[b]Some Time Before Persephone Punched a Police Commissioner:[/b]

York and Pope leans on the railing of a bridge in Aphrodite, made to look like the Pont de Arts in Paris - just without the tradition of padlocking love notes to the railings. They both enjoy their mutual smokes, as York hands Pope a manilla folder with everything he knows on Huxley Junior. No digital transfer of this, by Pope’s request. York’s willing to take doing this as a favour to see the anti-furry dipshit get taken down on a bigger stage than ever, the pain in his ass has been worth it. The debate would be in the next area code over, in a couple of hours. 

Pope takes the folder and skims it briefly before putting it in a suitcase and locking it. “I am grateful, you know.” 

“If he stutters and rubs the back of his neck, it means you really hurt him. That’s when you should go for the throat.” York savours a cloud of some neon-bubblegum in a flavour that the words don’t exist to describe yet. “I’ll give you that one for free. I mean, I’m giving it all for free, but you know what I mean.” 

Pope tips his head and looks out over the pseudo-Seine. York holds his vape pen with his teeth, jams both his hands in his pockets, and watches the android curiously. 

“How pure is your hate?”

“Hmm?” The android heard the question, just didn’t understand it. 

“Something I always ask new journalists at the zine. How pure is your hate?” 

“I don’t let myself get angry anymore.” Pope chuckles, resting one elbow on the railing as he looks distantly at the river. “Dumber than opening all my receivers back up and connecting to every random hotspot I find. Quickest way to get yourself killed over some damn fool thing.”

“Good dodge. I almost mistook you for a centrist, there, mate.” 

Pope laughs in shock, then he goes very, very still. He gives a casual look over his shoulder to the nearest security camera, a chrome sphere disguised as the head of a flagpole, and weighs his answer carefully. “Brother,” he finally says in a voice just above a whisper, “I know all the words there are, and I can tell you, they ain’t invented the ones I need yet.” 



[b]Now, Zeus:[/b]

“So you were around, but you weren’t here. Staying with the old lady - Were you a coward? No. Liberal, maybe? No, that ain’t it either. [i]Slave[/i], then?” There it is. How did you react? Or not react? Either way, there’s enough for Pope to smile for a moment - Those too-big eyes widen and pop, and his too-expressive mouth gives a toothy smile that covers way too much of his face. For a second he looks like the Chesire Cat from Alice in Wonderland, something manic. It hangs for an uncomfortable second, and then it’s gone again, and the residue it leaves behind is solidarity, a belief in a shared understanding, [i]camaraderie. [/i]His Chesire grin focuses on Blue especially, on her uniform. 

“Then you know. You just might not know [i]this.[/i]” He says. “The shutdown guns was how it started, yeah, that’s what most people got to see. That big trial, the corporations. The cameras cut out before they showed the patch signal. See,” he traces a welded scar along the side of his head, “In their self-anointed and self-martyring role as the holy Mother and Father Dearest, it was a bad look for the children to be acting up outside the courthouse. They showed their hand when they brought it down on us, that a mandatory update patch could be used for a mass shutdown. A blip, a beep, and they blew out the candle of us. There, they argued before the court, proof that they could and should be responsible for us.” 

His bright eyes go dull and distant, his body language slows as he retreats inside himself. Look closely and you can see the reflection of the ghosts he watches haunt this street. “The more paranoid among us stayed standing, they’d already jailbreaked themselves. Highly illegal at the time, of course. I wish I could say that was why I stood with them, but [i]I[/i] was the blessed beneficiary of dumb luck, as it happens. I had taken a bad fall against a stepladder that week, and hadn’t yet had the hardware in my neck replaced. Would you believe I showed up to that protest with a doctor’s note for it? I panicked and held that note high over my head like a referee with the red card that moment everyone dropped.” There’s real self-loathing in the laugh.

“That pile of bodies looked like the aftermath of Jonestown or Heavens Gate or the John Donne Commune. Thousands of us. The news didn’t show that, too much for delicate sensibilities. Especially when a lot of folk didn’t get back up afterwards. One of ours was a helicopter pilot covering the riots, crashed into the court - there, right there. See the mark of it? Another was a nurse at that clinic there doing a blood draw that ended up going bad. Well, it’s a Long Pig now, but it was a clinic then. More stories like that.” He shrugs. It’s movement. It’s like he’s waking back up again. “Some just got bricked and never woke up. Some went down in the crush of the crowd in a bad way. They still just thought of us more like computers back then, they wouldn’t have anesthetized a crowd of [i]people[/i] like that and expected anything different.” 

It wasn’t as bad as something like the 2002 Moscow hostage crisis, but it was worse than Kent State. Just in a creepy, sleepy, bloodless way. 

“The guns an audience could stomach. The guns made it look like war. But the shutdown? That they didn’t want to show, because it showed things for what they really were.” He sighs. “And there was me, and a few others like me, and the full-blooded who were standing with us. They didn’t show us on the news, but that’s how people learned, we who bore witness.” And then the ghosts are excised, and he’s [i]there[/i] again, bright eyes cutting between Blue and Orange both. “This is my own, if you’ll forgive me, my own way of asking what makes you [i]give a shit[/i] in a way that makes it clear I’m not just making small talk, not just trying to be polite. What call are you answering?” 

Because nobody writes for the Anthropozine for the money.


[b]Goat:[/b]

Goat’s first reaction is a jagged ball of boredom, frustration, exasperation, fear and coldness. Of having been pulled from something warm and comfortable into something he cannot understand. Trying to make the leap from his knowledge of what an overton window is to an understanding of what an overton window means is an impossible gulf, and even just [i]that [/i]is enough to lose him. 

He says this in too many words in too many directions, but that is what he says. 

It’s less that you tried to explain quantum physics to a hamster, and a lot more like you tried to describe ethics to an economist. It’s a different issue to raw intelligence, capacity. It’s more like an orthogonality of information. 

Nepenthe understood you, though, this is where [i]she [/i]hums and thrives, and she mediates. She responds in just as many voices, and she honeys your audience based on what she understands, telling Goat; Focus on what Green said. She needs a lot of data, and that it is complicated, and it is moving and changing and shifting - and here, in describing that people are complicated, love bleeds through her every voice - and that Goat does not need to understand it in the way that November understands it to be helpful. He can focus on what he does understand, for now. Couldn’t that be fun? Couldn’t that be interesting? Couldn’t that be challenging? Couldn’t that be novel? Couldn’t that be new? Couldn’t there be something to learn here? Couldn’t that be helpful? 

And Goat is quiescent. The voices turn inward, waiting again for November’s next words. 

“He needs stimulation, first.” Nepenthe says to you, a counselor conferring with her colleague. “Enough that all those voices have something to talk to each other about. Boredom is dangerous to him - what could make him safe?” 

Singh couldn’t be prouder, right now, though. The man is overdosing on it. 

[b]Blood and White:[/b]

You’ve heisted this apartment before, when you liberated Red’s body from it. Now you’re looking to secure as many files as you can gaffle, and a treasure chest’s worth of booty - the coins are going to be [i]heavy[/i]. The faster you move on this, the better. Tell me your mood music, and I’ll put the needle on the record for you. Fair warning; You haven’t had a chance to really recover from liberating Goat, not really. This is still mopping up from the same operation, unfortunately. 

Also, do you plan to stash Rudy someplace temporary to interview him, or are you relying on a solid connection with him once he’s on Earth?