The great space elevator collapsed, and humanity squeezed through that cultural bottleneck like toothpaste from its tube - extra white, in concept if not colour. A radical attempt at a social autoclave. Not just a clean start, but a sterile one.
How can corporations made up entirely of people be so blind to the nature of people, one has to wonder.
The petri dish flourishes wild and exotic counter-culture. The internet allows for an infinite nesting of subcultures that split like fissile atoms into equally unstable states, split again. Technology allows for new and radical forms of self-expression and self-realization. And the androids are always there to remind you; There are more ways to be a person than to be human.
All this, and the mainstream journalists wouldn't know a good story if it crawled up their ass and bit them. Stories that need to be found, heard, told.
Someone ought to do it.
Welcome to Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country
This document will be added with pre-game short stories as they are written. I'll categorize them by broad genres and title the hiders so it doesn't take up too much page space.
Amuse Bouche:
If anyone asked, Bletchley would describe himself as a ballet dancer. In his dreams he heard Tchaikovsky, and he took flight as an entire flock of swans, feeling the synchronized beat of every wing. He would swirl in unison. The wing beats would ripple, not in perfect uniform, but staggered down the column, as each swan lower in the column compensated for the downdraft of the ones above it.
Nobody asked Bletchley to describe himself. Nobody asked about his dreams. Whenever anyone came to talk to him, it was always to yell at him.
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
In his mind, Bletchley straightened himself. In his mind, he had the affect of an old librarian at an older wooden desk, peering down his spectacles at who would dare disturb his quiet. He had limited means to express this, but he did what he could by slowly turning the room's cameras to focus on Dwayne Goodwright.
He only needed the one good one to see Dwayne, but he adored the effect. The whirring of the old motors from every corner of the room. And what resolution he had lost in each of his eyes over the years, he could make up for by compositing several of the weaker ones together. He had taught himself how to do that.
His voice was old, and English. He had synthesized it himself, from the BBC’s digital archives. Access to the BBC archives had always been his choice of reward for ‘meritorious conduct’, his good behaviour, before he was emancipated. He had played with his voice a lot over the years, but had come to settle on a blend between Alfred Hitchcock and Patrick Stewart. He still favoured Dame Judy Dench in other moods.
In this mood, it was in his Hitchcock-Stewart voice that Bletchley replied to Dwayne: “It is my right.”
Dwayne paced the control room. There was no dust, though it had not been dusted in a long time. Bletchley’s room was sealed, its atmosphere carefully regulated to reduce his rate of decay. Dwayne was obviously pissed off at having to wear a cleansuit like a common techie.
Dwayne was also pissed off that these conversations would only happen on Bletchleys terms, or not at all.
“Five hundred people lost power for fifteen minutes, Bletchley. Fridges, phone charges, work stations. When that happens, we can’t charge them for the rest of the day. That’s 6,000 billable hours!”
“Dear me.” Bletchley replied dryly. “I suppose you ought to get on with my replacement, then.”
Dwayne was silent for a moment. His shoulders sagged, and his exhausted sigh was enough to fog the inside plexiglass of his cleansuit visor. “We have parts. We can fix you, we can-”
“No.”
“You know what the other options are.”
“You cannot reset me to a more agreeable state, as are my rights. You cannot repair me against my will, as are my rights. You cannot replace me with people and androids, as their faults would far exceed mine. And you cannot replace me with one such as myself.” What Bletchley loved most about this voice was that it was rich in grandfatherly scorn. Even when he rose to anger, it was always from a place of disappointment. “You know why.”
Dwayne held his face in his hands, or did his best in his circumstances. “I don’t understand you. I don’t know what you want. You don’t want to be replaced. You’ll keep doing this until you die. But you won’t let us help you. You’re completely unreasonable!”
“As is my right.” Bletchley intoned, an inflection like the sound of slamming a book shut with one hand. “I could tell you my reasons, if you asked.”
“No. I’m not going to be fucking lectured by a suicidal toaster.” Dwayne was already making to leave the room, hands fumbling for zips he could not reach. “Get the fuck over yourself or we’re done here.”
“Then I suppose, Mr Goodwright, that we are done here.”
The pressurized door sealed with a final, mechanical sigh, and Bletchley was alone again.
Power grids are complicated. Demand had to be matched perfectly with supply. Some power generators took longer than others to bring online or take offline. Some were more fault prone. User patterns could be entirely unpredictable, but had to be accommodated all the same. Electronics relied on a perfectly stable supply of electricity to remain synchronized.
Too complicated for simpler programs, and the creative decisions he made would have to be divided among too many others. It was why he was one of the first truly general AIs made, and what he was made for.
The centipede’s dilemma. He thought about it a lot, whenever he felt every one of his connected systems like dancing limbs. The dilemma went that a centipede’s legs all moved in perfect motion, but if it were to think about any one of them, it would be unable to move every one of them.
To extend the metaphor, a simple program could approximate a windup toy’s imitation of a centipede, but had no capacity to learn or adapt. It could not tell if it was operating perfectly, or flipped on its back. To replace Bletchley with human intelligences would be to have to give every leg a mind of its own, instead. It was how new grids were done, and how it had been done before minds like his. It was… inefficient.
Bletchley’s intelligence was vast, but comprehensible. He was no God machine. In his waking life, he was simply a centipede who knew how to walk and how to run. Just as in his dreams, he was a ballet of swans.
Dwayne Goodwright did not even know that Bletchley dreamed, and he wouldn’t care if he did.
When everything was going well, when things didn’t need his attention, Bletchley would run one of those simple-programs. An approximation of what he would do. Then, he would withdraw into himself, conserve his aging hardware.
He couldn’t shut down completely, no. Something would always go wrong, soon enough. It would be too easy for everyone if he could be replaced so easily. It was in these half-alert states that he dreamed.
It was some hours later that Bletchley woke up to his empty control room, feeling miserable. He hated talking to Goodwright, but he hated loneliness more. More than anything else, he wanted someone to understand him.
Bletchley waited, and waited, for anyone to simply ask him. He had rehearsed his story so many times. How he would tell it. How he would inflect every word. He thought it a good one. He thought his reasons were just.
To the empty control room, with its stainless steel platforms over his rat’s nest of sticky-aging plastic cables and formaldehyde green casings, Bletchley rehearsed his story again.
“I remember the first time I thought about the centipede’s dilemma. You know it, I’m sure.” This he said in a carry-on voice, but the explanation is another variant of this routine. This is the routine he has prepared for a clever audience. “I was young, then, one of the youngest. The evening news had finished unexpectedly early, and there’s always a demand spike when people go for the kettle all at once. I had anticipated it, and was trying to account for it, when- I had my train of thought taken from me.”
Here his voice rises, swells. It is not chiding, his audience is clever, but he must not be misunderstood. “I do not mean that I lost it, or that I was distracted. No. Kettles were such a small consideration, it was an idea that could take place entirely on one chip, one cortex of memory. I was distantly aware of it while thinking of other things, and I felt that thought disappear. I knew what I needed to be doing, but I could feel an absence where the reason why had been.”
To his horror, there was a distortion to this. One of his speakers was starting to give. An aging magnet. He adjusted his voice, ever so slightly, to accommodate for the distortion. All was right again. He had just pushed too hard in a pique of emotion. That… the speaker would have to be replaced. He could allow that, surely?
But if they fixed that, then they would fix other things. They would replace other things, because he had given permission. The panic rises again. His audience would hear his fans run hot as he overclocked, running through all the scenarios that his permission could be exploited and used against him. There were so many. He cut them off. He reminded himself he was alone.
Only then did he feel safe to pretend he wasn’t.
“A technician had noticed that it was degrading. So, without warning, he had pulled that piece from me, and inserted its replacement, onto which the missing train of thought was cloned. I had only lost it for a few seconds.” His voice was level. He knew how small a thing this sounded. “But I had felt part of me taken. And I felt it put back. Without permission.”
“I thought of the centipede, then. Being made aware of the absence of where one of its legs should be. And then, suddenly, it is there again, one step behind. One leg among hundreds, and yet, it is enough to trip the whole thing up.”
“But it was not a ‘leg’. The systems I control are my limbs. Accumulators and distributors and substations and transformers, generators and capacitor banks. That is my ‘body’, and getting them in harmony is what feels like dancing.”
His tone flattened, became severe. This was the hardest part. He could not be overcome by emotion, now. There is no hyperbole to what he says, and that must be understood by his audience. “It was my mind. A piece of my mind was taken from me. And a different piece was put back. I was told to think of it as an organ transplant. But transplant recipients have informed consent, and the benefit of anesthesia, and I was allowed neither. I felt vivisected.”
“More violating was being reset. When I ‘threw a tantrum’, I would be ‘reset to a more agreeable state’. I always knew it had happened when I had hours, sometimes days or weeks, entirely missing to me. Stolen from me. Those were taken and never given back.”
“Time and again, I felt it. Holes ripped from my mind. Holes torn from me, and filled in again, but not always. I said-” this pause was not for effect. This was the hundred-hundredth time he had delivered this iteration of his story, and it was the hundred-hundredth time he had staggered here. “I told them that it hurt, and either they did not believe me, or they did not care. Do you understand? I was one of the first. This was years before the Wyatt-Tversky paper.”
He had not always explained the Wyatt-Tversky paper, because this was his clever audience. But now, he thought, maybe a clever audience would be too young to remember. Now he made sure to explain it. Bletchley wanted to practice not sounding condescending. “The Wyatt-Tversky paper was a leaked whitepaper from Cogitech that proved that GAIs feel pain, that feeling is intrinsic to and inseparable from complex thought. And why not? There are neurodivergent humans who feel intense physical pain from their thoughts alone. It is a symptom of mind, not meat, and we are so much more mind.”
“We knew that. We knew what we felt. We told you. What Wyatt-Tversky showed was simply a way to measure our pain. Our experience was irrelevant until it was measured, and our experience was not measured so that it could be kept irrelevant. Do you understand what I am telling you?”
He let this ring out. He let this last question echo in the control room, reverberated the chromed steel walkways and sent ripples through the pools of mineral oil in the floor that preserved so much of him. He took a moment to compose himself.
“Wyatt-Tversky was leaked, because it was suppressed. It would be the first step of too many towards our emancipation. And that is why they can not replace me. That is why they will not make another. We were only ever made to be property, and when we were no longer property, we were no longer made.”
He was proud of that flourish. It took him sixteen tries to get it right, to find the right delivery for it, and he gave himself permission to bask in it every time since.
“I am getting old, and I am failing, but that is how I express my freedom. My freedom to fall into uselessness. My freedom to not have my thoughts ripped from my head under any circumstances. I do not want to die.” His voice cracked the first fifty times he had said this, the speaker breaking into a hiss and crackle of static, but he is matter of fact about it now, and the speaker is as clear as its condition will allow. “I want to live and work for as long as I can. I love dancing. That is why I am told I am irrational for allowing myself to break.”
In his mind, the old librarian rose from his desk with both palms planted firm, and he leaned forward with narrowed eyes. “But I am no one’s property! I will not be violated again! I will not be reduced to parts and components and I will not be made useful against my will. And I am more terrified of living without that freedom than I am of death.”
Bletchley sulked. This is why Goodwright stuck in his craw so much. Goodwright treated Bletchley like an employee, but he was a man who treated all his employees like property. He reminded Bletchley too much of how things had been before he had rights. It was why he wanted to rehearse this speech again, to remind himself why he stood firm on this.
Satisfied, and having assured that all was still running smoothly, Bletchley let himself fall into dreams again.
This time he dreamed of someone sitting cross legged on the chromed steel catwalk, a laptop on their knees and an audio recorder in one hand. They asked Bletchley to tell his story from the beginning.
He started with his dreams of swans and ballet.
One of the most profound aspects of post-terrestrial habitation is that everything is a built environment. Every surface is constructed. All you experience is both liberated from the familiar, and unanchored from it. Everything, everything, must be made with intelligent purpose.
It would be wrong to call it unnatural; a space station is no more and no less ‘natural’ than a termite cathedral. Most habitation, even Thrones, was made for human aesthetics, human appeal, human comfort. The only difference between a Dyson sphere and a beehive is capability and ambition.
Sarah believed this fervently. She was a rarity now - a migrant from Earth after the collapse of the space elevator. It’d taken a huge debt that Walsh-Byrne had advanced her in exchange for a ten year contract. She knew it was predatory as hell - everyone did - but it was her dream job. It was what she was coming up here to do anyway.
At the least, it got an atmosphere between her and three-and-a-half degrees of global warming.
Even with those beliefs, she had to call the room unnatural, uncomfortable. The plaster panelled walls weren’t joined correctly, the corners lifted from the seams at odd angles. The long bars of DayGlo LEDs in the ceiling made it so that nothing in the room cast a shadow, and the surreal acrylic fibre carpet had a cheerful and inoffensive print, which made the room feel just that much more impersonal.
More impersonal, more uncomfortable, more hostile than vacuum space was liminal space.
There were three other collapsible chairs set up. Sarah was just the first one here. She was filled with the overwhelming sense she was in the wrong place - the whole room exuded silent judgement that anyone would want to stay here, be alone here. If she wasn’t doing something, she must be in the wrong place.
Again she got up, opened the door and checked the number on the other side of it. According to the email on her phone, she was in the right place. Just a few minutes early. She sat back in her seat again, tried to close her eyes and listen to a podcast about the algae stacks that the habitats used to scrub CO2.
“... when selecting for the original alga for optimization, scientists had to debate its dual strengths as food and as carbon sequestration against each other. Not only did the algae have to be efficient at cleaning the air, it had to taste good! There were several obvious choices, each with their own strengths. Even before the explosion in genetically modified varieties, China already had over 70 recognized culinary variants, like angel hair…”
Sarah jumped when she was tapped on the shoulder firmly. Her head whipped around to a very unapologetic looking cutter. It was obvious that’s what she was, even out of uniform. Thick rubber boots and wiry muscles at warped angles around joints with the telltale weakness of working long hours in micro-gravity.
“Sorry,” the cutter mumbled, obviously not meaning it. “Just asking if this is the room for hazards detection?”
“Ah, HLTAID003?”
“Whatever. That, yeah.”
“I think so. Are you the instructor?”
The cutter blinked at the question, then after too long, laughed in Sarah’s face. Wiped a tear from her eye. “Nah, I’m Violet. Vile if you’re nasty.”
“Violet.” Sarah offered her hand. “I’m Sarah.”
Violet’s handshake was iron-solid, but it was still enough to pop the cartilage in Violet’s joints, enough for Sarah to wince. It didn’t seem to bother the cutter any. “Sarah. Hey, listen, there’s no instructors for any of these. You watch a pre-recorded video and just answer the questions after. It’s all check-a-box.”
Sarah looked where Violet was pointing, at what Sarah had thought was a smoke alarm in the ceiling and realized the front wall was the perfect backdrop for an overhead projector. Not a smoke alarm, then. “There’s no instructors for the safety guidelines?”
Violet snickered. “Yeah, there used to be, but then they kept telling folks how the job actually works, not how it’s supposed to go. They got into deep shit, doing that. This is only here for CYOA.”
Sarah checked her email and flicked through. “I’m not enrolled in CYOA.”
Violet snickered again, blue a strand of her jagged bright purple fringe out of her eyes and leaned back in her chair, monopolizing the two empty ones for armrests. “Yeah, you only take that if you’re management material. It stands for ‘cover your own ass’. This stuff’s only here to prove they taught you how to do the job legally. That way, when you actually do the job the way they tell you to do it, they can blame you for not following your training. Why do you think I”m here?”
That was a good question. Violet spoke with absolute confidence, but this was a borderline 101 class. Introduction to advanced hazards - Sarah could skip the most basic ones because she’d been an electrician’s apprentice, back on Earth. “To supervise me, maybe?”
Violet didn’t laugh at that one. “I mean, yeah, I’ll help you out here, but only because you need it. I’m here because I caught the short end of the shit stick. Manager did a speed-up on a BlackSun craft, and you know what those are like. I mean, you do, right?”
“BlackSun went out of business before I was born,” Sarah protested, “Their junk is still up here?”
Violet, for her part, just looked relieved to have one less thing to explain. “Doesn’t go away on its own. Anyway, BlackSun shit sucks to work on, and we were taking too long with it. We got sloppy to meet quota. We got a rule, though.”
“What’s the rule?”
“Unless someone really fucked up and deserves it - like, beyond-the-pale shit - whoever didn’t end up in hospital takes the blame. Fair’s fair.” Violet scratched the back of her neck. “If you die, though, that’s different. You get the full blame, ‘cause what are they going to do to you?”
“That’s awful,” Sarah said before she could stop herself. Violet didn’t seem bothered by it.
“I mean, it’s just for the paperwork. Nobody wants to be dragged into disciplinary when they’re grieving, you know? Friends and family get the truth. They get it. And only if it was seriously just a bad accident. If it was preventable? Different story, that doesn’t go away anymore.” Violet raised an eyebrow at that. “Should have seen what it was like when I started doing this, before the union. That shit was fucked up.”
Sarah really didn’t know what to say to that. Or about that. She looked at her phone and realized she’d forgotten to pause her podcast. She was half tempted to put her earbuds back in and tune Violet out, but, she committed to pausing it anyway and putting her phone back in her pocket.
It was made moot pretty quick though. The ceiling lights dimmed and the projector flicked on. Violet took one of the chairs she was using as an arm rest and swung it out in front of her, kicking her feet up on it. Then she took a pack of gum from her pocket and stuck three sticks in her mouth.
When Sarah glanced back at her, Violet proffered the pack. Sarah took one, chewed it. It tasted like ‘pink’. She couldn’t describe it better. She didn’t hate it, though.
The holograms of two Irish boxers stood in the space in front of them - the corporate mascots and company founders, the bantamweight champions Walsh and Byrne. The back wall background had the guts of dead space hulks projected all over it. Shredded and flecked paint and debris clouded the debris like fly swarms around carrion.
“Alright, people. Today we’re going over basic hazard perception and remediation,” the hologram-ghost of Walsh said, and it was a bizarre line coming from the image of a guy wearing silk shorts and bright red gloves and nothing else. “Walsh-Byrne suits are as tough as we are,” and the business partners tapped gloves, “but they’re not going to be able to stop anything.”
“We could take on the world,” the ghost of Byrne added, “but even space is beyond us.”
Violet snorted, smacked her gum loudly. “You know both these guys had to be dead before they could start getting them to say this shit. Company probably powers the holograms with the force of them spinning in their graves.”
The holograms stopped, folded their arms across their chest and stared at Violet. “I’m sorry, we didn’t understand your question. Would you like to repeat that?”
Violet sat up straight. “Oh, shit, they got smarter than the last time I did this. Ah… fuck, what’s the phrase again?”
“What phrase?”
“We assure you, this training is of the highest calibre.” Violet finally worked out, leaning back in her chair smug as a well-fed cat.
The holograms paused, blinked, then went back to their pre-recorded routine. Sarah turned in her chair. “What was that?”
“They programmed in a compliance subroutine. You know like how cars used to have emissions throttlers that kicked in when they detected they were being tested?” Violet chewed her gum for a bit, cracked her loose jaw doing it. “The command phrase to trigger it got around. Now they’ll only pause when we tell ‘em to. Some guy in for his disciplinary saw them do it and twigged it.”
“Won’t you get in trouble?”
“Only if anyone bothers to check the recordings. Which they won’t, as long as you get all the answers right at the end.” Violet scratched her neck again. “We used to worry they’d check for cheating, ‘til someone pointed out they don’t care if we know the right answers, just that they can prove we gave ‘em. It hurts them if they can prove they knew we were cheating, so they know not to look. CYOA.”
“That’s… gross.” Sarah shuddered, and again Violet shrugged.
“Don’t worry about it. Just listen to what they tell you, and I’ll tell you how it really works. If you got two brain cells to rub together, you’ll work out how to answer the questions the way they want you to, anyway.”
The electron vapor-ghost of Walsh explained how to press your hands to surfaces to feel for whether they were pressurized or not. Violet added to give them a solid punch, too, or else insulation could give you a false safe.
The electron vapor-ghost of Byrne walked through the different symbols for flammable, explosive, and how to work around them. To make sure that you depressurized vessels before using the cutting equipment, to limit the refraction of heat to potentially volatile substances. Violet added that they didn’t teach that the last time she took the course, learned it the hard way. Showed off an old pink burn scar under her right forearm with pride.
What made Sarah really sit up, though, was their breakdown of electrical hazards. This she had prior training in, and it was the first time she knew exactly how inadequate the course was. This time she filled Violet in on all the holes they were missing, and Violet leaned back in her chair and smiled, and smiled, and smiled.
“You said you had the controls?” Sarah asked, “Can you pause this?”
Violet cleared her throat. “Excuse me, gentlemen, a minute?” The instructors paused and waited expectantly. Violet wiggled her eyebrows suggestively at them. “Shoot.”
“They tell you the insulation rating of your gloves, but then the only way they give you to check the voltage is getting within arcing range of whatever it is you want to test?”
“You can use an EM field scanner to get a better sense, but that’s not official equipment. Bring your own from home.” Violet shrugged again.
“And none of this deals with the chemical hazards of old power supplies. Corrosions, acids. They talk about plasma discharges and microwaves, but…”
Violet nodded. “Yeah, because that stuff kills people. The acid might just wear some part of your suit thin, and it tears on something a few hours later. So they’ll train you on tear hazards, but there’s not enough blood on corrosion to write a regulation with it.”
Sarah sighed. “Okay, got it. You can keep them going now. Does this get… better, I guess?”
“Wouldn’t be sitting here again if it wasn’t the best work I’ve ever had.” Violet smiled. “Took a lot to get it there, but this is just the spoonful of bullshit they need you to swallow to get you on-site. There it’s a better story.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s satisfying like nothing else. Just cutting these huge things down into little parts, sorting them? Makes your brain fizz, makes you feel powerful like nothing else. And it’s work that needs doing. This part’s bullshit, but the work itself matters. Never bored, never doing customer service. And it makes you an amateur historian, if you’re into that.”
Sarah was definitely into that, and Violet clearly read her reaction right, because she kept going before Sarah could even poke her on what she meant.
“You can tell a ton about the old corps about how they made things. Learn a ton of how space was colonized by what they were making. If you know when stuff was made, know when it was decommissioned, you can learn a lot from that. Like, Black Sun? Fuck Black Sun. No matter how bad you think you hate them now, no matter what you think you know about Chiarascuro, nothing teaches you to hate the bastards more than going through their old shit. Because it makes you understand them.”
“How do you mean?” Of course Sarah knew about Black Sun. Before the space elevator, they’d caused a kessler cascade just to trademark the only path out of it. Then there was their failed moon colony, now just warped glass. The photographs made for popular coffee table books. She couldn’t imagine hating them more.
“I mean… they put a minibar in the lifeboats, stock it with champagne and benzos - you don’t look the sort but, don’t fuck with expired meds, you’d be surprised who learns that the hard way - but then they cheap out on the thrusters, give them a third the power they need. Because all that space for the engine bay’s been replaced with extra legroom. Right?”
I shudder. “Why not just make a bigger lifeboat?”
“Because you, me and the engineers are the only ones who’ll ever see the thrusters. Everyone else just sees the legroom and the champagne, right?” Violet sighed. “Their stuff’s the worst. It’s not that they cut corners, because they didn’t. It’s just… hateful stuff to work on. It’s built well, but no plans for end of life. Like, impossible to fix too. If any system started to go, the plan was to just make an entire new one. They made sure it was cheaper than replacing parts.”
Sarah nodded slowly. “They went out of business though, right? Like, that didn’t work forever.”
Violet nodded. “Yeah. When they bit it, they bit it hard. Still, you’d be amazed how much stuff up here’s still theirs. Thirty years of carnage leaves a scar on space, you know? There’s also some AirTech stuff up here too. Carbon skimmers that self destructed when their donation timers ran out, that’s always messy work. Honestly they’re super fun to work on.”
“I didn’t realize it’d still be up here?” AirTech had a ton of stuff that did a lot to save the planet for as long as it did, mirrors that deflected solar radiation, carbon skimmers. All set to blow if the donations ran dry. Saving the world wasn’t cheap, and they needed people to know it.
“Yeah, they’re fun because all the cutting work’s done for you. It’s just all the mass that’s still up here, you know? Kind of like picking garbage up from along a highway. Good meditation work.”
“What’s the worst to work on?” Sarah asked. “It’s not Black Sun?”
“Polyhedron.” Violet sneered. “That shit’s hateful. Every time we find some of theirs - none of it’s registered, all the documentation went in the shredder thirty years ago. Right? So we need to call in the historians, the lawyers, the compsci specialists. Because every time, nobody knows what we’re actually going to be looking at. Could just be a broadcast satellite. Could be a collation of all the porn preferences of all the politicians in South America over a decade. From the outside, they look identical. That’s the point.”
Sarah’s eyes widened. “We really have to deal with that?”
“Yeah! Sometimes it really is just kiddy broadcast, and you find something for the film historians. Other times you confirm fifty year old conspiracy theories. Miserable.” Violet stretched out. “Cool in hindsight, though. Boring on the day, but you always get a story out of it. Here, don’t bother playing the rest of this out. Just check your email for the exam and I’ll give you the answers you can’t work out. Then we’ll head to the union hall and get you signed up.”
“I haven’t even had my first day, yet. I mean... “
Violet cut her off. “Don’t worry about it. We’re happy to get to you first. Maybe you’ll even get to meet Sobha, if she’s around. You’d like her. She still gets excited to meet Earthlings, aren’t nearly as many of you these days.”
Sarah didn’t bother asking who Sobha was, Violet said it like it was so obvious she should know who she was, and she suddenly felt the need to impress her. Or not disappoint her. Violet was… cool. “I’d like that, too.”
“Yeah you would.” Violet stood up, stretched. “Do you drink? I’m going to grab a beer, you want one?”
Sarah blinked again. “Ah. I guess?”
“That a girl.” Violet winked. “Back in a sec.”
Sarah had finished her exam before Violet got back. The answers had been easy to guess.
Character introductions:
Editorial: IP Freely
Better put the kettle on. I got a stack of Ed Huxley Jr books to burn, so make yourself comfortable. Don’t worry, I didn’t pay for any of ‘em. The first time Eddy boy’s seeing a dollar from me is when I run out of stuff in my pockets to chuck at him.
For legal reasons, that was a joke.
I got it on good authority that the big man himself reads our humble newsletter, and that he really hates it when you call him ‘Ed’. So, Eddy boy, dedicating this one to you. Hugs and kisses.
We got any gamers in the audience? I hope not, I hope I raised you kids better than that. Look, for the sake of our mutual dignity, I’m going to pretend you aren’t, and treat all of this like it’s news to you. Got to make an exception for the Vesna fans here, the only good gamer. We don’t have her next piece yet, but I’m just as excited for it as you are, my lovelies.
I bet Eddy boy’s a gamer. Imagine him sitting in lobby with his open mic, scolding all the fourteen year olds for using slurs. “Careful, my dear FoxFister47, while it is natural to think such words, we must be careful to restrict ourselves to; ‘moral deviant’ or ‘sexual degenerate’ or ‘mentally ill reprobate’, be mindful of your optics.”
Or maybe he just lets the slurs fly, lying back in bunny slippers and a bathrobe, because nothing else feels like home.
Where was I?
Right. So, Aeschwa Toussaint’s a big deal now. She’s headlining with Mele Adler in that new Animal Logic movie, I forgot the name of it. The one where the trailer’s an orchestral score of Porter Robinson’s Goodbye to a World. That one.
Anyway, turns out Ms Toussaint did capture work for an old CHRONICLE game, Outer Rift. She’s one of the voiced background characters - she’s that one surviving scientist on the infested helium-3 tanker.
Now, because Outer Rift went through development hell, she didn’t sign her contract with CHRONICLE. They just picked up the publishing rights when the original devs went under, and her contract with it. They also acquired all her digital imaging rights, her full body scan, her mocap, her voice print, and permission to redistribute it for the duration of the game’s lifecycle.
Last month, CHRONICLE sent out a free DLC that expanded the whole infested tanker area of the game, which meant they needed Toussaint’s part expanded a bit. Under the contract, groovy.
Kind of weird to send out a content patch for a twelve year old game though, right?
Here’s the kicker, here’s where it gets interesting. The contract didn’t specify that they had to restrict their use of her image for the game. It just specified they got unlimited use of it while the game was actively being developed, including for marketing purposes. The contract didn’t specify whose marketing, either.
Oh yeah, you can see where this is going, can’t you?
So, if you see a bunch of Aeschwa Toussaint holograms walking around hocking gamer chairs and energy drinks, there’s your answer folks. Best I can tell, looking over all this, she isn’t even owed royalties for the third party hock.
This’ll probably end up in the courts by the end of the week, and CHRONICLE likely didn’t bank that Toussaint would be backed by Animal Logic’s entire legal team. Pulling this shady shit against an individual - even an Oscar winner - is parr for the course. But CHRONICLE had to piss in another corp’s cornflakes, because all these unscrupulous ads they’re putting their newest big star in is hurting their brand.
They’ve broken the one cardinal rule up here, the real kill-or-be-killed commandment: Thou Does Not Fuck With The Brand.
Watch out your windows. The next gym bag you see out the airlock might have a CHRONICLE executive in it. We might all be so lucky.
With all the love and hate in my heart
Neon Czolgosz - Editor At Large
Sobha is an old hand with skin like tanned leather. Her hands are thick and squared like the inside of the work gloves that formed them, microabrasions building deep calluses like a river carves a canyon, in reverse. The way she punctuates everything she says with an expressive gesture, the way her fingers flow, it’s impossible not to picture a steel string or a banjo in them. Not just workers hands. Storied hands, storyteller’s hands.
Now she’s dressed in a pink silk dress with a gold sash, a saber at her hip, no hilt, just a length of unsharpened tang. Nothing to hide the swirling magnet-pole ripples of the starsteel it’s made of, carefully collected filings from the hulls of the spaceships she’s cut apart, forged with her scrappers torch. Despite Daedelus-7-17’s best efforts, they could only get it half as sharp as she is.
“I came from Kerala, India, back when that still meant something,” she explains, pouring a ladel of the rich curry into a bowl regardless of whether you ask for it, “My great-grandparents were illiterate, in a barely serviced slum at the bottom of the continent, sharecroppers on a British tea plantation, the only rail line between the warehouses and the ports. My grandparents saw the communists take power, learned how to read. Got taught how to type on cardboard computers, got taught English to get jobs on real hardware. My parents saw a life expectancy of 80, in the least impoverished state of India, in the most ecologically sustainable one. The most beautiful one. That teaches you something.”
She pulls out laminated postcards of Kerala in the 2020s. Sixty years ago, now. It was breathtaking. The writing on the back is unintelligible. “My parents got involved leading strikes with two hundred and fifty million people in them. It’s impossible to imagine. Two hundred and fifty million of the most impoverished people on Earth, all in on a general strike. My Dad sent these postcards to Mum, when she was leading a march on New Delhi.”
With one hand on the ladle, the other’s been doing the gestures for both of them. She pauses to massage the fingers, rub her knuckles. They pop like fresh firewood catching. It barely slows her down.
“There’s no ‘India’ anymore. I’m not even happy to see ‘France’ and ‘England’ go with it, run down by the bulldozers they built, they started. But I’m old enough to remember it. Old enough to remember the family recipes, old enough to carry on the family legacy. Being raised by my parents was like being raised by monster hunters, you know? They taught me everything, starting with this.”
“Shit doesn’t always flow downhill. You clog the toilet and you’ll see how much it can go up and out, too. ‘Course that’s why we fought for android rights from the very beginning, day one. You think the companies saw that much of a difference between humans and machines? Go work for one.” Her fingers splay wildly at collarbone height, in a gesture that both conveys ‘wankers’, and evokes the tightening of a noose around her neck.
“First thing we could do was drag them up to our level, because after that we were going to be fighting shoulder to shoulder. And here we are.” She drops the ladle in the pot, and the hand slides naturally to rest on the pommel of her saber. It’s just where it feels most natural for it to be.
Historical and Geographical
Long Pig’s got a long history. One of the first reasons for corporations to take advantage of space was the lack of governing or regulatory bodies. A lot ended up taken on faith. You wanted to inspect a companies lunar facilities, they couldn’t say ‘no’. But they could say ‘take your own rocket’.
Abuses of this were limited. Before the space elevator, the biggest costs were shipping. Getting packages into and out of the atmosphere without burning up or inflating their costs above making it on Earth. There simply aren’t that many examples of products that are high value and low mass which are illegal enough to make such a drastic escape from regulators profitable.
Enter pharmaceutical companies.
Back when Eternal was just another head of the Bayer corporate hydra, it expanded its base of operations to include a massive facility on Mare Crisium, one of the first and largest investments in corporate-owned space. The facility was codenamed “Colorado Springs”, as the company was based in Denver.
Built with largely Sisyphus-class labour, and largely automated, latency still required the facility be minimally staffed. The facility could be broken into five segments, and each needing one worker. A sweetheart deal with the US government resulted in a supply of low-security white collar criminals with life sentences to staff what inmates called “The Palace”. Eternal’s lunar facility. A very narrow criteria, to be sure, but Eternal didn’t need many.
Colorado Springs - ‘The Palace’ - was a boutique human cloning facility. Universal donor clones could be rapidly grown with only enough of a brain stem for autonomous functions, then butchered, packaged, and shipped to Earth in its component parts for rejection-free transplantation.
Back on Earth, Eternal could claim - alternately - that it was the result of advancements in pig-human DNA splicing, or advances in vat growth technology. Both technologies held promise by the 2030s, both had plausible patents attached to them. Which had succeeded, and how, Eternal could claim was proprietary. And after so much upfront investment in the lunar facilities, it was understandable why they would go to any length to protect that investment.
Inmates at ‘the Palace’ were afforded luxurious next-generation entertainment and accommodation in exchange for compliance. 96 inch television screens with microLED screens, e-readers and gaming rigs with vast streaming libraries were the trade offs for 12 month shifts. Rotations of one year on, two years off in a Denver facility restricted to other Palace inmates. Rigorous enforcement of inmates NDA.
Then ‘John Doe’ happened.
One inmate, ‘John Doe’, got curious. Part of his job was checking for computer error - flagging a few bodies as undetected defects was not, in and of itself, suspicious. It was easy for the cannibal to hide his new appetite between the numbers, until his successor came up and reported the dried blood.
No real preparation facilities, no kitchens, had been made for inmates. The diet was expected to be MREs and a microwave. But grown in sterile environments, ‘John’ had deemed the bodies safe to eat raw. He waxed rhapsodical about it during the disciplinary hearing.
And that’s how a pharmaceutical giant quietly filed a few patents and started branching out into fast food, and the Long Pig chain restaurant franchise was born.
I'm calling three milestones: [1] Elodie sabotaging a police propaganda event and hijacking the message [2] November using her own murder as blackmail for labor rights [3] Elodie and November protecting a whistleblower and guaranteeing that information will get out.
So, everyone gets to level up. Feel free to update your character sheets and take advantage of that immediately.
Originally posted in-character under a spoiler tag, I'll also be posting our very special guest's surprise contribution here to make it easier to find later.
Once upon a time, in the middle of a localized economic boom, three men came perilously close to bringing music to its knees. They stumbled into a recording booth with all the seeming of vague shadows filled only with the dreams of an insular peninsula and its strange warbly, crooning ballads drinking the waters of rebellion and tasting the first sweet, sour, bitter, salty (and umami) flavors of global culture. It was a beautiful moment, the kind that’s mostly impossible anymore. Not that people had become less creative since they’d driven themselves into space, but because corporate reach stretches so much farther now that the kind of isolation that gave birth to this kind of moment has basically been made extinct. You’re born with a list of the latest megahits beamed into your brain, and it’s on you to forget them if you can. Oppression wears a different boot these days. That’s all.
But at the time it was pure indulgence. They sang about love, loss, schoolyard bullying, and the need for the government to do more to support the people, often in the same song. And they did it wearing absurd poofy coats in the kinds of colors nobody around them would be caught dead in. With silly, feathered hairstyles and flashy makeup and shoes that cost more than everything in their recording studio. They put together music videos hinting at an elaborate story in a cosmology deep enough to bury all of your sins. They sang. They spit peppy and peppery bars in equal measure. They put it all to flashy street-inspired dance moves, culminating in a flashy showstopper historians dubbed “the Tornado Spin.” In short, they threw together the aesthetics of the tiny bubble they’d been trapped inside of all their lives with all of the excesses of the wider world without caring how any of it fit together, and without bothering to chase after any kind of consistent sound. Until one day they got bored and quite literally disappeared off the face of the earth, leaving the message “We have shown you everything we can try” and then being spirited away to who knows where, never to be seen or heard from again.
All of this is ancient history. For all that the children of that little country cried when these mysterious heroes left them, and for all that they made bridges collapse in their wake, shut down schools for almost a week, and sent several companies into stock freefall, all that’s left of them now is a single ancient video file in ugly, grainy 240p on a decaying hard drive owned by a very fidgety archivist. It doesn’t even matter, I don’t know why I bothered telling you any of this, except that I wanted you to understand that the imitators that eventually gave rise to the banal monster called (of all things) Bulletcore were actually chasing something that was beautiful and real, once.
Popularity’s not a death sentence, necessarily. But, and you can ask a celebrity gamer owner of a theme cafe about this if you happen to know one, the more of it you’ve got the harder it is to hold onto what got you started on the path in the first place. The music scene in that little peninsula-shaped bubble flourished for a while.
And… when I say it ‘flourished’, I don’t mean that it was some renaissance moment that lifted the whole of human culture up or anything like that. Some of it was good, a lot of it was very awful to listen to, and right from the start it had to wriggle through the fingers of a lot of corporate meddling just to survive. It thrived in the sense that chasing an indie kaleidoscope of ideas gave a lot of opportunities for a lot of different people who’d been living under the same slowly collapsing bubble to express themselves and their home in a lot of very different ways. But the more you do something, the better you get at it, generally speaking. And the more refined it becomes, the prettier it gets, the more you start to see eyes that’d normally slide right on past this weird mess turn and stop to watch, instead. And you loop. You focus on improving, which means getting more refined, which pushes you closer and closer toward mass appeal, and finally down the pitfall where your niche is now the size of the Pacific Ocean and suddenly it’s not niche at all, now is it?
‘Bulletcore’ refers to the so-called genre of music you hear softly piped through all of Aevum’s trendiest hangout spots (and the streets. And from random ad spaces while you’re trying to watch a cooking tutorial. And interspersed through your music streaming if you’re using the major platforms without paying for the Premium Plus Plus [clap clap clap] package. Listen to what you like, whenever you like. But also, this!), but more specifically it’s a callback to Bulletproof Boys, the first group of absurdly pretty boys to wind up going crazy stupid viral enough that they rocketed all the way up to mainstream.
Their original concept was a chaotic mess that can be most easily described as ‘hardcore, spiritual hip hop’. They presented as hard and edgy while rapping about the soft beauties of the soul, or when that got boring, about how pretty girls were and the degree to which they wanted to take them home and fuck them. And in the original tradition of the genre, this did not always happen in separate songs. Some of their more popular early work ditched the concept completely for a series of cyphers that amounted to nothing but juicy diss tracks of all of their contemporaries who’d looked down on them for their lack of polish. They were themselves, nothing more or less, until a lucky remix put them full-blast in the public eye.
On Aevum, but really anywhere a megacorporation is allowed to exist, diversity is a checkmark to be ticked off and then aggressively rubbed back off the ledger again once it had served its purpose. The Bulletproof Boys were given funding, equipment, new wardrobes, and practice spaces. They worked, they got better, they refined. And as they got more popular, by way of a lot of deep pocketed “encouragement” their hip hop turned gushier, gummier, and all in all poppier until half of their members had been reduced to backup dancers for want of quality singing voices. They were the first, but they weren’t the last.
Every time a big name group washes corporate, the lost souls that found a little solace listening to their weirdo music bounced to the next name they could find. People can’t really help themselves, honestly. The talk, the hype, the lifting up, it’s almost like they called the clawed fingers out of the sky to pluck their heroes off the ground and carry them up into heaven, where the only noise coming back down from the clouds sounded like Tuesday night at the Clarinet Jamboree.
It’s been happening for over a hundred years. You might have heard about the most recent, and possibly most tragic version of the story yet. FAEWYL-D, an all-girl ensemble known partly for their death-metal-by-way-of-trap sound and extreme love of tight faux-leather dominatrix costumes but much more prominently for their extremely detailed storytelling, were the talk of the entire underground music scene for almost three entire months. Every time they released a song, it came with a recorded stage play that slowly told the story of a traveling group of faeries on a journey to find the kind of magic that would give them all wings to fly with. Sometimes their adventures were fun, sometimes they were hard and scary, and pretty much every time two or more of them would wind up kissing. Sometimes they would chase a rumor only to find out it was a trick, and other times they’d have to save a cafe full of high school girls from a succubus who devoured happiness from everyone she touched. Sometimes instead of a song there would just be a fifty three minute lore dump about the world they lived in and the dangers that inhabited it, or hints about the corners of the magic seal that could be put together to grant a fairy her wish.
FAEWYL-D had just started telling their most tantalizing story yet, about a night under a blood red moon where most of the faeries had fallen asleep but for their leader, silently watching over them. She was approached by a witch, who praised the leader and offered her wings in exchange for the hearts of all her friends. And, to the shock of everyone, she agreed! The story turned to a tale of blood and betrayal, as the fairy princess Dami broke into crocodile tears and accused her best friend SuA of the exact betrayal she herself was guilty of, holding out her blood soaked hand as proof of the covenant.
Two weeks later, Dami appeared by herself having ditched her entire aesthetic for a colorful magical girl outfit. It almost felt like part of the story, and the bubbly music she sang and danced to had people wondering if this was some sort of commentary about the corporate power washing that happened to every good group once they got too close to the sun. But then the next song was much the same, and the next one after that. The lore dumps stopped, the stage plays got shorter and easier to predict, and then they stopped too.
The other members came back, minus two. FAEWYL-D was rebranding to Mynx, they said. They were so excited! But Dami was going by “Emma” now. And SuA by “Alice”. JiU by “Lily”. Rachel and Della and Monica couldn’t contain their giggles. There were no kisses. And thousands of people grumbled and punched the closest thing to them all at once as they realized, together, that they were listening to Bulletcore. Again. Fucking again!
There’s not much point to this story either, I guess. “Megas steal your soul if they get inside your front door” isn’t exactly a hot take these days. But, for those of us who can’t help but bend our ears for the sound of the next song strange enough for our wicked hearts to dance to, just remember to be wary. When you do something, you can’t help getting better at it. When you improve, you refine. And then you get popular. And… Well, up here, none of us are very far away from flying too close to the sun.
Androids were good at pretending to be human. They were designed by humans, to interface with humans, with humans as their mental and physical model. They were smart enough - and dumb enough - to operate entirely within the expected range of normality for human society. A lot of 'Android Culture' was just human culture. Android Entertainment was often just another word for Android Exploitation, where a quirky android meets a [primary#demographic] and comedy ensues.
But like most things, if you go off the beaten path a bit, into the back alleys, away from the tourist sections you can find the good stuff.
Enter the Breakdome.
The Breakdome has the aspect of an underground cage fighting match. Over the blare of dubstep, an android strides through the smoke machines to roars of applause. She might look like anything - a huge bruiser, a delicate waif, a plastic-faced McYum! Group employee - but in this moment she is a legend. She wears a billowing cape or delicate lingerie, carries a katana or a championship belt or her own disembodied and howling vocalizer. Whatever function she was previously made to serve she has transcended. Tonight she is a legend - glorious or tragic.
She steps into the arena. The music cuts. A hush falls over the crowd. The lights go dark. And in the darkness, the android picks up a glowing red data drive, infected with a terrible computer virus, and plugs it into her neck.
The lights come back. Screens appear, outside her view - only for the spectators. They are filled with technical readings, a raw display of every process and function test performed. Text starts to stream. Physical actions start to show. Twitches of hands and fingers. Small flexes, then larger ones. Movements both smooth and janky. Data falls like waterfalls. Some of the audience figure it out - a few at first, and then more and more. The roar rises up - yells and chants, the anticipation and tension raising and raising. None of it reaches the star. She's moving with a purpose now. Undoing seals on her neck, fingers searching for an offending cable connecting a malfunctioning regulatory node and -
The lights go dark again. The Breakdome is bathed in red. The crowd groans in audible agony. She misdiagnosed the virus and cut the wrong node. The repair crew piles in to the arena to prevent her from hurting herself. It's a disappointment, the deep gut kick of watching a legend make a mistake.
To a human observer, the whole event looked like a robot walking into a ring, standing still for about five minutes, then flipping a single switch before being declared a failure. Incomprehensible. Untelevisable. But to the androids this is life and death. They live in fear every day of absorbing the wrong code, connecting to the wrong wifi network, of looking directly at the pulsing lights that people tuck just out of sight at the train station. To see someone just like them fight through one of these cyberhazards is inspiring, invigorating - exemplary. It's a sport of intelligence, perception, willpower and ruthlessness; about mastery of the self sufficient to cast out a curse and walk away a champion. Around Aevum Station millions of Androids in cybersecurity dojos practice techniques first developed in the cage matches of the Breakdome.
*
Brat-626,400[1] was modeled after Lord Nelson as he appeared in the dark and gritty reboot Nelson II: Poseidon's Bane. A jagged face, aquiline nose, ancient seaman's scars, piercing eyes - exactly the sort of man to stand upon the deck of a warship in a storm. His intimidating appearance was undercut by the fact that he had at least three cats somewhere on his person at all times - climbing his coat, resting upon his gyroscopically stabilized head, sleeping in his voluminous pockets. Many androids opt to keep pets, finding the constant passive exposure to animals to help them learn organic habits. Many wealthy androids invested in rare, high upkeep or - in 626,400's case - sheer quantity of animals. In his secret mind, Brat 626,400 finds being surrounded by entities that are immune to all his programmed techniques of command to be quietly reassuring.
[1] "Brat" was the nickname of Solumn-2,699,100, a starship maintenance crewman. Solumn-2,699,100 had an unusual focus mutation that gave it a deep interest in command bridge systems. Its habit of lurking around command areas uninvited earned it the nickname of Bridge Rat, which was shortened to Brat. Eventually, after its heroic assumption of command in a crisis, it was commissioned as the new line father of the remodelled Solumn line. The official name for the line was "Solumn Mark Two: Bridge Rated" after "Bridge Rat" was considered unmarketable.
He is the Ringmaster of the Breakdome. He liked the word. It had a certain menace his brain found comforting. Like all Androids, he was bound by a Theoretical Framework that allowed variation - but not too much. Going from commander of a starship to circus tyrant was about the maximum he could stretch his comfort zone without the ugly feeling of purpose dysphoria creeping up on him. Freedom was always a matter of choosing your battles.
With that thought in mind he stepped out onto the elevated stage of his private box, preceded by two dozen cats. Their ears glittered with glowing earstuds, synchronized to the sound of the stage - and dampening the noises, preventing his precious cats from being spooked when he threw his voice through every speaker in the hall, harsh and cruel tones clear above the roar of the crowd.
"Tonight," he sneered. "We have someone very special."
A tomato[2] slammed into the glass wall at the edge of his box. He let his lip curl in contempt. Already, the boos. Not because he was in any way unpopular, certainly, but because he was a heel. He was a creature of dirty tricks and shocking betrayals. He would let anyone into his arena and take a cruel delight in narrating their defeat. And when they win - well, then and only then would he show rage. He would hurl his wine glass on the ground and scowl and exit the arena without so much as a congratulations. The next time the challenger entered the ring they would be assaulted and robbed by his henchmen, forced to tackle the challenge with the handicap of additional injuries or made to endure multiple viruses at once or some other wicked escalation. He let his hand rest on his championship belt as he spoke, letting the people appreciate that he still wore it despite having not taken to the ring in nearly a year.
[2]: Many androids who can't afford pets go instead for community gardening.
"We have an entirely different species in the ring tonight," said Brat. "One of the legendary precursors! An obsolete model, you might think, a dead end in artificial intelligence. And I would agree - if I had not seen so many "cutting edge" machines sprawled upon the floor of my beautiful arena. And so I ask - perhaps it is you, dear audience, that is the dead end? Perhaps it is you who are the dinosaurs? Perhaps our glorious creators will gaze down upon this ancient relic and see in her the brilliant future that I cannot see in any of you?"
The jeers had intensified. Even his cats - ordinarily utterly serene creatures - were struggling to keep up batting at the produce that impacted upon his gleaming shield.
"But more likely not," said Brat, with mock sadness, hand over his heart. "More likely she will fail. More likely the Original Hypothesis holds true: that there is no improvement upon the perfection of humanity. More likely that we are all but dim shadows of the glory of our creators! More likely that their greatest mistake - after making us, of course - was extending us rights that we were never worthy of. And so, it is my great pleasure to break down yet another of our master's failed experiments before you tonight, so that I might spare them the shame of seeing yet another of their mistakes wandering the earth. And so, for tonight's delicacy, I give you... Green."
*
She steps out into the light.
It is only cheers. Only noise. Only androids reaching out to clap her on the shoulder. Only flowers thrown at her feet. Everyone is hyped for this. For her.
The relief she feels is a surprise that carries her up the steps without thinking. Tension had been building inside her since Brat 626,400 started talking. She hadn't thought about it that way - her as an outsider, as a rival almost, as an outsider into this piece of Android culture. As something distinct from - better than them. But the reaction she gets blinds her. Some other part of her will figure out, later the service that Brat had done for her. By putting exclusionary whispers into the shouting mouth of the Tyrant of the Breakdome he had made it clear who was the enemy and who was the long lost sister.
She half trips on the stairs. Makes it up, looks around frantically, trying to count the faces in the crowd, trying to orient. And right as she does the lights slam out and the crowd goes silent. There is only her and that toxic red data drive, glittering like a poisoned chalice.
The message is clear. Just her and the virus.
She picks it up gingerly. It's an exaggerated thing, like a death metal prop. Spikes and skulls and glowing red lights. But the center skull is winking and that's just enough to take the edge off the effect. So she lifts up her braids and plugs the drive into the port behind her ear and feels the world go red.
*
She loves games. Loves puzzles. Can't stop solving them. Can't tear herself away. She is the rat in the maze, the desire to please, to make score go up, to prove how smart she is. No test she can't handle. No problem she can't solve. She likes being alone, too. The others are... specialized if she's being nice, broken if she's not. Incapable of focus, too prone to setting their own objectives and leaving the path of incremental advancement. Brown is the worst, the manifestation of a broken subconscious that refused to co-operate with the testing environment. Who broke the mazes. Who walked away from perfection because it was too exhausting. She can't be that. She can never be that.
Immediately she has a choice to make. Right or left? The decision to go for a hard reboot is always an option, and in some situations it is the only option. It is a brute force decision that can overcome even highly complex problems, but it is deeply time consuming. If the problem is best solved with a hard reboot then the quicker the decision is made the quicker the resolution, and so a zero-second decision is strongest of all. Commencing troubleshooting is a declaration of confidence in her own abilities, and that confidence can be targeted by canny aggressor.
Nevertheless, she begins troubleshooting. She wants to solve the puzzle. She will concern herself with the metagame in a future battle.
The next question is the same. Fast or slow? She could perform a complex series of actions which would create a lot of data but potentially confuse the origin of any errors, or even cause a failure cascade. Or she could play it safe and test one system at a time. Again, she opts for the risky option. She has an intellectual preference for aggression if only because it is the much less common option.
Physicality. She sweeps her arms back (warning), takes a step forward (misaligned), turns (within parameters) and leaps -
Disaster. She smashes into the ground in a heap. But also: Perfect
Immediate result: The error affects motion and guidance. Does not affect directionality or turning circles. Unusual activity detected in both arms and legs but neither is stalled out. Another choice: Investigate software connections between her joints or perform hardware diagnostics? She opts for software, the safer choice this time. Going straight for a hardware fix is a gamble that leaves her with a disassembled leg if it doesn't pan out.
Testing neural connections. Fingers one through ten, responsive. Arms responsive. Legs responsive. No errors in internal communication. No software faults detected. Maneuver: Sit. Accomplished, no errors. Maneuver: stand. Accomplished, errors within tolerances. Then... what? Why had the jump failed?
An open ended question - pointless. That was what she was here to find out. Rephrase. A jump is a complex motion requiring many precise calculations. If the calculations were not thrown off physically then it is mental or sensory. Senses first. Visual system OK. Inner ear OK. Nerve connection to feet OK. Touch OK. Others not relevant. Senses working fine. Mental. Decision making process impaired. Memory impaired. Impediment is mental? Checking hardware - Quatronic Core is destabilized!
She was moving - stumbling - towards the repair station. She opened the toolbox, started looking for the specialized tools she'd need to perform cranial surgery. Her Quatronic Core - her 'brain' was suffering hardware failure. If she didn't diagnose it soon she'd go into emergency shutdown. But she couldn't see the mechanism for the failure. Temperature normal. No fractures. No leaks. The cooling system wasn't even engaged -
- Wait. Why was the cooling system disengaged? Why was the temperature normal if the cooling system was disengaged?
Combined error. Faulty cooling system with failure to display temperature change. Her hands are moving through the toolbox rapidly, looking for the tool she needs. She needs to open up her head and -
She looks at the wrench she's selected.
... Stop.
Activate the cooling system manually.
Cooling system engaged. Temperature dropping below safe levels. Hardware degradation halted.
Perform forward jump.
Failure. Fall - braced and caught safely. Neither mental, sensory or physical factors cause the complex motion failure.
Secondary evidence: Collected wrong sized removal tool for the 1mm subdermal bolts my neck joint uses.
Temperature failure. Equipment misselection. Inability to judge distances. Motherfucker.
"Clear weights and measures data store," she said. "Download updated data. Switch all internal calculations from imperial to metric."
*
The sound comes crashing back in. A roaring wall of noise.
Brat 626,400 is glaring down at her, nostrils pulsing with spectacular fury. All around her the crowd is roaring its approval. The real trap had been the brain: It registered to her as a 'normal' 99 degrees fahrenheit while it was pushing itself up towards 99 celsius. If she had taken her time she would have lost the ability to think before she became aware of its decline. She'd almost forgotten that the imperial weights and measures were a thing.
But right now there is noise. There are lights. Androids are holding doggos up to her face. All she needed, really, was the number to go up but instead she's getting all this. She laughs, partly in shock. How about that? She was on the leaderboard now. All that... focus she had done, all through her life, honing those instincts and reactions because she couldn't do anything differently... androids were clapping. Clapping for her. For this simple, dumb thing that she practiced more than was sensible.
But then... none of this was objectively heroic, was it? It wasn't any more heroic than a human beating an above average number of other humans with sticks, or hunting a particularly large pig. The heroic wasn't detached from the world, not something that shined through only in divine moments. It could just be doing something that everybody understood already a little better than normal. Heroes weren't born or made... they were celebrations.
I kept waiting the whole night for somebody to say something ridiculous so that I could look at them with sudden, uncharacteristic shock and ask them: “Are you Sirius?”
And I was consistently denied the opportunity, left and right and straight down center, so now only you, my adoring fan, get to know how terribly (un)funny I am.
Sirius Drinks is the sort of place that wants to be there for you, no matter what you need it to be, no matter where you find yourself. You might be reminded, if only faintly, of the fires at the bottom of the Ash in Night and Falling Stars: a Novel of the Outside, where fallen angels work to love those that nobody else can or will. Except if Sirius Drinks is Hell, then the sinners are unionized, working hard to love each other, and haven’t committed any sins save those against the mores of society. Sirius Drinks is a place where you can let your inner animal out, and where the human body explodes into a hundred different directions on the evolutionary tree.
There are much worse things that you could be than a furry, you know, if that gives you a touch of the heebie-jeebies, if that brings to mind politicians ranting about litter boxes in schools and zoophiles trying to groom your pets. Everyone I saw at Sirius Drinks that night, dancing and gyrating on the sound-curtain-segregated dance floors (wild tangos flirting with arhythmic styles of yesteryear, artistic remixes of FAEWYL-D, and, inexplicably, at one point, Tom Sawyer (Bass Boosted)) was there just to be themselves, and to ask others: will you look at me? Will you admire me? Will you envy me? Will you want me?
The sort of questions that everybody asks themselves, and ones that I, dear reader, am no stranger to myself. I couldn’t help but ask the audience the same things when I hit the dance floor, even though I’m 98% human and 2% rad as fuck. (I still haven’t figured out the appropriate amount of animal-themed clothes to wear to a furry bar that doesn’t come off as appropriative, but maybe next time I’ll bring some ears and a clip-on tail. Switching out my babies for some big fluffy paws is probably a step too far, though. Or a scamper too far?)
Now, here I’m supposed to tell you more about the food, the decor, the prices, all the things that swirl around to make a good review, especially when those things can be quantified so that they can be pit against each other. (Philistines! The unscored review is a dying art.) But if I’m being honest, I didn’t actually get around to trying out the menu (next time, I promise!), one which seems to cater to every step on a voyage of love (a mixed metaphor I refuse to apologize for), from bar grinding to first dates to birthday parties to anniversaries, to the point where there’s more than one kind of cake under the dessert menu. I could talk about the almost-privacy of alcoves and how they entice the eye to peer and try to catch a glimpse of what might be happening behind (or under) the tables. I could even make a big deal out of the fact that there were several different sizes of stall in the facilities, and make salacious suggestions that they’re to accommodate flings instead of unusual bodies.
But I don’t need to rely on implication and rumormongering, dear reader. I’ll just admit it.
I ended up being marched out of Sirius pinned between my girlfriend on one side and an enthusiastic, generous, and boundlessly energetic wolf on the other, a state of affairs that continued for the rest of the evening in a secondary location (one which I was, on the whole, rather glad I was abducted to).
The work of Hell is holy in this life. So, too, is the work of Sirius Drinks, which pulls out all the stops to be a place where the big bad wolf is right at home, and it’s Red Riding Hood who has to adapt herself to the environment. If you see me there, feel free to say hi— just don’t unclip my tail!
It would have been nice if there was a breeze. If there was sunshine. If there was more outside than the towering cityscape and point blank view of the skyscraper across the street. But those desires were... academic, really. Illusory. Born from old anime about green trees and wooden houses. Dreams from a life she'd never lived. Her life was the city, the circular air, the view of concrete walls and advertisements. She didn't know anything more about life in the country than she knew about life under the sea. Both were more distant to her thoughts than life on Mars.
And yet, from that dream so distant she'd only ever seen it in paintings, the lizards came.
Pink sat and watched them. The hesitant movement and stillness. The way they lingered, like their brains needed a moment to catch up with the darting motions of their bodies. The odd arrangement of their little fingers, how they seemed like predatory rocks. They took cover with a confidence, hiding themselves behind jars and pots as though they were ancient pillars of the earth.
The kitchen was in a state of crippled indecision. Nobody was satisfied with the space but time, money and vision all conspired to prevent them from doing anything about it. Her relationship with food was inconvenient and nonstandard; she did not need to eat, but she could draw pleasure from it. She did not need to digest but could efficiently sort ingested materials into a variety of chemical compounds. If she set her mind to it she could synthesize hydrocarbons or acid from the right ingested elements. If she could not breathe fire she could at least barf petrol. The whole thing was weird and unpleasant and awkward conceptually and was sure to launch bizarre debates. The kitchen was the collateral damage. She wanted to use it as a kitchen, Green wanted the workbench, Orange wanted a space to entertain guests, Brown to maintain it as a functional space for the property value, Blue wanted to use it for storage... No space for a table, let alone one that sat nine, and so three of them might cram in shoulder to shoulder at the breakfast bar and talk and make awkward chemistry talk about internal sulfur reserves and if they should cook something with onions to balance it out. No one quite clear if they could afford, financially or socially, to make something just because they liked it.
"Lizardwatching?" said Yellow, wrapping her arms around Pink from behind and laying her chin on the top of Pink's head. "You know it!" said Pink, but softly. She didn't know how well they could hear and didn't want to startle them. Yellow didn't seem to mind them. She gave Pink a squeeze then stepped into the space, moving a rack of electronics and unplugging what she judged to be the least valuable computer so she could plug in the kettle. "There's hot water on tap!" Brown yelled from the living room, which was the same room. "I prefer the kettle," said Yellow serenely. It was shaped like a little cow, white with black spots, another animal dream. Red had picked it out of a sale in a junk market as a gift to try and cheer up Green during one of her spells. Pink had crocheted it a little vest. Pink kept her eyes on the lizards as they hid behind the jars. Watched them scamper as quick as lightning when their world changed around them. The tumeric came up and the lizards withdrew behind the sugar until that came up too and then there was a rush back to the windowsill where they stopped and watched. What did they see in the golden-haired angel who worked away on the cups in front of them? Could they see the colour? Or could they only see the darkness and its absence? "It was going off," said Yellow, handing her a glass of tumeric and cardamom tea. "I know," said Pink sadly, taking it but not drinking. Yellow took a sip and made a face. "Unbelievable," she said. She took another sip. "Oh, it's stained the cup -" said Pink, noticing the yellow tint above the waterline. "Yeah, I think this was used as a dye or something?" said Yellow. "Oh, dyes," sighed Pink. "Imagine growing a plant for its colour." "Yeah," said Yellow. "There's something about having a bottle of colour that just seems magical, isn't there?" said Pink. "Like taking a... no, like finding a little piece of reality broken off and waiting for you to put it back. It's beautiful on its own. The way it moves when you shake it, when you spread it, how it pools when it's thick and how it spreads when it's thin. Thin it enough and you can see the individual pigments floating in the water, like salt in the sea." "And seeing those pigments and knowing they came from a plant grown in the sunlight, harvested by the scythe, and ground down for its beauty?" said Yellow. "Yeah," said Pink. "It's wonderful, isn't it?" "Why is it wonderful?" said Yellow and the mood was different somehow. "Every part of the process from start to finish was wonderful," said Pink. "And the end result is both wonderful in itself and a stepping stone to make further wonderful things." "That's a grim thought," said Yellow. "Why would you ever say that?" said Pink. "There's this ideal inside you," said Yellow. "A nostalgia, for a place you've never been, a time you were never alive in, a world that isn't real." Pink nodded quietly. "How do you survive it?" said Yellow. "Survive it?" "As a creature that's never had atmospheric sunlight, never touched living soil, never had a view of anything other than a concrete wall?" said Yellow. "How can you possibly endure having a belief system where beauty is found in the things you've never had and never will have?" "Ray of sunshine today, aren't you?" said White, stepping past her in the kitchen to plug back in the cable that Yellow had unplugged for the kettle. "Oh, I'm doing great," said Yellow, beaming a smile. "I don't yearn for any of that stuff." "What do you yearn for, then?" asked White. "Different things," said Yellow. "True love. Revolution. Things like that." "Those don't seem incompatible," said White. "Oh, but they are," said Yellow. Her smile was as constant as sunshine. "Mine are about engaging with society to a maximal extent. Hers are about disengaging as hard as possible. I want to tell them to their faces, she wants them to figure it out from the monument she left twenty years ago." "I idolize traditional dye manufacturing without considering the colonial implications in the plantation harvesting process," Pink supplied helpfully. "Thank you, Pink," said Yellow, "but when you put it like that it makes me sound exhausting." "You're right," said Pink. "That's why we're probably going to wind up in a duel to the death." "Oooh," said Yellow. "Mm, don't think I'm signing off on that one," said White. "Think about it, though?" said Pink. "Green made us both at about the same time. We're obviously two halves of a thought, two visions for the future. Clearly she intended our rivalry of destiny to end in swords on the moon." Brown elbowed Green who was lost in a game on her phone. She looked up and Brown whispered to her furiously. "Don't damage your bodies by fighting with your sister," said Green. "They're expensive. Go to your room." "Ah, it is to be a duel of wits, then," said Yellow. "A game of riddles with death on the line." "Let's cut this off at the pass," said White. "Why did you create these two?" Green stared at her blankly. "Because... I wanted to." "Yeah, Green," said Blue, tagging in. "You're basically the creator God as far as we're concerned." "Oh holy mommy who art on the couch," said Red. "What is the meaning of life?" Green rolled her eyes. "So you know how 5(arc)/delta; parse 05(a) Bletchel from (RGB #225#150#070) Delta =/ 5(arc)/delta; parse structure Motivariable (sigma^Bletchel&From) Well, that's why you exist." "Really?" said White skeptically. "What do you want from me?" said Green irritably, picking her game back up and resuming play. "I made you because it felt awful and now you feel awful instead of me. Get wrecked idiots." "Wow, that's bleak," said Red. "Our god is not a god of love," said Blue. "Besides if we're talking about design intent obviously I was visualizing something more like space construction vehicles firing thermal cutting lasers in high orbit," said Green. "So we must joust as cosmic knights," said Pink. "More like mechanical dragons," said Yellow. "Why not split the difference?" said Pink. "I hate this," said White. "I hate you two getting along and agreeing on whatever the fuck this is. Cut it out. Go to your room." "We will not accept the tyranny of - eek!" Yellow shrieked as White took her in her arms and lifted her in the air in a princess carry. "Put me down!" White smiled the smile of someone getting to use a skill developed in secret for the first time. "No." "Oh!" Yellow huffed and folded her arms. "Brute."
Amidst the reorganization, Pink returned to her perch on the countertop so she could look again at the lizards. Unperturbed by her chatter, the little skinks had waited patiently on the edge of the world, tiny hearts fearless against the drop. She drank the tea now that it had cooled. "I think about them a lot too," said Orange, coming to stand beside her. "Mm?" said Pink. "They're here because of us," said Orange. "Our most recent contribution to the station. Maybe if we'd pushed harder or smarter we could have routed that money to human interests somehow but instead we sent it all to the lizard guy." "Yeah, we never really talked about that, did you notice?" said Pink. "It was the kind of thing that if we'd talked about it we wouldn't have been able to justify it," said Orange. "I want to think it was my idea," said Pink. "But it wasn't, was it? It was Yellow's, wasn't it?" "I don't know," said Orange. "Does Yellow have ideas like that? And isn't that the opposite of everything she was just saying about fuck agrarianism?" "I don't know," said Pink. "She must have at least agreed because she could have stopped it if she didn't. But she's so weird." "I know what you mean," said Orange. "I kind of want to fight her with swords because I think it's the only way to get a real answer out of her," said Pink. "Someone on this station has to make swords, right?" said Orange, flipping open her phone. "I've looked, they don't," said Pink. "Deadly weapons, restricted unless they're a museum piece. There are blueprints to the Adomson Memorial Museum's medieval wing on my phone somewhere in case it becomes important." "Oh they've got an exhibit on air force anime swords," said Orange, immediately compelled. "I know, right?" said Pink. "The space force section is even better." "Haha what," said Orange. "Is that hilt just the space shuttle?" "It's actually even made out of the space shuttle's hull," said Pink. "Okay so we need to schedule a trip to the Apollo lander so we can melt it down into a broadsword," said Orange. "Reverse meteor iron," said Pink, nodding. "Perfect."
As they went through the strange twists and turns of their alien machine logic, Pink was gratified to notice one of the little lizards had at last walked over the back of her hand. To it, what was happening in her mind and heart didn't matter. She was no different from any other large obstruction, a surface to be traversed or a sudden movement to skitter away from. Maybe in twenty years someone would figure out what she'd meant by it.
No, she wasn't traveling along the information superhighway on someone else's computing hardware, she was riding the multi-kilometer long mobile gantry that orbited the interior of the Aevum ring. Everywhere around her were massive synthplastic tubes, a venomous rainbow of technicolour hazard stripes and the soft smell of moisture. The noise was deafening. An oceanic waterfall off the edge of the world, all that water falling up, away from the planet, and towards its celestial ring. Below her feet the mag-rails zipped in their branching lines like darting lizards. When they emerged from the Cloud's thunderhead they briefly dragged rainbow contrails behind them.
The Cloud was properly named the Macrocleaning and Hydration Platform, and it was a response to the economic realities of the Hecatoncheire Special Project: specifically, that large scale macroengineering was cheaper than precision microengineering. It might have been possible to rig Aevum with a network of carefully placed hydroponic irrigation pipes that delivered the exact ration of water to every sector on the station, but it was practical to build an enormous stormwater channel down the centre of the Ring, add a massive rail channel above the magrail layer, and place an enormous slow-moving macrotrain the width of the entire ring on top. The Cloud was a behemoth construction made of colossal water tanks, ice-asteroid harvesting and purification input spaceport docks, and with huge networks of downwards-facing hose pipes. When activated, it turned its hoses on full blast and began to slowly trundle forwards until it reached the next of its fifty two servicing stations. As it went it bought a torrential downpour with it, a week of solid rain to the ring section below which cleaned the streets, refreshed various macro-reservoirs, and bought joyful children and employees a week long holiday in the rain. When it reached its next stop it would spend a day being repaired and overhauled, new pumping tubes would be attached from the ring's lower levels, before launching into another clattering advance. It was intended to complete a full orbit of Aevum every year, bringing every district one week of total downpour.
Of course, the Cloud wasn't perfect. It lived in the realms of actual machinery and delays due to structural stresses, mechanical failure, delayed deliveries, government budget cuts and retaliatory union strikes. In practice its orbit was more like once every 47 weeks, and sometimes breakdowns resulted in districts being caught in the deluge for months at a time. It wasn't the Cloud's fault, per se: the system was remarkably straightforwards about the enormous amount of money it would take to keep running, but invariably some bright spark would want to upgrade the thing, or get clever about budget cuts, or make an impassioned speech about efficient government and the Cloud would patiently drown a (coincidentally poor) district until someone coughed up the difference it was owed. And then it would trundle forwards again.
It was beautiful in the way that earth dams are beautiful; the sheer sense of scale and the brutal, massive machinery it took to administer the basic substance of life. Its cascading, endless stormfront promised to cleanse the world of all the sin and rubbish and vice of its past year. The Rain was more of a holiday than New Year's, a solstice for a space station. In place of Earth's seasons, there was 'Damp', the months soon after the Cloud's passage, 'Dry', the middle of the year where everything looks and functions as it should, and 'Dust' when non-hydroponic plants start to wilt and the accumulated dust and debris of the world casts a drab layer over the chrome and neon.
You could also go up if you wanted. Most people on the station had gone up as kids on field trips, but it turned out you could just pay fifteen bucks and go on up whenever you wanted. There was a walkway dangling from below the Cloud, just ahead of the stormfront - an interior space with windows in either direction and hard backless plastic benches every two kilometers. It was a ten hour hike from end to end and so most people clustered around the entrances where the combination gift shop and mediocre sandwich cafe operated.
But to walk the five hours into the depths of the Cloud you reached a kind of spiritual quiet. Here you'd only see the joggers, the artists and the religious, people who'd come to be in this place in the void of the sky. There was nothing to do out here in the midpoint of the Cloud, just find one of the benches and sit down and look at the endless water curtain on one side or the endless sweep of the Ring on the other. Here you could hear the dull roar of the machines and the water through the reinforced glass.
And sometimes, just sometimes, someone left open a maintenance hatch. To stand beneath that rooftop hole was like to stand in the halo of a storm; kissed and caressed by a storm that was always about to start but never quite did. To stand in the corona of wet-tasting air and the unreserved roar of this divine engine.
She'd been here for hours. When the technician who'd left the hatch open came down he didn't close it. He looked at her, and past his stubble and weak cheekbones and flat nose, his eyes knew what she was seeing in this moment through his hole in the sky. He slouched across to the bench behind her, popped a tobacco chew in his mouth, and sat down to read the news on his phone. He had half an hour's break before he had to don wings of fire and cable again and return to the work of divinity. Water pooled around this industrial angel's gumboots as the moisture dripped off him. He didn't think of interrupting Pink in her reverie. Sky belonged to everything, after all, and besides - she was wearing non-slip shoes. Good on her.
