Update XIV: Deception
JB XIV: Deception
Jamelia pauses, trying to piece together exactly what happened. She turns the mic off and does something extremely rare. She says what she's thinking out loud. "What the fuck."
She immediately switches back in character. "Give me a moment, just need to burn through a firewall to get to the x-ray cameras," she says almost automatically to the sound of clicking fingers. "I could totally burn through it too, you know; surge-viruses are fucking hilarious, but the 'Crats would probably have their... like, three half-decent sysadmins harden against it eventually. Right... right... oh you shit-sucking fucker, you did not forget to patch this exploit, ha!"
But the automatic trained babble is just a disguise for the decades of experience she has whirring away in the background. If she had more time, she'd get a proper time-motion analysis done, but she estimates she can probably delay for fifteen seconds at most while she works out what to do.
So instead, she just guesses. Decades of experience come together, and she makes a snap judgement. It's not luck. It would be insulting to call it luck. It's just not at the conscious level. But she's pretty sure that the best lead would be found with the things in that location, which means that the rest of the stash here can be burned to keep the cover intact. An enemy who unknowingly owes her a favour is something which can be used.
"Rose," she whispers, on the alt-comms. "Aim to get the assets in the following location. I'm delaying the RDs and will divert them away from you, but I want to avoid encountering them at all." She flips channels. "Henriette," she says, "maintain visual and audio monitoring through the C-8. I want to see what they think are important, or whether they're just looters. If they're just out to pick up shiny things, then they're of lesser importance, but if they're investigating the case too, I want to see what their interest is before we act. And I want video footage of everything they take, so we can analyse it later - not as good as having it, but we can still get a lot out - and see if we need to act if anything in it is a high Cat threat."
She clears her throat, cuts the line, and returns to her persona. And so complete with swearing and occasional tangents, she directs the RDs.
Rose
The channel from Director Belltower clicks. It's a simple thing, just an audio cue to tell Rose that she's done talking on this channel, but what it means is that she's alone for the moment. Alone with her instructions. And Thorn, laughing at her.
You see, you're only worth the things you can get, Thorn says, her voice soft like moldy velvet. Are you going to go and play fetch, like the director's dog? Maybe if you're good, she'll scratch you behind the ears when you're done. Reward your service with a flea collar to keep the pests away.
"If a collar would get rid of you," whispers Rose, fists clenching involuntarily, "I might wear it."
So eager to give up your freedom for some trifling measure of control. That's the Technocratic disease. And you're welcoming it in.
Rose is saved from her distraction by another distraction. A comm channel opens from Henriette Langley, who is babbling about how amazing she is and the brilliance of this program she's going to instantiate on the C-8's hardware.
"... I mean, I can just repurpose the backdoor from the IFF scheme, and send that over. The revision's cake for me. Not everyone can graduate top of the class from Uni Freiburg at age 15, you know..."
Something bothers Rose about this, and it takes her a moment to place it. Ms. Langley seems to be caught up in the details of her own genius program, and is too busy bragging about it to worry about how exactly it's going to be deployed. She might be about to do it directly, with all the subtlety of a fist to the face. And while Ms. Langley is very clever, she isn't very subtle, so Rose takes it upon herself to do a bit of damage control. She breathes deeply, remembering that Director Belltower told her to go ahead and do the right thing. More or less. Rose might be editorializing a bit.
"Er, Henriette," Rose interjects, "if you forward that program to me for deployment, I can obscure its source. You know, as a safety measure."
The pilot makes a dismissive noise, and Rose can practically hear her rolling her eyes, but she does forward it. Rose then forwards it again, using her knowledge of dimensional science and a bit of deduction to make it seem to emanate from a point in the Virtual Web vaguely near a virtual adept hub. She can't quite make it work-it's a complicated bit of hypermathematics and even her augmented neural structure isn't quite good enough to process the transformations necessary. She doesn't tell Henriette this. No need to stroke the pilot's ego more than necessary.
Rose then gets back to her task set by the Director, silently grateful for Henriette's compulsive need to brag, both for letting her catch a potential pitfall, and for momentarily silencing Thorn with a barrage of braggadocio. She enters the closest thing she has to stealth mode, by activating some of her enhanced senses to detect thought patterns indicative of monitoring, and a blurring and dimming effect, to make her quieter and harder to see.
Time to fetch. No. Shit. Not time to fetch. Time to steal some deviant artifacts. She takes a step closer to the entrance, is delayed by the sound of gunfire. "Ma'am, we need you to stay here, this sounds like a terrorist attack. We're going into lockdown." Rose nods and smiles. "Take your time." Accelerants flood her circulatory system and she moves, slamming one of the guards into the pavement with a bone-cracking thump. The second one turns, but he is too slow, and her nails scratch into flesh. The paralytic toxin takes effect near-instantly, and he hits the ground. She checks their pulses. Still alive. Good.
Such concern for the lives of your lessers. Such hypocrisy, Thorn remarks. You still will kill when someone orders it.
"It's responsibility." Rose mutters.
"Ma'am?" One of the MiBs asks.
"Nevermind that. Let's go." She's seeing the world in subdimensions, looking through for things with the right resonance, the right "aura". There's a container ready for shipping she wants to look into, and if Jamelia's leading them to the warehouse there should be a way to avoid them. She hears the echoes of machine gun fire, screams, and the "fweeeem" sound of an Etherite energy weapon.
"Henriette?"
"Yes?" Rose is amazed that the pilot can fit such a level of "I'm-busy-right-now-this-better-be-important" in one word. "Currently spoofing Etherite tracking systems, fortunately most of their elders don't even know what digital computers are or else this might actually take effort. What is it?"
"Can you forward me the video feed from their machine?"
"Sure." A window shows up in Rose's integrated HUD, one of the few non-biological enhancements she's undergone throughout her service life. It's blank.
"I think you've got the wrong drivers." Rose says, even as she dodges a patrol of Triad guards heading towards the ruckus slowly approaching the warehouse by leaping on top of stacked containers. She lands silently despite the 5 meter vertical jump, keeps moving.
"Oh. Right. Not an ADEI. What are you running?"
"XVSecureDecode5."
"That's ancient."
"If you want your drivers updated you can get it done via wi-fi. If I want them updated I spend the next eight hours getting surgery."
"Ugh. Progenitors." Henriette says, but there's no heat to it. "All right, now does it work?" Rose sees through the eyes of the combat gynoid, spins off a subsidiary personality to handle the workload. She can pay full attention to the docks while the Reality Deviant machine is deploying a -"13mm Chemrail"- the status readout says, the weapon unfolding from a slim feminine arm too thin to contain the heavy weapon, and cutting a couple of security guards in half. She sighs at the needless loss of life, but it's not her responsibility. Director Belltower trusts her, she needs to show that it's not misplaced.
She makes it to the designated container stack first. Her two MiB followers are slower, not gifted with superhuman agility and Enlightened Science. By the time they get there, she has already forced the doors open with a crowbar. Among the porcelain vases is another one of the small amulets she's found, this one with a crimson woman carved into it to match the black dragon symbol. "The Scarlet Empress?" Rose says to herself. There's a short sword made out of something that looks like jade, and-what looks like a segment of something complex, definitely a Deviant artifact, but she can't quite place it.
The Scarlet Empress. Thorn repeats.
The RDs have almost fought their way through to the warehouse. They'll probably take a while to loot it, and they still have the hack on the C-8. That'll do. She moves to leave. "Ashford to Belltower. All right, we've got what we need. We're out of here."
"Belay that." Jamelia sends. "They've just broken into the main warehouse and they've found... something." Rose checks the feed. Outside of the magical artifacts the Reality Deviants are busy looting, she can see a single sealed box which faintly oozes menace, labeled "antiquities". They break it open and- inside there is something. Something living, shackled by darkly magical chains and metal. "Living", yet made out of metal, biomimetic design taken to its natural, extreme conclusion. Veins of plasma, muscles of shape-memory alloy, bones of self-healing composite. Inhuman, yet beautiful in the way any war machine may be.
Rose knows what it is. A machine-alien, a 'daemon'. A psychopomp. She doesn't know what it's there for, or who might buy a techno-organic xenomorph. She suspects she might want to find out. Murmurs from the other Reality Deviants there suggest they're exactly as surprised as you are.
Vote Time:
[ ] (1.2x) Try to do something to find out what they plan to do with it.
[ ] (1x) You've already gotten what you needed. The fact that they have a miniature giant death robot (if you don't think a psychopomp can kill you guess what happens when one teleports your head into the sun) is irrelevant, frankly.
[ ] (0.8x) Looks like the mystery's going deeper, and they might know something you don't. Suggest a trade of some sort.
[ ] Write-in. (This includes the "kill them all and steal all the loot" option)
Jamelia pauses, trying to piece together exactly what happened. She turns the mic off and does something extremely rare. She says what she's thinking out loud. "What the fuck."
She immediately switches back in character. "Give me a moment, just need to burn through a firewall to get to the x-ray cameras," she says almost automatically to the sound of clicking fingers. "I could totally burn through it too, you know; surge-viruses are fucking hilarious, but the 'Crats would probably have their... like, three half-decent sysadmins harden against it eventually. Right... right... oh you shit-sucking fucker, you did not forget to patch this exploit, ha!"
But the automatic trained babble is just a disguise for the decades of experience she has whirring away in the background. If she had more time, she'd get a proper time-motion analysis done, but she estimates she can probably delay for fifteen seconds at most while she works out what to do.
So instead, she just guesses. Decades of experience come together, and she makes a snap judgement. It's not luck. It would be insulting to call it luck. It's just not at the conscious level. But she's pretty sure that the best lead would be found with the things in that location, which means that the rest of the stash here can be burned to keep the cover intact. An enemy who unknowingly owes her a favour is something which can be used.
"Rose," she whispers, on the alt-comms. "Aim to get the assets in the following location. I'm delaying the RDs and will divert them away from you, but I want to avoid encountering them at all." She flips channels. "Henriette," she says, "maintain visual and audio monitoring through the C-8. I want to see what they think are important, or whether they're just looters. If they're just out to pick up shiny things, then they're of lesser importance, but if they're investigating the case too, I want to see what their interest is before we act. And I want video footage of everything they take, so we can analyse it later - not as good as having it, but we can still get a lot out - and see if we need to act if anything in it is a high Cat threat."
She clears her throat, cuts the line, and returns to her persona. And so complete with swearing and occasional tangents, she directs the RDs.
Rose
The channel from Director Belltower clicks. It's a simple thing, just an audio cue to tell Rose that she's done talking on this channel, but what it means is that she's alone for the moment. Alone with her instructions. And Thorn, laughing at her.
You see, you're only worth the things you can get, Thorn says, her voice soft like moldy velvet. Are you going to go and play fetch, like the director's dog? Maybe if you're good, she'll scratch you behind the ears when you're done. Reward your service with a flea collar to keep the pests away.
"If a collar would get rid of you," whispers Rose, fists clenching involuntarily, "I might wear it."
So eager to give up your freedom for some trifling measure of control. That's the Technocratic disease. And you're welcoming it in.
Rose is saved from her distraction by another distraction. A comm channel opens from Henriette Langley, who is babbling about how amazing she is and the brilliance of this program she's going to instantiate on the C-8's hardware.
"... I mean, I can just repurpose the backdoor from the IFF scheme, and send that over. The revision's cake for me. Not everyone can graduate top of the class from Uni Freiburg at age 15, you know..."
Something bothers Rose about this, and it takes her a moment to place it. Ms. Langley seems to be caught up in the details of her own genius program, and is too busy bragging about it to worry about how exactly it's going to be deployed. She might be about to do it directly, with all the subtlety of a fist to the face. And while Ms. Langley is very clever, she isn't very subtle, so Rose takes it upon herself to do a bit of damage control. She breathes deeply, remembering that Director Belltower told her to go ahead and do the right thing. More or less. Rose might be editorializing a bit.
"Er, Henriette," Rose interjects, "if you forward that program to me for deployment, I can obscure its source. You know, as a safety measure."
The pilot makes a dismissive noise, and Rose can practically hear her rolling her eyes, but she does forward it. Rose then forwards it again, using her knowledge of dimensional science and a bit of deduction to make it seem to emanate from a point in the Virtual Web vaguely near a virtual adept hub. She can't quite make it work-it's a complicated bit of hypermathematics and even her augmented neural structure isn't quite good enough to process the transformations necessary. She doesn't tell Henriette this. No need to stroke the pilot's ego more than necessary.
Rose then gets back to her task set by the Director, silently grateful for Henriette's compulsive need to brag, both for letting her catch a potential pitfall, and for momentarily silencing Thorn with a barrage of braggadocio. She enters the closest thing she has to stealth mode, by activating some of her enhanced senses to detect thought patterns indicative of monitoring, and a blurring and dimming effect, to make her quieter and harder to see.
Time to fetch. No. Shit. Not time to fetch. Time to steal some deviant artifacts. She takes a step closer to the entrance, is delayed by the sound of gunfire. "Ma'am, we need you to stay here, this sounds like a terrorist attack. We're going into lockdown." Rose nods and smiles. "Take your time." Accelerants flood her circulatory system and she moves, slamming one of the guards into the pavement with a bone-cracking thump. The second one turns, but he is too slow, and her nails scratch into flesh. The paralytic toxin takes effect near-instantly, and he hits the ground. She checks their pulses. Still alive. Good.
Such concern for the lives of your lessers. Such hypocrisy, Thorn remarks. You still will kill when someone orders it.
"It's responsibility." Rose mutters.
"Ma'am?" One of the MiBs asks.
"Nevermind that. Let's go." She's seeing the world in subdimensions, looking through for things with the right resonance, the right "aura". There's a container ready for shipping she wants to look into, and if Jamelia's leading them to the warehouse there should be a way to avoid them. She hears the echoes of machine gun fire, screams, and the "fweeeem" sound of an Etherite energy weapon.
"Henriette?"
"Yes?" Rose is amazed that the pilot can fit such a level of "I'm-busy-right-now-this-better-be-important" in one word. "Currently spoofing Etherite tracking systems, fortunately most of their elders don't even know what digital computers are or else this might actually take effort. What is it?"
"Can you forward me the video feed from their machine?"
"Sure." A window shows up in Rose's integrated HUD, one of the few non-biological enhancements she's undergone throughout her service life. It's blank.
"I think you've got the wrong drivers." Rose says, even as she dodges a patrol of Triad guards heading towards the ruckus slowly approaching the warehouse by leaping on top of stacked containers. She lands silently despite the 5 meter vertical jump, keeps moving.
"Oh. Right. Not an ADEI. What are you running?"
"XVSecureDecode5."
"That's ancient."
"If you want your drivers updated you can get it done via wi-fi. If I want them updated I spend the next eight hours getting surgery."
"Ugh. Progenitors." Henriette says, but there's no heat to it. "All right, now does it work?" Rose sees through the eyes of the combat gynoid, spins off a subsidiary personality to handle the workload. She can pay full attention to the docks while the Reality Deviant machine is deploying a -"13mm Chemrail"- the status readout says, the weapon unfolding from a slim feminine arm too thin to contain the heavy weapon, and cutting a couple of security guards in half. She sighs at the needless loss of life, but it's not her responsibility. Director Belltower trusts her, she needs to show that it's not misplaced.
She makes it to the designated container stack first. Her two MiB followers are slower, not gifted with superhuman agility and Enlightened Science. By the time they get there, she has already forced the doors open with a crowbar. Among the porcelain vases is another one of the small amulets she's found, this one with a crimson woman carved into it to match the black dragon symbol. "The Scarlet Empress?" Rose says to herself. There's a short sword made out of something that looks like jade, and-what looks like a segment of something complex, definitely a Deviant artifact, but she can't quite place it.
The Scarlet Empress. Thorn repeats.
The RDs have almost fought their way through to the warehouse. They'll probably take a while to loot it, and they still have the hack on the C-8. That'll do. She moves to leave. "Ashford to Belltower. All right, we've got what we need. We're out of here."
"Belay that." Jamelia sends. "They've just broken into the main warehouse and they've found... something." Rose checks the feed. Outside of the magical artifacts the Reality Deviants are busy looting, she can see a single sealed box which faintly oozes menace, labeled "antiquities". They break it open and- inside there is something. Something living, shackled by darkly magical chains and metal. "Living", yet made out of metal, biomimetic design taken to its natural, extreme conclusion. Veins of plasma, muscles of shape-memory alloy, bones of self-healing composite. Inhuman, yet beautiful in the way any war machine may be.
Rose knows what it is. A machine-alien, a 'daemon'. A psychopomp. She doesn't know what it's there for, or who might buy a techno-organic xenomorph. She suspects she might want to find out. Murmurs from the other Reality Deviants there suggest they're exactly as surprised as you are.
Vote Time:
[ ] (1.2x) Try to do something to find out what they plan to do with it.
[ ] (1x) You've already gotten what you needed. The fact that they have a miniature giant death robot (if you don't think a psychopomp can kill you guess what happens when one teleports your head into the sun) is irrelevant, frankly.
[ ] (0.8x) Looks like the mystery's going deeper, and they might know something you don't. Suggest a trade of some sort.
[ ] Write-in. (This includes the "kill them all and steal all the loot" option)
