JB CXXXIX: Paranoid Maneuverings
Donald is glad he has a corner booth. It allows him to nudge the very attractive, very scary pretty lady in full primium plate away from the onlookers. Not least because he has a very, very alarming suspicion that Dr Polanski over there may have recognised the armour and he's an Etherite power-armour nut so the last thing he needs is someone fanboying over the possessed-by-a-member-of-the-Inner-Circle Rose.
Well, the last thing he needs right now. He'll probably want to use Reina to pump him for information later.
"I need information," Reina informs him coldly. Her voice is Rose's - except it isn't. The accent is wrong because it isn't Rose's adorable faintly lilting hint of Italian. The intonation is wrong. She doesn't do the thing Rose does when she's thinking or trying to puzzle out something outside of her experience. Oh, and of course, she doesn't talk to him with any fondness. "I need information about the world, I need information about the nature of this... this synthetic realm of electricity so I can understand it and understand what the thing out there is doing. And I need information about the state of the world so I can draw conclusions about the motives of our enemies and what might have prompted such action - and what else they might be doing."
"Mmm," Donald says. She makes a good point.
"Therefore you will aid me in gathering this information," she says, denying any chance that he might argue. He thinks he prefers being told what to do by Director Belltower. She makes him feel like a henchman, you know? A proper second in command who she can say 'Sykes, get it done' to and expect that he'll find his own methods. Reina makes him feel much more lackey-ish.
"I think I know some people," he says.
"You will also need to find someone who you can trust to attempt to fix Rose," Reina adds. "I don't want to slip when I eventually grow tired and forget my older memories, restoring her personality to control. She would kill you very quickly, and though it would distress her she is not strong enough to fight the commands in her head. Fixing that is quite important."
Donald agrees that yes, not being torn apart by Rose is quite important.
And there's another thing. He's out of contact here. Rose is out of contact here. That only leaves Serafina from the senior command staff - and he knows they're going for the amalgam too. Against something like the... the god-thing out there, it won't stand. It'll just stalk through the labs and kill anyone it feels like.
There's a good chance that Serafina is dead right now. He wonders if Reina knows that - or even cares. Rose certainly would. He won't bring it up, though. It might make Rose crumble. And if she crumbles, she might just fall back to the blind obedience of orders rather than have to face up to the pain and the self-doubt and the blame for not being there to protect Serafina but instead being on a date.
They won't be able to bring her back if she's like that. Not without time that they might well not have.
So. Assume the amalgam is lost. It's not much of an assumption, with that Autochthonian thing out there. Therefore Panopticon have total control over the site. They'll no doubt be ready setting it up as a trap for Jamelia and the rest of the amalgam if... no, when they get back - because they have to succeed.
So he needs to get a message out onto the net. Somehow. Something floating in the digital sea that can wash up to her whenever she arrives back on Earth. Something that can get past that thing. Something... maybe he can try to bait it into... into destroying messages he tries to get out in a way that formats areas of the Digital Web that'll leave suspicious damage which will trigger the paranoia in his boss's head and make her realise that someone's trying to erase all the information about certain topics? Maybe trick it into going up against the Traditionalist web infrastructure carrying his messages, because that stuff has withheld the entire force of Iteration X pre-99, so might stand up to this thing. Even beat it?
Well, he can hope.
... or he could talk to a Virtual Adept. Might well be easier. Or maybe not even a VA. That'd use ways out that the machine could understand. Maybe there's a Verbena out there who could make flowers close to Director Bellower blossom with a warning message? Or some other kind of horrible blatant RDery that Donald of course can't do himself, but which he can pay or coax someone else into doing for him? He'd see if someone could send her a message in her dreams, but trying to send a message to the dreams of Jamelia Belltower has one significant flaw. It's like trying to email someone who's never online.
Fuck it. He doesn't have anything better to do here, apart from getting drunk and or high. He'll do that when he runs out of ideas and try to find new ideas in chemicals.
Donald adjusts his tie, and prepares to mingle. He then looks at the bar, with its collection of simulated liquors, glances at the attractive muscular bartender flashing a winning smile, and he thinks he should prepare a bit first.
***
A few hours later, Reina stares down at the table she's found Donald at. She stares at Donald. She stares at the stacked-up heap of empty shot glasses.
She purses her full red lips in a thin line of annoyance.
"Mr Sykes," she says, leaning down and grabbing him by the ear, and pulling it up to her mouth height. "You will cease such a shameful display this instant."
Donald blinks. The world has suddenly re-focussed and isn't wobbling any more. And his ear hurts. He still... he still feels drunk, but his head is perfectly clear. And he suddenly gets the feeling that he'll be sick if he tries to drink anything else. "Guh?" he manages.
"I believe you've had enough. You had enough quite a while ago."
"Maybe I didn't?"
"You did. No more."
"Please?"
"No."
"But everyone else is doing it!"
"So?" Reina glares at him, tapping her foot and somehow drawing on dark memories of Miss Black, who'd been one of his teachers in elementary school and hadn't had time for children who couldn't sit down and shut up when they were told to. "If everyone else was jumping off a cliff, would you do it?"
"Do I get a parachute?" Donald enquires hopefully, running his hands through his hair. "Or a wingsuit? That's a lot of fun."
"There are no parachutes in this hypothetical."
"... why are we jumping off a cliff? I mean, since everyone else is doing it, is there something scary up the top we're trying to escape?"
"Mr Sykes," Reina Lior informs him, "if I catch you drinking or imbibing debilitating drugs again without my permission, I will..." she considers, "... have your body hair pulled out via the application of hot wax. Do I make myself clear?"
"... but I wax anyway," Donald points out, and the moment of confusion on the face of the ancient member of the Inner Circle of the Technocratic Union is worth it.
"You will stay sober. And you will devote your full attention to your work!"
"Fine." Donald grouses. "We have plenty of time, but let's not actually use it. Let's just work ourselves to death worrying about the thing outside and what it plans to do to us if it finds any single weakness here. It's not like this might be the last moments of our life." Nevertheless, he's already looking at the crowds of people. Avatars of every sort crowd the Spy's Demise. Some are human-attractive, sculpted in the way that VR avatars can be. Others are inhuman-figures from myth, fantastical creatures, aliens and other things. He can pick out Technocrats, Traditionalists, and Disparates. There's a few he suspects to be Marauders or Nephandi.
Just another day at the Spy's Demise, except that now the sector's quarantined by a godlike being. Nobody's ever tried it before, Donald recalls. Everyone's found the Spy's Demise too useful to take serious action against it. For all that, its defenses are significant. He doesn't think they'll fall. If they would, the god-machine would have attacked instead of trying to secure the sector.
"Ahem." Someone clears her throat behind Donald. He turns around, and runs into a witch. Well, a witch Halloween costume. That is to say, flawless emerald skin, a dress with a neckline that plunges down to the navel, leafy hair the color of autumn, and a pointy hat. "And why are
you here again?" The witch asks.
"Er..." Donald says, lost for words. "Jan..."
"You run off and
don't say a word and then you start working for the enemy. And now you come back here and
suddenly everything starts going wrong and people can't log on." she starts saying. "Do you want to explain
exactly what happened? I know you're somehow at fault." There's no fighting in the Spy's Demise. Donald knows that. Nevertheless, he's more than a little scared, especially if Reina shows up and breaks up this reunion with his ex-girlfriend.
"I know this might be difficult to believe, Janice but..." Donald starts, only to be interrupted by Reina showing up with a scowl on her face.
"Who is this...
witch?" Reina sniffs.
"Who's this? Your new girlfriend?" Janice asks bitterly in return. She gets a death glare from Reina in return.
"Do not tell me, Mr. Sykes," Reina starts in a tone that somehow combines the best (worst?) parts of 'disappointed grandmother' and 'drill sergeant,' simultaneously berating him and making him feel that he deserves far, far worse. "You have been consorting with the enemy."
"I can explain!" Donald protests. "Everything!"
"Please do." The two women say simultaneously, then glare at each other.
***
While relaxing in the LX-4's luxuriant passenger compartment-well, as relaxed as she can be in a suspicious situation like this-Jamelia seemingly accidentally brushes her fingers along Kessler's hand. He's got enough hardware in his head that he should remember the old 80s hand ItX combat gesture for 'be suspicious'.
He yawns. Good enough. He's telling her she's boring him. Sneaky. He then goes back to looking out the window silently, acting like the dumb muscle people tend to think of him as. Jamelia knows enough about him to realize that it's a mistake.
Kessler is Kessler. He's the big guy. Not so bright, but damn amiable. Easygoing in the way that some shock troopers are, because he knows he's the most lethal man in the room and thus doesn't have much to prove. Especially since he apparently now killed a dragon or
the dragon or something - Jamelia still doesn't quite understand what happened there and she hasn't been able to find a way to isolate him so the two of them can have a little talk about certain things.
Look, basically,
she underestimates him which means she's pretty damn sure that everyone else will too. And he was the last one to see them. If they're missing memories they
should have, that's a sign something up.
"So," Kessler says cheerfully, "Donald. Did the Vees give you any problem with the arrangements at the base?"
Jamelia sits back and lets him get to work, listening in to Donald's responses. She's got her own little checkups to carry out. She's got chronons snarled up in her, Nichols said, and she's already been playing around with them. Just trying things out. Getting used to how things can shift them, and how that triggers her dimensional sensitivity. It's like she's got iron filing stuck in her, which means she reacts to magnetic fields. Only it's time here, not magnetism.
Oh, Allah. She doesn't have the words to explain what she's trying to do, exactly. It's like trying to feel... to do radiocarbon dating with the things trapped in her, only it's not quite like that. But she knows she can sense that Henriette is about twenty, for example, and she knows how old Donald should be - and maybe Serafina too, although her biological changes might throw her sense off - and if there's a real discrepancy, something has gone very, very wrong. She's certainly sure she could tell if they were fastclones less than a year old.
She doesn't think they are. They don't look like fastclones-the cells in their bodies are old enough, or "old" enough, that they might be who they say they are. Of course-that doesn't prove that someone didn't brainwash them. Or throw clone bodies in some kind of fast-time field. She can't prove that they're safe. Kessler looks at her and shakes his head fractionally. He makes a quick hand sign, "hostile." Jamelia doesn't know how
he knows, but if his instincts were bad-well, she's been in the void now. She's been in hostile subdimensions. If he survived in them-he'd probably know what he was doing. Jamelia notices that Henriette's seen the gesture.
And thankfully,
thankfully, Henriette says nothing. She doesn't give any tells. She just turns back to Serafina and starts chatting about happenings on Earth. "Where's Rose?" Henriette manages to work into the conversation. "I got her something."
Donald glares at Henriette about the insensitivity, and goes back to talking to Kessler about what had happened after they had left. It had been uneventful until about ten days ago, when everything had apparently gone completely and utterly wrong. Useful information to know, even if she's suspected a lot of it. Heavy casualties, lots of damage, valuables stolen-they'll be spending a lot of time replacing everything and making sure it's secure.
"Rose is... she's not in great shape. But she's recovering. The attack on the construct..." Serafina trails off.
Jamelia finds
that somewhat suspicious. Serafina probably wouldn't be here if that was true. But there's still the right amount of brittleness underneath her voice to mitigate some of her concerns. With access to Union servers again, she can take a look at what the official cover story on the Construct assault is. Jamelia has absolutely no faith that she can rely on it. It's not that the information is
inaccurate-she doubts that there's going to be many, if any, outright lies in the report. She doesn't have the ability to pick out omissions, or places where ambiguous information is interpreted in a way that helps the writer. But yet, what they want her to believe is fairly simple.
They want her to believe that the Camarilla, in vengeance for Moscow, attacked the construct with EDE assistance with subverted SWAT and National Guard units, destroying it and killing all the junior staff. The senior staff survived largely by luck-they weren't there when the attack happened-Donald had been out with Rose and had 'only' been attacked by a smaller hemophage contingent, which had led to her grievous injury and his stay in a Union nanomedical pod, while Serafina had been working in a lab, one much better defended than the construct and thus impossible to siege. A healthy amount of debate is going on about what forms of retribution should be taken against the hemophages, and there's certainly been incidents of hemophage identities being leaked to
certain parties from nominally secure Union servers.
There's a lot of Iteration X-related leaks, she notices. Jamelia finds that utterly unsurprising. A few crates of high-end weapons "go missing" and turn up in the hands of a group of ex-military veterans fighting a shadow war against hemophages. A Virtual Adept hack reveals hemophage-associated members of society and puts a bounty on them-and instead of taking it down, Iteration X finds something higher priority to put its immense processing power to. They're mad. On a war footing. It reminds her that she might be able to
use that war footing in some way.
"You did as well as could be expected." Jamelia says sympathetically. "We should have reinforced the construct somewhat, but to act so blatantly was insanity. The Camarilla here must have been fools to take violent action."
Serafina nods in agreement, and her voice is angry. She
should be angry. "Definitely stupid. It was probably a power play," she says. "Some idiot trying to leverage his position here to get into a better one ten years from now. Tragically they won't be around for much longer. I've been calling in our markers and bringing in some heavy assets to ensure that a repeat attack isn't going to happen. And maybe we can use them to get some justice."
Henriette looks up at that. "I'm in for giving some hemophages justice."
Elsa grins mercilessly at that, looking up from a quiet discussion with William, their new Void Engineer contact. "I'd love to administer some of it. Especially if it's high-caliber, high-velocity justice. Fucking hemophages. They did this a lot back in Moscow. We need to turn the tables on them, show them that we're not to be fucked with."
Jamelia notes from a glance at the GPS system that they're heading straight for the construct, probably to get them there as fast as possible. If Kessler is right-it's a trap. She just doesn't know what sort of trap, but she does suspect that it's not the sort of trap that wants its prey alive at the end of it. The hints she's teased out of Serafina and Donald are enough. She suspects they're false-somehow. High-end fakes? Infiltration clones? Brainwashed? Something far more dangerous? She needs to create a plan, bring her team in on the plan, and make sure Donald and Serafina don't know. Preferably without killing anyone or ending up blacklisted and hunted by the Technocracy. She realizes that this probably was the thought pattern of everyone she had hunted back in Vigilance. She feels a brief pang of
deja vu and a sense of... detached admiration at how she's become her own victim.
Her team, the people she can use... well, there's Harlan, they've worked together for years. She can practically read his mind, he can literally read hers. Telling him will be trivial. But if he uses his powers, they might notice. And he might doubt her. Might question her paranoia. Kessler's already convinced, apparently. Henriette might or might not believe him. Jamelia knows she'd have learned that code and with an ADEI she wouldn't forget, but she might see it as a coincidence, or not trust it. Or she might have believed it and is pretending not to. And then there's Elsa and Wufan. How much can she trust them? It wouldn't do for her to escape this trap, then end up being turned into bait by the Void Engineers.
Be A Harem Protagonist Donald:
Well, good news is you
have run into a Traditions contact who might be able to help you, being one of those weird Spirit mages and she definitely knows some Mind ones. The problem is that she's your ex-girlfriend, a bitter longtime poster on TradWiki under the handle "WickedWitchOfTheWeb," and is
very very peeved at what you've done. Also, she may actually blame you for the fact that she seems to be stuck. Reina is also very,
very concerned about your potential treason, in the kind of concern which, if you know Iteration X, tends to lead to bits of your brain being replaced. So your explanation is...
[ ] (0.5x) Tell both of them everything that happened. Your history and why you're here.
[ ] (1.5x) Redirect them to the
current problem of being hunted by a very powerful
machine-thing which she's definitely sensed, right? And now you need to get a warning out to save lives on both sides.
[ ] (0.5x) Tell Reina that she's drawing attention and you'll handle it, then try to mollify your ex-girlfriend.
[ ] Give an excuse and vanish somewhere else so you can find someone useful
directly. Maybe they'll end up handling this spat themselves.
[ ] Write-In.
Death Cab for Jamelia:
So, you're stuck in a limousine heading towards an imminent trap, and you need to figure out how to warn everyone to escape it. This is definitely a requirement and write-in fodder, but we're going to focus on what your escape plan
is. It is...
[ ] Finding an excuse to stop somewhere in the boonies, then making a run for it. (Lowest initial risk, but means you're easily targeted and can be eliminated with minimal collateral damage)
[ ] Stopping in the cities at some point, then disappearing there. (Puts you closer to Union assets but it's easier to blend in or acquire transport/equipment)
[ ] Calling someone up and burning some favors to get an official excuse to avoid having to go to the trap (Easy, but burns a favor and you don't have many of them, may also lead to extremely inconvenient explanations)
[ ] General Garrison
[ ] Professor Bastion
[ ] Ivan Rankovitch
[ ] The trap is
probably not going to spring the moment you walk in. And being able to get backdoors and retrieve equipment in the Construct itself is probably immensely helpful, as is simply being able to take a look at what your new Construct looks like and your new intern team, who are probably
also assassins. Henriette is probably going to
literally cry if she has to abandon her transforming supercar, for example. (Highest risk, gives you more intelligence information, lets you retrieve most of your Devices/equipment.)
[ ] Well, between Elsa, Harlan, and Wufan, you can probably hack a mat-trans. How better to escape the Construct than by using the Mat-Trans itself? (High risk, lets you retrieve most of your Devices/equipment.)
