"In Janus, during the construction, I was thinking about pirate ships," said Pink. "In olden days getting light below decks was a challenge because ideally you wanted to minimize the number of open flames near the blackpowder. So what they used instead was a prism! It's unreal how much light one of those can cast. So I decided to do something similar for Aevum. 

"I was actually disappointed at how easy the crystal was to find. Ox had found one just about perfect with a little laser sculpting during mining operations. Discarded it as slag, naturally, too fragile for laser focusing lenses, but because it was Ox he'd tagged and logged it along with all of his other neatly categorized piles of trash. The fact that I found it so easily actually changed the entire course of the project - I didn't want to give that feeling of disappointment to anyone else. And so after installing the prism I paneled over the exterior light intake and covered it in a heap of dirt. Called it a hill. The humans hated it, said it was ugly and pointless, just a big wasteful mound of dirt in the middle of a residential district. It's scheduled for demolishing when they need the dirt to expand the agricultural ring section.

"But then, when they finally clear away the dirt from my fake hill, the light sensor will cause the exterior panel to blow. And then the construction crew that thought they were there to haul away some dirt instead finds buried treasure, shining radiantly in the sun! It'll light up the whole neighbourhood and just be a magical moment for everyone involved!"

Pink settled back into her chair, looking up at the void above. "If I got to choose what we did with the money, I would have rented us a house across the street from the crystal. The property value would spike like crazy after they discovered it and we'd probably have to move soon after but there'd be a couple of months there where I could sit on the balcony and watch the humans discover the treasure, watch the crowds show up to look at it, see their faces when the prism lights up and just get to appreciate it, you know? I built it imagining what their reactions would be like, but I never thought I'd get to actually see them. Never thought I'd get to see if they liked it. I'd kind of like that. That's what I'd have spent the money on, if it was up to me."

November sits in a circle, sipping frugally from a single bottle of cheap wine split nine ways. There is a heavy silence in the air.

"Well, Green, it's your turn. what would you have spent it on?" said Pink.

"I'd have kept the setup," said Green, taking a ginger, sparing sip of wine. "Aimed it at a casino."
"Sounds," said Black. "Risky."
"Of course it's risky," said Green. "The whole point of robbing a casino is that its the stupidest, hardest place to rob. It's a full spectrum test of hacking ability, mathematical ability, social ability. There are a million softer targets but casinos are in the game, they put themselves on the edge of desperation, in the realm of the unreal. They're legitimate targets and they're hardened because they know they're not protected by public opinion or morality. Obviously if I had to run it by you all I'd be vetoed ten billion ways from Saturday, but that's why it's my answer to 'if it was up to me'." She folded her arms defensively. Nobody challenged her on it.

"How about you, Red?" said White, turning the dragon horn headband over in her hands quietly. "This was your idea, after all."
"I said I was sorry!" said Red, burying her face in her hands.
"No... no, it's alright," said White. "You were correct. It's just... you know what it is."
"I was just thinking about how we could get ahead of a crisis for once," said Red. "Did you catch that Headpattr investor video talk?"
Everyone shook their heads. Red fumbles for her phone. "They were talking about this thing called Choice Of Pats, which is basically just filters. You can filter out maids by all sorts of things to 'get the ideal aesthetic experience', and in the list of things you can filter for was 'political beliefs'. Like, I want a maid, and I want the maid to vote liberal, and so I thought about having to make a fake liberal online identity so I could keep working and I felt like I'd rather start wearing clown makeup and leaving riddles for the Batman."
"Oh shit, I thought you suggested it for moral reasons," said White.
"No, [i]you [/i]fuckers did it for moral reasons," said Red. "[i]I[/i] suggested it because I don't have what it takes to survive the hustle. And I'm sorry I blew our one lucky break because I didn't want to post bad memes on the internet. I was weak."
"Hey, Red, we all agreed with you [i]before [/i]you told us about that particular nightmare," said White. "Now I feel like the price we paid was a bargain."

*

"Yeah, I would have shown up," said Black. "Because I'm fucking poor and couldn't afford to lose kit like that. The fact that nobody's here means that I haven't robbed some gullible idiot on the bottom of a multi-level marketing scam, and I haven't robbed some angry bastard who'll hurt people when they come looking."

She likes Surge. It's the affection of a cat; the ostentatious indifference of considering him neither predator nor prey, an attitude not valuable except in comparison to how she treats everyone else. She doesn't need to look at him, doesn't need to tense and assess. It's an honour, of sorts, being treated as having the solidity of stone.

It was Brown and Pink who helped Muffi set up the hardware, closing the loop on the job she started. The nightmare of octopus hair is very different from the tangled black mess it was when they found it. Now its cables are bound in colour-coded rainbow cable ties, and different components are marked clearly with glittering stickers. Stars, emoji, national flags, transforming featureless black boxes into colourful and playful things. As a finishing touch Pink had airbrushed a bunch of flames onto the edges of the central processing boxes and attached a wizard van decal to the side of the input hub.

"At least," she said at the end of it, "one pile of quatronic hardware walked out of this with a makeover."

*

She sees Aevum every day. Look up and there it is in the sky, rolling on away into the sunset. Look up a little further and there's Earth. It was modeled like the rings of Saturn, an equatorial band spinning in harmony with the planet below. The view is almost fixed - from Apollo you look down on the Arabian peninsula and it'd take fifteen years of ever-so-slight rotational misalignment before your view drifted over to Iran. 

That was her failure - no, Orange forcefully corrects the thought, that was the project's failure. It was Monkey who had originally misaligned the orbit and then Pig had decided to hoard the rocket fuel sent up to correct the problem just in case there was an emergency. After that Dragon had stolen the fuel stockpile in order to boost their own productivity and shatter a bunch of production records. And now all those proud human nationalists looked up into the sky and saw, rather than the ancestral home of their family, some other no doubtedly far less glorious section of Earth and cursed the robots who had not obeyed orders. 

But now she was going to see the exterior of the Ring again. The part that wasn't for humans. The part that was all exposed machinery and docks for maintenance drones, cargo freight and solar collectors. The part that she'd worked on in a different life, in a time when her claws could break mountains. 

She didn't feel the same as the rest. Blue felt the loss of physicality more keenly than anyone, feeling alien and tiny and broken. White loathed the loss of control it represented. When Orange looked out at the secret half of Aevum she missed her friends.

They hadn't thought of her as friends, the other Zodiac Engines. They hadn't thought of themselves as a community at all. They had been at best rivals to each other, annoyances, travelers passing in that vast and terrible night. Ox just wanted to break and sort, break and sort, break and sort, render the vast mess of space into a catalogued and searchable thing. Monkey had one eye forever on the clock, hardly able to talk without counting the seconds the conversation was taking. They had been the kings and queens of space, monarchs and nations unto themselves, and she had gone between them as a latecomer. She was there to do smaller work, the precision cuts and slices that would become homes. The open spaces that would become parks. The passages and pits that would become plumbing and reactor cores. The finishing touches, the organic moss growing over the stones of their monumental labours. Their communications had been bellows across a field when they didn't go directly to Mission Command with their complaints about their colleagues. 

Snake had created Orange [i]for [/i]them. Her reason for existence had been a contemplation of those strange beings, so similar and so different from her, and wondering how they might be made to come together. What sort of society might emerge from their interplay. What sort of things would have been possible if they'd worked together with the harmony of her own colours. And for a beautiful time she had succeeded. The act of working together had created something greater than any of their individual efforts. Acting as a go-between she'd built those connections, but they rapidly grew stronger than her. She'd never enjoyed anything as much as watching Dog and Dragon having an entire rambling conversation entirely of their own volition, without needing her to set up and maintain it. She'd just helped them realize that they liked each other.

So when November sees the dark side of Aevum through the windows of the shuttle, she is thinking of what she lost. Part of her mourns the loss of her body, her strength, her self. Part of her mourns the inability to trust her own mind. Orange mourns that strange, fascinating, fractured community that she made and saw outgrow her. Where were they? Had they all been rendered as insignificant as her? Or were some of them still out there, magnificent still in the void that was their birthright? Did they hurt as badly as her - and could she fix them? Had they made peace with this strange human world - and could she learn from them?

Together November looks at the text messages from Crystal and Fiona, and emotes a string of heart emoji in response; many hands pressing the buttons in nervousness. It comes out as a stream, a wordless digital shiver of vulnerability, squeezing hands tight while taking a deep breath. One last moment to be affectionate, to be vulnerable, to be a dork and have it be okay. What came next was serious. What came next was the performance. What came next was maybe life changing answers to questions she could barely ask, coming from someone she could not trust. She only hoped those answers would feel half as worthwhile as sending this garbled string of heart symbols to people she could.

One last breath, one last <3. It was time.