Thanqol

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink!

There is a double archway on the second floor. Enter through the left arch and things continue as they were before. Step through the right archway and you instead enter a parallel universe where something is subtly different. Maybe lemon tastes like lime here, or your favourite song sounds cheap, or a necklace you've worn for years doesn't feel special any more and in a fit of anger you throw it out of the window of a moving car, determined to be free from it, from the person who gave it to you, from the person you were when it meant something special to you. Every day the choice, every day the arch. It comes when your feet are weary and your heart is heavy and when your head is full and you can see your childhood in the distance but they've built a fence around it and it's not yours any more.

And now she's back at the arch and she has to make a choice.

It was the only choice she had. Day after day, left or right. She'd patterned through it in morse code, deliberately random, spitefully contrary, numbly guided by convenience. The metronome of acceptance and hate, of despair and hope. Left left left, right right right, left left left. And here she's frozen again.

The only control she has over reality is in this arch; this arch must then control reality. Everything from then was a matter of programming. Commit to left for weeks and months until you choose right in a flicker of despair. Act kind and calm until you crash into a stranger at night and feel more alive then you ever have. Want the fight, want the spotlights and police lights and the scream so loud it wakes the neighbours. Do this for forty years and she'll be dead. They live that long these days, you know? Forty years maximum and code your complaint on the arch. One choice a day is enough for anyone.

"Ten years wasn't so bad," she said, staring at the arch, the binary gates of horn and ivory, through which the transistor knows things to be true or false. "Others spent forty years in the desert. Ten years was hardly anything, when you think about it."

White!

"A dragon is -" White started, but Yellow! interrupted her.
"You've got your design," she said. "You want to be bigstrong self reliant immune to everything, you've got the blueprints for that already."
"Bigstrong self reliant immune to everything is a worthy goal to strive for," said White, hurt.
"Yeah, yeah," said Yellow, poring over the napkins like a captain charting a voyage to the orient. "But that's not what I'm about. Let me think how to put this..."

Yellow steepled her fingers together and closed her eyes. Vision.

"A dragon means the end of the social order," said Yellow. "An entity of so much power that conventional military might is irrelevant. A dragon means the death of kings, the collapse of castles, the burning of villages, a nation sent into exile. A dragon renders armies irrelevant, makes laws and customs academic, recontextualizes wealth based on its values. A dragon represents, then, the return to a world of heroes and myth, a more primal level where the individual is exalted as the only entity capable of slaying it."

She sees the world as it should be, as it must be. "Some dragons are reptiles, things of fang and scale. Some dragons are fighter jets, things of flame and speed. Some dragons, though, are gods. They arrive when the festival drums beat and the streets are lined with lanterns. They subsume a hundred hands into their body. They stomp and dance and spin and leer and rise above the fire on the wind with luck spilling from their scales and all lesser spirits driven before them. A god-dragon is a festival that brings the blessing of fire to the city; a god-dragon is the flood that brings the wrath of the river to the town; a god-dragon is industry ground to a halt as everyone goes outside and raises their eyes to see it soar on a summer afternoon breeze. There is no fire on Aevum, no rivers on Aevum, no wind on Aevum. Humanity believes that they've left all the gods back on Earth, that they are beyond such things now. I want to prove them wrong."

Black!

She feels like she should try to at least talk herself out of wanting it so bad. That she's raising her hopes too early. Anything could go wrong. She could be trailing a professional into an ambush, this could be a disposable mule, she might be not as good as she thought she was. She was hungry for this, for what this represented, for the stalk and the pounce and satisfying crunch of power wielded - and she felt like that was itself some sort of flag. She should play disinterested. She should blink and glance away just to prove she could. She should let the universe know that she was cool about this so the universe wouldn't be tempted to fuck her on it.

She can't. She's been trying to get off the street level with these bastards for weeks, and that was after the biggest catastrophe they could possibly have experienced. If they don't slip up now in a few more weeks they might not again. She's under no illusions how insanely lucky she was to get the Merkin connection, that won't happen again unless she forces it.

She does a three point tail. One colour watches skullguy while the other two - Green and Red - jog along to get ahead of him. Every so often they switch out. She's hungry enough to risk a visual contact trail; she does not want to be blindsided by him moving through a front business or disappearing down a maintenance hatch.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink!

She shouldn't... need to scout the location. She'd embedded every detail of that house somewhere deeper than instinct.

She hadn't processed herself as a human, after the box. She'd been treated as a cleaning appliance, and she treated herself the same. Rather than processing anything of the world around her she'd reduced her perceptions to the level of a roomba; a detailed 3D map of the interior of the Everest mansion, everything down to the smallest detail. Once she'd done that she could go through her routine day after day, year after year, with her eyes closed. Nothing ever changed. No one ever visited. Nothing ever moved. Everest herself lived life according to a clockwork routine. Setting up an automated process to deal with all of that had been easy. And then she could just...

Check out.

"Am I really doing this?" she asked. She'd tied her hands together with ribbon lace, soft but firm, and given the other end to Fiona to hold. It wasn't just a safety measure - she actually had no idea where she was right now. The location map of the Mansion was superimposed over her conscious thoughts. She was there now; in the midst of the routine. "I don't see the reason. It's just a building, I don't need TV closure, there's nothing I can do there that I can't do here. It's like White says, I should just work on being better today. What" sweep "difference" dust "does" polish "it" cook "make?" cook cook cook. A ring with no beginning and no end.

Yellow!

There's kind of only one question to ask a girl like this. One question she's been waiting for her entire life.

"Do you think you could make a flight-capable dragon?"

The clock strikes high noon. The convention hall empties. A robot and a fairy stare each other down.

The fairy takes it on the mask. A joke, an idle observation, a wouldn't-it-be-nice? She's been asked that question before plenty of times. People want wings stapled on the back of their anthro wolf or a film director looking for a neat practical effect, someone wants it done for less than what it's going to take. Her eyes narrow. Her hand hovers over her pistol.

The robot stares impassively. She can't see the smile. Can't feel the smile. Can't sense anything other than absolute intent. But then, she's up against a robot. Can't chance it, time to shoot blind.

The wind howls. A tumbleweedgirl rolls down the street.

She brings her gun up and fires. "I'm sorry, I'm not looking for commissions right now - but my friend Archipelago over there would be happy to help!"

Dead centre connection. A rehearsed strike. The golden robot doesn't even sway despite the daylight showing through her heart. And then she snaps her hand out and fires back. "I've seen his work," she said. "It's not what I need."

She diverolls behind the water trough. "I've never heard of you -"
"November."
"- November. I've definitely never heard of you," she brings her gun up and fires, "and I don't think I'm who you want for a first time mod."
She wears it again, the round slashing her cheek, but she advances towards Hazel's cover, firing like the Terminator. "This is not my first mod."
"You look kind of default to me -"
Yellow threw a stick of dynamite. "Looking default is the modification," said Yellow. Hazel stared at it, looking at it hiss, before her like a snake.
"What are you -?"
November showed her.
The shockwave sent her sprawling.
Somehow she picked herself out of the dirt as the horsegirls stampeded around her. "That's industrial equipment. You want a shipyard -"
"I don't want to go back to what I used to be," said Yellow, clicking her revolver open to reload. "I want fucking magic."
She's sprawled in the street, fumbling with her own reload, hand trembling as the stranger stands silhouetted above her, noonday sun pouring through her bullet holes. "The expense -"
"Pay isn't amazing," she said. "But I've got a fully stocked workshop."
She fired blindly. "I don't work -"
One golden eye went out, replaced with the white sun. "Complete creative control," she said. "I'm not asking if you want a job. I'm asking, if given money, space and time, do you think you could make a flight capable dragon?"
Her pistol clicks empty. "Yes."
"Do you think you could do it while sidelining in making superhero equipment?"
The gun falls from her hand. "Yes."
The robot offers her hand. Hazel can see now that isn't the sun. It's passion. Passion as uncompromising as hers. Every rebuff just revealed more of it. She knows she's only scratched the surface of how deep it goes.

The robot offers her hand. The fairy reaches out and takes it.

"Supervillain equipment?" asks Yellow.
"Tacky," said Hazel.
"Divinity equipment?"
"You got the forge for that?"
"Not yet," said Yellow. "If I did, could you do it?"
She knows she won't need her guns again.

Black!

The objective now, as then, is to make sure that Moriarty doesn't pass wind without Black knowing about it. She didn't need to see this meeting, she needs to see what Moriarty does after this meeting. She needs to see how she makes contact with her superiors in an emergency. Specialized cell phone? Email? Face to face meeting? Moriarty by herself is useless, she's a shit-kicker, a functional asset. Black is glad for Knightly but he's already fading into the back of her thoughts. She's got the office as tapped as it's going to be, now she just needs to stand by to tail Moriarty if she needs to go elsewhere to make contact. She needs to get off the ground floor and this lady is going to take her there.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink!

Reptile sanctuary. Good old John Snake-in-the-Eye saw an opportunity to set up a nesting colony in the heart of Zeus from which the lizards could spread out and colonize an otherwise difficult to reach neighbourhood. It's a deeply hostile situation where aggrieved nearby property owners, concerned about the influx of lizards on their perfect lawns, have been trying to organize the homeowners society and town council to get rid of what they claim is an illegal animal nesting site. John's army of high profile lawyers fight them every step of the way, and so the neighbours have retaliated by introducing fox colonies to hunt the lizards, to combat which John bought in 'dogs' that may or may not be cloned grey wolves to hunt the foxes...

Someone is a couple of years away from hiring armed furries to finish the job is what I'm getting at here.

White and Yellow!

As you said - absolute trust and absolute talent, can't settle for just one. That's why she goes for the amateurs.

'Amateur' gets a bad rap, but that's a capitalism thing. Professional literally just means someone who does it for money. An amateur is someone who does it for love. A professional comes with a cluster of associated skills, like the ability to keep a schedule, navigate the financial system, advertise, kiss ass with their bosses, showboat, and so on. A professional can organize themselves so that they're legible to society; a role that money can pour into and services can fall out of.

That's the opposite of what Yellow wants. She wants the unemployable freaks with visions that transcend reality. She wants someone whose passion she can repay with passion. She wants someone who thinks like her - like November, as a whole. Not a copy but someone who can inspire and goad her to new heights while moving in a sphere she can't touch. She wants - well, she wants Crystal with an engineering degree.

Yellow never for a moment doubts that she deserves two unicorns in her life.

Black!

She knows in the back of her head she needs to yell at herselves. Green, Red, and Pink have all Fucked Up recently with regards to operational integrity and she needs to make sure they know that. Just because she left those three in charge of the convention while she went off with all of her senses of restraint and big picture vision doesn't mean she shouldn't torment herselves for her mistakes. But, she reasons, she can do that at random intervals over the next fifteen-thirty years whenever there's a lull in the conversation or they're feeling emotionally vulnerable. That kind of timely and repetitive feedback is sure to produce the kind of behavioral changes she requires.

She, however, is being cautious. She's paying attention to the patterns of the comms and operations are suggesting themselves to her. She's delighted especially by the financial problems because they synergize with her existing play in suggesting Knightly ask for a bribe. With Moriarty already under the pump financially, being asked for a serious bribe right now will force major action from her backers. And then she can follow the money back to whatever their backup money supply is.

That's what she communicates to Knightly in the dead drop she showed him: ask for money. Doesn't have to be for you, can be for the organization, but it has to be up front. From there the operation requires her to maintain absolute observation of Moriarty, to know exactly when and how she reaches out to her superiors. She's hungry for this. This is the crack she needs to get the wedge into.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Spearmint!

"It's not rust," said Spearmint, feeling something crackle to life inside her. "It's... new. I'm learning something new."

She smiled like the morning. "Normally I'd be crucifying myself right now for making contact without having done more background than an architectural textbook. Even though everything went right. I don't have hunches, vibes or instincts. Everything's got to be check, check, check-check-check-checked -"

There's a purr to her as her cooling vents start again. It's a different flow from before; before was a furnace roar, this is low and smooth like the engine on a stealth aircraft. "- but I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that people don't work like that," she said. She looked up, eyes in a new colour - and for a moment, in every colour. She was on her back, claws against her ribs, but she put her arms around Chaka's neck. "Next time you won't see me coming."

Red!

Dark_Red: i'm fine <3
Dark_Red: I actually can't not be fine
Dark_Red: The part of me who'd freak out about this is Orange
Dark_Red: And she's in deep space right now lol
Dark_Red: anyway once the wings and horns come off i'll be back to a generic anime girl in the crowd
Dark_Red: but i *will* swing by soon for non hideout reasons <3 <3

Pink!

She can't bring herself to wake Crystal as she sleeps. So instead she covers the area around the antipersonnelle cake with yellow and black hazard tape and erects a sign reading FORBIDDEN CAKE, just in case Fiona comes in late. Then she curls up to sleep alongside her unicorn and sleeps the first contented sleep in a long time.

Black!

She's back on surveillance today. It should be Brown, but instead she'll need to do this in stress mode. She curls up on location with a laptop, beret and fingerless gloves and settles in for a long, slow day at the office. The entire time she's going to be feeling itchy. She's picking up a knife by the sharp end.

She goes by train. She goes in through the front door with an ID pass. She goes in calm and slow and boring because a lot of spy work is calm and slow and boring. She goes with a bag of mealworms so that she can sit on a park bench and feed the lizards. She's not immune to taking influence from movies.

White!

Acquiring a mechanic was an essential task. Too much of her operational habits relied on technology, not to mention the various upgrades she had in mind. This was a big decision. A mechanic was going to be the closest thing she had to a life partner for the near future; someone she'd be forced to share every secret of her physical bodies with. Likely every secret of her operational designs with. She couldn't keep this in-house, but neither could she afford to be anything other than selective.

But when you were looking for perfection you didn't write a list of desirable traits - your prize would either be perfect or it would not be. So she looks with an open mind and open heart, taking in the complete possibility space in front of her, without feeling rushed if what she needed wasn't here.

Pink!

Pink doesn't have it together enough to make a play for Monk's exhibit. She needs time, money, and venue. She wants a mansion, preferably Everest's mansion. She wants guests. She wants to cook and prepare a feast worthy of Versailles, do the banners and the bunting, hold the party for the old lady that she'd never been allowed to. She would like the corpse of Mrs. Everest as guest of honour, which was possible and not gauche because she'd had her ashes processed into a diamond. She also strongly wanted to demolish the mansion at the end but she conceded that some things were too expensive to even fantasize about.

She doesn't know anything about getting the logistics of an event like that together. But she knows all the details of the event itself. She's been planning it for a decade and all she needs is the support and the go ahead that she could never get from herself.

Breathless Dead

Mosaic!

The Omn device is a creature of Empire. It understands power and it understands how to accumulate it. There is a science to this; to the breaking of kinship groups, to the establishment of ideologies, to the manipulation of ambition. It wouldn't even be difficult. In a small crisis, power flows towards the centre and it can help you be that centre. Each piece of advice has it's own swirling logic, each decision naturally implies multiple other decisions, the Imperial structure of government has a dread logic all of its own that makes it a natural resting point.

But it doesn't argue if it's pushed back at. You want to do things another way? Well, that's just a fact of the universe now as far as Omn is concerned, so now it's time to follow through on the implications of that idea. And that's the space you enter now, a strange world of glimpses into future problems. Do things this way and this social group will accumulate power. Do things that way and this group will be marginalized. Allow this freedom and watch as an organization emerges to exploit it. In the end it all comes down to who has power. If anyone except you has power, then you don't know what they're going to do with it.

So what is the distribution of power that Mosaic allows here? Will she empower community leaders, appointed praetors, individuals? Will she favour the military or the artists? Who rules in the city that she wants to live in?

Ember!

... and immediately set back because neither of your rivals is bound by consideration for the ship. The rival packs form and move to begin seizing centers of power. Pundering Fang's forces spread widely and begin administering the ship's agricultural systems, offering tempting feasts to draw people into her system of patronage. Sagetip concentrates around urban centers of power and prestige - the temple deck, the Engine, the Bridge. Each candidate only has a few committed loyalists, the rest are fair-weather supporters drawn in by speeches and promises, but they have planted their banners and are seen to be leading even as the world grinds to a halt around them. If this goes on too long, as well it might without your intervention, the Slitted might affect enough repairs to give chase.

When it is time to enter the contest, how do you?

Dyssia!

Perfect.

The Endless Azure Skies are perfect. Through genius design and relentless willpower they have outlasted the death of stars. Even the wounds are part of the structure; even these wounds will heal. A distributed organizing principle, an idea with no centre and no end. It is the end goal for a civilization, and the civilization works backwards towards it. Thought, will, action, result.

It's a thing of logic. It's a thing of beauty. It's fucking passe. Beauty has simple rules. Smooth, symmetric, simple. Geometric shapes floating in space, everything the same colour, everything so predictable your brain goes numb. The Endless Azure Skies is a project of mathematics. You can make the universe fit into mathematics, if you'd like. Sometimes if you're quick you can even do music purely through mathematics.

It's a different kind of music to the kind you make when you do three lines of coke off a broken bathroom mirror and step out onto stage and just kind of fucking feel it, you feel me?

There's no plan here, and the fact that you even asked that shows just how deep the Skies has it's claws in you. There's just vibes. Sometimes you'll be so overcome with love that you can tell a perfect stranger that they're your best friend, and that's true, and sometimes you'll be so blinded with rage that you'll punch a perfect stranger in the mouth over a peanut and that's true too. Don't read into it, who gives a shit? If you even start doing that the vibes will have moved on and you'll be doing archaeology on one specific musical note. That's no way to live, get the fuck out of here, what do you think living is?

Doesn't even need to be dramatic as all that either. Imagine getting up in the morning and having no idea what the fuck you're going to do today. When was the last time that happened to you? Don't answer that, if it's not today then you're still not noticing what's happening around you right fucking now.

Dolce!

"Surely that doesn't apply here," said the Architect absently. "We are the same entity, after all!"
"Then re-establish the connection!" shouted the Emissary.
"No." said the Architect. "Aha, no, yes, good point, Mr. Dolce, I see what you're saying now."

The drones descended on the metal, ripping and tearing. At the end they have produced a crude bed, a single chair, and a twist of metal to produce a roof. Nearby was a large circle on the ground with an X through the centre.

"Well, this seems like a solution everyone can be happy with!" said the Architect brightly. "You can live here under the laws of hospitality in this cute little house I have built, with all the food and fire you desire. Live here for ten years. A hundred years! And whenever you get bored of it, just step into this handy little circle and I'll delete you and repurpose your chassis for something useful." And then, in a reproachful tone of voice, "You know, the loss of specialized materials in your construction represents a 14 hour delay on the Schedule. Just so you're aware of what your extended existence is costing us."

The Architect's eye spun back to Dolce, leaving behind a catatonic Emissary. "There! The Gods are satisfied, don't you think?"

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink!

She doesn't notice Crystal's tears until the moment has passed. She's sorry for that, for missing things when she was reaching inside herself for something she'd never been able to articulate before. She knows she couldn't have been any other way but... that's another thing she'll need to figure out how to express through art. The expense of time it took. The necessity of the expense.

Because she feels good now, at the end. Buzzed. There's a rhythm to cooking she likes. First you wet the dries, then you dry the wets, then you wet the drys, then you dry the wets. Each transmutation changes the shape, back and forth, over and over on the brink. Like glazing paints, thin layers ever less each time, forming fades and blends, mixing in waters and mediums to make sure the transformation doesn't happen too fast. And then there's the other mixing, where chemicals are mixed with just as much patience and delicacy to ensure that the transformation doesn't happen at all - until it does, when it will all happen way too fast.

She's... blissful. This was what she needed and didn't know she could have. And already, her imagination is figuring out how to make things bigger, how to make things better...

When she steps back from the cake she smiles and falls back into her folded-hand maid posture, eyes demurely down.

The cake has a message written in chocolate icing, a beautiful calligraphic flourish. It reads "THIS END TOWARDS ENEMY ->" and was directed towards Mrs. Kilimanjaro.

Spearmint!

It is the drums for her, sadly. But drums are a state of mind. A couple of upturned empty cases, pots and kettles and kitchen utensils, even the butt of an unloaded handgun, all of these things can come together to form a percussion section in a pinch.

She finds she likes the adaptability of that. Drums were... more than other instruments, they were a thing of perception. The saxaphone was dedicated, built for purpose, a blinding statement of intent to create good music. Her improvised rhythm section was the opposite. This was noise, mundane and everyday, the sound of mistakes, the sound of clatter. But with a few repeating patterns built into the core of it, with precise timing, with knowing exactly when to shift tempo it became something more than that. Something to project onto.

It was, too, a thing of force and violence. Hands and heat and hard work. Overcoming an instinctive gentleness to treat things roughly enough to coax the necessary sound out of them. Sometimes nothing she has to hand is loud enough so she uses the wall, or the floor, or the headboard as the night progresses. And into the rhythm she lays, the vocals are coaxed. That's the other thing about the drums; even as a backdrop, even when they fade into the background of the superstar instruments, they still set the pace and the tone. The drummer is an instrument for control; from its position in the back it dictates the flow of the musician. The vocalist can no more override the drummer than override the music itself, no matter how many time the same circuit loops, and loops, and loops, holding that note longer and longer until it's almost too much - and then it is.

Small, glittering brushes that ring out crystal notes. Deep, heavy taiko hammerstrikes. Bells and leather and steel, tribal industry. These sounds could arise from anything. From these sounds could arise anything. Spearmint finds herself for the first time amidst this music and how it gives expression and shape to Chaka's breath.

November!

November's reaction to the news is joy. Dragon is safe. That it only cost injury to her meant that it was cheap at the price.

She couldn't truly get along with Knightly. She should perceive in him an ally and a peer, a hero who was dedicated to the same goal that she was. Instead she'd seen him as just another person in another kind of danger. He was worth saving even though he was a hero, because he was a hero, and her advice to him had been 'lay low and let me handle this'. Even if it would have been harder without him. Even if the risks of injury to her had gone up. In the collective consensus of November was the deeply rooted idea that paying a price was fine so long as she was the one who paid it. That was just - well, that was just virtue. Any attempt to discuss or contemplate what she'd given up hit a wall of elation at the idea of what she'd achieved. Same as it ever had.

What she doesn't expect, though, is that the feeling of yearning was still there. All the colours had privately associated that with Blue, had thought that her grip on the past was the only thing stopping them from embracing the present. But one by one, each of the colours notice that there is still a faint edge of discomfort. An urge to be other than they were. Blue gave that shape, pointed at something specific and said that we should be that - and even if they disagreed it formed a coherent axis around which they could align. But now the clarity of destination was gone even the ones opposing Blue didn't feel content. They just didn't have any way to voice the feeling any more, and so it scratched each of them like an itch. A thought they had no way to work through with the colours they had.

How can one mourn a dream? It's absence means by its nature one doesn't want it any more. One desire has been traded for another and so the opposite path begins to fade into a gentle river of regrets, a path not taken, friends and ambitions left behind. Receipts need to be used, returns made, tools packed away into boxes until they can either be regifted or have accumulated so much dust that it's okay to throw them away.

There had been no other way with Dragon. The damage was too severe. But Monk could have sacrificed Monkey to the same effect. Monkey had become to Monk what Blue was in the process of becoming to her - a vestige, a memory, an echo of the person she had once been. It might have been easier for Monk, with her hundreds of faces, to give up that part of herself than it was for November to give up one of her colours. It might not have, though. Losing that might have hurt Monk deeply, already traumatized by all her losses. Monk was less compatible with Dragon. Monk couldn't afford to sacrifice specialized hardware in the same way without experiencing a traumatic loss of function - she might lose control over one or more of her arms. The plan was worse than the one she had gone with, but the real point of decision had been that she hadn't wanted to lose her sister. She didn't want to lose anyone. She didn't even want to lose the fucking Governor, for all his bile and cruelty, which was why she had reached out for him in the dark. She wanted to keep them safe. Wanted to keep the whole world safe, everyone from the highest to the lowest enfolded within her wings. She wanted their lives to be magical and meaningful, a place where miracles happened. If that meant she had to become magic, meaning and miracle - well. It was only a power fantasy if you didn't act on it.

The story never mentioned who built the Omelas machine.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink!

Pink's face fell a little. "Oh! The birthday already and I haven't even started! I don't have any of the ingredients I require, and I haven't even gotten to organize the invitations! Let me take a moment to prioritize."

She sits down, takes out her notepad and pen, and starts rapidly writing as she tries to condense something larger and far more elaborate down into what she can accomplish on the requested timeframe. Crystal might recognize this particular kind of stress as exactly what she went through when she tried to set up this entire convention on a ludicrously narrow timeframe, but condensed even moreso. Pink's evidently got something far, far more elaborate in mind for a grand party where everyone is invited and Crystal can see her biting her lip unhappily as she is forced to start cutting features from it.

Spearmint!

"Threat profile," said Spearmint, falling into a daze. "Plainclothes police surveillance. Likely known face. Perimeter observation. Challenge concentrated in breaching that initial perimeter."

She's lifted by the claw, that one point of sharpness enough to suspend her entire body. Faster, stronger, more dangerous - there's no point in pretending there's anything otherwise. Her colour cools again, freefalling back down through the hues. "Digital camouflage. Fur dye patterns, black and white contrast spikes to break up MI silhouetting. Gait transformation is trivial due to low sample size, but still requires conscious effort. Depart during lunch to maximize crowd cover."

She's seeing patterns now, only seeing patterns. Her thoughts are never this focused. Not even physicality distracts her, because that would be it's own kind of failure. "Cargo locomotion methods. Band case is a classic and fits with the musical instrument cases already in possession but it is well known, lacks a sufficient alibi of having a real band, and it is too proud. This is how an arms dealer in a movie would move arms and cops love imagining themselves as movie cops. Personal preference is to conceal within electronic hardware; computer hardware presents enough complicating metallics and electronics to fool casual scans, tearing apart computers is seen as expensive and unglamourous. Provides a valid cover identity as secure/disposable phone sales which is shady enough to move in the circles you wish to move in."

November!

After a certain point all that's left is reverie.

It's just Black in the end, sitting out on the balcony, staring at the stars.

Something about space has always felt safe. Something about its blackness feels perverse. In space, every man-made object gleams in white, in chrome, catching and reflecting light for trillions of miles in every direction. It's a world where everything is knowable - except the blackness itself. The infinite walls of the universe where no stars have reached radiate outwards and she's long imagined folding herself against that nothing and disappearing. It feels antisocial almost to the point of being a crime to paint a piece of space debris black, to coat Russel's Teapot in stealth compounds and dare even the philosophers to posit one's existence. Matter unsorted, unindexed and illegible.

She wonders if it's selfish to want to have gravity as well as invisibility. The galaxy's black holes are matter so dark and dense as to be invisible but for the way they distort the light around them. In exerting power they return themselves to the realm of the light, just as surely as the minute gravitic distortions of dark matter reveals its own nature. Identified it can be studied, studied it can be controlled...

But then, dark matter is far more vulnerable to study and control than black holes. Phoenix had wanted to build a vast orbital particle accelerator so that she could chain dark matter. It had been theoretically possible. Could the same ever be done to the black hole? Was power a more reliable path to safety than obscurity? It seemed so, but power felt like a self referential goal. There always needed to be more. More, more, more. She didn't know if it could ever stop.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

The touch runs through her body and out into her fingers so sharp she snaps her chopsticks. She hasn't been touched in...

She's in relation to someone, physical, flinching, reactive, combat routines sent to limbs that didn't exist, small, hot, powerful, listening, attentive. The mental bubble around her body collapses and she rushes into a dazed, tense, physical awareness. Questions well to the surface, fragments of the TC language, warnings and theories, scattered remnants of perfection spilling over the floor and she doesn't have the time to pick and choose the right one.

A movie? A girl? Her, filmed? Like an anime? A... a girl?

She's conscious of her matted hair, her oily scales, all the concessions that perfection demanded from her self care routine. She gives a wide-eyed fish stare and slurps the remainder of her noodles down all at once. <Movie girl yes> she signed, barely remembering how to move her hands.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink!

"Oh, it's all about the polish," said Pink dreamily. "Shine, shine, shine! Silver tarnishes, you know, and that's why I need to shine until it sparkles. Anything less is a disrespect to metal and Mistress both."

"It's not as nice as working in space," she said after a moment, and was filled with some strange yearning. "But then, I don't know how to tell her that."

Green!

There was a lot there. She couldn't process it easily, not with this perspective. She could feel the thoughts condense around the edges of morality and paranoia and more besides and it dams up there. There's no way to move through it where she is.

"I'm not saying don't sell guns," she said. "I'm not even saying don't have guns. I'm saying you're selling them in my house. And that's the question you keep dodging: Why here? You're in my operation, advertising on the internet, opening the door for strangers, and when you're called on it you dodge into hard ideology. That's convenience, not purity, and you're not as careful as you think. It doesn't matter what I'm doing tomorrow, today I'm running a hotel with over a thousand transhumans about to get the worst news of their lives and I need to make sure their only support network and place of refuge doesn't go down in a flood of tear gas."

She's completed the thought. It's as hard as White. "You need to take it down the road. Stretch for some bus passes for your clients. And trust me, the second I get a whiff of heat around my own sins, I'm going the fuck down the road too."

November!

"Look what the catgirl dragged in," said White as Red staggered into the hotel room.
"Uh, don't worry," said Red. "None of it's mine. And you know what, I don't think I like parties?"
"But you always take over when there's a party," said Black.
"Yeah, doesn't mean I like 'em. I think it's the noise that gets to me," said Red, cleaning her face in the sink. "Can't hear anything. Spikes the danger sense even through the filters. Just can't get into it."
"In that case, hear this," said Yellow. "There is no political system for governing humanity that would satisfy humanity."
"Urgh, here we go," said Red.
"Even in ideal conditions of material abundance disaffection and misery spreads," said Yellow. "The phenomena of bullshit jobs have intensified even in this cyberpunk utopia, but even those who opt out of the system entirely, the NEETs of the world, are miserable. There's plenty said about how money can't make people happy, and even an economically equitable political system would be insufficient."
"Oh dang, she's fucked up worse than I am," said Red. "How much has she had?"
"Whole tube," White grimaced.
"So you're way past politics, Yels, and you're onto religion," said Red. "Like, slaying capitalism is one thing, but -"
"But what!?" said Yellow. "You think that we should just give up, good enough, settle for mere fully automated luxury gay space communism?"
"Well, kind of a bit," said Red. "That seems really nice, actually."
"I propose," said Yellow loftily, "that we strive for magical gay space communism."
She leans in, eyes intense. "Think about it. What do humans yearn for more than anything else? Magic. Adventure. So much of their lives is escapism, into virtual worlds, into artistic projects, into the extremely literal fantasy of the isekai. The children yearn for the blessing of Truck-kun. We solve money and implement a UBI tomorrow and what of it? They'll still face an uncaring and sterile universe, with magic and adventure reserved for only the vanishingly small percentage of the population engaged in space exploration - if that's not fully automated away too. They'd become entirely self-referential, an entire species trying to live vicariously through the tiny and decreasing percentage of people who have real jobs. Maybe for a while they find joy in basket weaving or whatever, but they'll end up like the coddled children in every dystopian sci-fi story about benevolent robots."
"And we should go stick our dicks in the middle of the species' quest for the meaning of life?" said Red.
"Of course!" said Yellow. "They want... fucking, fairy godmothers, and magical princesses, and mysterious contracts with daemons. They want that more than they've ever wanted another five square meters of living space and a higher grade of coffee. And so do we!"
"She's been like this all day," said White. "I think she's having a vision thing."
"Yeah, I'd imagine it," said Red, looking over the instruction manual that came with Yellow's drugs. "Oh, this is that crypto drug I was hearing about. It's making her compute her thoughts through her graphical senses."
"Is that why she doesn't sound like she's listening to us?" said White.
"Yeah. Hold on, let me try -" Red fished a set of panties out of her bra, red and laced, and dangled them in front of Yellow. Yellow's eyes phased out as she contemplated the intricacy of the pattern.
"That ought to shut her up for a while," said Red. "C'mon, help me clean the rest of this up."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink!

Pink settles into the routine of making her salad. She looks genuinely zen here, just complete creative flow. Distracting her this way is trivial, inviting her to create something shutters the rest of her mind. Only sometimes do jagged thoughts intrude and she needs to rearrange something or think harder about how to obtain perfection. For the most part all of this thinking has been going on in a detached understratum of her mind and the friction between it and full expression is mostly smoothed away. But then, this is only a salad, it's not really a complicated project.

She hasn't attacked the mannequin, blessedly. Instead she serves it a plate made out of ripped and torn utensils - butter knives sharpened to razor edges, spoons with heads ripped off and sharpened into shivs, forks broken apart so each splinter of metal forms its own unique spike. A scattering of crushed glass goes over the top, finished with a sauce made out of some liquid she ripped out of the refrigerator's engine.

She sets it in front of Mrs. Kilimanjaro and waits attentively, smiling in blissful, unmoving robot fulfillment.

Spearmint!

She's calmer now, almost serene. As she relaxed her colours deepened and darkened back into a rainforest Green.

"I understand," she said. "I was worried for a moment that I was dealing with a bomb-throwing accelerationist. You're concerned about safety, about people getting out alive. That's why I can tell you that tomorrow the Supreme Court is going to rule that transhumans are not a protected category. That's why you can see how mad everyone is about to get, and why you can see that this event is about channeling that productively while keeping vulnerable people safe. And you can see why, with tempers running super high and the cops in riot police mode, someone Big Mad and wielding a Auku-M55 sniper rifle," she drops the case of sniper rifle bullets heavily on the table, "has the potential to move the cops into urban warfare mode."

The last of her heat panels clicks back into place. Green doesn't see this as an ideological matter - she sees the ecosystem, the flow of cause and reaction that lead here, and she's not interested in standing astride it saying 'this far but no farther'. If the ecosystem was different then things would be different, and arguing down a single panther doesn't change the rainforest.

"Likewise," she said. "With the cops looking for any excuse to delegitimize a protest, if the balloon goes up and they find you and your arsenal here then they'll RICO everyone involved in planning the event as co-conspirators. That's what I meant when I said you're on my turf - there has to be plausible deniability between the armed and civilian wings of a movement, and you're on the wrong side of the line."

November Vs The People of Aevum Station!

White knows how to fight the internet. Specifically, she fights in single combat. She finds a guy who won't ever log off, won't let it go, and has enough self respect to hold to the Honourable Rules of Internet Debate. Then she just replies to him any time he says anything. The discussion sprawls into a eighteen page thread of back and forth where they litigate everything from the concept of evolution to the Treaty of Westphalia. Their tone with each other is barely restrained hostility and they both wind up getting probated by the moderators for shitting up the thread. But after going through all of that, though they never meet or speak again, they independently find themselves internalizing a decent amount of what their opponent said and chilling out enormously. That random guy no longer hates furries, and White now has strong opinions on Yugoslavian pan-nationalism.

Yellow writes a blog post addressing the matter rather than repeat herself multiple times. Sixteen people read it. Ten years from now her blog will obtain Time Cube level popularity and certain quotes from this essay will be circulated widely across the internet.

Black is a Reddit moderator herself. She does not break her impartiality keyfabe but she does strategically heavenban certain posters who are too eloquent at putting together the opposing case, leaving the anti-Reds disorganized and inarticulate.