Blue has a business card, and a promise to be shown around sometime - Serino will make a useful contact. Brown has her moment.
Some last moments of business to settle before things kick back up again. I’ve asked Blue and Pink about what they want from the new place, but does anyone else have ideas, requests, ambitions for it?
It’s almost time for Crystal’s debut.
Green:
Fiona whispers to the green kobold "I want to go home", and it snaps off a sharp salute.
A bedroom is made around Green at a 2:1 size that makes it feel like being ten years old. The starry night bedcovers are overloaded with stuffed mythological animals like hydras and centaurs, and the ceiling above is covered in a constellation of cheap plastic glow stars. The orb is on soft carpeted floor, head against the
It's not the childhood she ever had, her bedroom at this age was a steel coffin in a sleep pod cupboard, it's the borrowed memory of someone else’s childhood comforts. It helped her when she got like this, anyway.
She tries to see if Pink’s still around for her to ask a complicated question; "How do you think I'm doing?"
“Yeah. Probably should.” Right now he can’t think of a reason he’d want to stop her, so he doesn’t try. Still, it’s hard to sustain a fight when they don’t fight back. York seethes, but he looks back the way you came and seems to consciously remind himself of that part of today. “Sort out what happened here, get your head right with your other heads.”
Then, Zhang is yelling at York; “What did you say to her?”
“She’s- I don’t-” York pinches the bridge of his nose. “Some of her is like that sometimes.”
“Some of her?”
“It’s a whole thing.” His voice is receding. “One sec. I’ll see if Tess- If ProvocativelyFickle is free today, I can’t remember if it’s her or Numb that did metalwork.”
it was both. Fickle did metal sculpture until she got bored of it, and Numb did jank stage rigging for student budget concerts and short films with stolen scrap metal. Neither should be anyone’s first choice, but either would be fine.
Then Brown has a tap on her shoulder, and Zhang takes Brown’s hand and starts writing on it with a marker pen. “I gotta go too, but, I owe you, okay? Won’t forget it.” Then she runs back to York to stare over his shoulder and figure out who her helper is going to be.
Blue:
Shtern lets out a little wail, and Serino stands taller. He is about to be insufferable. This is what he lives for. Shtern finishes his beer in three gulps. “Look. It is empty. I must get another.” He makes sure his path is completely clear before he throws the empty bottle underarm across the workshop, where it shatters over a waste basket meant for metal shards. “Then I must clean that. Excuse me.”
“I own a small firm in Ares.” Serino pulls a hologram of a logo up. It’s a stylized animal rendering like the ones you used to see for luxury car companies like Lamborgini’s charigng bull, or Porsche’s rearing horse, or Ferrari’s rearing horse, or Jaguar’s - you get it. Except Serino’s heroic animal rendering is of the Italian cave salamander. Not an animal you’d associate with a dramatic pounce, but Serino’s committed. “Cornelion. It’s not the biggest of my companies, but it is the closest to my heart. It is… I was born in Corniglia, you see? This beautiful town on the cliffs of Italy. The salamander looks so much like the cornelion stones you found there, we try to use a silica blend that looks like that stone as much as possible.”
“Corniglia was tiny. Tiny! More people in an apartment building than were in the entire town. The colours! Every day, bambino Serino would walk down those long black stairs to the ocean, and fish while watching the smugglers go by in their beautiful speedboats. And if a police boat gave chase!” He claps his hands together and rubs them, and it makes a hammer striking an anvil. “The whole town is gone now, those cliffs - the ocean. But here, Cornelion, it is home again. It could be bigger, but… I like to keep it as small as the town I remember.”
Shtern shuffles past in the background, glances at the teenager’s trebuchet design, and sighs. He holds up a hand to them, ‘one second’, on the way to clean up the glass, and doesn’t spare a look towards Serino. His ability to deliberately ignore this is powerful.
“That is all we do there, this glasswork. One thing -” He pulls up a hologram of a luxury railpod with black glass windows, and an exterior shape like someone dipped a baseball in molten glass and pitched it lightning fast, letting the shards cool behind it in flight. “Private railcars. Beautiful, sleek, and impervious to crashing. We learned where it is best to be as hard as diamond, and a cushion where it must give. A braced passenger will survive an impact at 80 meters per second, a third the speed of sound. Each one handmade, no two alike.”
Ignore how many asterisks there are on that one - that passengers in luxury pods are rarely braced, that such impacts are incredibly rare. He’s not proud of this because it is necessary or effective, just that it’s possible. It’s a flex.
“Look at this, too!” He projects a hologram of a cavalry sword, and looks disgusted by it before turning it off. In the second you saw it, it looked fae. Like something made in the Winter Court for the Queen Titania. “No. Hologram doesn’t do much of this justice. So much is in the way it catches light, in the colours. We have become a favourite of Yggdrasil executives wanting to make their weapons of office. So much of the shaping can be done with your hands that it is allowed for them.”
Is it an effective weapon? Not compared to what Blue used against Chase Black. Is that the point? Absolutely not, diamond swords are their own justification. For all Yggdrasil’s silliness, this is a case of real recognizing real - they want for the same things as Blue.
“This, this was me.” He pulls up a carnation corsage for a wedding. “I made every petal of this with my fingertips, one by one. Shtern’s wife asked me for it for an anniversary present, flowers that would not wilt. He cried, and cried, and cried.” Serino laughs, sarcastically rubbing his eyes. “Boo, hoo, hoo.”
Shtern waves him off from the dustbin, then goes back to pretending not to hear as he shuffles back to the teenagers, and starts lecturing them all about how their center of gravity is wrong, and if they really want to send the cinderblock payload flying, they need to get more of a snap on their rope, like-
“You. You should visit.” Serino says proudly. “You want to see the best on the station? You come to me.”
The patronage system lives on. If you specifically want an expression of emerging technology that’s more artistic and expressive, then it’s probably going to be a billionaire’s money pit passion project. It’s not the renaissance anymore, sure, but paint will always be expensive to the painters.
And as Serino glances over at Shtern again, and there’s a twitch of a frustrated smile, there’s a story here too. It’s not Blue’s interest in technology, her knowledge of the old ways, anything else that Serino likes and shares with her that’s the reason he’s making an offer like this. It’s Shtern, the fact that when Blue went out looking for someone to learn from, Shtern immediately clocked her as someone who’d care about what he had to say and listen to him, and Blue did.
Serino spent this entire conversation looking like the billion dollar man, and Shtern looks like his wife still packs his lunches for him, and at every point Blue has treated them as if they’re complete equals.
Green:
Fiona [1d6 +3 = 5+3 Surveillance =8]
She makes a motion like coiling a loop of rope around her forearm, like you do when pulling a boat to a mooring. She yanks and her little kobold workers from before are pulled from all the way down at the tower of babel to here.
“Terra Null.” Fiona pats the pink one on the head. The kobolds begin to take hammer and pick and cartoonish carpentry saw to the boundary of a ten by ten by ten meter cube of perfectly nothing space. What’s more, they keep doing that, maintaining the space and constantly refreshing and resetting it as Fiona stands in the middle of her newly erected digital watchtower, admiring the beauty in what Green is doing around her, always trying to understand her better.
For now Fiona is spending more of her attention on trying to see what Green shows of her heart, here, than she’s worried about where the next hit might come from. She feels like she’s trying to read poetry off the claws of a paper tiger.
When Green strikes it can be on her own terms, in her own form. But it won’t be in her own environment. And this has still yet to take any of her concentration to maintain - Green’s yet to overcome Fiona at a resting neutral.
[Both pass - lead increases to 7, difficulty remains at 5, and Fiona will spend 3 from her Digital Intrusion pool again.]
York types, types, blinks. His ear cocks as his brain catches up to the information it just cached, ready to be ejected before it even bothered to reach short term memory, but an alarm started screaming from the trash eject button just before it went out.
He takes a sliding step to put himself between Zhang and Brown, despite the fact that there was no space between them to slide into. “Nope.” York says. “One sec. Need to talk to your lawyer for a minute.”
“Ah, sure?” Zhang sounds surprised. “She seems like a big girl, though, she’d handle it. It’s just-”
York doesn’t answer because he’s already got a friendly arm around Brown shoulders and he just pushes her forward ten steps ahead, out of earshot, and angrily hisses into her ear; “What the fuck are you doing? You cannot be interrogated as a person of interest right now, are you fucking kidding me.”
He’s actually sincerely angry he has to be the one telling you this. He had really hoped you were beyond needing a sanity check like this.
Sorry, Brown. Your masking makes him oblivious to the internal monologue you’ve got going on. We are punished for our successes, too..
Blue:
“Many little things, but the most interesting is heat management.” Shtern looks to Serino with questioning eyes, like he’s trying to ask him to fill the blanks in things he hasn’t said yet. Searching him for memories of the arguments they’ve had. “Water moves so much better as steam, and then back again. But never have we had materials that could take the heat change without bending, or warping, or melting, or- Don’t get me started on plastics.”
“Energy surplus to boil much more large amounts of water. Those ice freighters aren’t carrying ice anymore, they’re in-situ melting that volume of water. Around 20% more capacity, if you do it like that.” Serino snickers, and looks at the back of his fingernails. “Then you have to deal with free-surface effect in zero gravity, and pressurizing your vessel, but such things we can do.”
“Flexible tubing. Rerouting of systems. All new things that-” Shtern’s eyes light up. “Lom, do you think you could get me some of that tubing they use for the Cloud line?”
“I could.” Serino tips his head. “I think there’s still some salvage in Gaea. Why?”
“I would love to process it and see what it is.” He’s excited. “Just to tell Frau-Blau, of course.”
Serino stares blankly. “Right. Just that?”
Shtern pushes himself off the bandsaw chassis and dances in place like a happy goblin, making a low squeaking gurgle in the depths of his chest that sound very excited.
“Why?” Serino rubs his hands down his wrinkled face. “Why do you always get like this?” Shtern smiles dreamily.
“I put an old fridge into it. I close the door. I click the settings like I am making microwave popcorn. And the next day, it is all in its little pieces for me.” This makes him inordinately happy. “Or it could be its metal, its rubber, just in little cubes. The most perfect little cubes.” He rubs his hands together imagining it. “Jeana got so upset with me, I spent days just breaking everything down just to see, and giggling like a schoolboy. I was a little monster with it.” He would have had to have already been 70 years old by that point - it must have been a sight.
Macro Processors are like if you made a mass spectrometer out of nano piranhas. It intelligently identifies welds, nails, connections, and safely separates things at a submolecular level. The inventor, or inventors, is|are the only person|people who has|have accepted a Nobel Prize for physics anonymously. The amount of corporate espionage their work has enabled makes them the engineer equivalent of Salman Rushdie.
Green:
[Chase rules: Green is the Pursuer, in this case, trying to catch Fiona. Fiona’s lead represents her impression of untouchability or incontestability - her ability to feel out of Green’s reach even when she stays close enough to touch. Lead starts at 5. In this case, technical abilities such as Surveillence and Digital Intrusion take precedence over traditional skills like Athletics and Pilot.]
[Fiona rolls 5, +3 for 8.]
Fiona’s plan here is to just take it. Rolling with Green’s aesthetic or playing back in her way - She’s meant to show that she can be unchanging and unyielding. Is it more boring? In a way, sure. But the point of this is to make Green feel safe about her - and that means presenting herself as an indefatigable bastion Green can’t hurt, not as a force that can beat Green down.
That being said, Zoro wasn’t above cutting the clothes off his enemies to make a point.
Look past the imagery and the and the power, and into the raw code of what Green’s summoning. Delete her hurtboxes. Strip her of her physical touch until she’s left as naked imagery.
Fiona stands in the tumultuous rapids, and cocks an eyebrow. “Trying to get me wet, huh? Need to try harder than that, nerd.”
The problem with trying to be a solid wall against the tide? The tide wins. That’s what water does, it is a constant, implacable and shifting force that makes an embarrassment of all attempts to resist it.
Fiona tries to get her defenses out, but stumbles to keep her balance by swinging her arms. It’s not until she remembers her wings and her other senses here that she manages to clip out of the ocean and float above it, with it.
She’s out of practice. She won’t underestimate something like that again, but this was a bad start. “At least I know you want to make me wet.” Fiona dusts herself off, and waits for the next play.
The glowing macros around her wrists kick in. She’s dedicating more personal resources to this, adding digital latency time to her biological reflexes delay, but she shouldn’t need to rely on her reflexes to deal with something like this again either. [Challenge increased to 5].
“Ah, shit, I didn’t get any of that. I didn’t even think, and like, my camera stuff only got the original arrest. I don’t think they had badges though. Coffee just looked like takeaway cups to me, didn’t even think to check if they had brands or anything, that’s like, that’s Agatha Christie shit.”
“I started recording everything after we got there.” York holds up his phone before going back to playing with it. “It’ll corroborate any account we give, but that’s it.”
“I can show you how I got arrested for it, if you want?” Zhang offers hopefully. “You could figure out everything you want to know that way, maybe?”
Blue:
Serino barks a laugh at this. It’s Shtern that looks up with gold-flecked eyes with an annoyed grimace.
“My eyes are still 20/20 after all these years.” Serino explains. “It’s the only augment I haven’t got, but Wolfgang has.”
“Yes, yes, I’m getting old.” Wolfgang’s annoyed grimace breaks into something that just falls short of a grin. “No, that’s still not much better. Which we should all be grateful for, in my opinion. Everything is spying on me - my phone. Your phone. I think even Serino’s nipples are selling my data to advertisers.”
“Maybe? Who knows? They put the privacy agreements in with the liability forms, when you go in for the surgery. I never read any of it.” Serino… this is a joke, right? He says it like a joke, anyway.
“I do not want them to be much better at it.”
“There are so many ways you can change the physics behind looking at things.” Serino thinks. “Much more work went into the physics of things. Materials, that is the word. You want to know what I am most excited about? Glassware ceramics. Used to be far too brittle, but some genialità up in Ares found a way to blend the properties of diamond and silicone, as you like. Fantastic insulators,” he kisses the tips of his fingers, “Incredible to work with, like sculpting. The things you can do with the colour mixing, too, so much more…” he doesn’t have a word in English for this, and gives up, “than any painting.”
“Low melting point.” Shtern counters. “Once you get through that insulation.”
“I love that about it!” Serino closes his eyes in bliss, and his body shakes with the intensity of his passion. “The things I could have done with this sixty years ago… Glassblowing diamonds, Blue! To stir and to shape the wing of a fighter jet like I am pulling candy floss.”
Shtern sighs too. He can’t argue even for the sake of arguing. “If you are good. If you get the right tools… then yes. It is more like silicone the more you heat it, so it is very important you get the heat right.”
Serino shows you what he’d suggest, and his entry level is out of your price point. Shtern shows you his suggestions instead, and it’s still ludicrously expensive. Most of the difficulty is, as they have suggested, finding safe and practical ways to heat this stuff to its melting point through the insulation with any degree of scale or precision. Serino says of Shtern’s choices; “This might do.” As if being asked to chop firewood with a stone axe.
Green:
Fiona drops her solar-panel wings for beams of golden light again; “What’s the hacker version of wrestling, play-fighting? I don’t think there’s any way I can tell you that there’s nothing you can do to me that isn’t because I let you do it, without just proving it. And it’s the safest way to learn I’m wrong.” She says as an afterthought. “I want you to try your best to overpower me, until you know that you can’t.”
Her fingers twitch as she prepares three different macros in bands of light around her wrist - in case Green answers with a ‘surprise’ punch. [If Green wants it to be, this can be a legitimate combat encounter where the only consequences for losing are the resources she spends on it.]
“Also? Wouldn’t hurt for you to flirt back with me a little. I asked if you wanted to do things with me, you never asked me if I wanted to.” If she’s going to ask Green to test her strength on her, of course she’s going to be a brat about it. “You said you wanted to win at me, right?”
“Right, right. Yeah, right, uh. I don’t really remember much. People who picked me up were just regular cops, and then I got transferred here. I think that means they bring you here to interrogate you about the Pump stuff, they don’t do much screening to make sure there’s a good reason to. That’s going in the video. Two Themis guys showed up, saw my profile, one of them threw his cup of coffee at a wall, and then they left. Apparently they didn’t even check me out until then? I think the rest has just been like… fuck, what’s the word? What’s the word for taking shit out on someone else for shit that’s your own fault?” She snaps her fingers.
“Vindictiveness?” York suggests.
“No, it’s fucking… fuck this is pissing me off now.”
Blue:
Shtern looks to Serino. Serino looks at Shtern.
Then Serino flexes at Blue. This doesn’t add much, his mechanical muscles don’t bundle and bunch like a bodybuilder’s would, but it’s a universally recognized gesture.
“I ask him.” Shtern chuckles.
It’s not just Serino, though, much cheaper cyberware is much more common for moving and lifting. And even then, you don’t really need much more than that for handtools. The depot stations in neighbourhoods really does get freight most of the way, and hand tools go a lot further with titanium spines.
Enhanced bodies, too, just for the warehouse? That’s an expensive but interesting idea. White’s started exploring it more generally, but hot-swappable bodies just for purpose…
Green:
“You’re good, I was liking the listening.” Fiona’s suddenly treating this like when a songbird lands on the table in front of you at a cafe. Again she thinks about White, and she says something she is only capable of saying because of her. “I can be stronger than you, here, you aren’t a danger to me. I can fix anything you break. So just…” She reaches forward, carefully, and moves to skritch the soft, simplistic skin underneath Green’s jaw. “Give me your checklist for a bit. You were saying about how you want less agency?”
That part stood out to her. “In the physical world I have a containable level of agency” Of any word she could use to describe having less freedom, she used the word containable.
Zhang snickers. “Hey, I thought you were just asking to change the subject, didn’t think you actually meant it. I like iced tea? Jasmine tea when I can’t sleep. I don’t get you. It’s like, when you ask me if I like tea, it doesn’t really feel like you’re asking me if I like tea. Right? Like, when I ask you about welding and you say you ‘know the basics’ - I can’t tell if you’re underselling because you don’t want to flex, or if you’re overselling because you want the excuse to hang out. You know?” She asks York.
“No.” York says “HartlyDworkin says hi.” Zhang shrugs, and raids York’s backpack and pulls out a thin jacket. He must have brought it for her, it’s brown pseudoleather with a line of sharp silver studs from the shoulders to the wrists.
Zhang falls in step alongside brown again, hands in her jacket pockets. “Makes you a good pretend lawyer, though.” She’s noticed Brown’s awkwardness, then, it’s just put her into Cool Older Sister mode.
Tools in a Toolshed:
It’s a good question, in that both Serino and Shtern agree that wireless is inferior. It’s a great question in that they disagree on what kind of cabled is better.
“Wireless.” Serino spits. “It’s cheaper, less parts, looks neater.” He rolls his eyes.
“It’s great for outside the hull.” Shtern admits, clicking the new band into place. “Here? It is a good thing that they use in a way I do not think is sensible. Wireless power, you send whether or not it is received. If the receiver is broken, how does the projector know to stop sending? They have to run a wire back. But if that wire has been broken, too?” Shtern shakes his head and clicks his tongue, tsk-tsk-tsk-tsk-tsk. “Wire is fail-safe, wireless is fail-deadly.”
“Messy. Too easy to interfere with. Vulnerable.” Serino shakes his head. “Mayors change to wireless for a while, then change it back when they learn why everyone else did too.”
“But this time!” Shtern snips.
“We will fix all the problems they could not!” Serino agrees bitterly. He projects a hologram from his wrist of a weaving machine, and spins it for Blue to inspect from every angle. “Look. This is a Charcoal Loom, for electronics. Prints entire circuits in carbon nanofibre for you. As flexible as fabric, as resilient as the station hull, the loom can even thread fibre optics. I refuse to use anything else for a project that requires less than a quatronic core.” Carbon nanofibres can be near-superconductors or incredible insulators based on a minor tweak of structure. Serino shows how the Loom can weave its tapestries as thin as the ink on a page, or as thick as a wool sweater.
“Cannot be fixed or maintained.” Shtern crawls back out of the machine, wiping his oily hands on a rag before taking his beer again. “Only replaced.”
“What could damage it?” Serino counters, and Shtern waves a hand instead of arguing back. “Expensive to buy, very expensive, but you save in the long run. Raw carbon is cheap. And look. The fibres themselves are like muscle tissue. They can pull tight. They pull tighter when cut is made to restore connection.” Actually, there’s a lot more you could do with a carbon fibre material that is also a microprocessor which is also a hydraulic motor. Serino’s just talking about power transmission right now though.
Shtern shakes his head at the Charcoal Loom projection. “I still like platinum. It’s good, it’s cheap, it does not rust, it does not corrode. I can fix it how I like. I can solder it, and weld it, and cut it. Fifty years ago men would kill to have platinum wires, but now it is common, it is boring.”
“Carbon, though. This is just what you can do here,” Serino waves at the tool shed. Nearby, a bunch of teenagers gather around a rough set and simulate different trebuchet designs trying to figure out the best way to launch a cinderblock through their Principal’s office window all the way from Gwen’s apartment roof. “Think of what you can do with grid wiring, with this. Can you do these things with wireless?”
Pink and Crystal could make some very, very interesting things with that loom, but it’d be the Christmas item - she’s only going to be able to afford one thing she’d want like this, to still be able to afford everything else she’s decided she needs.
Cyberspace:
"Keep changing if you like that more. That's not affecting your score, but you really do get points for trying. Or, just, I love dragons, if you wanted to keep being that?" She's curious if Green changes like this for herself, or because of her indecisiveness in what she thinks she should be for her audience. "You've already started winning at Fiona, though - I'll give you your first prize."
Fiona throws a file to Green - it’s her library asset for the body she used to run, but doesn’t anymore. It’s about 36 times the size of the cleric she’s running now. That number might not sound like much in the context of general computer files, even a small image can trivially be thousands of times larger than a large word document. In this case, it’s the difference between a xylophone and a cathedral pipe organ.
The body Fiona has given Green is made of dozens of fist-sized glass orbs, all connected by cobweb-like threads. Some of these threads are as thin as hairs, others as thick as pipettes. It's jank. The threads are there because the simulations always required the body to be physically coherent in some way. Controlling it all required entirely remapping her motor cortex, so that every thought sends one of these nodes to wherever her attention wanders, and stays there until that attention is needed by a new thought.
The fuzziness coalesces around an orb in the middle like the pupil of an eye. This isn't a deliberate decision, just a consequence of where the most attention has been. Focus on one thing and the pupil dilates, constricts when the attention spreads elsewhere. The eye can't move all at once, it moves as growing and shrinking edges, fuzzy and flickering.
The dimensions of it means no matter where you stand relative to the eye would make it feel like Fiona is staring at you, because she would be. Did you know humans can see in full 360 panorama with mechanical assistance? And that's when they still rely on their eyes. Each of those glass orbs gave her panoramic sight and sound of wherever she sent one - all of them, at once. You were supposed to cluster several together to represent a bigger or smaller percentage of your attention, but you didn’t have to. It’s a question how far Green could disperse this and still handle the information stream.
This body gives you what it feels like to move through the world as an author experiences a world in the middle of creating it, omnipresent but not omniscient. Information impresses directly into the mind, lucid dreamlike, exploiting the eccentricities of a direct brain spike connection to hardware that has to know what it's simulating. You need to use eyes in the out-there because meatspace doesn't know itself, the eyes need to convert light into knowledge. The simulation is converting knowledge into light - it doesn’t have to.
This is what really broke the drivers in Fiona's head to be too long, her most bodiless body, her ultimate escape. Put her in a sensory deprivation tank and this is what she still is. She doubts she and Green have the same reasons for escaping, she hopes this at least shows they had the same reasons for the place they escaped to.
This body is also definitionally unfuckable. Any sensory input like that got scrubbed for being overwhelming noise without signal.
“So, that's me.” She says cheerfully. “Here’s me fully mapped out, and I couldn’t find any expectations in there so if you find any, tell me what they look like. This is what I’m capable of, of taking, of dealing with, what the inside of my head looks like. Do you really think you’re more dangerous than anything I’ve done to myself?” This is a serious question, not a challenge. As of handing this body over, Green now knows more about Fiona’s levels than Fiona knows about Green’s.
She’s not ignoring the undernet stuff, or the glitchwork AI goddess thing. She can’t argue whether that’s right or wrong for Green until she knows who Green even is, and interrogating that first would just lead through misunderstanding Green anyway, with a lot of time spent talking past each other on the symptoms first to get there. That’d make this too much like fighting with someone on the internet.
Empathy first, so she can get explanations instead of just warnings. She doesn’t know what dangerous means yet. She has no idea what Green thinks her core identity is, and if it’s different from what Fiona has seen of her. She can’t talk Green down from a ledge if she doesn’t understand why she climbed out to it in the first place. At least she can try to show Green she might be capable of understanding.
“Sucks your Mum was a bitch.” Zhang says with complete earnestness. She’s entirely unfazed by the infodump. Some people would feel scolded by an answer like that, an insinuation they’d fucked up by pushing - if anything, Zhang just seems vaguely honoured you trusted her with it instead of trying to suplex her into shutting up, like her ex used to (that was not a reason they broke up). “Appreciate it way more now. I kind of made you make a positive memory with it now, I’ve been calling you tea lady all day. That sucks”
“I mean, you wouldn’t happen to know anything about welding, would you? My day plan is patching a roof in a squatters place, squatters can’t even get their names onto the pod system to get the materials delivered. Thought it was just supposed to be plastics when I made the promise.”
York continues to be busy on his phone. This time because the thought of being asked to do manual labour visibly frightens him. He self identifies as the laziest person on the station and has simply tricked himself into believing management isn’t real work.
Blue:
Her two biggest finds are Wolfgang Shtern and Lombardi Serino, two very old men who remember construction back on Earth. They’re good, comfortable finds for what Blue needs.
Their choice of bar is one of the public toolsheds in Apollo - again, NASA engineers designed Aevum and thought; ‘Everyone needs a hammer sometimes, but almost no one needs a hammer all the time’. Normally guys like Shtern and Serino wouldn’t come down here, they have much better gear at home, but here’s the difference - Shtern is the guy who requisitions the tools for these public sheds, at least in Apollo district. The old German is the guy who really makes sure he knows that ‘cheap’ isn’t ‘value’, and he looks to spend a lot of his time doing exactly what Blue is doing.
Shtern cracks a Belgian style beer and leans against a variable setting bandsaw, clearly unimpressed with how the water jet setting is holding up when the machine is only five years old. He’s a short man, with a white cotton shirt that hangs off his body like sailcloth and a pair of jeans his wife bought him twenty years ago.
Serino, for contrast, is a thing of absolute beauty - what Jeremy Clarkson would consider absolute beauty. He’s more android than cyborg at this point, with top of the line parts. Under the perfectly tailored black silk shirt and white Italian pants is a black-and-chrome body with a heavyweight boxer’s build. This is a body made to operate heavy machinery as handtools, with the precision of a Swiss watchmaker.
It is eye wateringly, blisteringly expensive. This guy is long retired, but he was a dragon watcher back in the day. How could he not be? He had a hand in making a lot of the tools that were state of the art back then, there was a matter of pride in seeing how they were used. He’s been left behind in much the same way Blue has in being able to contribute to it, but unlike Blue he’s been able to keep up with the trade side of things. His opinions have stayed cutting edge long after his contributions have.
They are best friends because they love to fight, and what they love to fight about makes them the two most valuable people on the entire station for Blue right now.
“Should have gone with the Orochi.” Serino teases Shtern’s sour expression at the bandsaw. “I’m telling you, that green band laser-”
Shtern just kicks the bandsaw on with a foot and jams a finger into the running bandsaw blade, which stops immediately. They’ve had this argument so many times before that replacing the sawblade after doing this is faster and easier. Shtern cracks open the side of the machine and gets to taking the broken blade out. “You’re paying for this one too.”
Serino pulls out his phone and makes what’s functionally a rounding error in his banking account for the new sawblade. This, too, is easier than arguing with Shtern about it. “Their new liquid nail mix is definitely worth it though.”
This Shtern considers. “Oh, yes? I saw it is three times more expensive, and ignored it. What makes you think it is worth it?”
“You use half as much, and it sets twice as fast.” Serino says. “They split the solution into a trimix coming out the barrel, they completely fixed the problem of residuals of the dual mix sealing the internals. I haven’t had one fail on me yet.”
This gets Shtern’s notice. He pauses in his fussing with the bandsaw. “The Mondragons have been failing a lot faster than I thought they would, I do not understand why people cannot learn to clean the barrels well enough. What’s it like on skin?”
“Worse.” Serino admits. “There is solvent for this.”
“Worse.” Shtern says it like an accusation.
“So just don’t get it on skin.” Serino counters, folding his arms and looking disgusted. “There will always be consequences for mistakes, and you should worry less about the people who make them.”
“Meine Blau, pass me the new band, please?” Shtern sticks his head in the machine to ignore Serino and sticks a hand out to where he remembers Blue to be.
Fiona:
Fiona holds up a hand and counts things off three fingers. “First of all, I was going to fuck Pink later anyway, that’s not the point.” She knocks one finger down without looking at Pink, because cool girls don't look at explosions. “Second, you don’t know what I can take. You’re not the only one who’s had to deal with an overinflated sense of their own greatness just because they’ve been surrounded by mediocrity too long, but you wish you were too much for me like that.” Somehow, she manages to make this sound like a compliment to Green, because it is.
“And third of all?” She knocks down the last finger with a fox-like smile. “You didn’t answer my question. I asked if you wanted to, and you haven't said ‘no’.”
And that’s the most curious one to Fiona, because nothing about what she knows of Green tells her that Green would have given reasons like that to shoot her down. She’d have just shot her down. So even if Green does just say ‘no’ here, she’s going to have to wonder about that.
York knows about the tea thing, which is why he doesn’t want to get involved. The man who would throw himself blindly into a black site knows to keep a safe distance from… whatever this is.
“Ah, come on. That was weirdly specific right? You don’t drink? So you like tea for other reasons, that’s what you’re sayin’?” She tugs on Brown’s arm insistently.
Unfortunately, Brown, this is what watching Zhang is.
Blue:
How do you feel when Orange tells you what Pope could only reach through patience?
Have you started putting together your wishlist for Fiona?
Fiona:
This… she doesn’t know what to think of this. Her heartrate’s coming down from 1200BPM because she was so confident, so sure, Green would thwart her bullshit and she just wanted to see how she did it. The worst possible thing that could have happened there was she just won. The lateness of Green's pivot scared her bad.
She slowly unwinds the grains of sand she’s tossed. Deleting them all in a panic would just ruin the vista from the other direction. She’s careful to do it in batches so Green can adjust to the corrections, and wonders.
Fiona pauses, thinks, shrugs.
“Wanna fuck?” She asks casually. It's the most natural escalation to terminal hacker-brain
Well, why not? They can dance around doing the art showdown all afternoon but she’s not going to learn any more than this, like this, if Green keeps dancing away from her. She’s running out of foreplay options here, and this is one thing that Green would have to come to her for. And, besides, maybe it’d be like doing all the other girls at once.
God, that sounds exhausting, Fiona bites her bottom lip. Also, hey, if she gets kicked out for that one, finally, it’d be really, really funny. Pink would probably laugh, right? Red would definitely laugh.
“Hey, calm down. You got me out, let’s deal with that first, right? Before we lose the mood. I want to feel like this was a win while we still can.” She grins. Some of her teeth are chipped at the corners, it gives her a slightly serrated smile. Like a baby shark. “You do drink tea, right? When you’re not throwing it on yourself?”
York disappears into his phone. He’s not just pretending to be busy, but he would be pretending if he had to.
Pope:
Let this end like a Buddhist parable; And so, Pope experienced enlightenment.
There’s click of his tongue, and then his fingers, and a short nod. Then it’s like his attention turns entirely inward as his bulging eyes blankly look out. Whatever he finds there, he likes.
“You’re a forum.” He suggests. “The sum of the conversations that take place - that culture even as the individual members swap in and out like the planks on the Ship of Theseus. I can’t just take the best poster out of the forum, because it’s the forum that makes them a good poster. You live through the conversation - I’m asking for the sound of one hand clapping.” He chuckles, and rocks in his chair. “That’s why the illusion’s so damning for folks, isn’t it? It’s easy to try and relate to the people on a bulletin board. It’s a harder ask to relate to the bulletin board itself - that invisible thing behind the visible pieces, they have no idea how to do it. Just because they’re told it’s there doesn’t mean we know how to see it. If I’m wrong, I’ll not embarass myself any further with wild speculation, this must be hideous for you to sit through, but if I’m right… Well.” He offers a hand out to shake. “Then nothing would make me happier than knowing I might finally get it, even if it’s the smallest bit.”
Fiona:
On the one hand, Fiona has come here as a respectful emissary of her girlfriend collective and doesn’t want to risk offending blah blah blah blah look being a hacker was a personality disorder she can’t resist. She’s drawn to the reeking promise of QA tests like a woman to a guy in an Axe bodyspray commercial.
She summons an asset from her library. This is a very simple asset, in that it is a bag of sand. This is a monstrous asset, because it is a bag of sand where every grain of sand was individually rendered with no optimization.
Fiona holds the neck of the bag loose as she flies in a corkscrew.
Zhang does a backflip off the short stairs outside, wobbling slightly when she lands it. York gives a clap. She’s getting a bit too old for that one, she’s fronting that wasn’t hell on her knees. York keeps walking, and she skips to catch up to the two of you again, walking in the middle.
“I held my cuffs up to the chains, and York started talking about how easy they were to pick loud enough for everyone to hear.”
“Thought he’d want to know.” York says innocently.
“Then I started talking about how I could have shimmied out of them if I wanted to, but I was on my best behaviour.”
“Really, he should have thanked you instead of yelling at you. Everyone else thought that was a dick move, they were listening.”
“Then we just started asking what would happen if the zine reported on stuff. Like, what we weren’t allowed to say, what the specific threats were.”
“Dude got real fuckin’ mad when I said the threats were on the record, too.” York snickered. “Love that.”
“He was way too careful about it, though. Didn’t even do the mafia routine.” Zhang pouts. “Didn’t even do the ‘for your own safety’ or ‘you better watch your back’ stuff. Just boring legal stuff and blacklisting.”
“We’d get spiked.” York groans. They’re a good double act, feeding off each other’s energy. There’s a smoking-behind-the-arts-block highschooler energy to them like this. York switches to a sweeter vape. The coffee one was just to leave the most obnoxious smell he could. “Still, though. What’d you find out?”
Zhang grimaces. “I just reported myself as maybe having information on the Pump thing. Shit really was that vague. I think they looked at my record and realized what I was doing after, but they were too embarrassed to let me go over it. Would look way too much like admitting they’re doing shady shit to people over shit that flimsy, right?” She glances at Brown’s jacket. “You’re not really a lawyer, right? You really wasted a cup of tea over this? Least I can do is buy you a new one…?” The guilty silence is also the realization she doesn’t have a name for you, now.
Pope:
On translation? “That might be why I think you could be so good at it.” Pope says it like it’s a guilty confession - though what he’s guilty of is less clear. “The comparisons you need to make to make that choice. If that decision were easier for you, if you were less in the middle of it, then you’d have both feet in one side of things. You’ve got one foot in both sides where everyone else I can think of, they’ve got both feet in one.” He drips sympathy about this. Somewhere in his own writing is the phrase; To have a split allegiance is to be a double traitor. Somewhere on his bookshelf, a book is dogeared on a page that says; I will not be integrated into a burning house.
On dancing, he’s more wistful again. “That’s what I’d hoped writing could have been more like. Something you’d think think would be a problem like that, but that you got lost in when you found your own expression in it. Does something in my chest good that you’ve still got things like that. For all the talk I’ve been tricked by an illusion, I was starting to worry I was talking to someone entirely a Chinese room. You're more than that at least, right?”
Fiona:
Wings it is, from here, then.
Not angel wings though, as much as that suits the cleric vibes, she still feels like a guest here. She picks two wide solar arrays with an ion thruster strapped to the plate on her back, trailing blue vapour. It takes her a while to find, it’s at the absolute bottom of her assets list and she’s forgotten what she titled it in the menus.
And then, collision off, she goes right through the satellites. The idea of doing something dynamic like smashing through them just makes her sad. Beyond the consideration of processor power needed to run a kessler cascade, there’s just… what breaking through the satellites, breaking them, would represent. She wonders if this was a right or wrong answer, but at least she’s shown Green something about herself.
“What are you making here?” Fiona calls out to the void behind the satellites, the distant planets and stars. “Why are you making it?” She tries to use the parallax effect of her movement to judge the space between her and the distant planets and stars - are they very far away, or just very small to give the illusion of distance? “Or would you rather just make stuff together for a while? Just point me at some space you haven’t worked on yet.”
Some people loved to talk for hours about their art. Fiona suspected that Green wanted her work to speak for itself - or at least, speak for her. But that was fine, she could spend hours making her sandcastles and learn a lot about Green just watching her make hers. She’s already learned a lot already.
That’s the thing for Fiona, being here. She understands Green possibly the least of all of November, but she loves November and apparently all of her came started from Green. It’s something that doesn’t bother Crystal as much - she doesn’t need to understand something to love it - but Fiona feels like she needs to understand the things that she loves.
She doesn’t have to like Green coming out of this, and she won’t force that. But she’ll firewalk an endless horizon of burning eggshells if there’s even a chance of understanding at the other side.
Damycles
Phoe
Noctis
Fetzen
Anarion