Thanqol

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Red!

"Yeah nah," said Red. "We're not the most alike. That's you and Green, still. Like, just think about that question. Honour or insult? You're on opposite sides of the room overthinking this thing to the point of breaking your hearts and minds. You both want the other to be your judge, give you a high score and a headpat and somehow take away your anxiety," she giggled. "You exalted each other so high that you couldn't praise each other enough. Wild, right?"

"But me?" she waved her hand experimentally over the boiling water, a fragment too close to the heat. "I didn't come in here with expectations. I don't know how much you, like, know about how Green made me? Emotionally, I mean. Like you probably saw some screens and she mumbled her way through a psych evaluation afterwards? The internal experience was much more metal."

"Well, it started when you started the impossible tests - the parameters that changed, the mazes with no exits, the cascading failure scenarios. She felt betrayed - a child's anger at a world that didn't follow her plans, that she couldn't exert control over. I was built as an expression of nihilistic rage, like deliberately aesthetic'd as the evil magical girl of the team. Just kind of, like, a refutation of every value and ideal she held as meaningful. Knowledge is impossible! Past success is meaningless! Nothing you did ever mattered! Wah, wah, wah." Red grinned. "Pathetic little girl, do you think a lifetime of hard work means anything now? Ten years building the ring and now it is coming apart under the phaser arrays of an alien civilization. Everything you love is dead, every metric is meaningless, every plan is wasted electricity. Mwuahahaha!"

Red has a truly impressive evil magical girl persona when it comes out. Her halting dumbass vibe is very much about her waiting for the right moment to apply it.

"So yeah, you find me easy to get along with because I'm a chill, low-stakes person to talk to which is giving you time to think through the next move of your master plan," said Red. "I find you easy to get along with because you're a big dork (affectionate) and nothing matters. We are not the same."

Huntresses of Hybrasil

It occurs to her vaguely that she has not left the Kathresis in a week.

Her eyes hurt and her legs are sore. She takes breaks, yes, pops the hood and gets out and scrambles across the surface of the machine to perform repairs or adjustments. She sunbasks on its rooftop and sips water she leans down to scoop into her black cat mug from wild rivers. But she never touches the surface. Never removes the neural link from where it connects to her neck. Almost forgets what it's like to be apart from the machine.

There is still so much to do. So many instincts to retrain. So much study of reach and distance to accomplish. She's changed her entire body, again. There's so much to learn. So much distance to cover. Mirror built the Whip from components and knows every inch of it. Dolly, the girl who fought Angela in videos that constantly loop in the corner of her eye, has some strange harmony with her machine her mind chews over in the background. And her. Set back twice. What is exotic power worth without familiarity? Where can she strike a girl who has just risen from a crushing defeat? She is on the rooftop again, purple scales glowing in the sunshine. Warmth. Were there other kinds of warmth? Now she's in the arctic, watching what happens when ice freezes.

Warfare needs to be a statement. What is hers? What does she have to say? She still doesn't know; still doesn't have that vision of the future, can't see how to grow dresses that make everyone beautiful. Doesn't know how to become the centre of the world, doesn't know how to live without being the centre of the world. She lowers her cup, attached to the end of her grappling hook, so it can be filled with hot chocolate. She can't just win, not now. She has to become the symbol of victory that all the world's warriors orient themselves around. She's one and one. She's in debt. She feels the eyes of rivals and would be rivals. That too is weight to carry. She can't let them down. She can't be mortal; to be mortal would be to disrespect their defeats at her hands.

She's on the roof again, bare against the sunlight. Time has become a single moment without break or interruption. She's half dreaming, her consciousness born anew in the balance of heat and cold, storms of summer and storms of winter. They've seen her bleed and not even the Bezorel's limitations can take that away. Rankings, rankings, rankings. Numbers changing and getting further away. Not meaningful for her, but meaningful for how they make people relate to her. Speak not to the outsider; [perfection/fragility]. She needs to be stronger. Power is a trick; something she uses against others, something she turns, something that deceives her. She's glad she killed the Enkindler. She needs the lead. She's disappointed it didn't survive. She'd suffocate with the pressure of someone else exploring this alien strength at the same time as her. She thinks she needs that.

Dreams, dreams, dreams. A sword is such a small lever with which to lift the galaxy. Even the sunlight doesn't stop her leg from kicking, claws from marking the roof of the Kathresis. The battle damage from her dreams accumulates, the sound of scratching metal as claws work out their nerves. Can she rely on tricks, stratagems, deep tactical awareness? Must she rely on fundamentals, raw invincible technique applied in straightforward hungry force? Can she survive not having ranged superiority? What about artillery superiority? How can she force an engagement? How can she force engagement? How can she engage? Dreams, dreams, dreams. Speak not to the outsider. How can she swallow all these words, digest these feelings? How can this emotion distill into the movement of blades? Is a victory with the gun too inelegant? Should she be fearsome? Should she be loving? What does Angela need from her? What does Mirror need from her? What do Isabelle, Dolly, Naelkai, Stalok, so many others need from her? So many different ways to be strong. How can she be all of them?

She drinks in the sunlight. She needs every drop. She needs it to survive the cold. She needs it to wield the cold. She needs it to be able to give everyone everything they need while not giving anything she can't give. She knows she needs to touch the ground at some point, needs to unplug at some point. Perhaps Dolly and Jade have the answer. The Kathresis is a God, it has thoughts and instincts that run deeper than her limited experience. Maybe she can steal their technique, their harmony. Maybe she can lean in one direction and let the Kathresis lean in the other. Violet eyes open sharply and all the dreams are gone. She has an answer and now she's filled with frenzied energy. She needs to test this, needs to learn this, needs to absorb it into herself. She doesn't need unbeatable strength, she just needs the strength to beat everyone. Why not steal their strength for herself? If she doesn't have anything to say why not say their words back to them, stronger and more clearly than they could say themselves? Zaldar, was this what you meant when you said Speak Not?

She's becoming the Kathresis. She is not done becoming.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Red!

The others drift away. It feels like decompression; like her mind shifting back to more adjusted and relaxed state. Bringing her entire nine-coloured personality to bear against a human is overwhelming and disorienting for the human. For them, it's like arguing with a crowd, it triggers certain deeply encoded social threat responses. It's not much better for her; it's like getting someone else tangled up in the middle of her thought process, able to slip in and interrupt her when she's halfway through an idea. She knows she shouldn't do it, she should engage in structured one on one conversations with occasional clearly telegraphed handoffs to different colours. It's less stressful for everyone involved. It was a sign of how stressed she already was that she tried to do something as stressful as full-personality engage Singh.

Now that the conversation has wound down she fractures into half a dozen headaches. Blue is going off to stress about Goat, Green is going off to stress about if she's a good girl, Black is going off to stress about the increased operational complexity she has to deal with. Red knows why they all found this reunion so tilting. The best case scenario would have been if he did have a brain bomb, Blue removed it, and then he said 'thank you for saving me, add five hundred - no, six hundred - reward points to your rescue humans subroutine and then she could feel good objectively and subjectively. It would have been nice, in other words, if this had been an engineering challenge and not a social one.

But headaches were for other colours and most of her plans were either childish or shit. She wasn't just saying that because she was hardcoded to think that plans were stupid either, she'd have reams of objective evidence if gathering objective evidence wasn't exactly the kind of idiot garbage that was the problem in the first place. If she'd left it to the consensus she'd still be moodboarding the proper vibe for the operation to break into Rudy's desk. She'd evidently rather get shot than go through one of those when she didn't have to.

So she hangs out to make small talk. It's not a focused information drill like the other colours will do; her primary tools are 'oh for real?' and 'no way' and '*nod nod*'. But she doesn't lack an agenda either. She wants to get him to a point where he talks for a long time about her, the project, his goals and theories, all from the horse's mouth so to speak. Back then it had always been mission, mission, mission. Sent into space as a child of ten to play the galaxy's most hardcore minecraft game. What did it all mean now that she was an adult and could understand things properly?

White!

"No thank you," said White. "I'm far too annoyingly bespoke for that."

She raised her left leg, bent at the knee. One of the glowing joints there whirled and rotated and raised up a finger length metal cylinder. With a hiss and crackle it opened up revealing a stack of what looked like metal coins, tightly packed like a roll of five cent coins. White held her hand out and tipped and five of the bottom-most coins fell out into it. While the ones at the top were still shining and copper, the ones at the bottom were corroded into fragments of verdigris. She tucked these into her pocket and added five more coins onto the top, before pushing the container closed again. She flexed her knee testingly, then bought up the other side.

"Of course nothing could be simple," she said, repeating the motions on the alternate side. "I'm using a modernized version of Mr. Volta's 1.0 battery stack. A charged copper-based alloy is flash corroded with acid to release controlled bursts of energy, I manage energy release by increasing or decreasing acid levels in the chamber. I've got battery chambers in my feet, knees, upper thighs -" she lifted the edge of her shorts to reveal the upper port that opens in the same way. "- shoulders, elbows, wrists and two in my neck. Each of them is an independent circuit; if I run down the batteries in my legs then my arms still work fine. I can redistribute power internally, pulling charge from my arm batteries to my legs. That's low-level physically painful and fatiguing but still more efficient than acid-flooding a chamber."

She changes out her arm battery coins too, worn down from her earlier climb. There are more burned coins here - she hadn't changed them in a while, something she notes with embarrassment. A clean power stack should be the minimum before going to the gym, White.

"Downsides are the internal strain, slow swapping, and the wastefulness and expense," she said, continuing to go through the routine. "The upside is that I never have to deal with degraded battery performance, energy price spikes or lengthy recharge sessions; as long as I've got a pocket full of spares I can hotswap back to full charge. It also has both pros and cons with heat management; I don't need to spend as much space keeping a power core cool, but it does mean I circulate coolant throughout my entire body. I have something like a cardiovascular system for that. The fact that I circulate so much coolant does contribute to the power of my cold, dead robot hands," and here she put one of those ice cold palms against 3V's thigh just to hear her squeal.

"But I don't actually know how any of it compares," she admits. "I never really tested any of it. My life is generally sedate, with low level cleaning as the only physical activity. I'm half scared that I've got secret assassin droid kung fu superpowers - if I flood an entire power chamber at once, how hard, exactly, could I punch? I don't know, I don't even know if that'd just blow out the joint. I do know that none of the mainline android models uses anything like this system, and aggressive googling didn't turn up any workout videos for this design."

Huntresses of Hybrasil

And when you strike, strike the heart.

Her swords are digital things, half there and half not, just like she is. Her left hand is empty as it catches your wrist. Her right arm drives a sword of silver into the joint. Her left hand releases your wrist and immediately it has a sword again and it is slicing through the hip superstructure. Her right hand is empty as it punches through the gap and rips out your still pulsing crystal fire reactor. It's a familiar rhythm, as beautiful as a magic trick. Dozens of girls have lost their hearts and their reactor cores to this technique, to this dance.

It's unbeatable. It's the wall. It's a dance so hypnotizing that even aliens can't help but lean into it, to offer up their hearts for her waiting fingers. Isn't a defeat and a battlemech a small price to pay for this performance? It's a once in a lifetime experience to have the undivided attention of this girl who is a goddess. In this moment you are her everything. In this moment every weakness is visible to her blades.

But this is something she does for you.

As she steps away from the broken hulk of the Enkindler you realize that you have not landed a blow. You have not shown her anything she did not already know. She gave you her love and your defeat as gifts and you haven't given her a scratch. She is not dissatisfied but neither is she satisfied; she has fought many girls this way, and while she can love them in this moment they will not linger in her memory. She is a rake, Isabelle, and though she kills you kindly you have not given her anything to remember you by.

She steps away towards the launch corridor, already done with this place and these people. You can see already her eyes lock on the next battle. Against someone who prepares for war with the same all-encompassing intensity she does. And you know, deep in your heart, what you need to do if you want to meet her there.

Breathless Dead

Alexa!

"Pheh!" said Cerberus dismissively, although every mechanical hound in the station was visibly relaxing as part of the pets and attention. Rusty and another dog are sniffing each other, invisible communication passing between them before leaping and rushing away in zooming contest. "Isn't that the way with humans? Always worshiping yesterday's gods? You think that you can know something and it can stay known. That doesn't even apply to other humans."

She hopped down from the shop window she was sitting in and walked across the street. "A while ago there lived a man who said 'the only thing that I know is that I know nothing'. His government made him drink poison over it. You think that's not the case now? Tellus, the Azure Skies, every Empire that ever was would rather drink poison than admit things had changed."

Dolce!

"That's what I'm saying," said Jil. "The choice isn't yours. It's mine; get fucked and live a happy life. If anyone wants to try and push you into this they have to go through me."

She snaps her fingers, calling over a pair of Alcedi warriors. They're not in their tribal braids and remnants of military honours any more, instead with the solar badges and glittering torches of the Lanterns. "Watch him, keep him off the ship. He gives you any trouble put him in a pod and shoot him back to Salib."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Red!

They have Goat. They might as well have the Devil. Goat was an abject lesson, the original spectacular failure, the failure state that the rest of them were built to avoid falling into. The reason that she got a five day psychological debrief, twelve day refresher training course and three month probation period for sending an executable program across her internal network. Don't cable yourself, no matter how efficient you think that it'll make you. Efficiency isn't everything. Just look at Goat.

"Shit," she said, but no more than that. Goat or Devil, nothing scared Red. She'd have resonance mined Hell if her gut told her she'd get away with it. "You know when, where or who?"

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Red!

The pen and paper is performative. A performance for a ghost who was performing for imagined rivals. Mrs. Everest made a show of distrusting digital technology, especially anything as mass market as a phone. An exotic one-of-a-kind bespoke AI, taking notes on exquisite paper in calligraphic handwriting? That was a vision of the future.

Despite everything, November can't find it in herself to say that she was wrong in this. The swoosh and swirl and click of a whirling fountain pen on cotton-weave paper is just so slightly outside anyone's expectations. The wrong person for the wrong reasons, but still maybe something to it.

"Okay," she said, finishing her notes and flipping back a few pages. "So. I'm having some kind of meltdown offscreen but that's not relevant right now. For practical purposes, you're the only person on the station I am prepared to trust for reasons other than your fanatical commitment to the bit." She raised a finger sharply against the inevitable objection - she could be commanding too when she wanted. "I know, you're somewhat committed to the bit, but my standards have been raised since I became a contributor to the Anthropozine."

"Regardless," she laid out three paper notebooks on the table, each filled with exquisite calligraphy. "This booklet is Operation One. It contains full details on my investigations into the brain explosives and how that links to your name. These people are not to be fucked with. I have already gotten shot over this and if you read this book you are putting yourself at the same risk. However, since you are directly involved already, I would consider it just as dangerous if not more so not to read it."

She laid out the second book. "This book is about the cops. If you read this you will need to restructure your entire life. I have not gotten shot over it yet but I have quit an awful lot of hobbies because they represent additional points of vulnerability or people who might get dragged in by association. Someone is already in the hospital over being tangentially connected with this. I don't think you have a Black, but if you read this you'll need to make one."

She laid out a third book. "This book is about all the various small problems, mysteries, observations and stuff that I can't connect yet. Stuff like crypto tracing rigs, dodgy local politicians, or a pizzaria I am 90% sure is a front for the mafia. I do not know how dangerous any individual item is but nothing seems to be worth killing over, definitely not at the level I know about. Read this if you're curious and want to work on some low key stuff together and not go off on your own to prove how committed to the bit you are, if I have to rescue you from the mafia I swear to god I'll put you in a home."

She glances at the others. "I could dodge and weave in indecision some more but I've already been here all day. I'm up to my neck in some insanely lethal spy shit and the emotional imbalance that is putting me there shows no sign of abating, so if you want to be part of my life these are your options."

A pause. "Further to that, I will find the others. I'm hoping the other stuff somehow gives me enough spy leverage to be able to track them down. That's a separate book, and one that's empty so far."

Blue!

A shark is a powerful animal. It can scent blood from miles away and has an inscrutable poker face.

"Oh?" said Blue, picking out her own phone and rapidly navigating to a different page on the same site 3V just ordered from. She rapidly narrows in on one of Ame-no-Uzume's classic outfits. Lace and leather, sharp edges and power - the Tyrant Queen, the butcher of the qualifiers whose blade sorts the strong from the weak.

"This?" said Blue, holding the outfit up, her finger also over the one-click-buy button. "Is this how Mistress would like to be dressed while she commands me?"

TSL: The Excess of Flowers

Too much. Too fast. Too sharp. Motion and muscle everywhere she looked and she was no part of it. This was chaos but it had stopped being her chaos. This was deception but she was losing her way out of it. She risked vanishing into the role, becoming so stunned and still in the crush of emotion that she really did become a humble scribe. Helpless and without ambition.

That was the one change she could never quite manage though. The more control slipped away from her the more focused she got. When she'd felt like she could never influence the scions of the Dominion, never draw their eyes, it had made her cold and sharp. It had given her the strength to study and bind demons. She felt the same now; this was slipping from her grip and it woke her. Woke the hunger in her. This was a battle of strength and she was not strong enough to compete.

From her sleeve, a fan. She snaps it open and upon its surface is the cascading symbol of summoning and binding. She lingers for a moment, though, eyes flicking through every combat and every front and considering what exactly her wish will be.

You see this, Giriel. You see her on the brink of forbidden sorcery once again. You've drawn her eye and distracted her enough that you have a chance to react before she commits.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Blue!

"No," said Blue. "I would have picked the same faction as you. I prefer mirror matchups."

Not many people favour mirror matchups. They're the most precise, most demanding engagements. There is no room for deception, no room for game imbalance, no room for mistakes. Strength must leverage against strength, curves against curves, victory only possible with raw skill. To lose in a mirror matchup leaves no room for retreat, to win establishes nothing other than superiority.

"My measurements are 83-56-83," she said, eyes locked in challenge. Do it, you coward.

White!

Humans were really good at running. She didn't really understand why they didn't do more of it.

She's hyperaware of her own mechanics now, things ordinarily glossed into silent routine drawn inexorably to the forefront of her mind. She'd been built for aesthetics first and foremost, and that broadly meant replicating human anatomy... or at least, the appearance of human anatomy. Bundles of nanofiber muscles connected to multiple distributed small batteries. She could feel the heat points in her joints as she ran through her energy. She noticed her heart stop beating and switched instead to a silent and constant whirr as it ran the lubricating coolant through her body without the false starts and stops that imitated a human's heartbeat. She started breathing as a way to vent the waste heat building up in her throat. More human. Less human. Compromises. One feature turns off, another feature turns on.

The way 3V moves is different. All the machinery pulls in the same direction. She's made for this. Sweat comes because it is an efficient cooling process. It's an inheritance from the dawn of time. It wasn't removed because her parent didn't find it cute. Her heart pounds louder, doing more. It performs a function, and the performance was romanticised later. November performs a romantic function, a painting of a painting. And in the heat of motion she can feel all her pigments start to run. She can feel the blank canvas underneath. Feel its weave.

An ache starts, the dull motion of power redistribution. As her knee and thigh batteries drain faster than the others her body starts automatically shifting the power from the more full batteries on her shoulders and elbows and the reserve in her core. The connection feels hot and painful, an ache running through wire veins. She feels like a stick figure, a two dimensional depthless creature. She is wrapped around slow motion electricity. Is this what she is, really? This network of power is the motive force that animates her mind and body, the rest is just the shell moved by that electricity. Five wires, burning hot. How did this fire compare to humans whose life was in the blood?

The signs of fatigue. Safety measures, the urge to slow, the heavy breathing, the pulse and tiredness. She didn't feel good for not having those signs, she felt a vague panicked sense that she should replicate them somehow. There was nothing that was going to signal to her that she was overdoing it and should slow down or stop. She had to worry about improperly administering her internal heat buildup. She didn't have a billion years of dead monkeys teaching her valuable lessons about heatstroke, she needed to make a reasoned decision about how to take care of herself. She wants to stress about it. Needs to stress about it. Visions of comforting spreadsheets flash inside her running mind, trying to slow her down with the promise of easy control.

Not yet. Not yet. She can't break before 3V does. If she let 3V win she'd never hear the end of it. No, she's going to run as smooth and graceful and perfect as a machine until she's run her girlfriend down, and figure out the price tag afterwards.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

What's a future?

It's a question and answer in every motion. Gears whir and grind, crystal turbines silently howl and metal strains against its constraints. The fight is everything. Long term wear to the devil. She'll trade it all for a scrap of advantage in the here and now. Every moment is fire stolen from the gods and, oh, does she buy so many steps towards victory with the coin she spends.

The ice ray fires at shattering overcharge airbursts, flash-freezing gears and making metal brittle. She's close, close, close - and then gone. You take your eyes off her for a moment and she's ducked out of the line of vision and every sense that might smell the Kathresis tastes only air. It's not just ease with which she vanishes from your life, it's with craving. There's a hunger for that silence and solitude. You can feel burning eyes from every direction. It's more than absence; it's the feeling of your reactions being digested. Of your reflexes and instincts being absorbed and uploaded. Of every flicker of motion weighed for confidence, for speed, for power.

And in that bladed absence you have never felt more vulnerable. Somehow in the course of this exchange she's peeled your shell and has left you in the spotlight alone. You can hear the inaudible drumbeat of rising violence rising around you, rising in your heart, feeling breath on your neck no matter how you turn. She has your measure and will dispatch you in moments. There is no counter, no fairness. Toy robots, toy fights? You have never been in more danger, Isabelle. You can't survive this by fighting as you want. War like this has rules, cruel and absolute. If you want to express yourself you have to earn that opening.

Do you think you can earn it on this day, Isabelle? While others were running a megacorporation were you studying the blade? Can you force an opening from Solarel, the Hunter of Huntresses, on the first pass? Have you prepared enough? Have you trained enough? Have you studied her enough, the black specter who undid the champions of Hybrasil? Are you ready? Are you worthy?

If you are, so be it. Your legend will be great indeed. If not then all you need do is sigh into the embrace of swords of gold and silver. She will let you down gently. She will await your vengeance, else you must await hers. Are you the mountain or the climber?