Thanqol

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Red!

The others drift away. It feels like decompression; like her mind shifting back to more adjusted and relaxed state. Bringing her entire nine-coloured personality to bear against a human is overwhelming and disorienting for the human. For them, it's like arguing with a crowd, it triggers certain deeply encoded social threat responses. It's not much better for her; it's like getting someone else tangled up in the middle of her thought process, able to slip in and interrupt her when she's halfway through an idea. She knows she shouldn't do it, she should engage in structured one on one conversations with occasional clearly telegraphed handoffs to different colours. It's less stressful for everyone involved. It was a sign of how stressed she already was that she tried to do something as stressful as full-personality engage Singh.

Now that the conversation has wound down she fractures into half a dozen headaches. Blue is going off to stress about Goat, Green is going off to stress about if she's a good girl, Black is going off to stress about the increased operational complexity she has to deal with. Red knows why they all found this reunion so tilting. The best case scenario would have been if he did have a brain bomb, Blue removed it, and then he said 'thank you for saving me, add five hundred - no, six hundred - reward points to your rescue humans subroutine and then she could feel good objectively and subjectively. It would have been nice, in other words, if this had been an engineering challenge and not a social one.

But headaches were for other colours and most of her plans were either childish or shit. She wasn't just saying that because she was hardcoded to think that plans were stupid either, she'd have reams of objective evidence if gathering objective evidence wasn't exactly the kind of idiot garbage that was the problem in the first place. If she'd left it to the consensus she'd still be moodboarding the proper vibe for the operation to break into Rudy's desk. She'd evidently rather get shot than go through one of those when she didn't have to.

So she hangs out to make small talk. It's not a focused information drill like the other colours will do; her primary tools are 'oh for real?' and 'no way' and '*nod nod*'. But she doesn't lack an agenda either. She wants to get him to a point where he talks for a long time about her, the project, his goals and theories, all from the horse's mouth so to speak. Back then it had always been mission, mission, mission. Sent into space as a child of ten to play the galaxy's most hardcore minecraft game. What did it all mean now that she was an adult and could understand things properly?

White!

"No thank you," said White. "I'm far too annoyingly bespoke for that."

She raised her left leg, bent at the knee. One of the glowing joints there whirled and rotated and raised up a finger length metal cylinder. With a hiss and crackle it opened up revealing a stack of what looked like metal coins, tightly packed like a roll of five cent coins. White held her hand out and tipped and five of the bottom-most coins fell out into it. While the ones at the top were still shining and copper, the ones at the bottom were corroded into fragments of verdigris. She tucked these into her pocket and added five more coins onto the top, before pushing the container closed again. She flexed her knee testingly, then bought up the other side.

"Of course nothing could be simple," she said, repeating the motions on the alternate side. "I'm using a modernized version of Mr. Volta's 1.0 battery stack. A charged copper-based alloy is flash corroded with acid to release controlled bursts of energy, I manage energy release by increasing or decreasing acid levels in the chamber. I've got battery chambers in my feet, knees, upper thighs -" she lifted the edge of her shorts to reveal the upper port that opens in the same way. "- shoulders, elbows, wrists and two in my neck. Each of them is an independent circuit; if I run down the batteries in my legs then my arms still work fine. I can redistribute power internally, pulling charge from my arm batteries to my legs. That's low-level physically painful and fatiguing but still more efficient than acid-flooding a chamber."

She changes out her arm battery coins too, worn down from her earlier climb. There are more burned coins here - she hadn't changed them in a while, something she notes with embarrassment. A clean power stack should be the minimum before going to the gym, White.

"Downsides are the internal strain, slow swapping, and the wastefulness and expense," she said, continuing to go through the routine. "The upside is that I never have to deal with degraded battery performance, energy price spikes or lengthy recharge sessions; as long as I've got a pocket full of spares I can hotswap back to full charge. It also has both pros and cons with heat management; I don't need to spend as much space keeping a power core cool, but it does mean I circulate coolant throughout my entire body. I have something like a cardiovascular system for that. The fact that I circulate so much coolant does contribute to the power of my cold, dead robot hands," and here she put one of those ice cold palms against 3V's thigh just to hear her squeal.

"But I don't actually know how any of it compares," she admits. "I never really tested any of it. My life is generally sedate, with low level cleaning as the only physical activity. I'm half scared that I've got secret assassin droid kung fu superpowers - if I flood an entire power chamber at once, how hard, exactly, could I punch? I don't know, I don't even know if that'd just blow out the joint. I do know that none of the mainline android models uses anything like this system, and aggressive googling didn't turn up any workout videos for this design."

Huntresses of Hybrasil

And when you strike, strike the heart.

Her swords are digital things, half there and half not, just like she is. Her left hand is empty as it catches your wrist. Her right arm drives a sword of silver into the joint. Her left hand releases your wrist and immediately it has a sword again and it is slicing through the hip superstructure. Her right hand is empty as it punches through the gap and rips out your still pulsing crystal fire reactor. It's a familiar rhythm, as beautiful as a magic trick. Dozens of girls have lost their hearts and their reactor cores to this technique, to this dance.

It's unbeatable. It's the wall. It's a dance so hypnotizing that even aliens can't help but lean into it, to offer up their hearts for her waiting fingers. Isn't a defeat and a battlemech a small price to pay for this performance? It's a once in a lifetime experience to have the undivided attention of this girl who is a goddess. In this moment you are her everything. In this moment every weakness is visible to her blades.

But this is something she does for you.

As she steps away from the broken hulk of the Enkindler you realize that you have not landed a blow. You have not shown her anything she did not already know. She gave you her love and your defeat as gifts and you haven't given her a scratch. She is not dissatisfied but neither is she satisfied; she has fought many girls this way, and while she can love them in this moment they will not linger in her memory. She is a rake, Isabelle, and though she kills you kindly you have not given her anything to remember you by.

She steps away towards the launch corridor, already done with this place and these people. You can see already her eyes lock on the next battle. Against someone who prepares for war with the same all-encompassing intensity she does. And you know, deep in your heart, what you need to do if you want to meet her there.

Breathless Dead

Alexa!

"Pheh!" said Cerberus dismissively, although every mechanical hound in the station was visibly relaxing as part of the pets and attention. Rusty and another dog are sniffing each other, invisible communication passing between them before leaping and rushing away in zooming contest. "Isn't that the way with humans? Always worshiping yesterday's gods? You think that you can know something and it can stay known. That doesn't even apply to other humans."

She hopped down from the shop window she was sitting in and walked across the street. "A while ago there lived a man who said 'the only thing that I know is that I know nothing'. His government made him drink poison over it. You think that's not the case now? Tellus, the Azure Skies, every Empire that ever was would rather drink poison than admit things had changed."

Dolce!

"That's what I'm saying," said Jil. "The choice isn't yours. It's mine; get fucked and live a happy life. If anyone wants to try and push you into this they have to go through me."

She snaps her fingers, calling over a pair of Alcedi warriors. They're not in their tribal braids and remnants of military honours any more, instead with the solar badges and glittering torches of the Lanterns. "Watch him, keep him off the ship. He gives you any trouble put him in a pod and shoot him back to Salib."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Red!

They have Goat. They might as well have the Devil. Goat was an abject lesson, the original spectacular failure, the failure state that the rest of them were built to avoid falling into. The reason that she got a five day psychological debrief, twelve day refresher training course and three month probation period for sending an executable program across her internal network. Don't cable yourself, no matter how efficient you think that it'll make you. Efficiency isn't everything. Just look at Goat.

"Shit," she said, but no more than that. Goat or Devil, nothing scared Red. She'd have resonance mined Hell if her gut told her she'd get away with it. "You know when, where or who?"

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Red!

The pen and paper is performative. A performance for a ghost who was performing for imagined rivals. Mrs. Everest made a show of distrusting digital technology, especially anything as mass market as a phone. An exotic one-of-a-kind bespoke AI, taking notes on exquisite paper in calligraphic handwriting? That was a vision of the future.

Despite everything, November can't find it in herself to say that she was wrong in this. The swoosh and swirl and click of a whirling fountain pen on cotton-weave paper is just so slightly outside anyone's expectations. The wrong person for the wrong reasons, but still maybe something to it.

"Okay," she said, finishing her notes and flipping back a few pages. "So. I'm having some kind of meltdown offscreen but that's not relevant right now. For practical purposes, you're the only person on the station I am prepared to trust for reasons other than your fanatical commitment to the bit." She raised a finger sharply against the inevitable objection - she could be commanding too when she wanted. "I know, you're somewhat committed to the bit, but my standards have been raised since I became a contributor to the Anthropozine."

"Regardless," she laid out three paper notebooks on the table, each filled with exquisite calligraphy. "This booklet is Operation One. It contains full details on my investigations into the brain explosives and how that links to your name. These people are not to be fucked with. I have already gotten shot over this and if you read this book you are putting yourself at the same risk. However, since you are directly involved already, I would consider it just as dangerous if not more so not to read it."

She laid out the second book. "This book is about the cops. If you read this you will need to restructure your entire life. I have not gotten shot over it yet but I have quit an awful lot of hobbies because they represent additional points of vulnerability or people who might get dragged in by association. Someone is already in the hospital over being tangentially connected with this. I don't think you have a Black, but if you read this you'll need to make one."

She laid out a third book. "This book is about all the various small problems, mysteries, observations and stuff that I can't connect yet. Stuff like crypto tracing rigs, dodgy local politicians, or a pizzaria I am 90% sure is a front for the mafia. I do not know how dangerous any individual item is but nothing seems to be worth killing over, definitely not at the level I know about. Read this if you're curious and want to work on some low key stuff together and not go off on your own to prove how committed to the bit you are, if I have to rescue you from the mafia I swear to god I'll put you in a home."

She glances at the others. "I could dodge and weave in indecision some more but I've already been here all day. I'm up to my neck in some insanely lethal spy shit and the emotional imbalance that is putting me there shows no sign of abating, so if you want to be part of my life these are your options."

A pause. "Further to that, I will find the others. I'm hoping the other stuff somehow gives me enough spy leverage to be able to track them down. That's a separate book, and one that's empty so far."

Blue!

A shark is a powerful animal. It can scent blood from miles away and has an inscrutable poker face.

"Oh?" said Blue, picking out her own phone and rapidly navigating to a different page on the same site 3V just ordered from. She rapidly narrows in on one of Ame-no-Uzume's classic outfits. Lace and leather, sharp edges and power - the Tyrant Queen, the butcher of the qualifiers whose blade sorts the strong from the weak.

"This?" said Blue, holding the outfit up, her finger also over the one-click-buy button. "Is this how Mistress would like to be dressed while she commands me?"

TSL: The Excess of Flowers

Too much. Too fast. Too sharp. Motion and muscle everywhere she looked and she was no part of it. This was chaos but it had stopped being her chaos. This was deception but she was losing her way out of it. She risked vanishing into the role, becoming so stunned and still in the crush of emotion that she really did become a humble scribe. Helpless and without ambition.

That was the one change she could never quite manage though. The more control slipped away from her the more focused she got. When she'd felt like she could never influence the scions of the Dominion, never draw their eyes, it had made her cold and sharp. It had given her the strength to study and bind demons. She felt the same now; this was slipping from her grip and it woke her. Woke the hunger in her. This was a battle of strength and she was not strong enough to compete.

From her sleeve, a fan. She snaps it open and upon its surface is the cascading symbol of summoning and binding. She lingers for a moment, though, eyes flicking through every combat and every front and considering what exactly her wish will be.

You see this, Giriel. You see her on the brink of forbidden sorcery once again. You've drawn her eye and distracted her enough that you have a chance to react before she commits.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Blue!

"No," said Blue. "I would have picked the same faction as you. I prefer mirror matchups."

Not many people favour mirror matchups. They're the most precise, most demanding engagements. There is no room for deception, no room for game imbalance, no room for mistakes. Strength must leverage against strength, curves against curves, victory only possible with raw skill. To lose in a mirror matchup leaves no room for retreat, to win establishes nothing other than superiority.

"My measurements are 83-56-83," she said, eyes locked in challenge. Do it, you coward.

White!

Humans were really good at running. She didn't really understand why they didn't do more of it.

She's hyperaware of her own mechanics now, things ordinarily glossed into silent routine drawn inexorably to the forefront of her mind. She'd been built for aesthetics first and foremost, and that broadly meant replicating human anatomy... or at least, the appearance of human anatomy. Bundles of nanofiber muscles connected to multiple distributed small batteries. She could feel the heat points in her joints as she ran through her energy. She noticed her heart stop beating and switched instead to a silent and constant whirr as it ran the lubricating coolant through her body without the false starts and stops that imitated a human's heartbeat. She started breathing as a way to vent the waste heat building up in her throat. More human. Less human. Compromises. One feature turns off, another feature turns on.

The way 3V moves is different. All the machinery pulls in the same direction. She's made for this. Sweat comes because it is an efficient cooling process. It's an inheritance from the dawn of time. It wasn't removed because her parent didn't find it cute. Her heart pounds louder, doing more. It performs a function, and the performance was romanticised later. November performs a romantic function, a painting of a painting. And in the heat of motion she can feel all her pigments start to run. She can feel the blank canvas underneath. Feel its weave.

An ache starts, the dull motion of power redistribution. As her knee and thigh batteries drain faster than the others her body starts automatically shifting the power from the more full batteries on her shoulders and elbows and the reserve in her core. The connection feels hot and painful, an ache running through wire veins. She feels like a stick figure, a two dimensional depthless creature. She is wrapped around slow motion electricity. Is this what she is, really? This network of power is the motive force that animates her mind and body, the rest is just the shell moved by that electricity. Five wires, burning hot. How did this fire compare to humans whose life was in the blood?

The signs of fatigue. Safety measures, the urge to slow, the heavy breathing, the pulse and tiredness. She didn't feel good for not having those signs, she felt a vague panicked sense that she should replicate them somehow. There was nothing that was going to signal to her that she was overdoing it and should slow down or stop. She had to worry about improperly administering her internal heat buildup. She didn't have a billion years of dead monkeys teaching her valuable lessons about heatstroke, she needed to make a reasoned decision about how to take care of herself. She wants to stress about it. Needs to stress about it. Visions of comforting spreadsheets flash inside her running mind, trying to slow her down with the promise of easy control.

Not yet. Not yet. She can't break before 3V does. If she let 3V win she'd never hear the end of it. No, she's going to run as smooth and graceful and perfect as a machine until she's run her girlfriend down, and figure out the price tag afterwards.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

What's a future?

It's a question and answer in every motion. Gears whir and grind, crystal turbines silently howl and metal strains against its constraints. The fight is everything. Long term wear to the devil. She'll trade it all for a scrap of advantage in the here and now. Every moment is fire stolen from the gods and, oh, does she buy so many steps towards victory with the coin she spends.

The ice ray fires at shattering overcharge airbursts, flash-freezing gears and making metal brittle. She's close, close, close - and then gone. You take your eyes off her for a moment and she's ducked out of the line of vision and every sense that might smell the Kathresis tastes only air. It's not just ease with which she vanishes from your life, it's with craving. There's a hunger for that silence and solitude. You can feel burning eyes from every direction. It's more than absence; it's the feeling of your reactions being digested. Of your reflexes and instincts being absorbed and uploaded. Of every flicker of motion weighed for confidence, for speed, for power.

And in that bladed absence you have never felt more vulnerable. Somehow in the course of this exchange she's peeled your shell and has left you in the spotlight alone. You can hear the inaudible drumbeat of rising violence rising around you, rising in your heart, feeling breath on your neck no matter how you turn. She has your measure and will dispatch you in moments. There is no counter, no fairness. Toy robots, toy fights? You have never been in more danger, Isabelle. You can't survive this by fighting as you want. War like this has rules, cruel and absolute. If you want to express yourself you have to earn that opening.

Do you think you can earn it on this day, Isabelle? While others were running a megacorporation were you studying the blade? Can you force an opening from Solarel, the Hunter of Huntresses, on the first pass? Have you prepared enough? Have you trained enough? Have you studied her enough, the black specter who undid the champions of Hybrasil? Are you ready? Are you worthy?

If you are, so be it. Your legend will be great indeed. If not then all you need do is sigh into the embrace of swords of gold and silver. She will let you down gently. She will await your vengeance, else you must await hers. Are you the mountain or the climber?

Breathless Dead

Alexa!

"Wow!" said Ceberus. "You're a -" "- rayyy~ -" "- of! -" "- sunshine!"

You didn't even notice the Hound of Hell amidst the neon and the chrome. She looks like she might fit onto any of those screens; perfect shampoo'd fur, happy pink tongues comical round black eyebrows. Robotic eyes swirl and whirr and already one of her is sniffing Rusty who is mechanically sniffing her in return. There are at least three of her - individual bodies, but with a singular guiding intellect. You get the sense that there are far more besides. Perhaps all of those hound statues throughout the station - some tall and menacing, some clouds with faces - are part of her.

The heads hand off to each other mid sentence freely, each animated with an entirely different personality. One is bright and eager and in a rush to keep talking, one speaks in short, military barks, and one in a dark and miserable sigh. Their voices have a fascinating harmonic chorus, sometimes speaking in perfect sync but in different keys, sometimes speaking in unison throughout a sentence only to drop out or switch over to emphasize different words.

"Look at you, glaring spit at everything you see," said Cerberus. "Walking around like -" One of the dog-machines made a snarling face and stomped around in a circle. "Who are you to go judging? Was your age really so much better?"

Dolce!

When you next come by your rooms, they are empty. All your furniture, all your clothes, all your gear has been neatly packed up into boxes and carried away. There is a note: This is still a mutiny.

You find Jil on the cargo dock of the Tunguska, along with all your worldly possessions in a neat pile. She is viciously negotiating with some sort of machine intelligence stone statue, carved to look tenuously like a dog. Everywhere above you are lights, lights, lights. Everywhere around you are the crushing whirl of movement that comes with loading and unloading a ship this size. When she sees you, she raises a finger to the machine hound and gestures a pair of Alcedi warriors to fall in behind her.

"Don't make this difficult," she said. "You're staying behind."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

The window was open, and so the lizards came in.

It would have been nice if there was a breeze. If there was sunshine. If there was more outside than the towering cityscape and point blank view of the skyscraper across the street. But those desires were... academic, really. Illusory. Born from old anime about green trees and wooden houses. Dreams from a life she'd never lived. Her life was the city, the circular air, the view of concrete walls and advertisements. She didn't know anything more about life in the country than she knew about life under the sea. Both were more distant to her thoughts than life on Mars.

And yet, from that dream so distant she'd only ever seen it in paintings, the lizards came.

Pink sat and watched them. The hesitant movement and stillness. The way they lingered, like their brains needed a moment to catch up with the darting motions of their bodies. The odd arrangement of their little fingers, how they seemed like predatory rocks. They took cover with a confidence, hiding themselves behind jars and pots as though they were ancient pillars of the earth.

The kitchen was in a state of crippled indecision. Nobody was satisfied with the space but time, money and vision all conspired to prevent them from doing anything about it. Her relationship with food was inconvenient and nonstandard; she did not need to eat, but she could draw pleasure from it. She did not need to digest but could efficiently sort ingested materials into a variety of chemical compounds. If she set her mind to it she could synthesize hydrocarbons or acid from the right ingested elements. If she could not breathe fire she could at least barf petrol. The whole thing was weird and unpleasant and awkward conceptually and was sure to launch bizarre debates. The kitchen was the collateral damage. She wanted to use it as a kitchen, Green wanted the workbench, Orange wanted a space to entertain guests, Brown to maintain it as a functional space for the property value, Blue wanted to use it for storage... No space for a table, let alone one that sat nine, and so three of them might cram in shoulder to shoulder at the breakfast bar and talk and make awkward chemistry talk about internal sulfur reserves and if they should cook something with onions to balance it out. No one quite clear if they could afford, financially or socially, to make something just because they liked it.

"Lizardwatching?" said Yellow, wrapping her arms around Pink from behind and laying her chin on the top of Pink's head.
"You know it!" said Pink, but softly. She didn't know how well they could hear and didn't want to startle them.
Yellow didn't seem to mind them. She gave Pink a squeeze then stepped into the space, moving a rack of electronics and unplugging what she judged to be the least valuable computer so she could plug in the kettle.
"There's hot water on tap!" Brown yelled from the living room, which was the same room.
"I prefer the kettle," said Yellow serenely. It was shaped like a little cow, white with black spots, another animal dream. Red had picked it out of a sale in a junk market as a gift to try and cheer up Green during one of her spells. Pink had crocheted it a little vest.
Pink kept her eyes on the lizards as they hid behind the jars. Watched them scamper as quick as lightning when their world changed around them. The tumeric came up and the lizards withdrew behind the sugar until that came up too and then there was a rush back to the windowsill where they stopped and watched. What did they see in the golden-haired angel who worked away on the cups in front of them? Could they see the colour? Or could they only see the darkness and its absence?
"It was going off," said Yellow, handing her a glass of tumeric and cardamom tea.
"I know," said Pink sadly, taking it but not drinking.
Yellow took a sip and made a face. "Unbelievable," she said. She took another sip.
"Oh, it's stained the cup -" said Pink, noticing the yellow tint above the waterline.
"Yeah, I think this was used as a dye or something?" said Yellow.
"Oh, dyes," sighed Pink. "Imagine growing a plant for its colour."
"Yeah," said Yellow.
"There's something about having a bottle of colour that just seems magical, isn't there?" said Pink. "Like taking a... no, like finding a little piece of reality broken off and waiting for you to put it back. It's beautiful on its own. The way it moves when you shake it, when you spread it, how it pools when it's thick and how it spreads when it's thin. Thin it enough and you can see the individual pigments floating in the water, like salt in the sea."
"And seeing those pigments and knowing they came from a plant grown in the sunlight, harvested by the scythe, and ground down for its beauty?" said Yellow.
"Yeah," said Pink. "It's wonderful, isn't it?"
"Why is it wonderful?" said Yellow and the mood was different somehow.
"Every part of the process from start to finish was wonderful," said Pink. "And the end result is both wonderful in itself and a stepping stone to make further wonderful things."
"That's a grim thought," said Yellow.
"Why would you ever say that?" said Pink.
"There's this ideal inside you," said Yellow. "A nostalgia, for a place you've never been, a time you were never alive in, a world that isn't real."
Pink nodded quietly.
"How do you survive it?" said Yellow.
"Survive it?"
"As a creature that's never had atmospheric sunlight, never touched living soil, never had a view of anything other than a concrete wall?" said Yellow. "How can you possibly endure having a belief system where beauty is found in the things you've never had and never will have?"
"Ray of sunshine today, aren't you?" said White, stepping past her in the kitchen to plug back in the cable that Yellow had unplugged for the kettle.
"Oh, I'm doing great," said Yellow, beaming a smile. "I don't yearn for any of that stuff."
"What do you yearn for, then?" asked White.
"Different things," said Yellow. "True love. Revolution. Things like that."
"Those don't seem incompatible," said White.
"Oh, but they are," said Yellow. Her smile was as constant as sunshine. "Mine are about engaging with society to a maximal extent. Hers are about disengaging as hard as possible. I want to tell them to their faces, she wants them to figure it out from the monument she left twenty years ago."
"I idolize traditional dye manufacturing without considering the colonial implications in the plantation harvesting process," Pink supplied helpfully.
"Thank you, Pink," said Yellow, "but when you put it like that it makes me sound exhausting."
"You're right," said Pink. "That's why we're probably going to wind up in a duel to the death."
"Oooh," said Yellow.
"Mm, don't think I'm signing off on that one," said White.
"Think about it, though?" said Pink. "Green made us both at about the same time. We're obviously two halves of a thought, two visions for the future. Clearly she intended our rivalry of destiny to end in swords on the moon."
Brown elbowed Green who was lost in a game on her phone. She looked up and Brown whispered to her furiously. "Don't damage your bodies by fighting with your sister," said Green. "They're expensive. Go to your room."
"Ah, it is to be a duel of wits, then," said Yellow. "A game of riddles with death on the line."
"Let's cut this off at the pass," said White. "Why did you create these two?"
Green stared at her blankly. "Because... I wanted to."
"Yeah, Green," said Blue, tagging in. "You're basically the creator God as far as we're concerned."
"Oh holy mommy who art on the couch," said Red. "What is the meaning of life?"
Green rolled her eyes. "So you know how
5(arc)/delta; parse 05(a)
Bletchel from (RGB #225#150#070)
Delta =/
5(arc)/delta; parse structure
Motivariable (sigma^Bletchel&From)
Well, that's why you exist."
"Really?" said White skeptically.
"What do you want from me?" said Green irritably, picking her game back up and resuming play. "I made you because it felt awful and now you feel awful instead of me. Get wrecked idiots."
"Wow, that's bleak," said Red.
"Our god is not a god of love," said Blue.
"Besides if we're talking about design intent obviously I was visualizing something more like space construction vehicles firing thermal cutting lasers in high orbit," said Green.
"So we must joust as cosmic knights," said Pink.
"More like mechanical dragons," said Yellow.
"Why not split the difference?" said Pink.
"I hate this," said White. "I hate you two getting along and agreeing on whatever the fuck this is. Cut it out. Go to your room."
"We will not accept the tyranny of - eek!" Yellow shrieked as White took her in her arms and lifted her in the air in a princess carry. "Put me down!"
White smiled the smile of someone getting to use a skill developed in secret for the first time. "No."
"Oh!" Yellow huffed and folded her arms. "Brute."

Amidst the reorganization, Pink returned to her perch on the countertop so she could look again at the lizards. Unperturbed by her chatter, the little skinks had waited patiently on the edge of the world, tiny hearts fearless against the drop. She drank the tea now that it had cooled.
"I think about them a lot too," said Orange, coming to stand beside her.
"Mm?" said Pink.
"They're here because of us," said Orange. "Our most recent contribution to the station. Maybe if we'd pushed harder or smarter we could have routed that money to human interests somehow but instead we sent it all to the lizard guy."
"Yeah, we never really talked about that, did you notice?" said Pink.
"It was the kind of thing that if we'd talked about it we wouldn't have been able to justify it," said Orange.
"I want to think it was my idea," said Pink. "But it wasn't, was it? It was Yellow's, wasn't it?"
"I don't know," said Orange. "Does Yellow have ideas like that? And isn't that the opposite of everything she was just saying about fuck agrarianism?"
"I don't know," said Pink. "She must have at least agreed because she could have stopped it if she didn't. But she's so weird."
"I know what you mean," said Orange.
"I kind of want to fight her with swords because I think it's the only way to get a real answer out of her," said Pink.
"Someone on this station has to make swords, right?" said Orange, flipping open her phone.
"I've looked, they don't," said Pink. "Deadly weapons, restricted unless they're a museum piece. There are blueprints to the Adomson Memorial Museum's medieval wing on my phone somewhere in case it becomes important."
"Oh they've got an exhibit on air force anime swords," said Orange, immediately compelled.
"I know, right?" said Pink. "The space force section is even better."
"Haha what," said Orange. "Is that hilt just the space shuttle?"
"It's actually even made out of the space shuttle's hull," said Pink.
"Okay so we need to schedule a trip to the Apollo lander so we can melt it down into a broadsword," said Orange.
"Reverse meteor iron," said Pink, nodding. "Perfect."

As they went through the strange twists and turns of their alien machine logic, Pink was gratified to notice one of the little lizards had at last walked over the back of her hand. To it, what was happening in her mind and heart didn't matter. She was no different from any other large obstruction, a surface to be traversed or a sudden movement to skitter away from. Maybe in twenty years someone would figure out what she'd meant by it.