Da Boyz
The Cutest Apocalypse.
It certainly plays into what MJ12 said about Mind effects.
Panopticon: A Game of Posthumans, Perniciousness, Paranoia, Politics, and Plasmaguns
Emy
Artificial Defender
You might be underestimating just how dangerous it is to let Serafina live, vs. executing her. If we kill Serafina, we have to deal with the fallout among our team, including probably liquidating Rose. That sucks. If we let Serafina live, we're basically bringing someone (who isn't an experienced conspirator like Jamelia or Donald) in on information that has the potential to tear the Technocracy apart, hence ending the world as we know it. Now that's crazy. This info is Dangerous with a capital D.
(I'm in favor of letting her live, naturally. I'm just explaining why I think that killing someone as a damage control reflex is sensible for her position. Mind or entropy tricks against us could've led to this outcome too, but I think that the lack of heavily weighted votes in most other circumstances indicates that if we have been subverted, it's in a minor way.)
(I'm in favor of letting her live, naturally. I'm just explaining why I think that killing someone as a damage control reflex is sensible for her position. Mind or entropy tricks against us could've led to this outcome too, but I think that the lack of heavily weighted votes in most other circumstances indicates that if we have been subverted, it's in a minor way.)
Not necessarily. We know OOC that there's a grand over-arching plot, and Jamelia probably suspects it, but for all Serafina knows some Void Engineer is covering up a cock-up or something small scale but very embarrassing, like a favoured protégé of someone powerful and sensitive turning nephandus or just attempting to defect with a lot of stuff.
After all, we just fought some people with Technocrat gear. I think that's important in what we say to her.
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Da Boyz
The Cutest Apocalypse.
Well from our perspective it is, but we have meta knowledge is there anything we know IC that would cause us to freak out so heavily about Serafina thinking it is rogue branch of the Technocracy?
[X] Do Not Execute, Convince Her To Keep Quiet?
-[X] "So. We have someone in the Void Engineers doing a pathetic hackjob using Progenitor equipment on an obviously traumatic encounter in what I'll assume is the Horizon. I've performed coverups myself, no few involving the aftermath of Nephandus adversaries, and sometimes it's better for people not to remember who fell to that kind of corruption. Or how they fell. I do not, for example, plan to tell Rose the civilians we just slaughtered likely had no Nephandic taint, they were simply innocent tools.
"Frankly? This coverup is not so unusual. Nor, although it is infuriating, is it really unusual for an incompetent to damage a promising young Enlightened mind in the aftermath of an encounter like that. We are not all blessed with the ability to perform field surgery flawlessly. Whoever performed that operation may have bungled it and hurt Henriette terribly, but they decided to keep her alive rather than perform what some people would call a total quarantine.
"As for the recquisitions you're talking about... Well, we all know about them. But we're talking about an entire Convention there, Dr. Rosario. And, not to put too fine a point on it, the most powerful Convention in purely military terms. Off the record, I can tell you that the NWO also has some concerns about what the hell the Void Engineers are doing. But it would be very foolish to make any accusations without indisputable evidence. This isn't even close to that. All we know is former assets were compromised."
-[X] "So. We have someone in the Void Engineers doing a pathetic hackjob using Progenitor equipment on an obviously traumatic encounter in what I'll assume is the Horizon. I've performed coverups myself, no few involving the aftermath of Nephandus adversaries, and sometimes it's better for people not to remember who fell to that kind of corruption. Or how they fell. I do not, for example, plan to tell Rose the civilians we just slaughtered likely had no Nephandic taint, they were simply innocent tools.
"Frankly? This coverup is not so unusual. Nor, although it is infuriating, is it really unusual for an incompetent to damage a promising young Enlightened mind in the aftermath of an encounter like that. We are not all blessed with the ability to perform field surgery flawlessly. Whoever performed that operation may have bungled it and hurt Henriette terribly, but they decided to keep her alive rather than perform what some people would call a total quarantine.
"As for the recquisitions you're talking about... Well, we all know about them. But we're talking about an entire Convention there, Dr. Rosario. And, not to put too fine a point on it, the most powerful Convention in purely military terms. Off the record, I can tell you that the NWO also has some concerns about what the hell the Void Engineers are doing. But it would be very foolish to make any accusations without indisputable evidence. This isn't even close to that. All we know is former assets were compromised."
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So. We want Serafina to keep her mouth shut about this, because it's one hell of a landmine. Furthermore, it's a landmine that she's predisposed to setting off - we brought her in because of her contacts with the Progenitors, but that means she's got a bunch of people she trusts and might talk to about this, some of whom she undoubtedly shouldn't because she's not a veteran spy. (Note: These same people will be asking why we felt the need to kill her. Not nicely, either. We really, really would prefer to get her to keep her mouth shut, because we really don't want to have to explain why we killed her.)
So. We want to get her to keep quiet, and preferably in a way that doesn't involve telling her everything - not only is telling her everything going against Jamelia's vice, and thus harder to pull off, it also puts a whole lot of sensitive information in the hands of someone who is unprepared to properly secure it.
What leverage do we have to accomplish this?
Thought one: She trusts Jamelia to be both an experienced veteran spy and to be loyal to the Technocracy. That's ... not going to be enough to get her to shut up entirely just on our say-so, but it might give us enough push to hold her hand while we show her how to investigate securely on her own - and by the time she's good enough to figure out what we haven't been telling her, she'll know enough so that she'll be able to know the truth without spilling it.
Thought two: Investigating dangerous information might not be something that Serafina is willing to back off of to protect her own life. Is she willing to risk Rose's, though? If someone was unhappy about what Serafina just found out, they're not necessarily going to attack directly...
We might have other options as well, though I'm not too sure how well a seduction attempt would go. We're unlikely to be the first to have tried.
Edit: Oh! Thought three - something that Serafina could easily miss and that Jamelia won't have. If Henriette knew something the VEs didn't want getting out, they could easily have killed her. They didn't - they tried to memory-wipe her instead. That implies certain things, given that her death wouldn't have been unusual enough to note, under the circumstances.
So. We want to get her to keep quiet, and preferably in a way that doesn't involve telling her everything - not only is telling her everything going against Jamelia's vice, and thus harder to pull off, it also puts a whole lot of sensitive information in the hands of someone who is unprepared to properly secure it.
What leverage do we have to accomplish this?
Thought one: She trusts Jamelia to be both an experienced veteran spy and to be loyal to the Technocracy. That's ... not going to be enough to get her to shut up entirely just on our say-so, but it might give us enough push to hold her hand while we show her how to investigate securely on her own - and by the time she's good enough to figure out what we haven't been telling her, she'll know enough so that she'll be able to know the truth without spilling it.
Thought two: Investigating dangerous information might not be something that Serafina is willing to back off of to protect her own life. Is she willing to risk Rose's, though? If someone was unhappy about what Serafina just found out, they're not necessarily going to attack directly...
We might have other options as well, though I'm not too sure how well a seduction attempt would go. We're unlikely to be the first to have tried.
Edit: Oh! Thought three - something that Serafina could easily miss and that Jamelia won't have. If Henriette knew something the VEs didn't want getting out, they could easily have killed her. They didn't - they tried to memory-wipe her instead. That implies certain things, given that her death wouldn't have been unusual enough to note, under the circumstances.
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Bursting Eagerness Soul
Threadwalking Rating Machine
- Location
- Wisconsin
Let's try to fuse these together. Dead Serafina is a very bad thing, but a Serafina with some more info and enough training in all the spy-game stuff to keep quiet while we investigate is a much more useful asset.
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Grin_Reaper
Shadow Cabal Space Pirate
- Location
- Space Battleship Pennsylvania
[X] H/Aug Exoskeleton
[X] Barnes-Sykes Combat Knife
- [X]Trade in HITMarks in exchange for...
[X] Spectre Limousine + Armament/Gear Kits
[X] Imperator Tailoring Executive Reserve Power Suit
[X] Barnes-Sykes Combat Knife
- [X]Trade in HITMarks in exchange for...
[X] Spectre Limousine + Armament/Gear Kits
[X] Imperator Tailoring Executive Reserve Power Suit
FunkyEntropy
Occasionally insightful, possibly grumpy
- Location
- Los Angeles
[ ] Do Not Execute, Convince Her To Keep Quiet? (You better have a write-in).
Jamelia has most of the puzzle pieces necessary to figure things out:
-If the VE were actually acting against the Union, they would have eliminated Henriette instead of doing the psychosurgery-equivalent to wrapping her mind in duct tape. Egro the VE is fighting against EDEs camouflaged as 90s-era Technocracy.
-Supporting evidence for this theory is Henriette and Kessler just ran into an EDE disguised as a Technocrat, who had legit-but-out-of-date codes from Control. Odds of those codes being 90s-era codes? Suckers bet.
-Panopticon acts like 90s-era Technocracy. Claims to have gotten valid codes from Control? Odds of those codes being 90s-era codes? Again, suckers bet.
-Jamelia just ran into a memetic hazard that wanted her to join Panopticon.
-Serafina just uncovered more evidence that either there are EDE's masquerading as Union forces or that the Union has been infiltrated by EDEs, and Jamelias first impulse is to eliminate her? Yeah, sounds like another memetic hazard trying to cover the EDEs tracks.
Jamelia has most of the puzzle pieces necessary to figure things out:
-If the VE were actually acting against the Union, they would have eliminated Henriette instead of doing the psychosurgery-equivalent to wrapping her mind in duct tape. Egro the VE is fighting against EDEs camouflaged as 90s-era Technocracy.
-Supporting evidence for this theory is Henriette and Kessler just ran into an EDE disguised as a Technocrat, who had legit-but-out-of-date codes from Control. Odds of those codes being 90s-era codes? Suckers bet.
-Panopticon acts like 90s-era Technocracy. Claims to have gotten valid codes from Control? Odds of those codes being 90s-era codes? Again, suckers bet.
-Jamelia just ran into a memetic hazard that wanted her to join Panopticon.
-Serafina just uncovered more evidence that either there are EDE's masquerading as Union forces or that the Union has been infiltrated by EDEs, and Jamelias first impulse is to eliminate her? Yeah, sounds like another memetic hazard trying to cover the EDEs tracks.
We can't tell Serafina any of this though. We probably need to sell her on the concept that Henrietta saw something that should not be seen and someone, with either self-serving but not necessarily hostile or benign motives covered it up. All the Conventions prefer to make sure that their dirty laundry isn't washed in public, and if the VEs squashed a group of Nephandi infiltrators then they wouldn't have wanted it publicised. It might jeopardise their resource requests if the other Conventions didn't trust them to keep it secure.
FlatlineAskari
*feline scrutiny*
- Location
- Elsewhere
- Pronouns
- Any
Maybe dumb and/or unbelievably dangerous, but - any way we can spin general release to our benefit?
Civil war is obviously a bad thing, but it looks likely, and there are much worse ways one could kick off than a leak that convincingly paints TN as ENE-subverted.
Civil war is obviously a bad thing, but it looks likely, and there are much worse ways one could kick off than a leak that convincingly paints TN as ENE-subverted.
I think the TU would get dogpiled by all the other threats our there if it showed weakness like that, and humanity would be the loser. Open warfare is undesirable for both sides.
Remember that the Rogue Council's out there, as are both kinds of vampires, the shapeshifters, and all the rest of the threat spectrum.
FunkyEntropy
Occasionally insightful, possibly grumpy
- Location
- Los Angeles
I'm tackling it from the standpoint of the impulse to shoot Serafina being part of the already encountered memetic hazard rather than a legitimate, "she knows too much and can't keep her mouth shut" decision. It's basically Jamelia putting two and two together, realizing that the EDEs have already demonstrated a capacity to use memetic hazards to cover their tracks and as such any impulse towards action that would help continue the conspiracy should be regarded with deep suspicion.
As for actually getting Serafina to keep it all a secret, that's more a matter of laying out the evidence and then pointing out that blowing the conspiracy wide open could easily result in getting them all killed without accomplishing anything. After all, Jamelia just had to suppress an impulse to kill her in order to cover up the conspiracy - how many will have that same EDE-created impulse but fail to fight it off? We don't know the extent of the conspiracy, and we shouldn't blow the lid off it unless we know for certain that we're going to steamroll the EDE infiltration.
[X] Do Not Execute, Convince Her To Keep Quiet? (You better have a write-in).
"Not one more word, Doctor Rosario." The words come out ice cold, the dead automatic level of a New World Order operative who's over twice the age she looks.
Jamelia breathes deeply. Why do things never work out how she expected? She had been planning to do this for a while, but now it's forced upon her and she isn't ready, damn it. She was going to ease Serafina into it, carefully feed her tidbits in a way that could allow an abort if she didn't seem to be receptive. She was going to start today, for fuck's sake.
Ah, well. Inshallah.
"Y-you knew?" Serafina blurts out. "B-but..."
Jamelia raises one finger to her lip. Quiet.
"Troubling," she says. "But I'm sure it's nothing." She rises, and stretches. "Now, I believe you," she scans through her emails, "ah, yes, you had your complaints about the casualty rate of loaned Progenitor assets. I suppose I might as well handle these right now, even though I have other things to do right now." She shakes her head, showing the weariness which she feels and will keep on feeling until she takes her next keeper-upper. "Come on. I need more KeepAwake, and there's some in the limo. It's more comfy in there anyway."
Together they walk down towards the garage. She can feel Serafina vibrating with nervous energy beside her. Nervous energy and rage. Jamelia keeps her hands free and her eyes sharp, looking for any sign of enlightened science use from the other woman. Her mind is churning. Any wrong move, and she will splatter Serafina's brain over the wall, and then have an 'accident' with her brain chip.
She wonders if Serafina realises her life is in just as much danger right now as it was when the Series-P had a knife pressed to her throat. She really hopes she does. If she makes the wrong step, Jamelia will shoot her.
She may have to shoot her anyway, but she's trying to manoeuvre down a very narrow path. She doesn't want to kill her. Serafina means well. She's a good person, at least by the standards of Progenitor scientists and hot-housed Union brats. Possibly by most standards, too. Certainly she's a better woman than the person who calls themselves Jamelia Belltower. She cares for Rose; Henriette too. She has a life outside the lab. She's a fairly well-balanced human being. She spends time being silly. She has hobbies.
But Jamelia has given her life to the Union and she will not let good intentions tear it apart. Not now. Not ever. If the Union falls, at least let it be through enemy action, not the blundering of a well-intentioned oversized schoolgirl.
Idly she pulls out her phone, and gives the orders for some additional cargo to be shipped between here and LA. It's something she had been meaning to do anyway, even if she just increased the amount. But now? Now it's jamming. Teleporters play merry havoc with statistical projections which don't take them into account. She can only hope that what's about to happen is lost in the statistical noise of all those things which are now in the wrong bit of the world ruining forecasts.
She's going to have to answer to the Union about this teleporter use, too, she sighs.
Climbing into the by-now quite damaged limo, she grabs a KeepAwake from the minibar. Technically that's not the normal assortment, but any place she spends time around acquires a stash of them. She clambers through the oversized interior of the car, leading Serafina to one of the inner rooms. Windowless. Self-contained. Sound insulated. And thoroughly protected against any attempt to spy on it. For perfectly legitimate reasons and innocent reasons.
Well, it was the bedroom – sorry, 'Energetic Relaxation or Sleep' Suite – after all. So perhaps not for the most innocent reasons.
Of course, Jamelia sweeps the place for bugs and deploys a white noise generator anyway. She discovers no bugs, although she does confirm from the fact that the bedsheet is made of genuine cloned leopard fur that the tastes of senior Syndics doesn't appear to have made its way past the eighties. And then takes off her jacket, and undoes her headscarf, letting it hang loose around her neck.
"Really," Serafina says flatly. "Of all the things to try to get me to shut up… well, that's only been tried a few times before."
"Did it work?" Jamelia says dryly, raising an eyebrow. "Because if it did, I should have tried it earlier."
Serafina laughs nervously, a little too high and shrill as her brain puts together how quiet things are in here. "Um. Only in the nineties. Um… you look kind of weird without the jacket or the headscarf," Serafina says, eyes going to the pistol in its shoulder holster. "I think I'd prefer th-the seduction over the shooting, if it's all right with you."
"Serafina, Serafina, Serafina," Jamelia says softly. "What am I going to do with you?"
"Not shoot me? Please?"
"Considering that you seem quite insistent on getting yourself killed, some might consider it a kindness," Jamelia says, in that same soft, almost kind tone. "With me, at least you could guarantee that it'd be quick, clean, and I would make quite sure I destroyed your brain and backup so no one would grab you and force you to tell what you knew. I can't promise that from anyone else if you go down the same line of thought and let others know about it."
"… huh?"
Jamelia nudges Serafina down onto the bed. "You'll probably want to be sitting for this," she says, standing back. "The funny thing is that you chose the oddest time to do what you just did. I was going to talk to you about certain suspicions of mine today or tomorrow, depending on how the whole museum thing went. I was going to ease you into it gently, making sure that you were ready before I went to the next stage, and I was going to stop if I wasn't sure you could handle it. Now? Now we're going to just have to bring it all out into the open between us, and we'll see if this was what you really wanted."
Serafina raises a hand like a schoolgirl. "Um… have you gone back to the seduction thing?"
"No seduction is happening," Jamelia says calmly. "And if you are inclined that way, I'm sure that cyborg ninja Adept would be up for it, and the worst you could catch from her would be a computer virus." She pauses. "Although we may need to talk about the possible use of that excuse, vis a vis how we conceal what happened in here."
"Okay, I'm lost," Serafina says bluntly. "I was just going to shout at you because someone has fucked up Henriette's head and oh did I mention she was fighting Unionists."
"Was she?" Jamelia says calmly. "She was fighting 1990s Union gear." She pauses deliberately. "So were we, today."
"Ha ha ha oh no you're not pulling that bullshit on me," Serafina says coldly. "There is a difference between some post-Soviet stuff which has fallen into the hands of… of defectors and… and everything I saw in her memories! That was high end 90s gear! Some of it was better!"
"Really? Because there are whole worlds of 90s Union gear lying around. Literally worlds," Jamelia observes. She cocks her head."I'm not the only one looking into this," she says. It is technically correct, and that is the best kind of correct. Serafina doesn't need to know that only other person doing it is Donald. Well, that she knows about. She'd be willing to bet that there are other suspicious, institutionally paranoid senior Operatives at her who are putting little threads together and finding that things don't quite add up. It's just logical. People like her have spent decades trusting no one fully, dealing with Reality Deviant plans which span decades.
What's that complaint she's heard from both Henriette and Serafina? That the Void Engineers are doing their own in-house inferior copies of what other Conventions do? Well, the Void Engineers are trying to run a conspiracy without the aid of the New World Order.
"So. Shall I start with the conclusion or the premises?" Jamelia says out loud, wondering to herself. "I think I'll start with the evidence, and see if it guides you down the same path I've been thinking. It might not. In which case, I'll be interested to hear your opinion. I'm not going to lay any precondition on your actions."
No, she's not. She's not going to ask Serafina to keep quiet about it. Serafina will either realise how huge this is and choose to keep quiet by her own free will, or she will die. There are no two ways about it.
"Let's start where you began, then," Jamelia says, her voice level. "Henriette. Participates in a joined VE/Iterator attempted raid on Autocthonia, to reclaim it. Near total casualties taken. That's enemy action. We now know they were fighting 90s Union gear. Not surprising, really; Autocthonia would be a treasure trove of high end Iteration X gear all the way up to 1999. Anyone could have moved in there and taken possession of it, as it was cut off by the Anomaly. Henriette is left with major trauma, the insistence that she killed her parents - bearing in mind that she enlightened herself young, after their loss in 1999 - and a near crippling phobia of the Computer which led her to attack other Iterators which mentioned it in front of her.
"Autocthonia," she continues. "The centre of Iteration X. The location of their Computer. Also the centre of all their AI tech. Iteration X AI tech has taken a large hit since then. The Progenitors have been using more cultured life to fill the gap, but it isn't the same. And then there's the Void Engineers. They've gone and started up a whole entirely in house programme of 'AIs'."
"AIs," Serafina grumbles. "Don't make me laugh. I talked to that girl and she was no more an AI than an eighties-tech FAÇADE clone. Less, really. FAÇADE clones are programmed on top of that. She was one of the most… most fucking human FAÇADE clones I've ever seen. I worked out they were using past extrapolation – probably on a pre-existing enlightened scientist – because it's similar to some of what we used in EXEMPLAR. Clearly Do's handiwork and…" Serafina trails off. "That bitch," she hisses, with surprising venom. "She was the one who did that to Henriette. Or, at the very least, devised the process. Of course. No one would question them having access to FAÇADE mindtape. They can requisition it above board. After all, everyone needs to programme Bobs, right? And she was always brilliant at… shoestring solutions. It sometimes got her in trouble."
"Ah. I may need to ask you some questions about that later. But Iteration X also concerns me. Look at how they've changed. You remember before 1999, don't you? All HITMarks and full body cyborgs and brain implants and 'emotion is a weakness' and 'the Computer will lead us to glory'. Look how they've changed. They're much more into their power armour and their mechs now. You might not have seen it from the Progenitors' point of view, but from the New World Order? Since 1999, the tech you and them use has got a lot more similar."
Serafina frowns. "That's… huh. That's a point."
"They've got a lot more inclusive of meat and the human element. And you've, maybe in response, got less… meat-obsessed. But it's even more than that. Since 1999, since they were cut off from the Computer and from their higher-ups, they've started using Dimensional Science. So have all of us, relatively speaking. And that's strange when you think about it, because the Traditionalists have had all kinds of problems with the ways they contact EDEs. But we use it more, because it's no longer got all of Iteration X supressing it."
"We used to leave it all up to the Void Engineers," Serafina says, frowning. "But… people were encouraging us to build those DSci features into EXEMPLAR. Even them."
"Ah yes, the Void Engineers. Have you read the financial reports? Because I do. I've spent most of my career underesourced and under supplied – oh, don't look so surprised. No doubt you've seen my file, and I'm sure you pulled strings to see more than you were meant to."
Serafina has the grace to look vaguely embarrassed.
"Quite so. I've spent decades in places where I never had the latest gear or enough support. And you've talked to Rose and you've seen how I operate. Scavenge gear, find local forces which have common course, find the reasonable people in the Traditions who are willing to join forces against a mutual threat when you stumble across a Nephandus. When I look at the analysis of their finances, I recognise some of the thing they're doing. They're looting the Masses weapons' programmes, they're taking everything they can get, even terrible Mark Is like the Centurion, they're pushing their resources hard, and… oh, shall we talk about Lt Siddharth Rajesh."
"Who… oh, the Void Engineer who left your team?"
"Yes," Jamelia says, eyes momentarily narrowing. "He found my practice of making… shall we say pragmatic alliances to eliminate a Nephandic hive in the middle of Hong Kong to be unacceptable. That and he really resented not getting to plasma-cannon Rose when Reina took over her body, because he viewed her as a Reality Deviant. He seemed to have issues with constructs."
"Thank you for not having her terminated," Serafina says quietly.
"I hate waste," Jamelia says. "And doing that would have been a waste at more levels than the purely material." She shakes her head. "But then I started wondering why he was so vehement about that. Why the Void Engineers handed him to us on the 'dirt-ball', when he was – for all his flaws – highly capable. And then I couldn't shake the feeling that the Void Engineers are engaging in… ah, pragmatic alliances. That would fit with the data from their financial reports which state that they apparently have access to more enlightened manpower than they should."
"They're consorting with Reality Deviants? You're investigating that?" Serafina blurts out.
"Consorting? I don't think so. No more than I do. I said 'pragmatic alliance' and I meant it." Jamelia shakes her head. "And then there's EXORDIUM. I'm not sure how it goes together with everything, but this went wrong in Moscow. In 1989. Ten years before the Anomaly, pretty much to the day. And what do you know, it went wrong in pretty much the same way as your own EXEMPLAR III. And then there was the mysterious 'agent' encountered by Henriette and Kessler who I'm fairly sure tried to use Control's codes on her. Only they didn't work. Maybe they were out of date. Or maybe with what we know now about how the Void Engineers did something to her, they 'patched' those 'security holes'."
"They're defecting," Serafina says, going pale. She slumps back on the bed, running her hands through her dark hair. "God. God. They have the assets. All the machines. They… they could take on the rest of the Union and win."
"But if they were going rogue," Jamelia continues mercilessly, "why would they remove that Control override for Henriette? Why would they mind-blank her, in fact? There were massive casualties on that mission. We see it in her memories. Why wouldn't they just kill her? Why, in fact, would they want to defect? If they were going over to the Traditions, they could hold a gun to our throats. If they were going to the Nephandi, they control OMEN and could already lay waste to the world. I won't mock you by suggesting an entire convention is going Marauder.
"Autocthonia. The Computer. The Dimensional Anomaly. The Void Engineers and their mistrust of tech from other Conventions and their mysterious war and their unwillingness to use Iteration X AIs to the extent that they'll poach a Progenitor to make 'meat AIs' who they raise with full human personalties. I think it's all related."
Jamelia falls silent. The next few moments will determine if Serafina lives or dies. She just hopes that brain stuck in that woman's head is really as massive as it's meant to be.
Serafina's hands go to her mouth. "Oh. Oh shit," she breathes, beginning to hyperventilate. "Those idiots. Those blind, arrogant idiots in Iteration X. They made themselves their mechanical god, didn't they? Their Singularity, willing to take them to robo-Heaven. They made it… and then it got cut off in the Dimensional Anomaly. We weren't talking to it. And it decided it didn't need us anymore. The… the Computer went rogue in the Anomaly."
"That's what I fear," Jamelia says, breathing a tiny sigh of relief. "I think that's the Threat Null those Void Engineer financial records talk about. And that's not the only thing. Do you know how many Union extradimensional holdings included Iteration X AIs? Had HITMarks stationed in them? All those Iterators with brain implants?" She breathes out. There's one last thing she fears. Something she barely dares to mention.
"And that's not the worst part," she says. "The Computer. The single most sophisticated, powerful AI ever made. They always used to boast that it could break any code, defeat any cipher." She feels her hands shake at the thought. The thing she hasn't dared mention out loud. "Control relied on codes too, didn't it? All those authorisations, all those permissions, all those unbreakable quantum codes designed to 100% guarantee the message was genuine."
Serafina lets out a low moan. "But… but," she manages. "That would mean. It. It could seize control. From Control."
"All those Union assets out there," Jamelia says, trying to keep her voice level. "All those extradimensional holdings where people were Conditioned to do exactly what Control told them to. It could seize control of them, too. Long enough to move in the HITMarks, at the very least. Possibly indefinitely."
Serafina sits up, frowning. "The Void Engineers. There's always been rumours that they removed Conditioning, that they're… ah, less loyal."
Jamelia nods. "Maybe that accidentally saved them, if the Control codes are compromised," she says softly. "So. Assume you've been illicitly breaking Conditioning… we won't say why. Maybe you've been playing with forbidden tech. Maybe your senior leadership was planning to break away, but you lost yours in the Anomaly too and so that never happened. Maybe your leaders objected to it when it was being rolled out and never implemented it properly. Just assume there's enough unconditioned people among your ranks that you can retain control when something subverts Control. What do you do?"
Serafina rises, touching the ceiling with her hands as if she wants to make sure that they're solid. "I… I tell… no, I don't," she says quietly. "Because if anyone with Conditioning could be subverted, you can't trust them. I try to bring everything in-house, because I can't trust my own supply lines completely. I certainly make sure no one in my own organisation has Conditioning. I poach disillusioned or slightly maverick scientists from other branches, like Mai Do. I try to become self-sufficient. And then I make contact with middle-ranking members of other branches and bring them on side, so when they're in charge we can work together."
"Oh, Serafina," Jamelia says, a humourless smile creeping onto her lips. "You're showing you're not a field agent."
"Don't smile like that, you're creeping me out," Serafina mutters.
"You deal with cells and programmable blank minds, not with real people. You don't use guilt and lies and the betrayal of trust as one of your main tools of the trade. You haven't got a girl to change sides by entrapping her in passing information to us, and then playing off her shame and guilt. If she'd just come clean immediately, her friends would have felt betrayed, but they could have accepted it as a mistake. But as she delayed, as she lied to them about how we'd found the hideout of one of their allies among the Masses… well, she grew more and more scared. The longer she waited to own up, the worse it would be, but it would already be terrible to admit it. So maybe she'd just put it off and try to get out of trouble on her own.
"Of course, I wasn't going to let that happen. And in the end, she handed herself in because she was afraid that her friends and allies would kill her as a Technocratic spy." Jamelia smiles. "She's now a well-respected archivist in the Ivory Tower. We still have some contact. She's genuinely glad that I did it. She still sees me as the person who gave her shelter after she made a horrible mistake and then found out what kind of people her friends were and that her enemies weren't so bad." The smile melts away. "And the same applies to organisations, too."
"So… so the Void Engineers started lying to us because… because we probably wouldn't have believed them," Serafina says numbly. "And now they can't admit it. Because if they admitted it, we'd… explode. Like I almost did. And that'd tear the Union apart."
"And they're using all the forces they can get their hands on," Jamelia says. "I've read the reports. They're even raiding the weapons programmes of the Masses for gear. I think they're hard pressed out there. They need the rest of the Union. But they don't think they can trust us. I think they'd probably kill to maintain their secrets, because they think they're the only thing between the world and an evil robot false god." She spreads her hands. "And so here we are."
There is no noise at all.
"Fuck," says Serafina. Tears roll down her face. "Fuck, fuck, fuck."
"Yeah," Jamelia says with feeling. "You said it." The words are hard to come by. "So, now you know what I'm afraid of. I'd like to be wrong. I wish I was. But there's too much which makes sense."
"What do we do?" Serafina says, wrapping her arms around herself. She sniffs, wiping her eyes on her sleeve.
"We do nothing for now," Jamelia says, feeling old. "We do nothing which could break the Union in half. We do nothing that could draw Void Engineers scared that we're going to doom everyone down on us. We tell nobody. We don't trust any orders which come from Control, but we try not to give that away. And we keep our eyes open and hope that we're wrong. Because I really, really hope I'm just a paranoid old agent jumping at shadows."
"Not one more word, Doctor Rosario." The words come out ice cold, the dead automatic level of a New World Order operative who's over twice the age she looks.
Jamelia breathes deeply. Why do things never work out how she expected? She had been planning to do this for a while, but now it's forced upon her and she isn't ready, damn it. She was going to ease Serafina into it, carefully feed her tidbits in a way that could allow an abort if she didn't seem to be receptive. She was going to start today, for fuck's sake.
Ah, well. Inshallah.
"Y-you knew?" Serafina blurts out. "B-but..."
Jamelia raises one finger to her lip. Quiet.
"Troubling," she says. "But I'm sure it's nothing." She rises, and stretches. "Now, I believe you," she scans through her emails, "ah, yes, you had your complaints about the casualty rate of loaned Progenitor assets. I suppose I might as well handle these right now, even though I have other things to do right now." She shakes her head, showing the weariness which she feels and will keep on feeling until she takes her next keeper-upper. "Come on. I need more KeepAwake, and there's some in the limo. It's more comfy in there anyway."
Together they walk down towards the garage. She can feel Serafina vibrating with nervous energy beside her. Nervous energy and rage. Jamelia keeps her hands free and her eyes sharp, looking for any sign of enlightened science use from the other woman. Her mind is churning. Any wrong move, and she will splatter Serafina's brain over the wall, and then have an 'accident' with her brain chip.
She wonders if Serafina realises her life is in just as much danger right now as it was when the Series-P had a knife pressed to her throat. She really hopes she does. If she makes the wrong step, Jamelia will shoot her.
She may have to shoot her anyway, but she's trying to manoeuvre down a very narrow path. She doesn't want to kill her. Serafina means well. She's a good person, at least by the standards of Progenitor scientists and hot-housed Union brats. Possibly by most standards, too. Certainly she's a better woman than the person who calls themselves Jamelia Belltower. She cares for Rose; Henriette too. She has a life outside the lab. She's a fairly well-balanced human being. She spends time being silly. She has hobbies.
But Jamelia has given her life to the Union and she will not let good intentions tear it apart. Not now. Not ever. If the Union falls, at least let it be through enemy action, not the blundering of a well-intentioned oversized schoolgirl.
Idly she pulls out her phone, and gives the orders for some additional cargo to be shipped between here and LA. It's something she had been meaning to do anyway, even if she just increased the amount. But now? Now it's jamming. Teleporters play merry havoc with statistical projections which don't take them into account. She can only hope that what's about to happen is lost in the statistical noise of all those things which are now in the wrong bit of the world ruining forecasts.
She's going to have to answer to the Union about this teleporter use, too, she sighs.
Climbing into the by-now quite damaged limo, she grabs a KeepAwake from the minibar. Technically that's not the normal assortment, but any place she spends time around acquires a stash of them. She clambers through the oversized interior of the car, leading Serafina to one of the inner rooms. Windowless. Self-contained. Sound insulated. And thoroughly protected against any attempt to spy on it. For perfectly legitimate reasons and innocent reasons.
Well, it was the bedroom – sorry, 'Energetic Relaxation or Sleep' Suite – after all. So perhaps not for the most innocent reasons.
Of course, Jamelia sweeps the place for bugs and deploys a white noise generator anyway. She discovers no bugs, although she does confirm from the fact that the bedsheet is made of genuine cloned leopard fur that the tastes of senior Syndics doesn't appear to have made its way past the eighties. And then takes off her jacket, and undoes her headscarf, letting it hang loose around her neck.
"Really," Serafina says flatly. "Of all the things to try to get me to shut up… well, that's only been tried a few times before."
"Did it work?" Jamelia says dryly, raising an eyebrow. "Because if it did, I should have tried it earlier."
Serafina laughs nervously, a little too high and shrill as her brain puts together how quiet things are in here. "Um. Only in the nineties. Um… you look kind of weird without the jacket or the headscarf," Serafina says, eyes going to the pistol in its shoulder holster. "I think I'd prefer th-the seduction over the shooting, if it's all right with you."
"Serafina, Serafina, Serafina," Jamelia says softly. "What am I going to do with you?"
"Not shoot me? Please?"
"Considering that you seem quite insistent on getting yourself killed, some might consider it a kindness," Jamelia says, in that same soft, almost kind tone. "With me, at least you could guarantee that it'd be quick, clean, and I would make quite sure I destroyed your brain and backup so no one would grab you and force you to tell what you knew. I can't promise that from anyone else if you go down the same line of thought and let others know about it."
"… huh?"
Jamelia nudges Serafina down onto the bed. "You'll probably want to be sitting for this," she says, standing back. "The funny thing is that you chose the oddest time to do what you just did. I was going to talk to you about certain suspicions of mine today or tomorrow, depending on how the whole museum thing went. I was going to ease you into it gently, making sure that you were ready before I went to the next stage, and I was going to stop if I wasn't sure you could handle it. Now? Now we're going to just have to bring it all out into the open between us, and we'll see if this was what you really wanted."
Serafina raises a hand like a schoolgirl. "Um… have you gone back to the seduction thing?"
"No seduction is happening," Jamelia says calmly. "And if you are inclined that way, I'm sure that cyborg ninja Adept would be up for it, and the worst you could catch from her would be a computer virus." She pauses. "Although we may need to talk about the possible use of that excuse, vis a vis how we conceal what happened in here."
"Okay, I'm lost," Serafina says bluntly. "I was just going to shout at you because someone has fucked up Henriette's head and oh did I mention she was fighting Unionists."
"Was she?" Jamelia says calmly. "She was fighting 1990s Union gear." She pauses deliberately. "So were we, today."
"Ha ha ha oh no you're not pulling that bullshit on me," Serafina says coldly. "There is a difference between some post-Soviet stuff which has fallen into the hands of… of defectors and… and everything I saw in her memories! That was high end 90s gear! Some of it was better!"
"Really? Because there are whole worlds of 90s Union gear lying around. Literally worlds," Jamelia observes. She cocks her head."I'm not the only one looking into this," she says. It is technically correct, and that is the best kind of correct. Serafina doesn't need to know that only other person doing it is Donald. Well, that she knows about. She'd be willing to bet that there are other suspicious, institutionally paranoid senior Operatives at her who are putting little threads together and finding that things don't quite add up. It's just logical. People like her have spent decades trusting no one fully, dealing with Reality Deviant plans which span decades.
What's that complaint she's heard from both Henriette and Serafina? That the Void Engineers are doing their own in-house inferior copies of what other Conventions do? Well, the Void Engineers are trying to run a conspiracy without the aid of the New World Order.
"So. Shall I start with the conclusion or the premises?" Jamelia says out loud, wondering to herself. "I think I'll start with the evidence, and see if it guides you down the same path I've been thinking. It might not. In which case, I'll be interested to hear your opinion. I'm not going to lay any precondition on your actions."
No, she's not. She's not going to ask Serafina to keep quiet about it. Serafina will either realise how huge this is and choose to keep quiet by her own free will, or she will die. There are no two ways about it.
"Let's start where you began, then," Jamelia says, her voice level. "Henriette. Participates in a joined VE/Iterator attempted raid on Autocthonia, to reclaim it. Near total casualties taken. That's enemy action. We now know they were fighting 90s Union gear. Not surprising, really; Autocthonia would be a treasure trove of high end Iteration X gear all the way up to 1999. Anyone could have moved in there and taken possession of it, as it was cut off by the Anomaly. Henriette is left with major trauma, the insistence that she killed her parents - bearing in mind that she enlightened herself young, after their loss in 1999 - and a near crippling phobia of the Computer which led her to attack other Iterators which mentioned it in front of her.
"Autocthonia," she continues. "The centre of Iteration X. The location of their Computer. Also the centre of all their AI tech. Iteration X AI tech has taken a large hit since then. The Progenitors have been using more cultured life to fill the gap, but it isn't the same. And then there's the Void Engineers. They've gone and started up a whole entirely in house programme of 'AIs'."
"AIs," Serafina grumbles. "Don't make me laugh. I talked to that girl and she was no more an AI than an eighties-tech FAÇADE clone. Less, really. FAÇADE clones are programmed on top of that. She was one of the most… most fucking human FAÇADE clones I've ever seen. I worked out they were using past extrapolation – probably on a pre-existing enlightened scientist – because it's similar to some of what we used in EXEMPLAR. Clearly Do's handiwork and…" Serafina trails off. "That bitch," she hisses, with surprising venom. "She was the one who did that to Henriette. Or, at the very least, devised the process. Of course. No one would question them having access to FAÇADE mindtape. They can requisition it above board. After all, everyone needs to programme Bobs, right? And she was always brilliant at… shoestring solutions. It sometimes got her in trouble."
"Ah. I may need to ask you some questions about that later. But Iteration X also concerns me. Look at how they've changed. You remember before 1999, don't you? All HITMarks and full body cyborgs and brain implants and 'emotion is a weakness' and 'the Computer will lead us to glory'. Look how they've changed. They're much more into their power armour and their mechs now. You might not have seen it from the Progenitors' point of view, but from the New World Order? Since 1999, the tech you and them use has got a lot more similar."
Serafina frowns. "That's… huh. That's a point."
"They've got a lot more inclusive of meat and the human element. And you've, maybe in response, got less… meat-obsessed. But it's even more than that. Since 1999, since they were cut off from the Computer and from their higher-ups, they've started using Dimensional Science. So have all of us, relatively speaking. And that's strange when you think about it, because the Traditionalists have had all kinds of problems with the ways they contact EDEs. But we use it more, because it's no longer got all of Iteration X supressing it."
"We used to leave it all up to the Void Engineers," Serafina says, frowning. "But… people were encouraging us to build those DSci features into EXEMPLAR. Even them."
"Ah yes, the Void Engineers. Have you read the financial reports? Because I do. I've spent most of my career underesourced and under supplied – oh, don't look so surprised. No doubt you've seen my file, and I'm sure you pulled strings to see more than you were meant to."
Serafina has the grace to look vaguely embarrassed.
"Quite so. I've spent decades in places where I never had the latest gear or enough support. And you've talked to Rose and you've seen how I operate. Scavenge gear, find local forces which have common course, find the reasonable people in the Traditions who are willing to join forces against a mutual threat when you stumble across a Nephandus. When I look at the analysis of their finances, I recognise some of the thing they're doing. They're looting the Masses weapons' programmes, they're taking everything they can get, even terrible Mark Is like the Centurion, they're pushing their resources hard, and… oh, shall we talk about Lt Siddharth Rajesh."
"Who… oh, the Void Engineer who left your team?"
"Yes," Jamelia says, eyes momentarily narrowing. "He found my practice of making… shall we say pragmatic alliances to eliminate a Nephandic hive in the middle of Hong Kong to be unacceptable. That and he really resented not getting to plasma-cannon Rose when Reina took over her body, because he viewed her as a Reality Deviant. He seemed to have issues with constructs."
"Thank you for not having her terminated," Serafina says quietly.
"I hate waste," Jamelia says. "And doing that would have been a waste at more levels than the purely material." She shakes her head. "But then I started wondering why he was so vehement about that. Why the Void Engineers handed him to us on the 'dirt-ball', when he was – for all his flaws – highly capable. And then I couldn't shake the feeling that the Void Engineers are engaging in… ah, pragmatic alliances. That would fit with the data from their financial reports which state that they apparently have access to more enlightened manpower than they should."
"They're consorting with Reality Deviants? You're investigating that?" Serafina blurts out.
"Consorting? I don't think so. No more than I do. I said 'pragmatic alliance' and I meant it." Jamelia shakes her head. "And then there's EXORDIUM. I'm not sure how it goes together with everything, but this went wrong in Moscow. In 1989. Ten years before the Anomaly, pretty much to the day. And what do you know, it went wrong in pretty much the same way as your own EXEMPLAR III. And then there was the mysterious 'agent' encountered by Henriette and Kessler who I'm fairly sure tried to use Control's codes on her. Only they didn't work. Maybe they were out of date. Or maybe with what we know now about how the Void Engineers did something to her, they 'patched' those 'security holes'."
"They're defecting," Serafina says, going pale. She slumps back on the bed, running her hands through her dark hair. "God. God. They have the assets. All the machines. They… they could take on the rest of the Union and win."
"But if they were going rogue," Jamelia continues mercilessly, "why would they remove that Control override for Henriette? Why would they mind-blank her, in fact? There were massive casualties on that mission. We see it in her memories. Why wouldn't they just kill her? Why, in fact, would they want to defect? If they were going over to the Traditions, they could hold a gun to our throats. If they were going to the Nephandi, they control OMEN and could already lay waste to the world. I won't mock you by suggesting an entire convention is going Marauder.
"Autocthonia. The Computer. The Dimensional Anomaly. The Void Engineers and their mistrust of tech from other Conventions and their mysterious war and their unwillingness to use Iteration X AIs to the extent that they'll poach a Progenitor to make 'meat AIs' who they raise with full human personalties. I think it's all related."
Jamelia falls silent. The next few moments will determine if Serafina lives or dies. She just hopes that brain stuck in that woman's head is really as massive as it's meant to be.
Serafina's hands go to her mouth. "Oh. Oh shit," she breathes, beginning to hyperventilate. "Those idiots. Those blind, arrogant idiots in Iteration X. They made themselves their mechanical god, didn't they? Their Singularity, willing to take them to robo-Heaven. They made it… and then it got cut off in the Dimensional Anomaly. We weren't talking to it. And it decided it didn't need us anymore. The… the Computer went rogue in the Anomaly."
"That's what I fear," Jamelia says, breathing a tiny sigh of relief. "I think that's the Threat Null those Void Engineer financial records talk about. And that's not the only thing. Do you know how many Union extradimensional holdings included Iteration X AIs? Had HITMarks stationed in them? All those Iterators with brain implants?" She breathes out. There's one last thing she fears. Something she barely dares to mention.
"And that's not the worst part," she says. "The Computer. The single most sophisticated, powerful AI ever made. They always used to boast that it could break any code, defeat any cipher." She feels her hands shake at the thought. The thing she hasn't dared mention out loud. "Control relied on codes too, didn't it? All those authorisations, all those permissions, all those unbreakable quantum codes designed to 100% guarantee the message was genuine."
Serafina lets out a low moan. "But… but," she manages. "That would mean. It. It could seize control. From Control."
"All those Union assets out there," Jamelia says, trying to keep her voice level. "All those extradimensional holdings where people were Conditioned to do exactly what Control told them to. It could seize control of them, too. Long enough to move in the HITMarks, at the very least. Possibly indefinitely."
Serafina sits up, frowning. "The Void Engineers. There's always been rumours that they removed Conditioning, that they're… ah, less loyal."
Jamelia nods. "Maybe that accidentally saved them, if the Control codes are compromised," she says softly. "So. Assume you've been illicitly breaking Conditioning… we won't say why. Maybe you've been playing with forbidden tech. Maybe your senior leadership was planning to break away, but you lost yours in the Anomaly too and so that never happened. Maybe your leaders objected to it when it was being rolled out and never implemented it properly. Just assume there's enough unconditioned people among your ranks that you can retain control when something subverts Control. What do you do?"
Serafina rises, touching the ceiling with her hands as if she wants to make sure that they're solid. "I… I tell… no, I don't," she says quietly. "Because if anyone with Conditioning could be subverted, you can't trust them. I try to bring everything in-house, because I can't trust my own supply lines completely. I certainly make sure no one in my own organisation has Conditioning. I poach disillusioned or slightly maverick scientists from other branches, like Mai Do. I try to become self-sufficient. And then I make contact with middle-ranking members of other branches and bring them on side, so when they're in charge we can work together."
"Oh, Serafina," Jamelia says, a humourless smile creeping onto her lips. "You're showing you're not a field agent."
"Don't smile like that, you're creeping me out," Serafina mutters.
"You deal with cells and programmable blank minds, not with real people. You don't use guilt and lies and the betrayal of trust as one of your main tools of the trade. You haven't got a girl to change sides by entrapping her in passing information to us, and then playing off her shame and guilt. If she'd just come clean immediately, her friends would have felt betrayed, but they could have accepted it as a mistake. But as she delayed, as she lied to them about how we'd found the hideout of one of their allies among the Masses… well, she grew more and more scared. The longer she waited to own up, the worse it would be, but it would already be terrible to admit it. So maybe she'd just put it off and try to get out of trouble on her own.
"Of course, I wasn't going to let that happen. And in the end, she handed herself in because she was afraid that her friends and allies would kill her as a Technocratic spy." Jamelia smiles. "She's now a well-respected archivist in the Ivory Tower. We still have some contact. She's genuinely glad that I did it. She still sees me as the person who gave her shelter after she made a horrible mistake and then found out what kind of people her friends were and that her enemies weren't so bad." The smile melts away. "And the same applies to organisations, too."
"So… so the Void Engineers started lying to us because… because we probably wouldn't have believed them," Serafina says numbly. "And now they can't admit it. Because if they admitted it, we'd… explode. Like I almost did. And that'd tear the Union apart."
"And they're using all the forces they can get their hands on," Jamelia says. "I've read the reports. They're even raiding the weapons programmes of the Masses for gear. I think they're hard pressed out there. They need the rest of the Union. But they don't think they can trust us. I think they'd probably kill to maintain their secrets, because they think they're the only thing between the world and an evil robot false god." She spreads her hands. "And so here we are."
There is no noise at all.
"Fuck," says Serafina. Tears roll down her face. "Fuck, fuck, fuck."
"Yeah," Jamelia says with feeling. "You said it." The words are hard to come by. "So, now you know what I'm afraid of. I'd like to be wrong. I wish I was. But there's too much which makes sense."
"What do we do?" Serafina says, wrapping her arms around herself. She sniffs, wiping her eyes on her sleeve.
"We do nothing for now," Jamelia says, feeling old. "We do nothing which could break the Union in half. We do nothing that could draw Void Engineers scared that we're going to doom everyone down on us. We tell nobody. We don't trust any orders which come from Control, but we try not to give that away. And we keep our eyes open and hope that we're wrong. Because I really, really hope I'm just a paranoid old agent jumping at shadows."
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Trying to fight the impulse head on, if it even exists, which it may not, sounds unnecessarily risky, for now, I think it might be better to divert it by convincing ourselves that Serafina doesn't need to die to keep the secret. Better to consider where the impulse came from later, when we've resolved the situation.
This way also lies paranoia and second guessing your every decision in case it is not your own, so we need to be careful.
I'm pretty sure telling Serafina the details is a bad idea. The VEs are covering this up for a reason. Jamelia has the training and background so that her knowledge of this won't be picked up by behavioural analysis or the wide variety of other Enlightened Science effects that could be used to determine if someone knows something without asking them. Serafina doesn't. She doesn't even have the trade craft to prevent mundane measures of determining if she knows about it working, although they'd be less subtle.
We don't want her to be convinced to keep it secret, we need to convince her for now that it's not some earth shaking conspiracy, merely business as usual that some one cocked up implementing.
Edit: and while really well written, that's the same problem with EarthScorpion's write-in. I simply don't trust Serafina to be able to hide that knowledge from anyone who cares to look. She'd probably give herself, and us, away the first time she meets someone who presents a Control authorisation, or next time we meet Panopticon.
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FunkyEntropy
Occasionally insightful, possibly grumpy
- Location
- Los Angeles
Or we could just deal with it like EarthScorpion suggests, because OH GOD that was beautiful.
There's one person in the conversation with Mind 4.
It's not Jamelia.
There's also one person in the conversation with Manipulation 6.
It's not Jamelia.
There's also one person in the conversation with Intelligence 7
Still not Jamelia.
There's also one person in the conversation with WP7, and while that is Jamelia, Serafina has WP6 and thus is not actually much different.
Yeah. I think some of you are forgetting that while Serafina normally comes across as slightly giddy and a bit ditzy, she is in fact superhumanly intelligent and manipulative, and the one time Jamelia managed to really get one up on her she basically did it through cold reading, bullshitting, and having a pretty good psychological profile on the other woman when she wasn't prepared at all. She is also hardened in the fires of Progenitor academic politics and I am no-shit serious when I say that Progenitor academia makes the New World Order look downright civil, because the NWO is rather more meritocratic than the furiously back-biting world of the Progenitors and Mummy and Daddy will only get her so far. Serafina in fact comes across as a bit giddy and ditzy because she is a fairly well balanced human being who doesn't let the fact that she's smarter than everyone else around and really good at reading people get in the way of trying to be normal-by-the-standards-of-Union-hothoused-brats. She knows she's smarter than any normal human; why bother proving it?
Coming clean and trying to bring her into the "conspiracy" full-scale is the only solution we have that doesn't involve shooting her, because otherwise she will apply those contacts, that Mind, that Manipulation and that Intelligence to solving the puzzle we set her and we don't have enough information to know what we have to cover up.
Kill or compromise. Coverup won't work. So we present the facts the way we want her to see them, and hope we don't have to shoot her, because she's too smart for anything else.
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Lulz. Well, I was skeptical that bringing Serafina in on the secret was feasible. But to say Earthscorpion makes a good case or wrote a good stunt is a bit silly. Was that off-the-cuff, or had you been planning that speech for a while?
[X] Earthscorpion
[X] Barnes-Sykes Combat Knife
[X] Imperator Tailoring Executive Reserve Power Suit
[X] Earthscorpion
[X] Barnes-Sykes Combat Knife
[X] Imperator Tailoring Executive Reserve Power Suit
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And we can't intimidate her into keeping quiet, so we really, really need her to come to the conclusion that this needs to be kept under wraps rather than trying to force her to take our word for it.
[x] Earthscorpion
[x] Imperator Executive Reserve Power Suit
[x] Barnes-Sykes Combat Knife
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Emy
Artificial Defender
That's what we risk happening if she moves to investigate it without Jamelia. She's sharp enough to work things out on her own, but doesn't have the savvy of an experienced spy; Jamelia can ameliorate that.
- Location
- The end of all things
[X] EarthScorpion
[X] Barnes-Sykes Combat Knife.
[X] Imperator Tailoring Executive Reserve Power Suit.
[X] Barnes-Sykes Combat Knife.
[X] Imperator Tailoring Executive Reserve Power Suit.
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[X] EarthScorpion
When I had Jamelia say;
"Jamelia breathes deeply. Why do things never work out how she expected? She had been planning to do this for a while, but now it's forced upon her and she isn't ready, damn it. She was going to ease Serafina into it, carefully feed her tidbits in a way that could allow an abort if she didn't seem to be receptive. She was going to start today, for fuck's sake."
I wasn't kidding. Literally, "start bringing Serafina into the Jamelia and Donald Conspiracy" was what I was planning to do in the day-off downtime.
Jamelia has her big, somewhat accurate hypothesis which is mostly flawed because of her complete lack of DSci. She knows nothing about Void Adaptation or the 90 day limit, and once you remove that from consideration, her "the Computer went Skynet on us" hypothesis hits most of the data points. It can't explain the Agents, but she didn't see that in person and so can pin that to some kind of ENE-downloaded into the heads of humans like a computer virus, which then activates a holographic disguise field.
... the fact that she's blaming Iteration X also means it goes down better with Serafina, but that's just a happy accident. Jamelia genuinely does think "the Computer went Skynet on us" has a worryingly high chance of being true.
