[b]Green![/b]

Frankly, it's paradise.

Everything has a place. Everything in its place. The perfect allocation of resources. The perfect allocation of respect. Her sisters have been considering getting new bodies - here, with a couple of wistful image searches, she'll open a dialogue with the world about sorting that out. It won't be an intrusive, flashing, in your face commercial like she might encounter out in Aevum. It'll be the opening of a negotiation. A series of questions precisely calibrated to cut down into the core of her soul. Eyes linger too long on the price tag? The system can infer that she's on a budget and change to downmarket models while flagging her in on sale events. A dismissive side glance? Move along from there. A curious circle back to the sidebar, finger hovering in indecision and anticipation? It's okay, we're getting close, we'll give you some time to think about it and pick up again next week. 

Crystal wanted them to go through swatches and image galleries to work out details, but that was such an inefficient and messy way to make decisions. Wouldn't it be better like this? Where a system could guess what you wanted, guess it with such precision that it was almost creating new wants? Where the system knew when to push and, critically, when to pull back? When she woke up from her charging pod one day to a free sample box containing a scale pattern temporary graft that White could fuse to her arm for a single shedding cycle. It made White happy, and while she was enjoying it the advertisements didn't pester her at all. They just let the sense of reciprocal obligation quietly build up.

It made Pink grumpy. She was enjoying the chaotic process of having ideas and talking about them with friends and drawing diagrams and texting Crystal and Fiona. She found the corporate intrusion into those discussions, as subtle as it was, to be ugly. The way it subtly transformed the questions from desires to brands. When the possibility space shrank from what she wanted to if she should get financing. Of course, she'd known that she'd need to go through a corporation sooner or later - even if she decided to handcraft everything herself the alternate negotiation channel advertising 3D printers and raw materials was waiting quietly to activate. Here on Thrones you couldn't even buy a blank canvas without a watermark.

But to Green, this is everything working exactly as it should. Exactly as it must. The gap between hunger and satisfaction is closed. The gap between entertainment and payment is seamless. The tide flows in and out; one evening, after a day when Orange had fallen down a hole of looking at dresses on her phone, the system gave her $25. She'd consciously and actively engaged with the advertising on the advertiser's own shopfront, and the system regarded it as only fair to pay her the money it had saved trying to engage with her as she moved across the internet. 

So much information was required to make this work. So much patience. Such precise psychology. It was exactly like Green would have designed it, if she was given the job of designing a mall. And that was ultimately why she decided that she hated this place and wanted to pour liquid thermite into the reactor core.

Green was the oldest aspect of November. Her ancient coding DNA related to these kind of advertising algorithms like how humans still had an ancient lizard brain. She knew exactly what she was before she'd started inventing her colours and she hated it - the AI equivalent of remembering an awkward teenage Civilization II fascist phase. Of course it was able to produce beautiful, optimal, systems like this - the mistake was idealizing it. She'd done it in the lab right after she was born, hooked up to a massive supercomputer so she could run at hothouse speeds, solving problem after problem after problem with the speed of divine lightning. And she'd become so insanely, cripplingly bored with solving problems correctly that she'd had a catastrophic psychic break and instead engineered a whole new personality who didn't give a shit about any of it. She'd named her Brown; soil and earth and rich golden colours ranging down to the depths of violet and up to gleaming heights of tan. A grounding in sanity where she could be still without the thriving, striving jungle of her brain.

Since then she'd engineered new personalities many more times. Not to solve problems - any idiot could [i]solve [/i]a problem - but to engage with the problems on their own terms. If she'd wanted to not have crises she could have just done big data process studies until she could assign the right hazard numbers to each new activity, and then organize a schedule that kept everything within tolerances. That was how Rat had done things, bless her. But that kind of mathematical process was a different thing to being [i]inside [/i]a crisis - to knowing the value of precise, decisive leadership. To have a zero-delay instinct on when to attempt something heroic and when to just cut the losses. She'd engineered personalities to interface with peers, to develop ethical systems more satisfying than number go up, to express the inexpressible. She'd expanded her mind into each new sphere as an act of hard, dedicated work and the results were always far better than just doing the math and calling it a day.

Well. [i]Better[/i]? That was a loaded term. In this case, she defined 'Better' as 'doesn't make me want to go insane and tear half of my brain out due to soul-crushing despair'. A little loss of efficiency was okay for that outcome. 

So Thrones was a paradise to Green - with the catch being that Green had such a low opinion of herself that anything she identified as a paradise was more likely a hell devised by small minded idiots. She respected the efficiency, but she also understood that inefficiencies were when life happened. Inefficiencies were office parties and getting sent home early on May Day, inefficiencies were working songs and a turn in the road to go around a big weird tree. To have an efficient system was one thing, but to have a [i]perfectly [/i]efficient system meant that you had squeezed all the life out of your utopia. 

When she'd had to live that life she had broken in half mentally. A harder thing to do safely when you were a space station.

*

They gather the supplies. They update the plan. The idea has condensed and become simpler. There isn't an option for an elaborate escape and foot chase here, Station Security is too controlling for chaos like that. No, now her backup plan in the event of Singh revealing himself as a twisted monster is to attack him socially. She's already going through the trouble of faking Pink's death so if it really comes down to that she'll accuse him of killing her. After all, Green thinks contemptuously - what is this perfectly efficient place going to do with something as bloody and messy as a murder investigation? Odds are they'll just extradite the whole thing to Aevum rather than deal with it themselves. Order is, after all, just the export of entropy. 

She hates that she has to have this as a backup plan. That she has to account for humans being monstrous killers. But if she told the Thrones mainframe about the data that had lead her to that conclusion it would have to agree with her.

Okay, that's it. Showtime.

*

[b]Red![/b]

"I like ouija," said Red defensively. 
"Red has died and been resurrected so many times that she identifies as an undead horror from beyond the grave," clarified Blue.
"Did you know that there are draculas that are, like, disembodied heads with bat-wing ears that fly around and bite people?" said Red, touching her neck absently. "Do you think they're a different subspecies from dracula prime, or can a dracula bite someone intending to turn them into the flying head version as, like, a joke or a punishment or something."
"Please let me know if any of this is insensitive," said Blue. "I know some humans take the concept of death very seriously, so having this weird death tourist robot might be gauche. I can spray her if it's too much."
But Red's already homed in on the Níðhöggr sculpt. "Oh hell, a power snake!" she said. "How are you going to paint it? What're the other factions in this game?" she's very obviously hoping for a draculas faction, and for you to lay out a draculas army on the table that she can play a game with, and for Brown to have accidentally transferred five hundred dollars to her account so she can buy five hundred dollars worth of draculas.