Count Numbers

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Orange:

“I haven’t.” Here Starlight is caught flickering between a number of awkward confessions, caught trying to work out the least of them. You’ve dusted her bookshelves, and you doubt she’s bought a work of fiction since law school - and even then, those yellowed spines are mostly young-adult comfort food. There’s no accounting for what’s in her digital library, sure, but bookshelves aren’t obsolete, they remain a critical form of expression. No other decoration makes such a profound statement of their owner.

Hers is filled with the biographies of scientists and technical histories, but no science-fiction, classic or otherwise. If she does read any fiction, she’s not sentimental enough to get it in print.

And that, it seems, clinches the argument. Orange is following social rules that Starlight is ignorant of. This is no longer a bargain; this is a faux pas. And just like that, Orange climbs another notch.

Starlight clears her throat. “I’m not trying to impress anyone. I think everyone’s just going to be happy it’s not pizza again. It’s…” She rubs her forehead with the heel of her palm, massaging it hard. “It’s work friends, but it’s not meant to be a work thing. I’m so sorry, you’re obviously trying to help, and I obviously need it.”

Who are you bringing?

Pink and Persephone:

"Well yeah," York says to Elodie with a smirk, "Whole point is I'm going to be lying, aren't I?" Blink and you'd miss it, York’s across the room with one arm around Marco’s shoulder. There are stars in his eyes, and a carnival barker’s grin. “I’m the editor of the Anthropozine. I’ve heard you’re going to be our fulcrum.”

Marco blinks, trying to work out if he’s just too tired to understand, or if York genuinely didn’t make sense. “Fulcrum?”

“Some Greek guy once said, give me a big enough lever and a fulcrum to place it, and I can move the world. You’re that fulcrum. You’re also my Dreyfus,” and he twists Marco by the shoulders to face Pink, “And her Prometheus.”

Marco blinks and rubs his eyes again. “Okay. That makes sense.” It sounds half-sincere, but it’s a very valiant half that means it.

York looks the mouse up and down. He pulls Marco’s hoodie down for a moment to assess him, then pulls it back up. “Alright, you’re already camera-ready. The dead-mouse-walking look sells you as authentic. We’re going to need six hours of interview, then someone’s going to figure out how to drop you down to Earth. You think you can do that for me?”

“What?” York’s talking too fast for him - Marco’s eyes widen as he catches up to what he’s hearing.

“Going to need some things from you first,” York plows through, “I’m going to need your home address, I’m going to need the contact details of all your closest friends and family, and I’m going to need access to your banking details.”

Marco blinks and looks past York, over at Elodie. “What?”

In an instant, York sweeps the mouse into a big hug and squeezes. It’s a shockingly sudden and deeply sincere gesture, with Marco’s head resting on York’s shoulder and a hand rubbing just behind his huge, round ears. York just holds the mouse in silence for a few seconds. Then; “Listen, Marco. I’m really sorry about everything that’s about to happen.”

York breaks the hug, and Marco sways on his feet as he finds his own balance again. “What’s going to happen?”

But York’s already focused on you two, again. “Someone needs to go to his place and sweep it for everything. Drugs, storage media, laptops, cell phones. Take lots of pictures, before and after the sweep. I want to know what’s already missing, and what they’re going to attack this guy with. What’s the ‘he’s no angel’ narrative going to be? Then we need to hit everyone he’s close to. I’ll message Junta to clone a debit card and get him to try and buy something from a convenience store in Gaia, see if his accounts have been frozen yet." He checks his phone and remembers he's taken the battery out of it. Puts it back in his pocket without fixing it. "Someone else can figure out a way to smuggle our guy here to Selene safely.” He grimaces. “Persephone, I think you should do the apartment sweep. Go in ready for a fight. Fast as you like.”

That wakes Marco up. "Apartment 14, 272 Bostrom street, in Judith Butler. Apollo. Modern Apollo, I'll write it down. I've got a laptop and a desktop, all my external storage should be gone already. If you find any there, it might be someone else's, so don't plug it in to anything. Don't check. I keep all my medication in the bathroom mirror." Then, with a meek voice but hands balled into fists at his side, "Do I really need to go to Earth? Can't I stay here and, and fight? Isn't that what I'm supposed to do?"

York's firm on that one, but he looks to you two for backup - or dissent.

White:

“Heavens.” The unicorn smiles, and her companion stops in her train of thought, like a concrete bollard stops a cyclist at the bottom of a hill. “Another one.”

The companion looks up from the book with an amused smile. “You do like to collect them, don’t you?”

“Them, she says,” The unicorn directs to you with an amused tone. “How soon she forgets. I’m Crystal. And you and I are going to have a wonderful tête-à-tête the moment you can figure out whether you want to be me, or have me. Take your time. This one’s good at sharing.”

“You’ll have better luck with ‘have’ than ‘be’.” The companion raises an eyebrow, finding her place in her book again. “She has personality like Rembrandt has paintings. In this curator’s opinion, anyway.”

“You can see why I keep her around.” Crystal brushes a tress of her mane out of her eye, twirls a finger through it to curl it with the main body flowing down behind her ear. The result is perfect, even without a mirror, even though the gesture is unconscious. “She must like you, though. She went with a Dutch master, and not a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.”

“Fiona.” The companion says, giving a two-finger wave while focusing on her reading. “I’m not jealous, no. Feel free to pretend I don’t exist.”

“Now.” Crystal is within arm’s reach now. She trails fingertips from White’s elbow to her wrist, and then that impossibly soft hand draws White’s hand towards her lips, to kiss the back of her hand in a gesture that the unicorn elevates from old-fashioned to timeless. “You have my attention, but I don’t have your name.”

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

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.

–Errant

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Orange:

Starlight smiles supportively at a happily burbling Sarah when she watches for approval. Whenever Sarah turns back to vigorously conduct her masterpiece, though, the smile tightens like piano wire, and she rakes a finger through wavy black hair that shines red where it catches the light.

When Sarah’s performance is done, Starlight gives an enthusiastic applause and scoops her daughter up in a big hug, and her daughter burbles in absolute delight. Whatever ulterior motives you might have, so far this has been a genuine kindness.

Still holding her daughter in one hand, Starlight pulls her phone from her jeans and confirms the ‘ten’, then turns it around to show you. “I know it’s been a long day,” she apologizes, “but you’ve been so good with Sarah. Could you stay until after dinner? Can you cook? I can do double-rate.” Her phone is back in her pocket already, and she’s holding Sarah out in front of her, smiling. “I never like separating her, from people she likes.”

This would be surprising to hear, if you only knew that she was an easy tenner. But now you know she doesn’t bring herself to check on her babysitter’s work, and Sarah’s still too young to say. That performance was the difference between being a good babysitter, and being known as being a good babysitter.

“Sorry,” Starlight apologizes before you can answer. This is why she’s been running her hand through her hair, this is what she’s been rehearsing since the moment she saw how happy her daughter was. “I’m having some colleagues… some friends,” she corrects herself, “over. I know how long you’ve already been working, but it would mean a lot to me if you would stay a bit longer?”

Headpattr wouldn’t let you, officially. Work apps that try to skirt labor laws get shut down very quick. What she is asking you to do is illegal, and she knows it. This means she is asking you not as an employee, but as a person who would do this as a favour.

Orange smiles and curtsys. She likes the gesture; she has the poise of a ballet gesture as she makes it. "I regret to inform you that I cannot do so in my capacity as a Headpattr employee," said Orange. She lets the moment linger for a moment before making a play: "Section 14.3 of the Android Relations Code prevents me from working outside the legally mandated human maximum."

It's an unexpected argument to use in this situation and it reframes the entire scenario. By referring to that particular piece of legal code Orange has just demonstrated that she's got an understanding of law that goes beyond the basic. She's also made the point that she possesses the endurance and willingness to continue working long hours, and so the request is not considered an imposition. This is not an exhausted girl at the end of her shift, this is an intelligent AI doing her best to operate within a human context.

"In my capacity as family friend and house guest?" she said. "Entirely different scenario. There are but two complications: One, you will have to set out an additional table space so that one of my sisters might join you for dinner, and two, you will have to lend us some proper clothing."

This is the connection in Orange's mind. Upgrade herself from contractor maid to untrained but brilliant legal mind who can double as a babysitter.

Starlight flinches. It’s a lot of mental work and a very short time to do it, especially with Orange waiting on the answer. Still, Sarah makes an argument on your behalf that is impossible for her mother to ignore. A quiet, happy burble while pointing at you.

“You’re free to help yourself to anything in the wardrobe, of course. Your sister though…” she trails off, looking at her daughter. “Sarah’s only vouching for you. Maybe another time? When it’s not such short notice?”

Listen to the questioning tone; she’s worried you will walk away from the table. She’s still haggling, but right now a stranger at her dinner table is outside her price range.

Orange can either take the clean win, here, and her guaranteed place. Or she can press her advantage to try to get Starlight to accept the whole bargain, with the risk that comes with pushing.

[Charm or Bullshit could both work here - either making Orange’s word worth more, or by making a good case for the sister you want to bring. Starlight is more Clever than Cool, so meet-or-beat 9 or 10 respectively. Roll + Cool. 7 and lower would mean Starlight balks, she walks. Otherwise she just holds firm.]

Persephone and Pink:

York moves his lips for a second as he translates the ideas in his head. “Okay. I hear what you’re saying. But I’m with Persephone. I want my interview first. We have until he wakes up to prep for it, then I want six hours of footage.” He shadow boxes while he thinks, focusing more on practicing dodges than punches. “Keep it in our pockets of course, like good little children, and start off with announcing he’s offworld and untouchable. Even if it’s not true. Maybe work on making it true, depending on what he says.”

He drops his fists to his sides and shrugs. “Six hours of interview, because I’m with you on Earth. Probably only going to get one chance to get everything we need to get. Sorry, Persephone. Journalism like this broke a country once, back when that was a big deal. Author named Zola broke France over his knee, and he wrote an entire book about how he did it. Brought down an antisemitic conspiracy, upheld by the highest courts of the most antisemtiic country on Earth, and he fucking won.”

“This guy’s our Dreyfus, the knee that Zola broke France over. We have to make everyone know it, which means he’s got to tell ‘em. That’s what the interview’s for. Don’t show what we really got, yet. Just give the story a protagonist, and make everyone talk about what we could have. Let the counter-narrative start. Zola wrote the playbook here.” He holds up three fingers to both of you, and starts counting them off fingers. “First they’ll try to take our guy down. There’s going to be nothing for him here, on Aevum, anyway.” One finger down. “Next they’ll try to make the story the story. What I mean is, they’ll talk about how everyone feels about the news, and that becomes all that matters. This is where guys like Snowden tripped up, it’s why the P-Papers didn’t count for jack shit, and it’s why we hold back. Like I said. I hear what you’re saying, Pink.” Second finger down. Middle finger raised over his head. “That’s when we take this to court.”

He lets that ring out. “That’s what J’Accuse was. Dreyfus got accused by a secret military court, so Zola publicly accused everyone involved and made that accusation front page news. He knew he’d get sued for libel, he said it in the accusation. But to sue him, they had to unseal the records of the Dreyfus trial for him to use in discovery. That’s how he won. Hundred years later, Watergate didn’t work because it changed public opinion, ‘cause it fucking didn’t, it worked because Nixon got impeached.”

York massages his jaw until it clicks like a billiards break. An old MMA injury that goes off when he talks too long. He’s starting to feel it. “That’s where I’m at. We need to build the story first, so the courts feel people breathing down their neck. We only reveal what we know during the trial, for maximum impact, at which point they’re going to invent whole new laws to prevent us reporting on it. We break all of them and broadcast anyway. I’ll take the fall, personally, to keep The Anthropozine free to act. Then…” he trails off. “The masters tools will dismantle the master’s house. Doesn’t matter what the law is. What matters is making them realize what the law needs to be to stop Aevum burning. And that’s our gift of fire.”

There’s a squeaking yawn as Marco sits up and stretches.

White:

Two up at the bar near you. A white unicorn with hair like a cascade of fortified wine, and her girlfriend, frustrated eyes peering out through round-rimmed glasses at her ereader. You assume girlfriend. She’s going off about something she’s reading, and the unicorn is actually listening with more than feigned interest.

The unicorn has a physical charisma that’s impossible to ignore. She moves like an actress who has been perfectly cast for her role, like she knows all her lines by heart and she all the ways to sell her character in every gesture and small movement. She is who she was born to be.

On the other dance floors, a wild-eyed ferret with a spray of blond curls twitches in time to the beat as his partner, a sleek lioness half-again his height, moves with a fluid grace. She’s barely dancing at all, more wiggling her hips and flicking her wrist, more focused on the conversation. Whatever they’re talking about, it’s engaging enough that nearby dancers lose their rhythm stopping to listen to them.

Finally there’s the bartender himself, a hulking water buffalo with curled horns, wiping glasses with rolled-up white sleeves. He might have a more objective eye on the run of the place than the guests.

3V:

Black has her moment to dance, but there's an ambush here for you, too.

You wouldn't be the Anthropozine's first culture reporter, and you won't be its last. We stand upon the shoulders of giants.

Here's one from the archives, something you read on the site before you joined. Maybe it's one of the reasons you wanted to. I would understand why.

Errant; Close to the Sun

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.

–Errant

The DJ is making a statement. How many times have you heard the witch's offer to Dami, and how many times have you heard Dami's answer? Someone's isolated the vocals, killed the original instrumentals, and replaced it with a building, throbbing beat. The musical equivalent of how it feels between the "We need to talk", and the words that come next.

But then the beat drops as Dami declares her dedication to her friends. It's a great beat. FAEWYL-D's trap influences make it malleable to this kind of mix. Everyone else is dancing like that's all it is. Does anyone else realize the statement the DJ is making, when the succubus that SuA is fighting is replaced by Emma's bulletcore lyrics? It's a seamless sampling job.

Up above the crowd, a black catgirl raises her green eyes from her laptop to scan the audience, looking for understanding.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Orange:

Starlight’s not supposed to bring her work home with her, and she tries not to. Her home isn’t as secure - clearly - and her work is meant to be collaborative and directive. Her job isn’t to do, it is to make sure it is done. The only thing she should be doing from home, then, is emails.

No video conferences, either. It was easier to solve the problem of commuting than figure out how to make webcam conversations not suck.

This should suit Orange just fine for her purposes. She’s not trying to infiltrate the web itself, has no specific case of Ms Bandaras that she’s trying to learn about. She is trying to learn Ms Bandara. What she talks about when she’s trying not to talk about work is the honeypot.

Here is what Orange learns, before lunch.

Ms Bandara is deeply broken. There are no photos of Sarah’s sire, no momentos, no evidence of a shared life. Not at first. But clean her ensuite, and see that there are still two toothbrushes, two hairbrushes, two towels. Only one side of the queen bed gets used, only one night table, only one side of the room, only half the wardrobe.

In common areas, like the kitchen, there’s less obvious aspects. The spacious island counter that looks out into the living room, where Sarah is babygated. She is not allowed TV time, but the floor is covered in educational toys. Not mainstream ones either - one is a pillow that’s covered in straps and buckles, another is a pair of gigantic boxes of wooden blocks, most covered in fingerpaint marks.

More recently, a big box of animal toys, and next to it a rubberized book with buttons to play animal sounds. Watch Sarah bang the button with the toy, then hold it close to her eye and, with a big smile, try to imitate the sound she heard. The cow goes “ooooo!”, the horse goes “nnnnneh”. Watch her get bored and wander off to another of the expensive, doctor-approved toys. Still, care has clearly been given to what Sarah likes, and not just what her mother wants her to like.

This was meant to be an adult entertaining space, for wine and charcuterie. The floating counters of the kitchen are too spacious for even the most messy of home-cooks to take advantage of, you could plan a defense-in-depth strategy with the three tiers of them. There is only gravedirt where there once was a herb garden. This hosting and entertaining space has been given entirely to Sarah.

Messy divorce? Bad breakup? It would explain the lack of sentimentals, but not Starlight’s unwillingness to reclaim personal spaces. No. What’s more is a contradiction in her behaviour. She is clearly devoted to her daughter, but even on a day off, Starlight is barely seen in the living room. She hides in her home office. She calls out to you, routinely, for tea and coffee every half an hour or so. But she apologizes each time that she didn’t make it herself, and she means it.

Your mind is keen enough to find the significance in this data and extrapolate from it. Starlight Bandara was deeply in love, and whoever she loved - Sarah’s other parent - must be dead. Her daughter remains as a living memory to this absent partner. Starlight would do anything for her daughter, but it is painful to be around her.

Combine this with what is overheard, the conversations she has. Starlight Bandara has few friends outside work, and struggles to talk about hobbies. Attempts are made, but she is always listening to other’s interests and never expressing her own. There is obvious relief in her voice when she gets to talk about work, even if it’s in vagaries.

Her job must have been the one thing she did not share in her life, the one area of safe retreat. This is likely how she has achieved such a promotion at such a young age.

You were right in your initial read. To a woman like this, a maid uniform might as well be burlap. But children? They have not learned the complex mores of social hierarchies, of the connotations of a uniform. They just think you’re very pretty. Sarah certainly does. She loves to say “eow” at your headband.

There is an angle of approach, here. There is a way to leverage being good for Sarah into being part of Starlight’s social network. And her social network is her work network. She has failed, and continues to fail, to make a distinction between the two.

It would not be enough to be just be a good babysitter. Clearly there have been maids and babysitters before, and otherwise there may be ones that come after. If, however, you can find a way to be a connection between Sarah and her mother, Starlight would cling to you. Expect repeat jobs, and a trust of vulnerability that would place you as a worthy confidante.

It could be like with Ms Everest again, in a way. One person with a position of power who sees you as invaluable. And the rest of a room that you would remain invisible to.

Certainly, it shouldn’t be wrong to exploit a hole you didn’t cause? What reason could White have to see werewolfing in being a very good babysitter - especially as part of the mission to see Dad?

Pink and Persephone:

York blinks, and takes another sip of his cider. Puts it down. “This is the talk we’re having?” he cocks his head, stretches his arms and pops his shoulders. “Alright.”

“Prometheus spent the rest of a long life getting eaten alive.” He pulls out his phone and switches it off, then takes the battery out. He holds the power button down until the last of the diodes fade. “Some things are worth it, though.” He sniffs around the room. “I’ll take that coffee now, yeah?” He scratches scabs on his neck while he thinks.

“Every day, the site saves lives. The site’s ended careers and swung elections. Gift of fire? You’re talking about using the site like a molotov, and molotovs don’t survive getting thrown. It needs to be worth losing every small good we do, every day. And everyone needs to agree to it, you’re asking Junta and Numb to risk losing their only support network. You’re asking me to lose the platform before I can end Ed Huxley Junior.”

“Don’t give me Excalibur or Hrunting. Tell me this is as big as the Wyatt-Tversky paper. Tell me we can make an inferno big enough that Earth will smell the burning bacon.” He looks over to where Marco sleeps. “Give me an interview they’ll write history textbooks about, so I have something to read in thirty years when my liver’s still being pecked out. When’s it safe to wake… Marco, you said?”

3V et al.

Sirius Drinks has a charming sign. The building is two stories tall and three times as wide, with its frontage done in all matte black. The sign is a large dog at a water bowl, done as constellations - silver reflective paint for the linework, flecked with shimmering chrome, and its points and corners lit with white lights.

It’s got the air of a place that would have music pulsating through the walls, rattling your bones all the way out on the street. But no. From outside you hear nothing.

Inside it’s easier to tell why. Three different dance floors, three different DJs, all working with active sound-curtains. Sound manipulation tech is what’s really come far in the last sixty years, benefited the most from room-temperature superconductors, electromagnetics and brilliant innovators. Mist-like curtains hang in sheets around the quadrants, barriers of microscopic charged particles that act as shock-absorbers, dampening the vibrations passing through them. Three simultaneous music acts, not interfering with each other.

This isn’t normal nightclub stuff, this is totally extra. But music’s always been a big part of the furry subculture, and Sirius Drinks wants to showcase as much of that as it can: According to NumbToNothing, the DJs rotate often, and are always from the community. While the acts usually aren’t paid, it’s wrong to say it’s because Sirius Drinks ‘pays in exposure’. It pays its crews and technicians fine. It’s understood that the performers are doing it for the pure love of the gig, for the love of giving back to an audience they’ll be a part of again after a few hours. It lets the bar hack the risk of constantly hosting the unknown and the deeply experimental.

The drinks are overpriced, but the food tries to justify its price tag - unlike other pricey places, the vegan options are pushed here. The fox-in-the-henhouse burger is a patty of fried maitake mushrooms, herb aioli, provolone cheese on toasted brioche. But the menu makes it clear it uses synthetic proteins for all its egg-and-milk ingredients. At this price point, usually it’s the opposite, emphasizing ‘real’ or ‘organic’.

The carnivore menu shines with dishes where the meat is used to full effect. House marinade rack-of-ribs, harissa lamb, sous-vide scotch filet with garlic and rosemary butter, steak tartare. Nightclub fare? Hardly. It’s first-date fancy-restaurant food.

And here’s where it clicks. Three dancefloors with different sets, but the adjacent booths are quiet enough for conversation? A bar with cheap fruit juice but ludicrously overpriced cocktails? A dirt-cheap fries platter next to steak tartare? This isn’t a place that can’t decide what it wants to be; This is a place that wants to be available to every kind and every stage of a relationship. Everything from a casual night out with friends and looking for hookups, to an anniversary with a fiance.

Check the crowd. What you can see of it - the place is deliberately dark, only spotlit, like floating in a void. Most here have traded their birthday suits for something a bit more Liberace. Maybe between a quarter and a fifth are ‘vanilla’, counting the here-with-friends, the chasers and the too-broke. The rest are post-human. Not all of them are wearing clothes. A fairly cut blue wolf is jamming out hard in only a mesh shirt, and nobody’s batting an eye. Some are batting eyelashes, though.

Welcome to Sirius Drinks. You are safe here. Be yourself.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

November:

Merkin leaves the booth for the bar, and orders another boilermaker. When the bartender turns to get the bottles, he starts typing the character string onto his phone.

Soon Orange will be with White again, on babysitting duty for the tenner client with the two year old to look after.

Here’s an extra detail, a rub that explains why Muffi would give this to you specifically. The client is one of the twelve district prosecutors for Renaissance Apollo. The maid-babysitting is an easy job, but the client will only match with already very high rated contractors.

Starlight Bandara - she’s young for a second generation emigre, her parents came to Aevum late from what used to be Sri Lanka. Learning English was a formal requirement of relocation, and some took longer than others. Starlight’s name is an enthusiastic show of her parent’s pride, of their new language and where it had taken them.

Her kid’s name is Sarah.

There are two conflicting missions here. One is White’s, getting the tens needed to get to Thrones at the end of the week. The other is Black’s. A district prosecutor is an important node in the web. Justice is blind, but not the assistants that guide her sword.

D.P Starlight is primarily concerned with enforcing IP protections. Most of her cases are over pirated print-patterns being used to create gray-market bootleg at a scale large enough that it’s worth an arrest - It’s a bigger deal than it sounds, without physical currency in circulation, merch is the default for counterfeiting operations.

In terms of direct relevance to the Black mission, probably not much - but her direct relevance to the network of power? That would be invaluable.

The job starts soon. What’s the priority?

Pink and Persephone:

York slips through the door with a finger to his lips. Under one arm is a slab of fluorescent green Sharply Sweets, a truly godawful brand of strawberry cider, saturated in sugar and boasting a 17% ABV. One of Coca-Cola’s™ first forays into the liquor market, devastatingly popular with underage drinkers and only underage drinkers.

“Just for appearances.” He explains, sliding the slab onto the kitchen counter and breaking off a can from the stack. “You know the old trick with a clipboard and lanyard? This is just that for slinking around the city at the wrong hours of the night. Nobody wants to deal with pissed squeakers.”

He takes a sip, shudders and winces. “Tastes like all my favourite mistakes. Here’s to another one, fill me in.”

He hasn’t seen Marco yet.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

OoC: Let's just get the easy one out. More to come.

3V:

You’ve got a few options, besides the android harem.

NumbToNothing’s shouted out Sirius Drinks, an unabashed furry bar in Modern Aphrodite. All friends and allies welcome. If you want to do some culture reporting, that’s one in need of positive attention. Your mission, if you choose to accept it; Go out and have a good time.

NumbToNothing: Just make sure you’re cool with getting hit on
NumbToNothing: even bringing someone with you isn’t uh
NumbToNothing: anyway, they’re chill

Otherwise, there’s the Grand Derby coming up in Churchill, Zeus. The future of horse racing is wild. Back in the 20th century, stock car racing was how big manufacturers showed off the advantages of their latest developments. That fell off big time, when personal cars stopped being a thing.

Now, it’s biotech companies showing off their biggest flexes. Most of the events go by their limitations; The quadrupeds only bracket, the 4 ton weight limit, the flyers-only. Categories for the jockeyed and the jockeyless.

The divisions are nested fractally, too. Take the jockeyless events. Some are for competitors too unsafe to ride, so they’re raced like the greyhounds of old. Others are for competitors too intelligent to need a jockey. That used to be a showcase triumph; now the split’s just to prevent them getting an unfair advantage.

There’ll be a lot of money on the line. Might be a good place to do some networking.

Third option’s obvious but still worth bringing up. You could just run your shop for a bit and keep your ear to the ground while you take a breather. Let something come to you on your terms.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Black and Orange

Rudy smiles. “This is a weight off my chest. It means I got played by a player, not just a maid.” He considers his words. “That sounded more elitist than I meant it to. All I mean is that the world has more maids than players. I'm scared enough as it is.”

He unbuttons his shirt slightly. His necklace is a shard of meteorite, carved into a Japanese ‘mon’. It’s worn around the edges, and he squeezes it with a thumb, worries at it. “No. The police don’t represent a conflict of interest to me or my clients, I can say that much. What else?”

He takes a business card from his pocket and a pen, and begins to write on it. “I don’t want to give you a wrong impression. I am very good at one thing, and that is money. Moving it, hiding it, keeping it, tracking it - but not earning it or spending it.” He finishes the first card and puts it writing-side-down on the desk, then works on another. “I am a man of responsibility without power. Think of me like a chauffeur who needs to know where his clients live.” Another card. “I’m not holding back on you when I can’t get you past the front door.” Another card. Another card. Another card. He finishes writing, and puts the pen down on the booth table with a harsh click of metal on wood. The pen must be real silver. “Here are your doors.”

He hands you a card with a list of names.

Lazarus Adams - OESN Producer
Apt. 36, 14 Seines St, Jacques Brissot - Enl. Zeus
[e-mail]
06-4881-9951-625

Synthia Herb - NBN Editorial
Unit 2, 185 Scotland Rd, Winston Churchill - Modern Zeus
[e-mail]
06-6578-8920-333

Castile Louis - Spider
Lafayette - Enl. Zeus - appt. only.
Dial 06-2856-8888-794 during business hours.
Follow instructions.

“Manic” - Fixer
A Lionheart with serial numbers scraped
10-1423-1221-004

Brittinette Everest - Social Hitman
14 Donne Rd, Shakespeare, Renn. Aph.
03-8492-2222-682

“Adams and Herb are spikes. Usually they kill stories, but they might have something to say on protecting them. “Manic” is an artisan blackmailer who subcontracts. Tell him I sent you.” There’s a morbid humour to that one. Rudy rubs the coin around his neck again. “Miss Everest I only know by reputation. I’m not allowed to know what I have sent her payments for, only that it has been extraordinary sums of money. Sir Castile is probably a better option for you.”

“Sir Louis Castile trades in the priceless - he already has everything money can buy. Tell the secretary that you would like to schedule an appointment to arrange an acquisition, in exchange for his services.” He pronounces Louis the old French way, with the silent ‘s’. “Don’t waste his time. Tell him what you need, and he’ll name his price - a job. If you can’t do it, apologize and leave. He’ll respect that, and allow you future appointments. You can negotiate, but you must not haggle.”

“Beyond that, I’d suggest trying to find a contact at the Anthropozine. They’re small, but they’re impenetrable. If your reasons for targeting a police commissioner are all above-board, I’m sure they’d do it for free. They might even pay you.”

Reassuring he thinks he needs to tell you that.

The addresses are a nice touch. How many use Headpattr, do you think?

Persephone and Pink:

Marco rolls over in his sleep. It’ll be a few hours before he wakes up - probably around the time York is going to show up. Then it’ll be time to make a plan, and talk him into it. Not much you can do until then.

Elodie’s phone dings with a bunch of messages from Sasha. It starts with a link that thumbnails to her WatchMe channel, showing her wearing what looks like an EEG rig over her hands, a full-immersion headset, and a big goofy grin. The video, title Modeling and Modeling, has about 180 views right now.

Then comes a bunch of renders, sent individually, all around a common theme. It’s a high-def 3D capture of herself, but each update is modeling a different kind of cyberware. Not any you recognize - it’s concept art. Detailed concept art, too. It’s a 3D image, so you can zoom and twirl the renders to see them from all angles - a lot of care was made into making sure these look just as good from all sides.

Sasha’s new to this. She hasn’t figured out to compress her exports, yet, so she’s sending these at max res, even though the equipment she’s using doesn’t nearly justify the settings. Think taking a blurry camera photo, but sending it at 4K quality. Still, she’s got real talent.

It’s all explained in the video. Her robotics club got a ‘Rough’ - what that mesh of electrodes on her hands are. It’s an abbreviation of a sculpting term, ‘roughing out’, when you start by making the basic shapes of the piece. When the term stuck, that was all the tech was good for, and the fine detail still had to be done by mouse and math.

That was a few software generations ago, though. Now with better UI, entry-level tools, and a few good tutorials, someone like Sasha can make all kinds of things using just a Rough.

She starts the video doing all sorts of poses, standing in the club’s 3D scanner. Action poses, power poses, flexing, anything goes as long as she can keep still a full ten seconds doing it. Her friends stay off the camera, but they’re a constant presence. It’s all very highschool - everyone laughing too hard at jokes that don’t make sense, acting like mild observations are devastating bon mots. She’s having fun.

After that, the friends show up less and less. The sculpting gets more and more detailed. A few minutes of the video show the whole process of her replacing her hand with the kind of sword that’d show up in a first-generation Playstation game, start-to-finish. The next one is a few clips, where she forgets to talk-to-camera. After that? She just starts showing off end products.

When’s the last time she got so focused on the work she forgot to make it content?

Here’s one where her spine is stegosaurus plates, all gleaming solar panels. Here’s one where her arm is carbon fiber, with a wrist-mounted grapple hook. The bicep on that one is a very detailed winch system. Here’s the last one she sent as its own message, one where her hair is replaced by a thick weave of RGB lit Medusa snakes.

And here, at the very end, is what that was a practice for. Her own take of the cyberware you’d recognize in the mirror. In the video, she calls it the “ass kicking outfit”.

An export of that one isn’t in the phone messages. Maybe she was hoping you wouldn’t watch the video the whole way through, and wouldn’t notice.

She had to share the rest, though. She’s too proud not to.

3V:

You have your story. You have time to write in on the flight home. You have one last chance to talk to Gavin, alone, if you want to take it.

That’s all there’s left to do. Write the story. After that you can take a break, date some androids, and do something else. Something fun.

And maybe get the word out to some other archivists, about what Ferris has here.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Black and Orange:

Rudy makes a lot of expressions very quickly. Imagine keeping your eyes locked forward while a passenger train passes, and trying to get an impression of the people going by. He rocks forward slightly and adjusts his glasses, like he started laughing but the thought already wasn’t funny anymore by the time his body got the instruction.

He sits back up and composes himself. He’s wearing an open black suede button-up over a white singlet shirt, and it’s a good look for him. He’s obviously not used to being so casual, though, because he reaches to adjust the knot of a tie he’s not wearing.

“I can’t tell you that. It would be one of the triggers, just to make this more difficult for someone like you.” He shrugs, as if it’s obvious what ‘someone like you’ should mean. “The terms were acceptable because there’s some degree that the chip monitors intentions. I can’t accidentally detonate myself. If I start getting too close to the end of my leash, it starts to feel hot. I can’t tell you when that happens, either. I- No. Never mind.” Whatever he was about to say next, he stops and shrugs instead, and downs the rest of his drink, letting the shot glass slide to the bottom of the empty beer stein with a ‘clink’.

He frowns. “I should not have done that. I’m not going to be able to order another one, am I? No matter, no matter… Ask what you must, and I’ll say what I can. I can say that if you’re in a position to help me, then I have a longer leash. My handlers are aware that the risks of delegating are often superseded by the risks of not delegating.”

Persephone and Pink:

Three hundred and seventeen have definitely Fallen. The real answer’s bigger than that, but impossible to know. There are other bugout options, like the other space habitats. Even some of the mining colonies could be a better option. Even when people flee Aevum, they don’t make it obvious where they flee to.

Those other places are temporary. Earth is permanent. It’s when you know you can’t come back. People still leave Earth for Aevum, but usually it’s high-value labour taking indentured servitude contracts. Riding all the way up on a chemical rocket is win-the-lottery expensive.

Still, just because it’s the safest option doesn’t make it safe. There are still plenty of bounty hunters and assassins planetside. That’s probably not something that Marco would have to worry about, but it’s a reason why the kind of people who’d take the option to Fall aren’t making themselves available to census.

Let’s cover what happened to the Earth in the last sixty years. Current population; just under a billion.

It’s not lost on anyone that Aevum is a space station, and how dangerous that is. The mass migration happened even though people knew the risks. Even back then, the moon colony Chiarascuro stood as a warped glass sculptural testament to the hubris of man - or at least, rich white men. So a lot had to happen to make that risk worth it to 85% of humanity.

What drove people up were two things. The first was abundance. The wealth of the solar system was available up there - the asteroid belt had chunks of platinum the size of Texas. Mining it was easy. De-orbiting it without causing an extinction-level impact? Hard. Easier to bring people up to it.

The second? Mass migration had to happen anyway. Earth’s leadership didn’t ‘drop the ball’ on global warming; It was a mugging. The future of the planet was taken by force, and ‘security services’ served as the gun in the alleyway. Cops were critical to preventing protestors from stopping fossil fuel infrastructure in the waning days of empire.

Now Australia’s a bombed-out flaming wreck. South America’s only just recovering from most of the Amazon burning down, and almost totally uninhabited because of the climate. The less said about Africa the better.

More than half of people lived somewhere that’s now under sea water. They had to move anyway. The space elevator guaranteed they went up. Then the ladder got kicked out from underneath, when everyone left on Earth looked pot-committed.

Here’s what survived: China’s geography far outlasted its government. The state had mobilized early and intensely to prepare the landscape for the new climate. Its arable land is enough to feed everyone left.

Siberia, Scandavia and Canada all did fairly well out of the new climate. Canada’s probably where Marco’s going to end up, if you send him down.

It’s not a bad life down there, but it’s definitely a lot worse. In the good places, it’s a quality of life comparable to the late 20th century, with perks. Some stuff does make its way back down to the old world.

Only some, because trade is functionally one-way. It’s possible to send high-value finished goods down to the surface, but no way to send things back, which means no way to pay for it. Thrones has a complete monopoly on information services that Earth can’t compete with.

The riches of heaven, available only to artists, coders and lawyers. Yeah, that sounds about right.

It’s something you’re going to need to talk Marco into, when he wakes up. Even when it’s the sane option, the rational option, it’s one anyone would argue against taking. There’s a good reason why;

People have things more important to them than their lives.

3V:

“I understand what you’re trying to do,” she says, and as she says it, she finally looks her age. “I just didn’t want this to be a part of the story you wrote, or the reason you wrote it.” She looks to Gavin, and the weight that was bending his knees and sagging his shoulders and bowing his head is taken off of him. No, she failed here, not him. “It doesn’t affect my memory, yet. Not much. You didn’t need to know, to interview me. Why plant that seed of doubt?”

‘Yet’.

Gavin gathers up the things he’s taking with him. “I should head back. It’s always nice to see you, Lorry.” He slings his bag back on, and gives a nod. “Come visit me, if you don’t want me checking up on you.”

And again, Ferris drums her fingertips on the countertop, as Gavin starts off. He pauses as he passes that curio cabinet, filled with the blu-ray disks, and turns to you.

“You coming?”

There’s your out. And just behind him, that wall. The one line carved large enough to be readable from the kitchen.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

November:
Black:

Svelto’s is brick-and-masonry building. It’s an aesthetic removed three times from its context. First it was a trendy form of Western gentrification, the upmarket hospitality sector wearing industrial sector chic like the molted exoskeleton of Queen Progress, flown to find worker drones in the Developing. Thirty years on there were no more docks or warehouse districts to reclaim, but the aesthetic had become a signifier. Developers started making the dead husks bespoke.

Svelto’s is still doing that exposed brick industrial look on a fucking space station - complete with giant, too-dim filament-style lightbulbs. The only thing anyone associates the look with is bougie bars, pubs, coffee shops and bakeries. Without history or context, the sign can only point to itself.

Svelto’s is a pub-bakery hybrid, highlighting German bread and beer with real wheat - another signifier, wheat’s a pain in the ass to grow on Aevum.

You can find Rudy sitting in a booth at the back of the bar, where it’s empty. He drops a shot glass of whiskey in a stein of beer and sips it.

Take your time to make yourself comfortable approaching him. The place being upmarket makes it a lot easier to watch for watchers. Less people, more couples than singles.

At some point, though, that approach happens. There’s all sorts of high and low tech solutions you can make here to make it less likely to be overheard, intercepted. But they all introduce a chance of loss in the signal, a risk of being misunderstood, a chance of leaving evidence, or just take too long. Conversation is fast, as information-dense as humans get, and dpesn’t leave a trace.

He sees you approach the booth. He gestures at the seat across from him, starts talking before you have a chance to sit down.

“I was expecting the white one, but this makes more sense.” He shrugs uncomfortably, like he’s itchy. “Did you know the app doesn’t work for me anymore? I thought I was getting a clear message to cut contact. I’m guessing that wasn’t from you, though.” He raises his drink in mock salute, before putting it back on the table without taking a sip. “I just wanted to say I explained the situation to my handlers as cleaning up a sex crime. They trust that to remain a private matter. I would have preferred to keep your boss in the loop, but her reaction just reinforced my cover story.”

He says ‘sex crime’ with the awkwardness of rehearsed script - it’s a lie picked for the situation, and not for himself. It’s a line he only wants to touch with surgical gloves and rubbing alcohol.

“I was starting to think this was a deliberate setup, from the start, but now I’m not sure. ”

Pink:
Persphone:

The sedative means that Marco stirs in his sleep at the door kick, but doesn’t wake up. Like sleeping through a thunderbolt in a storm. 111 years ago, this is how the Chicago police assassinated Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, shot seven other Black Panthers in an apartment barely larger than this. A close friend had spiked Hampton’s dinner with sedatives.

Mark Clark was in charge of watching the door, shotgun in his lap, while Fred slept on a mattress on the floor. When a bullet shredded Mark’s heart, he fired the only shot that the Panthers would get off that night - up into the ceiling. Caught by surprise, Mark Clark fumbled the shotgun like a phone would be 111 years later, in an apartment barely smaller than the one he was guarding.

Tonight, Elodie shares his role but not his fate, and Marco Alvaro is sedated only by his own hand. Still too many reporters, but less of them with every passing hour.

What happens now depends on what Pink is allowed to know. What can she say? Someone needs to tell Elodie what was on that drive, at least.

3V:

Your own frustration is mirrored in Gavin’s, but Ferris is down, and she is dressed. A tank top and climber’s shorts - tight fitting but covered in zips and velcro pockets. She is making a point, and Gavin is not impressed by it.

She goes to pour herself a glass of orange juice from the fridge. “You remind me. Games like this were our version of the Turing test for a while, during the early days with NASA. It started as a joke, of course, because we didn’t know what AI would be yet. I predicted an early success would be a pure wargamer. If we were training something that liked winning games, it would try to win tabletop.”

She pours the glass, then sets in front of her and rests her chin on her hands, looking off at nothing. Gavin sets his own glass on the counter and moves to fill it, still listening. It seems like this isn’t a story he’s been told before.

“Now, Miles… He hated that. Thought that was too ‘human’ a way to look at winning. He said that a real AI would work out that it’s a collaborative storytelling medium, and that the objective is everyone has a fun story. He predicted that our first success would look like a failed Turing test - a bunch of actions that seem bizarre and absurd, but that made its audience laugh and give the other players interesting problems to solve with their own characters.” Ferris looks at the counter, blinks, frowns, looks back up. “If it tried to pick a lock with a live chicken, how could we tell the difference between a bad Markov chain or inspired absurdist comedy? It’s an idea that’s only obvious if you already know what ‘dogfacing’ is.”

“Then there was… Name. Tip of my tongue. She was my best friend for thirty years. I-” Ferris trails off, drumming her fingers on the counter again. “Her theory was different. She imagined they would pick their own rules, their own way of having fun. Instead of seeing how they played an RPG, she was interested in how they’d write one. TTRPG books are filled with the author’s explanations of their intent, so that other people can run them. She was excited to see if we could get AI to the point where it could explain abstract intentions in ways we could understand.”

“Miles liked her idea more than mine, but we both knew he hoped he wouldn’t be able to understand its intentions, even when they were explained.” She smiles at that. “Of course, all of that seems a bit quaint now, but you have to understand-”

Ferris hand goes flying through the glass of orange juice in front of her. She looks down at her hand in shock, but she’s not bleeding. A big bruise is starting to form on the back of most of her fingers, though. She hit the glass hard.

Gavin stares in shock, his eyes misting over. Ferris whips on him immediately.

“Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare show me pity.”

“I’m sorry,” Gavin says.

“I just didn’t see you pour it. I was lost in thought. That’s all it was. Stop it.”

“I didn’t pour it!” Gavin protests, and immediately Ferris turns to you with wide-eyed fear, hoping you don’t understand what it means that she doesn’t remember pouring her own glass, couldn't see it when she was looking directly at it.

There is no such thing as a perfect storage medium. In time, all data will decay. All systems eventually fail.

Even now, she won’t explain, won't let it be explained, because she doesn’t want you to understand.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

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.