JB CII: Consequences
He's done briefings before, but never like this. Here, he's not wearing an exosuit, he's not addressing heavily armed cyborg soldiers who could bend steel girders and kick down concrete walls, and the stakes are even higher than what he's used to. He's assaulted cultists trying to summon eldritch horrors from beyond reality, he's charged into subspace pockets full of hostile aliens, he's invaded an alien battleship to sabotage its reactor core before it could destroy New York-and now his responsibility is far beyond that.
"You called for us. What's going on?" Serafina asks, as she and Donald file into the empty cabin. He knows from Jamelia's notes that the enemy is ex-Technocratic and made of spirits-sorry,
EDEs, so he's not going to brief them in the Construct. He can sweep the place for most bugs, but the more exotic stuff he can't deal with. Whereas here, he can bribe a Watchdog with a little bit of Prime Energy and the enemy's agents will find it difficult to get in, without wi-fi, without radio or anything to intercept. In the middle of nowhere with absolutely nothing but wilderness surrounding him. To fight an enemy which is the worst excesses of the Technocracy, he has to think like a Traditions mage. It amuses him. Maybe next he'll be covering himself in mud and using a bow and arrow to fight an invisible alien hunter with a plasma cannon.
"And more importantly, why exactly are we here, John?" Donald asks, sitting down on the wooden chair. Serafina looks for another seat, and finally seats herself on the bed. "You said it was pretty important, so you drove us to this cabin in the middle of the woods for no reason in an old clunker. What's going on?"
"Thank you for being here." Kessler says, somberly. "You'll notice Director Belltower isn't here."
"Yes, she hasn't returned from Nicaragua yet, has she?" Serafina asks automatically, her face and tone unreadable.
"There was an assassination attempt that was almost successful. I've stashed her body in one of her safehouses here. It should keep them from realizing they were unsuccessful if we move quickly." Kessler drops the bombshell. He's thought it over, and he's not great at easing people into it. So he might as well drop the bomb now.
"What." Donald says. "They almost succeeded in killing
her?" He looks horrified. Hell, he should be horrified.
"That's terrible. Who did it?" Serafina asks, concerned. Her expression is slightly vengeful. She wants the director back, but she also wants some level of revenge. Kessler wonders if she would if she knew who-or what-Belltower was, but he's not going to broach that yet. Maybe later. Maybe when they find the director again and he can hit her again for putting all of this shit on his shoulders because she was a paranoid old woman who didn't trust anyone who hadn't been vetted a few dozen times.
"I suspect you already know about this... thing in space she called 'Threat Null,' like the Void Engineers did. I've fought 'rogue Technocratic machinery and assets' and this puts the picture together very, very nicely." He also knows that if the Void Engineers didn't think he was a dumb outcast who couldn't understand anything past 1992, they wouldn't have let him know even
that. They probably let him go, figuring that nobody would believe the dumb muscle who didn't understand what a 'cell phone' was and refused to upgrade to modern cybernetics. Useful. "Long story short, we are probably fighting the ghosts, figurative and literal, of the Technocracy in 1999. She thought you'd know what was going on, Donald, and I figured I'd need Sera's help here keeping her body working so we can get her back."
"Get... her... back?" Donald asks as he leans back in a wooden rocking chair, not getting it. Or maybe pretending to not get it. Something about the Syndic makes Kessler think he just wants it to be spelled out, so he has a valid ass-covering excuse.
"Some sort of psychic superweapon's thrown her mind into subspace. Or something." Kessler says. "Look, I'm not a nu-who psychic. I only know what I know, and I know that her mind is floating somewhere out in space and we can get it back. Or that's how she explained it to me with her notes." It took him the entire flight back to LA trying to figure out a sufficiently ass-covering excuse for what went on. He can't exactly tell them it was an astral knife, could he? That'd put suspicion on him, and suspicion on director Belltower. And it wouldn't do to have her rescued and mindwiped in the same day.
Donald nods, while Serafina still looks confused. So Kessler was right, he was pretending to not get it. Useful. "She wrote down notes?" Serafina asks.
"She did. Stuff about what she was fighting, what
we were fighting in Moscow, how they'd try to assassinate her, and about how there's a clone of her running around loyal to Threat Null. She wants us to bring her back. She trusted us to." Kessler says. And doesn't that tell him a lot about how she's in deep shit, when a crotchety old NWO operative is
trusting people? "I can explain most of it."
"Please do." Serafina says, face neutral at the start. What he says confirms everything she's figured out. It confirms everything the I-50-B31 construct had said. It confirms everything she suspected from Henriette's memories. And she can barely keep the emotions contained when Kessler finishes telling them what Jamelia has pieced together from everything.
"So Lieutant Rajesh was useful in the end after all." Donald muses. "He gave us the first hints and we followed the breadcrumbs. So what do you want to do?"
"We're going to go into space, get her back, and kick the asses of everyone who disagrees with us." Kessler whispers, in a low, menacing tone. "Are you in?"
"Yes." Serafina says. "Although I'm not sure how I can help."
"Of course." Donald says. "I'm her henchman, after all."
"Good. I'm going to need to make sure her body is in a perfectly preserved state. The next thing we're going to need is a way to get into the Void." Kessler says. This, military planning, he can do. "We'll need weapons, shielding, a way to survive in the Void, and we'll need soldiers. Soldiers that
aren't vulnerable to having their control codes hacked the way they were in Moscow."
"I'll see if I can get something." Donald says, cradling his chin with a hand as he thinks. "Maybe Henriette can help with the research. And the interns, too. How much can I tell others?"
"As little as they're going to need to know. We don't want anyone ratting us out. And we'll need someone to make sure Director Belltower isn't actually assassinated in the meantime, just in case they figure out they haven't finished the job."
"Problem." Donald sighs. "If we're moving resources like this, someone is going to ask why. We're going to need friends to cover for us. And a reason."
"That's your job to figure out." Kessler says. "I'm not the businessman."
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The room smells sterile and cold. The bleeping of the machinery and the sound of quiet breathing is the only noise present. It's cramped, too, although most of that is due to the presence of John Kessler, who has the remarkable capacity to make any room he stands in feel smaller than it is.
Serafina sighs sadly, and sticks her hands in the pockets of her labcoat. "I don't know what to say," she says, looking down from her tablet. "There's no physical trauma. None whatsoever. But entire swathes of her brain are... frozen. That's the only word I can use to describe it, and it's entirely metaphorical. It's... it's like she's a HITMark that's been put on standby. All higher functionality disabled, but basic maintenance routines are still running" Serafina pauses. "... is she a fully organic HITMark? That would explain certain things. It's not in her medical records but... I wonder if that's what INVISIBLE BEAR was a cover story for."
Kessler sighs, and massages his eyes. "No," he says, voice quiet and soft. Drawing on his UDEI, he recites the note Director Belltower left to the letter. "That's what she left me in a note she was writing when I found her."
"So an astral knife is some kind of RD memetic kill weapon," Serafina says, mostly to herself. "Peculiar. Very peculiar. I wonder what the vector was. Possibly some kind of EDE or RNE, as she says - but how could it have this effect? I'll need to check the literature... and cover my trail when I'm doing it. This kind of thing will only be in dedicated research libraries, and... cover stories, cover stories, cover stories..."
Inwardly, Kessler winces. A Progenitor - and one with no expertise in the dimensional sciences - doesn't have the mental tools to comprehend what's happened. She's like how he used to be, only thinking of the brain in materialistic terms. In fact, she's worse, because he just accepted what the geeks told him, while she has all her training telling her you can't separate the mind from the body because the mind is just a product of biological processes. He can trust Serafina to keep the biological processes running, but... well. No, he has to try to explain things to her. If he doesn't, she might try to 'restart the biological processes' and in the process create a brand new mind in Jamelia's body, so she has nowhere to go home to.
"That's not how it works." Kessler says. "It's her mind being severed from her body."
"That's not possible." Serafina protests. "I've never heard of it."
"The Void Engineers call the space made by the effects of thought on the universe Ensemble Space. It's where minds are rooted in their theories."
"Tegmark theory isn't universally accepted, or very well liked." Serafina says. "I learned it in Damien just because they insisted we do."
"You're going to have to accept that the RD weapon works via Tegmark theory." Kessler says, sighing. He's read enough Void Engineer cosmology to formalize the terms he uses. It was a necessity to keep himself from slipping up, but the Void Engineers were always just a little different from the other Conventions. "It's Reality Deviant bullshit, they can do weird stuff like that. That's why they're Reality Deviants, right? If it was all explainable and valid we wouldn't have any trouble with them."
"Fine. I'll leave it to you to fix that part, as a field agent." She doesn't look convinced, but she looks convinced
enough. And like any good field agent, John Kessler is very acutely aware of just how useful "good enough" can be.
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Somewhere,
Somewhen
Once upon a time...
... a woman opens her eyes.
"Time," she says to herself, almost sadly. "Is it time again so soon?"
The green glow of the shielded ununpentium reactor which runs through this hollow tubular space illuminates her face from the front, while the scintillating blue-purple veils of light seen through the windows light her back. Her hair fans around her in this null-g environment, forming a halo. Microthrusters flare as she orients herself and burns, aiming for the rotating walls.
She lands among trees, the rotational gravity taking her. She picks herself up, and adjusts the set of her clothing. Her dress code is a long way from uniform, but she quit... well, some time ago. The amount of time is quite variable, even within her personal timeline. She sticks her hands in the pockets of her tan knee-length coat, and shifts the sit of her old NASA rucksack.
The house which is her destination is some distance away, but she needs the walk. She's micro-g adapted, but sometimes she misses gravity - and this might not be strictly it, but it's the next best thing. Along the way, she plucks a genengineered apple from an orchard and eats it. It helps quench the nausea. Anchor her to the now, at least for a short while.
The green-lit steel bulk of the house looms over her, as she gets closer. She admits that most people would call it 'the wreckage of the IXV 55-0022', not a house, but it's where she keeps some of her personal belongings. It also helps that it's somewhere not lit by ununpentium fission in the central cylinder. She gets sick of the green glow. She keeps on meaning to repair some of the lights which used to light this place, but, well...
... there's never enough time. Not with her self-appointed duties.
But no. When she gets to the house and clambers her way through the plasma-punctured hull, climbing ladders and shimmying under crushed blast doors, she gets to the control room and finds that all the Relays which bear her name are apparently in full operation. They're working fine.
Why does she exist right now, then? Jamelia Belltower. It's clear. She's important. The focal point. Remove her, and Threat Null wins. How convenient.
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Mystery! Ominousness! Danger! Where has Jamelia Belltower gone? Who is this mysterious woman? Find out next time!
Becoming Space Cadets:
So, you're going to have to take a space ship into space. Or an equivalent. The question is,
how?
[ ] (1.2x) "Borrow" a mundane vehicle, like one of those Buran orbiters, and upengine and upgun it. This will require Henriette's help, as well as a lot of skilled and unskilled labor, but hell, you can lie to them about what it's for and execute the Bobs, right?
[ ] (Leads to modified vote) Tell Henriette and get her to do research on what you might be able to acquire.
[ ] (-0.4x) And get the interns to help as well.
[ ] Go to the Void Engineers. Please think of a rationale for doing this, because you'll need one.
[ ] The Etherites have etherships. You could borrow one of them, if you don't mind consorting with Reality Deviants.
[ ] (0.6x) Peyote-driven strange vision quests, go! Disclaimer: Peyote does not normally give you enough firepower to blow up Threat Null battlecruisers.
Cover-Ups:
Donald is going to have to find an excuse to make sure nobody looks too hard. This is going to be... entertaining.
[ ] Get some actual senior cover, like Jamelia's boss, to help you with that.
[ ] She's just off on a business trip.
[ ] It's a vacation, obviously.
[ ] You know, it turns out that Serafina has the ability to look just like Jamelia if she has to.
[ ] (+0.2x) or make someone else look just like Jamelia.
[ ] Write-in
