Thanqol

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink!

Pink laughs. "You're thinking of my brother, Pig. They made his internal decision making extremely legible; his brain runs like the stock market. You can track exactly the flows of votes and currency exchanges with him. For some reason they decided not to go with anything like that for subsequent generations, for me it's extremely blurry and vibes-based. Presumably it's to stop me from trying to game it, but the rules are also weird and unpredictable and id-based. Confidence plays a part. Like, Orange recently got a huge boost just by having a conversation with Pope and deciding to raise her game."

She was building still; a twisting green spiral pillar upon which the bowl rested. It ran and looped in strange and alien patterns, hollow arches, empty circles. "Everything rests on Green and Green's perceptions in the end," she said. "We don't even hold formal votes most of the time, we all just kind of sense the vibe. It's why I keep using the word 'influence' rather than 'votes'. And I can't even... think about turning against Green, and I think it's the same with Yellow. It's like..." she grabbed a full container and dumped it over the top of the bowl and the alien spires, half-burying each. "The specifics are obscured, and so we kind of have to play normal? I sometimes wonder how much of my brain design is to stop me wireheading."

*

November!

This is why.

Around and around this moment comes. The bloody scream for justice. Naivety shattering anew. Demons made manifest and the machinery of state is trying to exorcise them. They turn the air into poison, the electromagnetic system into madness, and before long the old testudoes of the Roman Republic will form up again. People say that capitalism worships the dollar but within an afternoon there has been enough property damage, injury and death to pay for everyone's healthcare for years. The state is the body of the king, and in its heart still beats that oldest of regal demands: You will all kneel.

Change the brain all you want. The heart beats on.

She does not need to take it all in this time. She knows her purpose. She knows it's failed. Never again - and here we are, past the brink. No matter how this went there'd be a next time. On and on until she finally slew the king once and for all.

But she was fortunate that the most aesthetic way to insult the king's authority ever invented had not just become possible but optimal.

She was going to jack a train and drive everyone home herself.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink!

Pink actually became increasingly attentive and interested throughout Fiona's speech. "You know, nobody's actually ever been interested in my internal politics before," said Pink. "I'd actually always wanted to talk about this but never had the audience - do you mind?"

She takes the lego blocks and separates them out into their component colours. She arranges them in a circle, with green in the centre.

"So there's a source of truth here, and it's Green," said Pink, adding more and more bricks of different colours, connecting them out into a strange helix pattern. "If Yellow killed me by shooting me with a gun it'd be pointless because so long as the impulse for me exists inside Green she'd recreate me. Same as if every billionaire died on a moon colony, if you change nothing else within a couple of generations you'd find billionaires running everything again. It's only if I became utterly marginalized that I'd be at permanent risk, and that's very much down to environmental conditions. Blue was optimized for deep space construction, she became marginalized when we stopped doing that, and her influence had faded almost to zero by the time she actually died."

There are a hundred bricks in all now:
25 black
16 yellow
15 orange
10 red
10 brown
10 white
7 cyan
7 pink

What she'd built was... something like a bowl? It was a strange magic eye trick, the way she'd placed the yellow made it look like noodles, while the orange looked like soup...

"Orange is actually very influential," said Pink. "But she doesn't talk to you much because I asked her not to. She's all about teamwork, but in practice that kind of means she manages people. She'd make our relationship a working relationship and I don't want that. She's been worrying about losing influence but that's just because she used to be where Black is and is sensitive to the perceived loss of status. She's currently trying to mobilize against Black and her head's in the right place to make that a real fight. I don't really have a dog in that fight, but I generally support Orange in it."

"But you're right that Yellow is my personal nemesis," she said. "And White is usually solidly in her camp. That means that she's got enough influence to power this Yellow-Black-White alliance that gets her to 51, and she can get around morality if she can present it as a crisis or status quo. That's bad for me because it means that she can encourage collective decisions that marginalize me further, but it requires those decisions to be individually morally correct enough to bring White along. This recent espionage campaign she's been encouraging has been very effective at changing the conditions that give me room to breathe."

She smiled. "Thanks for this, by the way. This is something I've always wanted to talk about but never had anyone this interested before."

Brown!

"Mm," said Brown. "I get a lot of titles. Observation, status quo, sleep, normie, chill, the boring one. I make sure the bills get paid, the batteries get replaced, and that someone's thinking about all of the stuff that we disregard in the moment. Basically any task that nobody else wants to do."

She thought for a while. She was talking to a Green here, so it'd be less work to give her all the data she needed to figure out how this conversation should go and let her take it from there.

"You spoke to Yellow, who's Vision. There's also Green, genius, Red, crisis management, Black, paranoia, Orange, cooperation, White, morality, Cyan, malleability, and Pink, creativity. Please don't talk to me about any of those topics because they're all busy and I'd be bad at it."

Yellow!

"I see," said Yellow. "You are simply biased towards people who make you climax hard. Well -" she flipped around on the seat, smiling and predatory and as liquid flexible as a beach wizard. "- if it's what's required to secure my political influence, I suppose I'll have to set a new record~"

Breathless Dead

Dyssia!

"Fool," hissed the Crystal Knight, brooding on her throne. "You point at the fall and ignore the rise. We conquered the galaxy with Biomancy. We leashed the stars, harvested black holes, mapped the edges of the galaxy. Yes, there was a fall, but you blame the very thing that made us strong in the first place. And your moralistic blindness prevents you from seeing the new source of power that will remake the Skies greater than ever before."

She drew her blade. Crystal lenses aligned, and a projection of simmering, dimensional energy blazed above her head.

"Do you see?" she said. "These crystals! They are new to the galaxy and represent the next generation of technological mastery. With these we have already built the crystal dragons, a new non-biological lifeform that have bypassed the injunction against electronic thought! With these we have built weapons that render the old rules of invincibility irrelevant! With these the Royal Architect, when he finishes his harvest, will be able to mine the same planet dozens of times over. A new font of boundless wealth awaits us, a new vector for supreme power, a new frontier that will render biomancy itself irrelevant! And rather than supporting the Skies as we master this new paradigm you fight yesterday's battles, weeping over the fate of slaves who will soon be as obsolete as slavery itself."

Dolce!

"Oh, yes, I suppose so," said the Architect. "I'd already written off the material composition so I'll cheerfully take a restoration of my hull in exchange for trying to grasp an undeserved windfall."

There's the screeching sound of power tools as the Architect's tools bent the makeshift house and table back into his superstructure.

"Actually, while you're here, and while you're visiting Liquid Bronze, and while you're taking out the garbage, I'm curious if you'll take another of my unexpected guests with you!" said the Architect suddenly, his massive video screen shifting to showing the Diodekoi assassin, frozen in stasis. "After all, if one thing has been made clear by the Biomantic community, I'm not really participating socially if I don't send an unstoppable killer assassin after them from time to time."

20022 is shaking is head and making the X symbol with his hands, but the Royal Architect has evidently decided that this is your decision alone.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink!

"I... don't think I'd enjoy playing with them?" said Pink. "God, I hate myself when I sound like this. I'm not trying to be a downer, I promise! I know that the character who is super pumped up and inspired for every new task is super lovable. And I can do that, but I need to change colours for it. You're fixating on the part of me that has deeply intense, weird, personal, boring incoherent untranslatable robot art, who just wants to stare at photographs until I can see the dogs. That's the whole reason I'm on the fringe to begin with! Every other colour is focused on the mission, focused on the family, focused on helping other people, fighting for everybody's smiles...

"I'm the part of me that wonders what my own smile looks like. And it's not this. I can be a version of me who does enjoy this, but that's not what you're asking. It's super cool and super fun and a great idea, Green would love it, Yellow would have a blast, you did super great. I'm just..." she gestured helplessly.

Brown!

"Reminds me, I'm still looking into your cards. I figured since you give out so many, and more to people you don't like, that the secret must involve destroying them so I'm chemstripping one now. But it's down the list."

She thought about it. "Why is nothing coming to mind? It feels like everything I've watched is inseparable from my own daydreams and alternate takes on it. Sometimes I can't remember if a show was actually gay or if I'm just so deep in the discourse that it feels that way in retrospect. All of these stories pass through me and I've got vibes as clear as crystal even as the titles fade away. Holding hands underwater. A city of crystal and light with one broken mirror. A song I was listening to on repeat while reading. Goodbye after goodbye until you can finally do it right. I know where to find the list, but I think there's this deeper sense of what a perfect world looks like underneath all of that."

Red!

Red: Listen, how about we stop talking about this until 9pm, lock in our ideas then, have an hour to argue about it, and then put it to a final vote at 10pm
Yellow: ಠ_ಠ✿
Yellow: What the fuck
Yellow: crystal
Yellow: crystal why are you fucking with my operation

"Oh, yeah, she hated that," said Red. "I think -"
"It's nothing," said Yellow, appearing through a door in a swoosh of saffron dress. She beamed, flower radiant behind her ear. "It's fine. New variable to account for!" she beamed. "And of course you're free to get involved in our inner debates, part of being an aspect of the world is accepting influence as it comes. But I should explain," she took a deep breath. "I am the only part of November that thinks about the big picture. Imagine this part of yourself, and then set it against the sentient manifestations of your sloth, your paranoia, your hedonism, your disaster lesbianism," she gestured, rather unnecessarily, at Red for that one, "and so on and on. Sometimes one needs to work oneself up to do something big and challenging!"

She flopped dramatically onto Crystal's empty throne, dress and hair cascading over the side. "Look. The leftist fantasy of being able to Fix Things is a genuine craving to make the world better, right?" she said moodily. "But just because most people are forced through the violent, depressive spiral of having to accept that their political influence boils down to one vote and twenty bucks donated to Space Bernie Sanders doesn't mean I can accept that. I'm not a Trot - rather, I'm a Leninist in a practical sense. Lenin in the sense that he was just Some Fucking Guy until, with perfect timing, he showed up in a nation on the brink of a total collapse and declared himself in charge and somehow fucking got away with it."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink!

"I know you didn't ask for Yellow," said Pink, standing up. "But you could not have created a more perfect summoning circle for Yellow if you'd marked it out in raw saffron. Creating a legal code that can manipulate a bunch of humans into happiness alongside a magical gift is, like - I literally can't take this away from her. I can't stay, I need to take her place with Crystal. Don't think you failed, you've just made part of me deliriously happy, even if it wasn't the part you were aiming at."

Brown!

"Yeah," said Brown, similarly without irony or sarcasm. "All this outside makes me want to close my eyes and fast forwards through it too. I can see so many places where, if I had more power, I could make meaningful changes. But in the absence of that power all I can do is either try to get power, quietly go insane or be a coward and check out."

White!

":3"
"You know, I think I hate her already."
"Why are you saying that, bestie? Aren't I the solution to your problem?"

The person-sized holographic colon-three dematerializes and recoalesces into the shape of a cyan-coloured two-tailed fox, grinning and scrambling up White's side to drape around her shoulders like a scarf. "Hi~! I'm Cyan. We haven't met, I'm new. I am a holographic symbiote, my job is to layer over the top of other colours like this -"

She shimmered, and White was a dragon - a painted watercolour dragon, diamond white scales breaking light into prisms of colour.

"- but that presents a problem, doesn't it?" She said. "I can only do a very limited area with my projector drones. We did a bit recently and any time I had two people on camera simultaneously I had to have them standing shoulder to shoulder almost. But if this girl is going to be loading up on muscles anyway, why not have her carry around the full multidirectional holoemitters I need?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean the wings, dummy!" said Cyan. "You don't need big punchy wings, you need wings that give you psychic control of the space - very relatable by the way. You only need the wings to be short extensions tipped with holoprojectors. When I'm not around you can just run them as default wing holograms which gives you the sense of size and momentum you want, when I am around I can use the additional hardware to cover the whole spectrum. Just imagine our unified fighting style! The ultimate in deception, and the ultimate in honesty! Imagine what Hazel can do with her design powered by two onboard AI. Isn't that exactly what you meant when you talked about being a hangar queen?"
"Oh no we're going to be room mates."
":3"

Red!

There's an incongruous beat where Red is phased out. A coin drops somewhere. "You look really good today, by the way?" she said. "And I'm probably not just saying that because of the thing you did with the banana. Uh, right anyway, Yellow. She's, like, she causes problems, all the time. Half the shit that I get into is because Yellow saw something that 'needed' to get done and kind of arranged things so they'd go that way. It's great when she's on your side - amazing frankly, there's so much you can get done - but she's always kind of almost on your side."

She grappled for the words. "Like, everyone else is kind of predictable. I know Black's going to want to do security stuff, I know Pink wants to do artsy stuff, but what the fuck does Yellow want? She wants something, but it's bigger than any of us can comprehend and so she basically gets to be the deciding vote any time anything comes up."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

Brown considered. It would be very easy to just not say anything. And so... she didn't! Correcting Apostle would make everything awkward, and if this locked her into a spiral of lies that wound up with her writing actual fetish fic to cover her ass then that'd be a problem for another day.

Besides. She liked watching and listening.

"I'm currently trying to get him to rage his soul back into his body," she said. "But apparently being mad at the mainstream press isn't enough to animate him. Do you have anything?"

Pink!

"Plastic is inert," said Pink. "It's dead matter, the same astroengineering principles all still apply to it. I'd need to work in structural stability and connection points and materials harvest and math and blueprints and it's all so much like work that there's no way I could enjoy it. I think what I like... what I like about cooking is the subtle stuff. The timing, the invisibility of decay, the moments of heat and transformation, the wet and the dry and the wet and the dry. It's weird and dumb, and none of my other colours get it, but that's... why..."

She frowned and pressed her hand into her forehead. "I can almost remember what inspired me about this the first place. But it's under the Pathfinding Layer."

White!

"No, it's -" she reset the thought. Clarity. Magic.

"I want the impression that I have made no compromises in the design," said White. "I want it to feel like I have completely disregarded the concept of tradeoffs. I want anyone who comes into contact with me to be asking the same questions you do: there's no way, that's not real, how can I fight that with my technology bounded by reality? In exchange for that illusion I am prepared to accept as many sacrifices as necessary. Such as, unrealistic power draw that requires full body battery reloads at regular intervals. Inaccessible access ports. Solid fusion welds that require full disassembly in order to service. I want the Mitsubishi Zero, a hangar queen whose tradeoffs happen somewhere they are invisible to those who have to come up against it. The swan, legs paddling furiously underwater."

Red!

"That's a really good idea," said Red. "It'd align with Black, but make an enemy of Green and Pink. But it's Yellow who I'm really worried about. She's up to something, I can feel it, but I can't figure out what. There's no way she'd turn this over to us, this is the biggest vision thing in ages. Any moment she'll swoop in and put her thumb on the scales which is why I'm trying to ruin everything in advance... or is that just clearing the path for her idea? God, she sucks, I hate her, can you figure it out?"

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

She's in thought. She's going over Dudekov's final statement, the one where he laid out where he thought the other Zodiac Engines were. The rest of her silently agreed to analyze that statement later because there's one crisis after another, and so Brown is left to hold the idea's spark.

She does most of the long term thinking. Sometimes an idea just needs to sit, clear and present, in an otherwise empty mind. Not doing anything with it, not forging new connections, just letting it saturate in the surrounding reality. Invisibly it sets out roots and joins the soil, forming the network of connections that Green can later dance across like lightning.

"He's a colleague," said Brown. "We haven't really spoken outside of work. From what I've gathered, though, he got kicked by a horse with an upside down shoe directly into a ladder made of mirrors while screaming the name of the Scottish play. A lot of people out there are having bad days, but he has a bad everyday so I wanted to make time for him."

Pink!

Pink looked at the lego mountain, and then across at Fiona with the most politely strained smile she could manage. "I think I'll just watch," she said. "Don't get me wrong, Blue would have loved this but... this really isn't my medium."

White!

She meditated on it for a long moment. She understood she was competing with Yellow's claim to divinity here. But she refused to let herself be eclipsed; the physical could be divine too.

"The core of my transformation is the sense of control," said White. "Self control, emanating out into the control of others. My agenda is to create a sense of futility in my opponents, to impose so physically upon them that I do not need to exert my full strength against them. I prioritize the strength of my grip over the force of my punch, the elegance of my movement over its top speed, the precision of force application above it's theoretical maximum. I want to move both swiftly and inevitably, the kind of momentum that disorients and overcomes. The wings and tail are to increase my perceived size and momentum, they're there to grip and enfold, they're to create a sense of helplessness in opponents who have trained only against default human models.

"Balance, then, is what's important. Every weapon and tool should feel crushingly superior; there should be no obvious counterstrategy. I should be able to outfight anything I can catch and outrun anything I can't outfight. I want everyone, no matter their speciality, to look at me with awe. I want to have total mastery over myself and be able to express that with the precise body language of wing and claw, of neck and tail. I am not too different a creature from Yellow, in the end - I seek to master my opponent's minds, but I seek to do it by exhibiting perfect strength, skill and virtue rather than manifesting divinity directly.

"Consider a Knight on horseback. Swift on the hoof, armoured in plate, skilled with sword, lance, shield and banner. A complete arsenal. A dragon, in my mind, is the ultimate Knight - swifter than they, stronger than they, more glorious than they, with more tools than they, but in the end the same order of being. They fight for the same princesses, for the same treasures, for the same kingdoms. To defeat a dragon means transcending knighthood itself. I do not mind if I am defeated by a transcendent soul, so long as I never lose to an unworthy one."

Yellow!

So far any nascent ideas are being disrupted by Red going off at length about what she thinks other colours are going to propose, and how their ideas are flawed. She's treating it as a game, getting ahead of everyone else's desires and poking holes in them, poisoning as many wells as she can think of. It's a brute force punish for colours who were trying to do coalition negotiations in the shadows.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

<I am Solarel, the Hunter of Huntresses.>

Even after everything she's never flinched from her name. To hide, to turn away, to pretend to be someone else... despite all the pressure that came with isolation and infamy, she couldn't see any way to be the person she wanted to be that didn't lead through being the person who she was.

<I am from the Stormlands of Roevg, the hurricane valley where only the Gods can walk unbowed.>

Home. An existence of crawling, masks, dust, power scraped from chinks of sunlight and the overflow of divine battle. A world of dust she would never feel compelled to return to.

<I am here because... I was hungry, and lost. I needed space to think. To prepare.>

Had she found it? What did she think now? The tactics, the calculations, an understanding of the world of her next foe, Isabelle Lorenzo. Everything here was the logic of cities.

<I pilot the Aeteline, the purified God of War.>

There was no way in foesign to de-emphasize into the word 'Mech', that curiously barbaric sense that a God was the same manner of being as a mechanical pencil. Though perhaps that was the genius of the Terenians? In understanding the unity of all things, perhaps they saw the Spirit World as one with reality. Perhaps they exalted the pencil rather than denigrated the God.

<I do like it. I have -> there was no word for 'barter' in foesign <- taken a tribute of idols. This one is Mordred of the Round Table, a wicked and noble knight raised from death to do battle as the Saber of Red. I think she is very relatable.>

She held up her prize, a polysynth figurine. She liked the bulk of the armour and how it could unravel to reveal the girl underneath. Something about that duality felt... important in a way that she could feel slipping away.

<But what it's like... strange. Zaldarians engage in physical reciprocity; power must be met with power, force with force. As I understand it, Terenians reflect invisibly through spirit world systems. You allow people to steal from you, but then you inflict retributive violence to their spirit number. It makes you seem like cowards at first, but in truth your battles happen telepathically and if you lose the battle then an army is mobilized against you. It seems complicated and dangerous until you realize the army is not particularly dangerous, though they are very loud.>

She'd punched out at least half a dozen cops and security guards already in her short stay here. But the sirens! Perhaps because their warriors were so unworthy they tried to scare their foes with extremely loud noises.

<For fun... I like those magical moving roads. The enchanted stairs are especially entertaining.>

She presumed that they were for the purposes of exercise - to allow warriors to double the effort it took to cross the city. She saw most people going with the flow, but she also saw warriors using the enchanted roads and stairs in dedicated rooms to simulate crossing vast distances, so they must have different uses for different castes.

<I grew up in a nomadic band of subsistence scavengers, a tribe not even powerful enough to raid, barely even wealthy enough to be worthy of raiding. We stalked the Gods and picked over their wreckage when they fought. It is not an entertaining story.>

These people could watch Gods fight nearly every day on their anime planets. She couldn't imagine that would be worth anything to them.

<No. If we desire someone we take them captive and integrate them into our household. From there, it is the host's challenge to make sure their prisoner is joyful. We do not reproduce genetically like you; upon the breakdown of our internal batteries we spend our days contemplating the spirit world until we sever our connection to physicality entirely and become an Ancestor. When an Ancestor tires of the Spirit World then they conjure a new frame for themselves and forget their immortality so they can experience the world again.>

Immortality broken by longing, by craving. Everywhere she looked she could feel the drive that must have filled her when she decided to be reborn; everywhere it felt like she somehow hadn't reached what she was yearning for. The only times she'd felt close had been with Mirror. The only times she'd been with Mirror had been in battle... sometimes after battle. Sometimes before battle. But the battle was surely the everything in each case.

So she'd do battle. As many times as it took.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Tyger!

"Give me your contacts," said Tyger. "I'll see what I can do."

She smiled. "I appreciate the offer, and I'll think about it. I don't have the focus to expand as a journalist at this time, and probably am better served by not becoming more of a public figure at this time... but I'll have a think. Maybe there'll be some doors I need to go through to get off the street."

November!

Dudekov couldn't have done more to disrupt November's internal unity with a virus.

None of them say anything. None of them need to. Instantly they all know that they're in conditions of Scarcity, conditions where decisions need to be made about a limited resource. The room falls silent. Eyes dart from colour to colour. The Ecstasy of Gold plays in the back of everyone's mind as they judge who can be persuaded and who must be silenced. It's Election Season and all previous coalitions and loyalties will fall apart in the face of this.

"I'm out!" said Yellow. The surprise broke the spell for a moment. "I'm making a political point, don't worry," she said with a smile, and bowed and stepped out of the circle. That broke the tension for a moment and the rest of November paired up into rapid fire internal negotiations. Brown's desire for reliable cashflow, Cyan's desire for riches, Black's desire for security, Pink's need for aesthetics, White's discomfort with becoming a landlord. The battle for the future was on.

November!

Fiona: Pink is seconded as requested. She feels like she's close to a breakthrough that will make her relevant and useful again, and is prepared to trust Fiona with that if she has any ideas. There's an idea, a memory, right on the tip of her tongue that she can't quite articulate.
Junta: Brown pays a visit to Junta. She doesn't want to be anywhere near Major Historical Events, so visiting a colleague in hospital seems both a nice thing to do and a way to duck responsibility for a minute. She's taken a newspaper to read aloud to him, starting from the theory that having to listen to mainstream journalism hot takes for an extended period of time will get his angry ghost to reinhabit his body.
Hazel: White has the components she needs to complete her transition - mostly. She wants aftermarket modifications to increase strength and speed further, to optimize her for hand to hand combat against a variety of targets, to harden her against common weapon types - to give herself the physical capacity to move like Euna Kim. She envies Red's instinctive muscle memory that lets her fight as a champion; she wants to achieve that same greatness through discipline and attention to detail. To be the perfect student she needs a chassis capable of keeping up with her idea of perfection.

Red/Orange/Yellow!

Orange has rallied forces of the Ancien Regime to her, determined to prove that teamwork and cooperation still are useful concepts. Yellow has come along because she can't resist a good idealistic dream, Red because Orange's sense of crisis empowers her. This cohort remains close to Crystal ready to provide a cohesive response to any crisis that emerges on this day of all days.

Black/Cyan/Green!

Black carries the banner of practicality and independence. She follows Green's instincts alone, the waterfall of traffic analysis data that she intakes as she predicts the flows and movements of masses of people. She has her eyes especially on any escalatory fascist groups, anyone who's got it in their head to meet assassination with assassination. The cops will be treating the furry community as threats rather than citizens to protect, so she took that role upon herself.

Breathless Dead

Mosaic!

"This at least I do not need to teach you," said Hera. "I cannot say if pride and spite are sufficient as virtues, but I have found even these to be far better than being ruled by anger. Arm yourself with these and you will have my blessings."

She looked at the deck as it ignited and burned, as Knight after Knight touched down, as untrained deck crews fumbled about them in crowds. All of your warriors have returned. All except one.

Ember!

As you hit the deck a curtain of lightning opens behinds you. Sagetip has restored at least some of the point defense Flux spikes and what stragglers remain break off from the lightning curtains that guard the Plousios.

You feel the tactical situation in your nose, in your hindbrain, deep and muscular as a yawn. Enemy in disarray. One suit captured, nonpack - acceptable trade. Retreat is clear and prize enough. The wisdom of Minerva rolling in your DNA is clear: you can flee, you should flee, even crippled the Slitted remains a terror.

Tell that to your Queen. It is your duty.

Dyssia!

"Don't you start," hissed the Crystal Knight. "Insurrectionist. Nihilist. You would trade centuries of progress for a few squirts of dopamine."

The material of the Azura warship is hungry. Already the metal is, with the speed of living plants, running roots and channels into the detrius of the town. It will suck iron and carbon and trace elements out like trees ripping nutrients from the soil and use the mass to rebuild itself, leaving only heaps of silicon and rock dust behind. Warships repair themselves by digesting the materials they need directly and the town of Beri will be rendered down to repair the damage it inflicted.

"All this for some servitors?" she said. "Fine. I'll put in a special order. I'll have an entire planet repopulated with nerve-stapled species. They'll be deleriously happy every second of the day, wherever you go you'll be able to see their maximal smiles. We'll see how long it takes before you understand how important the Skies are."

Dolce!

"Wait!" said the Emissary. He clattered over to Dolce, flinching as a drone followed him threateningly. "Wait! Take me with you!" he looked back at the enormous, staring eye of the Architect. "I - I can't stay here. I won't! Please!"