Count Numbers

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Jabratica by 3V

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

“Have you seen Jabratica?”

“No.”

“We’re watching Jabratica.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, it got blocked from Aevum. Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

York:

About the writing; “It makes you a great investigative copy-editor.” Pope thinks about that. “Don’t really need any of those as long as we keep our Frosty subscription going.” Frosty was editing software named after Robert Frost, it’s a pretty beefy bit of machine learning kit that tried to smooth out an author’s text without impacting their authorial voice. The only editing left to do was the higher level stuff, now.

York looks across the road. “They’re across the road, working. This is one of the places our researcher dug up from our source’s raw materials, and I asked Jezebel if any of her activists knew about it. This is who she sent to find out, and now we’ve got to pick them up. HD can’t get here fast enough, so-” York reaches into his blue op-shop suit jacket and slides an attorney’s badge over to Brown, along with a datacard that slots into the tablet. “Wham, bam, thank you ma’am, you’ve been granted power of attorney. Let’s go spring your client. Thought it might let you make a good first impression”

Across the road is a squat gray-brick warehouse surrounded by concentric rings of hurricane wire. Shining flecks in its surface give away that it’s the cheap, heavy concrete made of asteroid tailings, silica-nickel without the impurities removed before firing. As far as the secret police blacksites go, this one’s as unsubtle as the plainclothes officers in the bakery.

York is rash, but this is next level. To not tell you in advance that this was going to be an op is- But no. His entire attitude is off. He’s not just ignoring opsec, it’s like he’s willing to bait a fight with the cops here right up until the point that you’re collateral damage for it, and then he shuts up again.

Two people were meant to be waiting for you at that table.

Juan Costa-Silva:

There is a double-edged sword here. On the one hand, there is a magical level of trust and respect in an adult treating you completely like an adult, not dumbing their words down in the slightest, and acting like you’re an equal. In that regard, the speech hits hard.

On the other hand, there’s the fact that Juan is still 12, and is not an equal. And in that, a lot goes over his head. He hasn’t even heard the word tsar before, he’s barely left the confines of his family property, he doesn’t know what a slum means. He’s tabula rasa here.

Green has one thing going for her, though. She’s invested enough trust and respect into this kid that when he doesn’t understand all this stuff, he doesn’t think she’s stupid, he thinks he is. Maybe in another year, when he hits puberty, that’d swing different and he’d be shitty and defensive, he’d take that ego wound and lash out about it, find ways to beat Green down to his level again. But he’s not. He’s a confused kid in way over his head, and he doesn’t need to understand any of this to think you might.

“Yeah, maybe.” He mumbles. “I dunno, I guess I mean, my mum never killed anyone. I don’t think Chough hurt anyone either. It’s just money stuff. And I mean, I know money stuff is bad, but Sir tells me about the stuff his people had to do sometimes. Like, one time one of his guys got killed, and they’d wrapped him up tight in like a rubber sheet, and they filled it with gasoline, and then they lit him on fire.” The art of ‘necklacing’ has outlasted the existence of car tires, then. Eighty years earlier, Brazilian investigative journalist Tim Lopes was killed this way. Juan looks squeamishly at the graph. “He says my mum stopped that kind of stuff happening too. What does that look like?”

Honestly? Better. Aevum imported much of Earth’s problems, but it had a socialized welfare system already in place to address the cycle. It took pretty fearless work from people like Carmen Costa-Silva though to apply brakes to what was already set in motion, and often it was their bare bodies that acted as the friction surface. For all her problems, bribery couldn’t have been enough for her peers to vote her to the Supreme Court… probably didn’t hurt, though.

Green can start to answer here if she has one, but she’ll get cut off by the sound of the stairs opening. Juan is going to tell her to hide, but his hiding spot only fits him. Green will have to make her own plan

Team Bondi:

“There you are!” Luis claps his hands and breaks into a run to catch up. “Just a minute, please, all I ask of you.”

“I’m sorry, Lorenzo is insisting that he be there to check your bags going out, since he missed them coming in.” He rolls his eyes, genuinely sympathetic. “I just wanted to apologize for that. But we have had problems with guests taking souvenirs before. And I’m sure he wants to make sure you’re not missing any knives or smokebombs or such that Isabella might find later. God knows what she’d do with it. Normally I’d trust her to tell me if she found something like that, but I think my daughter’s so starstruck with you she’d be scared I’d take it from her and hide it from me! And that's just begging for a William Tell moment with little Herman to happen.”

He beams and claps his hands together again. “That’s really what I wanted to talk to you about. The children had a wonderful time, even the oldest ones. I cannot thank you enough for that. We must have you again sometime for Gwen's quinceañera, she will never forgive me if I don't. Also, I have to ask… Why Caliban and Ariel?”

And this he asks Orange and Pink directly. It's not that he bought the servant routine before as much as he understood the point of being in character. Now, with the show oever, he just values a literary reference discussion over kayfabe.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

York:

“Yeah, the problem is it’s bad.” York snickers and takes a sip from a flask filled with not-even-God-knows, “You’re our best investigator, but if we could make an investigative journalist out of you that’d be mint. Doesn’t even have to be site-ready, but it’d help if you could at least explain what you’ve got without it coming down to creepy-intense declarations.”

He just sounds jealous (he does not sound jealous).

It’s more of a bakery than a cafe. Industrial, stainless steel with black vinyl padded surfaces, lots of steam and humidity and the sizzle of a deep fryer going. It’s definitely not York’s scene, it’s- Well. It’s a cop shop.

It is a cop shop. Most of them aren’t in uniform, but they’re absolutely awful at not acting like cops. They tend to be broad, have main-character syndrome, and they have this particular way of ordering where they’re very polite and friendly about their order, but in this way that makes it clear you should be grateful about how friendly they’re being. Like the serving girl owes them for acting like functional adults.

Yeah, okay.

York slides a tablet across. “Most of the side contributors we get are academics and researchers who want a wider audience for their research, get some help making it a bit more saleable. Great work, but not omerta material. I made a short list for you to pick from.”

There’s one profile on it. A quick scroll confirms it. York winks.

“I said it was a short list. Jezebel recommended them - you ever met Jezebl? She’s in the background of the money shot where our girl suplex’d that dipship chief of police.” York does not give a fuck when a cop squints at him for this, and continues ingesting contraband.

This I can tell you; They’re a semi-popular police auditor video documentarian, which is to say they’re professional arrest bait for a camera. It’s their schtick to act completely legally and take an illegal arrest with dignity and grace. The content’s a little too dry and procedural - they’re aftermarket popular, they get great views in other people’s highlight reel compilations.

What else is true about them, though? What are your first impressions?

Juan:

Part of his whole motivation here is that this is something he can do to make his mum be less distant. It’s going to take him a little while to handle what it means that this isn’t the reason - she just… is.

Euna’s the reason this one’s solvable as fast as it is, that you can skim this at all. The majority of these cases are about negotiating the extension-of-lease terms from property sales. That whole thing about property on Aevum being locked in for 20 years and then renegotiated? If a property was bought cheap with those locked-in terms, had its area gentrified, how much value is there in extending that lease another 5 years on its slum-price terms?

That’s what the common factor here is. Don’t read any of the justifications, the processes, the people involved, the properties. They’re all different. What they share here is the outcome, and the outcome is how many times Costa-Silva found ways to justify extending - or sometimes outright resetting - the date-of-renewal terms on those extant leases.

It is at least billions of dollars worth of fraud here then, missing tax revenue in the pockets of property developers. Which is kind of funny, because Costa-Silva was elevated to the Supreme Court because of her law-and-order bonafides, her reputation for being incorruptible when dealing with street level organized crime.

And that put her in serious danger. Which was probably when she started needing the money, and people like Sir Barrera. Don’t feel too sympathetic for her though - her means long ago exceeded her living.

“But what does that mean?” Juan asks. Then, with a pout. “Who even cares?”

He was probably hoping for something a little sexier than federal lease extensions.

Team Bondi:

Well and truly on their way has to mean having the stage and props all packed, but still on the property - there's a security check to get out too, and Luis was given orders to stall you.

“I don’t like that.” Bondi keeps her voice low and cups a hand over her mouth. She leans forward so she’s ear level - she’s too much taller even sitting down. “If we all came in together, we all leave together. Don’t you want to make sure Green’s okay, too?" Then, nervously; "Is this that Lorenzo guy hasn’t come back yet?”

Over her shoulder, Luis is looking to see where you’ve all gotten off to. He’s about to spot your luggage, so you have a few moments. Bondi is whispering low enough that he wouldn't get any snatches of conversation coming up behind her.

This could just be a speedbump to getting out - It's not like Luis even knows what he's even meant to be detaining you for.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Anthropozine:

Okay, so there’s a bit of a story behind York’s new username.

2048 was a wild year, the space fountain is going up but Aevum isn’t complete until 2060. This is still in the early years when the Fountain was mainly just for industrial purposes of getting robot factories and launch facilities up into space, and a few years before people are moving into the absolute wild-west international waters of unregulated, no-laws space colonies. It’s at the point of space colonization that people are taking Indentured servitude contracts into a railway baron’s wettest dream of cosmic company towns - and you know those freaks had unholy kinks - because for a lot of people that still seemed like a better option than the failing Earth, where ambient carbon dioxide levels were reaching levels that used to be found only on the cheapest domestic airplane flights.

Anyway, back then there was a vulture capital guy named Zach Monte who thought that his best play was to buy commodities on Earth cheap, hoard it on the moon, and then rebuild after space was developed enough there was something worth buying. He figured all the most value-dense stuff on Earth was manufactured goods, but if robots were going to be doing all the manufacturing, then he was best off taking the most value-dense raw material he could.

So anyway, Zach Monte, billionaire brain genius, started forgiving trillions of dollars of African, Asian and Pacific Island debt he bought in exchange for all the gold and precious metals in their federal reserves, and shooting it all up the space fountain as fast as he could to the vault he’d had built near his palatial habitat on Chiarascuro. Most of the 1,120 tonnes of gold still sits in a crater on the moon because it’s so worthless it’s not been worth the effort to get it, except the black-site tourists who bring bars back to Aevum as souvenirs. Meanwhile the debt relief played a major factor in Africa being able to get most of its people onto Aevum when it was built in 2060.

York just learned about this guy, and it’s his new favourite guy. To him it’s like the chicken soup for the soul version of selling Manhattan island for beads.

Private Message - November
TheFullMonte: ive been thinking about things
TheFullMonte: the best way to prepare people for stuff thats going to happen
TheFullMonte: and i was thinking how they used to do it in the army was veteran mixing, you made sure to mix your fresh trainees with your veterans
TheFullMonte: 3V and HartlyDworkin have too much baggage for trenchwork and Persephones busy right now and IAmWhatIAm wants to tell you himself
TheFullMonte: Junta has medical leave
TheFullMonte: Fickle needs some frontlining though and Numb wants it but i need them for regular articles right now
TheFullMonte: Beside them there’s the irregular contributors, the people who post a few articles but dont come in enough to get the irc invite
TheFullMonte: im thinking we could promote some people to the circle of trust now before we need to do it and that would free up Fickle and Numb more too
TheFullMonte: you want to meet up and talk shit
TheFullMonte: theres a place in ares i could buy you a coffee you dont got to drink and show you what i need here
TheFullMonte: otherwise we can do this by email lmao im not your fucking boss
TheFullMonte: actually though
TheFullMonte: this goes both ways
TheFullMonte: i told IAmWhatIAm you need writing lessons so take that on the chin champ
TheFullMonte: your sorry and im welcome

Green:

Juan loves this.

“You’re not like any journalists I’ve met. The ones that talk to my Mum, they’re professional friends who write things down for you.” He looks at Green, and he looks at the notepad, and back at Green. “Okay, maybe you’re a little like that. But you don’t care if she gets mad about the stuff you write down, do you?”

"I wouldn't call those people journalists. More like... you know how kings in ancient times would get artists to paint pictures of them? That's what they are. I'm after the truth."

@Thanqol

Juan’s nods so hard he has to wipe his nose after, the sheer energy of agreeing shakes things loose inside his head both poetically and literally. “That’s what it’s like! And that’s kind of what my Mum is. My Mum is super paranoid about hiding this stuff, but she’s basically the Queen of Law. Who’s going to do anything about it? Who’d even arrest her? They can’t even fire her. Maybe when my mum finds out it’s not the end of the world people know about this stuff, she can stop acting so crazy about it.”

This is the kid that’s closer to the family’s head of security than either of his parents - there is no more ardent an atheist than the son of a preacher, and in the Cathedral of Justice his mother is Cardinal.

The Truth, though? He lights up like a firework for that. The scribble of Green’s pen focuses him, reminds him of the questions she’s asked.

“Harley is a friend of my Mum and Dad, but she always takes them out. She never visits here. I hear some stuff on the phone but, I already said. Oh!” Juan pulls a random box from the stacks and rifles through it. He takes a page off the top immediately, but has to dig through until he finds another. “See this? How this one’s yellower and got this mark on it, and this doesn’t? That’s because this one’s a copy, and this one’s original. Because all of these are the originals. And it’s almost all property stuff, but none of it’s the properties my Mum owns. I only checked twenty boxes, and there are way more boxes here than keys… but none out of twenty? I took the boxes from all different places, too.” He looks at you for a second opinion. “I think this is the real bad thing she’s done, and the keys are just how she got paid for it.”

He’s smug. Like he’s written a novel and never had a reader before. So? What do you think?

Several options here - for all of them, Juan wants to play lookout for you while you work, he really wants to know what you find out.

1: Study the documents here, in Costa-Silva’s study, and solve this case.
2: Photograph documents to solve them later
3: Steal some documents
4: Cut and run

1: Suggests three spends

a: A law spend is minimal to speed-reading these and internalizing any of the meanings
b: A research spend will cut your time down
c: 2 data recovery points will allow you to use what you know of information theory to drastically cut down what you need to skim.

2: Suggests two spends

a: Photography will give you the proficiency to video files passing in front of your camera lens instead of needing to individually photograph them. You’ll need to use the light in the study to do it.
b: Law and Notice will be enough to glean something from skimming the documents you’re scanning - otherwise you don’t have time to read.

3: No spends needed, it’s the fastest but good luck getting out with it.

4: No spends, the safest, Juan will be disappointed.

What does Green pick, and how does she start on it?

Upstairs:

Sir Barrera pokes his head into the security room on his way back out to the party. “Seal the ducts. I don’t want the smell to go room to room if we get another stink bomb, it’ll just make the next one harder to find.”

All around the house, there’s the sound of squeaking metal - like rusted shower taps turning - as airtight domed caps rotate flush into place between rooms. Green might not have noticed it yet, but she can’t go out the way she came in.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Juan:

Agenda? Yes. Questions?

The kid does a giddy fist pump. “I knew I was right about you. Mr Lorenzo tells me kidnappers are always way too dead in their eyes, and you didn’t seem like an assassin either. I was hoping you were a spy, but news stuff’s pretty cool too.”

He points to the keys. “Those are all keys for properties my Mum owns. Normally you just leave them with a real estate company, but she’s crazy about nobody knowing she has them. She doesn’t want anyone else having them I guess. If I ever get out of here, first thing I'm doing is finding a place one of those keys goes, and seeing if anyone lives there. Oh but like - one sec. Hey, check this out.” He opens the door and gestures Green out again, finger to his lips. He points to his Mum’s study. “The door’s soundproof right?”

Then he runs to the bathroom and upends a glass with a toothbrush in it, and presses it to the door. He shows Green that, then goes around to the other side and says “Can you hear me now?”

Green didn’t need the glass for that one, but Juan would have.

When he comes back, he thrusts a sheaf of case file notes into Green’s chest. “She got the keys from this lady, Harley Chough. I’m not even supposed to know they’re friends.” He says proudly.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

I've Totally Done This Before

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Ah, hi, uh…?” Fiona tilted her head.

“Fran.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Just come with me.” He repeated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wow. Super fucking lame.

She put the phone back in her pocket.

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

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

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

“People fit in the vents?”

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

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

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

“Why’s that?”

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

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

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

“Yeah?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fuck you, she did.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ah, lame.

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

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

What did she think was going to happen?

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

Idiot, dumbass. Now everyone was laughing at her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Do we use the emergency exits?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Knock yourself out.” Sponge-head said.

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

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

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

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

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

It beat standing around working out what to do.

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

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

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

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

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

“Wasn’t fast enough for what?”

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

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

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

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

She raised her phone to hit the fire alarm and-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah, so-”

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

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

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

Kind of, it was timelocked.

Could she change the timelock time?

No.

… How did it know what time it was?

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

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

Yes.

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

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

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

Fiona paused.

Her face fell into her hands.

Oh, she’d fucked up.

Oh, she’d massively, massively fucked up.

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

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

Well.

Maybe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re bluffing.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Passenger 57 by Junta Thompson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Green:

Three minutes. Then the shower cuts off, and Berrara makes his way upstairs. Juan Costa-Silva takes a breath out in relief, but keeps his back to the door.

“Who are you?” He asks, clearly wanting in on this. “Why are you here?”

He keeps one hand on something in a blazer pocket. It’s not a threat, he thinks he’s being subtle. Which means he’s got a reason to not want to threaten you.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Sir Barrera makes his way through the inner courtyard door and heads for a private shower. He takes his gun into his hand and hides it under the soiled jacket he’s carrying over his arm. He wouldn’t want a trip to the laundry to be the reason he’s slow on the draw.

He heads towards the basement.

Green:

The safe opens. Its contents are… house keys. Piles of sorted house keys with a variety of keyrings and fobs. Well, maybe not house keys - you’d have to find the locks that these open first, to know if they’re for houses or not, but-

There’s a sound in the next room, the staircase. Someone’s coming down. Freeze. This room is just like the attic staircase again, but with the safe there’s nowhere to go. Hiding in the safe itself is a death trap, it’s-

The door to the wine cellar starts to open. Freeze. Don’t move. Go absolutely still. Even if you can’t hide, you can at least not draw attention to yourself. If someone is just here for wine, then they’re not going to think to look for you. Even in plain sight, sometimes people just miss what they’re not looking for.

A twelve year old boy slips inside with a finger held tight to his lips, and presses the door shut against his back. He taps his wrist where a watch would be, and then three fingers.

In the next room, the shower water starts running. Barrera’s footsteps were so quiet you would’t have heard them. Sound dampening shoes, maybe? Or just the mud on them.

The twelve year old keeps his back to the door with his arms folded across his chest, immobile and immeasurably bored, as the shower water keeps running.

He must have already been hiding in the basement when you got down here, or else you’d definitely have heard the stairs activate. Why didn’t you see him in your search?
[“I don’t know” is a valid answer here. This is just a guarantee that this beat won’t end up making Green look incompetent. You can declare something as true about Juan or of any of the rooms for this.]

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Green:

Going clockwise:
One adjoining room: An office that’s almost a mirror to Luis’s in the attic. Reasonable to assume it’s Justice Carmen’s.
Two adjoining rooms: A glass and steel staircase that leads directly into a ceiling. No obvious buttons to push to open it.
Three adjacent rooms: A bathroom, with toilet and shower. The door to the staircase is between it and the study, implying it’s also for guards. Only one spare toothbrush, but three brands of shampoo as well.
Four adjacent rooms: A narrow wine cellar with a free-standing safe in the back of the room. The room’s tiny, it’s just about two meters of shelving and then the safe.

You have a terrible feeling.

Bondi:

Unfortunately, everything here works. Luca is success by failure though.

Caliban makes her offer, which Luca actually politely declines - which is a surprise in itself. Like it’s not a shitty teenager grunt, he pauses his game to look up, smile, shake his head, and mouth ‘thank you though’.

Unfortunately Luis sees that and-

“You’re missing out on the world. I’m sick of it. Go have fun with your family.”

“I’m having fun.” Luca holds up his game. “With family.”

“Go, or no screens for the rest of the week.”

“Oh, fuck me, fine.” Luca puts his games console down and angrily snatches up the water pistol.

It really is nothing personal. Luca has just decided he needs to be a little shit in protest of his Dad. That realization and play with Oscar, though, note perfect. He’s trying to invent a fair scoring system for this to judge by, and that occupies him completely. It’s clear he takes after his Mother at least a little bit, because his Dad’s completely lost by Oscar’s sheer enthusiasm for the argument of what is fair and unfair about hypothetical scoring measurements. Luis attention is totally captured by this, with overwhelming force - Oscar has a time limit to solve it!

Otherwise?

Herman is so close to the ground he doesn’t need to bend over to pick water balloons up from the pile, dutifully handing them to his sister. Isabella hucks as hard as she can at her siblings. Inside she’s laughing, but outside her face would look appropriate on Joan of Arc. For Bondi! For Ariel!

Barrera takes the balloons thrown back at Isabella in an eternal moment of Get Down Mister President. He and the punk rocker Joran get into a game of seeing if Jordan can nail Isabella better than Barrera can intercept, and he can’t. In a hail-mary shotgun blast of three balloons at the same time, Barrera gets one with a knee strike, another with a backhanded chop and takes a third to the chest like a soccer goalie, all at the same time. He hits the dirt, and slaps Jordan’s secret fourth balloon while lying on his side using a freestyle stroke. Jordan pretends he’s clapping sarcastically, but he’s honestly just clapping.

“See, that.” Oscar points out to his Dad. “How do we count that, because it feels like Barrera won.”

“I thought Jordan wasn’t supposed to get balloons?” Luis notes. “Where did he get them?”

“He wasn’t.” Oscar looks down at his scoresheet. “Wait.”

Pablo gets fully into it. “Sorry I’m evil now, Sell Out,” he winks at Selena with heavily tattooed arms folded across his chest. “I’ve turned to the dark side of magic. I’m thinking a stage show in Ares with fire, and motorcycles, and-”

And of course, that brings Selena fully into the moment, pummeling the everloving shit out of Pablo, using water as her medium. It’s very cathartic for her.

“Should I be worried?” Luis asks himself.

“Only if you’re cheering for Caliban.” Oscar marks down another note.

Fortunately, the threat of Luca just got neutralized by Gwen. The shitty-mood twin’s plans to cause problems start with him going up to his sister and asking her; “What do you like about this dumb show so much anyway?” Which is the exact wrong way to open, and it takes only a few more angry words between them before it ends in a fist-fight on the ground. Gwen is winning, and screaming, and she doesn’t know why, only that she must.

“Dad?”

“No, that one’s my fault.” He pinches the bridge of his nose.

“But how do I score it?”

But this is all misdirection, anyway.

As Caliban uses the distraction to trap Ariel too (Gasp!) Bondi manages to free herself on her own when nobody’s looking (Except Pablo, except it’s not like he could tell anyone because he was flat on his back while he watched from Selena actively demolishing him).

Just as Caliban’s actively gloating over her victory, Bondi throws her own water balloon at the side of her head, revealing herself. This one goes off in a burst of glittering light, so everyone sees it’s happened. Then Bondi reasserts herself with her magic glove, and puts a hand on Caliban’s shoulder.

“I think I’m just going to have to take you home myself, aren’t I?” She says authoritatively. It’s a reason they need to go that at least Isabella can appreciate.

Quietly, Barrera dusts himself off, noting just how much mod he’s gotten all over his summer suit. He grimaces and slides over to Luis still in the stands.

“I’m just going to have a quick shower and get changed. Keep them busy before I can get back.”

Luis just nods, and watches the finale, as Barrera breaks into a sprint.

[Other replies elsewhere until stated otherwise]

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Sophie:

Her shirt’s already off. When did it come off? She lies back on the couch with Red growling over her, completely aware she might actually be in danger here, but adrenaline’s just another hormone in the cocktail.

She doesn’t care that she’s lost total control over the situation. Even if the tether comes loose right now, this was mem-hacking - The conflict that led to the dragon cascade is going to eventually fix itself, unstable changes lead to error correction. Stable changes don’t, though, that will have to be changed back directly.

More important to Sophie, though, this wasn’t about being in control in the first place. She’s burning with jealousy. She wishes she could do this to herself, but biology is so non-responsive, has such high latency. To get close to this, she needs to use the imprecise, broad-spectrum medium of pharmaceuticals. It’s like trying to hammer a nail by driving a car into it. What’s happened with Red here is fixable - if she tried to do the address-forget trick to her own brain she’d need to use a gamma knife to physically burn that portion of her brain out permanently.

Sophie grabs Red’s wrist, and drags it down to where she’s unbuttoned her jeans to make space for Red’s hand. It’s probably a good thing she didn’t bother packing panties for the walk home, it’s clear they’d just need to be thrown out by now.

“Tell me how it feels,” she breathes, “if you can still talk.”

Costa-Silva (Heist):

Perfect. The real Hacienda on Earth didn’t have basement levels and this one does. It’s cooler down there, and that’s the reason for the double system to an extent - the basement layers can’t ventilate out.

This would have been hard to find. There are no obvious stairs down, nothing from your exploration that would show that it existed, and it doesn’t exist on the floorplans. But now that you know there shouldn’t be a place for a ground floor airduct to be going down to, you can be suspicious that it obviously does. Unscrew the grate, pocket the screws, cover it with sealant strong enough to hold it in place but weak enough you can kick it out later if you need an escape route, and leave no trace behind you when you go. It’s a tight squeeze, but within your competencies.

Here, underground, the part of the house as opposite to the attic as possible. Paper files. Shelves of boxes, but row upon row of stacks of them. A room about the size of an indoor public swimming pool in length and width, but claustrophobic in height - the dozens of rows of shelves almost touch the ceiling.

It’s dark here. Not pitch black, but like emergency lighting brightness. Bright enough that, to human eyes, you’re only meant to be able to see clearly enough down here to be able to get somewhere if you already know where you’re meant to be going.

Open the closest box and find case files. Confidential, privileged, stuff that’s not meant to have left courtrooms or secure buildings in Zeus. Already this is a legitimate scandal, this is incredibly illegal for her to have, but it’s not much of one on its own. “Supreme Justice took her work home with her”. Stealing it would make it a scandal, maybe. Arson is tempting, but it would just be destroying something she wasn’t supposed to have here.

There are adjoining rooms down here, and the basement must be larger because there’s no connection to the ground floor from this room.

Just a small answer is needed; What’s your first priority? Cover what you have here, or check the surrounding rooms? This is just a declaration of intent, because how difficult this is going to be is defined by:

Bondi’s Show:

It’s a brilliant start.

It starts with the box that everyone knows, even kids who’ve never seen a magic show. The magician gets in, the door closed, and then the box falls apart revealing it was completely empty, only for the magician to appear somewhere totally unexpected. Behind the audience, maybe.

Pablo sits up straighter, recognizing it. “Oh, snap.”

His sister, who is about to snap, glares at him. “Yes, even you can do this one. I know.”

“No I can’t.” He points. “Look, they’re on dirt. No backing curtain either.”

Selena looks. “So what do you think they’re doing?”

“No idea.”

Sir Barrera makes a movement that just looks like he’s getting more comfortable, so natural that nobody notices his hand is resting on his holster under his jacket at the end of it. “Either of you see Juan?”

“He said he was going to the bathroom, didn’t he?” Pablo asks. Selena notices the edge in his voice.

“He’s probably trying to find their backstage props so he can figure out how the tricks are done, while they’re distracted.” Selena says softly. “You know what he’s like.”

Jordan the skater boy is sitting in the row in front of the adults taking photos with his phone. He switches it back to portrait orientation for the moment. “I’ll message him, yeah? Chill out, psycho.” He says it affectionately. Luis is the disciplinarian, Barrera is just someone with an immense capacity for violence looking out for him, and that’s respectably metal.

Luis, meanwhile, is the one that’s confiscated Jordan’s phone after he started getting very creative with the zoom lens function, and only gave it back when Jordan promised to take normal pictures. Up until now, he’s been good to his word on that, but the escape act is about to begin.

Bondi is every bit her role, she has the manic, invincible energy of someone who’s been granted a genie’s wish. And like any good oddly-leftist, all she wants to do with this power is share it. She doesn’t have to fake she’s giving the audience something really special here, she feels it so much herself that it bleeds into her every word.

“You know, most magicians do a disappearing act right now, but I wasn’t planning on one” Bondi taps the box with a glittery wand as she walks around it with an apologetic smile, “because I haven’t wanted to leave any of you for even a single second! You’ve all been too lovely!” She says that while looking at Isabella especially.

“But.” Pablo mutters under his breath, so quietly only Selena sitting next to him can hear it.

“But!” Bondi puts her fists on her hips. “I’m thinking Caliban really needs to go home. So I think I need to go and tell her mother exactly what she’s been doing. And I don’t think the Underworld is a very safe place to see, so if you just wait right here, I promise I’ll be right back.”

The magic box opens. The door closes, and a purple pentagram projects on the ground around it in green and purple light, and ambient smoke makes the beams of light stretch up into the air around the box. “Sycorax? Hiiii~! How’s the island? Oh! Lovely! Oh they’re all absolutely wonderful, it’s been lots of fun. I was so worried, but Isabella is just the biggest sweetheart, and all her brothers and sisters have just been so - No, Luca hasn’t been any trouble, just very quiet. Herman’s been very brave helping his sister! Jordan? No, definitely not cut out for magic, the eye can see what the hand is doing there.” Jordan doesn’t turn around in his seat, he already feels his Dad’s glare boring a hole in the back of his neck. “Actually that’s what I wanted to talk to you about, ma’am! Caliban, she- Mmf!”

The gag goes in last. Bondi manages to give the entire ab-lib’d banter, simple as it is, completely naturally while Orange ties her up, and the name is the cue. Instead of disappearing from the box, when the four walls fall from the frame, Orange is standing on Bondi’s trussed back, absolutely victorious.

Gwen almost goes into cardiac arrest. She’s biting down on a finger hard enough to really hurt. It is increasingly likely that the field of robotics will have a new, gayer Alan Turing in ten years from now.

Ariel! Caliban! Array your forces. The balloons have been cleared by security.

Gwen, Pablo, Isabella and Herman are guaranteed to do what you want here. Jordan needs to be taking rather than throwing the water balloons, but he’ll need to be pushed into it - Bondi just roasted him, so it should be an easy sell. A Negotiation spend solves that without a roll.

Selena needs to be pushed to participate at all, which is a harder sell, but worth it.

Oscar and Luca are going to want to sit on the sidelines with their Dad, Luis.

Barrera’s a harder sell. What keeps him more interested in the fight than going off to find Juan? Knowing he doesn’t know who was in the attic makes this harder.

Fiona and Crystal:

Crystal immediately adopts the pose of the damsel in distress. She sees the game you’re playing and she writhes like the live bait trying to draw the biggest bite she can.

Fiona goes the other way at first. There’s relief that this is handled, that someone else has this, that she doesn’t have to - but then that’s the problem, isn’t it? She’s practicing right now, and we learn through play.

“No, she’s got work to finish for the day, she’s not done until 5pm.” Fiona says instead, pulling fibre tether from her right wrist absently. “Can’t let her think pushing my buttons is a way to get out of work. Black, you’re on guard duty. You can give her a treat every time she finishes a task, but if I find out she came before 5pm, then I’m taking off your arms and legs and giving you a proper lesson in denial.” She tests out the amount of tether she’s looped and gives it a testing swing.

She swings it, and it’s like that throat-grab from before. The first part of the gesture looks lazy again, but then the throw snaps it over White’s head, loops it around the back of her neck, and Fiona pulls, firm, until they’re almost eye level again. “We’re going to make it harder for them.” She kisses the tip of White’s nose. “The gag’s going in, so you’re going to have to make me scream twice as loud to make up for it. Get started.”

Divide and conquer is an ambitious play here, especially in front of both of you. There’s a reason it’s usually involving splitting people up and giving the ultimatum one at a time. If either breaks, then both will, and she’s immediately overpowered and destroyed.

But there’s a method here. She’s clearly worried about this gala, and this is a playful way to have Black supervise how Crystal actually handles the change in scope of the project right now, without Crystal realizing that’s what she’s there for. It’s a way for Black to make sure things really are okay right now, in the pretense of playing a game. A way to defuse the tension of the bomb that just dropped here.

And White can see this in Fiona’s eyes, as the fibre holds them close. She wants uncontested control here, now, in front of Crystal. In a minute, though? She wears this persona like a cape made from her own shed skin. She wants the chance to fit it again and make it something beautiful and monarchic. She wants the creepy thing ripped off of her. White’s power play against Fiona at the doorway gives a sweeter victory in its revenge, or a painless loss for the fulfillment of its promise.

This isn’t what Fiona’s conscious of thinking. These explanations are closer to what she might say if time was frozen on her, and she could write down why she twitched she did in the heat of the moment. Her conscious thoughts were that the pain in her wrists were worth it for the surprise pull against White’s neck, the image of a limbless Black with a wand taped to her, and something she’s trying to bury.

(Crystals thoughts, meanwhile, can be summarized that she wished she had double checked what the game was playing before she made herself a prize token.)