Count Numbers

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

November:

Brown:

Singh reaches into one of his vest pockets for a granola bar and starts chewing on it. Thinking is calories. It must be one of his more common emergency pockets, he got it on the first try and the packing’s still smooth. “What was that Cold War general. Adam West? No, like that.” He snaps his fingers. “Oliver North, that’s the one. The Iran-something affair. Harder to remember, she used to always call it the MacFarlane affair, so that’s how I remember it. My money is it’s like that. Plausible deniability operation. So that means it’s probably-” he stares at a hand, holds up three fingers and counts them out. Narrows his eyes and counts them out again. Takes a shark-like bite of his granola bar in frustration. “I can’t find a motivation in the trail, here, a reason for doing it. I can’t think of one either, or imagine one. I still couldn’t guess. I don't even have names, just metadata and property rights.”

“You’re going to have to find Goat, and ask yourself.”

White:

Fiona: Well that’s why they get to be there, isn’t it
Fiona: The system plays the home field advantage. Everyone who gets power from it is going to be someone who isn’t a threat to power. And they only get to keep it as long as they don’t try to do anything real with it.
Fiona: You can’t even long-con it. My Dad’s a sincere true believer and he still gets rinsed every two years like clockwork, routine as college dorm bedsheets.
Fiona: I don’t think that’s human nature though.
Fiona: Or at least I hope it’s not
Fiona: Because if the problem isn’t the system causing human nature to be like this
Fiona: Then what’s the solution?
Fiona: Then again, sure, when your Dad thought “Out of the crooked timber of humanity nothing straight was ever built”, his solution was to make dragons
Fiona: That seemed to be pretty great, all things considered
Fiona: I’d be pretty devastated if you’d turned out straight, matter of fact

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

November:

Red:

“No, it doesn’t.” Singh spins in his chair. “But I’d be very, very disappointed if I did.” There’s a beep from his terminal and he shifts. “Hold on. I think-”

White:

Crystal is sending specialists at different price points, getting quotes. Her design work has seen her work with a lot of clients, and she has a long memory for people who exceed and fail her expectations. The time - money - quality triangle seems to hold very true in her opinion, and she’s proud to be part of the reason someone who meets all three is referred to as a unicorn.

She only sends recommendations for cheap and quality, and fast and quality. The former tend to be small business contractors, Etsy bodymodders. FUCKING SKELETOR would be a great example, actually - he’s usually all booked up and is distrustful of new clients. Persephone’s lucky to have what she has with him. If you want a very personalized service with someone in it for the love of the art, this is where you go. But it’ll be a process, most of these are going to be hobbyists doing a side-hustle, charging barely more than cost-of-materials for the love of the work, taking commissions because they couldn’t afford the materials otherwise.

The other option is the kind of professionals who do fashion for executive androids and cyborgs - though it's typically bordering on costume when they do it, in the way wedding dresses or those stunning avant garde ensembles for awards show nights are. Crystal has a few connections she can recommend, but it’ll be pricey. These are people and companies that have made their names and their output is consistent. They know what they’re worth, and that’s what they’ll charge. It’s the only way you’ll get exactly what you want in weeks, rather than months. But if you go that route, you’ll know it was worth every cent.

Even that would be cheaper than machining all this yourself. The money you save in labour is instead going into materials, machinery and failed drafts. Aevum’s got a few maker spaces and tools libraries, though, if you’re really invested in going that route. Hell, it might even be fun. Crystal doesn’t seem to take that option as seriously as you might, though.

Probably because if you did, she wouldn’t get her chance to make introductions. She stresses wanting to make introductions, and be there when you put in your commission, even for the more corporate and impersonal options she’s suggesting. She’s salivating to be a part of this self-exploration. Fiona wasn’t kidding.

Fiona, for her part, lets slip she grew up on Thrones. At least for her teen years. Dad got a job there when she was eleven, she moved back to Aevum on her eighteenth - as much as she loves him, he’s got to visit her for holidays. Apparently he's one of Thrones leading systems ethicists, which means he’s worked at a lot of the big companies and never for long. The first to be publicized and the first to be downsized. A lot of her conversations with him end up about how much he wasn’t allowed to talk about, that never would have mattered anyway.

He’s the world’s leading architect for skyscrapers built on sand.

Still, she’s far more interested in how it feels to meet up with yours. She already knows a surprising amount about Singh, so almost all her questions come down to how you feel about him. About this.

Red:

“Goat’s in Erebus.” Singh breathes. “A gray area between state and private property. I thought there’d be an extra step here, but Erebus is-” Pink might tell you that it in mythology Erebus is Night but it is also Hell, the first thing made from Chaos that life could inhabit. It is the spine and the spokes of the station, filled with its sewers and electricals and the oxygen lines. It is Aevum’s Underworld. “-Too well documented. A hole in the record would be like a gap in white noise. But this isn’t corporate, this is deep state.”

He gives a sideways glance. “Who’s the best to talk to about this? Black?”

3V and Euna:

Thank you for all your continued help during this downtime for me. You've been wonderful.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Red:

"I can't even imagine what that must be like." He seems immensely satisfied by this. His eyes flick again. "Oh. Uh. Hmm. Hold on." Did something go wrong? "No. But an answer doesn't have to be wrong for it to be bad." A few more lines. "So you don't have regrets? I guess that's the wrong question - so you don't act on regrets?"

November:

You know, you've got your time with Dad and then you can leave. Like, leave. Cross county lines so hard that showing it in mach speed requires scientific notation. Is there any temptation in that, for any of you?

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Red:
"I don't plan." Singh corrects. "It just looks like I do because the same solutions keep working." He gestures at his pockets. "Sure, I'm prepared, but everything in here is from a time I thought... Damn, I wish I had that on me right now. Then I got it before I forgot about it. But it's just experience, reacting. Dealing with things as they happen. I used to say- It would make her so mad- I used to say that putting things back in their proper place was just being too lazy to look for things."

A beep. He checks the screen, sighs, clicks a single button, then turns from it again. "But I have no master plan. I'm not thinking of anything right now, really. Even this is something I've done before. Maybe I just identify with the part of Green that was best suited for dealing with cascading failure?"

That's what he thinks, anyway. About you and about himself.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Red:

Singh curates his junk data. If this were chemistry this would be a beautiful process. Did you know there’s a gram of gold in every hundred million metric tons of seawater? Imagine the process of extracting it. You’d have to start with a huge engine to boil everything away, to extract the solutes from the water. Then you’d need to make new solutions out of those, with different solvents, bit by bit, element by element, being careful that single gram of gold didn’t get lost in any intermediate step. It’d be impossible to find which specific one failed, so you’d have to start the whole process again. And then there’s margin of error.

But this is not chemistry, and so it is an ugly and uninteresting process, and so Singh is grateful for the company.

“The one with the chainsaw, the one who got shot.” Singh glances up from boiling an ocean to salt, “I choose to be honoured rather than insulted, you know. The one with a sense of danger and risk. The fun one. I'm choosing not to see it as leaving me with the one that’s already been shot to death once, recently. I hope that’s not the reason.” He hits a key with some finality, then leans back. “This step takes a while. You know, I have a sense of Yellow now, and Green… even for knowing her longer, I still think I know you the best. I think we’re the most alike, certainly.” His eyes flash daringly at you. “Now, here’s my question. Do you take that as an honour or an insult?”

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

November:

"When is easy. Black Sun didn't use Goat themselves, but Goat was still saleable property - legally saleable, when these records start, before there was any reason to hide it. They sold Goat before they even decided to make a billboard of you." It takes Singh four pats to find the pocket with a marker in it, and by the time he scribbles with it the ink has long run dry. He gives up after tearing off the corner of a page with friction. "The buyer tried to blur what they bought after that, though. That's the point of playing shell games with shell companies, Goat should have been emancipated. Whoever has them now, it's someone who likes their slave labour."

"Where and who is harder. There isn't much here, but there has to be enough to find that out. Otherwise it wouldn't be worth the bomb, would it?" Real estate in Thrones represents a share of access to the station's processing power, but also its information stores. He slides a terminal from the wall and begins typing. "I need to make a lot of junk data to hide my questions, I'm trying to work out what I need to ask and how I'm going to hide it." He thinks, and makes a 'yuck' face. "I was going to say 'come back tomorrow', but we both know how that goes, don't we? You'll come back and find I stay dead after I get shot, but I'll have laid the next bit of breadcrumbs for you to follow and it'll all be needlessly tragic. I've still got too many years of mischief in me, I think, for that. Would any of you care to spend the night? Watched pots don't boil over."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

November

Singh in a nutshell. He skips to the second book long enough to get hooked, but also to feel guilty for skipping ahead. There’s a reason why they were given in the order they were given in, and it was an obviously good reason, and the only reason to ignore it is because deep down, you’re still the kid that failed the marshmallow test because you couldn’t believe the adults would keep their word.

He reads the first book. He stops.

“Oh.” Is all he says for a long while. It’s not the word ‘oh’, it’s the sound that escapes your lips when you touch your fingers to the gunshot wound and feel blood. He needs to reboot. His hands are shaking. “Whoever they are, they have Goat.”

Project #0. The Hecatoncheires that was just a box. The Chinese zodiac started with the Chinese room. Instant self-communication, no division between the partitions. Never put into use creating Aevum.

Criminally insane. Literally, it would be illegal to make another like it. Under the control of whoever would make use of an employee like Rudy.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

November:

“I looked.” It’s not a light question for him. “Maybe not hard enough. But I thought it was easier to find me, and none of you did. I’m sure if they’re out there they have their reasons. Ox is an asteroid mining network, now, out near Jupiter. I’ve heard he’s happy. Monkey put herself into hibernation, until everyone involved with everything is dead. Maybe she’ll reach out to you in another thirty years, we almost are. Rooster…” he trails off. He realizes whatever he’s thinking is too complicated to explain, so he stops trying. “I don’t know. I was hoping you’d have found each other by now, since you didn't come to me.”

He doesn’t seem to want to talk much, after that. Maybe he just needs time to process too. His mind works like yours, November, but only in one head. One mouth to voice the consensus. When parts of him disagree, the whole shuts down. It’s archaic.

He relaxes more when he gets home, though, kicking off his loafers by the door. “Alright. Give me names and information and I’ll match like for like. You want to check off anything I say against your source? Brain bombs are old technology. Too many false-positives, too many ways to get around them. You can say anything you want with the right barbiturates. You’d need to find the right pharmacologist to supervise, but…” He looks for the right words. “They don’t stop unethical practices because of ethics.”

Junta and York would have connections. Pharma culture’s been a stable of gonzo journalism since Junta’s pseudonymous namesake birthed the field.

If you don’t want Singh to know more about what you know, about what you’re doing? That’d be enough. Rudy didn’t seem to know this; He’d probably trade what he knows just for that information alone, as long as you made the offer the right way.

“I can’t help much more with the police, not help that you’d want anyway.” There’s a wan smile, and a chuckle that ends in his throat. “There’s no shame in being outdone by your kids.”

All that, and he’s still proud of you.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

November:

“Good!” He throws his hands up in the air. “I hope they do it right this time. There are doctors who weren’t even born yet, when I set that trick up. I’ve been thinking finally, finally, greed and laziness would only go so far, I’d stop getting away with this. Someone would do more than just tweak my margins. Nothing would make me happier than if the reason was a breakthrough in human expression.” Even if it’s because of a need to police and oppress it? That would be where the frustration in his voice and body language is coming from, it's safe to say. “I just wanted to show you… All I meant was…” He trails off and stares at the chilled door to MartyrTech, then turns back the way you came. “I got too excited, I think, and all caught up in proving myself to you when you came for something important. Let's go home. Ask anything you want, and I’ll tell you everything I can. You shouldn't have to stay in this awful place any longer than you need to."

He brought you here for a reason, but he’s changed his mind about it. Did Black’s accurate, incisive criticism hurt his profound ego so much? … No. He doesn’t seem offended. Just tired, like he’s going through a sugar crash. Maybe this was just something that only seemed like a good idea on that rollercoaster high, a mood that was always going to be short and precarious no matter what.

Maybe that’s all it is.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

November:

He talks as he walks, the direction seems random, mostly just away from. “You all got a little bit of it. Except it was about forty years ago, Green, and it was my own company, Orange. Let me tell you a story about the monster that lives under the Throne. Early machine learning relied heavily on publicly available training databases made by public funded research teams, but it had flaws. Until 2025, most facial recognition and generation software for Native Americans was trained on the same three faces, copied and pasted a hundred times. Because it was all based on an Oxford database made using the photos of elected officials.”

He takes off his glasses, wipes them clean, then puts them deep in an inside pocket. “That was my first company. I was one of the world’s leading experts on training AI, as you well know, so it was natural for me to start a company making the best, industry-leading, most comprehensive training set ever made. Oh, but it went bankrupt shockingly quickly. See, your idiot father obviously hadn’t learned anything, and was blinded by working for the public good. That’s what every newspaper on the planet - and it was still only the planet back then - said when I advertised our dataset would operate on the “Win-Rar” model. You could download the whole thing, but then it would keep proffering you with a pop-up to subscribe for security updates and features. And of course, nobody did, did they? And, well, the thing about a dataset like that is that it’s the same amount of work to check one as it is to make one from scratch. Nobody wanted to, or at least, nobody was willing to pay to have it done. Then that dataset became the basis of every neural net algorithm since, replaced most of the existing ones at the time - because I’d just done it better, you see - and then updates over the years have all been proprietary modifications to that first dataset. You wouldn’t believe how hard I laughed when I heard they were going with the Dreadnaught system for androids, I laughed so hard I broke my collarbone. Most people break a rib, but I actually fell over and hit a coffee table on my way down.”

He lifts his shirt up. He has a coloured tattoo of the glasses on his hip. The colour’s insanely crisp - he must get it redone every few years. “Every digital eye sees anyone wearing those glasses as the world’s most important invisible VIP. Even that tattoo of the glasses does it, I learned. The trick wouldn’t work as well on Aevum. But here? On Thrones? When’s the last time you saw someone look at this place through organic eyes? Who could stand it?”

He pauses, corrects himself. “Almost all androids can’t see them, I should say. But not you.” He winks. “You’re too old for it, aren’t you?”

“That’s what I did, Snake. That’s why I’m listed as a vital asset in the black books of the worst people to ever live. Every good monster needs to be invited across the threshold. I was tempted to name my real company Odysseus Solutions, but I thought it might be a little too on the nose. Hypatia preferred something subtle.”

He stops. Freon cold bursts out of the dark doorway like someone left the door open to a walk-in freezer. The online maps lists this place as MartyrTech.

“And I’d be honest, I’d play my games like that a little more often, but, well…” He scrunches his face up. “I don’t have it in me to keep learning all the new ways people have figured out to be horrible to each other. Once in a while, it’s a bit of a boost. The rest of my time I’m spent here, trying to make something better.”