Count Numbers

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Apostle:

“Yeah, I did wonder about that, talking to your blonde segment,” Apostle thinks. “People just don’t do what you want them to, they’ll act against their own best interest all the time, totally irrational. You can’t reason people out of irrational positions. Her plan’s based, but it’d take removing everyone’s choices until they’re only left with the correct one all the time to work. She seems willing to do that though, so it’ll be cool to see if you can pull it off.”

“That’s what you were worried about, right?” It’s a genuine question, not rhetorical.

Chaka Zulu:

“I’m not that drunk.” She protests, looking at the bottle and wincing. “I’m drunk, but the bad sleep’s just making it hit harder. Couldn’t, couldn’t -” she stumbles, “had nightmares.”

[She takes the point and regains the stability. Good call.]

“I should go, I should- I shouldn’t go out there.” She slumps back down against a crate in front of a control panel Red would need to access, not on purpose just, this is your luck with each other. “No, like, that’s not self-pity bullshit. If the cops pick me up in this, then-” she holds back a retch and wipes her lips with the back of a hand, the anxiety of thinking about that one was rough. “They’re going to make me the poster child of trans being violent like they did with Alice. And she, she wasn’t. I mean she did it, she obviously fucking plugged that judge, nobody who knew her would ever believe she’d hurt anyone, Alice was a fucking mouse.”

She gestures at all the crates filling the room. “But she did it with one of my guns, so now if I get picked up in this they’re going to label everyone near me a terrorist cell.”

Eye of the Tyger, Thrill of the Flight

The first thing you need to do is tell everyone you’re organizing them before you can organize them to move out. They need to know there is a plan in order to follow one. Right now everyone’s too spread out in rooms, the halls, forming their own march groups in the adjacent streets in proactive self-defense. You need to unite them to lead them.

A gift from Fiona, the fact that everyone here’s had to sign up for a room with their contact details, you’ve got a complete list of every group’s phone number here if they didn’t spoof one. That could be useful to you.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Fiona:

The first bangs of gas grenades are heard in the middle distance. Not close to hear, no, but it’s the first ship landing on the shore of that isolated split-nation island.

Fiona looks up, at the world on the ceiling, to see the distant sparks like supernovas in the night. She sighs, this was a lot sooner in the day than she expected, and she makes ready one last thing she brought with all the boxes.

She unboxes and unfolds a modified soundnet projector used for small outdoor events like wedding areas, looking like the digital equivalent of the old oil burners restaurants used to use for outdoor eating areas. Modified to produce the same air filtering effects Leather was using for his firefighting demonstration. It’s big enough to project a cloud over the skate bowl, over the lego play area.

“They’ll be safer here than if they go anywhere in this.” She says, and taps something on her phone. “I’m going to put a map pin here so people caught out in this know it’s here. The tear gas can kind of spread and linger, especially with the spin gravity.”

“Okay. Next question. We going back to my place so I can spoil you, maybe do some debugging while I’m in there and see if I can catch anything Green’s missed - sometimes a different eye’s more important than a better one - or do you want to go out there and do stuff?”

She flexes her modified leg motors to emphasize she’s good for both.

Apostle:

“Laksa sucked, obviously.” Apostle says as they round the corner, then; “Oh shit.” As Brown messages. “You look like you actually had to do something. Good job.” This one isn’t stilted, they’re actually impressed. They go radiate in a corner like they said they would.

They half rest back in a chair at the other end of Junta’s bed, thin white shirt slipping over the cathedral glass plates underneath as they get comfortable, and close their eyes as if going to sleep, and then open one again.

“Other people would be mad at you if you didn’t, huh?” They ask knowingly. They pull their phone out of their pocket and hold it up for Brown to see. “Actually, you might like this. You said you’re Observation, right? Here.”

It’s the Eris server app, but filled to the brim with way too many servers. Like, you need to mod the app to hold this many. Also part of the mod is that the client background is a picture of two android girls in renaissance dress, one lifting the other’s chin with a rapier. The picture’s fantastic, but it makes the text behind it way more difficult to read, unless you’re completely insane.

“I’m a mod for about a third of them.” They say. “Because I lurk all of them and know about the shit people start in other servers. And it turned out stopping people spreading drama into my other spaces was less work than doing nothing and watching it play out.” They put their phone back in their pocket and close both eyes again with a wry grin. “Most people think I’m insane for it.”

Train Gang:

So we’ll get to everyone else in a moment, but I think it’d be funniest to start with Red.

See, because Red has just gone for the nearest command node access for the railway line, a private and out of the way disused station building mostly abandoned after a district rezoning. Even if she wants to head to a command center this is the most expedient point to access the rail network to get her own vehicle to get to one.

And inside it she finds crates upon crates of armament, and a very surprised black panther in a beret and a leather jacket who shoots up off the crate she was perched on with a half-empty bottle of rum.

Chaka Zulu:

“Fuck, it’s you. I swear,” Chaka says, slurring her words slightly, “I wouldn’t have sold her the gun if I knew she was going to use it on a judge.”

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Fiona:

“Could Yellow hack herself, like Red did?”

November:

That is insane and it wouldn’t work.

No, I mean, it’s like if everyone from the US gathered to a convention and you tried to hijack one train to get everyone back home.

Instead, November will have to hijack a lot of trains and get everyone home.

There’s a few ways to do this, but these are the core requirements;

1 - Get everyone out of the building and to the train station safely
2 - Keep them safe while they queue at the station, this will be a siege but if there’s a way around this then Disneyland will pay you a lot of money to share it with them
3 - Arrange individual transport to district era hubs (Renaissance Ares, etc.), they can work out neighbourhoods by surface streets from there. This is likely going to be your optimal balance between start and end point safety. Anything more specific requires smaller pods and longer wait times at a train station during a riot.

Crimson Tower has already learned how to access the train network to send emergency vehicles to mess with train routing - emergency vehicles are the only things being let through the lines right now. Still, the station is set to crisis mode and the crisis teams have more power in this situation, including commandeering trains and private rail vehicles like Dudekov’s. That is going to take work though, more than hacking the network remotely, physical access to the trains will be needed and an idea of who to commandeer from. There are no wrong answers here, follow your heart.

Big trains can be stolen easily to send people through to the main district hubs if there’s another November there, or at least another person in on the plan, who can organize the crowd from there. The issue with the big public trains is scarcity, not accessibility.

Chaka Zulu:

Does not know she has chosen an extremely inconvenient place to have moved to.

Brown:

Oh hey it’s York in the bed across from Junta - barely recognizable, though. No, it’s not a coincidence, this ward has to have more security because Junta’s in it, Junta’s boss being here means double dipping on that.

Right now you’re the only one that knows he’s here. Apostle won’t know who he is, if they ever come back with their disappointing soup. They legitimately might just have forgotten

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Crystal:

Her phone notifications start blowing up, but she ignores them for the minute. She’s already gone through ‘actually my flaws are okay because I’ve earned them’ once with Fiona, thank you very much. “That was more said to make it up to Red that this conversation had to happen in front of her.” It’s still true, mind. “You have your own ways of impressing me, and you do.”

She looks at Yellow and tries to put this into language she would understand, which is a difficult prospect because it requires trying to figure out the language Yellow might understand. “You would not be very impressed with me if I forgave unkindness for my own gratification. In fact, I don’t think there is a way you could get out of this without me having to disappoint you, and I’d prefer not to disappoint you.”

She checks her phone notifications.

Apostle:

“Hey, cool.” Apostle says, “Makes sense. In that case I’d put the TV news on because it’d piss Junta off more, just zone out if you want, and I think I smelled laksa in the cafeteria which, there’s no way it’s good, but I have to see.” They think for a second. “So yeah I’ll probably be back in ten minutes to tell you you’re doing a good job, and then I’ll go read in the other corner of the room for a bit. You’re doing good, by the way. Keep it up.” Awkward thumbs up.

It’s stilted because Apostle just, does not know how to give a compliment or praise like this. They just figure that if they’re talking to the part of the brain that does all the things nobody cares about doing, then it’s likely the part nobody cares enough to thank for doing it, so this is the correct thing to say.

The live news would be interesting. An android nurse comes in to make the other bed ready for a new patient, once they get out of surgery.

Fiona:

Okay, the bowl is a big piece she needed.

“You’re not one to one, you’re representative like political parties.” Fiona says as if it should have been obvious because it should have been, but it wasn’t. “So if your votes are-” She stops. “Okay. Who counts the votes?” She asks. “Is it something that could be hacked like,” she pulls a sharpie from her pocket (always be prepared for bodywriting at any moment) and scribbles over some of the red tiles in the bowl to make them black - but only on the inside, not from the outside. “Does anyone need to win votes, or can someone win by just changing the perceived weight of the voters? Could she marginalize someone indirectly doing that?”

The park is sheltered, and you’re both hunkered in a big concrete bowl. Without the immediacy of a news channel, the world passes by for a moment.

At the start of WW2 there was an island shared by the Germans and the French. It took six months for them to receive the news they were at war. And they wouldn’t have been, if they hadn’t heard the news.

The Third Day:

There are a lot of ways this could tie to November’s actions, or the people she knows.

Zhang throws the first brick, only in a crowd because she was asked to be there. Maybe Crystal’s convention is the nucleus. Chaka gets found because she was forced to move to a less secure spot, and things spiral out of control from there. Numb does something stupid. The anthrozine prematurely publishes its atomic bomb in this moment, the one November hid in turtles. All the heat finally catches up to November, she’s tied to the movement, everyone’s outed as terrorists, everything sucks forever.

But history is greater than great people, and the world is bigger than that, and sometimes things just… happen. It’s just messy, it’s nothing to do with us, and we just have to live through it.

The match:

One of the leftists own homemade bombs blows up in a crowd, killing no one but wounding three. The garbage build quality that causes it to detonate prematurely at least causes it to detonate incompletely, wounding only three people in a packed crowd.

This is the primer that blows up the powder keg.

See, people further ahead in the crowd thought it was their people being attacked, and charged the anti-trans crowd who were just kind of waiting for it like Christmas morning. This is where the cops switch from observation to suppression.

After that, all the protests have to be treated as violent and made to disperse. Up until that point standing orders had been observe and watch and that was fine, but at that point the situation’s deemed too volatile and so everyone has to be made to go home.

The problem is everyone might have gone home until you tried to make them.

This is where things start to go how you’d expect.

This is when Zhang Ho takes her bricks and starts getting ready to be in a real shit-fight.

This is when Pope sits on a high rooftop covered in cameras in Apollo, all pointed at the streets above and below in like the old Google Streetview cars, a few friends and fellow journalists watching the cameras and checking batteries. They take turns going down the fire escape to the streets themselves, to do on-the-ground interview and bring back coffee and vape juice. A crate of gas masks sits at the corner.

This is when the almost-useless pineapples are used against Echidna’s crowd, and in rage they crash the lines, and heavier riot police are on their way to stop the ‘monsters’.

This is when FUCKING SKELETOR drags a cyclopean android away from the fires being started in Cerberus Augments, cycling in and out as it alternates between extinguished and reignited in cyclic retribution, the place is held responsible for Echidna’s people on the other side of the station. Violence begets violence, and the information exchange across the whole world is immediate.

The police station keeping brutaldickshots is unseeable through the teargas they’ve flooded the entire street in, corner-to-corner. Some brave souls use it as cover to hurl lithium bombs through the cover of the smoke, causing incredible, beautiful chemical reactions to burn through the clouds as they’re hurled.

These people are just a fringe minority that most people don’t feel that strongly enough about to be this violent towards, so this riot isn’t to hit the levels of the Watts Rebellion from 200 years ago, a pressure cooker of racism and redlining.

This is worse in a different way though. Look up, and around, and you see the whole world with just a decent pair of binoculars. When the George Floyd riots happened in the US, it was contained to the US, the riots stopped at the borders. Here there are no borders. Just as the founders intended, this is one people, with one language.

The fire is less intense, but it is also unbounded. It’s everywhere.

The first thing they’re going to do is shut down the train lines, and then it’ll be much harder for everyone Crystal’s holding to get home. Two options - get everyone out now using Zhang’s opening, or talk the hotel into letting everyone stay one more night despite everyone here being a target, and trying to get out when it’s safe.

But they’re about to shut down the train lines everywhere, for everyone except emergency vehicles. Wherever November is now, she’s about to be stuck there.

Anthrozine:

The chat thrums with sleeper members, the barely-actives.

Showing up with HartlyDworkin are names like IRA_Glass, paperkatana, foot_to_the_left, BreadSanta, SapphoOfAphrodite, and puttingHisbootsOn (from the Pratchett quote about truth), the chat is dinging like crazy with news and updates.

Everyone just assumes York’s got his phone off because he’s in the thick of it, and they’re not wrong. But it’s left the commotion a leaderless fracas just sharing as much information as they can, much like the world around them.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Fiona:

“I’m not-” Fiona starts, stops. Thinks. “Okay. We can go do something else and find something you do find fun, just leave this stuff here. Go back to the apartment to give you a mechi-cure, maybe, like I promised.” Because Hazel has commandeered the workshop and she does not want her intimate girlfriend affection smothering weird cleaning moment to be ruined by bitch-queen of the fairies. “But can I just show you why I’m being weird about this?”

She stacks a quick rainbow of lego bricks, scrabbling around in the big dumped pile looking for one for every November color she knows about. “Black is a trauma response, naturally isolated.” She flicks that off the stack. “Orange is supposed to be your social core, but we’re your girlfriends and she sees us about as much as Green used to.” Flicks that off. “Green, she’s complicated but just for now, Ms Queen of the Underworld,” Flicks that off. “Brown?” Flicks that off without explanation. “Red.” She unclips it from the stack and puts that in the palm of her hand. “White.” Unclips that from the stack and puts it in her hand. “Yellow.” Unclips that from the stack and puts that in her hand. “Pink.” And again.

She makes a new stack, Red, White, Yellow and Pink. “This is who’s left of you who seems to really care about people in a way that could be kind of healthy.” She looks at the flicked Orange brick. “Which worries me on its own, but. White wants a strong leader, not to be one.” She sets White aside. “Three left. Red’s solid, but… this isn’t her place.”

And then she rebuilds the whole rainbow stack using just the flicked and discarded pieces, leaving Yellow and Pink beside it.

“So now all of this? All of this isn’t countervailing force anymore, it’s table stakes.” Fiona holds up the Yellow and Pink bricks. “For these two. And this one,” she holds Yellow up. “Apparently thinks that the point of making up a game to play with kids is manipulating them into optimal happiness.” She closes that one in her left fist.

“Which leaves Pink.” She says. “Hi.” She adds, wiggling her fingers. “So I love you,” and she holds up the rainbow piece and offers it to the actual Pink, “and I also love you,” she holds up the individual pink brick but keeps it in one hand without offering it. “So I have to-”

She stops cold. “Holy shit.” She looks at Pink in fear. “Pink she’s going to kill you.” She remembers she’s still holding the Yellow brick in her left hand and flicks it like a bee that stung her.

Okay, so you know that thing where people learn by teaching? Or like, doing a simple demonstration makes things obvious you wouldn’t have thought of?

Yeah, so. Fiona has just, in her head, made a very important series of logical connections. All these intermediary steps stay in Fiona's head for the moment though because she's too startled to explain herself, has no idea how, is relying on Pink making the same conclusions she just did.

1: Pink is the only threat to Yellow’s supremacy here in the way that actually matters.
2: Pink is the color responsible for selfishness, and Yellow's vision requires total selflessness.
3: She’s seen how much Blue’s disappearance is changing them even without Blue being there herself to change them. That’s a new data point for her.

She was going to say something like ‘I want you to be able to feel like you can be selfish having fun with other people, rather than need to hide away and keeping entirely to yourself’, and that was true too. It just feels way less important now.

Fiona is at least aware her girlfriend is… weird, that it’s not murder-murder. She knows she’s not accusing Yellow of assassination here so much as a change of mindset, a way to resolve a cognitive dissonance, something that would only be necessary if Yellow did win out. She gets that.

But also it’d make her fucking sad, damn it.

Apostle:

Apostle stops.

“Oh holy shit you’re a segmented GAI. Oh shit you were the blonde at the Lutherans meeting?” More gears, they push off Junta’s bed and glow like a Christmas light over you, radiating all different colours and blasting the sound of a hammering heart. “Definitely segmented personalities, she was too different. No fucking way, you’re kidding me. Wait. November? Junta talked about-” Apostle stops. “Journalism. You knew him for journalism.”

Apostle is a genuinely brilliant idiot, when they told Yellow that all the smartest people they knew were dumber than her they included themselves.

“Know him.” Apostle corrects themself. “The universe hates him too much to end his suffering this early. Anyway. You basically got it, with the card, so I’ll just tell you that it’s heat sensitive invisible ink. You’ve got to hold it as close to a candle as you can in a dark room without burning it.” They say this to save time, but don’t just say what’s on the card. They only want to help you skip the boring step. “Wait. Did you know he wrote…?”

This is awkward.

No it isn’t.

“Doesn’t matter,” Apostle continues, making it clear they have simply decided they don’t care about it and you shouldn’t either, so it’s fine, “I get like that with fanfiction. I kind of find one thing I like and I pull everything I can from it, but it’s not enough so I get deep into the fandom trying to stripmine that. But at the end I can’t remember what’s fanon, and what’s canon, and what’s from where. All the different characters get superimposed over all their other versions, all the different timelines.”

“And then I realize everyone else has done it wrong, except like two people, and then that’s the worst because you see two people get it right, it’s a solved problem, but nobody else-” they cut themselves off. “Actually what personality fragment am I talking to here, how are you subdivided? It’s going to make things way easier going forward if I actually just know what partition you are.”

Crystal:

“Yes dear,” Crystal says. “And all that is very lovely when the nation you mean is Aevum. If, however, my girlfriend were to experience a factional split, then I might have to learn how to break up with only a portion of someone, and that sounds thoroughly miserable.”

She looks down at Yellow from higher up the toppled throne and looks at her like a cat that’s knocked something off the bench. “You do not need to explain, or apologize, or justify yourself to me, none is needed. But-”

There are two tones she considers taking here, warm and cold, and she chooses warm this time. She trusts Yellow as fragile enough that saying this is warning enough without needing to belabour the point, so let this just be a celebration of the others.

“The sentient manifestation of your hedonism is a charming and vibrant sweetheart to whom I would give the world. Your paranoia is a watchful soul, deeply hurt but expressing care in her own ways. And your disaster lesbianism,” she smiles angelically at Red and maintains eye contact with her when she says this, “besides being forthright and adventurous, can make me cum harder than a corded vibrator at its full. And so on.” She laughs at her own joke as she thinks of it in her head. “I was going to say they just don’t make batteries big enough, but there is one in you, so I suppose they must.”

She looks back to Yellow. “Please do not talk about my girlfriend in front of me like that again.”

There. No coldness. No cuts. And most of all, finish on the singular, to make it clear that Yellow is still included in that as well. All this needs to be is an eccentric case of self-loathing, and nothing more.

The Third Day:

A lot of things are about to happen. It will not be quick.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Fiona:

“Stop.” Fiona says, somewhat sharply. “Hold on, a legalistic framework to manipulate someone would make her happy?”

“We need to put a-” she omits a word after looking at a five year old just across, “pin in that, for later. I brought it up because games are a good learning tool, and you have a bunch of kids here without any instruction books also wanting to work out how to be creative, and that’s what you’re figuring out too. I thought it might be a fun way to see if they could help you learn what you needed to learn. Maybe figure out how to make rules based on the same constraints you’re stuck with, and see how the niblets go about them. They’d like playing with you.”

“You aren’t going to learn from what they do with a problem if you’re trying to steer them. I meant… experiment! Play?”

It’s not a suggestion she thought of from talking to Yellow lately. It’s something thought of because she’s been talking to Green.

Apostle:

“Mood.” Apostle nods. “I kind of ruled out cowardice though. It’s a bad aesthetic.”

There’s a pause. “Personally, I recommend trying to build the perfect god machine. You get to try and seize power, which is pretty based ngl, but still spend most of your time checked out reading as much yuri magical-girl-deconstruction doujin as you want while your code compiles without it being coward shit.”

He looks at Brown thoughtfully. “You got any good reccs for me? You just kind of seem like you would.”

Hazel:

“Holograms and emitters are tacky,” Hazel winces. “But, sure.”

Hazel’s opinions of Cyan can be summed up with the words ‘noob tube’. They’ve got their place, like when one of your clients is made of holograms and there’s no getting around it, but the Magic lives and dies on its ability to stand up to scrutiny. This shit? Bridge made of pig-iron brittle.

But if all you got is pig-iron, and what you need is a bridge…

Crystal:

“I thought if anyone could appreciate a bit of macabre energy,” she says, finishing the last of the banana quickly as if to destroy the evidence. “You caught that? I was hoping you wouldn’t, I catch myself being a bit distracted, I think. Understandable, but regrettable.”

Crystal sits perched on her upside-down throne, still not righted. It’s a deliberate aesthetic now. “Yellow just strikes me as a bit young I think.” She says. “Every leftist goes through that phase where they think if they just bought a television station they could put out the right kind of shows that would trick people into listening to the right kind of news, the right kind of perspectives.There is a Trotskyist to fascist pipeline for a reason.”

She gives a wistful, nostalgic, half-remembered smile. “I was never one for politics in university, but I did sleep with a boy who always wore a Jason Ngonde shirt, and saw far too much of it that way.”

“She is undeniably brilliant though. Brilliance is making this little power play,” she gestures at Red’s phone.

“Wisdom is knowing that if she did that, she wouldn’t be able to stop Red typing out the sentence, ‘Listen, how about we stop talking about this until 9pm, lock in our ideas then, have an hour to argue about it, and then put it to a final vote at 10pm’.” Crystal stretches her arms over her head in a yawn on her throne. “She might still win the vote in the end, if she chooses to participate. I don’t doubt she has a better idea than mine. But that should be the only reason she wins, and all she wins for it.”

Crystal actually does rather admire Yellow, isn’t quite on the same page Fiona’s starting to come to. She’s not above such power plays and flexes herself - Just keep it outside the polycule, thank you, Yellow? A phrase comes to mind about what one should and should not do where one eats.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Fiona:

She puts her pieces down.

“Maybe you should make a game then,” Fiona wonders. “For them.” She gestures at the kids, still only about six, no teenagers - they’re still skating, Too Old For This, but the little siblings that came with them are here instead. “They’d have more fun with a, a challenge or a bit of structure or something, and you could make that for them. I think you’d find all those subtleties in the way people play. Might be fun for you, too?”

Apostle:

“Huh.” They blink, leaning over the bed and looking at Junta. “Wow, that’s a great idea. I was going to try to read stuff to influence his dreams and make him want to write stuff without me having to commission it.” They tilt their head. “God, look at him. He gets to not exist for a while and nobody’s mad at him for it. Kind of makes you jealous, doesn’t it?”

This is said without irony or sarcasm.

Hazel:

That Hazel understands, and smiles, and draws. That is her language.

“I’ll have a few concepts for you soon.” She says. “I need to think.” She looks at White with thought. “You’ll have to drop the wing thing, the wrapping people with it, I can’t do that. The best I could do is a shield you wrap around yourself.” The fairy pauses her drawing to hug herself tight in thought. “They’re flexible extremities, too many moving parts, too much segmentation to make it offensively strong. It’s like the difference between trying to build a squid and trying to make a folding umbrella.”

Crystal:

“Hm? Yes, she’s obviously hoping you fail on your own so she can swoop in and assert her superiority thereby. At least, I think so.” Crystal puts a banana in her mouth and starts to bite, stops, pulls it out and stares at it and realizes she hasn’t unpeeled it yet, and starts doing that. “She wants an uncontested victory, roses growing from the ashes. Either block her out by deciding without her, or prepare to drag her down into the muck with you when- Hold on. You hate Yellow? Why?”

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Apostle:

“That makes sense,” they say. “I mean, if all you have in common with a guy is you write fetish-fic, I can see how it makes after-work drinks stuff harder.” They snort. “I’m uh, I’m a friend of H.J’s. I just wanted to check how you knew him, first, he hates it when I out stuff like that.”

Fiona:

Fiona considers Pink between clicking parts of a gabled roof, having decided the extra effort will be worth how much more satisfying kicking it will be. “Well,” she considers. “Is this one of those things where I should push you to try to see what happens, or is this one of those things where we do something else while watching kids make up legends about us to explain how we got this cool?”

Hazel:

She considers this, but differently to how she did with Yellow. Yellow was almost pure form, a few notes of function to embellish it. A vibe. This was…

Well, this was almost just plain engineering now.

“So you want to be stronger, and faster, and more overwhelming, and have vestigial limbs that are as strong as main limbs, and have endurance, and be better than anyone at their specialization?” She shakes her head at White. “I like vision, but you can’t be unwilling to compromise on anything.”

She taps the AM=FM tattoo. “This goes one way. I can use actual machines to make fucking magic, but I can’t use fucking magic to give you actual machines. It’s not even that it can’t be done, it’s just that if it could be done, then other people would be doing it, and then you lose your comparative advantage again.”

“I can make you a knight on horseback,” she tilts her head, “but I can’t change the world so you’re only coming up against foot soldiers, and there’s nothing I can do to make you feel invincible against a gun, and you’re going to be disappointed if that’s what you think you want. Try again. This time, no external references, no opponents.”

Crystal:

Today she’s wearing a black tuxedo, and a red feathered black beret with funerary veil. The spray of red feathers deliberately evokes a gunshot in freeze frame, an exit wound. The tuxedo is lovely. She watches over Red’s shoulder as she types, on her way to the kitchen for more coffee.

“You know, they say the only one who gets rich in a goldrush is the one selling picks and shovels.” She reconsiders the coffee, just grabs some chocolate syrup from the fridge and squirts it on a spoonful of whole roasted beans and crunches it like breakfast cereal. “I imagine a lot more people are going to be wanting to invest in fire suppression systems than before. Not the most romantic of ideas, but it would give you a subtle access.” Her eyes gleam with mischief, her teeth brown with a second spoonful of coffee. “Would you be able to get firefighter’s master keys for it, do you think?”

This is her idea for Red, crisis management - more inspired by than for, though. The fight has been a wonderful way to get her mind off things, and encouraging stronger staked positions just gives her a better show.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

The Third Day:

There are crowds in the streets of every district, though most are peaceful for now. It’s the kind of protests it’s just fun to be in, as weird as that is to say. It feels good to be taking a stand for something you feel is righteous, it feels good to see so many stand with you. To walk around, to listen to the music and join the chants and read everyone’s signs and try and come up with your own, to hang out, to meet people, to dance.

Most won’t admit to it, it cheapens the whole thing. It’s an open secret but a deep taboo, as if having fun being at a march lessens the seriousness of it, as if fun is frivolous and has no place in such a dark moment.

But it keeps people in the streets, and it keeps them together, and it stops them getting bored of what they’re doing. This is the powder keg, this charge of massive amounts of people physically present, ready for the mood to shift to turn on a dime. And if that’s all this stayed, most of these people would go home today feeling like it was a good day in the shadow of a bad one.

A powder keg doesn’t light at the first thrown match, but it will catch if people keep throwing them.

At the same time:

brutaldickshots, an FPS streamer (800,000 subscribers), is being charged with murder after shooting his ex-girlfriend, cat-fox fandom music video artist Jessica Arbanz (2.4 million subscribers), with an inherited 2043 African Corps service rifle. He is quoted as saying “Judge just ruled she ain’t human so it weren’t murder, idiot.”

This match hits the barrel but does not light it. The barrel smoulders where a march moves to the police station where brutaldickshots was last known to be in police custody, though - mostly because the streamer is still posting about it.

At the same time:

There’s an absolute clownshow of a fistfight when both pro-and-anti transhuman factions hid weapons caches on the same rooftop to oversee their respective groups. Fortunately neither individual had managed to access their caches before the confrontation started for the rooftop territory.

This match bounces off the barrel, but police do find the weapons caches when investigating the event. They report both as belonging to the pro-transhuman faction, and take as credible the anti-transhuman activitist’s version of events he came up because the transhumanist seemed suspicious and violent.

This, despite FOR ANIMAL USE ONLY being carved into the handle of a scoped automatic rifle in the anti-trans arsenal. The cops don’t bat an eye - it doesn’t cross their mind that the furries wouldn’t self-identify the way cops identify them.

At the same time:

You can’t get petrol and the like for molotovs, not easily. A leftist agitator teaches impromptu street courses on how to make a homemade handgrenade out of stripping old lithium batteries instead and starts passing them out to demonstrate, a technique last popularized during the android shutdown insurrections.

At the same time:

Anti-android activists, for whom hating modified androids is just their most recent excuse, buy dozens of pineapples from a shop out of Ares - broad spectrum routers set to broadcast malicious mandatory updates to parts made by the common hardware manufacturers.

Besides the ones smart enough to have their wireless ports soldered out, the only androids this would exclude as a rule of thumb are the ones they’re meant to be targeting. It just hits the friends and allies marching with them.

At the same time:

York hides behind the dumpster of an alley by the train station he’d just come out of fifteen minutes before. His fists are soaked with blood, and some of it’s even his. One eye is bruised beyond the point he can open it, two cracked teeth he feels as if from very far away, three fractured ribs but he can’t tell which ones, and a whistle in his breathing he hopes isn’t a lung puncture.

Three guys had tried to give him a sign on the way to visiting Junta, a mouse extermination logo on it that they’d been passing around, and congratulated him for being brave enough to show up. Cunts weren’t even clever enough to think up a slogan, pictographs with this lot, had been his last lucid thought.

They hadn’t been the problem, all three down in a flurry of amphetamines, years of MMA and the deep well of anger that’s been building in him for months now that he could finally, for the first time, take out on someone who actually deserved it.

The problem was he was so focused on beating them he didn’t even notice the mob that charged him to pull him off them. And by the time he noticed he didn’t even care.

With shaking hands he puts his battery back in his phone to make an emergency call.

Junta:

He doesn't wake up.

After a while Apostle shows up. He doesn't recognize Brown, just leaves a get well soon card written in their own blood, and a gift card for body armor. Then he sits across from Brown and listens to her read for a while.

"So uh, how do you know him?" Apostle asks after a few minutes of listening, waiting for the break of a page turn. He doesn't know which name he should ask by.

Fiona:

$18,452 worth of Lego is dropped at a skate part.

"They used to print the booklets for the designs." Fiona laments. "I can't exactly just give out QR codes if anyone wants to actually make anything from the boxes. Maybe it's better to not give them the option, so nobody has to feel like it's what they're supposed to be doing with it."

There's a soft whir like a printer head whenever she crouches down or breaks into a jog with her new legs. She crouches to unbox a few more. She's commandeered a big bowl like an empty backyard pool and surrounded it with traffic cones and hazard tape - all the Lego here is free, it just can't leave the boundary line. So far the kids seem to be respecting it for the same reasons almost no-one considers stealing library books.

There's no marches here yet, no protests, but you can hear one in the distance. You can see one if you look up and across the station at the ceiling high above, a few more along the station. Fiona ignores it. "I'm going to make a highschool just so I can step on it. How about you?"

Hazel:

"That's the function," she says, "but what's the form? How should that perfection feel?"

She pulls up a browser and pulls up image references. A heavyweight champion boxer, who takes blows and cracks back with devastation when they see an opening. A martial artist like Bruce Lee, faster, dodging, blocking, enduring.

"You can't be both." She says. "Huge, overwhelming, overpowering. Or untouchable and unavoidable?"

Yellow's Political Statement:

Any highlights from the shared group chat so far? No need a decision yet.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pope:

“One or two.” Pope considers, then tilts his hand back and forth. “But it’d be a big step down for them. Anthrozine’s strength is its weakness: It has almost nothing, which is why it has nothing to lose.” He thinks. “The crew are fiercely loyal to the ship, rather than the captain. Part of the reason I might be so blunt about this is that Eli has already approached me with their own concerns about York. I wasn’t much help, but I can at least point you to one another.”

“There is another suggestion I could make.” Pope says carefully, like he already regrets the words he’s about to say. “You could do what I did and expand your loyalties. I can’t bring talent down to the Anthrozine as easily as I can suggest you somewhere else, make introductions. I have the, I am embarrassed to call it as such, connections afforded a public intellectual - I am not limited to opening doors for you in the world of journalism.” He looks at Tyger and cocks his head. “Suggest a door for me, and I will tell you how big a favour you’ll owe me to put my foot in it for you.”

This isn’t extortion to him, there’s too much of a sense he’s been burned by making this offer before, and very badly. Even just the double meaning of ‘putting his foot in it’ is very deliberate.

Cyan:

Well. Yes and no.

Dudekov wasn’t that. He wasn’t even sole head of a conspiracy, just one of the founders of it, the one the emergency services asked after. He wasn’t the money guy because to be the money guy would leave him holding, in any way, the bag. He held the keys to the money guy, who right now is on Earth being drunk and playing empire simulators in New Zealand. An election on who the next money guy would be.

This is not to cheat November out of hard-fought earnings, merely a mischaracterization of who she’s stolen from. When he paid off Mycroft, he was doing it out of pocket, from his personal wealth. He’s Sir Humphrey Appleby of Yes, Minister rich would be a good way to put it.

Most of his personal accounts are frozen right now, obviously. Video of a Chase Black helicopter getting shot down during his kidnapping are headline news, those accounts are ice.

Now, that being said, did he still have an ultra-secure VIP crypto bank account you can untraceably steal from and become rich thereby? Yes. It’s just he’s a retired civil servant with a lot of insider information trying to not have to deal with insider trading accusations with his investment portfolio, when he’s well connected enough that anything he does could turn out to be a pain in the ass. He’s a guest-of-honour on a dozen board of directors in a dozen industries, and it’s a nightmare to keep track of subsidiaries he technically owns parent companies of.

More advantageous to you though? He lost $500,000 on a sushi bar deal acquiring its eight year lease. The property was worth more than the restaurant and he was in the middle of - but had not yet - flipped it. Because of that the temporary holding company that Dudekov used to acquire it holds more debt than assets - so you can legally buy it in your own name as a non-suspicious investment. Put a $0.17 bid in for transfer of title, and nobody will bat an eye because of the on-paper risk exposure. Nobody but Dudekov knows the company’s his, and he’s not going to tell.

On-paper, even getting this company for free has you losing money.

In reality? It’s free real-estate. Specifically a two story main street corner property with good square footage.

It’s empty property now and it’d take work - but it’s a business in your name in a district of your choice. There is more than enough in Dudekov’s anonymous investment portfolio to act as serious seed capital too, to make something good from this.

Cyan can flip this to make a quick buck, a few million outright, but if you want my advice? It’ll be hard to get your hands on anonymous real-estate like this again. What you really need, as Fiona has shown, is a good money laundering operation. A front that makes it much easier to get dirty money in the future and legitimize it, rather than a one-off clean cash injection. There’s way more potential in that.

I’d further suggest you don’t consider this in terms of the empty mafia pizza place, or a nightclub with slot machines, the more obvious venues for this. If the acquisition of the warehouse was an expansion of personal resources, a home base, this is an opportunity for an expansion into public influence, resources and connections. What legitimate business is most appealing right now?

Consider the opportunities afforded from: Strip club, compounding pharmacy, IT retailer, high end fashion boutique, recreational drug dispensary, construction company, real-estate agency, non-profit NGO, mobile game publisher, spy gear supply store (does not sell to enemies of John of the Snake Eye), bike store, magician supply store, maid cafe, antique store, costume shop, sword dealership, small-print academic book publisher.

(Establishing a high-risk high-return new startup would definitely be a potential way to get Pig’s attention, too).

Roll Call:

Where is everyone right now?

Fiona has her heart set on Pink (but that doesn’t mean she’s there), Junta’s unconscious but allowed visitors, Hazel’s asking after a project to start on. Dudekov is one thing, Crystal’s team getting people out of the exhibit another.

You are at the end of the Introduction section of a Wikipedia page about to experience a major historical event so severe that even your Chase Black antics from the night before will not catch up to you until this is over. Even Themis resources are tied up and slow to respond to your shooting down of a Chase Black helicopter right now, too many fires to put out to deal with a situation that’s already resolved.

That is not to say that won’t catch up to November eventually, possibly even soon. It is to emphasize the scale of what is happening right now that even this fades into the background beneath it. With that in mind, I’ll ask again;

Where is everyone right now?