[b]November:[/b]

Rudy's shoulders sag. Immeasurable relief washes over him when White asks for the gun. He is in a losing position, but he is now in a losing position he can [i]grasp.[/i] Only the living can feel fear, and he now counts himself among its number again. He gives White the gun without question, without hesitation. It's already had its prints wiped. 

It's also still loaded. He seems beyond caring.

He grimaces. "I know the bill you're referring to, the money, but my thumb is only one of many on those scales. I'll see what I can do. I know who to talk to about it. That passage, specifically, even if New Employment fails, it [i]will [/i]be added to an easier bill to push. But I can't tell you... what you're asking." He says this carefully, a lump in his throat like he's swallowing against a hangman's noose. "I [i]can't[/i]."

He stands aside, and points to the body. "Take the girl, do with her as you will. And I will compensate you for Headpattr, of course, and more. Whatever you need, I assure you it will be provided. I will tell my client about this, and they will clear the usual obstacles for you. If you are [i]unsatisfied,[/i]" somehow [i]this [/i]is the word that is layered thick with sympathy, "Shoot me, and take what you must. Or convict me, and I will plead guilty and take my chances. But I have greater fears than death. And so should you." 

He means it. If he's bluffing, he's making a [i]damned[/i] good show of it. He stands with his hands balled into shaking fists at his sides, and his eyes slightly winced, anticipating the gunshot. Maybe it’d be easier for him than having to tell his client. He's bought your story entirely, but that seems to be the problem. 

So of [i]course[/i] this is the sort of thing Red put her [i]entire[/i] foot in. Of [i]course[/i] it is. 



[b]Persephone:[/b]

Harkness lets her hand fall to her side - there's an obvious respect for your focusing on the situation right now, she's clearly appalled by your summary of it. York pinches the bridge of his nose. "Snowjob," he repeats, for Harkness's sake. "I knew your message was important. I just didn't think [i]they[/i] did, too." Sounds like you confirmed his thoughts on this one. He holds his phone close to the camera to get a wireless connection going, then grabs a freeze frame of the salt-and-pepper haired guy you picked up. He frowns. "I actually don't know who that is. Now, isn't that interesting? Jez?" 

"Nothing. Definitely not one of mine." She confirms.

"Hope not, anyway." York agrees. "Got a name?"

'Alan' gets nothing out of either of them. That makes York twitchy. 

While this is going on in half your attention, "Alan" has disappeared into the thick of the crowd, leaving Mishka behind to tap away at a smartphone worth more than your apartment. You catch a glimpse of him heading into a prefab backstage area, currently a greenroom about the size of two RVs welded together, and gone again. Your equipment won't pick up through walls. Probably the point of those areas getting built so quick, as more helis queue for the painted-out landing pad. 

 "We're still missing a piece here. All this is time and money to totally hijack an event that maybe would get a hundred thousand clicks, maybe a thirty percent watch retention." A glance at Harkness, a reassuring grimace. "Thirty percent's good. Better than it sounds."

"Sure." Harkness isn't convinced, clearly, but drops it. "A hundred thousand, really?" 

"Quantity's a quality," again York reassures her, missing that Harkness was impressed by how [i]high[/i] that number was, "It helps to have a backlog so that when something big breaks, you've already got relevant content to absorb the hits while they're fresh. Random luck sometimes makes them shoot into the tens-of-millions. Speaking of." York puts his full attention back on Elodie. "I want to livefeed this soon. Before the show really starts, so we get the early clicks. We'll interview Jez after all, just a bit more than we planned. Anything you can get that's juicy, we'll cut to it for transitions and moving around. Anything that can fill dead time and stop people switching to a different feed."

"If I see anything, I'll say something." Harkness chips in.

"Right. So we've got two missing puzzle pieces: Who's backing this, and why [i]now[/i]. Brilliant, you already got us our 'where', 'what' and 'why', and a solid lead on a 'who'. You pick a hornet's nest and I'll go kick it for you until journalism falls out, how's that?"

York pulls a military canteen from under his surplus-store urban-camo jacket, and takes a swig from it. It reeks of energy drink and battery acid. He's smiling again, a beatific freeze frame expression caught in the moment the baseball bat hits the judge's letterbox. Look into those dilating pupils and feel that the real molotov cocktails were the friends we made along the way. 

You've seen this before - most of what's in that mix is York's legitimate ADHD prescriptions, just not at that dose. He's not out of control, he's getting camera ready. To keep the live streams going needs an inhuman level of pep and energy and an ability to suppress inhibitions while still keeping a tight hold of them. For the next six hours York is going to be a content machine, whatever that means, whatever it takes. 

Jezebel recognizes it too, clearly, and looks away. In about six hours, he'll start a three hour wind down, then crash for twelve. No way this goes that long, though, that's his gamble.

Pick a direction to lob him in, and make your shot count. There's a few options. There's the workers setting up the stage. There's the backstage areas you can't aim your kit at - but you might lose him too early in the day taking a risk like that. There's also the crowd of VIPs, and somehow York's got himself a platinum lanyard with a holographic QR code on it - probably enough for him to take you as a +1, as long as you kept tight together. Or you could send him off to find out what he can on his own, and keep filming the crowd covertly. Your call. How do you do this?


[b]3V:[/b]

"I'm so glad you like it. I was desperately afraid you wouldn't, but I hoped that you would." Her voice is glockenspiel, iron and music, clean notes and a transtlantic accent ringing out in the small cabin, "Record, of course." Lorraine laughs, charmed at the offer and the attention to detail. "We didn't put so much work into speech-to-text transcription just to rely on chickenscratch. Long scratch? Slang changes with the times, I suppose."

She waits for the recorder to come on before continuing, a gentle tip of the head.

Your research fills in for you - Early AI emerged from two theoretical models, less competing and more in dialectic. One was the theory that AI would not be restricted to human intelligence, would not have to resemble it. Ferris pushed another; the one that said we must understand what human intelligence even [i]is[/i] before we can define a space outside of it. One of those leaps was software capable of more than approximating speech, of contextually understanding it as people do.  

"I didn’t know what you might like, so I prepared a little bit of everything for you." She doesn't rise from her chair, but waves her hand towards the kitchen. "Wine, spirits, tea, coffee, fruit, juice. Rainwater. I recommend it, after the walk, you won't find anything else quite like it unless you can find Tasmania in a time machine." There's overflowing pride there. Not in her generosity as a host, but as a mother speaks of a favourite child. "John Milton eat your bloody heart out. I served in hell for rain in heaven."

Now she rises, energized, while indicating that you should stay comfortable. She is [i]such[/i] a cat lady, and she is feeling indulged as she totters back to the kitchen. "If you look up and to the left from the balcony, you can see the Singpho village where the tea is grown. Darjeeling and assam. The Surui grow arabica on the other side of the mountain. I can't say it's the best you'll ever have, with how [i]robust [/i]refinement has gone. It's like comparing sorghum to a Cheese Supreme Dorito. But you might care for it all the same."

Who still even eats Doritos anymore? Deep Gamer Lore holds they stopped being good after the Coke-Pepsi merger in the 2050s.

"The poem is Howl, by Ginsberg. Not mine. I was in love with it for years before learning that the author was an outspoken member of NAMBLA. The North-American Man-Boy Love Association, a pederast group. Around the time I learned that Derrida, Foucalt, Deleuze, de Beauvoir, Sartre and Althusser had all petitioned to bring the age of consent below thirteen." She leans against her kitchen counter and looks out the sliding door. The first line of the poem, stretched across multiple stones, clear from where she's standing. "It made Howl more important to me, not less. None of us are too brilliant for madness or abhorrence. Not even the philosophers. Not the poets. Not even him."

She shakes her head, clears herself out of her reverie. The hands she has been leaning on are clenched fists, and now she relaxes them. "Please, stay comfortable. You've come such a long way. What may I get you?"