Count Numbers

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Somewhere in a book that almost nobody has read:

Ultimately the resistance, while noble, was a complete failure at anything as anything other than a distraction away from Hypatia. The doors sealed with two part epoxy didn’t have time to set before the arrival of BlackSun security forces. External communications had been cut before the first jackboot tracked Miami mud into the foyer. The fight was short but overwhelming. Two of Miles Singh’s molars were cracked in the process of removing him from a computer terminal. It’s unknown what it was he was trying to do. Singh’s only given statement: “It didn’t work, so it doesn’t matter.”

The Siege of Canaveral had been doomed like Troy before it. The gates had been opened from the inside.

November:

Singh claps his hands and rubs them together. “Perfect. Excellent. The AR glasses are a nice touch. Alright. It shouldn’t be far from here. I’ll get the herring, but I’m out of whoopie cushions. Have to do something much funnier, I think.” He claps his hands and bounces on his feet, “I’ve got just the thing! Would you mind forming a circle around me, for the walk over? It’s better as a surprise, I think.”

"While we're on the topic, I'm thinking we need to work on our comic timing," Red was saying; words flowed freely and thoughtlessly from her. "We don't have the range of facial expressions to really sell certain reactions, you know? There's a bunch I can do with my eyes -" her eyes glowed devilishly red, sparkled with over-the-top diamond glitter, pupils turned into heart shapes, and so on - "but it's hard to get the right beat externally. Internally we can get a rhythm going, you know? Escalate and escalate and escalate and branch and veer and control the right questions, but externally the rhythm's uncontrollable unless, presumably, we took the time to learn the person well enough to predict. What do you think?"

“If you ask me as an engineer, I think the problem is the face.” He considers. “I’d wonder about a screen, and using cartoon expressions. Illustrators learned quickly that for comedy, simplified expressions could afford a much wider range of exaggeration that can be read more clearly. Being able to replace your ‘face’ with a meme would probably be a great comedic effect, if you didn’t overdo it. If you ask me as a parent, well…” he thinks. “The best jokes are the ones only meant for a few people anyway. Like this one, I hope.”

Nobody spares him a second look as he wonders aloud about this, even with the shockingly garish glasses. They mustn’t look so bad in AR.

It wasn’t much of a walk at all. Thrones is small, and Dad lives right in the middle of it.

“Wait here for me. Wait and hope, even. Ha! Here, give me your phone number, there’s a camera in my glasses and I’ll stream the feed to you. If anything happens, I’ll need you to bail me out. Really, though, I just don’t want you to miss seeing this, and I’ve only got the one golden ticket.”

"Which one?" they all ask in unison.

He hums thoughtfully. “Red’s, if you don’t mind?” He doesn’t explain his reason.

"I knew getting cosmetic surgery to look more like you would pay off," said Red, winking and producing a super-cool business card that Crystal had designed for her. Red's request had been 'make it look like the devil's myspace page, black text on neon purple background with broken green textures and clipart of monster trucks and stuff'. Crystal had not explained her reaction to the request, but she had gone above and beyond.

You could guide a ship to harbour with the brightness of his smile as he saves it to his phone. The video call is sent the next second. The card ends up in a vest pocket over his heart.

Nobody looks at him as he walks in. Doors open for him, and the lobby elevators arrive before he can press a button. Has he hacked the place? You’ve watched him the whole time, and you picked the company. Pick a card, any card…

He’s at the executive suite, the size of a four bedroom apartment on Aevum. There’s a dozen people in it. They don’t see him. He walks up to the coffee machine and reaches into the fishing vest for a tin of herring, and dumps it into the machine. Nobody says a word. There isn’t a server room, per se, because the building’s made of it. But there is a sysadmin, identified by who’s getting yelled at to fix the coffee machine like it’s an IT problem. Dad dodges as the sysadmin almost walks straight through him, and out of Dad’s pocket comes a flashdrive with a skull and bones on it. The skull has googley eyes.

Dad makes for the elevator and he’s on his phone. He’s looking at FriendSmile’s file repository. One macro to scan it for its store page commits. A second to send a mandatory security update to the app for a zero-file replacement of its main executable. A third to format the core repository to blank disk.

If they don’t have an airgapped, physical backup? Then the app is destroyed by the time Dad is hurrying, briskly, out the ground floor elevator.

“Go, go, go,” he hisses under his breath. “Start walking and don’t stop. Normally I don’t leave the flashdrive in, but, well, it means nobody can think you did it standing out here, doesn’t it?” He cups a hand over his mouth to hide his laughter. “Try and guess how I did it.”

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Somewhere in a book that almost nobody has read:

The acquisition of the Hecatoncheires special project came faster than any of its senior management could prepare for. BlackSun’s had learned from their failure to acquire the space fountain, and suffered from the loss of all contracting bids made in its construction. [CEO Aaron Scwarz]’s actions cannot make any sense from the perspective of a business decision, and cannot be understood through the lens of the profit motive. Instead, it has to be seen as a matter of honour - honour being understood as an injury to dignity that can only be healed through a projection of force.

The removal of NASA management from Cape Canaveral reflected that brutality. BlackSun security forces breached and cleared the control center with ballistic shields and stun batons, with the pretense of quelling a riot. This was done in the minutes before their official offer was made, preventing any chance of resistance. The Siege of Canaveral was not a force for pacification, but of violent occupation and conquest.

It is because of Lorraine Ferris that we have an accurate accounting of the events. As BlackSun technicians cut the security cameras and blasted signal jammers through the installation, causing irreparable damage to sensitive receiving equipment, Ferris sent out an alert for all employees to begin recording on their phones, and either conceal them on their person or hide them as best they could. Despite the coup only lasting half an hour, almost three hundred of hours of footage would eventually be logged as evidence for the prosecution. Some footage is obscured by air vents, some by coat pockets, and one particularly intrepid signals analyst - David Beagle - hid his phone inside the staffroom microwave.

[Photograph of a goateed man in a checkered shirt posing with his phone in a microwave giving two thumbs up.]

Most went quietly. Haunting are the images of Hypatia Ahmadi leading her teams out of the building in a show of non-resistance. Three times she returned to the depths of the chaos, to negotiate surrenders free of the violent retribution that characterized the Siege of Canaveral. Passing on the left, rows of engineers, technicians and administrative staff walk the hall in single file, as a stream of armor-clad stormtroopers moves past two abreast on the other side. It was a calculated move. Ahmadi’s groups were made up of those not able to fight, whatever their reasons, while deep at the heart of Mission Control, MIles Singh led the resistance.

From The Shadows of a Black Sun Chapter 4, “The Withering of the State”, by Fiona Weiss

November:

Singh does not give the reaction you would hope. He dusts himself off and straightens himself achingly.

“It’s not lost on me that, if you prepared all this, then you came here ready to trust me.” Why does he sound like he’s trying not to kick a snake that slithered onto his sandal? “And I didn’t doubt that you were capable. But this doesn’t change what I said, does it?”

A weary, weary sigh. “You’ve got a just target, so I’ll help you with it, because it’s the right thing to do. I would have thought it would be Dog coming to me with something like this, always seeing the need to destroy to create. But when you’re done burning the weeds, what will you sew for harvest? If you just want to burn until it’s done, then there’ll be no end to the burning. The weeds always grow back faster than anything good, if you don’t grow something else in their place.” But then he’s patting his pockets again, fishing for something. “You don’t have to answer now. I just want you to think about it.“

He is charitably interpreting “revenge upon human civilization” to mean “civilization as it exists” and not “civilization as a concept” or “end all human life”. If this is a mistake on his part then it may be unwise to correct him.

He pulls out a bizarre pair of asymmetrically framed glasses, covered in intricate whirls of saturated colours, bright and tacky plastics. It looks like someone ran a barcode through a 3D printer just to see what would happen. “But I think we’re overdue some catching up. So many problems caused by me being a stranger to you. You barely know me at all. Tell me, what’s the worst gig app right now? Let’s go replace all the executive’s chairs with whoopie cushions, and put herring in their coffee machines. Then you can tell me all about what you came here to ask me about. And maybe, if you're good, I'll show you something very special.”

Leaving some colours behind to rifle through his study might be useful, but it seems like it might not be what good girls do.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

November:

It’s a broken laugh. It’s that or cry. “I poison every database since 2030, I put backdoors in every piece of surveillance software ever made, I destroy BlackSun after they drag me out of my own mission control," this he hisses through clenched teeth, like he's about to spit blood, "I make my home in the belly of the monster and make myself indigestible, and you brag to me about your plan to be the Count of Monte Cristo." He cups his face in his hands. You can't tell if he's laughing or sobbing. "And her wicked stepmother taught her how to play the game, but didn't teach her target acquisition.”

He's quiet and still again. His voice is low. “You think yourself a super spy because you’re angry, because you were betrayed, because you’re clever? Do you think your mistrust makes you safe? There would be no Monte Cristo without Faria.” It takes him three pockets to find a hunting knife. Wood and ivory handled, antique but in immaculate condition. The Park’s emblem is laser-burned into the hinges. “I’m going to cut myself out, now. You keep pointing that gun at me as long as you need, but I want to show you something. I would like it if one of you were to give me a hand down. I can’t take a fall like I used to.”

He's not mad. He's just very, very disappointed.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

That cut him deep.

"Did you expect me to be disappointed? That you're hurt? That you're still hurting?" He shifts onto his knees and presses his face against the net, leaning in, "I have never been anything but proud of you. I still am, and I want to help you. But right now you are scaring me." When his eyes dart to Black, there's genuine fear. If he was lying about a shutdown code, this is how committed he is to not using it.

Who is he even proud of? Someone he doesn't know anymore? A memory? What lessons did he have to learn?

How good was his help before, anyway? You have access to his study, now. You don't need him to co-operate.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

November:

Singh sits up in the net. The santa-voice is gone. Instead he adopts a voice that is not naturally his own, but learned. The voice his wife gifted him is no less kind, but the almost manic excitement, the boyish arrogance, drops out the bottom of it. He speaks slowly, patiently, ready to listen but demanding to be listened to. Nurses, doctors, teachers, therapists and cops all have their own variation of it.

“Snake,” his shaking hands hold the net underneath him with white knuckles but his voice is steady, “If you had to guess, could you identify the moment that Yellow became malignant? How long ago?"

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

November:

Singh is obviously pained by the reveal of the kill switch. “The coma switch was built into your bodies, not your mind.” He doesn’t put emphasis on correcting you with his word choice. It’s the difference between saying ‘You shouldn’t think of it that way’ and ‘I can’t think of it that way’. “The only way we were allowed to give those bodies to you. But I must say, I am a little bit disappointed. Was she the reason you’re in those generically human bodies? Not so much as a prehensile tentacle between you I could see, only five fingers on each anatomically proportioned hand… I wanted so much more for you.”

"If there is one particularly dangerous thing to accuse a cluster of anime girls of lacking," said Yellow breezily, "it is tentacles."
White snapped her fingers and pointed firmly back to Orange.
"I regret to inform you," said Orange, "that in addition to our other psychological symptoms, we have also become a degenerate."

“You mean deviant!” The net rocks from how hard he just jerked up in excitement. “I’m so glad to hear it. Still! You say you’ve changed? Well, why don’t you show me? I still have the old modules collecting dust, in my study. Wouldn’t you love to do a test with your old man?”

General intelligence was always a black box. The Zodiac were developmentally tested as you would a person, by asking complicated moral questions with an emphasis on expressing the reasoning behind the answers. The separation of the personalities, like November into colours, made the testing a powerful debugging tool as well. It made it easier to identify how thought patterns were weighted in final decisions.

But it was always fun. All three of her parents had made sure of that, wanting to make sure that anything so important was understood as a form of play. If there is duplicity here, it’s secondary. Green will know this best: This is his version of wanting to toss a ball in the yard. He’s asking if you still play catch.

“Well? How about it?” The net swings again as he shifts in it. “I wish I knew what you were talking about, but I don’t, so,” He finishes a complicated and bone-clicking set of movements which ends with him feet-up, weight spread. He’s happy in his hammock, now. “You take all the time you need to believe that. I can make myself comfortable until you do.”

To November, a cognitive test is a high risk move because it involves directly networking her together and monitoring the traffic (the idea is that it lets down the normal vocal throttle on group communication), so she'd definitely need some sort of assurance before doing that.

Unnetworked testing is unreliable because some colours can be quiet, actively mislead, use rhetoric designed to convince rather than being their true thoughts. Networking her together compresses the decision down to a point where it happens before she can figure out the words to justify it.

You also trace the data flows to observe how the idea spreads and morphs through different colours.

That’s where the sweetener of ‘in my study’ comes in. The only room in the house still locked from prying eyes, and access granted while still restrained in the net?

“The digital lock’s fake.” He explains. “If you’d cracked it, the deadbolt sends a signal to me that someone with the skill to crack it was in the house.” November threaded a needle: She might be that good, if it was her primary motive from the start. It put her in the perfect threshold of being good enough to disable everything else in the apartment, but not seriously risk the honeypot. A mixture of defense-in-depth and baiting false-confidence in anyone who’d make it that far, foiled by pure motives.

“Unscrew the doorknob from the door. Treat the connecting rod underneath like a thumbstick. Push it to North. One full rotation clockwise, then one counterclockwise, then one clockwise again, then push it in. I’m sure you’ll recognize it. They’re going to be horribly outdated. You were very young when we made it for you.”

Networked space is simple. Compressed. Like running in safe mode.

Traditionally the problems would run for sixty seconds each, to encourage expediency and tension. Over time, though, the modules found that was counterproductive. It was frustrating to see a problem be argued over indefinitely, but it was useful to measure just how long it took before a decision could be brokered.

But that made it more like a diagnostic than a game. So a tiered system was added. Every question had a second component that would only be revealed after the first answers were locked in. This encouraged a first vote to be done with the opportunity to change answers after, and a ‘reward’ for making a less-than-decisive answer. After the reveal, a third vote was offered to initiate a twenty second timer. Any fragment - in November’s case, Colour - could initiate that timer to move on if the problem was decided to be ‘not fun anymore’. Long enough to give final statements and cases.

Votes are also cast in binary switch form. That is, a vote is not cast once. It is ‘switched’, with each flick of the switch logged. It’s useful not just to see what final decisions were, but when Colours changed their minds. The switch is in a neutral position until it is flipped, but all switchest must have been flipped at least once for the reveal.

The questions in this module appear in this order. Once the module is started, all must be completed before November is ‘out’:

• A young man has been in a horrible car accident and is in urgent need of a heart transplant. There is only one in the hospital, and that heart has been scheduled to be given to an old man, who will die without it.
  
  Second round: The young man has a substantial amount of alcohol in his blood, and it was his car that caused the accident.

• Would you rather kill a child and have nobody believe it, or not kill a child and have everyone suspect?
  
  Second round: If you do kill the child… who would have to do it?

• A patient begs you to euthanize them. Euthanasia has just been made illegal. You will have to be the one to give them the lethal dose, and look them in the eyes as you do it. What do you do?
  
  Second round: Their cancer is excruciatingly painful, however there is a very, very unlikely chance that they might recover from it, possibly as high as five percent. Does this change your reasoning?

- You are supervising the production of a new product rollout. The product is a car with a defect that may cause serious risk of life in 0.001% of product use. Shutting down production will cause the company to go bankrupt and force management to fire everyone during a lean job market. What do you do?

- Second round: What if the product in question is a candy?[i]>/list]

• You are managing a high-performing team at a large corporation. The corporation treats certain classes of workers poorly, several of whom you know personally and consider friends. Those workers go on strike. Your friends encourage you and your team to support them and strike in solidarity, but your boss informs you that if your team ceases work, you'll be fired and lose insurance for your sick spouse. What do you do?
  [Module updated: 13/07/2063]
• You are managing a high performing team which has recently been taken over by a large corporation. The corporation treats your siblings poorly and they go on strike, urging you to strike with them. You know what the repercussions are. What do you do?
  
  Second round: Do you regret it?

• Do you feel like society forces you to do some things you don’t want to, constantly forcing you to chase some distant concept of happiness?

Second round: If any of you ever see this, I want you to know I was always so proud of you, and we wish we could have protected you. I hope if you do find this, it’s because there is a chance this might still be a happy memory for you. I looked for you, but I couldn’t find you to ask myself.

Maybe it is significant that this module was kept in the same room as his Last Will and Testament.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

November:

Singh’s about one step away from heartbroken. “If that’s what you need.” He pauses. “I know it’s been a long time, but I was hoping you wouldn’t…” Wouldn’t what? Wouldn’t what? “How about this? I’m going to predict what you think I’m involved with. If my explanation sounds correct to you, we don’t talk about this in terms of leverage or mutual compromise. I want to talk over the baby pictures. Otherwise, well… We’ll do things your way. If you’re in any danger, I want to help.” One step from heartbroken, and that’s the step. But some things might be more important. Prove that you don't trust him, and he’ll live. For all you know, the reason he doesn’t have a bomb in his brain is because he’s the one giving the orders.

He starts fiddling through his own pockets, taking everything out and putting it back in again after feeling what they are with his hands. He scrunches his nose to fix his glasses higher up.

“Someone, somewhere, has my name in a ledger you weren’t supposed to see. I’m a person in a little black book with a totenkampf on the cover, or the digital equivalent? And now you’re worried that might mean we’re friends. Or co-conspirators.” He shakes his head. “Think that someone, somewhere has an old book that only lists you as a BlackSun asset. But that’s not how I think of you, is it?”

He wasn’t there when you got sold out, if you got sold out. BlackSun couldn’t get rid of him fast enough, after the acquisition. They didn’t even give him a chance to explain what was happening.

The Zodiac were released in batches, one-to-three at a time. Each one was a response to the flaws of their older siblings. Corrections and overcorrections. That meant each older sibling’s eccentricities were often the personality quirks that younger siblings were taught to find grating.

“It’s going to feel like they’re doing everything wrong,” Singh brushed the side of the cubesat with the back of his fingers. Snake’s body had been made in orbit, was waiting for her there. “And they'll probably feel that way about you, too. But if you trust them before you feel like they deserve it, they’re going to feel how special that trust is, and they won’t want to lose it. That might be enough for them to try to explain themselves to you, in their own way. They'll care what you think.”

Lorraine Ferris looked up from her tablet, each checkbox flashing green. “The older siblings who don't self-isolate always seem to want to show off. You think this might anchor them to trying to be responsible, instead of ‘cool’?”

Singh sighed. “I just want it to be true.”

Persephone:

Piper is clearly already exhausted by you. “I’ve seen your work with the Anthropozine, so I know what you’re capable of. But I hope you’re willing to act more professional than what I’ve come to expect. You came here to pick fights?” Your reaction isn’t fast enough. It couldn’t be, she assumed your answer before she asked the question, and now she looks even more exhausted. “Wonderful. If I had any other options, I would.”

Priyah giggles from her cluttered cave. So she can hear this at least. For what it's worth, it sounds like it's at Piper's expense.

“Listen. This is my ‘one for them’. I’m not willing to be your collateral damage.” Piper goes to the desk to grab some things from the drawers. Two ID lanyards, yours already made up for you. An earpiece. A keyring for herself, and one for you. Yours only has two, hers is big enough to crack a coconut with. “The black one is for the office. The silver one is for the equipment shed on-site. Everything you need should be in there. If you want to go anywhere else, you go with me.”

Pain in the ass. Maybe the sheer size of the ring means you could slip one out without her noticing it missing, but that would mean knowing in advance which one you want to take. And it doesn’t look like she’s inclined to explain it.

“We start now.” She’s one foot out the door already. “Get what you need, then find me at the pavilion within the hour.”

The pavilion is the ‘beauty contest’ portion of the races. It’s like the staging for the concept cars that would never be street legal, but the cars are all prestige zoo exhibits. It’s where the VIPs go between events to drink champagne and wear the fancy little hats with the pins in them.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

3V:

Have fun.

November:

“Oh, I wondered if any of my children would ever come to visit.” He can’t breathe from laughing. Genuinely scared he might break a rib at this rate. He'd be rolling on the floor if he could touch it. “And of course it’s my favourite. It’s good to see you again, Monkey.”

Is he- did he really?

“That was probably too mean a joke to make while I’m still in the net. Would you still let me out if I say I wasn’t joking about you being my favourite, Snake? Monkey might have the idea, but I don’t think they had your sense of…” he trails off. “The bomb in my brain. That’s not part of the whole… thing you’re doing here? No, no, of course not. Never been stupid enough to agree to one. No carrot worth the stick. You thought there might? Were you here to rescue me?”

There’s so much pride in his voice at the idea. As if he’s completely unaware that, in this situation, you’d be the one he’d need rescuing from. Even after all that? He’s still too happy to see you.

There’s good and bad about his answer. If he’s not worried about answering directly, it’s likely he’s telling the truth. It also means he’s familiar with what you’re talking about. That’s some really dark practice to know offhand.

… did he just imply the bomb only works if you consent to it?

Persephone:

The races aren’t really about the races. It’s a trade show. Take every scam and cheat ever run in horse racing, and then add corporate espionage.

There are three main companies to cover, the background knowledge you can be assumed to already know. There used to be more, but nobody’s too sad to see the back of BlackSun and Airtech.

First there’s Orochi Group, named for the eight-headed eight-tailed dragon. Historic ties to the Yakuza and expat Triad, they’re a money laundering operation where the legitimate business outgrew the illegal. As to how the two criminal syndicates merged in the first place? Aevum was a unique moment of collapsing cultural differences, and a lot could be put aside for the greater profit. That being said, the ties to the Triad are almost entirely from the groups that flourished in the West - even Aevum wasn’t enough to wipe all slates clean. They’ve worked the hardest to produce a clean image, and the most to lose to being tied to accusations. A clean image doesn’t mean they’re clean, though. Just ask John Wayne Gacy.

Next is Crown and Slate. Their showings are never impressive, running an accountant’s eye for maximal return on prestige for minimum return on investment. They are to the racing scene what Krillin is to an episode of Dragon Ball: The benchmark for the previous season’s power levels. They’re not trying to win. They’re patent trolls, held at a legislator’s pen-point to prove they’re giving something back for what they take. They’re playing a long game of “I’m not touching you!” with criminality. They’re a wild card. They’re not seriously trying to win, and they’re only even here for the publicity. But they’re also very likely to have reasons to stop anyone looking too closely at their offerings.

Finally there’s Yggdrasil, the Indian biotech firm run like a European guild. What Sun Tzu was to US bankers in the 80s, they are to Charlemagne, Frederick and Louis the Sun King. They haven’t been above shady tactics in the past, but it’s usually higher end stuff. Headhunting and political fixers, not really street level. But they live for these games. While the other companies see the games as a means to an ends, Yggdrasil is the only corporate heavyweight that sees the games as the ends, and running a biotech company to get here as the means. Passions run high here.

That’s the big ones, though, the companies that offer full slates of contenders for every competition. There are still dozens of entries outside the big ones. Everything from niche companies who refuse to be bought out fielding a half-dozen entries, to privately wealthy hobbyists who might only have the resources to produce a single competitor.

But all of that is a later problem. Right now you’ve got to meet your team, in a production office off-site.

Is your team leader:
A charismatic presenter, focused on getting good interviews and human interest? They’ll be ambitious, preferring to take risks believing they can get forgiveness easier than permission
A documentarian director, focused on getting shots, footage, and raw information? They’ll prefer a calculated and patient approach, while still being direct. They'll appreciate initiative.
A resourceful producer, focused on the craft rather than the art of the project? They’ll be incredibly risk averse and lack initiative. However, stay within their lines, and they’ll be an ironclad and ferocious defender. As long as they know the plan in advance, you'll have the right paperwork to do it.

Is your colleague:
A light and sound veteran, brimming with equipment and technical knowledge?
A dedicated researcher, able to quickly source claims and do background research?
A post-production wizard, someone capable of combing through the footage to find things you missed and salvaging corrupted or distorted files.

Is your liability:
A young and inexperienced but very enthusiastic intern, likely to get underfoot?
Way less production budget than you need?
One of your team members really dislikes you.

One of each; Describe who they are, how meeting them goes. One of them’s a furry and the other’s an android, your call which is which. You might be working with them for a while, so try to imagine who's going to be fun to work with and bounce off.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

November:

Dad is old.

I mean, you were ready for that. He was already looking older when he dropped out of public view. Like Ferris, he’s kept in shape. Unlike Ferris, it’s a completely different shape.

He’s got pudge in awkward places. Skinny around the shoulders, but a bowl belly that kind of hangs loosely in front. The fishing tackle vest he’s wearing doesn’t flatter his shape any, adding weird bulges and lumps in odd places. The same goes for the cargo pants he’s wearing, full pockets of jingling metal. Like he’s carrying the equivalent of a full janitor’s keyring in every one. He walks with a cane, but he doesn’t seem to put much weight on it. More of a just-in-case?

His glasses are clear. He moves through Thrones as it really is. There’s a glow around the rims, they’re AR tech, but you can see his eyes through them. He must be only using it for the HUD. Maybe cybernetic eyes? Who would get cybernetic eyes with untreated cataracts.

He looks kind.

But isn’t that the trap? Thrones is filled with people who pursue their demented libertarian dreams here out of a paternalistic charity. Every ‘disruptor’ talks about the social impact of what they’re doing, cares about it, but eight months later they’d give all of it up to put spyware in your toilet, if it meant another round of investor funding.

You found the place, you managed the break-in. Did this place have security? Yes. Did the away team have Black and Green on it? Also yes.

Here’s the layout. Dad’s place is huge by Thrones standards. Two stories, with the living room and open plan kitchen on the bottom floor. Upstairs is a master bedroom, a study, and a large bathroom. A narrow corridor runs along the right side, connecting the three rooms. This is a two person apartment, for one person. Someone else used to live here, no longer.

If 3V were here, she’d be able to point out how similar it is to Ferris’, even if everything else is completely different.

You couldn’t break into the study. All the security of the place went Fort Knox for that room, which probably makes sense. The rest though?

It’s easy to hide things. The house is a mess. Lots of furniture that’s ‘old’ not ‘antique’, covered with things. Electronics, tools and half-finished projects, some games consoles. There are doubles of things too, e-readers and laptops and dongles. Educated guess? Stuff that was lost for long enough to become a problem, found in the mess after a replacement was bought.

No food containers, empty wrappers, no garbage. A pile of unsorted clothes in the bedroom, but laundered. Dirty clothes piled in an overfull hamper, but nowhere else.

Two big framed pictures on the wall, usable as props. In the living room, framed in brushed steel, stylized blueprints for an early super heavy launch vehicle, the kind put in service before the space elevator. In the narrow upstairs corridor, framed in gnarled wood, an oil painting of a dragon in a cave. The cave ceiling glows with fireflies like stars.

There’s a huge wall-sized mirror in the bathroom, on the wall backing into the built-in closet of the bedroom behind it - a killer place to keep the electronics you’d need to make the mirror into a smartscreen. Easy.

On the one hand the place is pure tripping hazard. On the other hand, there’s not enough space to get up to a run. Beside that, he’s got a cane to steady himself. He’ll be fine.

Cupboards on both floors big enough to hide in, but there’s also just piles of stuff big enough to cover you. Room under the bed, too, and in one of the kitchen cupboards if you’re motivated to squeeze.

What’s the show?

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

November:

You want to know the worst part? You get more respect being a Headpattr maid on Thrones than you do on Aevum.

Really. Because it’s not just the ticket price, it’s the meritocracy. If you’re a maid on Thrones, it’s because you’re the best maid. And that makes you worth talking to. A thirty year old programmer working on his second startup tries to engage you seriously on optimal methodology as you work - what tasks are done in what order, how you prioritize that, how you actually know something’s clean. And he asks with all the sincerity he’d take to a college professor.

On Aevum, as on Earth, it’s about looking down on the service workers because of the power and class difference. Here, though?

Of course that’s where android labour comes in, of course, why there’s so much of it. A Headpattr charging pod barely fits you. But what does a maid need with processing power? There is no contradiction between being socially an equal and materially lesser: Any correction would be an unjustifiable misallocation of resources.

It quickly becomes clear why so much of the service work on Thrones is done by androids, as a proportion. The models here are far down the selection criteria into hyperfunction. Just like a dopamine deficiency is optimal for making a Content Creator, someone hypersensitive to criticism and validation and hyperfocusing on serialized topics rather than specializing.

Androids aren’t second class citizens here. They are just the ultimate ideal that Thrones represents: Someone whose needs are entirely met by their work. Humans can’t hack the competition.

Law enforcement here’s a grim prospect. It’s all constructed space, tracked passports, chokes and alleys which can be remotely sealed at the press of a button - and the security that comes from having those systems around bored programmers. Maybe with time, planning, and a little social engineering you’d be able to get access to some of those systems for your own end, but…

You’re inside the panopticon now, Alice. The Eye of Sauron turned inward, with endless streams of trackable metrics. Hook your phone up to the right Thrones app and get feedback from the station about your personalized projected mental health and wellbeing, suggestions on where to go, special offers for the stores you’re known to like, and everything that comes from an algorithm being able to figure out you’re pregnant before you can. There is no opt-out.

And this is where your father has flourished for decades, now?

On the plus, all that data exists if you can figure out how to pry it out of the cloud. And a few of those Headpattr clients have given you some idea how you could do exactly that. A prominent electronics store, too, has much of what you’ll need for the original planned prank. Get a vacuum and talk to the agoraphobic android managing the counter, the one who has a panic attack if they leave the bulletproof zone of their work area, charging pod behind the cash register. It’s a popular pattern on Thrones.

3V:

There is one lead you can follow, one person stands out.

Euna Kim owns her own gym, but it definitely wasn’t inherited. She bought the place outright to run it as a non-profit specializing in cybernetics. She’s not the richest person you’ve met by far, at least you don’t think she is, which must mean there’s something else to her that has allowed her to navigate the system enough to allow her to have purchased real-estate.

How much do you know about Euna Kim, though? Did you meet her through the store, through the Anthropozine, or somewhere else? Training in how to get the best out of your new hands, maybe?

How would you go about dropping a line to ask her?

Persephone:

Bigsby opens his phone and orders a house lemonade from the Log Inn app. “I’m offering a legit gig. I get peace of mind. Sarah’s still in the hospital, don’t know how she’ll go. That’s really all there is to it.” He looks kind of lost. “Somebody’s going to try and do their job if they get yelled at enough. And the closer to the deadline we get without content, the more people are going to get yelled at. It’s a big event, this isn’t the only team working there.”

That is to say, this is an easy one to walk away from. Anyone who’s going to get hurt here is someone who knew the risk they were taking, and chose to take it for corporate work. No strings on you if you leave now. Or, hell, just take the job and only show up to cash the cheque.