Manage my army.
That was the brief. That was the entire brief. He had asked for more of it twice, once that night while he was still on the floor and once the following morning over eggs, and had received, in order, a wave of the hand and the word "Yes."
So Josh sat down on Wednesday to manage an army, and discovered inside about four minutes that he didn't have one. He had a list of about nine hundred people who had all told him, at length, with photographs, that they would do anything for a girl who was not him.
He needed somewhere to put them. That was the actual problem, and it was a boring one: two thousand people organizing themselves across a chat, a comments section and a public timeline is not an army, it is weather. He needed a server. He needed somebody to build it and hand it over.
And he could not ask for it, because nobody in that fandom does anything a guy says.
✦ ✦ ✦
So he wrote the post as her.
He is not proud of it. He also spent two hours on it, which is the part he is least proud of.
He had six weeks of her posts to work from and he read all of them twice. No capital at the front. No full stop at the end. Never more than two sentences. She never says please and never says guys and never uses an exclamation mark, ever, not once, and when she wants something she does not ask for it, she describes the world in which she already has it. He built a spreadsheet of her sentence lengths. He is aware of what that says about him.
Then he posted it.
Sable: someone build me a room. a real one, with doors, where I can put people in the right places
Sable: when it exists hand it to Lebu. he keeps the lists
He read it back about nine times before he hit post and it was perfect. It was her. He would have bet the savings account on it.
krill: this is Lebu
Ninety seconds.
mothbite: yeah this is Lebu ch1287: hi Lebu it's Lebu lol pagefour: Lebu wrote this bigcatt: mate
Lebu I love you but no fourdollarsamonth: caught in ninety seconds. put that on a plaque
✦ ✦ ✦
He sat there.
He went back and read his own post. He read it against four of hers, side by side, in two windows. The lowercase was right. The length was right. The rhythm was right. There was no please in it. There was no guys in it. He had matched the thing so closely that when he read it now he could hear her saying it, in her voice, in the next room.
How.
How did they do that.
He went and stood in the middle of the living room.
Then he checked the window, which was stupid, and he did it anyway. Then he looked at the tablet, face down on the arm of the couch, and thought about the camera on it, and turned it further face down. Then he went through the room slowly the way somebody does when they have lost their keys, except he was not looking for his keys, he was looking for a person.
(Josh:Somebody is reading over my shoulder.)
And then he remembered the rune.
He went into the bathroom and turned around and got his shirt up and looked at it in the mirror over his shoulder: the mark on his back, the one that looks like a good tattoo, the one an elder in velvet put there so the Embassy could see him at all times, bathroom included, with no limitations attached and nobody willing to describe what "no limitations" covered.
(Josh:Somebody at the Embassy.
Somebody at the Embassy is on the internet, and knows which of us is typing, and is telling them.
That's insane. That's not possible. Solaris uses Yahoo. Solaris could not find Facebook with both hands.)
He stood in the bathroom with his shirt up for a while.
It is worth saying now that he never found out. Not that week, not later. He has a folder of theories and the best one is bad.
✦ ✦ ✦
Meanwhile somebody had built the server anyway.
Because of course they had. He'd asked in the wrong voice from the wrong mouth and a guy had gone off and done it inside two hours regardless, set the whole thing up, roles, channels, the lot, and then, being a sane person, sent the invite to Sable.
But not to Lebu.
Luna had the phone. Luna always has the phone. She read it, sat up so fast the couch moved, and went live.
✦ ✦ ✦
It was a Wednesday, at four in the afternoon, on a channel that streams Tuesdays and Saturdays. There was no announcement. There was no thumbnail. There was a girl going live in the middle of the day to read out an organizational chart.
An entire stream for onboarding was, by any professional measure, insane overkill, and Josh said so out loud and was ignored.
It did a thousand people in an hour.
I'm at WORK
I'm in a MEETING. I have the meeting on my other screen. I don't have another screen, I have this mothbite: how are you all here. it's four pm on a wednesday krill: how are YOU here mothbite: I'm self employed krill: you're not
I have told my manager that there is a family situation and I want to be clear that I do consider this one
✦ ✦ ✦
Here is what she told them, and she told it like a girl reading a will.
Sable is the queen of this army. That was point one. It was not framed as a joke and nobody treated it as one.
Lebu is the general. Everything goes through Lebu. Lebu keeps the lists, Lebu knows the numbers, and if there is a number involved you take it to Lebu, because, and she said this to a thousand people, on camera, in the tone of somebody conceding a technical point, "he's better at numbers than me."
Then she said:
"And don't bully him."
✦ ✦ ✦
She had to say that.
Josh would like that on the record. She had to say it out loud, on stream, as a standing order, because her audience hates him.
It was not teasing and it was not banter. There is a version of a fandom that is affectionately rude to the guy behind the scenes and this was not that. In six weeks they had gone from Lebu's filter is broken to nobody cares about Lebu to a running, cheerful, extremely organized project of making his life worse, and it had never once slowed down, and it had never once needed a reason.
Neither of them understood it. Luna had asked him about it twice and he had shrugged both times.
The reason is very simple.
Lebu is physically the closest to Sable. The source of this chapter is g.com.
That is the whole reason. That is the entire mechanism. He made her, he drew her for six years, he built the thing that put her on a screen, the filter that does not exist is his, the audience is his, they were his readers first, and none of that counts for anything, because he is in her room. He is in the room where she is, most of the day, most days, and two thousand people can hear him in the background sometimes, and that is not forgivable and never will be.
(A reader:he was in the room during the milkers stream. he was IN THE ROOM.)
(Another:I don't hate Lebu. I want to be very clear that I don't hate Lebu. I just think he should be further away.)
Josh has never worked it out. He has a theory that it's about the filter.
✦ ✦ ✦
Her sentence held, though.
mothbite: understood. no bullying. it's an order krill: from now on Lebu is off limits ch1287: pinning it bigcatt: I'd like to formally apologise to Lebu for everything up to this point and nothing after we'll be nice to Lebu in front of her bigcatt: obviously in front of her
Josh, watching this in a private channel from nine feet away, wrote nothing.
✦ ✦ ✦
Then the positions filled up, and they filled up fast, and they filled up on their own.
He had planned to spend a week recruiting. It took about forty minutes and he didn't do any of it. People simply arrived in the new server and announced what they were now.
Clippers first: six of them, then eleven, then a schedule. Editors. Two people who did nothing but thumbnails. Somebody who offered, without being asked, to write a weekly recap. Three translators. A guy who described himself as "PR" and, when Josh cautiously asked what that meant, sent back a four-page document about crisis response that was better than anything Josh could have written and cited the monitor incident by name in the risk section.
And then the handles started changing.
It began with one guy. He renamed himself Sable's Editor, which was a joke, and nobody treated it as one.
Inside two hours:
Sable's Editor
Sable's Clipper
Sable's Clipper 2
Sable's Clipper 3
Sable's Thumbnails
Sable's PR
Sable's Archivist
Sable's Timezone Guy
Sable's Lawyer (not a lawyer)
Sable's Discord Agent 01
Sable's Discord Agent 02
Sable's Discord Agent 03
The admins renamed themselves last, which felt like a formality, like a country recognizing a government. And where a job had more than one person in it, they numbered themselves, and they numbered themselves correctly, in order, without a single argument about who got 01.
Josh watched a volunteer moderation team assign itself serial numbers inside four hours and felt something cold go across the back of his neck.
✦ ✦ ✦
But it worked.
It worked beautifully. By Friday there was a machine: Luna on stream, saying things; Josh in the DMs, at two in the morning, coordinating eleven clippers and a thumbnail schedule and a guy in Manila who had built a spreadsheet better than his.
For the first time since the debut, he had a lever.
✦ ✦ ✦
On the Saturday, somebody formed an attack group.
Josh saw it in the server about an hour after it happened: a channel that had not existed that morning, forty people in it, and an actual plan, a target, a vtuber, a mid-sized one who had said something about the monitor thing on a podcast, with a schedule attached and a list of her sponsors.
He was still reading it when Luna, live, mid-sentence, on stream, said the guy's name.
Out loud. The whole handle. Once.
"That's not what the army is for," she said.
And then she moved on, and the thousand people in that room didn't.
Josh watched it happen in real time in three tabs. Twenty minutes later the account was gone. Not banned. Gone, deleted by its owner, along with two others of his that somebody had already found. The channel in the server was gone too. Nobody discussed it. Somebody put a message in general that said handled and the conversation went back to thumbnails.
Josh swallowed something and closed the tab.
(Josh:These are not normal people. I have two thousand of them and they are not normal people.)
✦ ✦ ✦
Except he knew exactly why, and that was worse.
These were not vtuber fans. That's the thing. Almost none of them had ever watched a stream before this one. They were not people who follow streamers and had now added another; they were his readers, and they had been his readers for years, six years, most of them, in some cases every week since before the comic paid for anything, and the entire relationship they had with that character had been conducted alone, in the dark, in silence, on a platform that does not have comments on the pages.
And then the girl came out of it.
Not a cosplayer. Not an homage. The character, moving, live, with the voice and the height and the temper, doing things they had read about, twice a week, for free.
What else was going to happen.
He could not even be surprised. He'd written the fandom's entire personality himself, on purpose, for six years, in a room, for money.
✦ ✦ ✦
The other thing that happened that week was that everybody started talking about her at once.
so is Sable a vtuber or is she a streamer. genuine question. she has no model. she has a FACE she's a vtuber. she uses a filter. that's a model with extra steps she is not a vtuber. vtubers have rigs. that woman has a WOMAN the vtuber community has spent four days trying to decide if they're allowed to claim her and she has not commented once
I'm calling it: she's fully AI. the whole thing. she's a generated presenter with a voice model and Lebu is running her live
"Lebu is running her live" is the funniest theory on this website. the guy draws a comic by hand. he does not have a real-time inference pipeline explain the pull then
I CAN'T EXPLAIN THE PULL ok whatever she is. can we talk about the fans. can we PLEASE talk about the fans those people broke their own monitors hundreds of them. HUNDREDS. and then they thanked her they've got NUMBERS in their names now. like a cult. an actual numbered cult
I have been in this hobby for nine years and I have never seen a fanbase like this. how did she build that how LONG has she been streaming
ONE MONTH
ONE MONTH?!!?!
✦ ✦ ✦
And the name they settled on for themselves was Sable's Agents.
Every handle. Every one. Sable's Agent 04. Sable's Agent 112. Sable's Agent 340. Matching avatar, all of them, the same mark on a black field, which is where Josh's afternoon ended, because he knew that mark. He had drawn that mark. He had drawn it about four hundred times.
They had gone into his comic, found one of the cults in it, and become it. The numbering was in there. The avatar was in there. The way they signed off to each other was in there. Somebody had done a careful job of it and gone back through six years of pages to get the details right, which is, technically, the nicest thing anybody has ever done with his work, and it landed on him like a wall. Get faster updates on g.com.
(Josh:They read it. They actually read it. All of it.)
(Josh:And they picked the villains.)
Then the agents decided, collectively, without anybody suggesting it, to flood the comment sections of everybody discussing her.
All of them. Every post, every video, every thread. Four hundred numbered accounts with the same avatar arriving underneath a nine-minute video essay in the space of a morning and being extremely polite.
That was what did the reputation. Not the monitors. The monitors were a story. Four hundred identical numbered strangers turning up under your work to say thank you for covering Sable is not a story, it is an experience, and every creator it happened to went and told everybody about it.
Luna confronted it on the next stream. She told them to stop. They stopped that afternoon.
It was four days too late and the reputation was already set, and by then there were eleven hundred of them.
✦ ✦ ✦
And then it simply kept going.
It is hard to put on a page, because nothing dramatic happened for a week and a half. It just didn't stop. Luna worked, and that is a sentence Josh would not have believed two months earlier and it was true now. She worked all day, every day, at a job with no hours, no output and no name.
She was not doing his job. He had the lists, the schedule, the eleven clippers, the thumbnail queue, the guy in Manila, the spreadsheet. She had none of that and wanted none of it. She never once asked what the numbers were. He brought her the week's figures on a Thursday, on paper, because he thought she'd want to see them.
"And?"
"They're good. They're really good. This one's—"
"Are you doing your job?"
"Yes."
"Then why are you telling me."
She played the queen, and she was superb at it, better than she had ever been at anything he'd watched her do. She held court. She named people. She remembered every handle, which is a thing she can simply do, and she used them, and being used by name in front of eleven hundred people turned out to be a currency with no ceiling on it.
And while she did that, her army went out into the world.
✦ ✦ ✦ hi. so I made a nine minute video that mentions Sable for about forty seconds and I have four hundred comments and they are all from accounts called Sable's Agent they're not being rude. that's the thing. they're all extremely polite. it's so much worse
I said one mildly critical thing about the monitor incident on a podcast three weeks ago. I want you all to know that I am still receiving thank-you notes
Sable's Agent 209 has left the nicest comment I have ever received on any video and I am afraid of him
I streamed for six hours yesterday and forty of them were in my chat the whole time being supportive. of me. it was the most stressful stream of my career there are ELEVEN HUNDRED of them a mid-size vtuber, privately, in a group chat: does anyone actually know how to make them stop. asking seriously. asking for real
Nobody could do anything about it, because at no point did any of them do anything wrong. That was the design, and nobody had designed it.
✦ ✦ ✦
The invitation came in on the Wednesday.
An online meetup: a small one, forty or fifty people, cameras optional, the sort of thing that happens in that community every couple of months and that nobody outside it has ever heard of. Sunday.
She said yes inside about nine seconds.
Josh, from the other side of the room, said, "Do you want to know who's going to be on it?"
"No."
"Because some of those people have—"
"Josh." She was already typing something else. "They invited me."
And that was true, and she was right, and it was the wrong reason.
He let it go. He had a schedule to fix.
✦ ✦ ✦
Friday.
Josh came out of the bedroom at about two in the afternoon and stopped in the doorway, because Luna was working.
She had three of them.
Three torsos, all hers, all rising off the same waist where a girl normally keeps one, fanned out across the couch like a hand of cards, one turned to the left, one square to the front, one leaning right and down over the arm of it. Three sets of shoulders. Three heads. The skin that isn't clothing had gone with her wherever she'd gone, without a seam, without a strain, the way it always does, so that all three of her were dressed the way one of her is dressed, and the whole arrangement met and merged low, at the hips, into the one pair of legs stretched out under the coffee table.
They moved separately. That was the thing that got him and always gets him. One of her shrugged while another laughed. The one on the left ran a hand back through her hair while the one on the right was still mid-sentence, and none of the three of them so much as glanced at what the others were doing, because there was nothing to glance at.
And each one had a device.
His phone, in the left hand of the left one.
His tablet, propped on the knee under the middle one.
And her own phone in the right one's hand.
Josh stood in that doorway for a while.
(Josh:Two months. Two months of "why won't you use your own phone." She has had it this whole time. She got it out when she ran out of hands.)
She was in three conversations at once and they were not the same conversation. He could hear all of them from the door and they were in three different voices: not different registers, voices, three separate physical apparatuses working independently in the same room:
"—no, that's fine, take the extra day, I don't care about the extra day—"
"—because I said Tuesday, and it is not Tuesday—"
"—you did very well. You did. I saw it."
Three people were being spoken to. All three of them thought they had her full attention. All three of them were correct.
Josh had a professional thought, which was that a guy who worked out how to sell this would never need money again. Then he had the other thought, which arrived underneath it and stayed longer, and which he didn't examine.
Then the doorbell rang.
✦ ✦ ✦
It went badly.
She startled, properly startled, the whole arrangement jumping at once, and three sets of hands lost three devices, and his phone went off the couch onto the floorboards face down, and the tablet slid off her knee and hit the rug, and her own phone bounced twice and went under the coffee table.
Then she pulled them in.
It was not slow and it was not pretty. It was the fastest thing Josh had ever watched her do that wasn't an arm going somewhere: the left one and the right one snapped inward and down and through, folding into the middle at the shoulder and the ribs, the three of her collapsing into one along a line he could not see, mass going somewhere, arms sorting themselves out at speed, six, then four, then two, and the whole thing was done in about a second and a half and finished with a small settling motion at her collarbones like a coat being shrugged straight.
One girl. Standing. Perfectly normal.
(Josh:There is a person on the other side of that door, and this apartment currently has, at a conservative estimate, four things in it that cannot be explained.)
She stepped over his phone, put a hand on the latch, and arranged her face.
Then she opened the door.
It was Rodey.