JB LXVII: Left Hand, Meet Right
I-50-B31 puts down the phone in... in something. Mr Sykes hung up on her. She's experiencing an unfamiliar emotion. One which her assembled independent personality takes a moment to identify.
Shock. With some annoyance. Yes, that had been experienced by separate minds now in the Hivemind, but not since they joined it. It can't have been her fault! It can't have! How could someone who managed to withstand all the powerful things which the Union threw at her in Moscow have problems against some inferior power armour filled with clones who had been obsolete by the time even something as weak as Mr Sykes' nice construct was made? How did that make sense?
I-50 gets the sinking feeling that she may have miscalculated how dependent baseline humans were on their equipment. She may have just done the equivalent of spending an entire squad of traitor Void Engineers in their best power armour against... well, her, if you cut out most of her muscles and form-locked her innards into organ emulation and blew large holes in her and... and stupid baseline humans! How dare they be so weak without easily removed tools? Why did they have to be that way? Why... why couldn't they see?
Shaking her head, I-50 flushes the anger from her system. She's just being silly. If she finds Jamelia Belltower and she's been injured, she can even give her partial field upgrades to help her survive better! After all, her own cells are polymorphic and could probably save Jamelia Belltower's life and then she'd see how much better being a transhuman was! Leading by example! Showing people how the Technocratic Union can help them!
So! Her mission may need to change a little bit. And she better think a bit differently, because she made a bit of a mess of things and transhumans are always ready to adapt to new circumstances without attachment to old ways of thought. So naturally she thinks like Jamelia Belltower, so she can see if she can think how the other will act. Mr Sykes certainly had the right idea there, getting a HITMark imprinted with her mind!
Find Jamelia Belltower. Extract her. Protest to the Void Engineers to see if she can slow them down, but don't waste time doing it. She has an objective. She will complete it.
And it's not like the Subjugation Corps clones are really members of the Void Engineers, so if she has to kill a few of them and drink all their blood to refuel, then it's not really acting against the Union. It's just a necessary sacrifice in the line of duty. Anyway, if any of them look like they're about to kill Jamelia Belltower, she'll kill them first, because she is not going to let some inferior clone who doesn't get how to serve the Union properly get in her way.
I-50-B31 smiles to herself awkwardly. It's a strange feeling, but running that personality engram of Jamelia Belltower does make things easier! It's such a simple line of thought! When you're cut off from Control, and the people on your side don't understand properly how to serve the interests of the Technocratic Union... well, you might need to help them see the way to do the right thing for the Union. You can do it later, properly, but if you fail now, everything will be worthless. Yes! It's wonderful! She likes thinking like this!
So she needs a car. A new one. A fast one. She accelerates, heading to the M25 and looking for something which will meet her needs. She finds one; a very expensive looking Ferrari being driven by a balding man on his way to work.
I-50-B31 clears her throat, expands her lung capacity radically, and does her best impersonation of a police siren. It is a very good one. She has it pitch and volume perfect.
The other car slows down, the driver looking around, and that gives I-50-B31 her chance. She leaps out of the side door of the cab, in through the window of the sport's car, and headbutts the driver with a skull which could bounce antimateriel rounds. There's a cracking noise, and he goes limp, and then she's pushing him out of the driver's seat and taking it herself and gunning the engine and she's off, engine roaring as she does so. And the man driving the sport's car is still alive! Ish! The subural hematoma won't kill him for a few hours, so she can save him!
Her old car goes swerving off into the middle embankment with a loud crunch.
Oops. She didn't mean to do that. She meant to assimilate the man she'd left stuffed into the trunk, not kill him! But the mission got in the way.
Oh well, she considers. If he survives, she can find where he's taken to hospital, and if there's time she can go in and assimilate him. It is her fault, after all. And people are always so happy when they join the Hivemind and realize everything they were missing! But the mission comes first.
I-50-B31 punches into the car's electronics, and lets the modified hair follicles in her hand interface with the system, turning off all the limiters and linking it directly to her nervous system. That feels better, better than using some inferior steering wheel. And now she can handle the car like it's an extension of her own body.
So she does. Driving at a speed which would win most professional car races, she swerves through traffic with a vehicle that seems to almost lack inertia. It's not that, though. It's just her boosted reactions and her programmed driving skills pushing the vehicle to the limit. She takes a guess at how long it'll take. Probably around 30 minutes at this speed. Good. Very good.
Even a meat-thing can survive that long, right? She grabs the phone she borrowed from the first man while driving with one hand, multitasking effortlessly to call the Subjugation Corps.
"What is it? We are currently in the middle of an operation."
"We're here to capture Jamelia Belltower, not eliminate her! Why did you deploy an A-variant Subjugator Marine Strike Team?"
"Our orders are clear. We are to neutralize and capture Jamelia Belltower."
"Yes," I-50 says, pouting. "So why are you sending these soldiers in?"
"The target is an extreme threat after Moscow and we are engaging with minimal necessary force. The personnel carrier is equipped with an Abductor Suite, we can provide emergency medical care. All marines have been told to attempt no headshots on Belltower herself. As long as her brain is salvageable the objective can be accomplished. Do you have any issues with this?"
"Yes I do! This isn't going to help convince her to defect!"
"The likelihood of her defection is less than 1 percent. Control in its infinite wisdom has provided you with these odds."
"Well of course it is! If you're trying to kill her, obviously she won't defect!"
"But," the voice replies, infuriatingly smug, "Reality Deviants defected to us all the time and we never stopped shooting at them."
"Oh. Right." I-50 says. "I suppose they did. But this is different! She's not going to willingly give up if you keep shooting at her!"
"Willing was not part of the objectives given by Control." The phone hangs up.
"Stupid Void Engineers." I-50 mutters. She's going to need to get there as soon as possible. She's going to need to stop them herself. And then she'll have to convince Jamelia that she is, in fact, right. An easy task, for someone so enhanced, right?
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Henriette Langley hasn't been able to focus on her work all day. Oh, she has things she's meant to be doing in preparation for the Tribunal, but she can't keep her mind on it. Not when all of this is going on.
The chime on her implanted comms is almost a relief.
"Langley," Director Belltower says. "Stop everything and listen to me."
Henriette frowns. "You still haven't found the real one?" she asks the HITMark.
"No, I am the real one," the woman says.
"I can confirm that isn't me," says an identical sounding woman, cutting in on a new comms channel with the familiar HITMark ID.
"Langley, get me everything you can get on Order of Reason architecture and see if there's a marked escape route in this location," Director Belltower says with her characteristic brusqueness. "They're using incendiaries, this place is coming down on top of them and me, and they have a perimeter set up which I really don't want to try to run again."
"On it." Henriette Langley doesn't even blink as her ADEI grabs a data-dump of... sigh, Early Modern Architectural Techniques In the Order of Reason, and feeds the contents of some intensely dull Ivory Tower academic papers into her memory. She now remembers the analysis they've produced. Nothing on this specific location, unfortunately, but she has some things on some other similar hidden manor-bases across Europe from approximately the same period.
"Okay!" Henriette announces. "I don't have the map for this facility, but the Oh-Oh-Arr was into labyrinths and hidden passages in a big way. They had really, really advanced techniques for concealing them - to the extent that most of them can even avoid detection by modern ground surveying techniques. Except when they're open, of course. But they usually marked them in a number of ways. Director, look for... uh, rose symbols, crests of the Oh-Oh-Arr, white-painted arrows hidden in artwork pointing towards Jerusalem... uh, if you know which Oh-Oh-Arr group built this place, they might also have it hidden in icongraphy of their own things, especially if they have one of the other symbols combined with it."
She clears her throat.
"It's going to be a tight fit, probably. Might just be a crawlspace, might be wide enough for one person if they squeeze." With a perfectly straight face, Henriette adds, "You're the best person in the amalgam for that. Kessler might have more problems. Serafina too."
"Ahem!" Serafina interjects.
"Look, I'm just saying that you won't be a fan of trying to squeeze through a tunnel made for short people in the olden days," Henriette lies. "Big thing is? They'll have plenty of 'tests', not just the ones at the entrance."
"Tests?" a Jamelia asks sharply.
"Uh... various things. Usually logic puzzles. Things to prove the 'worthiness' of the person trying to use the tunnel in either direction. Meant to show that the person can reason properly, according to these papers."
"Wonderful," the HITMark Jamelia says. "So the alpha of me will need to solve the Tower of Hanoi puzzle at some point."
"Oh yes," meat Jamelia agrees. "Everyone always uses the Tower of Hanoi puzzle. I'll get to looking for these signs. Tell me if you find anything else in the analysis, Henriette.
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"You got all that?" Donald asks, hunched over his laptop in the much more comfortable limo.
"Trying to look for a hidden tunnel here," Director Belltower says through clenched teeth. She pauses. "A thought. Rose?" Jamelia asks. "What do you know about Series As? They look like a variant of them. Any weaknesses? Please tell me they're basically Victor-thick."
"Uh, not exactly," Rose says from the front. "80s refinement of Victors... a sort of pre-Vanessa. Maybe baseline human smart, but very, very linear thinkers. If they're presented with a wall and there's no obvious door, they'll try to smash through, rather than check the rest of the building. Incredibly monofocussed. They never saw much use outside Damage Control, and then Vanessas started showing up and everyone stopped making them. I think most of the research got merged back down to eVictors."
"... huh. I was expecting 'no, they're all super-geniuses'," Jamelia says, sounding very nearly slightly happy. "I can use that."
"Yes. I'm sure you'll be able to act unpredictably enough that they won't be able to follow you," Donald says. "You're good at that. And if you get back, we can finish off that day-off which got so rudely interrupted. I'm going to make you spend 24 hours off duty. And see if I can find another thing you like that you don't know you like. Think of that as an incentive not to get caught."
"Are you trying to persuade alpha-me to throw herself in the way of a high explosion?" Jameliabot asks drily. "Taking time off means bad things happen."
And then a shocking, dreadful thing happens. The real Jamelia laughs. "Fine," she whispers. "Only if you can promise that nothing like Moscow will happen if I take a day off."
"I promise nothing," Donald says, and then pales. Enough with the psuedo-flirting. There's something else he has to tell her. "Oh yes," he adds, "and... uh, watch out for an ultra-naive and seemingly-friendly EDE body-riding a vampire-based human-shaped war machine that's... uh, about forty technological generations ahead of Rose and has a pheromonal package which could brainwash towns and which is specifically out to try to recruit you for Our Mutual Enemy."
"What."
"I've trapped her with an applied economics hyperpsych and DSci trick, but she can wriggle out of the contract in some ways and she may be heading your way incredibly quickly. She may try to kill the rogues in the power armor, but she'll be doing it to protect you so she can flip you so you're batting for the other team, if you get my drift. And not just the sexy kind of batting for the other team."
"Donald..."
"Look, keep yourself safe," he says seriously. "She can shapeshift and knows what we look like, so be suspicious if you see just one of us."
"... we'll talk about this later. Only contact me if you have new info or it's vital. Belltower out."
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Jamelia Belltower is almost glad she's dealing with dumb muscle. She's been on the other end of this, the commander trying to direct linear-thinking clone supersoldiers against a single target who was infinitely more resourceful but also much less heavily armed. The commander of these soldiers is reading her playbook, it seems.
Of course, Applications of Intelligence-Limited Assault Bioforms In Search and Destroy Operations was one of her magnum opuses. And it was published before the Dimensional Anomaly. So obviously they've read it. Even if they know she was the author-and they probably do, Jamelia concludes, because although it's always tempting to consider the other side incredibly stupid it's always better to assume they're only stupid when that might cause your plan to collapse and otherwise assume they're geniuses, they are working under her exact limitations.
Limited ability to affect the environment outside of the soldiers. Soldiers with a weapons and capability gap or parity but an intelligence deficit. A vulnerable target capable of extreme improvisational tricks. Well, Reality Deviance in hers, but she's not doing that. So even if they built their own playbook, it'll look very much like hers. So, then. How would she try to kill herself?
The A-series, according to Rose, are intelligent, loyal, and have excellent memories but are extremely linear thinkers. That means that the limit to their effectiveness is going to be the speed at which the commander can give orders. Given how they're advancing through the former Nazi technocrats, that speed is probably a little above what she could do post-INVISIBLE BEAR.
At least these rogue not Void Engineers aren't grossly superhuman, Jamelia thinks to herself. If they had been some hyperintelligent computer mastermind like Henriette's sister, then she'd have no chance at all. She sees a rose symbol over a small cupboard. She hides in it seconds before one of the Subjugation Corps soldiers smashes through the wall.
Smashes through the load bearing wall. She takes a risk and looks.
The clone has collapsed several of the beams on top of his armor, and has been knocked down. He seems to have
-ah, right. They'd probably have sacrificed joint flexibility for protection. When your legs are that heavily armored and balancing you, that wouldn't be a problem, but if you were knocked down on your heavy backpack and have no easy bracing to climb up on- it'd be embarrassing.
One of his comrades moves to assist, and she considers. She could hide there indefinitely-if the thin primium-flecked paint in the cupboard would hold up to in-depth scans. Maybe. If they didn't just trash it out of principle, and they might. On the other hand...
She rolls out of the cupboard fluidly and empties the half-full magazine of the SP-Charge Driver into both Void Marines. It hurts, and she thinks she's torn something in her shoulder from the punishing recoil of the autofiring rocket-launching railgun, but the result is worth it. Explosions batter at their thick armor, and both fall. She checks them for ammunition. Six shots in one magazine, thirteen in another. Sadly, both Etheric Disruptors, poorly optimized for killing Void Marines. They're still better than the RK-35 and -37 she has, and she ditches the rocket rifle here, retiring it in favor of the oversized charge driver and its punishing recoil but more punishing high-caliber ammunition. One of them has a mangled leg-she looks closer, and sees the ruined flowers of detonated ammunition.
So they're using volatile propellants for their gyrojets. Which means leg shots might set them off. Good. She goes back to the cupboard, looks for some sort of secret exit, some sort of crawlspace that might be there. Good. She finds one, neatly disguised.
Jamelia crawls through twisting passages for what seems like eons but she knows is mere minutes, and ends up in the inside of the base proper. There is another fallen Void Marine here, taken out by a shot to the chest from a "Storm Cannon"-a directed lightning gun. There are the telltale disruptions of disassociated ghosts, hit by multiple ED rounds, and mutilated corpses.
The A-series clones are emptying shots into the corpses to make sure they're dead and that keeps them from spotting her. It's creative thinking of the strangely linear and rather inhuman way combat-clones tend to do without proper socialization. It tells her that they aren't veterans who have been working alongside humans. They're new. Cloned, programmed, expendable. Fresh meat.
She wonders what the enemy's master plan is. Distract her with this issue and then what? Do they have actual, legitimate shock troops? And what would they be? Do they even have a master plan, or is this some sort of reflex, a complex Chinese Room of unthinking EDE singlemindedness that combines in arcane ways to create the illusion of a worryingly-hyperintelligent-yet-completely-insane foe? Whatever it is, she feels glad that it seems to be sabotaging itself, using multiple assets with weak cooperation instead of having a coherent battleplan.
Because with the assets and intellectual firepower they have, if it wasn't for the issues she's already spotted, if they simply got out of each other's way, or kept the self-sabotage at a low level, she'd be fighting a hopeless battle. She doesn't even have to take a guess, or run on gut instinct, or put a 'probably' in there. If they were as sane as even most Marauders, they would not be a potential threat. They would win. Always. Without exception.
There's another set of symbols and clues that she follows, dodging fascist jackbooted enforcers of an evil empire on one hand and undead fascist jackbooted enforcers of an evil empire on the other. She doesn't have the ammunition to play hunter-killer, although she's satisfied when one of them manages to collapse a stone ceiling over his head via excessive use of his armor's shoulder-fired micromissiles. If the armor's as tough as she thinks it is, he'll survive, but digging himself out will take time, and lots of it. Given expected losses to the fascists-that'd leave maybe a dozen. And the tank.
Henriette's voice crackles in her ear. "I found a tunnel behind a hidden wall ten meters forward. There's a puzzle there that's pretty well hidden and-
"No, I don't think that it's the key." Jamelia says. "I think it's the bait. The key is to discard your preconceptions and just..." she runs at the tunnel wall at speed, hopes that she's right. The wall slides downwards just before she slams into it and gives herself a concussion. "...just take a leap of faith." She finishes. "Because in the end, that's what the Order of Reason did. They took a leap of faith that a better world could be made, and they made things happen."
"Anyways the tunnel leads to an exit in the woods. But I think they've got some guys watching it."
"The tank?"
"No, worse. Things that might actually be smart. They look like cops from satellite, but-"
"But no cops have any reason to be there, because they wouldn't know the Order of Reason exists, nor would they know that there's a secret tunnel leading through the woods. Send your data over to Sykes, he may have a Dimensional Science scanning tool he can use, and if all else fails Rose can do it. Hopefully he knows what to do." Jamelia doesn't need tools and scanners to make a guess. They're probably EDEs, of the same type that Henriette encountered. Possibly the exact same EDE, in fact. If she didn't know, she'd probably open the exit and immediately end up perforated a dozen times by a Desert Eagle or similarly impractical firearm wielded by a suit-wearing special agent who calls himself Agent... well, probably some sort of somewhat sinister occupation like "Butcher" or "Exterminator" or "Sweeper".
Then again... she knows what Donald's going to try to do, and his not-quite-fully-controllable EDE not-quite-pet. She tries to enjoy the claustrophobic confines of the tunnel as she considers plan and counterplan, considers whether it's safe.
She decides that it's probably safe when she opens the artfully-concealed hatch to the surface and to freedom, of a sort. There are a trio of dead police officers around the exit, surrounded by spent shell casings that they couldn't have fired, as they lacked the weapons to fire them with. A fourth agent of Control is standing there, looking rather excited, despite for the dozen smoking holes in her clothing-clearly stolen men's clothing, Jamelia notices.
"Oh hi! Jamelia Belltower, is it? I'm I-50-B31! Nice to meet you. Sorry about the mess, we just got into a bit of an argument about whether or not you were supposed to get shot or talked to! But anyways, I'm here to represent the Technocratic Union and Control, Miss Belltower. Can I call you Miss Belltower? Or do you prefer Jamelia?"
"Miss Belltower is fine."
"Oh all right then, Miss Belltower. I'm sorry for the way my colleagues have treated you, and if there's any way I can make that up to you I'll do it. Any way at all. But I haven't done a single thing to hurt you, and okay I may have defended myself with lethal force against your other Construct and tried to stab a HITMark disguised as you after she shot at me, but I didn't want to kill any of you! Really!"
"Right." Jamelia says. She expected someone like her to try to seduce her into joining Control, not this... naivete. Someone to point out how their goals are aligned, how she'd do more good on the other side, someone using her own tactics against her. But not this. Maybe this I-50-B31 is a master manipulator, though, creating a persona that nobody would expect.
"But really I'm not just here to apologize to you for all the dreadful things that have happened to you in Moscow and now in London! I think you should join the Progenitors. You're so lonely and isolated from the world with your position, and if you join together with me, you'll never be alone again! And I know it's hard for you to admit it, but I think you need a good friend or a few hundred, and we can provide that! We can provide that easily. Everyone in the Progenitor group-mind is loved in ways mere human language can't describe!"
Jamelia barely resists the urge to say a flat "What". She tries to collect her thoughts, considers that debating the extremely charismatic and unbelievably sexy (how did that get there? Jamelia wonders) Faux-Technocratic killing machine might be a bad idea, but getting into a gunfight with it would probably be at least as bad.
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There really isn't a good vote here to end this interlude, sadly. Meanwhile, I'm going to need to count up all the enhancement project votes, but we'll have Serafina technobabble that later. Or I can just bribe you guys and say '+2 XP for all characters if someone does that job for me'. Hmm maybe I'll do that.
Dealing With I-50-B31:
[ ] (2.0x) Find an excuse to have her disabled. Probably involving running her over. With a tank. Repeatedly. And then shooting her to make sure.
[ ] (1.5x) Or you could take a quick trip back to Moscow. You know a few people who could probably dominate her and maintain control, and then you can spend lots of time getting her to open up to you and reveal her most intimate secrets... of Threat Null, you perverts.
[ ] Maybe you can convince her that Jamelia's already properly joined the Technocracy? Or that her mission should be altered to something more amenable to your needs. Like protecting Jamelia.
[ ] Write-in.
Serafina Write-In:
[ ] Write-in: Deal with Donald and Rose's... romance issues. And/or end up on a 'date' with Donald because GODDAMNIT ROSE.
Rose Seeking? Maybe?
[ ] Rose is potentially chancing an Enlightenement 5 here, especially if she can read more about the Order of Reason from Jamelia's stolen stash. This is also an opportunity for her to buy off Demented Eidolon if she so wishes and it is justified in the Seeking.
