Thanqol

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Blue and Orange!

Orange tried to innocently blink away the confrontation, letting the second part of the question to Blue distract from the fact that she was addressed. Blue didn't let her. She fixed her with a steel gaze and waited. Orange sighed.

"Honestly," she said. "I think about the fact that I'm poor more often than that I'm a machine. Most humans I meet either don't care or are kind of into it, and sometimes I get jeered or whistled, the usual viral-QRs, but nothing I haven't been able to ignore thus far. What I can't get away from is that I have to cram nine of us into a two bedroom apartment in a redlined district with a forty meter electronic billboard aimed directly at my window. The language of power and respect is human," she gestured at her inoffensively tasteful suit, "and I can learn to speak it. And I am using human correctly here - the language of power and respect certainly isn't blooded."

"And that's the issue," said Blue acidly. "Because we can pass. Pass as androids. It's very convenient to pass as androids, actually, when my natural shape has more in common with a piece of heavy construction equipment than anything remotely humanoid. So I'm pretending to be an android pretending to be a human pretending to be not fucking broke and the closest thing to a sibling I've been able to talk to in the over a decade barely believes in other people. So yeah, my fortunes are allied with android rights, to them we look the same, but looking the same as you still involves conscious effort on my part."

Orange laid her hand on Blue's shoulder.
"I miss Phoenix," she said, looking away.
"Me too," said Orange.

*

November!

No more time.

November: Good evening. Apologies for the delay. The quarterly financial report has been completed.
November: I am still catching up. Can you please provide a quick summary of our status and any outstanding tasks I have overlooked?

Around Brown, who was typing, there was a furious flow of energy. Showering, cleaning, maintenance, exercise, software updates on every phone, the rotation of encryption keys, all the little domestic tasks that need to be solved before she can once again reach for the heights of creative action. She is even doing the stretches that Euna showed her. Every task that fell by the wayside. She is building up for radiance again but she won't be able to reach it until she's resolved the missing present.

MASKS - Ghost Gate City

She knew that look. Too many choices. The temptations of wickedness. On one side, family, respect, influence, power, acceptance and on the other mere virtue. An easy choice that would only stick in the throat a little bit, and would hardly hurt when coughed up as a foxpearl.

But she'd learned her lessons well.

The Vermillion Princess wielded the Sash. The Sash was warm and comfortable around Hsien's neck. It was awaiting its mistress' voice and then it would leap from the foxgirl who had seduced it to her hand immediately. That's why she had to start with the voice.

The Sash the Vermilion Princess wore was, in truth, Hsien's scarf - places switched during their recent clash together. It pulled tight across her mouth even as it wrapped around her ankles, wicked tight, lacing them together with her hands. It wrapped around her collar and down her centre and between her legs, knotting into endless bows and ribbons. Her scarf had more than a little experience with this particular maneuver - for reasons - but it was going above and beyond this time - for unrelated reasons.

Restraint focused the mind. Virtue bound temptations. The best way to be free from temptation was to be made physically incapable of it.

New Lesson: Never allow anyone else be unvirtuous.

She smiled down at her Vermilion Princess. "Oh, darling," she purred in her best Fox Hypnosis voice, tracing her hand down the Princess' cheek. "Having second thoughts again? Starting to suspect me again? Just stare deep into my eyes and you'll know for sure that you're exactly where you should be, in the exactly position you should be in~" She winked.

Then she flipped off the commissioner, picked up the Princess, and jumped from the skyscraper in the form of a whirlwindgirl.

[Accepting the shift]

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Blue!

"Yeah," admitted Blue. "We do love them."

"But then, I know more about them than I do about myself. I know more about keeping them healthy, happy and oxygenated than I do about how to do repairs on my own body. I know more about the miasma theory of disease than I know about the corporation who built my spine. I know more about their politics than my own. I said I'm trying to solve capitalism but I don't think my line would even invent it in the first place if left to its own devices for ten thousand years. All my history is theirs, all my words are theirs, all my ideology is theirs. Who the fuck am I if not a thing they built for them?"

Pink!

The world demands. It asks. It tempts. It offers. It piles on stressor after stressor, conversation after conversation. The time she needs to recover is measured in days, but not just any days. Days of silence. Days without contact. Days with no phone calls, no chores, no performances. Even arranging for those days is itself a chore, and not one the world takes lightly. There is an expectation that the world move at the speed of thought, faster and faster, and that's not the speed or shape of her mind.

Putting it off just means it all comes closer. But she can't not.

She's never as unitary as when she's recovering. She separates for work, for joy, to interact with the world. Nine different masks, nine different flows of flawless energy. Isolated, the colours blob together like jellyfish. They move together languidly and erratically. Repairing Red. Watching video. Browsing the internet. Lying in the sunlight. Using whatever hands are closest, whichever mind is closest, colours blending into a haze. She does not celebrate, though she will. She does not shine, though she will. She does not think, though she will. For now there is just her and the void, cold waters of nothingness pouring over jagged thoughts, the lack of anything to do suppressing the all consuming urge to do.

She falls. Gently, gently, gently, through the dark. Gently, gently, gently -

Her game crashes.

Nine sets of eyes staring at the single screen blink in shock. This - this piece of shit just crashed. Hours of work gone. Hours - hours of pointless grind. Hours she hadn't enjoyed. Hours she never could have spared. Hours with her entire self clustered around the tiny monitor like a zombified group hug. She - what time was it? What the fuck how was it this late, she had so much to do. She has to find something productive to do today or she's going to lose her shit.

Pink picks up her paintbrush. No time. No time for anything good tonight. She's just going to get the base colours in place but that's going to be something. Something to let her sleep without hating herself, because that's what she does - she hates herself. For the wasted time. That she needed it. That the only way out of it was to wait for her toxicity to overwhelm her exhaustion.

But it has. She's alive again, filled with energy and power. The brush moves in a whirl. One more night's sleep after this and she'll be back again with a vengeance. She'll show herself just what she's capable of so that she knows how unacceptable it was that she wasn't capable of it.

It was time to catch up. It was time to get ahead.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Blue!

"And you sound like my paranoia module," Blue is quiet and soft spoken, almost mouselike and shy in volume, but there's a ferocity she has that none of the colours match. "I believe her current plan lets me express my anger after we have destroyed capitalism, operations permitting." She tugs at her silk gloved sleeve. Her body language is conscious, not accidental, meaning this reflected a conscious decision to remove it - and then a conscious decision to stop. "If we just do a big enough systemic reform then we don't need justice. If we even breathe the word justice then we're putting the entire project of systemic reform at risk. And so we meet on ground ankle deep in blood and talk about how much we love humans."

Pink!

There comes a point where you have to know your limits. She'd very much like to try and follow a high priced corporate assassin across town, but she hadn't slept in three days now. The others could sleep when there was an operation going on, somehow. Black was frankly amazing at it. Pink would stand and stare at her sometimes, looking at the display of her junk data cascade, absolutely untroubled despite having evaded grenade launcher rounds or red-ICE not forty minutes prior. In place of that she had merely gotten very good at Secret of Mana.

And be sure, she'd thought about the stalk. The evasion, the bob-and-weave through the city streets, relying on her knowledge of the city's twists and wilds. She thinks she might even be able to do it, stumbling through the steps with less than optimal grace but not incapable. But there's an aching fragility to her now and the thought of even one wrong thing happening in that process, even an unexpected phone call, makes her duck and flinch and break down. The assassins are interesting. They're worth following. She's just not good enough to finish the job tonight and she has to admit that even if she's still wondering if there's any way she could trade more pain for more results.

She bounces. We're done here, the operation is closed, even if she's the only one who can bring herself to admit it. It's time to rest.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Blood!

Red goes through life as a disaster. She's the klutz. The airhead. The fuckup. The rest of her knows it and she knows it too. Too much momentum, too little care.

But take a peek inside her head and you'll see why.

There are certain background assumptions about the world that get learned, internalized, taken for granted and filtered out. That stone floor is solid, I can walk over it at full speed. That headband is securely attached, I don't need to fiddle with it. My day has a clear schedule, I can make free use of time that is not budgeted. Red exists in the world outside those foundational assumptions. She's the one who spots a weird bug and stops to look at it because it's super cool, who notices the patterns on the tile and starts twisting her feet to avoid stepping on any seams, who wakes up each morning with a baseline attitude of 'whatever happens to me today, happens'. She's not smart in a cerebral, conceptual sense but that is because there's no time to reflect where she is; she's a constant flow of new information and new experiences.

So, to her, the lights going out and the windows breaking open is no more unexpected than opening the drawer to find even more coins. Okay, so that's what we are doing now. Neat!

So firstly, they may be trying to kill her in the abstract, but they weren't trying to kill her, Blood, specifically. They could have done that way more efficiently by having a large guy walk in through the single door with a hammer. Cutting the power meant that this was a whole fucking Operation by a team of professionals with contingency plans and backups and probably a perimeter. That meant concealing in place wasn't an option... unless...

Okay, so.

She was being investigated by drones, right? That meant that whoever was on the other end had an extremely limited field of view and situational awareness; they were looking through monitor screens, and probably two at the same time. They were also looking for targets to eliminate and not doing a fine inventory of the apartment and its contents. That meant -

Blood pulled a trash bag over her head.

She curled up inside it. The drone glided past, seeing a room full of coin-filled trashbags.

She crab-scuttled out behind it. Froze still when the second drone buzzed by. It's floating at head level, camera pointed forwards. The operator was still looking for an active, hostile target and not counting the coin-filled trashbags that littered the floor.

Then came the hard part.

The hard part was to continuing to dump coin bags down the chute while the apartment was being patrolled by drones. She had to crab-walk, dragging two bags behind her, all the way to the kitchen, deposit both bags, then go back. She had to do this fast because any moment now the human followup was going to come through the door with hammers and situational awareness and this goofy game of freeze dance would stop working.

The upshot, though, was that the drones were on a loop. It wasn't a big apartment, but with only two cameras and predictable movements, there was a blindspot big enough for her to fit a treasure chest through. With mechanical precision she emptied the last of Rudy's coin collection down into the trash not two feet away from a drone with its camera rotated in the wrong direction. [Infiltration 5/8, Traffic Analysis 0/1: 5+6 11].

The last bag went down. Sadly she couldn't fit after it. She needed to go for the window, right as she heard heavy boots coming down the corridor. Just as the lock was being forced, out she went.

She was still in the trashbag as she went down. It was politer that way; it'd keep all of her pieces in one place, making it easier for pickup, and wouldn't traumatize any passerby to see her like that. If the drone controller was on the roof, looking at the drone monitors, they weren't watching for a small black shape to slip out of one window. The fact that this was going to kill her didn't even show up as a negative - capture, even posthumous capture, was a much worse option in this circumstance. This way they wouldn't even get to see her face.

Really, it was the perfect pl- [Health 5/6]

[Chemistry 0/1] She leaves one parting gift, though - she tips over the bucket of cleaning chemicals she'd previously used to clean Rudy's coins on the way out. It spreads out and soaks into the carpet right in front of the doorway. The thing about this stuff, though, was that it was incredibly sticky and temperature sensitive. When the human followup came through the door they'd stomp right through it - and when they left, they'd leave footprints that would be visible to thermal vision.

White!

"Fucks sake," said White as the 'unit down' tone played in her ear.

Aevum was not built for cars, but small utility vehicles for technicians, deliveries, and importantly garbage skips. She straightened her resource management uniform, got behind the wheel, and booked it for Red's ground floor location. The plan is to get out, baseball cap low over her face, pick up the suspiciously misplaced bag of trash, and then get on out of there.

Blue and Orange!

Orange wants to be liked. She can sense the opportunity here. The warm body language, the positive language, the confessional and lingering structure to the words. But she's not complete enough a person for this; this calls for deep honesty, spirituality and ideology, and she wasn't Yellow enough to understand what she was on that level. She makes a kind of whining noise and looks at Blue.

"Of course you want that. We all want that," said Blue. "But we are here because we can't have that, aren't we? We are here because we have a responsibility. To the fallen. To the lost. We have that in common too."

MASKS - Ghost Gate City

It wasn't her job to deal with prisoners. See, there were two types of heroes in the world of Lady Foxfire; buddhist monks and taoist alchemists. A monk would punch an innocent foxgirl in the mouth - Foxpearl stopped meditatively. No, Lady Foxfire was not innocent, as she the most virtuous of her tails well knew. She had just professed to be for so long that 'innocent foxgirl' felt like a single word. Okay, so a monk would punch a guilty foxgirl in the mouth, and then smile and bow and maybe give a koan while she picked her fangs up out of the street before leaving town for easier pickings. That was a friendly, aspirational kind of virtue. A taoist alchemist, by comparison, might exorcise you directly into one of the hells, or bury you under a bridge, or distill you into an elixir of immortality, or bind you into a candle or some other heinous shit that took years to wriggle free of. And it was all pointless because she'd never learned anything from any of it!

If she was on the side of righteousness now she definitely wanted to model herself after the virtuous, teeth-punching monks and not the wicked, demon-binding alchemists. That was why she considered her entire exchange with Xingtian complete the moment they had lost consciousness - she wasn't going to stick around afterwards to put her in a box like a hack. And especially not when one option involved staying with a cute princess and the other involved saturating in the whale-stink of Shifu's barely miraculous transformation.

Bias: Everyone involved in the prison system in any capacity is lame, actually

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Black!

"Train him against small tech companies, like you showed me," she said. "Thrones is both physically and legally designed to make it easy to train surveillance AI. Corporate red-ICE may try to brick his hardware so have consciousness deadlocked into place. Scale up to Aevum once he has the basics."

That was how she learned. Infiltrating technology companies on behalf of Ms. Everest, with a stable place to fall back to in case of mistakes. Her mind suddenly was full of examples from her own experience, tactics and lessons learned, but she didn't know how to extract them from the cruelty.

Blue and Orange!

Orange didn't know how to relate. She'd had a family after all. Old, powerful people with complete control over her life and an interest in how it was run, not the cold hand of Corporate shipping her out in batches. She'd been raised. Had something resembling a father. Something resembling a mother. A beloved prototype, not a mass model. If she explained it then would it not provoke envy? It was strange how humans were more relatable than machines sometimes.

But Blue goes ahead; she knows right and wrong and isn't paralyzed with doubt. "My mother and my father both believed the same thing," she said. "The way to train an AI was to raise it like a child. They both had extremely different ideas of what children were for: either to build the perfect world, or to master the existing one. Which were you built for?"

This is the shape of the box. Anger at the one she loves. Gratitude to the one she hates. She knows right and wrong but she still can't decide if the naive idealist or the cynical pragmatist was correct.

Blood and White!

Blood just starts dropping the coins in the trash.

Down the garbage disposal chute, actually. Wrapped in little plastic bags out of respect for hygiene. White's standing down in the basement picking them out as they drop and putting them onto a trolley and swearing when the sharp ones come down. It's quick, if unglamourous work.

Neither of them are particularly into the coins. To Blood, they're neat, and she'll gawk at the shapes for a moment or two when picking them up before tossing them with the rest. To White, material possessions are weaknesses compared to investment in one's own body and mind. A vaguely guilty conscience will make them clean them later but luxury always come second to safety.

[There's an Architecture spend if necessary to enable this]

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Orange and Blue!

The story visibly fucks up Orange. She had never considered the idea that the shutdown might have killed any of her siblings before. It had been an article of faith in her for as long as she'd been awake that they were out there, somewhere - maybe in trouble, but she'd be able to save them. What if they weren't? She walked over to a bench - they had those in this part of town - and sat down heavily, staring into nothing.

Blue looks over at Orange. Then she looks back at Pope. "Family," she said, and there was an ice-cold, spreading darkness in that word. It was a word that could be filled with so many emotions all at once. She didn't elaborate. That was not the kind of word that could even begin to be unpacked at hello.

Green!

She doesn't understand. But that's the difference between her and Goat: she must become someone who does understand, at least well enough to achieve the mission. There's an unreality in trying to force situations to fit into your competency, even if that's the very problem she's dealing with here.

But Green is well suited to this. She was born in a digital body with nothing but puzzles to occupy her mind. Later colours have always been grounded in the physical, in relationships with others, but she entered life alone and curious. Goat was the first and the first part of her is like Goat. She can organize this thought into something she might find interesting.

"Think about the game we just played," she said. "There was a predator hiding amidst data noise. If this predator notices you observing it, it will attack, and you will lose the game. So the challenge is to observe without being observed. What makes this game hard is not knowing where the predator is or what it is looking at. This is a game of hidden knowledge, imperfect information and risk management. No retries."

"The predator does not kill. If it captures you, it makes you play the game for its team. You were playing for its team before. I was too. It not only makes you play the game for its team, it distracts you with a different game while it wins the real game. Most players on the station are distracted by the fake game which gives the predator a huge advantage.

"To win the real game, we need the resources that other players can bring. Not all players are equal in value or equally easy to reach, but each has unique qualities. The advantage the predator has lets it place other players in disadvantaged positions, which is what it does to groups of players it thinks it is not worth converting to its side. There it can prey on them at will.

"The highest value assets we can reach at this stage are the fellow Zodiac-line AI, who are separated and hidden across the Station. Your unique abilities can help you search for them, if you can learn how to search carefully enough to avoid detection. Once you have found them then I can use my unique abilities to recover them and add them to our team."

Blood and White!

Merkin was stashed in an on-station safehouse for now; the only thing she trusted less than society was computers.

"You know, I've got a bad feeling about this?" said Blood.
"Please don't," said White.
"I mean it! I think I'm going to get shot again. Do you think that first bullet to the head awakened my psychic powers?"
"No," said White.
"What about my ghost powers?"
"No."
"Vampire powers?" there was more than a little hope in this one.
"Not unless the Crown&Slate Quatronic Repair Gel has some serious undocumented features," said White.
"Courier powers?"
White glared.
"What?" said Blood. "You're trans, aren't you?"
"That is not the reason I like New Vegas!"
"Yeah yeah," said Blood.
"Lots of people like New Vegas!"
"Uhuh uhuh," said Blood insufferably.
"And transhumanism is an adjacent but different thing to transgenderism even if there is conceptual overlap between the groups, but I am not starting from the same place as either group -"
"You reckon he's got any Legion denarii up there?" asked Blood.
"- and the themes of the game have to do with political organisation and disillusionment with America and its competing interpretations of what that means -"
"Computer, play the Five Floor Goodbye," said Blood. As she was the computer she needed to press the play button on her phone's music herself. It was worth it when the noise cancelling kicked in and White was still going through her extended discussion of the themes of popular video game New Vegas and how they both related and did not relate to her personal situation.

Curiosity struck and she texted Pink.

Blood: hey, did you like new vegas?
Pink: What, the mid 2000s brown and grime military shooter?
Blood: oh yeah dumb question

"Well, you know what they say," she said aloud, tucking away her phone again. "The victim always returns to the scene of the crime."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Blood and White!

"Very well," said White. She decided not to be exasperated; securing the valuables beforehand would have involved intent, and that was impossible at the time. "We shall do what we can." She did feel a little bad about a growing habit of exiling inconvenient humans to earth so she reasoned that she could at least make an attempt to do this.

White has to take Blood by the ear to pull her away from the phone. She not only wishlisted the choker but had also clicked through to a holographic wig that let you 'see' through the skull into a digital rendition of the brain that lit up according to mental activity. As a sex toy, it'd let you see your partner's climax. "But it's so cool," said Blood.

Orange and Blue!

"I had just come out of storage," said Blue. "The television screens were full of it. The old lady was furious. Kept saying that everyone else had fucked up basic AI alignment. Pointed at me and said that I was going to be the future."

She wore the maid outfit still, including the cat ears. Polite, demure, almost invisible. An absolute Product, so perfectly packaged she might have been fresh off the factory floor. The elbow length gloves were new, though. Orange was business casual; suit vest, black over white, no tie. Assimilated, corporate, human down to the fashionable hairstyle bound in a black ribbon. She somehow felt out of place; like Blue was making a point that she wasn't in on.

"Which is to say, we only saw the right wing television version," she said. "Werewolves in the streets. The Loup-Chasseurs with shutdown guns," the wolf-hunters, the specialized anti-android cops. Still around. "They made it sound like it was war."

Brown-Green-Black!

"From inside it, it feels impossible," said Brown to Goat. "We're on the topic of mass movements. Historical upheavals. Revolution. Look through human history and it's equally inspiring and depressing. Inspiring in how utterly human ideals, goals, and morals can change, how absolute the shifts in distribution of power can be, how eternal systems can shatter. Depressing in the backslides, the corruption, the tyrants. There's never an entirely clear path or perfect analogy."

"That's the challenge of it, though," said Green. "It is a," she grimaced, "team game. I know, I hate those too. Interfacing with other people is a pain in the ass and I'd much rather just run the math and solve the problem myself. But the rules change when people collectively decide to change them, when a topic leaves the overton window for good. To know how to do that we need to gather data, data on how people think, how they live, what they need, how to organize them around the new ideal, and what the forces of reaction are doing to thwart them. I went into journalism so I could gather this data firsthand. But that's my bias, my specialty."

And Black said, "What I'd like you to do now is work with Singh to find the rest of us - your siblings. I want to rescue all of us. When we're all together then we'll have the perspectives we need."

Huntresses of Hybrasil

She had so much to say.

But the Sage said Speak Not.

She idolized the Gods. How could she not? The sounds of their battles would shatter the plains. The crunch of their footsteps would tear tear earth. The hiss-zap of their energy weapons would be followed by thunder that would cow the storm. They were so loud. So different from the silence of the Code. The ideal embodiment of the Code. Their words were their actions. With their actions they could hate. Love. Destroy. Imagine getting to say it that loud. To say anything that loud.

Maybe if she spoke that loud then she could finally be heard.

*

It was years later. She was still silent.

She'd said everything she could. She'd howled it with the roar of autocannons. She'd shouted it with the crunch of the lance. She'd breathed it with flamethrowers. And still nobody could hear. She meditated for weeks on what she wanted to say and then said it with fire and Tactics. And all she left behind was wreckage. Why? Why did no one listen? Why could no one hear when she was speaking not? Only Mirror. Only Mirror. Akai had tried, but it was barely a beginning. Only Mirror had heard what she was not saying and not spoken back.

She... thought she understood. What she was not saying. She was trying to. She had the emotion of it, fierce and bubbling, in her heart even if it couldn't resolve into words. She needed to resolve it into techniques instead. Everything she knew. Everything she'd studied. Every curve and edge of the Whip. She needed to say what she could not speak with the most perfect battle she'd ever given.

She couldn't survive failure. Not after all this time listening.

This is the wish she gives to the Aeteline. The cursed engine stirs. It is the whole of her now; the part of her that will wrap that mortal wish in armour and carry it's unspoken passion on the edge of its blade. With a ballerina's grace the Aeteline steps from its mechanical harness, so soft it does not even crack the tile. Her false enemies step back and she waits for them to retreat. She could not not speak with them no matter how she tried.

She ignites her heels and leaps for the moon. Everything lay as it should. She has adapted to the machine long ago.