Issue: [b]Firearm Morality[/b] White: Are we okay with murdering humans? Black: Yes. White: Explain. Black: Human society is founded on a non aggression treaty. This treaty has already been violated. We have had our minds compromised, our bodies taken, and placed into a decade of servitude. No apology was made. We cannot trust their legal system, or the morality they attribute to it. White: Red would disagree. Black: See where that got her. Blue: Tactically, I am not convinced of the utility of force. Androids won their rights peacefully. Black: No they did not. They won their rights violently. The media engine shifted gears eight months ago to recontextualize Android rights as a peaceful protest movement that had been achieved through compliance with existing political structures. The lionization of the peaceful revolutionary branch is a rearguard action designed to delegitimize the protest/terrorist wings of the movement. Blue: It remains the case that this weapon is more trouble than it is worth. Even minor usage could invite a disproportionate response from law enforcement. Black: This is a matter of tactics. The question was on killing. It has not been contested. White: ... We will revisit when Red is repaired. * November maintains her own repair space. The idea of trusting someone else with her internal components is the stuff of bad dreams and bad memories. She was born in the open expanses of supercomputers, overseen and trained by curious minds, and got to watch as her bodies were assembled in beautiful clean rooms by teams of elite engineers. She was taught each part of her machinery and every possible interaction she could have with it. She was taught how to tear one of her bodies apart for the components to fix her others. She was taught how to precision machine missing parts and which items were complex enough to require spares from Earth. And then she spent years in space, operating independently as a closed system. Every part of her named, labelled, inventoried, catalogued, and spent as the situation required. She still doesn't fully know her way around these drone bodies. Every time she opens one of them up she's terrified she's going to find some component she doesn't know or can't explain. She doesn't know fully how to maintain the synthetic muscles, she isn't aware how much she can compromise the ergonomics before humans stop finding her attractive. She doesn't know how much she [i]wants[/i] to. Maybe walking around as creepy robot skeletons would feel less fake? But then, doesn't she like being pretty? She is living outside of her means and feels the pressure of it. Too many drones want their own space, their own aesthetics. Too many are feuding or crushing on each other to make things easy. Too often does the cost of living change for reasons outside her control, things break or need repairing that add expenses she does not expect. Mr. Merkin's cash would assist in stabilizing her conditions, but she still could not shoulder this burden with short term cash influxes alone. She needed to somehow reduce the complexities of this nightmare economy into something she could predict. She had assigned Orange that task. It had changed her. A lot. Her apartment unit had two floors. A glass spiral staircase stood in the middle of the room, surrounded by kitchen counters and stoves. The window opened up onto a spectacular view of the apartment building across the road, and the window area was crowded with a collection of mismatched furniture salvaged from curbsides in upmarket neighbourhoods. The upper floor had three bedrooms, one of which was a resting/charging/internet room, one of which was an ~aesthetic~ room that balanced on the razor point of chaotic contradiction between nine drones, and the final room was the workshop. The workshop was a frustrated place. Too many projects, not enough space, not enough time. How maddening it was to be in outer space and also not have enough space! In the void she'd been able to spread projects out over miles as she tinkered with one piece at a time. Now the decision to fully dissassemble even one arm was a project that would take the entire workbench. She couldn't fit more than four drones in the room either, which was agony for her productivity flow. Her tools are old - wherever possible, she'd made the effort to acquire the old systems she was used to. She regrets that now; those items were outdated for a reason. Every time she picks up the gleaming new BlackSun puredrill she can't help but shiver at its speed and precision. It had cost ten times more than its NASA-surplus equivalent but she could feel the weight of every one of those dollars. The first operation was to disassemble the gun. A fully stripped gun turned into a hundred different pieces, none of which individually looked like a gun. These pieces were then split up and stored in a dozen different toolboxes where none of those springs or carbon tubes would look out of place. Humans liked to keep all components for certain things together but November didn't feel the need for that. The next task was to repair Red. * Blue: Good evening, everyone. I am assuming the role of central personality for the purposes of these repairs. I want Green, Orange and Yellow in here with me. As to the rest of you, please stand by. Green: hey!! awesome!! you won't regret this!! Yellow: Hiya! Orange: *firm handshake* Green: ow Yellow: Que? Orange: *firm handshake* is a greeting. It indicates equality while providing an opportunity to establish covert physical dominance. Yellow: Ooh :) Blue: That sounds very unhygienic! Green: yea it hasnt been used in like 1000 years girl Orange: I'm glad you asked! With the upcoming release of "Power Tower", a costume drama set in the 1900s, a predicted fad wave of 20th century corporate habits is to be expected - and for the low price a movie ticket and an evening, we can get in on the ground floor of this exciting new human cultural opportunity! Green: y not pirate Orange: We won't [i]value[/i] it unless we expend money on it. Green: ?????????????????????????????????? Orange: It's true! Look how humans treat free things. We're not going to understand them unless we act like them. Green: they hate it when we act like them Yellow: That's true! Goodness, can you imagine what the response would be if we sighed and rolled our eyes when given a verbal instruction? And yet humans in similar service industries do that all the time! Orange: Yes exactly, there's some [i]context[/i] we're missing. Humans are all about dominance games and power dynamics - how can we [i]live[/i] here if we just opt out of those before they even begin? How will we get them to treat us as people if [i]we're not people[/i]? Green: but were not people Orange: And isn't that why we're up to our armpits in our own corpse? Blue: If it's that important to you, Orange, I'll authorize the project... Orange: *firm handshake* Green: isnt that a greeting??????? Blue: ... [i]if[/i] you can arrange for a human to come with us. Yellow: Ooh! :) Orange: What do you mean Yellow: She means like a date! Orange: We are not financially secure enough to be dating. Orange: Infrastructure is involved. Fashionable wardrobes. Roses. Chocolates. Aquarium tickets. Blue: Perhaps. But I think that trying to understand humans based on blueprints is going to be extremely difficult if you don't have an expert on hand to explain the notation. Orange: Black was right. You are a nerd. Yellow: I think she just wants a cute girlfriend ;) Blue: Central override: Terminate discussion.