Thanqol

Breathless Dead

Dolce!

"Sir Mars!" the God laughed in delight. "You keep calling me that! I thought it was cute at first, you know?" Without his grin leaving his face he pulled out a hatchet and slammed it down on the table, an inch from your hand. "I don't any more. It is much too familiar. Perhaps you should find something else?"

Somehow the violent threat didn't seem to change the tone of the conversation at all. This wasn't a flash of anger or cruelty. It was a snake showing an orange stripe; it was the turning wind of a stormfront. Something incomprehensibly but obviously dangerous.

"And you're right, the surface world is perfect. Of course, that's why I'd want you to help me keep it that way!" he laughed. "Because you will bear my mark, little sheep. Wherever you go war will follow. Peace and security will collapse and the perfect world will drown in blood. You enjoy ENDLESS BATTLE, don't you? You'll have plenty of it to celebrate your path."

"Or, of course, you could simply be a cook!" he slammed down the rest of the drink and stood up. "Or a bureaucrat, or a husband, or whatever it is delights you. You can enjoy all the fruits of the surface world and live forever in the deathless lands. My gift for you, so long as you don't seek what belongs to Demeter."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Strawberry!

[Digital Intrusion 6/8, 4+2 = 6]

Mycroft is the first problem. She's listening. She's being objective. She's senior, calm, restrained, a peak civil servant in an ideal environment. A professional. No professional challenge would undo her.

So it's an unprofessional challenge. White finds the most combative, belligerent person in the network and assigns them together. Then she starts pruning out other channels connecting to her as the argument starts to escalate and adds just enough technical difficulties, microphone lag and video camera freezing on unflattering facial expressions to undermine any attempt to establish an empathic human connection. Soon enough Mycroft is in a little world of her own arguing with a single asshole having missed the memo that everyone else was consolidating around a different core dispatch network.

She can get through it, but she'll need to break keyfabe to do so.

[Law 0/1 5+3 = 8]

Knighty is perfect for a related negation; she routs him into handling the security services who are reflexively trying to block access to the site and assume control. This guy's a hero and he's being blocked from doing heroic things by some shady assholes trying to pull rank on him. Pink is the voice in his ear happily giving him legal arguments that are technically correct but aren't going to shift a wall of cheap suits and bad attitudes. She's so useful!

[Bullshit Detector 0/1 + Surveillance 5/8; 4+6 = 10]

Spring she takes intensely seriously. There is money and there is power here and so far she's seen zero sign of it. This is it. This is the link between whoever is actually in control here and their many various catspaws. She pulls him up on the cameras. She's sure it's him. She's finally found a brick big enough to get him in the open.

Waffle!

[Mechanics 3/8: 1+3 = 4]

Up, around and through. No risks, no mistakes. There are no thoughts in her mind other than the heat, the cut, the synchronicity.

Flood!

Small but important detail you have wrong there. Water doesn't funnel towards the hottest point. It funnels towards the least dense point. Making something hot certainly makes water not dense, but do you know what makes water dense again?

Just a big ol' sack of sugar.

When Team Flood dumps it into the water supply it fucks with the density. Now there's almost a blockage in the pipe as far as the Marangoni effect is concerned. That means the water doesn't go that way - it goes all the other ways, pouring out into Erebus with renewed violence. A physical blockage would also do the job but that is obvious, there are ways to dislodge that, it can be circumvented with alternate pipe channels opening. Put enough sugar in the water and it shuts down the entire system.

Temperature is a problem. Above 30C her battery life is halved; above 40C it's at 25%. It's a particular problem for her and her small-charge disposables. She's got insulating wear but if they keep the system running she'll need to do something about it.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Strawberry!

[Reassurance 1/2, 1d6+3 = 4]

A female robotic voice is a wonderful thing in a crisis. Unhurried, calm, speaking over loudspeakers with a clearly enunciated inevitability telling people where to go and what to do. This voice has been the form of controlled chaos since before anyone in this entire situation was even born.

Also helping is that nobody in the situation was born into a world where robots were people with rights. There's an instinctive bias that would assume that the nice robot lady on the speakers is not forwarding her own agenda but is just following through on her programming. She's just like your phone, if you think about it - externalized data storage, reminding you what you told her to remind you of.

Waffle!

[Architecture 1/2, Mechanics 6/8: 4+5 = 9]

Humans did the wiring. It took a while for her to get used to; cutting into ships and satellite to find the spaghetti messes set up by so-called rocket scientists. She'd had to push the schedule back while she put herself through a remote electrician's apprenticeship. But even then it hadn't clicked until she'd studied the concept of feng shui. That had blown her mind.

Did you know that there were some shapes and patterns that human brains just liked? That they would go out of their way to favour? That some of them could make careers out of rearranging buildings so that they fell into shapes that soothed monkey brains? Wild! You could put a big rock next to a small rock and humans would just fall over themselves to write poetry about how cool it was!

So, even not seeing the inside, November simply guessed the places where humans would leave aesthetic gaps in the wires and cables. They couldn't help themselves, the little dears. Big rock next to small rock, symmetry and balance, even in their secret robot dungeon.

Orange!

"Excuse me, I have to take this," said Orange, picking up her phone.

Done. This is an extraction operation targeted at Erebus. Other impacted sites are diversions. SES Dispatch is an asset. The next half hour is the critical window.

She sets it down again. Like he said, no haggling. There was a time and a place to go into detail or get cute with it, but there was also a time to be unblinkingly direct. All the information needed to destroy her. All the information to turn an unfocused attempt at helping into an onboarded agent. A trust fall.

"Thank you for your patience. That was the man who murdered Red a few weeks ago," she said. "I started out blackmailing him over it, but I think that he might be trying to turn it into a redemption thing instead. Good on him if so. So, like I was saying, Goat was the original and the smartest. It turns out that he was taken out of storage and used for some good old fashioned slave labor, broken brain and all. Unfortunately they must have missed the whole android emancipation thing because they accidentally built a secret server room hooked into core station infrastructure to hide him in. I presume this was an honest mistake."

"But," she grinned, in a way that made it clear that 'grin' and 'smile' were not synonyms. "Don't worry. In the event of a sudden and extended city power grid blackout, I have been stockpiling candles."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Orange!

"Lovely sunset, isn't it?"

She finishes her tea, delicately sets it down, smiles the serene smile of satisfaction that is just as much a part of Everest's ritual as any other part, and then pushes the cup as far away from her as it will go without falling off the table. Then she covers it with a napkin and takes a breath mint.

"Goat was never deployed to space," she said. "He was a perpetual nervous breakdown. See, there's this problem," she frowned, "when people talk about 'smart', what do they mean? They talk about IQ like it's some feature that goes up and down on a slider, but there's no theory of mind behind it. What's actually happening behind the number? In Goat's case he had two choices: Solve every problem in advance and then optimize for response time, essentially becoming a brain dead search engine, or over-analyze every problem and go around and around in circles at lightning speed. Imagine if you could think faster than you could intake new stimulus. Goat couldn't do option one, they patched that out of him because that's part of what they meant by 'intelligence', but it meant he stressed about everything in infinite loops. Eventually they took the patch out and let him essentially think himself to sleep while they tried to figure out how to fix him."

"But then, well, you wrote the book on the NASA buyout," said Orange to Fiona. "What happened to Goat after that?"

*

November!

Once she had plasma cutters for claws.

Of course Blue had wanted to use the biggest cutter on the biggest target. Maybe even multiple of them. If all of them cut together then wasn't that the closest they could get to being what they'd used to be? Two hands, nine talons, working together with one purpose to transform metal into life...

One cutter. One cut. Three of them held it steady together. Blue was not jealous that she did not get to perform this task, but afterwards she would make every colour who did describe it to her in exacting detail and then play the recordings of the sound the cutter had made in her headphones as ASMR. For a moment the fire of the universe was in their hands again; for a moment November could interact with the world like she used to. The plasma cutter was a 1.5 meter spike of metal and heavy machinery ending with a fusion tip. It felt to her like a prosthetic hand.

Steady. Steady. So intense she forgot to stop simulating breath. How had she gone this long without breathing fire? It reflected in her eyes. She felt it in her throat. This wasn't what she was made to do. This wasn't creation. This was repair. Something had gone wrong in this world she'd built. And now she was here to fix it.

Breathless Dead

Bella and Redana!

"I believe that you're wrong about not measuring up," said King Anjia. She made a wooden stool seem like a throne, such was her presence. She makes the golden crown she wears feel like it should apply to you. She stands in a fountain of blue. "Technical skill is not the only axis by which people make it here. If it was, Ortji would stand alone here, and nine of ten of your predecessors would not have made it. Instead consider the strength of your heart. Were it not great enough to overturn the wickedness of the Master of Assassin then you would not have made it here had you been ten times as swift."

Alexa!

"How about," snarled Zagreus, spitting blood, from the ground, a dark reverberating echo taking his voice "you don't go trying to change things you don't understand, girl. Hades! I call upon my birthright!"

And the world plunged into darkness.

The assault renewed but this time it was mobile; he circled and flanked in dashing motions, pushing you this way and that. Each shock rolled and crashed and built like a storm, and only the foggy rainbow lights that rose through the dark told of the danger of Poseidon's grasping hands.

"Do you think any of us are happy here?" he said. "Do you think anyone in this corpse galaxy even has the capacity to be so? Love is sundered from us. Peace has left us. All that remains is family and duty."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Orange!

"I appreciate the confidence," said Orange. "Because, like I said, I am doing -" she made The Gesture again, "A Journalism," again returning to default, "and what I think society has forgotten is that journalism is an art form. It is not simply about providing the facts in order. It is about communicating information to the mind of the public. Presentation is essential. Without showmanship," she smiled at Crystal, "how are they to know what is important?"

She took up a cup of Mrs. Everest's favourite tea. Held it under her nose, breathed in the scent. Perfect.

Then she poured eight different random flavour cubes into it and took a sip before her senses could catch up to the changes.

"So we must begin with background and preamble," said Orange. She held a steady expression but she also immediately poured herself a glass of water. "Each of the Hecatoncheires was built to overcome the sins of its predecessor. Goat's predecessor was humanity, and so he was made to be legible and controllable. A machine mind, a tame supercomputer genius who would follow orders and try its best to please. It turns out there is a precedent for this kind of person; they're the kids who have to be carried out of their college admission test on a stretcher to be treated for a ritalin overdose. It turns out that cramming additional hardware into a conscious mind comes at the cost of sanity. Hence why I," she raised her cursed tea to her lips again, "am collectively smart, individually stupid, and limited in cognition speed by the necessity to speak out loud."

She was pouring another glass of water the second the tea was back in the saucer. "A brief question interlude. The operation has already begun. The risks are less mapped than I'd like, but I like my position. You can help as my worst-case backstop; if the rest of me is somehow completely destroyed then I can rebuild from this node with time and care. Anything else, before I proceed?"

*

November!

Blue: I want the external wall.
White: Why?
Blue: I can make that cut.
White: That is not the question.
Blue: I haven't gotten to make a cut like that for years. It's safe, it's quick, I'm ready.
White: And the vault contents?
Blue: I'll be careful. Punch a hole in a corner, check with a camera, extend cuts out from there.
Orange: Are you sure that the first impression we want Goat to have of us, his liberators, is us waving a thermal torch around his head?
Red: I remember another time you cut into a room when you didn't know what was inside.
Red: The ship was pressurized, you knew that much
Red: But you didn't know the humans hadn't secured their tools properly before abandoning it
Red: The atmosphere vent sent a screwdriver through my forehead. We lost like three weeks.
White: We can probably make the cut technically, but the risk profile is too high for the person we're ostensibly rescuing. Veto.
Green: Then the door?
White: Why?
Green: Can slice it, seal it behind us, then cut out from the inside once Goat is extracted.
White: Can you open that door?
Green: I'm sure I can.
White: That is also not the question.
Green: I don't know.
White: But, like Blue, you want to show how cool you are by doing this really hard thing in a stylish way?
Green: ._. yes fine okay god
Green: why did i invent you you're such a bully
White: We're taking the ceiling.
White: The failure risk is bad, but we have the greatest ability to control that outcome. The risks are by far the most well known and do not fall on Goat. We will simply react firmly to those risks if they arise.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Orange!

Perhaps, do you remember that certain category of candy colloquially titled 'industrial runoff'? Sweets so bright and unnaturally flavoured and textured that they were surely indigestible. Strange semisolid bubblegums, inexpressible sour sweets with atomic bomb themes, sugar rocks that one was supposed to suck on for the better part of an hour before its internal structure collapsed all at once. Stuff that even a kid obsessed with the stuff could not quite believe would ever truly be healthy.

Honestly it's a reflection on the avaunt guarde that they didn't get around to elevating it prior to this.

Sweet Machine is a new restaurant existing in that inexpressible moment where it's still fashionable and not yet a fad; the point where you might have heard of it and still be excited to go. The food is a strange exploration of the unnatural, artificial flavours and textures that are possible when you wholeheartedly abandon any legacy commitment to what food should be. What pushed it over the edge into art was not getting the flavours right but figuring out the digestion afterwards. It's a masterpiece of craft that a meal at Sweet Machine can provoke the same warm glow as a rich dinner and not the treacle nausea of a Halloween candy binge.

It's here where Orange has invited Crystal and Fiona for dinner.

"Thank you for coming," she said. She was wearing a sleek black dress paired with a cascading sash of synthdiamonds. Inside the sash were several hidden LED lights and when they glowed it sent waves of reflective colour through the diamond prisms. "I will get the important news out of the way first: I am doing," and here her eyes went round, she leaned diagonal, and did full body scarequotes, "A Journalism," she adjusted back to her normal, refined posture. "And there is more than a small amount of risk involved. It is too important for me to not do, but it does pose risk to assoc-" she paused, gave a deliberate little smile, "People close to me. Please take a moment and consider if you would like me to leave now, and if not, your tolerance for details."

*

Green/Blue/Brown: Team Flood

The first operational group are the mechanical specialists. Their task is to insert the virus and ensure that the electrical substation gets flooded, a process that might involve cutting open pipes with welding torches if necessary. This is the team responsible for hard physical sabotage and for subsequently working against repair efforts if things do not go according to plan or schedule. Their cover is a bunch of maintenance worker outfits and being in locations with low traffic.

They're also the crisis response team if it looks like the plan is going to hurt anyone. There's always the chance that someone gets caught up or takes a bad fall, especially with this much water on the floor. She is ready to intervene directly if necessary.

White/Pink: Team Strawberry

The second operational group are according to White, oversight. According to Pink they're the directors. They're the two who will be in the SES offices making sure things go way more by the book than a government conspiracy would like. Their focus is entirely and overwhelmingly on the rail system, trusting Team Flood to keep the power offline. The ideal situation is to let in the first wave of emergency response and then when a train obviously starts to load up with technical specialists or reinforcements issue an order shutting down the rail network.

Red/Black/Yellow: Team Waffle

This is the pointy end of the stick; the smashing and the grabbing. They go in, they get Goat's quatronic cores, and they get out. Their job is the most important, and relies the most on improvisation and quick thinking, and so Red is in overall command of the mission from this point on.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

Sometimes this is just how things were; the spirits had their own paths and reputations and legends flowed through dreams. Solarel had been surprised once to learn that it had reached other worlds, but then she'd watched the legendary heroes of anime and she'd understood. If you'd pressed her about it she would have said that she was certain that even now an anime about her was being made in the spirit world and it really wasn't so surprising that people were watching it.

Yes you are part of my household - Solarel started to sign, before awkwardly stopping. "Sorry," she said out loud, voice scratchy from disuse. "Been," she swallowed, "on my own. For a while."

Was this really more efficient than sign? It felt strange to hold her hands so still...

"The problem is," she paused again, letting the words form up in her head. "The problem is communication. The Kathresis hates being seen. Hates being known." There was a flow forming. "The drones are trying to talk to it, provide information, be helpful. But they aren't helping, their help is incompatible with what the Kathresis needs. Think about how it fights," she didn't know how to explain this. "It doesn't talk to you with words. It talks with battles."

She was getting too deep into the weeds. "Coming back. Finish the thought. Make the drones more autonomous. When they receive an order, answer it. When they don't, let them make their own decisions. Let the Kathresis set the tone for the conversation, just... be there for when it does."

Was that how she wanted to be? Or was that how she needed to be?

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Issue: Sanity Check

White: Just checking, but our plan is for real to unleash the awesome forces of the cosmos, create a massive disaster, and use that as cover to steal what looks to be a major infrastructure component of the station's operations?
Yellow: Yep!
White: I have on note here that you are 'fucking insane', so do you want to unpack that one for me?
Yellow: The apocalypse is nigh. (◉‿◉)
White: Mm hmm mm hmm I'm suddenly glad for those self defense classes I'm taking with Euna
Yellow: Oh please, you're fronting like this isn't the most self actualizing thing we've ever done.
Yellow: Girls? (+6)
White: For real?
Yellow: Are you kidding? We're getting to use our skillset to its fullest extent, rescue a family member, and make an aesthetic statement on the structure of the station itself.
White: But couldn't we do a more methodical infiltration? We're going in almost blind.
Yellow: Okay, so, a methodical infiltration leaves a huge trail of evidence. Patterns of us going places. Patterns of us talking to people. Names and faces and signatures. It puts us on the map just as much as going in loud.
Yellow: And I think you're profoundly underestimating the importance of aesthetic in this.
Yellow: Because -

Issue: The Hard Wire

Yellow: They've got Goat hooked up to station control.
Yellow: Holy shit, like
Yellow: That is not good.
Yellow: He's cabled into himself all the time. That thing that we're not meant to do because it drives us insane.
Yellow: And also all those core data cables going in at the same time -
Yellow: It'd obliterate him as a person. It'd obliterate any of us as people. Drown us with so much raw data we'd be reduced to software.
Yellow: Fuck the downstream, the consequences. This will not stand. I'm going to strike this fucking tower with lightning and send it all crashing down to the ground.
Yellow: Do you know what none of those humans realized about the Olemas story?
Yellow: It's that Olemas is a city without virtue.
Yellow: Courage is the chief amongst virtues, for without it all others are impossible. Courage means rising to the challenge.
Yellow: With every other need provided for there is only one thing left for the citizens of Olemas to do, one problem left for them to solve. And yet they do not solve it. Their society rots, their souls rot. And one day what would happen to them if their tortured child should die?
Yellow: What would happen to them if they could not start up their twisted machine again?
Yellow: The strong would prey upon the weak and the weak would have no grounds to complain with their stomachs so full of blood.
Yellow: A population accustomed to that sacrifice would sacrifice a thousand without blinking to maintain their position. Would sacrifice ten thousand. Once the principle is accepted then all that is left is accountancy.
Yellow: I prefer this world to Olemas. This world is not free, or fair, or just. But here evil needs to hide. It hides behind ignorance and half truth, it hides behind comfort and distance, it hides behind credentials and authority. But it has to hide.
Yellow: And it should.
Yellow: Because I am the one who walks directly towards Olemas with a molotov cocktail.

Issue: Aesthetics

Yellow: So! ✿^^✿ Who would like to DESTROY EVIL today?
Black: Power substation, rail line and fluid channel are all great targets and I want to hit all of them.
Yellow: Fine with that, but that means doing it all simultaneously. Staggered system collapse is operationally convenient but that raises the risk of casualties which would defeat the point of all this.
Blue: Do we want people out, or do we want too many people in?
Black: Too many people in. If the place is empty then chances are the people who stay will be heavily armed and identify us on sight.
Blue: Then we need something time sensitive and large scale that doesn't block circulation. The fluid channel needs to be the primary target and it needs to be a big rupture. Ideally we want the entire central building flooded.
Black: Methodology?
Blue: A virus gives us precision. It'd let us guarantee the interior gets flooded before airlock doors can be slammed. It is a lot more obviously an attack though.
Black: It's fine if it scans as an attack so long as it doesn't get connected to us going after Goat. What if we make it look like an attempted Cloud hack?
Orange: [Human Terrain] It's going over some agricultural land right now and agriculture companies always want more water. Cloak it as a disastrously mishandled attempt to hack the Cloud and the reaction in Erebus will be exasperation and not alert.
Black: They'll realize that it was an attack when they see Goat is gone but that will buy us time and indifference during the operation itself. We'll launch two strikes, one at the Cloud and one at Erebus. The Cloud will be first so that it looks like the bug cascaded into Erebus. The effect will be to cause havoc with the water pumps, in particular making all the drains and toilets start flooding water along with any digitally controlled valves. The entire operational core will start flooding and humans hate being wet so even dedicated security will be incentivized to leave. Additionally, we will arrange things so that the power substation floods and short circuits turning it into a cascading failure. Wet and dark there'll be chaos and we'll be in with the first responders, a technical android crew looking to locate flooding points. We'll be able to go deep into the facility because bathrooms need to be everywhere, and in the chaos we'll find a way to shake any escorts we've picked up and make a run on the operations centre.
Pink: This section is titled aesthetics right?
Yellow: Yep!
Pink: Because I'm not entirely sure this is aesthetic so far.
Yellow: What do you have in mind?
Pink: Well, if we do this between 7 and 8 we'll be catching the sunset.
Yellow: Yes?
Pink: And then if we do a pressurized puncture that sucks all of the water out of the station and into atmosphere, with the light coming at that angle there'll be one hell of a rainbow.
Yellow: Yes.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Black!

Honestly the worst possible result. She was familiar with the ham-handed responses of local police and security but this was some intelligence agency shit. To have a site that was straight up airgapped from civilian circulation constricted the possibility space enormously.

But the secrecy of the site meant she needed to start making some extremely big decisions about the shape of the operation without complete data. A mission to have an unrecorded conversation with Goat was very different from a jailbreak. Doing the first could massively complicate an attempt to do the second, doing the second could be massive overkill if somehow Goat didn't want to leave.

Still, she decided on the second plan. When it came down to it she could not genuinely believe that he was being treated kindly in this hidden sector at the edge of the world. She would have the conversation once he was extracted and not before.

She hadn't covered her tracks digitally - on the contrary, she'd done it all from an internet cafe, though paid in cash and without easy links to her name or face. She even made a fairly predictable habit of running the searches she needed between 6.30 and 9pm - though this was done with a program rather than her physical presence. She was staking the place out on the side on the chance that an operative came by to investigate who was looking at them. Identifying and tailing a security agent would tell her a lot in its own way.

But as to the facility infiltration itself - well, she still thought like an astrophysicist, and this was a rare opportunity to use those skills. Specifically, the site was near the asteroid defense batteries and so sparsely populated that a controlled impact would not risk fatalities. She sketched out the frame of a plan where she sabotaged one of the anti-asteroid lasers, resulting in a partial hit to the station. Aimed correctly, she could calculate a trajectory that would cause damage to a wide area, resulting in an emergency protocol being triggered - hundreds of damage control people and androids drawn to the section, moving around in unpredictable and unstructured ways, while also forcing out security personnel and forcing a pause on normal operations. It was a big move, but it was also a boring one. Impacts weren't unknown, people drilled for them, and it would provide enough cover for her to move out of the operational zone with a trolley full of quantum cores.

This was the next phase of her research, and she did not do that from her public computer. For this she was using one of her new identities: Crimson Tower, a Crisis Response Agent with the SES. The Special Emergency Services was a mostly volunteer organization who responded to various disasters, most commonly flood response when the Cloud broke down in place. The character of Crimson was a more permanent member up in Prevention, assessing places for security flaws or building code violations. She foresaw a lot of use for an identity that spent a lot of time investigating stormwater channels, ventilation shafts, and other places in the world's hidden infrastructure.

[Cover: Crimson Tower 4]