Count Numbers

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Everyone:

The Anthropozine group chat has been going off. The entire thing’s set up on an open-source app called Enigma. It uses solid end-to-end encryption, has the option to scrub metadata out of uploaded files, and requires a password every time the app opens, with automatic logouts after two minutes of inactivity. The Anthropozine also uses its own local version of the app, hosted on its internal servers, for another layer of protection.

Using Chattr’s more useful for the casual and the day to day. Enigma only gets used when things have gotten real. Either way; Some of these people you know in meatspace, have real names for. Others are just their handles.

Here’s the situation;

Neon Czolgoz: fuck
Neon Czolgoz: need to do a crowdfunding
Neon Czolgoz: Persephone punched out a police commissioner and needed a heli evac
Neon Czolgoz: worth, tbh
Neon Czolgoz: footage is live already, if you got any questions. heres the highlight clip.
Neon Czolgoz: [file attached]
Neon Czolgoz: had this on loop for ten minutes now. incredible form.

That would be your fearless leader, York. And that would be footage of Elodie.

ProvocativelyFickle: Oh my goodness!
ProvocativelyFickle: Are you okay??

AKA PromiscouslyFickle, PF is a regular at 3V’s place, usually bringing her choice in partners for the week. Primary school teacher, cancer survivor, creator of a free app that teaches sign language. She doesn’t write in quality or quantity, but she's the personification of warm hugs, fluffy sweaters, and hot chocolate. Vital.

Neon Czolgoz: just speaking for myself, yeah
Neon Czolgoz: just can’t do expenses for a bit
NumbToNothing: Fuck
NumbToNothing: I, uh
NumbToNothing: I had something ready to go on the flog-blast scene coming out of Ares
NumbToNothing: But that seems kind of lame now

NumbToNothing, aka Eli. He/She/They, eternally saving up to turn themselves into a jackalope. Internet poisoned, they’re not terminally online in the way York is; Eli’s a centipede hiding in rotten stumps, deep in the sub-sub-cultures. It makes them a good scene reporter.

JuntaSThompson: What the hell is flog-blast
NumbToNothing: [file attached]
JuntaSThompson: This sounds like someone did BDSM to a drumkit while a brass section watched
NumbToNothing: I mean
NumbToNothing: All the instruments have to be played with fet gear in some way, or be fet gear, or whatever
NumbToNothing: so yeah kind of?
JuntaSThompson: Huh. What? Why?
NumbToNothing: Metacommentary on how all previous anti-consumerist genres got corporatized and stripped of their, like, core messages, so it’s about making anti-corporate elements intrinsic to the work. Like, look at hauntology
NumbToNothing: even though you had like, Mark Fisher being behind the k-punk pseudonym that brought James Ferraro into the mainstream, and Ferraro was hauntology at the time.
NumbToNothing: Mark Fisher literally wrote the book on how capitalism chews up counter culture like hauntology and spits it out but still couldn't do shit about it
NumbToNothing: hauntology evolved into hypnogogic pop and vaporwave
NumbToNothing: and then vaporwave stopped being done as a criticism of the endless recycling of pop culture nostalgia and vaporwave mixes started being used as unironic movie trailer scores whenever they did reboots
NumbToNothing: So, flog-blast is trying to do that to symphonic post-ska but tbh I don’t think it’s going to work
NumbToNothing: it didn’t work for hip-hop or punk or emo
NumbToNothing: and it really didn’t fucking work for gangsta which was way edgier
NumbToNothing: so I’m getting in while the idea’s still pure
JuntaSThompson: Wow what the hell
JuntaSThompson: Absolutely still post that I’m super into this
Neon Czolgoz: i’m like three deep into a playlist since I read ‘someone did BDSM to a drumkit’, yeah this is peak hummer
Neon Czolgoz: just because bigger stuff is happening doesn’t mean the other stuff stops being worth it, yeah?
Neon Czolgoz: send it through anyway. even if it’s just so I can read it.
ProvocativelyFickle: Me too!!
ProvocativelyFickle: You’re a good bean.
NumbToNothing: :heart:

No matter the subject matter, the origin of the group, writers are writers. Group chats tend to go certain ways.

Neon Czolgoz: back on topic though
JuntaSThompson: Just watched more of the stream now
JuntaSThompson: Someone’s got to go deeper on this right
JuntaSThompson: “Cops bad”, sure, nothing new, but this feels different, you know?
JuntaSThompson: Bigger, maybe.

Nobody’s met Junta personally. He does longform research pieces and keeps weird hours. He’s been a great colleague for November, though, actually - If you drop a huge block of files and data on a desk and say there’s a story worth telling in it, Junta’s the one who’ll find the story and do the writing. If an investigator is a composer, he’s their instrumentalist translating it for an audience.

Still. It means he’s not going to volunteer himself. Not his skillset, not his department.

Neon Czolgoz: i know but i honestly have no clue where we’d start
Neon Czolgoz: lowkey hoping the gammons sue so we can find something in discovery
Neon Czolgoz: highkey expecting that risk is what stops them from trying
Neon Czolgoz: no complaints
ProvocativelyFickle: Do you know who we could ask?
ProvocativelyFickle: Maybe?
Neon Czolgoz: me?
Neon Czolgoz: no.
Neon Czolgoz: if anyone has any ideas, now would be the time to say it, or i’m fridging this. obviously there’s a story here but if we don’t have an angle of approach it’s not worth the heat.
NumbToNothing: i’m so sorry
ProvocativelyFickle: Can’t we just ask some cops?
ProvocativelyFickle: Wait you tried that
ProvocativelyFickle: Hmm.
Neon Czolgoz: look we have a bigger priority
Neon Czolgoz: getting Persephone through this
Neon Czolgoz: November, you free?
Neon Czolgoz: could really use our surveillance specialist on this one
Neon Czolgoz: if either of you need anything you know where to ask
Neon Czolgoz: just as long as it ain’t funds because we don’t got any
JuntaSThompson: Ha.

That’s where it’s at. 3V, nobody expects you to be logged in for a while, but feel free to join in with your monstrously high ping.

November:

The only problem is getting your Headpattr score above the critical threshold to pull this off. This isn’t a big problem, you’re currently hitting 9.4/10. But you need a 9.7. The app weights more recent scores more highly, rather than aggregating your entire work history, which means a few weeks worth of work - and luck - would be enough to get you there naturally.

You’ve held a 9.7 before, but it only takes one particularly bad job to nuke it. That’s leaving too much to chance. This will be a heist for a big score in a literal sense.

There are ways to do this. Doing it legitimately means real jobs with real pay. Fake jobs means fake pay - and the app taking a cut of your transactions. In the middle, a dozen methodologies all different shades of gray. Who is given this task, and what does that look like?

Besides that, of course, there are your two colleagues, comrades, and potentially co-conspirators. 3V is checking her mail, and Persephone needs someone running counter-surveillance.

Those are three areas to divide your attention - how do you delegate yourself to them?

3V:

Let’s talk the problem with sales.

The problem with Moore’s law is that its outputs were linear and its inputs were exponential. Every time computers doubled in power, the amount of scientists and engineers squared. The promise of infinite growth hit the bounds of finite resources. Technology still marches on, but hardware doesn’t obsolete at the rate it used to. Only worth looking through if you need to replace something broken, or stolen.

And as a store owner, it’s bad for business to wait for sales on games you’re interested in. Sure, it can help to round out product, but everything in your inbox right now? Either you already have, or it was never worth getting.

Delete, delete, delete, delete, delete.

Here’s one. You’re about to delete it as spam that made it through your filter, but it’s got the Verified badge on it. Proverbs 26:18. One of the biggest prank channels running right now.

One of the worst people to have sent an email with “We are so sorry” as the subject header.

Bird,

Huge fans of your work. Did this out of nothing but love and respect. We thought you’d been out of the scene for a while, so you must be pretty lonely. And we know dating sucks. So how about we set up a MatchMaker profile for you and take all the hard work out of it, we thought. Play as you for a bit, and then let you know when we found your perfect match.

You know, like, Catfishing For Good!

We got about halfway through before realizing this was pretty fucked up. This got way too real way too quick. We are

So

Sorry

We didn’t delete the account. We’re throwing you the login details to do with it what you want, and we’re changing the account’s listed email to yours after triple checking we got it right. Once you change the password, there’s no way for us or anyone else to get back in.

Let us know if there’s anything we can do to make it up to you. Name a target, whatever, it’s done.

The whole team at Proverbs 26:18

There’s a reason “May you live in interesting times” is a curse.

Persephone:

Mattie shows up at the crack of dawn with a chilled fruit salad in the passenger seat of the rented car. Sweet melon, strawberries, pitted cherries, and a gros michel banana on the side. Is this what Sasha actually likes, or just what Mattie thinks Sasha should like?

Homemade fruit salads like this tells one of two stories. Either it’s a curated list of what the kid likes most, or it’s a compromise of picking around what they refuse to eat just trying to make them eat healthy. You know Mattie well enough to know it could be either. You don’t know Sasha well enough to know which it is.

Sasha hates being made to wake up this early. She hates being made to go. But this was the bloodless agreement she participated in - leave before the firestorm shows up and NBN can make her part of the story, throw her school assignments into the mix.

And why not? If it’s in the service of proving you’re a bad mother, then it’s in their interest to prove she’s a bad kid. NBN’s clearly not above trying it.

Sasha’s half-asleep when she squeezes you in a tight hug, and mumbles out a “Love you” before getting escorted out by your ex. Matilda’s expression and posture radiate pity at you. Pity in the way she looks at you, pity in the way she keeps her arms loose across her chest during the exchange. Pity for the circumstances, for the situation, but more than anything else, for the fact that you had to do this to yourself, that this is just who you are and what you do.

She means it with kindness. She means well.

When you look out the window at the car as it leaves, Sasha’s face is pressed against the passenger side glass, her forehead squished and her eyes closed. Her mother has to put her seatbelt on for her.

You got even less sleep than she did, though.

Check the group chat when you’re able, respond when you’re willing. There’s no question that everyone in it would do anything they can for you right now. The real question is what can they do for you?

Meta:
At this point 3V’s moving into asynchronous posting.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

November:

A decision:
What originally appeared as plaintext in what Red read about “Dad” was actually encrypted contact details. No phone, no email, but a physical address. Like a QR code attempting to render itself in hexadecimal.

There are several possibilities. Green knew this, but withheld that information for her own reasons. Green believed this was simply damage, until given cause to take a closer look. Green knew there was still information still decrypting, but had no reason to suspect it would be relevant or useful.

For further context; This work has been long, complicated, and filled with educated best-guesses. This was not the only piece of the information pulled from Red that would have come out as garbled spaghetti. It’s much harder to find a needle in a haystack when you don’t even know the needle is there to be found.

Regardless: The information leads to a location on… Thrones, the third super-habitat besides Aevum and the Park, the Bernal sphere named for the angels that served as “the chariots of Gods”.

An artist's interpretation

This would explain how thorough that ghosting is. Thrones is the ultimate gated community, Silicon Valley taken to the extremes of Galt’s Gulch. It’s physically much closer to Aevum than the Park is, only a few hours travel, but that travel is restricted - you’d need a passport.

You’re in luck, though. The only humans who ever get access to Thrones are experts in their respective fields. Thrones boasts a 74% rate of post-graduate degrees amongst its adult population over 30. The rest are exceptional service staff - physiotherapists, personal trainers, fashionistas, digital artists. No bartenders, only mixologists. That kind of deal.

It’s not the place for celebrities or influencers. They’re better suited in Aevum’s third district, Aphrodite, with its nightlife and arts colleges and galleries and theaters. It’s not the place for financiers and day-traders and bankers. While Thrones has an absurd amount of processing power, faster-than-light communication is still prohibitively expensive, and the amount of quantum-entangled particles needed for any amount of bandwidth is grotesque. Except for the most razors-edge hedge funds, those organizations are better suited to Zeus or Helios, depending on their focus.

Thrones isn’t about the money, though it concentrates a lot of wealth. Thrones is for the people who cannot, under any circumstances, settle for less than living inside a supercomputer. It is a leper colony for the terminally overeducated, a termite’s nest in a motherboard.

Which is why it’s lucky you aren’t human. There need to be feet on the ground to keep these heads in their cloud networks, and the strong preference is for android workers. Android janitors, android maids, android cooks, android deliveries, android babysitters, android maintenance workers, android plumbers, android electricians, and even the human doctors rely on android nurses.

Workers who can be relied on to be both more and less than human, with an emphasis on templates that serve that extreme.

The application can be done through Headpattr if your customer satisfaction score is high enough.

As for Singh’s post-NASA career?

Singh was muscled out of public agencies by the privatization period, the same way you were picked up by BlackSun in a firesale. He, Hypatia and Ferris co-founded Cogitech, a historical footnote serving the same role Xerox did to Microsoft and Apple; A corporation without killing instinct, whose best ideas were more aggressively marketed in competitor’s products.

One of the first companies to pioneer bespoke AI development, one of the first to stop. Earliest to speak for AI rights and last to be heard. Though Singh has remained the CEO for the company’s entire run, the company began to drift almost exclusively into humanistic technologies - brain scanning, medical technologies. Their current project - from what buried and disinterested reporting you can find - seems to be focused on cheap therapy solutions.

This much is obvious, from the abstracts of the paywalled papers he still puts out: Singh never deviated in his vision for inhuman and unrecognizable intelligences, never recanted or renounced it. His time was taken more and more by the business of running a company and less by the research it was supposed to give him the freedom to pursue. It was the sacrifice he had to make, to provide that freedom to others like Hypatia and Ferris and the ones who came after them.

He has no social media presence that you can find, bordering on paranoid. His interviews are rare, restricted to trade publications and academic conferences, some videos of which you can find online.

He’s easy to identify though. No matter where he is, no matter whether he is being interviewed or panelling a conference, he wears cargo pants and a fisherman’s vest, covered in bulky pockets and pouches.

He always looks kind. He always looks tired. His cheeks dimple when he smiles, pushing them up into the deep bags under his eyes. When they do, those bags crease into upturned crescents, and it’s like his eyes are smiling too.

But he’s corporate, and he’s caught up in this in some way. It would be illogical to trust him.

The result of this research is an anticlimax. He has a listed business number and email. You could just call him, email him. There might be no need to dramatically smuggle your way into Thrones to drop onto him unannounced. You still could though. Maybe you still want to.

Cogitech has its address listed on Aevum. The address pulled from Merkin’s documents is in a residential district of Thrones. Which begs the question why Merkin’s documents didn’t bother to list the business number and email you found.

3V:

Ferris is startled. “I thought it would have been released too late?” She walks over to the ereader across the room, then back to the cabinet, frowning at it. “Ah. Complete edition. 22.75gb. No, I definitely have it, but it’s about when I gave up. I’m surprised it’s up here.”

She looks meaningfully out the window, at the Park through it. “Never thought I’d need it. But nothing is so ubiquitous that it should be taken for granted. I trust other people try, but I’d never rely on them.”

She focuses back on the disk in your hands. “I’m surprised it’s not downstairs, on one of the shelves.” She laughs at the effect of mentioning ‘shelves’, plural. “Don’t go down there expecting too much, it’s not as impressive as you’d hope. These are my favourites, anyway. Every Nintendo 64 game on less than a quarter of a single disk - about 400 games of 32 megabytes each. That stays up here. Ten years later, the Playstation 2 had a hundred times as many games, and each was a hundred times larger. It takes up a quarter of a bookshelf. Most of it is probably what we used to call shovelware. I don’t know what you’d call it now.” She taps a corner of the ereader to her lips, in a chewing-on-a-pen gesture. “Had to keep it all, though, or someone might get too rosy-eyed about the past.”

She checks her catalogue, and smirks. “Ah. New Vegas is on the same disk - same publisher, same 12 month period. That would be why it’s up here.”

In terms of buried treasure, that one’s chocolate coins. A cockroach against the nuclear blast of time. Might be rude to say it out loud, though.

“If you can get any of this working, by all means. I’d love to play some of these myself, again.”

You can get signal here, Vesna. Ping’s measured in whole seconds out here, so a phone call’s out of the question. Email, though? That’ll send and receive just fine.

You might want to check your inbox, actually.

Persephone:

Sasha’s all yours for the night, still there when things start getting big.

It’s late when they cross reference your name and mugshot, and start doing the hit pieces you knew they would. Was Sasha already in bed when it happens? Do you wake them up? Do you want to talk about it, or avoid it?

One piece from NBN was a particularly low blow, particularly petty and vicious. What did they find out about you, and how did they twist it?

At the end of it, Sasha’s mother calls and asks if Sasha’s safe with you, if they shouldn’t stay away from you for a little while. At least until “this” “blows over”. How do you take it, and what do you say?

One last thing. Sasha’s joined a club at school, maybe only twelve people in it. They're excited to talk about it. What did they just get into, and how does that conversation play out?

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

November:

The work of data recovery takes longer than the work of Red’s restoration. The nature of the two tasks is entirely different. The first is a barn-raising - many hands lighten a load. The second is more like cooking. Setting the oven twice as hot doesn’t make it cook twice as fast, and a watched pot never boils.

As much as her task is to stir the pot, Green’s has been to prevent too many cooks from spoiling the broth. This takes as long as it takes.

So it is that Red is restored before the recovery of her last moments is. It wouldn’t have helped. The synthetic brain is as complex as the human one - complex in very different ways, but the ability to assemble it from blueprints does not make its functions any more cut-and-pastable.

All of this is to say;

[Data Recovery: 8 on the dice, +3 from clever and then any combination of Engineering, Drones, Data Security or Surveillance to get that up to 13]

Red is restored, as are her last experiences, but the two are returned separate from each other. Though all of November has far exceeded any expectations, she could no more have brought that Red back, any more than a brain surgeon could graft memories with needle and thread.

This Red is still the true Red, but the memories are someone else’s. Surreal, not quite her own. In a very real sense, they are memories and an experience that she has been distanced from by trauma.

Here is what she heard and what she saw, preserved in her short-term memory before it could be compressed and ‘internalized’ - rendering it inaccessible, as that compression process is as individual and inscrutable as neurochemistry. Inaccessible as the thoughts and feelings she experienced, or her motivations. These are lost to everyone, forever.

The video itself is patchy, imperfect, raw - it’s more like a strong impression than security footage. In most cases that’s enough.

The information, in reverse chronological order.

1: Rudy shot Red the same moment he entered the room. There was no chance of negotiation, of pleading, of fast talk. The gun was hidden while in its owners’ coat, even to her equipment. The first moment Red saw the weapon was the same moment it was being fired. This is useful to know, now that it’s yours.

2: Rudy entered from behind a sliding bookcase in his office. Red was still concentrating on the documents she was reading, but she definitely saw at least that much. She didn’t try to hide, or hide what she was doing. She likely had a plan. It’s also possible that she wasn’t simply distracted by the documents - she wanted to see how that played out. Or maybe she just didn’t want to risk incriminating the rest of you. You now know which bookcase.

3: This piece of the story is the truest testament of Green’s ability, and her patience. The recovered video is not clear enough to read the documents clearly. But Red’s reading of it could be recovered as plaintext. Originally a stream-of-thought as how she read it, in the order she read it. Another algorithm ties it to the tracking of her eye movements, to sequence them as they were ordered on the page, and not in the order they attracted Red’s interest.

Codename: Mamluke.

Here is what’s relevant:

This is about one of the original true AI, like the ones made to monitor mining colonies or power grids. Its serial number confirms the make, the generation, and the fact that it is not an intelligence you have had the pleasure of meeting. Not one you’ve heard of.

These were emergency protocols. A project that was on a “Need to know” basis required an agreement on who needed to know what, and it needed to establish consequences for someone knowing more than they needed. There’s little information about Codename: Mamluke itself here.

The documents Red found describe a chain of ownership. OsirisAgEng. Defunct. Monokaryot.Inc. A shell company for a venture capital fund that stripped all the copper wire from Osiris’ walls. Monokaryot.Inc. was itself acquired by Yggrasil - but not Codename: Mamluke, which was bundled off with other undisclosed assets to… Red is interrupted, but not before learning that Rudolph Merkin is not on the payroll of its latest owner-on-paper, but of the project itself, intact and unaffected by all these mergers and sales.

In this chain of ownership, Codename: Mamluke is never once described as ‘acquired’ ‘bought’ or ‘sold’. Only inherited. It is unlikely to have ever been listed as an asset, appeared on any legitimate internal inventory. Mamluke appears as a secret burden that demands tithe, a rider on the bills of sale.

Red lingered on one detail. Codename: Mamluke was originally contracted by Cogitech in its earliest days. Mamluke’s architects are listed as Lorraine Ferris, Hypatia Ahmadi… and Miles Singh. Lorraine’s contact is stricken from the record. Hypatia, deceased. Singh is listed as the only viable emergency contact, noted as “Pragmatic - Force likely to be counterproductive. Will listen to reason.”

You may have another lead, besides Mr Merkin.

Also on the emergency contacts is a list of representatives at Chase Black. Back when Earth was a burning car running off the road, the multinational Chase Bank had expanded the benefits it offered to its wealthiest clients - the means to preserve that wealth through Doomsday. The service outlived the end of the world. You cannot hire Chase Black directly, they are only available as a gratuity to clients who keep dragon-hoard sums with the bank.

This is important. They excel at wetwork, and at the art of the limited hangout in the rare instances its employees get caught. If nobody can ask for these ‘emergency services’, then nobody is seen asking for them.

This would be an example of an emergency they would be called to solve.

On the plus side - if you survive an encounter with a team, long enough for cops to arrive, you would send them to jail. All the money in Aevum couldn't buy a defense that would stick. Chase Black is the ultimate judicial white whale, and it's made an Ahab out of every judge and prosecutor on the station.

4: Opening the document were the contingencies placed against Mr Merkin himself. A small bundle of chromic acid had been grafted to his brain stem, set to burst if he knowingly leaked information. The result would leave him paralyzed from the brain down, leaving him breathing and with a heartbeat. It was important he was left alive for a retrieval team, to begin a very invasive interrogation process, and that he understood these terms.

This page bore Merkin’s signature at the bottom, and dated almost twenty years ago.

Finally, there is one last piece of information pulled:

5: The desk drawer was not already open, but merely unlocked. Red opened it. Possibly this is what alerted Rudy in the first place. A sensor, an alarm? Unclear.

But this has revealed something about Mr Merkin’s place in this. In an operation of need-to-know basis, he is someone who needs to know who needs to know. And he keeps that information in paper records, offline, where they cannot be hacked or remotely accessed.

This must have been the ultimate frustration of Red’s last moments. She had found a treasure map, stripped of its origin and end points. Caught in the middle of it; Here there be dragons.

3V:

Ferris wipes a tear from her eye, but she’s still smiling. “I can. Here.”

She walks back around the counter to the living room. Across from the fireplace, the wall opposite, is an enclosed cabinet in the shape you’d expect to keep crystalware - but those are usually open-panelled, letting you see the lovely contents. When she opens the bottom drawer, it’s lined in a black that eats light. The eye struggles to make sense of it. Try to understand its depth, its shape, its form, and the mind spits out divide-by-zero.

Inside the void, at once flush against its surface and floating in infinity, is a row of silver disks with a sapphire sheen to them. She pauses.

She opens a much narrower drawer in the cabinet, like a cutlery drawer. Inside are pairs of white fabric gloves. She puts on one pair, and puts the other on its hip-high shelf.

Only now does she take one of the disks from that void. It’s in a translucent sleeve, but still she only touches that with gloves.

“Games were the key to everything.” She holds the disk up to the light, inspects it from every angle. “How did we solve for the Chinese Box? How does a mind learn, more than simply reacting based on a vast bank of pre-programmed responses? Through play. It is how a mind first learns it can affect the world, and respond to it. It’s how a mind learns to relate to itself before it can relate to others. And it learns to relate to others through play, as well.”

Make out the sharpie on the disk’s sleeve. 1980-1990.

“By the time I started archiving in the 2030s, a lot had already been lost. Too much stored on magnetic media. Film stock you can refrigerate, at least, but a hard drive platter? No. If you can believe it, these only hold a hundred gigabytes each. Gigabytes. I only have until around 2010, here. Going from disks that cover decades, to disks that cover months, to only weeks. Information density with a doppler effect.”

She puts the disk on the cabinet next to the gloves.

“I don’t know if it’s useful to you. You’d need to find a working BDXL reader, and even then, the emulators installed on these disks were made for a 2030s Alphabet OS. My last working machine with it died fifteen years ago. I couldn’t tell you if my disk reader still works, I have no way to test it.”

“If play forms mind, then it feels obviously true to me that you must preserve certain kinds of play to keep certain thoughts possible. That’s why I sought out an expert at play.” A very novel to say ‘a gamer’. “What good is preserving the game, if you can’t... emulate the emulator?”

She takes another disk out of the cabinet, catches the blue tint of it. Windows95/2000/XP. She sighs.

Persephone:

There’s that manic energy, that shot of performance not going to waste. His candle burns at both ends, it will not last the night, but ah my friends and oh my foes “we’re doing this fucking live”.

“Here’s the best me and our team here’s been able to put together. Right now we were scheduled to broadcast Ms Jezebel Harkness, she/they, standing next to me. Jez?”

“Thank you for having me.” Jez is a little caught off-guard, but one last glance at you, Elodie, and she remembers to keep her eyes to York, not to the camera. Pretend it isn’t there if it’s not your turn to speak, that’s the trick to it. “Disburse Immediately! have always been a big fan of your work.”

“We’ll get to that in a second, but there’s a lot to catch people up on. Do you mind, while we catch up the people at home on all that’s happened?”

“Not at all.” Now Jezebel looks at the camera. “I think I’d appreciate it myself.”

York hits a button on his pocket mixer - tech that would be more familiar to a streamer like 3V than to a corporate producer, this one might have even been her suggestion. The B-roll of the crowd you took earlier starts playing, and York narrates it, taking the opportunity to look over his shoulder for any cops or bodyguards.

You’re good, you’re good, you’re good.

“Originally this was a planned and organized event for Disburse Immediately! - here in New Randstad Park. Officially that’s what this is still is, booked for an anti-police demonstration we planned on broadcasting, expecting a turnout of maybe a hundred people. Instead we are seeing thousands here, and the original speakers have been thoroughly deplatformed.”

“If I could interrupt for a second, Neon,” Jez switches into using his pen-name without having to be told, if only all the guests were so good about that, “Deplatformed here doesn’t mean silenced, it means buried. What you’re seeing here is a rider on our permission to assemble. We’re just denied access to a stage we couldn’t pay for.”

“Right.” York agrees, bobbing his head at the guest. Back to camera. “We did our own investigation behind-the-scenes while we could, to try to work out who was behind this snowjob. We now have strong reason to believe that this has been organized by the police themselves. We’ll be talking to Ms Harkness in a moment - but the goal of Disburse Immediately! Can be understood to be explicitly abolitionist, correct?”

“Ah, yeah,” if anyone at home doubted this was unrehearsed, they’re not going to after how unprepared Jez was for the attention to be thrown back to her like that. But she’s good, she’s rote. “Every study shows that there is functionally no task that the police do that could not be handled better by a disarmed, humanitarian, non-carceral civilian agency.”

“We’ll get back to asking you to break down what all of that means in a moment, I promise. But right now we’ve got to let the truth put its boots on before a lie makes it the whole way around Aevum.” York laughs and he looks past the camera to you, Elodie. “In the process of learning this I was attacked by Hermes precinct Commissioner Applebaum. Normally we try to keep our real names out of our reportage, for the safety of our contributors, but unfortunately that’s a decision taken out of our hands. When Commissioner Applebaum attacked me, there is reasonable dispute that could be made that I provoked him. There can be no dispute and no doubt about the matter that when our very own Elodie Auclair stepped in to defend me, she was acting legally, morally and ethically.”

That’s your cue. Turn the camera,smile and wave. The autofocus works fast to make sure you’re crystal clear.

There’s no joking tone now. He’s standing straight, his feet apart, his shoulders square over his knees. His chin is raised slightly and he looks down the camera. The voice is cold fury, the mental work of a death threat being filtered through a legal team. “We have comprehensive video evidence that Commissioner Applebaum was the aggressor and continued to escalate the confrontation far in excess of what could be justified. Elodie acted only in my defense, and with the absolute minimum of force. We know that when the police understand the story is against them, they target character. It is a tragedy that Elodie is a convicted felon with a storied past, and we have all the reason to suspect that her past will be allowed to become the main story here, and not her brave and honourable defense. We at Anthropozine have always been aware of her past, and that she has served her entire sentence and longer still, and we stand behind our reporters - especially when they stand in front of us.”

He’s so cold right now he doesn’t even smirk at his own wordplay. York’s many things, but immune to his own cleverness has never been one of them. Ask him to bury a body for you right now and he would - even if the body you asked for was his.

“Out of respect, we will not be tying Elodie’s real name to her pen name. We will only confirm that she is a respected peer and colleague, and as such, was an accredited journalist working this story. We might be the only publication that will run “Police Commissioner attacks journalist” as its headline, though. We shouldn’t be. It was Commissioner Applebaum who was no angel. Sorry, Jez, and thanks for your patience. Even to our audience, ‘abolition’ is a scary word. Can you talk to us a bit more about what you mean by that?”

As late night talk show hosts come to the stage and tell stale monologues about the times cops frisked them as teenagers, you might wonder how many of those stars know that’s who they’re really there for. When the stars try to make real points for reform, the interview revolves around dismantling them. In the slow periods, Jez and York present their own talking points. Jezebel is educated, eloquent, and entirely unprepared to be in front of a camera. She’s competing with a crowd that’s here for someone else. But whenever she loses steam, whenever the stage fright kicks in, she looks at you and finds a new well of confidence, and she finds her energy again.

What you said must have gotten through to her. That, and the fact it was you saying it. Nobody wants to get stage fright in front of the person they just saw all-but suplex the king of cops.

You’re there another forty minutes. While you’re holding the camera and working, you’ve got an invisibility cloak. People look at you without seeing you.

When York calls that wrap early, though, the camera drops, it’s gone. People start seeing you again. Maybe for some it was professional courtesy. Maybe for others it’s the fact they can’t see past a blue collar. York starts yelling and bodyblocking, but it’s less than a minute after you wrap that you’re surrounded, again, by interviewers thicker than the crowd. He thrusts his lanyard high over his head, phone in hand. You lose sight of Jezebel entirely.

Then event security’s around you, with a nod and a wave from York, and he’s pushing you to go with them. You can’t hear him over the shouting, but he’s the only one not getting shunted by the soldiers-in-suits surrounding you. They’re moving you towards the helicopter the VIPs had been arriving in.

“... eating rice for two months for this!” Is the first clear thing you can make out, being pulled from the crowd. “Worth every minute!” Is the last, before the door of the helicopter you’ve been bundled into is slammed shut.

You’re clear for takeoff.

You have somewhere very important to be, and someone very important to see.

Ride your chariot to Valhalla, Elodie, that heaven earned by battle. You have someone waiting for you there, and one night before your sentence in Hell begins in earnest.

But Hell can wait, and your kid shouldn’t have to. Not anymore. Not again. Tell me all about them, and the night you spend with them - your problems won’t catch up with you until the stroke of midnight.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

November:

Rudy was thorough. The gunshots were enough to disable Red, but the real damage was done after. It would be impossible to have believed the cabinet could have done the damage you’re seeing.

Still, there is hope. Rudy knows - knew - less about your internals than you do. He can clearly tell the difference between circuits and motors, but silicon brain surgery is beyond him. He put his efforts into roughly smashing everything that looked like it could be right, not thoroughly destroying the things he needed.

You’re going to need time and parts to rebuild Red, more than you have. More than you’d normally be able to easily afford - fortunately, someone has already agreed to foot the bill on this one. Someone who won’t complain if you check the ‘express shipping’ option.

Putting Red back together isn’t the hard part. At worst, it’s a frustrating process of figuring out more is broken than originally suspected, and waiting for a fresh round of delivered parts. The more is fixed, the more diagnostics can be run, the more faults it’s possible to find.

Some personalities would find this kind of work fun, a puzzle, a game. Others must find it aggravating, Sisyphusian, a boulder constantly rolling back down a hill. How do Blue, Green, Orange and Yellow approach this?

The hard part is working out how much of Red’s memory can be recovered, and how clearly. This is a difficulty 13 data-forensics check, as much an issue of luck as it is skill. Unconditional success should not be expected here, but Heca has been known to surpass expectations - she is guaranteed to get something useful from this no matter what.

This process will take a few days. A week tops, and only if you’re very unlucky. ‘Priority shipping’ means a lot when everything’s on a linear tube with a spine of high-speed rail lines, it’s just a case of the work taking as long as it takes.

In what small ways do the other personalities feel the absence of Red in their day-to-day routine? Who feels her absence hardest?

Persephone:

“This was never the real story. That was always the point of it.” York shakes his head. “I think we get a one-on-one with Jez on the side, and hijack the attention to get the real message across while we can.” He scratches the blonde stubble along his jaw, heard more than seen. “Couldn’t broadcast what I was thinking before, would have looked paranoid. Now that a Commissioner threw haymakers at our reporters? It’s just answering what people are going to be asking.”

There’s no satisfaction there, no joy in it. He’s been working himself up to the next bit. He at least looks you in the eye when he says this. He respects you too much for anything less.

“You’re going to be front-page prime-time again, for a little while.” York warns. “You’ve got maybe a day before people put a name to the face they’re seeing. The cops are probably going to want to lean on that, given how embarrassing this is for them. Let’s get Jezebel and get this done quick, and break early. I’ll follow the story up on my own for a bit. You’re going to have enough to deal with.”

York’s lost the appetite he’s had for covering this. A few hours of roasting the performers and correcting the message has lost its charm - the point of that was stealing the attention, something you’ve now got too much of.

3V:

“I don’t know.” Is that a smile? It is. Lorraine rises up on her tiptoes and stretches like a cat, and for a moment all her age disappears and there’s the tight sinew of a much younger, very active woman as her fingertips almost scrape the ceiling. The years weigh down on her again when she falls, the librarian’s curve of her shoulders and spine. “I know what I get out of climbing a mountain. But that wouldn’t be the point.”

She clicks her tongue, and goes to boil the kettle again. She doesn’t reach for a mug or anything to fill it with. Maybe she just likes the noise, the gesture of it. “Entertain the scientist in me, please? I love your questions. They're the questions I hoped you'd ask. And I’m excited to hear your answers to them, without my," there's a pause, and she reaches for a different word. "Interference.”

Maybe saying 'curating' would have given too much of her game away.

The kettle boils, a low rumble like summer rain on wide stone. It’s not the only sound.

Dusk has begun to saturate the mountain in new colours. It brings with it something entirely alien to you, the blanket of sound that is insects. Chirping crickets, cicada, grasshoppers. Reedy woodwinds and scraped percussions, piping trills and long croaks. How could such small things be so loud?

Aevum has only flies, roaches, millipedes. Urban vermin that slipped through rigorous quarantines. Silent, purposefully forgotten.

And outside, with no ceiling to hide them and no lights to smother them, more stars then even your most distant ancestors have seen.

Yes. She is definitely smiling.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Persephone:

The fight’s over. Heavyweight isn’t struggling. He’s gone still, and he locks eyes with you with an overwhelming and visceral hate.

Yorks’ a frozen stare. His emotional reaction is intense, overwhelming and unreadable. For a moment he’s unreadable, because there’s no signal under all that noise. It’s like trying to pick up a radio station during a solar flare.

Then he’s all smiles and energy. “Fine, fine, we’re all fine here, aren’t we, Mr Applebaum” He’s leaning down and offering a hand to Heavyweight underneath you, offering to help him up. It’s extremely clear you’re expected to move off him to make this possible. Heavyweight swats the offered wrist away and pushes himself into a sitting position.

Then two uniformed police officers are there, gripping him under each armpit and lifting him heavily to his feet. Heavyweight dusts himself off and gives both of them a nod.

“Persephone,” York claps your shoulder, careful to use your handle, “Allow me to introduce you to Police Commissioner Raymond Applebaum. You might not have recognized him, out of uniform like this. We were just finishing up a chat, weren’t we, Ray?”

One of the uniformed officers is saying something sotto voce to the Commissioner and giving a quick glance to the press pool nearby, some of whom definitely got that on camera - probably more incriminating than the view from yours, taking the wider view of what happened. Applebaum is dusting himself off, cricking his neck. Licking his wounds.

Then, he’s performing. The look he gives the crowd is bashful, then concerned. The expression he gives you - pantomime meant to read clear to all those camera watching him now - is mortified, positively ashamed of what’s come over him. But you remember that look of pure hatred when he was underneath you, just seconds ago.

He doesn’t say a word. Words can be documented, quoted, in courts and headlines. That could read as an admission of fault, or intent. So he’s silent when, after that last mortified look, he retreats to the backstage area with his two minders, to hide behind those fortress walls.

York’s smile drops the second Applebaum’s closed the newly-installed stage door on this side. It takes him a minute, the man is pretending not to have a slight limp right now. He ages ten years in that moment. “Fuckin’ ‘ell, E, out of the frying pan. Sorry you got caught up in that.” He bleeds sincerity into that. The full passion of someone who knows they’ve fucked up.

“Listen. I put some pressure on, yeah? I thought I was kicking his shin, but apparently I stabbed a nerve. This isn’t a corp thing, this isn’t even a poli thing. This is a cop thing, through and through. The call’s coming from inside the house, and apparently whatever it is, Ray thinks we know it. My fault. I didn’t think…” He pauses. “I thought I was bluffing. That there was a bigger player at the table, and the cops were being used as a prop. They’re not. This is them, and I just made it personal for us.”

York’s working out blame, and working out what his share of it is. Your judgement’s going to influence that. One thing’s clear right now; To him, you’re blameless.

November:

It’s just you, now. Nobody else to account for but yourself. Rudy’s out of the picture for the time being, as thoroughly as he can remove himself from it. If he is returned, it will be by your decisions and not his.

The data for your consideration

Location: In a small rented truck on an arterial road.

Public transport is the overwhelmingly dominant means of transport on Aevum, with streets dominated by pedestrians and cyclists. There is little vehicular traffic, mostly service, utility, and last-point delivery. The drive through the streets was an agonizing crawl with speed limits barely above walking pace. Now there’s barely anyone to share this stretch of road with you.

Cargo: A broken cabinet, a broken Red and a loaded pistol that represents uncountable broken laws.

What is your destination, and what is your objective? There’s no guarantee that Red’s body will have all the information you need. Even if any of her last moments are recoverable, it might not be enough to tell you everything you want.

Only one way to find out. Do you have someone you can rely on to help with this, or are you relying on your own skills, tools and expertise?

And what of the gun?

3V:

She doesn’t laugh about the name. About the dumb little dance ‘we hedgehogs’ are all compelled to do. There’s too much empathy there, too much shared pain, to surrender the smile that she clearly understands is expected from her.

It shines bright at the Vesna joke, though. That gets a scandalized giggle out of her, even, after a half-second of shocked-surprise. Apparently the thought hadn’t crossed her mind, and you are not the only one to deal in self-criticism.

At the end, Ferris sighs in visible relief. “I was worried you needed bigger answers from me, answers I only wish I had. I suggest you’re slower with the darjeeling, by the way. It’s a more subtle flavour.” That is said with a smile. “There’s no wrong way to drink tea, so it’s only a suggestion.” That is said with a wink.

“Would you accept a compromise, Ms Vesna?” She tests. She knows better than to say that she doesn’t find ‘Valentine’ ridiculous. She understands that’s not the point.

“There are people here who do live by that promise. I mean live, not just survive. But they are people too alien, I think, for your audience to relate to directly. It would need more than just a translator. More than it would be fair to ask of you.”

She finishes her glass of wine and pours a fresh one. She takes one of the larger slices of strawberry she’s cut for you and eats it in two chews. It’s a battle of willpower not to take another one, but one she eventually wins.

“I don’t know how many natives of Aevum would believe there was anything they could enjoy about climbing a mountain, if they heard it from anyone else. Even if all you take from this is that it was fun, I’ll consider this to have been worth it. I hope you do, as well. The most important things to people are the things that bring them joy. So it should be, but I don’t think they believe there’s any here for them.”

That reminds her. She is not just talking to Vesna Valentine, intrepid journalist. She is talking to Vesna Valentine, who has just climbed a mountain to be here. How easy you made that to forget.

“I’m sure you’re sore, and tired, as much as you’ve been gracious about it.” Ferris glances up the stairs and past them, to the parts of the house you haven’t seen yet. “The guest room upstairs is all made up for you, whenever you’re ready. A bathtub in the ensuite. I’ll show you up, when you’d like.”

There is still the darjeeling and the glass of strong, sweet wine. And, of course, the chilled rainwater. The offer is only an offer - when you’d like is when you’d like.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

November:

The plan is airtight, but Murphy's Law is as inevitable as Newton's, and far less forgiving.

There are two unforeseen encounters. The first group must share the elevator down with an older woman who wants to make smalltalk - she gets on at the 16th floor and, hell or high water, she'll have her chat. Difficulty 7 Cool roll, under the circumstances, to keep composed.

The other is that your first choice of last-minute transport falls through. It takes ten minutes for them to cancel on you, five minutes for a replacement to arrive. Fifteen minutes total babysitting a broken cabinet with a body and a firearm in it in the parking garage. People round dark corners and out of the stairwell at unexpected moments. Challenge 8 (Cool + Surveillance) to keep anyone saying the wrong thing at the wrong time - a toxic combination of tension and boredom. Roll at disadvantage if the lovely elevator lady was given cause to complain, or if that encounter already left you in a bad mood.

If all goes well, you're out. Otherwise, things are about to get complicated.

3V:

Lorraine flinches. “You’re right, you’re right, of course you’re right.” Anger is clarifying and focusing, like a microscope. No, not quite. A sniper’s scope. The tunnel vision is critical for function and purpose. It’s why snipers need to work with spotters.

She slings her anger against her back and straightens, letting the world swim back into focus. Her trigger finger taps morse-coded nonsense against the countertop.

She let slip that she’s not just a nature geek living cottagecore. She is an anti-consumer, a conscientious objector to capitalism. The details of her home become more significant - each tells a story of a commitment or a compromise.

At your fingertips, one example. The strawberries are grown here, but an old corporate logo is etched into the blade of the knife she used. Much of its length has been sharpened and ground away, long overdue replacing.

The lodge’s modern construction is more striking in this light - while the living room walls are cozy timber panels that could have been local-artisanal, the kitchen space is machine-smooth retro-modern. The slate of the mountain has been cut and polished into shining-smooth slabs to face the kitchen’s walls, countertops, floor - a sharp and beautiful contrast against the wood of the cabinetry and of the surrounding home.

It means that while there were endless concessions to use natural and local materials at every possible step, they were certainly built with the Park itself, with the same labour force. Plumbed, electrified and insulated by construction teams predating AI emancipation.

There are no bookshelves here. There are shelves around the living room, filled with unrecognizable curios; esoterics, archaics and anatomicals, but no books. More recognizable, there are too many awards in crystal and precious metals, in the shape of plaques and emblems and medallions and shields - those litter the walls and the shelves. In an otherwise obsessively clean home, the dust is too thick on their surfaces to read their inscriptions.

Digital readers are always walled-gardens for publisher-distributors. Each one pre-loaded with the corporate storefront that would sell books that only work on that brand’s device, the only books that work on that brand’s device. It’s difficult to imagine a more glaring compromise, a more painful reminder to keep around, that it’s the only book you’ve seen her with.

Maybe those aren’t answers to your question. But let them speak to just how difficult those questions are.

“What worked?” Ferris asks. She curls her fingers into a loose fist to keep them still and quiet. “Things were so much worse, then, which made it easier. We were facing nothing less than the extinction of the species. So many starving, desperate, bloodthirsty. Not enough soldiers to stop migrations at the borders and protect the gated compounds deep inside them.” There is regret in her voice, but not pity. “We were architects of lifeboats on a sinking ship, and we kept to our terms until the water was knee-deep and red. We had made ourselves indispensable.”

“Well.” She reaches for her own glass of wine, swirls it, takes a sip. “Until the lifeboats got built. The crisis was over. I lost my leverage, and everything with it.” She doesn’t elaborate.

Here are the blanks she will not fill here, but you know from your research: Space migration was only possible due to rapid advances in AI workforces, achieved at the height of state-agency power. AI was still in the hands of the kind of people who programmed Mars Rovers to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to themselves.

The resource boom these public efforts brought created a resurgence in privatization, gave corporations the resources to firesale the public agencies by force during the evacuation of the planet. The parents were separated from their children.

November remembers.

Then, just like that, Ferris blinks. The steam of the cooling assam wafted to her, reminds her to stretch out her fingers, unclench her jaw. “I’m sorry. I’m being very egocentric right now. I am quite interested in you as well, you realize? I was looking forward to your company. And I have taken for granted your question implies an objective. For something to ‘work’ or ‘not work’, you have an idea in mind for what you’re trying to achieve. What does that mean, to you? What do you want, 3V?” Her lips purse, and there’s a pained wince. “I always feel a bit ridiculous, calling people by handles. Do you have something else I might call you?”

Millennials.

Persephone:

Bigsby takes the card and puts it in a pocket he has to unbutton, button back up again. It’s a great sign he’s taking it for more than just the sake of politeness.

The stage is being built like a black-box fortress. A core stage with the thickest walling to hold structures, the keep, curtain walling around it to hide the talent and crew. You’ve gotten in through the right side, still open-air while they rig the trusses that’ll hold all the systems over the stage - lights, cameras, action. Fortunately the front walls aren’t a priority yet, but it’s going to make pulling this act-like-you-belong trick harder later.

The cables run back here are a jungle-floor tripping-hazard. The only cable management has been last minute zip-ties in places, no efforts made to tape them down to the plasteel panelled flooring. Anyone with feet is going to be dealing with a tripping hazard - an advantage you hopefully won’t need.

What keeps the crowds out from the back are natural barriers. A lake and thick clumps of shade trees. Most wildlife here is escaped pets - there are more parrots and cockatiels in the trees than pigeons. Still, what punters have shown up in paddleboats are going to be quickly disappointed. Walls are already being thrown up around the prefab shipping-container offices that you move past to get onto the stage-proper.

There’s four of those, each with a pair of guards - one human, one android - and at the back of the stage a large green room is being set up. Folding craft tables covered in bakery stuffs and fresh fruit, carafes of hot drinks and an open icebox of canned drinks. Aeschwa Toussaint, an A lister on her way to being S list, is grabbing a coffee Coca-Cola™.

You don’t need to move through to hit the stage from this direction, and your harness, kit and augments are enough to let you pass the casual scrutiny. Keep your distance, and maybe don’t use that footage. Aeschwa’s big enough that her image could result in copyright flagging, and you might not want to explain how you got this shot.

As you step out onto the stage, Bigsby shimmies upside-down overhead with a loop of cabling around his neck, to plug into one of the bigger LED fill lights on the overhead truss. He gives you a nod, then shimmies back into the darkness he came from. He’s maybe four meters off the ground, and you’re wearing his harness.

You’ve got a sense of dimensions of this place now. The stage is about twice as wide as it is deep, about twenty paces side to side and ten paces forward and back. The interstitial space being built around it might be another ten paces again on all sides, with stage-left - the side you came in through - being mostly cables, rigging, generators, machinery. The other side must be where they’re making the dressing rooms and talent prep. It makes sense, that’s the side with the helicopters and beefed up security you avoided.

No wonder most are on the red carpet run right now, out in front of the crowds. There’s not enough space back here yet, even an hour before the event starts.

Unfortunately, you’re fishing. Your crowd sweeps are going to be gorgeous - the view from here is going to be great B-roll when you need it. You also get a sense for how large the crowd is - your best guess is 20,000 people. No space for more. TV-screens are going to cover the top of the stage, panel those side walls over the back areas. From the back of the crowd, they’re still only going to look as big as phone screens. Rows of portable toilets and concession stands break the rippling crowd like stones in a river.

Nothing here hits your interest again. Unfortunately it’s all old news - desperate workers, tight schedules. Gaffers trying to force order into the chaos of cabling, producers with tablets and flesh-matching headsets saying keywords the feel like they should lead to something interesting - budget, insurance, scheduling, legal. None of it bears fruit. No gossip, no scandal.

The Big Two broadcasters that have legitimate crews around here don’t seem to have a better idea than you already have about what this event is; Big money, short notice, and a reform-the-police message. Still, you rule out a suspect. Their producers are being led just as much as they’re leading. This is for the news media, not by.

Not a waste of time though. You’re memorable, and a lot of people are going to remember thinking you belonged back here. You’ve got witnesses, now, and just being here’s legal if you’re not asked to leave.

Another advantage? There’s no crowd between you and the VIPs doing their red carpet performance. Nobody to muscle past when a man with a car-commercial windswept haircut and a sterling-silver pinstripe suit throws a boxer’s punch at York. The striker’s form is as tight as his tailored suit, which doesn’t restrict him at all. Maybe an action star you don’t recognize, or someone alpha-macho enough to fantasize about taking on muggers.

York’s surprised, but not caught off guard. His hours doing MMA show here - he’s not as good a fighter as you are, but he knows how to duck and deflect, and his amphetamine focus is amplifying his reflexes. But he’s a full foot shorter than his opponent, and a grappler, and he’s not making any attempts to close the distance or fight back right now. He’s still trying to defuse… whatever it is he’s done. Looks like he can’t tell, either, or he’d have tried to get your attention.

Lucky you looked over, because he’s too focused on not getting punched to signal you, let you know what he wants you to do. The boxer’s bouncing, reading York’s defense, ready to throw another punch, and you’ve got seconds to react before the crowd does. Right now it looks like nobody's realized this is a real fight.

How do you handle this?

[This guy's good, but you're better. If you take the fight before knowing who he is, you win, make it good. There will be capital-C Consequences, but maybe you want that. Otherwise, describe your alternative, and roll 2d6 with relevant bonuses, and I'll match a target number to your style of approach.]

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

November:

Rudy presses the button to open the doors again. He gestures out, then retreats to his desk and slumps into it, a weary puddle. He does not cry. He does not sigh in relief. He simply waits.

Conspicuous in the silence: He does not bring up whether your services will be needed again, or if this is an awkward termination. Another aspect of handling this in which he seems to have trusted your discretion.

Here is the situation:

Red is in pieces. She should fit into a duffle bag sized container, say, with some delicate packing. She is a significant weight, though.

Rudolph Merkin's office-apartment is on the eighteenth floor of this twenty-three story building. There is a corridor between it and the elevators, though minimal neighbours, none you've heard from tonight. Floors eight, fourteen and fifteen are entirely mechanical and contain the building's electrical, plumbing and environmental control units. Presumably the in-building security is in one of these sections, though precise details are deliberately obscured from you. It is improbable, but not impossible, the security cameras are actively monitored.

The stairs are unlocked, but all floors besides the lobby and garage areas are locked once inside the stairwell. The parking garage would be a very convenient place to be picked up from.

There is a garbage chute, which would fit a duffel-bag sized container, but would be very likely to damage the already-shattered Red further if she were dropped from this height. Still, there is potential there. The building also has a pool, most of which is indoors. The exterior portion is on the other side of the building.

The pistol you're holding is very illegal. Significantly more trouble to explain than the body. Exponentially more difficult to explain both simultaneously.

What's the plan you come to, among yourselves? It'll be easier if there are few points of failure, minimal opportunities to be accosted by bystanders and witnesses, and disguises and ruses are kept plausible. Being Rudy's regular maid service does give you an edge, in that regard.

You have the murder weapon, the corpse, and the Red-handed culprit. By all accounts, you have solved your own murder, except for the motive.

Persephone:

There's strong class solidarity to be had in these industries. The divide is even made explicit in designation: "Above" and "Below" "the line" workers. Who is dispensible, exploitable, expendable, and who is not. You see it now, and he recognizes his own with the slung camera. Still, the rigger is furious - grateful, but furious.

"Fuck this." The expletive comes out like a whip-crack, "We fucking said this was going to happen-" He takes a shuddering, calming breath.

This is not a man relieved to have been saved from an unfortunate accident. This is a man pissed off he almost wasn't saved from an entirely avoidable incident. Good news for you. There is no HR manager in the world capable of preventing everyone in a thirty foot radius from learning the juicy details behind this.

A lanyard with a vestigial human being attached to it is heading over with a pained look. That must be the HR manager who's obligated to try.

"You want to hear bullshit?" the guy continues, "We're getting double-time for this, but the whole stage needs to be up in the next ninety minutes, or we don't see any of it. That's not legal, right? But you set up a shell production company, contract them, write a massive penalty into the contract, and bankrupt it if they hit penalty terms, and they can't afford to pay outstanding wages. But ninety minutes? It takes ten just to stabilize the rigging and scaffolding, another five to shift it to move it down another section as you go. I don't want to think about how electrical unit's doing with all this."

"Bigsby." The vestigial extension of the lanyard snaps, a woman who glares more at you for hearing this than at him for saying it.

"Fuck this." 'Bigsby' repeats. "We're making a ten-ton house of cards."

"We're also getting paid a day's rates for three hours work." The woman cuts back. "Just do what you can."

"I'm not working without a line anymore."

"Fine. Ten minutes from ninety to harness up. I'll go tell Elaine and Marcus they need to cover your slack."

Bigsby stares at her, winces. "Fuck this," he repeats again, climbing up the scaffolding you caught him from without a harness, barely sparing you an appreciative glance on the way up. Then he's back to fastening bolts with both hands while trying to keep his balance in the station's wind.

"What?" The woman now turns to you, glaring. Then, bitterly. "Don't look at me like that. If he doesn't get paid, I don't work again. This is just how it is."

This whole time, both of them have taken glances at the very visible camera slung around your shoulder, turned off, and been reassured. But your candid cam just caught the whole thing, and you got yourself a segment worth keeping. It'll be the work of moments to digitize the cassette output for broadcast, but that's clean too.

Maybe it's not the interview you wanted, but you've got someone behind the scenes who recognizes you as a friend, now. And it does tell you something else; Someone's thrown a lot of money to do this quick, today. The amount of money thrown around to get all these A-listers at the same short notice they got the riggers and stagehands has got to be ludicrous - at least, getting enough to chum the waters to draw the rest.

What's your call here? Pull this thread and see where it goes, or find what York's been doing? He probably needs a bit more time to get up to anything good, but that's not a bad reason to find him now.

That being said. Bigsby's scaffolding harness and a hardhat lies abandoned on the ground here, and it'd be easy to slip on. It'd be a flimsy disguise, but the pretext of being a camera tech could probably get you deeper into the stage area if you like your chances of getting back out. Your press pass is authentic: Technically, you're allowed to be here, even if you get 'caught'. It's just a question of how far you're willing to push.

3V:

Apparently 'everything' that was the best answer - Ferris sups from cupboards and pantries as a hummingbird, truly at home. Whatever else she may be - martyr-scholar, hermit-savior - she's still a geek, and you've shown an openness to her favourite experiences.

"The wine's Aevum," she says reassuringly - some unspoken lingering trauma of local alternatives, maybe not any port in a storm, "We don't have the monopoly on ambrosia here. But the vintner and I talk about fermentation, sometimes, grapes, the terroir of stardust. Not quite amontillado, but rich and sweet all the same."

A tasting flight is rapidly being arranged. "The milk and sugar are shipped, too. I never grew the stomach for real dairy. I've made some oat milk if you prefer, or you can have the tea and coffee black. Really, you're not supposed to have milk in darjeeling anyway but..." she trails off. Apparently even the saints are entitled their sacrilege.

She picks up again, barely a whisper. Strain to hear; "I don't miss delivery. I don't miss temptation. Ignoring my conscience." Louder, remembering she has company, remembering that it's rude to mutter. "I was just remembering... once, I was on a committee discussing cultural preservation, and the international poverty line was brought up. I learned they would measure it in terms of income, not wealth. A farmer that grows their own crops on common land is below the poverty line. You enclose their commons, and pay them a wage to work that land, you they are no longer 'in poverty', but their quality of life, their psychological well-being, have both been irreparably harmed. I remember having to learn that for the first time. I was blind to the deliberate malice in that decision. I was stupid, and I gave my children away to slavery for not seeing it. It's all I see, now. I can't go back."

Maybe her finger isn't on the pulse enough to hear about the latest specifics of the case. But she's clearly still familiar with the broad strokes of the app-economy. She is trying and failing to show restraint. She catches herself again, and steadies herself, focuses on the little pleasure of shared enthusiasms. Two cups of tea are poured in cup and saucer - one a strong red stain on deep black pool, the other a clear and shining amber. Arabica espresso in the bottom of a mug with room for milk. Wine in a glass, and the chilled and stoppered bottle of rainwater at the end of it all. A plate of halved strawberries and slices of melon.

"I'm sorry. I know you didn't come all the way out here just for me to lecture you. Or maybe you did. I just know there are so many important lessons here, and nobody willing to learn them, share them. And I cannot make them listen to me anymore." Not 'can't'. Cannot. A pain that refuses contraction. "A community will only listen to you for as long as you can suffer to be a part of it. You know how it feels when the suffering matters more than the listening."

"I don't know what I want you to learn here, what I want you to show people. But I refuse to have my life's work end in deliberate obscurity, one last buried inconvenience. My garden must not end as a scream into the void. I did not slash away Moloch's horny pervert fingers just to be dropped into the memory hole. I refuse." There are no cataracts in her eyes, they are clear and electric, narrow and all-consuming.

The drinks, both hot and cold, regress to the mean. Entropy will not forgive a dramatic moment.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

November:

Rudy's shoulders sag. Immeasurable relief washes over him when White asks for the gun. He is in a losing position, but he is now in a losing position he can grasp. Only the living can feel fear, and he now counts himself among its number again. He gives White the gun without question, without hesitation. It's already had its prints wiped.

It's also still loaded. He seems beyond caring.

He grimaces. "I know the bill you're referring to, the money, but my thumb is only one of many on those scales. I'll see what I can do. I know who to talk to about it. That passage, specifically, even if New Employment fails, it will be added to an easier bill to push. But I can't tell you... what you're asking." He says this carefully, a lump in his throat like he's swallowing against a hangman's noose. "I can't."

He stands aside, and points to the body. "Take the girl, do with her as you will. And I will compensate you for Headpattr, of course, and more. Whatever you need, I assure you it will be provided. I will tell my client about this, and they will clear the usual obstacles for you. If you are unsatisfied," somehow this is the word that is layered thick with sympathy, "Shoot me, and take what you must. Or convict me, and I will plead guilty and take my chances. But I have greater fears than death. And so should you."

He means it. If he's bluffing, he's making a damned good show of it. He stands with his hands balled into shaking fists at his sides, and his eyes slightly winced, anticipating the gunshot. Maybe it’d be easier for him than having to tell his client. He's bought your story entirely, but that seems to be the problem.

So of course this is the sort of thing Red put her entire foot in. Of course it is.

Persephone:

Harkness lets her hand fall to her side - there's an obvious respect for your focusing on the situation right now, she's clearly appalled by your summary of it. York pinches the bridge of his nose. "Snowjob," he repeats, for Harkness's sake. "I knew your message was important. I just didn't think they did, too." Sounds like you confirmed his thoughts on this one. He holds his phone close to the camera to get a wireless connection going, then grabs a freeze frame of the salt-and-pepper haired guy you picked up. He frowns. "I actually don't know who that is. Now, isn't that interesting? Jez?"

"Nothing. Definitely not one of mine." She confirms.

"Hope not, anyway." York agrees. "Got a name?"

'Alan' gets nothing out of either of them. That makes York twitchy.

While this is going on in half your attention, "Alan" has disappeared into the thick of the crowd, leaving Mishka behind to tap away at a smartphone worth more than your apartment. You catch a glimpse of him heading into a prefab backstage area, currently a greenroom about the size of two RVs welded together, and gone again. Your equipment won't pick up through walls. Probably the point of those areas getting built so quick, as more helis queue for the painted-out landing pad.

"We're still missing a piece here. All this is time and money to totally hijack an event that maybe would get a hundred thousand clicks, maybe a thirty percent watch retention." A glance at Harkness, a reassuring grimace. "Thirty percent's good. Better than it sounds."

"Sure." Harkness isn't convinced, clearly, but drops it. "A hundred thousand, really?"

"Quantity's a quality," again York reassures her, missing that Harkness was impressed by how high that number was, "It helps to have a backlog so that when something big breaks, you've already got relevant content to absorb the hits while they're fresh. Random luck sometimes makes them shoot into the tens-of-millions. Speaking of." York puts his full attention back on Elodie. "I want to livefeed this soon. Before the show really starts, so we get the early clicks. We'll interview Jez after all, just a bit more than we planned. Anything you can get that's juicy, we'll cut to it for transitions and moving around. Anything that can fill dead time and stop people switching to a different feed."

"If I see anything, I'll say something." Harkness chips in.

"Right. So we've got two missing puzzle pieces: Who's backing this, and why now. Brilliant, you already got us our 'where', 'what' and 'why', and a solid lead on a 'who'. You pick a hornet's nest and I'll go kick it for you until journalism falls out, how's that?"

York pulls a military canteen from under his surplus-store urban-camo jacket, and takes a swig from it. It reeks of energy drink and battery acid. He's smiling again, a beatific freeze frame expression caught in the moment the baseball bat hits the judge's letterbox. Look into those dilating pupils and feel that the real molotov cocktails were the friends we made along the way.

You've seen this before - most of what's in that mix is York's legitimate ADHD prescriptions, just not at that dose. He's not out of control, he's getting camera ready. To keep the live streams going needs an inhuman level of pep and energy and an ability to suppress inhibitions while still keeping a tight hold of them. For the next six hours York is going to be a content machine, whatever that means, whatever it takes.

Jezebel recognizes it too, clearly, and looks away. In about six hours, he'll start a three hour wind down, then crash for twelve. No way this goes that long, though, that's his gamble.

Pick a direction to lob him in, and make your shot count. There's a few options. There's the workers setting up the stage. There's the backstage areas you can't aim your kit at - but you might lose him too early in the day taking a risk like that. There's also the crowd of VIPs, and somehow York's got himself a platinum lanyard with a holographic QR code on it - probably enough for him to take you as a +1, as long as you kept tight together. Or you could send him off to find out what he can on his own, and keep filming the crowd covertly. Your call. How do you do this?

3V:

"I'm so glad you like it. I was desperately afraid you wouldn't, but I hoped that you would." Her voice is glockenspiel, iron and music, clean notes and a transtlantic accent ringing out in the small cabin, "Record, of course." Lorraine laughs, charmed at the offer and the attention to detail. "We didn't put so much work into speech-to-text transcription just to rely on chickenscratch. Long scratch? Slang changes with the times, I suppose."

She waits for the recorder to come on before continuing, a gentle tip of the head.

Your research fills in for you - Early AI emerged from two theoretical models, less competing and more in dialectic. One was the theory that AI would not be restricted to human intelligence, would not have to resemble it. Ferris pushed another; the one that said we must understand what human intelligence even is before we can define a space outside of it. One of those leaps was software capable of more than approximating speech, of contextually understanding it as people do.

"I didn’t know what you might like, so I prepared a little bit of everything for you." She doesn't rise from her chair, but waves her hand towards the kitchen. "Wine, spirits, tea, coffee, fruit, juice. Rainwater. I recommend it, after the walk, you won't find anything else quite like it unless you can find Tasmania in a time machine." There's overflowing pride there. Not in her generosity as a host, but as a mother speaks of a favourite child. "John Milton eat your bloody heart out. I served in hell for rain in heaven."

Now she rises, energized, while indicating that you should stay comfortable. She is such a cat lady, and she is feeling indulged as she totters back to the kitchen. "If you look up and to the left from the balcony, you can see the Singpho village where the tea is grown. Darjeeling and assam. The Surui grow arabica on the other side of the mountain. I can't say it's the best you'll ever have, with how robust refinement has gone. It's like comparing sorghum to a Cheese Supreme Dorito. But you might care for it all the same."

Who still even eats Doritos anymore? Deep Gamer Lore holds they stopped being good after the Coke-Pepsi merger in the 2050s.

"The poem is Howl, by Ginsberg. Not mine. I was in love with it for years before learning that the author was an outspoken member of NAMBLA. The North-American Man-Boy Love Association, a pederast group. Around the time I learned that Derrida, Foucalt, Deleuze, de Beauvoir, Sartre and Althusser had all petitioned to bring the age of consent below thirteen." She leans against her kitchen counter and looks out the sliding door. The first line of the poem, stretched across multiple stones, clear from where she's standing. "It made Howl more important to me, not less. None of us are too brilliant for madness or abhorrence. Not even the philosophers. Not the poets. Not even him."

She shakes her head, clears herself out of her reverie. The hands she has been leaning on are clenched fists, and now she relaxes them. "Please, stay comfortable. You've come such a long way. What may I get you?"

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

November:

You're left waiting longer than you'd think. Watch, if you like, as Rudy takes a few moments to read what he can of the premium dispute services, not bothering to do the same for the Pinkerton investigation. There was never a doubt which button he'd press, but he is meticulous in his decision to press it.

Maybe killing's not in his nature, but you don't get office space like this if you don't have some kind of predator's instinct. Defenses raise at the too-good-to-be-true, a glint of steel in a dark alley out of the corner of his eye. But maybe that was your point.

Finally, Rudy taps the button.

"May I have a minute please, Ms?" He calls from his office at the same time. does not specify which 'Ms' he means - trusting whoever answers to be it. "In my study, if you'd be so kind?"

When White answers - this is her plan, her contingency, her call to answer - he presses a remote on his desk to close the door behind her. Red's shattered remains are where you knew they would be, look how you'd have expected them to look. There they are all the same. Rudy looks for all the world like a trench soldier who's been given the order to go over the top. A place beyond fear or pride or duty - he is already dead, and the next five minutes determine whether he can claw his life back.

"This was an accident." He kills the tremor of pleading in his voice, straightens up again. Walks until he is two paces from White and stops. "Whatever it takes for that to be true, I will pay. That's what's best for both of us. Because if this is investigated - if you try to look into what caused this accident - neither of us will ever be safe ever again. Please."

No apologies. No remorse. Your blood on his hands.

Well?

3V:

Your gracious host is a woman named Lorraine Ferris. Her emails were polite, warm, friendly. Something from an ancient era, she still types with ":-)" emoticons, right down to the little hyphen noses. It makes sense you hadn't heard of her before she reached out to you, most of her work was done a lifetime ago, before yours. Even then, knowing what to look for, left you with the impression of a woman screaming into a megaphone, desperate not just to be heard but to be something that could not be ignored.

Even just skimming her old work - what publications you can still search, what aging servers still carry legacy websites - one thing is clear through it all. Lorraine Ferris was angry. Too mad to live and too angry to die. Prominent in two fields, ecology and artificial intelligence, to see the worst atrocities humans would commit to each. Her work at Cogitech on AI ethics predated the Wyatt-Tversky paper by at least a decade. The chip on her shoulder was big enough to have plate tectonics.

None of that history is evident here. There can't be anything here that draws more power than is provided by the gleaming solar panel that makes the cabin's roof. There isn't even a television that you can see.

Now Vesna sees Ms. Ferris move about her kitchen, past the living room between them. You can see her clearly through the long, sliding glass door, and she clearly sees you just fine, too. She puts a kettle on, then takes a stoppered bottle of water out from the fridge and puts it on the bench, takes two wine glasses.

Ms. Ferris gives Vesna a nod - a smile, even, though a quick one. It's not a natural expression for her, and even that second took obvious effort. Then she moves to a comfortable chair by the fire inside, sun-bleached and moth-eaten, and even her wire-muscle mountain-climber frame doesn't protect her from making an arthritic wince as she settles. She takes her ereader out and waits, her back to you.

You are welcome here, and you will not be hurried.

You may take as long or as little as you like. With a word, Ms. Ferris would join you out at the railing instead. Depending on your mood, this is either a generosity, or she's put you in zugzwang.

A question for past and for present: When you prepared to come out here, did you learn about Lorraine through interrogation or investigation? That is - did you focus on researching her history, finding what was online about her, or did you focus on asking her about herself through your email correspondence, before this in-person interview?

The internet doesn't forget, and Ms. Ferris clearly preferred this sit-down. This means 'interrogation' is a target of 11, roll 3d6+4 (cool, charm, I Know You boosted). 'Investigation' is a 2d6 +2 (clever, social media) roll, beat a target of 8. Investigation would also allow you to keep your I Know You boost for the sit-down meeting. You only get to make one first impression. Either approach will lead to an advantage.

That was then, this is now: How long do you wait, before making your decision to greet Ms. Ferris (or maybe Lorraine, if you're lucky), and how do you do it?

Persephone:

NBN is all said and more. Its only other major competitor is the more liberal, more anodyne, less sensationalist OESN (usually pronounced 'ocean'), the Outer Earth News Syndicate. OESN has more of a pride of place here, its crews aren't with you behind the bollards but directly involved in setting up the rigging and scaffolding for the stage event literally unfolding in front of you. OESN is better for the kind of brand the A-listers are a part of. NBN was clearly tipped off to have gotten here so soon, maybe just to have noses thumbed in their direction.

A cynical voice might suggest that a manufactured culture war needs a belligerent side, and NBN provides belligerence in spades.

Mishka Ardent was a smart choice of focus. York mentioned her ratios on Hive are legendary, she'll double down on every bad take without surrender. To show discretion is to make a tacit admission that there might be negative social consequences for airing your ideas - Mishka Ardent's too arrogant to have that filter. Her mentions exploding like the Tsar Bomba just reassures her she's the Gallileo of 2080.

She's in an argument with a ridiculously handsome man you don't recognize, who wasn't introduced to you, but it sounds like Ardent considers him an equal.

"... cannot be taken seriously until you denounce these calls to abolish the police."

"Please," the man says - bassy voice in the microphone, sweeping a tense hand through neat salt-and-pepper hair with other, "It's hyperbole, it's rhetoric, it's not policy. This is just a case of a language barrier. Your tribe uses euphemism to undersell the real. 'Clean our streets' means pogrom the homeless. The radical left use hyperbole to gild the real. When they say 'eat the rich' they mean taxes. Learn the language barrier, and maybe we'll be able to have a real conversation."

"Frankly, Alan, what else could 'abolish the police' mean?"

'Alan' has his back to you now. You can't see his face, but he sounds exhausted. "We're on-message here. Retrain, reform, reintegrate into the community. We need to be on the same side here, Mishka, we want the same things. We're just appealing to different bases to get it."

Mishka pauses. "Why is it so wrong to take people at face value? Nobody's calling for a bloody pogrom. Just- Have you been on the subway lately? Homeless people shit in escalators, if you lock them out of the toilets. It's filthy. I want them housed as much as you do, just get it done."

Alan sighs. "I am well aware of the human need to shit." A click of the tongue, a tilt of the head. "We need to communicate an effective synergy here, and I can't have you torpedo this because you're jumping at shadows on cave walls. Learn the language, and don't feed a fire by giving it oxygen. Denouncing is platforming. Stay on the real message."

"Filthy." She hisses, then takes a deep breath. "Alright. If I'd known you were backing this, I wouldn't have-"

You're interrupted with a shake that knocks your headphones loose, back around your neck. York's back, a look of absolute disgust on his face, bruises on his elbows, and Ted's crumpled over in a heap beside you, twitching.

"Oh, eat a bag of cement, that was a love tap at best," York grunts, yanking Ted back up to his feet by the scruff of his jacket and dusting him off, even though Ted's a full head and shoulders taller. "Listen, mate, clench your thighs next time, it's just the shock of it. Sorry about that, you seem lovely. Yeah?" Ted winces, shakes out a nod, and York looks back in the direction he's come from. "None of these prissy dinguses go to a live show? Can't have been good ones. Got through faster than I should have. Here's Harkness, she's who we're here for."

Harkness is a woman with spaghetti braids down past her shoulder blades, and precise geometric tattoos in thick lines down from her elbows to her wrists. She offers a hand to shake, her warm and level eye contact not even sparing a second glance at your prosthetics. "Jezebel." She raises her voice over the crowd effortlessly - practiced. "It's a pleasure."

"Anything good?" York asks, tilting his head to the rig.

Dark Age (playtest): The Lands of Pendragon

Speak of a hard decision and do not speak of war and sieges, the prices paid with other lives. Speak of love, of your choice of co-author in the story of your life. The graft of one into another, and the heavy scars if ever to be removed.

Sir Liana had not been an easy decision. She was a commitment to doing more than was asked of him, of an aversion to failure. She was a commitment to seeking trials and duties greater than his shoulders could bear, for the simple fact that they were the trials worth pursuing. She was a commitment in her own right.

There remained a blight upon the land. Knights in need of a greater monarch - knights who would accept a seat at a round table of equals. A table Castle Sauvage could host. A table that would seat knights such as Sir Hector.

Maybe Sir Coilleghille had not found the company of such knights in her travels. But how many times have you found sundries in the places you already looked? A coin pouch in the very place you left it, the first place you checked. Seeing without seeing.

Good character is much harder find than bad. Arrogance announces itself. How does one see humility? What does a virtuous person look like, when you pass them in the street? The task is oblique; You can only find it by seeing it reflected in others. And Robena counted directness among her virtues.

For this, Tristan finds himself uniquely suited. Not from anything he had learned, but in how he had approached learning them. An endless and sincere interest in others, in learning what they valued so that he might also value it, and an infinite patience. A good heart, though at times far too trusting and easily misled. Crucially, not misled when it had mattered most.

In this he finds a perfect partner in Sir Liana, and she in him. A mutual flaw of idealism becomes something greater when shared - when the world or its people disappoint, one alone looks inward to correct the failure in their judgement. Two draw reassurance from each other. They look outward, and correct the failure in the world.

A samurai's story starts with failure. It is only through a failure in the service of a greater whole that leads to a quest for redemption through individual valor. It is the reverse of a knight's - their worthiness to serve the whole is proved by a quest showing their individual valor. Tristan had begun at the confluence of his parents two traditions; A quest to prevent the failure that would define him.

Alloyed from two stories that are each the other's reverse, how could it be any other way that Tristan's ends in beginning? In pursuit of the piece that Pendragon's poison snuffed: The greater whole worthy of true heroes.

The England that should have been.