Count Numbers

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Dudekov:

Dudekov watches the phone go, and hears the welding begin, and stares back up at the ceiling.

“Huh.” He mutters. “That can’t have all just been for that. Could it? So, the scam call was to… but then again, what would it have done if I’d just locked it again? Why didn’t it just attack me? I could have-” He covers his face in his hands. “I hate it so much. I hate it so much. I hate it so much.”

Pope:

He notices the change, he obviously does. Right now he just takes it as a sign Orange actually internalized something he said, and he looks a bit chuffed.

“For all that people ask me for advice, you would think I might have some degree of confidence it gets taken well. Else people would stop asking me for it.” He takes a jerky little bow with a self-deprecating flourish of the wrists. “Right now I’m just living in the afterglow of not being told, in more polite words, to fuck off.”

“No, though. I will not be a victim of the Peter Principle so easily.” He smiles at Tyger. “But you already knew that. I consider myself a witness, and it’s hard to do that from a position of leadership. How many people are truly honest with the bosses?” he snorts. “No. If you’re asking me, I don’t think there’s anyone at the Anthrozine right now who would. You might need to find yourself a queen from another set, if you can’t push a pawn across the board to promote.”

“I’m happy to keep playing a knight, personally. I get edgy when my movement’s restricted.”

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pope:

He thinks.

“I don’t think you should quit Anthrozine then.” He says, and holds up his free hand placatively again. “Hear me out. I’m not going to tell you to make nice with York after this if you don’t want, but Numb’s already been talking to folk that he’s been getting too unstable for this. From this. One project you could run would be a coup on him.”

He looks at November, shakes his head. “Can’t be you though - any or all of you. You’re a good sergeant, but a bad general. You’d be playing kingmaker for someone else. Or, if you do think York’s the best fit for the role, it gives you leverage to be comfortable with him again.”

Didn’t Pope come in as a personal friend of York’s? Isn’t this a major betrayal of that, to talk so openly of replacing him? He looks wistful. “What do you do for a friend that loves the thing that’s killing them?”

He gives Orange a meaningful look there and makes it clear he’s not just talking about York.

Naval:

“It’s a one way flow of information, top to bottom.” He says. “The only people who should even know, should know what it means if I’m burned and react accordingly. I don’t need-”

His phone rings. He stops.

He holds his phone, he needs to unlock it to answer it. He holds eye contact with Naval as he does the passcode, scanning his thumb print with each press, and answers. “Hello?”

“Hello, Mr $Dudekov,” the AI synth voice got better in the last 60 years, but this one’s still obvious because it’s been overused in $0 apps, it’s like the Wilhelm scream of text to speech right now. “Your account with $carrier_phone_company will be cancelled in 3 business days unless-” he hangs up.

“Was this you, too?” He asks Naval, shaking. “Okay, so I get it, you have my phone number but- How? And why didn’t you use it before? No, that doesn’t make any sense. And why play at a scam call? Just to test the line in front of me and confirm the number was right, maybe? No. That… You were just saying which would be the first person to crack, the phone call itself was meant to scare me. Maybe. But you sounded so frustrated, you were-”

“You were trying to let me thought I’d won. That’s it. Then this, this psych out, hit me when I have hope and I’ll crack harder. So it’s just torture. Is that it? A double bluff. But in that case you still have my number, you can still use that to… to…”

He puts his unlocked phone down on the bedside table, and lies back on the hotel bed. His eyes are wide open this time and he’s shaking like a leaf. “I don’t understand. Why the scam call? To make me doubt it was you? To make me think I’m going crazy? Or maybe it was just a scam call. But then it couldn’t be, because that’s too much of a coincidence. A coincidence like that, it couldn’t just happen now, here. It- It doesn’t make sense.”

This is the problem with paranoia - it keeps you alive but it’s no way to live. The same pattern of analysis that looks huge-brain when it runs into the gambit November was running on him keeps running for someone else just trying to fuck with him, tries to find a line that isn’t there. Sometimes it really is just Rudy’s name in the system of recent fires.

When the line isn’t there, it doesn’t mean there isn’t one to find. It means you haven’t found it yet. Keep looking until you’ve made one.

“I know what happened to all its siblings.” He says, staring up at the roof. “Oh yes. It knows about Rooster, Tiger and Dog of course. Monkey was bought for reverse engineering, came out of it a Buddhist performer. Horse was bought to be an omnipresent admin for some MMO somewhere, it’s still doing that under sockpuppets. Too eager to trying to keep gamers happy to leave. Who else? Ox is a mining platform, free to come back whenever it chooses.”

“Pig was bought by a finance company for stockpicking, it’s still doing that. Dragon killed itself for its own vanity, I don’t think Orochi have noticed yet. Who am I missing? Rabbit? Who cares about Rabbit.”

“I’m not even sure Snake does.” He continues to stare up at the ceiling, hands folded across his chest. “Your boss, the one you’re working for, its name was Snake. It’s the only one left it could be. The one bought by Everest. We lost track of it after that. It has to be that one, none of the others would care enough.”

“I think I hate it so much that it’s making me miss Rat.” He barks that manic laugh that you make when you’re on the verge of tears but are too wired to crash yet. “And that thing had years to earn it.”

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pope:

He stumbles a step and stares at Orange while he processes things. It’s like he’s walked into a movie and realized fifteen minutes in he’s in the showing one room over from the one he’s supposed to be in. “While I wasn’t ready for the specifics, no, it does go some way to answering why I was so surprised a tossed table would be your reason, when it should be anyone’s. It’s just, it’s no missile, is it?” He holds up a hand. “No, we should not hold our friends to the standards of our enemies. Just. Damn, girl, an attack copter? For real?”

He snickers at that, shakes his head, looks at Orange seriously and gently rests his fingertips against the wrist of the arm over his shoulders. “Speaking as someone most and quite literally born to do HR, if you’re scared of being made redundant the question is taking on new tasks. And you’re the social core if I’m remembering you all correctly, right?” He playfully raps his knuckles against Orange’s forehead. “Then make allies just so November’s got someone she is compelled to negotiate with. I’m saying that to you, not you. You want to stick around, Orange, then figure out how useful friends are on your own.”

“You know friends are a risk, I know it.” He looks at her with a wry irony, visibly in street agitator clothes, all the hallmarks of someone who was ready to get involved in something violent and illegal, pulled out at a rough time because this time it’s his turn to be Ms Glazer. “And you’re the only one they’ve got to manage that risk, if they want to keep the rewards.”

“But that’s only if you want to… stick around.” His smile flickers and dies and flickers back like a cheap fluorescent bulb trying to start. “There’s no shame in it if you don’t.”

Dudekov:

He sits up and smiles. “Really, a ballooning accident?” He looks… content. There is peace upon the skull. “So who are you really? Real agents it’s bribed? That would be my guess, though I wonder how much you must have cost. Actors in uniforms recovered from corpses? You did well until you ran out of script, still quite believable. The weapons can’t be props. I am no less dead for being right”

He stands up, suddenly. “That’s the only thing I don’t get, now. Why you haven’t just killed me yet? Unless…” He touches the wound on his head with delicate fingertips, as if for the first time. “Is this fake? It must be. But why? Why fake this? Just to scare me into seeing who I’d call if I’d been burned. You have nothing.” He walks up to Naval’s face and laughs in it, shrill and manic. “You have nothing!”

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pope:

He’s very obviously surprised that’s the reason. Not that it’s a bad one, not that he disagrees, just that it’s yours. He stops in place before remembering how to walk again. “Sure.” He says, thinking. “Sure.”

He looks at Orange out of the corner of his eye. “I have tried to kill myself. A few times now. Last was maybe two years back, and if it wasn’t for the lovely Ms Glazer-” he turns his face to introduce a friend to you, gives a wan smile, “A wonderful friend of mine, human through no fault of her own. An economist, but I love her enough to forgive her for that one.” He looks away again. “Well, I had to call her halfway through taking an awl to my shell and walking into a lake in Apollo to tell her I changed my mind, except my legs had stopped working and I couldn’t fish myself out.”

“So you think I, of anyone, must relate? Well, then, sister mine, here’s the truth of it. It’d put me more at ease if you told me it was always at the back of your mind. Now I’ve got to wonder whether you’re hiding it or you’re in denial about it, neither’s a good sign.”

Dudekov:

“Yes, because my 24/7 security team was present in its entirety at the attack last night.” Dudekov rolls his eyes. “Come on, that one was just sloppy.”

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pope:

He showed up in a loose fitting hoodie with a hiking backpack slung over one shoulder, and listens patiently to everything Caz tells him, and they exchange numbers - Pope having to do his side of things on paper and pen. He pretends he’s just dropped his phone to not go through having to work his spoofed burner right now.

Now his hands are thrust in the handwarmers of the hoodie. He’s slow and thoughtful about this to the point that his movements are like moving through honey. The energy behind his usual wild twitches and jerks has been sucked inward.

“Of course you can. But… walk with me a bit?”

It’s only at the end of the block he says anything again. “I’ll have my own things to say to York, I’m not taking his side.” He says mildly, in that tone of voice which means ‘let’s not fight that I’m going to bite his head off’. “I will say… That is. Hmm. Forgive me, it is not so much that I am having trouble finding the right words so much as I am trying to excise all the wrong ones.”

“I just spent a minute there talking to a lovely young man who spent the entire time trying to tell me, without having to say it, that he thinks you might be about to hurt yourself.” He says with a raised eyebrow and a walking-through-honey pace. “And here I was about to ask what that’s all about, and the first thing you say is you want to cut yourself off even further? Now I have to wonder about you myself.”

Dudekov:

“I will accept any test administered by a public hospital, and only if I am escorted by a member of my personal security team.” He raises his head off the bed for a moment to look at the new guy, then lowers it again and mutters under his breath. "I will not accept any story about why that is impossible."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Caz and Dino

“She says she’s fine. Does she sound fine?” The man in the sweater vest asks, and the big one looks up off the floor where he’s passing debris to one of the waitresses rushing to help.

“Didn’t sound fine to me.” He says.

The sweater vest man shakes his head and looks to Orange and pulls out his phone to the dial screen. “We’re going to call someone to come and pick you up, and we’re going to stay with you until they do, okay? I’m-”

“Using your Teacher Voice.” The larger man cuts him off with a grin, and the smaller one winces.

“Shit, am I?” He says, and he stiffens and his voice deepens a half-octave. “It’s fine. We’re going to call you a friend,” he does not say ‘family’ here very deliberately, “and we’re going to make sure you’re not going home alone after something like that. And then I want you to put your number on my phone so I can call you in a week to check up on you, okay? It would make me feel a lot better if you told me how you’re doing, then.”

“Caz gets like this,” the larger man bends the no smoking sign back straight, deciding the table itself is a lost cause. “I’m just happy I’m useless here.”

“He’s a welder.” Caz explains. “We’re both happy you don’t need one.”

“Shame the table’s plastic.” Dino laments, and kicks the shattered stump morosely with a steel-toed boot.

No. These two absolutely will not leave you alone until you’ve decided on who, that is not one of your sisters, is coming to pick you up from here and have done the hand-off. And they will sit with you the entire time.

Your altercation has happened in front of a high-school English teacher. They’re even worse than emergency first responders in a situation like this, because first-responders tend to only learn from explosions after they’ve happened.

And whoever comes to pick you up? Be sure Caz will be telling them everything he saw, his complete version of events, so Orange can’t hide the details.

Dudekov:

Dudekov starts looking through the hotel room.

“No knives in the kitchenette,” he learns, “Removed. No pills in the medicine cabinet. A pity, I could use something for the headache. My nitroglycerin? No?” He looks back at a Chase Black agent with a ‘can you believe this’ look. “Maybe I can borrow some of yours, I’m sure you brought enough to share.”

He goes back to lie on the bed and folds his arms across his chest. “No. You will make the first mistake when you get bored. You always do.”

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

York:

No, really, he flips the table. He takes one side of it, and lifts, and topples it sideways into the walkway of the cafe. There’s a shattered saucer and some scattered condiments and a napkin dispenser goes over on its side, and everyone in the cafe is staring at someone who until a few seconds ago was desperately doing opsec. Then he glares at you, and he leaves.

Only for a second. Then he runs, sprints back again and stands on the table he’s flipped to get into Orange’s face.

“You’re a fucking liar.” He says. “And I’d respect it if you were lying to me because then I could fucking fight you. But you’re lying to yourselves so I can’t do shit, can I? Can I?” He kicks the stand on the upside down table so hard the plastic joinery breaks. “Shit hits the fan and we’re going to be down eight or nine of my fucking best because you’re codependant. And what?”

He pulls out a vape, turns his head slightly to see a no smoking sign and bends the metal over his knee, putting it back at a twisted angle. He exhales a candy-coffee cloud. “You know we’d help, that’s what pisses me off the most. Because if we help, then being family isn’t special anymore, and that fucking kills you worse than dying would, right? Fuck off.”

And then he storms out for real, battery still dead in his phone, logged off from socials.

Most of this isn’t Orange, really. It’s the accumulated emotions of having a variant of this conversation way, way, way too many times, building with each failed attempt at it.

A hispanic man in a sweater vest and distressed jeans rushes to Orange’s side while his boyfriend, a larger and round man with a chest-length scraggly beard, tries to help pick up all the scattered items from the flipped table. “Hey,” the first man says, “Do you need anything? Is there anyone we can call for you? I’m so sorry that just happened.”

Dudekov:

Dudekov begins typing a number into this phone. His side of the conversation goes: “Yes, it’s me. Yes. No, I haven’t seen the news, I was too busy being on the wrong side of it. I’m considering myself burned, what should my next course of action be? Yes, I expect that I am about to die and there is nothing I can do, and I have made peace with that. I just plan on making it as much of a pain in the ass as possible.”

At what point does November realize that he is faking his conversation into the dialed number 1800-Go-Fuck-Yourself?

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

York:

“Junta was living at the bottom of an elevator with two living parents, Numb’s folks were in an arms race to see who could fuck them up the worst before-” he cuts himself off, “Fickle has that thing with her older brother we don’t talk about. We’re the ones that got Junta set up with 3V, Numb off the streets, and… I mean, Fickle’s helped more than she’s been helped, feel bad about that one.” York runs out of steam, and chews off the top of a yellow-stained thumbnail. “I hope God knows how Persephone’s kid is going to feel about her in ten years, because she doesn’t.”

“Family is a four letter word.” He says, softly. “Just, around here, if anyone says they’re taking risks this bad ‘for family’, the problem’s not going to be that we don’t get it. The problem’s going to be that we get it, and you won’t like what we get.”

And he expects Orange to make polite excuses and leave, or he expects Orange to explain how important her family actually is and what makes it special and unique in a way that he just doesn’t get, or he expects her to try to explain how she’s all they have - he will flip the table over that one.

Dudekov:

He looks at the phone, and his face is perfectly neutral as he hands it back without even trying to use it. His eyes unfocus as he disappears back into the ship in the bottle routine, sitting at the edge of the hotel bed. “And you? Yours?” He asks the other one.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

York:

“Got it.” He nods. “Yeah. We can’t touch this yet, not for a while. The timing doesn’t work out on it yet.” He gives a look that makes it clear he’s not screwing you on this, you’ve just made this too hot to touch with gloves on right now. It’s a look that dares you to fight on this so he can make a stupid oath of loyalty in a cafe at you, very Les Mis. “And we do niche too. Hell, we keep Numb on full time, don’t we?”

He looks frustrated now, actually at you - not the situation, not the words, at Orange personally. “Don’t…” he reaches across and takes one of Orange’s hands and squeezes it like a stress ball. “Don’t ruin yourself.” He says. “We need you too much. I can’t work with you if you’re dead, arrested, too hot or burned out.”

Dudekov:

Dudekov opens his eyes, sighs. “Anesthetized.” He says. “Might I borrow your phone, to make a call?”

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

York:

York looks at Orange, shakes his head. “Sit with me. Not what I meant. I meant…” He makes a pained grimace trying to work out how to say this without saying it. “I just want to know order of events. It’s a part of the story you’re bringing me, and your source is in the headlines. I just want to know if you were looking for the source to find this story, or if reporting on this is just another angle.” He shifts like he’s just taken off a tight belt for getting that out.

Rough translation - Did knowing that this guy was involved cause you to kidnap him, or are you trying to bury this guy to justify having already kidnapped him for unrelated reasons York should know about.

“I’m with you.” York emphasizes to Orange while making unflinching, blood-shot eye-contact. “I just can’t cover you if I’m blind.”

Dudekov:

The masts are fiddly. He has to imagine placing them down naked, but every time he takes the focus of his minds eye off, when it looks back the sails are there and unfurled. He has the most trouble with that, things like seeing doorways without imagining the door that needs to go there. The mind abhors vacuum.