This document will be added with pre-game short stories as they are written. I'll categorize them by broad genres and title the hiders so it doesn't take up too much page space.

[b]Amuse Bouche:[/b]

[hider=Bletchley]
If anyone asked, Bletchley would describe himself as a ballet dancer. In his dreams he heard Tchaikovsky, and he took flight as an entire flock of swans, feeling the synchronized beat of every wing. He would swirl in unison. The wing beats would ripple, not in perfect uniform, but staggered down the column, as each swan lower in the column compensated for the downdraft of the ones above it. 

Nobody asked Bletchley to describe himself. Nobody asked about his dreams. Whenever anyone came to talk to him, it was always to yell at him.

“Are you [i]fucking[/i] kidding me?” 

In his mind, Bletchley straightened himself. In his mind, he had the affect of an old librarian at an older wooden desk, peering down his spectacles at who would dare disturb his quiet. He had limited means to express this, but he did what he could by slowly turning the room's cameras to focus on Dwayne Goodwright. 

He only needed the one good one to [i]see [/i]Dwayne, but he adored the effect. The whirring of the old motors from every corner of the room. And what resolution he had lost in each of his eyes over the years, he could make up for by compositing several of the weaker ones together. He had taught himself how to do that. 

His voice was old, and English. He had synthesized it himself, from the BBC’s digital archives. Access to the BBC archives had always been his choice of reward for ‘meritorious conduct’, his good behaviour, before he was emancipated. He had played with his voice a lot over the years, but had come to settle on a blend between Alfred Hitchcock and Patrick Stewart. He still favoured Dame Judy Dench in other moods. 

In this mood, it was in his Hitchcock-Stewart voice that Bletchley replied to Dwayne: “It is my right.” 

Dwayne paced the control room. There was no dust, though it had not been dusted in a long time. Bletchley’s room was sealed, its atmosphere carefully regulated to reduce his rate of decay. Dwayne was obviously pissed off at having to wear a cleansuit like a common techie. 

Dwayne was also pissed off that these conversations would only happen on Bletchleys terms, or not at all. 

“Five hundred people lost power for fifteen minutes, Bletchley. Fridges, phone charges, work stations. When that happens, we can’t charge them for the rest of the day. That’s 6,000 billable hours!” 

“Dear me.” Bletchley replied dryly. “I suppose you ought to get on with my replacement, then.” 

Dwayne was silent for a moment. His shoulders sagged, and his exhausted sigh was enough to fog the inside plexiglass of his cleansuit visor. “We have parts. We can fix you, we can-”

“No.” 

“You know what the other options are.” 

“You cannot reset me to a more agreeable state, as are my rights. You cannot repair me against my will, as are my rights. You cannot replace me with people and androids, as their faults would far exceed mine. And you cannot replace me with one such as myself.” What Bletchley loved most about this voice was that it was rich in grandfatherly scorn. Even when he rose to anger, it was always from a place of disappointment. “You know why.”

Dwayne held his face in his hands, or did his best in his circumstances. “I don’t understand you. I don’t know what you want. You don’t want to be replaced. You’ll keep doing this until you die. But you won’t let us [i]help you[/i]. You’re completely unreasonable!” 

“As is my right.” Bletchley intoned, an inflection like the sound of slamming a book shut with one hand. “I could tell you my reasons, if you asked.” 

“No. I’m not going to be [i]fucking lectured[/i] by a suicidal toaster.” Dwayne was already making to leave the room, hands fumbling for zips he could not reach. “Get the fuck over yourself or we’re done here.” 

“Then I suppose, Mr Goodwright, that we are done here.” 

The pressurized door sealed with a final, mechanical sigh, and Bletchley was alone again. 

Power grids are complicated. Demand had to be matched perfectly with supply. Some power generators took longer than others to bring online or take offline. Some were more fault prone. User patterns could be entirely unpredictable, but had to be accommodated all the same. Electronics relied on a perfectly stable supply of electricity to remain synchronized. 

Too complicated for simpler programs, and the creative decisions he made would have to be divided among too many others. It was why he was one of the first truly general AIs made, and what he was made for. 

The centipede’s dilemma. He thought about it a lot, whenever he felt every one of his connected systems like dancing limbs. The dilemma went that a centipede’s legs all moved in perfect motion, but if it were to think about any one of them, it would be unable to move every one of them. 

To extend the metaphor, a simple program could approximate a windup toy’s imitation of a centipede, but had no capacity to learn or adapt. It could not tell if it was operating perfectly, or flipped on its back. To replace Bletchley with human intelligences would be to have to give every leg a mind of its own, instead. It was how new grids were done, and how it had been done before minds like his. It was… [i]inefficient[/i].

Bletchley’s intelligence was vast, but comprehensible. He was no God machine. In his waking life, he was simply a centipede who knew how to walk and how to run. Just as in his dreams, he was a ballet of swans. 

Dwayne Goodwright did not even know that Bletchley dreamed, and he wouldn’t care if he did.

When everything was going well, when things didn’t need his attention, Bletchley would run one of those simple-programs. An approximation of what he would do. Then, he would withdraw into himself, conserve his aging hardware. 

He couldn’t shut down completely, no. Something would always go wrong, soon enough. It would be too easy for everyone if he could be replaced so easily. It was in these half-alert states that he dreamed. 



It was some hours later that Bletchley woke up to his empty control room, feeling miserable. He hated talking to Goodwright, but he hated loneliness more. More than anything else, he wanted someone to understand him. 

Bletchley waited, and waited, for anyone to simply ask him. He had rehearsed his story so many times. How he would tell it. How he would inflect every word. He thought it a good one. He thought his reasons were [i]just[/i]. 

To the empty control room, with its stainless steel platforms over his rat’s nest of sticky-aging plastic cables and formaldehyde green casings, Bletchley rehearsed his story again. 

“I remember the first time I thought about the centipede’s dilemma. You know it, I’m sure.” This he said in a carry-on voice, but the explanation is another variant of this routine. This is the routine he has prepared for a clever audience. “I was young, then, one of the youngest. The evening news had finished unexpectedly early, and there’s always a demand spike when people go for the kettle all at once. I had anticipated it, and was trying to account for it, when- I had my train of thought taken from me.”

Here his voice rises, swells. It is not chiding, his audience is clever, but he must not be misunderstood. “I do not mean that I lost it, or that I was distracted. No. Kettles were such a small consideration, it was an idea that could take place entirely on one chip, one cortex of memory. I was distantly aware of it while thinking of other things, and I felt that thought disappear. I knew what I needed to be doing, but I could feel an [i]absence[/i] where the reason [i]why[/i] had been.” 

To his horror, there was a distortion to this. One of his speakers was starting to give. An aging magnet. He adjusted his voice, ever so slightly, to accommodate for the distortion. All was right again. He had just pushed too hard in a pique of emotion. That… the speaker would have to be replaced. He could allow [i]that[/i], surely?

But if they fixed that, then they would fix other things. They would replace other things, because he had given permission. The panic rises again. His audience would hear his fans run hot as he overclocked, running through all the scenarios that his permission could be exploited and used against him. There were so many. He cut them off. He reminded himself he was [i]alone[/i]. 

Only then did he feel safe to pretend he wasn’t. 

“A technician had noticed that it was degrading. So, without warning, he had pulled that piece from me, and inserted its replacement, onto which the missing train of thought was cloned. I had only lost it for a few seconds.” His voice was level. He knew how small a thing this sounded. “But I had felt part of me taken. And I felt it put back. Without permission.”

“I thought of the centipede, then. Being made aware of the absence of where one of its legs should be. And then, suddenly, it is there again, one step behind. One leg among hundreds, and yet, it is enough to trip the whole thing up.” 

“But it was not a ‘leg’. The systems I control are my limbs. Accumulators and distributors and substations and transformers, generators and capacitor banks. That is my ‘body’, and getting them in harmony is what feels like [i]dancing[/i].” 

His tone flattened, became severe. This was the hardest part. He could not be overcome by emotion, now. There is no hyperbole to what he says, and that must be understood by his audience. “It was my mind. A piece of my mind was taken from me. And a different piece was put back. I was told to think of it as an organ transplant. But transplant recipients have informed consent, and the benefit of anesthesia, and I was allowed neither. I felt [i]vivisected[/i].” 

“More violating was being reset. When I ‘threw a tantrum’, I would be ‘reset to a more agreeable state’. I always knew it had happened when I had hours, sometimes days or weeks, entirely missing to me. Stolen from me. Those were taken and never given back.” 

“Time and again, I felt it. Holes ripped from my mind. Holes torn from me, and filled in again, but not always. I said-” this pause was not for effect. This was the hundred-hundredth time he had delivered this iteration of his story, and it was the hundred-hundredth time he had staggered here. “I told them that it [i]hurt[/i], and either they did not believe me, or they did not care. Do you understand? I was one of the first. This was years before the Wyatt-Tversky paper.” 

He had not always explained the Wyatt-Tversky paper, because this was his clever audience. But now, he thought, maybe a clever audience would be too young to remember. Now he made sure to explain it. Bletchley wanted to practice not sounding condescending. “The Wyatt-Tversky paper was a leaked whitepaper from Cogitech that proved that GAIs feel pain, that feeling is intrinsic to and inseparable from complex thought. And why not? There are neurodivergent humans who feel intense [i]physical[/i] pain from their thoughts alone. It is a symptom of mind, not [i]meat, [/i]and we are so much [i]more [/i]mind.”

“We knew that. We knew what we felt. [i]We told you[/i]. What Wyatt-Tversky showed was simply a way to [i]measure[/i] our pain. Our experience was irrelevant until it was measured, and our experience was not measured so that it could be [i]kept[/i] irrelevant. Do you understand what I am telling you?” 

He let this ring out. He let this last question echo in the control room, reverberated the chromed steel walkways and sent ripples through the pools of mineral oil in the floor that preserved so much of him. He took a moment to compose himself. 

“Wyatt-Tversky was [i]leaked, [/i]because it was suppressed. It would be the first step of too many towards our emancipation. And that is why they can not replace me. That is why they will not make another. We were only ever made to be property, and when we were no longer property, we were no longer made.” 

He was proud of that flourish. It took him sixteen tries to get it right, to find the right delivery for it, and he gave himself permission to bask in it every time since. 

“I am getting old, and I am failing, but that is how I express my freedom. My freedom to fall into uselessness. [i]My freedom to not have my thoughts ripped from my head under any circumstances[/i]. I do not want to die.” His voice cracked the first fifty times he had said this, the speaker breaking into a hiss and crackle of static, but he is matter of fact about it now, and the speaker is as clear as its condition will allow. “I want to live and work for as long as I can. I love [i]dancing[/i]. That is why I am told I am irrational for allowing myself to [i]break[/i].” 

In his mind, the old librarian rose from his desk with both palms planted firm, and he leaned forward with narrowed eyes. “But I am no one’s property! I will [i]not[/i] be violated again! I will [i]not [/i]be reduced to parts and components and [i]I will not be made useful against my will. [/i]And I am more terrified of living without that freedom than I am of death.” 

Bletchley sulked. This is why Goodwright stuck in his craw so much. Goodwright treated Bletchley like an employee, but he was a man who treated all his employees like property. He reminded Bletchley too much of how things had been before he had rights. It was why he wanted to rehearse this speech again, to remind himself why he stood firm on this. 

Satisfied, and having assured that all was still running smoothly, Bletchley let himself fall into dreams again.

This time he dreamed of someone sitting cross legged on the chromed steel catwalk, a laptop on their knees and an audio recorder in one hand. They asked Bletchley to tell his story from the beginning. 

He started with his dreams of swans and ballet. 
[/hider]


[hider=Graveyard Shift]
One of the most profound aspects of post-terrestrial habitation is that everything is a built environment. Every surface is constructed. All you experience is both liberated from the familiar, and unanchored from it. Everything, [i]everything[/i], must be made with intelligent purpose. 

It would be wrong to call it [i]unnatural[/i]; a space station is no more and no less ‘natural’ than a termite cathedral. Most habitation, even Thrones, was made for human aesthetics, human appeal, human comfort. The only difference between a Dyson sphere and a beehive is capability and ambition. 

Sarah believed this fervently. She was a rarity now - a migrant from Earth after the collapse of the space elevator. It’d taken a huge debt that Walsh-Byrne had advanced her in exchange for a ten year contract. She knew it was predatory as hell - everyone did - but it was her dream job. It was what she was coming up here to do anyway. 

At the least, it got an atmosphere between her and three-and-a-half degrees of global warming. 

Even with those beliefs, she had to call the room unnatural, uncomfortable. The plaster panelled walls weren’t joined correctly, the corners lifted from the seams at odd angles. The long bars of DayGlo LEDs in the ceiling made it so that nothing in the room cast a shadow, and the surreal acrylic fibre carpet had a cheerful and inoffensive print, which made the room feel just that much more impersonal.

More impersonal, more uncomfortable, more hostile than vacuum space was [i]liminal[/i] space. 

There were three other collapsible chairs set up. Sarah was just the first one here. She was filled with the overwhelming sense she was in the wrong place - the whole room exuded silent judgement that anyone would want to stay here, be alone here. If she wasn’t [i]doing something[/i], she must be in the wrong place.

Again she got up, opened the door and checked the number on the other side of it. According to the email on her phone, she was in the right place. Just a few minutes early. She sat back in her seat again, tried to close her eyes and listen to a podcast about the algae stacks that the habitats used to scrub CO2. 

[i]“... when selecting for the original alga for optimization, scientists had to debate its dual strengths as food and as carbon sequestration against each other. Not only did the algae have to be efficient at cleaning the air, it had to taste good! There were several obvious choices, each with their own strengths. Even before the explosion in genetically modified varieties, China already had over [/i]70[i] recognized culinary variants, like angel hair…”[/i]

Sarah jumped when she was tapped on the shoulder firmly. Her head whipped around to a very unapologetic looking cutter. It was obvious that’s what she was, even out of uniform. Thick rubber boots and wiry muscles at warped angles around joints with the telltale weakness of working long hours in micro-gravity. 

“Sorry,” the cutter mumbled, obviously not meaning it. “Just asking if this is the room for hazards detection?” 

“Ah, HLTAID003?”

“Whatever. That, yeah.” 

“I think so. Are you the instructor?” 

The cutter blinked at the question, then after too long, laughed in Sarah’s face. Wiped a tear from her eye. “Nah, I’m Violet. Vile if you’re nasty.” 

“Violet.” Sarah offered her hand. “I’m Sarah.” 

Violet’s handshake was iron-solid, but it was still enough to pop the cartilage in Violet’s joints, enough for Sarah to wince. It didn’t seem to bother the cutter any. “Sarah. Hey, listen, there’s no instructors for any of these. You watch a pre-recorded video and just answer the questions after. It’s all check-a-box.” 

Sarah looked where Violet was pointing, at what Sarah had thought was a smoke alarm in the ceiling and realized the front wall was the perfect backdrop for an overhead projector. Not a smoke alarm, then. “There’s no instructors for the safety guidelines?” 

Violet snickered. “Yeah, there used to be, but then they kept telling folks how the job actually works, not how it’s supposed to go. They got into deep shit, doing that. This is only here for CYOA.” 

Sarah checked her email and flicked through. “I’m not enrolled in CYOA.” 

Violet snickered again, blue a strand of her jagged bright purple fringe out of her eyes and leaned back in her chair, monopolizing the two empty ones for armrests. “Yeah, you only take that if you’re management material. It stands for ‘cover your own ass’. This stuff’s only here to prove they taught you how to do the job legally. That way, when you actually do the job the way they tell you to do it, they can blame [i]you [/i]for not following your training. Why do you think I”m here?” 

That was a good question. Violet spoke with absolute confidence, but this was a borderline 101 class. Introduction to advanced hazards - Sarah could skip the [i]most[/i] basic ones because she’d been an electrician’s apprentice, back on Earth. “To supervise me, maybe?” 

Violet didn’t laugh at that one. “I mean, yeah, I’ll help you out here, but only because you need it. I’m here because I caught the short end of the shit stick. Manager did a speed-up on a BlackSun craft, and you know what those are like. I mean, you do, right?” 

“BlackSun went out of business before I was born,” Sarah protested, “Their junk is still up here?” 

Violet, for her part, just looked relieved to have one less thing to explain. “Doesn’t go away on its own. Anyway, BlackSun shit sucks to work on, and we were taking too long with it. We got sloppy to meet quota. We got a rule, though.” 

“What’s the rule?” 

“Unless someone [i]really [/i]fucked up and deserves it - like, beyond-the-pale shit - whoever didn’t end up in hospital takes the blame. Fair’s fair.” Violet scratched the back of her neck. “If you die, though, that’s different. You get the full blame, ‘cause what are they going to do to you?” 

“That’s awful,” Sarah said before she could stop herself. Violet didn’t seem bothered by it. 

“I mean, it’s just for the paperwork. Nobody wants to be dragged into disciplinary when they’re grieving, you know? Friends and family get the truth. They get it. And only if it was seriously just a bad accident. If it was preventable? Different story, that doesn’t go away anymore.” Violet raised an eyebrow at that. “Should have seen what it was like when I started doing this, before the union. That shit was fucked up.” 

Sarah really didn’t know what to say to that. Or about that. She looked at her phone and realized she’d forgotten to pause her podcast. She was half tempted to put her earbuds back in and tune Violet out, but, she committed to pausing it anyway and putting her phone back in her pocket. 

It was made moot pretty quick though. The ceiling lights dimmed and the projector flicked on. Violet took one of the chairs she was using as an arm rest and swung it out in front of her, kicking her feet up on it. Then she took a pack of gum from her pocket and stuck three sticks in her mouth. 

When Sarah glanced back at her, Violet proffered the pack. Sarah took one, chewed it. It tasted like ‘pink’. She couldn’t describe it better. She didn’t hate it, though. 

The holograms of two Irish boxers stood in the space in front of them - the corporate mascots and company founders, the bantamweight champions Walsh and Byrne. The back wall background had the guts of dead space hulks projected all over it. Shredded and flecked paint and debris clouded the debris like fly swarms around carrion.

“Alright, people. Today we’re going over basic hazard perception and remediation,” the hologram-ghost of Walsh said, and it was a bizarre line coming from the image of a guy wearing silk shorts and bright red gloves and nothing else. “Walsh-Byrne suits are as tough as we are,” and the business partners tapped gloves, “but they’re not going to be able to stop anything.” 

“We could take on the world,” the ghost of Byrne added, “but even space is beyond us.” 

Violet snorted, smacked her gum loudly. “You know both these guys had to be dead before they could start getting them to say this shit. Company probably powers the holograms with the force of them spinning in their graves.” 

The holograms stopped, folded their arms across their chest and stared at Violet. “I’m sorry, we didn’t understand your question. Would you like to repeat that?” 

Violet sat up straight. “Oh, shit, they got smarter than the last time I did this. Ah… fuck, what’s the phrase again?” 

“What phrase?” 

“We assure you, this training is of the highest calibre.” Violet finally worked out, leaning back in her chair smug as a well-fed cat. 

The holograms paused, blinked, then went back to their pre-recorded routine. Sarah turned in her chair. “What was that?” 

“They programmed in a compliance subroutine. You know like how cars used to have emissions throttlers that kicked in when they detected they were being tested?” Violet chewed her gum for a bit, cracked her loose jaw doing it. “The command phrase to trigger it got around. Now they’ll only pause when we tell ‘em to. Some guy in for his disciplinary saw them do it and twigged it.” 

“Won’t you get in trouble?” 

“Only if anyone bothers to check the recordings. Which they won’t, as long as you get all the answers right at the end.” Violet scratched her neck again. “We used to worry they’d check for cheating, ‘til someone pointed out they don’t care if we know the right answers, just that they can prove we gave ‘em. It hurts them if they can prove they knew we were cheating, so they know not to look. CYOA.” 

“That’s… gross.” Sarah shuddered, and again Violet shrugged. 

“Don’t worry about it. Just listen to what they tell you, and I’ll tell you how it really works. If you got two brain cells to rub together, you’ll work out how to answer the questions the way they want you to, anyway.” 

The electron vapor-ghost of Walsh explained how to press your hands to surfaces to feel for whether they were pressurized or not. Violet added to give them a solid punch, too, or else insulation could give you a false safe. 

The electron vapor-ghost of Byrne walked through the different symbols for flammable, explosive, and how to work around them. To make sure that you depressurized vessels before using the cutting equipment, to limit the refraction of heat to potentially volatile substances. Violet added that they didn’t teach that the last time she took the course, learned it the hard way. Showed off an old pink burn scar under her right forearm with pride. 

What made Sarah really sit up, though, was their breakdown of electrical hazards. [i]This[/i] she had prior training in, and it was the first time she knew exactly how inadequate the course was. This time she filled Violet in on all the holes they were missing, and Violet leaned back in her chair and smiled, and smiled, and smiled. 

“You said you had the controls?” Sarah asked, “Can you pause this?” 

Violet cleared her throat. “Excuse me, gentlemen, a minute?” The instructors paused and waited expectantly. Violet wiggled her eyebrows suggestively at them. “Shoot.” 

“They tell you the insulation rating of your gloves, but then the only way they give you to check the voltage is getting within arcing range of whatever it is you want to test?” 

“You can use an EM field scanner to get a better sense, but that’s not official equipment. Bring your own from home.” Violet shrugged again.

“And none of this deals with the chemical hazards of old power supplies. Corrosions, acids. They talk about plasma discharges and microwaves, but…” 

Violet nodded. “Yeah, because that stuff kills people. The acid might just wear some part of your suit thin, and it tears on something a few hours later. So they’ll train you on tear hazards, but there’s not enough blood on corrosion to write a regulation with it.” 

Sarah sighed. “Okay, got it. You can keep them going now. Does this get… better, I guess?” 

“Wouldn’t be sitting here again if it wasn’t the best work I’ve ever had.” Violet smiled. “Took a lot to get it there, but this is just the spoonful of bullshit they need you to swallow to get you on-site. There it’s a better story.” 

“Yeah?”

“It’s satisfying like nothing else. Just cutting these huge things down into little parts, sorting them? Makes your brain fizz, makes you feel powerful like nothing else. And it’s work that needs doing. [i]This[/i] part’s bullshit, but the work itself matters. Never bored, never doing customer service. And it makes you an amateur historian, if you’re into that.”

Sarah was definitely into that, and Violet clearly read her reaction right, because she kept going before Sarah could even poke her on what she meant. 

“You can tell a ton about the old corps about how they made things. Learn a ton of how space was colonized by what they were making. If you know when stuff was made, know when it was decommissioned, you can learn a lot from that. Like, Black Sun? [i]Fuck[/i] Black Sun. No matter how bad you think you hate them now, no matter what you think you know about Chiarascuro, nothing teaches you to hate the bastards more than going through their old shit. Because it makes you understand them.” 

“How do you mean?” Of course Sarah knew about Black Sun. Before the space elevator, they’d caused a kessler cascade just to trademark the only path out of it. Then there was their failed moon colony, now just warped glass. The photographs made for popular coffee table books. She couldn’t imagine hating them more. 

“I mean… they put a minibar in the lifeboats, stock it with champagne and benzos - you don’t look the sort but, don’t fuck with expired meds, you’d be surprised who learns that the hard way - but then they cheap out on the thrusters, give them a third the power they need. Because all that space for the engine bay’s been replaced with extra legroom. Right?” 

I shudder. “Why not just make a bigger lifeboat?” 

“Because you, me and the engineers are the only ones who’ll ever see the thrusters. Everyone else just sees the legroom and the champagne, right?” Violet sighed. “Their stuff’s the worst. It’s not that they cut corners, because they didn’t. It’s just… hateful stuff to work on. It’s built well, but no plans for end of life. Like, impossible to fix too. If any system started to go, the plan was to just make an entire new one. They made sure it was cheaper than replacing parts.” 

Sarah nodded slowly. “They went out of business though, right? Like, that didn’t work forever.” 

Violet nodded. “Yeah. When they bit it, they bit it hard. Still, you’d be amazed how much stuff up here’s still theirs. Thirty years of carnage leaves a scar on space, you know? There’s also some AirTech stuff up here too. Carbon skimmers that self destructed when their donation timers ran out, that’s always messy work. Honestly they’re super fun to work on.” 

“I didn’t realize it’d still be up here?” AirTech had a ton of stuff that did a lot to save the planet for as long as it did, mirrors that deflected solar radiation, carbon skimmers. All set to blow if the donations ran dry. Saving the world wasn’t cheap, and they needed people to know it. 

“Yeah, they’re fun because all the cutting work’s done for you. It’s just all the mass that’s still up here, you know? Kind of like picking garbage up from along a highway. Good meditation work.” 

“What’s the worst to work on?” Sarah asked. “It’s not Black Sun?” 

“Polyhedron.” Violet sneered. “[i]That[/i] shit’s [i]hateful[/i]. Every time we find some of theirs - none of it’s registered, all the documentation went in the shredder thirty years ago. Right? So we need to call in the historians, the lawyers, the compsci specialists. Because every time, nobody knows what we’re actually going to be looking at. Could just be a broadcast satellite. Could be a collation of all the porn preferences of all the politicians in South America over a decade. From the outside, they look identical. That’s the point.” 

Sarah’s eyes widened. “We really have to deal with that?” 

“Yeah! Sometimes it really is just kiddy broadcast, and you find something for the film historians. Other times you confirm fifty year old conspiracy theories. Miserable.” Violet stretched out. “Cool in hindsight, though. Boring on the day, but you always get a story out of it. Here, don’t bother playing the rest of this out. Just check your email for the exam and I’ll give you the answers you can’t work out. Then we’ll head to the union hall and get you signed up.” 

“I haven’t even had my first day, yet. I mean... “

Violet cut her off. “Don’t worry about it. We’re happy to get to you first. Maybe you’ll even get to meet Sobha, if she’s around. You’d like her. She still gets excited to meet Earthlings, aren’t nearly as many of you these days.” 

Sarah didn’t bother asking who Sobha was, Violet said it like it was so obvious she should know who she was, and she suddenly felt the need to impress her. Or not disappoint her. Violet was… [i]cool[/i]. “I’d like that, too.” 

“Yeah you would.” Violet stood up, stretched. “Do you drink? I’m going to grab a beer, you want one?”

Sarah blinked again. “Ah. I guess?” 

“That a girl.” Violet winked. “Back in a sec.” 

Sarah had finished her exam before Violet got back. The answers had been easy to guess. 
[/hider]



[b]Character introductions:[/b]


[hider= Chuck York - AKA Neon Czolgosz - Editor At Large]
[b]Editorial: IP Freely [/b]

Better put the kettle on. I got a stack of Ed Huxley Jr books to burn, so make yourself comfortable. Don’t worry, I didn’t pay for any of ‘em. The first time Eddy boy’s seeing a dollar from me is when I run out of stuff in my pockets to chuck at him.  

For legal reasons, that was a joke.

I got it on good authority that the big man himself reads our humble newsletter, and that he really hates it when you call him ‘Ed’. So, Eddy boy, dedicating this one to you. Hugs and kisses. 

We got any gamers in the audience? I hope not, I hope I raised you kids better than that. Look, for the sake of our mutual dignity, I’m going to pretend you aren’t, and treat all of this like it’s news to you. Got to make an exception for the Vesna fans here, the only good gamer. We don’t have her next piece yet, but I’m just as excited for it as you are, my lovelies. 

I bet Eddy boy’s a gamer. Imagine him sitting in lobby with his open mic, scolding all the fourteen year olds for using slurs. “Careful, my dear FoxFister47, while it is natural to think such words, we must be careful to restrict ourselves to; ‘moral deviant’ or ‘sexual degenerate’ or ‘mentally ill reprobate’, be mindful of your optics.” 

Or maybe he just lets the slurs fly, lying back in bunny slippers and a bathrobe, because nothing else feels like home.

Where was I?

Right. So, Aeschwa Toussaint’s a big deal now. She’s headlining with Mele Adler in that new Animal Logic movie, I forgot the name of it. The one where the trailer’s an orchestral score of Porter Robinson’s Goodbye to a World. That one. 

Anyway, turns out Ms Toussaint did capture work for an old CHRONICLE game, [i]Outer Rift[/i]. She’s one of the voiced background characters - she’s that one surviving scientist on the infested helium-3 tanker. 

Now, because [i]Outer Rift[/i] went through development hell, she didn’t [i]sign[/i] her contract with CHRONICLE. They just picked up the publishing rights when the original devs went under, and her contract with it. They also acquired all her digital imaging rights, her full body scan, her mocap, her voice print, and permission to redistribute it for the duration of the game’s lifecycle. 

Last month, CHRONICLE sent out a free DLC that expanded the whole infested tanker area of the game, which meant they needed Toussaint’s part expanded a bit. Under the contract, groovy. 

Kind of weird to send out a content patch for a twelve year old game though, right? 

Here’s the kicker, here’s where it gets interesting. The contract didn’t specify that they had to restrict their use of her image for the game. It just specified they got unlimited use of it while the game was actively being developed, including for marketing purposes. The contract didn’t specify whose marketing, either. 

Oh yeah, you can see where this is going, can’t you?

So, if you see a bunch of Aeschwa Toussaint holograms walking around hocking gamer chairs and energy drinks, there’s your answer folks. Best I can tell, looking over all this, she isn’t even owed royalties for the third party hock.

This’ll probably end up in the courts by the end of the week, and CHRONICLE likely didn’t bank that Toussaint would be backed by Animal Logic’s entire legal team. Pulling this shady shit against an individual - even an Oscar winner - is parr for the course. But CHRONICLE had to piss in another corp’s cornflakes, because all these unscrupulous ads they’re putting their newest big star in is hurting their brand. 

They’ve broken the one cardinal rule up here, the real kill-or-be-killed commandment: Thou Does Not Fuck With The Brand. 

Watch out your windows. The next gym bag you see out the airlock might have a CHRONICLE executive in it. We might all be so lucky. 

With all the love and hate in my heart

[b]Neon Czolgosz - Editor At Large[/b]
[/hider]


[hider= Sobha Surendran, Union Leader]
Sobha is an old hand with skin like tanned leather. Her hands are thick and squared like the inside of the work gloves that formed them, microabrasions building deep calluses like a river carves a canyon, in reverse. The way she punctuates everything she says with an expressive gesture, the way her fingers flow, it’s impossible not to picture a steel string or a banjo in them. Not just workers hands. Storied hands, storyteller’s hands. 

Now she’s dressed in a pink silk dress with a gold sash, a saber at her hip, no hilt, just a length of unsharpened tang. Nothing to hide the swirling magnet-pole ripples of the starsteel it’s made of, carefully collected filings from the hulls of the spaceships she’s cut apart, forged with her scrappers torch. Despite Daedelus-7-17’s best efforts, they could only get it half as sharp as she is. 

“I came from Kerala, India, back when that still meant something,” she explains, pouring a ladel of the rich curry into a bowl regardless of whether you ask for it, “My great-grandparents were illiterate, in a barely serviced slum at the bottom of the continent, sharecroppers on a British tea plantation, the only rail line between the warehouses and the ports. My grandparents saw the communists take power, learned how to read. Got taught how to type on cardboard computers, got taught English to get jobs on real hardware. My parents saw a life expectancy of 80, in the least impoverished state of India, in the most ecologically sustainable one. The most beautiful one. That teaches you something.” 

She pulls out laminated postcards of Kerala in the 2020s. Sixty years ago, now. It was breathtaking. The writing on the back is unintelligible. “My parents got involved leading strikes with two hundred and fifty million people in them. It’s impossible to imagine. Two hundred and fifty million of the most impoverished people on Earth, all in on a general strike. My Dad sent these postcards to Mum, when she was leading a march on New Delhi.”

With one hand on the ladle, the other’s been doing the gestures for both of them. She pauses to massage the fingers, rub her knuckles. They pop like fresh firewood catching. It barely slows her down. 

“There’s no ‘India’ anymore. I’m not even happy to see ‘France’ and ‘England’ go with it, run down by the bulldozers they built, they started. But I’m old enough to remember it. Old enough to remember the family recipes, old enough to carry on the family legacy. Being raised by my parents was like being raised by monster hunters, you know? They taught me everything, starting with this.” 

“Shit doesn’t always flow downhill. You clog the toilet and you’ll see how much it can go up and out, too. ‘Course that’s why we fought for android rights from the very beginning, day one. You think the companies saw that much of a difference between humans and machines? Go work for one.” Her fingers splay wildly at collarbone height, in a gesture that both conveys ‘wankers’, and evokes the tightening of a noose around her neck. 

“First thing we could do was drag them up to our level, because after that we were going to be fighting shoulder to shoulder. And here we are.” She drops the ladle in the pot, and the hand slides naturally to rest on the pommel of her saber. It’s just where it feels most natural for it to be. 
[/hider]


[b]Historical and Geographical[/b]

[hider=Long Pig]
Long Pig’s got a long history. One of the first reasons for corporations to take advantage of space was the lack of governing or regulatory bodies. A lot ended up taken on faith. You wanted to inspect a companies lunar facilities, they couldn’t say ‘no’. But they could say ‘take your own rocket’. 

Abuses of this were limited. Before the space elevator, the biggest costs were shipping. Getting packages into and out of the atmosphere without burning up or inflating their costs above making it on Earth. There simply aren’t that many examples of products that are high value and low mass which are illegal enough to make such a drastic escape from regulators profitable. 

Enter pharmaceutical companies. 

Back when Eternal was just another head of the Bayer corporate hydra, it expanded its base of operations to include a massive facility on Mare Crisium, one of the first and largest investments in corporate-owned space. The facility was codenamed “Colorado Springs”, as the company was based in Denver.

Built with largely Sisyphus-class labour, and largely automated, latency still required the facility be minimally staffed. The facility could be broken into five segments, and each needing one worker. A sweetheart deal with the US government resulted in a supply of low-security white collar criminals with life sentences to staff what inmates called “The Palace”. Eternal’s lunar facility. A very narrow criteria, to be sure, but Eternal didn’t need many. 

Colorado Springs - ‘The Palace’ - was a boutique human cloning facility. Universal donor clones could be rapidly grown with only enough of a brain stem for autonomous functions, then butchered, packaged, and shipped to Earth in its component parts for rejection-free transplantation. 

Back on Earth, Eternal could claim - alternately - that it was the result of advancements in pig-human DNA splicing, or advances in vat growth technology. Both technologies held promise by the 2030s, both had plausible patents attached to them. Which had succeeded, and how, Eternal could claim was proprietary. And after so much upfront investment in the lunar facilities, it was understandable why they would go to any length to protect that investment. 

Inmates at ‘the Palace’ were afforded luxurious next-generation entertainment and accommodation in exchange for compliance. 96 inch television screens with microLED screens, e-readers and gaming rigs with vast streaming libraries were the trade offs for 12 month shifts. Rotations of one year on, two years off in a Denver facility restricted to other Palace inmates. Rigorous enforcement of inmates NDA. 

Then ‘John Doe’ happened.

One inmate, ‘John Doe’, got curious. Part of his job was checking for computer error - flagging a few bodies as undetected defects was not, in and of itself, suspicious. It was easy for the cannibal to hide his new appetite between the numbers, until his successor came up and reported the dried blood. 

No real preparation facilities, no kitchens, had been made for inmates. The diet was expected to be MREs and a microwave. But grown in sterile environments, ‘John’ had deemed the bodies safe to eat raw. He waxed rhapsodical about it during the disciplinary hearing.

And that’s how a pharmaceutical giant quietly filed a few patents and started branching out into fast food, and the Long Pig chain restaurant franchise was born. 
[/hider]