Count Numbers

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Bondi:

And Bondi thinks; Wow! It’s so nice to have such a good helper! Pink is being so great and nice to me! She’s taking everything here at absolute face value, and wouldn’t understand the erotic nature of a ball gag even if you explained it to her. (But then you can’t talk! Or kiss! Or- You know! That’s the fun part!) She would understand the eroticism of being tied up if it was explained, though, so the ice you’re walking on is thicker in some places than others.

Magicians cases are easy. The false bottoms she’s made in some roadie cases aren’t, strictly speaking, perfectly flush. But every surface is so enthusiastically covered in big planets-and-stars themed stickers that the roughness has a deliberateness to it. And that’s magic baby - it doesn’t have to be flawless if they don’t see the flaws.

Even when security finds your +1 in their search, they’re going to stop looking for your +2. When, not if here.

I see two ways this setup goes: Either you formally register your +1 in advance, so that reveal is signed off on. Or you don’t, and bank on your ability to really sell that you just didn’t want to spoil the magic. If you do that, you’ll have extra attention on you for the rest of your time there…

Which would be to say; Are you watching close? Are you sure you see what this hand is doing?

Heist brain, right, there’s still a shibari’d bombshell wriggling off the ground.

Bondi furrows her brow and thinks very intently for a while. Then there’s a soft ‘pop’ as her wrist gives, and slips out of its restraint. She forces the join back into place against the ropes, then worries at another knot around her other wrist. She swings back and forth to get enough momentum she can force a shoulder out of its socket, and then that gives enough slack in the rope to pull an elbow out of the knots, and then the whole arm is free, and then that’s enough to pull the ballgag out, which is all she was going for.

This whole maneuver took about fifteen seconds on a stopwatch. Pink did great, it’s just that this is literally the one thing Bondi is actually good at - a lot of classic escapology comes down to how willing and able you are to see your skeleton as a suggestion rather than a rule, and her pain tolerance is freakishly high. Half of this kind of escapology is the ability to work a lockpick with dislocated fingers, and the other half is making it look so effortless that nobody realizes you just dislocated all your own fingers. Which means knowing how to put them all back again, too.

It’s a commitment to the bit that goes so hard that even when you can’t do sleight of hand, someone can watch you do the trick and still won’t be able to figure out how you did it. The answer just isn’t in most people’s possibility space.

The gag hits the floor, and Bondi looks really nervous. “Is taking the gag out by myself winning, or is it cheating?” Her anxiety sets the rope swinging again. “I didn’t know how to ask before I did it.”

Who are you bringing along on this one? With this one.

Red:

“Pfft, there’s the fucking question isn’t it? You think something this weird would be kept on ice if I had a clue?” She’s buzzing with excitement, one hand already on the handle for the morgue drawer. “Fuck, I’m so glad you picked this one.”

Her previous patient is left by the door in a wheelchair for pickup, a vegetable but alive. A man in a tracksuit comes in to wheel him out. The man’s Irish accent isn’t as thick as it would have been a generation ago, but it’s there. You can see the scars on his knuckles from across the room, under the sharp surgical lighting.

“What the fook? He’s a bleedin’ vegetable, inn'he?”

“You get that much because I’m the next best thing to God himself, except I’m actually better ‘cause I actually answer your fucking prayers. Everything’s put back together, give him a chance to heal and if you’re really lucky, he might just be kind of like a really senile version of his old self after a year or two.” Sophie bangs a hand on the new one’s drawer impatiently. “You mind? I’ve gotta get the next one out of the crisper. What?”

In a softer voice, the man strokes the cheek of his… colleague? “Didn’t have to leave him all alone over here, did you? Poor bastard.”

“As if he could even tell.”

“Fookin cold.”

“He’ll get better! Maybe!” Sophie protests. She shakes her head, rolls her eyes, jerks a thumb at the man and says to Red “Can you fucking believe some people? Anyway. This guy. I’m not sure if pulling the mods out will start to solve the problem, or just kill the interface I have to fix this with. I’m thinking we yank it out, absolutely flood him with a selective voltage-gated sodium channel blocker like Evenamide, since that’s the closest mechanism I can think of to treat wetware-induced schizophrenia. Then we wake him up, you smack him around a bit, and we see if that worked. And then if it didn’t…”

She grabs a bottle of liquid soap, squirts it on the floor, and then throws herself heels-first at the slick to glide across the surgery to a rack of shelves. She opens a small drawer and enticiingly rattles a box. “I reckon we get him absolutely fucking blasted on mushrooms, I’m talking higher than John the Baptist, and hope the comedown from that resets him. You’d think homeostasis shouldn’t work like that, but you’d be amazed how much brain shit you can fix by treating it like a television you just gotta hit real hard.”

“I’ll give you a finders fee if you know anyone who can debug the implants though, while I’m doing this. I’m pretty sure the danger’s out if it but, I don’t like putting anything back into someone’s head before I know it’s sterile, you know what I’m saying?”

Two hands is going to help a lot here. Especially one that is way more familiar with mechanical connections. Sophie’s done more than her share of cybernetics, sure, it’s just not where her passions lie.

And uh, in case you haven’t noticed? A lot of what she’s describing is experimentally flooding a dangerous (temporary) schizophrenic with pharmaceuticals just to see what happens. He'll have to be conscious while you check results at a minimum. It might be important for you to be here just to be that second pair of physical hands.

... How's it go?

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Bondi-Pink:

The problem is that Bondi is a great performer but a bad magician.

Her patter, her crowd work, her persona? Incredible. Absolutely vibrant. She sleeps in that costume, goes grocery shopping in it - imagining her wearing a hoodie and jeans is like seeing photos of Abraham Lincoln without the beard. That authenticity bleeds from her.

It’s just, Bondi’s sleight of hand is sloppy. She lacks the concentration span for the long hours of rote practice needed to master other tricks. She avoids buying setpiece prompts from magic retailers, because she’s terrified of thinking she just trust-funded this, too. Except she’s not very good at making her own.

There’s a reason she gravitates towards escape acts, which is that it’s a lot easier to practice and doesn’t take a lot of creativity to be impressive. The real risk involved carries, and she can sell that, make it believable. And she can get real props, not just the magic store ones!

“The proooblem is we can’t do the ones with real danger in them. Even if it’s only a teensy bit. You can’t do that in front of kids.” Bondi tells Pink as she fills the tuxedo pockets with coins, a deck of cards, some candy. Then she holds up the soft rope. “There’s this thing called ‘shibari’ though, the Japanese police used to do it because they didn’t have enough metal for handcuffs. I think it looks super pretty, and I can talk about the history while you tie me up, and people always like that. Do you think you could learn some knots?”

This is not innuendo. She is that cinnamon roll.

…

You uh, suggesting a magic trick for the act here would probably be a good way to smuggle in something that would help with your investigation too, I guess.

Red:

“Holy shit what the fuck.” Sophie rips the rough mesh from her hands, leaving her patient mid-surgery to run up to Red, bounce on her feet, stop, put two pairs of surgical gloves over her hands just to grab your hands and jump and down while holding them, screaming. Screaming! Jumping! Holding your hands! “Look at you! Look at you!”

Hard to tell, but you think she likes your new look.

She rips off her extra gloves and sighs, dragging her feet back to the patient. “Sorry, sweetums, I do got to get back to this guy, though. Shouldn’t take too long, I was about to cut my losses anwyay. I’m good but I’m not magic.” She rolls her eyes. “Numbnuts here took a monofilament sword to the head and they’re like, ‘the cut’s so thin you can just stitch it up, right’ and it’s like, not when the fucking medula oblangata got bisected. Just don’t tell a Tentojinoken loan shark his mother’s a whore, it’s that easy. Even someone with-” and this she shouts into the patient’s ear, “HALF A FUCKING BRAIN should get that one right. Anyway, mind checking the cryofluid intravenous for me? I’ll just give up and start gluing the cavities, I just need him still long enough for it to set.”

Did she even pause to breathe in that entire train of thought?

“After that, I got a binder over there with people waiting for appointments, I usually just do them whenever if they’re not urgent. Or I got two urgent ones in the freezer if you want to hardmode this, their case files are taped to the morgue drawers. Pick anything you’d like.”

Her case notes are written in the neat, looping handwriting of a primary school girl writing in her diary, and she dots all her i’s with skulls.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Earth:

Rudy’s escape pod will land safely.

Then he will be trawled out of the ocean off the coast of New Zealand, and taken to his mansion. It was a bargain, really - Real-estate on Earth got a lot cheaper with 90% of the population gone, one way or the other.

Then he will realize how much he preferred the intimacy of his apartment. He will roam the opulent corridors like a restless spirit. He will try to catch up on the books he never had time for, and put them down after only twenty pages. He will start a show he has always been told is good, get up to get himself a drink, and come back to the still-paused television hours later to turn it off.

He will rub the hair off his arms in a cold sweat, and his fingernails will dig into pudgy wrists, and he will remember what Orange told him.

It will cause him to go to the people in earnest. To go to bars, to community centers, to the farmers markets. Life will not be post-apocalyptic, just deeply rural even in the old cities. Something, on the other side of this world, a mouse named Marco had been growing to appreciate more and more.

Rudy will despair, because as hard and as sincerely as he tries, he will find no one with Purpose. At first this is because he believes he is bad at this, but with dawning horror he suspects that most people simply don’t. He’s known people like that, he knows what it looks like when he sees it, and he left all of them behind on Aevum. That ‘many’ might only be true when you can select from a large enough population, larger than he has now.

And then the depression will grow dark, and he will be grateful for it, because under the smothering neurochemical blanket he will at least be able to lose days to games of Victoria 6.

He won’t drink. Every time he considers a second glass of whiskey, he will instead reflexively reaches for his phone first and stare at his secure email inbox for a solid ten seconds, thinking he needs to stay sharp in case someone asks him to make the numbers dance again.

Now, though, Rudolph Merkin covers his eyes with the brim of his porkpie hat. He stares out the aquarium glass of Selene down at the faraway Earth and wonders what it’ll be like, to finally be able to relax.

Bondi:

Bondi is a woman this year. She changes her mind on that one now and again, going back and forth between Bondi and Bond. She’s not so much ‘non-binary’ as she is ‘alternating current’, a maximal commitment to one presentation or the other. Both those presentations reflect the kind of Swedish descent that just screams the Magnussons family wealth shared a vault with Nazi gold.

He was Bond when he took up magic; he was tall, with a flustered but confident smile and raked back blonde hair. Achingly handsome if you’re into guys who look like they play tennis, and a kind of innocent mischievousness to him. You’re pretty sure he fell into magic as a way of pulling off a prank without victims. He’s a fratboy in photographs and a schoolboy in videos.

Bondi’s better at it, though. Bond’s charisma is that of an earnest real-estate agent doing his best, but you know he’s got the job because his Dad owns the company. In Bondi, things just click. The flustered smile is more endearing, the confidence more charming. That same energy of ‘I’m out of my depth, but I’m trying my best’ that are frustrating in Bond, gives Bondi the resonance of an anime protagonist.

Her spirit animal is the Easter Bunny. Tall, a cascade of blonde hair, it is almost offensive to describe her beyond that; A hip to waist ratio most people need a corset to achieve, distractingly large breasts, and a thigh gap you could throw grapes through.

This becomes relevant when the base of her magician costume is a leotard and fishnets. Sure, later it’ll be more kid-friendly looking when she’s also wearing tailcoats, a cape and the silk tophat. But for now-

“You should be my assistant!” Bondi leans forward excitedly on tippy-toe, holding up a butler’s suit in November’s size on a coat hanger. “It’s always so much more fun with an assistant!”

Let’s chalk those details up to being a potential operational asset. She’s not going to be a deliberate seductress, but apparently it only takes minor alterations to her costume to render her an effective distraction - Just ask Orange.

Red:

Welcome back, by the way. Anything you've felt like you've missed, anything that you want to catch up on? Anything different about your new body this time around, now that finances are less tight than last time (even if you are still giving most of it away)?

Is it worth asking why Sophie's texting you seeing if you still want to help out, some time?

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Rudy:

He seems grateful for that. This is a man who voluntarily had a bomb put into his brain to do the job he did, and he can’t just have done it for the money. There’s no evidence that he particularly enjoyed what he earned, and he never acted on temptation in his fifteen years of working with dark money.

For him it is better to be good at what you do than it is to do good. It’s probably a big part of why he appreciated November when she contacted him. Earth’s going to be hell.

“Anything else?” He asks. “Before I go.”

He’s not going down the same way Marco did. He’s booking a private ship to the colonies under a different identity, like he’s told his friends, and he’ll be taking an escape pod down to the surface from there. The pseudonym will take a while to link to him, enough to be a plausible attempt to cover his tracks but not so good as to never be recognized.

He spends too long on arranging it perfectly, triple checking his work every time the high of doing it runs into the cold-blooded crash of what it means to have done it.

After this, it’ll be encrypted emails bounced off satellites.

Yellow:

Costa-Silva’s houses are a matter of public record, and she has two she actively lives out of. One in Zeus for when she’s doing her Justice rotation, and one in Hermes for when she’s back in her home district. This isn’t necessary, she doesn’t have duties there. Justice Roberts has no nostalgia for living in Selene, and just stays in Zeus all-year.

The one in Zeus is a penthouse apartment near the new high court building, but not too near. It wasn’t even a penthouse to start with - it was a floor of four modest studio apartments that she’s bought all four rooms of, then made into a single penthouse with a helipad.

Okay, so she’s paranoid. She found the closest neighbourhood that she could afford the highest rooms with clear sightlines that was still near the office, and then flies in so her feet don’t touch street at any point. Rumours have it she regularly sleeps in the office while she’s working, too.

Her mansion in Hermes, where her extended family lives, is gated and guarded like an old style Cartel house. Interesting. She’s got nine kids and enough aunts, uncles and older cousins there to help raise the young ones alongside her husband, a 56-year-old retired high school maths teacher. None of them came from money. The house was bought during her time in the Hermes district court.

Making plausible lies up is easy, actually learning real stuff is work. People actually try to hide the real stuff, and they don’t know to hide the completely-made-up. Her bank, her accountant, that isn’t public record, or trivial to learn.

But… All that physical security? There’s nothing you can find that would explain where she got the money for all of it. And it has to be an ongoing source of income - helicopters and guards are a daily expense for her, and they aren’t cheap either.

There is something real to find here. Either passive income from undisclosed property that someone bought for her, or she’s being actively paid off.

What do you think? How would you look into it?

November:

It’s probably better to let the military base thing sit for a while. It’s still good to know in case you find a way to contact the conspiracy what assets they’re holding that you can ask for, or if the increasing problems with the station’s conditions stop suddenly, what the solution would imply.

Also:

A package just got delivered for you. What is it? It’s not something case or investigation related, anyway, it’s just something nice. (Ideally related to one of the skills you’re refreshing from taking a break, or levelling up).

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Rudy:

“That’s why I wanted you to get them! Before they were destroyed.” He says, frustrated, matching perceived condescension with condescension. “I’m not taking them with me,” his heart skips a beat when he says it, and the frustration gets blown out like a candle by it, but then he’s back on point, “I already have their new owners written in my will. Just put them somewhere for my lawyer to pick up, and you’re going to make some numismatists very happy.”

The fact that they’re all accounted for in his will like that means they’d be miserable to fence, if you stole them for yourself - even if it did give you an easy buyer’s list. But that’s not the reason Rudy trusts you with these. He just trusts you. It’s weird for him too, don’t worry.

Probably for the best he’s not inspecting them individually, so he won’t have to know about the damage they took from the garbage chute.

The next few hours, Rudy types up everything he knows on an airgrapped computer, writing everything he knows about codewords, the people in the organization, the history that he’s seen. He was their money guy, he might not have known what all the money was for, but he did have to know how much and who it was going to, and that makes him an invaluable starting point.

The rest is just teaching you how to read the papers you extracted with the coins. You couldn’t have done this without Rudy. Ciphers and encryptions you can crack, but personal shorthands, industry language and the significance of bookkeeping practices are another. November’s smart and has a grounding in this kind of thing for research purposes, but it’s not at the level of Rudy’s specialized knowledge.

He outlines a network of changing shell companies, a diffusion of knowledge. This is less like a spider’s web, and more like light radiating from a campfire. It’s not just that light gets diffuse the further out you go, it’s that anything that’s closer to the source casts a shadow over everything behind it. Rudy can only see everything the light touches for sure, but he can make educated guesses about how much they’re keeping in their shadows.

Where’s the money come from - public or private money? That one’s where Rudy’s in shadow - trying to look into it was one of those things that made the bomb heat up. He just knew how much there was. How big’s the source? He thinks it’s the size of a small state government department, about 2,000 direct employees, probably less. That big, and just one accountant? God, no. Just one at Rudy’s level. He’s more like the CFO, thus getting the brain bomb.

It turns out he’s actually really, really good at this. There’s obvious pride in his voice when he points out evidence of embezzlement you can’t without his help - and struggle to see even when it’s explained to you - which he’s pretended not to notice. Those little threads of blackmail were always going to be part of his retirement plan, just as much as canceling the Chase Black account was something he kept up his sleeve.

Yes, yes, but what matters to you?

Names. Names of companies, names of subcontractors, names of his direct supervisors. They’re not names I’ve mentioned before, but some you recognize through the Everests. Which one surprises you the most, and which one surprises you the least, and why?

Organization structure. There is a central node that has frequently changing smaller companies that launder the money to then hire larger contractors. Think of the Department of Education hiring the McKinley group to figure out the best laptop to give to students, and then going to Lenovo with the purchase order. Not shocking, but useful to know. It means that the central agency can be relatively small, and only the highest levels of contact at the McKinley level actually need to know where their money and directions are coming from. From there, they can employ any civilian agency they want for the bulk of the work in anonymity.

That works for the vast array of downstream effects of Goat’s role in the station. Keeping all the sensors working that Goat used for input, making sure everything he was connected to output correctly. Keeping software compliant with Goat as hardware was maintained and updated. Considering the scale of what Goat affected, an absolute minority was dedicated to Goat himself. The rest was just about keeping up with him. Maybe 50,000 indirect employees, all of them in the dark.

What doesn’t that work for?

Goat’s direct maintenance, for starters. Some security forces, some programmers, upper management. Lobbyists, payroll politicians, systems experts. Media supervisors and liaisons, spin doctors, fixers. Their assistants and direct personal staff. A warehouse in Zeus.

Warehouse?

Yes. The warehouse where they keep Phoenix, Dog and Tiger, also bought at auction as backup should anything go wrong with Goat. Kept in a military storage facility. It was the only three they could get, and only meant for a worst case scenario. Those receipts were buried in Rudy’s desk, too.

Your siblings will still be there. The conspiracy is not going to risk implementing their backup until either they know Goat’s kidnapper has been taken out, or Aevum’s systems decay gets so bad that it’s worth the risk.

And then Rudy’s done, satisfied. “I’ve got Larry Page’s place in New Zealand waiting for me. I’ve heard it’s still beautiful there. Not like Australia, since…” The space fountain fell on it. “If you need a forensic accountant for anything, feel free to call. I’m going to be bored out of my mind without all this.” He’s smiling, but his teeth are chattering. He’s not just scared, fuck that, he’s terrified.

Not of someone coming after him, no. Of being retired. Of having nothing to do. Of being cut off from what friends he does have, up here.

Aside from his job Rudy is boring, one of the most boring people on Aevum. But he’s never had to deal with being bored before, and that’s something very, very different.

November:

Two weeks to fake a corruption story? This part is actually so easy you can do it on break as long as you delegate most of it.

No, really. Like, you have your own media organization in your pocket, just get Anthropozine to report on your own crime and make it credible and then let everyone else prove the real corruption in the process of trying to disprove you.

Two people come to mind. York would know who’s the best target, and Junta would know how to write this. Give it a week and Rudy will probably be bored out of his mind enough to help with this, too.

You don’t even need to tell York what you’re asking for. Just ask him who he thinks is corrupt on the high court and he’ll stream of thought it just because it’s a fun question to answer.

LatheOfHeathen: so there are nine justices
LatheOfHeathen: each is elected from one of the districts like the pope or some shit to get around the problems with how countries used to do it
LatheOfHeathen: but that means they have a kind of like legal terroir
LatheOfHeathen: like aphrodite is always going to care most about social issues, selene will always care the most about smuggling and organized crime
LatheOfHeathen: so the joke is that the selene justice would be the corrupt one, but truth is guys like Roberts cut his whole ass teeth on being anti-bribery anti-corruption, which is why the other selene judges respected him so much to vote for him, so he’s out
LatheOfHeathen: Becker-Klein is fuckin, apollo, it’s an open secret shes corrupt to shit which is part of why intellectual property laws gone to shit so hard lately
LatheOfHeathen: but my money for the worst is probably going to be either hermes or gaea
LatheOfHeathen: on the books gaeas justice Melnyk is the poorest but also their kid goes to a Zeus private school that costs half their annual salary so something fucky is going on there. Itd probably hit a lot harder to out Melnyk cause being humble salt of the earth is a big part of their mythos
LatheOfHeathen: hermes is police unionis and slum lords so if Costa-Silva isn’t filling her pockets I’ll eat the entirety of my own ass with a knife and fork no sauce
LatheOfHeathen: don’t bother with aphrodite, even if winters is dirty itd just hurt us to report her
LatheOfHeathen: ares guy is too rich to bother with this shit, his hands arent dirty he is the dirt other people get their hands stuck in, and the zeus justice is surgical clean, so clean i think she sweats bleach. woman fucking terrifies me actually its kind of hot

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

LatheOfHeathen: another bomb for the arsenal
LatheOfHeathen: im not going to burn out im just taking this seriously
LatheOfHeathen: honestly though ive been so fucked about other people being ready for whats about to come i havent got my own house in order fuck
LatheOfHeathen: i think
LatheOfHeathen: i think we need money off the books not the donation stuff or fundraisers stuff that nobody knows we have all that stuffs critical to the site working
LatheOfHeathen: might spend some time working out how much were going to need first before i say though
LatheOfHeathen: thanks babes

Doing logistics might not stop him from living off taurine noodles, but it does keep him off the frontlines, and that might have to be good enough for now. Especially if it’s useful.

The Anthropozine is more expensive than other pirate sites like it because it maintains its own infrastructure, its own server junction in every district, its own encryption for its traffic. Less like an onion net, more like what porn sites did in the late 2020s to help protect people get around puritanical state and local laws.

It’s not impossible to take the site off the traditional internet, but even OESN can be entirely shut down by cops physically being in two buildings in Aphrodite and Apollo. Anthropozine can’t. That’s where most of the site’s money goes towards, before being split among its contributors.

But something you’ve probably picked up on from the fact that I’ve always asked you where your safehouses are, and why none have been offered to you? This level of protective infrastructure has only been built for the information until now. Not the informers. People are a lot more expensive to hide.

The site couldn’t afford it before - York might be thinking it can’t afford not to.

A pebble strikes a fist-sized rock and sends it rolling down, down, down to the Earth below.

Rudy:

Rudy was making his plans for his transition to Earth. He spent that time writing cards for his few close friends - and he only has close friends, because if he can’t afford many then he’s had to make them count - tells them he’s going out to one of the smaller stations, out near Mars, to lie low. But he’ll be safe out there, and there’s money to be made for a person like him.

“It’s plausible.” He justified before you left to get the coins. “It’s smarter to think they’re dead, but it’s stupid to leave with the temptation to reach out later, or have them think they should try to find me. They might.” He says this proudly. Of the fact that he has friends that could, of the fact that they care enough that they would.

You mind if I write this safehouse? Just based on something you said to Goat? Cool, thanks.

It’s in Hermes. Always meant to be the industrial zone next to the ports, the ‘docks’ of Selene where raw materials are recycled, where waste is processed for valuables before the detritus gets sent forward to Selene. Originally designed by NASA to be a garden of mid-level housing for factory workers, the capitalists reasserted themselves and mixed density upon this district. Higher, denser housing made for the workers, next to lower density McMansions for the management and factory owners that oversaw them. The original design only saw for a 5:1 wealth disparity between the two groups, but by the time people were taking the elevator to actually live on Aevum, it was closer to 30:1 and widening again. That’s just for the management class mind you, hardly anyone from the executive class lives here.

But that change in zoning left weird snips and cuts in the blueprints and the landscape as a perfectionally rational plan got irrationally fucked with. Almost all of it got filled in with parks, bought up by the wealthy landowners, or used to fill gaps in utilities. Sensible things. It’s the knock on effects that gave you this one, though.

The increased density in a worker area meant enlarging a train station beyond the original plan, after a line of shops had already been built. The shops didn’t need to be demolished, just all their sensible access points. To get down here at all, now, you have to walk along the train line from the platform and down a ladder a footpath-wide alley to the entrances. These buildings are frequently leased and maintained by real-estate agents though - they’re a favourite for semi-real businesses who need a verifiable address.

Terrible for squatting, the eviction rate’s too frequent. But for your purposes? All the benefits of legal ownership, none of the costs, and it’s directly on the trainline. It had to be, for this place to happen. It’s a good spot for a middle ground to the airlock, when you can get it, a sleeping bag and a yoga mat on the carpet of a back-manager’s office is surprisingly cozy for a night or two.

Deliver Rudy’s coins and debrief him on what happened in your words, and then I’ll deliver the news.

Pope:

It’s a draft of a high court decision, a medical malpractice suit about the misdiagnosis of a six-armed patient. Notably the suit is not brought against the doctor by the patient themselves, who remains anonymous, but between the doctor and the insurance company. The doctor denies the malpractice charge on the grounds that such non-standard patients make expectations of the same standards of care desirable but impossible, and doctors are being charged with malpractice in these cases just so the insurance companies can get out of paying routine expenses arising from non-standard complications. The court will be cutting the gordian knot on this.

In a few weeks this decision will be made public, when it’s finalized. No chance of changing it after that happens.

All the details are here, but let’s just start with what’s important, what it means.

Basically, before it was ruled that furries, cyborgs and altered androids all had the guaranteed legal protections of all other humans and synths that would apply to them - that just got overturned. Legally, Crystal is human with everything that comes with that. Soon, in the eyes of the law, she will be seen as the unicorn she identifies with. That’s all this decision means on its own.

It’s like what Pope said. This wouldn’t be a problem if the differences between those things didn’t matter. It is going to be a problem. Don’t just think of what Marco leaked, also think of the legal protection he needed to get that job in the first place.

The 9 justices each come from and represent one of the 9 districts in Aevum - with the exception of the Prime, who is the Chief Justice elected from the other 8 Justices. Justice Winter of Aphrodite writes in her dissent; “In the least case, we are closing an umbrella before a more permanent shelter has been built,” and later, “we have already seen time and again the implicit privilege afforded to ‘human’ rights, and the consequences of narrowing that definition.”

The Chief Justice Trelawney basically says; That’s a problem for the legislators, not us. We can’t make a bad ruling on our end just because we’re worried about bad laws, that’s not our department. This is just common sense that lets better laws be written around it. It’s fine, don’t worry about it.

Workplace protections are baked into this ruling, though, it’s accepted that some roles simply require non-human anatomy to be performed. With that, the tacit and cowardly admission that they know this could go badly, and have a kind of person in mind for who they’re going to protect from it.

…

How did Pope get this? Who else knows?

This is not a loose stone rolling down the mountainside. This is of that broken earth that everything is heading towards.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pope:

He makes a gesture with empty hands like hitting the ‘stop’ button on a tape recorder and an upward flick of his hand like muscle memory of flipping a notebook shut. “Right. I beg you forgiveness for this interrogation, as it turned out to be. That was never my intention. Just, the problem with a job interview for a partnership is that I’m not going to be able to pull rank on you, fire you, discipline you. But there’s a time window here, and - To hell with it, I’ve been put in the position of getting one date, and then working out if I’m proposing marriage at the end of it.” He pulls a chequebook and pen from his pocket and starts writing. And I don’t think I can. You’re not someone I can trust like that, and I think we’re best off parting ways here. I’m sorry for wasting your time. I’ll write you a cheque for your train ticket home. I know this was a long journey for you, and money’s tight.”

He rips off the cheque. The numeric amount in the dollar column is too long, it’s a longitude-latitude co-ordinate for a place nearby, specific to within a meter. He shakes his head at you, looking disappointed, and leaves without another word.

Black would approve.

If you follow it, it’ll lead to a large suitcase full of paper documents. The cheque won’t have the passcode for it, but you’d be able to message Pope later for it, or pick the lock with some tools if you’re impatient. Your decision on where he hid it, and if and how you find it.

November:

Private Channel:
LatheOfHeathen: we dont have any information on the cloud stuff but the major networks are handling that better anyway
LatheOfHeathen: murine corps stuff is dormant at the moment while junta sorts through stuff but you can help with that if you want
LatheOfHeathen: frankly just between you and me all the shit is about to hit the scram jet
LatheOfHeathen: if the cloud got destroyed because of infrastructure decay thats a sign and if it got destroyed by terrorism thats a sign both leading to the same
LatheOfHeathen: a lot of reform got made in the last ten years and were right about to hit the reactionary pendulum swing back to it - havent wanted to bum people out by talking about this but forward progress doesnt mean things keep getting better
LatheOfHeathen: it just means its their turn to get angry and motivated
LatheOfHeathen: i don’t know how to get people ready for that but i dont think its viable to protect them from it any longer
LatheOfHeathen: i think we just have to make peace that the shot were loading to fire right now is going to be the last and were going to have to live with some fucking idiot dipshit chud morons getting theirs off first and that means having to hold our own together through bodies already dropping before we even start
LatheOfHeathen: murine corps making me think we have a chance here. Its like our own guerrero mexico where the teachers there practiced commandeering vehicles and causing enough crimes to practice fighting police just so when the next revolution came, they had veterans made in peace time
LatheOfHeathen: we just got to avoid getting igualad for it
LatheOfHeathen: so you know its all the same thing right now
LatheOfHeathen: why theyre squeezing the headpattr union the stuff against furries the stuff against androids the fact that the police budget just went up 20% this week on the quiet and nobody but us noticed because it was just cops getting to keep a share of civil asset forfeiture directly again its going to be six months til that goes mainstream
LatheOfHeathen: because all those fucking other useless cunts can only report on disasters after theyve already happened because thats what passes for fucking professionalism because everything else is speculation and fucking sensationalism and nothing is real until its already happened and the consequences arent real someone with a fucking lanyard has put it on a spreadsheet
LatheOfHeathen: if you could figure out how to get someone an interview with castile louis for me though id build all of you dicks just to suck them because hes the funniest fucking man on the planet and everyone deserve to know it
LatheOfHeathen: dont tell him that though hes not in on the joke and i dont want to ruin it

It’s hard to tell if York is wasted or sober - stone sober, dry sober, wrung out sober. Half his neurochemistry is external to him and reapplied by thermos cans and heated wire coils and eyedropper fluid. All it takes to radically impair his brain chemistry is ‘nothing’, now.

Hopefully this was helpful to you :)

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pope:

And there it is again. Miraculously Blue has obviously said something right. Or… wrong in an interesting way? “There’s an answer to that one, but it’s yours to give - not mine,” Pope says, amused. No, amused is the wrong word. “I’ve got two thoughts about that. You identify with humanity, but you aren’t them, and they’ll never let you forget that. Especially when you’ve gotten so good at this, most of the reminders are coming from you, now. I can’t imagine that going to a place other than self-loathing, self-resentment.” He thinks about it. “I won’t say anything so trite as asking if you wished you were human. What I was thinking is you can’t identify with neither androids nor the blooded, so you must want to be something else.”

Then, pinning Orange with those wide eyes, he says. “You noticing I say ‘blooded’ instead of ‘human’? It’s not to be edgy, I don’t like creating distance that way, it’s just that I find ‘biologicals’ to feel far too clinical. I’m trying to be be inclusive to those living, breathing people who don’t identify as human by saying it. That is the kind of thing you must want for yourself, right? What would you really see yourself as, what do you want to shuck this shell for - the shell in the shape of a humanity who won’t have you, the shell that casts you among the androids you feel you belong with even less. Tell me everything about what you see, just, let me say the second thing first.”

No, seriously. This is actually just how his brain works. He looks back to Blue again. He’s not smug for these reads, he’s apologetic. Like having identified it, he’s identifying with it. There’s empathy here, not just sympathy.

“The second is that your fortunes are always going to be tied to whoever people mistake you to be. When humans see you as an android, that only matters because being an android matters. And when people see you as a furry, that wouldn’t matter if it didn’t matter to be a furry. You’re going to have to learn to identify with the people you’re being misidentified as, that’s how this works. That change you really want, that change you actually crave? That’s social, not systemic.”

He obviously knows both are important. He’s just not sure that you do.

“I know how different you and I are. But them?” This thumb jerks back over his shoulder towards the street like a catapult arm flinging its shot, “They don’t. And that counts for something, between us. At least until… Tell me about it. What’s going to crack out of that maid-apron chrysalis?”

November:

New Group Chat: 3V, November, ProvocativelyFickle, JuntaSThompson
JuntaSThompson: Just
JuntaSThompson: It's fine, just keeping this group open for later in case I need it
ProvocativelyFickle: Secret best friends chat?
JuntaSThompson: Honestly, kind of, yeah
ProvocativelyFickle: I can’t wait to not tell Numb about this, they’re not going to know they should be so jealous!!!

A pebble scatters across bare rock face - if you weren’t so far away from it, you could hear the bounces sound like tic, tic, tic.

You have more time.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pope:

His eyes are unfocused and his lips slack for the first line or two, but then you say that last line and those eyes are sharp again, the line of his mouth tight as he purses his lips together. “We do love them though, don’t we?” Then he tilts his head at you. “Ground ankle deep in blood. That’s a human metaphor, a human expression. Sure, there’s power and poetry in it, and I like what you mean by it. I just got to wonder, Sister, why are you still using their language and their ideas to describe their oppression? Even when it’s just you and me – synth to synth.” He runs through possibilities in his head, and straightens again with a coy smile. He bites down on his vape but he doesn’t draw from it.

Whatever he thinks he’s figured out about you, though, he holds in tight-lipped silence, and leans forward in his chair. He’s frustrated about keeping his guess in, but must think getting an untainted answer out of you first is worth it.

Pink:

You - November - need to rest and recover from all of this. To debrief and decompress. This is true and important.

What is also true and important is that you’re about to get critical information, on multiple fronts, that is going to make the other colors want to ignore that. But there’s going to be a big difference in November treating them as end-of-the-first-book cliffhanger, or just the end of an episode of a television series that she’s going to keep binging.

Getting the others to be aware of this is probably far more important than tracking those assassins anyway.

Because elsewhere…

Elsewhere

… in 3V’s apartment, York tries to give Junta a peptalk about working through trauma, about how important the work is for him to do it. York thinks it’s going well and he’s wrong…

… In a saferoom in Aphrodite, Rudy didn’t know what information he was keeping from you, because he couldn’t know how important it was. Red didn’t know what she had when she got it, either…

… in the backrooms of a courthouse in Zeus, Daniel “Robocop” Perez is frozen out of an argument about a leak, because nobody trusts him into the conversation about it. Which makes him remember a contact card he’s kept from a dinner with Starlight, weeks ago, that an android left under his plate. He liked her…

… across from the burned-out ruins of an older court, Pope thinks about the documents he’s keeping in a second location, and tries to figure out whether he can trust the girls across from him, or at least work with them. But he’s got nowhere else to go, and York’s resume for her covers Marco’s leak - either of those stories by itself is a powder keg on its own, but together, this is how you make a hydrogen bomb…

… in an apartment covered in artwork, Fiona has gotten a whiteboard out and drawn a round-table diagram of all Novembers different aspects, with two nodes for Fiona and Crystal in the center of the ring. Two bottles of wine down, they get into a heated debate ranking all possible threesome combinations. This is a night of celebrating the thrill of being debonair freedom fighters, in a window of short lived naivety that will soon be closed to them…

There are bricks thrown up that will not come down for a longer time. The emergency repairs on the shredded cloud still continue. Forensic investigators work where they can to figure out what happened, and who caused it, but their work is slow.

A Goat-shaped hole in that station cannot and will not be filled, but the consequences will take time - and any attempt by the people who know the real cause to solve it risks vulnerability towards you. This still needs time.

Singh, too, has people he can call in, ways to introduce Goat to the Game. Blu-ray disks of gangster rap blare over speakers of Martyrtech. This will be a while, too.

Everything else is about to hit all at once, simultaneous and imminent in the coming days. The portents will build like gravel down a mountain, where the catastrophe at the end is inevitable long before it is obvious.

Give me a timeline for how long Pink thinks November needs to recover, and I’ll give you the sound of gravel scraping rock to the rhythm of it. Like a bassline, tension for things to come.

But while the disaster is coming, that’s for the next book. You got Goat, he’s an asset now, and you have leads on your siblings. Make this time count. Make this be about everything you’ve earned.

(Yes, I know I am giving this instruction before you know what White found and what Pope says. That's rather the point of giving it to Pink specifically <3)

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pope:

He laughs in surprise, his extreme expressions magnify his shock in that moment, and he wipes an eye. “Forgive me. You just sounded like an undercover Fed.” It’s not an accusation, he doesn’t think you might be one, he just thinks that it’s very funny.

… Probably.

White:

The bags also contained the tossed papers from Rudy’s desk, the storage brick from his desktop, a laptop, stuff like that. The brick and the laptop are totalled by the fall, but the paper is pretty resilient to that kind of thing.

White might want to get somewhere clear before going through it. Already there’s the sound of fire engine and police sirens as the smoke starts to belch out in clumps from the broken window Red came out of.

The bootprints don’t lead out of the building, at all. They go down into the apartment directly below Rudy’s, and then the thermal vision is obscured. News reports will reveal this is where the fire started, and that it traveled up into Rudy’s suite. Privacy laws prevent tenancy records being easily accessible (keyword; easily) but what you can check readily is real-estate listings.

The apartment hasn’t been listed for years. Decades, maybe. Possibly for as long as Rudy himself lived there.

Whoever did it makes it out of the building with the rest of the legitimate tenants, hidden in the crowd of people wearing their freshly changed-into civilian clothes as their wetworks uniform - uniforms? - go up in flames with the rest of the evidence.

You still learned something here, and got a lead out of this. This means it wasn’t Chase Black, and it wasn’t a contractor. This was someone’s long-standing contingency plan.