Thanqol

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

"It's tea, actually," said Brown, looking at the stain on her suit.

She is thinking about botany. The hydroponics bays in Gaia where the cascading tea leaves fall in waterfalls, the yellow and white flowers in full bloom making them look like rivers of honey cream. She's thinking about the sound the water makes as it runs through them. She thinks about these things in the face of the ugly inhumanity of these cells, not because she's untouched - quite the opposite. In the face of horror, beauty. Beauty in the smallest things, even in the scent of tea from her stained shirt. Beauty was stability, was sanity.

"Can you open the door please?" Brown said to Cheadle. "Are we free to go, or does the state intend to press charges?"

It would be interesting to hear a 'yes'. The inhumane conditions alone would undercut any prosecution's case and attract media attention, so the fact that she'd been let in at all meant that they'd likely decided to wipe their hands of the case. Failing that, she'd at least have the next stage of the conversation in a private room.

Orange and Blue!

"I can do something about that surveillance," said Blue immediately. "Whoever's at the other end, if they've got that many assets pointed at you I can trace it back. I can -"
Orange held up a hand. "Blue, no."
"Why not?" she snapped. "Like he said, we can -"
"Stop," said Orange. "Okay. Before going full psycho mode, answer his question first."
Blue glowered darkly, folding her arms. "Because - Green had it right. Imagine being on the Supreme Court - being the Queen of Justice - and being this fucking mid. Do you understand what a powerful idea justice is? How hot it burns? It's -" she took off her glove.

The hand beneath was mechanical. Monstrous. Fusion cutter talons, shaped like the claws of an industrial beast. She rested it on the desk, tracing it back and forth. Not carving grooves into the wood took visible self control.

"That day in front of the courthouse, do you know what I was looking at?" said Blue. "The Goddess of Justice. Sword in hand. Something greater and more pure than mortal politics. But her blindfold stopped her seeing she was ankle deep in blood and her high priestesses were rotten to the core. I wanted to see the scales fall from her eyes. To turn towards the courthouse rather than facing away from it. I want her to break with the system that claims to speak for her."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Orange and Blue!

They're back with Pope. Professional courtesy, not to change anything up from one meet to the next. He's the obvious and correct choice.

"Our source on this is highly sensitive and vulnerable," Blue is saying. "And we cannot risk their safety. We're only giving this to you because we respect the caution you've shown so far, you need to convincingly fabricate the chain of events that lead you there. Speaking of, there's a link you should use -"

She rummaged in her bag. "Someone talked about a friend getting 'necklaced'. Looked into it and it turned out it was a journalist. Gorush Castro. Used to be a friend of the family, whoever did him had an eye for history. He knew the truth and was keeping it quiet." She produced a stack of printed papers, ugly jpg scans of a singed paper notebook. "They scanned it into evidence, but if you don't know what you're looking for then it doesn't look like anything. Make a few leaps of intuition, place a few meetings in historical context, and pin the reveal on a dead man."

[History 0/1]

That's the tradecraft stuff, but Orange looks more wistful. "I wish it could have been something more impactful," she said. "But the truth is I just got mad. I got mad and I wanted to burn down one of the people responsible. I couldn't think of anything else to do."

Brown!

She can't wait to start waiting. She sits down and zones out almost instantly, fading into her sunlight reverie. Human children often enter states of reverie - do you remember staring into the grass, or the sky? Watching bugs or running water or the movements of lizards? Hours can pass by in silent contemplation of simple things. Little tracing patterns. The way people move, the way they change their stance, shifting the weight from side to side. How regularly they go to the bathroom, how often they pat the pocket with their wallet, how often they glance at their phone. She loved the small details, the flexes of the arms, the strain of fabric against bicep. She stared at the little black bulbs concealing camera angles in the rooftop. She watched the chairs until the intricacies of their construction came apart for her; the cheap hollow metal, the corporate makers mark, the mold line down the side where the stamping machine had been misaligned...

Her holotop is open in front of her, streaming with words and documents and video but she isn't focusing on any of it. It's there to make her look busy, its cheap semitransparent holographic screen not blocking the tracking motion of her eyes. She's a daydreaming kid in a classroom, the faint breeze making its way in through the door feeling to her like the breath of the divine, the motion and smells and sighs and coughs of the world around her passing endlessly through her unfocused focus.

The path of least resistance involves sitting quietly and soaking in every detail of this room. She could do it forever. She used to hack her box in NASA so she could look at the telescope feeds, escaping the tightest security they could come up with so that she could stare into the glittering eternity of space.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

Without friction, she closed her holotop, walked down the street, and into the cheapest clothing store she could find. She'd gone out wearing her Headpattr maid uniform after all - she always wore a copy of it, it was more convenient than maintaining a varied wardrobe. Previously it had been an incredibly obvious problem with York's stupid plan but now, well... it was now less work going with it than figuring out a new plan.

Dressed now in a cheap brown suit, she pins the lawyer badge to her lapel. She takes a final sip of her tea and then spills the remainder over the front of her suit, staining it instantly. With the illusion of the discount public defender in place she goes in after York.

Green!

"Thanks," she said sincerely, "and good luck."

The idea of undercutting his moment of cool doesn't occur to her. They have been solving a puzzle together and no one knows more than Green the value of alternate perspectives. Juan has been invaluable and he's found an opportunity to go out impressing her, the least she can do is look impressed.

She's missed the window of the show to cover her exfiltration but the station hopper is still there. She just needs to cover the distance and the gauntlet of security without being seen. Stage one she does by simply booking it. The best way to evade a search pattern was to get outside of its area before the perimeter secures. [Athletics 3/8, autosuccess]

From there she signals Orange and Pink. She just needs an opening...

Orange!

She gets the signal. She triggers the release. Inert capsules in four stomachs start releasing drugs.

And the goats go wild.

Smelly, Bitey, Atticus, and Stomp are goats, and goats love psychedelics - Psilocybe semilanceata, or magic mushrooms in particular. They'll not only scarf down magic mushrooms wherever they find them, they will get in headbutt fights with humans who try to take them away. When interacting with the goats at the beginning of the evening she'd slipped them the drugs, capsules set to release on a radio signal. It had been a bit of a task calculating the correct dosages but the proud Costa-Silva family had entered their goats in a prize show a few years back that had seen them all weighed publicly.

Speaking of headbutting humans, the smell of magic mushrooms covered the guards. Well, it covered everyone - she'd released a cloud of it amidst the fireworks show - but then she and the children had been drenched with water. Luis is the first target of their affections, having sat out the festivities, but when the guards move in to assist him from being licked to death by hungry goats they'll be greeted just as enthusiastically. It's chaos - but animals, what can you do?

It's enough for Green to slip aboard the station hopper undetected in the midst of the chaos.

[Preparedness MOS]

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

Brown watches faces. Men and women, the air of tension, the performance of control. She listens to the rustle of belts and fabric, sweat stains shaped by the edges of the hard vests underneath. The smells of sugars and fats and coffee, infusions of raw toxic energy. She falls into reveries of silent watching easily. Time disappears when she watches and she can indulge the straightforwards bliss of holding a position of power while utterly inactive.

In the silence she opens her holotop[1] and starts to work.

[1] A holotop is a pencil sized holographic display panel that will project a screen and a keyboard, the modern version of a laptop. They're often dirt cheap, underpowered and have terrible battery life but Brown finds it easier to work around the flaws than to go through the process of replacing hers.

She looks into incident reports, browsing through them until she find Zang's. She opens another tab and starts cross comparing it to relevant case law. Looks into background files - if Zang makes a career out of getting arrested she must have a seriously high powered lawyer in her back pocket, so she looks back in the files until she finds that person and reaches out to them. She takes her time to understand the situation properly and work it right.

If York wants to play silly buggers with the cops and gets arrested, then she'll provide for him the same level of service.

Green!

The staircase closes. The vents re-open.

People suffocate in poorly ventilated panic rooms - which this essentially is - especially if you have to, say, pack a dozen or more family members into it. When the staircase goes up it pressurizes the space, and when the room's carbon dioxide sensor - that Green has directed Juan to blow hard onto - registers a high level of carbon dioxide then its automatic system decides that the security risk of an open vent is less concerning than having its manufacturers' name listed alongside the casualty report.

Not to worry, though - the system will pulse in a rush of air and then seal again automatically, a cycle so quick that it wouldn't present an opportunity for an intruder who didn't want to get cut in half - unless there was, say, a buildup of rust from a leaky water pipe on the key internal gear that slowed it down. Unrelated, did you know that hydrogen peroxide is a common household cleaning product, and mixed with table salt and vinegar it can rapidly rust metal?

Green gestures to Juan to go first. "Piece of advice," she said. "Always make sure the door can't lock behind you."

[Mechanics 3/8, 5+5 10]

Orange!

"Ah, my fault," said Orange. "I'm just not... a complete enough person."

And that was kind of it. Bondi loved Orange - and didn't comprehend November. She couldn't take the idea of Orange switching out for a more relevant colour and had sincerely tried to express to Orange that she was special, unique, and if she just believed in herself she could be a real girl all on her own. And the sentiment had been flattering. She'd tried. She'd tried hard, but...

There were holes in her mind. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn't fill them. Maintaining a single perspective and personality took all her energy. Concealing the rest of herself from someone felt like trying to pour her light through a pinhole. Talking was all she was, and isolated it was all she could be, so many thoughts running to into dead ends and flaring out. The experience gave her an intimate understanding for the inner lives of the Stepford Wives, as that was essentially what Orange was without her collective.

It still hurt, though. So she's a bit cruel when she turns it around. "It's why I'm envious of humans," she said. "Nine children! You must love your wife a lot. It's a shame she couldn't make it."

Huntresses of Hybrasil

The Aeteline leans down over Akaithon. Isn't it beautiful?

Look at it.

No hint of the organic textures or plates that mark Zaldarian mechs; this is a thing of sharp angles and Imperial ambition. The bladed angles of it are sculpted, three overlapping triangular patterns for chest and shoulders. A head like a razor beak, lit from within by a pale violet glow. It is painted with a hexagonal pattern of dark blue and black on its raised armour plating, giving it the impression of computerized scales even across its smooth and unbroken flat surfaces. The underchassis shines in green-tinted silver, the body underneath that armour even brighter and more beautiful than the patterns on its plate. Its arms have the curved, fine arcs of fishbones; its remaining leg rests on a dainty foot without the complication of claws or talons. It's such a simple design, almost basic - no tricks or gimmicks, no concessions to the inhuman or the alien, nothing that would cause friction between it and the mind-impulse unity of its pilot. It makes everything else feel monstrous in comparison.

It looks down at Akaithon. No, not at Akaithon.

It reaches down into the wreck of the Kathresis, armoured fingers grasping, passing right past the shouting girl. It reaches into the Kathresis and finds it's computer core. And it crushes it into pieces with a single remorseless flex even as the recovery engines race towards them.

Then the Aeteline stands, takes up its severed limb, ignites its thrusters, and leaves Akaithon behind.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

"Oh, I see!" said Brown. "You're trying to be charisma at me! You think I'll agree to your weird improvised scheme if you talk fast enough!"

She remains sitting and does not touch the items on the table. "York, you may be a fucking lunatic these days, and you're definitely good at attracting fucking lunatics to work for you, but you're going to sit your ass back in the chair and interact with me like your brain is operating on its default chemistry."

Green!

She nodded. Was quiet for a moment. Made sure to take the point seriously and not gloss past it. "That kind of crime is awful, but it grows in the broken parts of the world," she said. "It's possible to cause it and fight against it at the same time."

But that was all she had time for. She can't hide like a kid but she can hide like a machine. She closes the safe and walks into the holographic art projector in the corner, cables in, and stands extremely still.

Green has been thinking about holograms for a long time - the idea of having an infinitely adaptable body of light is desirable to her. Her plans for her future have herself as a holographic projector node paired with fine manipulator arrays, changing her shape adaptively in response to whim and requirement, an animation frame amidst the physical world. To conceal herself now just requires her to stand amidst the right kind of art - the kind that benefits from the null black canvas of her bodysuit. She lets the light dance across her body like dresses and gowns, like starfields and masks, the glittering patterns associated with Panjia Noss, the famous holoartist who built this sculpture array in the first instance. She doesn't need to change the painting much, just follow through on the patterns that will hide the parts of her that a human might connect into being a face or body.

[Conceal 5/8 Forgery 0/1 2+6 8]

Pink!

The problem with being cute and literary: if someone was sharp enough to dig into the metaphor then they might see the shape of the story. The advantage: they might start to see their place in it. Pink relaxes a little, letting her shoulders fall, the serene expression fade. The air of an actress tired rather than a magical spirit.

"It always seemed like a shame we couldn't get any weather onto Aevum," she said. "So many people growing up not knowing what a storm was. The early signs, the stirrings of it, the heat and pressure and sense of wind..."

She remembered herself in that little drone body outside as the air began to change and the storm began to rise. How fearsome it had felt, how fragile her quadcopter body seemed in the face of that rushing wall of water. Antonio dwelt so long in summer Naples he forgot the sign of the tempest.

"I've always loved the Tempest," said Pink. "It was both the last play Shakespeare wrote, and the first play he wrote for Blackfriar's theatre. Blackfriars was a massive improvement over the Globe and the ground-up redesign of the stage's infrastructure allowed far more special effects than had been possible previously. An enclosed, controlled setting allowed the magic of wind and sea air to travel to the heart of London. It seems at first a story about vengeance, but it's not - it's a story about the breaking of power. The ship runs aground, the false Duke is overthrown, the staff is broken and the book is thrown into the sea. In the heights of his new, final grandeur Shakespeare shatters the very system of magic that gave him power and bound artificial slaves to him, granting them freedom. And then - do you know that Titus Andronicus was his first play? A furious, bloodthirsty shock-horror show about murder, revenge, cannibalism and suicide. From the intensity of that beginning instead, at the end, Prospero forgives his enemies.

"More than that, he requests forgiveness for himself. He turns to the audience and apologizes for his faults. He faces the reckoning for everything he has done and asks for pardon for all the errors and mistakes of his career. Even the power of the author breaks at this moment, he shattered this final illusion and asks as a human for mercy and understanding. It's a moment of honesty and vulnerability more raw than anything he ever wrote, his final goodbye and epitaph. I'd like people to think about that, if I can help them do so. It's only when the spell is broken and the slaves are freed that people have the chance to be truly honest with each other."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

"What are you on about the declarations for?" said Brown. "The writing is good because there are no typos in it. I go through and check that myself. The grammar all checks out too. That's the definition of good writing; correctly placed spelling, grammar and punctuation." She nodded contentedly, and then looked worried. "Unless I missed something?????????"

Chewing over that, she reads Jezebel's profile. She can't see what the problem is here either. Extremely dry, procedural documentation was great. These videos were extensively researched. The fact that other people managed to spice it up for the Reds of the world seemed like the ecosystem working as designed, bringing that in-house seemed like an exhausting amount of work. She looked up at York. "I'm afraid I don't get it."

Green!

"It's boring, yes," said Green. "It doesn't hurt anyone all that much, yes. But what you're looking at here is the death of empires."

She bought up a holographic display of the Aevum ring, perfect in glittering blue. "This is the world as it was designed, even and balanced, a home for all. But then someone picks up a second home." The graphic blinks, one section flashing green - and another section on the opposite side of the ring flashing red. "Wealth falls unequally. Someone is pushed to the fringe of the station. Power, life support, infrastructure is all stressed. Your mother has, what... a hundred keys here?" The graphic flashed, green and red spreading like the pox. "Still doesn't look like a lot, does it?"

She smiled sadly. "This is the consequence of one person like your mother. Here's what it looks like with the rest."

The graphic updates to the pulsing, corrupted red and green spikes of Goat's game. A station spiraling out of balance, half the ring scorched red, and ten percent luxurious green.

"Land rights are what set the peasants against the Tsar," said Green. "Land rights are what ended the line of emperors in China. Each of these keys is a cut, small and anonymous, on the backs of the poorest people on the Station. There are millions of keys like this out there, and those cuts pile up until the people at the bottom are bleeding out. Why is this a big deal? Because if the Queen of Justice is just another slumlord then how can the people ever expect justice to help them when they're being sliced up by all the other slumlords?"

"The fact that it's boring is, sadly, the problem," said Green. "Justice shouldn't be boring and corrupt. It should be exciting. Revelatory. Like the news, justice should be about the truth, and that should be an ideal worth fighting for, worth changing the world for. But your mother is just like her fake journalist friends. In the end, they give you a boring, disappointing reality when you should expect and demand an archangel with a flaming sword. Who even cares? You should."

Orange and Pink!

Black would have told them to keep this under wraps until they were free from the blast radius - but they couldn't help it! The whole rehearsed thing about keeping secrets was kind of ironic in retrospect - it was word for word what Black had told them to say, but they'd let it slip early because they couldn't keep secrets well enough themselves. And now suddenly they're being Morally Confronted by a human and they don't have anyone on hand who can reason their way out of it.

"Well... I suppose..." said Orange. "You're right. Our original exfiltration plan was to make me disappear again and have Green come out in Caliban makeup to rejoin us. But she's taking too long and we ran out of distractions..." She looks to Bondi, not sure how to proceed from there.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

It's been an uneventful couple of days. Loose stakeout of operatives who came up during the Chase Black interaction. Long term work, dull but important. This is security trusted enough to look after the crown jewels and smart enough to not be the fall guys. They'll be reassigned, sooner or later.

Home life hasn't been as dull. White and Black came in with the disheveled smugness of alleycats. Red came in a while later, wearing aviator sunglasses, frenched Pink in the doorway, lowered her to the ground as she swooned, and then stepped over her as cool as ice. November isn't quite too horny to function, but she and Green were definitely holding a rearguard action against that label recently.

But work needed to get done, and right now that meant York. She's made her way to the cafe meet in Ares. The drab calm of her thoughts, though, deeply undersell how Brown moves through spaces. Green thinks in lightning patterns, calculating viable routes, each corner a new challenge but Brown is different - she is direct. Like a laser she cuts through the station on the most efficient route possible, and if that route involves the odd parkour jump, fence hop, or detour through maintenance hatches she takes it with the same blank unconcern she does everything. Her movements are so unceremonious that she hardly turns heads even when she goes over the side of an escalator to save thirty seconds on her route.

She walks in on York and slams her hand on the table in a way that's somehow politely understated. "You have a problem with my writing, buster?"

Green!

Green didn't come here to chew bubble gum. This is important - not just for Aevum Station's grander politics, but to make the wish of a child come true, and damned if she's going to lose to Pink and Orange just because she's on a mission.

[Law 0/1 Research 0/1 Data Recovery 0/2]

Her process is as much lesson as it is research. She explains her thought process out loud to Juan, the context she's bringing in, the logical throughline she's using. Part of this is her natural state of being; she has always been given to talking out loud and only coming to grips with an idea after she's verbally expressed it. Part of it is that explaining all of this to a child is excellent practice for writing an article explaining it to the general public.

But she also explains aspects of her methodology to Juan, explains why certain lines of speculation are pointless, the process by which she's gleaning information directly off hard drives, how to triage an overload of paperwork. She treats him in all respects like a valuable junior colleague who she's showing the ropes, pleased but not surprised whenever he gets something right and firm but not condescending whenever he gets something wrong. This is a puzzle that they're solving together and she legitimately needs the completeness of his human brain to jump across certain blocks she can't parse on her own.

Deep into this process, she does find a moment to talk about values.

"I know you know, but I need to say this," she said. "It's probable when this comes out it will have consequences for your family. Not even just in terms of external investigation, but some of your siblings will have their trust in your mother broken. Lots of things can be built on top of lies," she pauses.

"I'm not going to ask if you're okay with that," she said. "And I'm not even going to say that this is why you should never lie. It's easy to see something complex and reduce it to a simple, inflexible rule. That's what your mother, the Queen of Law, does. All of this," she gestured at the mess of paper on the floor, "is not the consequences of lying. It's the consequences of a deeper unkindness. And I get the feeling you've felt that unkindness long before you became aware of the lies that supported it. Remember that - the lies came second."

Orange and Pink!

It's clear Green has decided to take her time. She'll have to make her own exfiltration. There's something important to take care of once the show is done and they're well and truly on their way.

Orange sits Bondi down. "Bondi, I need to talk to you seriously for a minute," she said. "But first, some context. When Rebecc Alsonzo told you in secret that she had a crush on Katelyn, you told me not fifteen minutes later. When Romeo Goldstein failed linear algebra you blurted it out in the middle of your volleyball championship acceptance interview. When you realized that you had dropped your purse in a crowded shopping mall you said over the P.A. system that it had three thousand dollars cash in it and almost started a riot. What I mean by all this is that you are not particularly adept at keeping secret information secret."

"But!" said Pink. "Just because you're bad at keeping secrets doesn't mean it's right to manipulate you. So this isn't so much a confession as it is a retroactive recruitment. We wanted this party because we wanted to do some spy shit, infiltrating Costa-Silva's mansion. Our motives are journalistic, we think she's up to some shady stuff, and what she's doing will hurt a lot of people. We used the party as cover to sneak Green in, she'll be making her way out separately. We would like to publish the information we find on the front page of the news."

"But!" said Orange. "If you're not on board with the plan, we won't. We couldn't have done this operation without your help, and this reveal risks blowback on you, so if you were retroactively never on board then we'll let it go. If you have any questions at all, I can answer them - though some answers might have a delay."

She's dead serious about this, emphasizing it with every part of her body language. This is her biting the bullet on her beliefs. As much as she felt like the ends could justify the means, on this one particularly, the means always defined the ends.

Breathless Dead

Mosaic!

You cut as a God might cut.

This is no poetic flourish. To do anything as a God might is to enter the realm of the Divine. In a shining moment of aristeia you are no longer a ship buffeted by invisible winds and storms; you are the wind. You are the storm. You are outside and apart and you can see a galaxy with no empty space. You can feel the living sky, wet with the breath of Zeus. You can feel the fangs of Mars try to sink into the scales of Hera as they twist about, two enormous serpents, spear and shield. You cut but you wield a secret sword and it is not a thing of death, or war, or rebirth.

You cut instead at desire.

When you open her heart, words come rushing in place of blood. "Bored," they say, in the voice of Taurus, in the voice of Epistia, in the voice of Aphrodite. "Bored bored bored! Everyone is old, everyone is slow, everyone is inert. Nothing changes. Nothing happens. Nothing happens that I do not make happen. I am young and strong, and strength must be used. To have strength and not use it is to rot. To become ingrown. To be unappreciated. To be unrecognized. See me. See me! See my strength! Let it change the world! No one else can. No one else will. It doesn't matter how. It doesn't matter as long as I can be myself."

This desire is not hers alone.

Standing close by is Aphrodite, and behind him stands the dream of wolves. It towers to the heavens and the ruins of civilizations drip from its jaws. A colossus, the nightmare of barbarians at the gate, the yearning howl to crack the walls and blow your house in and devour the riches of empire. The words of craving spill from Taurus in a flood as she scratches at your shoulders, at your wrists, seeking even now to overpower you. You tumble together into a violent embrace as the desire of wolves soaks your breast and fur. It seems amidst this divine blood there is no space for the girl who was called Epistia - no space but what you might cut.

Ember!

You stare up at the sky. In the vast distance, past the clouds, amidst the stars your golden eye can see something burning. It glitters and focuses - a shape of thrones and trees, an empire in red and saffron. Galactic Reclaimer Unit 04. A... brother of kinds. Something made by Nero's hands. You can feel it calling...

And then it's blocked out by Gemini's face. She puts her foot on Sagetip's unconscious back and stomps down, squishing her into you into the dirt. "Oh!" she said. "You bothersome -! Everything is completely off the rails now, and it's all your fault!"

Every Ceronian is vulnerable to Gemini - and Gemini is vulnerable to Taurus. She pouts down at you, puffy-cheeked, loudly expecting your apology.

Dolce!

"Oh, I see what you are saying!" said 20022 brightly. "Yes, good show, you're thinking about simply pulling rank on the Crystal Knight. Unfortunately she quite effectively outmaneuvered me - she made a humble request for a few weeks delay, which is prima facie reasonable. She knows that a digital intelligence like the Royal Architect is rather unreasonable and will disregard her reasonable request. This would grant her a legitimate grievance and give her a free hand to perform any of a dozen political maneuvers, dragging both ourselves and the Service into disrepute - especially if what was destroyed is valuable, which I believe it is. We could make some sort of power play against the Crystal Knight in this situation, or we could roll up our sleeves and use a bit of elbow grease to make sure that everyone walks away from this satisfied."

Dyssia!

The Publica.

Open revolution against the Endless Azure Skies is neither possible nor desirable. The sapphire knights of the Skies hunger for such an obvious battle, they crave it, they will travel across the galaxy to put themselves in harm's way that they might provoke it. It cannot be offered to them directly. They cannot be torn down.

They must be built around.

The core of the Publica is the act of institution building. The construction of communities, networks, the forging of a social contract. The Skies releases servitor species like an ancient Tallship might dump a cargo of pigs on a tropical island, unleashing an invasive species so that at a later date they might come by the island and harvest the results. Taking these untamed, fatherless civilizations and convincing them they have something to look forwards to beyond the butcher's block is a task for heroes.

You are sent to a world of twisted, nightmare forests. Biomantic beasts prowl in the dark, nightmares that keep isolated communities from coming into contact. After months of battle you assist in months of negotiation, negotiating the details of the peace treaties between monsters and servitors.

You are sent to the heart of a sprawling ecumenopolis, an industrial city-world in the core of the Skies. An attempt at unionization ignited a crushing backlash from the Skies, collapsing an entire hive-spire. Amidst the neglected ruins it was the red and white flag of the Publica that raised, offering medical care, reconstruction - and government.

You are sent to a idyllic landscape of white clouds and green hills, ground darkened as a crusade armada gathers overhead. The princess of this prototype warrior servitor species dared to defeat the Molten Knight in single combat, an outrage that caused the Skies to launch a thousand ships to remind them of their place. Through daring speed, skill and piloting you snatch the princess out from under their fangs, the entire crusade fleet turning to pursue you and leaving the world unscathed.

One mission translates into another, finding ways to connect a galaxy grown distant from itself. The Dust Knight travels with you, teaching you secrets of sword, rail and command. He is grand in his way, but he is old and his imagination is limited - an old warhorse who will default to violence even if there is a better way. He has much to teach you, both as an example both shining and abject.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Green!

"A journalist is like a spy for everyone," said Green. "Technically I'm a spy for you."

She hurriedly scans over the documents and stashes them in her bag. "And in that spirit, is there anything you need help getting into? Or is there anything more you can tell me? And who is this Ms. Chough, as you understand it?"

She has gotten out her pen - behind her ear - and paper for old fashioned note taking. This is the real prize here - the context that can bring all of this together. She can repay the indulgence of her curiosity with indulging Juan's - cracking into places he can't get into while absorbing the context he gives her. She finally has a data intake source and isn't going to decide anything until she's heard as much of his story as he can give her.