Well There's Your Problem: IPSN Blackbeard

ON SCREEN: A mass of pixels. Not just because the image has been photocopied six times, scanned and printed repeatedly, then downloaded by Rocz and scaled up to fit the screen, but also because there’s a “for mental safety and health” filter over it which is covering up most of the various meats and scraps. In the middle of the picture is a pair of skeletal metal legs that appear to be at least 10% slag by volume, standing in a corridor of rock and metal that have been painted off-white to look like every medium security site in history, then painted again with a few long sprays of dark red-ish chunky liquid. In the bottom left corner sits the IPS-N compass star and slogan Your Friend In An Unfriendly Sea. In the bottom right corner of the screen and maintained throughout the presentation is the Activate Windows logo.

LIAM: -what I'm saying is, what kind of asshole spends months writing fanfic about real people? It’s-

NOVA: *clap*

LIAM: What?

NOVA: Rocz asked for a sync point?

ROCZ: That is…untrue. Very strange. Welcome to Well There’s Your Problem. It’s an engineering disaster that’s decoupled from time-

NOVA: A good start? I’m still not sure why I thought you asked for a sync point.

LIAM: Probably space dementia. You were on Mars for a while.

ROCZ: Hmm. We might as well make a point of synchronization and bind ourselves in a mundane chronology. On three. One, two, three, mark.

ASSORTED CLAPS, BROADLY AT THE SAME TIME

ROCZ: Perfect. Well There’s Your Problem is a time-space disaster that’s also a podcast, the podcast is about engineering disasters, and it has slides. If you’re listening in an audio only format, I can’t help you find the slides because they’re a visual element. I’m Justin Roczniak, the person who is speaking now. My pronouns are he and him.

NOVA: Nice recovery, thanks Roz. November Kelly, apparently desynchronized from time. Pronouns she and her, but I’ve got a story about that. Yay Liam!

LIAM: Thanks. Liam McAnderson, I shoot at your mech if you do anthrochauvanism and insult you on Twitter. Pronouns He and him. Hit me?

NOVA: So I recently acquired my own mech, she’s a Balor, she’s beautiful, covered in shimmering iridescence, and if I’m consumed by the hellswarm and manage to merge with her in an eldritch biotechnical fusion then I give you, specifically meaning my co-hosts and not the hogs, permission to call me shes and hers when you refer to the hellswarm, because we'll be a legion of Nova-bots. A plurality of Novembers. A calendar?

ROCZ: I’ve never had to consider the collective noun for a group of plural individuals before. Calendar of Novembers would probably work.

DEVON (ON SCREEN): Devon. They/Them. Thus far I have not been turned into five billion tiny robots, but the day is young.

LIAM: Somehow you transmogrifying into a hellswarm is less worrying than your drive setup, and I don’t know why you can’t just get a normal mech made of actual components, like a Tortuga or a Lancaster or something.

NOVA: I like not having to repair it. I can just leave it next to a pile of scrap and when I come back it’s pulled both of the legs back on. Also, it’s probably because we’re friends and so you don’t think I’ll become an inhuman monster if I do get transformed, which is less entertaining than the audience would probably like but quae fiant fiunt. It is what it is.

LIAM: One of these days it’ll eat your house.

NOVA: Quae fiant fiunt. I can live in the mech. It’ll be fine.

LIAM: You’d be safer in a Chomolungma.

NOVA: It’ll be fine. Also, I was expecting a Chomolung-ma-balls.

ROCZ: I don’t even have one mech yet.

LIAM: You break computers by standing next to them.

ROCZ: This is true.

NOVA: Also you don’t need a mech, you still have that nuke in the sublevels.

ROCZ: That’s not mine.

LIAM: You looking after it for the Ungratefuls?

ROCZ: Yes.

LIAM: What frame would you pick anyway?

ROCZ: If I could use a Barbarossa as an asteroid defence cannon, I think I'd enjoy that. Maybe I could put wheels on it so it can travel on tracks across the entire planet. That could be nice.

LIAM: You’re reinventing the armoured train, and we already did an episode on that, buddy.

ROCZ: This would be for planetary defence, so-

LIAM: And one on nazi superweapons, so you're 0 for 2.

DEVON (ON SCREEN): Car Bad, but I could see Rocz behind the wheel of an Indigo Dream. Or a Navy Projection. Something where even if he breaks the computer it won’t slow him down much.

NOVA: Unfortunately I do like Harrison Armory’s aesthetic. Very Soviet, in the sense that the mechs throw off sparks and like, go on fire and scream ominously when they’re overcharging, and they’ll do that for a while before things really break. Also a bunch of them look like old computer towers, you know?

LIAM: Pity about the fascism.

NOVA: Yeah. There's that quote, I think Lenin said it... "The last capitalist we hang will sell us the rope" and maybe that works with giant robots.

LIAM: That's the hope.

NOVA: But none of the big four are really, you know, morally good. The Armoury are imperial fascists, SSC are hyper-capitalist eugenicists, IPSN are a cyberpunk hellscape by way of the East India Company, and Horus-

LIAM: RA can behold my nutsack.

NOVA: Get their ass.

ROCZ: Enlightened centrism wins again.

NOVA: (laughing) Fuck off!

LIAM: Union’s whole thing is about being the guiding moral centre of the human race which is (gagging noises)

NOVA: Universal guarantees of food and shelter isn't bad.

LIAM: I didn't say it was! Just, how much can you trust the organization that gets most of its resources from the Baronies and- (audibly shutting himself up) Whatever. I think Rocz could use an Atlas. Mainly as a full body suit of armour while cycling.

NOVA: John Forester’s first Space Marine, Justin Roczniak.

ROCZ: I’ve seen the catalogues. Smith Shimano doesn’t make products for comically fat men commonly found on bicycles.

NOVA: They probably have a subsidiary that makes, um, hyper ozempic. I bet it turns you into a catboy twink.

LIAM: Don’t do that to my husband. Rocz, why are we here?

ROCZ: We’re here…to podcast.

UNINTELIGIBLE CROSSTALK WHICH EVENTUALLY QUIETS

DEVON (ON SCREEN): If we’re broadcasting across the omninet, is it really a podcast?

ROCZ: We’re podcasting about the subject of this image, Interplanetary Shipping Northstar’s Blackbeard. It isn’t supposed to look like that.

LIAM: Saves weight. Put the chainsaws on the feet.

NOVA: …Two slim and molten legs of steel, stand in the soup-like homogenate…

ROCZ: Honestly this is more like sloppy joes. Liam and I wrote this episode, working from something along the lines of twenty fifty different sources where none of them had the full story.

LIAM: Mainly Rocz wrote it. I got drunk, yelled a lot, and fucked up the referencing.

ROCZ: Don’t sell yourself short. Before that, we have a section where we cover recent-ish events. It’s the Goddamned News.

NOVA: Fair warning, I might have incorrectly ordered the drops.

LIAM: I thought you’d finally got a configuration you liked?

NOVA: I did! And then I needed

REDACTED as KORONE INUGAMI: PANIK DOG

NOVA: and

BILL PAXTON as PRIVATE WILLIAM HUDSON: Why don’t you put her in charge!?

NOVA: and

TIM CURRY as PREMIER CHERDENKO: I’m ESCAPING to the ONE PLACE that hasn’t been CORRUPTED by capitalism…. (audibly restraining laughter) SPACE!

NOVA: so I moved things around.

THE GODDAMNED NEWS JINGLE

ON SCREEN: The God Damn News: CURSE OF RA and a picture of The Temperate Throne Room of Ras Shamra, high angled from a security feed, Harrison II and court in attendance. On every single one of the visible screens in the image is a small moon, specifically the former moon of Mars, Deimos. During the segment, Rocz Maddens the slide to say "spicy rock detected" and give Deimos angry eyebrows.

NOVA: Got it.

ROCZ: Okay. We have quite the backlog on Well There’s Your Problem.

NOVA: The Fall, and, you know, the following ten-to-twenty thousand years of questionably well recorded human history! …They were not a good time for disasters. Or, they were a good time for the disasters but not, like- We have a lot of future episodes to write.

LIAM: Bizarrely, someone tagged us in this one as it was happening. Pretty sure we were under [BEEP] at the time.

ROCZ: I’m not including the video. Devon says it’ll give something like 2% of the viewers induced metastatic paralysis; it gave Devon a headache.

LIAM: Aww. Anyway, the disaster, reported on only a few thousand years after it happened, is The Bruise versus one of Mars’s former moons as mobilized by RA, so fuck them both.

NOVA: This is still more timely than some of the stuff we have in the backlog.

ROCZ: We’ll have to do a bonus episode about the Deimos Event itself. Eventually.

LIAM: Now. Our Union-mandated lawyers have told us we can’t actually say much, because they’re cowards and also legislation is still ongoing, so all deserved respect to NAME REDACTED for getting us the information we do have, but also rest in piss, you Armory stooge.

NOVA: This could be a Safety Third, if we had more to work with.

LIAM: Probably.

ROCZ: I wanted to use it here. For the bit.

LIAM: I know you did, buddy.

NOVA: The lesson is, don't work for Harrison the Second. Or, you know, the Third.

THE GODDAMNED NEWS JINGLE

LIAM: Harrison the… Safety Third

JIM STRINGER’s SHAKE HANDS WITH DANGER from SHAKE HANDS WITH DANGER

NOVA: Huh. Ultra Instinct Drop playing. It’s probably fine.

ON SCREEN: A picture of Taika Waititi as Edward “Blackbeard” Teach, and Rhys Darby as Stede “The Gentleman Pirate” Bonnet, as taken from the series Our Flag Means Death. It looks like Mad Max circa 1980 is passionately kissing an English Judge circa 2025.

NOVA: Very nice.

ROCZ: This is Blackbeard, Edward Teach. He operated as a pirate in the West Indies, here on Earth. He got the name of Blackbeard by threading lit fuses into his… black beard. Early fictional renditions of Blackbeard became the archetypical pirate, at least before the Fall.

NOVA: On Cradle.

ROCZ: Cradle. Excuse me.

NOVA: It’s like, on one hand, this is my instinctive anti-deadname response, and on the other we’re talking about a planet, so…

ROCZ: Hmm.

LIAM: Teach died after two years as a pirate, so the show is over, pack it up.

ROCZ: This is true. Our next episode is on the Dyhed Metavault, this was Well There’s Your Problem- I’m joking. We’re here to talk about the IPSN Blackbeard, one of Inter Planetary Shipping Northstar corporation’s first dedicated combat machines. To do that, we need to talk about resource extraction, we also need to talk about interplanetary transport, and we’ll also need to talk about Mechs.

ON SCREEN: A selection of mechs, ranging from some pretty standard 5019u patterns like GMS 01-Everest and industrial construction machines with wheels on the ends of their legs, to anime stuff like Tachikoma (big blue jumping spiders) and the Evangelions (vaguely humanoid in the same way that a jellyfish resembles a plastic bag). In one corner is the power loader from Aliens, looking kind of forlorn.

NOVA: Question. Northstar name mechs after sailors.

LIAM: And turtles.

NOVA: Sailors and turtles. Naming a machine after a pioneer of psychological warfare and then arming it with repurposed forestry equipment feels like kind of a miss, like, surely they could come up with a more extractive industry related ship captain, maybe one of New Zealand’s historical figures.

LIAM: You’re assuming they have any. And chainsaw-axes rate pretty high on the Liam Fear Index, even when they're not as tall as me.

NOVA: Explains the Lancaster. They’re not going to axe murder a fellow sailor.

ROCZ: We’ll get to that.

NOVA: ...I should have read ahead.

ROCZ: To begin, we have to ask, what is a mech?

LIAM: Again, Socrates?

NOVA: People don't watch us sequentially. Also maybe there's, like, a, survivor of a lost colony and they want to know what the big steel giant outside their cave is.

LIAM: For that poor bastard specifically: a mech is-

NOVA: -the dream of ancient Japan.

LIAM: - a type of power bottom, because they’re fun to be inside.

NOVA: …*Laughs*

ROCZ: …Mechanized Chassis. That’s what Mech is short for.

NOVA: I thought it was like M.E.C.H., like it stood for… um.

LIAM: Massive Energetic… Chaos… Horse.

NOVA: Mobile Environmentally Controlled Hull?

LIAM:

ROCZ: Well, maybe. The-

NOVA: Mechanical Egg Cracking Hardware!

LIAM: …We do know a lot of trans pilots.

ROCZ: This is true. Almost all of them were out before becoming pilots, so-

NOVA: Maybe it’s (spooky voice) ~paracausal~

LIAM: …Yeah, I’ll add that to my belief system.

NOVA: The grandfather paradox that transes your gender. Always read the small print before fabricating a Lich.

LIAM: I thought the point of Lich was they show up on their own, even more than the usual Horus bullshit.

NOVA: We’ll getcha

LIAM: You stole my joke!

ROCZ (Valiantly, audibly, trying to direct events): So. Mechs rose to prominence as weapons during the last decades of Union’s Second Committee, as an offshoot of environmental suit development.

LIAM: I’m adding Sec-com to the episode list as we speak.

ROCZ: The full episode is in the archives, but basically: armoured and powered environment suits already existed for doing science, exploration and disaster cleanup. GMS made them modular, added weapons, and made them bigger: those were the first modern mechs. Over the centuries, different groups have made their own designs.

NOVA: Pre-Fall, some enterprising people attempted to make mechs but they kept falling over or running out of power or, running out of power and then falling over. About the closest I remember seeing work was that Japanese emergency rescue suit, the strength boosting exoskeleton, and I think that one ran on mains electricity.

LIAM: One thing on a short list that I kind of appreciate about the Union hegemony is how basically every unit is works on any frame, which means I can put a Cluster Projector on my Lancaster if the Karrakins start any shit.

ON SCREEN: A periodic table. It’s been rotated 45 degrees to reveal a third axis of elements. The table is illuminated specifically in three locations: three steps away from mundane Tungsten, four from Iron, and three from Carbon, all along the newly added Z axis. Below the table is a representation of different outer electron layer arrangements: notably none of them are arranged as in any actual elements identified circa 2020 CE; nothing here divides by 2.

LIAM: I remember just enough chemistry to know that’s fucked.

ROCZ: Now, mundane structural engineering says full-size mechs are impossible. That’s because they are. It’s not possible to make something with the required structural characteristics using normal chemistry. Over the years, Paracausal Studies have really pushed the boundaries of what engineers can get away with.

NOVA: There are materials stronger than mundane steel, it turns out. We just needed, like, to employ ghosts to break the laws of physics for us to actually build them, and I know I sound like I’m taking the piss but this actually does work, kind of.

ROCZ: We’ll get to that.

NOVA: Martian researchers were like “Just strap Cthulhu to the PC, what could go wrong?” and that’s less than you’d think, as it turns out.

ROCZ: We'll also get to that.

NOVA: The Deimos event special will happen eventually.

LIAM: I don’t care if they’re a man-fish-ghost from beyond reality, Union’s higher ups treat Non-Human People as machine parts, and they don’t deserve that.

NOVA: Mhm. They’re people doing jobs, just, like…non-human people.

ROCZ: We’ll get to that, too.

NOVA: Fuck.

ROCZ: This slide isn’t actually the form of paracausal steel used in IPSN products, because that’s highly classified, but it is a common type. It’s the layout used for space elevator parts.

ON SCREEN: upper text YE BETTER START BELIEVING IN CYBERPUNK DYSTOPIA
A picture of HECTOR BARBOSSA from PIRATES OF THE CARIBBIAN with cool robot parts on top of his skeleton face
bottom text YER IN ONE
Next to the picture: the IPSN Compass Rose “Your Friend in an Unfriendly Sea”
Off to the side: logos of the other Big Four. Further off to the side: a selection of logos from relatively minor manufacturers/deniable operations groups/various houses of the KTB

NOVA: *Laughs*

ROCZ: IPSN is the group we’re talking about today. They’re one of a group of Five mech and tech manufacturers collectively called The Big Four, who provide most of the base technology and licenses for the other designers in human space. For example, the Karrakin Trade Barons-

LIAM: Fuck ‘em.

ROCZ: -have frame designs licensed from and developed with the help of at least three of the Big Four, as well as the rights to use GMS machines. In rough order of founding; General Massive Systems is Union’s nationalized manufacturer, and is generally thought of as group zero. Smith-Shimano Corpro and Inter Planetary Shipping-Northstar are corpro-states that were established the second time humans left Earth in large numbers, Harrison Armoury is a fascistic colonization project that spun off from Union’s Second Committee, and Horus is…weird.

NOVA: Weird, like, my Balor just showed up when I printed an Everest.

LIAM: I didn’t know that bit-you just got in?

NOVA: I figured one of the hogs sent it!

LIAM: …Horus, creators of the Balor, are a bunch of assholes who make edgy memes about overthrowing society as we know it and ushering in a new dark age of eldritch gods, while actively working to do that. To be fair, they’re also made up of millions of cells that all disagree with each other most of the time, so, occasionally a cell will do something good, like developing the Kobold and giving the plans to anti-Barony groups, or fucking up Harrison Armory in general. Or members might burn down a soup kitchen because one of the cooks is a free demosian and they hate that.

NOVA: People keep conflating the Horizon Collective with Horus, which pisses Liam off, and also, like we said back in season one, you’ve really got to fuck up your messaging for “overthrow the government” to be thought of as a bad move by our friendly Anarchist.

LIAM: Overthrow the government in the name of what. Because I’m not cool with the fucking pyramid-headed self-proclaimed godling. But I might steal their Nanocomposite Adaptation. Heh. One good thing about the size of the human expanse is it’s so big that no single organization reliably works as a single organization anymore, at least not without Union’s omni-net…

NOVA: Well there’s your Kronstadt.

LIAM: Well, maybe.

ROCZ: …A corpro-state is a nation or political territory that runs like a business, where the goal of the nation is explicitly to provide profit for the shareholders, who are also, often, the political leadership class of the nation.

NOVA: Like the UK in old 2020.

ROCZ: Well…They were less obvious about it.

LIAM: Also they don’t just produce transphobia.

NOVA: Yeah. The number of, like, transgender people who seem to have an affinity with mechs being what it is, you’d think they couldn’t produce any transphobia. Just out of a profit motive.

LIAM: It’s probably easier to get away with inefficiency when you’ve got a private army of a billion soldiers and a bunch of planets to strip-mine.

ROCZ: So. It’s-

LIAM: Fucking anthro-chauvs.

NOVA: Yeah Harrison is basically just the old USA but, like, more so.

LIAM: All the “freedom” you want as long as you’ll go off planet and kill people for profit.

NOVA: Season One USA. Actually, Marx wrote about this.

LIAM: Wait, what?

NOVA: Seriously. Corporations as capitalism in the markets and something else for the leadership and internal structures. I don’t remember him predicting cradle-to-grave employment as a literal soldier of the company, but…

ROCZ: IPS-N are more like the British Empire in the age of sail, in that they control transportation and extractive industry with their own workforce. They break local social and financial structures by importing in much cheaper products, which can lead to crime because people lose their jobs.

LIAM: How dare people steal food.

ROCZ: Which means IPSN can open a new market: sell anti-piracy tools to local governments and other powers.

LIAM: This is why I [DEVON: You probably can’t say that on spacetube] my Lancaster.

NOVA: Based.

LIAM: Don’t worry about it. The post office has Printers.

ON SCREEN: Glittering shards in the deep black. Multiple ships, mostly hastily rigged from habitation blocks into microgravity transports, have been torn open and mission killed. The IPS-N transport in centre frame is unharmed, aside from light scarring and one adhering limpet-transport, which is cracked open and venting atmosphere. There’s a stylization to the image and a lack of corpses or pieces of bodies that show it’s a painting or equivalent sanitized/representative art piece, probably commissioned by the owner of the transport. The scale might be legendary or it might be accurate, it's hard to tell without anything else to compare to and the stylization is such that things lean towards the mythical; but the habitation blocks are standard Union personal microgravity settlements, about the size of a cheap flat with a one-shot chemical rocket bonded to the frame, and the painting looks like they're attacking a ship the size of a high density town, somewhere that thousands of people could live and work, so as bizarre as the image appears to members of the audience weighed down by gravity, it's probably accurate.

ROCZ: This is what interplanetary shipping often looks like; attempts at space piracy as the transport passes nearby sufficiently destitute populations. This is what Blackbeard was supposedly developed to handle.

LIAM: Fuck you, hostile show takeover.

ROCZ: You wrote part of this one… *laughs* I’m going to get another beer.

NOVA: Cool.

LIAM: Humanity has the tech to make sure everyone can eat and drink and have a place to sleep, but we largely don’t do that, outside of the Imperial core of Union space. It’s not profitable to do that, and even Union’s attempts at so-called utopia hinge on cheap resources from the Baronies.

NOVA: Capitalism requires a precarious population which is available to be exploited. I’ve heard of this.

LIAM: So people steal shit because they can’t afford to buy it; but making the stuff they’re stealing is so cheap that it’s essentially free, so-

NOVA: So it’s pure profit for the companies, at least on the edges of core space.

LIAM: Exactly. There are minor empires of assholes outside the core who do this shit because they’d rather be king shit of trash mountain than have to live like a quiet life, but most space pirates, like the poor motherfuckers who turn their habs into crash-shuttles, they’re only doing it to survive.

NOVA: For example, the ones depicted in… Dev, can you put the details of this art in? I can’t see it in the notes.

DEVON (ON SCREEN): Sure thing Boss

DEVON (ON SCREEN): “A representation of the aftermath of the cowardly assault upon the IPSN UNTIL FURTHEST SKY by pirates of an unnamed band during the year 4901u” Commissioned by Captain Pace Hourai, details of artist available on request.

DEVON (ON SCREEN): The artist’s name was Tongariro Knox, she lived in the Kuwari volume, and died there around 5020u during the Anzerite war. Finding that out took longer than you’d think.

NOVA: These pirates would be, like, orbital dock workers or farmers or…

LIAM: Probably miners? There’s a gas mine in the picture, upper atmosphere of the Jupiter.

NOVA: The point is, they want medicine or food or water or…I don’t know, fuel, so they can leave, which is something else guaranteed in the Utopian Pillars…

LIAM: and they’re minced for trying to get it.

ROCZ: *Beer can snap*

NOVA: Perfect timing. We were talking about the economic realities that lead to piracy and it was getting kind of dark.

ROCZ: We’ll get to that. Well…

NOVA: Fuck!

ROCZ: Returning to the history, Northstar Robotics, who among other things handled resource extraction for largely first generation settlements, and Interplanetary Shipping, who handled-

NOVA: Shipping. Between planets, mainly.

ROCZ: …merged into the IPSN we know today.

NOVA: Then they spent a few decades consolidating their position, mostly by hostile takeovers of former competitors and questionably legal integration of independent groups.

LIAM: You’re still sore about the Störtebeker, huh?

NOVA: Störtebeker is very aesthetic. I want a pilebunker.

ROCZ: Now, when you disrupt the fringes of human space so completely, that has knock-on effects.

NOVA: Discussed while you got a beer.

ROCZ: So, this takes place almost immediately after the consolidation, after the wave of unemployment and economic collapses were at a zenith, specifically in the...Sabir-Miraj volume.

NOVA: Pronounced Sabir-Miraj. Probably.

ROCZ: OK. The company wanted something to sell as an anti-pirate tool, they wanted it for cheap, and they wanted it ready fast.

LIAM: And they couldn’t use a Nelson or a-

NOVA: I think they just wanted something intimidating.

ROCZ: Or they were going for different lines for different customers. The Albatross use Nelsons almost exclusively, maybe the designers wanted something new for the new customers.

LIAM: Oh. And this was before the Tortuga?

NOVA: It’s a little unclear. Like you said, lightspeed is too slow for the entire galaxy to be on the same schedule.

LIAM: Just to remind the audience, this is IPSN’s response to epidemics and desperation and general collapse across, at minimum, twelve inhabited star systems. Collapses they caused, to various degrees, and continue to profit from the effects of.

ROCZ: This is true. And also a good time to introduce…

ON SCREEN: The curve of another gas giant, deep near-black on the scattered harsh stars of the backdrop. Several moons about the size of Earth orbit the giant. The image is, again, stylized; it has a Tongariro Knox look, so it’s not clear how much of the eldritch glow in the giant’s atmosphere is real, how much of the deep darkness is an accurate depiction, how close the moons would get in reality. The fourth moon has the unmistakable gleam of electric light, lights in number that cities put up when they’re not trying to fit into the local ecology. Light as a mark of aversion, to scare off the dark.

ROCZ: Ceb 4. Ceb is the gas giant. The moon is called 4.

LIAM: Planets orbit stars. What’s the star called?

ROCZ: It doesn’t have one. Well, maybe it does, but it’s…I’m not an astrophysicist.

NOVA: It’s a rogue planet?

ROCZ: Or it’s on an extremely long period orbit? Ceb is a planet in the Miraj end of the volume, spinward of the main group. A Northstar subsidiary company, Yannick & Verstuck, bought settlement and extractive rights before the big merger. It became a semi-secret test site afterwards, while still being the source of a few…interesting biological components.

NOVA: This is the most haunted a planet has ever been. I don’t feel like I should be able to see that shade of purple.

LIAM: You're not wrong. It feels like something is going to reach out of the image.

ROCZ: Everything living on 4 is part of a broadly human-compatible biosphere, but not one that is really liveable without technology.

LIAM: If you step out the house unprepared you die instantly. It’s like living in Antarctica.

ROCZ: Well…within a week, trending generally towards a few extremely unpleasant hours. It’s not actually that cold, but the radiation that keeps the moons warm also does unpleasant things to human DNA. Lots of cross linking, cancers, radiation burns.

NOVA: They discovered Big Ben?

LIAM: The clock? I wondered where that went.

NOVA: No, the-move on. How cold is, like, not that cold? Because outer space is like three Kelvin, and winter in Antarctica used to get as low as… minus ninety degrees Celsius, and you’d be dead pretty fast whichever one you ended up in without protection so I guess it doesn’t matter too much?

ROCZ: The atmosphere holds on to a lot of heat. It’s only about negative 40 degrees at the coldest, so a good Canadian winter, just most of the time and across the entire moon. Ceb 4 is too far away for interesting gravitational geology.

DEVON (ON SCREEN): Space: -270°C, Winter: 183°F, Ceb 4: 233K. You’re welcome.

NOVA: So it’s a horribly dangerous place with entire ecologies of rare and medically valuable alien botany, which is why people put up with having to mine for their drinking water…pretty convenient if you want ice for your drinks.

DEVON (ON SCREEN): Medically valuable botany she says, most powerful psychedelics in the Orion Arm says I

ROCZ: Yes. Well, medicines, recreational drugs, and also fancy wood for rich people to make tables, chairs, and prosthetic limbs out of. Only a few days from Xai Lai Leng Gate, if you’re moving as close to the speed of light as is possible for humans.

LIAM: Currently. Because stuff in space moves, but also space is so fucking huge that even near-lightspeed transport takes years sometimes. Maybe I’m stupid-

NOVA: You’re not.

LIAM: Thanks. The size of the galaxy, space in general, I can’t fit that into my head except, something like island chains?

ROCZ: I think the gate is gaining on it, overall. Very slowly.

LIAM: Uugh.

ROCZ: Or the other way round? I guess it depends on your frame of reference.

NOVA: Where does that sit on the Liam Fear Index?

LIAM: Lower than you’d think. Don’t get me wrong, I hate it, but it’s not that bad. I’m not planning to go any further than Free Sanjak any time soon, so I don’t have to worry about it.

NOVA: In-system orbits aren’t static or circular; journey times can vary quite a bit.

LIAM: Stop it.

ROCZ: Now, because of the complete lack of local light, the biosphere doesn’t rely on photosynthesis. Because photo means light, and synthesis means construction, and they don’t have enough light. The base trophic level, the equivalent of trees or phytoplankton, feed on the ionizing radiation, then the entire biosphere proceeds from there. That's why everything is so dark.

LIAM: Let me guess, everything that’s not a plant looks like a fucking catfish.

ROCZ: Mostly millipedes, actually.

NOVA: Segmented bodies, lots of legs, and no actual relation to Earth millipedes, just a similar body plan?

ROCZ: With the lower gravity and greater oxygen, they’re about the size of train cars, but yes. It’s very cold on Ceb 4, so they’re also furry. I have a slide.

ON SCREEN: Five pictures of "millipedes" as native to Ceb 4; they're actually quite pretty in human-standard light, with many and varied colour and texture patterns on their shells and fur. Four of the images include close-ups of mandibles (specialized for piercing), legs (numerous), the precise chemistry of their biology (recognizable proteins) and the adhesive strength of their various extruded goo (capable of immobilizing a mech). In the fifth picture, someone wearing a cowboy hat on top of their hardsuit is riding the back of one; from what little detail is available they look like they're having the time of their life, though the bug seems less than pleased. It’s got something like a moustache for filter feeding, unlike some of the other horrifyingly befanged or proboscisized critters sharing the slide with it.

NOVA: Fantastic. Just going around doing my bullshit logging job in my bullshit logging mech and I have to fist-fight a bug because if I use the chainsaw all the fur will gum up the chains.

ROCZ: Yes.

NOVA: I can’t step outside to fix anything because I’ll get a million kinds of cancer.

ROCZ: Agreed. Powered exoskeletons with radiation armour are expensive, and you already have a mech, so the company would rather bolt lead or an equivalent material to that.

NOVA: And if I take up smoking for the stress I’ll immediately become the first spontaneously combusting trans woman, because of the high oxygen.

ROCZ: This is…probably true?

NOVA: But I shouldn’t worry about that because if my habitat controls break I’ll freeze to death while also being haunted. I’m going to worry about that instead.

DEVON (ON SCREEN): The following section was reconstructed from Liam’s local recording because I thought it was funnier this way. Don’t pretend I never do anything for you people.

ROCZ: Who’s the guy from that movie?

NOVA: Man, you've lost me.

LIAM: Jack Torrance?

ROCZ: The guy who goes up to the mountains, to the hotel.

LIAM: Jack Torrance.

ROCZ: And he’s a writer. Kills people with an axe.

NOVA: From The Shining?

ROCZ: Yeah.

LIAM: Jack! To- I’ll go fuck myself.

NOVA: I’m not going out like- did we lose Liam?

ROCZ: We might have lost Liam.

NOVA: It begins. I’m not going out like space John Daniel Edward Jack Torrance.

ON SCREEN: The Technical Difficulties Slide. It still looks like a quick photoshop of BBC Test Card F with Rocz’s face on it, only now Rocz’s entire head appears to be sitting inside a support vat. It’s unclear if Rocz has been photoshopped before placement or if this is actually how he looks now.

ON SCREEN: A screenshot from an IPSN Advertising campaign featuring the Hathor Resource Extraction Chassis. It’s got four legs, two primary arms, mounting points for various of tools: it’s obviously a civilian frame because there’s no way anything that spindly could stand up in a fight against another mech. Overall it’s kind of cute, a centaur-foal in orange safety wear, but the effect is slightly ruined by the fact that it’s holding a chainsaw larger than two people.

LIAM: FUCK!

NOVA: Welcome back, buddy.

LIAM: A krait unplugged my mic.

ROCZ: They get everywhere.

NOVA: Everywhere with ducts.

LIAM: I’m gonna fry it up later. Still got my local recording.

NOVA: Nice. Weird crab-thing dinner delivered directly to you.

ROCZ: The Blackbeard project started with your standard quadruped-frame Yannick and Verstuck machine with a few changed modules; they called it the Hathor Resource Extraction Chassis.

NOVA: Your classic birachial quadruped, the horse with hands. Centaur!

ROCZ: It *coughs* “Comes with all the tools required to harvest and transport lumber and lumber analogues under even harsh environmental conditions! It’s a single machine that can replace or enhance your entire field working group, improving safety and efficiency!”

LIAM: You're my best friend and I love you, but never use that advertising copy voice again.

NOVA: Yeah. We might have to exorcise Rocz.

ROCZ: Now, resource extraction, whether it's forestry or mining or drilling for oil, is horribly dangerous.

NOVA: Forest work is of those jobs where you make what can be a lot of money while living in the wilderness because there's a good chance you'll lose an arm. The original-

SHAKE HANDS WITH DANGER from JIM STRINGER’s SHAKE HANDS WITH DANGER

NOVA: was mainly about farm work, but it could have been easily about forestry.

LIAM: And that's on earth.

NOVA: Cradle.

LIAM: On Cradle, yeah, but standing on honest dirt. The number of things that'll kill you only go up once you're in space or underwater or both.

NOVA: As seen in the documentary series Dead Space.

ROCZ: And that's why the Hathor was made: to keep people alive when they worked in dangerous situations that couldn't be given entirely to automatic or subaltern systems, because as good as today’s computers are there’s still a kind of...I don’t know…

NOVA: Je n'sais quoi.

LIAM: What is this dead language?

NOVA: But I get it, you don't actually need human miners if you're smelting an entire asteroid.

ROCZ: There’s also the fact that humans evolved to survive in the world. As a species, we like doing stuff, even when we don’t entirely need to.

NOVA: As famously not seen in the documentary series Dead Space, because that’s a setting with hypercapitalist bullshit as a justification to put characters in danger and have the story happen. I guess this is a setting with hypercapitalist bullshit, just, not equally distributed. Like Neuromancer.

LIAM: Also because they’d have less zombies to deal with if the mining ships weren’t crewed by humans.

NOVA: I suppose they might get zombie robots. Like in Signalis. So the…Hathor? I’m going to try and guess the licenses.

ROCZ: Feel free.

NOVA: Forestry requires chainsaws, traditionally. Transporting logs means cables and chains, so the grapples aren’t military only…

ROCZ: The original Hathor licence includes a backpack module, and they kept that for the semi-civilian Blackbeard. You can see it [on screen, Rocz maddens the hump behind the L-spine of the robot centaur] here.

NOVA: Adorable. I’m guessing rank one is the same? The chain axe and synthetic muscle, which would be a horrifying thing to have zombify.

ROCZ: Agreed. Hathor’s licence only has two levels, and the cabling is included in rank one.

NOVA: Then rank two is the frame and the backpack?

LIAM: Blackbeard rank two inherited the sword from the Hathor. The flechette launcher is new.

ROCZ: Yes.

NOVA: Why?

ROCZ: Some things, like most forms of alien animal, cut better with a single sharp blade than a moving series of serrated edges. The Nanocarbon Sword, I’m reading from the press release here, is “a new spin on an old classic. Embedded nanosensors along the blade capture a full spectrum of data and transfer it to omninet storage banks for after-action review. Meanwhile, onboard software interprets the live feedback and adjusts the molecular composition of the blade edge in real time.”

NOVA: -and it can do your bottom surgery in a single cut, when wielded by a master of the art of mechanized iaido.

LIAM: No.

NOVA: No?

LIAM: The Terashima Blade is the one designed for doing samurai anime stuff.

NOVA: True! If a Sparri ancestral memory included gender affirmation surgery, the Terrashima Blade can do you in a single Wind Stance kata.

ROCZ: The nanocarbon sword isn't a medical device, it's a tool. It’s also absurdly sharp, because it repairs itself.

NOVA (broadly simultaneous): Female to male, male to female, top and/or bottom.

LIAM: Don’t ask where they get the pieces from.

NOVA: Garfield, who do you think took your breasts?

ROCZ: Somewhere on Sparr there’s a very confused Turantulos.

UNINTELIGIBLE LAUGHTER, CONTINUING FOR A WHILE

ROCZ: Okay.

BEER CANS SNAP

ON SCREEN: A Blackbeard, looking like an undead axe murderer on a much larger scale. This particular build has been painted to look like a Halloween skeleton costume, bright white lines standing out on a black base coat. The entire shot is low angled, probably a handheld camera or head-mounted unit, and is inside a burning residential area inside a space station, which the Blackbeard is stalking through. This image is labelled NOT FOR PUBLIC RELEASE and has already been annotated by the marketing department.

NOVA: Really looking like the good-guys here.

LIAM: So almost everything that makes the Blackbeard terrifying was very easily made from stuff they had lying around.

ROCZ: Essentially. IPSN made a machine to creep between hard vacuum and human habitable environments, to kill crew and disable machines, and they did it primarily by up-scaling logging equipment. They also put it on two legs, because that's apparently faster, or harder to lock on to than four?

LIAM: As worrying as being attacked by any mech is, the more human they look the creepier they are.

NOVA: So the Ceb 4 team cracked Yemanova about a century before anyone even thought of the Caliban? And despite the fact that we’re talking about a death machine, it’s one that came in on time and under budget, so we finally have an episode of the show we’ve been threatening since season one: “Well There Isn’t Your Problem, the podcast about engineering successes, with slides”?

LIAM: He’ll get to that.

NOVA: Damnit.

ROCZ: Ceb 4 was already home to an Extreme Environments Engineering group and an extractive site using Hathors, so the Northstar Campus on Ceb 4 was selected for the process which would turn their civilian forestry chassis into a reliable weapon. Progress was swift, and mostly involved going out and killing the local wildlife.

NOVA: Such as the perfidious megapede.

LIAM: What.

NOVA: Like millipede, but I replaced the prefix for “a bit smaller” with one for “very many times bigger”.

LIAM: No, I get that it’s a pun, I…Moving on!

ROCZ: Okay. This project took place during… Y60, 55% to 98%

NOVA: I don’t understand that time system but the fact you mentioned one makes me nervous.

ROCZ: Okay. The moons are tidally locked to Ceb, and there’s essentially no local sun? They match Cradle Realtime for their place in the year. Year 0 started when the first campus was established by your friends and mine from Why and Vee.

NOVA: Got it.

ROCZ: For reasons that no-one adequately explained, the Ceb system uses a 36 hour local day-

LIAM: Probably the haunting.

ROCZ: -which they keep for the entire orbital volume.

NOVA: And because of the (spooky voice) paracausality~ of the omninet, you can set up an atomic clock on Cradle and use it to know what the Union Realtime is.

ROCZ: Essentially. Which is why a 36 hour day is weird. I’d keep a 24 hour day.

NOVA: 24-ish hours.

LIAM: Blame the ghosts.

NOVA: I’m honestly surprised no-one’s used the omninet to set up some kind of parallel processing based supercomputer, à la Charles Stross’s Eschaton.

LIAM: Isn’t that what RA is, supposedly?

ON SCREEN: Inside the lab, from several angles. Proto-Blackbeard is basically a skeleton of metal and servos, with some hydraulic and hydrocarbon combustion systems because they’re cool and old even though myosynth and nano-engines are much more efficient. It looks more like the power loader from Aliens than anything that’s completely mech-like, because they didn’t make much armour for the prototype; there’s also no specialized heat dispersion system visible. This is mainly for speed of manufacture and repair but also because someone on the team thought they’d be able to make it look cooler by keeping parts exposed. This machine is pretty obviously the one from the first slide, before the unpleasantness.

ROCZ: Development took less than half a year, and, as said, largely was on time and under budget. Mostly the development team were new members of IPSN management, with Forestry Shift Manager Phuong Edit MacCready kept on as the safety minded representative of local workers, and largely ignored; I don’t actually have a photo of that guy. Void Executive Amir Kempo Diogenes Valtteri was said to be taking a personal interest in the project, and was directing the team to work “hard and aggressively”.

NOVA: Oh that’s going to end well.

LIAM: How tall is he? I’ll kick his ass.

ROCZ: The man was born on a high gravity world. He’s also long dead.

NOVA: I think Liam could fight his way through the halls of Aule.

ROCZ: Now, the Blackbeard project was going fine in terms of actually being a machine, but IPSN's public relations team were having trouble getting broad support. The development team believed they needed something that would really turn heads and they needed it fast.

LIAM: Because it's not enough to make the thing work, they have to sell it and make a profit.

ROCZ: Yes.

LIAM: Also they’re haunted forestry workers hallucinating through thirty six hour days, and their immediate boss just told them their closest thing to god is paying attention.

ROCZ: Also very true.

NOVA: It’s not really relevant but I did some quick maths, I think Christmas Day is about 98% through the year.

LIAM: We’ll get to that.

ROCZ: What marketing decided was that they needed to manifest an NHP, a Non-Human Person. This is because developing a new form of life which can be packaged with your mech really shows initiative. It gets the shareholders going.

NOVA: And they named her Sekhmet, the catgirl goddess of war.

ROCZ: Well, no. They didn’t know that yet. They had projections: she was going to be dedicated, direct, militaristic, but they knew nothing else. NHP manifestation is like being a parent-

NOVA: I- I follow you. You don’t know who you’ll get.

ROCZ: The NHP probably exists before people start trying to draw it out. I have to say probably because, again, I really don’t know.

LIAM: The NHPs I talk to don’t remember much before the shackles get bolted on, and the ones that break out don't usually want…or maybe, don’t have… the ability to talk to humans anymore.

NOVA: I was going to mention gatcha games but, I’m not sure I have a good enough joke lined up.

ROCZ: Because they’re worried about staying up to speed, the project staff decides to manifest their first shard directly from their computers into a casket built into the tester chassis. They ran thousands of programs through the virtual environment, because apparently brute forcing sentience development works? Liam knows more about this than I do.

NOVA: Union’s glossary for NHPs sounds spooky as all hell, but they are, like, eldritch maths ghosts, it’s kind of on theme.

LIAM: Sekhmet started as a sub-program of a sub-program which eventually became IPSN’s military AI WATCHDOG, but the Blackbeard team did something to the core systems which no-one has any public data on. Basically they took a non-sentient program, forced sentience and discrete identity onto it, moulded it to a human worldview, and then she was turned into a weapon.

NOVA: That’s probably why she’s so pissed off.

ON SCREEN: An image captioned “Dramatis Personae, before the event” which has obviously been scanned from the pages of a printed book. From left to right:

An extremely old woman in a pilot suit. Blinded by theburn scars across her eyes, she’s had those eyes replaced with a flat plastic band holding a brace of micro-cameras that look like spider ocelli, surrounding large bio-mimetic eyes with gold-iris cat-pupils. She’s half-smiling and looks like she could knit a scarf or kill someone with her knitting needles. Or one, then the other.

The most generic looking late-middle aged man you’ve ever seen, dressed in a safety orange plaid logging jacket and tartan saw-chaps over a dark hardsuit. He’s very pale, which means the dark bags under his eyes pop, and his formerly brown hair has largely evaporated off his forehead into thin grey wisps.

Everyone’s favourite/most annoying enthusiastic nerd, equipped with a shoulder mounted pair of auxiliary robotic arms built for micro-adjustments and/or painting collectable figurines. There’s a tattoo across her cheek like a little Welsh dragon in black and gold.

Someone who looks like they’ve been designed deliberately to be the most consistently attractive person in any given room, a real statistically biased projection, to the degree that it’s only their broken and poorly reset nose that makes them look like a person made of actual flesh. Their eyes are bright green, a vivid contrast with their neat black suit, smooth black skin, and neat white teeth.

ROCZ: They’re doing this part as fast as they can, and have version 1 ready after a week. On site on the day of the unpleasantness were some twelve or so assorted fabrication and engineering staff who had cleared the floor before first manifestation, and an additional fifty or so who were working on their own projects in other research domes. Present in immediate reach of the event were Retired Pilot Mahira Zahnikova Prudentius, who they’d borrowed from Albatross; Forestry Shift Manager Phuong Edit MacCready, who had lived in the Ceb system his entire life and represented the original team; Print Lead Su-Jin Khaled, transferred directly from Argo Navis to assist the project; and Para-Psychologist Ojala “Zero” Olamide, formerly of the Constellar. Notably there are no representatives from Union in system during the project.

NOVA: Because Union would have shut everything down and told them to get some sleep.

ROCZ: This is true.

NOVA: And the higher ups put themselves in danger because they wanted to be in any commemorative photography.

ROCZ: The Print Lead and Para-Psychologist didn’t trust anyone to do their jobs, which were, respectively, making sure the casket ports lined up with the mould lines and making sure the ghost was comfortable in the machine. Prudentus was a pilot they’d hired for the test runs, because the Albatross already use IPSN machines. MacCready, as a member of the resource extraction sub-companies who had first settled Ceb 4, was mainly there to try make sure no-one did anything stupid with chainsaws.

LIAM: Which is how he gets turned into marinara sauce.

NOVA: I’d say that went poorly.

ROCZ: Testing goes well for most of the session: the machine is responding perfectly, it’s fast and direct. So they decide to load their NHP. Now, NHPs can exist in mental states that are basically impossible for humans, and one of them is as part of a “time-reversible multivariate probabilistic quantum processing substrate”.

DEVON (ON SCREEN): LSD

ROCZ: Which means a single shard can go through an arbitrarily large number of training scenarios at the same time, or be rewound to review events.

LIAM: I have something for this but I can’t stop thinking about sandwiches.

NOVA: Take your time.

LIAM: Got it. Because this NHP is existing in one of their less causal states, they don’t have to think in cause and effect during training. It means they can reset-

NOVA: It’s ~paracausal~

LIAM: -so no-one ever really dies. Which was actually one of the arguments as to why what happens…happens.

NOVA: Ah. Fuck.

ROCZ: It’s 7pm Union Realtime on December 25^th of the reconstructed old calendar, the “Day of the Feast of the First Birth of Christ The Buddha”.

NOVA: It can’t be that bad, you didn’t say minutes or seconds.

ROCZ: I do actually have those, but I didn’t want to re-watch the security footage to get them. It’s nasty. Also they’re more like a series of timestamps. You have short periods of very intense violence, and then a lot of running.

NOVA: Fair.

ROCZ: So. Everyone except Prudentus is extremely tired, and they want to get this test done so they can go drinking. Pilot Mahira Zahnikova Prudentius is a teetotaller, perfectly fit, and well rested.

LIAM: Ah, cowardice. What kind of open bar does Northstar put on?

NOVA: The kind where it’s not actually an open bar. I read about this.

LIAM: They’ve got to pay for their drinks?

NOVA: Of course. Company planet, company store and all that. Mister MacReady probably grew up under company ownership as some kind of press-ganged cabin-boy, now I’m thinking about it.

ROCZ: They lock the casket in place, tool tighten a few bolts. Khaled, under instruction from Zero, hits the download switch. The NHP who goes down in history as Sekhmet-1A finds herself inside the prototype Blackbeard. She’s confused, lost, embodied in matter for the first time in her existence.

LIAM: Like a baby.

NOVA: Like a baby with an antipathy towards all living things.

LIAM: I already said she was like a baby.

NOVA: A baby with an integrated chainsaw.

ROCZ: That would be appropriate.

LIAM: What?

NOVA: No, I know this. The first chainsaws were hand-wound bone saws, used medically. For, like, awkward births. Which would make for a weird performance of Macbeth…assuming they gave Macduff the chainsaw…? Or he untimely ripp’d himself?

LIAM: Reminds me of the first Alien movie.

ROCZ: (Even more deadpan than usual) Yes. (Standard levels of deadpan) Sekhmet takes control of the prototype and starts doing what she’d been trained to do, which is spin up her weapons and prepare to kill things. The staff back up, most of them finish clearing the floor. Prudentus points her machine at various training mechs, and Sekhmet-1A has what I’m assuming is the time of her life cutting chunks off of the freshly printed machines until they stop moving. Prudentus notes that her co-pilot refuses to use anything other than blades or fists, but is highly effective regardless. Then they run out of mech-scale targets, and Sekhmet-1A turns towards the audience.

NOVA: Which is when Prudentus shuts down the machine and gives Sekhmet a talking to?

ROCZ: That might have worked, but the Prototype’s cockpit had been changed since the last test and no-one had told Prudentus. The emergency shutdown, which had previously been a big red button a little under the natural resting point of the pilot’s right hand, had been moved to below her left during the last print cycle.

LIAM: Khaled you fuck.

ROCZ: Well… Moving the shutdown button had been a directive from the PR/Advertising team, because “70% of evaluated human cultures see the left side of the body as unlucky” and they’d managed to sneak that into the most recent fabrication cycle.

LIAM: Oh. Sorry. She was probably still an asshole.

ROCZ: These kind of minor changes were pretty much constant, but normally didn’t touch the control layout. Prudentus slams where the shutdown was. It doesn’t work, because the button isn’t there anymore. She tries to take over the controls without using the emergency shutdown, because she knows she has seconds to respond, and Sekhmet-1A says…

ROCZ: …there’s supposed to be a clip playing.

ROCZ: …Come on…

ROCZ: …Next time I’m sending any voice clips to Nova to put on the soundboard…

SEKHMET-1A: You silly girl, we’re not done yet.

LIAM: …she sounds kind of drunk.

NOVA: I gotta tell you, boys, if this is what my personal ghost sounds like, I’m okay with being haunted.

ROCZ: Then she physically levers Prudentus out of the cockpit with the tip of her nanocarbon sword. I’m not certain exactly when this kills the pilot, but Sekhmet isn’t being very gentle, so it’s probably pretty fast. This is the kind of thing where I hope it was fast.

NOVA: Still surprisingly okay with this.

LIAM: Yeah, that tracks.

NOVA: Going out like a picked winkle isn’t, you know, at the top of my list, but-

ROCZ: Sekhmet, at this point, starts “rampaging through the compound”; she attacks anything that moves with intention, and ignores anything that doesn’t.

LIAM: Like a T-Rex?

NOVA: Wait, with intention? I don’t know how Sekhmet could know that.

ROCZ: She’s not chasing automatic machines, parts on conveyor belts, or things that fall over. She goes after people, drones, systems under the active control of the base’s compcon, piloted mechs. Things of that nature.

LIAM: It’s paracausal. That’s why NHPs are so widely used despite the whole slave-race thing, because they can do stuff that shouldn’t be possible. It’s like if dowsing actually worked.

NOVA: Hmm.

LIAM: Sorry, it’s ~paraca- *coughing* ~causal.

NOVA: You ok, buddy?

LIAM: Fuck you.

ROCZ: That’s actually on an old version of the advertising copy.

NOVA: It’s ~paracausal~, fuck you?

ROCZ: Yes. Well, basically. First to go are Khaled and MacReady, who panic and try to run, and, honestly, I would have done the same. “Zero”, Ojala Olamide, tries to talk her down, which actually works for a while; a few more people manage to get into the cover of the flare tunnels while Sekhmet is distracted. That’s before Sekhmet-1A “becomes audibly bored” and kills Ojala with a chainsaw.

LIAM: Points for heroism at least.

ROCZ: Now, Sekhmet-1A is an active NHP inside one of the only combat grade chassis on the moon. It’s unclear what her mental state is, other than, and I’m quoting again “an appearance of unrestrained murderous glee”.

NOVA: But IPSN sell Blackbeards with Sekhmets in them, so she must have been stopped somehow, we know this.

LIAM: They had these big barrels of beer for the Christmas party, right? And then they made sure she drank all of it…

ROCZ: IPSN regulations prohibit sharing alcohol with Non-Human Persons.

LIAM: Bastards.

NOVA: You don’t want a wet cockpit.

LIAM: You don’t know me.

NOVA: Okay so getting her drunk won’t work. Was she hurled into the Duat by the followers of RA?

ON SCREEN: An orbital photograph of the primary campus on Ceb 4. It’s mostly a cluster of domes connected by underground tunnels, though there’s a skyscraper complex that pokes through one of the largest domes, and a large flat landing zone off to one side; judging by the skyscraper’s apparent size, the entire complex is roughly equivalent with a small city. The entire settlement is ringed by lights, and has visibly mulched zones near the edge where the encroaching alien forest is being aggressively managed. Through the presentation, Rocz annotates Blackbeard’s path through and from the furthest dome, through the larger underground network, and towards the residential district.

ROCZ: I…We’ll get to that. After the initial attack and finishing off a few poor bastards wounded in crowd crushes, Sekhmet ran out of human targets. She mostly chased down remote controlled mechs and drones, while the surviving staff hid in emergency tunnels. The tunnels had been cut so people could hide from radiation flares, and were too small for a full sized combat mech. There were larger tunnels between each dome, and while those had emergency seals which had been successfully locked, the team had done their job too well.

NOVA: They’ve made a machine to cut through, like, warship bulkheads; a fire door isn’t going to keep her busy for long.

LIAM: Next door people were already drunk, loud, and in some cases belligerent enough to get the local security teams involved, so she’s following the noises.

NOVA: I thought it wasn’t possible to hear people scream in space, and had extrapolated that to include the sounds of violent office parties. Have I been misinformed by Ridley Scott et al.?

LIAM: Ceb has an atmosphere, remember?

ROCZ: This is true. Deck Security decided they needed to step in. Deck Security is the name for shipboard and site-wide emergency response, because of IPSN’s general nautical theme. They sent a squad of recruit cadets in combat hardsuits, and one Deck Officer, Rangi Caelestis, in a Nelson. They also sent out a call to the system’s closest thing to a warship, because they’re not sure if Sekhmet-1A is breaking out of her shackles or if she’s “supposed to be” doing this. Also in the area and joining the immediate response was a research scientist from a nearby lab. I’ve not been able to find the names of any of these people aside from Officer Caelestis.

NOVA: Still, it went well and everyone got to go home in one piece?

ROCZ: Not quite.

NOVA: The cadets were sent to jump on the Blackbeard, and while it was distracted the Officer got to do thrilling heroics?

ROCZ: Well, part of why finding names is difficult is I’m not sure how many cadets there were in the first place…IPSN Deck Security usually operates in groups on ten, but It’s unclear how many people actually died. Lots of pieces.

NOVA: Ugh.

ROCZ: The cadets were supposed to lure the mech back into the research bunkers where it could be easily attacked, but…That didn’t work out as intended. At this point, System Defence, represented by a single transport/frigate hybrid, is trying to decide if it’s worth dropping a Lance barrage on the moon, because they’re paranoid about Eidolon events… which are things that can happen with certain NHP configurations and are generally unpleasant to anything which relies on consistent versions of the laws of physics. I don’t have the Captain’s name or any identification, but we’ll get to that.

NOVA: This is one case where “nuke the site from orbit” wouldn’t be my first option because there’s still a Christmas party happening next door, and a bunch of staff hiding in the tunnels. Meanwhile Sekhmet is giving random people chainsaw injuries, which is exactly the kind of thing these mechs were originally built to avoid.

ROCZ: And crushing injuries, and piercing… Deck Security is trying to convince their orbital support to send down transport to evacuate the workers, and they’re getting nowhere, because the un-named Captain in question won’t risk his crew unnecessarily...and is also dealing with a minor revolt because the gunnery engineers on his boat refuse to fire...at the time they claim there’s a malfunction. Meanwhile, the security teams watching over the Christmas party aren’t keen on trying to break up the drinking games without a really good reason, or really looking forward to trying to evacuate thousands of celebrants. Deck Security Officer Caelestus, in the Nelson, realized things weren’t going as planned nearly immediately, and charged into the fray.

LIAM: Not that they had much choice, but…I act like a big tough guy and it’s because, because I am in human terms, but if I’d seen my friend shredded by a robot built for anti-mech combat I’d be running my machine away.

ROCZ: You wouldn’t have known it was built for anti-mech combat, because each development team on the moon kept their work separate and secret from each other. This was, at the time, the Hathor Mark 2 to the people who were somewhat in the know, and…Project Loose Brick Embryo on the payment slips.

NOVA: Fantastic. Loose Brick Embryo is a terrible code name. It’s no MK Ultra.

LIAM: Mind control gas is probably an SSC cologne. Aerosolized date-rape drugs for the 0.001%.

ROCZ: The fight goes well for our officer, up until he gets both of the arms shorn off of his machine and ejects. The remaining cadets pull him out of the pilot seat and dive into a side tunnel before Sekhmet can get to them. This is when our nameless scientist catches up with the fight, carrying what the after action reports call a modified communications laser. She shoots Blackbeard with… I don’t even know how to describe this…

LIAM: The stuff that grows on you whenever we sit you next to a computer.

NOVA: I’m just going to assume the researcher was part of Horus.

ROCZ: …and as the code took hold it forced Blackbeard’s reactor into a “runaway hyper-energetic event”.

LIAM: You can just say meltdown.

ROCZ: This might not have been a meltdown…I’m not sure if coldcore reactors can meltdown.

NOVA: But what’s important is that the Blackbeard prototype failed catastrophically, which is how we got the picture from the start of the presentation.

ROCZ: This is true. They’d skimped on heat management for the prototype.

LIAM: I’ve seen the stats on the production version: they skimped on heat management for that too.

NOVA: With the evidence of their negligence being so obvious, IPSN are sanctioned, the surviving project leaders are sent to counselling and restorative justice groups and Sekhmet gets…I don’t actually know enough about Non Human Persons to really have any idea.

ROCZ: Not quite or immediately for the first part, and for the last one I’m invoking the ancient rites of Yay Liam.

LIAM: What? Oh okay. Sekhmet-1A dies pretty much instantly when her casket explodes, because as we all know clones are individuals. Depending on exactly how the core identity was created and how important NHP rights are to the project leaders, they could have done anything from immediately euthanizing her core manifestation to locking that version into the archives for categorization and trying a new shard, putting that into a new casket with a more pliable blink-body.

NOVA: Yes. I understand all of these phrases. I said that as a joke but what you mean is in human terms either they kill her, imprison her, or lobotomize her…except that they’d be doing it to her currently innocent twin sister, in more human terms?

LIAM: Basically. What upper management actually did was decide that the NHP had done more or less what they wanted her to do. Then they sent a sanitized version of the rampage to marketing, only showing the vehicular destruction, and not the mincing of staff.

NOVA: Whatever the modern equivalent of photoshopping is, it’s apparently easily detected by the marketing department.

LIAM: They also officially named their new Prime non-human-person Sekhmet….I know Union’s systems automatically name their NHP, but I’m not sure if these guys have a similar sub-program or if someone on the crew was weirdly obsessed with double ancient legends.

NOVA: Sekhmet, being the catgirl goddess of war from ancient Egypt. I’m actually wearing a t-shirt with an anime girl version of her on it, from a TV show.

LIAM: I thought you said you weren’t reading ahead for this one?

NOVA: Oh, I’ve had this for years. She’s cute! She’s got a pirate hat-a tricorn, and two kopesh, and she’s wearing a very stylized naval uniform that looks more like a 2130s Pan-Pacific Admiralty dress uniform than anything Egyptian, they’ve given her a collection of very anachronistic medals…

ROCZ: That’s a lot of detail for a tshirt.

NOVA: Oh, it’s animated. Some kind of projection system air-gapped between layers in the fabric, which also means it cleans itself.

ROCZ: …That’ll do it.

NOVA: Right now she’s juggling kopesh.

LIAM: Also, a group of systems engineers decide to go with the pliable-blink-casket thing, and essentially lobotomize Sekhmet, to force her into a configuration which will cut her freedom of thought to as close to nothing as they can get away with. The official reason they give is so they’ll be able to direct her and her clones more reliably, but it feels like revenge.

NOVA: Fuck. The Kennedy method.

LIAM: The blink-engineers, who’ve admittedly seen a few of their friends mulched and are pretty justifiably pissed, get to work on that secretly. It’ll take them a while, because NHP lobotomies can’t just be done with a butter knife.

NOVA: I feel like if you’re creating a new life form to be a living weapon and then you’re going to complain about said eldritch life form choosing her own targets maybe you shouldn’t have created a living weapon. Watchdog and Uncle work because they’re predictable code.

ROCZ: NHPs are, you know, sexier.

NOVA: I mean, I agree, but this seems out of character?

ROCZ: What I mean is the marketing department leant on them to add more stuff to the license that they could sell.

NOVA: The thesis of the podcast was always “ninety percent of the cut corners or whatever is because people are trying to live under capitalism” and now I’ve lived in post-capitalist attempted-utopia too long I keep forgetting that.

LIAM: Feel free to move to the edges of utopian space, it sucks here. Someone on the base tells Union about the event. Union files the incident and would probably have gotten to it sometime around the mid 5600s, as at the time the Department of Justice and Human Rights was kind of swamped dealing with other violations, and you’d think Union could just fund the bits of the hegemony that actually help people, but no, they need to work with the Karrakin Baronies, that’s stellar politics-

NOVA: Breathe, buddy.

LIAM: My day before this wasn’t great, I’m not having a breakdown, I’m just pissed off. One of the dead was the test pilot, Prudentus. She was a retired member of Albatross, I don’t remember her exact rank at the time but it’s probably Wing or Petrel or something like that. For anyone who doesn’t keep track of the various major factions in the Orion arm, Albatross are one part IPSN propaganda project to nine parts actually heroic. They travel around fighting monsters, slavers, Harrison Armoury-

GO BIRDS

LIAM: Heh. Most of the Albatross live at near light speed, and that means they’re nearly immortal because the faster you go, the less time affects you, and people have known about that since at least the 2000s on the old calendar, because they had to build the effects into GPS satellites.

NOVA: Humans didn’t evolve to think about time dilation. Perverse monkeys shouldn’t be moving at a good fraction of light-speed.

LIAM: That’s another thing that rates on the Liam fear index.

NOVA: Relativistic kill chimps?

LIAM: Actually… less intimidating than a normal chimp. A relativistic chimp would just hit you and explode-

ON SCREEN: a slightly blurred pause symbol, and a picture of a heavily CGI’d ANDY SERKIS as GORDY THE CHIMP

DEVON (ON SCREEN): Chimpanzees were close evolutionary relatives of humanity, native to Cradle (née Earth), and they’ve been extinct for at least 10000 years. This is a tragedy for several reasons, but mainly because a bunch of my jokes and “would you rathers” don’t work anymore.

DEVON (ON SCREEN): For example, you can’t ask someone “would you rather swordfight a chimp once a year or have to fight a chicken every time you went to drive a car” when they don’t know what a chimp is.

DEVON (ON SCREEN): Old humanity really fucked the biosphere when we killed off everything that wasn’t easily farmable food.

ON SCREEN: a slightly blurred play symbol

LIAM: -a normal chimp could pull your arms off and beat you with them.

ROCZ: IPSN’s management on and around Ceb think they can keep this quiet for long enough that if Union gets involved they’ll have precedent of a few hundred years of functional use…Realtime centuries, probably, but the documentation wasn’t clear. Random deckhands are directed to start burying the dead, researchers start categorizing operational behaviour and working on upgrades-

NOVA: The Christmas party trundles to a halt.

ROCZ: -then an Albatross nearlight response carrier ship, the Aaron Bushnell, arrives in response to a blinkspace distress call, which is to say a zero time lag alert that no-one in the settlement will admit to sending.

LIAM: Everyone with a higher rank than…I don’t know, Second Boatswain? Absolutely shits themselves.

NOVA: A few hundred Nelsons dropping from nearlight on your doorstep will do that to most people, and I was going to make a joke about high velocity apes but I don’t think it was going to be any good.

ROCZ: This was actually a pretty small deployment, something like one ship and a few wings of mechs, which is still more than a secret research base and resource extraction site could fight off without having to escalate to space battles; which is unfortunate because the Bushnell arrives within extremely close range; in space combat around a relatively static settlement, extreme close range means stopping between the defensive fleet and the settlement, something which is nearly impossible when the fleet is anything more than one ship.

NOVA: That…yeah, okay.

ROCZ: There are a number of things that captains don’t do as a rule, and one of them is fire a potentially society ending weapon at a ship which is between them and the planet they’re supposed to be guarding. System defence, such as it was, immediately surrenders; they’re one ship which mostly exists as an armed transport, and, like most of the IPSN navy, they basically worship the Albatross.

LIAM: Prudentus was supposed to be retired, teaching people how to protect themselves. You can talk all the shit you want about the Albatross, but they care about their retired instructors. Meanwhile, most of the settlement didn’t know who Prudentus was before she died, and now they’re kind of pissed that not only are some of their co-workers dead and maimed, so is the closest thing to a saint they’re likely to meet.

NOVA: The low number of deaths is also balanced against the sheer dysthynasia of going out like a picked winkle or, like, Leon, if the player fucks up in Resident Evil 4.

LIAM: Where IPSN might have gotten away with burying the project, they instead had to deal with the worst Albatross-related PR in their operational history up to that point.

ROCZ: We’ll get to the Daucus Station thing, eventually.

LIAM: Having to calm a near revolt on top of everything else held them up long enough, or maybe made the situation impossible to ignore, which meant Union got involved. They send a single ship, carrying a team that includes an Arbitrator, Zuhura Anayat, and her…this isn’t a real job title… Esoteric Para-Psychologist, a non-human person by the name of Tomte.

NOVA: Arbitrator, meaning she’s here to settle disputes between IPSN and Albatross?

LIAM: Also Sekhmet. She actually gets a say in this, because despite everything I’ve said about Union treating NHP less like people and more like property, they are actually, kind of, trying to be better. Also, because the shard which was running the prototype mech was more like a clone than anything else, technically the Prime Sekhmet which is still in the research base’s systems didn’t do anything.

NOVA: That makes sense. It’d be like blaming me if my teleporter-malfunctioned duplicate said something that Dev would have to redact. She’s her own person, she can [you can’t say that]

LIAM: Their conclusion is that metaphysically lobotomizing Sekhmet would be extreme, and, basically, that the development team should have expected what they got after running her core code through an infinite war dimension then copy and pasting her into a new body in the real world.

NOVA: How many Xbox-equivalent units of compensation does she get?

LIAM: I don’t actually know how you would convert that…I think some well meaning archivist dipshit gives her an emulator to run Gears of War on in the deep storage on Venus, so…one?

NOVA: That’s more than I expected.

LIAM: Most of the rest of the compensation was handled by IPSN’s own legal systems: they’re a corporostate, so Union is technically a foreign power. In a startling display of actual humanity, the administrators on site make sure everyone gets buried with full honours and that their dependents get paid about ten times more than they would’ve gotten over the span of the original project. Everyone who was wounded but survived gets a full clone body replacement and prosthetic surgeries so they can keep the scars but not lose any mobility or sensation.

NOVA: I’m assuming the presence of various heroic figures helped.

LIAM: Growing an entire thoughtless body to mine for spare parts creeps me out.

NOVA: I’m already growing a thoughtless body. Fully bimbofied.

LIAM: Meanwhile the Albatross of the Aaron Bushnell lean on IPSN until they get an exclusive contract to test Blackbeards on a group of slavers in the local volume. Eventually that becomes the usual subsidized agreement.

ROCZ: The captain of the system defence vessel gets demoted so hard that they scrub him from all records of the event, except as The Captain.

NOVA: Okay. Sure. What did we learn?

ROCZ: Never move the emergency stop. Related to this, know where your shut off button is.

LIAM: Don’t create NHP as weapons?

NOVA: I was going to go with something like make sure your catgirls have the correct stimulation.

ROCZ: All of these are truths. The last segment of the podcast is Safety Third

JIM STRINGER’s SHAKE HANDS WITH DANGER

ROCZ: "Dear Devon and the minions-"

LIAM: (makes a LOUD INCORRECT BUZZER type sound)

LIAM: Devon’s our-

DEVON (actually voiced this time): god of editing

ROCZ: "I’m writing as a now retired member of the safety team for REDACTED-" they actually wrote redacted- "a forging company on Whitefall."

NOVA: Searching isn’t getting me anything for Whitefall Redacted other than conspiracies about a Smith-Shimano Idol group, so unless our writer did a lot of hitting singers with hammers that’s probably not related. I'd assumed Idols were made of, you know, various of meats, unless they’re virtual idols…

ROCZ: …a face that’s moe and a voice that’s strong… You sing sixteen songs, what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt...

LIAM: Saint Peter don't you call me, I can't go, I owe my soul to the licensing store.

NOVA: Beautiful. There's probably some kind of bullshit licensing contract that means the singers can't get paid until they sell enough product.

LIAM: That's what I was getting at, yeah. You gonna continue, hotshot?

ROCZ: I just feel a little strange about being the one to start a tangent. It'll pass. Anyway. "This is the story of an over enthusiastic, hard working co-worker, and the importance of explaining why a procedure has been set up. We'll call this worker Taro. Taro had been assigned to the DATA EXPUNGED, a proprietary cyclic cutter device that's still mostly under a non-disclosure agreement. What I can tell you is that the device has a tendency to jam, because the ~paracausal~ material used to make cuts is cycled and re-collected, and in doing so picks up various heavy metal impurities which eventually have to be removed from the system. The machine also has a multiple stage shutdown process which must be followed before cleaning out blockages in the system. The cleaning process involves 1) cutting power to the machine, 2) finding the floor supervisor and/or a member of the safety staff who will ensure power has been cut and the cutter materials are fully inert, 3) using a standard equipment key provided by the staff in step two to open the now shut down machine, 4) cleaning the insides of the machine with a specialized device which is mostly a long pole with something that isn’t but may as well be a cube of aerogel on the end, and then 5 to 10) closing, locking, reconnecting, recharging, then restarting and confirming the machine is operating correctly."

LIAM: I can see where this is going already.

ROCZ: "At 11:25 on an otherwise uneventful… diransdi-"

NOVA: I think I've Pavloved myself. Justin says a date or a time or both and I brace for impact.

ROCZ: "-an uneventful diransdi, the machine jams. Taro, being an enthusiastic young man who doesn't want to bother his co-workers and delay the work, takes out his own standard equipment key, available from all Union-affiliated equipment Printers. He opens the machine-"

LIAM: I hate being right.

ROCZ: "-and begins cleaning the blockage with his fingers."

NOVA: In doing so he begins his new career as a rapidly expanding cloud of high energy plasma?

ROCZ: Not quite. The letter continues: "This is where I need to explain a little of the layout of our forge: Taro's device is, for reasons that made sense at the time, effectively hidden behind a primary strut and a few older machines. The forge is also loud; we're required to wear ear protection as long as any of the machines are operating, which they are from the beginning of shift to the end. Taro begins yelling almost immediately after clearing the blockage, and no-one hears him. At 11:47, a routine inspection pass is made by your writer, who finds him in the machine up to the base of his fingers, immobilized by the way his own finger bones had jammed the system after clearing the blockage. He has burns growing across his skin past the elbow, because humans are largely made of lighter elements than hull alloy is. I hit the emergency stop/reverse, pull Taro out of the machine, and dunk the remains of his hand into a maniple of medical/industrial whitewash nanites. Another co-worker arrives, locks the device, calls for help, and then fully disconnects it from the system.”

ROCZ: “By 12:01, Taro's hand has stopped smoking, and he’s stable enough to transport."

NOVA: That might actually be worse than immediate vaporization?

ROCZ: "We evacuate Taro, shut down the forge for three days, and near immediately after we return to the site begin drafting new protocols which include explanations of exactly why each procedure exists as it does. By the time Taro returns from the hospital with his shiny new prosthetic hand, we're all alcoholics from the stress. The only good things about all of this is that since The Taro Incident-“ she capitalized T, T and I “-we've had a perfect safety rating, much better documentation, and a free hand from upper management to stop production if something looks dangerous, a right we made sure the new staff knew they could use. It wasn't worth having Taro maimed, but at least the company paid to patch him up."

NOVA: I'm going to have nightmares about whatever that machine was.

ROCZ: "Sorry I couldn't send you a funny work story. Yours, 'Red Admiral'"

LIAM: You're not forgiven. Fuck you.

ROCZ: "P.S.: ‘Taro’ enjoys the podcast too, and he asked me to send the story in as a reminder that the best way to help your friends finish their work on time is to not get yourself maimed trying to save the company a few minutes of production."

NOVA: Huh. No, that doesn't make me any happier about a man getting his fingers mauled by eldritch energies.

ROCZ: That's the episode. Next time we're talking about the Dyhed Metavault Event. Does anyone have anything to add?

NOVA: Always know where your exits, your hard cover, and your off switches are.

LIAM: Don't finger the Kthussy. I can't stop you, but...actually....

NOVA: Call that the hookup that changes you as a person.

LIAM: Seriously, if you see any members of Karrakin nobility, [extended bleep]

ROCZ: I don't think that actually counts as an actionable threat. Goodbye everybody.

Notes:

The Five Voices see all possible futures. This one is low confidence.

All due apologies to Nova, Rocz, Liam and Devon of Well There’s Your Problem: any irregularities in the behaviour of the hosts can be explained by them being Memorial Homunculi or time displaced ghosts or something.
All inaccuracies to the Lancer setting are because I didn't do enough research or because I decided to change something for the sake of the story, but I’ve knowingly referenced the Core Rulebook by Miguel Lopez and Tom Parkinson Morgan and Legionaire by Katherine Stark, as well as Lancer Battlegroup by Kai Tave and Miguel Lopez, and last but not least Waffenfabrik Zalewski by Konigstein, Narugaa, and Duvalasur.
This was largely inspired by "Well There's Your Problem Episode 151: The Great Kanto Blackout" by docmatoi

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