Bluntly, what is your justification for telling her the truth when:
a) she hates us
b) we can't untell her if it turns out to be a bad idea
c) we can still tell her later if we decide it would help
d) we have no guarantee that it will work
Telling her the truth about death of the personality?
First, why it doesn't hurt as much as it might seem.
- I don't believe that it really matters if this *particular* piece of information gets out. Letting on that we've had memory rewriting and that we know about it is a pretty big deal, for various reasons, but that's not what this would be doing. We don't need to worry about letting the info get out to Threat Null, because Threat Null almost certainly knows - unless we're going to assume that none of the people in charge of building INVISIBLE BEAR got caught up in the Dimensional Anomaly, which seems unlikely - especially since they did have the kill-codes, and we know they have the guy who was our mentor at the time, who knew us both before and afterwards. We're also not making particularly strong claims... the wording as selected could be anywhere from "complete personality scrub" (implied) to "picked up some additional, fairly strong conditioning". Furthermore, as Serafina noted, we've had time to develop an independent personality since then - and the stuff that *most* people really care about with respect to us tied to things that we've done since INVISIBLE BEAR, rather than the things we did beforehand.
- Some people already have this information, like anyone who has access to the files on INVISIBLE BEAR. This almost certainly does included Threat Null, as previously noted, but likely includes others as well.
- Most importantly, though, we lie about who we are... all the time. It is *entirely in character* for us, in a situation like this, to do something like overstating by a fair margin the effects of something like INVISIBLE BEAR. In fact, my write-in does do exactly that (presenting a relentlessly professional and low-emotion front suggesting that we still haven't recovered all that much of a personality). As far as someone like Bastion is concerned, having us in this situation claiming that we were reconditioned to the point of death of the personality isn't necessarily particularly strong evidence that we were reconditioned to the point of death of the personality.
Now, what it buys us.
- It sells her on the idea that we didn't get away scott-free. This is helpful to reducing her overall hostility towards us, and to convincing her to interface with Jamelia rather than anyone else. Right now, the party has two social tanks who would function for this purpose, and Donald is busy. Thus, having her go through anyone else means either putting up a construct member who isn't as good at the social-fu, pulling Serafina out (*terrible* idea) or waiting for Donald's schedule to free up a bit (takes that much more time). Alternately, we could try to get someone from outside of the Amalgam, which is *also* most likely a terrible idea, for various reasons, or give it to someone who isn't social-specced (not best). The not getting away scott-free thing is also why we're implying that we're not the head of our amalgam. Indeed, we're pretty much implying that we've been shuffled off to Watcher duty somewhere, and are unlikely to rise all that much in the future.
- It doesn't give her time to think/plan/act. Right now, she's a semi-hostile but potentially convinceable and a bit off-balance, which is a situation that Jamelia is *really good at*. Once Jamelia walks out of here, she's going to think, and then she's going to grab whatever info she can, and then she's going to act. It's *possible* that if we take control of the situation we can keep her from acting after we go by convincing her that the wheels of the bureaucracy are turning and she's better off staying put, but if we just pull a bluff-and-go, that doesn't seem all that likely... and there are all sorts of potential complications that could come out of her eventual actions. Especially if she attracts the attentions of Threat Null, it could get... messy. *She* is certainly not going to mind the idea that Jamelia has gotten where she is inappropriately, that Control has decided that she's the Adversary, and that she needs to be wiped out. This meeting is pretty much the only time that we have guaranteed (or nearly so) that Threat Null hasn't gotten to her.
- It gives her a chance to rant about the unfairness of it all, directly to our face. This has some benefits in reducing hostility (rather than stirring it up, enflaming it by showing off how well we're doing, and then walking away so that it can fester *properly*) but the bigger deal is that we might learn something. There are things that she knows that we'd dearly like to, but she's not going to tell us just for the asking. She *might*, on the other hand, throw them in our faces as she vents about the unfairness of it all. She is, in fact, highly likely to throw at least some of it in our faces while she rants about the unfairness of it all.
- To my eye, it much more strongly reinforces the idea that the technocracy wheels are turning, and that if she can reign it in for a bit, we can get her back where she should be. More to the point, if we can sell ehr on that, and sell ehr on keeping us on as "primary investigator", we're pretty much guaranteed that she'll give us at least some access to the stuff that we need to see to determine if we want to reactivate... given that we'll have been accepted as an official investigator to determine just that, and will be getting at least some support.
...and, in turn, a lot of it collects together to refute "c) we can still tell her later if we decide it would help". There is an opportunity to learn something here (via ranting) that will not come again. This meeting is basically our best (possibly only) opportunity to convince her to treat us as an official investigator (which opens up a lot more useful information at minimal additional cost). It's also our best opportunity to reduce her resentment - and if we don't, it's entirely possible that that resentment, now enflamed will cause her to do something (like, say, call some sort of Control-owned hotline) that will make life *hugely* more difficult for us. This moment is a tipping point in a lot of ways. Things are unstable. We can't just walk away now and come back later.
The hating us... well, as noted, part of the point is to work on reducing the level of hating us, by giving some acceptable answers to the resentment underpinning it - and answers that she will want to hear, as they come with the feeling that someone she's resented really has gotten what's coming to them. Even having her be the one to choose to throw us out against our probable preference, rather than use just walking out on our own, will give her at least a bit of satisfaction on the matter (should she choose to go that way) and will mean that she's likely to internally take at least some of the responsibility for any delays, rather than blaming it all on us.
As for guarantees - well, we don't have any guarantee that *anything* will work, ever. Even if it doesn't work as well as I'd like, though, it's likely to grant a partial success. She'll have a suggestion that we got at least *some* of the comeuppance that was coming to us, she'll have a chance to vent a bit, and she'll have some reason to believe that with a bit of patience she may come back out of mothballs. She'll likely go home feeling better, and she'll be a lot less likely to do something that could get us all killed or mind-controlled by Threat Null while she waits for a replacement investigator (which she's been told may take a bit). She may still resent us, may not have told us anything new, and may have told us never to get anywhere close to her again, but she won't be galvanized by the meeting to go out and make things worse, and that'll give Donald time to finish what he needs to with the Ivory Tower/White Tower thing, get briefed as well as we can manage, and head in as a more agreeable investigator (probably with Henriette as technical assistant).
[X] Don't tell her the truth. We have no real insight into who she is or what she wants, and you can't undo such a thing.
For the record, we totally have insight into who she is and what she wants. We know that she's been mothballed for decades, and out of the loop, and in spite of feeling demeaned by it and resentful of it, she's done her best to do the job well. She's applied a similar degree of pride to her own appearance, to her augments, and to her own bodily maintenance. We have some decent insights into who she was back in the day, and there is a fairly good chance that she hasn't been compromised by anyone else yet. As an example, if she *had* been compromised by Control, she wouldn't be bitching us out, she'd be taking this opportunity to draw us into a deathtrap of some sort or setting up a future meeting to have us killed at. What she wants is to get back into the Union proper, to have her frustration validated and her work and value recognized, and to have us get at least a reasonable fraction of what she feels we so richly deserve.
There is a low-to-moderate possibility that she's also been compromised by something (almost certainly *not* Threat Null) in which case she will also want to make sure we don't find out about that and/or that she isn't investigated by technocrats who would. There's a moderate-to-significant possibility that she's made some compromises along the way that the old Control would not approve of, in which case she'll want to either make sure that we don't find out about those or that they don't come back to haunt her for some other reason.