[b]Somewhere in a book that almost nobody has read:[/b]

Ultimately the resistance, while noble, was a complete failure at anything as anything other than a distraction away from Hypatia. The doors sealed with two part epoxy didn’t have time to set before the arrival of BlackSun security forces. External communications had been cut before the first jackboot tracked Miami mud into the foyer. The fight was short but overwhelming. Two of Miles Singh’s molars were cracked in the process of removing him from a computer terminal. It’s unknown what it was he was trying to do. Singh’s only given statement: “It didn’t work, so it doesn’t matter.” 

The Siege of Canaveral had been doomed like Troy before it. The gates had been opened from the inside.

[b]November:[/b]

Singh claps his hands and rubs them together. “Perfect. Excellent. The AR glasses are a nice touch. Alright. It shouldn’t be far from here. I’ll get the herring, but I’m out of whoopie cushions. Have to do something much funnier, I think.” He claps his hands and bounces on his feet, “I’ve got just the thing! Would you mind forming a circle around me, for the walk over? It’s better as a surprise, I think.”

[quote]"While we're on the topic, I'm thinking we need to work on our comic timing," Red was saying; words flowed freely and thoughtlessly from her. "We don't have the range of facial expressions to really sell certain reactions, you know? There's a bunch I can do with my eyes -" her eyes glowed devilishly red, sparkled with over-the-top diamond glitter, pupils turned into heart shapes, and so on - "but it's hard to get the right beat externally. Internally we can get a rhythm going, you know? Escalate and escalate and escalate and branch and veer and control the right questions, but externally the rhythm's uncontrollable unless, presumably, we took the time to learn the person well enough to predict. What do you think?"[/quote]

“If you ask me as an engineer, I think the problem is the face.” He considers. “I’d wonder about a screen, and using cartoon expressions. Illustrators learned quickly that for comedy, simplified expressions could afford a much wider range of exaggeration that can be read more clearly. Being able to replace your ‘face’ with a meme would probably be a great comedic effect, if you didn’t overdo it. If you ask me as a parent, well…” he thinks. “The best jokes are the ones only meant for a few people anyway. Like this one, I hope.”

Nobody spares him a second look as he wonders aloud about this, even with the shockingly garish glasses. They mustn’t look so bad in AR.

It wasn’t much of a walk at all. Thrones is small, and Dad lives right in the middle of it. 

“Wait here for me. Wait and hope, even. Ha! Here, give me your phone number, there’s a camera in my glasses and I’ll stream the feed to you. If anything happens, I’ll need you to bail me out. Really, though, I just don’t want you to miss seeing this, and I’ve only got the one golden ticket.”

[quote]"Which one?" they all ask in unison.[/quote]

He hums thoughtfully. “Red’s, if you don’t mind?” He doesn’t explain his reason.

[quote]"I knew getting cosmetic surgery to look more like you would pay off," said Red, winking and producing a super-cool business card that Crystal had designed for her. Red's request had been 'make it look like the devil's myspace page, black text on neon purple background with broken green textures and clipart of monster trucks and stuff'. Crystal had not explained her reaction to the request, but she had gone above and beyond.[/quote]

You could guide a ship to harbour with the brightness of his smile as he saves it to his phone. The video call is sent the next second. The card ends up in a vest pocket over his heart.

Nobody looks at him as he walks in. Doors open for him, and the lobby elevators arrive before he can press a button. Has he hacked the place? You’ve watched him the whole time, and you picked the company. Pick a card, any card…

He’s at the executive suite, the size of a four bedroom apartment on Aevum. There’s a dozen people in it. [i]They don’t see him[/i]. He walks up to the coffee machine and reaches into the fishing vest for a tin of herring, and dumps it into the machine. Nobody says a word. There isn’t a server room, per se, because the building’s made of it. But there is a sysadmin, identified by who’s getting yelled at to fix the coffee machine like it’s an IT problem. Dad dodges as the sysadmin almost walks straight through him, and out of Dad’s pocket comes a flashdrive with a skull and bones on it. The skull has googley eyes. 

Dad makes for the elevator and he’s on his phone. He’s looking at FriendSmile’s file repository. One macro to scan it for its store page commits. A second to send a mandatory security update to the app for a zero-file replacement of its main executable. A third to format the core repository to blank disk. 

If they don’t have an airgapped, physical backup? Then the app is destroyed by the time Dad is hurrying, briskly, out the ground floor elevator.

“Go, go, go,” he hisses under his breath. “Start walking and don’t stop. Normally I don’t leave the flashdrive in, but, well, it means nobody can think you did it standing out here, doesn’t it?” He cups a hand over his mouth to hide his laughter. “Try and guess how I did it.”