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justinspoliticalcorner · 2 days ago

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Melissa Gira Grant at TNR:

Late Sunday, a reported 20,000 people joined an organizing call quickly convened by Indivisible, a group founded to push back on Trump’s first administration, in response to actions largely undertaken by one of his unelected lackeys, the chaotic tech entrepreneur Elon Musk. As the call maxed out its capacity, tens of thousands more watched via YouTube. Meanwhile, outside an otherwise unexciting federal building in Washington, federal workers and D.C. residents assembled. Inside, under orders from Musk (who apparently paid his way into the president’s good graces), a small group of young men, whose only professional experience was working for one of Musk’s or Musk’s cronies’ companies, were wreaking havoc on federal payment systems. “Musk is inside the Treasury right now with his cadre of flying monkeys, and we don’t know what they’re doing,” said Indivisible co-founder Ezra Levin on the organizing call. No one seemed to know how to stop them.

But the accounts from that small protest outside the federal building, with just a few people blocking the doors—backed up by chants of “There’s a robbery in progress”—put a spotlight on the scene and gave it a story. On Monday morning, as federal workers reported lockouts from their offices, more people joined. Some protesters took to the street outside the Office of Management and Budget and blocked traffic. And the next day, Indivisible demonstrators and Democratic members of Congress gathered at the Treasury Building in opposition to Musk’s ongoing takeover, which some lawmakers were by then plainly calling an “illegal raid,” in which he “illegally seized power.” When they tried to get into Treasury on Tuesday, they were turned away. “We’re not going to allow them to steal from our people, from working-class people!” Representative Maxwell Frost said at the rally assembled outside.

In the wake of the November election, multiple news outlets ran stories suggesting that, this time, the president’s opposition were exhausted and inclined to sit this one out. But the fact that the National Mall isn’t packed with pussy-hat-wearing women does not mean that everyone has moved on. Some may have, of course, like the group of Pennsylvania women profiled in The New York Times ahead of the 2025 inauguration, whose first experience organizing was protesting Trump’s first term. (But, to be fair, we don’t know how many people in that particular demographic have really tuned out.) The story those particular protests were telling—a man who sexually assaulted women was in the White House, and himself was a threat to democracy—has only gotten more grim, more all-encompassing, in the last eight years. If anything, there is too much to protest and there are too many villains, an overwhelming number of stories competing for attention and action. But protests are, in fact, happening—and this week, more people are starting to show up.

At the same time as some lesser-known federal office buildings became sites of protest on Sunday, thousands of people across the country were turning out in opposition to Trump’s promised mass deportations and the already-escalating ICE raids: In Los Angeles (blocking the 101 Freeway), Phoenix, Las Vegas (over several days, including hundreds outside Trump’s hotel), Dallas, and Atlanta, among others. On Sunday and Monday, a few thousand people in Washington, D.C. and New York protested Trump’s attempted bans on gender-affirming care for young trans people. On Tuesday, as Trump contemplated shutting down the Department of Education by executive order, students walked out of schools in Los Angeles, and members of the Chicago Teachers Union held “walk-ins” at 100 schools, calling for protections for immigrant students, parents, and educators.

What do we know about these protests? It’s too early to make any data-based generalizations. But based on the rapid-fire research I did for this story, including going to some of these protests (both now and in the first Trump administration), they are not primarily organized under a banner of “Resist Trump.” Protests have mobilized around Trump’s orders, but they are also targeting those who are carrying out his orders, whether that’s responding to an ICE raid in their own neighborhood or to a hospital that is preemptively banning gender-affirming care. Many of these same protesters, not coincidentally, remained active no matter who was in the White House.

Their communities did not see the Biden years as a victory but as a possible reprieve. That reprieve didn’t materialize: Biden didn’t brand his deportations as Trump did, and they weren’t media spectacles, but by the numbers available, he removed as many people from the United States as Trump did in his first term. For trans people, who Biden did at least mention in some speeches and whose rights he backed in a number of executive orders, almost all of that has been undone by two weeks of Trump. The Biden years also saw a constant onslaught of attacks on trans people at the state and local level. There was nothing to sit out. Maybe, to those who deemed protesters “tired,” this resistance doesn’t look like what they expected. Perhaps they don’t see protests led by immigrants and trans people as part of the resistance, or see these as side issues—even though those are the communities Trump is specifically targeting.

The resistance to Tyrant 47 feels and looks different from Autocrat-in-Chief Trump’s first term. #Resist47 #ResistTrump

#The Resistance #Resist 47 #Donald Trump #Trump Administration II #Indivisible #Musk Coup #Ezra Levin

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sportsthoughts · 6 months ago

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In The Room Masterpost Seasons 1-4

This is mostly for my own reference but I hope you can enjoy seeing what our guys were up to at any point over the last decade or so! (I was going to combine every season into one giant post but tumblr won't allow that many links so here we go)

Watch Pittsburgh Penguins In The Room on Youtube here

All Season 1 gifs (2011-2012 season) Episode 1 part 1 - Episode 1 part 2 (Sid's return from injury) Episode 2 - Episode 3 - Episode 4 Episode 5 part 1 - Episode 5 part 2 (Geno's rehab in Russia) Episode 6 - bonus sidgeno Episode 7 - Episode 8 - Episode 9 Bonus Season 1 Core

All Season 2 gifs (2012-13 season - only played in 2013 due to lockout) Episode 1: A Fast Start Episode 2: Pass The Hat part 1 - part 2 - bonus Geno Episode 3: Marching On part 1 - part 2 - bonus Geno Episode 4: Trade Winds - bonus Geno Episode 5: The First Four Episode 6: The Second Hurdle

All Season 3 gifs (2013-14 season) Episode 1: Toting the Rock - bonus pre-season - bonus Kris Episode 2: Well Equipped - bonus coach Sid - bonus Geno Episode 3: November Reign - bonus Sid - bonus Flower Episode 4: Silhouettes of a Season Episode 5: The Strongest Bond - bonus Kris Episode 6: The Extra Mile - 2014 Olympics prep Episode 7: March to the Playoffs part 1 - part 2

All Season 4 gifs (2014-15 season) Episode 1: A New Chapter Episode 2: Family Matters - bonus Geno Episode 3: Hitting Home - bonus Flower's 300th win Episode 4: Building Character - bonus Sid fighting Episode 5: Planes, Trains and Hockey Games - bonus Flower at the 2015 All Star game Episode 6: Shuffling the Deck - Sid's Little Penguins - bonus Sid - more bonus Sid Episode 7: Fight to the End - bonus Geno

Sid highlights: Season 1 - Season 2 - Season 3 - Season 4

Geno highlights: Season 1 - Season 2 - Season 3 - Season 4

Kris highlights: Season 1 - Season 2 - Season 3 - Season 4

Flower highlights: Seasons 1 & 2 - Season 3 - Season 4

#voila #itr masterpost #itr gifs #luce's gifs #pittsburgh penguins

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dailyanarchistposts · 2 months ago

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Dig For Victory!

Most people have a garden or could take on an allotment fairly near to where they live. Organising garden sharing schemes where people with gardens they can’t use team up with people who want to garden but don’t have gardens is a worthwhile step. We need to investigate ways of producing and distributing organic food in our localities in ways that maintain biodiversity and as far as possible outside the money economy. Think organic, low-impact farming won’t work? A recent study of sustainable agriculture using low-tech methods introduced on farms supporting 4m people in majority world countries revealed that food production increased 73%, crops like cassava and potato showed a 150% increase and even large ‘modern’ farms could increase production 46%. The future occupation and use of land will depend on the extent to which all who wish to do so have discussed and consented to such use, that those occupying or using the land continue to work in solidarity with the whole of society within broad principles of co-operation, sharing freely both the means of production and what is produced. No individual or group of individuals will have any ‘right’ to say “the land must be used in the way we decide” nor can what is on or under the land or produced upon it be their property, whether plant or animal. The number of people involved in agriculture (in its widest sense) will probably expand greatly, with vast estates and agri-corp holdings broken up and shared out but also urban farms created in and near towns. The aim of agriculture (and associated activities like food processing) will be self-sufficiency for the localities and specialization or growing for ‘export’ only where there is surplus land or productive forces. It is likely that neighbours, co-workers, communities and communes will collectively agree that land will be used in particular ways according to a plan or program of beneficial change. This will not always be in the direction of development or ‘efficiency’ (which will have different definitions and parameters anyway); if people need more gardens or wilderness, small-holdings instead of sheep stations, they will create them.

To many people this will sound utopian. However we believe that if this approach was developed widely – and applied to our other vital needs — it could subtly undermine the credibility and power of the global economy (as well as having obvious personal benefits in terms of health etc). It is an important part of building social solidarity and a community of resistance in majority world communities. It would be a way of showing our solidarity with these majority world movements based around issues of land use, access to resources and so on: communities of small farmers are organising seed banks to preserve crop diversity as well as launching more militant attacks on the multinationals such as trashing fields of GM cotton and destroying a Cargill seed factory. In the longer term as (hopefully) numbers and confidence increase, large long-term squats will become a possibility on land threatened by capitalist development either for roads, supermarkets, airports etc or for industrialised food production being taken back for subsistence food production and as havens of biodiversity. We should take inspiration from the Movimento Sem Terra in Brazil where in the face of severe state repression and violence hundreds of thousands of landless peasants/rural proletarians have occupied large tracts of unused land.

Although it is clear that food prices are so low that they are not a major factor in tying people into the capitalist system (rents, mortgages and bills do so far more effectively) it seems to us that a population capable of and actively involved in producing much of its own food outside of the money economy will be in a stronger position in the event of large scale struggles against capitalism involving strikes, lockouts, occupations and campaigns of non-payment etc. Many thousands of people are being forced by the government to take low-paid, shitty jobs or mickey mouse workfare schemes and threatened with loss of benefit if they refuse. We could support that refusal by offering surplus food from allotments and gardens to those suffering the state’s oppression. There is also the possibility of people developing similar independence from the money economy in other spheres as well — housing, energy production, waste management, health care etc which would also be highly beneficial but which is beyond the scope of this text. So to summarise our practical response should consist of: 1) a massive campaign of direct action; 2) a consumer boycott and propaganda campaign against corporate injustice, focussing on issues of sustainability and social justice; and 3) attempts at collective withdrawal from the industrialised food production system.

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kami-tsuru · 6 months ago

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8月26日カードキャプターさくらの新しい単語

原因 (げんいん) - cause, origin, source

閉鎖 (へいさ) - closing, closure, shutdown, lockout

ひとまとめ - bundle, bunch, pack

放課後 (ほうかご) - after school

冷凍庫 (れいとうこ) - freezer

校舎 (こうしゃ) - school building, schoolhouse

落ち (おち) - slip, omission; outcome, final result; punchline (of a joke)

根性 (こんじょう) - willpower, grit, determination, guts; character, nature

合わせる (あわせる) - to match (a quality of something); to join together, to unite, to add up (among other meanings)

ぶつける - to hit something, to strike, to crash into; to throw; to express

隠れる (かくれる) - to hide, to be hidden, to conceal oneself

固める (かためる) - to harden, to freeze, to solidify, to strengthen (among other meanings)

確かめる (たしかめる) - to ascertain, to check, to make sure

きつい - tough, demanding, harsh; forceful, determined, fierce; tight, constricting

バラバラ - scattered, disperse, loose, in pieces

バッチリ - perfectly; thoroughly, completely, sufficiently

役に立つ (やくにたつ) - to be helpful, to be useful

「お役に立ててよかったですわ。」

思いつく (おもいつく) - to think of, to come to one’s mind, to be hit with an idea; to remember or recall

「しかし、よう思いついたな。」

お陰で (おかげで) - thanks to…, owing to…, because of…

「雪兎さんのおかげよ。」

#紙鶴 💌#learning japanese #日本語 #japanese #japanese langblr #japanese studyblr #japanese vocabulary #単語 ⭐️#文法 🌸#漫画 🎀

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andmaybegayer · 2 years ago

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Hello. So what's the deal with computer chips? Let's say, for example, that I wanted to build a brand new Sega Genesis. Ignoring firmware and software, what's stopping me from dissecting their proprietary chips and reverse-engineering them to make new ones? It's just electric connections and such inside, isn't it? If I match the pin ins and outs, shouldn't it be easy? So why don't people do it?

The answer is that people totally used to do this, there's several examples of chips being cloned and used to build compatible third-party hardware, the most famous two examples being famiclones/NESclones and Intel 808X clones.

AMD is now a major processor manufacturer, but they took off in the 70's by reverse-engineering Intel's 8080 processor. Eventually they were called in to officially produce additional 8086 chips under license to meet burgeoning demand for IBM PC's, but that was almost a decade later if I remember correctly.

There were a ton of other 808X clones, like the Soviet-made pin-compatible K1810VM86. Almost anyone with a chip fab was cloning Intel chips back in the 80's, a lot of it was in the grey area of reverse engineering the chips.

Companies kept cloning Intel processors well into the 386 days, but eventually the processors got too complicated to easily clone, and so only companies who licensed designs could make them, slowly reducing the field down to Intel, AMD, and Via, who still exist! Via's CPU division currently works on the Zhaoxin x86_64 processors as part of the ongoing attempts to homebrew a Chinese-only x86 processor.

I wrote about NES clones a while ago, in less detail, so here's that if you want to read it:

Early famiclones worked by essentially reverse-engineering or otherwise cloning the individual chips inside an NES/famicom, and just reconstructing a compatible device from there. Those usually lacked any of the DRM lockout chips built into the original NES, and were often very deeply strange, with integrated clones of official peripherals like the keyboard and mouse simply hardwired directly into the system.

These were sold all over the world, but mostly in developing economies or behind the Iron Curtain where official Nintendo stuff was harder to find. I had a Golden China brand Famiclone growing up, which was a common famiclone brand around South Africa.

Eventually the cost of chip fabbing came down and all those individual chips from the NES were crammed onto one cheap piece of silicon and mass produced for pennies each, the NES-on-a-chip. With this you could turn anything into an NES, and now you could buy a handheld console that ran pirated NES game for twenty dollars in a corner store. In 2002. Lots of edutainment mini-PC's for children were powered by these, although now those are losing out to Linux (and now Android) powered tablets a la Leapfrog.

Nintendo's patents on their hardware designs expired throughout the early 2000's and so now the hardware design was legally above board, even if the pirated games weren't. You can still find companies making systems that rely on these NES chips, and there are still software houses specializing in novel NES games.

Why doesn't this really happen anymore? Well, mostly CPU's and their accoutrements are too complicated. Companies still regularly clone their competitors simpler chips all the time, and I actually don't know if Genesis clones exist, it's only a Motorola 68000k, but absolutely no one is cloning a modern Intel or AMD processor.

The die of a Motorola 68000 (1979)

A classic Intel 8080 is basically the kind of chip you learn about in entry level electrical engineering, a box with logic gates that may be complicated, but pretty straightforwardly fetches things from memory, decodes, executes, and stores. A modern processor is a magic pinball machine that does things backwards and out of order if it'll get you even a little speedup, as Mickens puts it in The Slow Winter:

I think that it used to be fun to be a hardware architect. Anything that you invented would be amazing, and the laws of physics were actively trying to help you succeed. Your friend would say, “I wish that we could predict branches more accurately,” and you’d think, “maybe we can leverage three bits of state per branch to implement a simple saturating counter,” and you’d laugh and declare that such a stupid scheme would never work, but then you’d test it and it would be 94% accurate, and the branches would wake up the next morning and read their newspapers and the headlines would say OUR WORLD HAS BEEN SET ON FIRE. You’d give your buddy a high-five and go celebrate at the bar, and then you’d think, “I wonder if we can make branch predictors even more accurate,” and the next day you’d start XOR’ing the branch’s PC address with a shift register containing the branch’s recent branching history, because in those days, you could XOR anything with anything and get something useful, and you test the new branch predictor, and now you’re up to 96% accuracy, and the branches call you on the phone and say OK, WE GET IT, YOU DO NOT LIKE BRANCHES, but the phone call goes to your voicemail because you’re too busy driving the speed boats and wearing the monocles that you purchased after your promotion at work. You go to work hung-over, and you realize that, during a drunken conference call, you told your boss that your processor has 32 registers when it only has 8, but then you realize THAT YOU CAN TOTALLY LIE ABOUT THE NUMBER OF PHYSICAL REGISTERS, and you invent a crazy hardware mapping scheme from virtual registers to physical ones, and at this point, you start seducing the spouses of the compiler team, because it’s pretty clear that compilers are a thing of the past, and the next generation of processors will run English-level pseudocode directly.

Die shot of a Ryzen 5 2600 core complex (2019)

Nowadays to meet performance parity you can't just be pin-compatible and run at the right frequency, you have to really do a ton of internal logical optimization that is extremely opaque to the reverse engineer. As mentioned, Via is making the Zhaoxin stuff, they are licensed, they have access to all the documentation needed to make an x86_64 processor, and their performance is still barely half of what Intel and AMD can do.

Companies still frequently clone each others simpler chips, charge controllers, sensor filters, etc. but the big stuff is just too complicated.

#computer stuff #silicon #vlsi #ask #video games #thehylianbatman

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locksmithchicago45 · 11 months ago

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lenasai · 11 months ago

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a lil confession from a guy who used to like blaseball. going to preface with i absolutely loved it, the culture, the community, the characters and setting and all. i made art, wrote fics, bought the albums. but as someone who wasnt usamerican, who lived on the opposite side of the world in fact, i always felt a little left behind. joining late contributed to the feeling of lockout, timezone mismatch meant that i slept through events like voting, and the finale.

and… the communal character building. sometimes i felt like i had to force myself to use a usa-centric lens to see what everyone else saw. the deicide jokes were funny, but not when my actual rl faith started being teased and challenged as well.

i think i'll still always keep a shard of blaseball near and dear to my heart. the good parts of it really were amazing. but sometimes when i see people say they miss it, i think, i wish i could miss it as fiercely as you guys do too.

hey, i wanna say thank you for sharing this with me. i think it's an important perspective to put out there. i debated on whether i wanted to maintag it since i don't have a way to reach out and ask if it's okay to do so, but i really think other people should see it. (you can always send me another message if you want me to delete it and i will do so asap)

blaseball, as a game and as a community, was wonderful and overall a net positive, but it was by no means perfect. it had its flaws like any other community, in this case driven by the fact that its active fanbase was largely white and centered in the united states. there were a lot of people who felt ostracized by a community that was supposed to be welcoming to everyone - and whether it was people not knowing how to keep a bit contained to the circumstances of its universe or shutting down discussions about problems in character writing, there were people who got hurt. we cannot and should not pretend that never happened.

and of course, as you mentioned, the game was designed in a way that mostly centered the united states. i think there were attempts to fix this during coronation with planned events at different times, but we never got to see that play out. hell, you could even see it in which locations got to be represented by teams. i'm not personally sure how i feel about the fact that a lot of the teams that were represented outside of the us were prehistory teams. it feels like they took a step in trying, but those are all teams that wouldn't ever see active play, so it rang a little hollow to me.

at least from my perspective, it seemed like there were dialogues happening about this and that there was progress being made to fix those issues, but then the game ended and we didn't get to see anything come out of it. i really don't want to see that all be for nothing. i hope that everyone who learned something from this community will take those lessons and apply them to how they interact with other communities.

thank you again. i am truly sorry we didn't get to have the same experience.

#blaseball #all of this is of course not to say that people can't reminisce about blaseball. just don't treat it like it was 100% perfect

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armoredcorelegacy · 6 months ago

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1 Year Ago, Bandai Namco brought in Armored Core Legacy, VampyBitMe, Oroboro, & Fightin Cowboy to Show the world PvP in ARMORED CORE VI FIRES OF RUBICON for the first time.

An unplanned 1v1 took place between Oro & Cowboy, but it was not enough. Both Pilots had more to give, more to prove, and so, on the 1 year anniversary of this legendary bout, we are bringing them back.

On August 17th, at 2PM CST, Fightin Cowboy & Oroboro will return to the Battlefield of Armored Core VI.

In a rematch to end all rematches, Cleric Armored Core presents:

The Runback On Rubicon

This contest is a First to 10 Wins LOCKOUT Match. In order to win this contest, both competitors will bring 10 AC builds. A competitor must get 1 win with each of their builds. Once they win with a build, it cannot be used again, forcing them to switch to a new AC.

Who will be the first to assert their dominance with all 10 of their ACs? Will Oroboro get his redemption, or will Fightin Cowboy maintain his Crown?

Armored Core Legacy’s Zealous & Cleric will commentate the match!

Come Find out LIVE on Twitch & YouTube on August 17th!!! https://www.twitch.tv/cleric_armored_core

#armored core #armored core legacy #pio #pilot's internal organization #acl #aclegacy #アーマード・コア #アーマードコア #armoredcore #Armored Core VI #Armored Core 6 #Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon #ACVIFOR

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mikelocksmith · 1 year ago

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#Building Lockouts services in Mississauga #Automobile Locksmith services in Mississauga #Commercial Locksmith Services in Mississauga #Emergency Locksmiths service in Mississauga #Key Replacement services in Mississauga #Local Expert Locksmiths in Mississauga

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servicemasterlocksmith · 1 year ago

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allthecanadianpolitics · 1 year ago

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Nearly 300 Rogers Communications workers have voted strongly in favour of a new contract, ending a company lockout that began two weeks ago.

The United Steelworkers union Local 1944, Unit 60, says in a statement that its members voted 96 per cent in favour of ratifying the tentative agreement reached last Friday.

The Rogers technicians, who build, maintain and repair internet, phone and television infrastructure and services in Metro Vancouver, were locked out Nov. 6, after serving strike notice and announcing plans for rotating strikes.

Full article

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

#cdnpoli #canada #canadian politics #canadian news #canadian #rogers #rogers communications #workers rights #unions #union #workers' rights #british columbia #BC #vancouver

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secularbakedgoods · 2 years ago

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Lockout

(science fiction, 3900 words)

When Jackie first met her next-door neighbor, she had no inkling whatsoever that there was six figures’ worth of military hardware grafted onto his body.

The man who answered her knock at the door of the neighboring apartment was somewhere in his early 20s, with the permanent five ‘o’ clock shadow of someone who only shaved with an electric razor. It was early autumn, not even cold, but he wore a hoodie and kept both hands tucked into its front pocket.

Jackie did her best to look friendly (a redundant effort, as she usually came across as the least threatening person alive). “Hi, I’m Jackie. I live next door.”

“Hi.” The neighbor looked pleasantly surprised, as if he’d opened the door expecting much worse. “Connor.”

“So, this is weird and I’m sorry to bother you about it, but my cat is on your balcony right now.”

The balcony was the major selling point of an otherwise standard crappy apartment. Everything was the same shade of Landlord White, and the kitchen backsplash had been ripped out and never replaced, but the building was in decent shape—although construction further up the block had rattled it beyond its usual tolerances, leaving cracks in the walls and ceiling. A balcony meant that Jackie’s cat, Greg, could get some unsupervised fresh air while she worked.

An acquaintance in the local esports league had hired Jackie to replace the control sticks in his lucky gamepad, which were starting to drift. The money wasn’t great, but she was between freelance gigs. The job demanded enough of her attention that it was only once she’d finished and put down the soldering iron that she realized Greg had gone wandering.

Connor left the door open and moved to his window, pulling the heavy blackout curtains aside. His apartment and Jackie’s shared the balcony, with a divider between. Somehow, Greg had made his way across the divider and now lay indolently in front of the sliding door on Connor’s side.

Jackie hovered at the apartment’s threshold. “Can I just—?”

Connor shrugged. Jackie bolted gingerly across the apartment and slid the door open to retrieve her cat.

Greg offered no resistance to being hoisted, even when Jackie held him up in front of her face and said, “You are a very bad cat.” She turned and waggled him at Connor. “Say ‘thank you’ to the nice man for the use of his balcony.”

In response, the cat only yawned. Connor, however, cracked a smile. With his left hand, he gave Greg a scratch behind the ears.

His right hand remained hidden, tucked into the hoodie.

Jackie next saw Connor on laundry day.

He came up behind her in the hallway outside the laundry room, where she stood with half a key in her hand and the other half wedged in the lock of the laundry room door.

“Did your key break?” Connor asked.

Jackie glared at the door. “Yes.”

Connor tried to pry the broken key out of the lock, but couldn’t get a grip through his gloves.

“I think you need fingernails for that,” Jackie said, and Connor stepped aside.

It took a few seconds, with Jackie chipping her thumbnail in the process, but eventually the broken key came loose and Connor unlocked the door.

As they commenced the intricate dance that only took place between near-strangers doing their laundry together, Jackie asked, “Why is this room even locked?”

“They found someone sleeping in here once,” Connor said. “Landlord got mad. Do you want one of my keys?”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I’ve got a spare. I’ll just tell the landlord one of mine broke.”

Connor worked the key off the ring with his right hand, but handed it to Jackie with his left.

The fire alarm went off at three in the morning. Greg, the asshole, immediately hid under Jackie’s bed and had to be dragged out.

Jackie ended up outside in her slippers with the cat under one arm and her bed’s comforter over her shoulders. There was some consolation to be had that the building’s other occupants, scattered all over the parking lot, were in similar states of undress.

Connor was off in the corner, arms wrapped around himself; he’d neglected to grab a coat on the way out, and the night was chilly. His oversized t-shirt did nothing to hide the advanced mechanical arm grafted to his right shoulder where a flesh-and-blood limb had once been. Jackie faintly recognized the model from videos that crossed her feed every once in a while. It was a military-grade prosthetic, supposedly as dexterous as the human limb it was intended to replace.

People were staring. Connor did his best to ignore them.

Jackie sidled over, holstered Greg against her hip, and extended one side of the comforter. “Hey. You cold?”

It was a polite fiction on both sides: Jackie pretended not to notice the arm, or the fact that she’d offered Connor the side of the comforter that would cover it, and Connor pretended not to see right through the gesture. He ducked under the comforter with a quiet, “thanks.”

They huddled together in the parking lot until the fire department showed up. After all that, it turned out to be a false alarm.

The building was only three stories tall, with no trash chute. Instead, Jackie had to haul her garbage bags down to the dumpster in the alley.

Someone had left a bedside dresser—slightly beat up, but still solid—on the ground next to the dumpster. Connor hovered over it with an air of uncertainty.

“You taking that?” Jackie asked.

“I don’t know.” Connor had his hoodie on, with his right hand tucked into the front pocket; the arm hung limp from his shoulder.

“I could help bring it up,” Jackie suggested.

Connor ducked his head, avoiding her eyes. “I can’t lift anything. My arm’s not, uh. Working.”

“I can carry it. Just get the doors for me, okay?”

It was a little awkward to lift, and the stairs were a bitch, but a few minutes later Jackie set the dresser down next to Connor’s bed. It was just a mattress on the floor, no frame.

Jackie stretched, hands at the small of her back. “Can I ask you an awkward question?”

Connor cleared his throat. He still wouldn’t look at her. “The VA hasn’t paid the bill yet.”

“For your arm?”

Connor nodded. “There’s a fee every month, from the company that made it. The VA covers it, but sometimes they’re a few days late.”

“So the company switches the arm off remotely.”

“Yeah.”

“You tried modding it?”

Connor rubbed his shoulder; it had to be a strain, hauling that much dead weight around. “Like how?”

“You could try disabling whatever antenna receives the lockout signal,” Jackie said. “Or cracking the firmware. I could help, if you wanted.”

“Is that legal?”

“More or less?” Jackie shrugged. “It’s the kind of thing the law has trouble keeping up with.”

Connor looked uneasy. “I’ll think about it.”

Amelia’s scoff came through Jackie’s headset like a burst of static. “Again, Jackie?”

“What? What’s ‘again?’”

The rest of Jackie’s regular gaming group had gone to bed hours ago, leaving Jackie and Amelia to claw their way up the leaderboards late into the night.

Jackie didn’t particularly like Amelia.

“This thing where you’re nice to some guy,” Amelia said, “because you’re nice to everybody, and then he decides he’s in love with you. And then you have to move halfway across the country because he won’t leave you alone.”

“So I should just be a bitch to everybody?”

“It’d make your life easier.”

“I don’t believe that.”

There was a knock on Jackie’s door.

“I’ve gotta go,” she said.

“Yeah, sure.”

Jackie closed the game and dropped out of the chat server. When she opened the door, Connor was there, looking sheepish.

“Hey,” he said. “Sorry, I know it’s late.”

“It’s fine, I was up.”

Connor rubbed his shoulder again, although his arm seemed once again able to support its own weight. “So, that thing you suggested. About the arm. Could we try?”

“Yeah, absolutely.” Jackie moved to let him in, then hesitated. “Actually, let me grab my tools and we’ll use your place. Less cat hair.”

They set up at Connor’s dining room table, which—like the dresser—looked like it was salvaged out of the trash. Connor changed into a sleeveless shirt, and Jackie got her first full look at the arm.

The prosthesis didn’t stop at the shoulder; the shoulder blade and part of his spine had also been reinforced, the whole apparatus clearly not designed for easy removal. The casing wasn’t metal, like Jackie expected, but some kind of polymer. Where it met flesh, there were scars: long furrows, clumsy and chaotic and not at all surgical.

There was an access panel on the arm’s shoulder, and the screws holding it in place all had a distinctive head. “Security screws,” Jackie said. “You need a proprietary screwdriver for these.”

“So we can’t open it?”

“What? No, I have the screwdriver here.” The toolbox rattled as Jackie fumbled through it. “You can buy them online. They’re like five bucks.”

The screws were all slightly different sizes, just to make Jackie’s life hell. She placed each on the table in a pattern roughly corresponding to where they’d been on the panel.

When she tried to pry the panel up, it didn’t move. Closer inspection revealed it was also glued in place.

It was probably unwise, not to mention impractical, to stick Connor’s arm in the oven. Luckily, Jackie had a heat gun. She tried to keep it away from Connor’s skin, but he still flinched every time the nozzle got a little too close.

Once the panel was off, Jackie grabbed a pen light and examined the board beneath. The network chip that received the lockout signal was easy enough to spot; it was, of course, glued to the board. Everything was.

“Chips are glued down,” Jackie reported.

“Can you melt the glue?”

“Probably shouldn’t,” Jackie explained. “Sometimes they like to layer acid between coats of glue. If I try to dissolve it or pry the chips off, I might damage the board.”

Another sweep of the pen light revealed a port without a connector.

“When they were setting this thing up,” Jackie asked, “did they have any cables plugged into it?”

Connor shifted in his seat. “I don’t remember. Does it matter?”

“Maybe. I think I see a debug port. They would’ve used it to calibrate the arm while it was being installed. If I can solder on a new connector, that might get us the access we need.” Jackie grabbed her laptop. “I’ll have to order the connector online, though. None of the suppliers in this city are anywhere near a bus stop.”

Connor said, “I have a car.”

“Is it the one with the tree growing out of it?”

There was, in the parking lot, a car with four flat tires and a tree growing out of it. It wasn’t a big tree—barely a sapling—but the fact that it was there at all was not a good sign.

The look on Connor’s face was all the answer Jackie needed.

A few days later, the courier delivering the new connector called Jackie and said, “I can’t find your address.”

“Oh. Your GPS is pointing you down the wrong street.” Jackie sighed; this was nowhere near the first time. “That’s the pedestrian entrance. Car access is through the parking lot, one street over.”

“Could you come down?”

Jackie groaned. “Yeah, sure.”

The courier hung up.

Jackie was only halfway down the stairs by the time her phone rang again. She answered without looking and said, “Hey, I’m on my way down.”

A voice that was not the courier said, “Jackie?”

Jackie stopped dead, her heart pounding up into her throat. “Wyatt. Hi. How’d you get this number?”

“I got it from Ethan.” Fucking Ethan. “I heard you moved.”

“Sure did,” Jackie said. With any luck Wyatt hadn’t heard where to.

“I’m gonna be out your way pretty soon. We should have coffee or something.”

Jackie’s mouth went dry. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Why not?”

“Because I asked you to leave me alone, Wyatt.” Jackie took a deep breath that rattled in her chest. “Please don’t call me again.”

She hung up, blocked the number, and managed to stop crying by the time the courier finally showed up.

In retrospect, it should’ve been obvious that soldering parts onto a board was much harder when the board was attached to a human being. One who, on occasion, had to breathe.

“How the hell did they even install this thing?” she grumbled, holding the soldering iron away from anything sensitive as she waited for Connor to settle.

“I was out for most of it,” Connor replied.

Distracted, Jackie asked, “‘Out?’”

“I was in the hospital. IED.”

Jackie had to put the soldering iron down. “You got blown up and then they stuck a robot arm on you? Don’t they have to get consent for stuff like that?”

“When I enlisted, I just signed whatever they put in front of me,” Connor said. “There was a form I could fill out to get an extra few thousand a year. I didn’t read it too closely.”

Jackie took a moment to calm down, picked up the iron again, and went back to work.

Once the connector was on, Jackie plugged in her laptop, opened a terminal, and pulled up the arm’s internal drive. There was a long list of utilities, all with arcane names and no indication as to what any of them did.

“This might take a while,” she warned Connor.

“How long?”

“Long enough that I shouldn’t sit here plugged into your arm the whole time.” Jackie typed out a command to copy the firmware to her own drive. “This next part is going to be very boring.”

Around midnight, Jackie closed her laptop and announced, “I need caffeine.”

Connor, half-asleep, grunted in agreement.

There was a convenience store a few blocks away. Jackie lunged for the drinks fridge the moment they arrived, grabbed two, cracked one open, then wandered toward the snack aisle for her usual ten minutes of indecision.

On the walk over, Connor had asked if Jackie was from around here.

“I like that the rent’s way cheaper.” Jackie wavered between chips and jerky. “I never could’ve afforded to live alone back home.”

“Don’t you miss your friends? Family?”

“My kind of people don’t hang out much in person anyway.”

Momentarily distracted by a display of sour candies, Jackie almost missed it when Connor said, “I don’t talk to anyone. From before.”

It was a weird thing to say right then. Jackie suspected Connor had been trying to say it for a while.

“They all felt so bad about it,” he went on. “And then I’d end up apologizing to them over how bad they felt. And then everyone kept ‘checking in,’ and complaining that I wouldn’t open up to them, and had I talked to my therapist lately, and ...” He rubbed the back of his neck, eyes trained on the floor. “Eventually I just liked it better when I was alone.”

Jackie said, “Do you want some gummy bears? They’re two for one.”

“Yeah.” Connor’s laugh was short, brittle, but genuine. “Thanks.”

Halfway back to their building, Connor said, “Somebody’s following us.”

Jackie stumbled; Connor steadied her and urged her to keep moving.

“He was outside the convenience store,” Connor explained. “I wasn’t sure until we turned that last corner.”

“What should we do?” Jackie fought down the urge to look back. “The last time this happened I hid in a diner bathroom and called my mom, but she’s not—”

Connor turned on his heel and charged down the sidewalk, back the way they’d come. He had the guy by the front of his shirt by the time Jackie caught up.

She knew that guy.

“Wyatt?”

“Jackie!” Wyatt struggled indignantly in Connor’s grip. “What the fuck?”

Connor said, “You know him?”

“Somebody I knew back home,” Jackie said. “He followed me here.”

“He do that a lot?”

“He’s ... kind of why I had to move.”

Connor’s face settled into a cold mask. Whatever happened next was too fast to follow, and then Wyatt was on the ground, clutching his arm, howling.

There was blood, so deeply red it was almost black under the anemic street lights. Something protruded from the red-black mess, white and jagged, at a sickening angle from the natural line of his arm.

Jackie screamed.

Wyatt scrambled back and staggered to his feet. Jackie tried to help him stand, but he lurched away.

“No, no, wait,” Jackie was babbling, “please let me take you to the hospital—”

“Fuck you, bitch,” Wyatt spat, and bolted.

Connor ignored him. He was staring at her, eyes wide; his right hand reached out for her, but faltered.

She ran.

Jackie didn’t leave her apartment much for the next few days.

In spare moments, she sifted through her copy of the arm’s firmware: opening each utility and fiddling around until she’d figured out what it did. It was time-consuming, but comfortably monotonous—at least until the words “DEBUG TOOLS” appeared at the top of her terminal.

She still had the laptop open in her hands when she knocked on Connor’s door. Connor opened it, then stared at her without speaking, guilt etched across his face.

“Hi,” Jackie said.

“Hi,” Connor replied. “I figured you weren’t talking to me anymore.”

“Yeah. Well.” Jackie cleared her throat. “You scared me.”

“I’m sorry. I was just trying to help.”

“I know. You didn’t, though.”

“I know.”

“So. Uh.” Jackie hefted her laptop. “It looks like the company left their whole suite of testing tools installed on your arm.”

“And that’s good?”

“Very,” Jackie said. “They would’ve used all these scripts and commands to run tests while they were developing the firmware. They’ll let us completely bypass the security on your arm and start switching things off.” She lowered the laptop. “You still want to do this?”

A shaky laugh escaped Connor’s throat; he leaned heavily against the door. “Yeah. I do.”

They settled back in at the dining room table, and Jackie plugged her laptop in.

The trick wasn’t getting the arm to ignore the lockout signal. The trick was getting it to respond to the manufacturer as though it had initiated the lockout, even though it hadn’t. Jackie wound up scripting a workaround so that the arm would receive the command, report back like a good little robot, but otherwise completely ignore the lockout order.

It wasn’t pretty, but it did the job.

“Okay.” Jackie opened up another of the test utilities. “I’m going to send a fake lockout signal to the arm, now. Let’s see what happens.”

“If this works,” Connor said, “I owe you dinner.”

“Don’t promise that,” Jackie warned him. “I’m not a cheap date.”

The false lockout signal went through. The arm sent its report back, indicating that it had done as it was told.

“Try to move your arm,” Jackie said.

Connor’s hand twitched, then closed into a fist.

They took the metro downtown. The train rattled and shrieked the whole way; the cars themselves looked to be at least twenty years old, but had been gutted at some point in the last few years so the seats could be “upgraded” to hard, molded plastic. It didn’t deter anyone from sleeping on them.

Connor decided not to wear gloves.

Jackie had found the sushi bar online. It was basically a closet, but the reviews were good—deservedly so, as it turned out. They (mostly Jackie) had demolished at least four rolls and several orders of nigiri when Connor said, “I washed out after they installed the arm.”

Jackie paused to chew and swallow before answering. “Right after?”

“The plan was to send me back out there,” Connor said. “They figured I’d wake up, be grateful for the upgrade, and go right back to fighting. I couldn’t.” He shook his head. “I felt wrong.”

Despite her best efforts, Jackie recalled the scars around Connor’s shoulder. Scars that could’ve been made by fingernails.

“Anyway.” Connor smiled at her. “Thank you.”

All in a rush, Jackie said, “I don’t want to have sex with you.”

Connor’s head tilted to the side, like a confused dog. “Okay?”

“I just need to make that clear, because sometimes I get friendly with a guy and he thinks things are going in that direction and then gets upset when they don’t.”

“I don’t.”

“What?”

“I don’t think things are going in that direction.”

“Oh.” Jackie slumped back into her seat with relief. “Good.”

Just as the metro was pulling into their station, it came to an abrupt screeching halt. Out on the platform, someone screamed.

Dread pooled in Jackie’s gut. “What’s going on?”

An alert came over the speakers overhead, announcing that all passengers needed to exit the train immediately. There was an edge of panic in the air as they disembarked.

On the platform, a crowd had gathered in front of the gap between two train cars. “What happened?” Jackie asked.

“He jumped,” someone said. “He jumped in front of the train.”

Jackie went cold as the fear in her gut started to spread. “Is he—?”

Connor was taller than most of the others; he leaned over them to look down through the gap between cars, to the tracks below. Recognition flickered across his face.

“What?” Jackie grabbed his sleeve. “Who is it?”

“Nobody.” Connor hooked his arm through Jackie’s and steered her away from the edge of the platform.

Jackie tried to turn back, suspicion dawning. “Is it him?”

Connor didn’t answer.

“Connor.” Jackie tugged on his arm, heart racing. “Is it Wyatt?”

“No.”

She blinked, rapidly. There was something in her eyes. “Are you lying to me?”

Connor shook his head, and Jackie let him pull her up the escalators and out of the station.

It was wordlessly understood that neither of them wanted to be alone, so they ended up in Jackie’s living room while some mindless video played on the TV. Jackie lay on the couch, curled up on her side; Connor sat on the floor next to her head, Greg sprawled purring across his lap.

Eventually, Connor said, “It’s a stupid way to try and kill yourself.”

Jackie didn’t know how to answer that, but he didn’t need her to.

“The train is slowing down as it comes into the station,” he continued. “It’s not going fast enough to kill you. At least not right away.”

All at once, Jackie understood why Connor lived in a building only three stories tall. Why he shaved with an electric razor. Why his car sat unused in an open-air parking lot.

She saw the shape of the grand gesture Connor had ruined by ushering her away from the train before she could see who it hit.

She knew she could check the news to see who it was, and decided she wouldn’t.

Jackie slung one arm around Connor’s shoulders and pulled him into a hug, resting her forehead against the back of his neck.

Connor took her fragile human hand in his mechanical one and held on tight.

(my ko-fi)

#original fiction #short story #science fiction #cyberpunk #cw stalking #cw suicide

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