[b]Earlier:[/b] “I’ve never been to the end of the line before.” Marco looks out the train window as it runs express to the port, the churning airlock-city. The hundred meter thick carbon band linking Hermes to Selene is in view, now, rising up into the distance on all sides. The bottleneck begins there. “Most people never need to.” The tweaker editor who’s just wrung him through the emotional wringer for the last six hours wipes his nose on the back of his hand. “We have, though. You’re going to be fine, mate.” Marco draws his baggy hood tight, and touches his rounded ears self-consciously under them. “Are you sure I can’t go back? If it works? No more cops. It’d be safe then, right?” “If this works,” the editor takes a swig from a flask that reeks of sugar in chemicals, “Every cop on Aevum will have nothing to lose, and know who to blame for it.” The editor takes some aluminium packs of pills from his pockets and passes them over. Motion sick remedies and headache pills for the trip down. He gives a side-eyed look to Eli, and Eli nods back. Marco’s heart shivers in his chest, a little, but there are too many reasons for him to know why. That the answer is no. That he knows it’s going to be bad news. That Eli trusts him to hear it. That last one… Eli. Pronounced like ‘lie’ if he’s feeling masc, or ‘lee’ if she’s feeling femme. ‘She’ right now. She’d managed to not get caught slipping his stolen battery packs to the news people on the way out, even though the editor thought she was an idiot for it. She wasn’t supposed to be taking the train right now, but she said she was going to, and that was that. She was kind. The train hit the carbon band and began its slope. Marco gripped his chair, he felt like he was about to float out of it. The editor waited for him to get used to it. “We sent someone with your credit card up to Gaia, and he got stomped by cops.” He holds a firm look, and Marco feels small under it. “That’s not on you. We all knew the risks. This is just how serious this is. If the cops even think someone has something to do with you, they’re going to get hurt. Our guy’s in the hospital right now.” “I could write something, maybe? Say that he had my permission, say-” but the editor shook his head. “We’ll take that for Persephone, sure. But our guy-” “Junta.” Eli cut over him. “Yeah, Junta. Story with him is he found it on the ground, was seeing if it hadn’t been reported stolen already, and was just going to hand it in. Just a bit of bad luck. Because if we pass on that you let him…” He trailed off. Marco presses his head against the glass of the window and watches warehouses go by. Huge things covered in service line inputs and outputs in three dimensions. This close to the airlock, everything starts to look like those casts you take of ants nests, where you pour molten tin down the tunnels and dig them up. They’re close now. There wasn’t one airlock, of course. Selene’s rim was filled with them, thousands in all different sizes. They were just treated as a collective entity, right up until the moment specifics mattered. “I need to go.” Marco mutters. It’s still not real to him yet. He knew how much danger he was in, he’d known that for a long time. He’d just thought he could hide this out. He had just found people he could be close to, and that was the moment he was being ripped away from them. But every reason he wanted to stay was a reason he needed to go. “It’s not fair.” “No, it’s not.” The editor said, and Eli squeezed him from behind in a tight hug. Marco sniffled, then wiped at his eyes. Sleeping had made everything worse, it made him feel everything again. Before he’d been too tired to even feel how tired he was. Almost there. Just a few more minutes, now. Persephone hadn’t been able to get him anything, either. He was scared about that, about some of the stuff they’d have found in there. That… that at least made it a bit easier to run away. That was something to run from. The editor misunderstood the flash of anxiety, what to reassure him about. “We’ll get your prescriptions down to you.” He cleared his throat, and Eli let go. “They’ll be watched, so it’ll be a good way to make it clear you’re out of reach. It might put you at a bit of risk but…” “My friends will be safer.” Marco finished for him. “Yeah. What you’ve been wanting from the start, right?” Marco nodded as best as he could without taking his face off the glass. This close to the airlock, everything was lighter. The narrower diameter made it easier to load and unload freight, and made it easy to tell who’d been working down here long term. They all moved with a distinctive hop-skip, like they were prancing around. As the train pulled into the station, a man in a parka with a tin whistle pranced along, eyeing the passengers. Marco flinched away from the window and pulled his hood tighter. “It’s fine,” Eli took his hand and squeezed it. “They’re not cops. You’re safe from here. Okay?” Marco nodded. Should he ask her if…? It didn’t matter. He was one foot out the door already, no need to make it hurt more than it already did. The editor stood up, even though the train hadn’t stopped yet. “Come on. We’ve got one last person we’d like you to meet.” … Marco felt naked for his trip. No luggage to pack, not even his laptop. At least Eli had stolen a music player from a train station vending machine and spent most of the trip filling it with her playlists, which seemed to be… everything. A lifetime’s worth of genres to discover. The headphones she had plundered for him, too, were helping a lot. Selene was loud, impossibly loud, the entire world’s freight and garbage infrastructure all crammed together into one spot. Sometimes he didn’t even keep the music on, just kept the headphones for their noise cancelling. He stood in the shadow of the Selene station building, waiting for his contact. The editor and Eli had walked him to the train door, and waved goodbye. They’d gotten on the train at opposite ends, and decided it was better to not be seen leaving with him. He looked up, and blinked. The woman approaching him was broad, with leathered skin. At all times she rested a hand on the pommel of the sword at her hip. She didn’t hop-skip like the other workers. Instead she swung one foot in front of the other, always making sure the front foot had stopped before raising the back foot. Where everybody else bounced and bounded, she was slow, solid and stable. “I am Sobha.” She said. “Are you…?” She left the question hanging. Marco nodded. He squeaked. “Hmm. Not yet.” She reached out, and Marco froze. She was a tiger, and he was definitely still a mouse. She took his hood and loosened it, then pulled it back from his head. She nodded, but still seemed unsatisfied. “Please. Take it off.” Marco wriggled out of the hoodie as fast as he could, folding it across his chest and tucking the bundle under his arm. And finally, Sobha cracked a smile, and squeezed her pommel tight. “I will make sure that you can leave as you are.” She cupped a hand under his chin and lifted it. Marco had been staring at the floor for so long that looking above the horizon was almost too much for him. He swayed on his feet. “See? Lift your head. Stand proud. You are not running, scared. You are sacrificing to protect people. You are leaving as a hero. That’s how I want you to remember this.” It was hard not to look down again. It was overwhelming. He needed to see less, to feel less, to- He closes his eyes and balls his fists at his side for a quiet moment. Then he lets out a breath. “My name is Marco.” He says, and he holds on to how he felt explaining himself to Persephone. “And I am brave.” Sobha nods, satisfied, then eyes one of the platform’s exits. “Good. Walk tall, with me. The Union has made your way for you.” [b]Everyone: [/b]Advance a level. [b]November:[/b] Baba does not ask what you need the wheelbarrow for. Instead she takes the trip downstairs, sees the rest of November and their planned haul, and spits. Not suspicious, but inquisitive. “Яку ж кашу він заварив… і для чого?!” Baba walks back up, and jams the elevator button. When it arrives she reaches into a pocket underneath her shawl and pulls out a set of keys. She jams them into the elevator and twists counter-clockwise. The elevator starts descending, and a steel panel slides open for it at the bottom. Baba shakes her head and climbs back up the stairs a second time. “I do not have patience for this. Why no button to basement? Life is too hard to make silly problems for others. Two at a time only. Wheelbarrow? Ridiculous. For such a thing?” Again she shakes her head, and thrusts her socket wrench into Red’s hands. “Wait.” Baba 003 stomps to the railway node, and opens a storage shed. She stomps back with a motorized push-trolley. On it are four pairs of grip gloves. “You twist left handle forward, left wheel goes forward. You twist it backward, it goes backward. Right handle for right wheel. I will be back for the key in twenty minutes. You will be done with it by then, and you will wait for me. Or I will find you.” These are not questions. This is not to be negotiated. She takes her socket wrench back without asking, and begins up the stairs. You can do it much faster than twenty minutes, if you can keep organized. Four in the basement to load for the elevator, four left at the pod to unload and stack, and Red to push the ‘wheelbarrow’ and yell instructions at both ends. Five trips. Four for the server boxes, the size of washing machines and the weight of safes, but five hands make light work. Another for the graphics card rig on its own. Twenty seconds for each elevator ride, two per trip, that’s five minutes in the elevator. Twelve seconds to load, six to unload - ninety seconds total. Fixed time taken: Six and a half minutes, plus however long it takes for Red to snap November into action. That just leaves the actual trip. This is a question for Red: Does she have experience using this kind of freight trolley, and if so, how much? Where does that experience come from? [i]If she is proficient[/i]: Set it to Hare, and make no mistakes. The trip can be made at jogging speed, and a round trip takes less than a minute. While the rest of November can scarper, Red will need to wait almost ten minutes for Baba. [i]If she is accustomed: [/i]Set it to Walk, and make no mistakes, or set it to Hare and decide on a mistake that requires help to correct. The trip can be safely made at walking speed, and a round trip takes two minutes. She’ll only have to wait a couple of minutes for Baba. [i]If she is a novice: [/i]This is a struggle. Set it to Turtle and a round trip takes five minutes with no mistakes, or set it to Walk and decide on a mistake that requires help to correct. In this case, Baba might need to wait for Red for a minute, and be placated. A mistake might be bumping into a wall hard enough to leave a hole, taking a turn sloppy enough to roll a piece of equipment, or simply getting stuck when a three point turn becomes a thirty-three point turn, a delay long enough for another colour to come check on her. Also, White just got a text from Crystal. [i]“Curious what you think. If you get stuck choosing what you like most, try explaining to yourself what you like least. Kisses.” [/i] In it is a folder of images, scans of hand-drawn designs. A flurry of sketches drawn in an inspired lunchbreak. Image One: Heights. She gives three options, the first almost twice as tall as the average person, huge, towering, imposing. The second is tall enough for most people to have to tilt their head to make eye contact, authoritative, dominating. The final is average, equal, eye-to-eye. Image Two: Build. Here she sketches a variety of different outlines. Broad, powerful, muscular. Slender, narrow, graceful. Trim, athletic, solid. Hourglass, curvacious, sultry. Image Three: This is just a slate of six arms, viewed at an oblique. Smooth scales, rough scales, thick scales, thin scales, lots of tiny scales, or a few large scales. Rounded or squared, reptilian or aquatic? Images Four, Five, Six: Facial designs, spread about at seeming random. First she tried to do them holistically, as entire heads, but quickly gave up on that. Instead she does rows and lines and boxes for the individual features, build-your-own. Muzzles and snouts, teeth and lips, eyes and brows. Ears. Trailing off the bottom of the page; [i]“Hair? Genitalia? You should ask Pink. Fiona suggested piercings?”[/i] White doesn’t have to read the text as soon as she gets it, of course. But if she does, how does it affect her, and the mission? [b]Persephone:[/b] Now it’s just down to dotting i’s and crossing t’s. Organize a dead-drop for 3V to pick this stuff up from. Get home. Marco’s off-station. Warnings have gone out. Cops know you’re involved in the leak, now. You’re still getting evicted. You’ll still need to find a new place, eventually. Your friends might still be in danger. But for now? For now the price must be paid on bad sleep and dark bargains made at dark hours in the morning. Tell me about how you get home too tired to dodge those last straggler reporters, and accidentally give them one last, perfect epitaph for these days. Tell me about the things you manage to do to take care of yourself before you sleep, even through the sleep deprivation and stimulant crash. And tell me about the one last, unexpected conversation you have through text before your eyes finally shut on this day. [b]3V:[/b] Junta looks at the can suspiciously. “I don’t like iced tea. Do I? I can’t remember.” He cracks the tab on it, and takes a sip. His eyes go wide, and then the can goes higher, higher, higher, empty. He crunches the empty shell in his hand. “I guess I like iced tea now. I just don’t think I’ve had it for a long time…” He looks at the can, morose. The thought never crosses his mind that he could ask for another one. Of research projects? “I have a few.” An understatement. Research journalism too often means nobody to write [i]for[/i], no onus or expectation of deadlines. Just deep dives of personal interest. At a more traditional outlet, it’s tight leashes and constant reports. For an outlet like the Anthropozine, though? Ask a fiction writer about their works in progress. “I really liked your last one, about Sirius? Give a Dog a Bone? I wish I could write something like that. Ah. I should be working on something like that…” Snap, snap, snap. Focus his attention on the ‘is’ and not the ‘should’. You’re familiar with this spiral, it fits you, just your size. Not helpful. “I have a few. There’s apparently a kink scene for chemical hypnosis fetishists, now. Tailor made drugs that target the free will part of the brain, but still leave you free to follow orders, that kind of thing. Really illegal, the non-consensual applications are pretty terrifying, but I hit a dead end on that. I’m at the part of the process where I’d need interviews to make any kind of story out of it, and I don’t know how to find people. Ah. The rest is really boring, honestly.” He almost shrugs, but thinks better of it at the exact last second. “Why domestic labour is still undervalued by design in an era of abundance, why Thrones got built with public resources and comparing it to all the other libertarian playgrounds they tried to make when we first got to space. You know compared to like, Chiarascuro.” Still a fun place for treasure hunters who can ignore a geiger counter reading. “Like, who thought it was in the public interest to do Versaille again.” His eyes are closing. He’s as exhausted as he looks. “All the handsoap on the station is made by a single company, and their recipe is undisclosed. The four day work week was a combined response to zero hour contracts, the phone app casual labour market, and the collapse of the 2040s. The tips on the ends of shoelaces are called aglets, and their purpose is sinister. Do you know anyone - anyone? - on Aevum that owns their own home? Why is that?” He’s asleep. Again. Probably not for long, but who knows with him?