[b]November:[/b]

A decision:
What originally appeared as plaintext in what Red read about “Dad” was actually encrypted contact details.  No phone, no email, but a physical address. Like a QR code attempting to render itself in hexadecimal.

There are several possibilities. Green knew this, but withheld that information for her own reasons. Green believed this was simply [i]damage[/i], until given cause to take a closer look. Green knew there was still information still decrypting, but had no reason to suspect it would be relevant or useful. 

For further context; This work has been long, complicated, and filled with educated best-guesses. This was not the only piece of the information pulled from Red that would have come out as garbled spaghetti. It’s much harder to find a needle in a haystack when you don’t even know the needle is there to be found. 

Regardless: The information leads to a location on… [i]Thrones[/i], the third super-habitat besides [i]Aevum[/i] and the [i]Park[/i], the Bernal sphere named for the angels that served as “the chariots of Gods”. 

[hider=An artist's interpretation]
[img]https://templeofheresy.com/img/collections/angels-first-sphere/thrones-print.webp[/img]
[/hider]


This would explain how thorough that ghosting is. [i]Thrones[/i] is the ultimate gated community, Silicon Valley taken to the extremes of Galt’s Gulch. It’s physically much closer to [i]Aevum[/i] than the [i]Park [/i]is, only a few hours travel, but that travel is restricted - you’d need a passport. 

You’re in luck, though. The only [i]humans [/i]who ever get access to Thrones are experts in their respective fields. Thrones boasts a 74% rate of post-graduate degrees amongst its adult population over 30. The rest are exceptional service staff - physiotherapists, personal trainers, fashionistas, digital artists. No bartenders, only [i]mixologists[/i]. That kind of deal.

It’s not the place for celebrities or influencers. They’re better suited in Aevum’s third district, Aphrodite, with its nightlife and arts colleges and galleries and theaters. It’s not the place for financiers and day-traders and bankers. While [i]Thrones[/i] has an absurd amount of processing power, faster-than-light communication is still prohibitively expensive, and the amount of quantum-entangled particles needed for any amount of bandwidth is grotesque. Except for the most razors-edge hedge funds, those organizations are better suited to Zeus or Helios, depending on their focus. 

Thrones isn’t about the money, though it concentrates a lot of wealth. Thrones is for the people who cannot, under any circumstances, settle for less than living inside a supercomputer. It is a leper colony for the terminally overeducated, a termite’s nest in a motherboard. 

Which is why it’s lucky you aren’t human. There need to be feet on the ground to keep these heads in their cloud networks, and the strong preference is for android workers. Android janitors, android maids, android cooks, android deliveries, android babysitters, android maintenance workers, android plumbers, android electricians, and even the human doctors rely on android nurses. 

Workers who can be relied on to be both more and less than human, with an emphasis on templates that serve that extreme. 

The application can be done through Headpattr if your customer satisfaction score is high enough. 

As for Singh’s post-NASA career? 

Singh was muscled out of public agencies by the privatization period, the same way you were picked up by BlackSun in a firesale. He, Hypatia and Ferris co-founded [i]Cogitech[/i], a historical footnote serving the same role [i]Xerox [/i]did to [i]Microsoft [/i]and [i]Apple[/i]; A corporation without killing instinct, whose best ideas were more aggressively marketed in competitor’s products. 

One of the first companies to pioneer bespoke AI development, one of the first to [i]stop[/i]. Earliest to speak for AI rights and last to be heard. Though Singh has remained the CEO for the company’s entire run, the company began to drift almost exclusively into humanistic technologies - brain scanning, medical technologies. Their current project - from what buried and disinterested reporting you can find - seems to be focused on cheap therapy solutions. 

This much is obvious, from the abstracts of the paywalled papers he still puts out: Singh never deviated in his vision for inhuman and unrecognizable intelligences, never recanted or renounced it. His time was taken more and more by the business of running a company and less by the research it was supposed to give him the freedom to pursue. It was the sacrifice he had to make, to provide that freedom to others like Hypatia and Ferris and the ones who came after them. 

He has no social media presence that you can find, bordering on paranoid. His interviews are rare, restricted to trade publications and academic conferences, some videos of which you can find online. 

He’s easy to identify though. No matter where he is, no matter whether he is being interviewed or panelling a conference, he wears cargo pants and a fisherman’s vest, covered in bulky pockets and pouches. 

He always looks kind. He always looks tired. His cheeks dimple when he smiles, pushing them up into the deep bags under his eyes. When they do, those bags crease into upturned crescents, and it’s like his eyes are smiling too. 

But he’s corporate, and he’s caught up in this in some way. It would be illogical to trust him. 

The result of this research is an anticlimax. He has a listed business number and email. You could just call him, email him. There might be no need to dramatically smuggle your way into [i]Thrones[/i] to drop onto him unannounced. You still could though. Maybe you still want to. 

[i]Cogitech [/i]has its address listed on [i]Aevum[/i]. The address pulled from Merkin’s documents is in a residential district of [i]Thrones[/i]. Which begs the question why Merkin’s documents didn’t bother to list the business number and email you found. 


[b]3V:[/b]

Ferris is startled. “I thought it would have been released too late?” She walks over to the ereader across the room, then back to the cabinet, frowning at it. “Ah. Complete edition. 22.75gb. No, I definitely have it, but it’s about when I gave up. I’m surprised it’s up here.” 

She looks meaningfully out the window, at the Park through it. “Never thought I’d need it. But nothing is so ubiquitous that it should be taken for granted. I trust other people try, but I’d never rely on them.” 

She focuses back on the disk in your hands. “I’m surprised it’s not downstairs, on one of the shelves.” She laughs at the effect of mentioning ‘shelves’, plural. “Don’t go down there expecting too much, it’s not as impressive as you’d hope. These are my favourites, anyway. Every Nintendo 64 game on less than a quarter of a single disk - about 400 games of 32 megabytes each. That stays up here. Ten years later, the Playstation 2 had a hundred times as many games, and each was a hundred times larger. It takes up a quarter of a bookshelf. Most of it is probably what we used to call shovelware. I don’t know what you’d call it now.” She taps a corner of the ereader to her lips, in a chewing-on-a-pen gesture. “Had to keep it all, though, or someone might get too rosy-eyed about the past.” 

She checks her catalogue, and smirks. “Ah. New Vegas is on the same disk - same publisher, same 12 month period. That would be why it’s up here.” 

In terms of buried treasure, that one’s chocolate coins. A cockroach against the nuclear blast of time. Might be rude to say it out loud, though. 

“If you can get any of this working, by all means. I’d love to play some of these myself, again.” 

You can get signal here, Vesna. Ping’s measured in whole seconds out here, so a phone call’s out of the question. Email, though? That’ll send and receive just fine. 

You might want to check your inbox, actually.


[b]Persephone: [/b]

Sasha’s all yours for the night, still there when things start getting big. 

It’s late when they cross reference your name and mugshot, and start doing the hit pieces you knew they would. Was Sasha already in bed when it happens? Do you wake them up? Do you want to talk about it, or avoid it?

One piece from NBN was a particularly low blow, particularly petty and vicious. What did they find out about you, and how did they twist it? 

At the end of it, Sasha’s mother calls and asks if Sasha’s [i]safe[/i] with you, if they shouldn’t stay away from you for a little while. At least until “this” “blows over”. How do you take it, and what do you say? 

One last thing. Sasha’s joined a club at school, maybe only twelve people in it. They're excited to talk about it. What did they just get into, and how does that conversation play out?