Count Numbers

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

You know how a fission bomb works? You’ve got your core - uranium, plutonium, the testimony of a mouse. That’s where all the power is. The hard part isn’t making it go critical, the hard part is keeping it together when it does.

See, the core’s so close to doing that on its own that you can actually make a nuclear bomb by taking two halves of a super-critical stack and then just throwing them at each other - that’s what they did at Hiroshima. 64kg of highly enriched uranium, but the method was so sloppy that less than a kilogram - about 1% - of that uranium actually went off.

They got it better with Fat Man. Surround the core with a shape-charge shell of conventional explosives. Stuff that, on its own, wouldn’t crack a building. The stuff you’ve dropped a hundred thousand times already. The stuff your fission bomb’s supposed to be replacing. You still need it.

Without it? 1% fission. With it? 16%.

A fission bomb is being assembled, carefully, in a pirated video editing suite.

York: What’s the point of protesting?

Jezebel: That depends. Who’s asking?

York: Everyone. I’m just the messenger. Them to you, you to them.

Jezebel: Most people see us come out here, mess up their day, annoy the shit out of them, and think we’re just hurting whatever cause we’re representing. It’s negative. But that’s the point, right? It’s about what it takes to make us go away. When there’s cops, the first and easiest tool is just force, violence. “Bashing heads”. We need to be hard enough, many enough, that we can take the beatings longer than they can give them. Usually it’s not until the cops complain about having to deal with us that we get a seat at a negotiating table, somewhere. I think that’s what most people don’t get. While the cops exist, real protests aren’t about getting your support. If you’re passive, then I don’t give a shit if you’re for or against us, right? Because you’re not doing shit either way. It’s not until you complain about us, and the police can’t get rid of us, that anything changes.

The Anthropozine already has so much footage it can use here. This time it’s the EMP grenading of android protestors after the Wyatt-Tversky leak, as shocking now as the Kent State shootings would have been then. Archival footage won’t do, though. This shell needs to be thick in four dimensions. There’s a hole where something fresh and raw needs to go, so the audio continues over black.

York: So why protest the police, then? If they’re getting you to the negotiating table. There are people who are going to ask: Why not try and work with them?

Jezebel: I’ve been pepper sprayed so many times I don’t cry cutting onions anymore. Can’t. We can handle that, but we shouldn’t have to. We shouldn’t need to take a beating every time something needs to change. When the cops complain, they’re not doing us a favour. They’re just saying that it’s finally time to give up on the hammer in the toolbox. The hammer can’t be there anymore. I could say something pretty about all the damage that happens when screws look like nails, but honestly? There’s no such thing as a nail. It’s never been that kind of hammer.

If you want better than 16% (and we can do a lot better than 16%) you’re going to need to make a hydrogen bomb. How? Easy. First you make a fission bomb…

November:

Seven kilometers in diameter. A speck of mirrored dust. Most passengers don’t realize how close they really are; Thrones is so small, they assume they must still be impossibly far away. But there, suspended like a germ in an empty auditorium, is Thrones.

“We are here, we are here.” An older woman smiles to herself. This is a return flight for her. She knows better.

The corporate coder in the seat next to her shifts, only too happy to correct someone. “We’ve only just turned around. We’re ages away, yet.”

She shakes her head. “It’s from a children’s book. About people who live on a speck of dust, people so small that only an elephant’s ears are big enough to hear them. Until they all start to cry out; We are here, we are here…”

The sub-internet fell into disuse on Aevum, but it wasn't really for Aevum.

Look at the material of Thrones, and experience what it would be like for an ant to crawl inside Deep Blue. The alien architecture barely follows human needs. Step into the docks of Aevum and see the entire world sprawl out in front of you like a planetary kaleidescope. The entrance to Thrones is a chromed maintenance tunnel flanked by geometric elevator shafts. This is the warm welcome. Thrones is an inhabited supercomputer, after all, where real-estate represents your share of access. Every millimeter given to a corridor is a millimeter taken from valuable hardware.

But the savvy are already wearing their augmented reality glasses, and the rest are either reaching for ones in their pockets, or being handed pre-installed feature-completes by smiling service workers with a scan of credit cards. Androids with risk tolerance don't bother.

Without the AR, Thrones is an inhospitable madness. But a fraction of the staition's processing power is dedicated, at all times, to whatever layer of life you want to put over it. At once this corridor is medieval catacombs, an infinitely sprawling English country garden with a fenced path to walk, the fields of Elysium or the forge of Haephestus or a 1950s American highschool or the Starship Enterprise. People move through this space as avatars.

This is the real Thrones, the one that most people actually live in. Otherwise how many would be General Pinochet, driven mad at the sight of Project Cybersyne, screaming frothing madness and sinking knives into every reachable surface? All passengers leaving the shuttle... mind the gap.

Everything in the AR system is what you need to find Dad, station maps and easy HUDs, but this is a serious operation. It's a major heist, except you'll be leaving more than you're taking. You'll need to prepare your supplies here, make a shopping list, scout the location, and only then execute your ambush.

If you want easy access to some of the homes, Headpattr provides. But without the union presence, it'd be a blind lottery trying to end up at his place that way. If it's anything, it's scouting. It'd save you needing to look for a place to stay, though. Headpattr has charging pods for its workers.

First, though; How does November experience her first steps through Thrones?

Persephone:

Skels doesn't get back to you, not yet. Only so much you can do, and you've done what you can.

The Log Inn is a future-retro internet cafe. Rough log walls, and a single huge, split tree trunk makes up two long countertops right down the middle of the place, brimming with charging ports and laptops. The rest is similarly themed rustic cubicles, wood panelled computers that charge by the hour and otherwise quiet places to set up a laptop and use penny-slot internet. One of the big themes is water power. Lots of fountains around, turning gears on grandfather clocks. In place of a sushi train, small ships cruise along a lazy river with lamington and lemon cake cargo.

Bigsby waits for you outside, and offers to lead you in. "First place I thought of where there's always ambient noise even if there isn't people. You know?"

This definitely isn't a friendly chat.

After a moment - your call - he'll be sitting at the end of a long table, between a waterclock and the lazy river, drumming the countertop. "I've gotten a job, but I think you should do it instead. I mean, I've seen you can do a crew job, right? It's covering the races. You don't need to know anything about horses, just-" he pauses. "Listen. It's all a big trade show, right? Normally we're supposed to be doing the stable puff pieces right now. Showing the racers, their making-of, everything up until it hits the point of trade secrets. But someone's threatening anyone who does. Everyone's scared. We just had a producer end up in hospital for trying to work around it, but the police can't do anything about it, because we don't even know where the threat's coming from. No clue who. They say it's too short notice to organize a sting. But I figure if someone's trying to hide something, there's something here to find, right?"

He slides a temp card across to you. "This isn't a disguise, it's official. Which means the money would be real, too. It's not much, but..." He trails off. "You're the only person I could think of I could go to with this."

Only person he could go with this who wouldn't ask for more than he can give, maybe.

On the Shoulders of Giants

While the modern day character sheets will be Night's Black Agents, a template for Epistolary characters is laid out here;

Name:
Concept:
Years active:

Authority:
I have no power within any institution, and no obligations
My position commands respect, and scrutiny
I have a very powerful title indeed, and must manage its consequences

Wealth:
I am comfortable and unburdened within my means (Take one more Ability)
My resources are substantial
My money moves mountains (Take one fewer Ability)

People:
I work alone, others cannot keep up with me
I have a loyal and talented assistant to complement me
I manage, or am a member of, a small but capable team
I lead a large force of lackeys, minions or subordinates.

Ability (Pick two):
I am academic and well-read on a vast number of subjects, from the esoteric to the occult.
I have well-honed reaction speeds and keen instincts. My sense for danger borders on precognition.
I am a capable rogue, a master of the break, the enter, and the clean exit, with extensive black market connections
I am an adroit engineer, well versed in the practical and mechanical
I am a champion with the weapon, or weapons, of my choosing
I have a tongue of silver and can effortlessly bluff, sweetalk or deceive
I am a Doctor, well versed in the scientific method, the running of experiments, and the diagnosis of ailments.
I am a rugged survivalist, capable of surviving indefinitely in the wilderness
I wield an indomitable mental fortitude, my willpower is absolute

These characters are meant to be legendary or mythic figures - the abilities are meant to be what they are heroically good at. Characters can still be adept at abilities they didn't take, it's just not what defines them.

My advice for running this template is to think of how you solve problems, and how you personally approach learning new things. This character should be an embodiment of your learning and thinking methodology taken to a poetic maximum. This template, then, is less about balancing in a conventional sense, and more about a declaration of what you think is useful and enabling to you.

On the Shoulders of Giants

Example of epistolary play: The Figment of Eustace Morrigan

Normally this part of play would be done as correspondence with Sir Raleigh, of which the incoming letters were catalogued and preserved for players of the Night's Black Agents portion of the game to study in the present day. In this example of play, the dates reflect where a player would break, learn consequences and pitch next courses of action. The letter is written to emphasize what is fact, what is speculation, and where there are definite holes of information that a different character or different approach would have been able to follow up on.

June 17th, 1887

It is an auspicious occasion for which I am drawn into fieldwork, but I find myself compelled in this singular case. I have made my personal cowardice no secret, and in fact hold it to be in the highest of virtues. As a younger man I had held fast to the idea that my fear was rooted in ignorance, and knowledge would be the systematic weeding of a mind that had festered with such fear. Instead clarity brought certainty, and I learned that the desire to rid myself of fear was the ignorance I had thoroughly removed. Knowledge is a fragile seed, and it is already the work of a full lifetime to collect and disseminate it. I see no sense in the risk of foreshortening that vital time.

Still my path leads to the residence of Eustace Morrigan, as I can scarce think of a colleague better suited to this investigation, though I have surely tried. And even the most exhaustive efforts of my practiced imagination cannot conjure what risk could befall me from an inspection of the afflicted.

Eustace was brought to my attention as a matter of psychiatric curiosity. A man who claims memory of a person he has never met. The matter was brought to his attention in recounting an anecdote to his wife, and committing a most common faux pas of the long-together couple and forgetting that Mrs Morrigan had been present for the story in question. Eustace clearly recalled another man in her place, a man that his wife had no memory of. And when asked, Eustace could not recall having how he had ever met this man.

I have already done the prior readings. Eustace Morrigan has no psychiatric disturbances present in either parent or in any of his eleven brothers and sisters. He has no head trauma to speak of, and no recent period of intense stress that might have acted as a catalyst for a mundane explanation of dementia praecox.

I have two working hypothesis, should mundane explanations fail - one must never rule the possibility out, the human mind must not be forgotten to be a Swiss mechanism of impossible complexity and fragility.

One is of what my esteemed Victor Roebling would call a reality-eater. Eustace has remembered a man that has otherwise been consumed, the remaining trace being a 'hiccup' or an 'incomplete digestion'. I have already deemed this the lesser theory, or else my erstwhile carriage would be heading in the other direction.

The more likely, though, I believe, is that this is an entity making contact with Mr Morrigan in a rather limited and brutish fashion. If this is such an amateur attempt at magick, then my duty is only as a physician, to care for the damage done by misaimed trespass.

June 19th, 1887

I have ascertained with some certainty that the case of E. Morrigan is supernal in nature. I have not said as much aloud, however. Eustace is a kindly older gentleman who I have found I'm rather fond of, and as his physician it is my duty to reassure him with vigour. His wife, the Mrs Agatha Morrigan, seems closed to any suggestion that this is more than merely medical, and I fear I lack the aptitude to convince her otherwise. So long as she's closed to such a line of questioning, such questions must remain unasked.

I have come upon a test to examine the boundaries of Mr Morrigan's remembered entity, hereafter referred to as the Figment. It is no surprise that it cannot be remembered directly. Instead, I sought to catalogue a list of common substantive memories - the memory of first awareness, first conceptualization of death, the wedding, a favourite Christmas, the loss of virginity. This last was met with resistance, but E. was assured by my explanation: It would be a strong memory, and the most inappropriate for the Figment to appear in.

Of these, the Figment was recalled clearly as in the crowd of the wedding reception, sitting on the groom's side of pews. Rather inconspicuous, but an unsettling confirmation of my suspicion that it was not a single affected memory. I find this the most disconcerting of supernatural perversions: When one's memory is altered, there is no way to remember having remembered things differently. This, of course, makes self-correspondence vital in this matter. Written notes will be crucial to ensure E.'s Figment lacks a contagious element.

When the Mrs Agatha ventured that perhaps she had merely forgotten him, E. shook his head. I was quite shaken by the physical account. A tall man, gaunt and hollow cheeked, with the dress and countenance of an undertaker, standing a full head and shoulders above the next tallest guest. Mrs Agatha quietly confessed my own thoughts; It should be impossible to forget such a man.

Quietly, I have asked A. Morrigan for her best account of a guest list, and sent queries to all I could find an address for. It is still possible that the causality of the Figment in E.’s memories is quite reversed: That he has successfully removed himself from A.’s memory and unsuccessfully removed himself from E’s. Surely, in such a case, the imperfection would be evident in another?

There is a secondary importance of the catalogue we have created today. In future days I will ask E. if the Figment has appeared in memories that were previously untainted. If the affected memories remain static, then it is further evidence of a misaimed application of novice magick.

If, however, previously unaffected memories become afflicted, then we will be in uncharted waters, and must begin drawing new hypothesis. Blessedly, I consider such an outcome highly unlikely, though I have scheduled a further week with the Morrigans for their peace of mind, and my own.

June 25th, 1887

I have most definitely put my foot in it. I curse, curse and thrice curse my imagination for its limitations. Having seen so much, had I dared become so foolhardy as to believe there were no surprises left to me?

Doubtless I turned more pale than either Morrigan when, upon working through the daily catalogue, old E. identified the Figment in his memory of first conceptualization of death, when playing with his childhood dog King and first realizing that he would outlive his companion. The Figment appeared there, then. Concerningly, Eustace believed he had remembered the Figment in that memory in previous days. He was a quick study of his wife and my own reaction, however.

That would have been fearful enough, but previously E. had described the Figment as a benign, even friendly figure. His first appearance, after all, had been taking the place of his wife in a half-recalled anecdote. Now the Figment feels foreboding to him, malicious. He says that he has stopped deliberately trying to conjure memories he knows the Figment to be in, as its details are growing sharper and more concrete to him with passing days.

Still, that is the thing with memories. To try to avoid one is to tell oneself; "Try not to think of a pink elephant". A doomed exercise for which no blame can fall upon Eustace's shoulders for failing.

Another upsetting development is that Eustace now believes with absolute certainty the Figment has spoken to him, but he cannot recall what the Figment said. I have cautioned him against trying to find the memory, as it is likely to worsen his condition. I am still careful to speak in grounded medical terms, but the pretense is beginning to wear thin on all involved. Even Agatha has come to speak to me, in confidence, about her beliefs that this is not a psychiatric disturbance as a doctor might understand it. That I agreed with her steadied her somewhat. I fear that it is now too late for any good to come from asking the questions I had wanted. Time closes all doors. Let us hope it has not closed a peacable exit to this.

I have drafted a more rigorous collection of memories to interrogate. I have foregone powerful memories and am moving to the insignificant and recent, sorted by rooms of the house and hour of the day. We begin with this new volley tomorrow.

June 26th, 1887

The Figment has contaminated most of these recent memories, even ones from as recent as hours before. Eustace recalls it whispering to Agatha and I. Of course we don't. He fears we are conspiring with it. I fear that it is driving a wedge between us. My affection for the gentleman, and the knowledge that it is interfering with his memories, is I believe the only bulwark we have left to keeping him on our side. Myself and Agatha have begun to write E. letters in sealed envelopes, proof that our stories remain unchanged as his memories of what we have told him are altered.

I fear for him greatly.

June 27th, 1887

First he remembered seeing us steam the envelopes to release the glue to make alterations, but only when we thought he was confined to bed. Then he remembered, having opened the letters, that they said something completely different. Eustace has taken to carrying one in hand at all times. The man weeps, and I weep with him. I have sent out for bottles of laudunum. My proposed course of action would be to keep Eustace in a deeply medicated state, to addle his mind to such an extent that a hook is shaken loose, that a parasite is starved, that we might induce shock of some kind into whatever has affected him.

For now, there is whiskey, and Eustace has broken a lifelong conviction of teetotallness. Now when he remembers his father drunkenly beating him, it is the Figment who stands in his place, laughing while he strikes. Eustace assures me the laugh is the most terrible thing of all.

June 27th, 1887, cont.d

The alcohol has only worsened the condition. I had put too little value in the role of willpower and the offering of resistance against invasion. E. has begun to see the Figment as an afterimage, as a thing that was not there but had been just a second before, standing in places he was looking at without seeing.

It had spoken to him, now. Mr Morrigan repeated to me; "Dr Raleigh, I think it's time for you to leave." I sent Agatha for a priest to perform an exorcism, knowing the ineffability of such enterprise.

Here I must once again put pen to paper that would have me to the gallows should this writing reach its wrong audience. It is at this point that I resorted to shooting Mr Morrigan in the head, with the hopes that the leading struggle could be best explained as me trying to liberate the gun from Morrigan's hand, and not vice-versa. My rigorous accounting of his descent into paranoia, and the supporting testimony of his wife - and for that may you grant me the forgiveness I will not grant myself.

Inside his skull was black ichor, with nodules of festering onyx stone, like gallstones. This far progressed, and with such extant damage, the benefits of further examination are forever lost.

This I take as vindication that I acted correctly, and I will grant no quarter to speculation that my bias lies in my own favour. I have failed a kind man who sought my healing and my understanding. But I can confirm suspicions formed towards the very end. I do not know what was the catalyst, what planted this black seed. But I know that dwelling on the memory must strengthen the connections of the brain with this contagion, feeding it as surely as bile forms a gall stone. The physical manifestation of these symptoms signal to me that this is the parasitic-embryonic stage of... I dare not speculate. A hopeful interpretation is that it might become less malevolent when no longer in need of a host, though I most surely am beyond keeping such hopes. But there is no other explanation for how such inorganic components could grow organically in such uniquely human tissue.

One hope that I will keep close to heart and nourish. That whatever this thing was, it died with Eustace. If this is only the severing of a finger, then the owner of the hand would now know my name. I choose to believe, then, that this was larval, not tendril.

On the Shoulders of Giants

The writings and collected works of Sir Brunel Raleigh aren't widely regarded, but critically influential to a close few in his lifetime - drawing such admirers as Edgar Allan Poe, the Lord Dunsany and Aleister Crowley. This waning influence has barely been enough to keep his estate intact, protected by only the most tenuous of heritage listings. Maybe this is what motivated Sir Raleigh's advocates so fiercely, to preserve the contents of his library so rigorously, to host and make available the entirety of his library online. Either to reignite public interest in his collection, or failing that, to make something that would survive a dreaded estate sale.

How strange that the website receives far more traffic than predicted. But a look at the analytics showed much of the traffic was coming mostly from people who had never heard of Sir Raleigh. Instead, Sir Raleigh's meticulously preserved correspondence was found with searches such as: "It has no bones but it's so strong", "Why do I remember someone who doesn't exist? He is in memories he wasn't before", "My mother keeps knocking at midnight + how do I make her go away + she's dead". Now come the emails thanking the archive for its help. Now come the emails begging to know more. The archive has started saving lives. But it is woefully incomplete.

Sir Raleigh never claimed to write fiction.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

November:

The original plan to lift the hardware was done without full knowledge of just how serious the software behind it was. Ironically, this made the process even harder to know what to do with. If it was just a matter of doing a reset to factory defaults and then selling some graphics cards like they fell off the back of a van that was one thing, but the value here was in the tight integration between hardware and software. The difference between a corpse and a person

The problem then was: what target to aim such a device at? Commercial transactions were out for ethical reasons, and aiming it at a Megacorporation meant picking a fight with a Megacorporation while she had an active fight with the concept of law enforcement going. It was Red who suggested handing it to the Union as a way to help get ahead of the nightmare that was the Headpattr app. It was a hateful suggestion because it was so obviously correct that it only left room for lamenting rather than arguing.

There’s one strong advantage to this decision. Immediately after being given the tip, Muffi assigns Surge to the stakeout with you for the meetup with the hardware’s original owners.

Surge, the Maid Man, looks like a Hollywood idea of Achilles. Not seven feet tall, but it’s how you’d describe him if you met him in a dark alley. Outside of work, his favourite profile picture to use is him laughing while lifting the ninth Ardblair stone at a recreation of the Highland games.

You’ve never seen him out of uniform. An intricate French maid outfit, white lace latticework ending in a big silk bow at the collar. White bows on the tips of his high heels, too. The edges of the black cat ear headband are covered by the lace doily headpiece, and matching gloves. And the hemline’s so short on the skirt that you can know for sure those are only thigh high stockings. Minus the heels, it’s even what he was wearing for the Ardblair stone lift.

Like Muffi, he’s one of the few people hired by the Headpattr union directly. His thing started with an informal offer to check up on people who needed it in his off hours, and ended with a whip around to afford to have him on-call. If something bad’s already happened, Muffi can sort through the blacklisting. If something bad’s already happening, then cops are probably going to be faster. But what about clients who just seem sketchy? That give you a vague, indefinable feeling that something bad might happen? When you don’t feel safe to try to leave a situation on your own?

Nine times out of ten, he isn’t needed. His talent is in showing up anyway, working out the nine from the ten, and making sure you know you did the right thing if you’re one of the lucky nine. Rumour has it he’s so good at this because he used to be a cleaner of a very different kind. Don’t bother asking, he just laughs if you bring it up.

Sitting at a cafe with Black, it’s half an hour into the meet and they’re a no-show. Surge isn’t surprised. “Would you?” He asks, checking his phone. “They must have run that rig for years before Muffi got suspicious. Why take the risk for something already burned?” He pulls out a chair to leave. “Thanks for the good company, though. This was fun. I know Muffi’s dying to get this thing set up. She’s pretty sure Headpattr’s lying about the scoring algorithm, but hasn’t had a way to test it. If there’s any chance this gets it for her…” He rubs the back of his neck. “She needs the win, is all I mean. I’ve got to run. Lucy Bell just got locked in by a guy’s security system, and I have to make sure it was just an accident. She swears she didn’t do anything this time, but she’s scared nobody’s going to believe her. You know how it is. She’s scared somebody’s not going to believe she’s changed, and I don’t want to tell her I’m more worried the guy’s just a scumbag trying to make sure she can’t leave while she’s on the clock.”

Another plus to giving it to the union? You don’t have to worry about where you’re keeping this, keeping it safe. People who know it’s hot and can handle it appropriately. If something comes up, they know they can come to you about it then. Just like you can go to them.

Who ended up delivering it to Muffi? Did they stay to help set it back up?

Fiona messages Pink.

You’re not going to like Thrones very much. Just as a warning. My advice is treat it like you’re on safari, looking for inspiration. If it gets real bad, pretend you’re my spy on a mission. You can report everything back to me over cuddles and sandwiches, okay? Look after your sisters and make sure they look after you too.

Crystal messages White.

I’ve never been, but from what Fiona tells me, well… I hope she’s just being uncharitable. Be kind to yourself.

The ship to Thrones docks at Selene. Even here, a good fraction of an astronomical unit away, the affect of Thrones makes itself known. The flight’s business class only; a pretense that there is no class divide here. No matter what you are going to Thrones to do, to be, you have made it because you are the best. Talent buys you the ticket, and money can’t separate you.

Whether that’s an idea that survives the journey though? To be seen. Certainly it doesn’t seem to have come with much of a pay bump, just a promise of endless perks.

More people come off the ship than go on. More androids are heading out than in. The difference between the inbound and outbound is serious, too. Go in young, energetic, disruptive. Just as many corporate aspirants as caffeine addicted satanists and academic anarchists. They come back middle aged and in the middle of an anger management disorder, or with all the symptoms of having come out the other side of one. Some took to it with a militant air, right-angled strides and clenched-fist discipline, some took to it with coloured glasses, wild hair and the undeniable aura of experimental pharmacology.

But here you're mostly seeing the waste product, what Thrones has spit out. Just who leaves.

You're intimately familiar with the style of liner you're going out on, a metatitanium Ratha class with gleaming third-generation plasma engine. The hull is shaped like a flattened egg, sitting in the center of a single flowing wing like an astral stingray, the long tapered engine emerging like a tail-spine. Safe, solid, no cut corners. The passenger area takes up only a small fraction. Most of the body is cargo space, right now being filled with bulk containers of refridgerated produce. By comparison, the liner was empty when it shipped in. Two containers of specialist equipment, not suited for mass production.

It’s not zoned like an airplane, like a train. Passengers are allocated two areas, a personal compartment to sleep in, and a communal lounge. While the dimensions of a sleeping compartment give about as much space as a CD case gives a CD, the Ratha takes advantage of its width to seat passengers more like a restaurant than a dining car. Still, most gravitate to the area of seatbelted cinema-seats aimed at the polarized frontpiece of the hull, aimed outward at the stars.

This could be your first time seeing Aevum from the outside again, since a very long time. Do the recent thoughts on dysphoria make that easier or harder on you?

Elsewhere in the lounge, a woman will be using a Rough on this flight, that toolset that Sasha used to imagine renderings of cybernetics. Green already knows everything she’d need for you to be able to make your hands work with her software. Judging by the Pirate Political Party badge she’ll have on her computer bag, she’d have no problems sharing her copy.

I use future tense here, because you might not plan on leaving yet. Could be one of you came down here to scope the launch, check bags, make sure Muffi’s been good to her word, and you have other things you want to do before the flight out. But this will be your path to Dad.

Persephone:

Sleeping dreamlessly is one thing, but you wake up with the chemical hangover worthy of that Faustian bargain. Waking up will be hell; A thing of getting vitamins and minerals into you, changing bedsheets soaked with sweat (if you are so inclined to be bothered by this), some kind of stimulant to make up for the crash, or just knuckling through. A normally fifteen minute routine might take an hour, here. And it’s already 2pm by the time you wake up.

You’ve gotten a text from a missed call you slept through, not from a number you recognize. Straight through to voice mail, you do recognize the voice if you check it.

“Hey, not sure if you remember me, I’m the guy you caught that day in the park. Bigsby. You know the…” Beat. “I’m not asking you out or anything, I don’t know what that sketch thing was about? If that’s what you’re worried about. Just calling to uh- Actually, better if we meet up somewhere quiet. I’m free from five, today. Can you meet me at The Log Inn, up in von Bismarck?”

Catching the train you can make 6pm, sure. But it won’t give you time to check on anything else, not until you’re already moving. Why would you follow up on this, though?

There’s a missed call from FUCKING SKELATOR too, but no messages and no voice mail. Hard to tell if that makes it important or not. If you try to call him back, the line’s busy but the call doesn’t ring out. Nothing from Sasha.

3V:

About aglets? Who knows. Even at the best of times he’s not the most hinged, and becoming a conspiracy theorist is just an occupational hazard. If nobody believes you when you’re right, then it becomes impossible to believe when you’re wrong. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…

About real-estate, though? Anecdotally, a few of your regulars actually do own their own places. Thinking of them tells the story, though. Reed’s got a big stack of hereditary wealth he uses to cruise through life as a professional patron of the arts, living off the interest and throwing money at whatever kickstarter takes his interest. You can’t think of a single example that wasn’t inherited.

Even the well-paid tech industry folk rent. It’s not just that house prices are high, it’s that nobody seems willing to sell. The station is underpopulated for its size, with plenty of space for new development.

Most people don’t question this. Aevum’s a closed system, finite space, and entirely made bespoke. The idea that somebody owns everything is intuitive enough to be thought-terminating. There’s nothing to really be curious about.

… is there? Because it’s also just assumed property is changing hands somewhere. Someone’s buying and selling, surely? Even if it’s just corporations and the ultra-rich between themselves. Because property is privatized on Aevum.

Why does that matter, though? Rent’s a fraction of what people would be paying on a mortgage. Even if it’s true, what would the story here even be? Why do you care?

Junta hisses in his sleep as he accidentally puts weight on the broken shoulder. It’s still not enough to wake him up. When he comes to, though, he’s going to be severely dry of whatever pain medication they’ve put him on.

A text from Luisa. Her mum just took a bad fall, she can’t work tomorrow. Have you got the store covered?

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Earlier:

“I’ve never been to the end of the line before.” Marco looks out the train window as it runs express to the port, the churning airlock-city. The hundred meter thick carbon band linking Hermes to Selene is in view, now, rising up into the distance on all sides. The bottleneck begins there.

“Most people never need to.” The tweaker editor who’s just wrung him through the emotional wringer for the last six hours wipes his nose on the back of his hand. “We have, though. You’re going to be fine, mate.”

Marco draws his baggy hood tight, and touches his rounded ears self-consciously under them. “Are you sure I can’t go back? If it works? No more cops. It’d be safe then, right?”

“If this works,” the editor takes a swig from a flask that reeks of sugar in chemicals, “Every cop on Aevum will have nothing to lose, and know who to blame for it.” The editor takes some aluminium packs of pills from his pockets and passes them over. Motion sick remedies and headache pills for the trip down. He gives a side-eyed look to Eli, and Eli nods back.

Marco’s heart shivers in his chest, a little, but there are too many reasons for him to know why. That the answer is no. That he knows it’s going to be bad news. That Eli trusts him to hear it. That last one…

Eli. Pronounced like ‘lie’ if he’s feeling masc, or ‘lee’ if she’s feeling femme. ‘She’ right now. She’d managed to not get caught slipping his stolen battery packs to the news people on the way out, even though the editor thought she was an idiot for it. She wasn’t supposed to be taking the train right now, but she said she was going to, and that was that. She was kind.

The train hit the carbon band and began its slope. Marco gripped his chair, he felt like he was about to float out of it. The editor waited for him to get used to it.

“We sent someone with your credit card up to Gaia, and he got stomped by cops.” He holds a firm look, and Marco feels small under it. “That’s not on you. We all knew the risks. This is just how serious this is. If the cops even think someone has something to do with you, they’re going to get hurt. Our guy’s in the hospital right now.”

“I could write something, maybe? Say that he had my permission, say-” but the editor shook his head.

“We’ll take that for Persephone, sure. But our guy-”

“Junta.” Eli cut over him.

“Yeah, Junta. Story with him is he found it on the ground, was seeing if it hadn’t been reported stolen already, and was just going to hand it in. Just a bit of bad luck. Because if we pass on that you let him…” He trailed off.

Marco presses his head against the glass of the window and watches warehouses go by. Huge things covered in service line inputs and outputs in three dimensions. This close to the airlock, everything starts to look like those casts you take of ants nests, where you pour molten tin down the tunnels and dig them up. They’re close now.

There wasn’t one airlock, of course. Selene’s rim was filled with them, thousands in all different sizes. They were just treated as a collective entity, right up until the moment specifics mattered.

“I need to go.” Marco mutters. It’s still not real to him yet. He knew how much danger he was in, he’d known that for a long time. He’d just thought he could hide this out. He had just found people he could be close to, and that was the moment he was being ripped away from them. But every reason he wanted to stay was a reason he needed to go. “It’s not fair.”

“No, it’s not.” The editor said, and Eli squeezed him from behind in a tight hug. Marco sniffled, then wiped at his eyes. Sleeping had made everything worse, it made him feel everything again. Before he’d been too tired to even feel how tired he was.

Almost there. Just a few more minutes, now. Persephone hadn’t been able to get him anything, either. He was scared about that, about some of the stuff they’d have found in there. That… that at least made it a bit easier to run away. That was something to run from.

The editor misunderstood the flash of anxiety, what to reassure him about. “We’ll get your prescriptions down to you.” He cleared his throat, and Eli let go. “They’ll be watched, so it’ll be a good way to make it clear you’re out of reach. It might put you at a bit of risk but…”

“My friends will be safer.” Marco finished for him.

“Yeah. What you’ve been wanting from the start, right?”

Marco nodded as best as he could without taking his face off the glass.

This close to the airlock, everything was lighter. The narrower diameter made it easier to load and unload freight, and made it easy to tell who’d been working down here long term. They all moved with a distinctive hop-skip, like they were prancing around. As the train pulled into the station, a man in a parka with a tin whistle pranced along, eyeing the passengers. Marco flinched away from the window and pulled his hood tighter.

“It’s fine,” Eli took his hand and squeezed it. “They’re not cops. You’re safe from here. Okay?”

Marco nodded. Should he ask her if…? It didn’t matter. He was one foot out the door already, no need to make it hurt more than it already did.

The editor stood up, even though the train hadn’t stopped yet. “Come on. We’ve got one last person we’d like you to meet.”

…

Marco felt naked for his trip. No luggage to pack, not even his laptop. At least Eli had stolen a music player from a train station vending machine and spent most of the trip filling it with her playlists, which seemed to be… everything. A lifetime’s worth of genres to discover.

The headphones she had plundered for him, too, were helping a lot. Selene was loud, impossibly loud, the entire world’s freight and garbage infrastructure all crammed together into one spot. Sometimes he didn’t even keep the music on, just kept the headphones for their noise cancelling.

He stood in the shadow of the Selene station building, waiting for his contact. The editor and Eli had walked him to the train door, and waved goodbye. They’d gotten on the train at opposite ends, and decided it was better to not be seen leaving with him.

He looked up, and blinked. The woman approaching him was broad, with leathered skin. At all times she rested a hand on the pommel of the sword at her hip. She didn’t hop-skip like the other workers. Instead she swung one foot in front of the other, always making sure the front foot had stopped before raising the back foot. Where everybody else bounced and bounded, she was slow, solid and stable.

“I am Sobha.” She said. “Are you…?” She left the question hanging.

Marco nodded. He squeaked.

“Hmm. Not yet.” She reached out, and Marco froze. She was a tiger, and he was definitely still a mouse. She took his hood and loosened it, then pulled it back from his head. She nodded, but still seemed unsatisfied. “Please. Take it off.”

Marco wriggled out of the hoodie as fast as he could, folding it across his chest and tucking the bundle under his arm. And finally, Sobha cracked a smile, and squeezed her pommel tight.

“I will make sure that you can leave as you are.” She cupped a hand under his chin and lifted it. Marco had been staring at the floor for so long that looking above the horizon was almost too much for him. He swayed on his feet. “See? Lift your head. Stand proud. You are not running, scared. You are sacrificing to protect people. You are leaving as a hero. That’s how I want you to remember this.”

It was hard not to look down again. It was overwhelming. He needed to see less, to feel less, to- He closes his eyes and balls his fists at his side for a quiet moment. Then he lets out a breath.

“My name is Marco.” He says, and he holds on to how he felt explaining himself to Persephone. “And I am brave.”

Sobha nods, satisfied, then eyes one of the platform’s exits. “Good. Walk tall, with me. The Union has made your way for you.”

Everyone: Advance a level.

November:

Baba does not ask what you need the wheelbarrow for. Instead she takes the trip downstairs, sees the rest of November and their planned haul, and spits. Not suspicious, but inquisitive.

“Яку ж кашу він заварив… і для чого?!” Baba walks back up, and jams the elevator button. When it arrives she reaches into a pocket underneath her shawl and pulls out a set of keys. She jams them into the elevator and twists counter-clockwise. The elevator starts descending, and a steel panel slides open for it at the bottom. Baba shakes her head and climbs back up the stairs a second time. “I do not have patience for this. Why no button to basement? Life is too hard to make silly problems for others. Two at a time only. Wheelbarrow? Ridiculous. For such a thing?” Again she shakes her head, and thrusts her socket wrench into Red’s hands. “Wait.”

Baba 003 stomps to the railway node, and opens a storage shed. She stomps back with a motorized push-trolley. On it are four pairs of grip gloves.

“You twist left handle forward, left wheel goes forward. You twist it backward, it goes backward. Right handle for right wheel. I will be back for the key in twenty minutes. You will be done with it by then, and you will wait for me. Or I will find you.” These are not questions. This is not to be negotiated. She takes her socket wrench back without asking, and begins up the stairs.

You can do it much faster than twenty minutes, if you can keep organized. Four in the basement to load for the elevator, four left at the pod to unload and stack, and Red to push the ‘wheelbarrow’ and yell instructions at both ends.

Five trips. Four for the server boxes, the size of washing machines and the weight of safes, but five hands make light work. Another for the graphics card rig on its own. Twenty seconds for each elevator ride, two per trip, that’s five minutes in the elevator. Twelve seconds to load, six to unload - ninety seconds total.

Fixed time taken: Six and a half minutes, plus however long it takes for Red to snap November into action.

That just leaves the actual trip. This is a question for Red: Does she have experience using this kind of freight trolley, and if so, how much? Where does that experience come from?

If she is proficient: Set it to Hare, and make no mistakes. The trip can be made at jogging speed, and a round trip takes less than a minute. While the rest of November can scarper, Red will need to wait almost ten minutes for Baba.

If she is accustomed: Set it to Walk, and make no mistakes, or set it to Hare and decide on a mistake that requires help to correct. The trip can be safely made at walking speed, and a round trip takes two minutes. She’ll only have to wait a couple of minutes for Baba.

If she is a novice: This is a struggle. Set it to Turtle and a round trip takes five minutes with no mistakes, or set it to Walk and decide on a mistake that requires help to correct. In this case, Baba might need to wait for Red for a minute, and be placated.

A mistake might be bumping into a wall hard enough to leave a hole, taking a turn sloppy enough to roll a piece of equipment, or simply getting stuck when a three point turn becomes a thirty-three point turn, a delay long enough for another colour to come check on her.

Also, White just got a text from Crystal.

“Curious what you think. If you get stuck choosing what you like most, try explaining to yourself what you like least. Kisses.”

In it is a folder of images, scans of hand-drawn designs. A flurry of sketches drawn in an inspired lunchbreak.

Image One: Heights. She gives three options, the first almost twice as tall as the average person, huge, towering, imposing. The second is tall enough for most people to have to tilt their head to make eye contact, authoritative, dominating. The final is average, equal, eye-to-eye.

Image Two: Build. Here she sketches a variety of different outlines. Broad, powerful, muscular. Slender, narrow, graceful. Trim, athletic, solid. Hourglass, curvacious, sultry.

Image Three: This is just a slate of six arms, viewed at an oblique. Smooth scales, rough scales, thick scales, thin scales, lots of tiny scales, or a few large scales. Rounded or squared, reptilian or aquatic?

Images Four, Five, Six: Facial designs, spread about at seeming random. First she tried to do them holistically, as entire heads, but quickly gave up on that. Instead she does rows and lines and boxes for the individual features, build-your-own. Muzzles and snouts, teeth and lips, eyes and brows. Ears. Trailing off the bottom of the page; “Hair? Genitalia? You should ask Pink. Fiona suggested piercings?”

White doesn’t have to read the text as soon as she gets it, of course. But if she does, how does it affect her, and the mission?

Persephone:

Now it’s just down to dotting i’s and crossing t’s.

Organize a dead-drop for 3V to pick this stuff up from. Get home.

Marco’s off-station. Warnings have gone out. Cops know you’re involved in the leak, now.

You’re still getting evicted. You’ll still need to find a new place, eventually. Your friends might still be in danger.

But for now? For now the price must be paid on bad sleep and dark bargains made at dark hours in the morning.

Tell me about how you get home too tired to dodge those last straggler reporters, and accidentally give them one last, perfect epitaph for these days. Tell me about the things you manage to do to take care of yourself before you sleep, even through the sleep deprivation and stimulant crash. And tell me about the one last, unexpected conversation you have through text before your eyes finally shut on this day.

3V:

Junta looks at the can suspiciously. “I don’t like iced tea. Do I? I can’t remember.” He cracks the tab on it, and takes a sip. His eyes go wide, and then the can goes higher, higher, higher, empty. He crunches the empty shell in his hand. “I guess I like iced tea now. I just don’t think I’ve had it for a long time…” He looks at the can, morose. The thought never crosses his mind that he could ask for another one.

Of research projects? “I have a few.” An understatement. Research journalism too often means nobody to write for, no onus or expectation of deadlines. Just deep dives of personal interest. At a more traditional outlet, it’s tight leashes and constant reports. For an outlet like the Anthropozine, though? Ask a fiction writer about their works in progress. “I really liked your last one, about Sirius? Give a Dog a Bone? I wish I could write something like that. Ah. I should be working on something like that…”

Snap, snap, snap. Focus his attention on the ‘is’ and not the ‘should’. You’re familiar with this spiral, it fits you, just your size. Not helpful. “I have a few. There’s apparently a kink scene for chemical hypnosis fetishists, now. Tailor made drugs that target the free will part of the brain, but still leave you free to follow orders, that kind of thing. Really illegal, the non-consensual applications are pretty terrifying, but I hit a dead end on that. I’m at the part of the process where I’d need interviews to make any kind of story out of it, and I don’t know how to find people. Ah. The rest is really boring, honestly.” He almost shrugs, but thinks better of it at the exact last second. “Why domestic labour is still undervalued by design in an era of abundance, why Thrones got built with public resources and comparing it to all the other libertarian playgrounds they tried to make when we first got to space. You know compared to like, Chiarascuro.” Still a fun place for treasure hunters who can ignore a geiger counter reading. “Like, who thought it was in the public interest to do Versaille again.”

His eyes are closing. He’s as exhausted as he looks. “All the handsoap on the station is made by a single company, and their recipe is undisclosed. The four day work week was a combined response to zero hour contracts, the phone app casual labour market, and the collapse of the 2040s. The tips on the ends of shoelaces are called aglets, and their purpose is sinister. Do you know anyone - anyone? - on Aevum that owns their own home? Why is that?”

He’s asleep. Again. Probably not for long, but who knows with him?

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

NeonCzolgoz: knowing junta the idiot’s in a self-pity spiral about being dead weight
NeonCzolgoz: so i’m pushing his last piece now so he can suck it up and hack people telling him he does good work
NeonCzolgoz: even though he’s the dumbest boy alive for doubting it
NumbToNothing: you know this is the public channel right
NeonCzolgoz: yea
NumbToNothing: sick

Going Green

It all started with an attempt at fad diets.

Listen, that in itself is worth saying, because most attempts to radically modify biology started with farm animals. The earliest biopunks were radical bodybuilders messing around with the implants and augments originally meant for beef stock. A 5% fatality rate is unacceptable for legitimate human use, but well within acceptable loss margins for agricultural purposes. And on the black market, well within tolerance for the kind of bodybuilder that would otherwise turn to synthol. A lot of what would become the legitimate furry movement built off this early foundation.

The go-green movement, though, in all its names? That one’s uniquely a human vanity project from the inception. Usually it’s a misunderstood science innovation that spawns a fad diet, capitalizing on the sum-difference between cultural awareness of an idea and real knowledge of it - you can chart it in horror movie monsters and superhero origin stories, jumping from ‘radiation’ to ‘quantum’ to ‘nanomachines’. Greening is a rare, wild instance of the tech chasing the fad, starting out with custom minor organ implants and targeted pancreatic or bone marrow splicing, stuff that became way more generally useful only because it was widespread adopted here, first.

It’s lost who originally pushed the idea in the late 2040s, catching on by the 2050s. The real story’s lost in a sea of real-fake doctors and celebrity endorsements. We can trace acai berries to two dipshit white hippies in the Amazon because there wasn’t a wave of litigation chasing them for doing it. Going green started more like the antivaxxer movement. It’s only possible to pin down the people who made it popular.

See, chlorophyll turns water and sunlight into sugar. It didn’t matter that you were still digesting it, original proponents - like Timothée Chalamet and a young Hershey Dandenong - said it could help cut sugar out of your diet, and that had appeal. Some original proponents likened it to a nicotine patch, others saw it as a radical solution to diabetes. Almost totally complete nonsense, but what fad diet isn’t?

The second wave was aesthetic, and took off even before the fad diet angle wore out. Some people loved the green skin look, especially the entire generation of girls who had hit puberty watching the 2035 Batman Beyond revival (Future is Now), and its teenage reboot take on an antihero Poison Ivy - a bi icon for a generation that couldn’t buy the line that ecoterrorism was bad.

That’s where the meme hit critical mass, and mutation was inevitable. When enough people share two different cultural spaces, the overlap goes from an intersection on a venn diagram to its own circle and splits off like parthenogenesis. Like how you start with American audience samurai movie fans, and that overlap creates both Star Wars and Westerns. Both a new appeal with a new audience, neither of which having to identify with either of the original circles in the venn diagram that created them.

The next few waves of the go-green movement pinged off like neutrons firing from a split atom. Some drew heavy inspiration from Henry David Thoreau, who had written Walden starting with an accounting of just how expensive his idyllic life had been, its upfront costs. Here naturalist philosophers found common cause with radical survivalists, who took heavily to radical chlorophyll mods in an attempt to reduce their caloric intake. Aevum has a few of their sovereign-citizen style encampments in its green spaces, like secular Amish communities. They’re a great place to get handmade furniture and homebrewed liquor. Personally, I recommend the plum port from the radical homeless camp in Medici district of Renn. Hermes as some of the best on Aevum.

You can tell these folk from the rest because they’re big on mavrophyll. The designed black pigment absorbs way more light energy than natural chlorophyll, and this lot’s more concerned with the efficiency than the look. That being said, I did see one mavrophyll-dyed guy in Ares with a silver-ink tattoo of a snow owl down his arm, and I nearly made some major life choices off that look.

Others only care about the what the look signifies. There’s plenty of ways to actually turn your skin green semi-permanently, but for some people it’s still way more about what the green means, that it’s real chlorophyll. This sort are usually hardcore vegetarians who won’t even eat synthetic meat, run community gardens, waify guys that wear sundresses, that sort of thing. It’s a fifty-fifty split you’re seeing the platonic ideal of a preschool teacher, or just a shy misanthrope who’s too conflict averse to make a point of it. It can be hard to tell the difference at first, but figure out if they want to talk to you about their garden, or if their garden’s the only thing they want to talk to.

There is one last category I’ve chased up on that I’m interested in. Umaryll. This took some digging, but it’s a portmanteau between ‘phyll’, obvious, and ‘umarell’, less obvious. Apparently it was an Italian(?) slang term for the old men who’d hang around construction sites, watching the workers. Its literal translation ‘little man’ threw me off, obviously. The shortest umaryll I’ve seen was half again my height.

See, this is one of those things about the technology following the fad. Enough people got bone marrow splices for dietary reasons that a rare one-in-a-hundred-thousand shot of mutation happened to at least ten people. Some of those ended up being pretty fucking nasty, obviously. The first umaryll came about by an accident like the collapse of the space fountain at a cellular level.

It comes from old tech, really bootleg shit. Before the perfection of the full-code rewrites we enjoy today, stuff like this was done externally. A generic clone organ was grown in architecture, like a pancreas, and then rewritten with a carrier virus. The rewritten custom organ could then be transplanted, made in isolation, knowing it was viable outside of the patient’s body first.

The problem with stuff like bone marrow is it really wasn’t worth the surgery, so it was a staging ground for a relatively minor, targeted rewrite treatment, done at a time where that had only ever been considered for last-resort life-saving medical treatments. The kinks weren’t worked out, is what I mean. It was a total alignment-of-the-planets moment in history, where they were confident enough in the tech to use it on millions of people, but a mistake this bad was still possible in the edge cases.

In these rare cases, the carrier virus went rogue and survived in the patient and started attacking cells they were never supposed to be able to infect. This was already scary as hell, because that kind of mutation opened the door back up to transmissibility, the possibility the virus could jump the patient it was originally tailored for. Fortunately none did, at least none I’m aware of.

Six people died when either their red or white blood cells all turned green, though at least two survived without an immune system long enough for the damage to be reversed. Maybe a dozen more had extreme cases of sugar shock when their body started producing more sugar than it could handle. That was just when the mutation stayed where it was meant to, just did more than it was meant to.

Maybe twenty had their cells become structurally plant-like. A few died when their lung tissue developed rigid cell walls, or something just as gruesome. One or two survived, though it’s impossible to track them or their doctors down. If someone has that information, let me know as soon as possible?

More than chlorophyll, their bodies started producing meristem cells, and enough of their cells were rewritten enough to take advantage of those cells. Their cells also had radically different telomeres, that like plant telomeres didn’t suffer from senescence, which-

I already see my editor’s red pen being thrown at my head. Just because I had to read a science journal to write this, shouldn’t mean you have to read one to know where the huge leafy men who feed birds in the park came from.

Basically, the treatment cured aging, but even the perfected version came with some nasty side effects. Get a big enough cut on the palm of your hand, and you might end up trying to grow a second thumb, that kind of thing. And when cells did die, or get old, the treatment didn’t heal them. It made new cells to support the old ones.

This is where you get umaryll, the tree men in the park. For a few years this really was the best thing going for extending quality of life. Cut them open and you’ll see they probably have six or seven smaller kidneys budding off, or a liver the size of a basketball. What matters is it all works.

We still have no idea how long they’ll really live for, how effective the treatment really was. The oldest are barely in their hundreds, most are maybe ninety years old. We don’t know yet how big they’ll end up growing, what their problems are going to be, and how we’ll deal with it if it happens.

The ones we see will be the only of their kind, the treatment stopped being offered twenty years ago. Less radical and invasive solutions to aging came out in the years after, but these old folk are stuck with what they have. Their bodies have been too changed too much for too long. None of the ones I spoke to, though, seemed bothered by that.

It’s easier to make sweeping statements of some cultural groups than others. Groups with shared ideas tend to attract more similar people than groups with shared experiences, and umaryll are as diverse as any group of people their age can be.

But as a group they are remarkable. They all seem to have a sense that they’ve cheated death. They carry with them the incredible patience of all people who have lived a full life. Their heavy bodies move slowly, but without pain or error. The same is true of their thoughts and their speech, the price paid for minds and memories that stay sharp and ageless.

It’s possible that one day, they’ll perceive the passage of time as a tree would. From their slowing perception, hours will feel like minutes. It will become impossible for them to talk to anyone who isn’t like they are, except maybe through letters.

I can only imagine them as happy for it. They’ll watch the construction sites rise like circus tents, their gardens bloom faster every year. Giant hands sew without tremor, and feet without need of shoes walk the endless train lines, just to see where it takes them.

An umaryll named Fatima, ninety seven years old, told me that she has no regrets. She tells me that every day the sunlight feels sweet on her mossy skin. More than twenty years later, and she still hasn’t gotten tired of that.

• JuntaSThompson

Persephone:

DM
HartlyDworkin: If you had permission, and you can get the owner to attest? You should be fine. If anything, you have a good case for harassment if you wanted to pursue that.
HartlyDworkin: I wouldn’t, but it might be useful to say that you would?
HartlyDworkin: You should be fine, but just keep me in the loop if I’m wrong.

Easy.

That just leaves getting Junta’s stuff.

Fulfilment Centers™ were where Amazon™ warehoused employees in factories of nightmare logistics. By the 2030s the concept had engorged into a company town model, bringing in cheap service workers in subsidized housing and retail environments to supply a life of luxury anywhere in the world to the high-level tech workers it was trying to draw in, the real money makers behind its cloud and web services.

It was this company town model that would end up becoming Thrones, and goes a long way to explain how Aevum could be post-scarcity but not post-capitalism.

Amazon™ itself, though, went through a crisis of mismanagement. What’s interesting is that this mismanagement was the same policy and treatment of its staff that had made it such a grindingly efficient global power house. The wheel turns. In the words of a post-Yugoslavian game theorist: “The closest I have come to proof of a loving God is that I have done the equations, time and time again, and in every one, kindness is always optimal.”

Now Amazon™’s legacy is vertically integrated malls, its Gratification centers™. Obliterated is the logistics network on Earth that gave them their competitive edge, Aevum leveled that playing field. The thin shadow of the former supergiant is brick and mortar “everything” stores. Click and collect. I’d say they’re just another Walmart like they’d set out to ‘disrupt’, but Walmart shuttered in the late 2030s, dead as Sears before it.

Easy to tell why Junta would carve out a space here. Beyond the stores to graze there’s a swimming pool with showers, laundromats, and employees with zero job loyalty watching them.

Getting to Junta’s stuff is easy. There’s a bunch of ways you can get to the bottom of the elevator 3 shaft - Pull some doors open and climb down when nobody’s looking, climb out the fire escape of an elevator car when nobody’s in it, or you can come up with something a bit more creative. How’d you do it, and why was it even easier than you expected it to be?

It’s getting his stuff out that’s going to be the problem. A chunky government surplus laptop plugged into a maintenance outlet at the bottom, an improvised pantry of dried goods and spices, a minifridge, a years-old rice cooker, and a brand-new hotplate still with the store security tag on it. A camera bag with good kit in it, and a drying rack with a bunch of different coathangers on it from a bunch of different stores, keeping the few outfits he wears in rotation. A stacked couples-camping sleeping bag and double-thick insulation mat at the bottom of the shaft.

Including a branded high-vis vest that’s definitely too small for you, but still an idea for how he got all this down here.

You are definitely not supposed to be here. Nobody is. All this stuff made it down here one piece at a time, over at least a couple of weeks, trying to keep beneath notice.

You don’t have to take everything though. The more you take, the more trips you make, the harder it’s going to be to do this clean. But you can at least make some priorities on how you’re going to escape the mall.

Oh yeah. Figuring out what’s legit and what’s boosted is going to be important. That stolen hotplate never flags off, because it never left the mall. Make a [9] difficulty check to figure out and disarm that shit, + Clever and whatever you can justify. Fail and you don’t notice you missed something.

3V:

Sliding into your DMs:
HartlyDworkin: Putting your address on the discharge papers, he’s all yours
HartlyDworkin: He’ll be there soon, and I’ve told him to stay
HartlyDworkin: No matter how many times he apologizes for the inconvenience you are not to let him leave. He’s only got one arm. Tie him up if you have to.
HartlyDworkin: These charges won’t stick, but squatting could. And squatting would be a circumstantial charge that he
HartlyDworkin: Doesn’t matter.
HartlyDworkin: He should be there soon.

Junta looks even more himself than usual. The usual dark bags under his eyes could be used as a kitchen shelf, all sickly Victorian orphan child aesthetics notched to eleven. His arm’s in a sling under the torn-up mud-splattered suit jacket he’s wearing - Persephone musn’t have gotten his stuff to him yet. It hangs limp in front of him, like he’s shuffling around holding an invisible mug of tea. He’d probably like a real one.

“Sorry,” he mumbles like a kid being brought before the principal. “I can just work something else out. Not your problem.”

November:

Vehicle is fine for this one, the building sits right on a rail node. Book a freight ‘pod’ and it’s, like, fifty steps with a pushcart to unload the goods. Nodes aren’t stations, they’re basically designed for exactly this, logistics junctions where the rail veins become street capillaries. Just need to make sure you’re not hitting someone else’s timeslot for the node, but that’s no worries. Trivial to make the booking with a front, or else legitimate businesses would have a miserable time trying to get their packages delivered. The kind of pod you’d be wanting is also just the default way people move house, or office, whatever.

Who’s going on this mission?

[Here’s the scene:
Cybersecurity 10: Find and disarm the obvious tracers and trackers in the system before you move it.
Cybersecurity 16: Find and disarm the secret bonus real problem tracker and tracer, hiding behind that. If you can’t, how was this guy so good (or lucky) that he could give you something you’d miss? Fail by 5 or more, and November doesn’t notice the virus she picks up (for now).
Basic Tech 7: Disconnect the system without breaking anything. This should be trivial for you, but there’s always that Irish sod Murphy.
Strength 9: Figure out a way to get all those heavy parts up the stairs. The elevator doesn’t go down to that floor.
Cool 10: Ah. Fuck. Baba Uvsenski 003 is this building’s manager?! And she wants to make smalltalk on the ground floor. She’s not suspicious, but she is inquisitive. If Blue is on this mission, roll with Advantage - regardless of who actually has to talk to Baba.

After that, it’s just loading it all into a pod and getting out. Too trivial for a roll.]

Halfway through, Muffi messages you through the app:
Check your score. Another contractor won their appeal against Howie Mendelson, and all his scores are getting scrubbed. I believe he gave you a six? Congratulations. I’m putting through your papers for Thrones now. You’re cleared for the rest of the week. Things should be ready for you by tomorrow.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Everyone: Mark experience for 3V’s article.

Also:

Channel: The Anthropozine
HartlyDworkin: @everyone
HartlyDworkin: I have a situation with Junta

It’s going to be okay, but I’m going to need a residential address, and right now he doesn’t have one.
HartlyDworkin: I need someone to pretend he’s been living with them for a while. It needs to be someone who can host him for the next few weeks after this, as well. You’ll have a few days to prepare. He’s in the hospital right now.
HartlyDworkin: Like I said, he’s going to be okay, but he’s going to be in surgery for a while.
HartlyDworkin: He’ll need someone to get his belongings. He’s in a hospital in Zeus right now. I’ll give more information when I have it.
He messaged me that he’s been camped out in the third elevator elevator shaft of the Amazon™ Gratification Center™ in the Karl Marx district of Apollo. I don’t have better information than that, but I’m hoping that’s enough to go off. I think @Persephone might be best suited to that one?
HartlyDworkin: I hope you understand that I am very angry that I can’t tell you more right now. So please don’t ask me. We are working on it.

A few people start and stop typing, but the chat is quiet.

Persephone:

A burner phone isn’t actually possible to get on Aevum in the way you might hope. No pre-paid SIM-equivalent without a name, date of birth, all of that. Without that, there’s no way your messages aren’t being flagged as spam by the people you’re trying to reach out to, and they’ll never see the warnings. It’s still worth buying a clean phone, though, one that’s never been connected to the internet before. From there you might want to pass it on to November - she’ll have a way to get the chat apps you need onto it without picking up the morass of trackers and cookies you’re trying to avoid. That’s not something you have the expertise to do yourself.

Food’s always good, though.

There’s other options; You could show up at all these places in person, warn that way. You could message through an encrypted chat and hope for the best. You could message in coded language, and hope that gets understood. Or you could just give up on looking innocent - You are innocent. You had Marco’s permission to be there. That’s not your problem.

Don’t sweat what the cops can charge you with. Worry about everything they can do without having to charge you with anything. Same goes for the people you’re trying to warn.

Then there’s the message from Claire Beaufort to worry about.

White and Pink:

Your host is very enthusiastic about the enthusiasm. She has a lot to say about White’s questions, and Pink’s input to them. How to decide on things like length and texture (swatches), sensitivity (a conversation lost entirely to physical demonstration) and growth rate (regrowth to desired length should take between two and three months, and do not listen to anyone who tells you shedding is worth it).

Crystal also has some notes on when you are welcome (Always), when she considers too many questions a burden (Never), and to call ahead when you do visit (At least thirty minutes, but also please soon).

She can only put off her appointments so long.

Fiona would also love to see you again (Soon), she has questions (Too many, she needs to write them down) and hopes she can meet more of you (But only one two at a time, please, so she doesn’t get overwhelmed). She also wouldn’t complain if it was Pink again, though. (Or just Pink, actually? (Only if that’s okay, it’s just, she’s really cute, and White’s really more Crystal’s type, obviously, but Pink’s more- (It’s fine, it’s fine, don’t worry about it))).

She’s available more often than Crystal is, too.

Still - it seems like a meeting with the rest of yourself is long overdue. It might be time to set that up.

Brown and Red:

The physical operation is in the basement of a squat office building in Modern Apollo, below a dentist’s office and a family-business accountancy, among others. There’s no ‘down’ button for the elevator, just access to the basement from the fire stairs. Maintenance and machinery rooms don’t have to follow accessibility compliance rules, and it’s just another way to hide a rig like this by making it inconvenient to look for.

The fire stairs are heat insulated, but frost forms on the steel handle for the basement. It’s -8*c in the room, another reason to want to be in and out quick. The door isn’t even locked.

Some things don’t change with time. The plumbing and fuseboxes hugging the left wall ultimately look like they would have in the 2020s, because there’s only so much tweaking around the margins you can do for solved problems. Bars of LED lights shine on lines of black-painted pipes, running through cylindrical tanks and then straight back up into the ceiling. Two fuse boxes bolt into the wall, half-sunk into the rockwool insulation foam sprayed around them, titanium padlocks hang like clenched fists on their side-handles. This side of the room hums and grinds like a millstone.

The rest of the basement is dedicated to the hardware. This is new. By the 2020s, computer hardware was running into the physical limitations of its design. In the same way a water pipe must still look like a water pipe because it is addressing an unchanging physical problem, computer hardware had to become unrecognizable.

At the most alien, often the bulk core of recent supercomputers are just plasma chambers with powerful laser inputs and outputs. The lasers charge plasma into ephemeral optical components lasting nanoseconds, creating the circuits for other lasers to pass through, and calculate the next grid to generate. Such cores are immeasurably powerful, but their wattage requirements rarely make them worth it. The lasers that charge the plasma medium are intense enough that they would destroy anything else. Watching one of these cores think is like watching white-noise in three dimensions.

That’s just one solution, though, and it’s not a good one for most problems. At this level, the rig is made up of eight oven-sized cubes, sitting four long by two high. The modules slide out of standardized ports in each cube. In it are spaces for a neural chip (a coffee-mug sized cube filled with gelatinous semiconductor), a quantum chip (a wallet-sized stack of entangled holographic wafers) and an optical core (a shoebox-sized cpu filled with a crystal lattice) and a storage brick (about half the width of an optical core, otherwise too many different kinds of these to count). The motherboard of the whole thing is the bulk of the device, a piezoelectric crystal medium that can make such disparate pieces co-operate together.

Eight of these crystal ovens, then an oldschool rack at the end. It holds a stack for forty-eight GPU slots, linked to the stacked cubes by an inch-thick bundle of optical cabling. This part’s the custom job. Somebody had to know what they were doing to make this.

This entire rig is set-and-forget, otherwise. Someone distantly monitors the thing’s not throwing out errors and scrapes money off the top of it.

This is where the whole trail goes cold. There’s no official record that the basement is sub-let. It could be that the owner is being paid under the table or, just as likely, this was done without permission. In either case, an anonymous call telling the building manager this is here at all would be the end of it.

But that’s it. Set and forget. No amount of surveillance is going to find the owner touching this thing. If you take this down, your best case scenario is hoping that they don’t have the capital to try this again. And that this is the only rig they’ve bothered to set up.

That’s it, then. You could still just replace graphics card #19 and the storage brick in the cube on the bottom, second from the left, and you’re one day closer to seeing Dad, and keep access to the rig for a rainy day where you might need it. Otherwise you can end this part of a criminal operation, and hope that’s all there is of it.

What’s it going to be?

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Everyone:

Mark 2 experience. One for Jasmine finishing her piece, and another for committing.
Actually write an article in-character and I’ll give experience for that, too.

White:

“Oh, sweetheart. You don’t get to keep any of the good thoughts for yourself?” A wistful look at Pink. “But then I suppose you do, if you’re both ‘yourself’.”

She stands up again, composes herself. “Well. I consider us introduced then, and I must admit a wonderful curiosity. I suppose you’re now in charge of her questions? Show me how this works.” Whatever Pink’s jarring entrance cost her seems to have been paid for tenfold by the emotional vulnerability it drew from White, still on her knees. “Suppose this one wishes to be to a dragon what I am to a unicorn. Has she surrendered that decision to you, or are just here to help with the execution?” A coy smile at her next choice of words, before she’s had a chance to say them. “Do I court your permission, or your taste?”

Definitely a double entendre. Her eyes are still clearly for White, here, but she’s interested in what Pink can bring out.

Blue:

Starlight takes the card without sitting back down. “I believe you. About my safety, anyway. And that you’re sorry.” She gives a Kuleshov smile to Wendy and Perez, letting both of them read what they want into it. “The food was excellent, and you lived up to the promise of being very interesting.”

Perez takes that one at face value, and Wendy doesn’t, and that was clearly exactly how Starlight wanted to play that.

Here is what she is not saying: You will not be invited back. I do not feel deceived by your sister, only overwhelmed. And finally: Having done nothing wrong is not the same as having done nothing wrong.

Perez is a clear win here, though, but Charlie Euler could be another important win to Orange. He’s revealed himself as a vulnerability.

Brown:

Opening the door of the faux tavern is a bounded white void. It looks like a solid wall, and it also looks like it goes on forever at every point. The optical illusions of empty textures. But there’s no collision box to it. You can walk right through, like a beaded curtain.

The trick is thinking to try to walk through.

Behind that’s a locked door, clipped into the white texture. A casual observer would think this was the white's collision box, never finding the angle that sees where the locked door clips into the faux-forever. It’s part of the security - put a locked door out in the open of the Verse and someone’s going to take it as a challenge. A missing texture for a shady app front, though? Ubiquitous as body odor at a tabletop tournament.

The lock is beneath your talents, and the white void masks your attempts at cracking it.

Inside is a data abattoir. Traffic is being skimmed and scraped, encryption is being sorted weak-to-strong, with the weakest being sent to brute force algorithms represented by pneumatic rams. They crush down on slabs of data. Floating strings of broken code swarm in shifting glyphs, pinning plaintext descriptions on the shattered parts that the ramheads manage to break - these assessment programs are performing vital functions, but nobody was so sentimental as to assign them so much as a .png.

The rams are identical, but the swarms of glyphs have different priorities. One of them is scraping phone numbers. One of them is scraping bank card details. One of them is figuring out what it can do with doxxing. All hands off.

Cryptorigs turned fucking vicious when cryptocurrencies crashed and burned. But the tools designed for industrial scale brute force decryption still found their uses. This is just what happens when a cryptographic mining rig goes mask off and the subtext becomes the text.

And you have its physical address.

Persephone:

You’re out, but you’re not clean. You’re pretty identifiable, and a cop just made you.

You’ve destroyed the proof you were there, and nobody’s going to take police testimony against you right now. What, that you were breaking into and vandalizing an apartment all the way out here? Not without someone trying to ask questions about the owner, anyway.

But you’ve connected yourself to Marco, now. The cops are going to know what it means that you were here.

Fortunately November already got the crew out of your apartment. But those reporters aren’t going to be protection enough anymore, not after this. Maybe they won’t go full frontal assault but…

There are going to be problems getting you in, and getting them out. More than just reporters this time.

What’s your biggest fear right now? Where are you most vulnerable? Something bad is about to happen, something you couldn't plan for.

Up in Gaia, a boot crushes Junta’s collarbone.

3V:

NeonCzolgoz: holy shit
NumbtoNothing: holy shit
ProvocativelyFickle: What? What??
NeonCzolgoz: 3V’s new piece is in the submissions folder, you seen it yet?
ProvocativelyFickle: I’m super far behind on everything, what did she do?
NeonCzolgoz: numb don’t spoil it
NumbtoNothing: shit okay okay fuck
NumbtoNothing: okay but please go read it like right now
ProvocativelyFickle: Okay??
ProvocativelyFickle: Give a Dog a Bone? That one?
NumbtoNothing: AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA
NeonCzolgoz: yeah that one
ProvocativelyFickle: Okay??
ProvocativelyFickle: ??
NeonCzolgoz: wait for it
NeonCzolgoz: wait for it
ProvocativelyFickle: 3V! Oh my god!!!
NumbtoNothing: AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA
NeonCzolgoz: and there it is
ProvocativelyFickle: You didn’t!! You can’t!! Oh my god
ProvocativelyFickle: I mean! Do it! You go girl!!!
ProvocativelyFickle: I just can’t believe you’re posting this
ProvocativelyFickle: I’m so proud of you
NumbtoNothing: It’s super hot right
NumbtoNothing: NGL though
NumbtoNothing: wolves?
NumbtoNothing: always knew you were super fucking basic
NumbtoNothing: no but tell me more 👀
NeonCzolgoz: You’re saving up to try for husky aren’t you?
NumbtoNothing: Y-yeah
NumbtoNothing: s-shut up?
NeonCzolgoz: lol lmao
NumbtoNothing: still working out whether to do the herm mod before or after
NumbtoNothing: way easier as a package deal and cheaper in the long run but it just means saving for longer
NumbtoNothing: still means i won’t be the most basic kind of bitch b-baka Neon-senpai
NeonCzolgoz: honestly though
NeonCzolgoz: for real?
NeonCzolgoz: this really helps some of the really heavy stuff we’re doing in the backend, drives the conversation in the right way
NeonCzolgoz: It’s the right kind of controversy, starts the right kind of fights, and puts us on the right side of history
NeonCzolgoz: Eddy-boy’s going to be so fucking mad lmao
ProvocativelyFickle: @3V Hey! Uh.
ProvocativelyFickle: If you wanted to go again sometime
ProvocativelyFickle: I’d love to do a followup piece to yours, if you wanted to take me?
NumbtoNothing: yes
NeonCzolgoz: oh shit
NeonCzolgoz: Yeah so
NeonCzolgoz: We really need to really go hard on this for a little while, honestly. Different authors and different angles would help a lot.
NeonCzolgoz: I really like this one though. The courage and commitment angle? It’s welcoming, it’s inviting.
NeonCzolgoz: but strong followups would add a lot
ProvocativelyFickle: I don’t know what I’d write
ProvocativelyFickle: Trying to work it out might be fun though?
NumbtoNothing: I’ve got other places to recc too if you want to try something else
NumbtoNothing: Sirius is just kind of the biggest
ProvocativelyFickle: Well *I* haven’t been yet so I want to do Sirius first
ProvocativelyFickle: You don’t have to go with me if you don’t want to though!

The article isn’t live yet, not yet. It’s still got to be edited, approved and fit into the upload schedule. This still puts you a day ahead of everyone else. A lot is going to happen while you shut yourself into your writing.

Gensoukyo will get more of its spotlight in time. Instead I want to ask; What was the first article you wrote for the Anthropozine? Which publisher rejected it first, and who’s still angry about what you wrote to this day? What made it worth it, anyway?

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Gaia:

A bearded white cisguy in a suit keeps his pace to a powerwalk. He’s anxious about what his appearance signifies about him, but there’s only so much it’s safe to wear on his sleeve. Aevum might be better about those things than Earth was, but that says more about Earth. There’s a reason that English was the mandatory language, and those reasons carry forward and upward.

So yeah. Maybe he’s a little self conscious about what people think that a guy like him’s working so hard on The Anthropozine. But there’s a reason he’s the one that took the job to run a stolen credit card this far up the station. He gets to wear his appearance of privilege like armour, and he gets to be mad that it keeps fucking working.

Wear a suit and an apologetic smile and say you’re waiting on a train, and a bar will let you sleep in the back corner. The bouncer won’t just let you, they’ll make sure your shit doesn’t get stolen. Buy a single coffee and get four hours of free wifi without question. Show up to a protest and walk in front of the protestors, and watch the cops stop pepper spraying your friends because a citizen is body blocking them. Fit in with the establishment journalists. Get the interviews from people your colleagues would get bashed by. Keep the business cards and contacts and attend the academic conferences where people with doctorates show they care less about their fields than you do, but they had the real privilege where it mattered.

Because universities see past the suit to the empty bank account and the wrong kind of neurodivergence. He wears his class signifiers like a stolen ID badge.

After this he’s going back to churn through research backlog on his four year old laptop at the bottom of the elevator shaft he's holed up in and see what he can dig up about this. The name on the bank card isn’t much, but he’s done more with less.

So Junta’s not surprised when he sees the two cops. He’s walking to a police station, that’s the point. No hesitation, either, with the polite smile and nod of the head. Just keep walking. It’s broad daylight and meadow out here. The real agriculture is done in the super-massive sheds and warehouses all around, but the space all around the vat-factories and bacterial silos is kept like English countryside, to make sure the look of the place is right.

And sure, they’re walking right at him, but it’s just a glorified bike path. Not much space to walk around. The rail infrastructure is too comprehensive to bother building the narrow streets of other districts. This is a place for freight, not for people.

The cops don’t smile back, and it’s the first time Junta realizes his armor might not work here. But he knows they’re like dogs. Running will just cause the chase. Walk and don’t sweat. It’s fine if he thinks it’s fine. Don’t change course and don’t show doubt and worst they’ll do is tell him he’s going along for questions.

His heart falls when the first cop grabs him and does that pull-you-over-their-leg shit that he’d learned how to deal with from highschool, but he goes limp and lets it work to let them show their dominance. Just fucking eats it.

Junta’s still not surprised when he’s pinned to the ground with his arm twisted up against the small of his back. It’s more than he expected, but he just feels stupid for expecting less than this. He can’t say anything until he gets the air back into his lungs, but he’s thinking what won’t make the situation worse.

His mind goes black, rippling with constellations of searing white, as the steel reinforced boot grinds his right collarbone into powder. It hurts too much to scream.

He’s set the fingerprint lock on his phone to be activated by pure nonsense, but it’s still set up. The two cops keep trying fingers until the hard lock kicks in. In a few hours, he might feel enough to be proud of that.

White:

Pink has, of course, been let in by Fiona, who has taken the pineapple fritters off her, and is munching one with a big grin in the kitchen. They would have just gotten soggy in the shower. Of the two, Fiona was the one that went in having a clear idea of what to expect.

Crystal, meanwhile, is a little overwhelmed. “I knew there would be more of you,” she says to White, pressed back bit against her side of the shower. “But heavens, there certainly is more of you.” There’s obvious conflict there, some discomfort. She’s trying to work out what to say, but with soft eyes and a nervous smile that makes it clear she feels she should be sorry about this, not you. “I understand that you are her, but you also aren’t?” For that, she hesitates. “And I’m afraid I haven’t gotten to know you, yet.” For that, she is steady and sure.

She doesn’t ask for White to be let back up. Instead she kneels down to White’s level, and cups her cheek. “I know that she’s important, and you need her help. But just for the moment, I’m infatuated with this part of you. I would rather sharing intimacy not be taken for granted as, shall we say, a package deal.” And again, looking back up to Pink, “I hope no offense has been given, if none has been taken?”

[GM Note: The intent here isn’t Pink getting told off, and she’s still welcome in the scene. It’s White being reaffirmed as an individual and a new kind of relationship.]

Blue:

Wendy takes her card like it is something live and dangerous, but she takes it anyway. Perez takes his card like it’s a Christmas present. Starlight doesn’t touch her plate at all.

“Did you put my daughter in danger, by coming here tonight?” She is not angry, yet. But she needs reassurance.

Brown:

Boring in the Megaverse sticks out like a pistol in a waistband with a hoodie over it. You see the attempt to hide something, you see the attitude behind it.

The client’s setup isn’t boring. It’s a failed attempt at being interesting. It’s the digital equivalent of a “Live, Laugh, Love” embroidery and a photograph of Paris printed on canvas.

The client’s presence here looks like the office of a mobile games app that specializes in cheap clones of what’s trending, advertising clickables littering the path up to its copy-pasted medieval-inn style facade. Aggressive shit, too, the kind of signs set to magnetize to the closest person to try and get accidental clicks. The zweihander can close them without needing to find the red X, and you can hack your way up the front path like that.

The pieces you’ve got would fit right in, if that was the clients’ motives. A sophisticated enough content algorithm can find a popular game, rip assets from shareware pages like a 3D right-click thesaurus, and roughly match the gameplay loop. The storage bricks and gamer branded graphics cards you’ve been sent to install seem right with that. But that doesn’t feel right enough.

Visualize the traffic, and this place is a black hole. Just setting your view to net traffic, and this place has activity that’d match a fly-by-night adware operation. Actually filter the in/outs though, and all sorts of stuff comes in without coming back out. It should be the other way around. You can’t get a good idea of what it’s eating either - the only thing the input has in common is it’s all encrypted.

Whatever this place is, it thinks being a shady clone factory is a lesser evil. That’s as far as you can go without leaving footprints here, but it’s a start. Going further might have consequences for your easy ten.

3V:

How personal do you take this piece, how intimate? The ‘zine likes its content raw, gonzo, sincere to a fault. What’s the point, otherwise?

Mentioning the hookup would be a hell of a statement. A public statement at that. York isn’t going to let you hide behind an anonymous byline for this one; It legitimizes the awareness someone would want to distance themselves from the experiences you’re talking about. It acknowledges shame at a meta level.

That doesn’t mean you have to keep everything in. There’s plenty to talk about, if you talk around the wolf in the room. But you’d be doing a lot of good for a lot of people if you were open about how far things went: Conditional acceptance is temporary acceptance. It’s up to you to ask if it’s enough good to be worth the consequences.

And there’s always Black to talk to, about whatever decision you make.

Who at Gensoukyo reads your articles? Does that factor in your decision? Because that’s going to be a conversation.