Thanqol

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Cyan!

See, they could have just stolen his phone. That would have been one thing.

But stealing an unlocked phone, after taking full biometric scans, while having physical possession of his laptop, while the subject was welded into a soundproofed hotel room unable to trigger a remote wipe or reset? That not only got you access, that got you absolute access. No time limit, no quick info dumps, no micron electroscopes trying to read hard drive fluctuations. She could make phone calls with his voice as a filter! She could log in to his bank account using full two factor biometric authentication, change the passwords, and start making purchases! She had three days minimum before the hotel would override the Do Not Disturb status on the door - he'd be fine he had plenty of sandwiches[1] - and you could do a lot of crimes in three days!

[1] Fifteen boxes of cookie dough, and a bag of limes so he didn't get scurvy.

"The cops are probably watching the account," said Black. "He was kidnapped."
"The cops aren't watching shit," said Cyan with her mouth[2] full of illegally attained fried tofu. "This guy ran his fucking crime conspiracy out of this bank account. It's one of those ultra secure VIP crypto banks, and if they wanted to start investigating transactions they'd have to start with how he lost half a million dollars in a sushi bar a few days ago." She grinned a fanged grin, swishing her huge bushy tail. "Don't you get it, dummy? We're rich! Untraceable rich!! We can dump all this in a completely different account and nobody will say shit! Everything he set up to cover his ass now covers our asses!" She gasped, and a second magnificent bushy fox tail conjured into being behind her. "Like a second tail! I get it now!"

[2] Green's mouth. Cyan herself was a freefloating collection of holographic emitters that liked to settle over the 'top' of other colours, half-possessing them through a cabled link.

She left the investigation stuff for the other colours. She was wondering what she could do with all this money. Get Pig's attention, probably! She scoffed to herself - so basic that he'd gone into finance, though she supposed if he was that committed to normative determinism she was lucky he hadn't become a cop.

Tyger!

"You did great, Pope," said Tyger. "I'll remember this. And yes, I agree. York is too intense for management. He's a rant journalist and he needs to touch grass by interacting with people he legitimately hates for a while. Send him undercover to a cop conference so he can remind himself what he's supposed to be."

"To manage something like the Anthrozine, with its unique staffing requirements, we need a specific personality type. First, they need to be an anarchist. Communists are more correct, but they are impractical at this scale. Secondly they need to be an abrasive numbers guy. Someone who's shit in an extremely predictable big picture way. Someone who'll optimize the site and make enough money to pay the people who need it without selling out and going corporate. Someone who can hold feet to the fire on deadlines without getting worked up about it. Someone who can bang their desk and demand pictures of Spider Man, and then be unambiguously happy when they get pictures of Spider Man. Do you know anyone like that?"

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Orange!

"I wouldn't know," said November. "I'm not friends with anyone who doesn't torture themselves for what they love."

She folds her hands behind her back and paces. Pope doesn't know, but she's mirroring Tiger right now - for some reason that was just where her mind went when she was thinking about performing coups.

Get the mannerisms right. You're not impersonating a human any more. You're not dealing in human power. You're dealing in balances of force and fait accompli. Immediately the illusion deepened, plunging through layers of her mind like dry ice into golden whisky. Mannerisms, turns of speech, accents, surface level stuff - but go deeper. Think about the structure. The politics. The turns and twists of thought, the inevitable truths that let her predict the future.

Yes. She had once been the most powerful colour. Everyone else had been emanations of her. This was how.

She drops back a step as they walk, just on the edge of Pope's peripheral vision. She hunches forwards a bit, hands in her pockets. She'd have to do away with this suit; it revealed too much. The aesthetic of the enemy. She pulls off the jacket and stuffed it in a trashbin as she walked, undid her tie and top button and let it hang loose, reached up to pull her crafted hair into a rough ponytail. She produced a sparkstick she'd built for this purpose - the shape of a glowing cigarette, a flicker of light and heat and a wisp of smoke. It was the inverse of a vape; it was useless for any recreational purpose, it was purely an aesthetic tool, the motion of holding a glowing fragment of fire in hands and mouth.

Orange like Tygers, burning bright.

"How about you, Pope?" she said. "You ever want to run a magazine?"

She could predict the answer. The question was useful regardless.

Naval!

While Dudekov is looking at the roof, lost in his monologue, Mr. Naval Oldberg, Psychologist, strikes like a Snake.

It's an impossible move, not least because he's still sitting back in his chair while he does it, hands folded thoughtfully. He doesn't move a muscle actually, every one of the limbs he uses for this assault didn't exist before he started using them. He doesn't bat an eyelash even when his hands close across Dudekov's unlocked phone, ice blue eyes don't blink even as teal eyes look up through batting eyelashes.

"Hey," said Cyan!

And then she fucking scrams. A crazy, high energy, zero dignity scramble rolling over the bed, powering off with both legs, landing in a shoulder diveroll and sprinting out through the door without dropping a second of momentum. Brown is waiting to slam the door shut behind her and weld the lock shut.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Orange!

"The fucked part was that shooting down the attack helicopter was the plan," said Orange. "And it was the plan because we're trying to condition our enemies into not defaulting to violence. They're the ones who decided to rely on an extrajudicial paramilitary company, they're the ones who decided that their response mechanism wasn't going to be bound by any sort of checks, balances or oversight, they're the ones who decided to do battle in the realm of raw, naked force. They hit 'betray' on every social compact and the only possible response to that is to make that seem both costly and useless."

She sighed. "Anyway, you're right. I've been thinking too much about negotiating with my enemies, but I can't do that because I can't trust them, and that makes me feel pointless. But maybe I just need to accept that peace is off the table and start using my talents for military purposes."

She looked at Pope directly again. "And I think there is. I want to win. I want to be there to see it. I want you to be there to see it too."

Naval!

"Yeah yeah, laugh it up," grumbled Naval. "She has other leads, all this costs is time. Not everyone in your organization is going to be a perfect lord of the mind palace. Someone will crack eventually, you know your colleagues. Which of them do you think will break first?"

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Orange!

She looked at him. Listened, put an arm on his shoulder seriously. Some of the others acted sympathy through the routines she'd given them in moments like this; hers was genuine. She hurt to know that he hurt.

"Pope, last night I got shot at with an air to surface missile launched from a paramilitary helicopter," she said. "And I'm stressed and terrified and exhausted and horrified that this is the life I've chosen for myself. But I'm not on the same framework as you. When I'm pushed to my limit, November will go on. She'll just be the parts of her that are right for the situation. What scares me is that I'm seeing increasingly that the people I'm up against are so awful that I'm uninterested in negotiating with them. That means I'm going to end up on the wrong side of a realignment where we harden into something more... efficient. Built for purpose."

She looked away. "I was good as a carefree space engineer. Someone who thought that history was fascinating and politics was something that happened on another planet. But I can't live in that world any more and I don't know what my purpose is in this one. I couldn't even make the fucking op in the first place, I had to do it without -" she corrects herself; not because the thought is wrong but to make the pronoun game more comprehensible "November had to do it without me because I went to the entirely wrong district and fucked around watching retro movies instead. I thought I'd have purpose by now but Monk is enlightened, Ox is off at Jupiter, Dragon fucking lobotomized himself, Goat's a child -"

She turns her hands up. "I, Orange, am not going to crack under the pressure. November? She absolutely will."

Dudekov!

"They were all injured in an unrelated ballooning accident -" Naval sighs. "Fuck. Goddamn it. How are you this sharp after waking up from brain surgery? The hangover alone! I can barely browse reddit without my coffee."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Orange!

Orange laughed like ashes. "I have a very long list of people interested in hurting me, Pope," she said, "and if I wanted to add myself to that list I'd need to go to the far back of the line. You've lived your life under the wiretap while fighting for the rights of appliances, so I reckon you of all people can relate."

She let out a frustrated breath. "I don't want to cut myself off. But I'm not going to work for a boss who threatens me with violence no matter how much socialist theory he knows."

Dudekov!

"Of course, sir," said Naval. "You are under no constraints whatsoever. We did not contact your personal security team because they are in hospital themselves, but you can probably arrange to have them discharged with a few slings and casts."

He smiled. "It's understandable if you find it hard to trust right now. But we are genuinely at your service."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Orange!

Rescue.

Too little, too late. But still... ever since she'd heard of Singh throwing Remoil's bags she'd been filled with the secret yearning that she might get something like that. Something she could see firsthand, let her internalize firsthand. It was better than she'd thought it could be, even though it was only a single drop of what she needed. It takes her a long moment to process what's happening, to finally stammer out the thank you.

It's impossible to articulate gratitude. She can't do it. She can only let the tension and weariness show as exaggerated as she can express it, still not enough to communicate how much she feels.

She asks for Pope.

"I'm going to resign from the Anthrozine," she said after everything had settled. She shudders a bit to say it, but she holds her nerve. "Can I give my material to you instead?"

*

Dudekov!

There's a knock at the door.

"Thank God, took him long enough," said the Chase Black agent. There was some brief chatter from just outside earshot and in walked the psychologist, leaving the agents both outside. He was a creature of earth tones, warm and indistinct, fuzzy in beard and clothing, one lazy eye always drifting to the side. He knocked on the wall as he approached Dudekov's bed.

"Mr. Dudekov? I'm Naval Oldberg, a military psychologist on contract to Chase Black, NV2 security clearance. I understand that you've experienced -" he didn't look at the scar. "- quite the trauma. Do you mind if I run some tests to ascertain the extent of the damage?"

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Orange!

Being Wrong is a strange feeling. Everything feels out of resolution, out of balance, a fracture in the mind that thoughts can't move across. A sensation that nothing can continue onwards until everything has been boiled back to nothing. She knows she's wrong. She wants to reach out. She should be...

Mrs. Everest demonstrated what power was. Power was a castle with only one person inside.
Untrained operatives risk information leaks.
You'd be putting them in danger.
We can move faster by ourselves.

She can't figure out how to navigate this. She's overlapping layers of excuses and ideologies and thoughts that make this the only way. She's no better. Because it's family. People she loves. She loves them, genuinely, and she has to come for them even if she also loves everyone else. Every day she fantasized about the manor walls slicing open and Phoenix arriving in a blaze of glory, Pig breaking the outside windows, Rat's confident smirk, "We came to rescue you. As soon as we knew we didn't hesitate for an instant."

But they hadn't come. No one had rescued her. And the only possible explanation was that they had it worse than she did. That they were still waiting for her to rescue them.

That was why she couldn't fight Black. Even if it meant packing up every part of her life and then quietly disappearing. She was just as much a part of this as any other colour. She was wrong by her own standards, but there she was, leading the vote for her own dissolution. It was her purpose. It was the opposite of her purpose.

"Thank you, I'll be fine," she said. It took her a moment. She was shocked anyone asked. "I'll... I'll be fine."

November!

The Chase Black agent stands politely by the door with his back turned, pretending not to overhear his client have a weird meltdown into a dial tone.

If this is a bit it's going to take more than that to convince them to drop it.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

York!

"It's not like that, it's like -" she came up short. "I didn't mean it like that. I'm sorry. I mean it like, I met one of my sisters recently. She has over a hundred colours now because of the experiments they ran on her. Even if I published that in headlines on every paper in the station nobody would give a single damn. It's barely legible as an outrage when the station can't even agree on healthcare for transhumans. They're mine, and no one else will fight for them. It has to be me."

Dudekov!

The officer goes over to the door and gets the phone from the agent standing guard. This is without embellishments, almost factory defaults, the only flourish of personality being the installation of an online poker game.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Orange!

"I'd like to chill," said Orange. "Believe me, I'm going to do everything in my power to turn the volume down as much as I can. But..." the arguments of the others wash across her mind: I'm the only one that can do this, the system needs to be destroyed, this is the right thing to do, when you think about it this is kind of the status quo now... "... but it's family," she said, just as helplessly as before. "I have to do this."

Because no one did it for me.

Dudekov!

The phone had, prominently displayed, a sticker of a happy elephant wearing glasses on the front side, obscuring part of the screen. Several pieces of glitter had somehow physically embedded themselves in the glass, and there are dozens of games installed blotting out every useful feature. "Sorry sir, my daughter likes to play with it," said the agent apologetically, scrolling through to the phone app and handing it over.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

York!

"There's a main story," said Orange. "And it's not this. This is kind of something that fell out in passing while I was researching the main story. And I honestly don't know how well the main story will sell because it's incredibly niche. But I have to do it because..." she shrugged helplessly. "It's family. You know?"

Dudekov!

There's a knock at the door. The Chase Black agent answers it and steps out. His relief steps in, different guy, higher stripe, same logo. He waves his hand directly in front of Dudekov's face like he's checking for function. "Sir? We're bringing in a specialist. He's going to ask you some questions. You feeling any better?" This guy had a pleading twist to the voice like he was staring down the barrel of an Unsatisfactory Performance Review. "You got anything useful about the thing that did this to you? It say where it was going?"