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So who? The nature of the Union means that the Abjad need to exist outside the normal system, or they can't function at all.
Panopticon: A Game of Posthumans, Perniciousness, Paranoia, Politics, and Plasmaguns
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As far as I am concerned, the Abjad had/has a legitimate purpose only insofar as they provide cross-Convention internal policing of the union. I do not believe that being a secret police is at all sensible. It means the Abjad does not work as a deterrent, nor do they receive any outside criticism in their turn, which means bad decisionmaking, or subversion can fester.
If what you mean by outside the system is that the Abjad needs to be non-Conventional, and to have the authority to bypass normal Convention hierarchy, then I agree with that sentiment.
If you mean that the Abjad needs to be a secret, then I disagree.I think it could be sufficient with an arms length principle w.r.t. their leadership, and publicly (within the union) known what their goals and overall methods are, as well as post-facto (in-union) publication of the cases where they took action.
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The assumption that your argument rests on (that the Abjad are secret police) is fundamentally wrong.
As said on the previous page:
Their purpose is to look at the Union from an extremely paradigmatic heterodox perspective, which means that they must be secret. The Union cannot shepherd consensus while also tolerating such extremely unorthodox positions, so secrecy is essential to the whole idea.
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I disagree with noliars analysis. What I have seen of the Abjad in this quest so far does not seem to serve that purpose, at all. It has been stated that they once did, before becoming Controls personal assassins,but that was at least a century ago, and I am quite skeptical of the idea that they could go back to that.
Furthermore, I don't see how the position of 'secret group with heterodox perspective' is all that useful useful. How does it help the world and/or the Union that there is a small group incapable of providing feedback which Technocrats will actually listen to, and which don't IIUC have the power to actually change policy on their own? Working to put reformers in charge seems to me to be a more effective means to influence the Union than to have a dedicated outsider group do it.
Furthermore, I don't see how the position of 'secret group with heterodox perspective' is all that useful useful. How does it help the world and/or the Union that there is a small group incapable of providing feedback which Technocrats will actually listen to, and which don't IIUC have the power to actually change policy on their own? Working to put reformers in charge seems to me to be a more effective means to influence the Union than to have a dedicated outsider group do it.
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A rather central theme of the Quest is that the loss of Control (and its Tradition equivalents) allowed for their organizations to grow beyond the sins and mistakes of the past to go in a positive direction. So if being compromised by bad older leadership is a reason to view the Abjad as incapable of reform that surely you must extend the same opinion to the Technocracy as a whole (and probably the Traditions), they, after all, were just as much under the ruthless Old Master's thrall and just as complicit in the nastiness.
Since that obviously isn't true and the Technocracy is capable of reform then the Abjad must be able to be reformed as well.
Furthermore, I don't see how they couldn't be useful. The Technocratic Union as an organization that wants to shape consensus which requires a rather high level of ideological conformity amongst its membership, which is good for maintaining unity and advancing the interests of the organization but has the downside of leading to a blinkered view of their own actions and policies. That's why it's so critical to have people who can examine the Technocracy from a different perspective and intervene if they think it's going the wrong direction, which is where the Abjad comes in. Make no mistake, if the Abjad (or some group identical to them) isn't rebuilt then there is a good chance the Technocracy will just repeat the mistakes of the past.
The Abjad are not supposed to be as overwhelming as Panopticon but don't confuse a deft touch with being powerless, they would simply be forced to compromise and make the most of what they have (which come to think of it sounds like Jamelia's Amalgam
). Which is not the same thing as being powerless.
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I acknowledge that the Abjad is not unreformable or powerless. I do not believe that Yinzheng Li joining their ranks helps reform them, nor that her membership of that organization is a better way for her to help the world than to be a part of the Union proper.
I may need to reread the chapters with the Abjad, but I did not get the impression that they were a deft hand at things besides spying and assassination. That's rather redundant with the rest of the Union's skillset, and I do not think it is a particularly efficient way to shape an organization. For the Union in general, they're useful methods as a part of how the Union influences the WoD, but hardly the most important parts, IMO. Edit: and the Union can follow up assassination with alternative leaders and/or visions, which I don't think the Abjad is capable of, with their small size, nor do I think Yingzheng joining them would help solve that problem
I may need to reread the chapters with the Abjad, but I did not get the impression that they were a deft hand at things besides spying and assassination. That's rather redundant with the rest of the Union's skillset, and I do not think it is a particularly efficient way to shape an organization. For the Union in general, they're useful methods as a part of how the Union influences the WoD, but hardly the most important parts, IMO. Edit: and the Union can follow up assassination with alternative leaders and/or visions, which I don't think the Abjad is capable of, with their small size, nor do I think Yingzheng joining them would help solve that problem
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The Abjad is important, because they act as secret observers with power within the Technocratic system, who can view the system from outside the paradigm it shapes, while having the people in the Union actually listen. The problem they exist to solve is that paradigm puts blinders on most mages, both Union and Traditionalist, just as a factor of how mages below E6 see the world. Their position as loyal heretics, utilizing Dual Traditions to use both enlightened science and mysticism means they can understand the technoparadigm, and it's problems, in a way someone who lives entirely within it cannot. They aren't perfect, but they also don't need to be to serve their purpose. They strayed, and were complacent a long time, but they cannot be any longer. Aleph is dead, and with him what he represented. If they can ever go back to what they once were, it is now that path exists. Yingzhen is in a moment of viability for joining them, a moment that may well pass. She has seen Control, an essential pillar of the technodigm, is nothing more than a lie now, and that the world is not as she believed. She is in a position of doubt that may open her to the Abjad's goals, and she has motivation to forward those goals. To stop others falling into the trap she did, to stop more monster-born-of-men ruling the world as control now wishes too. She can become a heretic now, because belief has failed her, but from this failing she can find a way to protect others from other failures.
Pretty sure Syndicate Quants are already example of the Technocracy accepting what amounts to hermetic numerologists in its ranks openly, the Union spans a extremely large net where they already plenty of members holding heterodox positions for such a purpose.
UrsaTempest
Don't Panic!
Yeah, but Syndicate Quants are still rooted with Technocratic Paradigm pretty solidly. They're the guy that crunched numbers, probably via computer/special software/big data and figured-out patterns based on that - from trading to society prediction to whatever. Very similar to mystical numerology, especially since I'm pretty sure they'll develop something like 'chart patterns' as well which can remind you with superstition. But it's still solidly Technocratic.
Doesn't sound solidly technocractic if your being suspected being RDs.
UrsaTempest
Don't Panic!
From non-Quant perspective, yes.
From the Quant themselves, what they're doing fit Technodigm perfectly, thank you very much.
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Right and the fact they only exist because of the Syndicate's protection should tell you exactly how viable a true heretical methodology would be.
Not viable at all.
Fundamentally, the Abjad must exist because there is a very sharply limited supply of E6 people, and even when they extend offers to people who haven't really grokked the E6 paradigm (hah) shift, there's still a limited number of people who can handle that revelation without going bad places.
Similarly, they absolutely must be secret, because the Union cannot acknowledge that reality is consensus and still complete its mission.
Similarly, they absolutely must be secret, because the Union cannot acknowledge that reality is consensus and still complete its mission.
[X] Clarity: The Abjad have suffered their own losses in the paroxyms of Panopticon's self-destruction. They need new recruits. With her conditioning and her surety shattered, Yinzheng Li could make a good potential recruit. All it costs will be her old life, her stability, and forever being branded a heretic. But isn't that the right word for someone who was given a commandment by a god, meant to be obeyed, and walked away from it?
Consider this another way; that both sides of the Cold War were actually were actually controlled by the same global conspiracy(Eg: Technocracy)
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Can anyone remind me which chapter the Abjad first appeared in? I'd like to re-read those chapters, but Panopticon Quest is so huge, that even with threadmarks and reader mode I'm not quite sure where to start looking. I may well end up control-f'ing through reader mode, but if there's a faster way to sort through the 37 pages worth of (all interesting but not immediately relevant to this discussion) content Majestic 12 has written over the years, I'd like to know.
I don't remember the Abjad making decision-makers within the Union listen to them, except due to their authority as part of Panopticon. If you could point me to one or more examples, I would appreciate it. As it stands, I don't think Yinzheng Li joining the Abjad is the best way for her to help improve the Technocracy. I think an understanding of the fallibility of ones leaders is a trait the Union could do with a lot more of.
I don't see why E6 people must necessarily organize themselves into the Abjad and act accordingly. That seems to me only one way they could organize, leaving aside the possibility of not joining together. I don't think being co-workers is the only way for them to make the world and the Technocracy better places to be.
Does their existence need to be secret in order for their E6 nature to be? Couldn't they hide it? I'm not being rhetorical, I genuinely don't know.
I don't remember the Abjad making decision-makers within the Union listen to them, except due to their authority as part of Panopticon. If you could point me to one or more examples, I would appreciate it. As it stands, I don't think Yinzheng Li joining the Abjad is the best way for her to help improve the Technocracy. I think an understanding of the fallibility of ones leaders is a trait the Union could do with a lot more of.
I don't see why E6 people must necessarily organize themselves into the Abjad and act accordingly. That seems to me only one way they could organize, leaving aside the possibility of not joining together. I don't think being co-workers is the only way for them to make the world and the Technocracy better places to be.
Does their existence need to be secret in order for their E6 nature to be? Couldn't they hide it? I'm not being rhetorical, I genuinely don't know.
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They effect decision makers by secretly being those decision makers, using codes they've stolen/slipped in, using magic to manipulate the organization in ways people don't expect because they can use non-technocratic tricks. They've also been complacent a long time, and Aleph has both led them and had more or less unilateral power, so they haven't done much of their usual in a while. But it was shown when they met Donald they can do...quite a lot, with what they have to manipulate a situation. Jamelia noted in her trial as well that Aleph played Command, and they did as he desired. His power, as the last human member of Control, was their main tool in the quest up until this point. It was not before, and has ended now.
They aren't E6 as a rule. No group is E6 as a rule at this point, as most of the people with high enlightenment were lost in the DA. The Abjad just have a little of the understanding of paradigm normally gained with high enlightenment via their dual paradigm stuff.
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Okay, so I've been rereading from the part where the Abjad/anti-Control Panopticon contacts Donald, and it's been quite helpful to refresh my memory. It's made me reconsider my stance on the Abjad. They seem more helpful than I've given them credit for, and the role I was advocating them taking up seems to be already filled by Ethical Compliance. Insofar as the Abjad leaves behind the secret police role, they can play a helpful, and distinct, role for the Technocracy and the world at large. I'm still not convinced that Yinzheng Li would contribute better as part of the Abjad, or that her joining helps push them in the direction I'd want them to go.
Update CCXXIX: The Vigilant Ones
JB CCXXIX: The Vigilant Ones
There is a restaurant in London, not too far from one of the entrances to the Geofront. It does sit-down and take-away Mexican street food. The head chef is Greek, most of the waiting staff are Spanish, and most of its clientele are people grabbing a meal before a train. No one stays here for very long. The eyes of the world glance over it - unless, of course, they feel like Mexican. But the top floor is closed off today, because its owner is here. Of course, nobody else knows the owner is here. Its clientele just think it's a private party.
Three old killers are here, on the top floor of the restaurant. They're all that remains of HELMETSHRIKE Section 7. A man, graying and tired, with a mind that can break steel and a body that's his true age. A woman with the body of someone forty years younger than she should be; a terrorist, killer and lately a traitor. And a grizzled man who sits like a tiger and is as mauled as a old tomcat, one missing eye covered by a patch, old scars on his face and hands.
"... and then they went and named one of their uplifts after me!" Winston exclaims.
"How did they tell the two of you apart?" Harlan says darkly.
"Play nice," Jamelia says.
"You're not paying me for that. Or at all."
"Ha! Well, you know what they say. Next year in Doissetep," Winston says, saluting with his beer. It's an old phrase, a legacy of the time when people had thought that was all they needed to do to win the war.
"Poor taste," Harlan grumbles into his whiskey. He's not drinking what they're serving here. He brought a bottle along and asked for a glass and ice. That got him some dirty looks, but he glared at the waitstaff until they complied.
Jamelia sits back in her chair. Her suit is - of course - immaculate. She has an apple-and-mango J20, and she's already scanned it for contaminants. "This is nice," she says. "We should do this more often."
Harlan glares at her. "Are you serious? What kind of-" He catches the look in her eyes, and his brows furrow. "You're not serious."
"What's not to like about catching up with old friends?"
"You're doing this deliberately. You're doing this deliberately, and I'm not playing your game."
Jamelia just sips her drink in response.
Winston grins, flashing white teeth. "It's impressive how deep down, you two haven't changed. Still getting on each other's nerves like the old days."
"Well, I do try," Jamelia says calmly.
Harlan just grumbles, leafing through the menu. "I don't see why we couldn't go to somewhere better."
"This is a good place," Winston says, waving his hand over the surroundings.
"I don't like Mexican. Why couldn't we go to the Ivy?"
"Security," Jamelia says instantly.
"I like Mexican," Winston says at the same time. "Come on, decide what you want and I'll go place the orders."
Harlan sighs, and with only a little bit more grumbling chooses the plainest, least spicy thing on the menu. Winston leaves, and Jamelia catches Harlan's eye.
"What?" he demands sullenly.
"You're acting like a big child. Act your age."
Crossing his arms, he scowls at her. "Why don't you act your age?"
"And retire to a cabana on the beach? I think not." She sighs. "I hope you'll be acting better by the time we get on the Eurostar. Is it being around Winston? Or me?"
"Don't try to psychoanalyze me."
"No, that's your job."
Harlan swirls his whiskey, ice clinking against the sides. They can hear the sound of street vendors outside the windows. "I'm not comfortable with this," he says.
"I can see that."
"No, shut up and listen. I can't help but feel that something's very wrong."
Jamelia's skin prickles. She puts her drink down carefully, senses alert. "I can't feel anything," she says softly. "And you're not a precognitive."
"I know! I… I know." Harlan nervously licks the corners of his lips. "I can't place it. But… I can't help but feel that everything is going to go wrong."
"Are you sure it's not just nerves?" Jamelia asks.
And there's the hesitancy. "Of course," Harlan says, unconvincingly. "My mind is steel."
Ah, Jamelia doesn't say, but steel rusts. Steel builds up stress fractures. Steel crystallizes and warps. Steel is never invincible - and she is concerned about Harlan. He's been away from the action for so long. He's steel left out in Ohio to rust, and now he's been pulled back into action with no real warning. Has he had time to really polish away and file off the corrosion, or has too much damage already been done? She's an Operative. She always suspects the people on her own side. But she doesn't mistrust Harlan's loyalties. Just his capabilities.
"Stop that."
"Stop what?" she asks.
"Don't play innocent. You think I can't hack it anymore."
She doesn't degrade him by lying. "I'm just concerned about your physical fitness to be in the field if things do go as wrong as you suspect."
That draws a barking laugh from him. "Hah. You probably should." He rubs the small of his back. "You two might've dodged it so far, but we all grow old eventually. Some day you'll feel like this, when the rejuvenation wears thin and the body starts giving way. At least it's just my muscles and bones and tendons that aren't working like they used to." He taps his head. "The old brain is back at one hundred percent."
Is it? Is it really? Because he's drinking whiskey at midday, and she can see the microshakes that his drink is quietening. "I suppose so," she says, sipping her own J20.
Nothing more gets said before Winston gets back, bringing the (oddly rapidly done) food. None of them would trust the staff to bring it, after all. He slumps down in his chair, the wood groaning under him. He glances from face to face. "So you heard the news?"
That gets both sets of attention on him. "What news?" Harlan asks.
Winston shakes his head, then idly adjusts his eyepatch. "We're secure. Good. I wasn't just ordering. I got a call from Command's Assets Tracking, inquiring about my knowledge of certain former Vigilance assets who've shown up in the files again." He shakes his head. "Haven't had one of those calls in years."
"Who?" Jamelia feels chills up and down her neck.
"Wolf and Squid."
Harlan blinks. "But Squid's been dead for decades. And last thing I heard, Wolf defected years ago. Went off the radar and there hasn't been a trace of him since."
Jamelia remembers being sent after him, back in the late 80s. In retrospect, it was probably another Blanc move to send her after a former colleague, back when she was little better than a P-Series. If she'd found him, she wouldn't have paused before putting a bullet in his brain, if that had been her orders at the time. But she hadn't found him. Vigilance hadn't hired incompetents, after all. She doesn't mention it to the others, though. She'd bet that Winston already knows, and Harlan doesn't need that intel. He's not cleared for it.
"Why would he have come out of the shadows?" she asks Winston instead. No one has touched their food yet.
"Not by choice."
"Hmm. Something doesn't line up." It's a gut reaction but she knows it's right. The Technocracy would need a high-end team to get someone with Wolf's training, even if he's gone soft while hiding. High end teams don't get sent after phantoms who've been gone for decades. So either he got unlucky, he felt something was more important than hiding, or…
"Someone's cleaning up loose ends."
"Correct."
"Fuck," whispers Harlan, who's clearly come to the same conclusion. "What the hell happened?"
Winston sits down. "Mmm." He looks around with a practiced eye, gets up, and makes sure the door is closed. "Wolf was captured and processed by a Panopticon team late last year."
Jamelia feels the hair on the back of her neck stand on end. It's cold and hot at the same time, and her stomach churns. She wets her lips, aware that she's both scared and angry and hating the feeling. "Makes sense," she says, lips feeling numb. "They're the only people with both the assets and the desire to drag him out of whatever hole he dug himself into."
There's a long pause. "And Squid's mental imprint showed up, sharing a body with a Traditions reality deviant."
Harlan's nostrils flare. "That doesn't make sense. If she'd been fitted with that kind of biotech, it would have been in mission briefings."
Jamelia is thinking something else. "How old was this RD?" she asks carefully.
Winston sits back, head tilted at an angle. "Now that's an interesting question."
"Why is it interesting? I want to know if she could have prepared that kind of imprint before she died," Jamelia says. It's not a lie. It's not true, but it's not a lie.
"Because it's the same question I had. The Traditionalist in question was born after Squid was KIA."
"Hmm." Harlan whiskey wipes off his mustache. "How much younger? Could be a case of fetal possession by a psychic waveform."
"Eight months," Winston confirms.
"Well, well, well," Harlan muses, fingers tapping the table. "I had no idea she was dabbling in those kinds of forbidden psychic techniques."
Reincarnation, Jamelia doesn't say. It's a simpler explanation than whatever Harlan has to say. She always used to find his explanations long-winded as a younger woman; now, as an old woman, she sees how stretched they are to try to cover the whole world with the word 'psychic'. And she looks at Winston and wonders what he isn't saying.
He's looking back at her.
What does he know? He's a decade or two older than her. He's seen things that very few have. He doesn't have Harlan's catch-all psychic explanations. Does he suspect? Does he know?
"Yeah. Psychic powers," Winston says. "What I want to know is why she'd turn up now, of all times?"
"Maybe he tracked her down?" Jamelia says, eyes narrowed.
"Could be," Winston grunts.
She knows instantly he isn't saying everything. "So she wanted to be found?" He nods. "But why now?"
"Why now? That's a complicated question." Winston lifts his beer. "One a lot of people don't want to answer. 'Why now' was I ordered to kill a man who's been a problem for years? 'Why now' are we having all these alien invasions that get past the Engineers and they're opening up? 'Why now' are you two talking again?"
"That's classified," is what Jamelia wants to say. She wants to say it, and it's true. And the thing about Winston is that for all that he's just a man, barely more than baseline, who insists that when he gets vat-grown organs they're baseline too… the thing about him is that this man is a living chisel. He finds weak points and he hammers into them.
With a word, a fist, or a bullet. Doesn't matter much to him.
And with his clearance, he no doubt already knows. So he's asking. For a reason.
"That's classified," grunts Harlan, who's always been a little less willing to get involved in these games of 'I know that he knows that I know that he knows'.
Winston sits back, beer in hand. "Everything always is. I couldn't tell you about a lot of things I've done. I've just finished a long term placement, so I'm off the chain for the first time in years." He takes a sip. "At least until someone remembers what I do and I'm shipped off to Korea." He salutes Jamelia with his drink. "They need someone like you over there."
"What I'm doing is more important."
"Is it?"
"Yes," Jamelia says automatically, considers it, and decides that much to her surprise, she's actually telling the truth.
Harlan levers himself upright. "Where's the bathroom?" he asks.
"Over there," Winston says with a casual gesture.
The two of them are left alone.
"Yeah. Yeah, you think it is more important. And that isn't like you."
"I suppose it isn't."
Winston sighs. "It'd be closer to say that it's never been like you."
Jamelia for her part pokes her food around the plate. It's cooled down, and she takes a mouthful. It's not great, but she's tasted worse. "That's an odd comment," she says.
"I'm older than you. I can make odd comments."
"I suppose you've looked at my up-to-date medical records."
"Just to check your operational readiness, yes. Quite a few changes from when I saw them before Moscow."
"Mmm. I suppose so." Jamelia pauses at the precipice, then leans over it because frankly she doesn't want to have this conversation but she'd like it even less if Harlan was back. "So you're fully aware of the removal and degradation of INVISIBLE BEAR and its associated… blocks."
"Yes. I am, Jazmin."
Jamelia smiles wryly at that. "Having her memories back doesn't make me her."
"A change of name isn't necessary to become someone else. I wouldn't say I'm the same man I was thirty-five years ago. It's just a matter of degree."
"But I think it matters." She loads her fork up. "My matter of degree, that is."
"Yes. You would."
They sit in silence. The food tastes of even less now to Jamelia, like cardboard and ash. Maybe it is, if it's coming from a hidden food synthesizer.
"So. Are you looking for forgiveness?" Winston asks, mildly, just as she takes another mouthful.
If he wanted a reaction, she's not going to give him one. "Do you think anyone can look for forgiveness?"
That forces a laugh from his lips. "Soldiers like us don't get to go home, Jazmin. Our lives are on a battlefield, whether we're fighting hand-to-hand in bloodied trenches or dueling unseen in an invisible war. We give up everything in what we do."
"So that's a no."
"No, it's not. But," and the man rolls his shoulders, "I don't expect any of us to live through anything we'd say was forgiveness. We're monsters, Hyena, all of us. Me, you," he nods to the bathroom, "him. He tried to walk away from the war, but that left him pickling in his regrets. Stewing in his grief and bitterness. He's glad to be back on the battlefield. Because it could kill him, and only when his life is on the line can he hope to forgive himself. And me and you, Illiyeen? We never left it. No matter what names we wear. No matter what we do. We've been monsters ever since HELMETSHRIKE ended, living on the battlefield among the bodies and the blood. Sometimes monsters for a good cause, sometimes monsters for a bad one, and it's not us who apply the labels of good and bad. Is it?"
He's speaking the truth. Or, rather, Jamelia mentally corrects herself, he's seeing the truth as he sees it. "So there's no point," she says.
"Like I said, I don't think of any of us can live through what we think is true forgiveness," Winston says. He reaches into an inner pocket, pulling out a pack of cheap cigarettes which he plays with. "How many people did we leave alive to forgive us? Not many. And of those who we left alive, who even would know our names? Our faces? So running off on a quest for forgiveness is only about trying to settle your own mind." He chuckles. "Begging forgiveness from the survivors is a waste of time in my eyes. You might feel differently, but if you do, I doubt we'll persuade each other."
"It's just as well that I'm not looking for forgiveness, then," she says a trifle tartly.
"Are you sure?"
"Yes," and that's the problem. Because she's less sure than she used to be. Realizing what she did with Catherine, out in space - it's made her less sure. It's hard to be sure when everything is just a point of view. No wonder people like old Reina Lior hated a world that was so malleable.
"Hrrum." Winston puts down his beer, nibbling on his burrito. "Like I said, it's not like you. And it's never been like you."
Jamelia sighs. "I suppose not," she says. "But then again, we all get old, don't we?" They both could pass for their twenties. "In the mind, if not the body."
"Hah." It's a short, barked laugh - the sound of a man who's just had something unpleasant forced in his face, and Jamelia isn't entirely sure why he's doing it now of all times. "Yes, we do. Time's the one killer that'll get us all some day - and if he doesn't get us, he'll hold our arms behind our backs so someone else can." He takes a swig from his beer. "You know, there's a lot of people who say a man's not dead until his name isn't spoken anymore."
She gets his meaning straight away. "Then we're among the dead already."
"Fitting for us old war hounds, yeah?"
Jamelia glances over at Winston; his hair that's been growing long enough that it's almost a mullet, the fact he hasn't shaven in days, the way he fiddles with his cigarettes. The eye patch. "You know, once, years back, you told me you wanted to be remembered."
"Did I?" He's acting innocent.
"Just after Tehran."
"Well, you know how post-mission stress can be…"
Something about his attitude gets Jamelia's hackles up. In, she thinks ruefully, a very Jazmin-like way. "There you go, accusing me of looking for forgiveness when you're afraid of being forgotten."
"Hmm. You're guessing." He glares at her with his one eye, warning her off.
"You became a legend," she says, driving in the knife. "And your story's slowly dying now that there's no war to fight. Just endless 'police actions' and 'counterterrorist operations.' You're becoming a man once again."
Winston Kingsley sits back, a dark expression on his face. "Well, well," he says carefully. "That's just what you said the second time you tried to recruit me."
Her blood runs cold. His other hand is under the table and she knows he has a gun.
A man and a woman, much older than they look, sit in a Mexican restaurant in a side street in London. They're both armed. But right here and now, he's the one who has the Mjolnir pointed at her under the table.
Jamelia wants to sigh. He taught her so much of what she knows. He's one of the few people who could manage to set this up without her noticing. Of course, neither of them are running any major physical or combat enhancements because… well, they'd have noticed it in the other. And she knew it was a risk meeting with him, but - ah, maybe he's right. Maybe she wanted forgiveness of a kind, for failing him all those years ago.
"That wasn't me," she says, voice clear and emotionless.
"It wasn't you, but it was you," he says. Nothing in his posture would give away that the hidden hand has a weapon. "Like I said, Illiyeen. We're sometimes monsters for a good cause, sometimes monsters for a bad one, and it's not us who apply the labels of good and bad. You're just playing for both sides right now. Control would say that the side you're on is the bad one and the other you is the good one."
Jamelia sighs. "I haven't met my alpha fork," she says, shifting in her seat. "Are we that alike?"
"Blanc knew what he was doing when he made you two," Winston says.
She says nothing.
"What? Aren't you going to ask me if you're the real one?"
"Does it matter? I don't think it does."
"Ha. That's a difference. She cares."
Jamelia raises one eyebrow. "I don't see why it matters. Like I said," she mimics his phrasing, "having her memories back doesn't make me her."
"Mmm. You're New World Order down to the bone."
"And she isn't?" Jamelia has the habits of a lifetime. She will talk to someone pointing a gun at her. The fact that he hasn't shot her yet - when he knows that Harlan is nearby - means that either Harlan is already eliminated, or he has a reason to not want her dead immediately.
Winston smiles, but doesn't say anything.
"What did she promise you?"
"Do you think she had to promise me anything? As if I was up for sale?" Winston's lips curl down. "Illiyeen, an old wardog knows his purpose. How many people have we killed who were on our side?"
It's true. It's so painfully true. She's been the person on the other side of the table before. More than once. "It's funny," she says softly. "There are so many ways you could have tried to kill me. You don't have a shortage of assets - and she has even more. But in the end, it's a handgun under the table at a diner."
"Don't sell yourself short." Winston's eyes crease in amusement. "Machines wouldn't do it. Air strikes wouldn't do it. You'd hear of those kinds of preparations. Your allies would flag you, or you'd tell what I was planning from the markers. You're just like me. This is the only way that'd work. Just me, you, and a gun in my hands."
Jamelia inclines her head. "You know what's funny?" she says softly.
"Many things. Which one were you thinking about?"
She smiles, showing her teeth. "You were lying when you said she didn't buy you."
"Think what you will-"
"Winston, I know you." Jamelia smiles at him sweetly. "We are old war dogs. And you can feel yourself greying in this peace. She didn't buy you with the promise of money, of equipment, of anything so material." She pauses. "She bought you by whispering that you're being forgotten. She bought you with the promise of a great war, something worthy of your talents. She bought you because you're sick of fighting petty rebels in petty countries for sake of petty companies."
There's a grimace on Winston's face now.
Jamelia leans forwards. "And more than that, you're afraid. Afraid that they're forgetting you. The people you kill don't know your name. They fear the American drones more than you." She spreads her hands. "So she promised you a war. She promised you something that'll change the world. Something that'll burn your name into the history books, win or lose. She didn't buy you with money or equipment. She bought you with a worthless promise of fame."
Winston raises his eyebrows. "This isn't going to work."
"What isn't working?"
"You're trying to weaken my resolve."
She frowns. "If the truth weakens your resolve, perhaps you should reconsider your resolution. Control are exhumans who won't remember or care about you as more than a data point, as a tool to be thrown away. I've seen their servants - what they became out in space. I've seen their servants - what's happened to to the people who chose to serve them here. Nothing you do for them will mean anything, Winston."
"Perhaps."
Anger flares up in her. "Then what are you waiting for? If you're so unwilling to talk, shoot me and have done with it."
"Perhaps I would." He pauses. "If you hadn't already used a RD procedure to remove the bullets from my gun."
He's already moving before he finishes talking - but she's moving faster. She comes off her chair backwards, avoiding his swinging pistol-whip, and tosses the cutlery she was holding at his face. He fends it off with his other hand and slams the gun down on the table, spraying chili sauce in her direction. The pain is a distraction she doesn't need; the lack of vision is worse. She listens for him - and there's the clatter of the overturned table. She ducks, feeling the air displaced by his murderous fists, and grabs his arm, throwing him over her shoulder. That buys her enough time to wipe her teary eyes and grab the nearest chair.
Winston turns his roll into a perfect recovery, drawing a knife from an inner pocket and lunging at her. The knife goes through the seat of the chair and she twists, wrenching it from his hand and tossing it aside.
The two circle each other in the wreckage of the restaurant.
"You haven't called for Harlan."
"You'll have made sure I couldn't," she says back, blinking heavily.
"Didn't take you for a secret Reality Deviant."
"Just simulated Reality Deviance," she retorts. She won't say it for the psychic trickery it was. "A trick from the old days."
"Hmm." He tries to circle her. She backs away, aware of the limited room.
Then he charges, barreling through tables and chairs like they're not there. Silver flashes in his hand and she realizes he's produced another knife from somewhere. Jamelia narrowly dodges his first swipe, then grabs his arm and slams it down into a table. The wood splinters but he doesn't let go. And she's miscalculated, because his free arm is around her neck, pulling her upright.
She's smaller, lighter, has less reach than him even if she matches him in strength. Up close like this, it's a real disadvantage. She smashes the back of her head into his jaw and both of them stagger loose, dazed. She recovers first and explodes towards him, fists flowing from position to position. Bones break under the impacts as she pummels at his chest. But he's still mobile and even with broken ribs, his lunge catches her in the side. A red hot needle pierces her flesh and she can't help but gasp.
But there's a fork on the nearest table and she brings it down on his hand. He drops the knife from blood-slicked fingers and punches her.
Jamelia is down, jaw aching, ears ringing, feeling sick. Speaking as an expert, it's a concussion.
"Look… look at us, flailing at each other like a pair of amateurs," Winston wheezes through broken ribs, stooping down and drawing his backup pistol from inside his jacket. It's a compact X10 variant, with almost all the bells and whistles stripped out. Just a silencer. No ejection port. No traces. "We would have-"
There's a discontinuity.
And they're both back upright, and even with broken ribs, he's lunging and she side-steps, feeling the ache in her bones from what she just did. Now she's inside his reach and she brings a knife hand up and rising into his windpipe. He gasps for air, dropping his blade, and she explodes up into his solar plexus.
A silenced pistol coughs twice.
He's down. His jacket is torn off.
The gun is in her hands. Smoke wafts from the barrel.
Winston starts to chuckle, breath rasping through broken ribs. Red blood flows from the two holes in his abdomen. She's not much better off. She can feel the hot flow of blood from the wound in her side - and the wound is tingling. This is Winston. There's probably some poison on it from some species of Andean frog, or maybe venom from a South-East Asian snake. "Tables… have turned, eh?" he says. "Should have shot me in the head."
She says nothing.
"Wish my… last fight could have been better. Look at us, flailing at each other like a pair of amateurs."
"You're lying," she says softly. "You loved it."
"Ha. Ha. Of course. Of course I did. You had to be good to make my last fight so sloppy."
"Where is she?"
He knows who she means. "Don't know. Didn't really care. She always contacted me."
"What is she planning?"
"Come on, Illiyeen. You wouldn't tell me that. Why would she?" Winston clutches his hand to the holes, the instinctive act of a body trying to staunch the blood flow. "'S funny, really. Always wondered who'd kill me. Which dog of the battlefield would tear out my throat?"
"This isn't a battlefield."
"It is. The world's a battlefield. Existence is war." Winston coughs, wheezes, gasps. "Every moment is a fight for survival, no matter what happens. You killed me. Someday someone will get you. Maybe she will. You're not so different. It'll be a coinflip, you versus her. I just wish I was there to watch it."
"So what do you have set on a dead man's trigger?" she asks.
"Dead man's trigger? Illiyeen, that would ruin everything. You don't understand it, no matter how many times I tell you. We're sometimes monsters for a good cause, sometimes monsters for a bad one, and it's not us who apply the labels of good and bad. If I had a dead man's trigger, that'd say that I thought this was a good cause. It's not. It's just the mission."
She holds one hand to her injured side, but the hand with the pistol stays steady.
"At least it was one of my students who put me in this position," Winston gasps. "You killed me with my own teachings. You'll go on to teach them to others. Maybe in the end, that's all that men and women like us get…" He swallows. "Do it. Take my legend and make it part of your own."
Jamelia pulls the trigger again.
"What the fuck?" Harlan demands when he enters the room again. "Jesus fuck, Hyena! I was in the bathroom for ten minutes!"
Jamelia glares at him, and finishes cleaning her wound. She's swallowed an immuno-amplifier and an broadspectrum antivenom, and now she clenches her teeth as she sprays biofoam into the wound. "Winston was working for her. Ms Clock," she says, when she can talk without gasping. She's shaking now, as she pays for the exertion.
"I'm surprised you beat him," Harlan says, inspecting the body.
"I nearly didn't. I cheated. Psychic trick."
"What kind of…" Harlan's mouth hangs open. "Oh. Fuck."
"What?"
"You look ten years older. I can see grey hairs." He taps his temples. "Up here. You fucked with the passage of time."
Jamelia scowls. "Just a few seconds. It was that or die. I'll take a few grey hairs for that. And yeah, well, I'm using my headscarf as a bandage right now," she mutters. For some reason, it feels deeply personal. "Didn't you hear anything?"
"No. The soundproofing in this place is fantastic."
She yanks her shirt back down, and leans from side to side, testing her flexibility. "Could be worse," she says laconically. "Now. Are you going to dispose of the body, or shall I?"
"Now?"
She looks directly at Harlan. "I don't think he cared if he won or lost. It was personal. I'm not sure if she was holding something over his head or he just wanted a proper fight against me, but he told me he didn't have any dead man's switches set up."
"And you believed him?"
"Yes." She purses her lips. "He wasn't in any condition to lie. I'd have seen."
Harlan looks around the wrecked restaurant. "So. It's just you and me left," he says softly. "Death comes for Vigilance."
"Yes, it does." She swallows, tasting copper. "So we dispose of the body. I've got some ProDecomp in my briefcase. We can flush him, then leave by the back entrance. I want to delay anyone realizing he's dead and make sure they can't recover the remains."
"Because she'll use that against you," Harlan says grimly.
Jamelia tilts her head. "That too. But I don't want her bringing him back." Her hand unconsciously goes to her side. "I don't know if I can do that again. Next time he might get me."
The work of disposing of a body and bloodstains is a messy one. As Jamelia vanishes the mortal remains of her old friend into carbon dioxide, water, and flushable trace elements, she can't help but remember what he said. There's something that sticks in her mind, and she's not sure why.
Thanks to @EarthScorpion for his work on this. And now you know how this story ends-one woman tying off loose ends, in an inevitable collision course with herself. Because in the end, the systems and processes that make up the world-and make up its secret masters-are built around people. And in the end, it's about those people-who they are, who people want them to be, and who they themselves want to be.
One Last Lesson
Sometimes, when you kill your mentor because that's the only way things possibly could have gone, you get a cut-down assault rifle with infinite ammunition. Other times, you get the key to attaining further wisdom. Jamelia probably got the better of the two boons, honestly. Choose 2 final Sphere upgrades for Jamelia Belltower.
[ ] "It's not us who apply the labels of good and bad": Mind 2->4 (Manipulation)
[ ] "You're not so different. It'll be a coinflip, you versus her.": Entropy 4->5
[ ] "Every moment is a fight for survival, no matter what happens.": Time 3->4 (Revelations)
[ ] "Just me, you, and a gun in my hands.": Correspondence 3->4 (Coordination)
[ ] "Existence is war.": Forces 2->4 (Proportional)
There is a restaurant in London, not too far from one of the entrances to the Geofront. It does sit-down and take-away Mexican street food. The head chef is Greek, most of the waiting staff are Spanish, and most of its clientele are people grabbing a meal before a train. No one stays here for very long. The eyes of the world glance over it - unless, of course, they feel like Mexican. But the top floor is closed off today, because its owner is here. Of course, nobody else knows the owner is here. Its clientele just think it's a private party.
Three old killers are here, on the top floor of the restaurant. They're all that remains of HELMETSHRIKE Section 7. A man, graying and tired, with a mind that can break steel and a body that's his true age. A woman with the body of someone forty years younger than she should be; a terrorist, killer and lately a traitor. And a grizzled man who sits like a tiger and is as mauled as a old tomcat, one missing eye covered by a patch, old scars on his face and hands.
"... and then they went and named one of their uplifts after me!" Winston exclaims.
"How did they tell the two of you apart?" Harlan says darkly.
"Play nice," Jamelia says.
"You're not paying me for that. Or at all."
"Ha! Well, you know what they say. Next year in Doissetep," Winston says, saluting with his beer. It's an old phrase, a legacy of the time when people had thought that was all they needed to do to win the war.
"Poor taste," Harlan grumbles into his whiskey. He's not drinking what they're serving here. He brought a bottle along and asked for a glass and ice. That got him some dirty looks, but he glared at the waitstaff until they complied.
Jamelia sits back in her chair. Her suit is - of course - immaculate. She has an apple-and-mango J20, and she's already scanned it for contaminants. "This is nice," she says. "We should do this more often."
Harlan glares at her. "Are you serious? What kind of-" He catches the look in her eyes, and his brows furrow. "You're not serious."
"What's not to like about catching up with old friends?"
"You're doing this deliberately. You're doing this deliberately, and I'm not playing your game."
Jamelia just sips her drink in response.
Winston grins, flashing white teeth. "It's impressive how deep down, you two haven't changed. Still getting on each other's nerves like the old days."
"Well, I do try," Jamelia says calmly.
Harlan just grumbles, leafing through the menu. "I don't see why we couldn't go to somewhere better."
"This is a good place," Winston says, waving his hand over the surroundings.
"I don't like Mexican. Why couldn't we go to the Ivy?"
"Security," Jamelia says instantly.
"I like Mexican," Winston says at the same time. "Come on, decide what you want and I'll go place the orders."
Harlan sighs, and with only a little bit more grumbling chooses the plainest, least spicy thing on the menu. Winston leaves, and Jamelia catches Harlan's eye.
"What?" he demands sullenly.
"You're acting like a big child. Act your age."
Crossing his arms, he scowls at her. "Why don't you act your age?"
"And retire to a cabana on the beach? I think not." She sighs. "I hope you'll be acting better by the time we get on the Eurostar. Is it being around Winston? Or me?"
"Don't try to psychoanalyze me."
"No, that's your job."
Harlan swirls his whiskey, ice clinking against the sides. They can hear the sound of street vendors outside the windows. "I'm not comfortable with this," he says.
"I can see that."
"No, shut up and listen. I can't help but feel that something's very wrong."
Jamelia's skin prickles. She puts her drink down carefully, senses alert. "I can't feel anything," she says softly. "And you're not a precognitive."
"I know! I… I know." Harlan nervously licks the corners of his lips. "I can't place it. But… I can't help but feel that everything is going to go wrong."
"Are you sure it's not just nerves?" Jamelia asks.
And there's the hesitancy. "Of course," Harlan says, unconvincingly. "My mind is steel."
Ah, Jamelia doesn't say, but steel rusts. Steel builds up stress fractures. Steel crystallizes and warps. Steel is never invincible - and she is concerned about Harlan. He's been away from the action for so long. He's steel left out in Ohio to rust, and now he's been pulled back into action with no real warning. Has he had time to really polish away and file off the corrosion, or has too much damage already been done? She's an Operative. She always suspects the people on her own side. But she doesn't mistrust Harlan's loyalties. Just his capabilities.
"Stop that."
"Stop what?" she asks.
"Don't play innocent. You think I can't hack it anymore."
She doesn't degrade him by lying. "I'm just concerned about your physical fitness to be in the field if things do go as wrong as you suspect."
That draws a barking laugh from him. "Hah. You probably should." He rubs the small of his back. "You two might've dodged it so far, but we all grow old eventually. Some day you'll feel like this, when the rejuvenation wears thin and the body starts giving way. At least it's just my muscles and bones and tendons that aren't working like they used to." He taps his head. "The old brain is back at one hundred percent."
Is it? Is it really? Because he's drinking whiskey at midday, and she can see the microshakes that his drink is quietening. "I suppose so," she says, sipping her own J20.
Nothing more gets said before Winston gets back, bringing the (oddly rapidly done) food. None of them would trust the staff to bring it, after all. He slumps down in his chair, the wood groaning under him. He glances from face to face. "So you heard the news?"
That gets both sets of attention on him. "What news?" Harlan asks.
Winston shakes his head, then idly adjusts his eyepatch. "We're secure. Good. I wasn't just ordering. I got a call from Command's Assets Tracking, inquiring about my knowledge of certain former Vigilance assets who've shown up in the files again." He shakes his head. "Haven't had one of those calls in years."
"Who?" Jamelia feels chills up and down her neck.
"Wolf and Squid."
Harlan blinks. "But Squid's been dead for decades. And last thing I heard, Wolf defected years ago. Went off the radar and there hasn't been a trace of him since."
Jamelia remembers being sent after him, back in the late 80s. In retrospect, it was probably another Blanc move to send her after a former colleague, back when she was little better than a P-Series. If she'd found him, she wouldn't have paused before putting a bullet in his brain, if that had been her orders at the time. But she hadn't found him. Vigilance hadn't hired incompetents, after all. She doesn't mention it to the others, though. She'd bet that Winston already knows, and Harlan doesn't need that intel. He's not cleared for it.
"Why would he have come out of the shadows?" she asks Winston instead. No one has touched their food yet.
"Not by choice."
"Hmm. Something doesn't line up." It's a gut reaction but she knows it's right. The Technocracy would need a high-end team to get someone with Wolf's training, even if he's gone soft while hiding. High end teams don't get sent after phantoms who've been gone for decades. So either he got unlucky, he felt something was more important than hiding, or…
"Someone's cleaning up loose ends."
"Correct."
"Fuck," whispers Harlan, who's clearly come to the same conclusion. "What the hell happened?"
Winston sits down. "Mmm." He looks around with a practiced eye, gets up, and makes sure the door is closed. "Wolf was captured and processed by a Panopticon team late last year."
Jamelia feels the hair on the back of her neck stand on end. It's cold and hot at the same time, and her stomach churns. She wets her lips, aware that she's both scared and angry and hating the feeling. "Makes sense," she says, lips feeling numb. "They're the only people with both the assets and the desire to drag him out of whatever hole he dug himself into."
There's a long pause. "And Squid's mental imprint showed up, sharing a body with a Traditions reality deviant."
Harlan's nostrils flare. "That doesn't make sense. If she'd been fitted with that kind of biotech, it would have been in mission briefings."
Jamelia is thinking something else. "How old was this RD?" she asks carefully.
Winston sits back, head tilted at an angle. "Now that's an interesting question."
"Why is it interesting? I want to know if she could have prepared that kind of imprint before she died," Jamelia says. It's not a lie. It's not true, but it's not a lie.
"Because it's the same question I had. The Traditionalist in question was born after Squid was KIA."
"Hmm." Harlan whiskey wipes off his mustache. "How much younger? Could be a case of fetal possession by a psychic waveform."
"Eight months," Winston confirms.
"Well, well, well," Harlan muses, fingers tapping the table. "I had no idea she was dabbling in those kinds of forbidden psychic techniques."
Reincarnation, Jamelia doesn't say. It's a simpler explanation than whatever Harlan has to say. She always used to find his explanations long-winded as a younger woman; now, as an old woman, she sees how stretched they are to try to cover the whole world with the word 'psychic'. And she looks at Winston and wonders what he isn't saying.
He's looking back at her.
What does he know? He's a decade or two older than her. He's seen things that very few have. He doesn't have Harlan's catch-all psychic explanations. Does he suspect? Does he know?
"Yeah. Psychic powers," Winston says. "What I want to know is why she'd turn up now, of all times?"
"Maybe he tracked her down?" Jamelia says, eyes narrowed.
"Could be," Winston grunts.
She knows instantly he isn't saying everything. "So she wanted to be found?" He nods. "But why now?"
"Why now? That's a complicated question." Winston lifts his beer. "One a lot of people don't want to answer. 'Why now' was I ordered to kill a man who's been a problem for years? 'Why now' are we having all these alien invasions that get past the Engineers and they're opening up? 'Why now' are you two talking again?"
"That's classified," is what Jamelia wants to say. She wants to say it, and it's true. And the thing about Winston is that for all that he's just a man, barely more than baseline, who insists that when he gets vat-grown organs they're baseline too… the thing about him is that this man is a living chisel. He finds weak points and he hammers into them.
With a word, a fist, or a bullet. Doesn't matter much to him.
And with his clearance, he no doubt already knows. So he's asking. For a reason.
"That's classified," grunts Harlan, who's always been a little less willing to get involved in these games of 'I know that he knows that I know that he knows'.
Winston sits back, beer in hand. "Everything always is. I couldn't tell you about a lot of things I've done. I've just finished a long term placement, so I'm off the chain for the first time in years." He takes a sip. "At least until someone remembers what I do and I'm shipped off to Korea." He salutes Jamelia with his drink. "They need someone like you over there."
"What I'm doing is more important."
"Is it?"
"Yes," Jamelia says automatically, considers it, and decides that much to her surprise, she's actually telling the truth.
Harlan levers himself upright. "Where's the bathroom?" he asks.
"Over there," Winston says with a casual gesture.
The two of them are left alone.
"Yeah. Yeah, you think it is more important. And that isn't like you."
"I suppose it isn't."
Winston sighs. "It'd be closer to say that it's never been like you."
Jamelia for her part pokes her food around the plate. It's cooled down, and she takes a mouthful. It's not great, but she's tasted worse. "That's an odd comment," she says.
"I'm older than you. I can make odd comments."
"I suppose you've looked at my up-to-date medical records."
"Just to check your operational readiness, yes. Quite a few changes from when I saw them before Moscow."
"Mmm. I suppose so." Jamelia pauses at the precipice, then leans over it because frankly she doesn't want to have this conversation but she'd like it even less if Harlan was back. "So you're fully aware of the removal and degradation of INVISIBLE BEAR and its associated… blocks."
"Yes. I am, Jazmin."
Jamelia smiles wryly at that. "Having her memories back doesn't make me her."
"A change of name isn't necessary to become someone else. I wouldn't say I'm the same man I was thirty-five years ago. It's just a matter of degree."
"But I think it matters." She loads her fork up. "My matter of degree, that is."
"Yes. You would."
They sit in silence. The food tastes of even less now to Jamelia, like cardboard and ash. Maybe it is, if it's coming from a hidden food synthesizer.
"So. Are you looking for forgiveness?" Winston asks, mildly, just as she takes another mouthful.
If he wanted a reaction, she's not going to give him one. "Do you think anyone can look for forgiveness?"
That forces a laugh from his lips. "Soldiers like us don't get to go home, Jazmin. Our lives are on a battlefield, whether we're fighting hand-to-hand in bloodied trenches or dueling unseen in an invisible war. We give up everything in what we do."
"So that's a no."
"No, it's not. But," and the man rolls his shoulders, "I don't expect any of us to live through anything we'd say was forgiveness. We're monsters, Hyena, all of us. Me, you," he nods to the bathroom, "him. He tried to walk away from the war, but that left him pickling in his regrets. Stewing in his grief and bitterness. He's glad to be back on the battlefield. Because it could kill him, and only when his life is on the line can he hope to forgive himself. And me and you, Illiyeen? We never left it. No matter what names we wear. No matter what we do. We've been monsters ever since HELMETSHRIKE ended, living on the battlefield among the bodies and the blood. Sometimes monsters for a good cause, sometimes monsters for a bad one, and it's not us who apply the labels of good and bad. Is it?"
He's speaking the truth. Or, rather, Jamelia mentally corrects herself, he's seeing the truth as he sees it. "So there's no point," she says.
"Like I said, I don't think of any of us can live through what we think is true forgiveness," Winston says. He reaches into an inner pocket, pulling out a pack of cheap cigarettes which he plays with. "How many people did we leave alive to forgive us? Not many. And of those who we left alive, who even would know our names? Our faces? So running off on a quest for forgiveness is only about trying to settle your own mind." He chuckles. "Begging forgiveness from the survivors is a waste of time in my eyes. You might feel differently, but if you do, I doubt we'll persuade each other."
"It's just as well that I'm not looking for forgiveness, then," she says a trifle tartly.
"Are you sure?"
"Yes," and that's the problem. Because she's less sure than she used to be. Realizing what she did with Catherine, out in space - it's made her less sure. It's hard to be sure when everything is just a point of view. No wonder people like old Reina Lior hated a world that was so malleable.
"Hrrum." Winston puts down his beer, nibbling on his burrito. "Like I said, it's not like you. And it's never been like you."
Jamelia sighs. "I suppose not," she says. "But then again, we all get old, don't we?" They both could pass for their twenties. "In the mind, if not the body."
"Hah." It's a short, barked laugh - the sound of a man who's just had something unpleasant forced in his face, and Jamelia isn't entirely sure why he's doing it now of all times. "Yes, we do. Time's the one killer that'll get us all some day - and if he doesn't get us, he'll hold our arms behind our backs so someone else can." He takes a swig from his beer. "You know, there's a lot of people who say a man's not dead until his name isn't spoken anymore."
She gets his meaning straight away. "Then we're among the dead already."
"Fitting for us old war hounds, yeah?"
Jamelia glances over at Winston; his hair that's been growing long enough that it's almost a mullet, the fact he hasn't shaven in days, the way he fiddles with his cigarettes. The eye patch. "You know, once, years back, you told me you wanted to be remembered."
"Did I?" He's acting innocent.
"Just after Tehran."
"Well, you know how post-mission stress can be…"
Something about his attitude gets Jamelia's hackles up. In, she thinks ruefully, a very Jazmin-like way. "There you go, accusing me of looking for forgiveness when you're afraid of being forgotten."
"Hmm. You're guessing." He glares at her with his one eye, warning her off.
"You became a legend," she says, driving in the knife. "And your story's slowly dying now that there's no war to fight. Just endless 'police actions' and 'counterterrorist operations.' You're becoming a man once again."
Winston Kingsley sits back, a dark expression on his face. "Well, well," he says carefully. "That's just what you said the second time you tried to recruit me."
Her blood runs cold. His other hand is under the table and she knows he has a gun.
***
A man and a woman, much older than they look, sit in a Mexican restaurant in a side street in London. They're both armed. But right here and now, he's the one who has the Mjolnir pointed at her under the table.
Jamelia wants to sigh. He taught her so much of what she knows. He's one of the few people who could manage to set this up without her noticing. Of course, neither of them are running any major physical or combat enhancements because… well, they'd have noticed it in the other. And she knew it was a risk meeting with him, but - ah, maybe he's right. Maybe she wanted forgiveness of a kind, for failing him all those years ago.
"That wasn't me," she says, voice clear and emotionless.
"It wasn't you, but it was you," he says. Nothing in his posture would give away that the hidden hand has a weapon. "Like I said, Illiyeen. We're sometimes monsters for a good cause, sometimes monsters for a bad one, and it's not us who apply the labels of good and bad. You're just playing for both sides right now. Control would say that the side you're on is the bad one and the other you is the good one."
Jamelia sighs. "I haven't met my alpha fork," she says, shifting in her seat. "Are we that alike?"
"Blanc knew what he was doing when he made you two," Winston says.
She says nothing.
"What? Aren't you going to ask me if you're the real one?"
"Does it matter? I don't think it does."
"Ha. That's a difference. She cares."
Jamelia raises one eyebrow. "I don't see why it matters. Like I said," she mimics his phrasing, "having her memories back doesn't make me her."
"Mmm. You're New World Order down to the bone."
"And she isn't?" Jamelia has the habits of a lifetime. She will talk to someone pointing a gun at her. The fact that he hasn't shot her yet - when he knows that Harlan is nearby - means that either Harlan is already eliminated, or he has a reason to not want her dead immediately.
Winston smiles, but doesn't say anything.
"What did she promise you?"
"Do you think she had to promise me anything? As if I was up for sale?" Winston's lips curl down. "Illiyeen, an old wardog knows his purpose. How many people have we killed who were on our side?"
It's true. It's so painfully true. She's been the person on the other side of the table before. More than once. "It's funny," she says softly. "There are so many ways you could have tried to kill me. You don't have a shortage of assets - and she has even more. But in the end, it's a handgun under the table at a diner."
"Don't sell yourself short." Winston's eyes crease in amusement. "Machines wouldn't do it. Air strikes wouldn't do it. You'd hear of those kinds of preparations. Your allies would flag you, or you'd tell what I was planning from the markers. You're just like me. This is the only way that'd work. Just me, you, and a gun in my hands."
Jamelia inclines her head. "You know what's funny?" she says softly.
"Many things. Which one were you thinking about?"
She smiles, showing her teeth. "You were lying when you said she didn't buy you."
"Think what you will-"
"Winston, I know you." Jamelia smiles at him sweetly. "We are old war dogs. And you can feel yourself greying in this peace. She didn't buy you with the promise of money, of equipment, of anything so material." She pauses. "She bought you by whispering that you're being forgotten. She bought you with the promise of a great war, something worthy of your talents. She bought you because you're sick of fighting petty rebels in petty countries for sake of petty companies."
There's a grimace on Winston's face now.
Jamelia leans forwards. "And more than that, you're afraid. Afraid that they're forgetting you. The people you kill don't know your name. They fear the American drones more than you." She spreads her hands. "So she promised you a war. She promised you something that'll change the world. Something that'll burn your name into the history books, win or lose. She didn't buy you with money or equipment. She bought you with a worthless promise of fame."
Winston raises his eyebrows. "This isn't going to work."
"What isn't working?"
"You're trying to weaken my resolve."
She frowns. "If the truth weakens your resolve, perhaps you should reconsider your resolution. Control are exhumans who won't remember or care about you as more than a data point, as a tool to be thrown away. I've seen their servants - what they became out in space. I've seen their servants - what's happened to to the people who chose to serve them here. Nothing you do for them will mean anything, Winston."
"Perhaps."
Anger flares up in her. "Then what are you waiting for? If you're so unwilling to talk, shoot me and have done with it."
"Perhaps I would." He pauses. "If you hadn't already used a RD procedure to remove the bullets from my gun."
He's already moving before he finishes talking - but she's moving faster. She comes off her chair backwards, avoiding his swinging pistol-whip, and tosses the cutlery she was holding at his face. He fends it off with his other hand and slams the gun down on the table, spraying chili sauce in her direction. The pain is a distraction she doesn't need; the lack of vision is worse. She listens for him - and there's the clatter of the overturned table. She ducks, feeling the air displaced by his murderous fists, and grabs his arm, throwing him over her shoulder. That buys her enough time to wipe her teary eyes and grab the nearest chair.
Winston turns his roll into a perfect recovery, drawing a knife from an inner pocket and lunging at her. The knife goes through the seat of the chair and she twists, wrenching it from his hand and tossing it aside.
The two circle each other in the wreckage of the restaurant.
"You haven't called for Harlan."
"You'll have made sure I couldn't," she says back, blinking heavily.
"Didn't take you for a secret Reality Deviant."
"Just simulated Reality Deviance," she retorts. She won't say it for the psychic trickery it was. "A trick from the old days."
"Hmm." He tries to circle her. She backs away, aware of the limited room.
Then he charges, barreling through tables and chairs like they're not there. Silver flashes in his hand and she realizes he's produced another knife from somewhere. Jamelia narrowly dodges his first swipe, then grabs his arm and slams it down into a table. The wood splinters but he doesn't let go. And she's miscalculated, because his free arm is around her neck, pulling her upright.
She's smaller, lighter, has less reach than him even if she matches him in strength. Up close like this, it's a real disadvantage. She smashes the back of her head into his jaw and both of them stagger loose, dazed. She recovers first and explodes towards him, fists flowing from position to position. Bones break under the impacts as she pummels at his chest. But he's still mobile and even with broken ribs, his lunge catches her in the side. A red hot needle pierces her flesh and she can't help but gasp.
But there's a fork on the nearest table and she brings it down on his hand. He drops the knife from blood-slicked fingers and punches her.
Jamelia is down, jaw aching, ears ringing, feeling sick. Speaking as an expert, it's a concussion.
"Look… look at us, flailing at each other like a pair of amateurs," Winston wheezes through broken ribs, stooping down and drawing his backup pistol from inside his jacket. It's a compact X10 variant, with almost all the bells and whistles stripped out. Just a silencer. No ejection port. No traces. "We would have-"
There's a discontinuity.
And they're both back upright, and even with broken ribs, he's lunging and she side-steps, feeling the ache in her bones from what she just did. Now she's inside his reach and she brings a knife hand up and rising into his windpipe. He gasps for air, dropping his blade, and she explodes up into his solar plexus.
A silenced pistol coughs twice.
He's down. His jacket is torn off.
The gun is in her hands. Smoke wafts from the barrel.
Winston starts to chuckle, breath rasping through broken ribs. Red blood flows from the two holes in his abdomen. She's not much better off. She can feel the hot flow of blood from the wound in her side - and the wound is tingling. This is Winston. There's probably some poison on it from some species of Andean frog, or maybe venom from a South-East Asian snake. "Tables… have turned, eh?" he says. "Should have shot me in the head."
She says nothing.
"Wish my… last fight could have been better. Look at us, flailing at each other like a pair of amateurs."
"You're lying," she says softly. "You loved it."
"Ha. Ha. Of course. Of course I did. You had to be good to make my last fight so sloppy."
"Where is she?"
He knows who she means. "Don't know. Didn't really care. She always contacted me."
"What is she planning?"
"Come on, Illiyeen. You wouldn't tell me that. Why would she?" Winston clutches his hand to the holes, the instinctive act of a body trying to staunch the blood flow. "'S funny, really. Always wondered who'd kill me. Which dog of the battlefield would tear out my throat?"
"This isn't a battlefield."
"It is. The world's a battlefield. Existence is war." Winston coughs, wheezes, gasps. "Every moment is a fight for survival, no matter what happens. You killed me. Someday someone will get you. Maybe she will. You're not so different. It'll be a coinflip, you versus her. I just wish I was there to watch it."
"So what do you have set on a dead man's trigger?" she asks.
"Dead man's trigger? Illiyeen, that would ruin everything. You don't understand it, no matter how many times I tell you. We're sometimes monsters for a good cause, sometimes monsters for a bad one, and it's not us who apply the labels of good and bad. If I had a dead man's trigger, that'd say that I thought this was a good cause. It's not. It's just the mission."
She holds one hand to her injured side, but the hand with the pistol stays steady.
"At least it was one of my students who put me in this position," Winston gasps. "You killed me with my own teachings. You'll go on to teach them to others. Maybe in the end, that's all that men and women like us get…" He swallows. "Do it. Take my legend and make it part of your own."
Jamelia pulls the trigger again.
***
"What the fuck?" Harlan demands when he enters the room again. "Jesus fuck, Hyena! I was in the bathroom for ten minutes!"
Jamelia glares at him, and finishes cleaning her wound. She's swallowed an immuno-amplifier and an broadspectrum antivenom, and now she clenches her teeth as she sprays biofoam into the wound. "Winston was working for her. Ms Clock," she says, when she can talk without gasping. She's shaking now, as she pays for the exertion.
"I'm surprised you beat him," Harlan says, inspecting the body.
"I nearly didn't. I cheated. Psychic trick."
"What kind of…" Harlan's mouth hangs open. "Oh. Fuck."
"What?"
"You look ten years older. I can see grey hairs." He taps his temples. "Up here. You fucked with the passage of time."
Jamelia scowls. "Just a few seconds. It was that or die. I'll take a few grey hairs for that. And yeah, well, I'm using my headscarf as a bandage right now," she mutters. For some reason, it feels deeply personal. "Didn't you hear anything?"
"No. The soundproofing in this place is fantastic."
She yanks her shirt back down, and leans from side to side, testing her flexibility. "Could be worse," she says laconically. "Now. Are you going to dispose of the body, or shall I?"
"Now?"
She looks directly at Harlan. "I don't think he cared if he won or lost. It was personal. I'm not sure if she was holding something over his head or he just wanted a proper fight against me, but he told me he didn't have any dead man's switches set up."
"And you believed him?"
"Yes." She purses her lips. "He wasn't in any condition to lie. I'd have seen."
Harlan looks around the wrecked restaurant. "So. It's just you and me left," he says softly. "Death comes for Vigilance."
"Yes, it does." She swallows, tasting copper. "So we dispose of the body. I've got some ProDecomp in my briefcase. We can flush him, then leave by the back entrance. I want to delay anyone realizing he's dead and make sure they can't recover the remains."
"Because she'll use that against you," Harlan says grimly.
Jamelia tilts her head. "That too. But I don't want her bringing him back." Her hand unconsciously goes to her side. "I don't know if I can do that again. Next time he might get me."
The work of disposing of a body and bloodstains is a messy one. As Jamelia vanishes the mortal remains of her old friend into carbon dioxide, water, and flushable trace elements, she can't help but remember what he said. There's something that sticks in her mind, and she's not sure why.
Thanks to @EarthScorpion for his work on this. And now you know how this story ends-one woman tying off loose ends, in an inevitable collision course with herself. Because in the end, the systems and processes that make up the world-and make up its secret masters-are built around people. And in the end, it's about those people-who they are, who people want them to be, and who they themselves want to be.
One Last Lesson
Sometimes, when you kill your mentor because that's the only way things possibly could have gone, you get a cut-down assault rifle with infinite ammunition. Other times, you get the key to attaining further wisdom. Jamelia probably got the better of the two boons, honestly. Choose 2 final Sphere upgrades for Jamelia Belltower.
[ ] "It's not us who apply the labels of good and bad": Mind 2->4 (Manipulation)
[ ] "You're not so different. It'll be a coinflip, you versus her.": Entropy 4->5
[ ] "Every moment is a fight for survival, no matter what happens.": Time 3->4 (Revelations)
[ ] "Just me, you, and a gun in my hands.": Correspondence 3->4 (Coordination)
[ ] "Existence is war.": Forces 2->4 (Proportional)
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E6 is handy like that.
(yessssssss Jams is back! Jamelia and her disruptive phone calls have always, always been my absolute favorite part of this Quest. There's something about how she gets everything done with so very, very little in the way of blatant force that appeals to my sense of elegance.)
....
So, I'm mostly just making this up on the fly, but the themes I'm guiding myself with are:
We don't want to directly compete with Miss Clock. (Mind) That's never been how Jamelia wins.
And we are Jamelia bani Euthanatos, initiated into the first and final secret of the world. We have power in places a hardline Control-overridden Technocrat won't, can't, look.
So.
[X] "You're not so different. It'll be a coinflip, you versus her.": Entropy 4->5
Symbols. Jamelia reached the truth through a coinflip, out in space; she reached that point through Euthanatos teachings and Old Man Senex's bracelet. And I want a trump card mastery to counter Clock's Mind 5.
[X] "Every moment is a fight for survival, no matter what happens.": Time 3->4 (Revelations)
We're not brute force. We never have been. Forces 4 is a complete change of character, I think. Corr 4 co-location is... tempting, but Jamelia's never been someone who leads from the front, who needs to be physically two places at once - not when she can do all her best work over mundane telecommunications.
But Time 4? The entire Quest, Jamelia has won fights by being one step ahead -- or by pushing other characters one step back, by predicting people's responses and understanding how they tick and then making those memetic disruptive phone calls. This plays into her strengths. Time 4 is about "just as planned", about effects placed and left to hang until the right trigger, the right moment, about never seeming to be caught off guard. It's about as Jamelia as a Sphere can get. (Other than nega-Resources
)
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Cornuthaum
Be kind to each other.
- Location
- Austria
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[x] "You're not so different. It'll be a coinflip, you versus her.": Entropy 4->5
All systems crumble. No idea is bulletproof.
[x] "Every moment is a fight for survival, no matter what happens.": Time 3->4 (Revelations)
Time and fate together. It is as it should be.
All systems crumble. No idea is bulletproof.
[x] "Every moment is a fight for survival, no matter what happens.": Time 3->4 (Revelations)
Time and fate together. It is as it should be.
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I, uh. Don't think you meant to vote for the same option twice.