...and throws it over Endryx' head. "Here you go."

Sia catches it. "Thank you." She winks. Endryx sighs in resignation. "Can I doll up your bed a bit?"

"What the hell for!" shrieks Endryx.

"Misdirection. Spanner's trademark. They think they're getting porn. What they'll get's the news."

"You know this is gonna get us all killed, don't you."

"Not if we were never here." Sia winks.

"Oh, all right."

Hunter grins. "I knew you'd agree."

Suddenly Sia's bodysuit bursts into light. Endryx gasps when she realizes it's showing live video from every official channel. "Fiber-optic fabric with antennas woven in." She runs to Endryx' coat closet and riffles through the coats.

Endryx pulls her away. "What are you doing?"

"You got something I can take off?"

Hunter suggests, "How 'bout that Sounders jersey you just got?"

Endryx glares at him. "No, she--"

He spots it hanging over her chair,...

Endryx studies Sia skeptically. "So what enigmatic dropping he wanna post?"

"Video."

"About what?"

"Starring me. Short version: I'm back, suckers, lol."

"Perfect," says Hunter.

Endryx asks, "You got a camera on you?"

Sia looks at Hunter. "I want a professional. I want it dramatic."

"How dramatic?"

She takes off her jacket. She's wearing a plain gray bodysuit so tight it looks spraypainted on. Endryx frowns. Hunter gives her a knowing smile.

"That's her all right," says Hunter.

Endryx hurries Sia through the door and autolocks it. "I thought you were dead."

"They tried their damnedest to make me wish I was," says Sia.

"You said you got a better host?"

She taps the side of her head. "Right here."

"You don't have an account with us."

She flashes her famous mischievous smile. "Spanner does."

"He's just a shitposter here."

"He's your very own Deep Anon now. Use him."

Endryx shoots him a skeptical look. "Most of the volunteers were male."

"Only one of the first group survived. A factor-positive female." Hunter flashes her a wicked grin. "You'll never guess who she is."

They barely notice the motorcycle parking outside. Several minutes later someone else knocks on the door. Endryx gestures the door camera fullscreen. Someone removing a helmet. She's shocked to see the bronze face and wild red hair of Sia Richter-Thomas.

A knock on her apartment door. She checks the camera image on her monitor. Scope. She rolls her chair away from the desk and steps out to let him in. "It's about time."

Billy Hunter is a pretty man who lets his hair fall over his right eye. His left eye's a camera, Zeiss-built, designed for spies. Few people notice. His blue eyes match. He brings pizza and the news. "I found her."

"Her?"

"Not only did I find her, she's coming as we speak."

It's in the subplot of Willa's bike journey in #Spanner In The Works. She rides first to her enemy Gov. Brinkman's corporate capital, then back home through a Tacoma being rebuilt by its people on not just New Urbanist but #solarpunk principles. This subplot encodes a full-blown rejection and refutation of #cyberpunk itself, and I didn't know it when I wrote it. Even her lifelong "Nacktkultur" advocacy (since the '80s, no less), inseparable from her unshakeable belief in radical socialism, fits.

Now here's where I come in. I started planning Chaos Angel #Spanner as a webmanga at #cyberpunk's 1992 peak. I thought I'd kept true to the cyberpunk spirit all this time. After what I learned today, I discovered I was wrong. My purpose was to destroy the superhero universe. What Spanner's monkeywrench destroys when it hits the third eye of Steve Jobs' "great and powerful" god-manifestation turns out to be cyberpunk itself. There's evidence in earlier chapters I'm really writing #solarpunk.

There's one big complication. Our villain is also a superhero, a member of a superteam called the Liberators. I'm using public-domain superhero names here; he's the Scarab, 9th of his lineage, and wields a powerful Staff of Ra. His power alone is a formidable obstacle. The other is PR. He's a Hero; if Sia opposes him, that makes her a Villain by definition. She needs powerful PR of her own. What she does is hire the guerrilla hackers of the Wrecking Krewe.
#Spanner #introduction /6

You see, a hurricane's bearing down on NYC and, being the master of ceremonial magic he is, he's planning a human sacrifice rite when it hits, at midnight August 19, 2024, under a full moon. When the Foundation offers Sia the mission to stop him, she leaps at it.

Sia has two secret weapons. One is her "Charmer" power that allows her to project a "reality distortion field" like Steve Jobs, whose construct she's to steal back. The other is Spanner.
#Spanner #introduction /5

The starting point of Spanner In The Works, apart from the intro video on Sia's Profile, is the crisis of capitalism that triggered the Conservative Revolution. The World Bank President and Illuminati Grandmaster happens to be a conspiracy theorist who conflates democracy with Communism. He had a mind control signal imposed throughout the Confederate States of Russia and America. Now it's wearing off, so he's evacuated New York all of a sudden.
#Spanner #introduction /4