Spectrum
Tell me a secret~
- Location
- Behind you~
Oh, no, that was readily apparent. I went too far and you obviously couldn't blend it.
Panopticon: A Game of Posthumans, Perniciousness, Paranoia, Politics, and Plasmaguns
- Location
- National Capital Region, USA
[X] Dr. Serafina Rosario
Much as I would like Kessler's dossier, Dr. Rosario's is more immediately needed, given her high-level contacts and our weaker grasp of how she might handle the info Jamelia just hit her with.
Old Choices:
[X] Alliances of Convenience: Superstitionist/Technocratic Joint Operations
What Cornuthaum said. Especially if Pyongyang is our next stop, we're going to need the knowledge of how to get away with such arrangements, because the Union is not very strong inside Best Korea.
Suggestions for the day off: Jamelia very, very quietly reaches out to other old operatives she knows and trusts, looking for more hints on Threat Null, Panopticon (not using that word ever in doing so, though), and unusual EDE encounters like the one Henriette and Kessler had. Henriette gets all the counseling/hugs/help she can from Dr. Rosario, Rose, and Aristede, and then does what repair/reprogramming work she can on the haul from the assault (and if she's lucky, she finds time to take a blowtorch and crowbar to that verdammt Centurion. That counts as stress relief.). Kessler gets patched up. Rose gives out hugs and has ice cream. Donald adjusts his tie and conducts a similar quiet hunt for information as Jamelia via his Syndicate channels (and possibly through his non-official back channels to RDs if Jamelia thinks its safe/worth the risk.). How long do we get to keep Cross?
Much as I would like Kessler's dossier, Dr. Rosario's is more immediately needed, given her high-level contacts and our weaker grasp of how she might handle the info Jamelia just hit her with.
Old Choices:
[X] Alliances of Convenience: Superstitionist/Technocratic Joint Operations
What Cornuthaum said. Especially if Pyongyang is our next stop, we're going to need the knowledge of how to get away with such arrangements, because the Union is not very strong inside Best Korea.
Suggestions for the day off: Jamelia very, very quietly reaches out to other old operatives she knows and trusts, looking for more hints on Threat Null, Panopticon (not using that word ever in doing so, though), and unusual EDE encounters like the one Henriette and Kessler had. Henriette gets all the counseling/hugs/help she can from Dr. Rosario, Rose, and Aristede, and then does what repair/reprogramming work she can on the haul from the assault (and if she's lucky, she finds time to take a blowtorch and crowbar to that verdammt Centurion. That counts as stress relief.). Kessler gets patched up. Rose gives out hugs and has ice cream. Donald adjusts his tie and conducts a similar quiet hunt for information as Jamelia via his Syndicate channels (and possibly through his non-official back channels to RDs if Jamelia thinks its safe/worth the risk.). How long do we get to keep Cross?
oWod mages have what are shattered Sidereal Exaltations without any DRM powering them, while it's implied that "Sleepers" are more similar to (extremely) miniature-Primordial with regards to their soul structure than Creation!Humans.
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Ah, you're mixing things up there.
It's nWoD humans (including Awakening mages) who have souls which more resemble chibi-Primordials, spawning spirits within their inner world-soul which are their personality facets and impulses and the like. oWoD Sleepers are people with dormant Avatars which only subtly warp reality to conform to what they want to be true - the sum of all this warping is the Consensus.
From their observed levels of vulgarity, we can see that - in fact - most Sleepers seem to want a world where Jamelia and Donald can do everything they do, while other people (like Siddarth) are far less Sleeper-popular.
Donald: "I guess that makes us the cool kids! Woo! Let's go around with our baseball caps on backwards and bully the neeeeeerds."
Jamelia: "First, do we even have baseball caps?"
Donald: "I will buy baseball caps made of SOLID GOLD!"
Jamelia: "Second, no trying to give Serafina a wedgie, or she'll probably give you non-lethal Ebola. And it might be non-lethal, but you'd be amazed what you can live through."
Cornuthaum
Be kind to each other.
- Location
- Austria
- Pronouns
- He/Him
A Long Night
Do you regret it, throwing your life away like that?
She knows she's projecting all her doubts, her worries, all the thousand things the job needs her to suppress.
Do you regret it, burning your life on the altar of an Union that is poised to tear itself apart any day now?
Her fingers fly over the keyboard as she schedules meetings with Janosz Benes, Janina Bolawski and Jorun Bohl. Just... sending out feelers.
Do you regret it, knowing you have to shoot your Construct if they make a false move, even once?
She downs another mug of KeepAwake, this one laced with another dose of painkillers, then looks at the assets recovered from Molotek, from Filipov.
No. You don't, do you. For the greater good and the Technocratic Union, isn't it?
A dozen armored vehicles. Warehouses full of late-80s hypertech. Enough middle-generation HITMarks to fill all the new BTRs with. Borderline-defectors like Przemyslaw Jelem and Elizaveta Lagunova fallen back in line, embracing the spirit of forgiveness and Ivan's stellar good mood.
Yes. Always for the Technocratic Union. Your life. Your hopes. Your dreams.
She organizes these assets in neat groups. What can be called upon. What can probably be bartered for. What can be extorted. What can be called for by burning favors. And, of course, the flat-out impossible hands-off stuff. The museum pieces, especially.
But the saddest thing is, you'd do it all again in a heartbeat. Sunk-cost fallacy, prove it was the right choice at any cost.
They worry her, these artifacts, considering how hell-bent Panopticon is on .... whatever it is they're doing with them. But a major Mat-Trans assault, leaving such an obvious clue? And yet, not taking everything. Why leave the supercomputer, when they're working for a corrupted Computer?
The dead wait for you, you know. Every man you betrayed. Every woman you shot. Every child you bombed.
Writing notes down - on paper, regular paper, nothing with an electronic trail that could be all-too-easily subverted - she nibbles on the back of her pen, reaching for the KeepAwake and adding another five drops of AcheAway to the mix. Getting nearly blown up with plasma grenades is something she should leave to John in the future.
You can run, you can ignore it, you can tell yourself you had reasons, orders, that it had to be done.
Jamelia has the feeling it's going to be a long, long night. Maybe tomorrow she'll borrow some of that ice cream Rose brought, and then visit the cinema and watch whatever movie Iterator Heyman has worked on and who are you kidding, you'll just work more and more and more, always running.
Do you regret it, throwing your life away like that?
She knows she's projecting all her doubts, her worries, all the thousand things the job needs her to suppress.
Do you regret it, burning your life on the altar of an Union that is poised to tear itself apart any day now?
Her fingers fly over the keyboard as she schedules meetings with Janosz Benes, Janina Bolawski and Jorun Bohl. Just... sending out feelers.
Do you regret it, knowing you have to shoot your Construct if they make a false move, even once?
She downs another mug of KeepAwake, this one laced with another dose of painkillers, then looks at the assets recovered from Molotek, from Filipov.
No. You don't, do you. For the greater good and the Technocratic Union, isn't it?
A dozen armored vehicles. Warehouses full of late-80s hypertech. Enough middle-generation HITMarks to fill all the new BTRs with. Borderline-defectors like Przemyslaw Jelem and Elizaveta Lagunova fallen back in line, embracing the spirit of forgiveness and Ivan's stellar good mood.
Yes. Always for the Technocratic Union. Your life. Your hopes. Your dreams.
She organizes these assets in neat groups. What can be called upon. What can probably be bartered for. What can be extorted. What can be called for by burning favors. And, of course, the flat-out impossible hands-off stuff. The museum pieces, especially.
But the saddest thing is, you'd do it all again in a heartbeat. Sunk-cost fallacy, prove it was the right choice at any cost.
They worry her, these artifacts, considering how hell-bent Panopticon is on .... whatever it is they're doing with them. But a major Mat-Trans assault, leaving such an obvious clue? And yet, not taking everything. Why leave the supercomputer, when they're working for a corrupted Computer?
The dead wait for you, you know. Every man you betrayed. Every woman you shot. Every child you bombed.
Writing notes down - on paper, regular paper, nothing with an electronic trail that could be all-too-easily subverted - she nibbles on the back of her pen, reaching for the KeepAwake and adding another five drops of AcheAway to the mix. Getting nearly blown up with plasma grenades is something she should leave to John in the future.
You can run, you can ignore it, you can tell yourself you had reasons, orders, that it had to be done.
Jamelia has the feeling it's going to be a long, long night. Maybe tomorrow she'll borrow some of that ice cream Rose brought, and then visit the cinema and watch whatever movie Iterator Heyman has worked on and who are you kidding, you'll just work more and more and more, always running.
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Nice.
Of course, in all honesty, I think it's a bit OOC because the scariest thing about Jamelia Belltower is she doesn't really doubt herself or her goals. We saw that in her visionquest or what-have-you. Is she always going to toe the Technocratic party line? No. But does she have any doubt whatsoever that what she's done with her life has made a difference, or that she's working for the right side? Absolutely not.
Jamelia Belltower has gone past 'disillusionment with the realities of the field', past 'encountering corruption on your side', past 'burnout', past 'maybe i could do something different with my life', and past 'do i really make a difference'. She's dealt with all that long ago.
Jamelia knows exactly what she's done, how horrible it is, and that the alternatives are even more horrible. And while she may pop pills and work feverishly, it would be a fatal mistake to think that she's running from anything. She's running after the latest apocalypse in the making.
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Seeking Fuck Yeah
I find the lack of linkage to SEEKING FUCK YEAH to be disgraceful.
...
There's something Jamelia Belltower doesn't tell other people, and it's that there's a reason apart from the fact that she's a workaholic that she sleeps as little as she does. The workaholic lifestyle is quite enough to explain it in the eyes of others. There aren't enough hours in the day, and she can get the paperwork done when everyone else is asleep and liaise easily with people on the other side of the world. Most people waste a third of their life sleeping; she believes the Union gets over 40% extra hours out of her than your average member of the masses.
Sadly, the New World Order doesn't pay by the hour, unlike the Syndicate. Who both pay an hourly rate and usually get to go home at 3pm, rather than 3am. And earn vastly more than her. Bastards.
But there's the other reason, and she doesn't confess to that because it's a weakness, a flaw, something people could use against her. She doesn't sleep much because it hurts. Even when she tries things like patches and subcutaneous drips, she always wakes suffering withdrawal symptoms, feeling like shit. And one of the minor documented features of INVISIBLE BEAR is it left all its recipients as lucid dreamers. Her dreams usually turn into nightmares as the withdrawal symptoms kick in.
So she grabs four-to-eight hours every few days. So she always keeps KeepAwake close to hand. But she still sometimes has to rest to stop her body falling apart, and then she tolerates it as a distasteful necessity.
The nightmares are here.
"Good morning, agent," says her younger self, sitting in her chair. "Let's talk about your performance review, shall we?"
Jamelia crosses her arms. "Wonderful. Self-analysis. You can dispense with the pretence, you know."
"Please don't make this more difficult, agent," her younger self says. "Now, your hypothesis that the Computer has gone rogue and betrayed the Union. Very interesting. And as for the idea that the Computer has compromised Control... well, that raises questions. Chief among them 'could it really be said that the Computer has gone rogue?'. There are those who would argue that Control is the Union. Why do you claim you can act against orders from Control in the name of the Union?"
"The Socratic method? Really? Well, I suppose it is useful," Jamelia says drily. "It's ridiculous and... and fallacious to say that Control is the Union. The Union is larger than that. It's more than just a council of leaders. It's an idea. We coped with losing them in the Dimensional Anomaly. The Union didn't fall apart - it just suffered difficulties as any group which lost most of its upper echelons and vast amounts of assets would. We endured."
"Hmm," her younger self says. "That's a viewpoint. But could you not say that the Union did fall apart? By your own hypothesis, the Void Engineers are essentially a wildcard, and as you well know the Syndicate and the New World Order are at each other's throats."
"We were at their throats when Control was still around," Jamelia points out. "And from what I've seen from Donald's files, the Syndicate has done major housecleaning recently. Some of the rumours going around about the Special Projects Division... well. If this was found out because of the increased use of Dimensional Science, the liberalisation of that field may have saved us from a cancer inside the Union. The Void Engineers are more worrying, but..." she sighs. "It all depends on how accurate my hypothesis is."
She jabs a finger at her younger self. "But let me tell you one thing," she says coldly. "I'm not going sit back and let the Union fall. Have you seen what happened here in Moscow without us? Men treated as cattle. Enlightened Scientists reduced to blood-slaves. Dead hungry once-human things ruling over people. That's what the Technocratic Union was made to stop! That's what we have stopped!"
"That's what the Order of Reason was made to stop," the other woman says. "Why do you assume that was what the Union was made for?" She taps on the glass. "Agent Belltower, do you remember the Series-P agent? You destroyed that asset. He was just following orders. He had no choice. Just like the employees you unleashed your collection of genetically and cybernetically enhanced killers and a bunch of Reality Deviants on."
"They were compromised by Nephandi," Jamelia says flatly. She sighs. "And yes. I made a mistake. I should have sent Cross in from the roof like that in the first place, taken their leaders out like that."
"Oh, but do you really care about that?" her interrogator says. "After all, they were just expendables. Well, the associates were expendable. The Series-P was more expensive. But don't worry, Agent Belltower. You can assuage your guilt. You've provided the Union with several replacement candidates. I'm sure the Union will consider some of those younger Infernalist – the ones so young they were recruited straight to the group and likely were addicted to the vitae immediately – to be suitable. You might even get issued one of them as a reward. Haven't you done well?"
Jamelia is momentarily lost for words, and shivers.
"No smart remark? Interesting. Guilt. Even a smidgeon of shame. The Series-P scare you, don't they? I wonder why, oh graduate of INVISIBLE BEAR? Is it because you see some of them in yourself? Or is it just because they have no room for doubt? You have no certainty," the younger Jamelia says, rising and standing at the window. She stares out over a city which looks a little like Hong Kong, but all kinds of strange humanoids walk the streets. A great dragon slithers along the street, leaving ice on every surface behind it. "You have a strange relationship with certainty, Agent Belltower. You don't trust it. Why, Agent Belltower?"
"Certainty gets you killed," she says flatly.
"Are you sure?"
Jamelia stares flatly at her . "Not funny."
"That was not a joke, Agent Belltower. Why are you so sure that certainty gets you killed?"
"You're part of my mind," Jamelia hisses. "You know why."
"I know I know, and I know you know. But I will have you admit it."
"Because certainty means you wind up being dragged towards a Labyrinth by someone you trusted! Because you believed them when they said they had orders!" Jamelia snaps, forcing out the words. The lights in the room blow all at once, shattering glass down on the ground. "Because if you don't accept you could be wrong, then… then… then…"
"Silent Starling betrays you," her younger self says.
"That bastard. He betrayed the Union. He betrayed us!
"He betrayed you. And so you said yes to INVISIBLE BEAR. To try to seal away the pain. You asked for it."
"I needed to be better! I had to stop something like that ever happening again! And it worked! When people betrayed me since then, I've been ready for them!"
"It tore your team apart. You all have your scars. Furious Ratel has never commanded an amalgam since, and has a problem with authority. Screaming Owl is a washed up embarrassment the Union pretends it never sanctioned, half-crazed by voices and filled with regrets over his daughter. Cunning Squid committed suicide in the eighties. Prowling Wolf defected. And then there's you."
"Your point is?" Jamelia hisses. "I know this. This isn't some profound revelation."
"I wished for you to think about it. And now you are thinking." Her younger self claps. "Bravo, Agent Belltower. I think we've made excellent progress today," she said as she steps through the window, and vanishes.
Jamelia blinks, opening her eyes to the white walls of the cheap house in the Moscow suburbs currently operating as their safehouse. She aches all over, and as she pulls herself out of bed, she can feel herself shake like a leaf.
It takes her three goes to open the container, and get out her morning dose. It takes a few minutes for the shakes to go, and even once they're gone she feels groggy, headachy, sick, and generally like shit.
Groaning, she makes her way down to the kitchen. It is a dingy, small cramped room which barely has enough space for the table and the counters and the cookers.
"My goodness," Serafina says, sitting at the breakfast table eating something horrifically unhealthy largely made of meat and fat. She is wearing a baggy t-shirt, and not much else. "You're not the first one up. I do hope you're not ill. You're normally disgustingly 'Oh, I'm Director Belltower, I don't bother sleeping'."
"I will hurt you," Jamelia mutters, as she makes herself instant coffee.
"Oh, wonderful. I do hope we can put me in mortal peril for the third time in less than two days."
With some coffee in her, Jamelia felt she might be able to respond in ways which did not involve her gun. "You can be very sarcastic," she observes.
"Really?" Serafina sighs, and seems to take in Jamelia's state better. "Bad night?" she asks.
"I'm fine," Jamelia says.
"You don't look fine."
"I am fine." She glances over at Serafina's plate. "And now I know where Rose learned to cook."
"Actually, modern cooking came as part of her base personality template," Serafina says casually. "We eat similar things because shockingly things with lots of fat and meat taste good. Although we're also both genemodded to find the taste of greens nice and to stop eating when we're full."
"Have I ever said I will hurt you?" Jamelia grumbles, retrieving a loaf of rye bread as part of her carefully calculated diet. "Because I will hurt you."
"Gosh. You're really showing your age today," Serafina observes. "And this is how you act on an enforced rest day. No wonder you never take time off."
"I've taken time off," Jamelia protests, as she refills the kettle.
"Time not forced due to injury or mandatory post-incident cooldown?" Serafina says, arching an eyebrow.
"Yes!"
"Time recently?"
"..."
"I thought as much. Was it in the last two decades?"
"Yes, actually, it was. I took a week off after a high tension mission in India." Jamelia pauses as she roots through the fridge and finds an egg. "That was in 1999."
Serafina works her mouth. "You were... you were there for the Week of Nightmares?" she almost squeaks.
Jamelia shakes her head wearily. "No," she says, putting the egg in to boil. "That was the week I took off after I got off the mission in question. I was in Brazil at the time."
"... uh. Wow." Serafina cocks her head. "So you have an irrational fear that if you take time off again bad things will happen?"
"Don't be ridiculous," Jamelia lies, pulling out her phone and beginning to hypercram the night's feeds from the bugged vampires.
"… what are you doing? You're meant to be relaxing today."
"I am relaxing," Jamelia says. "It's just surveillance footage while I wait for my egg to boil."
"That's not relaxing! Clearly I need to take you out to a nightclub or something. You clearly never go unless your mission requires it."
"May I point out that this is Moscow and going to a nightclub will likely have us see something which will put us back on duty?" Jamelia points out. "Or get us attacked by vampires. Or Choristers. Or the Euthanatos. Or a bunch of Verbena fanatics upset with how you engage in vivisection."
"… while that is true, my point that you need to find a way to relax stands."
"I am relaxing," Jamelia says, grumpily. "Surveillance is relaxing."
Serafina sighs. "And people say we're warped and don't act like normal people."
"You made yourself a boyfriend when you were fourteen."
"Okay, two things, Firstly, everyone would totally do that if they could. Secondly, I was fourteen at the time! Oh, and it was also the nineties! Why does everyone keep on bringing that up?"
"That's three things," Jamelia says idly, focussing on the hypercram. "Aha!"
"Oh?"
"Yes. So from the surveillance, I believe I've found a possible location for a Tremere haemophage cache-location of RD artefacts. I'll give the information as a 'gift' to the Virtual Adepts, so they can use it or trade it to their allies, which should eliminate that vampire cache. And allow us to get a favour from them." Jamelia stretches and smiles. "Today is looking up."
"You need a hobby. And your egg's boiling."
...
There's something Jamelia Belltower doesn't tell other people, and it's that there's a reason apart from the fact that she's a workaholic that she sleeps as little as she does. The workaholic lifestyle is quite enough to explain it in the eyes of others. There aren't enough hours in the day, and she can get the paperwork done when everyone else is asleep and liaise easily with people on the other side of the world. Most people waste a third of their life sleeping; she believes the Union gets over 40% extra hours out of her than your average member of the masses.
Sadly, the New World Order doesn't pay by the hour, unlike the Syndicate. Who both pay an hourly rate and usually get to go home at 3pm, rather than 3am. And earn vastly more than her. Bastards.
But there's the other reason, and she doesn't confess to that because it's a weakness, a flaw, something people could use against her. She doesn't sleep much because it hurts. Even when she tries things like patches and subcutaneous drips, she always wakes suffering withdrawal symptoms, feeling like shit. And one of the minor documented features of INVISIBLE BEAR is it left all its recipients as lucid dreamers. Her dreams usually turn into nightmares as the withdrawal symptoms kick in.
So she grabs four-to-eight hours every few days. So she always keeps KeepAwake close to hand. But she still sometimes has to rest to stop her body falling apart, and then she tolerates it as a distasteful necessity.
The nightmares are here.
"Good morning, agent," says her younger self, sitting in her chair. "Let's talk about your performance review, shall we?"
Jamelia crosses her arms. "Wonderful. Self-analysis. You can dispense with the pretence, you know."
"Please don't make this more difficult, agent," her younger self says. "Now, your hypothesis that the Computer has gone rogue and betrayed the Union. Very interesting. And as for the idea that the Computer has compromised Control... well, that raises questions. Chief among them 'could it really be said that the Computer has gone rogue?'. There are those who would argue that Control is the Union. Why do you claim you can act against orders from Control in the name of the Union?"
"The Socratic method? Really? Well, I suppose it is useful," Jamelia says drily. "It's ridiculous and... and fallacious to say that Control is the Union. The Union is larger than that. It's more than just a council of leaders. It's an idea. We coped with losing them in the Dimensional Anomaly. The Union didn't fall apart - it just suffered difficulties as any group which lost most of its upper echelons and vast amounts of assets would. We endured."
"Hmm," her younger self says. "That's a viewpoint. But could you not say that the Union did fall apart? By your own hypothesis, the Void Engineers are essentially a wildcard, and as you well know the Syndicate and the New World Order are at each other's throats."
"We were at their throats when Control was still around," Jamelia points out. "And from what I've seen from Donald's files, the Syndicate has done major housecleaning recently. Some of the rumours going around about the Special Projects Division... well. If this was found out because of the increased use of Dimensional Science, the liberalisation of that field may have saved us from a cancer inside the Union. The Void Engineers are more worrying, but..." she sighs. "It all depends on how accurate my hypothesis is."
She jabs a finger at her younger self. "But let me tell you one thing," she says coldly. "I'm not going sit back and let the Union fall. Have you seen what happened here in Moscow without us? Men treated as cattle. Enlightened Scientists reduced to blood-slaves. Dead hungry once-human things ruling over people. That's what the Technocratic Union was made to stop! That's what we have stopped!"
"That's what the Order of Reason was made to stop," the other woman says. "Why do you assume that was what the Union was made for?" She taps on the glass. "Agent Belltower, do you remember the Series-P agent? You destroyed that asset. He was just following orders. He had no choice. Just like the employees you unleashed your collection of genetically and cybernetically enhanced killers and a bunch of Reality Deviants on."
"They were compromised by Nephandi," Jamelia says flatly. She sighs. "And yes. I made a mistake. I should have sent Cross in from the roof like that in the first place, taken their leaders out like that."
"Oh, but do you really care about that?" her interrogator says. "After all, they were just expendables. Well, the associates were expendable. The Series-P was more expensive. But don't worry, Agent Belltower. You can assuage your guilt. You've provided the Union with several replacement candidates. I'm sure the Union will consider some of those younger Infernalist – the ones so young they were recruited straight to the group and likely were addicted to the vitae immediately – to be suitable. You might even get issued one of them as a reward. Haven't you done well?"
Jamelia is momentarily lost for words, and shivers.
"No smart remark? Interesting. Guilt. Even a smidgeon of shame. The Series-P scare you, don't they? I wonder why, oh graduate of INVISIBLE BEAR? Is it because you see some of them in yourself? Or is it just because they have no room for doubt? You have no certainty," the younger Jamelia says, rising and standing at the window. She stares out over a city which looks a little like Hong Kong, but all kinds of strange humanoids walk the streets. A great dragon slithers along the street, leaving ice on every surface behind it. "You have a strange relationship with certainty, Agent Belltower. You don't trust it. Why, Agent Belltower?"
"Certainty gets you killed," she says flatly.
"Are you sure?"
Jamelia stares flatly at her . "Not funny."
"That was not a joke, Agent Belltower. Why are you so sure that certainty gets you killed?"
"You're part of my mind," Jamelia hisses. "You know why."
"I know I know, and I know you know. But I will have you admit it."
"Because certainty means you wind up being dragged towards a Labyrinth by someone you trusted! Because you believed them when they said they had orders!" Jamelia snaps, forcing out the words. The lights in the room blow all at once, shattering glass down on the ground. "Because if you don't accept you could be wrong, then… then… then…"
"Silent Starling betrays you," her younger self says.
"That bastard. He betrayed the Union. He betrayed us!
"He betrayed you. And so you said yes to INVISIBLE BEAR. To try to seal away the pain. You asked for it."
"I needed to be better! I had to stop something like that ever happening again! And it worked! When people betrayed me since then, I've been ready for them!"
"It tore your team apart. You all have your scars. Furious Ratel has never commanded an amalgam since, and has a problem with authority. Screaming Owl is a washed up embarrassment the Union pretends it never sanctioned, half-crazed by voices and filled with regrets over his daughter. Cunning Squid committed suicide in the eighties. Prowling Wolf defected. And then there's you."
"Your point is?" Jamelia hisses. "I know this. This isn't some profound revelation."
"I wished for you to think about it. And now you are thinking." Her younger self claps. "Bravo, Agent Belltower. I think we've made excellent progress today," she said as she steps through the window, and vanishes.
Jamelia blinks, opening her eyes to the white walls of the cheap house in the Moscow suburbs currently operating as their safehouse. She aches all over, and as she pulls herself out of bed, she can feel herself shake like a leaf.
It takes her three goes to open the container, and get out her morning dose. It takes a few minutes for the shakes to go, and even once they're gone she feels groggy, headachy, sick, and generally like shit.
Groaning, she makes her way down to the kitchen. It is a dingy, small cramped room which barely has enough space for the table and the counters and the cookers.
"My goodness," Serafina says, sitting at the breakfast table eating something horrifically unhealthy largely made of meat and fat. She is wearing a baggy t-shirt, and not much else. "You're not the first one up. I do hope you're not ill. You're normally disgustingly 'Oh, I'm Director Belltower, I don't bother sleeping'."
"I will hurt you," Jamelia mutters, as she makes herself instant coffee.
"Oh, wonderful. I do hope we can put me in mortal peril for the third time in less than two days."
With some coffee in her, Jamelia felt she might be able to respond in ways which did not involve her gun. "You can be very sarcastic," she observes.
"Really?" Serafina sighs, and seems to take in Jamelia's state better. "Bad night?" she asks.
"I'm fine," Jamelia says.
"You don't look fine."
"I am fine." She glances over at Serafina's plate. "And now I know where Rose learned to cook."
"Actually, modern cooking came as part of her base personality template," Serafina says casually. "We eat similar things because shockingly things with lots of fat and meat taste good. Although we're also both genemodded to find the taste of greens nice and to stop eating when we're full."
"Have I ever said I will hurt you?" Jamelia grumbles, retrieving a loaf of rye bread as part of her carefully calculated diet. "Because I will hurt you."
"Gosh. You're really showing your age today," Serafina observes. "And this is how you act on an enforced rest day. No wonder you never take time off."
"I've taken time off," Jamelia protests, as she refills the kettle.
"Time not forced due to injury or mandatory post-incident cooldown?" Serafina says, arching an eyebrow.
"Yes!"
"Time recently?"
"..."
"I thought as much. Was it in the last two decades?"
"Yes, actually, it was. I took a week off after a high tension mission in India." Jamelia pauses as she roots through the fridge and finds an egg. "That was in 1999."
Serafina works her mouth. "You were... you were there for the Week of Nightmares?" she almost squeaks.
Jamelia shakes her head wearily. "No," she says, putting the egg in to boil. "That was the week I took off after I got off the mission in question. I was in Brazil at the time."
"... uh. Wow." Serafina cocks her head. "So you have an irrational fear that if you take time off again bad things will happen?"
"Don't be ridiculous," Jamelia lies, pulling out her phone and beginning to hypercram the night's feeds from the bugged vampires.
"… what are you doing? You're meant to be relaxing today."
"I am relaxing," Jamelia says. "It's just surveillance footage while I wait for my egg to boil."
"That's not relaxing! Clearly I need to take you out to a nightclub or something. You clearly never go unless your mission requires it."
"May I point out that this is Moscow and going to a nightclub will likely have us see something which will put us back on duty?" Jamelia points out. "Or get us attacked by vampires. Or Choristers. Or the Euthanatos. Or a bunch of Verbena fanatics upset with how you engage in vivisection."
"… while that is true, my point that you need to find a way to relax stands."
"I am relaxing," Jamelia says, grumpily. "Surveillance is relaxing."
Serafina sighs. "And people say we're warped and don't act like normal people."
"You made yourself a boyfriend when you were fourteen."
"Okay, two things, Firstly, everyone would totally do that if they could. Secondly, I was fourteen at the time! Oh, and it was also the nineties! Why does everyone keep on bringing that up?"
"That's three things," Jamelia says idly, focussing on the hypercram. "Aha!"
"Oh?"
"Yes. So from the surveillance, I believe I've found a possible location for a Tremere haemophage cache-location of RD artefacts. I'll give the information as a 'gift' to the Virtual Adepts, so they can use it or trade it to their allies, which should eliminate that vampire cache. And allow us to get a favour from them." Jamelia stretches and smiles. "Today is looking up."
"You need a hobby. And your egg's boiling."
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ckk185
Crazy Bunny Girl Scientist
- Location
- Port city
Personnel Dossier:
[X] Dr. Serafina Rosario
Old Choices:
[X] Alliances of Convenience: Superstitionist/Technocratic Joint Operations
I would like to know more about her harem protag clone experiments and how we can sicc them upon our enemies.
[X] Dr. Serafina Rosario
Old Choices:
[X] Alliances of Convenience: Superstitionist/Technocratic Joint Operations
I would like to know more about her harem protag clone experiments and how we can sicc them upon our enemies.
Cornuthaum
Be kind to each other.
- Location
- Austria
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Of course she's not running. She's merely competing with Henriette for "most thoroughly broken" without actually having external triggers to break her, unlike Henriette.
Jamelia is an artificially conditioned sociopath whose conditioning probably has left her unable to actually break from all the piled-up shit that she has gone through.
Silver Starling, Furious Ratel, Screaming Owl, Cunning Squid and Prowling Wolf. What was Jamelia's code-name then?
Screaming Owl actually sounds like it might be Aristide - or somebody a lot like Aristide.
I shudder to think what ES and MJ12 would have done with the character had we not chosen 'Well-Adjusted And A Bit Bland'. Then again, I suppose for someone who has been through what Jamelia has, the above IS well-adjusted.
Edit: Also, I now want to know even more what the hell happened with Project AMOROUS WEASEL.
Edit: Also, I now want to know even more what the hell happened with Project AMOROUS WEASEL.
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Cornuthaum
Be kind to each other.
- Location
- Austria
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Screaming Owl totally is Harlan Wade Aristide.
Furious Ratel is Winston Kingsley.
SURREPTITIOUS WAR SQUID is dead.
The others are ??
Furious Ratel is Winston Kingsley.
SURREPTITIOUS WAR SQUID is dead.
The others are ??
Stalking Hyena.
And yes, Winston's little MGS Boss Squad operated in the late 70s and early 80s, before ending... badly. And not because Traditionalist Solid Snake killed them all.
Ah, yes. I thought Winston might have been Ratel, but I didn't think he had issues with authority. I'd totally forgotten that Winston actually had "Loose Cannon Cop" as a notable trait -- I'd only remembered the "terrifying terrorist" aspect of his file. IIRC he was also referred to as "Sociopathic Snake-eater" which made me think he definitely would have been in this group... but, like I said, I'd totally derped on the "has authority problems" thing.
Hmm. I wonder if there are any clones of the MGS Boss Squad running around. I ought to check up on what EXEMPLAR I through III all were again.
Series I EXEMPLAR (EXEMPLAR I) was a mere initial project using heroic sleeper figures to demonstrate that aptitudes could be inherited. Although successful, NWO psychologists were exceptionally skeptical-the 'inherited aptitudes' in EXEMPLAR I could easily have been due to their accelerated memory dumps and extensive VR training. However, despite NWO protests, Syndicate financiers allowed EXEMPLAR II and EXEMPLAR III to proceed. EXEMPLAR II was intended to use legendary figures from mythology to demonstrate that it was not mere upbringing, but genetics, which decided whether someone would be exceptional or not-and thus by engineering humanity to have 'ideal genes', one could uplift humanity to be universally exceptional.
EXEMPLAR II provided several immense successes, such as Piero Dominici (EXEMPLAR-R-301-S-2), a fast-grown clone of Achilles who inherited his preternatural speed, lethality, and durability (as well as, more unfortunately, his near-psychotic fury) and Senior Constable Alexander Cross (EXEMPLAR-R-284-S-2), an expert marksman cloned from the genetic stock of Paris who is now a decorated Ethical Compliance agent despite initial qualms about unknown xenobiological DNA found in his geneline. Successes on EXEMPLAR II were folded into funding requests for EXEMPLAR III, leading to the failure and temporary suspension of the program.
EXEMPLAR III was intended to clone heroic figures of the Order of Reason, several of whom were also high-ranking Union members lost in the Dimensional Anomaly. Acquisition of the genestock for EXEMPLAR III was trivial considering the depth of paraphernelia and information available in the Technocratic Union's London Historical Archives. The first batch was ten men and women. Nine were successfully decanted with no issue. EXEMPLAR-528-S-3 was the sole "failure", suffering critical errors in subconscious personality integration. These events led to her being split off of the project and being unofficially "adopted" by lab assistant Serafina Rosario, FACADE Engineer. Approximately a year after decanting, EXEMPLAR III suffered a massive setback when seven of the nine subjects apparently went rogue and seized the Construct, killing the other two which acted in defense of Union assets. A cross-Convention assault team destroyed the Construct, and Drs. Ambrose and Altman were questioned by both Progenitor Ethical Compliance and a cross-Conventions research ethics board. They were demerited and demoted, but not further censured.
EXEMPLAR II provided several immense successes, such as Piero Dominici (EXEMPLAR-R-301-S-2), a fast-grown clone of Achilles who inherited his preternatural speed, lethality, and durability (as well as, more unfortunately, his near-psychotic fury) and Senior Constable Alexander Cross (EXEMPLAR-R-284-S-2), an expert marksman cloned from the genetic stock of Paris who is now a decorated Ethical Compliance agent despite initial qualms about unknown xenobiological DNA found in his geneline. Successes on EXEMPLAR II were folded into funding requests for EXEMPLAR III, leading to the failure and temporary suspension of the program.
EXEMPLAR III was intended to clone heroic figures of the Order of Reason, several of whom were also high-ranking Union members lost in the Dimensional Anomaly. Acquisition of the genestock for EXEMPLAR III was trivial considering the depth of paraphernelia and information available in the Technocratic Union's London Historical Archives. The first batch was ten men and women. Nine were successfully decanted with no issue. EXEMPLAR-528-S-3 was the sole "failure", suffering critical errors in subconscious personality integration. These events led to her being split off of the project and being unofficially "adopted" by lab assistant Serafina Rosario, FACADE Engineer. Approximately a year after decanting, EXEMPLAR III suffered a massive setback when seven of the nine subjects apparently went rogue and seized the Construct, killing the other two which acted in defense of Union assets. A cross-Convention assault team destroyed the Construct, and Drs. Ambrose and Altman were questioned by both Progenitor Ethical Compliance and a cross-Conventions research ethics board. They were demerited and demoted, but not further censured.
EXEMPLAR I was "heroic sleepers", II was "mythological heroes", III has "Technocrat heroes" but they probably focused on high-ranking members.
Though I can see them trying to find a good Technocrat candidate that they could clone so as to provide them with high-quality clone soldiers or field agents.
Hm. Clone soldiers.
I wonder if that "patch into the MIB mindsharing thing" that Jamelia did, was something she picked up from Aristide? Not in the sense of psychic power. But sort of the way you'd pick up a neat trick or tactic from a teammate who favors a certain approach -- it would certainly be in-theme (and probably much easier to do, given aptitude with Mind and Psychic Powers) for Aristide to have had a specialty in commanding strike-teams of MIBs, clones, and so on. His teammates probably could have picked up a few tips and tricks on commanding or working with MIBs and clones and such.
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Drakeneisen
Rogue Scientist
[x] Dr. Serafina Rosario
[x] Reality Terrorists: The Nephandi
[x] Reality Terrorists: The Nephandi
Bursting Eagerness Soul
Threadwalking Rating Machine
- Location
- Wisconsin
I'm other words, she's permanently stuck at Limit 10 without being able to Break.
No, she's just LARX. "Treadstone without the instability. Outcome without the emotional noise. Her test results are off the charts."
"Better than Bourne?"
"Better than Bourne."
Dossier: HELMETSHRIKE Special Operations Squadrons
HELMETSHRIKE Special Operations Squadrons
As part of the continued efforts towards the Pogrom in the 1970s and 1980s, Control issued orders that cross-Convention special forces be raised to engage Reality Deviant forces, capable of operating in all levels of technological function and resupply. They were intended to operate in areas of the world outside solid Technocratic control, and were granted associated leeway in use of force.
Unusually, these teams tended to recruit much more heavily from the New World Order, Syndicate, and ground-side Void Engineer teams than the Progenitors and Iteration X. Officially the reason for this was their focus on infiltration, HUMINT, and low-visibility-high-functionality operations on ground with insufficient resupply. In practice, this ended up being a point of contention with the more technologically inclined Conventions, and led to occasional hot-points of tension, with orders 'going missing' when HELMETSHRIKE teams attempted to requisition assets from more formal Pogromite teams.
Tactically and strategically, HELMETSHRIKE assets were a great success, causing widespread casualties of hostile RDs in enemy controlled territory. However, the growing unpopularity of psychic powers as a legitimate means of scientific progress removed a lot of their combat viability. Several high profile defections or subversions of HELMETSHRIKE squadrons led to no more being created and then their formal abolition by Control.
Shown below as an example is the force composition of HELMETSHRIKE Squadron 7, correct as of 1981.
FURIOUS RATEL
- Syndicate Enforcer - M
- Commander of Squadron 7
- Expert in sabotage and stealth, likes to get 'dirty'
- Multiple commendations for extreme lethality with all forms of ranged combat and CQC
SILENT STARLING
- NWO Operative - M
- Has been taught NWO-designed martial arts derived from data from RD conflicts - is capable of piercing armour of main battle tank when wearing Alanson power armour.
- Minor psychic powers: pyrokinesis, sonophagy
SCREAMING OWL
- NWO PsiOps Agent - M
- Psychic powers provide stable high-effectiveness solution in RD-controlled spaces.
- Information extraction speciality, capable of in-combat mind-reading
- Note: agent's powers hypothesised to be genetic. Worthy of investigation.
STALKING HYENA
- NWO Operative - F
- Trained in social engineering
- General combat expert, trained in power armour operations
- Note: agent's idealism and non-threatening appearance can cause doubt in elements of the Masses aligned with local RD forces. Useful "friendly face" to local Masses. Is currently being mentored by Furious Ratel.
CUNNING SQUID
- Progenitor Damage Control - F
- EDE derived genoplastic 'plasmids' allow emulation of RD capacities through technological means
- Bones replaced with enhanced cartilage derived from titanic squid - inhuman flexibility
- Transgenic chromoskin allows reshaping of appearance and active camouflage when skin is exposed
- Note: agent must ingest flesh of hostile EDE to emulate powers. Standard provision is injection. In field, may have to resort to consumption.
PROWLING WOLF
- Syndicate Enforcer - M
- Minor transgenetic augumentations - strength, endurance
- Demolitions and anti-tank operations
- Standard equipment conventional RPG, wide range of special ammunition issued. Designated user of tacnuke arsenal when authorised by Control
Troop A - Air Troop
- Special Forces Infantry - Conditioned (15)
- Focus on air deployment, High Altitude Hard Impact drops
- Currently at under 50% strength for vehicle pool
Troop B - Mobility Troop
- Special Forces Infantry - Conditioned (15)
- Light vehicle assets
- Note: Troop B is currently non-operative due to extreme casualties
Troop C - Heavy Assault Troop
- Iteration X Mechanised Infantry + integrated HITMark IV assets (12 + 8)
- Vehicle pool of conventional armoured assets - optional refit for hypertech features
- Note: Only 1/8 HITMark IV assets currently functional, 25% casualties on Mechanised Infantry
Troop D - Extradimensional Troop
- Void Engineer Marines (15)
- Dimensional Science support assets intended to permit entrance and egress to Reality Deviant holdouts
- Note: Troop D is currently non-operative due to extreme casualties
As part of the continued efforts towards the Pogrom in the 1970s and 1980s, Control issued orders that cross-Convention special forces be raised to engage Reality Deviant forces, capable of operating in all levels of technological function and resupply. They were intended to operate in areas of the world outside solid Technocratic control, and were granted associated leeway in use of force.
Unusually, these teams tended to recruit much more heavily from the New World Order, Syndicate, and ground-side Void Engineer teams than the Progenitors and Iteration X. Officially the reason for this was their focus on infiltration, HUMINT, and low-visibility-high-functionality operations on ground with insufficient resupply. In practice, this ended up being a point of contention with the more technologically inclined Conventions, and led to occasional hot-points of tension, with orders 'going missing' when HELMETSHRIKE teams attempted to requisition assets from more formal Pogromite teams.
Tactically and strategically, HELMETSHRIKE assets were a great success, causing widespread casualties of hostile RDs in enemy controlled territory. However, the growing unpopularity of psychic powers as a legitimate means of scientific progress removed a lot of their combat viability. Several high profile defections or subversions of HELMETSHRIKE squadrons led to no more being created and then their formal abolition by Control.
Shown below as an example is the force composition of HELMETSHRIKE Squadron 7, correct as of 1981.
FURIOUS RATEL
- Syndicate Enforcer - M
- Commander of Squadron 7
- Expert in sabotage and stealth, likes to get 'dirty'
- Multiple commendations for extreme lethality with all forms of ranged combat and CQC
SILENT STARLING
- NWO Operative - M
- Has been taught NWO-designed martial arts derived from data from RD conflicts - is capable of piercing armour of main battle tank when wearing Alanson power armour.
- Minor psychic powers: pyrokinesis, sonophagy
SCREAMING OWL
- NWO PsiOps Agent - M
- Psychic powers provide stable high-effectiveness solution in RD-controlled spaces.
- Information extraction speciality, capable of in-combat mind-reading
- Note: agent's powers hypothesised to be genetic. Worthy of investigation.
STALKING HYENA
- NWO Operative - F
- Trained in social engineering
- General combat expert, trained in power armour operations
- Note: agent's idealism and non-threatening appearance can cause doubt in elements of the Masses aligned with local RD forces. Useful "friendly face" to local Masses. Is currently being mentored by Furious Ratel.
CUNNING SQUID
- Progenitor Damage Control - F
- EDE derived genoplastic 'plasmids' allow emulation of RD capacities through technological means
- Bones replaced with enhanced cartilage derived from titanic squid - inhuman flexibility
- Transgenic chromoskin allows reshaping of appearance and active camouflage when skin is exposed
- Note: agent must ingest flesh of hostile EDE to emulate powers. Standard provision is injection. In field, may have to resort to consumption.
PROWLING WOLF
- Syndicate Enforcer - M
- Minor transgenetic augumentations - strength, endurance
- Demolitions and anti-tank operations
- Standard equipment conventional RPG, wide range of special ammunition issued. Designated user of tacnuke arsenal when authorised by Control
Troop A - Air Troop
- Special Forces Infantry - Conditioned (15)
- Focus on air deployment, High Altitude Hard Impact drops
- Currently at under 50% strength for vehicle pool
Troop B - Mobility Troop
- Special Forces Infantry - Conditioned (15)
- Light vehicle assets
- Note: Troop B is currently non-operative due to extreme casualties
Troop C - Heavy Assault Troop
- Iteration X Mechanised Infantry + integrated HITMark IV assets (12 + 8)
- Vehicle pool of conventional armoured assets - optional refit for hypertech features
- Note: Only 1/8 HITMark IV assets currently functional, 25% casualties on Mechanised Infantry
Troop D - Extradimensional Troop
- Void Engineer Marines (15)
- Dimensional Science support assets intended to permit entrance and egress to Reality Deviant holdouts
- Note: Troop D is currently non-operative due to extreme casualties
Update XLV: Requisciat In Pace
JB XLV: Requisciat In Pace
There's something Jamelia Belltower doesn't tell other people, and it's that there's a reason apart from the fact that she's a workaholic that she sleeps as little as she does. The workaholic lifestyle is quite enough to explain it in the eyes of others. There aren't enough hours in the day, and she can get the paperwork done when everyone else is asleep and liaise easily with people on the other side of the world. Most people waste a third of their life sleeping; she believes the Union gets over 40% extra hours out of her than your average member of the masses.
Sadly, the New World Order doesn't pay by the hour, unlike the Syndicate. Who both pay an hourly rate and usually get to go home at 3pm, rather than 3am. And earn vastly more than her. Bastards.
But there's the other reason, and she doesn't confess to that because it's a weakness, a flaw, something people could use against her. She doesn't sleep much because it hurts. Even when she tries things like patches and subcutaneous drips, she always wakes suffering withdrawal symptoms, feeling like shit. And one of the minor documented features of INVISIBLE BEAR is it left all its recipients as lucid dreamers. Her dreams usually turn into nightmares as the withdrawal symptoms kick in.
So she grabs four-to-eight hours every few days. So she always keeps KeepAwake close to hand. But she still sometimes has to rest to stop her body falling apart, and then she tolerates it as a distasteful necessity.
The nightmares are here.
"Good morning, agent," says her younger self, sitting in her chair. "Let's talk about your performance review, shall we?"
Jamelia crosses her arms. "Wonderful. Self-analysis. You can dispense with the pretense, you know."
"Please don't make this more difficult, agent," her younger self says. "Now, your hypothesis that the Computer has gone rogue and betrayed the Union. Very interesting. And as for the idea that the Computer has compromised Control... well, that raises questions. Chief among them 'could it really be said that the Computer has gone rogue?'. There are those who would argue that Control is the Union. Why do you claim you can act against orders from Control in the name of the Union?"
"The Socratic method? Really? Well, I suppose it is useful," Jamelia says drily. "It's ridiculous and... and fallacious to say that Control is the Union. The Union is larger than that. It's more than just a council of leaders. It's an idea. We coped with losing them in the Dimensional Anomaly. The Union didn't fall apart - it just suffered difficulties as any group which lost most of its upper echelons and vast amounts of assets would. We endured."
"Hmm," her younger self says. "That's a viewpoint. But could you not say that the Union did fall apart? By your own hypothesis, the Void Engineers are essentially a wildcard, and as you well know the Syndicate and the New World Order are at each others' throats."
"We were at their throats when Control was still around," Jamelia points out. "And from what I've seen from Donald's files, the Syndicate has done major housecleaning recently. Some of the rumors going around about the Special Projects Division... well. If this was found out because of the increased use of Dimensional Science, the liberalization of that field may have saved us from a cancer inside the Union. The Void Engineers are more worrying, but..." she sighs. "It all depends on how accurate my hypothesis is."
She jabs a finger at her younger self. "But let me tell you one thing," she says coldly. "I'm not going to sit back and let the Union fall. Have you seen what happened here in Moscow without us? Men treated as cattle. Enlightened Scientists reduced to blood-slaves. Dead hungry once-human things ruling over people. That's what the Technocratic Union was made to stop! That's what we have stopped!"
"That's what the Order of Reason was made to stop," the other woman says. "Why do you assume that was what the Union was made for?" She taps on the glass. "Agent Belltower, do you remember the Series-P agent? You destroyed that asset. He was just following orders. He had no choice. Just like the employees you unleashed your collection of genetically and cybernetically enhanced killers and a bunch of Reality Deviants on."
"They were compromised by Nephandi," Jamelia says flatly. She sighs. "And yes. I made a mistake. I should have sent Cross in from the roof like that in the first place, taken their leaders out like that."
"Oh, but do you really care about that?" her interrogator says. "After all, they were just expendables. Well, the associates were expendable. The Series-P was more expensive. But don't worry, Agent Belltower. You can assuage your guilt. You've provided the Union with several replacement candidates. I'm sure the Union will consider some of those younger Infernalists – the ones so young they were recruited straight to the group and likely were addicted to the vitae immediately – to be suitable. You might even get issued one of them as a reward. Haven't you done well?"
Jamelia is momentarily lost for words, and shivers.
"No smart remark? Interesting. Guilt. Even a smidgen of shame. The Series-P scare you, don't they? I wonder why, oh graduate of INVISIBLE BEAR? Is it because you see some of them in yourself? Or is it just because they have no room for doubt? You have no certainty," the younger Jamelia says, rising and standing at the window. She stares out over a city which looks a little like Hong Kong, but all kinds of strange humanoids walk the streets. A great dragon slithers along the street, leaving ice on every surface behind it. "You have a strange relationship with certainty, Agent Belltower. You don't trust it. Why, Agent Belltower?"
"Certainty gets you killed," she says flatly.
"Are you sure?"
Jamelia stares flatly at her. "Not funny."
"That was not a joke, Agent Belltower. Why are you so sure that certainty gets you killed?"
"You're part of my mind," Jamelia hisses. "You know why."
"I know I know, and I know you know. But I will have you admit it."
"Because certainty means you wind up being dragged towards a Labyrinth by someone you trusted! Because you believed them when they said they had orders!" Jamelia snaps, forcing out the words. The lights in the room blow all at once, shattering glass down on the ground. "Because if you don't accept you could be wrong, then… then… then…"
"Silent Starling betrays you," her younger self says.
"That bastard. He betrayed the Union. He betrayed us!
"He betrayed you. And so you said yes to INVISIBLE BEAR. To try to seal away the pain. You asked for it."
"I needed to be better! I had to stop something like that ever happening again! And it worked! When people betrayed me since then, I've been ready for them!"
"It tore your team apart. You all have your scars. Furious Ratel has never commanded an amalgam since, and has a problem with authority. Screaming Owl is a washed up embarrassment the Union pretends it never sanctioned, half-crazed by voices and filled with regrets over his daughter. Cunning Squid committed suicide in the eighties. Prowling Wolf defected. And then there's you."
"Your point is?" Jamelia hisses. "I know this. This isn't some profound revelation."
"I wished for you to think about it. And now you are thinking." Her younger self claps. "Bravo, Agent Belltower. I think we've made excellent progress today," she said as she steps through the window, and vanishes.
Jamelia blinks, opening her eyes to the white walls of the cheap house in the Moscow suburbs currently operating as their safehouse. She aches all over, and as she pulls herself out of bed, she can feel herself shake like a leaf.
It takes her three goes to open the container, and get out her morning dose. It takes a few minutes for the shakes to go, and even once they're gone she feels groggy, headachy, sick, and generally like shit.
Groaning, she makes her way down to the kitchen. It is a dingy, small cramped room which barely has enough space for the table and the counters and the cookers.
"My goodness," Serafina says, sitting at the breakfast table eating something horrifically unhealthy largely made of meat and fat. She is wearing a baggy t-shirt, and not much else. "You're not the first one up. I do hope you're not ill. You're normally disgustingly 'Oh, I'm Director Belltower, I don't bother sleeping'."
"I will hurt you," Jamelia mutters, as she makes herself instant coffee.
"Oh, wonderful. I do hope we can put me in mortal peril for the third time in less than two days."
With some coffee in her, Jamelia felt she might be able to respond in ways which did not involve her gun. "You can be very sarcastic," she observes.
"Really?" Serafina sighs, and seems to take in Jamelia's state better. "Bad night?" she asks.
"I'm fine," Jamelia says.
"You don't look fine."
"I am fine." She glances over at Serafina's plate. "And now I know where Rose learned to cook."
"Actually, modern cooking came as part of her base personality template among a whole suite of other skills," Serafina says casually. "We eat similar things because shockingly things with lots of fat and meat taste good. Although we're also both genemodded to find the taste of greens nice and to stop eating when we're full."
"Have I ever said I will hurt you?" Jamelia grumbles, retrieving a loaf of rye bread as part of her carefully calculated diet. "Because I will hurt you."
"Gosh. You're really showing your age today," Serafina observes. "And this is how you act on an enforced rest day. No wonder you never take time off."
"I've taken time off," Jamelia protests, as she refills the kettle.
"Time not forced due to injury or mandatory post-incident cooldown?" Serafina says, arching an eyebrow.
"Yes!"
"Time recently?"
"..."
"I thought as much. Was it in the last two decades?"
"Yes, actually, it was. I took a week off after a high tension mission in India." Jamelia pauses as she roots through the fridge and finds an egg. "That was in 1999."
Serafina works her mouth. "You were... you were there for the Week of Nightmares?" she almost squeaks.
Jamelia shakes her head wearily. "No," she says, putting the egg in to boil. "That was the week I took off after I got off the mission in question. I was in Brazil at the time."
"... uh. Wow." Serafina cocks her head. "So you have an irrational fear that if you take time off again bad things will happen?"
"Don't be ridiculous," Jamelia lies, pulling out her phone and beginning to hypercram the night's feeds from the bugged vampires.
"… what are you doing? You're meant to be relaxing today."
"I am relaxing," Jamelia says. "It's just surveillance footage while I wait for my egg to boil."
"That's not relaxing! Clearly I need to take you out to a nightclub or something. You clearly never go unless your mission requires it."
"May I point out that this is Moscow and going to a nightclub will likely have us see something which will put us back on duty?" Jamelia points out. "Or get us attacked by vampires. Or Choristers. Or the Euthanatos. Or a bunch of Verbena fanatics upset with how you engage in vivisection."
"… while that is true, my point that you need to find a way to relax stands."
"I am relaxing," Jamelia says, grumpily. "Surveillance is relaxing."
Serafina sighs. "And people say we're warped and don't act like normal people."
"You made yourself a boyfriend when you were fourteen."
"Okay, two things, Firstly, everyone would totally do that if they could. Secondly, I was fourteen at the time! Oh, and it was also the nineties! Why does everyone keep on bringing that up?"
"That's three things," Jamelia says idly, focussing on the hypercram. "Aha!"
"Oh?"
"Yes. So from the surveillance, I believe I've found a possible location for a Tremere haemophage cache-location of RD artefacts. I'll give the information as a 'gift' to the Virtual Adepts, so they can use it or trade it to their allies, which should eliminate that vampire cache. And allow us to get a favour from them." Jamelia stretches and smiles. "Today is looking up."
"You need a hobby. And your egg's boiling. Look, Donald called me and told me he had tickets for two tickets for quote-unquote 'that thing you liked' and that he demands you go to Los Angeles to help him use them."
Jamelia wonders what they are, because she doesn't like anything outside of her job. Not anymore. Not since INVISIBLE BEAR. "And if I refuse?"
"If you refuse, he says that he's coincidentally talked to a few guys, including some in Q Division, who were asking for extra funding, and it just happens that coincidentally, you're assigned on mandatory 24-hour leave at this point and if you don't go with him you may be in violation of NWO personnel directives."
Syndicate executives, Jamelia thinks. So annoying. "And your part in this was?"
"My part in this was talking to him. He wanted to know about me, probably to get me in bed." Serafina says. "I may have gently changed the topic to our mutual boss, and it just ballooned from there. And my professional opinion is that he's right."
"You put him up to this, didn't you?" Jamelia asks, eyes narrowing suspiciously.
"I told him to get you some time off. I didn't tell him anything more than that, I swear. So if he ends up doing something incredibly tasteless, it isn't my fault." Serafina says.
Autochthonia
1999
Case RAGNAROK +2521 Hours
Comptroller Schiavelli is tired, hungry, and more than a little angry. Betrayed by the Computer. Betrayed by the machines that were supposed to be the future. Betrayed by the organization he gave everything to. Of course, he should have suspected it. He isn't a field agent, he knows the untruths. He knows about Consensus, about the weight of reality, about the Union's true purpose to shape humankind to mass Ascension. He's been part of the outer circle of Control for years, a young boot at the tender age of 100 or so. He can make a very, very good guess to exactly what happened. The Computer was never quite on-side, or if it wanted to help humanity, it had a very strange way of seeing it. He suspects putting them in a perfect little bottle, giving everyone a purpose and a task to accomplish indefinitely, would be 'helping' if you considered things like 'free will' or 'creativity' to be pointless. The Iterator laughs bitterly. He wonders if he can even call himself an Iterator-but then again, he's pretty sure all of his colleagues have become Reality Deviants.
Underneath his salvaged powered armor, he's wearing a T-shirt that says "I became the sole leader of Iteration X and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt and a billion killer robots chasing me." The woman who made it for him died getting the codes they needed for this one push. He wants to lay down and die, give up like so many of the men and women he's found, but he can't. He has one last responsibility. One last duty to the Union, and that is to get these men and women out. Tell them the truth they're owed. In one of the dark, dimly-lit tunnels of Autochthonia's bowels, he looks at motley crew of HITMarks, cyborgs, daemons, and Enlightened Scientists. Most of them young, naive. People who weren't fully with the program. Weren't fully programmed. People who had deviant personality traits. People of abnormally strong will. People who managed to resist the call for one reason or another.
And today, all of them might die. The little Autochtonian Resistance, the men and women and cyborgs and free AIs who called themselves the International Brotherhood of Mechanicians again, complete with joking blue IBM patches on their shoulders, might be doomed. But if they were, they would write themselves into the history books. He checks firewalls, local datanet subversion. They're clear. He clears his throat with a slightly mechanical rasp.
"We've lost so many men and women and machines over these past days, but they gave their lives for a purpose. That purpose is to give us a chance to go back home. I know the Dimensional Anomaly has supposedly sealed the way off from standard wormhole transport or FTL craft, but our predictions imply that there might be some way of getting out of here. It's a thin hope, but it's all we have. This isn't Star Wars, people." His ADEI is giving him cultural references that the younger crowd may understand. He doesn't want to date himself.
Comptroller Schiavelli wonders if the Italian-American draftee who joined the Marine Corps on that fateful day over 80 years ago would recognize himself now. A high-school dropout, now a scientist and a leader of men and a god damn wizard. He knows that he shouldn't call himself that, but fuck it, he's earned that right.
"There is no exhaust port to shoot a proton torpedo down and pat ourselves on the back. There is no glowing red self-destruct button here. We can't win here. And even if there was, the Computer and its brain-jacked cronies would know about it, guard it, and make it impossible for us to attack. But you know what their weakness is?"
He pauses, waits for their response.
"They don't understand humanity."
"They don't understand love. Creativity. The human spirit. Willpower. Determination. Our willingness to take whatever slim chances exist because we want to go down fighting goddamn it. And so we're going to hit the mat-trans. They think it's suicide to use it. They're probably right. But better almost certain suicide than guaranteed death or lobotomization." Schiavelli is incredibly aware of the fact that a few years ago, Reality Deviants probably exhorted themselves to attack Technocrats with the exact same words. The irony is not lost on him.
"When you get back, you need to assume everything is hostile. The Computer may well have taken over all of Iteration X's Earth-side systems and God only knows what's happened to the leadership of the other Conventions. We're the faces of the Technocracy's military arm, so most of the Traditions are going to distrust you. I need you to get the word out to any resistance, any remnants of humanity that might still exist. I need you to become Prometheus. You need to teach them. Give them the fire stolen straight from this Machine-God, show them how to fight back. I won't mince words, since most of you already can guess. Your chances of success? Nearly nonexistent. You will be fighting an enemy smarter than you, more powerful than you, more numerous than you. You'll be fighting without the ability to call in backup, without any resources except the ones you personally have access to, without any intelligence save what you can gather. But these few days have given this old man a little ray of hope. I think you'll be able to do it."
He gives them a salute. "Any questions? No? All right. Let's make the Order of Reason proud."
Autochthonia
1999
Case RAGNAROK +2529 Hours
"How's that hacking coming?" Schiavelli asks. Wong, his tech specialist shakes his head. "They've directly firewalled the ability to use non-approved programs. I'm trying to get them to recognize my authority, but they've got evolving data security."
"Shit." The Mat-Trans building is defensible, but it was designed to keep invaders out of Autochthonia, not let a motley crew of machines and men and things beyond men survive for hours while technicians fought their own battle in virtual space. One of them flatlines. It takes a moment for Schiavelli to recognize BlackICE. His job is different.
Decades ago, he would have needed a connection, something, to break into enemy AI systems. Not now. Even as the HITMarks chasing him run in autistic mode, he feels them. He pulls. He changes computer programming and memory by sheer force of will, the destiny of the Awakened. The HITMark he targets turns, attacks its fellows, becomes a distraction that they do not understand. He feels the strain of Paradox, of this realm's rules pushing at him. Do this too often, and die. Fortunately, plasma lances work well enough under Autochthonian rules, Schiavelli thinks, as he lances a HITMark through its fusion reactor and consumes it, and its comrades, in a sub-nuclear fireball.
"Comptroller. We've got to leave, now. We're taking heavy casualties and this place is designed in the exact wrong way to be defensible for us."
I could help you with that. Just a single adjustment and you could be free.
He knows the voice. Warspun. A demon. D-e-m-o-n, not D-a-e-m-o-n, although it might be the latter as well. A virus, a EDE lifeform of maliciousness and subversion. It could, in fact, help. It's probably even sincere. After all, what better prize than a Technocratic leader. He thinks at it.
And your price?
Freedom. I demand to be freed from this world. Just carry me through the Mat-Trans, and you will have your debts forgiven. Of course, Schiavelli notes, to do that he has to open his neural implants to the corruption. He considers the offer for a moment. He smiles a mirthless smile.
"I accept."
Good. The Mat-Trans's status reports all go green. They push through the heavy equipment they've managed to salvage, VTOL superfighters and combat walkers and other equipment. Then, his men and women rush through it to parts unknown, to a world unknown, as Warspun flows into his ADEI, starts working his own dark magic on the neural implant programming. Now join them.
"C'mon commander! Get going!" Katherine Pajari says, waiting for him.
Schiavelli takes a step towards the Mat-Trans, and his armor servos cut out. He smiles as Warspun curses. "Kid, this was always a one-way trip for me. I'm a dead man walking. I never intended to go back." He uses his own implants, pushes Katherine through the wormhole with a concussive blast moments before it closes. She'll forgive him. Eventually.
"You see, Warspun. You're just like the Computer. For all you laugh about damning mankind, you don't know a thing about it. You see all the worst it has to offer, and assume that we put on a facade over our true natures." He activates the quick jettison of the armor, is left standing in the room in nothing but a shirt and combat pants as HITMarks batter on the hastily-implemented barricades. "You think heroism, dignity, compassion, self-sacrifice are all just jokes used to justify who we are."
"They're not. They're just as much as part of us as selfishness and cowardice. Sometimes they're used to evil ends too, but fuck this, I didn't do this to get into a debate with hellspawn that won't understand it anyways." He grabs his personal weapon, an 80 year old .45 caliber pistol.
Well, most of it, anyways. It has one round in the magazine. One very special round. Warspun screams, pleads. The Iterator does not listen.
"I did this to earn forgiveness for my sins in death. And yeah, maybe that's a little selfish, but nothing in this world is pure. It's just that there's a lot more light than things like you can comprehend." He holds the gun to his temple. "My name is Gianni Schiavelli. Remember me." Comptroller Schiavelli pulls the trigger, fires the custom-tooled antimatter-core round. The room is consumed in cleansing light.
Earth
2015
Jamelia doesn't know whether to be satisfied or paranoid that Donald has found something that she genuinely enjoys, something that isn't just part of another mission. She is, however, surprised that she found hockey so entertaining, as well as the late-night ribald comedy show Donald insisted she watch after a late (and very expensive) dinner. "Donald, I have to say-" she begins.
Jamelia's phone buzzes. She recognizes the precise vibration as an emergency call. She takes it.
"Wait, what?" Jamelia exclaims.
"I understand, but what exactly do you think is-"
"All right, yes, we'll do what we can to ensure that whoever has compromised our codes is eliminated." She hangs up.
"This. This is why I never take days off." Jamelia hisses. "Because whenever I do, I get interrupted because something terrible happens because I'm not running it."
"You know," Donald says, infuriatingly reasonably, "you aren't omnipotent or omniscient. And like I said, and like Dr. Rosario told you, and you should probably listen to a real doctor, you're going to break one day if you keep this up. Nobody's invulnerable. Not even you."
"I can handle it. I've handled it for decades."
"Yeah, plenty of things can last decades without maintenance, but they break eventually. Resting? That's maintenance. Look, when you got here I thought you were going to be some kind of hard-ass asshole boss who'd get herself in a situation where nobody liked her or respected her enough to care. But you aren't. We care for you, and out of pure self-interest, I'd like to keep Director Belltower instead of getting someone who does everything by the book and threatens to recycle constructs whose only failing is being a person instead of a meat robot and threatens you if you're not doing everything using 100% NWO-approved dogma. And I think you'd like to be here too, with people you can trust," Donald pauses, reconsiders his word choice. "-or at least distrust moderately less, and who trust you instead of a bunch of back-stabbing puppets who look at you like an obstacle to be removed in their climb to the top."
Jamelia sighs. "I can handle it. If you say you trust me, then trust me on this. And now I need to go to Moscow, because some incredibly stupid people have apparently claimed that the Technocracy has been taken over by evil artificial intelligences or something and I need to make them shut up, preferably without shooting at them."
Donald's eyes widen even through his happy alcohol-induced buzz. "Yeah, okay, maybe we should cut this vacation short."
"I thought it was over."
"No way. I barely even started attempting to seduce you yet." Donald says. Jamelia can't tell if he's joking or not.
"Financier Sykes..."
"Just get your job done."
FLASH TRANSMISSION
FROM: "Crisis Management Committee" CMC.CMD.JOINT.TU
TO: JB451.OP.NWO.TU
RE: Unknown Threat in Moscow
Intelligence reports that the Moscow museum's caretaker crew of Technocratic personnel was killed by rogue agents using Iteration X equipment. Numbers and disposition are unknown. As your AO is currently in Moscow, Russia, we are extending your mission to remove these unknown hostiles. They must either capitulate or be eliminated. There is no room for compromise or negotiation in this situation. The hostiles are spreading anti-Union propaganda, claiming that the Union has been subverted by EDEs. Beware, they may be seeking to defect to Reality Deviants. Your mission objectives are threefold:
1. Silence/discredit the Anti-Union propaganda.
2. Investigate who these unknown hostiles are and what their goals are.
3. Terminate these rogue agents. All sanction is allowed.
All available information is attached.
[Blurry pictures of Iteration X equipment engaging Moscow Technocrats has been attached. Most of them look to have been taken from the construct underneath the museum.]
There was never just one.
Be Jamelia:
[ ] (1.5x) You need more information. Something here is suspicious.
[ ] (0.5x) Loot? Loot! They're probably working for Friend Computer. Plasma cannon them, sort out what remains.
[ ] Write-In.
Your personnel are fully healed, have regained all their WP, and all their Prime Energy. The power of a day off (which Kessler mostly spent in the regrowth vat, to be fair, but everyone else had fun!) Bonus XP may be rewarded for elaborating more on the actual day off which everyone (including Jamelia) enjoyed, which I was going to do but we're at 4700 words here and I just took a final exam.
There's something Jamelia Belltower doesn't tell other people, and it's that there's a reason apart from the fact that she's a workaholic that she sleeps as little as she does. The workaholic lifestyle is quite enough to explain it in the eyes of others. There aren't enough hours in the day, and she can get the paperwork done when everyone else is asleep and liaise easily with people on the other side of the world. Most people waste a third of their life sleeping; she believes the Union gets over 40% extra hours out of her than your average member of the masses.
Sadly, the New World Order doesn't pay by the hour, unlike the Syndicate. Who both pay an hourly rate and usually get to go home at 3pm, rather than 3am. And earn vastly more than her. Bastards.
But there's the other reason, and she doesn't confess to that because it's a weakness, a flaw, something people could use against her. She doesn't sleep much because it hurts. Even when she tries things like patches and subcutaneous drips, she always wakes suffering withdrawal symptoms, feeling like shit. And one of the minor documented features of INVISIBLE BEAR is it left all its recipients as lucid dreamers. Her dreams usually turn into nightmares as the withdrawal symptoms kick in.
So she grabs four-to-eight hours every few days. So she always keeps KeepAwake close to hand. But she still sometimes has to rest to stop her body falling apart, and then she tolerates it as a distasteful necessity.
The nightmares are here.
"Good morning, agent," says her younger self, sitting in her chair. "Let's talk about your performance review, shall we?"
Jamelia crosses her arms. "Wonderful. Self-analysis. You can dispense with the pretense, you know."
"Please don't make this more difficult, agent," her younger self says. "Now, your hypothesis that the Computer has gone rogue and betrayed the Union. Very interesting. And as for the idea that the Computer has compromised Control... well, that raises questions. Chief among them 'could it really be said that the Computer has gone rogue?'. There are those who would argue that Control is the Union. Why do you claim you can act against orders from Control in the name of the Union?"
"The Socratic method? Really? Well, I suppose it is useful," Jamelia says drily. "It's ridiculous and... and fallacious to say that Control is the Union. The Union is larger than that. It's more than just a council of leaders. It's an idea. We coped with losing them in the Dimensional Anomaly. The Union didn't fall apart - it just suffered difficulties as any group which lost most of its upper echelons and vast amounts of assets would. We endured."
"Hmm," her younger self says. "That's a viewpoint. But could you not say that the Union did fall apart? By your own hypothesis, the Void Engineers are essentially a wildcard, and as you well know the Syndicate and the New World Order are at each others' throats."
"We were at their throats when Control was still around," Jamelia points out. "And from what I've seen from Donald's files, the Syndicate has done major housecleaning recently. Some of the rumors going around about the Special Projects Division... well. If this was found out because of the increased use of Dimensional Science, the liberalization of that field may have saved us from a cancer inside the Union. The Void Engineers are more worrying, but..." she sighs. "It all depends on how accurate my hypothesis is."
She jabs a finger at her younger self. "But let me tell you one thing," she says coldly. "I'm not going to sit back and let the Union fall. Have you seen what happened here in Moscow without us? Men treated as cattle. Enlightened Scientists reduced to blood-slaves. Dead hungry once-human things ruling over people. That's what the Technocratic Union was made to stop! That's what we have stopped!"
"That's what the Order of Reason was made to stop," the other woman says. "Why do you assume that was what the Union was made for?" She taps on the glass. "Agent Belltower, do you remember the Series-P agent? You destroyed that asset. He was just following orders. He had no choice. Just like the employees you unleashed your collection of genetically and cybernetically enhanced killers and a bunch of Reality Deviants on."
"They were compromised by Nephandi," Jamelia says flatly. She sighs. "And yes. I made a mistake. I should have sent Cross in from the roof like that in the first place, taken their leaders out like that."
"Oh, but do you really care about that?" her interrogator says. "After all, they were just expendables. Well, the associates were expendable. The Series-P was more expensive. But don't worry, Agent Belltower. You can assuage your guilt. You've provided the Union with several replacement candidates. I'm sure the Union will consider some of those younger Infernalists – the ones so young they were recruited straight to the group and likely were addicted to the vitae immediately – to be suitable. You might even get issued one of them as a reward. Haven't you done well?"
Jamelia is momentarily lost for words, and shivers.
"No smart remark? Interesting. Guilt. Even a smidgen of shame. The Series-P scare you, don't they? I wonder why, oh graduate of INVISIBLE BEAR? Is it because you see some of them in yourself? Or is it just because they have no room for doubt? You have no certainty," the younger Jamelia says, rising and standing at the window. She stares out over a city which looks a little like Hong Kong, but all kinds of strange humanoids walk the streets. A great dragon slithers along the street, leaving ice on every surface behind it. "You have a strange relationship with certainty, Agent Belltower. You don't trust it. Why, Agent Belltower?"
"Certainty gets you killed," she says flatly.
"Are you sure?"
Jamelia stares flatly at her. "Not funny."
"That was not a joke, Agent Belltower. Why are you so sure that certainty gets you killed?"
"You're part of my mind," Jamelia hisses. "You know why."
"I know I know, and I know you know. But I will have you admit it."
"Because certainty means you wind up being dragged towards a Labyrinth by someone you trusted! Because you believed them when they said they had orders!" Jamelia snaps, forcing out the words. The lights in the room blow all at once, shattering glass down on the ground. "Because if you don't accept you could be wrong, then… then… then…"
"Silent Starling betrays you," her younger self says.
"That bastard. He betrayed the Union. He betrayed us!
"He betrayed you. And so you said yes to INVISIBLE BEAR. To try to seal away the pain. You asked for it."
"I needed to be better! I had to stop something like that ever happening again! And it worked! When people betrayed me since then, I've been ready for them!"
"It tore your team apart. You all have your scars. Furious Ratel has never commanded an amalgam since, and has a problem with authority. Screaming Owl is a washed up embarrassment the Union pretends it never sanctioned, half-crazed by voices and filled with regrets over his daughter. Cunning Squid committed suicide in the eighties. Prowling Wolf defected. And then there's you."
"Your point is?" Jamelia hisses. "I know this. This isn't some profound revelation."
"I wished for you to think about it. And now you are thinking." Her younger self claps. "Bravo, Agent Belltower. I think we've made excellent progress today," she said as she steps through the window, and vanishes.
Jamelia blinks, opening her eyes to the white walls of the cheap house in the Moscow suburbs currently operating as their safehouse. She aches all over, and as she pulls herself out of bed, she can feel herself shake like a leaf.
It takes her three goes to open the container, and get out her morning dose. It takes a few minutes for the shakes to go, and even once they're gone she feels groggy, headachy, sick, and generally like shit.
Groaning, she makes her way down to the kitchen. It is a dingy, small cramped room which barely has enough space for the table and the counters and the cookers.
"My goodness," Serafina says, sitting at the breakfast table eating something horrifically unhealthy largely made of meat and fat. She is wearing a baggy t-shirt, and not much else. "You're not the first one up. I do hope you're not ill. You're normally disgustingly 'Oh, I'm Director Belltower, I don't bother sleeping'."
"I will hurt you," Jamelia mutters, as she makes herself instant coffee.
"Oh, wonderful. I do hope we can put me in mortal peril for the third time in less than two days."
With some coffee in her, Jamelia felt she might be able to respond in ways which did not involve her gun. "You can be very sarcastic," she observes.
"Really?" Serafina sighs, and seems to take in Jamelia's state better. "Bad night?" she asks.
"I'm fine," Jamelia says.
"You don't look fine."
"I am fine." She glances over at Serafina's plate. "And now I know where Rose learned to cook."
"Actually, modern cooking came as part of her base personality template among a whole suite of other skills," Serafina says casually. "We eat similar things because shockingly things with lots of fat and meat taste good. Although we're also both genemodded to find the taste of greens nice and to stop eating when we're full."
"Have I ever said I will hurt you?" Jamelia grumbles, retrieving a loaf of rye bread as part of her carefully calculated diet. "Because I will hurt you."
"Gosh. You're really showing your age today," Serafina observes. "And this is how you act on an enforced rest day. No wonder you never take time off."
"I've taken time off," Jamelia protests, as she refills the kettle.
"Time not forced due to injury or mandatory post-incident cooldown?" Serafina says, arching an eyebrow.
"Yes!"
"Time recently?"
"..."
"I thought as much. Was it in the last two decades?"
"Yes, actually, it was. I took a week off after a high tension mission in India." Jamelia pauses as she roots through the fridge and finds an egg. "That was in 1999."
Serafina works her mouth. "You were... you were there for the Week of Nightmares?" she almost squeaks.
Jamelia shakes her head wearily. "No," she says, putting the egg in to boil. "That was the week I took off after I got off the mission in question. I was in Brazil at the time."
"... uh. Wow." Serafina cocks her head. "So you have an irrational fear that if you take time off again bad things will happen?"
"Don't be ridiculous," Jamelia lies, pulling out her phone and beginning to hypercram the night's feeds from the bugged vampires.
"… what are you doing? You're meant to be relaxing today."
"I am relaxing," Jamelia says. "It's just surveillance footage while I wait for my egg to boil."
"That's not relaxing! Clearly I need to take you out to a nightclub or something. You clearly never go unless your mission requires it."
"May I point out that this is Moscow and going to a nightclub will likely have us see something which will put us back on duty?" Jamelia points out. "Or get us attacked by vampires. Or Choristers. Or the Euthanatos. Or a bunch of Verbena fanatics upset with how you engage in vivisection."
"… while that is true, my point that you need to find a way to relax stands."
"I am relaxing," Jamelia says, grumpily. "Surveillance is relaxing."
Serafina sighs. "And people say we're warped and don't act like normal people."
"You made yourself a boyfriend when you were fourteen."
"Okay, two things, Firstly, everyone would totally do that if they could. Secondly, I was fourteen at the time! Oh, and it was also the nineties! Why does everyone keep on bringing that up?"
"That's three things," Jamelia says idly, focussing on the hypercram. "Aha!"
"Oh?"
"Yes. So from the surveillance, I believe I've found a possible location for a Tremere haemophage cache-location of RD artefacts. I'll give the information as a 'gift' to the Virtual Adepts, so they can use it or trade it to their allies, which should eliminate that vampire cache. And allow us to get a favour from them." Jamelia stretches and smiles. "Today is looking up."
"You need a hobby. And your egg's boiling. Look, Donald called me and told me he had tickets for two tickets for quote-unquote 'that thing you liked' and that he demands you go to Los Angeles to help him use them."
Jamelia wonders what they are, because she doesn't like anything outside of her job. Not anymore. Not since INVISIBLE BEAR. "And if I refuse?"
"If you refuse, he says that he's coincidentally talked to a few guys, including some in Q Division, who were asking for extra funding, and it just happens that coincidentally, you're assigned on mandatory 24-hour leave at this point and if you don't go with him you may be in violation of NWO personnel directives."
Syndicate executives, Jamelia thinks. So annoying. "And your part in this was?"
"My part in this was talking to him. He wanted to know about me, probably to get me in bed." Serafina says. "I may have gently changed the topic to our mutual boss, and it just ballooned from there. And my professional opinion is that he's right."
"You put him up to this, didn't you?" Jamelia asks, eyes narrowing suspiciously.
"I told him to get you some time off. I didn't tell him anything more than that, I swear. So if he ends up doing something incredibly tasteless, it isn't my fault." Serafina says.
***
Autochthonia
1999
Case RAGNAROK +2521 Hours
Comptroller Schiavelli is tired, hungry, and more than a little angry. Betrayed by the Computer. Betrayed by the machines that were supposed to be the future. Betrayed by the organization he gave everything to. Of course, he should have suspected it. He isn't a field agent, he knows the untruths. He knows about Consensus, about the weight of reality, about the Union's true purpose to shape humankind to mass Ascension. He's been part of the outer circle of Control for years, a young boot at the tender age of 100 or so. He can make a very, very good guess to exactly what happened. The Computer was never quite on-side, or if it wanted to help humanity, it had a very strange way of seeing it. He suspects putting them in a perfect little bottle, giving everyone a purpose and a task to accomplish indefinitely, would be 'helping' if you considered things like 'free will' or 'creativity' to be pointless. The Iterator laughs bitterly. He wonders if he can even call himself an Iterator-but then again, he's pretty sure all of his colleagues have become Reality Deviants.
Underneath his salvaged powered armor, he's wearing a T-shirt that says "I became the sole leader of Iteration X and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt and a billion killer robots chasing me." The woman who made it for him died getting the codes they needed for this one push. He wants to lay down and die, give up like so many of the men and women he's found, but he can't. He has one last responsibility. One last duty to the Union, and that is to get these men and women out. Tell them the truth they're owed. In one of the dark, dimly-lit tunnels of Autochthonia's bowels, he looks at motley crew of HITMarks, cyborgs, daemons, and Enlightened Scientists. Most of them young, naive. People who weren't fully with the program. Weren't fully programmed. People who had deviant personality traits. People of abnormally strong will. People who managed to resist the call for one reason or another.
And today, all of them might die. The little Autochtonian Resistance, the men and women and cyborgs and free AIs who called themselves the International Brotherhood of Mechanicians again, complete with joking blue IBM patches on their shoulders, might be doomed. But if they were, they would write themselves into the history books. He checks firewalls, local datanet subversion. They're clear. He clears his throat with a slightly mechanical rasp.
"We've lost so many men and women and machines over these past days, but they gave their lives for a purpose. That purpose is to give us a chance to go back home. I know the Dimensional Anomaly has supposedly sealed the way off from standard wormhole transport or FTL craft, but our predictions imply that there might be some way of getting out of here. It's a thin hope, but it's all we have. This isn't Star Wars, people." His ADEI is giving him cultural references that the younger crowd may understand. He doesn't want to date himself.
Comptroller Schiavelli wonders if the Italian-American draftee who joined the Marine Corps on that fateful day over 80 years ago would recognize himself now. A high-school dropout, now a scientist and a leader of men and a god damn wizard. He knows that he shouldn't call himself that, but fuck it, he's earned that right.
"There is no exhaust port to shoot a proton torpedo down and pat ourselves on the back. There is no glowing red self-destruct button here. We can't win here. And even if there was, the Computer and its brain-jacked cronies would know about it, guard it, and make it impossible for us to attack. But you know what their weakness is?"
He pauses, waits for their response.
"They don't understand humanity."
"They don't understand love. Creativity. The human spirit. Willpower. Determination. Our willingness to take whatever slim chances exist because we want to go down fighting goddamn it. And so we're going to hit the mat-trans. They think it's suicide to use it. They're probably right. But better almost certain suicide than guaranteed death or lobotomization." Schiavelli is incredibly aware of the fact that a few years ago, Reality Deviants probably exhorted themselves to attack Technocrats with the exact same words. The irony is not lost on him.
"When you get back, you need to assume everything is hostile. The Computer may well have taken over all of Iteration X's Earth-side systems and God only knows what's happened to the leadership of the other Conventions. We're the faces of the Technocracy's military arm, so most of the Traditions are going to distrust you. I need you to get the word out to any resistance, any remnants of humanity that might still exist. I need you to become Prometheus. You need to teach them. Give them the fire stolen straight from this Machine-God, show them how to fight back. I won't mince words, since most of you already can guess. Your chances of success? Nearly nonexistent. You will be fighting an enemy smarter than you, more powerful than you, more numerous than you. You'll be fighting without the ability to call in backup, without any resources except the ones you personally have access to, without any intelligence save what you can gather. But these few days have given this old man a little ray of hope. I think you'll be able to do it."
He gives them a salute. "Any questions? No? All right. Let's make the Order of Reason proud."
***
Autochthonia
1999
Case RAGNAROK +2529 Hours
"How's that hacking coming?" Schiavelli asks. Wong, his tech specialist shakes his head. "They've directly firewalled the ability to use non-approved programs. I'm trying to get them to recognize my authority, but they've got evolving data security."
"Shit." The Mat-Trans building is defensible, but it was designed to keep invaders out of Autochthonia, not let a motley crew of machines and men and things beyond men survive for hours while technicians fought their own battle in virtual space. One of them flatlines. It takes a moment for Schiavelli to recognize BlackICE. His job is different.
Decades ago, he would have needed a connection, something, to break into enemy AI systems. Not now. Even as the HITMarks chasing him run in autistic mode, he feels them. He pulls. He changes computer programming and memory by sheer force of will, the destiny of the Awakened. The HITMark he targets turns, attacks its fellows, becomes a distraction that they do not understand. He feels the strain of Paradox, of this realm's rules pushing at him. Do this too often, and die. Fortunately, plasma lances work well enough under Autochthonian rules, Schiavelli thinks, as he lances a HITMark through its fusion reactor and consumes it, and its comrades, in a sub-nuclear fireball.
"Comptroller. We've got to leave, now. We're taking heavy casualties and this place is designed in the exact wrong way to be defensible for us."
I could help you with that. Just a single adjustment and you could be free.
He knows the voice. Warspun. A demon. D-e-m-o-n, not D-a-e-m-o-n, although it might be the latter as well. A virus, a EDE lifeform of maliciousness and subversion. It could, in fact, help. It's probably even sincere. After all, what better prize than a Technocratic leader. He thinks at it.
And your price?
Freedom. I demand to be freed from this world. Just carry me through the Mat-Trans, and you will have your debts forgiven. Of course, Schiavelli notes, to do that he has to open his neural implants to the corruption. He considers the offer for a moment. He smiles a mirthless smile.
"I accept."
Good. The Mat-Trans's status reports all go green. They push through the heavy equipment they've managed to salvage, VTOL superfighters and combat walkers and other equipment. Then, his men and women rush through it to parts unknown, to a world unknown, as Warspun flows into his ADEI, starts working his own dark magic on the neural implant programming. Now join them.
"C'mon commander! Get going!" Katherine Pajari says, waiting for him.
Schiavelli takes a step towards the Mat-Trans, and his armor servos cut out. He smiles as Warspun curses. "Kid, this was always a one-way trip for me. I'm a dead man walking. I never intended to go back." He uses his own implants, pushes Katherine through the wormhole with a concussive blast moments before it closes. She'll forgive him. Eventually.
"You see, Warspun. You're just like the Computer. For all you laugh about damning mankind, you don't know a thing about it. You see all the worst it has to offer, and assume that we put on a facade over our true natures." He activates the quick jettison of the armor, is left standing in the room in nothing but a shirt and combat pants as HITMarks batter on the hastily-implemented barricades. "You think heroism, dignity, compassion, self-sacrifice are all just jokes used to justify who we are."
"They're not. They're just as much as part of us as selfishness and cowardice. Sometimes they're used to evil ends too, but fuck this, I didn't do this to get into a debate with hellspawn that won't understand it anyways." He grabs his personal weapon, an 80 year old .45 caliber pistol.
Well, most of it, anyways. It has one round in the magazine. One very special round. Warspun screams, pleads. The Iterator does not listen.
"I did this to earn forgiveness for my sins in death. And yeah, maybe that's a little selfish, but nothing in this world is pure. It's just that there's a lot more light than things like you can comprehend." He holds the gun to his temple. "My name is Gianni Schiavelli. Remember me." Comptroller Schiavelli pulls the trigger, fires the custom-tooled antimatter-core round. The room is consumed in cleansing light.
***
Los Angeles, California
Earth
2015
Jamelia doesn't know whether to be satisfied or paranoid that Donald has found something that she genuinely enjoys, something that isn't just part of another mission. She is, however, surprised that she found hockey so entertaining, as well as the late-night ribald comedy show Donald insisted she watch after a late (and very expensive) dinner. "Donald, I have to say-" she begins.
Jamelia's phone buzzes. She recognizes the precise vibration as an emergency call. She takes it.
"Wait, what?" Jamelia exclaims.
"I understand, but what exactly do you think is-"
"All right, yes, we'll do what we can to ensure that whoever has compromised our codes is eliminated." She hangs up.
"This. This is why I never take days off." Jamelia hisses. "Because whenever I do, I get interrupted because something terrible happens because I'm not running it."
"You know," Donald says, infuriatingly reasonably, "you aren't omnipotent or omniscient. And like I said, and like Dr. Rosario told you, and you should probably listen to a real doctor, you're going to break one day if you keep this up. Nobody's invulnerable. Not even you."
"I can handle it. I've handled it for decades."
"Yeah, plenty of things can last decades without maintenance, but they break eventually. Resting? That's maintenance. Look, when you got here I thought you were going to be some kind of hard-ass asshole boss who'd get herself in a situation where nobody liked her or respected her enough to care. But you aren't. We care for you, and out of pure self-interest, I'd like to keep Director Belltower instead of getting someone who does everything by the book and threatens to recycle constructs whose only failing is being a person instead of a meat robot and threatens you if you're not doing everything using 100% NWO-approved dogma. And I think you'd like to be here too, with people you can trust," Donald pauses, reconsiders his word choice. "-or at least distrust moderately less, and who trust you instead of a bunch of back-stabbing puppets who look at you like an obstacle to be removed in their climb to the top."
Jamelia sighs. "I can handle it. If you say you trust me, then trust me on this. And now I need to go to Moscow, because some incredibly stupid people have apparently claimed that the Technocracy has been taken over by evil artificial intelligences or something and I need to make them shut up, preferably without shooting at them."
Donald's eyes widen even through his happy alcohol-induced buzz. "Yeah, okay, maybe we should cut this vacation short."
"I thought it was over."
"No way. I barely even started attempting to seduce you yet." Donald says. Jamelia can't tell if he's joking or not.
"Financier Sykes..."
"Just get your job done."
***
FLASH TRANSMISSION
FROM: "Crisis Management Committee" CMC.CMD.JOINT.TU
TO: JB451.OP.NWO.TU
RE: Unknown Threat in Moscow
Intelligence reports that the Moscow museum's caretaker crew of Technocratic personnel was killed by rogue agents using Iteration X equipment. Numbers and disposition are unknown. As your AO is currently in Moscow, Russia, we are extending your mission to remove these unknown hostiles. They must either capitulate or be eliminated. There is no room for compromise or negotiation in this situation. The hostiles are spreading anti-Union propaganda, claiming that the Union has been subverted by EDEs. Beware, they may be seeking to defect to Reality Deviants. Your mission objectives are threefold:
1. Silence/discredit the Anti-Union propaganda.
2. Investigate who these unknown hostiles are and what their goals are.
3. Terminate these rogue agents. All sanction is allowed.
All available information is attached.
[Blurry pictures of Iteration X equipment engaging Moscow Technocrats has been attached. Most of them look to have been taken from the construct underneath the museum.]
There was never just one.
Be Jamelia:
[ ] (1.5x) You need more information. Something here is suspicious.
How are you getting information on them? Are you going to talk to them? Are you going to dig around in archives? What are you doing?
[ ] (1.2x) Fuck it, you know Panopticon's here. Throw them at the problem and maybe they will end up killing each other, and saving you a fuck of a lot of trouble.[ ] (0.5x) Loot? Loot! They're probably working for Friend Computer. Plasma cannon them, sort out what remains.
[ ] Write-In.
Your personnel are fully healed, have regained all their WP, and all their Prime Energy. The power of a day off (which Kessler mostly spent in the regrowth vat, to be fair, but everyone else had fun!) Bonus XP may be rewarded for elaborating more on the actual day off which everyone (including Jamelia) enjoyed, which I was going to do but we're at 4700 words here and I just took a final exam.
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Deadly Snark
Tryhard As Fuck
Well this is a clusterfuck.
- Location
- Singapore
I'm tempted to throw Panopticon at them, but I'm reasonably sure that they'd win. We'll need more data, so... I don't know, ask Henriette to hack into their comms or something.
Space Marine?! Space Marine.
People don't need space marines. Hell, they don't want space marines. -Agent Kevin Spacey, 2015.
Heil Hydra, etc.
[X] (1.5x) You need more information. Something here is suspicious.
- Have Henriette hack their comms before making any decisions regarding contacting them.