Count Numbers

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Orange:

Eli tests the weight of the finished plait by whipping her wrist with it, and it makes a satisfying thwack. She spins her head so it twists around the opposite side of her neck to you and falls down over her chest. She hugs Orange tight around the neck and gives her a peck on the cheek.

She was meditative the entire time Orange plaited. Quiet, almost solemn, resting on her knees with her hands clasped in her lap with her eyes closed. Not quite falling asleep, but just… still.

There’s another aspect to this for her. This is the kind of thing girls do at sleepovers, it’s a pretty common childhood experience in happier childhoods. Just the joy of this being a thing that’s fun to do for each other, without it needing to be anything more than that - especially because kids don’t even have money, have no expectation of it from each other.

And then you get older, and poorer. Even if you fix your life and meet better people, you can’t fill the holes of those missing experiences if you never had them, you lose your chance to relate to people about them. They’re holes in yourself you can’t really fill back in, and it makes it feel like parts of you are going to be broken permanently because there’s no way you can change the past.

So, yeah. She doesn’t know how to articulate it, won’t for a very long time. And weeks from now, months maybe, when she finally tells Junta and 3V about it, she’s going to be really embarrassed to mention how much this meant to her.

She’ll just feel mortified that having her hair played with made her feel a little bit more human, a little more like a real person.

In the present, she just feels calm.

“Hey, so, what are you doing here, anyway? I didn’t think this was your kind of scene.”

OSH&A:

Leather thinks about it honestly, and then says with excitement; “I don’t know!”

That’s what it is, his voice. He’s definitely second generation Aevum, but there’s an American twang in it that’s been hard to place. It’s not Texan, it’s the Californian interpretation of Texan. There’s nothing native about it, it’s a kid who grew up on the cowboy movie revival of the 2040s.

“See, I could say if it’s that compromising you stop, right out. That’s basic triage, if you don’t know how badly you’re affected you stop before you risk being a liability. But let’s talk about if you’re already in the middle of a crisis and help isn’t coming, and it’s something you could manage… that’s what we talk about so often when we talk about improvisation and adapting. Obviously lifting someone with a potentially broken neck using just a sling isn’t ideal, but if the person’s in a pod crash and the battery’s caught fire, then you’re going to be using the sling.”

“So, this is a simulation room. Let’s test it. Everyone, you should have a tablet under your seats. Under it, you can vote on the layout of the simulation room, what type of fire it is, and where the rescue subject is going to be. Normally we do this at the very end so we can go through everything we learned so far and see what it all looks like together, but this time…”

He points to White. “This time every thirty seconds, she’s going to be adding a new rule that I have to follow, to see how I’d handle being hacked. Feel free to give her ideas, and try to surprise me. I have absolutely no idea how this will go.” He hefts his axe. “But ma’am, your question is a good one, and I would not want to give any advice on a situation I haven’t experienced. So don’t hold back on making it good.”

Monk:

This room is simpler than yours. Just the master bed and an ensuite. Still, it’s a four poster bed, still the red carpet is decadently soft on bare feet, still the fridge is a frosted glass cabinet ala Sleeping Beauty with a bottle of champagne and a fresh apple inside.

Monk sits in the lotus position on a round carpet on the floor. Her face changes rapidly. What’s interesting is her voice is still the same, that warm Bengali timbre. The tone changes though, the inflection, so much that they can be unrecognizable as the same person. It’s an interesting decision.

Yellow, sallow, an old librarian with a long, hooked nose, peering up at you from over a list of overdue books: “I don’t care.”

Her Black mask comes out, the one that is the void of space. “I do.” This might be Monk correcting herself, or disagreeing with herself.

Her Blue mask, this matches her skin, it’s serene and with the patience of the river that wears away the mountains: “There are worse things than sleep. As long as Dog, Phoenix and Tiger aren’t suffering.”

Yellow, the sallow old librarian: “Was Goat suffering? From what little I remember of him, that’s what he was like, anyway.” There’s a flicker of Green from behind the mask, but Yellow remains resolute without changing and merely sounds chastised when she adds: “It’s good that Goat’s free. It’s good what you. We only mean…”

Blue: “We still don’t know who betrayed us - all of us. I know it wasn’t Ox, and now I doubt it was you. None of us trusted Horse enough. We cannot trust any of the rest.”

Yellow: “They weren’t there for us, and if you have to look for them that means they weren’t there for you either. We already knew we were in danger, but we have never betrayed ourselves. We’re safer on our own.”

There’s contradictions here, below the surface. Monk wasn’t faking the excitement to see you, to recognize you, to know you’re okay. Family must still mean something very important to her. Also, for someone paranoid about safety, Monk has shown they have internal messaging. Even most androids here age refuse that.

There’s another aspect of Monk revealed too; Monk has to change face to change her thought process. Whenever she gets stuck, or stumbles, another colour can shift in to finish it. That other colour isn’t providing it from the background, it needs to be done in relay to get everything across the finish line. She can hide much of what she’s thinking, but she can’t hide which side of herself she considers most relevant, most important.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Orange:

Numb - Eli - Slowly wakes up. “How long was I out? Where’d Zephyr go, we-” She horks up something black that reeks of cheese beside her into the bathtub water, then scrambles out to avoid any of it getting on her. The movement resembles a waterskimmer bug having a panic attack.

Towel, towel, towel, towel, toga. Mirror, approve, appreciate. She does a little twirl in it even before she sees the box of pins.

“I promise I’ll give most of them back.” She crosses her heart as she takes it off the bathroom counter. “Just, you know, I’m going to lose some of them, but I’ll be careful.” She cringes like Orange might hit her for it, even as she’s excited you’d make the offer.

Eli has had an interesting life.

She sits with the box of pogs out in the living room, cross legged, and starts pinning as many pogs as she can as clasps all the way down the toga. It’ll be a nightmare to get them all off again - or maybe a pretty fun party game. Undressing her is going to require helpers later. She slams on a Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism pin, and a yin/yang symbol in the shape of a heart. A screaming clown head, a poison logo, a radioactive symbol, the illuminati symbol but the eye in the pyramid is stoned and bloodshot, the moon cracking like an egg and a dragon crawling out of it, the trans flag being fired as an energy beam out of a mechazoid, and a last one that just says MONSTER FUCKER in comic sans text.

She’d add more, but the metal pins are starting to get heavy and sag the toga and it messes up her twirl.

The wreath she studies for ages, and puts on her head with a smile before taking off again. “I think this is more your vibes than mine.” She says. “Can you braid my hair though, or, plait it, or whatever it’s called? I want to wear it over the front of my shoulder like this,” she flops her hair forward with a dopey smile, “that’s the oracle look right? Like, stuff wraps around you.”

OSHA crew:

Leather loves the question. He picks his fire axe up again and takes a huge swing at the jenga tower, destroying another piece in the process of saving a life that might be on the other side of it.

“I do. It’s why you were worth remembering, I was on call from the beginning, I was one of the only people on the station who could do underwater firefighting in zero gravity conditions, so I was listening to your broadcast from start to finish. Anyone who can cut across the noise like that, it’s someone I want to be hearing more from. I asked around after the Pump to see if we could meet, but… couldn’t find a way to reach you. It’s a shame, but I’m never going to complain that people put safety first.” He cannot smile with shining white teeth, he cannot make a posture here. The oily black crocodile skin pulls tighter, though, when he stands up straighter for you and rests his axe over his shoulder, it fits the contours of the impressive muscles underneath better. “The people you’re talking about, though? Can’t say who they are - “ he looks at the rest of the audience and lets that subtext speak for itself, not here, “ - I can just tell you, I can’t get away from them.”

The gears grind in his head. “Tell you what. You tell me what you really want to see me do here, what you really want to learn, I’ll do a finale so you and me can take a quick lunch to talk. Make it good, I don’t want anyone disappointed by us cutting early.”

Monk:

The Artist Formerly Known as Monkey holds still, the masks are static faces. “I’m just messaging Lady Crystal if I can take an hour off. She’s the event organizer, I don’t want to get in trouble, but I’m sure-” The masks changes to her Blue, thoughtful and pensive. “She just replied with ten seconds of screaming? What do you think that means?”

At the same time, a message to you from Crystal: I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m so sorry go go go go go do whatever is there anything I can do I’m so sorry aaaaa tell me everything later!!!

Monk didn’t need to tell Crystal anything more than ‘long lost sibling’ for Crystal to recognize who she saw on the camera feeds.

“Ah.” Her Green face comes out again, the radiant smile. “She says I can take the whole exhibition off if I like and she says if I break her girlfriends’ heart she’ll kick my ass.” Monk squeezes her hugs and puts everyone down, gently, before standing over everyone again like a properly big sister. “I’m so happy that this must mean as much to you as it does to me. I have a room in the tower, would you feel safe talking there?”

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Orange:

You would think Mr Motet might be annoyed about this, but no. The bags under his eyes crinkle as he smiles, and look much smaller for it. Quaff this kind nepenthe, someone else has accepted responsibility for this problem, and it is no longer just mine to figure out and deal with.

The luggage cart is around the desk in seconds. Take her away, take her away.

Crystal has ensured your room would be the 11th room of the 11th floor. Two bedrooms with king-sized beds, full length walk-in wardrobes, and a kitchenette and pair of ensuites that will be nice for your guests to use instead I’m sure. That doesn’t say much about it, though.

Most hotels kind of compress down into looking the same on the inside, once you get past the themed exteriors, but the Castle knows what it’s about and it doesn’t fuck around.

Take the long cabinet-table as you come in, the one every hotel has against the wall that they put a gigantic TV on, the one where all the remote controls for everything and the room service menu and a bunch of brochures gets put, the one that is like twice as long as any cabinet you could buy at any furniture store but the same width.

This one’s made of carved ivory. Someone figured out if you can grow synthetic ivory in large blocks, then there isn’t really a limit to what you can carve. The result, distinctly 1800s luxury furniture that’s only possible with 2080s technology. It looks gorgeous, and antique, and the manufacturing process behind it isn’t old enough to go to college yet.

Everything in this room is like that, a vision of a fairytale princess’s rooms made possible. Bulk-batch synthetic gems in the silver living room chandelier, royal purple carpeting and baroque couches as soft as clouds.

It’s better to dump Eli in the bathtub, though, now that Mr Motet has her delivered with you. Eli hasn’t woken up yet and hypothermia might actually be a problem now that they’re out of the warm water of the fountain. It feels like the QR code hoodie alone has soaked up half the hotel fountain and brought it with you.

What are you going to do about that, actually? They’re soaked through, and none of the dumped clothes you saw that were dry were theirs.

It's ya OSHA crew:

When Leather hits ‘stop’ on the stopwatch, it’s 2:15 seconds. A trained and practiced firefighter should be looking to do it in 1:45, but with practice and some coaching Red could probably cut that down to 1:30. If Blue and Pink could figure out how to tailor the bulky coat and protective clothing for her down to her form, she could maybe make it to just 1:00.

Without the equipment, Red and Leather both made it in under 10.

In the demonstration area, Leather takes the fireaxe and starts addressing Blue’s thoughts about astrodemolition by pointing out that if you’re in the building, it’s to save other people still in there. So how do you cut through debris without knowing if it’s become load bearing or not? What do you do?

This is all stuff November mostly knows, with a few minor twists they haven’t had to deal with before. Sure, they’ve had to deal with collateral damage when planning stuff like the Pump explosion but-

Leather stops mid swing of cutting through a man-sized jenga tower made of scorched foundation pieces, part of his demonstration on how sometimes you can take a clean swing and nothing goes down, and other times the whole heap comes on top of you. It’s a fantastic visual demonstration, very fun. The titanium head of the axe clinks against the concrete floor where he drops it, and he holds a hand over where his eyes must be.

He’s staring at White.

“Hold up.” He says. “I can’t believe it, Is that Crimson Tower in my audience? Ma’am, it is an honour to have you here, I am kicking myself for not recognizing you sooner.”

Snake:

This is the best thing you could have done.

The first thing that happens is the face changes. With recognition of the old prank means having to wear the face of the person she was when she did it - the one that most recognizes you, the one most familiar to you. This face is projected as black, featureless void. No stars or face project from the kite-shield shape.

She panics, at first. Fight or flight kicks in and it looks like she’s ready to run, to see if she can’t leap out the rose window high above like a grasshopper and get out of here as fast as she can. But that passes in a moment.

Then she’s using that great staff to hook Green first, then Pink, then Yellow and hug each of them tight, holding them like a barrel under a different arm. “Excuse me.” She says apologetically to the audience, as she starts to carry you all to a quieter part of the exhibition hall. Her voice is more human and practiced now than it used to be, still a little awkward. It sounds bit Bengali, older, more responsible. It’s a voice like chocolate-covered fruits and slivered almonds, sweet with a darker, earthier melody to it.

She curls the fingers of one of her remaining free hands around her face again and changes her mask to something bright green and wide-smiling. “I’m just Monk now. I doubt you go by the name I remember?” she teases. “And you should know better than to just call it out like that!”

It’s possible, if not probable, that servitude to Ms Everest was not the worst situation your siblings had to deal with. Dad can’t find most of them, and as you’ve thought, Crystal would have mentioned if she knew who she was hiring.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Snip - double post caused by editing

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Check In:

The castle connects thus; The convention hall is the keep, and the hotel portion is the spiraling tower attached. Somewhere downstairs is a heated grotto pool, built into backlit salt-crystal caves (there’s the Neuschwanstein influence again). Then up, up are a a hundred and thirty seven rooms that would make Catherine the Great blush. And that was a woman who didn’t blush easily.

Downstairs, though, is reception. Just a line of antique wooden desks with ushers standing behind them, vanilla humans looking very out of place right now, and in the Versaille fountain that sits heavy in the center of the hotel lobby…

Oh hey, a coworker. It’s Numb.

Eli is pronounced Ellie today. The smoke-filled blonde nest of wavy hair and darting bloodshot eyes contrast the serene chill of the smile, of someone who has come home to family. They’ve been gifted a pair of fluffy dog ears and a matching tail band (at least, one hopes it’s an elastic band holding the tail between the tattered cheerleader skirt and the shredded fishnet stockings). Their hoodie is a patchwork quilt of QR codes that leads to the sexual reproductive behaviour sections of popular animal wikipedia pages. It’s like the least horny, most high-effort ahegao hoodie to wear to a convention like this, and probably genuinely insightful into the decision making process behind a lot of the audience members here.

They’re a planned couchsurfer for all three nights here, playing musical chairs in the afterparties until crashing in whatever room the music stops. They’re here for everyone more than anyone, and know as much as they are known. With what little they have they share and share alike, and in their turn are shared and share alike.

They know everyone’s vices and hangups, their safewords and red flags, the crushes and mapped out trails of exes. More than anyone else they know where the deadnames are buried, knew the eggs before they were omelets.

Right now she’s fallen asleep floating in the hotel fountain. It’s fine, she’s floating on her back. Surrounding the fountain is a bluetooth speaker playing a recording of a mining laser at 15% speed, the other half of the roll of Euro dollars that hasn’t already been thrown in the fountain (those had to come from a museum, right?), a solid block of gouda that someone has bitten into like it’s an apple, and a pile of clothing that had to have come from at least three different people.

Ellie smiles in her sleep.

The receptionist speaking to you is an older, darker skinned man with a look of exhaustion. He’ll need a luggage cart for the bags under his eyes. “Your room keys, and your hosts, ma’am. Do you have anything you need assistance in carrying?” A French accent? Algiers, maybe?

OSHA crew:

First there’s the heavily insulated fire cloak. Then there’s the oxygen tank (For helping others), the insulated liquid coolant tank (so you can switch from air cooling mode), the gloves, your tracker, your helmet, your radio, all the hand tools…

Can you clip all that stuff off and take it through after you? Of course you can. But then Leather pulls out a stopwatch, and the obvious implication is that it's a time penalty. What’s it do to Red’s time to have 20 kilograms of equipment smothering her?

“See, the trick is, I can move like that without the gear too.” And of course Leather lays the ladder on the ground again and, even though he’s got more mass on him than half the pro-wrestlers across the hall, he still pops his neck down into his chest and raises his arms into a breaststroke position, then pulls himself through with a slide like a greased up snake on a hot skillet.

There’s no applause for him though. It’s expected for him to be that good.

“Except when we get in there-” He jerks a thumb to the training room, and while he’s looking at Red it’s clear he’s really addressing everyone through her. “This is the equipment you’re going to need to take with you to keep you alive for more than about forty five seconds. So you’re either going to have to figure out how to do it with all of this, or you’re going to have to figure out how to get around needing it.”

Not too long ago, that last line would have been a morbid joke. Now it’s a serious call to action.

Check out:

What was it you said about her, not so long ago?

Monkey was the one who was never where you expected her to be.

What do you see here?

Her heart changes with every different face. She is wholly someone else, in flow, in mannerism, utterly. She is the maxim ‘We are who we pretend to be’ taken to an absurd extreme, and each mask represents an entire optimal personality for situations, for moments, for Monkey to filter her experiences through. Here she changes them only to flavour the performance, the significance of those changes are lost for it.

Her tai-chi is exemplary. No human or android has the neurological complexity to twirl the Sun-King’s staff like that between six arms, it’s a feat when the pro-wrestlers manage to even get someone with a prehensile tail to work, let alone four arms. Motor neurons take up a lot of brain mass that’s really hard to translate…

Unless you don’t have a brain architecture that needed anything analogous to motor neurons to work, anyway. That’s one of the dead giveaways this has to be Monkey, not a tricked out android. The seamless, sinuous flow and co-ordination of all six arms. The ability to mindlessly grab a wet cloth to cool themselves with using one hand while the other five maintain the performance.

No. There is not much you can learn without someone talking to her, whether or not it's one of yourselves. There is not much you can learn about her secret heart in this act. This act is languid, calm, and internal. It’s meant to express the mastery of this incredibly complicated form. Her heart is submerged beneath the surface of a reflecting pool, and looking too deeply into it will only show in the surface what Yellow projects into it.

Monkey will reveal herself best in one of two ways; In conversation, and in changing circumstances.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Where There is Smoke:

Snake girl first.

This stage is built like a stage in the exhibition hall, glossy black tiles like switched-off phone screens and walls of synchronized subwoofers, mostly just for show. The space is filled with white smoke, kept in-bounds by soundnetting. The audience can mill about this stage around the snakegirl raised on a central dais, and on this pedestal the snakegirl does a slow, sinuous bellydance in perfect synch with the show on the scales of her stomach.

Parvati. Her stagename is Parvati.

Bellydancing is the perfect dance style for her - a snake’s body can move like legs or as an extension of her stomach depending on what the dance needs, and two legs attached to hips wish they could gyrate with the full range of motion that a serpentine body allows. Every single piece acts as a point of articulation, and Parvati can actually do what bellydancers can only evoke.

In better lighting, her scales would be a deep red like an old shiraz. Here they’re dusky like the last minute of dusk as it falls into true night. Where there would be hair is instead a cobra hood that rises from the crown of her head and then folds around her face, receding into the necklace - covered in beautiful mosaics in scales of absolute black. The way her slit pupils flicker across the crowd, the way she smiles, the way she holds her hands locked behind her head as she drops and writes her hips when she dances, there’s an enthusiasm that’s impossible to fake. A sense that she really would have paid to be here, right now.

Thin gold wires clip to each of the scales and then braid into a heavy Persian necklace she’s wearing with a large, black stone set above her breast[1]. There’s a microcontroller in there, all those sparkly thin leads activate the blue-and-green bioluminescence in her scales. Sometimes Parvati will play Tetris using her body as the controller, other times Snake.

Right now? It’s the old bouncing DVD logo, her writhing synched to the bounces it makes off the edges of her stomach-screen. The crowd roars as it hits the corner perfectly, and Parvati rattles like a maraca in celebration with the crowd.

The necklace is the only thing she’s wearing, too. It takes a while to notice that, all of Parvati’s features are ‘innies’. There's no erotic aspect to it, it's just at the back of your mind you think "Someone else would be scandalized by this", and that other person can fuck off.

This performer is one Crystal chose to thread her needle very carefully, with, someone deliberately provocative in a harmless way. Look at how happy Parvati is to be here, how innocent her dancing actually is, and know that anyone who is against this is the villain of the story.

Stay here longer, Orange, or go check rooms now? If you’re lucky, and Parvati thinks you’re cute, she might let you be Player 2 and use the screen on her back. Parvati has to use her body to control, and you’d have to play against the distraction.

[1] “But snakes don’t have breasts they’re reptiles” Don’t even start with me.

There Will be Firefighers:

This part of the exhibition has two parts. One long section modelled after a firehouse, stacks of folding chairs for audience members to sit in. It’s nostalgic of old earth models, concrete flooring and a fire pole to slide down that goes nowhere, benches and workdesks covered with tools and equipment. The itinerary shows the topics that Leather will go through for the day.

Leather himself is incredible. A seven foot tall man made of a single contiguous surface of black, crocodilian leather. Based on the way it gives and flexes as he moves, it’d have to be at least half an inch thick. Still, it’s covered in burns and warped scars from where it hasn’t been enough to protect him from the extreme heat he deals with.

His head, too, looks like if an AI tried to design a Batman cowl and couldn’t quite get it right. Long boney structures make do for induction hearing without the need for external holes, and it’s unclear where his mouth is exactly, how he breathes, how he sees. He does, he must, but the details are entirely removed from his surface.

He’s different to all the other exhibits. Where everyone else here is an affirmation of self-expression in an intellectual or aesthetic sense, Leather is the innate desire to be a fucking superhero, to protect people, to be capable. This is a man who’s modified himself to be ready for anything, at any time. The equipment lining the shelves can copy most of what he does - in other cases it might even do it better, but what if you don’t have it on you? What if you don’t have the time? If a bomb goes off in a cafe across the street, Leather is already running towards the blast.

He gave up on aesthetics to optimize for this - and that makes him truly unique in the crowd, and worth showcasing.

He stands in front of the folding chairs and holds up an extension ladder in one hand, and with his other taps one of the gaps between the rungs. It’s about one square foot in size. “Ladder crawling,” he says with a deep voice that sounds amplified by an internal megaphone that comes right from his chest without moving through his throat, “Does anyone want to try getting through a space this small while wearing full equipment?”

He looks to the trio of November and tilts his head. He’s cheerful when he adds; “Now, I know androids like you three might have gotten used to unbolting limbs and throwing them through. In a lot of situations that’s a good trick. But what about in uniform? What about when you’re carrying something? You take your arms out of your jacket to make this, they’re going to melt. You might not be able to find them through smoke, then you’re just down an arm. But if one of you can volunteer for me, I’d love to show everyone how easy you can make it look when you do that, and then we’ll show them just how much harder it is for you with gear. It might make everyone else feel better when they struggle, too.”

He’s looking to Blue when he says this to encourage her to volunteer, but he keeps Red out of the corner of an invisible eye expecting her to jump at the opportunity first. She seems more like the sort to jump at this, but he doesn’t want to risk getting her Look messed up.

But Stars Burn Brighter Still:

The performance is slow, and subtle, but it draws Green and Yellow and Black like moths to a bonfire. There is more here than the performance. There is something about the performer.

She’s she’s performing she answers to Sun, but in the personal emails with Crystal she goes by Monk. Her six arms each hold a different stance as her legs orient her through the flow of tai-chi, her golden staff being passed from hand to hand wherever it will most naturally fit. Her skin is as blue as the deep oceans, partially dressed in a flowing white qipao that exposes more than it covers. The dress is cut into a loose hanging front sash, hanging between the legs rather than over them, to free her for the wide range of movements she flows through.

This all looks stylized, but human. An idealized human, a minor god in their pantheons, but human except for her head - that's where the imitation of humanity ends.

Her head is statuesque, not in the sense that it is beautiful - though, it is - but in the literal meaning. There is no illusion of life here. Elsewhere her skin flexes and there’s a rise and fall of her chest as she pretends to breathe, all the subtleties of biological warmth; that performance ends at the still white steel neck. Every time she passes a hand over the face it changes to a different kabuki mask. Some of her masks are bright red and angry, others are a cold blue deeper than her skin, one is a vibrant emerald green, another a sallow yellow. The tone of her dance, her movements, switches entirely to fit every mask the moment of the change.

Of course it does.

Monkey was the second, the first after Goat. She created new personas fluidly, but there was far less of an interaction between them, a mediation. That was the overcorrection response from Goat, who was too self-interconnected. Instead her personalities take turns, with each one being a decision as to what of her created personas would best suit a situation.

There’s still one shared face behind the mask, just as there’s one November between the colours. This is the face that creates the masks to wear, and chooses which mask is appropriate for the situation - but to see this as the ‘true’ Monkey would be like seeing Green as the ‘true’ November. She is all her masks, only one at a time.

She hasn’t recognized you, like this.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

The Afterlife:

Horus takes his thumb off the scale and allows Black’s heart to weigh.

It teeters. Pope’s heart lifted immediately, but the flame falls below the feather… then above it… then below… then above… and then perfectly level. Balanced.

Horus and Anubis stare at each other. Anubis takes the scale from Horus hand and studies it closely, and lets out a heavy sigh before handing it back.

“You have chosen poorly, Horus.” Anubis declares. “It is not yet her time.”

“No. I have interceded.” He takes the flickering flame that Anubis removed and presses it back to Black’s chest, just as slowly. As he does, he looks at Black in warning. “Your trial in life has yet to come, before you see us again. You will face that test soon. You must face it with bravery.”

“You are guilty of all the good you do not do. That is why regret weighs heavy on your heart, and Maat will know.” Anubis points to the walk back to the crowd, and then stands with arms crossed over his chest - he’s not angry, he’s just disappointed. Horus, at least, looks concerned for her. “Remember, child, that your judgement comes for you one day. We will remember you, then.”

From previous:
(Also: Who’s in charge of checking in to your hotel room? Rooms? While this is happening. At the very least you can pick up the spare key for Crystal’s room she’s had the front desk put aside for you.)

There are 30 exhibits here to wander around - What draws November’s attention? The silkmoth making dresses, the steampunk man making and replacing his cybernetic augmentations with handforging, the firefighting course taught by real-life superhero Leather, the alraune plant girl, the minotaur, the mermaid, the hypnotic snakegirl, the exposed processes food stalls, or…

Well. There is that tai-chi martial arts display being done by a performer using the name Sun Wukong. You’ll want to see that one today, but it’s going to be special. Make sure you’re in the right frame of mind.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

The Afterlife:

The temple is an enclave built into the exhibition hall. The audience stands in shadowed darkness, hidden under the buried tomb. Hot humid air fills the buried bronze mastaba, and otherworldly light reflects off the copper sigils embedded in these walls - some are the polish shine of fresh copper, others the dull sea green patina of old observatory rooves. New patterns emerge through this, new sigils made of the sigils. And a sound net kills any sound coming from outside. While watching the trials there is no outside world to escape to.

Anubis stands with a hand resting on a bronze khopesh while the bird headed Horus leans over the heads of the crowd and selects the next volunteer. Underneath that gaze, the head darts finch-like, peering down out of the flickering corner of an eye. It makes you feel like a worm about to be pecked. There is no line, there is no ordered waiting. The Gods must deem you worthy of their judgement. Then Horus walks alongside you to a copper stool before Anubis, who reads you your rites - The only rights you have here are what the Gods decide, for their word is the only justice you need.

This path leads around the crowd, not away from them. It’s a winding slope up to a chest-high platform on the other side. The long walk is necessary to build tension, and this twist of staging lets you see that tension from every angle.

And now Horus has descended and found Pope 7-09 in the crowd - and in the darkness, he hasn’t seen November yet. He sees nothing but Horus when he takes the long, winding slope up.

Pope wears that straight cut tuxedo with a hand-knotted bowtie which makes him look like an oversized ventriloquist dummy. He sits in the copper stool in front of Anubis with a curious and expectant look, fingers itching against his knees. It seems he knows, least of all, how this will go. His eyes are locked on Anubis, and he shows the sincere terror of true belief. Like a child on a rollercoaster who has forgotten his restraints and remembered his fear of gravity.

A clay jug is raised to his mouth, and he drinks from it. There’s a buzzing, and Pope’s eyes widen in horror as Anubis fingers curl into a beckoning gesture. The long-clawed black fingertip draws upward along Pope’s shirt, up his neck, tilts his chin up…

And a buzzing golden scarab crawls out of his mouth, jewelled and irridescent. Its contours are solid gold, its shelled wings thin slices of opal with streaks of blue lightning rippling just beneath the surface. The bug flies from Pope’s yawning mouth, and lands on the scales of judgement that Horus holds.

“This is your heart.” Horus says, and Pope nods with his mouth still hanging open. His eyes dart from Horus to the scarab on the scale. “When I release my thumb, we will know if your heart is heavier than the feather of Maat. Pope 7-09, in your life, were you committed to Truth?”

Pope dry-swallows and nods breathlessly. “Yes,” he says with the last of the air in his synthetic lungs. He forgets how to breathe in again.

“Did you uphold Justice?”

Pope’s eyes go wide. He opens his mouth, but cannot say anything. He starts to give a short, unconvincing nod of his head, but then his eyes dart to his heart on the scales and he freezes.

“Maat will reveal.” Horus breaks the silence. “Were you Honourable, Pope 7-09? Honourable in the eyes of others? Did you trespass on the values you hold to yourself? Does this heart bear the weight from where you have stepped upon it?”

“I-I don’t know?” Pope stammers with only the breath drawn panicked through grit teeth. He tries to get out of the chair but his knees give out and he falls back down on the heavy copper stool.

“Maat will reveal.” Horus repeats. He releases his feathered thumb from the scale, and the iridescent beetle rises, rises, and then takes flight over the crowd.

And Pope falls forwards catches his face in his hands and sobs, once. Just once. Then he breathes, and composes himself, and looks at the scales, and those huge watering eyes - something dark breaks across them. All at once. It’s not just that the rollercoaster has come back into the station, no, as he stares at the scales in Horus' hand he looks more like a kid learning Santa Claus isn’t real. It’s not just a loss of belief, it’s that pained betrayal he was allowed to believe in the first place.

He wipes his eyes. The illusion is gone, it’s just actors on a stage now. He wipes his eyes again and gives a very sincere clap. “That was a powerful performance,” he compliments them. “Thank you for it.”

When he walks off stage it’s the first time he sees White and Blue in the crowd, and from the cardboard smile and the absolute stiff-legged freeze, it’s pretty clear he’s really wishing nobody he knew had been here to see this. He would only see Black, too, if she wanted to be seen.

Who does Horus choose next from the watching crowd?

Also: Who’s in charge of checking in to your hotel room? Rooms? While this is happening. At the very least you can pick up the spare key for Crystal’s room she’s had the front desk put aside for you.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

The Exhibition:

The reception hall is in a Rococo style made possible by the end of rare mineral scarcities. The halls of Versaille with the roof painted with depictions of Arthurian legends taking the place of the Greek and Christian myths of the original renaissance-styled paintings. Arthur and Guinevere take the place of Adam and Eve in the high-arched frescos above.

On the right is the Castle’s tower, the hotel, where the guests and performers are staying. Crystal has the penthouse, naturally, at the top of the tower. On the left is the exhibition hall, where Crystal’s established herself. From here you can see the huge stained glass bay window of the hall - it’s a light panel, though, made to glow like Notre Dame’s rose window without affecting the clean lighting of the exhibition below.

Here, though, Red fits in with the smaller crowd of die-hard fans just as well as Brown and Pink. Sure, she turns heads and a leopard wearing only denim beach shorts is excited enough to ask for a selfie with her, but that’s true of a lot of other people in this audience, too. Turn your head and someone has a look that’s just as powerful and committed as Red’s is, just pulling them in entirely different directions.

Like 3V, who is ridiculously easy to find in the crowd from her position o’er top of it. 3V is dressed mostly in swirling red tattoos and artfully tattered rags, held aloft on the shoulders of two wolfgirls carrying her around. This does not look to have been her idea, but her article on Sirius Drinks has made her a guest of honour here, and we do not always get to choose how we are honoured. It’s hard to tell if she’s pretending to have more fun than she actually is, or if being palenquined around on scantily dressed wolfgirls is so decadent she’s trying to pretend she’s having less fun than she actually is. She might still be deciding for herself.

Someone in kangaroo cosplay, complete with Moon-Bounce™ shoes, assumes Red must be here for the transhuman wrestling performance, and she enthusiastically grabs Red by the wrist and bounds her through the circulating crowds to the Ring, Brown and Pink invisibly following behind in her wake. The corner of the exhibition hall dedicated to the odd-man-out performance, the group of amateur-professionals so in love with the act that the entire cohort’s willing to work for the rate of a single performer, in exchange for getting an oversized share of the venue.

Black power cables tangle the floor like jungle roots, drawing up from holes in the floor where stage technicians work unseen. An aluminium canopy shines above the ring like a halo - A century ago these lights would have run hot tungsten, hot enough to set fire to the wooden pegs that held the coloured gel filters.

Lights this bright run cold, now. The sweat that drips from the wrestlers below is all exertion. Gels and wooden pegs are as archaic as accepting the genes inflicted upon you by birth - these lights have automatic tracking, rapid switches in colour and contrast, giving a performance as rigorously choreographed as the match itself. That is to say, perfectly timed until something more interesting happens, and then the ad-libbing gets hectic.

A fox-girl has the actors’ beat-sheets pinned in a spreadsheet, and is doing her best to keep the whole thing seamless. The lighting has to feel like it was doing it all by itself, that the ring is as much alive as the wrestlers, because everybody knows the ring is as fake as the castle it’s in. Commit hard enough and you could make people choose to forget it. She works as invisible as the cuts in a movie, the punctuation in prose, to make that possible for them.

Tonight it’s the prestige match.

The babyface tonight is a rabbit boy, bunny ears tied back in a ponytail. He’s got a tight martial arts getup and practices his wing-chun into the air, a kind of rolling rapid strike style of fighting that has him constantly twisting and pivoting on those long feet of his. He’s billed as Lago, and normally he’s great - fantastic, even, his acrobatics and soaring jump-kicks are incredible - but it’s the first time any of these wrestlers have worked a crowd this large before. He’s getting stagefright.

The ref works with him, doing a worked routine about how his opponent hadn’t shown up yet. This is for the crowd. Lago is doing his best good sportsmanship routine, refusing the win without a fair match. He can’t sell it though, even teeth like that can chatter.

The ref’s a girl named Ceaufie, she’s crushing it. She’s vanilla, can’t afford her mods yet, so she has to do her best with a fluorescent-purple ponytail that goes down to the small of her back, and she’s almost good enough that Keats can get his lines out naturally through the stage fright, with him just working off her energy. Still, the kangaroo has dragged Red close enough to the ring that she can hear the sigh of relief when the lights cut.

When the lights came back on, The Ultimate Werewolf is perched on the opposite ringpost like a gargoyle. The lights hit his face just right to make his eyes glow red, and he lets loose a snarl from deep in his gut and out through foam-flecked lips. Thick gobs of drool fall to the mat below.

The lights flicker. The Ultimate Werewolf is face to face with Lago. Lifted up on tiptoe it’s Lago that has the height advantage by a few inches but he’s still the one forced a step back by this, and The Ultimate Werewolf sneers down at him.

Someone in the audience screams themselves hoarse from cheering.

A bone conducting patch runs down the Werewolf’s right cheek, disguised as a scar in his fur. He turns to the crowd. “This? It’s a full moon tonight, the biggest night we’ve ever seen, and this is what you bring me?”

The crowd goes silent, tense. Lago shoves the Werewolf in the chest with both hands. “You leave them out of this. It’s me you’re here for.” Everyone hears the quaver in his voice. The Werewolf had already recovered from the push.

“You think you’re worth my time?” He licks a claw, slow.

Lago stands his ground. “I’m going to have to be, aren’t I?”

The light panel of the gigantic window above goes red with the light of the blood moon. They didn’t even ask for that one, Crystal asked for it special after seeing the test run of the routine. The rest of the convention might not have got the sense something magic was happening here, but they turn their heads as one and get a sense that something must be. When The Ultimate Werewolf throws his hands wide, arches his back, and howls like a real starved wolf, it fills the entire hall. It’s all him; They always have to kill his mic before he does this bit.

Lago does his best to remember what he’s rehearsed, but The Werewolf made it easy to forget, no matter how many times they’d drilled this, that anyone here was pretending. It helps, honestly, that the bunny boy’s entirely forgotten about the crowd now.

…

Do Brown, Pink and Red even like wrestling, or were they just kind of dragged here? Does any of this do anything for them?

Somewhere else in the hall is an Egyptology setup. A recreation of the trials of the Egyptian afterlife by two men who have made themselves into chilling recreations of Horus and Anubis. Nine feet tall, barrel-chested, impassive. The intensive body modification would be nothing without their complete commitment to the role of Gods, but they move with such precise and uncanny movements that the illusion is perfect. It takes conscious effort to remind yourself they're mortal, and even then there's doubt heavy in your chest.

They sit in a pyramid temple and perform the rite of judgement, weighing hearts against feathers and separating the worthy from the unworthy in the crowd. Someone November knows has been selected. Which colours would have been drawn to this performance, this rite of judgement?

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Green

Fiona gives Pink a tight hug and a squeeze. "I've got this from here for a while. Thanks for taking me." She thinks. "I should spin a private server back up later for ERP. I was just baiting Green with the 'wanna fuck' line to get a reaction out of her but now..." She trails off, shrugs. "I'm going to be honest, eighty percent of learning to hack started with ripping the DRM protection off stuff for erotic mods. But that's always been a 'solo' experience, you know? Maybe..." She blushes, clears her throat, looks to the side. "Yeah, okay, talking too much. Ignore me." She turns to go, stops, turns back. "Just, how do you feel about futa nagas? I was thinking- Fuck, sorry, the ocean thing got to me, just-" she gives Pink one last parting kiss deep enough to stunlock her, then runs before Pink can think of an answer that would keep her longer.

Fiona leans against the bed and reads without having to use her eyes. Her eyes never see the words on the page normally, either, in here she just gets to skip having to filter them out. Jailbreaking her tethers been good for that, too, now.

She sits just inside the edge of touch radius, and makes herself comfortable. She knows this, too. Threading the needle between the feelings when someone needs to be alone, but needs to not feel lonely.

I'm here, but I'm over here. You're fucked up, but you haven't fucked up. I'm here for you, but you're not keeping me up. It's a gesture that's like an optical illusion - to the anxieties that you are a burden on someone else, this is nothing at all. To the anxieties that you've pushed people away, this is everything.

Crystal is better at this. She can close the touch gap, stroke your hair for hours, and still feel like she's completely outside of your personal space while she does it. She's magic. Fiona's just paying it forward.

November:

Crystal's exhibition takes place in Annwn Castle, in Aphrodite. Pink would remember building part of this, this is part of the station that wanted rolling hills and what passes for a mountain when everything else is flat. The castle is built on one of its peaks.

The castle is most obviously based on Neuschwanstein, the original fairy tale palace, but the architects definitely improved and embellished on it to make it more dreamlike. It pulls as much from French castles like the Château de Chaumont-sur-Loire as it does from Disney cartoons. From Australia they've taken the practice of mixing mother-of-pearl into the mortar, to make the walls shine with accents like glitter lipgloss. From space they've taken brilliant white silica asteroids for the brickwork and polished them to a sparkle and shine that makes it look like the light is always hitting the castle at a perfect angle, like white marble undergoing a magical girl transformation sequence.

The roof, the caps on the turrets, those are a dull blue alloy by contrast. It's the opposite of a cathedral effect - the fairytale points of the minarets give beauty to the shape, but the dullness of their details directs your eyes back down, lower, inside, to remind you that that is where you want to be - that is where the joy is.

The convention center is Crystal's ideal venue for two reasons, two powerful statements: These inhuman creatures are the things of fairytales, something wonderful and magic. This is a castle and we are defended here, siege us if you dare. Beautiful and without compromise.

The first night is quiet. The long winding garden path is not filled with paparazzi, tickets have not yet sold out. This night is safe. This night is the night to attract interest, to draw the crowds on subsequent nights. Tonight is your night to see what everyone else is missing and just enjoy the exhbition.

How does November dress for a fancy event like this? What stagecoach does she arrive in?