COUNTER/Weight 0.1: The First Bell

Episode description

By two o’clock in the morning, Orth Godlove of the Consolidated Counterweight Technocracy had chosen four names. Cassander Timaeus Berenice: an Apostolosian medic with a cool head and a noble background. They’d be able to use their connections, Orth thought. Speak with the Ithikos in a register others wouldn’t. Then there was Mako Trig, some bright-eyed punk kid who claimed to be able to hack anything and everything. He’d dance through their security with a smile. The robot was a risk. Automated Dynamics’ presence would raise questions, but if it came to it, Orth trusted that they would be nothing compact steel and ceramic couldn’t answer. The last name on the list was a wildcard. He’d had to pull some strings, get some questions answered, make sure that this was the real deal. Aria Joie herself, the jewel in EarthHome’s crown, now apparently turned freelancer on the desert planet. Whatever her motives, her legendary charisma and boundless optimism more than qualified her.
There was a certain matter that needed to be cleared up - a corpse on a casino floor, a CCT manager in a cell. There were people down the hall who Orth knew would love nothing more than to roll in with the big guns, but things were… delicate. That’d be a disaster. No, it’d be these four. He’d already furnished them with a ship. He pinched the bridge of his nose. They’ll be in and out. He made the call.
This week on COUNTER/Weight 0.1: The First Bell
Orth Godlove rolls the dice!

On the far northeastern reach of Counterweight's central sprawl, there rests an outlier, a progenitor; a sign of what was, and what is, to come. It was built long before the populace of the planet was locked away inside of climate-controlled domes, a place where still-mighty Apostolos hosted diplomatic visitors from their then-new rivals, the People's Conglomerate of Orion and the Autonomous Diaspora. A long, clear-ceilinged, high security habitat meant to create the perfect conditions for statecraft, to show off the strength and brilliance of Apostolos and to protect its inhabitants not from the chemical storms of modern Counterweight, but from the seasonal hurricanes from what was then still the nearby ocean. It was called the Provisional Diplomatic Cylinder. Today, it’s just called the Sill.

And just as it was before the war, today the Sill is a strange cousin to the rest of the planet’s cities. It is, just as the name suggests, a low-lying cylinder, and not a dome, and unlike the other habitats, its roof is perfectly clear, letting its residents see the scarred skies, the stars, and of course, the blue and green miracle world of Weight.

By law, the Sill is administered by the Consolidated Counterweight Technocracy, but day-to-day matters are actually run by the Ithikos family, an old-fashioned mob crew, and the only remaining Apostolosians in real power on the planet. The family operates a casino, the Cerulean, out of what was once being built as a general assembly complex for a hypothetically unified Golden Branch government. But unification never came. There is only an uneasy peace, an ignored occupation, and the sense that something wrong is just below us, waiting to emerge.”

Plot

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Cast

Trivia

Partway through this episode's recording, the news broke that Henry Kissinger had finally shuffled off this mortal coil.^[1] A lot of the resulting celebration was cut for Clapcast episode 76, but several references to his death can still be heard in the released episode.

References

↑ Tweets by Austin (Nov 30, 2023)

[1] Tweets by Austin (Nov 30, 2023)

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