Logs:C is for Conspiracy

C is for Conspiracy
Dramatis Personae B, Skye
In Absentia Shane, Taylor	2024-07-13 "It was totally a setup, and they're gonna milk the fuck out of it."
Location <NYC> Evolve Cafe - Lower East Side
Spacious and open, this coffeeshop has a somewhat industrial feel to it, grey resin floors below and exposed-beam ceilings that have been painted up in a dancing swirl of abstract whorls and starbursts, a riot of colour splashed against a white background. The walls alternate between brick and cheerfully lime-green painted wood that extends to the paneling beneath the brushed-steel countertops. There's an abundance of light, though rather than windows (which are scarce) it comes from plentiful hanging steel lamps. The walls here are home to artwork available for sale; though the roster of prints and paintings and drawings and photographs changes on a regular basis it has one thing in common -- all the artists displayed are mutants. The seating spaced around the room is spread out enough to keep the room from feeling cluttered. Black chairs, square black tables that mostly seat two or four though they're frequently pushed around and rearranged to make space for larger parties. In the back corner of the room is more comfortable seating, a few large black-corduroy sofas and armchairs with wide tables between them. There's a shelf of card and board games back here available for customers to sit and play. The chalkboard menus hanging behind the counter change frequently, always home to a wide variety of drinks (with an impressive roster of fair-trade coffees and teas largely featured) though their sandwiches and wraps and soups and snacks of the day change often. An often-changing variety of baked goods sit behind the display case at the counter halfway back in the room, and the opposite side of the counter holds a small selection of homemade ice creams. A pair of single-user bathrooms flanks the stairway in back of the cafe; at night, the thump of music can be heard from above, coming from the adjoining nightclub of the same name that sits up the stairs above the coffeehouse. It's been a hot day but as the sun sets it's a lovely pleasant evening. It'll be even more crowded at Evolve later, when the club is in full swing, but even in the earlier evening it's plenty busy. B isn't in the cafe, but out on its pleasant patio. Parked just adjacent to the patio rail is her blue and silver bike -- probably it's a motorcycle, it looks generally motorcycle-shaped, but kind of like a motorcycle designed by a cyberpunk artist, all sleek-sharp lines, no actual tires on the slender gleaming circles where the tires should be. B herself is also kind of sleek blue-and... well, not exactly silver but there's a faint metallic sheen to her skin anyway. She's tucked at a side table on the patio, two coffees and two plates in front of her though she's the only one there. She's dressed in a lacy mostly-sheer midi tank top and metallic pink short-shorts, chunky metal wristcuffs on her wrist that match the extensive hardware on the metal-heavy chunky black and pink boots she wears. She's got her phone in one webbed hand, and is kind of people-watching the passersby as she talks animatedly into it: "-- no no you're right I mean -- c'mon that man ducked for cover at a rally once when a balloon popped but he's all bravado fist in the air for this? If that wasn't a setup I'll eat my hat." "I know!" says B's phone in a similarly animated voice. The woman on the screen is not looking at her phone directly, which is probably good because she is driving at the moment. "Did you see how quickly they put out statements? Multiple statements. They're always scrambling every time he says something out of pocket, how are they gonna have their shit together so fast after something like this?" An ancient dark blue van is pulling up at the curb. The engine cuts off and Skye hops out with her phone in hand and her big laptop bag over one shoulder. She's dressed in a black ribbed tank and hip-hugging cutoff jean, her black lace-up boots plain and somewhat less stompy than B's. "See you soon!" she chirps on the video call, hanging up before she gets close enough to tempt feedback. "Hey!" she says to B as she pockets her phone and sinks into the chair across from her. "It was totally a setup, and they're gonna milk the fuck out of it." "I've seen the way Secret Service act when their charge is in danger -- the way they stood him back up in full view two seconds after? You can't tell me they didn't know..." B is grimacing, and has been looking back at her phone again but sets it down so she can pick up her coffee. "And the backlash from his nazi army already talking about going to war with the 'libtards'." She grimaces before she takes a gulp. "Don't guess we're heading into, uh, better times to be a freak. Or trans. Or not white." Her exaggerated perk comes with a glace toward the door of her brother's cafe, an overly chipper: "could be worse, though, 'least I'm not Jewish." Skye snaps her fingers sharply. "Exactly! That was a whole photo op right there." She takes up her coffee, too, and raises it in a little salute to B. "Thanks!" Before she has a chance to drink it, though, she's leaning forward. "I recently joined this crawler coding collective...huh." She frowns. "That's kind of hard to say out loud. Anyway, everyone on the chat is lightly losing it because we've been working on a distributed data mining tool that would be useful for peeling apart exactly this kind of -- I mean it's a prelude to a literal, actual coup." She does finally gulp down some coffee, and gives the colorful mural outside the cafe a lingering look. "Has there been any trouble yet? Here. Like the Purifiers are awful but they're not fast, or all that organized." "Crawler coding collective crawler coding collective crawler coding collective," B is very quietly whispering to herself, nose wrinkling while she does. She shakes her head in distaste and decides, instead, at conversational volume: "C-Spot. You're working on, what, making The Machine but for fascist takeovers?" Her head turns, too, inner eyelids blinking closed and her gills pressing down flat as she looks over towards the many-armed barista immortalized across from the cafe. "S'been quiet so far but it's early still. World's got a lot of random bigots, figure it can't hurt to -- hang out." Skye mouths 'C-Spot' quietly and nods her approval. "That is snappier than 'Project Funnel Web', and like we should have a name for the collective itself and not the thing we're working on. But, yeah! Kind of that, except we don't have a whole emergent AI under the hood. Unfortunately, because that would be pretty handy." She frowns deeply. "Or fortunately, because that would be pretty unethical, too. Probably." She shrugs, clearly not very troubled by this hypothetical. "At the end of the day, large language models are still pretty dumb, and we still have to farm the data out to actual meat brains at some point in the process. You're an AI wizard, if you have any ideas how to push that point back, minimize the number of trusted volunteers we need? That would be super rad." She follows B's gaze and blows out a long breath. "Can't hurt. Like I said, I haven't really got anywhere to be, and I can work on my code anywhere. I'm down to hang out with you for a while." B's brow wrinkles, and with a heroic effort she does Not bring up that her idea of an appropriate number of trusted volunteers is Zero, but the implication is still there just a little in the uncertain skepticism on her face. "Make a better large language model," is more or less the same suggestion, admittedly. She is at least getting her computer out so that she can make more concrete contributions to this effort than wry snark. "Or," she's adding -- oddly cheerful -- "just stage the coup yourself, then you don't have to predict it. Kinda a matter of when and not if, we are clearly in the late chapters of America here." "Oh, so the 'C' in C-Spot stands for 'coup'." Skye chuckles nervously. "I don't think the rest of the collective would be down with that, and we'd probably need to do more than just...hacking. And I get we're already living in a fascist empire but..." She shrugs, leaning over to take her laptop from her messenger bag. "Foiling even more fascist takeovers is probably still worth something. Do you just happen to have a very smart and very open source large language model just conveniently lying around?" "Do you mean right now?" B gives a small amused twitch of closed-lipped smile to Skye. "Enough time and, uh --" She jerks her head towards Evolve's door, "-- enough caffeine and maybe future B and Skye will have one." Her nose crinkles, and she adds wryly: "Maybe kinda far-future." "I did mean right now, but this is even better." Skye perks up, grinning. "Future B and Skye are gonna fuck over so many fascists. Or...well, they're pretty good at fucking themselves over, we just have to catch them at it." She salutes B with her mug. "You keep the coffee flowing and I'll start a CryptPad."