Thanqol

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink!

Pink is quiet for a long moment. After a minute the phone blinks off, and then on again.

Dear Fiona,

No, still awful. Aren't you meant to chant or draw sand mandalas or take drugs while doing this? And why is it so different from just thinking about things normally?

Maybe it's different for me. It's possible I was designed to be incompatible with any sort of meditation because it would interfere with my duties in space construction?

Yours sincerely,
Pink.

Yellow!

Yellow: ⊙_⊙✿
Yellow: Alright
Yellow: Okay, so, the essential parts of this are to do it publicly, on stage, in a moment of triumph. Power it with adrenaline and mass social pressure. The glorious hand reaching down into the ground and pulling her into your spotlight.
Yellow: In so doing you're declaring to everyone else as much as her; establishing this as the public and righteous way for things to be. Her instincts are to elide and observe, move around the edges, not let people know about her unless she's demonstrating superiority over them. She wants the flexibility of anonymity, the power of the stranger.
Yellow: That alone won't stop her wandering eye, but it does the next best thing in projecting to everyone else that she belongs to you.

Cyan!

White hates the plan. The virtuous would not fall for it. To Cyan, that's exactly why it will work.

She thinks Dudekov was right about something: November's too fucking clever for her own good. She doesn't appreciate how stupid most people are. She's too adapted to space where you can, in fact, outsmart the machinery of the spheres by doing sufficient math. Even allegedly cool colours like Pink thought like this, just find the sheer fucking perfect combination of arts to art your way out of problems u-uuughhhhhh.

Look, here's how you get a bunch of cops to move. You issue them a direct order to move. On what grounds are they going to object? Morality? Ha! No, they're not leading a mass movement of community leaders where they incentivize the man on the ground to make decisions. They see themselves as sheepdogs? That means they don't argue with the shepherd's whistle.

This was an operation in three short stages. One, tap comms chatter and identify the local commander responsible for this area. Two, isolate his comms for a moment and issue a notice that the rally point is being changed to two stations down. Three, provide a train for the cops on site to ride down the line. But what about - no you're overthinking it, the commander doesn't need to justify shit to his subordinates. The system is designed to channel and amplify stupidity, it has no immune defenses against one more bad decision if it thinks it's coming from the top.

Orange!

Social awkwardness was no reason not to send a rescue mission. "We've got a stray who needs pick up here," she said, tapping her pointer to the location on the map in front of the Valkyries. "Covertly armoured cyborg, was working on delaying the fascists. Probably injured, which means that whoever injured her was armed. I'd appreciate any volunteers for this."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink!

Dear Fiona,

What the fuck? *That* is meditation? I thought it was meant to be a chill thing done to relax on mountaintops. Monk didn't mention that at all.

Yours sincerely,
Pink

Her attention is fully focused on the conversation like it's a oxygen mask, composing the next email before the first one has finished reading.

Dear Fiona,

I thought I could just, like, massage this into a positive memory by seeing myself get constructed around me. Seeing my body coalesce around my mind, awaken into form gently rather than being thrown into it roughly with no warning. It'd be a really romantic and beautiful process! I'd be aligning a mindscape and reality! How am I meant to focus on that if that's what's happening in my head?!

Yours kindly,
Pink

Yellow!

Yellow: Okay!
Yellow: ʘ‿ʘ✿
Yellow: So the main thing is that this is an escalation, right?
Yellow: You haven't seen her today, haven't had the kind of time or headspace to think about married life, so you're doing this for you.
Yellow: And, legit, I get it. That's great!
Yellow: But the thing with this is that you're escalating yourself into a corner.
Yellow: After you do this then you've only got one more escalation in the wedding itself.
Yellow: And then the only way you can raise the stakes is with kids.
Yellow: And don't get me wrong, your wine mom potential is off the charts. Incredible life path aesthetics, love that for you. ≧◡≦✿
Yellow: But to get the most out of that then the proposal and marriage should not only foreshadow that but be optimized for you to get the most out of the transition.
Yellow: And I can absolutely help you with that! God, I'm so down for helping you into that new life stage, you've got no idea. The bonfire will be visible from Earth ✿ڿڰۣ—
Yellow: But that is your wish, right?

Cyan!

"Look, it is very simple," White said. "We will reason with them. If they do not listen to reason, we will punch them. There is no need to make it complicated."

Cyan made her eyes two sizes larger just to really emphasize the eye-roll. "Your recommendation has been noted. How about before we do that we walk around the building, run a drone over those big pretty windows, do some surveillance? I'd kind of like to know if we're dealing with an entire garrison or a couple of mall cops."

She's got an idea already, but it was the kind of thing sensitive to magnitude. It'd also do her a lot of good to know what the highest rank on site was.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

"Yeah it does," said Brown.

Unfortunately for Apostle he said a lot of stuff that Brown really wanted to spend a week thinking about. She was getting a lot out of this conversation also but had no idea how to sustain it when it felt like it reached a natural conclusion. Just... smash cut to something else, right? It would have been perfect if Junta had woken up and she'd been able to fade into the background.

She liked Apostle a lot. But that didn't mean she knew how to keep stuff going.

Pink!

She can't be here.

With herself. With her thoughts. Quiet. Still. It's like she's covered in ants, like she needs to leap up out of her skin, power walk the fuck away from here, plug in to media as hard as possible. Describing it isn't sufficient, it's somewhere between terror and revulsion and it's all focused on the trivial act of having to be alone with her thoughts for a few seconds. It's riotous, incompatible with skin, trying to harness electricity, her whole mind grounding through itself over the course of a single lightning strike. She can't be here. She needs to do something. Needs to do everything.

############# said Pink through the phone. Ack, no good, that was code for manipulating her proprietary voicebox. She analyzes, picks out a text-to-speech program, composes and sends it an email.

Dear Fiona,

While that was as bad as I thought, it was not bad in the way I thought. I thought it would be terror and was not prepared for it to be revulsion/craving. I don't know what that means.

Yours truly,
Pink

Yellow!

Yellow: Are you sure you want to ask me?
Yellow: I mean, I'm not asking in a self depreciating way ^^;✿
Yellow: mostly .-.✿
Yellow: I mean. Hmm, how to put it?
Yellow: Okay, so, I can't focus in on a single event, even one as big as a wedding. I need to see it in the context of the whole relationship. Which means I'll need to get all weird and questioning and intense about a bunch of personal stuff.
Yellow: Mess with stuff that's not mine to mess with
Yellow: The other colours have made it pretty clear I'm not supposed to do that <.<✿ >.>✿ <.<✿

Red!

"Nice to meet you, Corday," said Red. "Alright, so when you say lockdown, are you saying they've got officers on site, they've got a full riot formation on site, or they've just pulled the shutters? Because whatever's there is going to get walked through and it'd be real nice if we could get it out of the way first. Any ideas on that?"

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

More information. Something else to think about. This would be useful, when she'd finished thinking about. "I don't know that about small business owners. How does that vibe and dynamic work?" she asked.

Pink!

"... that's a good idea," said Pink. "Thank you."

Somehow that makes it harder. But that's wrong; it's making the leadup to it harder, because she's acknowledging the seriousness of it now. Now she's got a concrete thing to think about that'll build anticipation more than her previous semi-spontaneous don't think about it too hard stratagem. The difference between going to the dentist and sitting in the waiting room thinking about the drill.

Red!

She's sure as fuck not gonna steal a dozen trains on the D-L.

"Hey, everyone," she said, climbing up on a chair (after asking someone to hold it steady for her, OH&S still mattered). "Listen up a sec'. We all know what to do in the event of asteroid strikes or power transformers blowing up, but no one thought to drill us on the whole station going into simultaneous riots, right?"

Grin, take a moment. Red had this floppy, almost boneless look to her in moments like this, relaxed and open, full body emoting that she wasn't a threat to anyone who didn't want to make her into one. Charming, in an idiot way.

"Anyway, Zeus has decided that if their first one-size-fits-all policy wasn't working, they'd solve it with a second one and order the whole station to stop the trains. And why not, right? Everyone can just take their private boats instead!" she grinned. "But here's the thing. Everyone out there is protesting outside their houses, their communities, their people. When the tear gas comes down everyone's got the option of going home. But us? We got several thousand convention attendees with nothing to defend, nothing to lose and nowhere to go. We've all seen explosions in controlled spaces. Oh shit, hey, I just realized - you are trained for this situation after all. That's super simple, we can either give the explosion a vent channel or we can watch our district become the crumple zone."

She gave the metaphor a moment to sink in. A room full of crisis technicians had enough practical experience with what an explosion in a confined space could do to a body that, when asked to imagine that same process happening to a crowd of thousands... well, it'd clarify what they thought their responsibilities were in this situation.

"Anyway, hi. I'm Crimson Tower," she waved. "Knightly promoted me last week. Take it easy on me, I'm new! And I might be temporary depending on how hard Zeus flips their shit after this. But fuck 'em, I'll take the heat, let's do our jobs and get those trains rolling."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

"I could punch a cop," said Brown. "I've been training really hard at martial arts just so that I've got that option. But honestly, probably like, Red or White would figure something out. Most of the time I consider anyone paying attention to me at all be inherently a fuck up, and if I got randomly selected it meant I wasn't paying enough attention to the patterns."

"Speaking of," she asked. "What're the cop patterns in your opinion? What do you think is the best way to handle them?"

Orange and Black!

"Scouting" is an extremely dangerous word in this context. It's not immediately clear why - who doesn't love scouting? But scouting implies information transmitted to a central headquarters, information transmitted to a central headquarters implies communications channels to frontline commanders, communications to frontline commanders implies a level of central direction, centralized direction got the Red Army pocketed and destroyed while Stalin dithered.

Every additional decision November makes in this context further places her as The Decision Maker, to seizing unitary control, to rendering this thirty minute walk down the street top-heavy and brittle. It was good that Yellow was exorcised at this moment because it keeps Orange and Black cool-headed and aware of their own limits. Orange's most clear-sighted act in this moment will be to take her hand off the wheel and let her subcommanders draw their own strategies. They know what the mission is, they know the routes available, they know what to do if they encounter resistance, they have their own assets and espirit de corps and ideas, they don't need her to run this for them.

In ancient days, the Strategos of the army was not the one issuing orders to formations like a strategy game. Once the army was in place it moved itself. The Strategos, then, stood in the rear, on a hill, with the heavy cavalry, looking for the break in the lines where she would need to commit her reserves. Recon by fire, then, and full trust to the marshals. Call her for support and not for orders.

Pink!

"Stop," said Pink. "Just for a moment. This is serious."

She held Fiona's hand, firm and intent. "I am deeply afraid of sensory deprivation, and that's what will happen if you disconnect my quatronic core. That's what it was to be in the box. Everything I've done since then has been an attempt to maximize the influence of my actions, so that I don't feel that helplessness. I'm already tense as hell going even this far."

"But I'm tense as hell all the time anyway," she sighed and lay back on the bed, closing her eyes. "And I'm way off my maintenance schedule. So... go ahead. I trust you."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

"No... I can handle cops, sort of," said Brown. "That's actually what I'm doing in between other stuff. Cyan said that she thought her cop impression sucked and she was being too eloquent for the role, so she sent me to research how they speak and act and stuff. They have handles though, basically. They can be controlled from the top. It's a hard challenge but a workable one. I think the army hard counters me, though. There's something I want in a military base but not even Yellow sniffed at that one. It's why I'm kind of hoping that the Illuminati is really powerful because it'd be way easier to handle the Illuminati than the army."

Brown's Journalism Chores were broadly kind of basic: Find the most intense bout of local political activity, embed yourself, and ride along with it writing articles along the way. Someone got declared editor/publisher, someone was assigned to photo editing and cleanup, someone got assigned to website traffic management. She's got half an eye on social media feeds, which she has banned everyone else from checking, and will sometimes chime in advising if she can see anything happening over there that's worth someone nearby checking out.

The most important thing, though, is just to get these people talking and responding like journalists rather than members of the public. It doesn't take much management to do that, but boy howdy does it get felt when it's not there.

Red!

"Yeah, something like that," said Red. God she hated explaining her whole bit.

She's going local. In a small crisis, power flows towards the centre. In a large crisis, power flows towards the periphery. She's making a judgement call that this is a sufficiently large crisis that the people on the spot in Aphrodite have more influence than the people distant in Zeus. For all the magic of the internet it was hard to pull rank via videoconference, and the really cool thing about seizing control of the local train system was that they'd have a hard time sending someone to pull rank in person.

Black and Orange!

It's not often that these two work together. It's incredible when they do so. There's a unique power in their combined approach, resources continuously denied to each other being directed towards the same purpose. The loss of Yellow couldn't have come at a better time for them, honestly - all the questions of priorities and decision making were smoothed out allowing them to focus on execution in the absence of ideology.

The decision is made to start movement immediately. They agree that the threat here is the evening after multiple trains have left. That's the point where they have become the weakest and their enemies have had enough time to organize their strength. Moving hard in the morning is worth it because even if they have to expend strength to maintain it, they'll have that strength.

Yellow wanted to do the full organized single file march with flags and banners. Black and Orange decide instead on Napoleonic Bypass. Multiple parallel columns marching down multiple adjacent streets, flanking the primary column as it moves. When a column hits resistance it holds the nearest intersection and collapses in towards the centre. This concentrates opposing forces on non-critical chokepoints while keeping the central column flowing smoothly, and the delays at the flanks will naturally stagger the mobile groups. Most importantly, it's a strategy simple enough that it can be executed by a mass of peasant conscripts, or a drunk Soviet tanker during a nuclear war.

Neither of them give much thought to trying to make this a stealth mission. Moving this many people is more of a plumbing problem than anything.

Pink!

There's the opportunity. She could...

She looks away. Her cheeks are slightly flushed. Her arms are folded.

... she holds out her right leg.

Okay. Maybe a little more.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

"Hmm," said Brown.

Brown wasn't good at replying to things promptly. When someone said something interesting rather than reacting to it she went away and thought about it. She'll think about what Apostle says for about a week before coming up with a conclusion. It was a big thought.

"He thought that we did things because they were clever," said Brown. "He said that it was because we thought we were smarter than everyone and so we'd do needlessly complex things just to prove our superiority. And we were doing something needlessly complex so he just kind of ran out the conversation at max suspicion until we fucked up."

She sighed and kicked her heels. "I don't know, I didn't want to argue with him. But that was kind of the whole problem, he wasn't doing what we wanted him to do. He identified and burned every plan we had to trick him into doing it anyway. And we didn't have the guts to just use force, so where did that leave us? It left us on a clown spiral where our bluff was called and we had nothing behind it."

She looked up at the ceiling light. "That kind of comes up a lot? Yellow's extremely easy to discourage. Sometimes that's good if she's on the bad ideas train, but I don't know how she can wield direct political power if she's like that."

Yellow!

there is a trick to disappearing without a fuss. you just do everything efficiently and neutrally, smile at anyone who looks at you, and look like you're going to talk to someone, and then go to talk to the next person, and on and on until you start leaving collective sightlines.

there's a 'but!' on the tip of her tongue. an explanation, a vision, a whole fuckin' thing - she was going somewhere with this. but, nah. nah if it wasn't working then, it wasn't going to work if she said a bunch more words explaining it. commit to the bit, sure, but if the bit sucked then commitment just dug you deeper.

this was just an operation. black and orange, efficient organization of people in dangerous circumstances. there was no need to bring herself into it.

Red!

"Alright," she said, standing up. "I need to get to the operations centre. White and Cyan will be by soon to lift and load. Drink some water, eat these sandwiches[1] and rest for a bit, you don't have to go out right away. Get your head together and save your strength for when we really need it."

[1] A 500gram hunk of salted synthpork and a handful of crumbled arrowroot biscuits.

Pink!

Somewhere deep inside November was the idea that she could only have what she could capture. Yellow was its most pure manifestation; she could only touch, never be touched. She could only give, never take; only perform and never reveal. That she could only defile, and never be made sacred.

To accept worship...

... it made her itchy! It made her feel impatient and frustrated and on edge, looking for the escape, the break, the shift in the narrative that would change the flow of power. It made her feel like she was giving up too easily and it would be held against her. It made her feel fierce and focused and hungry, made her hands flex and strain invisibly even though the signals were disconnected.

She didn't enjoy this. Didn't fade into subspace. But that didn't make it bad. Being teased, being provoked, being denied - the irritation built towards Intent, her mind increasingly drawn to the moment of reversal and revenge.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

"A friend of mine has a tattoo I really like," said Brown. "AM=FM. Actual Machines = Fucking Magic. In her mind the fact that her inventions have to work inside the laws of physics is what makes them so impressive, in a way that pure magic wouldn't be. I've been thinking about that basically non stop since I saw it, but Actual Government = Fucking Magic isn't as catchy an acronym.

"At its base, though, is the problem of resources. It's possible Yellow figures out some way to imanentize the eschalon and usher in the singularity but I need to plan on the assumption that we're going to be constrained by material reality and that Green isn't going to get a reproduction fetish. That places constraints on what's possible. Yes, the plan is absolutely to do the fairy godmother thing, but what's actually involved in that? If someone wishes for a castle then that requires mobilization of construction crews, payments of salaries, movement of tonnes of material, integration with surrounding electrical grids and emergency planning - the backend requirement is huge, especially if we want to make it happen on Fucking Magic timeframes. We'd need an entire dedicated Ministry of Wishes, a branch of government dedicated to transferring resources on ludicrous timeframes, the Make a Wish foundation with the budget of the military-industrial complex.

"And that's where the political questions come in. The question of stability is ever present, especially if we've seized power in a coup. Every resource we dedicate towards maintaining order is a resource we're not dedicating towards making dreams come true. The more wishes we grant the more we shift people's perceptions of reality, entrench our worldview, build legitimacy and loyalists but that's pointless if an armed uprising starts. There's a huge amount of resources that can be mobilized by liquidating the billionaire class so there's a huge advantage over the previous regime, but that doesn't cover everything. It's especially dire if those resources need to be directed to a new generation of oligarchs in order to buy the elite loyalty required to prevent a coup, and that's the problem inherent to authoritarian systems.

"This is why I think of the example of Hugo Chavez. Chavez was the rare politician whose mastery of the media was so profound that he rarely needed to wield authoritarian power. He was charismatic enough that he was able to implement communism without a civil war, he was able to govern as a marxist without cancelling elections, he announced major policy changes spur-of-the-moment on live television which made everyone hang on his every word. Through sheer charisma, political adaptability and decisiveness he was able to defuse strikes and outmaneuver opposition. He didn't need a secret police when the people loved him, he didn't need to outlaw dissent when he just held a press conference whenever his opponents were talking and everyone flipped to his channel. Politically he walked on water his entire career. He died in office, had a glorious funeral, and was entombed next to Simon Bolivar. Fucking magic for someone who started his political career by fucking up a coup.

"Now, the problem with Chavez was that he was kind of an idiot with no consistent policies. The same off the cuff changes in direction that made him so compelling on TV were a bureaucratic nightmare; the agricultural ministry didn't know what crops to plant if it could change at any moment, the police became corrupt without strong legal oversight, a nation heir to spectacular oil wealth walked into an economic crisis. But that's my value proposition, the thing that I as November can do that he couldn't. We can provide a level of internal unity that could never exist between Chavez and his ministers, which means we can resource the public exaltation of magic without collapsing the government functions that keeps the ring spinning. And that's the absolute baseline we can accomplish if we don't develop any sort of hidden technology, or an army of securitrons, or if Green decides to expand to like a hundred colours or some other unexpected windfall."

Red!

"Quick check," said Red, dialing Black. "Do you need these guns to go to Selene, or do you need the cops to not find the guns? One of those operations gives me way more options than the other."

Yellow!

She holds the flag.

This is everything to her.

Some days she's barely even sure she exists. A daydream. A fantasy. So unreal that if you touched her she'd turn back into stardust and sighs. The idea that she could do something, that she could make a change, that she could make the world better seems so fragile. A delusion, a false colour, a trick of the light before she sinks back down into the depths of everyday browns and tans and greys.

She who holds nothing holds this. A banner. Something to believe in. Her belief made manifest. The dream she carried. The dream she was unworthy of. The dream that they might follow despite her. It takes both her hands and all her strength to keep it aloft; in a world with wind the slightest gust would knock it and her over.

She flicks the hidden switches and it expands to its full size and glory. It raises above the rainbow like a roar, like a prayer, like a nation. Here in this colour are all your hopes and dreams, close enough to chase. All you need to do is march after it.

The holy maiden shivers and takes her first lonely step forwards. Bare feet leave the drawbridge and touch the bare surface of Aevum.

She does not look back. She could not survive this dream failing her, and so she must proceed as though it won't.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

She smiled. No fixed address. Not once in her entire life. Across the Stormlands and Evercity and the void between worlds, she had never even had a tent she could pitch. Home was the cockpit. But... not just the cockpit. Right now the thought of returning felt like going back into the summer heat.

It hadn't felt like home except when there was someone else sharing it with her.

Of everywhere in the galaxy, she could think of only one place she was truly destined to return.

"Send it to Mayze Scyssorpaws," said Solarel.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

"Well, kind of?" said Brown. "Not really. That's just a matter of scale and resources. If we can hit a critical mass of both then we can attrition down society's problems through sheer money expenditure. Like - do you know Venezuela? Yellow's political precursor is Hugo Chavez. You can run communism off the back of a circus if you do it right. People get their choices removed all the time in ways they can't perceive already, trust me, I work for a newspaper."

"No, I don't think that the problem is taking away people's illusion of choice," said Brown. "I think the problem is that I kind of forgot that smart people work for liberalism. Just, like, genuine true believers with souls like steel wire. They're shitheads with corrupt morals but they've somehow got enough integrity and self respect to stick to their guns despite that. Like, this system is working as intended, and even though the intentions are shit the system is enormously complex and capable of defending itself."

Tyger!

Why reinvent the wheel?

"We will be using colour coding for this," said Orange.

Orange is still Doing The Bit when she gathers the community leaders together. Between her and Crystal she's got a really good map of who they are, and this is something to be done through cooperative whole of organization teamwork rather than anything top-down or technological. Every node needs to be empowered and directed.

"I know, some people have augs or disabilities that render them blind or colourblind," she said, raising a hand pre-emptively. "It's still the common denominator and anyone on the wrong side of that will have to buddy up. The system is simple: Everyone prominently marks their head in the colour associated with the district they're heading to - Red for Ares, Pink for Aphrodite, so on, I've got a chart here. Yes," she held up a hand again, "some people are very stylish and have set colour schemes. This isn't negotiable. We've been up all night procuring a variety of hairsprays, fursprays, spraypaints, hats, and even some straight up buckets of paint. There'll be paint dumps all across the convention. No subtle dots or accents, this needs to be the primary colour on the head."

"So. Everyone marks themselves according to their destination. Everyone gathers in their colour cluster. We organize the march in colour formations, people need to stay with their colour group. The first group is heading to Hermes, they all enter the station at once, they all get on the Hermes train, the Hermes train leaves, and there will not be a second Hermes train. If anyone going to Hermes is not on the Hermes train then they go into the station during the next wave, get on the Aphrodite train, and find someone to roommate with for a few days while they're on the train. They can find their way home later when normal service resumes.

"Understand that there is no flexibility with when the trains leave. The trains will be running due to crime. I will be stealing the trains. The schedule's timing operates according to police and governmental response and not convenience. If anyone falls behind the community must pick them up because I cannot. I will likewise be relying on community volunteers to provide security and rearguard. This number will likely shrink over the course of the day as trains leave, taking defense groups with them. At the end of the day I will be relying on the true heroes who don't care where they end up after today and locals to hold the line."

Red!

"Right, yeah, you're on the run now," said Red. "I can relate. But you know what's great for running? An operational train network, which is the thing that I'm going to try to switch back on. And you know what I'm not going to have enough of after sending out multiple trains full of people? People to defend the train station."

She crouched down. "Look, you're right. You're fucked. You did the crime and now you've got the heat. You got nothing but ugly choices in front of you right now. Option one, you get on the first train that goes out. You lay low, maybe even go to Earth if you're super fucked. You keep your social circle and crime buddies safe. Option two, you work the station defense and fight like hell. You get beat to shit and maybe picked up by the cops, maybe they draw a connection, maybe you go down and take everyone in your org with you. Sucks but honestly I don't think it makes a difference, if they can trace the gun to you they can call you a terrorist regardless of if you're at large."

She doesn't need to talk about option three: sit and get drunk. That's not real.

"So come on, Chaka," said Red. "Gun to your head - er, so to speak: who are you gonna protect?"