You know how a fission bomb works? You’ve got your core - uranium, plutonium, the testimony of a mouse. That’s where all the power is. The hard part isn’t making it go critical, the hard part is keeping it together when it does. See, the core’s so close to doing that on its own that you can actually make a nuclear bomb by taking two halves of a super-critical stack and then just throwing them at each other - that’s what they did at Hiroshima. 64kg of highly enriched uranium, but the method was so sloppy that less than a kilogram - about 1% - of that uranium actually went off. They got it better with Fat Man. Surround the core with a shape-charge shell of conventional explosives. Stuff that, on its own, wouldn’t crack a building. The stuff you’ve dropped a hundred thousand times already. The stuff your fission bomb’s supposed to be replacing. You still need it. Without it? 1% fission. With it? [i]16%.[/i] A fission bomb is being assembled, carefully, in a pirated video editing suite. [i]York: What’s the point of protesting?[/i] [i]Jezebel: That depends. Who’s asking?[/i] [i]York: Everyone. I’m just the messenger. Them to you, you to them.[/i] [i]Jezebel: Most people see us come out here, mess up their day, annoy the shit out of them, and think we’re just hurting whatever cause we’re representing. It’s negative. But that’s the point, right? It’s about what it takes to make us go away. When there’s cops, the first and easiest tool is just force, violence. “Bashing heads”. [/i]We [i]need to be hard enough, many enough, that we can take the beatings longer than they can give them. Usually it’s not until the cops complain about having to deal with us that we get a seat at a negotiating table, somewhere. I think that’s what most people don’t get. While the cops exist, real protests aren’t about getting your support. If you’re passive, then I don’t give a shit if you’re for or against us, right? Because you’re not doing shit either way. It’s not until you complain about us, and the police can’t get rid of us, that anything changes. [/i] The Anthropozine already has so much footage it can use here. This time it’s the EMP grenading of android protestors after the Wyatt-Tversky leak, as shocking now as the Kent State shootings would have been then. Archival footage won’t do, though. This shell needs to be thick in four dimensions. There’s a hole where something fresh and raw needs to go, so the audio continues over black. [i]York: So why protest the police, then? If they’re getting you to the negotiating table. There are people who are going to ask: Why not try and work with them? [/i] [i]Jezebel: I’ve been pepper sprayed so many times I don’t cry cutting onions anymore. Can’t. We can handle that, but we shouldn’t have to. We shouldn’t need to take a beating every time something needs to change. When the cops complain, they’re not doing us a favour. They’re just saying that it’s finally time to give up on the hammer in the toolbox. The hammer can’t be there anymore. I could say something pretty about all the damage that happens when screws look like nails, but honestly? There’s no such thing as a nail. It’s never been that kind of hammer.[/i] If you want better than 16% ([i]and we can do a lot better than 16%[/i]) you’re going to need to make a hydrogen bomb. How? Easy. First you make a fission bomb… [b]November:[/b] Seven kilometers in diameter. A speck of mirrored dust. Most passengers don’t realize how close they really are; Thrones is so small, they assume they must still be impossibly far away. But there, suspended like a germ in an empty auditorium, is Thrones. “[i]We are here, we are here[/i].” An older woman smiles to herself. This is a return flight for her. She knows better. The corporate coder in the seat next to her shifts, only too happy to correct someone. “We’ve only just turned around. We’re ages away, yet.” She shakes her head. “It’s from a children’s book. About people who live on a speck of dust, people so small that only an elephant’s ears are big enough to hear them. Until they all start to cry out; [i]We are here, we are here…[/i]” The sub-internet fell into disuse on Aevum, but it wasn't really for Aevum. Look at the material of Thrones, and experience what it would be like for an ant to crawl inside Deep Blue. The alien architecture barely follows human needs. Step into the docks of Aevum and see the entire world sprawl out in front of you like a planetary kaleidescope. The entrance to Thrones is a chromed maintenance tunnel flanked by geometric elevator shafts. This is the warm welcome. Thrones is an inhabited supercomputer, after all, where real-estate represents your share of access. Every millimeter given to a corridor is a millimeter taken from valuable hardware. But the savvy are already wearing their augmented reality glasses, and the rest are either reaching for ones in their pockets, or being handed pre-installed feature-completes by smiling service workers with a scan of credit cards. Androids with risk tolerance don't bother. Without the AR, Thrones is an inhospitable madness. But a fraction of the staition's processing power is dedicated, at all times, to whatever layer of life you want to put over it. At once this corridor is medieval catacombs, an infinitely sprawling English country garden with a fenced path to walk, the fields of Elysium or the forge of Haephestus or a 1950s American highschool or the Starship Enterprise. People move through this space as avatars. This is the real Thrones, the one that most people actually live in. Otherwise how many would be General Pinochet, driven mad at the sight of Project Cybersyne, screaming frothing madness and sinking knives into every reachable surface? All passengers leaving the shuttle... mind the gap. Everything in the AR system is what you need to find Dad, station maps and easy HUDs, but this is a serious operation. It's a major heist, except you'll be leaving more than you're taking. You'll need to prepare your supplies here, make a shopping list, scout the location, and only then execute your ambush. If you want easy access to some of the homes, Headpattr provides. But without the union presence, it'd be a blind lottery trying to end up at his place that way. If it's anything, it's scouting. It'd save you needing to look for a place to stay, though. Headpattr has charging pods for its workers. First, though; How does November experience her first steps through Thrones? [b]Persephone:[/b] Skels doesn't get back to you, not yet. Only so much you can do, and you've done what you can. The Log Inn is a future-retro internet cafe. Rough log walls, and a single huge, split tree trunk makes up two long countertops right down the middle of the place, brimming with charging ports and laptops. The rest is similarly themed rustic cubicles, wood panelled computers that charge by the hour and otherwise quiet places to set up a laptop and use penny-slot internet. One of the big themes is water power. Lots of fountains around, turning gears on grandfather clocks. In place of a sushi train, small ships cruise along a lazy river with lamington and lemon cake cargo. Bigsby waits for you outside, and offers to lead you in. "First place I thought of where there's always ambient noise even if there isn't people. You know?" This definitely isn't a friendly chat. After a moment - your call - he'll be sitting at the end of a long table, between a waterclock and the lazy river, drumming the countertop. "I've gotten a job, but I think you should do it instead. I mean, I've seen you can do a crew job, right? It's covering the races. You don't need to know anything about horses, just-" he pauses. "Listen. It's all a big trade show, right? Normally we're supposed to be doing the stable puff pieces right now. Showing the racers, their making-of, everything up until it hits the point of trade secrets. But someone's threatening anyone who does. Everyone's scared. We just had a producer end up in hospital for trying to work around it, but the police can't do anything about it, because we don't even know where the threat's coming from. No clue who. They say it's too short notice to organize a sting. But I figure if someone's trying to hide something, there's something here to find, right?" He slides a temp card across to you. "This isn't a disguise, it's official. Which means the money would be real, too. It's not much, but..." He trails off. "You're the only person I could think of I could go to with this." Only person he could go with this who wouldn't ask for more than he can give, maybe.