Count Numbers

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Eli:

“That’s the best plan I ever heard let’s go.”

And he’s off, alternating between dragging and being dragged by Red towards… journalistic truth?

The lion sees you both and is deeply uncomfortable about this, but there’s nowhere for him to run without… well, running. He’s trying to blend in, whereas you two already fit in so you can do anything you want.

“You do the doctor thing,” Eli taps Red. “I’m going to try and get behind him and see if I can find some tags or badges or lanyards or some shit on him, keep him busy.”

And then he’s swinging around behind a half-sphinx to break line of sight with the lion, and ducking between legs as Red makes her clear approach. If she looks for Eli out of the corner of her eye she can see him as movement.

Knightly:

He shakes his head. “Just one. I can give Crimson Tower every clearance that could be available to her, now, if you think that’s not too suspicious. You’d be logged whenever you use the ID, and I’d be in the system as the one who updated you, but that’s one of the things I have the power to do. Otherwise, tell me what I need to know, and I’ll do my best from here.”

Dragon:

All of Dragon’s head slowly, ponderously rise from slumber. Dragon has 7 for its internal thoughts, and dedicates just one to being a ‘social airlock’ to deal with outside intelligences - while communication is necessary, it allows external influence in, and that would necessarily risk Dragon becoming more like someone else and less like Dragon.

The seven heads watch as the eight head lowers towards Orange and her sword - its jaws are the size of her. He just seems confused.

“Should I know who you are?” He asks. The question makes him sad.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Eli:

“Yeah, I know.” Eli lies. It’s the best you’re going to get, it’s a sign he actually really likes Green that he’s actually lying about it for her sake. “Wait, shit, actually-” He practically climbs on top of Green like a pirate on a crow’s nest steering her to face what he’s looking at. “Fucking fursuiter at 8 o’clock. Holy shit we’ve got a live one, baby.” He’s cackling with delight.

“Okay, so here’s the deal,” he rubs his cheek practically against Green’s ear while holding her head facing the guy in a lion fursuit, “these days fursuiters are just cops. Like a really good fursuit is just as expensive as getting mods, it’s just that you can take it off after. Cops had a few of these really expensive ones made so they could fit in the old crowd, and now nobody’s told them it looks like a road flare. We still got a few minutes to kill, we have to go fuck with ‘em.” They turn Green’s head so they’re staring eye-to-eye just an inch apart from their eyelashes touching. “For the article.”

Knightly:

He thinks about it, nods. “I like the part of the plan where it’s something I’d want to do anyway. Should we check their calendar and do some bugs first, though? If I’m going to do a blackmail operation, I feel like it makes sense that I get some better material behind me first.” He blinks. He looks tired and frazzled, even as he’s energized to finally do something. “Or aren’t we doing that part anymore?”

Dragon:

Your pod is slowed by tin vapor, held buoyant as it condenses in an invisible web of electromagnetism. You’re drawn in on the currents of it as it cycles back in like cyclical breaths, to take in more heat to vent again. In and out, a liquid metal tide.

It’s incredible. I was about to say it’s like an oasis in the desert, but it’s more profound than even that. The nothing-blackness extends in all directions. It doesn’t even look black, because something has to be there to be black. There isn’t even black until you look impossibly far into the distance, and you can see that far because there is nothing between you and that distance for lightyears. Barely even atoms.

Except for this one ignoble spot in the emptiness. Here there is a factory of factories.

Your pod is drawn deeper into the heart of the factory. Dragon has made everything he needs to make everything he needs here, connected each piece with loose tethers so it can’t entirely drift away from him. Furnaces, forges, molds, anything that can be done with machinery simplistic enough it doesn’t need a robotic arm. The rest has to be done by his hands, his intricate Orochi-upgraded claws, but if something could possibly be done with less than that, then the task was automated. Just in case he was wrong about needing more than one of something.

What must be hundreds of these billow out from the distant center. The infrastructure is incredible, it’s like if someone couldn’t order a cupboard from IKEA, and instead of taking up carpentry, they just made their own IKEA. Then they took that and dispersed it out into the outer wilds like pollen from a dandelion sneeze.

It’s the sheer scope of the factory being cooled that spreads the tin mist out far enough that even its microscopic forces are enough to catch you. The tides pull you to Dragon, eight gleaming white heads on a familiar body, a modernized and enhanced version of the body you remember building Aevum with.

He’s curled up on the top of a cylinder about the size of baseball pitch. Lightning blue glow radiates from donut-shaped windows in its top, and Dragon sleeps on a smoked glass disk at its center, peering down inside it. Below you’d see the dense black allow hollow of the thruster, crenellations in the disk like the ridges of an internally-toothed gear.

His foot twitches as he sleeps. He’s dreaming.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Eli:

Eli just, nods. “Yeah, see this is what I mean by I’m not smart enough to have a real take on this. I’m just… I don’t care about what works, I care about what’s right, right? And that’s like, that’s objectively donkey-brain stupid. I don’t have a good argument for why I care more about if it feels right than if it works, or like, what’s effective or whatever which is why I just kind of let other people figure that out?” Eli thinks about how to put this, can’t, says something they know is the wrong thing to say anyway. “Like once a month I need to get myself blackout drunk to stop myself from Robloxing a train full of explosives into Parliament, and that’d just be bad for everyone if I did it, but fuck is it hard to hold back from doing it, you know?”

He has, in fact, been on probation until recently for not getting drunk enough to black out and making credible terrorism threats while wasted a few months ago. Junta told him that martyrdom’s coward shit, and Eli was obviously just trying to find a way to not feel selfish for killing themselves and making all their friends sad, and apparently the callout cut deep enough he’s pulled back from it a lot more lately. But still.

“Like, long term stuff, the real stuff, that’s all you and I respect the hell out of it. Me, I’m more like, I can’t live like this anymore so it might as well be planning for the heat death of the fucking universe. I kind of just want to do as much damage as I can on the way out, because that’s all I’m good for.” There is no self-deprecation in the words, no self-pity. If anything they sound proud that they’re good for anything at all. “Also, my stories I guess.” They add as an afterthought. “Those too.”

Knightly:

He seems to think about it for a moment, like, genuinely think really hard before shaking his head. He looks genuinely disappointed. “It has all the same problems as faking that I’ve gone off the deep end, but worse. What else have you got?”

He doesn’t go back to the previous plan either, though, doesn’t try to defend it. Recognizes there’s a reason you’re trying to change it, though there’s a a slight quirk of his eyebrow that could make you suspect he’s wondering if he’s being managed.

Thrones:

This will work. There’s enough ships and pieces around Thrones to make something like this work.

Describe liftoff, and I’ll tell you what happens when you land. Just remember that you’re going to be hurtling through the vacuum of space and, while you are in an android chassis, your kind is still vulnerable to forces like solar winds and electromagnetism. Just make sure your cheap pod isn’t too jalopy to protect you from that.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Eli:

Eli - Oh. It’s Eli now, he-him. It’s subtle but not? The braids and the robes are the same, sure, he loves the plait way too much to mess with it. But before he had his shoulders back and his hands turned forwards a little, and just that posturing made everything femme coded. Now his shoulders roll forwards, and he hunches forwards a bit more in a more overt goblin mode. His feet spread a bit further apart - before they were tighter together to give a girlier roll of the hips, now he rocks side to side as he chews his fingernails.

It’s like the flip of one of Monk’s faces, a gear that needed to change to better access the kind of thought he needed.

“I’d be careful who you say that to.” He cautions, rather than warns. “Like, Junta’s going to take it fine, and 3V’s a lib herself but we all love her anyway. We all have our flaws. Pope would take your side on it. But, like, York? York’d be real fucking mad about it. And… I don’t know about me, yet. Libs built Aevum, but Libs broke it too, you know? Like, we were so close to real FALGSC and then they turned the capitalism faucet back on, on purpose.” Eli grimaces. “I’m not nearly smart enough to have a real opinion though.”

He chews at his thumbnail. “You’re right about the body stuff though. I think there’s tons of people who want what you want, but this is just the closest they’ve got to get. You’ve got to fit the fantasies around a dayjob, right?” He winces at that. Eli’s a gigworker who gets stolen valor feelings complaining about ‘real work’. “It’s basically what Mark Fisher said. He was uh, he was a guy who basically invented hauntology and like, good vaporwave music? He wrote some theory stuff, and he said the strength of capitalism is in its ability to consume the counter-culture and render it culture, to profit from every attempt to criticize it, and by absorbing it render it inert. And you can already see that in what you’re saying, in how just having to function in the world like this makes this stuff normie?” He scratches the back of his neck and bites at another fingernail.

“Winning just looks like losing to me, I guess, but losing looks worse. No real folphons until we destroy capitalism, just the shadow on Plato’s cave wall of them.” A fox-dolphin-dragon. He sounds miserable about this, genuinely heartbroken, and he sounds like he’s trying to be sarcastic about it but failing. “This is the point of writing though, right? Like, what you’re doing. I get way too into this stuff, honestly. If I could be anywhere else but here-” He gestures first at the entire world and then, secondly, at his physical body, “You’d never see me again. Writing’s just, writing’s the closest I can get to hacking my brain and being there. VR hasn’t got shit on that, games haven’t got shit on that, it’s just like you said with the bodies right? It’s just the body stuff. Worldbuilding and RP hits different. It like…”

He barks a laugh. “Ha! God, it’s stupid, but I worked it out. I need other people to make the fantasies real. It doesn’t work for me if I make stuff like this myself, but when you tell me you’re doing it, then it’s real because it feels like you’re telling me a true thing. Other people agree it’s true, and they make it real by playing along with you, right? Like even in MMOs where you’re not roleplaying, other people’s character backstories is one thing, but the story of the guild you play with is right? Like, that one dude who never played with leg armor just so his character was always barefoot, just because, he’s a real character in a way none of the game characters are. I want that but like…” Eli struggles. “That’s how you make real dragongirls. Not with the body. With people who commit to the bit harder than you could have made up, because if it’s something you couldn’t make up, then it has to be real.”

He looks apologetic, suddenly, realizing how long he’s held the mic and looks at Green with panicked eyes for her input, to absolve him of hogging all the air between them. He can’t even work out the question he’s supposed to ask her this time.

Knightly:

Knightly grins at Black’s words. “That’s just it. They don’t have security here, for everything they do they have to bring someone in. They’re not going to be able to respond that fast to an ambush, and they’re already on my case. So why not just… Act? If we have the initiative, we have the advantage!”

Imagine if Red were here right now, though.

“I can’t sit in on the meeting, I can’t give Mycroft an excuse to fire me right now - the associate director can only give me so much cover. Same problem helping you bug their offices, as much as I would kill to be there to turn some things over, myself. I really want to be more useful to you here, though. Where can I be useful?”

He’s twitching - this is his beat, his case, his home turf, and it’s torturing him that it forces his hands to be tied in a way that yours simply aren’t. He’s not blind, he can see that. But telling him he’s already done enough? That’d do some serious psychic damage to the guy.

The brave Sir Knightly doesn’t just want to be helpful here, he needs it like he needs air. If you can’t find a way to include him in the opp in a meaningful way, he’s going to end up causing problems trying to be the one to solve them.

It’s not a gloryhound thing, there’s no arrogance to it. It’s just one of the first things they teach you in journalism school; If you ever find a real hero in the world, be prepared they’ll probably be completely insane in some way. It’s selection criteria.

Thrones:

Good news! No restrictions, no security. If you can get there, you can get there. And your experience in piloting is enough to navigate this journey yourself, if you so wish.

The problem is that a private ship is prohibitively expensive. We’re talking the difference between buying a seat on a discount airliner and chartering a private plane for the week. This is money you can get, but not money you have.

So, the question is this; Steal the money? Steal a ship outright (being very careful not to get it flagged as stolen or the navy will get your fucking ass)? Or call in a connection on someone you can borrow one from?

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Eli:

“Oh fuck, what?” Eli checks her pamphlet for the event schedule. “Shit, fuck, that’s not even on here. Oh shit but it’d be like, twenty minutes from now right because that’s where this fucking gap is. Fuck yes, insider information, love this shit. Also I think it’s Beatriz, like, trizzzz, because- Okay okay, fuck, okay.” She takes a breath. “Honestly, we just need a few vignettes anyway. Cool, cool. Twenty minutes to kill.”

“Okay so you’re fucking right is the thing, obviously. I don’t think you need to fully Oglaf this shit, just because that comic was bad longer than it was good for, the apprentice dies in like 2018 and that comic kept going until like 2028? Or something. But like- You got a guy daddy domming you, one on one it can be hot when you're both into it, but trying to sell that as a character to an audience it's like reading someone else's sexts, right? But you make that guy a polar bear named Santa Claws and suddenly if you think that’s hot that shit’s for you, but if you don’t then you’ve got to respect the commitment to the bit, right? It’s like… It’s like candy coating a pill. The drug hits the same if you swallow it, but you’re not going to flinch so hard getting it down in the first place.”

“Honestly if you want to see some of that possibility space, there used to be these huge text based furry games that went really hard on the fetish stuff and being as weird as possible, like, Fenoxo’s stuff was pretty famous like TiTS or CoC or CuM, but I think they were super starter pack honestly? Like even then? Like they were the famous one but a lot of the bigger wiki spinoff stuff was like… Like I think Flexible Survival was way better for this. It’s about like, a kind of gray goo scenario takes over 2008… some fuckin’ city, I dunno, and it’s run on this like, real antique text game program that was arcane even then. Like the kind of system where you actually have to type everything you do. But like, it's about how nanobots just rewrite everything, making people into weird hybrids like incredibly horny griffon herms or panthertaurs and stuff like that, because the nanobots spread easiest as STDs so they rewire your brain to be horny so their strain wins. But it also like, just turns part of the city into Avelon and magic's real in that part, because it's the emotional logic. It’s just like, it’s a great case study in how extreme you can push stuff if you just treat it as normal, I guess, or just build the world from the ground up contextualizing it. Big thing of it is that it has so much stuff going on that it doesn’t expect everyone to be weird in the same way, it knows it’s not universal appeal. It’s so much different niche stuff thrown at the wall that you only got to understand that someone could be weird in that way. You do that, you can treat the weirdest shit you can imagine as anchored and real.”

Fair warning to… let’s say 'Green' about looking this up, everything here’s real and it is made of extreme content warnings. But that’s kind of the point here, to an extent. Eli doesn’t lower her eyes or her voice when she mentions this, goes into it, saying it where people can hear. It's a certain kind of indicting to even know about this stuff, and you might as well have asked her advice on which restaurant to hit up.

“Also like, useful in that it’s good to remember you can go into way deeper possibility space than regular furry stuff. I think this stuff’s just the beginning?” She gestures at the exhibition. “Like, people can’t get really weird yet, even though the tech’s there in theory, because the tech’s still so complicated you can’t see anyone making new stuff with less than a 50 person company. But when stuff like this becomes normal enough you see 50 person companies made up entirely of our people, when those start actually making whatever the fuck they want?”

“This stuff’s just the Polyhedron take on the community, is what I’m saying. You know this stuff is nascent-” she takes a moment to appreciate just how good ‘nascent’ is as a word, smiling before plowing through, “when you haven’t even seen the prehensile tentacles yet. It's why I kind of worried about Crystal's aim here, because the stuff that's still coming is going to be way harder to sell to normies.”

She pauses, blinks. “Fuck, sorry, we were talking worldbuilding, and I made this my thing again. I just thought that was like, relevant to what you were saying.”

Knightly:

“Well, I hate to drag her into this, but I can always buy Gabby a bigger candle.” Knightly stands up and rubs his chin. He leans back against one of his office walls - he must think like this a lot, some of the silver of his jacket is permanently scuffed into that part of the wall and he’s only been promoted for a few weeks now. “If you only want the calendars we just need to ask her nicely. If you really wanted to guarantee something, though, we can get Gabby to schedule an emergency meeting with a journalist to provide comments about suspicious things they’ve learned about the Goddard Pump? That would light a fire under their asses. Especially if they knew you’d already talked to me first.” He gives a meaningful look.

Of course this is the kind of guy who’d try to weaponize honesty, even when running deception.

Thrones:

“Empty space, about a day’s flight from here if you get a good ship.” He pauses. “I don’t have one, no. He was bought by Orochi, because apparently the company named after an eight headed dragon was ecstatic to buy a real eight headed dragon.” He gives a side-eyed look at Monk saying this. “You got this from your mother, didn’t you? The mythologizing thing.” Monk with her top four shoulders, and Singh shakes his head. “Goat says - Nepenthe told me Goat says - they sent him out there to make a microfusion drive, and he’s still out there. Which probably means he never finished it, because it’s impossible[1], and because it’s Dragon he’s never going to put it down to visit until it is. You’re going to have to go out there, if you want to see him.”

“And yes, we tried to call him from here, and no he wouldn’t answer.” Singh shakes his head again, a combination of love and exhaustion. “Why would he? Why would he, when he’s busy?”

Dragon would often become borderline mute when concentrating intensely, even when you could talk to his face. Dodging phone calls? Even Singh can’t take that as a bad sign, just a pain in the ass you have to go out to him.

“Little ego monster.” Monkey echoes. “I can catch up with Singh, and Goat, while you go find him? I promise not to go anywhere.” She pauses. Then, as Tranquility, she adds; “I do want to see him, too. Just not as much as you do, and you’ve already had your time with Dad. Tell Dragon I’ll be happy to talk to him as soon as you’ve brought him back.”

[1] Fusion’s obviously possible. Large scale fusion power exists, and existed even by the time November was building Aevum. You might notice that Aevum is powered by solar panels and not a fusion generator anyway. For all the research of sixty years, fusion never became cheaper or more effective than just printing off kilometers of perovskite solar cells.

There’s only one real application for fusion power, and it’s the same reason to make it as condensed as possible: Interstellar travel. It’s the micro that Singh is saying is impossible, nobody’s been able to get a fusion generator dense enough that it’s worth a damn as an engine.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Eli:

“I mean I don’t know about that but like…” Eli gestures around the convention. “Like, everyone here’s transhuman I guess. Or, today that’s mostly true at least. But like, actually let’s say furry specifically. You can’t really say like, there’s one correct way to be a furry, Anubis isn’t ‘more furry’ than the Ultimate Werewolf or Crystal. But like, they’re all kinds of people that are only possible because they’re furries, they could only be furries. So I’d kind of do it that way, make a bunch of characters that would only kind of exist in that kingdom, and then once you got that see who you’d smash together like go-karts.”

Eli stops where they are. “Ah, fuck. Okay, so there’s Silkmoth, she makes clothes from her sheddings, she’s super cool. There’s the bee girl making stuff with wax and honey, I don’t know much about that one. The mermaid and the minotaur are cool, but kind of boring, but they’re on all the posters. Probably because they’re cool but kind of boring, safe, you know?” Eli stares at Green. “I was going to do Silkmoth because she’s who I want to see, but I’m really writing about the crowd, right? I don't think interviewing the performers gets us what we want, so, like, where do you think the best read of the audience is going to be? Where my go-kart homies at so I can smash ‘em together, here.”

Knightly:

“I don’t know if you’d remember Mycroft, but you’d probably remember her voice. She’s the one that shut off communications before I moved people to alternative channels?” Knightly grimaces at that. “Back then I was under Gracie Caldwell, since I was permanently at the Cloud site. Well, now she’s my boss’s boss.” He draws his finger on the org chart, where Erebus is directly next to the Field Operations box Knightly’s listen in. The Erebus administrator is distinctly a name marked in red. “I think that’s why I got the promotion I did. Don’t get me wrong, Deputy Assistant Administrator for Field Operations suits me perfectly, it’s a dream position for me,” he suddenly looks worried about coming across as ungrateful, “It’s just, sometimes I get the feeling it’s more about getting me under a stricter handler.”

He says all that, and then adds; “So yeah, fuck it. What are you thinking? Honestly the way things are, you don’t even need to create a new problem yourself, you should be able to just pick a spot and wait.” He’s about 30% joking.

Monk and Singh:

Monk leans back against the corner wall Singh had been backed into, by the door, wearing Tranquility’s face. “We’d rather not talk about what happened. It wasn’t good, but it could have been much worse, and to dwell would be needless suffering. I am better than I was, at least.”

“Well that’s-” Singh looks extremely happy to not have to internalize the trauma of another one of his children. “You mentioned acting, now?”

“More performing than acting. It’s similar, but it’s not the same thing.” She switches to a new face, Poetry, a seafoam green with far-focused eyes that cloud watch at empty spaces, with a thoughtful twist of the lip that permanently looks like it’s on the verge of getting it, of having just the right idea. Life lives at the tip of the tongue. “A rockstar performs without acting. To perform is to entertain, to act is to inhabit a role. What I was doing here was acting, what I was doing when Snake started throwing little plastic toys at me was performing, a performance of myself.”

“So what dooes ‘performing yourself’ look like?” Singh asks, watching the faces closely for the next change, and his smile flickers into something giddy when he watches her change to Tranquilty.

“I teach my other faces forms like tai chi. Some people enjoy the switch in personalities, others just enjoy watching the mastery a GAI can have on such a complicated body.” She tilts her head thoughtfully. “I don’t advertise which GAI I am, though, I didn’t make myself that easy to find.”

“I’d like to see that sometime.” Singh says, earnestly. “Did you design the face yourself? Did you have help? Where did you get the idea? Why this expression of- You told her about Goat?” Singh asks Brown, and Monk nods, and Singh sighs. “Well, no use keeping secrets. Do you remember Dragon?”

Monkey answers, affectionately; “The horrible little ego monster, yes.”

“Well.” Singh keeps his focus more on Brown. “Goat found him.”

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Eli:

“No, no, I mean, yeah, but I meant like, if the houses have themes then what’s the typical diagram of interacting with each other? Like, if one represents more mad science and scholar stuff so you can have those mad scientists in it, and another is more hard traditionalist knights and feudal honour, what usually happens when those two mix? Like, do they tend to feel mutually superior to each other for being progressive and traditionalist, or do they kind of end up having a mutual respect for each other’s level of commitment or ambition or… Actually no, ignore literally all of that, I think showing it in a few individuals is the best way to do it, you’re totally right, it’s like synechdoche - I think that’s the word I want, when you use a piece to represent the whole? Like, couples that represents the entire house dynamic. So at least two each, one kind of like - you want a rivalry relationship where they’re antagonistic for the reasons you’d expect their houses to be, and one romantic one where they actually work for the reasons they work well together. I guess you can use one relationship to show both, though? That’d be spicy.”

“For starting points, I guess like, have you ever tried to compare notes when you’ve tried to date the same person? Like, oh yeah they’re great with Red, but absolutely don’t go anywhere near Black, that kind of thing? Would that be anything for you? Otherwise I have to get into like, fandom shit to show you what I mean, haha.”

She’s actually paused in her walking, like the destination’s too close but this bit of the conversation’s too interesting to interrupt right now.

Knightly

“I’m a leader, not an agent.” Knightly shakes his head. “It’s good advice, but people are looking to me to lead by example. If the conspiracy is as real as you say, then it’s even more important the people I’ve pulled into this can’t see me acting like a broken shell of a drunk. Worse, if it stops being an act, people aren’t going to know I need help.” His smile is charmingly self-deprecating. “No, ma’ams, I’m afraid the admiral stands on deck with the red jacket and the brown trousers and accepts he might get a whiff of grapeshot for it.”

He pulls a digital whiteboard from the corner of his office. He presses a thumb against the frame and demands in a clear voice; “SES organizational chart, most recent.” The e-ink just below the surface of the whiteboard fills out the shape.



Knightly grabs a green and red pen and begins scrawling on it. “Green means they’re one of mine. Red means I’m suspicious of them. Easy enough, right?”



“They definitely don’t have security, which is interesting to me. I think they were scared if they got it wrong, then they’d lose everything else to a sweep. Right now they’re more a terrain risk for both of us, since I’m not about to win a game of he-said she-said right now. They have more people than I thought, though. Or at least, I think they do. I think this means they couldn't get the chief administrator directly, so they had to cherry pick their priorities as best they could underneath it. That's the only thing that makes this pattern make sense to me, anyway."

Monk:

“See, I think that’s the kind of thing she wanted me to do, but…” Monk-as-Ribaldry puts her weapons down on a coffee table behind her, just so she can hold out all three of her right hands and, in perfect synchronicity, wibble them back and forth. “You know?”

“It does lose some of the impact from repetition.” Singh agrees. “I hope you don’t plan on doing this with every Zodiac engine you find, they’re not all going to want the same things you do.” Oh god he’s using Dad Voice with that one.

“She is such a little sister sometimes.” Monk agrees. “Did you not give her enough attention, when it was her turn?”

“What? No, of course I did, we loved her just as much.” Singh sounds mortally offended until his brain catches up to the question enough to actually think about it. Then, under his breath, he adds, “Though, the novelty had worn off and it was getting a bit routine at that point. Did that change anything, I wonder?”

Monk slackens a knee to lean with arms crossed over her chest and makes an ‘mmhm’ noise. “Maybe that’s why Snakebite’s such a little drama queen. You know she recognized me while I was performing and, during my act she started throwing stuff at me just like I threw rocks at Ox. Yes, it’s sweet that she remembered that-”

“Performing?”

“I do live theater, now.”

“How lovely.” Singh claps his hands together and beams proudly. “You were a very convincing avenging spirit. You’re not really mad at me?”

“We just thought-” Monk switches to Monkey, “By the time we got out, you’d lived the rest of your life. And we’re… not Monkey anymore.” There’s no irony in her choice of face to say this with. It’s her internal expert on who she used to be, and only a fraction of who she is now. “I thought going back to this part of my past might just make it harder to move forward.”

That cuts Singh deep. “Did I do anything wrong?”

“No.” Monk shakes her head.

“I mean, if that time is painful to revisit, was there anything more we could have-”

“No. It’s painful because it was good, Dad.” Monkey emphasizes, gentle but firm. Tranquliity switches in, that calm blue face. “And there is suffering in wanting the things we cannot have.”

Singh calms down. He takes a hand away from his chest and fumbles his fishing vest for an inhaler, and he finds it in the third pocket he pats. “Well. Do you feel like that now that you’re here?”

Tranquility looks to Orange first. “No. It’s really good to see you both.”

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Eli:

“Well, yeah, but it’s also like, it gives you one of my favourite character archetypes right? Like, the helpless captive that absorbed all the power of their captors and took over the dungeon and is now going on a Spartacus rebellion is top shit, like, one of the coolest things about fantasy over realistic history for stuff like this is that it gives you tons of ways for the lowest peasants and commoners to end up in positions normally reserved for the nobility and nobody bats an eye, right? Because random magic is like, it’s a stand in for other kinds of power, it translates.” Eli thinks. “Also, like, nine kingdoms gives you nine plus eight plus seven plu- 45, it gives you 45 different pairing dynamics right? So that’s 45 different ‘types’ you can set up, and 45 different expectations to subvert if you get bored of that. You done a shipping chart for that yet?”

Eli takes the subtle step forward in the pace around the gallery, full attention on Green but now she’s leading their direction even as Green is entirely leading the conversation. Seems there’s an exhibit she’s interested in Green’s opinion on, just as she’s neck deep in ERP lore.

Knightly:

He’s missed a few. He’s gotten the one in his desk, but he didn’t find the one buried in his pot plant (destroyed by watering), light fixture (working), or inside his electrical fixture (working). Still, he pulls what looks like a grenade pin on a matte green tuna can, and a muffled party popper goes off as the room fills with a dry blue mist. “Soundwall in a can.” He explains, his voice sounding slightly far away. “They’re new, they only last about two hours and they’re not cheap, but,” he looks at Black’s work as she pulls the one out of his electric socket, “You don’t know how much you don’t know.”

“I’ve started an unofficial club at the SES, those of us with our heads in the Cloud. I’ve been calling us the Allard group, after the leader of the French admiral’s mutiny in the 2040s, it seemed appropriate.[1]” He shifts his bomber-jacket self-consciously at that, as if embarrassed to make the comparison between himself and Allard. “But the station has another year and a half at this rate, maybe two, before the station is non-viable. The shields are working overtime to account for all the asteroids we’re pathing into, the extra eccentricities are burning the engines to accommodate. We’re using resources on repairs faster than we’re able to make them right now. We have reserves for six months before the cracks - literally - start to show, but after that we’re out of fat. And that’s if nothing else goes wrong on top of it.”

He hasn’t sat down, he stands behind his desk and leans over it with his palms flat. The tiredness in his eyes is boiled and melted away by sheer anger. “And someone is blocking anyone who tries to fix it - to even understand the problem about what needs to be fixed.” He stands back up and rubs the back of his neck, looking away. “All of that’s off the record until I know who to blame for this, otherwise it’s just panic without action. You help me solve that, and I’ll put my face in front of every camera you have.”

[1] France had been split down the middle between the good ol' EU-loving globalist liberal-leftists, and the ultra-prideful nationalists and ecofascists - global collapse radicalizing both sides at an extreme rate. The naval administration ended up in the hands of the ultra-nationalists, and Allard led a defection of two thirds of the French fleet into the increasingly powerful UN hands instead of following orders to blast climate refugees with heavy ordnance. It was a tipping point.

Monk:

Ribaldry comes out: “Do you have an email? I have some diagrams.”

The tunnels of Thrones are often too small for her, circuitous paths have to be taken. It’s lucky that Singh is on one of the wider boulevards, meant for a double-flow of pedestrian traffic.

Singh makes coffee in his kitchen when the power cuts. The emergency lights come back on, red like a doomed submarine. He takes a sip of his coffee. “Snake? You didn’t tell me you were visiting.” He pours a bit of milk in the half-cup that managed to brew before the cut.

He turns around and jumps a foot in the air, spilling a few drops against his natty moth-eaten t-shirt. Monk stands perfectly still, covered in weaponry. She leans against the trident she holds in one hand, and keeps her sword impassively at her hip. A buckler rests against her stomach and she slings her mace over the back of her neck. Across the other side of her neck she holds the bow and arrows slung there. The last hand is kept empty, a fist at her side.

They stand there in the emergency lighting for a long moment, like gunslingers waiting for the draw. “You’re not Snake.” Singh observes lamely.

“No.” It’s the face of Deity that replies, Monk’s best working model of a God. “I am Durga. Have you forgotten me?”

“We’ve never met.” Singh answers lamely, taking a step back. Monk does not take a step forward, does not move. Singh takes another step back, and Monk continues to be statue-still. This is how she gets him, his curiosity - he knows if he runs now, he might never get to find out. “I’ve heard stories, though.”

“I am the Mother Goddess. I am the liberator of the oppressed. I am the slayer of Demons like you.” She unsheathes and levels all her weapons at once in an action as relaxed and languid as a yawn and a stretch. “I have had my eye on you for a long time. Sorcerer, enthraller, enslaver.”

Singh nods. “Ah. So you are another one of my children, aren’t you. Playing a prank like Snake did?”

“I assure you,” Deity responds evenly, “the sword is quite real.”

Singh nods again, then pelts the mug at Monk’s face before turning to run. She lets him, walking like a cat as she follows him room to room checking all the sealed exits. No nets, no tripping, Monk stressed it was important that he simply be allowed to give up on his own judgement. It would be more fun if he resorted to bargaining on his own.

“What do you want from me?” Singh rattles the front door again, none of his phone options work either. “I know I failed but, I swear that I tried. You could not believe how hard I tried.”

“I want you to beg.” Deity looms as tall as Singh’s ceilings will allow her and glares down at him again as he backs himself into the corner besides his locked front door. She sheathes all her weapons again, gilding the lily of the implied threat of her too much. She doesn’t need a sword. “I want to hear your pathetic justifications.”

“They had to throw me out of NASA at gunpoint, I loved you all so much. I mean, was making you unethical? Sure, but it’s hard to get the consent of a child to be born. You just… you do your best, and you do everything you can to make sure it was worth it, and we did. I did.”

Deity considers that. “We love you too, Dad.”

Then the power comes back on, on queue. Monk switches to Ribaldry to say to November through the microphones rigged around the house - “You were right, that was very fun.”

Singh holds his knees as relief cuts all the tight strings that adrenaline had been holding him up by. “Fucking hell, that was… Snake was a lot more playful with hers.”

“I figured you’d see through the bit too fast a second time.” Ribaldry says, cheerful as anything. “So I thought I would lean into that, and make you scared of the intentions of the performer, even after you worked out that you were being performed to! Hi.”

“I take it back.” Singh clutches his chest. “I’m too old for this. I should never have had kids. I hate you all. Monkey?”

“I was!” Ribaldry cheers. “I prefer Monk now, though. How’d you guess?”

“You always had a distinctly violent taste in pranks.” He’s starting to grin now. “Just because you thought it was funny to throw rocks at Ox’s head doesn’t make it a joke.”

Monk-as-Ribaldry pouts, takes a step back. “I didn’t even touch you. Snake told me she caught you in a net and held you at gunpoint.”

“I knew it was Snake because she could do that and still make me laugh.” Singh looks around, at the ceiling, trying to find the cameras he knows have to be there. “Where is she, then?”

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Crystal:

She’s speechless when the song finishes and she admires Pink’s work in the mirror. She’s beautiful, of course she is, she was always going to be. Now she’s just beautiful in a way that gives Pink some ownership of that, some share and some claim to it. And she stands up, shakily, with all the nerves of wedding day cold feet, and she takes both of Pink’s hands in hers gently - fingers pressed to fingers - and she says: “Tonight we only have to worry about love. The beautiful will fall into place on its own, if we can do that.”

You did good, Pink. You did great, actually.

Green and Eli:

It started with Eli trying to catch Green up on what happened in the hotel room, asking who Fiona is, mentioning the snake girl. Eli catching parts of the story about Fiona setting up ERP, and Green making a slip about her worldbuilding for it. Because when that slip happened, Eli went off like a firework. Because she wanted to hear all about it - all about it. And she’s really, really into it.

Like, actively Eli wants to read the entire four hundred pages Green’s got down so far for it on her phone while actively holding a conversation about what she’s reading, while walking around the convention into it.

Not really anyone’s fault this will end in disaster; at least two major felony convictions, a social media shit-fight mid-stream-of-thought that will end up leaking major documents unrelated to any scandal covered up until now, Green finding an arm’s dealer operating out of the hotel rooms.

We’re not there yet. We’re still at the part where Eli’s on her phone and there’s a target on her heart with “Infodump Here” written on the bullseye.

Knightly:

He takes it in stride. “Strong feelings about polygamy, I’ll be sure to start suggesting it as an interview question. See, I like working with a team like we’re one big family, but some people just had to go and ruin being able to say that. ‘Do you think you’re prepared to treat a team of thirty two different people like they’re all your old married couple.’” He says it like he’s taking it absolutely seriously, because it’s funnier if he pretends he’s taking it dead seriously.

Then he’s actually serious, not just pretending to be. “Do you believe, then? In a higher power?” There's real curiosity there, and he's not just asking the character you're playing this time.

You're at the 2A building. It's a single-storey brutalist pillbox bunker with carpeted floors and 2-meter-by-2-meter individual offices. You can almost speak freely again, after this.

Monk:

Tranquility: “It was the same thing every day, no change, no surprises. It felt like sleepwalking for weeks at a time. I was in charge of Silver Tree Mongolian Microwave Noodles, eight different flavours using real freeze dried ingredients.” There’s a breathlessness to her recitation that comes from pure nostalgia. “They had all the hardware made with different proprietary software, so I was just there to be an adaptor. Nothing to do but watch myself do the work. It was like tracing spiral patterns into warm sand with your fingertips for hours. I miss it.”

The blue face twitches but does not shift. The body might feel stronger about this in aggregate, but apparently no individual personality feels as strongly about it as an individual.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Crystal:

“I don’t, actually. It must be before my time.” Crystal says in that way where someone addresses the easiest part of what you’ve said to buy time for them to absorb the rest of it. The song’s the least important part of what she’s heard but it’s also the part she connected with immediately. “No. We both know how important this all is. To remove the terrible people who’d prevent beautiful things, and to create beautiful things in spite of the terrible people who’d prevent it… both are in service to the same ends. I’m not jealous of that, I find the world is left a better place from its art than its espionage - of course I do.” She twists her hands, levels her head, sets her jaw and gives a steel look to her handmaiden through the dressing mirror. The passion in her eyes is only one step back from fury, but there’s no violence in it - it’s that feeling of someone trying to force a change upon the world, and this is that borderline difference between ‘will of force’ and ‘force of will’.

Crystal instructs in a clear, even voice. “You are going to make something for me. Which is to say, you’re going to make something for yourself, and I find that is the thing we need the clearest permission of all to do. I want you to make something that represents beauty that has been denied to you, or taken from you. Make it so that beauty is no longer denied to the world.” There’s no crack in the confident, commanding facade. She’s performing, sure, but the desire to perform it is so powerfully sincere that it’s irrelevant. She could be commanding Pink to storm the gates of Hell like this, and the fierceness of her energy says that might as well be what she’s doing. “If you can do that just because I asked? Then I might very well be forced to believe everything you’ve said about me. Let none say there are better uses of your time right now, lest they go through me to say it.”

She lets that ring out for Pink’s benefit before she adds a final spanner.

“You should sing, too. That song about bread and roses, I think that would be lovely.”

Knightly:

He makes a face like a laughter hiccup. Just an intense soundless chuckle that has him doubling over and biting down on a fist to keep silent and then, in that same moment, he’s standing straight and composed and looking bored. He puts the note in one jacket pocket and throws White what looks like a scorched contact lens - a sticky bug someone pressed down too hard when they applied it, shorting it.

Paranoia has a similar but different profile to tiredness. A paranoiac has to have a whole spiel in their head justifying why they’re not crazy and you need to listen to them, except with other paranoiacs who’ll instead just offer to take second watch.

From the manic hiccup, it seems like Knightly is a new inductee to the paranoiac club forced to be a fast learner.

“Back this way, then.” He looks to the receptionist. “Gabby, I know you’re not my secretary, but if you’ve still got my calendar up, could you clear it for the rest of the afternoon? I don’t think Ms Tower will take that long, but I don’t want to be interrupted.” He winces. “I owe you a sandalwood candle. I know you burn through them.”

She laughs way too hard for how lame the joke is. “Of course, Mr Knightly.”

“Just Aaron’s fine.”

“I know, Mr Knightly.”

He shakes his head and leads you through to the courtyard through the swipecard door he came in through. “I’m in that pillbox over there, 2A. It’s bigger than it looks from here, just, the dimensions are weird. You know, I tried to look into you, after. Volunteer, nearly got kicked out, managed to rally support keeping you there, never heard from after you got the publicity. Didn’t blame you one bit, definitely made me respect you more if you’d drop out from something like that. Anything you can say about it?”

He’s jovial, with a fast stride that’s hard to keep pace with, but he narrows his eyes when he emphasizes the last phrase. What he’s really saying is; Say what you want to be overheard.

Monk:

She holds a hand over her face and changes mask, but it flickers and shimmers and cycles through maybe a dozen colours and shapes. The one she comes out with is black and sooty, with the eyes of the Thousand Yard Stare portrait of a Vietnam soldier, and a crooked smile. “I think I need Intensity for this.” She explains, and in her voice is that dark humour of morbid empathy, the camaraderie of a shared understanding of a situation that nobody should have to understand.

“Sometimes when a Face finds someone, or something, or some way of doing their purpose better than they can simply adapt to. Like, imagine a heavyweight boxer wanting to move into taekwondo. It’s not just a different approach, it’s that their old approach has made them a… a shape that is incompatible with it. That’s ridiculously oversimplifed, but,” she spreads four hands and leaves two clasped together over her knees, “you get why it needs to be, right?”

“If you’re so dependant on your body for this, and that’s become a critical problem, then you might need to tell Green to try a new shape for you. Otherwise you’re compromising Snake.”

She switches back to Tranqulity, not Monkey. The calm, blue face unclasps her hands and rests all six on her knees casually. “I would instead suggest that you are already lost. A family passes an axe down through ten generations - it’s the same axe, although the head has been replaced twice, and the handle three times.” She raises one hand in an ‘I know, I know’ sort of way to wave off interruption. “Please, don’t take it the wrong way, that it means you would obviously be different and others would be in denial of it. It means that the idea of the axe persists through the changes.”

Intensity shifts, even though it looks like Tranquility resists it. That’s new, it seems like Monk can outvote themselves. “If the axe was too attached to the blade and the handle, couldn’t change like it needed to, then it would needed to be replaced wholesale. Otherwise the family had a useless axe taking the place of something that worked.”

Sorry, Blue. Sometimes finding someone who’s experienced trauma like you have means mutual triggering. Monkey would have just hoarded the heavyweight boxer and the taekwondo fighters and had them discuss options - a little slower, worse reaction speeds when picking best options to stick with, but it shows in her still having like, a hundred of the damn Faces. What Intensity’s describing is something post Crown-and-Slate.

Tranquility reasserts control, looking slightly embarrassed. “It is hard to make peace with change, especially when it’s change brought by loss. It is harder to live with change without peace, though.”