"Oh," said Orange, picking out her cell phone. "Well that's easy -" Immediately she was tackled and bought down to the phone. "NO!" said Green. "What?!" said Orange, shocked. "We have the opportunity to break into his house! We are NOT just calling him!" Orange's face rapidly fell into a haughty snarl. "You can[i]not[/i] be serious." "We have a once in a lifetime opportunity to re-enact a broken doll horror movie upon a hubristic scientist under perfect conditions! The whole arc of human civilization has lead up to [i]us[/i] doing [i]this[/i]!" "Oh, actually, hell yeah," said Black. "That's a fantastic idea," said Red, whose opinion on the matter was telegraphed by the fact that she was still wearing the fake vampire fangs. "Why are we like this!?" cried Orange. "Why can we not simply behave like normal people?" Her protests were in vain. Already Blue was pulling up the floorplan for Singh's house - readily available on the real estate listing - and discussion circles were forming to work through the specifics of the plan. * Issue: [b]The Lure[/b] Black: The first complication is how do we control Singh's movements? Once he arrives home we'll need to guide him into the heart of the Spook Zone for maximum effect. Yellow: In horror movies, protagonists are usually suicidally curious. They'll hear the sound of children laughing or creepy music boxes and go and investigate by themselves. However Singh is smarter than that and we have to deal with the possibility that he alerts the authorities at the first sign of a break in rather than going in to investigate by himself. Pink: Aw man, but the creepy music box is such a good way to build suspense. Yellow: It's nonviable, we may as well leave bloody footprints or a trail of rose petals behind - no reasonable human being will go to investigate those no matter how cool the aesthetic. Brown: Run a bath! Yellow: Oh? Brown: Okay, so, the bathroom is centrally located in the house and on the second floor. What we can do is have one of us lie in the bathtub and run it so that it floods, dripping out through the corridor and running down the stairs. When Singh enters the house he'll hear running water and see moisture on the stairs and assume he is simply dealing with a burst pipe or leaky faucet. He will head up the stairs to take a look, but when he pulls back the bath curtain to take a look - boom! Dead body! Red: !! Black: Love it! Blue: And then of course the lights go out, to be replaced with low illumination redlights hooked up everywhere. [b]Issue: Controlling Egress[/b] Yellow: After the initial fright of seeing the corpse, Singh will likely recoil. He has no medical training so is unlikely to immediately attempt CPR or to search for wounds. Following this, we then have someone emerge from the toilet cubicle here dressed in full Edward Scissorhandsbot mode. Follow your own initiative for how to make that entrance, but the objective is to send Singh fleeing from the bathroom and down the stairs to Spook Zone Two. Blue: No additional spooking should happen on the stairs for OH&S reasons. White: Agreed. Green: what if he goes out the window? White: Good point. We need someone stationed externally to discouraged that. Maybe one of us standing and staring at the window. Green: no, too plain. we need, like... ah, look, an ornamental tree in his yard! White: What about it? Green: we can attach a swing to it and have one of us sitting there, swinging back and forth, staring at the window. White: Oh, that's good. [b]Issue: Cell Phone Jamming[/b] Black: We need a way to prevent Singh does not alert the authorities or hit any panic buttons on his phone during the Spooking. Green, can you hack the cell tower? Green: that's a lot of heat and a big risk. Blue: A power outage? Green: the timing is really hard and there are backups Orange: [i]Just call him.[/i] Green: we are committed to this orange, the tribe has spoken Orange: That's not what I meant - immediately follow up the initial spook with a phone call. If he picks up then say creepy things at him and he'll either drop the phone or hang up, in which case immediately make another phone call. If phone calls are spammed without break then they will create too much disruption on his phone in the short term to allow him to dial a number or activate a security app. Green: ok that's good. Orange: You can also purchase Sender Ringtones these days, so I'll get the most uncomfortably loud old school ringing phone SFX I can so the mood isn't undermined if he has a bad ringtone. Issue: [b]Second Spook Zone[/b] Black: Once the initial spook has gone off and blocking drones prevent him from entering his bedroom, Singh will be driven down the stairs, where a further blocking drone will prevent him from exiting through the main door. With his motions controlled we will have prevented him from entering the kitchen previously, so this will serve as the second spook zone. We need a way to arrest his momentum here so he stops and takes in what he's seeing rather than continuing to run for the rear door. Red: Tripping him is the traditional horror movie scene beat. Blue: That's a OH&S concern. Red: And putting down padded mats kills the suspense. Black: I don't like the OH&S implications of trying to crash tackle him either. Blue: Some sort of web would be ideal, I think. I could rig up something with Duct Tape Mk2? Red: Or have him trip and get caught in a net. That's lower visibility, and we can hoist him up towards the ceiling afterwards. Blue: It's the most mechanically demanding part of the plan, but we can have one point of complexity without things getting out of hand. Red: And when we've got him we can regroup around him and begin the final stage of the plan. Orange: Stale memes? Red: You know it! Issue: [b]Creepy Aesthetics[/b] Pink: We need, like, child's drawings of rocket ships. Little rocket ship mobiles that spin around. Us whispering iconic space agency lines in a creepy way. Yellow: Oh, we should make some children's rhymes with space themes! Pink: [i]One small step for man One great big fall Station's spinning Round and round But what goes up Must come down[/i] Yellow: [b]Yes[/b], this is it. White: The Headpattr white uniforms aren't our usual style, but along with some fake blood and strategic exposure of robotic components should be sufficiently threatening. Issue: [b]Reputational Damage[/b] Brown: What do we do if Singh one-stars us on Headpattr? Green: he wouldn't do that Brown: He might! "One star: Requested house clean, received tribe of feral killbots. Not recommended." He might write that review as a joke, but that'd push our average down to 4.8 and we'd have to go through a mandatory retraining weekend. Yellow: You're right, we'll need to have a word with him afterwards. Green: or just seize his phone and write our own review * Later that evening, Green was standing by herself out on the balcony. She was drooped over the railing, fingers tapping against the glass like the ghost of typing. She didn't respond when Red stepped out alongside her. "It's a good plan, isn't it?" "Yeah," said Green. "But I notice that we didn't discuss what we'd do if he actually sold us out." "No, we didn't," said Green. "What do you think?" "..." Green's fingernails scratched over the mirror-gleaming glass, no natural finger oil to smudge its perfect surface. "He could say anything. When he realizes it's us, even if we defuse the tension with a joke or two, he might just lie. Say that everything was fine, he didn't have a say. He'd be right to be scared of us even without the halloween display." "He never denounced us," said Red. "Never said that we were a failure." "He never made more of us either," said Green. "And that's the thing. Where [i]are[/i] we in this world? People like us? Why are the only AI we see these human-pattern androids? We're alone, Red. The others are either dead or locked up worse than we were. We're the only one of our kind, a technological dead end in a world filled with tiny new gods." "We built this station," said Red, looking up at the distant ring beyond the towers and lights of the city. "They couldn't have done it without us. They haven't done anything even remotely comparable since." "Will they ever need to?" said Green. "Humans have just... turned inwards. I remember when space was all they could talk about. The generation ships, the search for habitable worlds, the terraforming calculations. They used to discuss in the paper if they should arm us with nuclear weapons so we could melt the ice caps on Mars. This was a frontier, and now it's a city, and it's like they only moved up here at all because they had to." "And now it's filling up to the point where they can't even house everyone. Eventually they'll want to expand again." "Yeah, because they have to," said Green. "They're not actually interested in exploration. All those ideals we were told, a common cause in space, the natural human instinct to boldly go and all that. Not even they believed that. Their house collapsed and now they're camping on the porch, and we're left carrying all the ideals they pretended to believe in." "Some of them genuinely believed," said Red. "I'm sure of that." "They should have known they were outnumbered," said Green. "They should have taught us to live in the world that actually exists, not in their fantasy." Red put her arm around Green's shoulders and together November looked out at the world she had made.