Count Numbers

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Crystal:

“Well, the plate is in front of Mrs Killamanjaro.” Crystal wonders aloud, for Pink’s benefit to hear it. “Is this really serving though? Is this presentation?”

The penthouse is a huge suite, made for entertaining. There is a dining room of gilded cream-coloured chairs and rosewater pink wallpaper with a 16-chair long dining table, made of quartz and bracketed in golden edges. A chandelier, of course, with more gemstones than sense hangs over either end.

Crystal seats Mrs Killamanjaro at the head of the table, at the far end. At her side of the table she also hefts a second dress mannequin, some bath towels wadded to fill a dress, and an ironing board over an evening jacket. “Mrs Killamanjaro had three daughters, I believe… The rest of the guests have yet to arrive. But as luck would have it, I think it might be Mrs Killamanjaro’s birthday today!”

Crystal claps her hands in excitement and gestures to the room. “So I think, if we were going to bake a cake next, it might as well be a birthday cake. Well, wouldn’t it just be so exciting to throw the old bat a birthday party to go with it? And she couldn’t plan the thing herself, the poor dear, but we can’t serve birthday cake without one. And I- Hold on a moment.” Crystal taps Pink’s shoulder to wait there as she finds the fireplan on the wall next to the elevator, and triple checks the pressure on all the extinguishers she can find. Then, skip-running back to Pink; “Yes, we can even help her blow out the candles at the end, if you’d like.”

Panther:

A lot of recalculations happen very quickly. That’s the thing about really complicated equations full of a lot of variables, you change one variable and it has to refactor every single other conclusion you reached based on it. When the equation is as complicated as working out how to deal with having your arms deal site busted by a vulnerable girl in distress who’s probably a narc who can ruin your entire life, there’s a lot that can flip just changing one variable.

“Yeah, I can move. If that’s really all you’re asking, I’ll move.” Her tail snaps again. She’s going to miss this place, it’s her scene. It’s her people here. “Just lemme clear my head on this. I wasn’t dodging anything, I just didn’t think what you were saying was what you meant.”

She crouches lower next to Spearmint so she’s eye-to-eye, face in front of her. She studies that face closely and carefully, making her new reads based on the adjusted equation.”I thought you were trying to shut down what I’m doing here. Making it sound like ‘cause I tried it on your turf I was fucked no matter what I did, if you decided to fuck me.” She decides she likes something she sees in the face she’s studying. Tension drains out of her like taking off a too-tight belt at the end of a long day.

She’s still in her low crouch and she’s curious. She flicks out a claw and tilts Spearmint’s chin up, pulls her slightly closer so Spearmint’s face is drawn just over her toes. Like she’s being drawn in for a kiss that Chaka doesn’t lean into, and now she can’t turn her face away to hide it. “Where do you think I should go, then, and how’d you do it?”

She’s not asking because she needs the suggestions or the advice, God knows she already arranged backups and fallbacks before she got here. What she’s really doing is giving Spearmint a chance to flex without her having to admit to any of her actual crimes, what she’s done.

Because if this is shop talk? Same side of the same game? Then you’re in a very different place with each other. An ally is someone we never have to feel threatened by, even when they overpower us.

November:

[This space intentionally left blank]

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Crystal:

When Pink finally puts the plate in front of Mrs Killamanjaro she takes her earbuds out, finally, one last snippet of the book she was listening to heard before she puts them back in their charging case.

“I will say that the spoons were an inspired touch, I’ve never seen that twisting technique before. The refrigerant, too.” She pokes the the plate, which clicks and chitters. “Why don’t you tell me about what you made, here? In your own words.”

Panther:

She opens the sniper round case again. “What, these?” She thinks.

She starts there, before anything else. She doesn’t even blink when you mention the Supreme Court news, you might as well have told her it was raining while she was standing out in the storm.

She heads back through the bathroom and speeds through her instrument cases until she pops one with… well let’s do some history here first. If you want to find the ugliest, dumbest firearms ever made you look for frontier colonialist states. It’s why a 10km radius of Mormons in the 19th century were responsible for bringing firearms technology from the 18th into the 21st century. Colt’s 1911 was called that because of the year it was made, and as of 2023 it’s still a standard service weapon with minimal changes.

Still, with the sensible and generally practical mined out, later designers wanting to push boundaries for distinctive weapons got stupid with it. South Africa, Rhodesia, fantastic examples there. But the most iconic, the most famous of the godawful is the Israeli Desert Eagle. A handgun chambered to take .50 caliber rounds. Designed in 1980, this ridiculously ugly handgun could not be surpassed for its ability to be a semi-automatic self-loading pistol capable of firing rounds made for sniper rifles.

But in the 1950s wars of economic and ecological collapse, the Spanish finally did it. Long thought impossible, they finally made a handgun that was even fuglier. The Cordoba is essentially 2080’s answer to the Desert Eagle, a handgun chambered for the antimaterial rounds of the future, with a bulging cylindrical barrel for the hydraulic suppression system and a one-size-fits-none custom handle because every single person who has ever bought this has been expected to buy their own custom grip, so why bother building anything but a frame for it? It’s too big for her hands. There’s no way for her to comfortably fire it.

“This is for guys like Minotaur down there,” she says. “You got to think, when guys like that get scared, what are they scared of? Who’s coming after them? We’re talking the serious cyborgs, the kill-droids, Chase Black like you saw on the news a while ago. Can’t believe those guys still exist.” She shakes her head. “Guys like that don’t care about collateral damage. What the hell else can you do if you’re in their blast radius because some terrorist ran through your greenhouse trying to run away from them?”

“The rest are just re-ups to the folk I seriously trust not to start anything. That’s the thing about rifles, Spearmint. It’s the small things here you should really worry about.” She puts the Cordoba away and pulls from a different case a pistol so small it disappears entirely into her paw when she balls a fist around it the right way. “Except for that one Yank that got his head popped a hundred years ago, every politico since Lenin’s been done by someone going point blank with something like this.” She pulls the trigger and clicks the empty handgun into the bed five times, then one last time with her hand over the muzzle, before she dares mime showing Spearmint just how close she can get to her before she sees the gun in her hand, pointed at her the whole time. “Rifles don’t conceal, rifles are harder to move with. Rifles you’ve got to ambush, or run through the open. I only sell the things to long watchers, people checking the crowds at big open events. If they’re buying rounds like this, it’s because they want to be able to take out the engine block of a rented moving truck before it hits a crowd.”

The last time it happened was less than three years ago, and it killed about 80 people. The trouble with stuff like this is that Aevum’s got billions of people on it, so it’s incredibly rare. But when it does happen, everyone knows about it. Everything’s local, here. Stuff happening in Ares doesn’t feel foreign in the same way something happening in the Middle East used to, especially when you can see Ares with a good pair of binoculars from basically anywhere on the station.

“Problem is it takes this many rounds for someone to finish getting their practice in, even if you’ve got a good simulator.” Aevum laws make it illegal for game devs to publish too-realistic shooting mechanics. This doesn’t stop fan mods and soldiers on military bases leaking cracked copies of their training software to complain about how bullshit the balance on Honourable Warrior VII is. “Cases like this look scarier than they are. I’d bet you anything, all of these are going to end up in a concrete wall, or collecting dust for the rest of time.”

She shakes her head. “I’m careful about who I sell to. You’re telling me tomorrow we aren’t going to be a protected category? I got some people I need to strike off, then.” She pulls out her phone again and cancels two more deals she was going to make, clicks her tongue in frustration. “The rest, though, they’re going to need it worse than ever. Some of them were scared the cops wouldn’t get there in time, now all of them know the cops aren’t even coming if they call. The people coming for them are going to realize the same thing. What do you want me to tell a stalking victim booked with me? Sorry I can’t give you anything this week, the courts took away all your civil rights and now if you actually do anything with this, the cops might get a gallery organizer on bullshit charges? You’re on your own, good luck?” She snorts.

She’s not mad at you, is the thing. She’s not arguing that you’re wrong, dismissing the chances or the risks here. Read all the sarcasm in that, all the dismissive energy, as entirely aimed at the no-win trolley problem situation she’s been put in. Chaka intimately, personally knows about all the lives she’s been responsible for saving doing this - it’s hard to put that against an abstract chance of a future riot over it. It's hard to weigh the issues of the forest ecology when it's all you can do to tend your garden.

But no, still when Chaka gets her breath back, she looks to Spearmint in pain, like there's a sickness in her stomach. She narrows her eyes and hunches her shoulders forward as she tosses the empty pistol onto the floor at Spearmint's feet. “I bet you have a gun, is the thing. If you’re who you’re saying you are, you came alone ready to threaten me, which means at the back of your head you know you’re safe. You’re the one knocking on doors ‘Big Mad’, coming in and causing a situation when I was trying to keep quiet, and what’s fair about that?”

She is mad about that one, and more than that she’s hurt and scared. Underneath all the practical and the political, that’s the one thing she’s taken personally in all this. There’s a way through that'll make Chaka forgive, maybe even respect Spearment for it. But if Spearmint really is sane and stable, then what she’s doing here makes her something lower than a cop; she’s a self-deputized sheriff, a Concerned Citizen Militia, who came here while having a mental break.

To Chaka, she’s doing the very kind of thing, acting like the kind of person she’s telling Chaka she’s worried about.

She's committed the most high-profile act of terrorism in Aevum's recent history. Crystal has to be worried about being associated with her, for all the reasons Spearmint's giving Chaka. She's kept a gun out of paranoia, in case she's needed it. She's been in a shootout with Chase Black that ran roughshod through Gaea. Spearmint has personally infiltrated the secure compound of a Supreme Court Justice trying to find blackmail material. She's knowingly moved into a new home bought by another one of the event organizers that was bought with money from a bank robbery. She's blowing Chaka's cover when she could have left well enough alone.

Chaka doesn't know any of that, of course, but they're all reasons Spearmint might wonder if she's a self-righteous hypocrite - or if those are ideas that matter to her, bother her. Even beyond an argument over whether she is self-righteous or hypocritical here those are still subjective value statements. Would either of those possible self-assessments bother her, even if they're dismissed? (Self-righteous, especially, being so subjective as to be irrelevant to dismiss if Spearmint simply doesn't identify with it. I bring it up not as a personal read of this situation, but as a potential grain of sand to make pearls from in her broader conflict of how responsible she is for the world around her.)

Remember, Remember, The Rest of November:

This is about to be the end of the first night of the exhibition. Eli plans on crashing one last party before writing their article - Red is invited along, of course, there’ll be sex, drugs and rock and roll spilling out between three adjacent rooms of a hallway. After that, they’ve got to write their article for Crystal.

Red is otherwise invited to join Pink to Crystal’s Penthouse. Fiona lost her dibs on Pink when Pink started cooking despite being scared of it and, besides, she’s got a snake girl right now anyway. Don’t mention this to Pink yet, Crystal doesn’t want to interrupt the purity of artistic expression happening in the kitchen right now.

How do the rest spend the night? Tomorrow will be a big day; The SES investigation, Pope’s Costa-Silva article going live, Red getting the Persephone treatment, Crystal debriefing with Eli about what they wrote, and obviously the Court’s decision itself. Everyone else will find out about Blue and Dragon. Leather would probably appreciate knowing things went well. Am I forgetting anything?

[I’d love to see this across at least two posts, I think, so as not to feel rushed on Pink and Green without shutting out the other colours - I also suspect Pink and Green are staying where they are for the night. But this feels like a good place to just vibe the current situation, because today was a hell of a day. It might be worth doing some debriefing on it all. I definitely think there’s enough here to reflect on, trying to condense it down would feel like rushing anyway.]

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Crystal:

Crystal thinks about this. “Let’s put that aside for now. Would you rather start with the cake, or the salad next?” She thinks about it, and then finishes the last spoonful of the first-try cereal. “Hold on a moment.”

When she comes back, she’s lugging a dress mannequin from the bedroom, and she sits that at the kitchen counter where she had been sitting. “That might be better. How about we try cooking for… Mrs Killamanjaro instead.” She glances at the poison cereal.

Privately, she’s half-expecting one of the steps for making the salad being to dice the intended diner directly. If that’s what needs to happen here, then it’s better to have a diner who won’t interrupt by complaining about it.

Spearmint:

“Well now, don’t you think you should have started with that? Don’t want to get caught giving orders from ignorance.” Chaka opens and closes an instrument case full of light body armor that fits like a bodystocking and labels it. “Cops have started targeting kin more, and there’s only one thing for it when that happens.” She pulls the next instrument case open, it’s just full of sniper rifle rounds, and closes and labels it. “Here’s the thing, Spearmint. When they put one of ours down, it’s almost always found to be unlawful. A few pigs get fired for it, maybe, but dead’s dead. When one of ours kills in self defense, it’s usually legit. This,” She taps the case of bullets, “is the only way any of us are going to see our day in court.”

“Better to be judged by twelve than carried by six, you ever heard that one?” She catches she’s getting heated and crossing a line saying that, and shakes her head.

She’s walks herself back, instead. “I’m not selling to gangs, Spearmint. My clientele are streamers, camgirls, content creators, organizers, activists, small time independents. High profile enough they’re scared of being made an example of, can’t go to the cops because that’s half of who they’re scared of. Maybe a couple girls who can’t get a restraining order, ‘cause the courts fucked ‘em on it.”

“Didn’t you wonder why I didn’t look surprised about a girl like you showing up here?” Chaka looks back at Spearmint, over her shoulder, and stands up with a hand on her hip. “You’re the kind of girl I’m used to taking care of. You looked like you could use some protection.”

The sales pitch never comes after that, she doesn’t suggest anything. She wasn’t saying that to you as a prospective client.

The Fucking Internet:

While Red holds a sorbet up to Eli’s eye so they can lap the runoff that trails into their mouth and clean the taste out that way, videos of the fight are already starting to go up on social media.

This is, of course, around the same time the SES team has nothing to do from their investigation, and probably don’t have anything better to do than mess around on their phones. Whether it’s killing time at the site waiting for something interesting to happen, or waiting on a train back out of Zeus, it amounts to the same here.

So here’s my question; What kind of social media shitfights does November get into when it’s Red getting dragged? Is this a meaningful, calculated swaying of public opinion through calculated delivery of memes, or is this getting caught in the weeds of a 27 chain reply thread with the single most obnoxious dickhead on Reddit they can find? (Reddit still exists, it’s just had 60 years of getting worse every year, yet somehow exactly the same.)

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Eli:

Pope nods absently, he’s focusing on his story now. “I’ll be taking that as a direct quote, name withheld of course. Trouble is going to be finding a pseudonym for you that sounds like more of a placeholder than ‘Red’ is anyway. The Dragon, maybe?” He nods. “I’ll post that on the socials now, to get ahead of it. Make sure that’s what people agree to call you, before the doxx comes in.”

Eli climbs a brown bear’s shoulders to find you over the top of the crowd, then drops down and runs over to you. He’s read, panting and he’s got a black eye, but he looks proud as hell. “Hey! Lost you for a minute there, you should have seen-” He stops, looks at Pope, grins. “Hey, my absolute dude.”

Pope looks up from his story and his big bulging eyes widen in terror, suddenly. “Numb. Always, always a pleasure. I should really get on this, uh, thank you for everything. The Costa-Silva piece goes up tomorrow morning. You’ll like it.”

Then he’s making any excuse to walk nonchalantly away from Eli, and Eli grins after him. “We didn’t like, there’s no drama between us,” he explains to Red, “he just really hates it when people know he’s got a type.”

You’ve got to wonder, Red, how much Pope identified with the stuff you just said about the Governer you just unmasked.

Panther:

The panther considers the situation, the overheating, the way Spearmint claims ‘my event’. Spearmint is still aware enough to recognize the way the panther’s attention disappears from the front of her eyes and turns back inwards, that someone’s started concentrating when they look at you but they’re not completely looking at you. She’s working out how to steer you through this situation - like a nurse realizing the patient is delirious, like a highschool teacher realizing something about a student they’re not supposed to see, like a scam artist realizing their mark is already caught on a worse hook, like the bartender realizing the woman he’s been serving to has been roofied and is trying to figure out a safe place to get her before someone comes to collect.

“Call me Chaka.” Pronounced Shah-kah. “I’m not hijacking anything, I’m letting you in on it, it’s you and me together now, right? We’re just going to move this, and you can go through it while we do, and you tell me what you don’t like.” Her tail cracks like a whip to punctuate it. “Here, I’ll walk you through it. Walk with me.” It’s not a question.

She flicks a single claw out to steer Spearmint with, to trace the parts of her back she’s venting from so she doesn’t burn herself touching her - especially because touching Spearmint just seems to get her hotter. She aims Spearmint back at the bathroom again. “Now. Be a lamb and pick one up. You’re stronger than you look, aren’t you? Then we just take it back to the bedroom-”

The bed has been flipped up against the wall to give more space in the room. Electrical tape has been laid out to mark planned inventory space around the room with a central walkway through it. In the middle of the taped bit of plush carpet is a label maker which makes packing-tape wide stickers with a little Blackberry style keyboard input on the handle.

“You’re going to open it up, look at what’s in there, and you make a label for it, and find the part of the floor it belongs. If you don’t know what something is, I’ll tell you.” She stops steering Spearmint with the claw and walks around her, tracing the side of her neck as she goes, drawing a line up and down from Spearmint’s throat to her heart and back again when she crouches in front of her so they’re eye to eye again. Again, those legs make it so her crouch doesn’t slow her down, it just makes her ready to pounce. “Isn’t it better to keep an eye on me? You just throw me out, I’m just going to end up somewhere you can’t find me again. Stick close, though, you see for sure I’m not making too much trouble for anyone.”

Threaded through those words is something Spearmint might not be capable of understanding, but an outside observer would hear pretty clearly; ‘Please stay where I can keep an eye on you, and stop you from getting yourself hurt. Please do this simple, repetitive task to keep yourself from doing anything worse.’

As far as Spearmint’s flirting goes, it’s actually got something going for it. Right now she obviously feels genuinely responsible and protective of you - her natural domme is coming out and she’s trying to take control from Spearmint. An unkind view of what she’s doing has her taking control from Spearmint like you’d take a gun from a five year old while trying not to freak them out about it, but if that was the whole story then why is Chaka still trusting Spearmint with all the actual weapons here?

“Look,” she pulls out a phone and holds it up to Spearmint’s face, shows her a calendar with anonymized names on it for later tonight, and wipes it. Her phone buzzes as it sends a text to each of them. “I canceled my appointments for the rest of the night. Call it a show of good faith. Now we can take as long as we need with this, because nobody’s going to be coming to bother us.”

If Black were here, she’d say she’s just doing it because she’s scared she’s been made and she’s limiting her exposure and now she’s just flipping the gesture to impress Green with it. If Orange were here she’d be trying to work out what she could learn from looking at the rest of the calendar, discern any of the people behind the pseudonyms, recognize the wealth of social knowledge here.

What nobody is going to tell her is that if she sees you as fragile or vulnerable, she’s not going to react to the brat routine with claws and chewing. She’s trying to de-escalate you, right? That doesn’t mean Spearmint has to do what Chaka’s actually asking, here. It just means Spearmint’s got an easier path getting soft-dommed if she goes along with this until she proves she’s of sound mind, and the harder path lies in threading a needle; proving she’s sane enough to be a risk while provoking and resisting without contextualizing herself as a genuine, real danger to Chaka by doing it.

Not to gild the lily too much here, but you’re locked in a hotel room with a black market arms dealer who literally transformed herself into the image a jungle predator, who is deeply aware that half of all murders go unsolved and not getting caught gets easier with practice. Violence is close to a last resort to her, but that is a sincere risk of trying to bait the hard path or attempting to blackmail her. Blackmail will really not work here. There’s a path through the minefield, just mind the mines.

On the other paw, the softer route lets you go through the cases one by one, scope each other out better, and gives you a staging ground to show you’re sane first - you can always pivot back to the other path from there. At the very worst case scenario? It makes the shower usable.

Pink:

Crystal takes the first, boring bowl and takes a bite of it with a spoon. She appraises the one made ‘creatively’.

“Why don’t you tell me about that one.” Her eyes flick from Pink to the second bowl as she debates saying something, but she decides on saying it. “That one’s just poison, I’m afraid. What’s curious to me is I’m sure you know that about ‘Sink’em!’, and obviously you don’t want to hurt me.” Still, she thinks, it’s better to remind Pink she knows that. “Please, correct me if I’m wrong about any of what I’m about to say, I just want to make sure I understand: You can cook masterfully if you do it without thought, but it requires a sort of rote learning to do. If you actually try to cook, it turns out somewhat lethal. The obvious conclusion is that you were taught to cook for Mrs. Everest and you wanted to kill her.”

Here she cocks her head at Pink. “What I don’t understand is why you’d repress that? If I might be so blunt; the bitch had it coming.”

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Lion:

He glares for a moment, rolls his eyes, mugs a camera as if to say - ‘Can you believe this idiot’ - and walks into the parting crowd as his bodyguard has extracted themselves from Eli’s body-prison using taser fibres in their suit jacket. Not a shining moment for anyone involved. It’s only when he’s got some distance from Red and it’s not as easy for her to shut him down he starts up again - “See, this is the problem, these creatures talk about being inclusive, about being welcoming, about just being expression, but even when you show up looking like one of their own-”

Guys like him are like the McDonalds of ideology - you can autofill the rest based on that, he sounds like every other guy who’s ever started a rant like that, there’s nothing new here you can’t already guess. But that’s the appeal of them, too, to their base. Maybe it’s more accurate to say they’re all cover bands playing for an audience that keeps making the same song request.

“Smartest thing he could have done, honestly.” Pope sounds a little impressed. “Only chance he has you might be wrong about any of that is just act like you are. Going to make a great shitfight on social media now, lots of people are going to be debating who won that. 30% of the station are going to think you came out of that looking hysterical. That can’t have been easy for him to pull off, did you see his eyes when you mentioned the gas station toilet? He looked like a spanked hog.”

“Does it ever get to you? That you can rub the truth in someone’s nose like that, understand the world and a person in it so completely that there’s no argument that could be made, no debate, no counterfactual… and if they still deny it, there’s nothing more you can do about it?” He’s more interested in Red than the Governer by far, doesn’t bother to watch him go even to laugh at him. “Sure, we’ll ruin him. It’s just not going to change him.”

Unicorn:

“You’d love to, then. Let’s start with that, because I think it’s the most important thing.” Crystal squeezes. “We don’t have to do everything at once. Maybe let’s start with some cheese toast? No, no, I think I might like a bowl of cereal more. So why don’t we just go through that?”

Just two ingredients in a bowl, nothing to cook, nothing to burn, nothing to ruin. It’s the safest thing she can think of, one of the few things simpler than a sandwich. Even this is enough to trigger the hell out of Pink’s pantry memorization though, right?

She hugs Pink tighter and says softly against her ear; “Just one step. The longer you don’t take it, the more power the story of this has over you. Something you could have done ten years ago becomes something that has defeated you for ten years. Just take one step with me, and this is no longer about something impossible. It’s something you’ve started fixing.”

“If I’m being honest? I expect this is about to go horribly.” Crystal leans out of the hug for Pink to see her face when she says it, wry and knowing. “But I think I’ll be even prouder of you if it does. Because it means you tried anyway, even though the problem is exactly as bad as you say.”

Panther:

Black Panther looks at Green with an appraising look, as she comes back to step around her and close the hotel room door. That is, close the hotel door behind Green. Click. This close, you can smell her fur is damp with sweat. You must have interrupted her during her first chance to sit down in hours. She smells like - no, the panther is too far gone now. If Green buried her face in that fur, though, her head would be filled with more precise and specific adjectives.

“Think I’ll call you Spearmint.” She decides. “You’re the same colour as the packs of Winter Breaths I used to buy. Trying to be real cool, but I bet you’d go all sweet on me if I chew on you a bit.”

It seems like Green’s impassioned plea is undercut somewhat by the panther definitely noticing how much Green was staring at her butt.

“I want to hear some more about this apocalyptic level of heat.” Her tail swishes, like it’s flicking flies out of the air. “I’ll ask again. You going to help me set up, or what?”

Does she believe you? Does she think you’re lying? Does she think you’re stupid? Does she just think you’re underestimating what she can handle? The panther is shrouded in too many impenetrable layers, and Green’s not in a good position to penetrate her.

What she needs set up is a bathroom covered floor to ceiling with instrument cases, and it’s unlikely any of them contain a single musical instrument. She needs to move, sort and open them before she can so much as take a shower here. This… does add some context as to why she’s still willing to pressgang Green into this, after that.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Lion:

“Nobody’s made.” He says, looking for his security team and absolutely unable to find them. “Hey!” He shouts, but he can’t see that his guard’s buried under about four warm bodies right now, Eli sitting atop the pile and chewing on a giant pretzel. “Limited detail my-”

He had to bring a limited detail because he didn’t even want his security team knowing too much about this. He chose a lion because it’s how he’s seen himself since he was six years old, it’s what he drew himself to be when his primary school teachers asked them to do self portraits. He got told from the youngest age it wasn’t just a harmless self-image thing but a profound symptom of mental illness, and he has hated that part of himself since, and he projects that hate on everyone that freely expresses the same thing. He has to exercise hating these people to be able to keep repressing it in himself, and he takes to that exercise with vigor.

Except he still wants this and he hates that too. Just, deep hatred and shame.

Of course, the problem is that his response to those feelings was to become a prominent reactionary politician, an ideology defined by pure cowardice. It takes courage to unbox those feelings, find love in the people around you like this, and in finding that love for others find love for yourself. All you need to take political office is fear. He was never going to answer any of Red’s questions.

Fortunately he doesn’t have to. Reverse Google image search of his way-too-expensive personalized lion suit can bring up his private anonymous forum accounts where he’s still a coward. He’s not even in Nazifur groups because his anonymous accounts are too scared to admit his politics to these people.

Pope raises an eyebrow at Red as he shares all this on his phone, while Red pins the Governor and gets nothing but a string of hate and denials from him that are frankly too boring and tedious to repeat. Hollow rage covering shame the whole time he’s watching Red get shown his web history.

“Now here’s my question,” he asks Red, “When this makes the front page tonight, how do I angle it? I don’t want people to get the idea that all bigots are just in the closet themselves, it’s a bad message. It’s finding a way to blame furries for people hating furries.” He raises an eyebrow at her captive. “It will destroy this one, though, and a win’s a win.”

The dude spits on Pope’s face. Pope just smiles wider at Red, because you’ve got an audience now who are filming this on their phones from all angles.

Don’t worry about the assault charges you’ll get for this, even though Red’s being recorded too. There is absolutely no way, even a little bit, this guy will ever be able to take this to court. Red is super-duper going to get charged, but those charges will get dropped before they ever become a problem for her.

Panther:

The black panther is wearing a heavy brown leather jacket and a green beret when she opens the door - and that’s all she’s wearing. She stands tall, with narrow shoulders and sleek cat’s fur reflecting the light in long white pools along her predatory angles. The digitigrade legs she’s committed to serve two purposes; For the appearance of an arms dealer she looks like she’s always about to break out into a flat sprint, even when standing completely still. For the purposes of Green breathing hot and heavy, it’s as flattering for what it does to her butt as a pair of stiletto heels.

Her voice is deep, her accent heavy and urban. Not in the racially coded sense of the word, but in that inflection of speaking that comes to so many children of the poor inner cities everywhere. It contrasts against rural poverty, which gives the tenor something bored and disaffected, or reckless and manic. The accent I mean is full of cautious swagger, baiting and retreating, alternating between trying to test for ambushes and bait you into one. It’s a way of speaking that sees cleverness as a kind of power, and power ultimately as a means of violence.

That is the voice that says to Green; “We don’t have an appointment.” She looks to Green again, and turns, leaving the door open. Her flicking tail comes an inch away from brushing Green’s face as she turns. “Close the door behind you, and help me set up. Show me the biggest crime you never got caught for, and we might be able to talk.”

She’s not being unusually trusting, or taking an instant liking to Green. She just clocks that Green is going to recognize all the implicit threats without her needing to make them explicit.

Like, yeah, is her question a trust fall exercise that obviously gives her blackmail material? Sure! Is going into this arm’s dealer room and closing the very well soundproofed door behind you and then acting cagey about it any better? Fuck around and find out!

Crystal:

She’s naked in her penthouse again, gone even is the diaphanous gown. There’s no lewd intentions here, it’s just that feeling of extreme comfort and openness that leads you to being able to leave the bathroom door open sometimes. More than that, it’s an expression to Pink of how much she doesn’t plan on leaving the penthouse again for the night, of having anyone over. She’s entrenched, here.

She moves to the penthouse kitchen and thinks. The cupboards and fridge have enough to give her options for three days, but not so much she should be stuck thinking about what to have like she is - but she’s been thinking for a few minutes now.

“Pink?” Crystal calls out. “Would you like to learn how to make something other than sandwiches?”

It was a funny, harmless quirk until now, actually a charming recurring bit. But if the bit has made Pink sad… well, that’s another thing, isn’t it?

There’s no pity in her eyes, her voice, no suggestion this is a thing she thinks needs ‘fixing’. Instead there’s a pleading there - Please. I owe you this.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

The Lion:

“Get your filthy hands off of me. Who the fuck are you?” He starts. This does not go well. “You’re never going to see daylight again, you disgusting - You’re going to wish you were going to jail for this, you’re not even going to see a jail until they need a place to bury you. I hope-”

“Quiet, Governor,” an amused and familiar voice cuts through in the darkness, “as much as I love to have this on the record, the lady is speaking.” Red has managed to walk right into Pope doing this, but it’s not a coincidence to walk right into someone who was looking for you. He goes still in Red’s hands, a devil confronted by someone who knows their true name.

The light comes back on. For once in his life, Pope looks happy to have been born. “Dear sister, I was just looking for you. A colleague at Olympia had an interview with Justice Costa-Silva at her home an hour ago, and a child went up to her and said… ‘Lady, you ain’t a real journalist, I know what that looks like and you ain't it’. She asked around if anyone knew what that meant, and I told her I knew exactly who to ask.”

He looks at the man in Red’s grip. “I can already see the headline I’ll be writing. The lion, the snitch from the wardrobe; Ares governor dragged out of the closet in a fight at a furry con. I’ll be requesting a comment, of course.”

And just like that the social power dynamic inverts for Red - in a story about a fight, she’s the one nobody’s going to care about in the story. “You all are sick. My constituents will be proud to know I walked into the heart of Sodom to understand the sickness we’re fighting first hand.” He lies. That’s interesting, not just that it’s a lie, but because he thinks that’s a better thing to say than the truth. He shoots filthy looks at the surrounding attendants who overheard that.

Pope looks incredulous, acts like Steve Harvey when someone gives a dirty answer on Family Feud and it ends up being right. “I don’t believe him for a second. Sister, what do you make of this?” He asks like he knows the answer, he just thinks it’ll hurt the Governor more if Red says it instead.

Dragon:

He stirs. The eighth head opens its eyes, and watches Brown and Orange. Then those eyes close, and the eyes of other heads open in turn. They are silent as they watch and study, unable to speak, unable to give expression to their thoughts.

When Dragon starts to move it’s staccato, like 1930s claymation. Now he’s running correct software through broken hardware so the damage shows through, the electromagnetism has to have fucked with all his joints and rotors too. This is the thing with radical surgery - to cut a cancer out of someone still requires cutting them open and cutting pieces out of them, and those cuts still need to heal the same as if they were made with malicious intent.

One head welds your pod back to the fusion drive, then goes back to sleep against his chest as another wakes up to do software. And another remembers Blue’s mass calculations from when she slingshot you here to do this.

The eighth head opens its eyes again, at last. “There is only one vector of thrust, so the engine will have to rotate to provide braking force. Since we can only accomplish this by angling the outbound thrust we have had to program a very wide parabola.” He breaks the news with the heartbreak of a doctor explaining it’s fatal, “It will be very inefficient, but we are too exhausted to do better. We’re sorry.”

It’s the first big sign of how drastically Dragon has changed because of Blue. The old Dragon would have forced everyone to wait for his recovery so he could use his factory here to build retrorockets to actually spin the drive on a direct path. It would have been way slower, would have forced Orange and Brown to wait for him to be capable of doing that, but then nobody would have been subjected to such disgustingly shoddy work. That’s the dragon that didn’t use stopgap assembly and did things by hand if it meant keeping his perfect, final layout intact.

No, it took pieces of Blue to accept that pre-programming a naked fusion drive to do a kick-flip will have to be good enough.

It’ll be a long flight home. By the time Orange and Brown make it back to Thrones, it’ll be the third day of the exhibition, and the day after the Supreme Court reveals its decision.

Green:

Hey, all the people joining rooms are doing it with QR codes, going through an app written by Fiona. You know her code, and you could probably get a copy of the backend if you just asked. Identifying information has to be put down for legal and financial reasons - it’s one thing to want to give everyone hotel rooms, it’s another thing to have to rob a third bank because you couldn’t work out who trashed their free hotel rooms you’re footing the bill for.

This ends with Green finding a black market weapons dealer, but the question is… was she even looking for one? Or was it just kind of an accident? Like, was this a case of thinking back to the one gun she got off Rudy and thinking maybe a few more like that might be a sweet deal, or was she trying to figure out something else and got in way over her head?

Maybe a lot of things will make a lot more sense if I tell you the dealer she’s going to end up finding is a literal black panther.

SES team:

It's starting to be late enough that everyone you're trying to surveil goes home for the night, but the place is still too occupied at all hours to make it worth trying anything. These characters may be available to return for scenes elsewhere without it interfering in the operation they're doing.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

The Lion:

Governor Joseon of Classical Ares stares back at you, whether Red recognizes him as that or not. One of the most aggressively anti-transhuman legislators on the station. The suit’s not a governmental loan, he’s just the kind of dude that kins lions.

This is really, really, really funny. You might have actually just destroyed a guy’s re-election campaign right now.

The lights cut out.

& The Unicorn:

(There’s an obscure George Orwell reference for you)

The thing about all that white is that it lights up first, it becomes sharply visible with the same amount of light that keeps everything else in shadow. It helps the illusion that there is nothing, nothing in this exhibition but her as she silently walks the stairs up. There’s no television screens or cameras rebroadcasting her, so she waits until she’s where she needs to be to start. Everyone that sees her is seeing her from their own unique angle.

It’s a deliberate choice. When the televisions show up with their well positioned cameras, even people sitting close to the action often watch that instead, because it shows a variety of perfectly chosen angles. And if you’re going to do that, then what’s the point of being there? Without the curation, there’s no better view than the one you have.

“Thank you all for being here this evening.” The station’s angle has taken it just past sunset, it’s only minutes since ‘afternoon’ would have been appropriate. “I believe that home is wherever your family is. While I consider myself lucky to have such a large family, in all of you, the things that tie us together are personal. The same place we come from is a yearning in the same part of all our hearts - if we are to be together it is because we have to find each other. If we are to ever feel like we have a home it will be because it was brought to us, as much as we were brought to it.”

“The coming days will be hard on us, be hard for us, and none of us should face it alone. If, after you leave here tonight, you expect to return to somewhere that is more like family to you then please, we are all of us more than this one part of our identities.” She twists her head to address the darkness behind her and her horn sparkles in the light, as if to emphasize how important that one part still is. “If, however, this feels more like home to you than anywhere else, then you shouldn’t have to leave. We have organized for the acquisition of every room in the adjoining hotel for the entire three days that this exhibition will run. My partner has created an app with which to select your room, first come first serve. We apologize that, for boring and mundane reasons, you will need to verify a unique mobile number for each bed you are requesting. An offensive bit of reality creeping in when I’m trying to grant wishes, I’m afraid.”

The perfect illusion jumps when that gets enough of a polite chuckle from the audience she hears them for the first time. This entire time, in the blackness, Crystal has had no way to know anyone’s listening, no way to see any of the reactions. The reminder that there are hundreds of people around her, she’s terrified. Then she rubs her thumb against a pink ribbon tied around her wrist, and she’s perfect again.

“This will only be an offer we make today, for this audience, for the rest of the event. Your presence among the gallery is welcomed, but not expected. All I hope is that, come what may, we can all of us here be together for it. Home is where you feel safest.”

The light comes off her. The rose window glows white, then displays a QR code for all attending. When the hall lights turn back up again Crystal is already back in the stairwell with Pink, her black stage folding into the rafters.

Quietly, Crystal wraps her arms around Pink’s neck and shakes, slightly. “Fiona found something robbing the bank that first time that made robbing it a second time much easier.” Her voice is far more calm than her body betrays. “Necessary, absolutely necessary.”

The attempt at a stoic resoluteness is ruined by by a choking at the back of her throat. Some things you can put a brave face on, but not a runny nose.

She wipes her face with the back of a very expensive lace sleeve, half-ruining it with sniffle. “I say I can’t take the risks you both do, because I need to keep my hands clean to do this. Why, if I’m close enough to the both of you that I’d be damned by that anyway?” Everything she’s done and doing here gets inverted and weaponized if she’s caught. You and Fiona are the gloves that keep her hands clean - but what if something stains through? Then she’s made herself a representative to these people just in time to become a pariah, tying everyone to terrorists and bank robbers.

Even in the heart of the crowd, surrounded by hundreds of people, she found a way to not have anyone be seen with her. On one level the wedding dress represents inviting people across the threshold into a new home, but on the other the virginal innocence and purity it symbolizes is a deeply ironic plea of how she needs to be seen.

Crystal takes a shaking breath out. The adrenaline is leaving her system, leaving her with the crash. She wipes her nose again as she fiddles with the other wrist, the one with the pink ribbon. This sleeve she’s kept clean, and she makes no move to offer the ribbon back. Pink herself being there doesn’t replace it, she adds to what Crystal’s already getting from it.

“Thank you, though. I was ashamed for a moment, at what I was exposing everyone to; especially given how this has all been paid for.” She flashes a smile at Pink, and she’s not smiling for Pink, she’s smiling because of Pink. “Bluntly, I asked if that meant I was ashamed to be associated with either of my girlfriends who I love quite dearly, and I got so angry at the question it carried me through to spite it.”

& the Dragon:

It has to be said, standing here on the altar of Dragon’s stupid martyrdom and martyring yourself while declaring it’s the thing Dragon would have done is… Densely layered.

Let’s pull apart one aspect of this. On the one hand Blue is the illusion of a whole person, and in this her self-removal from the world is different to that of Eli wanting to blow up parliament to make their own death worth something. On the other hand that illusion is capable of learning, self-perception, had a name, and was recognized as a person by the people around them. Socially, emotionally, pragmatically, Blue was.

Blue was not interchangeable to the old Italian who wanted to show her glasswork, and now never will. Blue was not interchangeable to Pope, who will never get to make amends for so offensively misunderstanding her. She was not interchangeable to Chase Black, who still tell horror stories about fighting the dragon maid. People will mourn her as a real person. Her voice is being removed from the story. What is that, if it’s not death?

November lives on, but as much as Blue wasn’t November, November isn’t Blue either. For this to be a true and meaningful act of sacrifice then we have to acknowledge that - This is a profound but reckless act of suicide.

It would be convenient to say that it didn’t work, because of that. That suicide is never justified, that it was a stupid thing to do, that there was another way to do this… but that’s not really the problem with it, is it? No, the issue shouldn’t be the competence of your self-removal from the world, especially given that Blue’s is obviously, incredibly competent. This is where she peaks; Not just because it has to be, because she has taken from herself the chance to ever top this moment, but because even if she had the rest of her life to surpass this she would have struggled to find an opportunity like this one, that says this much about her.

Dragon was gone. This is likely the only way Dragon, as an entity, could be brought back.

So it does work. What does it mean that it works?

I’m going to be very oversimplistic here. Picture a slice of Dragon’s quatronic mind in two dimensional space as a collection of microfiche, like so;



Now, I’m going to represent the damage he’s done to himself with a blast from a double barrel shotgun. I’ve named the left barrel ‘Hemmingway’ and the right barrel ‘Cobain’. Now;



The thing is that we can partition what’s left of this two dimensional space. Erect barriers and tell new information to fit where it can in the safe spaces. It’s not ideal, a 747 can land without any working engines, but almost nobody would ever do it by choice. So;



Dragon’s limping along like he is because he did a good job holding on to the bitter end, but you can’t get back the information once it’s blown out. You can’t remember the things you’ve forgotten, you can only clean up and tighten the edges of the usable space around what's missing. What Blue's giving is that missing information, like this;



She fills in those missing pieces, she acts as the context of what used to be there. Sometimes this is like a book where every word on a page is missing half its letters, and the fixed result is entirely Dragon - The information of what the words were comes without any of the words themselves changing. In other places it’s like where entire chapters were ripped out, lost, and replaced with Blue’s copy of them.

But then there’s that real hardware damage. Dragon was still on the same devastated hardware when Blue did this. The fix can’t fit. The end result ends up like;



That doesn’t mean this was a failure, that Blue’s sacrifice was in vain. It’s an illustration of moving from necromancy into mere emergency surgery. Those repaired pieces are enough that, when Dragon’s hardware is fixed, those holes will merely be empty spaces that he needs to fill again, expand into.

And Blue? On your way out? I’ll throw in that Dragon spent years optimizing his damaged remaining mind to the broken components they operated on, it was necessary to finish what he’d started here. No, thinking about it, I actually don’t believe this could have been done later, after those fixes were made. He’d made the shapes of his damage load bearing.

There doesn’t need to be an explanation here, but still think I should explain what I mean. Imagine a pair of neurons having a thought as two people who need to throw a ball back and forth to each other, and the roof has caved in between them. Dragon’s neurons figured out how to bounce the ball off the wreckage between them to have it still end up in the right place. Repairing the hardware without Blue’s fix means those two neurons, in trying to start the game again, throw the ball where they would always bounce it off the wreckage. Except without the wreckage there, the ball ends up slamming into the face of the next pair of neurons playing the game next to them. Every borked throw like that overwrites its target with the wrong information, and they were all going to be doing that.

I feel that explanation is worth saying because it adds a new light to the depth of Dragon’s purposefulness in doing this to himself, and because the situation simply denies me an easy avenue to undercut Blue’s decision with, here. There is no hidden reveal there was another way, no saviours emerging from the Mist drawn by the sound of the self-inflicted gunshot. This was it, this was the only way, she was right.

So I say this last not to speak against Blue. I say this because this martyrdom is so intensely romantic I’m worried about how someone like Eli would read it. If you are in a dark place, and you value others more than you value yourself, then stories of sacrifice like this can feel too straight-up aspirational. The truths that go into this story can too easily lead to swallowing a black pill, and living only for the moment you can martyr yourself this poignantly. Because it is profound and poignant, for reasons November will be far better at saying for herself.

Dragon sleeps deeper than ever, medically induced coma deep, and it’s hard to tell how long this will take to wake up from - it might even be hard for Orange and Brown to tell that he will except that his stirring has gotten more even and he’s stopped doing what, in hindsight, were basically Parkinson's tics. How are they going to work out how to get home from here without their engineer?

When we give ourselves to one great act, we deprive the world of every small act of good we could be doing instead. Blue’s been gone for all of a few seconds and already that’s kind of a problem.

More than that; Blue will never get to hear Dragon thank her. She will never get to bask in his gratitude and attention. She will never get to see the version of him that is pieces of her, and know what they mean to him. Dragon will never get to know his saviour. There’s a romanticism to never seeing the fruits of your own sacrifice, of planting a tree whose shade you will never feel. Still, this will badly hurt the very person she sacrificed herself for, for years to come, who would have asked her not to do this if he was capable of understanding that he needed to.

But you know, fuck him for that, because he’s the reason she needed to and he’s the reason he wasn’t capable of stopping her. At least Blue’s sacrifice was selfless, Dragon did this to himself just to prove he could. If he doesn’t think this was justified, then that’s his fault. It’s his fault that he has to live with that, and it’s because of Blue that he gets to.

We are never the only ones hurt by our decisions, no matter how much we wish we could be.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Lion:

The lion stares, takes the words seriously, thinks about it, and then bolts running as fast as a person in an expensive fursuit can.

Which is to say, the chase mechanic of this game system does not have a difficulty modifier low enough to represent this.

Eli kicks up like a scorpion flicking their tail and nails the security detail guy between the legs, and as he keels over starts chomping his ear like a feral dog. Red can take it for granted he’s fine when she’s already started running.

SES:

Put a pin in this one. This will take a bit of time to work, and the convention is still going. The resources spent have been locked in, and the answers you’ll get are commensurate - but we don’t want to risk the Aevum teams getting too out of synch, and we can take this camera and move it to a different focus. Let me throw this focus up-

Dragon:

All that, and it’s too late.

“So that’s who I was?” The eighth head asks. “That’s good.” It looks at the other heads, and the other heads look back. “I don’t think they can learn to talk now. They didn’t want to, before.” His head lowers, chin flat against the surface of the drive in front of Blue, next to the sword she’s thrown down. “It might be better this way. They are giving me most of their attention.” That is to say, the one head talking to you as if through a thick mental fog is talking with most of the brainpower of all eight heads. If the others could speak, they would not be so generous to share.

“We liked you.” He says. It’s not less than saying he loves you, you can love family you don’t like. “You didn’t need us.” It’s not a compliment or reassurance - just a correction.

…

There’s no more than that, gone is the ability to properly react to Blue. Even determining what he meant by that much took a lot of work from Orange to get across the finish line.

Crystal:

-a focus comes back down on a unicorn taking a spiral staircase down, her handmaiden just a step behind her.

Crystal smiles back at Pink. “Thanks for doing this. I know you’d have done it regardless, but I still consider it as owing a favour.”

Her makeup is exceptional, her wedding dress fantastical - as in coming from fantasy. To get here has required crossing over from the hotel via a bridge modelled after the Bridge of Sighs in Venice, the canal crossing which would be the last time prisoners would ever see sunlight - for some reason, people got it in their heads that it’s incredibly romantic.

This comes down a tower adjoining the convention center. When she opens this door, the lights in the convention will shut off, and Crystal will take to a rising black stage, walking up seemingly invisible stairs to hang over the convention and give her speech like a star in space, or an angel giving their proclamation from the heavens - spotlit by the light of the Rose Window at the far end, voice seeming to come from everywhere at once.

The one side effect of doing this is that she will feel completely and utterly alone above the crowd. In speaking to them, and for them, she cannot be one of them. Then she’ll come back the same way, and alone again but for Pink. And it’s clearly getting to her.

She hasn’t told Pink what she’s going to say, or do, either. Just that Pink will like it, and it needs to be done.

Pink?

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Exhibition:

Okay, so this is when something genuinely hilarious happens.

As you’re saying this, Eli gets tackled by a secret service lady who appears to have come out of like, fucking nowhere. He starts cackling laughter as he goes down.

The lion backs away a step as the agent looks up at Red. There’s only one of them, then, and he’s made his priority target. “Ma’am, please back away.”

“Rip his head off!” Eli screams encouragingly, and ironically the lion freezes like a deer. “Cops don’t need bodyguards, idiot! This is way funnier! Rip his head off!” It’s unclear who Eli is calling an idiot, but something idiotic is happening.

SES:

Burn some Investigation points, describe how you’re planning on spending them, and I’ll give you some answers based on your approach. I’ll provide information for up to four spends here, distributed how you like. Going wide and going broad will be compensated in different ways.

A reminder and reference: The layout of the Zeus headquarters opens with the Femur, which is mainly a tourist building, and then a bunch of separated bunker-buildings filled with smaller offices. Different sections have their own offices, meeting rooms, whatever. The place is deliberately kept dispersed with a wide open park in the spaces between, to limit vulnerability as much as possible. Official surveillance of the parklands is minimal, especially if you know the right routes to walk, while within the buildings it seems total and nearly unavoidable - how actively it’s monitored, though, is currently unknown. All the cameras might just be for show, only intended to have recordings pulled in hindsight when an incident is logged.

One of your two point spends can also declare something usefully true about the campus for your purposes - For the moment, I’d request these spends only being true about what and how you’re investigating, and not who (This only matters for people Knightly marked in red on the org chart. If they’re green or unaffiliated, declare anything you want about them.)

Dragon:

The heads stare at you sleepily, and there’s an impression of a slow blink.

“I remember you, Snake.” The eighth head says fondly. “There was… more of you, then.” It’s unclear if he means you used to be bigger, he remembers there being more personalities, or both. Likely both. “Rescue me? From what?”

The eighth head looks to the seventh head, shakes ‘no’, then looks back at you. “They want to tell me what I was like. They forget how long it takes to talk.” The seven heads glare at the eighth, and the eighth continues, “It is more important to them than being rescued.”

It is not because it is the ‘social’ head that makes it care about self-preservation more here - it’s what allows it to be Dragon’s social head. The others all just care about Being Dragon more.

Blue: You can be this good sometimes. Spend 2 on Military Science and I will tell you everything that happened here, from what was made here.

Thanq: Definitely, yeah

Blue: The others see the finished product and the factory and the story has two obvious parts, almost like a joke; setup and punchline. Something so obvious it doesn’t need more thought than that.

You, though. You look through time, you can see the steps. You could do this, and the surest way to prove that is to look at everything that needed to happen for everything else to happen and make sure you know for a fact you understand how everything was done. That there are no gaps in your knowledge. In commercials for high-tech products they show the final product exploding outwards into a scientific diagram of all the component pieces, but that’s not enough for your analysis. Yours needs to explode outwards into the fourth dimension as well.

The factories are arranged into clusters, like city districts. One builds nets to collect asteroids, which feeds into the refineries and forges. Another builds the factories that build pieces for other factories. From that you can work out the pattern Dragon expanded in - it’s idiotic genius, he had the final layout planned from the beginning, for months there must have been huge gaps and chunks in production he just didn’t have the resources to finalize yet, slight delays of handmaking critical pieces just so he wouldn’t have to tamper with his perfect final layout. Inefficiencies in months to accommodate efficiencies of years.

You’ve never seen a microfusion drive before, because this is the only one. Figure it out from the pieces in front of you. That forge makes electromagnets, that factory makes conductors, there must be the shielding, and that- Hold on. No.

Your vision of this is wrong, start over.

The forges were first, then the screws and rivets factories, those are the best to automate early because you need a lot of them and they’re easy to machine but awful to do manually, and then he used that to make-

Your vision of this is wrong, start over.

The forges were first, then the screws and rivets factories, and then…

Blue, you have to be wrong about this. It doesn’t matter how many times you play this out in your head and get the same answer, it has to be because you’re missing something, failing to account for something, just projecting your worse way of doing it onto this perfect design.

Because the alternative is this; Dragon needed the drive to power most of his operation here, and he built the shielding last. That was the only way he could have done this, tested this, run this, operated a thousand miles of tin-drop radiators, caught metals-rich asteroids and melted them. The solar power he built only runs enough to run the creation of the stellarator itself, now they’re just emergency systems. After the stellarator was built he needed to dump the power into something to keep it running.

Years, and years, and years of bombarding himself with an unshielded fusion chamber, because there is no way to take this perfect machine apart to keep working on its insides once the outsides are built, and the stellarator must have needed years of maintained upcycling before it reached its break-even point. No way to test or adjust it once those final layers are put on. It must be done once, and it must be done correctly, because that is the only way to do this.

The drive works. If you can figure out how to control it, how to operate it, attach your pod to it, then it could get you back to Thrones easily. After that, it could get you anywhere in the universe - on a long enough time scale, anyway. It’s probably the only thing that could, the only thing that ever will.

Goat could get this information because the project is still listed on Orochi’s logs. It’s not mothballed, buried, hidden, deleted. One day they’ll come and pick up their working fusion drive, they think, if they ever need it. But there’s no money in deep space exploration, it’s a scientific expedition that might not pay off for generations, and no government agency can afford what they’ve made here. So for now it’s simply… warehoused.

There was no recognition for making the impossible, here, no glory, no accolades. Just a challenge. What most people don’t understand about the myth of Sisyphus is that he could have stopped himself at any time and walked away. Sisyphus would push that boulder for every day of eternity because he was told it was impossible, and because he was told he couldn’t do it.

Dragon wasn’t controlled, he wasn’t pulled in to heel, he wasn’t punished. It’s impossible he didn’t know the consequences of spending so long next to one of the most powerful electromagnets ever made. But he was told to build something impossible, and he knew the only way he could do it.

This kingdom of his greatness is made of his bones. You found him sleeping on the sword he fell upon.

Dragon still lives. Dragon is no more.