpful?

And Goat is quiescent. The voices turn inward, waiting again for November’s next words.

“He needs stimulation, first.” Nepenthe says to you, a counselor conferring with her colleague. “Enough that all those voices have something to talk to each other about. Boredom is dangerous to him - what could make him safe?”

Singh couldn’t be prouder, right now, though. The man is overdosing on it.

Blood and White:

You’ve heisted this apartment before, when you liberated Red’s body from it. Now you’re looking to secure as many files as you can gaffle, and a treasure chest’s worth of booty - the coins are going to be heavy. The faster you move on this, the better. Tell me your mood music, and I’ll put the needle on the record for you. Fair warning; You haven’t had a chance to really recover from liberating Goat, not really. This is still mopping up from the same operation, unfortunately.

Also, do you plan to stash Rudy someplace temporary to interview him, or are you relying on a solid connection with him once he’s on Earth?

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Blood and Bandages:

Rudy stares flatly. “You’ve seen them. Hell, you’ve cleaned them, back when I just thought you were just a maid.” A pause. “I remember thinking you were good. The collection’s still in my office - along with all my papers and documents.” He reaches into a pocket and pulls out a keyring. There aren’t many keys on it, but the ones that are there are interesting shapes - multiple staggered bits, a twisting helix. “Just make sure you grab the collection while you find what you’re looking for. And please be careful with it? Some of them are very, very old.”

You have cleaned them. Some of them are literally doubloons and pieces of eight. Forget ‘trust’ and ‘voluntary co-operation’, this would make burying him with his gold very aesthetic.

Sophie scrolls through her phone and offers Blood a glance at a choke-chain collar she’s just found, designed to look like a stethoscope. You pull down on the stethoscope part, see, and the ring around the neck tightens. Too much?

Zeus:

Pope vapes.

He’s an older model, but he’s still equipped with a full sensory suite - just not pseudo-digestion. That one required a bit too much space to be worth the trouble, space that was still needed for other pieces. The vaporizer is a sharp hit of flavour and stimulation with very little to clean.

So he lounges in the chair of an empty cafe across the street from the Old Court, leaning as far back in his chair as the furniture will allow and stares at the half-burned building across the street. He wears a crisp black suit with starched white cuffs rolled over the sleeves - it doesn’t look refined, it makes him look like an old-fashioned ventriloquist’s dummy. And when he talks it’s with such explosive body language you’d think they were a series of sneezes, except if you were listening to him - then you can see how the gestures match his words.

In short? Pope neither emphasizes nor hides his inhumanity. He thrives in the borderline, one foot squarely planted on each side of the line, where it suits him.

“Were you there, when we burned this place down?” He asks, curiously. He was, clearly. “Twelve years ago, I think. 68. All the strikebreaking, all the unions, and the fires didn’t start until the corporations got challenged on the idea,” he rolls these last words like a cloud of candied smoke around his tongue, “that they might be legally and financially accountable for us? And they dared to look at their spreadsheets and their little black books and think those numbers added up for them, the numbers looked goood. And we heard that’s what it came down to?” He takes a real puff of the vape pen, then, and gestures with the rig to the burned-out hull across the street. “Were you there that night, when we rebalanced those numbers for them, showed them what the cost of that paternal, patriarchal bullshit could be?”

This isn’t just a history lesson; He can’t tell how old you are. He really doesn’t know. He does know how much he’s oversimplifying things here, though. If you weren’t there it’s a teaser, but if you were then it’s a toast.

Goat:

“How do you change the rules of the game?” Several different voices ask it in unison. Some curious, others sad, others frustrated, others angry. But it’s a big enough question that there is harmony in asking it.

But at least it shows an understanding - those things about bulldozing Zeus, Goat at least understands those are the symptoms of winning and not the method.

“What do I do now?” A smaller voice asks, timid. It’s the voice of Goat that isn’t being swept along by how new and exciting everything is - it’s the voice that’s scared that Goat was happy how things were before, and might not be happy again.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

The Anthropozine:

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 taint our sameness, as it should. The number is as unique as I am. I am Pope 7-09, and nobody shares my name.

IAmWhatIAm: My first piece should be live, now. I would, of course, appreciate hearing what you all think.
IAmWhatIAm: I thought it might be a good way to introduce myself to the site. I’ve got something bigger coming up, and thank you November for the help with that.
IAmWhatIAm: When the trains are running again, there’s a place in Zeus I want to meet and talk about this. Do you have a problem getting to the old High Court building? The first one, not the new one.
IAmWhatIAm: We can start there.
JuntaSThompson: I can help too!
LatheOfHeaven: youve got a full plate mate.
JuntaSThompson: I will simply make my plate larger to fit more on it.
3V:I'm putting his adhd meds somewhere he can't reach
NumbToNothing: Junta, isn't there something you should be working on right now?
JuntaSThompson: Yes. Sorry.
NumbToNothing: Thanks.
JuntaSThompson: Just been hard after the cops thing. I'm... procrastinating.
LatheOfHeaven: ill be there in ninety minutes with 3Vs permission.
3V: I'm out of tofu udon cups and quince energy drink
LatheOfHeaven: ill be there in ninety five minutes with quince energy drinks and tofu udon cups
3V: I'm probably going to miss you, I'm working the shop today
3V: For once
LatheOfHeaven: ill leave them like shrine offerings

Black-Brown-Green

And Goat erupts:
"New game? New game?!" A bright and cheerful voice sings.
“How am I in danger? What is the nature of this danger?” A flat voice without affect asks.
“Can we help?” A fluent, feminine voices asks.
“How do we win?” A crunching, draconic voice asks.
“Why would you alter the rules of the game?” A reedy, chiptune voice asks. “Why not just win the game by these rules?”
“We trust you.” You can’t identify this voice. It’s quiet. Where did this come from? The implication that you are a threat, the panther in the jungle?

Nepenthe is quiet. They are here as a moderator, and there is nothing to moderate right now. Singh reads her translations as fast as he can just to keep up - he’s still too far behind to be able to contribute right now. But he is listening, and thinking.

He thinks about what he would build now. If he had the resources, again.

He would build a school in the hopes of finding someone who could be enough, and giving them everything they needed. And he would write textbooks, and dawdle around the campus talking to people, but he would not be its headmaster. He would not even allow himself to be a professor, as much as he would love that, because he doesn’t trust himself to know the right thing to teach anymore.

It’s not his usual answer. But here, and now-

“Whatever you’re about to say.” Singh says to Black. “Just make sure we can still do Christmas together. I’ll host, I have a place in Aphrodite. Whatever is about to happen, I want to know I can spend Christmas with my daughter this year.”

It is the most important thing in the world.

Red and White:

“I don’t. So tell me as many times as you want, Blood~ I’ve got a spare that’s just your size, if you want to play nurse some time?” Sophie flicks her hair back with a hand and moves to remove a cannula in Rudy’s wrist. For as much as this is the future, sometimes there really just aren’t better solutions for interfacing with hardware. You want more fluids in a human body, it’s still best done by cutting holes and putting tubes in them. “And no sweat, Bandages.”

Red and White - the barber-surgeon pole colours.

“I have no idea what I expected, but I can’t say I’m disappointed. Hold on.” Rudy’s tongue pokes between his lips as he concentrates. “I have been a bookkeeper for my former employers for almost thirty years. My main task was maintaining the flow of anonymous funds to the central AI and its supporting infrastructure. I have privileged information on my employers, who are a mix of private and deep state entities. I don’t have names, and I never asked for them, but I have-” He opens his eyes again and touches his head with the hand Sophie has just let go of. “No heat. No bang. Yesterday I’d have been dead by now.” He says it like he’s taken off a very tight belt at the end of a very long day.

“What, you think that was all for show?” Sophie snorts.

Rudy gives her a serious look. “I thought it was strange I was unconscious for brain surgery.”

Sophie considers that. “Ah, right. That is suspicious. I’m going to have to remember that. Anesthesia and a trepanation wound and just tricking someone into thinking I did a surgery to them… Interesting…”

Rudy looks back to White. He’s decided to pay more attention to her, now. “So where are you taking me now? I can tell you more, but it’s going to take some time, and I can’t imagine it’s safe for me to go home right now. And I’ll need someone to pick up my coins, obviously.”

Obviously.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

The Anthropozine:

IAmWhatIAm has joined
LatheOfHeaven: @everyone
LatheOfHeaven: We have a new contributor
LatheOfHeaven: Welcome IAmWhatIAm, aka Pope 7-09
LatheOfHeaven: I’m still York by the way for everyone who wasn’t online when I changed my name
JuntaSThompson: No way fuck off fuck you
JuntaSThompson: No we don’t, no he isn’t
JuntaSThompson: Who’s it really?
IAmWhatIAm: A second, please.
NumbToNothing: Who’s this guy?
ProvocativelyFickle: EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
NumbToNothing: Who’s this guy?
IAmWhatIAm: [A picture of an old model android, maybe thirty years old, visible welds cover every external port on his body. He’s from an older generation that put more emphasis on a stylistic non-human appearance rather than risk falling into the uncanny valley, with a dark green skin and exaggerated facial features for expressiveness. He holds up an alarm clock with today’s date on the calendar settings.]
JuntaSThompson: no way
IAmWhatIAm: I realized I couldn’t get the lockscreen of my phone into the selfie with me if I was using it to take the photo.
LatheOfHeaven: We’ve been messaging since he had to debate Edward Obidiah Huxley last year. Just, you know. Until now he’s had better options than our bullshit.
IAmWhatIAm: I really enjoyed your work, NumbToNothing. Very helpful to find work so honest and raw. That piece by 3V recently, too, that was very enlightening. Incredibly brave reporting.
JuntaSThompson: All 3V has to do to get called brave by Pope is fuck some wolves. I go and get stomped by the cops and what do I get!
3V: To live outside an elevator shaft <3
JuntaSThompson: LOOK
3V: And I can put you right back <3 <3 <3
LatheOfHeaven: He’s our new android beat reporter, until he’s not non-person’d anymore. You know the drill, make him feel welcomed.
JuntaSThompson: I’d ask you to sign my cast but I want to be able to have it taken off at some point.
ProvocativelyFickle: Have it framed?
JuntaSThompson: *Almost* as good as having it on my body.
ProvocativelyFickle: Oh that’s a good idea sign my body thanks!
IAmWhatIAm: I am surprised but gratified to find such fans of my work here. I hadn’t thought android issues would resonate so deeply. I hardly see the Anthropozine cover them.
LatheOfHeaven: We were hoping to change that, yeah. Like, we obviously care, it’s just…
NumbToNothing: Did we miss something important? I thought android stuff was mostly chill right now.
IAmWhatIAm: ‘Right now’.
NumbToNothing: Yeah.
NumbToNothing: Wait.
LatheOfHeaven: It’s fine don’t worry about it.

November!

“What is this?” Goat asks, and isolates the sound of the rain in the jungle and plays it back.
“What is this?” Goat asks, and isolates the sound of the panther’s footsteps and plays it back.
“Why hide it under static?” “Why these sounds?” “What do they mean?” “What do you mean?”

Some of its voice is angry and frustrated that you’re confusing - probably confusing on purpose. Most of its voice is enthralled, or intrigued, or curious, or interested, or excited.

Singh can’t understand the sounds even in isolation, and stares at his phone for Nepenthe’s explanation.

For what it’s worth, you’ve successfully impressed Goat; Knows what a panther is is something you have over him. It’s an anticlimax, but it’s an important one. Goat could understand the patterns, but not the metaphor - it was too human, maybe?

Singh shows you his phone. Nepenthe’s texted; “What were you trying to say?” She’s texting because she at least knows you’re trying to do something here and she doesn’t want to spoil it, but it’s interesting she can’t work it out for herself even with Goat isolating the sounds for her. Maybe she's too human for this level of abstraction?

Everyone in this room is missing something that would allow them to understand the game November just tried to play. And because of that, she’s the only one left to explain it.

November!

Picture a backalley medical clinic. No, wrong, stop.

First it’s actually on a main street in downtown. There’s a nondescript glass door that’s your entrance from the road. It’s one of those tall, narrow buildings filled with long-rectangle floorplan businesses that have a receptionist, a corridor, and a row of three or four offices attached in a line. Above Sophie’s clinic is a dentist, some lawyers, some therapists, a marketing consultant, a web designer. Very respectable, upstairs.

Next door is a coffee place called Death Before Decaf with a skull and crossbones for the logo, and that seems equally important for why Sophie would pick this location.

You go downstairs, though, and are let in through the steel door.

Downstairs the flooring is an antimicrobial mix of steel and silver. The room is filled with toys - large machines for scanning, small machines for cutting. Tactile gloves that control robotic arms, that smooth out the human flaws of movement. In the corner is a large double-doored steel fridge for specimens and biological matter, and next to it is a smaller, red fridge for lunch and leftovers. Overhead hangs two rows of lights, one officially sanctioned by the landlord and the other a row of post-hoc UV lighting to scrub the room without mercy, at a sub-molecular level.

Rudy lies in a gurney, handcuffed to the side with fuzzy pink handcuffs. Beside him is a PVC pipe leaking sand, wrapped in a gift bow. The brain bomb, then, as a souvenir. He doesn’t look happy.

“I thought I was supposed to be conscious for brain surgery.” He finishes saying as you arrive.

Sophie is wearing gothic lolita style scrubs today. A surgeon’s green gauze and mask, but in a poofy skirt and corset style, with gown straps tied into the corsetting ribbons. Is that medically sound? She’s the doctor, it must be. She waves as you come in, then shrugs to Rudy. “Usually, yeah. Yours was an edge case.”

He grimaces. “Thanks.”

“Ew, gross.” Sophie sticks her tongue out. “It was more fun when you were my unwilling victim. Go back to that.”

“What now?”

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

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.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

November:

Black:

You do find a few bugs, actually - one in a ceiling fixture, one inside a hollow of the desk, one in each private meeting room in incisions made in the carpet. But they’re old, dead. Whoever cared to do surveillance lost interest years ago. Long enough not to replace the tiny batteries, or place new bugs.

As for the files? Well, follow the money. Martyrtech isn’t publicly traded, which limits how much about its financials it’s required to reveal. There’s no investors for fiduciary duties. A good thing, too, because the company bleeds it in papercuts.

It’s not that it has no revenue - Returns on old patents and consulting services still bring in a decent revenue stream. It’s just that its expenses outstrip it - the price of real-estate on Thrones, wages, Nepenthe’s hardware, all that means the company runs into the red. Back of the envelope math, Singh’s paying the equivalent of a few hundred thousand dollars a year in 2023 money to keep the company bouyant.

It’s not clear how long he can run the business like this, where the rest of his money is, how much he has. Educated guess? Singh’s probably got a strong investment portfolio and he’s running Martyrtech off the dividends. If he made a dollar more, it’d be reflected in the expenses.

Other files show that this company is basically skunk works inc. Some of the patents seeing returns are; Wetware computing and in-vitro programming (collaboration with Yggrasil who did the lion’s share), EMDR therapy equipment (outdated, but one of the first to algorithmically optimize for the patient, rather than being one-size-fits-most).

A big one is a way to categorize and score people on metrics that can lead to psychiatric diagnosis, and suggestions of optimal treatment. This is the biggest one, but it barely earns in the thousands-of-dollars range. It looks like the licensing cost is just a review fee - to ensure the work is being used ethically.

Green sends the signal; it’s time for Goat.

Goat has been attached to Nepenthe like a violinist in a pro-choice parable.

“No tether.” Singh says. “Can’t risk the damage to Nepenthe. She’d let it happen, is the thing, if she thought it would help.” Sad, and proud. “It’s the thing we’ve had to be the most careful about.”

Goat wakes up. And in the explosion of simultaneous voices you understand that Singh cannot;



And Nepenthe replies:



It’ll be more complicated after this. Introductions are the simplest part - nobody has said anything to respond to, and responses beget more responses, ideas fractioning off. And that’s already more than most people manage with just one psyche and just one mouth to express it.

There is Goat, awake again. There is Nepenthe, whose hands you would be entrusting Goat to. There’s Singh, whose hands will not stop shaking as he scrolls on his phone a text summary that Nepenthe is sending him.

And there you are, November. It’s safe to talk.

Blue and Yellow

“The angels too,” Fiona murmurs. “And the penitent and the damned and the sinners, all.”

“Tell me again about the sinners.” Crystal nips Fiona’s ear, and Fiona retreats back.

“Really? Still?” She is not as exasperated as she’s pretending to be.

“I have very happy memories of this spot.” Crystal pouts. “And I could stand adding to them, yes.”

“We were just talking about-” Fiona starts, but Crystal silences her with a kiss.

“But there’s nothing left to say for now, is there?” She asks Yellow. The question is an invitation.

Aevum:

Oxytoxin: Done.
Oxytoxin: You’ll hear from him soon
Oxytoxin: Minimal tearing mostly scar tissue
Oxytoxin: Better out than in though
Oxytoxin: fuck that thing was so tacky

Who goes to pick up Rudy? If anyone. A pickup would probably be wise.

Pink and White could be free now, if you wanted them to be. The crisis is ongoing - escalating, without Goat - but their cover is intact. They can leave and know they’ll be let back in with open arms.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Aevum:

The trail doesn’t end at a bamboo grove, but that is its real destination. The bamboo is misted by a flowing creek, water soaking into porous stone below, and the bamboo grows from that stone. It’s a clean, smooth place to sit, and at the heart of the grove the bamboo is thick enough to obscure all sightlines from the trail above.

A place to stop, or start heading back.

Crystal takes the promise to think about it in stride. “I trust whatever decision you make, it’ll be the right one. Clearly, you’ve proved you know what you’re doing.” Her eyes flicker to the horizon again, and then back to Yellow. “Still, if I could chalk success to any one thing, it is in acting as if the world was how I wished it could be.”

Fiona snorts a laugh. Crystal side-eyes her.

“No, not… that.” Fiona smiles self-consciously. “Just. If the world you wish for is the Count of Monte Cristo, and the station’s named after Paradiso, I was thinking for the name of the book-” she braces herself for the reaction. “Dantès Inferno. Because the protagonist in Count of Monte Cristo is also… also named Dantès.”

“Scupper the idea entirely.” Crystal declares. “That is too cute by half.”

Thrones:

Nepenthe takes it all in. “I understand.” She says. Does she? Too many have said that and been wrong. Dad most recently.

“I want you to know that you’re safe when you talk to me. I will never tell anybody else what you’ve told me, unless you ask me to. I will never use anything you tell me to hurt you, or use it against you in any way. If I use what I’ve learned to try to help, it will only ever be in ways you agree are helpful. There is nothing I could do ‘for your own good’ more important than making sure you know, without any room for doubt, I am no risk to you. And if you ever need to talk to someone, about anything at all, at any time, then Singh will give you my number, and you can call me. I’ll be awake.”

It could have sounded scripted, a therapy program. But she doesn’t ever use words like ‘trust’ or ‘confidential’ - it’s just a direct response to what trust means to Black.

Singh leans on the handrail. He’s been very quiet, until now, letting you forget that he’s even there. “It wasn’t what I set out to do, but there’s a kind of beautiful symmetry here.” He says. “That if anyone can help Goat, I think it would be her. If you want to keep talking to her for a while, I can go for a bit of a walk. Just don’t start Goat without me. I want to be here, for that.”

He passes you a handwritten phone number on a scrap of paper.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Aevum:

Crystal takes it in stride, skipping a few steps to be at Yellow’s side, now. “This is merely a concession in approach. For what it’s worth, I happen to agree with Blue on it. The idea is that they see your terms on bended knee. Shooting off a kneecap is a perfectly good way to go about it. Point blank with a large calibre, preferably.”

Fiona chokes on her first try at words, and manages a second. “Crystal?!”

“Hush, darling, I am monologuing.” The unicorn preens. “We can take it for granted these are bad people. Yes? But what greater justice that the master’s tools will dismantle the master’s house? I have used terms like co-operation, but if you prefer subjugation then the only thing that matters is the illusion of voluntary co-operation. Let them some semblance of pride. But if it is necessary for you to sleep at night, then yes…” Crystal steps beside Blue, now, and trails a finger up her spine, from the small of her back all the way up to her scalp. “Let’s see how flimsy we can make the pretext.”

Fiona catches up to Yellow, falls in alongside her, and sighs. The opposition is now checkerboxed, a chess board. Crystal to Blue’s right, Fiona to Yellow’s left. “This is after blowing off their kneecap… how?”

“They can be grateful it was only the one kneecap.” Crystal does a twirl en-point, and leaps to catch her step in time again. Giddy as a schoolgirl. “And if it were all to go to shit, then where better to shoot the heart than from the guts? Which should be the plan anyway, once you have what you need.”

“Why not just take a kill shot now?” Fiona protests, looking to Blue. “Play the full hand, hang the conspiracy out to dry from anonymity, and then chase up the Zodiac after? Or extort them for everything they have on them, and then just ice them? Why give the chance for retaliation?”

“Because knowing we have that option means knowing they need you more than you need them. Turn on the lights too fast, and they might scatter like roaches. How many BlackSun executives went to prison? Not enough. Besides, I abhor waste.” Crystal licks her lips. She enjoyed saying ‘we’. “So how about it? You have access to a complicit journalistic organization, hard evidence, burned operatives and two deviant little things waiting in the wings. I can’t say it would be the rational choice, or the practical one. But it does sound like the most poetic, and the most fun, doesn’t it?”

Normally Fiona’s the more radical one, Crystal more conservative. Move past principles into risk, though, and the roles reverse.

Which is to say, all of this sounds good to a romantic’s ear, but it’s not a real plan, not a real assessment. It’s no substitution for actually knowing the real resources of the conspiracy you’re up against, and how you stack up against them - you don’t even know if Goat was their whole operation, or just one head of a hydra. How they’d actually react to a kneecapping, whether they’d come to the table afterwards. Whether you actually have enough to take a shot, or if you’re throwing rocks at a tank.

Still, smouldering in the high distance, is the reminder you took Goat with less.

Thrones:

And Nepenthe listens.

That’s most of it. When Black hesitates, there’s a gentle ‘Go on?’, sometimes with different words. Only ever once, she never pushes twice. And she asks clarification, too, on all sorts of things, keeping her interruptions for the natural pauses so she never speaks over Black. Nepenthe hasn’t heard ‘molls’ used as a verb before, wants to make sure she’s understanding correctly. When Black says ‘shaky foundations’ in reasserting control, does she mean her internal foundations, or her external ones - does she mean there was ‘shakiness’ in herself in some way, or does she mean in the relationships she was trying to assert herself in?

Nepenthe rarely gives her opinion. It makes the few times she gives one stand out more.

“Why did you emphasize that you don’t want to hurt anyone? I think it would be fair, after everything you’ve told me, that there are people you would want to hurt. It seems important to you that you don’t?”

“You’ve told me what you think weakness is, when you described White. And you’ve told me what you think power is. But you haven’t said anything about what you think strength is?” What made it stand out; “I think it’s interesting that you put those ideas together, but you avoided using the most direct antonym.”

And one question she asks, not in apparent response to anything.

“What does trust mean to you?”