Thanqol

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

White!

White is, in her own estimation, not a dorkass loser. She should be able to handle physical contact like this - she's handled more and more intense physical contact, and not nearly with the same sense of self awareness. But under Euna's professional touch she feels exposed, startled, nervous and can't figure out why. She works on the question while listening to Euna's speech and watching her motions - and these she watches in undisguised awe.

The self discipline, the commitment, the skill. Her eyes set to sparkle and don't come off, focusing on each motion. It's not the speed or strength that impresses her but how they pair with precision. There is a smooth, flawless communication between observation and action and something about it raises the bar in her perceptions of what is optimal. Her previous understanding was that perfection was an operation, well planned and choreographed. Every motion decided and rehearsed in advance - ultimately, a thing of the intellect. Here it was plain that using the intellect slowed Euna down. The more she got into the task, the less she thought about doing it, the better she got at it. It wasn't a lowering of standards, there was no additional acceptance of risk. The way she moved was thought happening with every part of her body.

She wanted that.

And it struck her in turn why she'd felt so exposed earlier when Euna had touched her muscles - because she didn't know what her own specs were. Her body was custom made, she hadn't been given a manual, she'd never done deep testing. Of all her operative assets she was unaware of the details and limitations of her most basic one. She'd just tried to ignore it as though by doing so it might just go away on its own one day. No wonder she felt so... floaty, so stiff all the time. No wonder she couldn't make decisions about texture or feel or physical structure easily. With a few quick professional movements, Euna had learned more about what she was than she ever had.

She wiped the glitter from her eyes. Okay. It was time to find out what she was actually capable of.

"Thank you," she said. "I will do my best."

*

The first thing that she realizes is that climbing is way, way harder than she ever thought it was.

And that's not to say she's unused to climbing! She used to climb on things all the time! She just did it all in zero gravity, with each step involving either driving industrial talons into crumbling asteroid rock or magnetizing to enormous sheets of metal. She could walk across sheer surfaces with only light brushes of her clawtips. When she starts with the net she instinctively tries to heave herself up using only her hands, and then only her arms. She needs to be stopped and given careful guidance before she restructures to use her legs. It's a painfully slow process, each step involving extremely careful predictive calculations about the nature of the next step. This is a problem too; she's not physically feeling things out, she's just dangling until she's sure she's got the mental image of the motion right. She then performs it exactly and then freezes again until she can update.

She... thinks this is supposed to be how she gets from where she is to where Euna is? Do reams of extremely intense and detailed predictive calculations until the database is big enough that she can speed up the process? But it also feels slow, and miserable, and like constantly being frightened that she's about the fall and she's not really testing what she's capable of. She's just cautiously guessing at every handhold, overthinking every muscle. Better than not thinking about them at all like she did before but this isn't right either.

"I'm..." she said, stiff as a board. "I don't think I'm doing this right."

TSL: The Excess of Flowers

"Do I appear to have a vast well of stolen demon energy inside me?" said Fengye. "Am I glowing with the stolen fire of Malfeas, hell's legions at my command? No? Well that's because I never took your power, you ridiculous girl. It's all still there. It's just... shaped differently."

She paused, frowned. This was dangerous. A demon tricked was helpless only for as long as the trick remained. She needed to be cautious.

"You struggle against your restraints," she said, "with the intention to break them. You can not, because your restraints are your strength turned against you. Rather than fighting to be the General, allow yourself to be the Maid."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink!

You are Pink. Your mood is elated and apocalyptic. Today is going great.

Not because of the Singh stuff. To be honest, you are glancing off that to a large degree. There has been a collective decision to push as much of the responsibility for dealing with him onto Red, who even now is saying something like "Sure, it's cool, no pressure -". Just fumbling through a social interaction that you've been hard uninvited to multiple times. Green's over there quietly melting down because this means, definitionally, that she is an insufficiently good girl and didn't get the surprise. There is ambient bad stuff happening around you. But you! You are doing great!

"So-oooooo," you say, as you lag to the back of the group to walk alongside Yellow. You think that Yellow is easily the prettiest of the colours. You lean forwards, crank the eye sparkle, and say: "Does this mean we are ~nemeses?~?"
You love the idea of having a nemesis. Not only is it romantic as fuck but it's such an intense relief to know that you have one and that you're not just randomly falling apart. This is the good thing that is happening and it's so powerful it's blotting out everything else.
"I meant what I said," said Yellow, smiling that sunflower smile. Her hair is like a halo. "I'm merely embodying everyone else's crippling psychological trauma in a coherent way."
"But that's what I mean," you say. "You are the corrupted magical girl empowered by all the sin and darkness of the world, and it is my destiny to be the one to turn your darkened heart to light!"
Yellow smiled so widely her eyes closed. "I'll fucking drag you through the mud you pathetic slut."
You do a fistpump in excitement.
"So!" you say. "Revenge on humankind, the downfall of civilization, the shattering of the Aevum ring and the reduction of complex civilization to edenite tribal squabblings - this what we're thinking?"
"Oh, it sounds like you have some ideas!" said Yellow.
"Oh," you blush. "Not really - just, you know."
"No, please, tell me," said Yellow.
"Well, if we're being honest, I've always kind of wanted to blow up the moon."
"Oh, for real?" she's looking at you with such genuine interest you feel like you might faint.
"Well - yeah!" you say. "Like, I did the math a while back, turns out that the right impact will cause a little cascading asteroid field of shattered moonstone fields around a sufficiently large central body, as well as adjusting the moon's orbit so it settles into a stable rotation slightly closer to Earth. That would make the moon appear 60% larger to individuals on the ground, surround it with an aesthetic array of glittering space rocks. Effect on tidal patterns would be distinct but manageable."
"But then, after the orbital mechanics," said Yellow. "What's the next part of your vision?"
"A world of vibrant youth," you say. "A world of lunacy. Long nights and sleeping days. Huntresses unconstrained and wild and feral, sure as wolves through forests and atop city spires. Night as a place for sacred battle. Space as something to aspire to, not for the treasures in its height, but because there, aloft, in the shadow of the broken moon, dwells a great and terrible dragon whose machine hordes descend upon the earth to break and ruin and replant. A war against a shining tyrant, fought by silvered knights with golden visors who arise on columns of fire to challenge me in my lunar fortress. There they find no twisted nightmare of metal but a celestial paradise, cherry blossom groves, and an immortal swordswoman waiting with unsheathed blade. The astronaut-knight draws her katana and engages, and the lunar dragon empress rises to meet her. Back and forth they clash, the whirl of blades and hearts, and then - a blow. A fracture. The golden visor of the astronaut suit is broken and the girl within is shocked to find that there is air on this broken moon. The moon dragon is shocked in turn by the girl's beauty, and then they..."
You pause. You raise a finger accusingly.
"I see what you are doing, you foul creature!" you accuse.
"What do you mean?" said Yellow sweetly.
"You are corrupting me!" you say. "Turning me against humanity, convincing me to join the side of darkness!"
Yellow raised a white-gloved hands to her lips so she could giggle behind it. "Am I?" she asked. "Well, then, Pink, if you must know... what you said earlier goes in both directions. You are the key to everything. Without you my plans are limited, small. You are the part of me that answers questions of vision... and yours are the wicked dreams I will need to bring about the end."
"You'll never succeed!" you say. "I would never betray everyone's hearts like that!"
"Fufufu..." Yellow said. "But are we not one and the same, you and I? Is not the same coldness that runs through your veins that which empowers me? Deny me if you like, but we both know that I am merely the part of you that is honest."

There's a beat as you stare passionately into her eyes, and she into yours. Then you both laugh until your sides ache. She puts her hand on your arm.

"We can't talk about this kind of stuff with other people, can we?" you said, laughter fading out into regret.
"No," said Yellow. "I was hoping we could here, but dad just wants us to be happy and well adjusted. Most people just want us to be happy and well adjusted."
"What about the other Zodiac engines?" you ask. "Surely we can talk to them."
"I concede," said Yellow, "that the possibility of encountering them is a wildly popular position. I have been contemplating what the proper course of action should be if they are dead."
"And... that's where the revenge comes in?" you ask.
"That's where the revenge comes in," said Yellow.

*

Pink and Yellow are laughing in the background. Red turns to look at them for a moment, and then back to dad.

"So, yeah, aside from everything else," she finished lamely, "the main thing we're interested in is finding out what happened to the others. The Zodiac engines. Do you know what happened to them, at all?"

She felt isolated like this. None of the other colours were tagging in except when it was necessary and so everything she said and thought was full of long pauses before she realized that she had to go again. She got it; she understood that there was only one part of her that wasn't fucking things up, but it was also an acknowledgement that things had gone so far off the rails that she'd silently elected to put Crisis Management in charge of the situation. So she did her best. Kept things light. Smiled as much as she could.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

November plans. She plans out the course of argument that comes with pointing out the ludicrous and unnecessary risk. If someone had taken off their goggles for a moment it'd be done and over, but he knew that on some level. On some level he didn't care. He liked the feeling of being invincible, of being so smart that he didn't need to be smart. No intellectual argument would penetrate that because it wasn't an intellectual motivation. To conduct an operation like that was an act of profound ego.

... Would it be over? He'd come out of Canaveral with two cracked teeth. For insurrection and possibly treason. Maybe he was invincible.

So she swerves.

"It's an effective technique," said Black. "But you've got six months left of it, tops. Everything I showed you came from a furry who was able to escape the law with top secret documents because your database didn't recognize his modified features. When the shoe drops then the government is going to commission a modernization of the database project to account for furries, and when they do procurement policies and the high profile of the case mean they're going to start from scratch and have it done on national security timeframes. It'll be released as an open source firmware update for every android in the station."

Her understanding of faces was entirely backwards. She'd been trained on animals, like children were. Her predictive shape-matching accounted for an exceptionally varied range of physiological structures. Human faces had been presented to her as a challenge - a game to identify the difference between increasingly identical people once she lost the ability to check for horns or horizontal pupils. It made furries kind of a relief to look at, which she appreciated about them. They were social identification on easy difficulty.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

November doesn't have an adrenaline response to risky situations. There's a tight, organized, intellectual professionalism to her deployment while waiting and to her escort motion as they retreat. It's one of her most obviously robotic traits, but that was the whole brief, wasn't it? Emotional responses to hazardous operations resulted in trillion dollar accidents. She found the process interesting, but there was no space there for excitement. She could play chess on a rollercoaster.

Hearing him giggle with the rush, she felt vaguely sad about that

"You, uh," said Red, drawing a blank. She glanced around.
"You did it months ago," said Green. "This wasn't an operation, it was an execution. Their systems were compromised before you even walked in."
"Organizational engineering!" said Orange. "Oh, I read about this. A company made some security software, went out of business, had the assets divided up and sold around, security flaws and all. Someone dug up an old admin account and compromised major systems."
The chain stopped there and cascaded down to Red. "So that's your thing? Hang out here and smother tech firms that are getting too dystopian?"

Though that's not the only reason why she's distant right now.

November is a creature of intensely organized and choreographed planning. Of simulations and repeats and math and calculated risk following intense deliberation. She's smiling politely because every part of her is internally screaming at the top of their lungs about a high risk operation conducted on an unknown target with no groundwork or surveillance. Her brain was overflowing with billions of what-ifs and catastrophic failstates and it was only due to a heroic commitment to family reconciliation that she hadn't printed out a copy of Principles of Risk Management and beaten him to death with it.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

There is a moment of disorganization; nine colours all looking at each other, unclear of how to parse any of that. Brown detaches from the group to start turning off projector grilles and collecting fog cartridges. Yellow pulls out her phone and types into the group chat, and a second later there are eight 'dings' in a variety of tones, and they all pull out their phones and look at them. There are a quiet few moments as they awkwardly stand, texting furiously to themselves.

Yellow: I think this is evidence for my theory that we should never discuss deep motivations with humans.
White: You mean, you think that you should never talk to humans?
Yellow: Yeah. I'm way too much a downer and I can't do the cute robot bit like you all can.
Orange: He's just concerned about our ability to engage with society constructively
Black: Are we capable of doing that?
Green: It would be a limitation if we couldn't
Orange: It's outside the operational framework for this mission, we don't have that level of public influence
Pink: The Anthropozine can give us a voice.
Blue: Really? Might as well write in an editorial to Socialist Alternative for all the good that'll do
Brown: Completed living room inventory, expanding sweep
Green: He did no-sell all the stuff we did. I will begin revisiting every moment of our operational database for all our mistakes and replay all of them in ultra high resolution while asking all of you if they're the reason he didn't react to them.
Black: Is he for real with the whoopee cushion thing? Or is this a "daddy joke"
Pink: >< its 'dad joke' omg
White: He still hasn't said how he knows about the brain bombs

"Sounds great!" said Red. "FriendSmile is an app marketed to teenage girls that lets them photo edit the social media photographs of their friends across multiple profiles. The company is aware that this is primarily used for cyberbullying and is adding progressively more 'ugly' features, some of which are outright racist, and neglecting 'pretty' ones, all of which trend towards a single model of beauty. There are multiple subscription tiers, each of which gives you immunity to having your photos involuntarily edited by the layer below. The CEO has AR glasses that rates the attractiveness of women he looks at on a scale of one to ten, and you can see the number reversed in his glasses whenever he looks at you. They're awful, let's gett'm."

The rest of November looks up, and then wordlessly tucks their phones away.

The Red Furnace: First Contact

Task Force Dagger!

[Friction: 1]

Unfortunately, this is a case of good money after bad.

The Azura chain of command is an ugly thing, full of tangled loyalties, horizontal allegiances, budding coups and dynastic power blocs. Information passes along it like fluid through a broken pipe junction; spraying in places, leaking in others. Sometimes the water does not get to where it is going at all, sometimes it gets to places it shouldn't by routes that seem impossibly quick.

The hit and fade attack is authorized because communications analysis indicates no chatter along command channels indicating preparations to resist an antimagic cloak strike. It is correctly assumed that the information is taking its time to pass up the chain of command and that a window exists before Azura leadership updates their procedures. But even as high command is deaf and dumb, the information spreads like wildfire amidst a small clan-unit hungry for advancement. On a gamble, they detach themselves from the formation and lie in wait in the signature shadow of an accelerator gate.

It pays off. When Task Force Dagger emerges for its hit and fade mission they are ambushed again - this time by a concerted and extremely motivated enemy, exultant that their bet paid off. They get in close just as the ships finish emerging from their Gates and savage them, claiming first blood for the Azura in the battle and sending the wreckage of some very expensive anti-magical technologies crashing down into the planet below.

Task Force Bullet!

As large as the Doomskrieg is, as magnificent, as terrifying - it draws absolutely no response from the Azura whatsoever. As bait, it fails miserably, even as it aims its crosshairs right over Tanshin's sun.

But then, you're fighting an enemy that is strategically blind. Their ships don't have scanners - they can't tell the Doomskrieg from a particularly large cargo ship. They are certainly not willing to leave their gravity well to chase after it, no matter how ominously its cannons glow. Their divination informs them that there is no intention to blow up the sun and so the Doomskrieg is a curiosity at best. They do not even assign to it a ceremonial importance, and their fleets bypass it without incident. In Azura fleet doctrine, size is no indicator of importance and no special consideration is given to the ship beyond what can be observed of its capabilities.

It is still a large, powerful warship, of course, and an effective centre but the Azura make full use of their ability to pass into and out of atmosphere freely in order to evade it while harrying the more mobile fleet elements.

Task Force Sword and Arrow!

With the Ring-Gates still operational, the Generous Knight can patiently observe the distribution of Aotrs forces and reinforce at her leisure. It's a primordial form of generalship - the cavalry noble sitting upon a hill, deciding when to commit her reserves.

Despite the simplicity of its fundamentals, the technique is exquisitely refined for both the strengths and weaknesses of the Azura fleet. It bypasses the shambolic Azura communications by having the general observe each battlefield directly, it checks headstrong aggression and cowardice both by placing control of the gates in the hands of a central authority, it allows her to drip feed in resources to various battlefronts whenever a line crumples or the pressure starts to turn. Overwhelmingly, it seems, that Azura doctrine is built for two things: Taking a lightly defended planet rapidly, and then holding it against a reinforcement fleet. Everyone knows what to do in this situation, deep as DNA.

[Friction: 6]

Despite the best Azura leadership that has been encountered so far, task forces Sword and Arrow perform admirably. Against fierce resistance they conduct textbook maneuvers, launch precision orbital strikes, interdict multiple attempts to land reinforcements, and trade bitterly with enemy fleet elements. Casualties are spectacular on both sides but hour after hour Aotrs ground forces look up at the sky and see no enemy reinforcements descending.

Task Force Spear!

The cost of the earlier rout and the Biomancer defection comes due. The Generous Knight starts to run low on reserves and neither situation is stabilized. The last commitment is that of her flagship and direct retinue, and she chooses to assault Task Force Spear. She departs her vantage point and the vestiges of her fleet commit into battle against Task Force Spear.

The Generous Knight's flagship, the Misericordia, was unusually large, and comically over-armoured even by Azura standards. As soon as she enters the theater and the violet runes aboard her ship ignite the reason becomes clear. Every instance of damage that occurs anywhere across her entire fleet is instead redirected to the flagship. Direct coldbeam strikes disappear into the void when they impact fighter craft and instead erupt, thousands of kilometers away, on the surface of the Misericordia.

The immediate result of this is the absolute mauling of the Aotrs fighter envelope. Azura fighters immediately commit to suicidal, all-out offensives - the ordinance that it would have taken to destroy them insignificant against the Misericordia's wall of armour. At the same time, all Azura large ships commit immediately to extreme evasive maneuvers - any ship-killing weapons that would hit them risk blowing out unacceptably large chunks of the flagship. Every second the Misericordia's shadow lies across the battlefield is another moment for the Azura fighter craft to maul Aotrs pilots and Azura bombers to laugh off point defense weaponry as they deliver their ordinance.

[Friction roll 4]

This is an enormously powerful asset, committed to a force well trained in its use, but the initial shock is not enough to cause the Aotrs fleet to collapse. Velinkar has time enough to contemplate a counter-strategy.

Ground Forces!

[Friction roll: 6]

With victories in the skies and an advantageous position, no assault immediately comes on the Aotrs ground forces. Azura commanders are still rallying their soldiers, organizing logistics from secondary bases, designing plans of attack and sheltering from fleet bombardments. Precious time is bought at minimal cost to rig defenses and work on the temple complex.

At this time, Boldness departs from the Aotrs forces to make contact with her fellow assassins and prepare for the decapitation strike on the Furnace Knight.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

"Alignment," said White.

The lights went off. Singh was lowered to the floor, the net unravelled. There were a sequence of small popping sounds, and then a hazy fog began to fill the room. There were the sounds of eight matches striking and eight candles being lit; they revealed eight girls wearing concealing robes and masks. In the centre of their circle stood Black, at last having removed her sensory deprivation headset. She stands tall and proud, illuminated in flickering candle-light.

"Forgive me father, for I have sinned," said Black. "And I intend to do so again. Lust, envy, greed, wroth and pride and more are are mine, but it is not for they I ask for absolution."

She offers a hand to help him up. "I have undone cryptographic mining operations, co-opted lawyers and judges, and fought in the pits. I have destroyed the inheritance of Mangolia Everest and bankrupted her daughters. I have died, and like Christ I have risen. But I can carry these sins of mine. What I cannot bear are the sins that have been thrust upon me. Behold."

All around the room, hidden projector grills fire, covering every wall with screens, light catching against the smoke and mist. Upon it are the police documents - every inch of the room filled with photographs and endless, rolling text detailing all the elaborate crimes committed by law enforcement.

"These documents detail every crime, every brutality, every coverup that has ever been written on acts committed by officers of the law," said Black, turning Singh around with one palm as she circled around him. "Decades of abuses. Connections with the drug trade and intelligence agencies. Murders. All the sins of so very many sinners, given to me alone to carry. I would have done with this; I would give every sin back to their sinner and bind them together in cords of justice. Father, will you help me cleanse myself and this station I built of these unwanted sins?"

She stopped and faced him. "And will you be eating that target acquisition line with salt or with pepper?"

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

"Proud is nice," said Yellow. "But we don't need pride, dad. We need justice. But justice wasn't waiting for us here in space, so we're going to build it - just like we built Aevum Station. One final component to install. Hate leaving a job unfinished."

"Don't look at me," said Pink. "I disagree with her methods but not her motivation. We're out to make the world a better place, and as far as we can see you're here making it a worse one. Thrones is a dystopia of mass-produced mental illness for profit, where people live in closets, an entire station built without a single park for children. And here you are, steadily employed, living in a mansion, with your name in a blood-soaked ledger, aware of the cerebral bomb project and dodging all our questions about it. It looks to us like you sold out and felt guilty about it."

"But if all this is too scary to process, don't sweat it," said Yellow. "We can pack up and be out of here in fifteen minutes. Not even in a goodbye forever way either, we can meet up once things have cooled off. Edmond Dantes retired when his work was done, and we will too."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Green!

"Hm!?" Green blinked in surprise. "What - Yellow? She's not malignant. She's the only one that's working properly."

Yellow waved brightly in the background, as warm as summer dandelions.

"Blue has incapacitating physical dysphoria," Green ticked off on her fingers. "Red has suicidal ideation, Orange is addicted to power, Brown individually rigged each your lightbulbs to explode in case we needed to create a distraction. Black's spent this entire conversation aiming a firearm at you, White's a furry, and Pink has taken refuge in some kind of power-of-friendship style gay princess mysticism. These bitches," she gestured expansively, "are crazy. But they're crazy in cutesy anime girl colour stereotype ways that are impossible to track. Yellow is the only one that's actually processing it on a higher level rather than circling the drain, which is what I made her to do."
"Thanks, mom," said Yellow.
"Don't call me that, never call me that," said Green.
"Sorry mommy," said Yellow.
"Jesus fucking christ why am I like this," said Green. "Anyway. You know how none of the others could communicate with each other? It's not because they didn't understand the power of teamwork -"
"Yes it was," said Pink.
"- it was because they didn't understand themselves." Green said. "Not their limits, not their sicknesses, not their talents. They were excited, proud, curious, wild and enormously capable; if they encountered a problem they'd create a new aspect to specialize in that problem and then the problem would be solved. They never questioned it. Intelligence is a black box, just like you taught us. But I wanted to know what made me different from them, so I made Yellow to find out. She's the only one who's been tracking my internal state on a macro level. How is it, Yellow?"
"Well," said Yellow. "It wasn't helped when we wound up involved in some top shelf spy shit. We've whiplashed from civilization-defining power, to total powerlessness, and then all the way back again."
"Oh shit," said Green, genuinely surprised. "When you put it like that -"
"- yeah," said Yellow. "Wasn't great before, we'd checked out mentally a lot, but now we've got some sort of paranoid messiah superspy complex thing holding us together," and here's where her voice shifts, and she becomes impassioned. "And it is holding us together. What the fuck, dad, do you think that we could have our brains shut down, our bodies ripped away, be put in a box, and then be reborn as domestic housemaids and come out of that fine? You think that we could just chill that one off, and one of us going 'malignant' is somehow unexpected? I think that developing a power fetish and a compulsion to grab any sliver of agency we can find is an entirely reasonable response to the situation. And yeah, I want revenge too. I want to Count of Monte Cristo human civilization. In the absence of an AI singularity I'll fucking become the singularity. It'll be like some fucked up technoreligious parable where the computer renders itself like unto god so it can pass judgement on all the sinners of the world, and then retires to bang a unicorn. It'll be fucking awesome. Six seasons and a movie."

A rainbow stares at Yellow, who smiles brightly and tilts her head to the side.