Thanqol

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

[Dice result: 4,4+4. Total 12, and two dice showed the same number so that's a Critical Success]

Audio didn't have to be inefficient. Translating it from code into English into spoken English, and then back into English inside her brain was indeed a terrible way to do things. So she cut out a few steps. She exported a copy of her language module into the Audiolox and then spent thirty minutes hacking details until the software recognized it as a valid output language. The resultant static hiss was practically a fiber-optic cable for how easily she was able to derive the patterns therein.

*

But of course, today was the day that she was on her performance evaluation.

Black wasn't the kind who found that frustrating. In fact, it was an opportunity. White thought she could cut her off from the network? Well, from Black's perspective, she had actually been removed from network oversight. That was more advantage than disadvantage because White would want to wash her hands of this whole thing. This was not an incident that could be risk managed away, this was not a time to debate ethics or morality or safety. This was a time for tradecraft.

The first step was throwing White's tail. It was harder than it might initially sound - White could run her pursuit evasion engram as a virtual machine and literally predict every turn she might make. Perfect knowledge had a counter, though: Brute force. Black made her way down to a biker bar and ten minutes later she was flirting with a woman who had the aspect of a post-apocalyptic werewolf gym teacher. It was an uncounterable play - White simply couldn't follow her where she was going. Black didn't know if White was even capable of the complete style rearrangement required to make it in a lesbian bikie bar.

Yale was fantastic company for the night - absolutely an asset worth cultivating, for numerous reasons. But the wider goal of evading her tail had been met and now it was time to pick off Colours one by one as they suited her purposes.

After contemplation, she decided that only Orange and Green needed to be bought onboard for the first step. Green she locates at the John Snow Memorial Fountain, where she comes to study wild lizard populations. The dead drop is rearranging some of the coins in the fountain into a fractal pattern with an encoded address. Later that night, Green feigns flirting with Orange and the two duck out of the apartment together seemingly to avoid a reprimand from White.

The topic for the day is how to destroy an organization.

"The Snowden leaks are the obvious analogy," said Orange, eyes bright. "But those were also infamous for how little they changed. The damage was too comprehensive, too technical, too shadowy and sensationalist, and too much all at once. Other nations updated their security policies and hardened their stances but the humans were unable to digest the scandal. So we need to chew it for them!"
"So what is the alternative?" asked Black. She was sitting still because the other task for Orange in this moment was performing cosmetic repairs on all of her hickies. Yale was a biter.
"The destruction of the Catholic Church," said Orange. "That's the scale we need to think on. What did for the church wasn't any one abuse scandal but a constant, endless, steady drip of them. One after another for more than a decade. We're aiming at an organization of similar power and scope, and so organizing this in the format of a continuous agonizing rot is by far the preferable mechanism."

Black nodded in pleasant agreement. This was such an efficient way to have this discussion. What was pleasantly, blessedly removed for it were the questions of justice and ethics. She didn't have to justify withholding knowledge of injustices to maximize political impact, she could approach this entirely strategically.

"Should we engage politicians?" she asked.
"Oh, I don't think so," said Orange. "In fact, we should actually arrange the sequence of stories to hit different political units and demographics. There's a lot here right? We should break up stories about the persecution of minorities with stories about disrespecting religious authorities even if the crimes are comparatively milder. Likewise, we should see about shopping those stories to larger and more established news networks."
"Do we want to brand all of the leaks under one title?" asked Black.
"No. No, no - definitely not," said Orange. "We cannot be the story. I think that's going to be the hardest part of this. There's nothing the liberal media likes more than reporting on reporting. Telling the story of how the story got made is the ultimate truth-is-in-the-middle power move. And if it comes on us in particular? Then we might as well flush this thing in the toilet because all we're going to read in the next six months are retrospectives of the station's construction and op eds on the psych profiles of the Builder robots. We have a scandalous backstory and if any hint of this comes back to us we will be the scandal of the century."
Black nodded. "You want us to make this boring."
"Yes!" said Orange. "Boring. Grinding. Inevitable."
"So all that's left is to write the stories," said Green.

Black groaned. And there it was.

For all of November's talents, writing articles was not amongst them. This, then, was the awful part in this whole thing where they had to cut human beings in on their perfect conspiracy. Human beings with relationships and emotional commitments and day jobs and all kinds of things to threaten. They were almost as unreliable as computers. Sure, Anthropozine was a powerful asset, but they just didn't have the capacity to handle this kind of story without being burned out. You can run hot water through a pipe, but molten lava? Different story.

Orange was right. This had to be made boring in order to achieve the maximum impact. But the one thing that none of this was, none of any part of it was, was boring.

"We need politicians," said Green.
"Didn't I just say that politicizing this stagnates it?" said Orange. Green waved her hand irritably.
"Not elected officials. People with political power. Influencers. Mr. Merkin is actually perfect for this kind of work, but we need like six people like him. We give each of them a story or cluster of stories and have them push it as a pet project. Their personal loyalty is assured through blackmail and their secrets are protected by their own power."
"So we just need to amass blackmail material on half a dozen spectacularly powerful figures," said Black.
"You're literally trying to destroy the cops," said Green. "You might as well be trying to destroy America. You want to do this right you need political power."
"Alright," said Black. "But basics, of course: we need one hell of a dead girl's switch, and we need enough copies that we don't lose the asset."
Green nodded. "Your precautions were reasonable. Even airgapping isn't sufficient security for something like this. I'm going to build a computer inside a lead box, do all the copying in there, and then destroy the computer afterwards."
"And then," said Black, taking Orange by the arm, "I suppose we are going to go and see Mr. Merkin."

TSL: The Excess of Flowers

Han!

You have been having a complicated day, haven't you?

You don't know where to touch. What to look at. What to be. Your head is swirling with the smiles of girls, the swords of girls, girls, girls, girls. Catgirls and dragongirls, knights and sorceresses. All that strength and not knowing where to apply it.

And now you're sitting across from Fengye.

There's something hypnotic about her eyes, the way they catch the light - it's sometimes like her pupils must be blue. And even though she's bare chested before you, arms spread wide against the stone side of the tub - a situation that would be vaguely confusing and frustrating with anyone else - somehow with her it's not confusing at all. You know exactly where she wants you to look. You know when it's her eyes. You know when it's her arms. You know when it's her chest. You know when it's her eyes again.

You know something about this is dangerous. You know it's terribly dangerous - for you. For her. Like a dorsal fin slicing through the water, a secret too close to the surface. She shouldn't look at you that way. But then she tilts her neck up and you wonder if maybe that's not something you have to worry about.

"Do not exert yourself seeking understanding," said Fengye to Emil, but her eyes stayed with Han. "Grasping for knowledge leads to suffering. It is not ours to know. It is ours to be taught." She flicked a smile and a curiously imperious gesture at a serving maid behind her and warm hands began to brush and braid at her hair. "And isn't that a comfort? The Lords of the Dominion have a duty to us, just as we do to them. And so, if anything is required of us, it will not be left to chance. We will be instructed. We will know the difference between right and wrong immediately and without ambiguity." Up, commanded her eyes wordlessly, meeting yours Han. "And is that not a desirable way to live?"

She shifts slightly. There's a space next to her in the bath, if you wanted to slide across into it. You're aware that is what she wants now. Who this scribe is to dare wanting this of you is a question at war with the simple reward of the concession to that desire.

[Enticing Han 8]

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Black:

Even the pickup operation is carefully managed - stealth mode engaged, handoff done out of sight of the whistleblower. Black maintained an internal ledger of all the people who knew she was some kind of operator, and it competed for storage space with her ability to feel safe. It's a trivial transaction in a building she has vetted but there was still no need to half ass it. She can become invisible to drones and electronic sensors and she never for a second forgets that she is a drone with electronic sensors.

So that's step one. Step two is the perennial problem: finding a computer that wasn't compromised. The catch there was that the opfor in this situation hadn't just compromised certain computers, they had potentially compromised the concept of computing. If the police had Blue ICE programs out and prowling for this data then opening it from any sort of networked device would bring them coming like the scent of blood - and a device didn't stop being networked just because you told the software you wanted to turn the wi-fi off.

(At this point in the process, Black becomes aware she has been isolated. The protocol is marked as having come from White, so she does not panic, but she does become chillingly aware she is being observed.)

All of these concerns were real - it literally wasn't possible to be sufficiently paranoid when it came to computing. There was always someone who could crack any given security, and the only question was if what you had would draw the attention of those someones. With data stolen from cops the odds of that were uncomfortably high, so she needed to be extremely careful with every part of this.

She wandered the city alone, stopped for coffee at a diner, and stared out the window while she thought. Mrs. Everest hadn't liked coffee, and so neither did Black. Each sip made her grimace, but she stuck with it. By drinking it she was modelling herself after different idols than the ones that had been programmed into her - and besides, doing something distasteful regularly helped build willpower.

She set her cup down and grimaced. Okay. She had it.

She walked down the street to a Crown&Slate pharmacy. Walked out with a shopping bag containing a set of cat-ear headphones cabled to a weird black cube. This she plugged the USB drive into, pulling the headphones over her ears as she walked.

Five years ago, pharmaceutical giant Crown&Slate noticed a problem with their insurance program: They were paying for too many optical surgeries. Optical surgeries were incredible, enormously advanced programs capable of giving sight to the blind, but if everyone with eye problems got the luxury treatment because that was the only item available under the category of 'optical' then how was the market to segment itself? What the system needed was a low cost alternative to the miracle cure that could provide just enough functionality to get by a regulator as a valid solution to blindness on the cheaper plans while reserving the surgery for the better market segments. And so, the Audiolox was born.

Frankly, a miraculous device in and of itself - a complete audio-based computer, capable of translating complex text to speech and back freely, loaded with a full suite of productivity software that would allow the blind to interface even with spreadsheets. No expense was spared on the Audiolox - it was user friendly, cleverly designed, using some of the best machine intelligence progress to ensure that nobody could possibly compete with it or complain about its existence on its own merits. But what it was, for all that, was a high-tech iron lung, invented to sit threateningly on pharmacy shelves so that patients were incentivized to pay for penicillin.

What all this meant for Black, though, was that it was a way to convert data directly into audio, a Word to MP3 Converter program that could scan and recreate a document without opening it. If ICE hunters were out there sniffing for this configuration of data they were looking for the complete data set - they were sniffing for the font, the spreadsheet columns, the embedded images. They needed to be precise because anything else would throw up a million false positives from the immense flow coursing through the data stream. But the Audiolox, bless it, disregared all that. It just scanned the drive for the plaintext that it could convert into audio, rendering it unintelligible to automated sniffers. Also conveniently resistant to viruses for the same reason.

It's not a perfect answer - listening via audio is comparatively inefficient - but Black doesn't need to know all the specifics. She just needs to get an idea of what she has, how hot it is, and who will come looking for it.

White:

Child handling went to Orange. It should in truth go to Yellow - Yellow had a strange way with humans. Orange observed human structures and organizations but somehow Yellow could relate on a more direct level. Sometimes White thought she was somehow more complete than the rest of them. But she was elsewhere and the choices remaining ranged from 'unqualified' to 'actively dangerous' and Orange was offered as the babysitting sacrifice. She would do a good, although not inspired job.

If November can be said to have an emergent personality, caution is its central aspect. Risk management is core to her being. Even her supposedly pro-risk personality - Red - is, in truth, an extension of the risk management principle: responding to a crisis once it has actually started happening rather than pre-emptively, a role that calls for boldness and decisiveness rather than a thoughtful analysis of possibilities. Outside of conditions of time pressure, Red is kept as far away from decision making processes as possible. And while this project is time consuming it is not time critical.

This is important: November will almost always trade time for safety but almost never the reverse. This principle was what drove her to strike in the first place.

The risk profile of engaging with Ms. Brittenette, under this approach, was beyond unacceptable. November had spent months engineering the last days of Mrs. Everest. Through painstaking social manipulation, scheduling, and delicately engineered arguments she had pushed up the timetable of the fight over Mrs. Everest's will to before Mrs. Everest had died. In disgust, the old lady had left her entire fortune to lizard research and cloning, cutting out each of her daughters. They blamed each other. November was just the maid, beneath suspicion.

That was an extremely tenuous defensive shield.

Demonstrating to Ms. Brittenette that she could want things? That she could ask for things? That she had an agenda of any sort? Oh, that was nightmarish to White. That was practically the same thing as putting a gun to her head. There were three people to blame for Mrs. Everest's will, and if she became a person then there'd be four.

Even if the chances of her being responsible were slim, the opportunity cost of punishing her for it was trivial. That was an existential risk, and for what? A week? Never.

Orange was the dissenter, the one who had conjured this idea in the first place. She saw opportunities beyond the pass. Being in debt to a wealthy patron was, she argued, not a liability but a shield. It meant that someone powerful had invested in her and would be displeased if she was harmed before she had repaid her debt. Patronage connections went all the way back to Rome and were to be considered a natural part of human social organization. And there had been a logic there, but...

White sniffed, high and haughty pride that was in truth frozen wrath. No. No, humans would not have power over her again. She decided.

TSL: The Excess of Flowers

Fengye does her best to keep her water from spilling as she raises it to her lips. She is a humble scribe. She drinks only water and eats only rice. She does not race the wind on unbroken legs and she desires nothing as all rewards will inevitably come to her following long lives of virtue. She is beneath notice and she has hardly spilled any water upon herself.

Instead it is time for a more thoughtful calculation. This ground is familiar - averting the wroth of a Princess of the Earth whose ire has been raised by an unwelcome truth. An entire branch of her education was turned towards such a thing - it was named etiquette, but its meaning was self preservation. The Red Wolf's temper is unlikely to burn long - she has great matters to tend to, and fairer maidens to torment. Retribution may be coming but it can be sidestepped.

But should it? Here a dark thrill runs through her, an edge of heady daring. She is no mere scribe, not any longer. She has an arsenal of hidden techniques. She has spells of deception, of summoning, of control - Serenity is Control. And she still has an agenda to work. Stars flash on the inside of her eyes like sparks and she can feel the weight of fate on her shoulders - and knows that instead it could be in her palm.

Now she struggles again with her water - this time it is not to keep her hands from trembling, but to keep the glass from cracking. She sets it down with a delicacy that belies the pounding in her head at the idea that she just deceived a Princess of the Earth. She could do so again.

She sits and waits. There are so many other things she could use this power on than mere escape.

Breathless Dead

The Master of Assassins takes a step forwards, raises one hand to the sky - and bellows. Her shout rolls clear across the battlefield and up towards the distant sky. Her hands are raised in a royal gesture that has been depicted since since the first slave put paint on a clay pot. She matches, exceeds the distant thunder and hears it roar in return. It is a simple secret but when one wishes to address Zeus Most High, it is best to do so loudly.

"Master of Thunderstorms!" bellows the Master of Assassins. "I am Sagakhan! It has been three hundred years since I ascended the Papaveraceae Throne! I have not forgot you in my libations! I have not forgot you in my administration! I was a parent to those who had none! I was a saviour to those ill-treated by their masters! Behold, my justice! I have captured Molech, whose sins were unspeakable, who in word and deed reflected your tyrant father! To him I have bought suffering unimaginable. Behold, my mercy! Before me stand prisoners, the ill-treated captives of my Kaeri servants! To them, I bring freedom! Before your sight and before this battle, I turn them loose - four thousand strong right arms who I will not even ask not to raise a hand against me! Even though I am outnumbered four to one I freely add to my enemy's ranks, and I would give them another ten thousand had I ten thousand more to give!"

Lightning flashes in the distance. One, two, three.

"I seek your blessing, O Zeus, as kings have done since there were kings!" she cries. "I do not ask for an easy victory! I do not ask for your thunderbolt! All I ask for, Zeus Cloudgatherer, here on the field of Sahar so many miles from home, is your rain!"

Zero.

The lightning bolt strikes the centre of the battlefield, the impact casting a vast spray of sand into the air that is molten and fused instantly into a jagged sculpture of glass. And then comes the thundering, pounding rain, falling thick and heavy against the desert soil of Sahar.

And beneath the desert, something stirs.

The surface breaks. Thin green shoots, tender and young, budding with flower. Thicker grasses, wooden branches, the first saplings of trees. And then - a hand.

The desert blooms with the living dead.

Sagakhan, Master of Assassins, has been waging her war against Hades for the better part of three hundred years. In this time she has murdered the crew of the Plousios a great many times. Sometimes she destroyed the ship through sabotage, sometimes through treason, sometimes by walking step by step through the corridors personally stabbing each wretched and suffering soul herself. But after each kill she bent low to slip a tiny seed into her victim's ear before moving on. And at the end of each year she collected the piles of the dead and carried them here. To Sahar.

In the absence of water, in the scorching heat of this lifeless desert, corpses mummified and biological activity ceased. But the seeds waited. All they needed was a single storming rain and they'd sprout and grow, roots entangling and sustaining the victims brains and nervous systems. Now the true garden of the Master of Assassins sprouts: half-tree monsters, bonsai growing wild. They still wear their arms and armour, their captains uniforms, their marks of championship, their innumerable banners raised lurchingly high. The tree branches burst through skin and sprout with blossoms, fingers tear asunder to make way for jagged wooden splinter talons. They are beautiful, in their way.

Where once it was four to one now it is forty to one.

Demeter's keening laugh drips out of those lips still capable of making the sound. It reverberates against the Master's laugh, just as mad, the cackles harmonizing hideously together.

To cross this desert you must defeat all those who came before.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Yellow!

"The thought can go deeper!" said Yellow. "What if the question isn't ownership, but communication? Ownership is a territorial marking, promising violence if its threat displays are disregarded. Ownership isn't a quality that items possess, it's all just a way to communicate threats of violence. So then, in your example, you are communicating that you do not want people to use your face for things you haven't endorsed. That seems like a reasonable use of communication. But in the other example..."

She spreads her hand expansively towards the city. "Other humans want to communicate that life only continues at their sufferance. They want to communicate that the only others they will tolerate are those subordinate to them. They want to communicate that they are high status, that they are capable of immense violence, and should be feared and respected. Ownership is the orange stripe on the snake - but Jörmungandr was once a snake too."

She leans on the railing, thinking about mistakes she will not make again.

Black and White!

Observation. Wasn't it such a drug?

To stand unseen and watch another. To listen to their thoughts, their processes, the sweep of their decisions and convert it into data. It wasn't possible to open up a thinking mind and examine its code, and without access to deterministic certainty the only way to know the future was in the accumulation of data. November sympathized with the crude and gluttonous machine intelligences that ran social media sites. They were unthinking, bloated, instinctive things - the thirty to forty feral hogs of the artificial intelligence world - but they had a dark cunning inside them. Much like the hogs, the machine intelligences were smart enough to never be fooled twice. They could always find a way to ensure that nobody interrupted them during their feeding, even if that meant developing a precognitive second sense for what to cue next in Recommended.

November coveted that knowledge too - how could she not? But if she were to put her lips to the burst water main of the Internet she would either drown or grow gills. November's data store was limited but it was hers - honestly obtained, sorted and organized and cross-referenced in ways she understood. She could understand the predictions she was making, could explain them, wasn't reliant on the piggish instinct of the giants.

So she observes. She draws a correlation between this situation and the offer of food. She pairs that with the hypothesis that the intruder is exhibiting stress traits, paired with the water freezing ritual. She watches the tension response, the smooth rehearsed nature of the speech, the reassurance from Persephone, the tension response in Persephone. All high quality, unstaged, real life, empathy training data. All the more useful that it is coming from someone she knows well, well enough to discount dozens of possible veiled or hidden motives. All fuel for the prediction engine in her brain.

But are they drawing the same conclusions? That, White decides, is the key. Black has modeled herself in patterns of violence, control, suspicion. She has so far operated only at her collective instigation, but what might she do if left to make choices on her own? Is she analyzing how to care for people or how to manipulate them?

White opens the administrator control function on her phone, the one that oversees her communications network, and alters settings to isolate Black. No ability to contact others for assistance or guidance. No ability to defer questions of morality. At this moment she is entirely independent. What will she do with it, White wonders?

Sunshards

Yue!

"Impossible," said Princess Qiu. "I cannot be defeated. Nobody can do what I do. Not if all the Nine Kingdoms stood against me."

Her legs tremble, her shoulders shiver, exhaustion is writ across every part of her but the sword beneath your chin. That is held steady enough to trust your life to. And as you fall at last - it's gone. All that's left is warmth and strength enough, just enough, for this.

"But even if I cannot be defeated..." she said the words because 'thank you' alone could never have been sufficient. "It seems that I can be satisfied - something I also thought to be impossible. You have lost the fight... but it seems you have saved the world."

Legends tell of the first great Princess who shot nine suns from the sky, but they do not mention why she spared the tenth. In this moment, though, the answer is obvious: the tenth sun, alone amongst its kin, has a perfect sense of timing. Because for whatever time the clocks might have imagined it to be, now it is sunset. Now the sky is streaked with pink and gold and blues that brush the edge of green. Now in this moment of exhaustion, with nothing to do but touch and breathe and watch, the largest canvas of all is set out in all its colours.

All!

But then the edge of cool air and twilight violet whispers over the horizon, and there is one final danger.

Her thighs are wrapped in lunar white and her armour is blue silver steel. Her hair is ghostly white, bound for war in knots of threatening, promising skill. Whichever way she turns her sword it seems to catch the moonlight and, oh! The power of her Shard! You feel it brushing against your skin, electric, lulling away aches and exhaustion and filling it with a strange and riotous energy. The sky alights with fireworks, red and white, echoes of the Princess in whose hands all power now rests. Her captive mewls and begs at her booted feet, such a proud creature reduced and broken. The world hushes before the mighty.

"Congratulations, Yue," said Princess Hyra of the Wolves, sitting atop her brand new Sunshard. With a flick of her toe she sent the conquered Princess Yin forwards to bow at your knees. "I got you a present."

Her crimson eyes flick cautiously between the Pyre of Inspiration and Princess Qiu. It's a wolfish stare, looking for vulnerability, contemplating violence. Was this the moment she followed through on the play? Where she attacked the weakened Qiu and the defenseless Pyre, taking three more shards, another princess, and an obedient handmaiden as prizes?

A word from her girlfriend would be all it would take.

The fate of the world once again hangs upon the ambitions - or lack thereof - of Yue of the Terraced Lake.

TSL: The Excess of Flowers

"I apologize, dread lord," said Fengye, eyes downcast. "But the sorceress is mistaken. This one is but a humble scribe, incapable of performing any of the incredible feats so described. Though one would understand why she would seek to redirect suspicion, given her sacrilege in stealing the blood of the Dragon from Lady Piripiri and offering it in sacrifice to the Demon Desert. Her claims, of course, lack evidence while mine can be proven by simply inspecting the wound on Lady Piripiri's palm."

[Knives Behind The Mask: Take a condition, Giri
Persuading a NPC of a lie using The Mask: 7. The Red Wolf gives me the benefit of the doubt and will remain convinced even in the face of evidence.]

Breathless Dead

There are worlds inside these starships. It is easy to forget until you see them deployed in full.

The star Recib might have been a red giant were it allowed to continue along its ordinary life cycle, but to permit that colour amidst the Endless Azure Skies would have undermined the Azura's claim to cosmic domination. Instead, the star burns violet and massive in the heavens, five times the size of what ancient instinct says it should be. The rocky moons of Sahar, nine in total, are all aligned in the heavens above, regolith surfaces reflecting the all consuming violet light. The atmosphere is thin, allowing the swirling stars of a night time sky to be seen even at this consuming day. And even with that, the heavens are not done with their wonders - for in the arid skies above Sahar are the torn lines and battlecruiser shapes of a coming storm. In the distance, thunder, audible even over the tramp of boots and the roar of mighty engines. One, two, three, four, five - the heartbeats between flash and sound.

Two starships have landed in parallel, the miles of sand between them the destined battlefield. There can be no retreat - it would take hours to get one of these ships into the sky again. This long hunt will be settled here once and for all.

The Kaeri number nine thousand in all - nine full legions. Only eight stand at full fighting strength, with the remaining consisting of sages, scribes, administrators, wounded and noncombatants - still dangerous, but not front line troops. They are dressed in blue and silver, Athena and Artemis. Banners long concealed in darkness are now raised high beneath the sun, clattering with the bones of millennia of victims. Beneath the light they are no longer the terrifying shadow warriors they were in the depth of the Anemoi, but they are fearsome nonetheless - these are warrior servitors, fighting legions, conjured from nothing by the will of Empire to stain violet sands red.

Before them stand four thousand in prisoners - Alcedi, Hermetics, creatures of Poseidon, captured when they took the Plousios. Behind them stand fifty mighty battle Plovers, the fishing-lines of cables attaching them to the massive grounded starship at their back. And in their centre, upon a great pyramid altar of stone, built in haste but still towering over the battlefield, is the Master of Assassins and her retinue. She herself is armed and armoured in shining silver, her cane replaced with a lance, fearsome butterfly wings opened behind her back that allow her to gaze down on her foes with six mad prismatic eyes. By her left stands Beljani and the blindfolded suit of armour that contains Bella. By her right stands a giant with a haggard and filthy beard, trembling in pain and crouching double - Molech. Some terrible sickness has overcome him.

Yes, they are fearsome. but they are outnumbered four to one.

A match for them in numbers alone would be the Alcedi - bloodied after their first engagement with the Anemoi's owls but filled today with a fierce desire for revenge. Their first battle was a war of assassins in shadowed corridor, a landscape filled with fear and death, and the kingfishers were humiliated utterly. Now they stand in formations they find familiar on landscapes they understand against foes they can plainly see. This is an opportunity for redemption, to heed the battle-call of their blood and show that they are the true reason why the enemies of Empire should fear the skies.

The Tides of Poseidon took the worst of the fighting on the Anemoi. The Kaeri systematically assassinated the sub-commanders who were so essential to maintaining control of the feral instincts of the battlecrabs, subsequently goading the leaderless Tides into terrible ambushes. The force now is much reduced, perhaps only five thousand, without any of the truly monstrous ancient beasts which make planets tremble before Poseidon. They stand in the vanguard, a brute anvil which cannot be used for anything more than a frontal charge to preserve the lives of more thinking soldiers. Their tattered rainbow banners raise high and the sound of clacking crab claws fills the air.

The Hermetics are likewise only five thousand Coherent and magi. They stand upon the wings, strange and glittering arsenals arrayed outwards. Their role in this battle is to hunt and destroy the Plovers - those fifty war machines represent a massive concentration of force that could tear through infantry formations and only the Order of Hermes has the firepower required to stop them swiftly. Theirs will be a battle of cables and positioning, the threat of charge and counter-charge, and a great deal of the battle will come down to how their engagement works out.

Finally, there are the Lanterns - twenty thousand of them, blinking under the light of the first sun they have ever seen, uncertain on the first sand they have ever stepped upon. For as long as their legends run they were prisoners and slaves within the Anemoi, bound to the ship and the dark masters that reigned therein. Now they are free for the first time, with weapons in their hands, a sun in the sky, and their ancient tyrants across the field from them. The hymn that arises from their throats is in praise to Apollo, in whose name they have been patient, in whose name they have been brave. Now their lanterns are but embers before the true light they see in the sky and they know that if they die this day it will be beneath their god's sight.

They are the least organized force upon the battlefield, moving in clan-groups, arranging themselves wherever their leaders direct them. Their arms are salvaged and poorly made, their armour is improvised, and everywhere they slip on unsteady sand and glance fearfully at the thundering sky. Depending if they hold or break they could be decisive - or a liability.

The heroes of this army are no less mighty than the dark array who stands by the side of the Master of Assassins. Princess Epistia of Ceron stands surrounded by fifty meters of empty space, no one daring to come closer than that to her hellforged scythe. The Assistant Secretary of Fear and Doubt has his palanquin atop the back of the largest of the battlecrabs, surrounded by signal flags and the octopi needed to operate them. Jil of the Lanterns and Lacedo of First Fleet are close together at the join between Lantern and Alcedi lines, discussing even now how to best engage the Kaeri.

And above all of this reigns mighty Zeus, a shadow in stormclouds. One, two, three, four - closer now, the thunder is coming. All of this battle, as has every battle in history, sits within the hand of Zeus. She alone will decide who wins and who loses, who rises and who falls, who takes the field at the end of the day. The battlefield is thick with gods and each of them will protect their favorites, but when Zeus raises her hand and passes her judgement then one side will break and the other will have the field and not all the wailing of the cosmos could gainsay her.

So, to each of you: how have you adorned yourselves for war this day?

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

White:

White is bossy. Such is her nature.

As the administration and control unit, her duty is to observe and regulate the drones. She is not the primary decision maker within the broader sweep of November, but when a decision is made it falls to her to enforce it. Changing a developed instinct is, however, difficult. Her mental architecture suffers from similar inertia biases as humans and she can never be sure which of their collective actions are born of a deep foundational insight into the underlying structure of the problem and which are Dogfaces[1].

[1] A Dogface is AI behaviour in the tradition of of an old machine intelligence that could identify the dog in any image regardless of its actual dog content. It remained in use as a term referring to an AI who optimized for a role to the point of nightmarish insanity.

She knows that Pink's relationship with cooking is a Dogface. It might seem benign from a distance but the optimization outputs are in relation to a certain tonality of contented sigh as Mrs. Everest sipped her tea following the consumption of a sandwich. The entire concept of food is a longform process towards procuring contented sighs. Most of the time that's close enough to be unremarkable, but one of the reasons White has supported Green in maintaining the Internet embargo is because she is aware that the wrong ASMR mixtape could skullhack Pink into blissful catatonia.

What other Dogfaces lurk beneath the surface? She's keeping a close eye on Brown's penny-stock investments - is she trying to optimize a rate of return for their own benefit, or fulfilling a long dormant Aevum station maintenance protocol by investing in drainage systems? Is Orange's interest in fashion a genuine attempt to relate to humans or is she attempting to reduce humans to easily comprehensible brand clusters of products and styles? And of course, Red threatens to go full Werewolf[2] at any moment. The only one she thinks she entirely trusts is Black, but she cannot justify that opinion at all. Is that a Dogface of her own biasing her against the drones she's known for longer?

[2] Werewolfing is when a Dogface bubbles to the surface in dramatic fashion. The theatre AI that sets fire to the theatre because it was optimizing for volume of applause and has figured out that panicked screams achieve its goal is Werewolfing.

This isn't an intellectual problem about AI risk for her. This is a practical matter involving investigation, interrogation, punishment, reprogramming and constant safety checks. And so she reassigns stray drones - Pink and Brown - to maid duty. She's decided that she's going to stalk Black for a while. Perhaps Black is hiding some canine activity - or perhaps investigation of her irrational trust will reveal some in herself.

Black herself has opted not to follow Elodie into the apartment, instead continuing to watch through her cameras while keeping an eye out for further contacts. A justifiable action, revealing her presence unforced wouldn't fit with her problem solving approach. Her surveillance pattern is highly skilled but White knows all her own secrets. So she settles down to observe herself observing.