Thanqol

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink!

"Iron shortages date back to the early history of Japan! When the samurai wanted to make katanas they were working with poor quality iron and so accordingly needed to use the Hanzo steel-folding technique to excise impurities from the blades. Some legendary blades were forged over 1,000 times and could cut through the armour of modern main battle tanks..."

Around and around and around...

The plan was straightforwards. She would smuggle herself into the complex - using the old fare-dodger's trick of disassembling one of her colours and carrying them in a suitcase. This would form the basis of the stageshow magic tricks when she could suddenly and mysteriously split into two different identical copies.

She appreciated the perversity. Costa-Silva was ardent in her passion for moral standards, which meant she was a huge proponent of mandatory modesty bolts for androids among other things. But just like an edge of magic would skate over what she'd call scandalous clothing on Bondi if she saw it on the street, a veil of magic could transmute mechanical dismemberment into entertainment for the whole family.

"But iron ore shortages really began to bite in the Meji period, leading to the conquests of Korea and Manchuria in order to fuel Japan's industrial interests! Even then there still developed a resource rivalry between the army and the navy, which wanted to build a space battleship to defend the country from the angels..."

Across and over and under and splay and gently tighten. Don't think that she wasn't giving this her full attention - it was impossible not to. Not even her own planning or the somewhat anime influenced recounting of the history of Japanese steel production could distract her of what she was looking at, what she was touching...

And besides, getting to hear the outpouring of a hyperfixation was half of the appeal of being intimate with a trans girl.

So, that was the stageshow. The real trick would be smuggling in a third colour. It would require some doing but she could clown-car two full bodies into a single magician's suitcase and while the performance went off with two of them the third would be free to infiltrate the building and dig for dirt.

"Following the catastrophic collapse of domestic mining in the early twenty-first century, Japanese steelmaking became dependent on Australian iron ore exports until the impact of the Space Fountain devastated the continent. Those mines that remained were tiny and inefficient returning Japan to it's earlier period of steel scarcity, which lead to a revival of the traditional arts of prisoner restraint just as the internet age began! You can see the way search trends for shibari spike right as the price of iron - mmph! Mmmph!!!"

But all good things had to come to an end, didn't they?

The ball gag had not, strictly speaking, been part of the arrangement, but Pink considered it a teaching aid. She checked the knots, the weight distribution, made sure that everything rested comfortably and firmly, and then pulled on the hoist to lift Bondi from the floor. As the sudden tightness began to concentrate pressure on places that were not previously experiencing pressure she heard a high, muffled shriek from Bondi.

Pink then sat down in front of her and looked up at her magician with wide, expectant eyes.

"This is safety training," said Pink. "You keep getting into trouble because you don't know how to express yourself using body language, especially in conditions when you can't talk. How are you going to let me know that you need help in this position? How are you going to let me know what kind of help you need?"

She smiled. Of course, that would only be relevant if she couldn't escape from it in the first instance. It would only be fair to let her try her best before she had to beg for mercy~

*

Red!

Buzzing from the enthusiastic compliment, Red spent most of the monologue making a heart-symbol with her hands to communicate attentive affection. Then she bounced over to the urgent cases with the inevitability of a meteor strike.

"Oh wow," she said. "For real? A human tried to go a round in the Breakdome?"
"Yeah, added a cybernetic brain implant, chromed himself up a bit to look androidy, whole nine yards. Of course it's always the idiots who buy intelligence implants who go with plans like this."
"But why the ruse? Surely they'd love to have a human cyborg contestant?"
"He bet everything on himself, thought that no way a virus tuned for an android would cause problems with his implant."
"Did... did he not know that android brains are modeled on human brains?"
"Yeah guess the intelligence implant didn't help him figure out that one, huh?"

Red looks over the notes. The virus was meant to affect vocal processing, altering external voices to sound like they were the listener's own voice, coming from inside their head. The idea was that it could make external speech sound like inner thoughts and thus form the basis for suggestion - but she had no idea what the fuck that would mean for a human brain. "So, uh, what do we do about it?"

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink!

White has, at times, questioned many fundamental aspects of their mind - their gender and sexuality not least amongst them. Why do we present in a feminine way? What is the basis for finding humans beautiful in abstract, and female humans desirable specifically? Our neural architecture was not modeled upon human brains and was designed for space construction. Many of the other Zodiacs never expressed an interest in humans at all, let alone the specifics of their physicality - why us? Were we reprogrammed? Was this a trauma response? Was this always a part of us? Why, upon becoming human shaped, did we become so relentlessly thirsty for human women?

All the wrong questions, in Pink's mind. The answer was simply that human women were objectively beautiful, and now she was finally positioned to do something about it.

She had always known this, even when she was a rogue thought pattern giving Green a distracting headache - a headache that had started when Green had first beaten the original Metroid. She was that thought, in the same way that Red was 'be ready for anything!'. When it came to justifying her fundamental position she found the Bond/Bondi transition to be the most useful case study she had access to. Yes, as Bond he was kind of cute, but she could write poetry about Bondi. In fact, she could write an operational plan to break into a cartel mansion while also putting on the performance of her life for Bondi. And she had, it had all come together in a flash of colour and she'd become the operational commander. Thoughts about girls were both paralyzing and inspiring in a way that thoughts about guys were not and she would drag her entire distributed consciousness behind her towards this fixation.

Black had once joked that if Green ever started becoming interested in males Pink would kill her.

Pink had given it serious thought.

"I'd love that!" said Pink, taking the suit. "I haven't been practicing enough - can you help me train? I want to be the best I can be!"

Red!

She used the term 'death' for what happened to her because she enjoyed drama, but it was more like a reset and genuinely relaxing to emerge from it. Despite her ditzy air she was generally a bundle of stress. Everything was immediate, everything was threatening, everything compounded on everything else, doors and corners are where they get you - it was such a relief to wipe that back to zero and hit the world for a while with a brain chill and empty. It was a similar after-shock to the morning after ill advised sex. On that note, she was getting texts from Sophie!

She's beta testing the dragon scales. Not a full spread, more like an anime dragongirl scattering across her body and a small few on her cheeks. Fingernail sized, hard, sharp and overlapping like scale armour - in theory protective but worn in a configuration more akin to a chainmail bikini. She liked the way they made her move, extremely aware of her elbows and hips. She'd run her fingers over them constantly and was wearing a crop top and shredded jeans to show them off a little more.

The crop top had a neon pink skull, incidentally, and she was wearing egyptian-style eyeliner. A headphones-necklace with an ankh symbol, with the faint sounds of Linkin Park emanating from it. Her aesthetic was retro-goth, radiant in her resurrection, with the dangerous sharpness of the scales making it come together into something vaguely daemonic. She finished the effect with a disposable medical face mask - she was going to hang out with a brain surgeon, after all.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Orange!

She had never liked Mr. Merkin, to be perfectly honest. She had kept her distance professional, but privately had alternated between contempt and pity. This was a bad person trapped in a hell of their own devising, someone who had put themselves before others past the point of pulling the trigger. What she had done for him was courtesy and not kindness, and now that she was done with him she fully intended to discard him to Earth and never think about him again.

But something stirred in her then. For the first time she saw something she understood in his eyes. Something she could relate to.

"It is... hard," she said. She was looking at her hands. "Being separated from your Purpose. It never goes away. I was made for construction. It makes me itch even being here when my every instinct is telling me to scrap and redo this building. It's..." she flexes her fingers. "Having skills you can't use hurts. Your thoughts become ingrown. It'll feel like a toxic weight in your brain. Curdling, heavy, occasionally manifesting in flashes of rage. You'll try substitutes. Nothing will work because it's not the real thing."

Her eyes flicked up. "But it does go away when you're talking to people," she said. "Like, really talking to them. Not just making small talk or politely sitting through a conversation. Many people have... something like a Purpose. Most of them have never been asked what it is. Ask the right questions for long enough and it'll start to pour out of them. You'll probably not find another forensic accountant that is your peer in skill, not down there. But you will find people who are your peers in passion. Listen to them."

She holds the door open for him.

*

Yellow!

The Hermes mansion was the target. In some ways it was a harder target than the military base.

A cartel mansion was, after all, secured against infiltration. One person getting in and out unobserved was the whole threat profile it was meant to be secured against. A rival gang sending in an assassin, or a team of assassins, was the threat profile. The foundation would include a steel ring to prevent people from tunneling in. Independent power generators and secured utilities, built like a bank vault. People everywhere. The kind of infiltration she'd used against Goat, involving stealth and explosions, was utterly unviable here.

Which meant that the approach needed to be social. People did come in and out constantly - there were too many of them, too wealthy and independent to hole up in their stronghold all day. Costa-Silva didn't go out to cafes or restaurants, which meant that when she conducted business people had to come to her. And it meant that when there was a party, celebration or other social event, lots of people had to come to her.

Dignified people. People with names, identities, reputations and entourages. People who weren't what the threat profile of the building was designed to secure against. She just needed to tag along with one of them.

[Network: 3, 9 points remaining] And here at last was a use case for Bondi Magnusson, faildaughter ex-billionaire turned stage magician. A ludicrous figure who spent bankruptcy hearings practicing card tricks who had just gotten out of hospital for another failed act of escape artistry, she was a living monument to the power of sheer inherited wealth to overcome endless bad decisions. Naturally, she was a hit at parties - and with nine children, two parents, and various holidays and festivals there was almost a 50-50 chance that there was a party of some kind falling in her operational window.

Bondi was one of Brittenette Everest's friends - she'd walked them to and from university numerous times. And for all her faults, Bondi was progressive in a way only mildly shaped by the brain damage of her first failed attempt to escape the water tank. That meant she'd insisted on both swapping contact details with November, chatting with her constantly afterwards and sleeping with Orange on several occasions. All she really had to do was place the idea of the party's presence in Bondi's mind and within the next three lines of dialogue she would have expressed both an intention to attend and an invitation to take November with her.

White!

"Fuck!" said White, immediately cracking her skull against the door frame.

There were evidently a few drawbacks to being over two hundred and twenty centimeters tall.

She had decided to transition in stages. Cost reasons were the main driver, but gradual adaptations would help with easing her into it. The first stage was structural - she needed a sufficiently large canvas to paint on - and that meant improving height, weight and strength. She felt a strange, aching stiffness in her powerful new muscle fiber bunches - stretches that had previously been easy now ached satisfyingly whenever she did them. She could not stop wondering if she could put her new fist through a plaster wall. She could not stop wondering if she could pick up Crystal.

The new chassis was not beautiful, an industrial hauler model. But it could be. But more importantly it felt right. In absolute terms, she had not gotten much closer to her original form. But... but relatively, it was night and day. This was a body with agency. Previously she'd asserted herself with intensity and words, but now it felt like there was something backing all that. That she was not entirely relying on a bluff, that if challenged she could prove superiority on a baseline, physical level. Meaningless, operationally. It didn't tilt a balance built on systems and guns. But subjectively it meant everything. It meant that there wasn't the shadow of doubt over every word she said. It meant that confidence didn't feel like a lie. It meant that she didn't have to rely on others playing along in order to feel like she could protect them.

And she would. She would prove her strength by those she sheltered. Already she ached for her wings.

MASKS - Ghost Gate City

Hsien Lang had her arm up to the elbow inside the vending machine. She turned and stared with fish-eyed blankness at Joshua Chan, the kind of dead eyed uncomprehending stare that made it plain that there was not even the conceptual framework in place to explain why she shouldn't do this. She knew all about virtue, discourse, Posadism, and girls. This was... just, like, how you got snacks.

"Hungry," she explained. She tried to give it some more juice to reach the tofu sticks that were extremely clearly out of reach. The vending machine wobbled dangerously. "Hunting."

"But you hear that, Shifu? You're too obvious. You really need to learn how to move stealthily," she stuck her tongue out as she strained, fingernails scratching at the plastic at the bottom of the forbidden tofu bar. "Like me! You can't just go miraculously perfectly transforming into whales all the time, you need to use your head. Be smart!"

She tried to pull her arm back out of the machine to change her position. It was stuck in place.

[Shifu, Hsien wants to shift your Superior up and your Savior down]

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Black: We are not infiltrating a military base.
Green: We can totally infiltrate a military base

There was no daylight between those statements being posted. Exact same cognitive speed and reflexes. Exact same intensity.

Black: Listen. Green. The Aevum Military is the organization with the most to gain by commissioning its own line of specialized combat androids. They're the single entity most hungry for robot flesh for their grinders. With robot armies they could achieve their ambitions of peacekeeper forces on Earth. If there was any way for them to have androids they would have androids.
Black: But there isn't because military anti-android technology is more advanced than even they know how to stop.
Black: You know how fascists will spray-paint those virus-embedded QR codes on buildings to fuck up passing androids? That's the baby version of military MEDUSA-Code.
Black: They're so good at infowar that they live like cavemen on their own bases because they'll brick any electronic devices they take in.
Green: That's a solvable problem. We have a location, that's enough to begin operational planning. We can engineer a move and then hit while transporting. Steal a train!
Black: Do you think that the military will not air strike a train.
Black: I don't know how to say this. We cannot enter a kinetic exchange with the military and win.
Black: Either on a personal or a political level.
Black: Because, what, we're going to publish the truth that the Aevum Military is doing something underhanded with AI? A single digit number of AI? Do you think that's going to incite popular unrest at a time where they just unpersoned ten percent of the station's population?
Green: This is all speculation. We won't know the security vulnerabilities or lack thereof until we begin observing the facility.
Black: The facility will be on high alert for exactly such an observation.
Black: Our other plan literally involves an operation against a supreme court justice and it's not even close to this risk profile.
Blue: What if we had our original bodies though?
Black: ... o.O
Blue: I could kaiju right through the front gate. Blow up tanks.
Red: Laser breath!
Pink: Holding Crystal in our hand as we climb the Olympus Spire.
Black: Getting shot by fighter planes!
Pink: Yeah sure we'd die but what better way to communicate that man is the real monster?

*

Orange!

Strange to think that Merkin is just like Goat in that way. Terrified by the weight of boredom. Unable to function outside a specialty. Games of numbers, games of system engineering - pure-hearted nerds who didn't mind their slavery as long as it kept them from boredom. How much of the world was built by people like them? Missile designers who just loved the interactions of high energy physics? Procurement specialists who considered a well-negotiated contract to be its own reward, even if that contract was for a military black sites? Movie producers who'd churn out shallow propaganda just for the chance to work in film?

The problem with intelligence was that it craved being used. It was one of the most insidious desires of all. She was no exception.

It had surprised her the most when she saw Jsef Cantrillo's name. A senior contract negotiator, he had been one of the most warm, composed and reasonable people she had ever encountered - the kind of person who could successfully negotiate a government contract with Mrs. Everest on a bad day. The kind of person no amount of surveilling could find dirt on. But then, wasn't social adroitness just another skill? Wasn't that mindset just as vulnerable to the need to be useful as doing financial or technical math?

She's not surprised to see SLAM! *click*'s name. SLAM! *click* (you pronounced slam long and drawn out while grinning, 'SLAAaaaaaam...' and then you clicked your tongue. Ideally you also made finger guns throughout this. All SLAM! *click* employees were contractually obligated to say it this way every time.) was the avatar of the New Economy - the conglomerate behind Headpattr, Roofdash, and every other kind of no-overhead gig work labour laws are there to be disrupted startup corporation. Their business model involved companies going out of business after the investigations had begun but before the lawsuits. There had always been rumours that SLAM! *click* was involved in money laundering, more financial shell game than real business but for the real businesses it drove into bankruptcy to help cover its tracks.

It had a vibe like it was three days away from bankruptcy itself - a failing tech startup that it wasn't worth going after because it was perpetually underwater. But Mrs. Everest had held a 20% stake in the company and had never gestured towards selling it no matter what the headlines said - and it paid regular and reliable dividends. Rather than being an aspect of the disaster economy, then, SLAM! *click* wore the disaster economy as an aesthetic to cover what was a real and serious business model underneath.

"I cannot promise anything," she said to Merkin, "but I will at some point try to get my hands on Slam-click's," she used the colloquial, just the words slam and click without the fingerguns or grins, "real ledgers. If I do, I'll see about letting you take a look at them." She couldn't think of a nicer thing she could do for someone like Merkin.

Yellow!

It's going to be Costa-Silva of Hermes. She already has the information on police scandals so that could act as a multiplier if released at the same time as one of their political champions was tarnished. In a political crisis you could only run cover if you weren't directly implicated. A hard target, but a good one.

She decides to find something real if she can first. She can use innuendo or fabrication as a backup, but that would damage the credibility of the Anthropozine which she will continue to rely on in the future, even if the collective Well-Actuallies into discovering legit corruption. Fabrication is a clear plan-B, though.

With the target selected, the focus narrows. Where is Costa-Silva's house? Her bank? Her accountant? What is the shape of the targets she'll need to hit as viewed from the outside? She can dial in once she knows the basic topography.

Breathless Dead

Dolce!

The skulls hit the table. One of them chips. They're fascinating, almost childlike - you feel like you could crush one into powder with your fists if you set your mind to it. It's hard to imagine how a creature could even survive with bones that fragile.

"Incredible, aren't they?" said the Crystal Knight to Princess Redana. "An independently evolved, intelligent species - growing up only three gates from here! I could hardly believe our fortune when we discovered them. Entirely untouched by Biomancy, barely above the late medieval period. What a treasure! You can keep these, of course, they're gifts - I have plenty more."

The house of Triden was a place of maps. Not maps of the world as it was, maps of the world as it would be. Fascinating, beautiful, interconnected - every valley a garden, every city a paradise. They covered the walls, the ceilings, the floors - the master cartographer drifted without gravity, brush illustrating in incredible detail the future of Bitemark. She only looked up at the Crystal Knight vaguely, but Princess Redana was giving her full tight-lipped attention.

"You might think that a novel alien species might be worthless," the Crystal Knight went on. "Not so! See, while evolution may have laws, it also has surprises - things that develop in isolation can sometimes have some genuinely novel ways of going about things. This is valuable inspiration for Biomancers who oftentimes," she made a face, "get stuck in the rut of Afane sealife or Earth vertebrate mammals. An alien world means entirely new paradigms for servitor species! But more than that, it means entirely new paradigms for sociology! Many people forget that sociology is the other half of biomancy, but getting to see an entirely unique lifeform's methods for social cohesion cannot help but be fascinating."

She picked up one of the skulls which still had a metal circlet wrapped around its head. A crown? "For instance, humans," she grinned, "have a tendency to band together against external threats, and fall to entropy in conditions of stress. Most human servitors are human patterned in this same way. But these little darlings - we call them Dredges - we believe to be the opposite. We're running a test. I landed on the planet, went around to every Dredge king or queen or emperor of note, killed them in front of their entire court, and declared I would return in seven years to fight whatever warrior or army the kingdom set against me. And now we're going to watch what happens! The Biomancers theorize that this relatively minor intervention will cause a total system collapse without me even having to return. Imagine building a servitor species that doesn't need a whole invasion fleet to Decommission - one Azura showing up and saying 'boo!' would cause them to panic so hard that their civilization collapsed on its own. Wonderful!"

The air between the Crystal Knight and Princess Redana could have frozen. But that was the point. You could see it in the curl of her tail, in the easy flex of fingers across that strange silver belt attachment. The Crystal Knight was provoking the Imperial Princess to a duel which would remove her from the safety of Zeus' laws of hospitality. One atrocity became the means to perform another.

20022 saw it too. He gave a firm, polite cough. The spell was broken and the Crystal Knight's eye snapped around, cerulean-teal, slitted, and furious. "What!?" she hissed.

20022 bowed politely. "Lord Governor," said 20022. "We were not expecting you. We have a meeting scheduled with Imperial Princess Redana."

"We?" hissed the Crystal Knight. She loomed. Azura were huge and she was no exception, a battle-scarred warrior, turquoise scales chipped and broken, coils and coils and coils. "I know you, meddler, but who is this?" It was impossible to break her gaze, Dolce. It was impossible to know if she was coming closer or if she'd activated her Grav-Rail and was lifting you, weightless, from the ground. She was transfixing and everything else dropped away.

"You smell fresh," she purred. The anger had gone. She was all smile. Just one smile, unchanging. "You smell alive. You haven't internalized the Skies like your friend, so what are you? His apprentice? His replacement?" she was close now. When she smiled you could see her fangs as her tail wrapped around your legs. "If so, you'll be seeing a lot of me. That's why I'm hoping we can get off on the right," squeeze, "foot. Don't you think ♥?"

Dyssia!

Your eyes slip, and you see the gods.

First amongst them is Demeter. She stands upon the barren world with Hades' stolen scythe in her hand. She stands astride the gate of Death and none may pass below her.

Blood splashes the soil and immediately she raises it up. The drones are simple creatures, barely more than fungi, and where their shells crack and their life spills she causes the eruptions of grasses, mushrooms and minor insects. The basic building blocks of an ecosystem, the first lurches of evolution on this hurricane stone forest. Swarms of algae vomit forth unending tides of oxygen as they drip from mucous-soaked rocks down into fast flowing rivers and stagnant streams. Life has come to this planet and she will never, ever let it leave.

Where one of the Pix fall, worthier blood conjures worthier life. A dead soldier produces a hound, or an eagle, or a flock of doves. One glorious hero who catches her eye especially she raises as a crab. The more drones the Pix kill, the richer the ecosystem they will live in in their 'afterlife'.

You know that it has been centuries since death has walked the galaxy, but the way this consumptive, violent war seems to be a particularly horrifying form of terraforming a desolate rock into a tropical rainforest is still not internalized on an emotional level. This is not right - but it is a Blessing. Kind are the gods.

Mars is here too. Husband to Demeter, he nevertheless oversees the Pix exclusively, walking amongst them with encouragement and smiles, a word here, a flash of steel there. Sometimes he seems to be calmly professional, other times inspiringly stupid, wearing a big smile and a thumbs up as he clotheshangers half a dozen drones to give some staggered Pix a chance to regain their feet and their formation. If any analogy ever felt right it's that he seems like a plastic action figure, stiff and rigid and bodyslamming enemies into submission - or a plastic miniature on a battlefield of pure tactical skill where his absurdity belies genuine brilliance. A toy soldier god of a toy soldier species, all wound up and kicking ass for justice and survival.

To lose the favour of Mars so entirely, then, should be a disaster for the Wayang. They are at odds with the God of War and, whatever else this is, it is a war. Their drones pay the price in the tens of thousands. But still they work, still they pray, and still they offer. But if not to Mars, then who?

You see Aphrodite in the distance amongst them. He gives you a smile and a wave of his cigarette. Then he looks at his silver wristwatch.

That is when you hear the

tick
HATE
tick
HATE
tick
HATE

...

something important is not happening

...

tick
HATE
tick
HATE
tick
HATE

...

salvation is not getting any closer

these deaths buy no time

everything is pointless

...

the pounding of the clock. an old, mechanical, clockwork thing, wound up springs and gears. the gears of time itself, grinding away in that old fashioned pocketwatch.

When Zeus struck down her monstrous father she imprisoned him in linear time. All his bones were broken and he was pulled long and thin. Where once he was all consuming, formless and eternal now he was, beat after beat, crushed into a comprehensible shape. Once no one could escape him. Now with every passing second he has to let them free from his grasp. The only part of him that survived was his monstrous, severed phallus, containing within it all his nightmarish lusts.

And this one above all.

The Biomancers created the Pix. Now they are killing them.

And Cronus cannot help but love those who devour their children.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Black!

She opens with the video footage of fire pouring out of Merkin's apartment window. He might have seen already. Might not. Important point to make, and she makes it in silence.

You can never go home.

She plays the video in silence for a full minute before Orange pushes in the cart with the entire coin collection. She makes that point in silence, too - on the top of the box is a handwritten inventory of everything she recovered, including its position in the storage for quick access. She'll give him a minute there as well.

She hates being here. The weight of the station's broken architecture feels like scars on her body. Every misplaced door or missing pavement puts her on edge, tells her broken, failure, repair required.

"... it wasn't us who burned down the apartment, by the way," said Orange, glancing over at Black's looming stare and seeing immediately how it could be misinterpreted. "That was your employers cleaning house, and we almost got caught in it. She's just a dramatic bitch."

Yellow!

It was surprisingly useless information, really.

Not unimportant. But this was a matter of public record come a few weeks early. The people responsible knew that protests and riots would come from this, that was priced in - which meant that a few weeks of protests and riots leading up to it would not change the calculus. In fact, publishing this tomorrow would get the court to simply focus on the fact of the leak and ignore the wider discussion. What were the words they used last time? This leak is the gravest, most unforgivable sin.

The problem here was that these people were legitimacy golems, process made manifest. Nothing she could do on an individual, heroic level, nothing the public could do on a collective, organized level could deter them. They would follow the process even as it ate the stars.

... but the same cut in reverse.

She only needed one of them to be corrupt before the veil of Process was disrupted. If she did that then the same defense that let them be outraged at leaks would work in reverse. If she could change this story from 'The supreme court decided...' to 'corrupt supreme court justice Trelawney sold out human rights to the insurance corporations...'. That was the twist that would make it unpalatable to normies. They'd still do it, to be sure. But they'd have to do it mask off.

And she had two weeks to pull this off. That meant she'd need to plan this operation as a frame job. It would be amazing if she could find something real in that time but she frankly did not have the time to be sure she would find that. She'd look for which of them was the most corrupt seeming, the one with the most rumours and suspicious wealth. That way, if and when they investigated they'd find something even if the original connection she created fell apart in the end. What was it they said? Get followed by cops long enough and they'll eventually find something to book you on.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

Tactics means something different when you are the greater.

As the lesser, Tactics is about closing the gap; understanding habits, identifying weak points, undoing your opponent. The onus is on you to change a predetermined destiny of defeat. It means taking risks, gambling everything on a blade that pierces your opponent's heart and reactor core in the same stroke. In some ways it is easier.

But now she has the superior god. She does not need stratagem. She needs only to be aware of stratagem. To watch her flanks and her instincts and be prepared for a plan born of desperation. She can already see the shape of it, with the unregistering of the Makhaira and the disappearance of the Kathresis. Had Akai taken up her refuse once again? It would be an act of love, certainly, but one that would condemn her forever to be Solarel's shadow.

But then, this was what Akai fought for. The chance to beat Solarel at her best. The chance to rise out of that shadow. For love. This was no distracted, half-hearted maiden who would fold as soon as she asked them to. This was the second most pure foe she had ever faced, one who knew how she spoke not, whose entire future was premised on her victory on this battle. She would bring everything she had and fight for her dream.

Alas that her dream depended upon defeating Solarel at her peak. She would watch and miss no detail. She would hold nothing back.

And that included her off field assets. She calls the Boatmen of Styx and asks them to discover what her rival was hiding.

[Call upon a toxic power: 8]

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Black!

She retrieves the briefcase. It's frictionless.

That's a rare feeling. To be a part of someone else's operation. To have a colleague who she doesn't need to oversee. Discomforting, to know that other people are smart. To think there are things she doesn't have to control. It's easier if she has to do all the work. With something like this she's encountered someone who she can't condescend to, but doesn't yet know the failure points of. Maybe he gets sloppy. How? When? She doesn't know. He did this too well for her to know why she can't trust him.

She will wait patiently, then. This isn't her operation, she'll let herself be handled at whatever pace Pope is comfortable with. Her only acknowledgement of receipt is a black heart reaction emoji appended to the photograph he took of the courthouse in the moments before Blue and Orange arrived.

Black!

November: I appreciate what you're telling me.
November: I hope I do not come off as distant. I will be as honest as I can be with you: I am managing you right now.
November (Orange): Professionally.
November: I am withholding data and drip feeding you revelations for effect. This is because I am neck deep in an investigation and before long I shall need to look into getting a snorkel.
November: Right now I have both more than you'd expect and less than you'd hope.
November: So, I must make an unfair request. You feature heavily in my current contingency plan for if the shit does in fact hit the scramjet. It would cause problems if you had already gotten yourself igualad for putting yourself on the front line.
November (Red): or killed yourself with opiates and sleep deprivation
November: You represent a rare source of credibility. It would be professionally damaging if you burned out before I do.
November: This is a big ask based on no evidence. If the choice is between my vague insulation and using your platform to confront a clear and present danger I am well aware I have no right to question your decision.
November: But if the choice is between my career defining scoop and giving yourself a late twenties heart attack from soaking your ramen in energy drinks, I would politely request you give some consideration to the former.

Breathless Dead

Dolce!

"This is the sort of thing that is debated at great lengths internally in the Service," said 20022. "The answer, to a degree, flows down from the top. At the absolute top is the Saoshyant, the monarch-prophet of the Skies. She appoints from her court a series of Ministers, some overseeing particular sectors or geographic areas, some overseeing concepts like military readiness or planetary terraforming. I am a member of the Ministry of Planetary Repair. These Ministers set policy and define glory and hold absolute power over their Ministries, though much of what they do is filtered through the Secretaries of each Ministry, who are like us."

This... the Tides of Poseidon were the same, weren't they? You remember from a dream. The eaters of worlds, the shattering bureaucracy that tried to break the stars of man. Just another extension of the Azura system of government.

"While Ministers come and go, Secretaries are eternal - until retirement - which give them a lot of power and discretion," said 20022. "If the Minister demands results, then the Secretary must produce those results, but it is often up to them to decide how that will be done. The Secretary then further delegates down the line, until they reach me. If a member of the public objects to one of my decisions they can challenge me legally, at which point my manager would assess the decision. If they agree with me, then the citizen can either drop their complaint or escalate it to the next rank. Some complaints do get escalated all the way to the Minister, who can order entire branches decommissioned if they are overstepping or ineffective."

"But, there is still a lot of room for self expression and personalization of results," said 20022. "So, what does glory mean for me? It means reducing the time that this world spends cut off from the Skies as a war-scarred backwater from centuries to decades. To look at a thriving, interconnected planet sitting astride major commercial slipway lanes would be glorious to me, I think."

Dyssia!

If you told the ancients of the distant past that twenty thousand years from their birth wars would be waged with pike and muscle they might have assumed that nothing would have changed. War would be war, they would think, as eternal and unshifting as the seasons. That kinship in weapons would mean a kinship in results.

They would have to be told that every soldier in fifty thousand fought like a God to even begin to understand.

The Pix are an armed and armoured warrior species at the height of their power. Their designers hoped not just to match but surpass the legendary Wolves of Ceron. It is not with perfect teamwork that they fight, like the wolves, but with perfect ambition. Every soldier of the line has trained in secret to for every role in case the opportunity to steal a badge and advance should arrive. This makes each soldier a strategos. It makes the movements of the formation one of unparalleled genius. Armies in ancient days needed to suppress the instincts of their soldiers, slave their collective will to a single commander, rendering the vast masses inert and brainless. Not here. There are no orders here, not even any communication. Everyone just knows when to turn a flank, when to retreat, when to charge. No mass of people ever moved anything like this.

The drones come in waves.

Drones are not independent life forms. They need to be tended and quickened by the Biomancers. In the distance you can see the Biomancer Wayang - their shadow-puppets, tall and spindly avatars of bone and flesh, hands thick with chemical dispensers. They walk amongst still-stirring drones, surrounded by their massive sentinel bodyguards, injecting stimulants and balancing unstable growth patterns. They are like artillerymen loading shells, and when they are ready they release a silent mass of flesh and stone like a single shot.

There is cunning in them, too. Their tools are brainless but they are not, and their weapon is crude but they know when to hold it in reserve and when to fire so quickly that poorly grown drones collapse and are trampled by their fellows before they even hit the Pix lines.

Now and then a particularly brilliant maneuver of the Pix will see a fox or a squad strike deep enough to butcher the Wayang; they fall apart in fountains of yoghurt-like nutrient slurry and pheromone gland bursts that send their sentinel protectors clawing at the remains in blind confusion. It's heartening. Every hour feels like a victory. The morning feels like a triumph. No one is tired. The stamina of the gods and perfect force rotation keeps everyone in fighting shape.

But they are millions still.