[b]Everyone: [/b]Mark experience for 3V’s article. Also: [b]Channel: The Anthropozine[/b] [b]HartlyDworkin: [/b][color=#ff0000]@everyone[/color] [b]HartlyDworkin: [/b]I have a situation with Junta It’s going to be okay, but I’m going to need a residential address, and right now he doesn’t have one. [b]HartlyDworkin: [/b]I need someone to pretend he’s been living with them for a while. It needs to be someone who can host him for the next few weeks after this, as well. You’ll have a few days to prepare. He’s in the hospital right now. [b]HartlyDworkin: [/b]Like I said, he’s going to be okay, but he’s going to be in surgery for a while. [b]HartlyDworkin: [/b]He’ll need someone to get his belongings. He’s in a hospital in Zeus right now. I’ll give more information when I have it. [b] [/b]He messaged me that he’s been camped out in the third elevator elevator shaft of the Amazon™ Gratification Center™ in the Karl Marx district of Apollo. I don’t have better information than that, but I’m hoping that’s enough to go off. I think @Persephone might be best suited to that one? [b]HartlyDworkin: [/b]I hope you understand that I am very angry that I can’t tell you more right now. So please don’t ask me. We are working on it. A few people start and stop typing, but the chat is quiet. [b]Persephone:[/b] A burner phone isn’t actually possible to get on Aevum in the way you might hope. No pre-paid SIM-equivalent without a name, date of birth, all of that. Without that, there’s no way your messages aren’t being flagged as spam by the people you’re trying to reach out to, and they’ll never see the warnings. It’s still worth buying a [i]clean [/i]phone, though, one that’s never been connected to the internet before. From there you might want to pass it on to November - she’ll have a way to get the chat apps you need onto it without picking up the morass of trackers and cookies you’re trying to avoid. That’s not something you have the expertise to do yourself. Food’s always good, though. There’s other options; You could show up at all these places in person, warn that way. You could message through an encrypted chat and hope for the best. You could message in coded language, and hope that gets understood. Or you could just give up on looking innocent - You [i]are[/i] innocent. You had Marco’s permission to be there. That’s not your problem. Don’t sweat what the cops can charge you with. Worry about everything they can do without having to charge you with anything. Same goes for the people you’re trying to warn. Then there’s the message from Claire Beaufort to worry about. [b]White and Pink: [/b] Your host is very enthusiastic about the enthusiasm. She has a lot to say about White’s questions, and Pink’s input to them. How to decide on things like length and texture (swatches), sensitivity (a conversation lost entirely to physical demonstration) and growth rate (regrowth to desired length should take between two and three months, and do not listen to anyone who tells you shedding is worth it). Crystal also has some notes on when you are welcome (Always), when she considers too many questions a burden (Never), and to call ahead when you do visit (At least thirty minutes, but also please soon). She can only put off her appointments so long. Fiona would also love to see you again (Soon), she has questions (Too many, she needs to write them down) and hopes she can meet more of you (But only one two at a time, please, so she doesn’t get overwhelmed). She also wouldn’t complain if it was Pink again, though. (Or just Pink, actually? (Only if that’s okay, it’s just, she’s [i]really [/i]cute, and White’s really more Crystal’s type, obviously, but Pink’s more- ([i]It’s fine, it’s fine, don’t worry about it[/i]))). She’s available more often than Crystal is, too. Still - it seems like a meeting with the rest of yourself is long overdue. It might be time to set that up. [b]Brown and Red:[/b] The physical operation is in the basement of a squat office building in Modern Apollo, below a dentist’s office and a family-business accountancy, among others. There’s no ‘down’ button for the elevator, just access to the basement from the fire stairs. Maintenance and machinery rooms don’t have to follow accessibility compliance rules, and it’s just another way to hide a rig like this by making it inconvenient to look for. The fire stairs are heat insulated, but frost forms on the steel handle for the basement. It’s -8*c in the room, another reason to want to be in and out quick. The door isn’t even locked. Some things don’t change with time. The plumbing and fuseboxes hugging the left wall ultimately look like they would have in the 2020s, because there’s only so much tweaking around the margins you can do for solved problems. Bars of LED lights shine on lines of black-painted pipes, running through cylindrical tanks and then straight back up into the ceiling. Two fuse boxes bolt into the wall, half-sunk into the rockwool insulation foam sprayed around them, titanium padlocks hang like clenched fists on their side-handles. This side of the room hums and grinds like a millstone. The rest of the basement is dedicated to the hardware. This is new. By the 2020s, computer hardware was running into the physical limitations of its design. In the same way a water pipe must still look like a water pipe because it is addressing an unchanging physical problem, computer hardware had to become unrecognizable. At the most alien, often the bulk core of recent supercomputers are just plasma chambers with powerful laser inputs and outputs. The lasers charge plasma into ephemeral optical components lasting nanoseconds, creating the circuits for other lasers to pass through, and calculate the next grid to generate. Such cores are immeasurably powerful, but their wattage requirements rarely make them worth it. The lasers that charge the plasma medium are intense enough that they would destroy anything else. Watching one of these cores think is like watching white-noise in three dimensions. That’s just one solution, though, and it’s not a good one for most problems. At this level, the rig is made up of eight oven-sized cubes, sitting four long by two high. The modules slide out of standardized ports in each cube. In it are spaces for a neural chip (a coffee-mug sized cube filled with gelatinous semiconductor), a quantum chip (a wallet-sized stack of entangled holographic wafers) and an optical core (a shoebox-sized cpu filled with a crystal lattice) and a storage brick (about half the width of an optical core, otherwise too many different kinds of these to count). The motherboard of the whole thing is the bulk of the device, a piezoelectric crystal medium that can make such disparate pieces co-operate together. Eight of these crystal ovens, then an oldschool rack at the end. It holds a stack for forty-eight GPU slots, linked to the stacked cubes by an inch-thick bundle of optical cabling. This part’s the custom job. Somebody had to know what they were doing to make this. This entire rig is set-and-forget, otherwise. Someone distantly monitors the thing’s not throwing out errors and scrapes money off the top of it. This is where the whole trail goes cold. There’s no official record that the basement is sub-let. It could be that the owner is being paid under the table or, just as likely, this was done without permission. In either case, an anonymous call telling the building manager this is here at all would be the end of it. But that’s it. Set and forget. No amount of surveillance is going to find the owner touching this thing. If you take this down, your best case scenario is hoping that they don’t have the capital to try this again. And that this is the only rig they’ve bothered to set up. That’s it, then. You could still just replace graphics card #19 and the storage brick in the cube on the bottom, second from the left, and you’re one day closer to seeing Dad, and keep access to the rig for a rainy day where you might need it. Otherwise you can end this part of a criminal operation, and hope that’s all there is of it. What’s it going to be?