[b]3V:[/b]

At the turn of the 21st century, it was said that environmentalism was humanism. That we are not removed from our natural environment, we [i]are[/i] the natural environment, and the two were inseparable. 

And then we made a clean split, cleaner than any we made with church from state. 

Ignore the colony ships, the mining outposts, the failed surface habitats like Chiarascuro, pushed by private companies. Colonization in space comes down to that last, best gasp of the world governments. Most only think of the O’Neil cylinder, [i]Aevum[/i], that ultimate urban sprawl, that glass and steel and carbon-fibre slum of heaven, that self-satire of the anthropocene. 

Here is another - one hardly anyone thinks of, though everyone knows of. 

Forty hours by shuttle away, a timeframe dictated by acceleration’s hell on the human body, is the Park. Its real and formal title, not a colloquial term, not a shorthand. Just a reflection of the lack of thought and care that the collective species put into its natural environment. 

That it is a Bishop’s ring, and not an O’Neil cylinder like Aevum, was a perfect confluence of politics and engineering, an awareness of the grim economics that led to the destruction of the great Space Fountain; Its designers were well aware of how important their work was, and how little anyone could be made to care about maintaining it. 

That’s why even though Vesna stands atop an artificial mountain, a triumph of the human-made natural, the air she breathes is authentically thin and dizzying. 

See, an O’Neil cylinder is sealed, airtight, has to be protected against the vacuum of space. That makes it better suited for the tight densities of urban sprawl, better utilizes its surface area. It relies on people who care a whole damn lot about keeping those seals working. 

A Bishop’s ring? That you build wider. Impossibly wide anywhere but [i]here[/i]. You build it so wide that you don’t need a roof, don’t need to keep it sealed - the atmosphere here is held down by the artificial gravity, just like everything else. The oxygen sloshes against the side retaining walls like water in a cup - walls too thick to fail, reflecting a fear that nobody would care enough to fix a break. 

As a species, humanity had left Earth a wreck, drove it like a stolen car, and in its industrial awakening had grown a murderous resentment towards its natural environment. Had come to see it as the marble that must be chiselled to reveal the sculpture beneath, the obstacle between its past and its future. 

Not all of humanity. Many parts were greater than the sum of the whole. And they had made sure that this would exist. A self-sustaining nature preserve, a new home for all life worth saving, warm bodies dragged from the burning wreck of that stolen car. 

Vesna stands atop a mountain, as high as any in the Swiss alps. It’s not the highest mountain in the Park, so there are no tourist climbers. The snow here is abysmal, so it isn’t bedeviled by the yuppie ski lodges further clockwise. She's almost alone, in fact.

The thin air makes it impossibly clear just how close she is to the unshielded vacuum of space. It’s easy to look to the rimward horizons and peek over the top of the walls, directly into forever. And if she looks up - directly up - the other side of the Park hangs suspended above her, and the mountain under her feet dwindles to just a pebble in her shoe.

There’s an observation deck here, its railing a waist-high wall of rough-grey stones loosely fit, barely smoothed, natural. A private deck, not one of the better trod public trails - for what public finds it worth coming. This affords it the eccentricities of its owner, one of the park’s few legal residents. 

Carved into the cobbles by hand, hours and aching hours of chiselwork, is the entirety of the poem “Howl” by Allen Ginsburg. Its first line has several stones dedicated to it and only it, the only line readable from any distance away. 

[i]I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness[/i]. 

This deck is but a balcony for a large red-timbered lodge, smoke rising invitingly from its chimney and up into the forever-nothing. This is the home of one of the Park’s architects. She is expecting you, Vesna. But before that, she asked that you made the journey here yourself. Hours of uphill climb in unspoiled wilderness. 

You, a true child of Aevum, did not expect to love it. Yet you did. Why?  

[b]Persephone:[/b]

Here you are, Elodie, holding a second-hand studio-grade camera and a microphone, first-come best-dressed with an indie press pass at what’s quickly becoming the biggest event of the year. Find the right app, and there are people looking to pay thousands to take your place.

It’s not meant to be like this.

A police abolition open-air Q&A was scheduled. Is scheduled. All the permits still hold. York checked. Whatever this is, it’s [i]technically[/i] the thing you were favoured here to do AV work for. 

Except that was meant to be a hundred people tops, which is why your editor-at-large York had plans to signal boost it as much as he could. Now, though, the midtown park is choked by as many people as will fit. If you hadn’t been here from the start, there’d be no way for you to get where you are now. Not without one of the helicopters the VIPs are using. 

10am, York had been all smiles, ripping fat clouds of sickly-sweet bubblegum vape and wheeling you around the scene - There’s Penny, highschool teacher, spear-tackled a riot cop last year during the Better Living chemists strike. Wonderful. There’s Barnaby, great speaker, just won his local council seat with the power of slam poetry. No, really.

Now, all of an hour later, he’s tense, keeping you both at your spot at the front of the crowd. Shoulders up, head down, shades on. He’s still pointing people out. His smile is rictus.

There’s Pedro Buffett. Evening news anchor for thirty years now. Personally spikes any story about tenant rights for ‘not engaging with the audience’, owns four apartment buildings. 

There’s Mishka Ardent, of Ardent Strategies. Public policy think tank. Probably haven’t heard of them, but most of their ‘research’ gets laundered through front page news. She’s a blood and soil post-nationalist. No, really. Takes all kinds. 

There’s Castile Louis. Billionaire with a feitsh for the French revolution. Do you one better, Haitian origin, if that means anything to you.

York’s making a game out of it, and underscores the point - Not the people meant for the crowd of an indie-leftist pop-up protest.

Others he doesn’t bother with, you recognize on your own. Late night talk show hosts, a couple of movie stars, real A-listers. People who pass even York’s terminally-online sniff test - sincere progressive liberals, all of them. Real crowd pleasers. Authentic true-believers with big fanbases. 

“Haven’t seen a snow job this big before.” York texts you instead of talking through the crowd. “Going to go dance with the ones that brought us. Save the spot, we’re lucky to have it. Catch some on your tongue and tell me how the snow tastes.”

Now you’re alone, Elodie, at the front of a crowd of ten thousand people, press credentials armor against the corporate bouncers walking the bollards in front of you. The stage is almost built. 

You’ve got a camera with a powerful zoom, and the microphone matches. It’s not just ambient - it can ‘zoom’ and ‘focus’ just like the camera. Aim up to four through the crowd, spend a moment adjusting, and you can pick someone out as if you were standing next to them. Lav mics are dead as dodos, these days. 

All this kit, and how are you using it? But more importantly, what were you doing just [i]before[/i] you got dragged into this? You were in the middle of something important, and you were promised the AV work would only hold you up for two hours, tops. No chances of that, now.

[b]November:[/b]

Not everyone gets to experience being a witness to their own murder. At least, not more than once. 

Lucky you, Heca. 

You have a culprit. Rudolph Merkin has been far too dull a client to consider worth paying attention to, but the scrawny little pencil neck just got it with a few blasts of an unregistered sidearm followed by a sweaty, terrified bludgeoning, smashing Red into finer and finer pieces. 

This is a man who took his home to work with him. A man who, due to the nature of his work, had to have an office that gave off a sense of lavish wealth, of success. With so little sentimentality that he decided he might as well pool his resources into the one location, because there was no life worth separating. His personal quarters, you have noted, have all the personal characteristics of a well-kept hotel room. 

Until now the most interesting thing about him had been the level of detail he put into the instructions for cleaning his antique coin collection - a spreadsheet of every coin and its composite metals, updated with every acquisition. Even tied to a calendar, to make sure they weren’t cleaned too rarely or too often. 

Here are the facts you would be capable of putting together; All of you saw some of this, but none of you saw all of it. 

Two minutes ago, Red entered the office to clean it, per normal. She saw that one of the desk drawers that are normally locked was open. She took something out of it that could have been a file, could have been a folder, and began to read it intently - so intently, in fact, that she didn’t notice Rudy until it was too late, didn’t see the deeply illegal gun. Silenced, too. 

Now there’s a crash as Rudy drags the body under a heavy display cabinet and tips it over, a shower of glass shards burying into carpet you’re going to have to clean up. This is the lie he’s going to try to make you believe - unaware that you saw the whole thing. 

Right now, Rudy doesn’t know you know, and he was already willing to kill you once over whatever’s in that desk - he thinks he’s covering up a murder, right now. Which means that he’s hiding something there that was worth killing for. 

How do you want to play this?