Count Numbers

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Fiona:

Wordlessly, she takes some blueberries from the top of a tank and pops them in her mouth while she listens.

“Wait hang on. You know you’re bad for wanting those things? Who said that?” Fiona tilts her head. It’s not a wry ‘I assume you’re in your own head about this’, it’s her Black kicking into gear - who’s been here first, and have they laid traps for me?

Downstairs, unheard and unnoticed to either of you, John Snake-in-the-Eye wonders if Tiana the red-crested water dragon doesn’t deserve some fresh blueberries after such a big clutch of eggs today.

“Listen,” Fiona insists. “I could tell you something true, like if we only give other people what they want then we can only give them what they already know they want. We can’t figure out something new that they didn’t know to want. But the problem is Crystal would say something like that way better, and she’s doing the same thing. ‘Oh no I’m just throwing parties you need to rob banks for’, yeah, well, that was obviously worth robbing banks for and I’m here because I obviously thought artistically appropriate forms of closure are worth it.” Are, present tense.

Her eyes widen. She has it. She bends her knees and scoops Pink up suddenly, hoisting her onto her shoulders for an involuntary piggy-back ride, with Pink’s hands tangled in her hair for balance. “Ha! Mental judo throw! You have to want things for me to be able to give them to you! And I love giving things to you. Being ‘less selfish’ would be selfish because then I couldn’t do something like this for you, and do you know how special it makes me feel that I could be here for you today? You think I’d miss this for anything?!”

She’s on a roll now! She does a giddy-up jump to settle Pink’s weight better over her back. “And I felt closed off from Green until I could help her too, it’s- I think you need this to be able to have relationships. Not just romantic ones, I mean with anyone. Please don’t make me learn how important you are by seeing what changes without you. I want to prove it by seeing what gets better when you do?”

Next to the note she’s made to keep an eye on Black after this, she makes one to pay attention to see if Yellow… can have relationships, real ones. She can’t remember Yellow ever asking for anything, only telling her what she wants and she hadn’t noticed the difference until now.

“Anyway. You helped me figure out how to do this.” Fiona kicks the pot plant out of the way for a moment to look back and forth across the corridor, Pink still balanced over her, then kicks the plant back in to jam it. “I think this guy would love to host your party as long as we invited all his neighbours. You wanted a guest list anyway, right?”

"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law” is a first rule of magick, and it’s often misinterpreted as something far worse than what it actually means: Find what you love and let it consume you.

Pink is being carried now. Fiona is probably about to do something incredibly stupid for her entertainment. Just a pair of law-abiding citizens.

Red:

Oh shit get anything good?

Black:

Hypothetically, in the future, Fiona will say thank you for saying she has a fantastic personality, and then T-pose and yell ‘witness me’ while a nearby ATM explodes. She pretends it was meant to do that instead of- It was meant to do that, don’t worry about it.

…

JuntaSThompson: I’m already at the court but I can see Trajan from here
JuntaSThompson: please don’t tell me not to worry about it I’m already going
JuntaSThompson: you don’t even have to tell me who this guy is I don’t know why I’m doing any of what I’m doing today anyway
JuntaSThompson: just promise me it’ll be a cool story in hindsight

Junta’s looking better these days, and his bones have mostly healed - the sling holding his arm is like elasticated webbing now, adding resistance to the muscles to strengthen them as they rebuild and redirect forces away from the breaks in the bones. It’s like watching him try to push the arm through honey, but it moves.

He was a good choice to pull, he was dressed for court and that makes him fit in to this beat naturally.

He doesn’t know why he’s in court today. He’s not educated enough for this. He could stand the break, and he’s a short walk away anyway - well, short for him, after getting off at the nearest accessible station it’s an hour walk, and it’ll be an hour back, but he’ll be back in the court in time.

But first.

The first thing Junta thinks is the guy looks like he stepped off a boat. So he takes his phone camera out and zooms in as far as he can, looking up for the district from the courts. In Aevum, go far enough horizontal and you might as well have a vertical vantage point, the problem is distance.

He checks for waterways on an impulse. Fuck it, right? Just because the guy looks like he stepped off a boat doesn’t mean he did, but if you’re starting with nothing you might as well work from vibes. And, yeah, looks like that district has serious waterfront properties, marinas, boats. Structurally it’s like the fishing dams of old, aesthetically it’s riverfront. Probably actual live catchment too, real stocks.

Junta swears under his breath. Useful, but useless. It means the boat-guy read is probably literal and not just an association, but Trajan a whole neighbourhood of people Like That. Time to go fishing (metaphor) for fishing (literal).

Junta- Wait.

Okay no, a second thing before he makes the trip.

Junta walks out of the high courts and walks the fifteen minutes to the head offices of the department of recreational services building, and waits the twenty minutes in line to get service. Thirty five minutes to listen to history podcasts at double speed, the time is nothing to him.

He gives a nervous, apologetic smile to the teller. “Hey, sorry, it’s my grandpa he… Okay, so I know I’m about to ask you to do a bunch of things you’re not allowed to do, and I totally get it if you can’t, it’s fine. It’s totally on him, not you.”

“What happened?” The teller, an older Caribbean man asks.

“He got his ID stolen a while ago, and I’ve been trying to help him close down a bunch of the fake identities they spun off using his details. I know they got a fishing license with his photo I.D, maybe in the last year or so, but they’re mixing information together, so I don’t know what I’m supposed to give you for access. Just knowing what information they used with his picture would be a big help.”

He pretends he’s giving useful specifics, but the fishing license would need to be updated every two years anyway.

“What can you give me?”

“This is the best phone picture I could find from a year ago, he took a fall down some stairs after this so his head isn’t the same shape anymore. Bones get, uh, soft when you get that old apparently.” Junta grimaces, and the distinctive shape of the man’s skull makes the lie plausible enough the Caribbean teller winces in sympathy. And just like that, using Black’s photo instead of a family portrait or something isn’t suspicious anymore, there’s already a story.

Don’t give too many details, that’s suspicious. Just a few, the absolute bare minimum, and make them evocative. Don’t explain the fall, don’t explain what part of the skull got hit. Just make it easy to imagine and give no threads to pull.

The man loads up his software with a backwards glance over his shoulder. “I shouldn’t be doing this.” He mutters. “Anything else? Due diligence.”

“No, yeah, I fully get it, I really am sorry this is - Thanks. I’m pretty sure they’re using his mailing address in Trajan for it because we got sent a box of weird dick-hardening neutropics sent there. Ah, too much information?”

“No. Do you have an exact address?”

“Ah, not off the top of my head. Totally blanking, he’s been in hospice a year now and I never had a thing for directions, I’d have to look it up.”

“Email, phone number?” He asks, and Junta winces apologetically. “Right. It would be the wrong ones anyway. I just need it for-”

“Yeah, no, it’s fine.” Junta nods. “This was a long shot for me anyway.”

“I can just cancel the card if that would help?” The service teller grasps at a straw, and Junta shakes his head.

“I mean, I’d appreciate it, but it wouldn’t help me. I need the information they used so I can track down the next cards that had his data mixed in. It’s like links in a chain, you know?”

The teller bites his bottom lip. “Right. Well.” He hints print. “I just need that much to look up the card, and I’ll make a paper record of the deletion. I can’t give you any of that information.” He says. “I wish you luck helping your grandpa out.”

Junta takes the printout from the printer with a finger to his lips and a smile. “No, I get it man.” Junta smiles. “Sometimes you gotta just trust that people are doing the right thing, you know?”

JuntaSThomson: Fuck it
JuntaSThomson: Adrian Dudekov
JuntaSThomson: 1 Papinian Crst.
JuntaSThomson: Got his email and phone number too if you want it
JuntaSThomson: Need anything else?

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Fiona:

“I didn’t know about Blue, no.” She says, sadly. Her gut twists - they left on such brusque terms, just being redirected to Green… she was going to regret that.

She looks at Pink and translates her into a cloud of connected concepts, tries to see the broken points in the web of ideas, the missing values and what they connect to. They-

No. As much as Pink is a person, she is also only the illusion of a person. She is a piece of the whole of November. Synechdoche. She cannot stop at only seeing the connections within Pink, but outwards from her as well - Fiona and Crystal are better at thinking like this now, they’re actually trying.

Fiona experiences a shot of adrenaline like a hypnogogic jerk, those jumps you have when you suddenly wake up right at the edge of sleep. She doesn’t understand what she’s seen, not completely, but something dark and dangerous moved in the corner of her mind’s eye when she imagined November without Pink.

“Okay, so first of all, I’m pretty sure you’re the part of November that knows she likes girls.” She says breezily. “So if you go, then Crystal and I would have to break up with you, so we’re making sure you’re sticking around.”

“Second, you’re your vision for what the changes in the world should be, right?” Fiona squeezes Pink’s hands. “You’re going to be needed more than ever. Wanted more than ever, too. Let’s…”

Don’t be grateful for things you never asked for, even if you appreciate them. It was a debt whose terms you couldn’t refuse, even if you want what it got you.

No.

Not getting enough smiles and headpats is worth-

No.

It doesn’t matter if you’re like this ‘only sometimes’ if you’re like this any of the time I-

No scolding. No telling her that she’s done something wrong, thought something wrong. They’re things she wants Pink to know but that’s not what she needs to tell her.

“Let’s say that you’re damaged.” Fiona says instead. “So we’ll help you get better, okay? That’s different to just fixing you, because we’re not going to try to go back to how you used to be before this, or try to get a Pink that can act like none of this happened. ”

“What do you want to be like?” Fiona asks. “What do you want to be that you wouldn’t have to pretend anymore?”

Why are you pretending anyway? What is it like when you stop pretending?

Hazel:

“I might work on this in pieces and do some of the side projects first, if that’s okay?” Hazel asks, far-away and foggy-eyed. “I know what this needs to be, but I don’t know how to do it yet. I can’t give you a guess to how long it will take, I can’t even tell you if it’s possible.” She smiles when she says that last bit, because that just makes it more fun, doesn’t it?

“Let me finish going around today, I was here for ideas anyway. Now I just need to go from looking for concepts to looking for execution.” She reaches into a suitcase and pulls a business card out. “Call me when you’re ready to show me around the workshop later, and try to have something for me to do. I need to see if the space inspires me, or if I’m going to need to make changes.”

Black:

You might want to spend some more time with Fiona, not least of which because she’s suddenly very interested in some new topics of conversation to have with you. But also because of that view of technology.

She would say that the rich are absolutely vulnerable to technology fights because it’s one of the areas where money can be made irrelevant. Expensive technology is the outsourcing of all understanding of your tools, and the trust in the expertise of people you will never meet. A technological solution, then, is learning to exploit the blind trust of wealth. This is the essence of hacking.

They’d have to compare notes, though. Fiona has never considered the state itself as another technology in the same way.

Here’s the trick. It’s illegal to ask where a private pod is going, but unlike a plane - with infinite airspace - it’s not illegal to ask about what’s been rerouted on shared lines to accommodate it. And all lines are shared, this is a train network.

Privacy gives way to safety - on a shared line, no train’s path can be kept so secret it would cause a collision. That gives Black the final thing she can do.

All she has to do is book and cancel an emergency services vehicle onto that line now that she’s figured it out. These things happen often enough to not be suspicious - fat fingers on a callout. But the moment they’re made they still need to clear the line they’re commandeering, which sweeps through the network grid as reroutes.

Basically, you don’t need a thermal scope to find the invisible man if you can fill a room with flour.

That gives you a neighbourhood now, Trajan in Classical Zeus. You can’t get there in time to follow him, can’t disrupt the network more to delay him, the trail is about to go cold no matter what you do here…

But you still have a lead, an area of a few city blocks, and a face. Narrowing it down from there will be the next operation.

Green can already be on her way now. There is no reason you have to wait.

November:

LatheOfHeathens: D-Day ladies
LatheOfHeathens: I got the new girl in Ares with Jez doing pre-op, I got Junta in Zeus, I got Pope in Apollo doing android stuff. Junta doesn't know why he's at the court today, Pope didn't want to be there even though it's his racquet.
LatheOfHeathens: 5pm today your mods are going to be marking you outside the acceptable fringe. not illegal just
LatheOfHeathens: targeted.
LatheOfHeathens: so if I got one bit of advice?
LatheOfHeathens: you probably got like 5 hours to go full shopping bender on off the shelf non-humanoid parts, tomorrow nobody's going to be insured to give them to you so they won't
LatheOfHeathens: my prediction anyway
LatheOfHeathens: fuck this bullshit

It won't stop you making your own parts. It just means you have to, now.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink:

Fiona does some math in her head.

There’s sounds from downstairs. She pushes Pink away, just to the edge of arms’ reach and holds her hands tight. “It’s just the lizards,” she says, “but let’s get a bit out of the way just in case.”

The nearest room is a conservatory, where John keeps the plants flourishing. Gone are the daughters’ collections of exotic nightshades, replaced with little hydroponic tanks of blueberries and bugs in the tanks to clean their roots, both for feeding to the lizards later. The room is warm, and humid, and the light from the high windows makes rainbows in the glass, and fresh berries float on lilipads as healthy roots overflow the containers and seep flowering onto the chequered tile floor.

It’s nice. It should be a nice room. It’s very pretty.

Pink was locked in here for eight days once. Before the lizards, this had been a place for bees that could only drink from the nectar-rich flowers in this room, so Everest could ensure even the honey in her tea was tailored to her exact tastes. The flowers were temperamental, but they were also beautiful, and so that was just… Pink’s job.

The door jammed behind her, wax seizing just the wrong part of a mechanism, and she couldn’t get out. And to call out that she was trapped would be… disruptive. Only bad girls raised their voice. But that was fine. Everyone should have known what Pink was sent to do. They should have known to look for her. But Everest told her sisters she had been sent to do something she couldn’t remember, and that meant Pink had been sent, and that was the end of it.

It wasn’t until a week later, when Pink could not be found to be sent back into this room, that anybody checked the door to realize what happened. And then it took one more day to wait for Blue to get the parts she needed to take it down, because they would not break the door down for her.

But that’s not so bad is it? To be left there until your batteries drain and you lose consciousness because there’s no charging equipment for you anyway but maybe it was kind of nice to just, sleep and not have to do anything for a while, so why complain? Maybe it still eats at you that nobody cares about you so much they wouldn’t notice if you died and this is something that felt so close to it you relive it behind your eyes as proof that can never fully be contradicted.

Left forgotten in a cupboard like you were just a vacuum someone had finished with because that’s all you were.

And maybe nobody cared and maybe it felt like even your sisters weren’t allowed to care about you because they didn’t come looking for you but they were just trying to survive too and nobody touched you, nobody hurt you, nobody, nobody beat you or anything. They just didn’t care. You’re not entitled to care. Nobody did anything to you here. Nobody did anything to you for eight days.

(This is why we repress things. Because if we believe it didn’t matter it doesn’t. But what would it mean if we did matter? What would it mean that we were only worth this much even when we mattered?)

(Because if we matter now and we didn’t matter then we are safe now because we matter now, but if we mattered then we can’t be safe now because it wasn't enough. If it wasn’t our fault this could happen to us again. Recovery is only temporary. We could be sent back here. We always still were here.)

She wasn’t worth breaking the door down for.

Fiona didn’t pick a particularly bad or traumatic room. All of them are like this. This is just the story of this one.

…

Fiona sees how Pink looks at the door and even though they’re explicitly in here to hide she takes a potted plant and jams it in the doorway so the door cannot close behind them.

….

“I know tomorrow’s going to be a bad day for, for everyone, but I think… I know a mechanical pinball museum in Apollo where they let you take the machines apart so you can watch all the pieces move while you play, see how everything works, and you’re never going to beat my highscore on the Bad Moon Witch. There’s a place near there that deep fries this stuff that smells like potpourri but it actually tastes as good as potpourri smells, I can’t describe it better than that. Then I’m going to buy you two of every Lego kit in the nearest toy store, and we’re going to take it to a skate park where there’s plenty of open cement and people can see you make anything you want out of it. And then we’re just going to leave it there and watch some kids break it down and make whatever they want with it, and tell them they can take it home with them, and we’re going to be their favourite people for the rest of their lives for it.”

“And then when we get home I’m going to break you down myself, one limb at a time piece by piece, and we’re going to clean and polish every single piece of your internals, because I’m going to make you feel beautiful on the inside too. You’re going to shine and sparkle in a way that only we’re going to know it’s there, but we’ll know.”

She kisses Pink’s forehead. She’s trying to be brave about this too because what she’s going to say is going to hurt her when she’s already hurting so much. “That’s just one day, Pink, that’s just what one day with you is worth to me. That’s what was taken from you, every day you were here. Ten years is… If you counted each day like that as just a second, it would take an hour.”

And Fiona knows enough to say ‘to me’. It’s not just an expression of love, but it is that. There is indisputable, inarguable value in what we give to others - and we must have at least that much value if we can give it.

It’s unhealthy to keep down that path, to only see our value that way. But… In here? She has to make a stronger case than eight days that contradict her. Then an hour’s worth of seconds worth of days after that.

Then Fiona starts counting. One second a second. It feels slow bordering on excruciating because she's being measured, but the worst part is actually how fast the seconds come and that this would still take an hour.

“One”

“Two”

“Three”

“Four”

“Five”

“Six”

“Seven”

“Eight”

Hazel:

Her eyes go wide. “That’s where I was going wrong. It doesn’t have to be big it has to be-” she tosses the napkins away in disgust and looks around the convention hall for inspiration. No. None of this will do. “My room. 17 on the third floor. Do you need me to write it-” She looks up at Yellow. “Right.”

Then she’s off, high over the crowd and towards the exit hall, wings twisting on their tilt rotors with an organic flex that drives her like a dragonfly. It is insanely, lethally dangerous if you think about the forces involved but the fae is so perfectly correct that nobody ever will, not even her.

The door is open for you when you make it up there, six suitcases spilled across the floor filled with props and dresses and styles and aesthetics in different moods and seasons, steampunk and cybernetic and neon and spring and summer and autumn and winter and fire and ice. All different ways to look like her true self.

The rough on her fingers is wired into the display of the big hotel TV screen, and she sketches a dragon that has borrowed human shape to walk among her subjects.

Her feet never touch the ground. Hazel has drawn it with a disconcerting effect, not like the dragon is lifted but that her feet are perfectly flat as she levitates like she is held up by no force but simply rejects the premise of ground, flying so low as to be unnoticable but creating an uncanny, hindbrain ‘what the fuck’ feeling until you notice what you’re noticing.

The eyes are organic and serpentine. The flesh is solid gold, and while its real material value isn’t what it used to be the cultural aspect of it remains pure. Every seam in the body is hidden, and the metal would move like liquid. Hazel sculpts her naked, with a warriors build - the metal-to-flesh with the treatment of renaissance marble sculptures, that uncanny impression of life in unliving material that is both and neither. She doesn’t bother suggesting clothing or she’d be here all night on that, her suitcases are a testament to that, drapery is left to Yellow’s imagination.

This is a body that says; I do not fear disloyalty, it would only mean I would have to kill you myself.

It’s an impression that goes beyond the morality of power and simply into the nature of it. Was krakatoa evil for its eruption? Was the asteroid that wiped all life on Earth evil for is impact? It is without malice and cruelty. It is simply an unstoppable authority.

“The thrust would have to be completely silent for the effect to work.” Hazel says of it. “And no light, either. Your shadow being wrong is going to be a big part of the effect of it.”

Maybe someone else would hesitate, even a moment, at the implication of thinking this is what was being asked of her. The work is simply too pure for Hazel to care.

Black

He wordlessly arrives at the train station and moves to the sideline, where a private railcar waits for him. Serino’s company made this one, actually, Blue might have liked it - the entire personal pod is made of one-way black mirror in the aerodynamic shape of a droplet, stylized with rippling fins and vanes of rainbow that give the entire pod the impression of being a prince-rupert’s-drop made of obsidian glass. He has staff waiting for him at the pod, a guard and a valet.

Just like the weakness in opsec represented by picking the sushi bar because it was the good place nearby, some mistakes are made to visit old friends to reassure them in crisis with our presence. That’s the only thing this could mean.

How do you tail a public railcar without a booking, with private and protected destination logging? There are ways, but as for a direct chase you might as well attempt to tail a private plane by trying to book an economy flight at the same airport.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Black:

Honestly, reasonable. It’s just an operational hazard with this kind of short shelf-life equipment. It was supposed to last longer than that, you couldn’t know the exact moment you’d need to turn on, sometimes this is just how it goes.

It wouldn’t have done much better anyway. She stays there for a long time, a very long time, as normal, as if nothing happened. It’s not until her official lunch break she moves again and you can move with her.

She goes out to lunch at a sushi bar just outside the SES campus. It’s a little bit of sloppiness but also it’s the only 4.95/5 reviewed restaurant for a very long walk, and sometimes it’s the little things that break opsec. Besides, a longer password doesn’t give more protection when it’s still read off the post-it on your monitor.

It’s a face to face meeting. The man is even older than her.

His face is visibly shaped by the skull underneath - not in the literally true way it applies to all humans, but rarely do you look at someone’s face and see the shape of the bone and think of the bone. The skin and muscle are thick enough to conceal it, just so obviously in the shape of what they’re concealing. Wide, owl-like eye sockets and a narrow jaw where the mouth meets his cheekbones at almost right-angles.

He’s dressed in a tight blue polo shirt and khakis, with comfortable brown loafers. Despite having to be in his eighties he looks like he’s in better shape than most guys in their thirties. He looks like he’s just finished manning a sailboat.

No words are exchanged. They eat their lunch together in silence, and when he pays he pays far too much. The correction of several decimal points - oops, grandpa moment - is put back onto Moriarty’s card instead.

And then they leave in silence.

Him. Tail him. How?

Hazel:

“What makes it a dragon to you?” She falls to the ground and folds her wings. She doesn’t want to be in the air for this, she wants two feet planted on the ground, but every landing is another chance to take off again. “It’s not just the shape, the form. A puppet isn’t worth my time.” She smirks like it’s a secret shared between you that she knows it’s not worth yours either, now. “We’re talking about se-e-erious rocketry to get the power for flight that scale, and you can either disguise or incorporate it. Actually-”

She leaps into the air like a tossed javelin and aims herself for the fast food stands. It takes a while to catch up to her. She’s almost finished drawing on four napkins when you’re there, all glued together with dabs of ketchup at the edges. It’s a dragon that incorporates the main thruster as the curve of its spine, down and out over the tail. Vents down from the legs and forelimbs give it directed vertical thrust.

Didn’t Crystal do something like this once? For White?

It’s obviously mechanical, with absolutely no pretense of biology or hiding the nature of its flight. The head is a sleek, spaceship-hull muzzle. Instead of eyes, it has a visor in the shape of a viewing screen. Like the mind inside is a piloting crew looking out.

The rest is incredibly loose in detail, no specific decisions made for the limbs themselves, or the tail, it’s just these two details she’s focused on for now and shows Yellow. “Like, this is what I mean, if you don’t conceal it. If it doesn’t have to be hidden, then there’s no illusion to spoil and we can go a lot harder on the raw power. With a good enough cut of meat, the only thing you should do when cooking with it is salt it.”

She looks down at the napkin, frustrated. “I wouldn’t use this one, obviously. I ended up liking the face, but it’s just to show you what I mean. I can do better, but I’m just stuck on…” She scratches her wrist like a junkie. “I can’t use visual reference because they’d only tell me what it can’t look like. It needs to be recognizable for the purity of the idea. Tell me what a dragon is, without using a single word that describes what it looks like.”

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Fiona:

Let’s talk about the Great Gatsby and mental illness, but for completely different reasons.

So that rich people peninsula in the Great Gatsby where the mansion is, the garden parties, all that? Based on a real place, early 20th century New York gated community of the richest people in the country. People like Rockefeller, Vanderbilt and Carnegie were all shoulder-to-shoulder neighbours there. They owned the entire landmass leading to what would become long beach, and they built a golf course on it there.

Children of these magnates would go on to say that a busy day on that course meant seeing a single other living person on it. These people weren’t golfers, but they maintained it at huge expense, dredging swamp, maintaining grass, designing everything. Millions of dollars project between them. Why? Well. The previous owner of that land had no heirs to leave it to, and it nearly went into public trust. The golf course was just there to prevent the land being used for anything else, despite the now-still swamp water causing an endless blight of mosquitos.

That was fine, the heir being interviewed said. Their parents said, actual quote; “Better the mosquitos than poor people.”

This, I think, sets the scene for how much John Snake-in-the-Eye’s neighbours hate him, and how much righteous joy he gets out of that. There is no man happier than a man with moral clarity and the right enemy.

That’s why this has to be an infiltration, with Fiona. There’s evidence all over of John’s war with his neighbours. It’s not just the animals having their own war, no, these people don’t just fight with lawyers. They fight with “private investigators”, which can be anything from a bloodless private journalist to former intelligence services agents with more hawaiian shirts than morals.

A lot of these guys are con artists, finding sheltered clients who will believe a handsome looking rough guy who can shovel impressive sounding bullshit. The kind of guy who Tropic Thunder parodies as their Vietnam expert, giving lines like “I don’t know this gun by name, I just recognize it by the sound it makes when it takes a man’s life”. These people love that stuff, but it’s wrong to chalk their clients up as gullible for it. The grift works on them so often because these people are in Zeus looking for excuses to justify their view of how dangerous the real world is, that it’s something worth hiding from. John’s neighbours aren’t idiots, they’re just a sucker for a moral narrative that vindicates them; they’ll grasp at anything they can get . These con artists take the money, write a fake novel sitting at a bar, and take it back and call it intelligence.

If that’s all that was going on you’d have nothing to worry about, I’m just saying that because it’s the case often enough that the information might be useful. No, the Everest mansion actually has protected itself against the real kind of infiltrator, the good kind. The kind of operator that Black would respect as an enemy.

Fiona’s mostly got this. Pink is, for the most part, physically safe while she’s led by the lace around her wrists. That’s not the danger.

She’s physically safe when Fiona puts her on her back to shimmy her up a tall tree, safe when Fiona fires a tether crossbow at the second floor balcony of the mansion, entirely carried over the heads of the wolves and to the unlocked door on the second floor.

That’s when the problems start.

See, John Snake-in-the-Eye is a kind of take matters into his own hands sort. The Everest mansion has been sort of… Home Alone’d? Given the Kevin McAllister treatment? Spring-loaded cricket bats in the walls, false floor tiles that lead to single sharpened wicket punji spikes covered in… fluids. A gunpowder-launched clothesline on the corner of the first turn that acts as the blade action of a giant mousetrap, nylon hanging wires turning into a human-sized egg-slicer.

None of that’s dangerous to you though, because it’s absolutely fucking Looney Toons and Fiona’s in charge of navigating you through it and she does. It’s ramshackle because all these things are so deeply illegal that John couldn’t hire anyone to make it for him, so he did it himself with parts dragged over from his old place. None of his victims can afford to be honest about what they were doing, it’s always settled out of court.

This is where we talk about mental illness.

All that stuff about Pink seeing this place deeper instinct, not seeing it? Yeah she can’t do that now. It’s not just that this place has changed, it’s that this place has become dangerous.

This is the difference between PTSD and CPTSD. PTSD is the first layer of trauma reaction you get, something happens that fucks you up badly enough it leaves a scar - just like body scars they can heal differently based on how messy the wound was and how well it gets treated. Some don’t heal at all, others fade unnoticed into invisibility.

CPTSD though is the next one, and here the scar metaphor falls apart. There is no analogy for being scarred by your scarring, to be cut over the first wound in a way that multiplies them together that makes sense. We have to speak of this thing literally, as it is.

It’s when you have more traumatic incidents after the initial scarring where your learned PTSD behaviour isn’t enough to protect you - or maybe it even put you in a worse situation. The mind starts having a trauma response to its trauma response, its PTSD triggers its PTSD. The mind becomes scared of its own reaction to its coping mechanisms. It destroys itself. It cannot feel safe and trying to make itself safe puts it in danger.

This is where we get into the really bad kind of mental illness. This shit is where we get into the Things I Will Not Work With blog of psychology. Not all CPTSD is built the same, but if we're talking about the kind of repression Pink is, then-

The mind destroying itself in these circumstances is not a universal experience. Each self-destruction is precious and fragile like a burning snowflake. For some it feels like being shunted right back into the corner of our mind, like you’re put in a safe room in the back of your head watching out, locked out of the controls. For others it feels like your mind is an animal caught in a beartrap trying to gnaw its own leg off to escape, but the leg that it’s trying to gnaw off is the vulnerable physical body that it’s grown terrified to be in, that it can’t protect and wants no truck with.

I can’t say what that feels like for Pink.

What I can say is that 3D familiar interior for her is a coping mechanism of everything she’s repressed and is repressing. It’s a safety thing for her to not have to think about any of this, process any of her feelings about this place.

No. That doesn’t work now. She has to look and see this place and search it for the unfamiliar, because while Fiona is protecting her, who is protecting Fiona?

(Isn’t it funny how that works out? That’s a CPTSD thing too, if you didn’t know, a protective mechanism is to simply not care about our own wellbeing because we can’t afford to anymore. But we will always care about you. For you the safety comes off and we have to feel again. Because we love you like we cannot love ourselves anymore.)

(Even when we are so far gone we cannot feel that love anymore we know how precious it is because we can imagine the grief of losing you and we live in that moment as if you are already gone and it hurts more than dying and the thought of dying no longer hurts please I’m so alone when I’m with you I can’t imagine how alone I’d be without you I can’t do this anymore but I have to, I have to.)

(I’m sorry)

Pink it’s… This is going to break you. Not permanently, not as badly as the word ‘break’ implies. There are softer ways to break, and gentle ways to be broken.

It’s not enough to see the traps, you have to look for them, prepare for them, see if Fiona’s missed anything. But they’re disguised, hidden, in ambush. If you want to know you can see them-

She will get hurt because of you she is here because of you she loves you and you got her killed she’s already dead because you fucked this up you fucked this up you fucked this up and she died for you didn’t ask her to

You need to know what places are supposed to look like. Really remember how they were. Remember what’s changed. Open your eyes Pink.

Not as they are now, but then. Open the eyes you shut back then and see through them so you can protect her now from your selfish fucking stupid party it wasn’t worth this.

Fiona is already dead and she hums Genesis 3:23 by the Mountain Goats, a band from 60 years ago that still has some minor popularity among hyper-literate internet weirdos like teenage girls still wore The Smith band shirts then and everyone in those bands is long dead and she sings the dead words to herself so low under her breath she doesn’t think Pink can hear her, but she can.

She wants good things for her. She smiles, and pulls the ribbons.

“I knew this was going to be fun, I had no idea it was going to be this fun.” She says. “You’re being quiet. How are you holding up?” She says. “Pink?”

Pink how do you tell her the past is superimposed onto the future and you feel what was never safe for you to feel? How do you tell her that you can’t stop seeing it no matter how hard you try and that’s not, that’s not figurative you can’t see the walls as they are in front of you except in their differences, in the parts where the changes are dangerous to her, in the parts you need to see now for her to be safe.

Because that’s the thing. You’re looking for danger and the most dangerous thing you can recognize here is your past. You’re not going to be able to stop seeing it until you understand how to make someone safe from it.

And then will she be fixed? Jesus Christ, no. Fuck, no, are you kidding me? God. I’m sorry, no.

That’s what it takes to get her through the corridor and into the mansion. You’re still only ten steps out from the balcony door.

This is doable. You’ve already survived this once, you already know it’s possible. This isn’t, this won’t… I’m trying to work out how to put this. This will keep happening as long as you’re here, as long as there are rooms and as long as there are reasons to trigger you. John Snake-in-the-Eye has been thorough.

You can’t do the party, though, without seeing this and figuring it out. You cannot perform your exorcism without facing your demons.

Don’t get trapped in your own head in this. You have someone here; Talk to her. She’ll help you. She will. I promise she will, I promise.

This isn’t your fault. You’re broken but it isn’t your fault. We can fix this, just, I promise we can fix this, but you can’t hide from this anymore because if you do you can’t tell her what’s broken and if you can’t tell her what’s broken then she can’t help fix you and if you’re not fixed then she’ll die and it’ll be your fault because you need to be able to SEE through these fucking ghosts in your eyes.

This is the scariest thing you have ever done in your life so be brave even though it’s hard. Even though telling her how broken you are might make her not trust you to save her and she’ll die and it’ll be your fault it won’t though. It won’t, it’s not your fault. Trust her.

Fiona hugs Pink tight, and cups the back of her head with a hand and pulls Pink’s head tight into where her neck meets her shoulder and cradles it. “Hey.” She says. “Hey, hey. You don’t have to be okay, right now.” She says. “She’s dead. She can’t hurt you anymore. And even if she wasn’t, I wouldn’t let her. We’re never going to let anyone hurt you like that ever again.”

And in her private thoughts Fiona thinks she’d cut and run with Pink right now, if it wasn’t for the party, because the party is the closest way she can think of to kill a bitch that’s already dead.

And if she hides it well enough Pink never has to know angry she is right now., because Pink could blame herself for it, for being the reason she’s here. Because the anger comes when she looks at Pink, but it’s not at Pink. She can’t help that in the contour of her bruises she sees the shape of the fist.

It’s fine, she has so many other feelings right now to smother her anger under. Anger holds nothing for the survivors, it’s not for them.

“I love you, okay?” She says. “I love you.”

…

…

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Fiona:

It’s Fiona waiting for Pink outside the elevator, when she next comes back to the room. Wild eyed, covered in cake, and holding a large knife.

“I missed you, yesterday.” Is all she says.

She’s unhurt but changed from the experience of the dining room. Wild-eyed and inspired. The gunpowder in the Christmas baubles? Incredible. The nerve gas in the humidifier? Beautiful how it sparkled in the air like that, Fiona was grateful she checked the bins for all the labels she could find before she went in there. Hollowing out all the chairs with a file to install landmines in all the seats?

Well, Pink couldn’t get landmines, they were all hand-drawn pictures of landmines for now, but it was clearly the thought that counted. Especially when Fiona didn’t know it was only going to be the pictures when she cut the chairs back open. Give her a few minutes to come down from it all, and she’ll gush about it.

The cake was surprisingly easy to defuse, actually, for artistic reasons. The candles themselves were sticks of thermite made from ground-down metal filings of pieces of the kitchen oven and aluminium foil run through a herb grater. Incredibly safe to pluck out, and deal with the core explosives after, safe without their fuse.

The hardest part was resisting the urge to light the candles. Seriously, that was actually the hardest part for her. She loved this.

She shakes her head and hop-skips to the kitchen to drop the knife in the sink. “Crystal’s busy today, she says she hopes it’s obvious how much she wishes she wasn’t. But she filled me in on as much as she could.” Then she goes to the bedroom, and comes back with a gray turtleneck and cargo pants on a hook, the pockets bulging with their pre-filled goodies. “She says that the first thing one must do for a big event like this is scout the location, make sure it’s a good fit, get a sense for what you can do. See if it inspires anything last minute, like the big window did for her here.” Fiona shrugs. “I’m butchering it, but you know. That’s the idea.”

She pauses on her way to the bathroom, and sticks her head back out the bathroom door behind her. “You want a shower before we head out? I don’t want to rush this, but it’d be nice to get back here before 5pm. If that’s not enough time, we can always go back.”

She never says “to the Everest mansion”. It’s too obvious to her for her she thinks she has to.

White and Yellow:

You know in 2023 how there were those furry costume makers who just went absolutely insane on the mechanical aspects of costumes, stuff that really blinked, stuff that mimicked wolf leg walks, wings that really beat? The closest real word to it is puppeteering, but I actually rather like Disney’s ‘imagineering’ to describe it.

Yeah, so, in sixty years from now, those people get access to the same kind of tools Blue was getting told about, charcoal looms and glass and all other sorts.

The world is not so neat as to fold neatly along the lines that would give you a second unicorn, one made of fire and steel in oppositional contrast to Crystal’s warm flesh and blood. Well, it’s not so neat as to give you that this time. Such a thing would feel a little too neat, anyway.

That’s fine though. Yellow’s heart is still clear here. A cybernetic unicorn wouldn’t have been nearly so interesting a decision, what, use the horn as an antenna for drones? Something like that? Something is betrayed in that aesthetic by making the horn a whimsical way to hide a practical consideration.

Yellow will instead be casting her lot among the fae to make her deal.

Hazel was born with a genetic condition that stunted her growth significantly, but genetic treatment had already come a long way. She didn’t opt for traditional treatment though, from a young age she wanted to be a fairy like many little girls do. And her parents allowed her this modification to her treatment, thinking that if she ever - pardon the phrase - grew out of it, it would be reversible. Getting larger is much easier than getting smaller with these things.

She never did. Still only as tall as Yellow’s hip but with rail-thin proportions, Hazel grew fixated on making herself real wings. It wasn’t enough for her to wear costume pieces, to just be small and peppy and costumed. There’s an engineering term, AM/FM, which means ‘actual machines’ versus ‘fucking magic’ as the difference between what’s promised in a white paper and what’s actually implementable in reality. Hazel has a tattoo in moss green ink down her right forearm instead: AM:FM. Actual machines make fucking magic.

Her fairy wings beat like dragonfly wings, and she hovers and she soars and she sups from the crowd like she’s drinking nectar from flowers. The cowling that protects them is done in sculpted glass, to protect their delicate internal membrane without sacrificing anything of the illusion. She powers them with strips of graphene battery packs, arranged as blue-green faery fire tattoos that cover her entire body - the tradeoff of keeping them so skintight is needing to maximize surface area, but again she just makes that another part of the look.

Hazel Belle-Fleur is not in costume. She even folds her wings on her back to sleep, designed them so she can lie on them indefinitely without breaking them, because in the moments between changes of outfit, in the minutes she takes to change her batteries, she feels amputated. Severed.

This is all superficial, though. This is her sleeve, and all the heart that’s worn on it. When White and Yellow approach her now, what is in her voice and her words that makes her… perfect?

[Out of character; it wouldn’t be a proper deal with the fae if you didn’t give me a voice that I might steal it. Happy to workshop this, I can think of plenty, but as she’s replacing Blue’s role I enjoy being more collaborative in implementation before I steal her back. First blood all yours]

Knightly:

Of course it had to be him. He’s been rehearsing this.

Microbead camera-bugs are doable, but problematic. Like, signals and transmitters and lenses all got good enough that a camera the size of a dew drop can send its raw feed to Black’s phone and get as clear a picture as a 2023 phone camera can at around 5x zoom. Which is nothing to sneeze at when you’re using an aperture that tiny.

The problem is that battery tech didn’t get better enough to support it how you’d want, it’s only got between half an hour of up-time. That and there’s no storage because it’s just junking its signal as soon as it sends it, no storage. This thing’s only good for being used when you know exactly when you need it, and when you’re a few rooms away at the most.

That’s fine, that’s all you need. You can’t get into her office, can’t risk more than a walk past. But a pretend pick and flick lands the camera on a bookshelf through a crack in the door. You’ve already made your plans for it to be retrieved after, by someone else, haven’t you?

So there’s Black, in the bike storage area of building 1D, directly under the office. Still in signal range. It’s dark down there, intentionally low-lit to make it harder to identify the bikes from one another and malicious tampering or targeting. At the absolute lowest threshold of what is considered the legal minimum of lighting. Carry a vape pen in one hand, your phone in the other, and nobody will ever be suspicious of you for loitering here. It’s like how a plant growing in the middle of an office is suspicious until it’s in a plant pot, and then it’s invisible - a thing in its rightful place.

The feed shows Moriarty’s office and of course it’s a British ministerial old wooden style office. What is it with these smarter-than-you rich assholes and wood as a status symbol? This one actually is forested from Gaea to meet demand, but it’s not a sustainable practice. Water is a mineral you have to mine as much as aluminum or iron out here. It’s just a way to say…

Well, actually, that’s what it is, isn’t it? IIt’s saying: I maintain my chain of authority from the old world. I am the Roman administrator in Londinium. I refuse that the empire has fallen, for I am still here. We shall keep it alive in its traditions, and first of its traditions is to venerate me.

Some people just like wood, because wood’s pretty. It’s great. But do you think someone like Moriarty or Rudy would so enshrine themselves in it for that surface level aesthetic? Nah. They wear their offices with it like an Oxford tie.

Knightly enters without knocking, dressed in his jacket again, his sign of the old world. Of the collapse. The symbol of the people that had to deal with the fallout of the breakage. Neither of them intended this symbolism in their conflict, but it’s that subconscious draw to these symbols that makes their conflict inevitable.

Knightly: “I want Colon and Gomez, and I want you to pay me their cut for taking them.”

Through the lens, Moriarty looks up. Gaunt, hollow-cheeked and gold-wire glasses with permanently pursed lips coated in flaking red lipstick.

Moriarty: “Cut?”

Knightly: “You’re paying them off. Caldwell, Crane and Casey might be true believers, but I know you’re paying Guy Colon and Hermione Gomez, and I know they’re pissed, and I know that’s becoming a liability for you.”

Moriarty: “Is that what your skulking has been about? Aaron, we’ve been worried about you. These… paranoid delusions, they are not the sign of a sound or stable mind. The promotion has clearly been too much pressure on you, you weren’t ready yet.”

Knightly: “I can’t… come out and say anything against you yet, and you know it. But I’ve been talking to the both of them, and they’re actually talking to me when they didn’t before.”

Through the camera, Moriarty lowers the lid of the laptop she’s typing on, just slightly, and sits up straighter. Not on purpose. Her attention is more than she can hide, now.

Knightly: “I think a limited hangout would be the best for the both of us. You give them to me, and I’ll keep them in my little conspiracy, stop them going to those journalists that have been going around. That helps me too, I… Honestly, I’m disgusted by all of this. The shame of whatever it is your doing would stain my beloved SES for years, years from now.”

The most plausible lies are the truth. If you didn’t already know that Knightly planned on breaking this anyway, you’d never be able to suspect it. It’s going to crush him to help you, but it’s not as important to him as doing the right thing.

Moriarty: “You don’t know what you’re asking.”

Knightly: “No, I don’t. But they’ll tell me what they were getting either way, soon. This is just… for their protection too.”

Moriarty: “Protection?”

Knightly: “We do a limited hangout. You know that I can keep the lid on them, they think it’s because I’m protecting them from reprisal, and you get to cut loose agents you can’t afford to pay before they defect in some way that’s worse for you than this. We both win.”

Moriarty closes her laptop completely, checks and double checks her door is closed, and casually cleans her desk, as if for any other kind of bug than the one she’s actually checking for.

Moriarty: “These are the paranoid delusions of a man cracking under the pressure. I have humoured you long enough. I’m putting you on one week paid medical leave.”

Her eyes dart up as she emphasizes paid, and she tugs an earlobe. It’s a smart play by her. She wants him off-site, but the punishment will increase his legitimacy to the agents she’s cutting.

Knightly: “I- No. Maybe you’re right. Maybe the time off will be good for me. Just, you know… ever since the Godard Pump…”

Moriarty: “Of course, of course. The damage to Erebus has been taxing on us all, and to fall into your position in the middle of it…”

Knightly: “I hope we do find out just how much was broken, in the end.”

The camera dies, fizzles, feed out. You don’t see what happens after that, but it seemed like the end of the conversation anyway.

Might as well make sure he’s okay when you enact your quick plan to retrieve the bug you set up before. But then what?

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink:

Just, hypothetically speaking, what’s the biggest obstacle to getting the Everest mansion? The third of the sisters has it - the one who kept out of the power plays of her siblings. She’s barely upper middle class, the theft will be simple bordering on trivial.

The mansion though - is it occupied? Abandoned and used for storage? Being used as a reptile sanctuary?

Fiona:

She stands at the caution tape. “This isn’t as dangerous as it looks, is it?”

Crystal looks up from her coffee at the kitchen bench. “Hmm? No, of course it isn’t.”

“Right.” Fiona nods. “So it’s way worse than it looks.”

“I’m grateful you understood my little joke before I had to chase after you in a flak vest, I’d have looked ghastly in it.”

“So what do we… what are we supposed to do about it?”

“Well,” Crystal covers her mouth with her coffee even though Fiona isn’t looking at her. “I thought you might like the practice. It would be nice if you could appreciate how intricate it all is, and tell Pink what you think of it?”

Fiona dipped into the kitchen to grab a knife to cut the caution tape with. “There’s a genuine chance this kills me, isn’t there?”

“Please, we both know you’re better than that.”

Fiona stared at the knife with a frown. No, this would not be good enough to cut the cake with - the most explosive cake in at least a several kilometer radius. “You say it’ll make Pink happy?”

“Ecstatic.”

That settled it then. “Yet still more than death, I fear a life unlived. Lemme just find my wire cutters.”

“Jewelry box, second drawer.”

“Love you.”

White:

Okay, so first there’s a question of approach.

There’s three ways to go about this. The first is to try and recruit one of the cyberneticist exhibitors directly. This is going to be a go-hard-or-go-home artist type larger than life personality, this route goes loud. If she goes this route, how does White go in to this showing she’s worthy of their time?

The second way is to go backstage and look through the technical crews for someone who’s making the exhibition work. This gets you closer to the pre-Mythbusters Adam Savage and Jamie Hynemans of Aevum, someone who might not be as temperamental and have their own things going on but are still going to be cool and useful people to know. In which case, it’s about what White’s doing to move herself backstage to look for someone worth pulling.

The third is to mingle around the crowds and look for the amateurs and enthusiasts watching the exhibitions, the old guys like Serino who’ve come looking at this event like it’s a trade show. This would be the absolute complete wildcard, backshed inventors, weirdo hobbyists, corporate connections and the untested students still looking for their first industry jobs.

Even when we decide to let the wind carry us how it may, we must set our sails.

Black:

This is just a faultline you’re going to be able to leverage - the question is how you leveraged it.

One thing becomes immediately obvious just with this casual level of surveillance - pulling Rudy out of their ecosystem has deeply fucked things up. The money guy is not someone who can be trivially replaced, it’s a fulcrum point of absolute trust and absolute talent. Replacing him with someone who only has one or the other is even more disastrous than leaving the system in emergency autopilot.

It shows in how people are being way more slack about opsec than you’d expect, the way people are when it’s a month of late paycheques and now its their employers problem if they speak openly about it, not theirs. The people lower down the org chart, the mere assistant associate deputy administrators, are getting tetchy.

They won’t say what they’re tetchy about directly, no, they don’t let things leak. But they will make frustrated and catty comments with each other whose cause is only obvious to those already in the know. You overhear it at lunches, through bugs, through casually being in the right place at the right time following the mailroom trolley (people still order things online in 2080).

There are a lot of loyalties here that stay solid because they were made for free, and a lot of problems caused by loyalties that didn’t need to be bought, but were worth the money when the money was available. Now it’s not.

Rudy didn’t pay these people directly though. It’s money paid to Moriarty that has to filter down, so if they’re pissed about that, they’re pissed about her.

I’m being scarce on the details here because I think it’ll be more interesting to ask Black; Did she learn this in a way she could immediately exploit it in the heat of the moment it happened in? Or is she planning on a longer game with this?

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Spearmint:

At some point the bed does get pulled back down from the wall, and the headboard can keep a beat you can curl your toes to. The shower is accessible with all the cases dragged away from it, and the dreadful heat can be relieved. It turns out you can settle a disagreement and still enjoy getting chewed out for it.

One night, just one night before she has to move on.

In the morning, it’s going to be people carrying real instruments on shoulder straps and slings that help her move. A leopard with a keytar slung over his back, a cheetah with a bass guitar. Catch the hep cats, slick? Still. Chaka’s organized, she’s got help, she’s got a backup and she’s got a cover. The instrument cases really do fade into invisibility when they’re being carried by a real band. After all, anyone who points them out might be volunteered into helping carry them.

“Don’t take it personally, but I’m not going to say where we’re going when we go.” She tells Spearmint the morning after, before she has to be Green again. “I’m sure you’d find me if you really wanted to, anyway.” Her head’s telling her she’s being safe. Her heart’s telling her it’d be fun to get chased.

“Think I figured out how to find you too, but I wouldn’t count on it.” She pulls Spearmint across the mattress and rolls her to face the wall, so she can hold her tight like a seatbelt and scratch her ribs. “Your playing’s rusty, I think you need to be more serious about your practicing. You getting enough in?”

What was that? A cover to bluff about being able to find you later, an excuse if she can’t? A goad, to make you try to impress her? A genuine criticism made playfully? It would be so much easier to get a read on it if her claws didn’t feel so wonderful when she said it.

Honestly though, it’d make sense if it were just true, considering this would be a first time without Blue, and all that entails. Would that have been enough to throw you?

[Whether it’s true or not, Chaka’s saying this with the intent to fluster her, not to hurt her. There’s a risk of this coming off as a worse kind of negging because it’s based on information about Spearmint I don’t know yet - so I will reveal that whether the part about Spearmint is correct or not, the part about not finding her later is absolutely because she is bluffing about knowing how to find her. She seriously doubts Spearmint would tell her if she asked, so she’s being a cat about it to avoid rejection.]

Crystal:

Crystal’s asleep when she finishes, though the unicorn tried her hardest. When Pink finds her, the other side of the bed is still open for her place in it, and on the sheets has been placed a printed and hand-bound copy of a very old book that has been out of print for over a hundred years, but still circulates the internet in ancient .pdfs.

The Anarchists Cookbook, signed with pink lipstick.

The Next Morning:

The SES investigation starts back up again. Is it the same team working this job today, and if so, how do they approach it again? Like, physically, how do they physically approach getting back into position for this so they can get the information they’re owed.

The Costa-Silva article goes live, now. Pope’s 12,000 word piece is thorough and devastating, cross referenced, cited, a mix of gumshoe on-the-ground investigation and the higher abstractions that result. The Anthropozine tends to favour the gonzo, but Pope’s Olympia work reads more like Michael Lewis at his best.

This, this will help.

He posts another article to the Anthropozine instead, for Red. It’s much shorter and much more personal. Here.

The Lion, the Snitch and the Wardrobe

Isn’t it just the strangest thing? Remarkable. Here I was, all dressed up and ready to hang this man from a cross when I find all the heavy lifting has been done for me. What makes this so remarkable is that being there to see it happen only served to slow me down. I had to transition from the physical into the digital, if you’ll pardon my lateness for it, and it seems that by the time I’d kicked off my shoes to write… Well, now, how can I write an opinion piece when everyone already has an opinion that they’ve made up their mind on?

If I am to say anything, then, it will have to be something I can only add from the experience of someone who was actually there. Do not mistake me for saying that I will contradict the evidence of so many eyewitness accounts and so many video recordings of the matter, for I cannot do that and will not attempt to try. There is nothing I can say that will teach you anything new about those moments you cannot better learn elsewhere, through their objective record. I can only add to the pool of collective knowledge by telling you more of what I know from before the cameras started recording, and of what happened later.

To dispel some of the nastier rumours; No, I do not believe the Dragon was attempting to kidnap our man the Governor. I have it on good authority her taste lies instead in the taking of fair maidens, as befits any dragon of proper stature, and a fair maiden the Governor most certainly is not. I think he would find any insinuation to be libelous to say the least. The statements put out by the Governor’s press office paint a terrifying picture of a frogmarch through the darkness and away from his embattled security service. While such may be true from the perspective of the Governor and I would dare not call him a liar for this account, I will tell you now that his escort never once left the confines of a crowd of witnesses. Missing from his version of events is that he was brought to heel not by a fear of his safety, but for the fear he had been recognized.

The simple fact of the matter is that the Governor was caught acting suspiciously in a crowd he sought to belong in, and told on himself when he couldn’t. He, or at least his press office, claims at once he was prejudicially targeted and that he was outed by a random act of violence from the crowd. These two things cannot be simultaneously true. It is agreed that before the events the Governor’s disguise was not known, and we find no other accounts of violence at the event. The unflattering truth of the matter is that the Governor’s disguise was thwarted by his overt hatred, something the fabric of his costume was incapable of hiding, and such was the basis to target him regardless of his identity.

If the Governor himself was the only source that needed clarification on this matter I would find it understandable as he is the one who benefits from people lacking a clear record of events. The most to lose from people having a genuinely clear understanding of what happened. What I find most disappointing is that I am also compelled to dispel the accounts of liberal allies who would otherwise condemn the Governor and everything he stands for, but will instead stand with him to defend him from the very people he endangers. To them I have to ask; What good are your principles if they would bring you into an alliance with Joseon?

Did you not think it odd that, surrounded by witnesses, not one stood up to the physical defense of Governor Joseon against only a single aggressor, a young-seeming girl at that? A crowd with at least several wonderful and empathetic people I can personally account for. I should hope so, I was one of those people who made no motion in the Governor’s defense.

I will drop my glib facade a moment and I pray that you will help me pick it back up in a moment, because I will need it back again. Thank you for allowing me to be so blunt as this; This man came into my house. This man brought his filth and his hatred and his evil into my home. How could you dare wring your hands about how he was told he would kill himself when this man has demonstrably, provably and gleefully created law that has led dozens to that end? Why? Because one is something tangible you can see, and the other so intellectually abstracted? That’s not a principled position, that’s moral incoherence.

For many it is justified by how scared they are of violence and vigilantism, scared that this will lead to worse. I find this fascinating, because that remit, that order, must have been backdated months. The police have already been acting as if this were the case, and the withdrawal of legitimate state protection is what necessitates such vigilante protectionism in our spaces. If that is the nature of your fear then it is Governor Joseon and others like him that lit the petard that hoisted him today.

We tried it another way, we tried an exercise of community and safety today, we had something that was truly ours. And at its shining moment, during the beautiful speech of the organizer who made this possible, I had my reverie interrupted by this man’s hateful, evil garbage spewing into my ear from the darkness. My one consolation was knowing that it was that very hatred in that place that would destroy him, and here instead I find some of you trying to make a martyr of him, as if he is entitled to the political power that he uses to persecute these very people. What defense do they have from him, outside these walls?

The truth was what truly wounded him, and must be allowed to destroy him. That truth I do not need to elaborate on, because the Dragon herself said it so well, of which there is already an objective account. I can only say that her truth cannot be invalidated because it was delivered with a blow to the stomach or a hand held to the stuff of the neck.

I will not mince my words: Get this man the fuck out of my house.

Every suicide and murder due to this stochastic terrorism is the burning of a photo album that now never was. There is no money nor compensation that can ever make that whole, the only protection we are afforded is eviction. Eviction from a space he would see razed, even as he longs to be a part of it. The coward would commit arson upon my home, a home he is scared to share in, and the man who must live in the fire has no sympathy for the man who is afraid of it.

I apologize for that. If you will forgive me for getting so heated around the fire metaphors, and help me pick my glib facade back up again? I think it’s more comfortable for us both if I am to mantle myself in it for what I am about to say. I won’t overstay my welcome further than this.

I share in your fears of escalating violence and understand why you would condemn this, I promise you that. I wish such a matter were as simple as refuting violence altogether before it can escalate. But you cannot prevent an explosion of pressure by plugging the holes from which it vents. You cannot condemn the leaks. You must instead shut off the boiling.

Anyone who condemns the violence against the Governor today misses the point. No, it is not enough to condemn the Governor in the same breath and call for order on both sides. One side holds one of the most powerful men in public office with a professional security team, on the other was an angry girl with costume wings. There is no equivalency here.

To condemn the girl is to condemn the whistle of a kettle without removing the kettle from the heat. It is to fail to understand that the heat is the source of the noise since the heat itself is silent until it creates a symptom we find unpleasant. We must address the cause of this unpleasant symptom, to silence it is to fail to be warned. It is to fail to understand that for the kettle to start whistling, it has to have already been boiling in silence for a long time. We must ask how we remove the vessel of Aevum from the heat before there is a far worse spillover.

To stand with the Governor is to stand with the explosion I fear may be coming.

Sophie:

Oxytoxin: Blood
Oxytoxin: That was obviously you
Oxytoxin: You’re not a fucking android like an android so if it looked like you it was you so don’t even try
Oxytoxin: Do you need a place to lie low?

Okay, she must really like you like, really like you because otherwise she’d be ghosting you harder than she’s ghosted anyone in her life. She barely let you into her place when she was scared of her getting seen.

Oxytoxin: Just tell me you’re okay

The Exhibition:

Eli’s still going to be covering it, other people too. Pope rotates out, 3V migrates into the hotel party space, and now the human guests are going to be coming to ogle. The crowds will be thicker, there’ll be more tension - albeit well meaning. Consider it a change in atmosphere from people vibing at home to inviting friends over.

Strictly speaking nobody needs to be here for it. The interesting thing that will happen is in the late afternoon, at around 5pm, just at the close of business hours before the weekend. Would anyone enjoy being here though, to see the remaining exhibits, to see the change in atmosphere from the space, to hang out with Eli while they monitor how their prediction turns out?

Actually. You know what?

The transhuman exhibits focused on thus far, for obvious reasons, have been the biological ones, the furries. There are also cyborg exhibits here like Odysseus. With Blue gone, this might be a great grounds to start looking for contacts to fill her missing skillset with, someone who might have both the talent and the inclination to solve the problems that Blue was needed to solve.

If that’s something November is interested in starting on, tell me what she’s looking for, and who’s doing the looking, and I can tell you who she finds. If you use a 1 contact spend, you can tell me who she finds.

Oh! One last thing:

Pink:

Monk’s exhibit stands empty, since she’s, you know, on Thrones now. Crystal will not think of this or suggest it to you, so if this idea occurs to you it is yours alone to pitch it;

What would you do to fill in that slot? How do you sell Crystal on taking Monk’s place in the gallery, especially on a day when there will be critical outside observers now, judging the acceptability of transhumans?

[You can write Crystal’s side of the conversation up until she has to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’, you know her voice well enough and think it’ll make a tighter scene. Crystal is privately supportive but publicly risk averse, positive about anything to do with Pink’s happiness or artistic pursuit but insanely fearful of an untested Pink in a public demonstration - and she hasn’t even seen the dining room yet. She is also aware that Pink is werewolfing and doesn’t trust her to be a sound judge of her own mind - she just doesn’t want to make Pink feel bad about that.]

[... Actually, if the problem is werewolfing, Sophie’s texting Red right now.]

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

NumbToNothing's gallery posts

1: Want

I wish saying a place felt like home wasn’t an insult if I’m the one saying it, because I don’t know what else to call the Annwn Castle transhumanism gallery.

There’s this thing they used to talk about with queer culture where people asked why a bunch of us seemed to immature for our ages and it’s cause none of us had a first childhood like they did, we never got it out of our systems. Trans people got hit with it the hardest because they just straight up went through the wrong puberty years and had to catch up on that.

Like, one thing I had to think about a lot when I was going through the crowd today was makeup. Girls would practice makeup at all their sleepovers and parties, and guys didn’t. So if a guy transitioned then she had to be shit at makeup because nobody taught her. Looking at guys who are minotaurs and cyborgs now, it’s hard to remember how it was basically only a couple of years ago that guys wearing makeup got called slurs for it.

My Dad did when I started to. Like as a joke, it was funny, I laughed, but there’s a reason he knew I’d get what the joke was.

I think that’s kind of it, though. It’s about socialization, it’s about being taught how to be the right kind of person to fit in. And for some people it’s about trying to be an entirely different kind of person you weren't taught how to be, and for some people you just get taught wrong and you have to go through all the steps everyone else did when they were kids, when you’re too old to get being a kid as an excuse for it.

If you want to get what that feels like, you come here. If you’ve already dealt with that, then this is a celebration of it. If you haven’t, if you were raised right and like how you turned out, this is where you come to wonder if you should be. If maybe there’s something past ‘adult’ and ‘normal’ that it’s worth thinking about being. Something that doesn’t take twenty years of practice or being born with better genes or you haven’t already spent years getting good at it so it’s already too late. You can be something entirely new, that nobody’s ever been before.

If you did that, you start having to think about how you’d be all the time. Because it’s not just going to change who you are, it changes how people treat you. You have to write an entirely new social script where you’re acting the part of whatever new thing you are. You’ve got nobody you can learn it from, because you’re the first person trying to do it.

It’s just that when you look at the people here you think that’s worth it. You think maybe that people not being able to treat you by their existing script could be the only way to be treated as you for once, because they have to learn who you are before they can put a label on you. They have nobody to compare you to that makes being how you are get seen as a failure to be something else. It might start to feel like the only way to get treated like a person is to move past being human.

It’s why I love being here. Even when I don’t look like that, yet, that’s how the people here think, that’s how they treat you. Everyone who succeeded at being unique is someone who failed at being normal first, and I love them. I love them all, and this place is a celebration of everything about that, and why anyone who doesn’t like this because it’s weird is missing the fucking point.

Because I can tell you this, whatever excuses they tell you for it, whatever bullshit they give you, that’s the whole thing to them. That’s what I worked out today, when I helped tear the head off a lion. The transhumanphobes hate me even though the transhumans love me and they hate us both because of the same thing; These are always going to be the people who judge you based on how close you fit their idea of normal, and even if we wanted it that’s always going to be impossible for some people. What’s at stake here is our right to be anything other than the most boring kind of asshole.

The good thing is, even these assholes have totally different definitions of normal to them. It’s just that the weirder someone gets, the more of them you can get to agree it isn’t normal. Get weird enough and they can form a coalition.

If all you’ve ever wanted is to be what you are, if you’ve managed to fit in, then you might not get why that’s such a big fucking deal. You might get that the assholes are wrong for pushing their values on other people trying to exist in theirs, but you might also think transhumans are just immature kids playing dress-up who just haven’t figured out yet how to fit in to the real world.

And if that’s you, then come here tomorrow and learn what it’s like to want something. Where nothing’s stopping you from having it except people it doesn’t effect making it a problem for you. Learn what it’s like to feel like someone would want to kill you for being the person you wish you could be.

You look at the sheer joy of a dancing snake girl playing tetris on her scales, or of a unicorn pouring her heart out over the love she has for every single one of us deviants and reprobates, and you tell me how anyone who’d want anything else for them isn’t a fucking monster.

That’s the whole thing, right? None of that’s in here, right now, while I’m writing this. This place burns like a searchlight, it’s just that how bright it’s burning makes the shadows outside the walls feel so much darker.

I wish I never had to leave. I only have three days here and how bright everything is makes me realize how sick having to go back outside again is making me feel.

This is the first place that’s ever felt like home and it has to go away soon.

Eli.

The Lion, The Snitch and the Wardrobe

Isn’t it just the strangest thing? Remarkable. Here I was, all dressed up and ready to hang this man from a cross when I find all the heavy lifting has been done for me. What makes this so remarkable is that being there to see it happen only served to slow me down. I had to transition from the physical into the digital, if you’ll pardon my lateness for it, and it seems that by the time I’d kicked off my shoes to write… Well, now, how can I write an opinion piece when everyone already has an opinion that they’ve made up their mind on?

If I am to say anything, then, it will have to be something I can only add from the experience of someone who was actually there. Do not mistake me for saying that I will contradict the evidence of so many eyewitness accounts and so many video recordings of the matter, for I cannot do that and will not attempt to try. There is nothing I can say that will teach you anything new about those moments you cannot better learn elsewhere, through their objective record. I can only add to the pool of collective knowledge by telling you more of what I know from before the cameras started recording, and of what happened later.

To dispel some of the nastier rumours; No, I do not believe the Dragon was attempting to kidnap our man the Governor. I have it on good authority her taste lies instead in the taking of fair maidens, as befits any dragon of proper stature, and a fair maiden the Governor most certainly is not. I think he would find any insinuation to be libelous to say the least. The statements put out by the Governor’s press office paint a terrifying picture of a frogmarch through the darkness and away from his embattled security service. While such may be true from the perspective of the Governor and I would dare not call him a liar for this account, I will tell you now that his escort never once left the confines of a crowd of witnesses. Missing from his version of events is that he was brought to heel not by a fear of his safety, but for the fear he had been recognized.

The simple fact of the matter is that the Governor was caught acting suspiciously in a crowd he sought to belong in, and told on himself when he couldn’t. He, or at least his press office, claims at once he was prejudicially targeted and that he was outed by a random act of violence from the crowd. These two things cannot be simultaneously true. It is agreed that before the events the Governor’s disguise was not known, and we find no other accounts of violence at the event. The unflattering truth of the matter is that the Governor’s disguise was thwarted by his overt hatred, something the fabric of his costume was incapable of hiding, and such was the basis to target him regardless of his identity.

If the Governor himself was the only source that needed clarification on this matter I would find it understandable as he is the one who benefits from people lacking a clear record of events. The most to lose from people having a genuinely clear understanding of what happened. What I find most disappointing is that I am also compelled to dispel the accounts of liberal allies who would otherwise condemn the Governor and everything he stands for, but will instead stand with him to defend him from the very people he endangers. To them I have to ask; What good are your principles if they would bring you into an alliance with Joseon?

Did you not think it odd that, surrounded by witnesses, not one stood up to the physical defense of Governor Joseon against only a single aggressor, a young-seeming girl at that? A crowd with at least several wonderful and empathetic people I can personally account for. I should hope so, I was one of those people who made no motion in the Governor’s defense.

I will drop my glib facade a moment and I pray that you will help me pick it back up in a moment, because I will need it back again. Thank you for allowing me to be so blunt as this; This man came into my house. This man brought his filth and his hatred and his evil into my home. How could you dare wring your hands about how he was told he would kill himself when this man has demonstrably, provably and gleefully created law that has led dozens to that end? Why? Because one is something tangible you can see, and the other so intellectually abstracted? That’s not a principled position, that’s moral incoherence.

For many it is justified by how scared they are of violence and vigilantism, scared that this will lead to worse. I find this fascinating, because that remit, that order, must have been backdated months. The police have already been acting as if this were the case, and the withdrawal of legitimate state protection is what necessitates such vigilante protectionism in our spaces. If that is the nature of your fear then it is Governor Joseon and others like him that lit the petard that hoisted him today.

We tried it another way, we tried an exercise of community and safety today, we had something that was truly ours. And at its shining moment, during the beautiful speech of the organizer who made this possible, I had my reverie interrupted by this man’s hateful, evil garbage spewing into my ear from the darkness. My one consolation was knowing that it was that very hatred in that place that would destroy him, and here instead I find some of you trying to make a martyr of him, as if he is entitled to the political power that he uses to persecute these very people. What defense do they have from him, outside these walls?

The truth was what truly wounded him, and must be allowed to destroy him. That truth I do not need to elaborate on, because the Dragon herself said it so well, of which there is already an objective account. I can only say that her truth cannot be invalidated because it was delivered with a blow to the stomach or a hand held to the stuff of the neck.

I will not mince my words: Get this man the fuck out of my house.

Every suicide and murder due to this stochastic terrorism is the burning of a photo album that now never was. There is no money nor compensation that can ever make that whole, the only protection we are afforded is eviction. Eviction from a space he would see razed, even as he longs to be a part of it. The coward would commit arson upon my home, a home he is scared to share in, and the man who must live in the fire has no sympathy for the man who is afraid of it.

I apologize for that. If you will forgive me for getting so heated around the fire metaphors, and help me pick my glib facade back up again? I think it’s more comfortable for us both if I am to mantle myself in it for what I am about to say. I won’t overstay my welcome further than this.

I share in your fears of escalating violence and understand why you would condemn this, I promise you that. I wish such a matter were as simple as refuting violence altogether before it can escalate. But you cannot prevent an explosion of pressure by plugging the holes from which it vents. You cannot condemn the leaks. You must instead shut off the boiling.

Anyone who condemns the violence against the Governor today misses the point. No, it is not enough to condemn the Governor in the same breath and call for order on both sides. One side holds one of the most powerful men in public office with a professional security team, on the other was an angry girl with costume wings. There is no equivalency here.

To condemn the girl is to condemn the whistle of a kettle without removing the kettle from the heat. It is to fail to understand that the heat is the source of the noise since the heat itself is silent until it creates a symptom we find unpleasant. We must address the cause of this unpleasant symptom, to silence it is to fail to be warned. It is to fail to understand that for the kettle to start whistling, it has to have already been boiling in silence for a long time. We must ask how we remove the vessel of Aevum from the heat before there is a far worse spillover.

To stand with the Governor is to stand with the explosion I fear may be coming.

Night 2: Eulogy for the Living Dead

I don’t want to write tonight but it’s the only thing that makes everything stop hurting. So I’m probably going to make this way too long just so I have an excuse not to stop.

It feels like I’m writing a eulogy for someone who I have to pretend isn’t already dead just because he’s still alive. The fact he’s still alive right now just makes it hurt more because I have to have to have hope until it’s gone again.

Adrian Liddell would have preferred to be known as Junta, and he was one of the smartest people I know. I talk like everything’s just leaking out of me, it’s like mashing random article on wikipedia over and over and I’m just kind of vomiting words all over you, and Junta could just talk like that back and he’d think about what I’m saying and then go back to something I said fifteen minutes ago because he was still thinking about it the whole time I was saying new shit to him because he was doing both, and also the thing to talk about next.

Can talk like that, fuck. Will talk like that, if he’s not brain damaged from this again.

You know he helped me when nobody else thought I deserved it. He thought I deserved it before I did, and he reached out and he just kept talking to me about stuff nobody else would let me say. Like I was angry, I did that thing where I wanted to kill myself but I didn’t want to hurt anyone by doing it so I tried to push anyone away so there’d be nobody in the splash zone and he didn’t. I did everything I could to make sure everyone would be happy I was dead and when I did it to him, he asked me why I hurt so bad I was trying to do that.

I didn’t deserve to live. Just- Fuck I’m making this about me now, but shut up, this is really about him I don’t know how else to say this. I didn’t, but he thought I could, and he tried to make sure I’d get there, and he never stopped telling me. Him and friends he introduced me to, some of my best friends now I only know because of him.

Like I don’t want to say I’m only alive because of that because it’s not fair to put that much pressure on someone and like, he’d tell me I should take most of the credit because I did all the work. So okay, maybe it’s me. But it was like holding on to a cat long enough to cut its claws and it’s slicing your arms the entire time you do it, he spent years holding me up while I did nothing but cut him for it.

He used to tell me that we don’t have to be okay now, or soon, but that if we worked hard enough we could have more good days ahead of us than bad days behind us. And if I stick it out, if I make it long enough, I can live enough good days to have made all the bad days worth it. We can’t change what we’ve already done, the only chance we have at fixing that is by being better for long enough.

If you’re already deep into the karmic red it’s hard to imagine any way most of your life could be good, so there’s no point trying. You get one chance and you already ruined this one beyond recovery so you know you’re just… continuing on a save file of a game where you’ve already missed all the chances for the good ending. Why keep playing just to get a bad one?

Shit, I hate that’s the best analogy I could come up with. Sorry Junta.

But you know where he was when he was holding me up through all this?

Living in the bottom of a fucking elevator shaft.

I think that’s what got me. He believes that, genuinely believes that when he’s had more reasons than anyone else to give up. You think the stuff he admits about himself in his articles is dark? I don’t think getting shot today was even the worst thing that’s happened to him. Maybe not even if it ends up being what kills him.

You know what gets me, about the footage?

I keep watching it. I know I shouldn’t so don’t tell me. Just, I keep watching it, and the thing that got me was like, why him right? Like out of everyone in that whole building why was it this dumb asshole and not someone I didn’t care about, some rich lawyer asshole or a real journalist (derogatory) or some bodyguard taking a bullet like they’re paid to.

He doesn’t see it’s a gun when she draws it, but he’s watching her. But even though Junta’s a fucking agoraphobe, he’s the only one that doesn’t start to duck and cover when the shots start going off. You watch frame by frame, and this stupid idiot asshole dumbass fucking, he’s the only one that starts moving closer to her.

I can’t tell if he’s going for her hand, or if he’s trying to hug her, but he looks more scared for her than by her. LIke, he’s realized how bad the situation is and the first person he wants to protect from it is the girl who got him shot.

Story of his idiot life lmao.

I’m probably reading too much into it, it’s like, it’s me going frame by frame over a two second reaction. He probably didn’t even have time to think about it, but that’s why I think I’m probably right. I think if Junta had a bit more time to think he’d have done something way smarter.

But he didn’t, so he probably died trying to hug this girl just so he could say something like ‘you don’t have to do this’ or ‘I got you’ or something. I’m just guessing.

I’ll ask him if he wakes up.

He’d say the only mistake he made was not seeing the gun sooner. I know that much.

And he wouldn’t say it like he thinks he’s a hero, he’d say it like he was a failure for missing it. Like anyone else in his position would have saved this, even though there were seven other people and every one of them ran away when he took the step closer.

Anyone out there that paints him like an innocent bystander who this crazy mouse girl got killed misses the whole point of Junta, just makes him this stupid fucking angel who had so much potential in life when they wouldn’t have thrown a Snickers down an elevator shaft for him. Angels are boring, they’re flat, they’ve got no personality and even though they’re hot they think sex is impure like it’s a bad thing and not the best part.

Sorry I swear so much, if you think that invalidates everything I’m saying go read Pope instead. But one of my favourite people just got shot so cope.

This is also day 2 of my Transhumanism gallery exhibit series. I hate that this is relevant to all of it. It kind of overshadows the art a bit.

Because today a bunch of OESN and NBN coverage breached the walls of this castle to bring word of it to the outside world, because they were allies before but now it’s a whole thing. Tomorrow the real siege is going to happen, and everyone inside is making their peace with that in their own ways.

Me? I’m so wasted I can make a magic carpet ride out of empty absinthe bottles and this side table I flipped upside down, lmao.

Tomorrow, a mob’s going to show up waving signs with pictures of my dead friend’s face on it as an excuse to bash the shit out of the kind of people he died trying to protect. I don’t think they can imagine how much he’d hate them.

Someone’s probably going to throw a brick at my face with his name written on it, but they won’t even know him well enough to write the right one.

I know he’s still alive. I just don’t believe he is.

I ran out of words. I wish I had more words but I don’t know what to say. It’s just people actually need to read this, and the longer I keep writing it the worse it’ll be that I held onto it. The moment I stop though it’s all going to hit me because the feelings are going to stop being in the words and they’re going to go back to being in me again.

Here’s to Junta S Thompson, a man m ade of paper who ran back into the burning building, who tried to give his place on the lifeboats to someone it was already too late to save.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Chaka Zulu

She leans away and her smile is very, very different now - she knows she’s got the power here, now, and it’s her, and she’s about to flex it.

“You really have no idea who you’re talking to, do you?” Chaka’s claw runs up the side of Spearmint’s face and she ruffles her hair as she pushes herself up to her full height again, lingering for one last look before she disappears into the bathroom. She comes back with two more instrument cases hauled from the back, from the shower that’s now reachable. She pops the lids.

The saxaphone is old, every atom of its surface is covered in patina. The shine is long gone, what remains has more in common with the look of brown suede than metal. When it covers the valves and levers like that it looks like a piece ripped from an ancient steam engine, and it’s impossible to imagine the sound it could make. The other case has a flute, a clarinet and a piccolo, but it’s the saxaphone she lifts from its paper nest of sheet music.

You don’t have to imagine the sound it could make. She shows you.

For Spearmint

She looks at Spearmint when she starts, at first, just the first two bars. Just to see the look on her face. She closes her eyes and gets completely lost in it. Another two bars and she’s forgotten there’s anyone else in the room with her. Another two bars and nothing in the world exists outside of the music.

Her hands choke the neck of the saxaphone as her fingers straddle the keys. There’s more than just technical playing, here, she’s trying to feel the instrument as much as possible. Some musicians play as if the instrument’s just a medium between themselves and the song, Hendrix played the guitar like it was just the closest imperfect thing he could get to what he needed, and it couldn’t keep up with him. Chaka plays the sax like the music’s an excuse to work the machine in her hands, and there’s rapture in what she gets out of manipulating the physical to produce the transcendental.

There was almost no way any of those instrument cases had real instruments in them. They’d come in at the top of the pile, which left them buried at the back of the room before.

The solo ends. She opens her eyes again with a smile that shows just how white and sharp her teeth are. “Chaka Zulu. Second chair saxaphone for Ares’ Sankara Jazz Orchestra, reserve clarinet for the Eisenhower symphony, founding and lead member of the Zulus quartet set, and under no circumstances to be fucked with.” She raises her saxaphone over her head with one hand like she’s raising Excalibur. “And how you doing tonight?” The cry is euphoric, like Spearmint is worth as much as an audience of thousands.

Sure, Ares is not a district known for jazz or classical music and she probably couldn’t cut the reserve list of the least prestigious orchestra in Aphrodite, sure the Zulus make more from wedding gigs than album sales, who cares? If she cared about any of that, she’d have picked something way harder to play, something that showed off how much better she is than the piece needed her to be.

If Spearmint plays anything, the second case is still open and there might be a third still in the shower (Unless it’s strings or drums, then no shot). Digital mixing won’t work here, this is just another one of those sentimental human things like good handwriting. It’s really not just about the music itself, you can pour your heart out in an EDM track, but Chaka’s all about that mastery of the hands and the fingers, the tongue, the lips and the breath - the way she can use them to make you feel things from all the way across the room.

Crystal:

“I’m happy to help where I can, of course.” Crystal said it thinking that it might be the best way to make sure nothing too expensive happens with this little experiment. Pink did have an affinity for explosives that might be better off redirected into other forms of creative expression, should it come up. “We have all night.”

She can’t say to Pink yet, but she’s hoping if she’s allowed full expression of these impulses, to see she’s still loved in spite of them - loved through her expression of them - it might be easier to talk about, be one less reason to repress all this. But even if it isn’t, well…

Seeing how much Pink is enjoying herself is a pure enough reason. She doesn’t need any other.

Scratch that, she sends an encrypted text to Fiona asking after a chart for expected damage from various explosive yields. No explosives was unreasonably stifling, better to learn what might be healthy boundaries to play within.

There’s a ding and she thinks Fiona has replied unreasonably fast, worried she just had that information on-hand, when she sees it’s Eli. They’ve written what she asked for. When she starts to cry, she tries to excuse herself before Pink can notice, it would be too much of a waste to interrupt her.

Eli:

Want

I wish saying a place felt like home wasn’t an insult if I’m the one saying it, because I don’t know what else to call the Annwn Castle transhumanism gallery.

There’s this thing they used to talk about with queer culture where people asked why a bunch of us seemed to immature for our ages and it’s cause none of us had a first childhood like they did, we never got it out of our systems. Trans people got hit with it the hardest because they just straight up went through the wrong puberty years and had to catch up on that.

Like, one thing I had to think about a lot when I was going through the crowd today was makeup. Girls would practice makeup at all their sleepovers and parties, and guys didn’t. So if a guy transitioned then she had to be shit at makeup because nobody taught her. Looking at guys who are minotaurs and cyborgs now, it’s hard to remember how it was basically only a couple of years ago that guys wearing makeup got called slurs for it.

My Dad did when I started to. Like as a joke, it was funny, I laughed, but there’s a reason he knew I’d get what the joke was.

I think that’s kind of it, though. It’s about socialization, it’s about being taught how to be the right kind of person to fit in. And for some people it’s about trying to be an entirely different kind of person you weren't taught how to be, and for some people you just get taught wrong and you have to go through all the steps everyone else did when they were kids, when you’re too old to get being a kid as an excuse for it.

If you want to get what that feels like, you come here. If you’ve already dealt with that, then this is a celebration of it. If you haven’t, if you were raised right and like how you turned out, this is where you come to wonder if you should be. If maybe there’s something past ‘adult’ and ‘normal’ that it’s worth thinking about being. Something that doesn’t take twenty years of practice or being born with better genes or you haven’t already spent years getting good at it so it’s already too late. You can be something entirely new, that nobody’s ever been before.

If you did that, you start having to think about how you’d be all the time. Because it’s not just going to change who you are, it changes how people treat you. You have to write an entirely new social script where you’re acting the part of whatever new thing you are. You’ve got nobody you can learn it from, because you’re the first person trying to do it.

It’s just that when you look at the people here you think that’s worth it. You think maybe that people not being able to treat you by their existing script could be the only way to be treated as you for once, because they have to learn who you are before they can put a label on you. They have nobody to compare you to that makes being how you are get seen as a failure to be something else. It might start to feel like the only way to get treated like a person is to move past being human.

It’s why I love being here. Even when I don’t look like that, yet, that’s how the people here think, that’s how they treat you. Everyone who succeeded at being unique is someone who failed at being normal first, and I love them. I love them all, and this place is a celebration of everything about that, and why anyone who doesn’t like this because it’s weird is missing the fucking point.

Because I can tell you this, whatever excuses they tell you for it, whatever bullshit they give you, that’s the whole thing to them. That’s what I worked out today, when I helped tear the head off a lion. The transhumanphobes hate me even though the transhumans love me and they hate us both because of the same thing; These are always going to be the people who judge you based on how close you fit their idea of normal, and even if we wanted it that’s always going to be impossible for some people. What’s at stake here is our right to be anything other than the most boring kind of asshole.

The good thing is, even these assholes have totally different definitions of normal to them. It’s just that the weirder someone gets, the more of them you can get to agree it isn’t normal. Get weird enough and they can form a coalition.

If all you’ve ever wanted is to be what you are, if you’ve managed to fit in, then you might not get why that’s such a big fucking deal. You might get that the assholes are wrong for pushing their values on other people trying to exist in theirs, but you might also think transhumans are just immature kids playing dress-up who just haven’t figured out yet how to fit in to the real world.

And if that’s you, then come here tomorrow and learn what it’s like to want something. Where nothing’s stopping you from having it except people it doesn’t effect making it a problem for you. Learn what it’s like to feel like someone would want to kill you for being the person you wish you could be.

You look at the sheer joy of a dancing snake girl playing tetris on her scales, or of a unicorn pouring her heart out over the love she has for every single one of us deviants and reprobates, and you tell me how anyone who’d want anything else for them isn’t a fucking monster.

That’s the whole thing, right? None of that’s in here, right now, while I’m writing this. This place burns like a searchlight, it’s just that how bright it’s burning makes the shadows outside the walls feel so much darker.

I wish I never had to leave. I only have three days here and how bright everything is makes me realize how sick having to go back outside again is making me feel.

This is the first place that’s ever felt like home and it has to go away soon.

Eli.

November:

One last, small thing then.

Just after midnight is when the message arrives to everyone back on Aevum - the girls with Monk have found Dragon, and they’re going to get him. Whether the news came from Singh or from the girls themselves, this is the point in the timeline just before the slingshot launch to get to him, immediately after which that team will lose contact with Aevum and Thrones until they return the morning after the next.

We can consider Blue’s end as so inevitable at this point that November may already see the symptoms of her disappearance. Telegraphing and foreshadowing always look anachronistic when the outcome is known.

This should still be happy news here, now though. Dragon is alive, and they’re bringing him home.