JB XCIX: Piercing The Veil
"Well, Jazmin?" Dyne asks, tapping the desk with a pen, while Jamelia is still in thought. "Nothing witty to say? Could Little Miss Self Righteous actually be feeling guilt over her actions? My, my, I never thought that would happen. So, what are you doing now, Jazmin?"
"I'm in command of a Construct now, but that's not relevant." Jamelia replies, quite bluntly.
"Well,
congratulations. Good to see that the perfect little model Technocrat is doing so well, while others rot out here for her mistakes." Catherine says sarcastically.
Given the amount of hate Dyne is displaying towards her, Jamelia is quite certain that nothing good is going to come out from attempting to pursue the subject of her altered memories. Revealing such a weakness to someone who clearly had no love for her and quite a lot of reason to make life more difficult for her would be unwise, to say the least. Moreso, when Jamelia isn't certain that Dyne hasn't already been compromised by Threat Null. No, Dyne is not someone she would trust with something like that.
"Just because the Order believes in rehabilitation rather than retribution doesn't make the rehabilitation any less of a punishment." Jamelia doesn't give a chance for Dyne to say anything in reply. "In any case, that isn't why I'm here. The Union is here to determine the viability of reintegration and reactivation. Dependent on your assent, of course."
"So, after
30 years of leaving me out to dry, the Union suddenly decides I'm useful again, and sends
you of all people to pay me a visit? How
thoughtful of them." Her tone is acidic, and the thick metal pen in her hands is visibly straining under her grip. "And what if this bitter old woman decides she doesn't want back in the Union that kicked her out in the first place? If I refuse, do you send in the HITMarks to burn Cybersolutions down because I might defect to some other side?"
There's no use lying or sweet-talking her. If she was Vigilance, she would know how people with sensitive information are handled. "That is one of the possible options, yes. Otherwise there might be enforced retirement." Such a clever euphemism for being stripped of your memories, of your knowledge, of even your sense of self, possibly of your extremely obvious augmentations-and being shuffled into a place where you will benefit the Union anyways, but in a way so that you'll never know what you're really doing. Like Hirsch.
"At least you're honest about how this works. I'm glad you don't think so little of me to try to pretend that the Union would never shoot someone who didn't listen to the 'or else' in the 'join us or else' they sell." Dyne pauses and sighs. "Of course, you were always capable of making things so...
clinical. It's not genocide, it's just an area sterilization." The pen in her grip snaps. "You're clearly the same person you were 30 years ago."
Jamelia wants to sigh at this annoyance, but she's here as a guest and she has a reason to be here. "It's clear you don't want me here. I'll tell the Union to send someone else."
"Good. Now leave." Catherine says. "And tell them that they shouldn't send one of your stooges."
"I'll be sure to pass that on."
********************************************************************************************************************
Henriette is only a little envious of Jane Clarent's oceanside mansion. She's surprised that an Iterator might own something like that, but she supposes there's not much you can do with Sleeper money and the Union virtually showers you with it if you're a valued operative. As Major Clarent's sports car pulls into the garage, Henriette is only moderately annoyed by the wastefulness of this. You shouldn't be living like this as an Iterator! You should be living with the Technocracy and-
"It turns out that I inherited all of this from my parents." Clarent says. "It's really all that I have of them, since they died before I was old enough to really know them." She looks at it wistfully. "I wonder what they were like? Who were they? All I have is what we've deemed fit to write about them, and everyone knows how easily history is manipulated."
"Thanks for bringing me here, Major." Henriette says. Clarent didn't need to respond to her request for a short talk and definitely didn't need to do so like this.
"You wanted to talk to me about further enhancement, about what it's like being on the frontlines without a vehicle. I think I owe you at least that much for covering us back in Smilodon a few weeks back." Clarent is cosmetically sculpted, drop-dead gorgeous with cherry-red hair and brilliant violet eyes, but she's not a honeypot of any sort. Under the discerning eye of Henriette's ocular improvements, her body is a nimbus of electromagnetic radiation, dense with military-grade hyperalloy and carbon allotropes.
From what Henriette's heard she has physical reactions just this side of unreal. One agent mentioned a bodyguard operation where Clarent shot the incoming sniper round out of midair with a smartlinked variant of the M-16 and nothing else. She's a late-90s cybersoldier, when Iteration X started integrating tactical software right into the core components of the human mind to break clock speed limits. She's like the sports car she drives-sleek, fast, and fragile. By the standards of the heavy-spec borgs anyways and their half-ton bodies.
And she's almost like Henriette. Raised by the Technocracy and forged by it. Had Genius at an early age and found herself on the frontlines in her youth. She's someone who had many of the same experiences and the same problems. She's also lived through the Reckoning.
"I came back here for the first time right after the Reckoning. On my eighteenth birthday." Jane says, as they leave the garage for her spacious vestibule. There are glass-well, hyperdiamond-cases surrounding cyborg bodies, their internal microfusion plants shut down, a trickle of power entering them through wireless transmitters for minimum self-maintenance mode. There's a young child, a girl of about ten or twelve, and a few adult women with various hair styles and facial features. They're all combat-rated, Henriette realizes, examining their mass and their materials. Clearly backup bodies. One of them is wounded, and Henriette can recognize the damage on it slowly being mended by nanorepair systems, covered from casual observation by a hologram. Inert like this, they could be confused for statues or mannequins.
"Wait." Henriette sputters. "You're... you're not even in your forties yet!" And already high-up in the Union. Already ranked nearly equivalent to Jamelia, who could be considered old before the Reckoning, who was Henriette's age in... 1968. Before the first Sleeper moon landings. Not even twice Henriette's age.
"Thirty-three." Clarent says apologetically, as she waves Henriette into her library, grabbing a glass of something and a few pills from a butlerbot. "I spent a lot of my formative years in military training, and I was operating alongside the Shock Corps at 14 before I formally joined. It's a bit of an accelerated career, especially compared to most of my peers."
"Really?" Henriette said. She takes a look around the library, scanning the titles of the neatly organized books. There's not a single book on military tactics or cybernetics or computer science. It's all philosophy, history, classic fiction, biographies-things that don't seem to mesh with the cool professional soldier Clarent's reputation paints her as.
"It's something people don't want to talk about." Jane says. "The Computer asked for something like this to show them what they could do with someone trained effectively from birth. They wanted in me-well, us-soldiers used to our bodies like we had been born in them. Orphans with low rejection rates for augmentations, high neural compatibility-they made us what we are. Shaped everything we are. I read your message. You wanted to know about what it means to be a combat cyborg."
"I do, so thanks." Henriette says politely. She sits down on a leather chair and waits for Clarent to start.
Jane Clarent pops a few pills and washes them down with something alcoholic. It's clear that she's wanted to say this for a while. "Well, my name is Jane Clarent. I have a real name, of course, but I haven't used it for twenty-five years. I was the miraculous survivor of a plane crash that happened when Superstitionists assassinated a Syndicate higher-up taking Sleeper transportation. Iteration X found me, the sole survivor, and took me in. I was raised in a boot camp when they realized my compatibility with augmentations was nearly one hundred percent. They taught me how to kill, how to lead, how to think. I'm one of the only twelve qualified users of the Model 1995 high mobility combat chassis, and one of the four still here post-1999. I can outrun most cars, outshoot 95 percent of automated targeting systems, and penetrate almost any cybersecurity system, up to and including hacking human neurology. The men and women under my command respect me to the utmost degree."
She slumps, and she looks so much more human, more vulnerable. "My brain chemistry is dependent on artificial stabilizers because I've never had a human hormone mix since recently. They still haven't quite figured out how to fix it because I was enhanced before Iteration X realized a balanced emotional range would be a good thing to have. When I go outside into Sleeper society I had to run multiple etiquette programs because I didn't know how to react when I was dealing with a waiter at a restaurant, or a sales representative, or a panhandler asking me for money, or someone asking for directions without help. I don't remember my parents. I get more nervous trying to ask someone out for a date than I do when planning a murder in cold blood-and I can't even do that without the help of a HITMark honeypot program. I don't even know why I'm asking people out, even, because I've never sexually matured but the cybertherapist insists that I try to act like a person so I do things people like to do in the vain hope that I might become a real girl sometime. I take these pills because they're still trying to figure out the right biotech mix to fix all the damage that's been done to me in the 90s. This is obviously unique to my situation, but, Henriette..." Clarent trails off. It's clear that she's wanted to say this to someone, and maybe the fact that Henriette is a stranger in a similar situation lets her do it.
"Yes?" Henriette asks, attentive. She was consciously aware of how messed up Iteration X cyborgs could get, how malsocialized and how broken, but hearing it from someone she broadly respects and admires-it's putting it in a different perspective.
"I wouldn't trade away what you have for what someone else has, simply because you admire them. In the end, you've lost so much. All you have is yourself." Clarent says. "And that's what I think. I've... become a bit interested in reading about the human condition." She gestures at the library. "And I don't know what I'd do. When the Reckoning happened and everything was paralyzed and I stopped getting orders, I finally took a chance to look and see what we're here to protect, the humans we're supposed to be guiding, and it was beautiful. It's not perfect-it's not even close, but there's something to be said about being a person instead of a war machine."
Henriette is sure that the computer that turned her sister into... well, that thing, wouldn't have minded stripping down a person into a war machine. It's hard hearing that the leaders of old Iteration X seem to not have changed all
that much-but it also makes her realize that something of what Kessler said was right. This changes you. "I wasn't looking into anything as extreme as that."
"Good." Jane says. "There's nothing wrong with a few biomods here and there. Or learning how to shoot. But the training you want-to become like me, or Sergeant Kessler, or a NWO commando-that requires a lot more than practicing. And if you don't have it-well, you're not competitive. There's a lot of people who thought knowing how to use a gun made you good enough to fight us." Clarent sounds slightly regretful, and Henriette wonders how much of that is actual regret at ending lives and how much is regret that she doesn't feel regret at doing something society broadly thinks is bad. "They didn't last very long in general. You're never going to manage to be at our level without unreliable cutting-edge tech or psychodynamic indoctrination, and the latter-you're always giving up something for that. People aren't designed for fighting, so we break them down and use what remains to make someone else. Or you get them young and mold them into something new. Or sometimes, if they come pre-broken." Clarent muses. "Sometimes someone decides being a HITMark is better than still living. And we grant them that."
"I suppose." Henriette responds. What are you supposed to say to that? What can you say to that?
**********************************************************************************************************************
"Jamelia Belltower." Bastion says, on the holoconference suite. He's apparently on one of the old Syndicate VIP planes they repossessed into C3 units, the ones with thick hypercarbon armor and heavy primium plating, with enough self-defense weaponry to deal with a Void Engineer VF-5 or a Etherite corvette. The NWO has stripped out most of the luxuries for additional command and control equipment, but they've still kept the autochef and food synthesizer. The shot glass full of amber liquid at Bastion's desk is ample evidence of that. "Any updates on your... acquisitions?"
"Professor Bastion. I visited Cybersolutions. They're apparently still on standby for now. We might want to reintegrate them. The CEO, Catherine Dyne, was hostile to me, and apparently knew of me." It's the hardest thing for her to say. She hasn't had to say anything like this for so long. She doesn't like talking about herself because-
because that might cause someone to notice the discrepancies.
"Knew
of you?" Bastion asks, the glass forgotten halfway to his lips. "What do you mean by that?"
"Some of what she says, I believe, means that one of us has undergone memory alteration. Either I have, or she has." She wonders, though. Did Dyne really hate her
that much from the past? Or was that yet another method, playing off of some existing resentment, amplifying it, just to make sure that
she wouldn't find out about her past? Was she also memory edited? Were there a half-dozen different stories about HELMETSHRIKE somewhere, split up among the survivors?
"You were reprofiled in the 80s, isn't that true?" He briefly stops, clearly checking the data feeds on his contacts for information. "Invisible Bear. Psychological conditioning, pharmaceutical cognitive modification. It might have been done then. Funny, nothing says anything about memory modification and I should have total access-" Bastion mentions. "Thank you for telling me this of your own free will. Hopefully there are no... unfortunate surprises in the past."
"Thank you for being so understanding, Professor." Jamelia says, and closes the link in relief. That went as well as she thought it would.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Digging Into The Past
So where do you go from here to find out more about HELMETSHRIKE and Vigilance?
[ ] Pay the old surviving members of the team a visit. (Choose one)
[ ] Furious Ratel
[ ] Screaming Owl
[ ] Cunning Squid
[ ] Prowling Wolf
[ ] Find out what happened then in Nicaragua.
[ ] Take a look into mothballed HELMETSHRIKE bases.
[ ] Write-in
And part two is what you do with this knowledge.
[ ] Stay silent about your past.
[ ] Confide into one or more team members about it.
[ ] Kessler
[ ] Serafina
[ ] Rose Reina
[ ] Donald
[ ] Henriette
