JB C: Things Laid Bare
She's back in LA. The labs in their construct aren't anything to match up to a dedicated research facility, but there's enough. Including a holoprojector. Her own form floats in front of her in doll-like miniature form, red shape with a few traceries of blue implants. She swipes sideways, and blue metal replaces the limbs and spine. She swipes and that's replaced with a single metal arm with a foldout shotgun. She swipes again, and everything is blue replacement, apart from the red glow of her brain.
Swipe. Swipe. Swipe. It's like playing dress-up with dolls. Well, 'dress-up' wasn't really the right word. It was more like playing tune-up with dolls. She'd played with Iteration X toys when she was little, which had been much more about swapping the limbs and trying out new implants and... and exactly what she was considering doing to herself. Making herself into her own tune-up doll.
Goddamnit. She'd been trying to avoid that comparison and now it has just crept up on her.
The door behind her slides open, and closes with a hum. "Henriette," Dr Rosario says. "So how was New York?"
Henriette shrugs. "Director Belltower wants to wait until the formal debriefing," she says. "We didn't see too much of the city. I like New York normally, though."
"Mmm. So. What's this about?" The older woman tilts her head, taking in the hologram. "You're considering enhancement programs? Fairly heavy ones?"
She checks the room is reporting as secure. "Yes," Henriette says.
"You don't sound like you're sure."
That's the annoying thing about talking to Serafina - or Director Belltower or Donald for that matter. It always seems like she's half-running to catch up with the flow of the conversation. She considers her options, and plunges in. "I'm not. I feel a bit sick thinking about it," Henriette breathes. She folds her arms over her stomach. "I... I like being me. For the first time since... since then. Since Autochtonia. I like being me. I don't want to be... be made into a weapon. I don't want to make myself into a weapon. But... I might not have a choice."
She sighs. "I don't want to become something like... like the MUSCOVITE humanoid interface." It numbs things to refer to the girl who looked so much like her like that. "Even if we could, even if that much hypertech could be crammed into me somehow, I... I talked to Kessler and a few other full-body augs. That's not a life I want for myself. I'm not an assault trooper. I don't want to be one. I... I like piloting. Not just for fighting. I like the vehicles. I like how an upgrade doesn't mean being in a medical facility for several days of surgery. I like being able to eject if my tech fails on me. I... " she trails away. "I hate the way my body doesn't do what I want it to. I wish it was back how... how it used to be. Assault troopers have that as part of their life, knowing it could fail on them and... and I wish I didn't!"
Serafina nods sympathetically. "You know, I haven't mentioned it before, but I should show you my motorbike collection some time," she says, clearly trying to get Henriette off the topic. "It's not as good as my dad's - he's a total fanatic - but I've picked up a few here and there." She jams her hands into her pockets. It was something we always did together," she says.
Henriette smiles back, thankful for the distraction. "That might be fun," she says, and sighs again. "I don't want to become a weapon... but they're going to try to kill me again," she says quietly. "I... they... the MUSCOVITES. I piloted DSS-03. Everyone in the Union knows it. They'll know it. They'll come after me. I know she... they will. Even if..." she trails off. "It makes strategic sense for them to kill me," she says. "I don't want to die."
Running her hands through her hair, Serafina shakes her head slightly. "No," she agrees. "It's not fair, but... they'll probably try."
The young woman stares up at her hologram. "They'll try to gun me down in the street," she says. "They'll make our missions go wrong. They'll try all kinds of dirty tricks. The only way they won't is... is if their field-commander wants to kill me personally, with her own hands. And I'm not going to rely on that."
Henriette swallows. Is this how her mother felt when she'd replaced her limbs with biomimetics, in those last desperate days on Autochtonia? W-would she have escaped if she'd gone full body? Had her mother died and her sister become that thing because her mother hadn't enhanced herself enough? But if Henriette went full-body, she'd be becoming like... like her. She'd be doing what Major Clarent and Kessler had advised her against.
She sniffs, and feels Serafina wrap her arms around her in a hug. "There, there," the older woman says maternally. "It's hard, I know. Especially when you can't do in-vivo gradual enhancements with metal in the same way you can with flesh, so it's much more sudden. And what you're talking about would be a very big step."
"I don't want to lose myself, but I don't want to die." Henriette clears her throat. "If... if I remove any limbs or... or organs, you'll keep them f-for me?" she asks softly, her voice wavering. "I... I want something I can come back to. Something other people don't." Something Clarent said in her weekend away sticks in her mind. How doing so in the old days was considered a threat-that you were only a probationary member, and that they could "humanize" you if you misbehaved. But the old Iteration X-well, it scared her a lot compared to the softer, kinder one she's grown up in.
"Yes." Serafina pauses. "Well, even if that proves impossible, it's relatively easy to clone baseline organs. As long as the changes aren't too radical, it's not too hard to replace things." She lets go, and turns to the hologram, her voice all professional. "Now, what are you looking for?"
Henriette blushes from that display of weakness, and coughs, trying to settle her racing heart. "Certainly not full-body," she says. "I don't want that, and... and it would be wasted on me. I'm not a shock trooper. Anything I get should be useful for piloting, too. Even bulletproofing protects me from a cockpit shot. And nothing too unreliable - I know things break down when pushed, but," she rolls her eyes, "we'd both be shouted at by Director Belltower if I needed regular access to a high-grade lab for checks."
"Heavens, yes," Serafina agrees with a smile. "So... hmm. Piloting... g-tolerance, reaction time, muscle precision. Some of that can be done with gene therapy, if you're wanting a more subtle approach. But you'll want either some kind of subdermal plating, or possibly some more flexible flesh reinforcement - enough that conventional firearms in non-specialist hands shouldn't be much of a threat. And all of that will require some skeletal reinforcement and tendon-proofing, or you'll tear yourself apart..."
It's actually kind of fun going back and studying augmentation packages, Henriette concedes. It's almost easy to forget everything that happened in the last year now, about being in recovery with Void Engineer psychotechnicians who broke her mind and broke her body covering up whatever they were fighting among the stars. Possibly making sure that their work was shoddy enough that they could claim she was crazy in case she remembered, Henriette realizes. She'll have to talk to Jamelia about that.
"How about this?" Serafina asks, looking at a nanoaugmentation process that seems to allow an agent massively superhuman ability with minimal physical signs.
"APOSTLE? It looks interesting but- probably too expensive. It's still experimental, isn't it?"
"We could try using our collective reputations to get it for you." Serafina thinks. "You're the Hero of Moscow now, nothing's really out of your reach."
"It's a bit... inefficient, though." Henriette concludes. "There's a lot of people who would be better placed to use this than I would."
"Well then, how about this? PKF-variant, early 00s before they shut down the lab for lack of funding. It's a full conversion but they intended it for high quality of life. Moderately superhuman, self-repairing, full human senses of touch and taste and sensation-" Serafina pauses as she skims the test reports "-are these field test reports or erotica?"
"What are you reading, Serafina?" Henriette demands, glaring at her. "And why is it-" She looks at the file forwarded and blushes. "Okay I didn't really want to know about its 'quality of life' testing."
"That was one of the last products from the idealistic transhumanist phase of Iteration X if I remember right. All about pushing the envelope like the old days but with a lot more of a humanistic streak."
"...And then reality came along and made it all tumble down when the shapeshifters and hemophages didn't decide to do us a favor and disappear in a puff of logic. It's tempting, but I said no full-bodies." Henriette said. "I'm not ready for one yet. Something less invasive would be nice."
"Well, what era?"
"Any." Henriette says noncommittally. "I just don't want to die." She admits. "I know I should be looking at this as a choice about who I am and who I want to be, as another form of self-expression and Kessler and Clarent have talked about how looking at yourself and your flesh as a tool takes a lot out of you in the end, but really that's all I'm worried about-that's all I can worry about."
"If you want cheap and durable, there's always going back to the old days of dermal myomer implants. Well, 'old' days." Serafina sighs. "They've come back in a big way now that we've got cheap myomer implantation devices. Nevermind the painkiller addictions, the biochemistry issues, and the lowered quality of life."
"You know how to sell these."
"As your doctor, Henriette, I'm doing my job warning you away from them, because they fit your criteria. They're not full-bodies-they're mostly dermal with skeletal reinforcement and maybe an artificial organ or two, they're extremely low-maintenance, and they'd give you the survivability you want. But they're old tech and old tech-"
"-doesn't care much about the user being a person as long as the user works fine as a soldier." Henriette finishes for Serafina. "My education wasn't as well-rounded as yours but it wasn't exactly one-track."
"Mmm. So quality of life is something you still want, we can work with that. There's a late 90s project for increasing pilot survivability, they built the-oh this is a very original name-the SERE II series of augmentations. The Void Engineers still make use of them a lot. Integrated shielding, prosthetic legs for improved mobility, skeletal reinforcements, dermal armoring-"
"They look a bit unreliable, though." Henriette concludes. "But that's a good start. Anything along those lines which isn't?"
"One project. It's drastic, though."
"How drastic?"
"Replacing your entire cardiovascular system drastic. It's reliable, though. I've worked with the base technology itself. Rose uses it, as do most of EXEMPLAR. They just took it to a larger extreme. It's an entire solid-state nutrient transfer system replacing your cardiovascular system-that includes all your blood vessels. They paired it with a couple of other augmentations but that's their main selling point."
"It..." Henriette thinks. It'd be pretty drastic. Despite disliking the NWO's pretensions that liberal arts were as important as the hard sciences, she remembers her Shakespeare. "If you cut us do we not bleed" indeed-if she takes this choice, she literally won't bleed, because she can't. It'd be a visible reminder of her inhumanity when a paper cut leads to nothing but momentary annoyance. Jamelia bleeds. Serafina bleeds. Donald bleeds. Rose bleeds. Even Kessler bleeds. A little, because his organic parts are heavily shielded and the external synthflesh doesn't need that much blood to run, but it's important to remember. But on the other hand-maybe it's not what your body looks like, maybe humanity is the mind. Jamelia said something about how the NWO defined human. Maybe they have a point. Maybe she can be fundamentally human even if she can't bleed or get sick or age. "It sounds good." Henriette says, with bravado she doesn't feel. "When can we start?"
"You can actually put this off if you're not comfortable with it..." Serafina trails off as they enter the surgical suite. It's sterile, heavily automated, designed so that in a pinch it could even be operated by remote. There's a nanofabricator there to build replacements for augmentations, and a few ominous-looking surgical drones, hovering in midair with long, dangerous-looking limbs full of wicked-seeming instruments. The Progenitor doctor puts a hand on Henriette's shoulder. "This is a very drastic change you're asking for."
"I don't want to. I'm nervous, sure, but that doesn't mean I'm conflicted." Henriette states, looking at the surgical drones with only a little apprehension. She feels better about it. "I already know what else I want integrated with it, and I'm ready now. I want something to improve my ability to connect with people, because it'll help me escape from MUSCOVITE assassins." And because it'll prove the thing that might have once been my sister wrong, Henriette doesn't say.
Serafina is silent for a moment, lost in thought. "I understand," she finally says. "We can begin immediately."
"Thanks." Henriette says. "For this."
"You're going to be a lot more angry when I tell you that I can't operate on you with your clothes on." Serafina says. "Especially with that unhealthy case of envy. Which I could fix for you..." Serafina offers jokingly.
"Just because you're proud of being top-heavy doesn't mean it's an objectively good thing! And- I'm trying to escape attention here, not get everyone staring at me!" Henriette says. She wonders, as she undresses-is Serafina so casual about nudity because she's seen so many people naked? That she's comfortable around the human body inside and out? No, Henriette concludes. She's probably just showing off, because just because you can doesn't mean you should. She feels proud of realizing that.
"You wish that'd happen. I can't implant a more attractive personality and that's what really counts."
"Shut up, you bimbo." Henriette sighs, but she's glad for the distraction. "It's easy for someone like you to talk about charm when you have every advantage in the world."
"Look, do you want me to put you back together wrong? If you value keeping your pretty face, you'll stop talking like that right this instant, missy!" Serafina jokes with the overbearing tone of a mother.
"Do you really think I'm pretty?" Henriette asks, blushing slightly. But only very slightly.
"Did you not get any positive attention towards your looks in your entire life? Yes, by objective standards you are. By Technocracy standards, not so much, but our job creates and demands excellence in all areas, including physical appearance." Serafina answers instantaneously.
"Iteration X." Henriette offers, as her only explanation.
"So I suppose not. Look, you need to go outside more. People there aren't going to be spoiled by the sexiest .1% of the population being there."
"I thought you were going to say something stupid like 'looks are skin-deep it's what's inside that counts.'" Henriette admits. She finishes folding up her clothing and lies down on the surgical bed. It's cold and uncomfortable, unlike Iteration X facilities-even though the Union's outgrown the need for medical facilities to be depressing long ago, NWO policy insists that agents be disincentivized from regular surgical appointments.
"Pffff." Serafina says. "The only people who actually believe that are ugly people. Also, I'm going to need you to shut down your implants after you lie down so we can reinterface them. Properly, this time. They've got a nice self-install kit so this should be done in 12 hours."
Henriette does so, and for once in her life, the state of near-total paralysis doesn't faze her. Because she knows that when she wakes up it'll be gone, and she'll be better.
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The Los Angeles sky is a dull red glow. Light pollution illuminates the night clouds from below. An utterly generic blue Ford pulls up at a generic apartment block and parks in an empty spot. Jamelia and John get out.
She lets the two of them in, flicking a little switch by the entrance which deactivates the building's cameras for ninety seconds, and leads him up four flights of stairs rather than take the lift. The two of them make an interesting couple. Kessler looms over Jamelia, and would considerably outmass her even if he wasn't a metal killing machine under the meat.
His boss didn't explain why he needed to accompany here. Merely that 'there might be some danger' and she's 'preparing something'.
Key in hand, Jamelia lets him into a small apartment, and then locks the door behind them, bolting the door.
"What is this place?" John asks. "Do you live here?" He's... well, a bit of him is surprised. Surely she can afford somewhere better than this?
"No. This isn't my main residence. Sometimes you need... places," Jamelia says quietly. "Not places to do anything. Just empty spaces. And there were a lot of places being repossessed with the recession. Going cheap. I have places like this all over the world. Safehouses I can live in, if I ever have to go to ground." She sighs. "I'm going to need a new one in Los Angeles after this meeting. By using it, it's compromised."
Kessler shakes his head. "That's pretty paranoid. The enemy isn't that omniscient." He's all but certain she has more places like that in LA. She wouldn't be using her only safehouse for this meeting otherwise.
"It's kept me active this long." The answer is low and flat. Kessler notices how she says it. Active. Not alive. Course, for a high-ranking Technocrat, death was an inconvenience, nothing more. Senior operatives died often enough. They came back from it often enough. Most of the time, they came back just the same as they were, even. He can't vouch for that with personal experience, though. He's always come back alive. Even if several times it was on a technicality, with a vitrified brain kept in biological stasis by emergency medical implants.
The man inspects the two room apartment. It's absolutely sterile, sealed off from the outside world by Union preservation chemicals. But it's more than that. There's no television. No phone. It's located in a mobile phone blackspot. There are potted plants on the window, but they're plastic. The floor is bare, and while there are pictures on the walls, Kessler thinks they fit together too neatly to be anything other than straight out of a catalog. There are bookshelves, but the sensors in his eyes can sense metal in several of the books, which means there's holdout weapons in them. About the only thing which might show a trace of humanity is the grand piano in a corner of the room, and... wait, no, there's a trapdoor under it, and an assault rifle hidden in its superstructure.
Jamelia gestures over towards the kitchen. "There are drinks in the fridge," she says, leaving him. "Non-alcoholic."
Collapsing onto the sofa, it groans under his weight. Kessler takes a look around, and thinks.
People tended to underestimate him. They saw a tank of a man with a metal skull, and that was what he was. They thought because he was strong and tough, he had to be stupid. Nowadays, they saw that he had problems with all the strange new technology of the future, and decided they were right. He had to admit that he did help encourage that, sometimes. Played up things a bit, to cover up some of his unorthodox knowledge. Right now, he was wondering how much Director Belltower, his boss, had fallen for that.
He'd heard of her a few times even before he'd wound up in space - mentions from other teams, after action reports, the like. And of course, now that he knew she'd been in Afghanistan at the same time as him. He'd seen what those mujahideen had done, and that a NWO Operative had been organizing them meant things made a lot more sense. That they'd been listening to a woman...
...Well, they'd found one of their camps, abandoned as if they'd known his team was coming, and they'd found the corpses of two men, next to a sign saying that their crimes were insubordination. They hadn't died pleasantly. They had been an example to the others. Director Belltower might look petite and pretty and inoffensive, but it was a lie.
Admittedly, that's not a very profound statement considering her job title, and while it was possible to get to a high position in the Technocratic Union by being genuinely inoffensive and harmless, you only managed that by being a compromise candidate for a contentious position.
Kessler sighs. He's in no mood for this shit. He's far too sober. She has to have something apart from juice. How's a man meant to deal with something like this without beer? Kessler rummages through the fridge, and with disgust discovers that she wasn't lying when she said that there was no alcohol. The one time a NWO agent tells the truth, and it has to be about this.
He grumbles slightly, but winds up pouring himself a long-life grape juice. Jamelia is off, checking certain security systems - though what kind of systems does she have here, considering the near complete electronic blackspot? Purely analog things? - which leaves him alone for a bit. He holds his juice up to the light, and swirls it, watching the pattern of the light.
Hmm. The Gauntlet was actually a little weaker here than usual for in-city LA. Well. Isn't that interesting? No doubt the lack of any electronics here caused it, but was it merely a side effect? Or was it entirely deliberate.
He takes a sip, and quirks an eyebrow. Heh. If he really wanted to, he could ask the spirit of the grape juice to turn it into wine, but… that's probably not a good idea. It might get him some awkward questions. He gets up and empties the grape juice into the sink, leaving the glass on the side to dry. Sitting back down - the sofa protesting again - he pulls out one of the many hip flasks he keeps hidden in his coat. Sometimes a man just needs a brandy, and now he has one. Not his best, but it'll do.
"Really," Jamelia says in a flat tone. He didn't hear her come back in, but there she is, sitting at the piano.
"You didn't have any beer," Kessler said with a shrug, taking a sip from his hip flask. "Way I see it, BYOB doesn't stop you from saying that the second 'B' is brandy."
She sighs faintly. "Very well," she says, stretching, before she starts to play. It's a complicated little melody. "Where'd you learn to play?" Kessler asks. "Didn't think you'd have time to learn when you were out doing... NWO stuff." Like terrorism, and mass media manipulation, and all the other spy games that NWO agents get up to.
Jamelia shrugs, still playing. "When I joined the Union, the Ivory Tower demanded every member of the New World Order be a Renaissance Man - or Renaissance Woman in my case - with interests in every field. The perfect Operative was a generalist, able to speak many languages, play instruments, discuss philosophy, kill a man with every limb and any kind of weapon and be able to follow the process of scientific inquiry even if they aren't trained in a field. And when you're learning from Ivory Tower professors who use dream instruction and cognitive implantation education, you learn quickly." She pauses like she's about to say more, but stops herself.
"So you learned to play piano," Kessler says, smiling.
"They taught me several instruments," Jamelia says. "I play the piano, the violin, the harp, the flute... well, the list goes on. I can take up most of the roles in an orchestra as part of a cover, and have had to. You would be amazed at how many Traditionalist sympathizers let their guard down at a night at the opera." She trails away, just playing. "I prefer the piano, though," she says, and chuckles softly. "Perhaps because I've only killed people with piano wire, and not a full piano. Never had the chance to drop one on someone's head. A harpsichord, yes, but not a piano."
Kessler laughs. "I did that once, in Hong Kong," he says. "I was there in '89. Wild place. Got in one hell of a shootout in one of the markets. Man, we got screamed at by the local NWO spooks when we got back, but we bodybagged our targets. Oh, hey, I guess the ChiComs run it now. What've they done to it?"
Jamelia shrugs. "Not much," she says. "And Kessler, we don't talk about 'ChiComs' anymore."
"They're Chinese, they're communists. So ChiComs. What's the big deal?" It's one of the things about the future he doesn't really get. Everyone's so fussy about perfectly straightforward ways of saying things. "Is this another one of these things I missed?"
The woman shakes her head, and finishes her piece. Rising elegantly, she closes the lid, and shakes her head. "It was slightly out of tune anyway," she say, getting herself a glass of water. Jamelia slumps down on the sofa opposite to him. He can see the muscles working in her jaw, and then she takes a deep breath. "This conversation isn't happening," she begins. "This conversation will not have happened and it will never happen. And now that's clear, it also isn't a conversation between a Director and her subordinate - and it's barely a conversation between two members of the Technocratic Union. It's just… just a conversation between two people who remember what the old days were like. Two people who… who've spent a long time killing people because they were ordered to do so."
"What conversation would that be?" John says. "I don't think we're talking at all." It's the kind of thing you're meant to say in situations like this. He isn't sure what he should be thinking, but he wonders if this might explain what they were doing in New York. There was something suspicious about the mission itself. Nothing he could articulate-but when you've been a soldier for as long as he is, when you've seen the things he has, you get a gut feeling about these things. And his gut was telling him that there was something more to the mission than that. He could have sworn it was personal, but he rejected that hypothesis. Jamelia Belltower was always a consummate professional. She wouldn't make it personal, even if the people she encountered were people she knew.
"Good man," Jamelia says. She takes a breath, lets it out, and takes another one. "Does the name 'Vigilance' mean anything to you, as a Union organization?" she asks, words coming out in a rush.
Kessler frowns. That's not how she normally acts. At all. "Vigilance… is it something to do with the Watchers? It doesn't ring a bell."
"I think it was the predecessor group to Panopticon," Jamelia says softly, bringing her legs up and resting her chin on her knees. She bites her lip. "I think I was a member of it," she says reluctantly.
John swallows, and he shifts slightly, making sure he can get his hand to a pocket and get a gun. He's heard some things about Panopticon since he got back - things beyond what he got from the issues this amalgam had with it. It was set up in 1995, after his time, but… "I heard a bunch of rumours about elite internal security groups in the NWO." he says warily.
He isn't going to admit to anything. When you're like him, doing quite a lot of things which aren't exactly Union orthodoxy, being in a room with an ex-member of the secret police is not a good position to be. Even if you've been in the same room as her multiple times, because… his mind whirls, trying to reinterpret past events. How many of her constant actions to try to bring people back into the fold were her just following orders? Not a softer side at all?
She shakes her head. "Not the Order. Not just the Order. It… it was all the Conventions. Us, the Syndics, Iterators, Progenitors and Void Engineers alike. Panopticon was more open, but I… I think Vigilance was totally hidden. Secret police. Cover operations. False identities." She pauses. "Pretending to be Traditionalists to murder inconvenient Technocrats. All on Control's orders. Directly on Control's orders. Making them into martyrs who could be used to further the war, rather than people who might get in the way. Or embarrass high-ranking members." She laughs bitterly. "And now I'm the kind of person they used to send someone just like me after."
Kessler says nothing, and lets her talk. Pretty much anything he says might incriminate him. This doesn't entirely surprise him, though. He'd had a long time to think when he'd been stuck in space, and he'd seen enough things to find it entirely believable that the Union would dispose of people and blame "unfortunate accidents" or "enemy action." It had nearly happened with Piero in Moscow. Something about his posture and his confusion about why she seems uncertain seems to creep through, though, because she answers his unspoken question.
"I… I don't know what I did back then. I don't remember much of it," Jamelia says, hugging her knees. "I don't know what of my memories of the 'Shrikes are real, and how much of them are covered-up Vigilance operations. I have a few patches that I'm willing to accept are probably real, but the rest? I don't know how many of them are lies. Or truths devoid of context made to reshape me. I remember hunting down rogue Unionists as part of the 'Shrikes, but were they really rogue or had Control just decided they needed to be disposed of and so declared them rogue?"
She looks… vulnerable. Tiny. There's something almost childish about her posture. Kessler wonders how much she's playing him - and realizes that there's a bit of him which hopes that she's still in control and it's all just a ploy, because it's more reassuring to think that it's all part of a pre-planned manipulation.
"Slow down," he says, shifting, keeping his hands close to his pockets. "I don't follow. What do you remember? What don't you remember?" He doesn't trust this side of Jamelia Belltower and he doesn't get what she's playing at. If she's playing at all. And wouldn't that be worse? Director Belltower was a pillar of machinelike certainty in this strange world. If she's uncertain-something is going deeply, deeply wrong.
"I don't know. I don't know what I do remember and I don't remember. Just fragments. Bits and pieces creeping through the false memories." She looks up at him, and there's a look in her eyes which suggests she's in pain. "I think I've been Enlightened since I was 21, not since I was 27. I… I think I was the protege of… of a very senior Man in White. One of his pet projects. Trying to take someone who… who stumbled onto the Union on their own and turn them into the perfect Operative. Only using training. No gene mods or implants. Someone who could walk into any bit of the world and carry out their mission without any reliance on advanced technology." Jamelia looks at Kessler again, eyes seeking something like trust.
He keeps his expression neutral. She seems to accept that as enough, and continues.
"I don't know what I was doing in those missing years, but… but I know I was in Vigilance for some of them. Since '77 at least. And I was also in HELMETSHRIKE at that point. I have memories telling me that, even though I also have memories which tell me I only joined the 'Shrikes in '79." She looks away. "Everything before '84 is suspicious. More so than usual for an Operative."
John frowns. There's one thing he has to ask, as he leans forwards, clutching his hip flask in both hands. "Were you… on the other side?" The last thing he needs is for his boss to remember that she was once a heart-ripping Verbena witch or a free-love Ecstatic hippy and start backsliding. It'd be bad for the entire group and it'd be especially bad for him, he thinks over the sound of sirens wailing outside.
Jamelia swallows. "I don't think so," she says. "I don't know, but… I don't think so. No, I… I think the reason it happened is that… that I fucked up. Big time." She trails off. Falls silent.
Kessler waits for her. Very few men can wait like he can. When you've hidden from cyberdragons in plain sight - because the dumb beasts can only see motion - you know all about biding your time.
And in some ways he isn't entirely surprised by this. There was always something a little too hardworking, a little too devoted to her job, a little too professional to be entirely natural. Iteration X did it, and the NWO were plenty capable of it. So why wouldn't the spooks do it to make broken tools useful? Except... well, the ones Iteration X converted, most of them were cripples. Brain damaged, often just badly enough so they still remembered what they've lost. Sometimes people who hurt others because voices in their head told them to or because they couldn't control their emotions and were given a pardon in exchange for certain experimental medical procedures. Kessler remembers the cybertechs who worked in the HITMark conversion programs. They were proud of their work. The people they fixed-well, they'd pay the costs in blood, but it was a second chance. It was the one bit of good in a questionable program, enough that he's still sad that they stopped it after the Reckoning.
"I don't know what to tell you," she says in a tiny voice. "You probably won't trust me after I say this." She looks up, her fists screwed into fists. "You might want to shoot me," she says. "This is one of the hardest things I've ever had to say and I'm not even sure why I'm telling you this except, of course, I know why I'm telling you this. I'm telling you this because Panopticon will know - or be able to find out. And because… because… I trusted the wrong person back then and I hope you're the right one now."
That's never a good way for a sentence to start. "I'm not liking the way this is going," Kessler says. Internally, he checks that his muscles are warmed and ready for explosive force.
"I don't like it either. I've run the odds and there's a thirty-ish percent chance that you're going to try to kill me when I say this," she says in a tone which sounds much more like the normal Director Belltower. She swallowed. "I trusted the wrong person. I fell for one of my teammates."
"That's normal, though." Kessler shakes his head. Yes, he could see how that might be a problem in this kind of black-ops business. He remembers the regs from his own days doing similar things, and Iteration X emotionally neutered anyone who engaged in a romance with a teammate. And also docked them six months pay and put a black mark in their file. "People fall for people close to them all the time, even when they shouldn't. Especially when you've got the most stressful job in the world."
"No, you didn't let me finish," she says reluctantly. It's clear that she doesn't want to talk about it, but feels that she has to. "I fell for him - and then at some point, he Fell. He became Nephandi. And… he tried to drag me down into one… one of their places. I don't know what happened there really. I remember being dragged there by my hair after… after he'd attacked me from behind, but I don't know if that's what happened really." There's a bleak, hollow look in her eyes. "I remember them stopping him. Killing him. I don't know what really happened, but I know I had a breakdown after it happened. Completely non-functional. Burned out. Went AWOL, and… I think I might have tried to kill myself. I don't know."
John Kessler isn't moving. His eyes are focussed on her hands. If she moves in any threatening way, if she goes for her gun - which he just noticed she isn't wearing and that she must have left it in the bedroom - he'll shoot and damn the consequences. "So you fucked up big time and they smacked you for it. You're lucky, most people in that position would have been shot."
"No, that's the thing," she says, resting her head on her knees, not looking at him. "I… I think I volunteered. To forget it all. If it was a punishment, it was one I asked for. I've only started putting things together recently. I think… I think something that happened in Moscow broke one of the blocks that was there to stop me looking into it. INVISIBLE BEAR was always there, pushing me away from things I shouldn't know. And now it's gone."
"Why now. Why me?" Kessler asks with all the emotion of a HITMark, and all the veiled menace.
Jamelia smiles at him sadly. "Because who else would understand?" she says. "The others are all too young and were never involved in the black-ops murdering people for the Union like we were. And I'm fairly sure your Conditioning has atrophied to nearly nothing, so I was gambling you wouldn't have a switch put in you to shoot me if I started talking about Vigilance." She shakes her head. "Maybe I just needed someone to talk to. Maybe I've spent forty years lying and I'm afraid we're about to go up against someone who knows things about me even I don't know, so I wanted to make sure someone who might have my back knows most of what he might use against me."
"You're not telling me everything," Kessler says.
"I don't know everything - and yes, there are things I'm not telling you. Some of them because I don't think I can trust them as actually having happened. Other bits, because I don't know what they mean yet." She sighs.
"What now?"
Jamelia stares at him, a hint of moisture around her eyes. "Now's the bit where you decide whether to shoot me," she says simply.
Kessler thinks through the possibilities at lightspeed, the room silent except for her breathing. Nephandi? He discards the thought after a moment; if Jamelia was some sort of undercover Nephandi, all she'd had to do was try slightly less hard to get killed in Moscow, and the entire world would've burned. Was she an imposter? Unlikely; someone faking the Director would try to fit seamlessly into her previous life, instead of upending it with such an obvious change-of-pace like this. Was it a gesture of trust? John barely suppressed a laugh at the thought of an NWO agent actually trusting someone.
Was she subverted by Control in the past? Most definitely. Was she still subverted by them? Well...Moscow. He didn't have anything concrete, just a spirit claiming to represent Control, (and he'd sawed the body it was possessing in half with his Thunderhead, so good luck interrogating the corpse) and of course the invasion of giant robots and subversion of Union assets and all that jazz. He had a good idea about what happened to folks stuck out in the Black for too long without a way to phone home, and with over a decade out there, he could only imagine what Control had gotten up to in the meantime. Yet the Director had fought the EDE incursion, gotten within inches of losing her life to seal it, and he had no doubt that whoever had been able to subvert entire armies of HITMarks would've turned those same skills on whatever little-C controls or killswitches she still had buried.
"I'm noticing a distinct lack of bullets or words from you, Mr. Kessler. Should I be worried?" she asks, with a lilt in her voice.
"Shaddup," he responds brusquely. He has to assume she's smarter than him, that she's looked through the ramifications and seen the possibilities. If the Director was still subverted, if that Man in White had gotten back into her head, could he be risking his subverted asset to try and bring in Kessler as a deluded ally? Or was she serving the same ideals but different masters; did he have to worry about her noticing his habit of talking to the spirits in his guns...or the Reality Deviants he called family?
Fuckin' noo-whoos, this is why no one likes you people. John could really use a chance to shoot something right now. Ideally it'd be something that deserved it, and really ideally it'd shoot back too, but right now he'll take what he can get.
Too many variables. Too many possibilities. Too many wheels within wheels, plots reaching back decades and plans he can barely comprehend, let alone understand. John's splashed around in the kiddie pool of conspiracies before, but the tiny woman in the hijab has just pulled back the curtain and now he's looking at the goddamned Pacific Ocean. He doesn't know how to sail those kinds of waters without getting sunk, and he can't swim to save his life. (literally and figuratively) When your boss might have actually been part of Panopticon-that-was, you're definitely in need of some metaphorical dry land to stand on.
John Kessler reaches out, and punches Director Jamelia Belltower.
That, he understands just fine.
He's pulled the punch, of course, so the short woman is 'only' knocked backwards into the couch, blood flying from her nose. John stands up and towers over her as she gasps in shock. "That's for puttin' this all on me," he growls.
He sees blood. That's a good sign; spirits don't bleed. But as she's knocked silly, in those moments where she isn't sure whether he's about to slap her or kill her, he sees something else: acceptance. Not the blank stare of a drone being abandoned by its controllers, not the shock of a master plan gone awry, just the calm face of a tired old woman ready to meet her fate. He can work with that.
The tired old man grabs his flask of brandy and hands it to her. "An' that's for helpin' you through it." Kessler drops back on the couch, which groans and finally gives way in a shower of fluff and splinters, and points a finger at her. "Tell me what you know - Vigilance, Panopticon, your past, everything. Don't leave a thing out." Trust? He never trusted Jamelia Belltower in the first place, not with anything important. He still doesn't, if he's being honest with himself. But he can listen to the stories of a broken-down black-ops agent, and keep her secrets safe. He - no, the world - owes her that much.
"You do know I don't drink, right?" Jamelia says through a mouthful of loose teeth. "But thanks. For not killing me."
"It was pretty tempting for a while." Kessler admits. "But no. Not for this."
**********************************************************************************************************************
Nicaragua
She thinks this is the right place. She's sure that her memories are leading her here, so sure that she's left Rose in the car to wait because she doesn't want Rose to know what she did here. Whatever she did. If she did something. Her psychic powers are telling her that some great tragedy happened here, something that means there are RNEs here, suppressed by military-grade phase space stabilizers. RNEs that look like they were the victims of violence, whispering words she can't quite hear. But she understands.
Murderer.
Killer.
Psychopath.
What did we do to deserve this?
We were simple farmers! We did nothing wrong!
Why do you walk again and we do not?
But yet... the village here looks like it was never touched. In fact, it's doing quite well now, selling coffee blends to fair-trade buyers and giving out tours to coffee plantations. A lynchpin of international business, with international investment. It's become relatively wealthy now, with no real crime and plenty of participation in Nicaragua's burgeoning political scene. Pro-international business, pro-human rights, pro-multiethnic secular democracy. A perfect little jewel of the System.
"Too goddamn perfect." Kessler says, eyes hidden behind his wide-brimmed hat. "Like someone wanted to cover somethin' up." He's here because he has to be. She has to demonstrate that she trusts him-insofar as she can trust. He can't see anything here, which makes her moderately suspicious. If he could he'd be focusing on the screaming wraiths, sealed off from the world by a barrier none can cross.
She tries to look at what's happened in the past but-it's been scrubbed clean. There are no clues here. It's a bustling little tourist trap now with smiling foreigners. It's too unlike- unlike what she remembers.
There is no pain, but there is something cold and dark. She knows she's dying. Starling is holding her hand but the injury is too drastic and she's gotten unlucky just once and Squid can't get to her in time and she knows it. Why did it have to be her and not Dyne? Why did she have to check that house and find-some lucky man with an old rifle who was just a little luckier than he should have been? They were supposed to be hunting Reality Deviants, and-well, irony of ironies it didn't take a Reality Deviant to end her life. Just one old soldier with an equally old AK-47. He's joined her, of course, because Starling was behind her and shot the man in front of his grandchildren.
It was entirely deliberate. Disarmed, then shot repeatedly with shredder rounds. Cruel, almost. He didn't need to kill him. Without surprise he would have been harmless. Without phenomenal good luck his shot would have been stopped by the ballistic armor they both wore. But he did it anyways.
"VIGILANCE 7-Actual, we see you have a man down. Permission to engage?" The voice is emotionless, clipped, like a White Tower unit.
"Engage at will. We no longer have sufficient personnel to accomplish the mission. Eliminate all threats." Starling's voice is angry.
"James, don't do this you're not thinking straight."
"This is my fault."
"And doing this won't make it right."
"Maybe. But it's necessary."
"She's changed you, man. And not for the better. She's turned you into a fuckin' killer." Wolf says. "Stop thinking with your dick for ten seconds and realize that we're the good guys and this isn't what the good guys do."
"Are we really?" Starling laughs hysterically. "Are we? Look at us! Look at what we're doing! Look at what we've been doing! Maybe we should just face it."
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Be Jamelia Belltower:
Choose the lead you want to follow up on as Jamelia Belltower.
[ ] (2.0x) Prowling Wolf
[ ] (1.5x) Jamelia's Mind
[ ] (1.0x) Nicaragua
[ ] (0.5x) The General
[ ] Write-in
Does Jamelia Want To Tell Serafina About Her Issues:
[ ] Now?
[ ] Later?
She probably can't punch you so there's that.
