13:20 <VoxPVoxD> What is Richard doing at 1PM or so when the Greybox's buzzer buzzes, and the door cam reveals a woman holding an insulated food delivery bag, wearing an expensive outfit colour-coordinated to match said bag? 13:23 <dammitwho> Data entry! Even when the Nameless House aren't bringing back interesting facts from the field, there are Levels to be Monitored and Throughput to be Maintained to keep the nodule of extradimensional wiring called the Greybox healthy over the long term. 13:23 <dammitwho> Willie gets buzzed in instanter. 13:24 <VoxPVoxD> Willie breezes in. "Mr. Haldane! I do hope you're hungry." 13:24 <VoxPVoxD> "I made pizzas." 13:26 <dammitwho> Richard raises his eyebrows briefly. Cooking to stave off pandemic loneliness or even as a hobby is very common and unremarkable, but dressing to complement your takeout bag is a small danger signal. One that there's basically no way to bring up without being catastrophically rude. "Oh, thanks! I was just about to order out." 13:31 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "I've got black olives and wild mushroom here, and one that's caper, artichoke, and anchovy." 13:32 <VoxPVoxD> She's also got actual white cardboard pizza boxes, albeit unlabeled ones. Presumably you get just get these by the stack from the internet or a restaurant supply store. 13:34 <dammitwho> Buying pizza boxes for this purpose? Hm, maybe he needs to recalibrate and this is just how she is. "I'll dig in, then. Many thanks for the clock, by the way. It's just the thing. How did you know?" 13:36 <Crion> Aaron Aster is working at his station, spending a half-day here because young Kingfisher needed the morning and early afternoon for his studies and frankly, the chairs are comfier here for reading and ruminating than they are at the spartan Aster Biologics. He will nod to Willie as she enters, accept only a slight portion of pizza if he's asked repeatedly, and otherwise remain fucked off 13:36 <Crion> to his work. 13:37 <VoxPVoxD> Willie smiles. "I didn't! You never really know, do you? But I saw it window shopping - our Brexit hell has not yet been reflected in the shelves of curio shops - and I thought, very Richard. Then I just got it engraved and there you are." 13:42 <VoxPVoxD> "I'm very glad you like it! Not really an adequate apology for what I've put you through, I'm afraid." 13:42 <dammitwho> Mouth full, Richard waves a hand in a 'think nothing of it' sort of way. 13:46 <VoxPVoxD> Willie, in her cherry-red suit - the same one she wore when she interviewed Aaron the first time, actually - looks unusually pale. But she seems very gratified by Richard's reaction. "I'm very glad you're vegetarian. Meat's half again as expensive as it was when I moved up here." 13:47 <VoxPVoxD> "I am eating so much squash." 13:47 <dammitwho> Grumpily: "It'll be veg too, soon enough. Sodding Brexit." 13:49 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "And Leavers won't bat an eye. It's not like there's any actual meat in Ginsters pies or draught lager." 13:50 <VoxPVoxD> "They don't even enjoy winning! They just get madder and meaner." 13:51 <dammitwho> "If they wanted to be miserable so they'd have something to enjoy complaining about, why couldn't it have been the weather? Or the football? Grand tradition, that." 13:53 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "It's like an addiction. They get inured to the ordinary things to complain about, and they keep chasing ever-greater algorithmic rage highs. Now it's 'woke' this and 'wokes' that." 13:53 <VoxPVoxD> She didn't bring any cutlery, but luckily the office has some flatware so she can eat this pizza. 13:56 <dammitwho> "Mmmh. It's just awful." Richard has a plate, but he's eating the pizza like a normal person. Is Willie really going to... you know... use a knife and fork? 13:58 <VoxPVoxD> Yes...? 13:59 <VoxPVoxD> Also she eats from both the crust and business ends alternately. 13:59 <dammitwho> Holy shit. 14:00 <Crion> That only gets a brief look from Aster. He's had to tolerate her eating pizza in his presence before. Hideous stuff. 14:01 <VoxPVoxD> Willie delicately chews and swallows. "Is there something on my face?" 14:02 <dammitwho> "Ehrm. No. I was just... have you always eaten pizza like that? Knife and fork, alternating sides? I've never seen anyone do it that way." 14:07 <VoxPVoxD> Willie purses her lips and nods, with the air of someone who has had this conversation before. "When I was a child I didn't eat the crusts at all, but I worked out a solution. Pizza's not made to be eaten with your fingers. You wouldn't pick up a slice of any other kind of hot pie and just mash it into your face." 14:13 <dammitwho> "Right. It would just fall apart." 14:15 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "Anything with a tough enough crust to stand up to that is going to be a pasty. Speaking of Ginsters. And pasties don't drip hot fluids everywhere. In New York people get these tablecloth-sized slices of pizza and just fold them into grease funnels. Mortifying." 14:21 <dammitwho> Contemplatively: "Back in sixth form we would make sandwiches out of them by flipping one slice on top of another." 14:22 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "How many times did you have to do it before you stopped getting grease on your shirts?" 14:23 <dammitwho> "Never did. There's an art to it, a movement of the wrist." 14:24 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "As true gamers dare." 14:26 <VoxPVoxD> "There's a place not far from here that I keep meaning to try, a small plates place with quite a small menu, including flatbreads. Got a rave review from Rayner in the Guardian... but it's never open now. No food to sell." 14:29 <dammitwho> Richard nods, chewing. "That's almost everywhere. I suppose the Graun's food reviews are still alright?" 14:31 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "Rayner and Dent are the best restaurant critics working in Britain today. Most of the rest of the site is a sort of life support system for those dreadful live blogs now." 14:31 <VoxPVoxD> "And the paper is totally subsidiary to the website. It's sad." 14:33 <dammitwho> "Just a downhill plunge since Snowden. Awful. Awful!" 14:35 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "...Edward, right? Not the Earl." 14:37 <dammitwho> He nods. "Right. GCHQ made them take drills to their hard drives and they've been whipped curs for the security state ever since." Richard adds bitterly. 14:38 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "Really? I didn't know that." 14:39 <VoxPVoxD> "They're definitely more establishment than they like to pretend they are, but still, what other paper in this country will give someone like Owen Jones a byline, or print an op-ed like 'we shouldn't have gone to Afghanistan to begin with'?" 14:42 <dammitwho> Begrudgingly, Richard agrees. "Owen's alright. He's really swimming against the tide, though. For every antiwar column there are a dozen trying to appeal to middle-aged, middle-class curtain twitchers who are scared of the trans." 14:44 <VoxPVoxD> Willie sighs. "Yeah... they're just a bit old, I think. From a particular period in history. They were manifestly better than the baby boomers and the Thatcherites and now they've got laurel bum. Of course that rings a bit hollow after spending much of October wading through Young Tories." 14:44 <VoxPVoxD> "The Snowden thing was an American, wasn't it? Writing for them." 14:49 <dammitwho> "I think so. That sounds right, anyway. It went to the New York Times after." 14:51 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "Do you see yourself as akin to Snowden?" 14:51 <VoxPVoxD> "With your mild treason?" 14:55 <dammitwho> He looks startled for a moment. "Honestly, I'd never considered it before. Insulated life, I suppose, where news stories are a parallel dimension that you still get angry about." 14:56 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "I imagine the thought of contacting a journalist never crossed your mind, considering what happened at the Guardian." 15:01 <dammitwho> "First instinct is to say no, for traditional British reasons of self-deprecation. A moment's thought and... still no, because he thought he could change the whole system. Sunlight as a disinfectant. I never did... I left because I couldn't stand it anymore and the place was falling to bits anyway. Who would I even tell and be believed, no matter what I brought with me? And if I were believed, 15:01 <dammitwho> what then? When the night city and the state both get a sudden interest in turning me into a smear down the pavement?" 15:02 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "Ah! Rather like our Robert." 15:03 <dammitwho> He takes another slice gloomily. "Yes, I do feel a bit like him sometimes. Less, you know," He makes a gesture like pointing a gun. "I might have gone to a journalist or something, I suppose, if Greyjack hadn't called. Not out of any reasoned motive, just to get the whole sick business out of my gullet. And that would have been the end." 15:04 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "How very lucky we are to have you, then." 15:06 <VoxPVoxD> "Does being stuck in here make it easier to ignore what's going on out there, or harder?" 15:12 <dammitwho> "Oh, much easier. It's interesting work, and in theory helping you help the night city means fewer people are killed who shouldn't be. I talk to my friends, family, the worst of the pandemic largely passes me by... Tea?" 15:13 <VoxPVoxD> "Please!" There's pizza enough for Aaron or Bob or for Richard later. "Have you developed any greater insight into..." She waggles her fingertips at the wires a bit, to suggest Richard's facility with the same. 15:21 <dammitwho> He stands and heads to the little utility area, with its upright washer and dryer, water cooler, mug rack, and little hot plate for the tea. While getting the water boiled, he says: "A bit! This whole area appears to be, or have been, a sort of maintenance area for all the rest of it, wherever that goes." 15:21 <dammitwho> "Its interfaces with the outside world don't really seem to need a physical entry and exit. We could pull up the metaphorical drawbridge if we needed to." 15:22 <VoxPVoxD> "Interesting. But not actively-in-use? Or at least, whose functioning does not actively interfere with your work or ours?" 15:24 <dammitwho> "No one else has been using the Greybox. The wires in the walls carry signals from... somewhere to somewhere, though." 15:25 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: ”...perfectly natural, standard electronics, twisted to its limits and forced through unusual edge cases.” 15:29 <dammitwho> "Hmm? Not sure about that. I know how some of this runs, but I'd be hard pressed to explain it." 15:29 <dammitwho> "The how but not the why, you know." 15:30 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: ”I was just thinking about... I went to the Dragon Vampires last night, with Aaron. They showed us the study they’d done on my blood, then they drugged me and tried to draw the Devil out.” 15:31 <VoxPVoxD> “So far, they’ve been unable to determine on a physical level whether I’ve been possessed or subsumed by a demon or whether I’m just like this.” 15:31 <VoxPVoxD> “They don’t think I’m magic at all. They think I’m some sort of X-Men.” 15:32 <VoxPVoxD> “And I was thinking about how these place, things like it, also have, to me, a whiff of the infernal.” 15:32 <VoxPVoxD> “And it is quite a mundane sort of supernature here, isn’t it? Very physical.” 15:33 <VoxPVoxD> “Perhaps Hell is... simply real. Rather than Real, in the way that Magic Is Real.” 15:34 <dammitwho> "The X-Men are magic," He says, pouring into mugs. "They just use different words to describe it." 15:36 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: ”Perhaps. We’d be arguing with the dictionary a bit to disagree. But they have observed - and I have no reason to doubt their technical ability or their candour - a difference of kind with the sort of magic they normally associate with the blood.” 15:42 <dammitwho> Richard makes thoughtful hrming noises for a moment, turns and brings two steaming mugs of tea back to the conference table. (There's a third one ready back at the kettle in case Aster suddenly goes mad and demands tea, but it isn't full.) 15:42 <dammitwho> "That makes a bit of sense, actually." 15:43 <dammitwho> "If you took away almost everything I've learned about the wizards and then asked me what sort of things they do that's what I'd guess - ordinary things pushed past normal into strange, undocumented edge cases in physics. Glitches in the system." 15:43 <dammitwho> "Have you ever heard the magic/more magic switch story?" 15:43 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: ”I haven’t.” 15:45 <dammitwho> He hands Willie her cup, sits back down and blows gently on his. "It's a very old story, foundational to computer engineering culture. It's about a PDP-10 in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI Lab. Now, a PDP-10 is a mainframe computer that was state of the art in the '60s and '70s, which should give you an idea of just how long ago this all was." 15:45 <VoxPVoxD> Willie drinks her scalding hot tea immediately, and nods attentively. 15:50 <dammitwho> "On the side of the metal frame of this PDP-10 was a switch- an old mechanical one, you know. Homebrew job, actually glued onto the frame. The fellow who discovered it and first told the story - whose name has passed into myth, or at least it has for me - knew not to touch a strange switch on a mainframe, for fear of crashing it. But the switch was labeled very unhelpfully. One position was 15:50 <dammitwho> labeled 'magic' and the other 'more magic', with the switch in the 'more magic' position." 15:52 <dammitwho> "So he calls a colleague over to figure out what the hell it is, and they determine that the switch only has a wire running to it on one side. Now an electrical switch is completely useless unless you have wires running to both ends, so that it can make or break a connection. Otherwise, the thing's inert. They decided it was some sort of small prank, and flipped the switch." 15:52 <dammitwho> "The PDP-10 instantly crashed." 15:53 <VoxPVoxD> Willie grins. 15:55 <dammitwho> "Astonished, they restart the computer, but not before a bit superstitiously flipping the switch back to the 'more magic' position, and they leave it be. About a year later, our hero tells a friend called David Moon, whose name is not important except that it's part of the story. Suspicious that he's being made fool of, David demands to be shown the switch." 15:56 <dammitwho> "So the pair of them scrutinize the thing, still on the PDP-10 in its closet, and they notice that the wire connected to the one end of the switch ran through a snarl of other wires and ultimately terminated in... a ground pin. Not only was the thing electrically inoperative, it wasn't connected to anything that could affect anything else!" 15:56 <dammitwho> "So they flipped the switch again. And the PDP-10 crashed." 16:00 <dammitwho> "After that, they left it alone, and there it sat. Since then, there have been theories about what it was and how it worked. The switch itself was finally cut out in '79 when the mainframe was moved. Just one of those mysteries, where everything comes together in just the wrong way and something baffling happens." 16:01 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: ”Did the mainframe still work when the switch was cut out?” 16:02 <dammitwho> Richard nods, and takes a sip. "Oh yes. Perfectly normal." 16:03 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: ”But I bet wherever that switch is now, they keep it flipped to ‘more magic’.” 16:06 <dammitwho> He grins at Willie. "Just in case." Sips his tea again and swallows. "Once we accept that the universe is far stranger than our science currently allows, what strangeness is honeycombed beneath the surface? Paranatural, if you like." 16:07 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: ”It all gets rather Clarkeish, yeah? Magic just being science you haven’t learnt yet.” 16:07 <VoxPVoxD> “Or science being magic you think you’ve got a grip on.” 16:08 <VoxPVoxD> Clarkeish is a Manchego Word. 16:08 <dammitwho> Richard: "This particular kind of magic, anyway. Unless the Dracula scientists have got it wrong." 16:13 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: ”I sort of hope they haven’t, both because it’d mean I’m learning something and because it would lend SOME credence to my repeated insistence there is value to cultivating professional relationships with the Kindred.” 16:19 <dammitwho> Curiously: "Insistence to whom?" 16:23 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: ”For now, just the rest of the team. Rolf and Agostina, certainly, would rather disassociate entirely. Aaron agrees with me, contingent on being around to chaperone anything that might come back on him. And Bob... well. Is Bob.” 16:23 <VoxPVoxD> “Eventually that circle will widen. Eventually other hunters will find out what we’re doing. Locals. Old colleagues.” 16:24 <Crion> Aster stirs at the mention of his name but does not contradict or indicate he wishes to comment. 16:31 <dammitwho> "Mmm. I'd been thinking about the remnants of the Human Office, but there must have been, ah... grassroots. Whatever they're called." 16:31 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: ”Have you ever heard of Network Zero?” 16:35 <dammitwho> "Doesn't ring a bell." 16:37 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: ”It’s a bit like - don’t make this comparison to their faces - Anonymous for hunters. I worked with a group of them in London, running a website. They’ll be in touch, probably, and so will other colleagues, ones who were trained in Milan. Dev or Scratch or Amaro. Maybe Sammie.” 16:38 <VoxPVoxD> “It’d be bizarre for them to come up, but they’ll be curious. And they’ll hear things, eventually.” 16:44 <dammitwho> "A website," Richard muses. "It's not what you'd expect, is it?" 16:44 <VoxPVoxD> “What isn’t?” 16:47 <dammitwho> "What do you think their reaction will be?" 16:50 <VoxPVoxD> Willie sips her tea contemplatively. ”It really depends. There are ways to explain this all to them, or that they could come to see it all, that they would find tolerable. Perhaps even agreeable. But then there are other ways... it really does come down to our messaging, and the facts on the ground.” 16:51 <VoxPVoxD> “I didn’t leave London on the best of terms with my colleagues.” 16:51 <VoxPVoxD> “Nothing like your or Bob’s situations, but...” 16:52 <dammitwho> "Do you think we could actually conflict with them?" 16:53 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: ”...it really depends. Milan’s doctrine is very firm on the night-city. but it does not come easily to everyone who follows it. And there is one thing they do not forgive, which is someone who they believe has willingly and knowingly given themselves over to the Devil inside them.” 16:55 <VoxPVoxD> Willie’s realising that she’s talking herself into reaching out to them. To getting ahead of the story, and just to thaw relations. Three months isn’t that long, surely. Now she wonders if this is the point Richard is indirectly drawing her towards, like some kind of cheerful Caledonian Yoda. 16:55 <VoxPVoxD> “What do you think?” 16:58 <dammitwho> Richard: "I think we're doing well at the moment, and we might not always be. We've done nothing wrong, or at least nothing to be ashamed of. Maybe it's a good time to rebuild relationships?" 17:01 <VoxPVoxD> Doing well, yeah... but doing good? ”Yeah, I think you’re right. Just some personal messages. Nothing with the imprimatur of the House, since we’d need to agree collective messaging on that. Nothing that invokes the rest of you.” 17:03 <dammitwho> "It does make sense to start informally." 17:06 <VoxPVoxD> Willie checks her phone and frowns. ”My lunch hour’s almost up. I’ll have to get back. Perhaps I’ll draft some emails while I’m working. Thank you for keeping me company, Richard. We must work out some way that I can take you out for a proper meal some time, instead of all these breakroom lunches and pizza furores.” 17:07 <dammitwho> "I'd like that! I enjoyed the chat." 17:08 <VoxPVoxD> Putting on her coat. ”For now, I suppose, just continue to be More Magic.” 17:08 <Crion> Pizza is a proper working lunch. English.