JB CXLIV: Involuntary Requisitioning
The garage level is filled with acrid smoke from the destroyed machines and EDE remnants. The dust twists and swirls through the environment like a thing possessed, wild nanotech aimlessly flitting through air. It's a straight shot to the cargo elevator. Technically there's resistance, but the hastily assembled crew of security personnel aren't equipped for combat in a hellscape and aren't trained to fight combat cyborgs and armored vehicles. They disintegrate almost instantly when Kessler turns a captured autocannon on them and Elsa follows up with smart grenades, fleeing the battle and the hellish mechanical things that seem to be attacking all comers. With the resistance broken, the team is heading downwards into the bowels of the construct. There's less noise on the elevator. It's a brief moment of respite.
John Kessler knows it's a lull, but he still appreciates it. He checks the ammunition on the salvaged autocannon he's using as a portable weapon. 15 rounds left. Still worth lugging around. The Void Engineer spook and the NWO spook are Elsa's problem, in the backseat of that heavily armored assault vehicle which reminds him of a cross between a sports car and a tank, and from what he's overhearing the VE spook is still screaming at Elsa about her recklessness. Kessler has to admit, that was a pretty ballsy move that would have led to instant horrible laser-y death had she miscalculated. But he's too experienced to care about protocol, and if it works but it's stupid it isn't stupid. A good policy for a lot of things in this world. It's what let him survive being stranded for years on an alien planet. It's what let him adapt the enemy's knowledge to his own. It's what let him realize fundamental truth.
In the quiet between battles, John Kessler wonders about that. Reality might be what people believe, but he likes this one. For all its flaws. It could be better-some better cybernetic limbs instead of ones which can
almost do what a natural one can, a bit more virtual reality, maybe bring back the term "cyberspace" and fix problems like poverty and religious extremism instead of focusing too much on giving consumers phones which technically have more processing power than his old UDEI had. But even so-he likes this world. It's not a perfect world, it's not even a 'good enough' world, but he likes it, flaws and all.
Kessler laughs to himself. Even after realizing everything's a social science, something determined by human behavior and belief, that doesn't make him a Reality Deviant. The Traditions' hubris is that they think people will realize the truth behind the world and suddenly decide that they were right after all. For all that they have the wise-men and the gurus and the wizards in their towers, many of them don't quite understand just how damn
convenient it is for a world where things work because they've always worked that way. So it might all be because of people believing. That doesn't make it wrong. It's the world mankind has chosen for itself just as much as the world the Technocracy has chosen for it. And it's a world he's sworn to defend. Like he vowed in the void, when fighting The Dragon-he's chosen death and pain and uncertainty and flawed heroes. Hell, he's a flawed hero himself. You don't use heavy weapons in combat without ending up with some fatal accidents on your record. All he can do is try to make the most of it. Make sure it doesn't happen again. Make sure people who died when they shouldn't have die for a good cause.
He understands now what the term "Reality Deviant" actually means. A conscious rejection of the Technocratic ideal. A discarding of a materialistic objective system for something else entirely. A rejection of the law. Not the best term, but now it makes sense why so many things are Reality Deviants. They reject the Union's politics. It explains why even the Virtual Adepts are RDs. Kessler laughs again. The signs were always there, but they're invisible unless you already know. So Control knew. It had to know, because otherwise they couldn't guide the world. But does Command know? That question makes him wonder. Does the Technocracy now know what it does? Or is it the blind leading the blind?
***
It's quiet inside the cockpit of the VGV-3. It was always quiet-there's enough noise cancellation equipment in the vehicle to make sure of that. But now it's a normal quiet, rather than an eerie quiet. A lull in the screaming and the battle. Henriette is still unresponsive, head lolling in the passenger seat. A pity, as Jamelia Belltower knows her limitations. She's not a combat walker pilot, and never was. She's had some success controlling the vehicle, but she knows it's because of automated systems and Iteration X wanting some more of Q Division's funding. She knows she's definitely not more than 'adequate' at it. Henriette could have made it dance.
Even so, having an armored vehicle laying down fire let them advance faster. She's satisfied with this performance. They're going to be making good time in their escape, even if the defenses were strangely light. Distracted, almost. Was there another force attacking? Jamelia guesses that whoever did it was trying to help them. That doesn't mean the attackers aren't hostile-but it does mean that she's not entirely out of friends here. That's good, because she has to have a secondary plan. She needs a place to retreat, to understand what's happened recently, and to plan a counterattack. She needs personnel, materiel, and intelligence. This will likely be the best opportunity to gather them.
Her thoughts drift to her recent experiences as the elevator descends and descends. The subbasement is deep, deep down, carefully emplaced so that nobody would find it unless they already knew of its existence. It gives her time to think about Nichols and about the void. About how the NWO lied to her face-and got away with it. She understands the necessity of the lie-simply because physical laws are mutable with human belief doesn't make them any less laws. It just means that there's a political aspect to every science. It means she can laugh at the Iterators who liked the apolitical hard sciences and sneered at anyone who did social science.
And it explains the clever term "Reality Terrorist." Unintentionally-Jamelia's sure that whoever coined it didn't understand it, not consciously. But it works so much better than "Reality Deviant." A terrorist is someone who seeks political ends via violent means. A Reality Terrorist is someone who seeks to change reality, an inherently political act, via violence. How clever. Even when the NWO's leadership is decapitated, when it seems to be the blind leading the blind-even then, the truth exists somewhere in the very structure of the NWO. Or maybe there are people like her. People keeping their heads down, because their statements are themselves Reality Deviance. Control had to know-but now Control's gone and it's become broken and inhuman and there's nobody left to bring nascent leaders back into the fold.
Nobody except one. Jamelia thinks, and before she can reflect on that thought they're there.
The doors start to open and they're inside the subbasement, where most of the advanced equipment is stored. The mat-trans is a level below, but there's more to do than simply escape here. The walls here are blank metal. Not Primium-the Construct didn't rate that much protection, but alloys that mundane industry would struggle to produce, alloys more valuable than gold built up into meter-thick walls of armor plate.
The cyberzombies are back again. The screaming starts. The zombies move. And gunfire follows.
***
Automatic weapons crackle and John Kessler guns down a pack of screaming vaguely feminine cyberzombies with the autocannon he tore off a TENNO. It's just as well, because the weapon runs dry just as the last one falls. He discards the heavy weapon and draws a fresh one from his coat.
"Left corridor clear!" he calls out. "Moving!"
For now. the monsters from Henriette's subconscious - although Wufan says they're the product of EDEs molding themselves to feed off the neural patterns of her nightmares - are holding back. They're screaming, still, making it hard to communicate, but that's a two-sided sword. It should also make it harder to spy on them.
"Go go go!" Jamelia orders. "Secure the network node. I want us to grab what we can and set up a screamer so the Union is alerted to-"
"I wouldn't do that if I were you," Elsa says from the armored vehicle. "Uh, that is, I'd respectfully advise against it on the grounds that I wouldn't do that if I was you."
"Explain."
"When I was hacking this
beauty," she says, almost purring with that word before becoming more serious again, "something tried to counter-hack me. If I wasn't loaded up with counter-black ICE and... other kinds of protection, it'd have fried me. I cut the connection before it hit, but going poking around in their files would give it more chances to bring the pain. That, or just blow up the node on us. Really high end ItX hardware, by my guesstimate. Probably a high end AI."
Jamelia nods. Elsa is telling the truth. That is to say, she's only lying by omission because Jamelia suspects strongly that any 'really high end ItX hardware' is probably Autopolitan in nature. "Thank you, lieutenant. In that case, stick WhiteLiars in the local network and make it look like we're going for the node as that was my initial response - instead we'll go to grab what hardware we can and punch through to the MatTrans. We are on a deadline here, but the MatTrans is an industrial one. I want us prepared in case they've already gated in something heavy."
***
"Engage only to distract." Ms. Clock sends to her primary Enlightened asset there. Gabriel Cedano is not a particularly valuable asset, unlike the rest of her crew. He's too high-maintenance, too blood-blind by his idealism and anger and not even close to the level which would let him actually thrive in the environments he tends to end up in. She hopes he'll listen, but she knows he will not.
There's no response but the screaming. She can't reach him anymore. The unknown incursion has been spreading through the construct, and nothing has been capable of stopping it yet. It's been largely harmless to her own forces, as most of them have been topside clearing out the shapeshifter incursion. The Nazi werewolves are good fighters, no matter how abhorrent their personal philosophies might be. They've managed to take out quite a few units, including several of her security HITMarks. The 90s-era spidertank has been intact through it all, an invincible fusion-powered fortress with the armaments of a Sleeper armored platoon-but they've been smart enough to hit and run, concentrating on other assets. Or try to. Ms. Clock knows shapeshifters and how they can phase shift. She knows that their objective is the building itself-probably because one of Belltower's subordinates is using the enemy of their enemy as a tool.
It's what she'd do. And if she was in the enemy's place-she'd find assets who were capable of thinking like her and acting independently. Control needs intelligent, thinking agents to enact its will. If Control needed mindless warriors-well, they'd have sent more HITMarks. Not that they haven't been sending them. The Mat-Trans in her base is working overtime to bring in all the constructs Control has been preparing. So, Ms. Clock thinks, she really doesn't need Cedano. She just hopes that Cedano will manage to bring down one of the enemy before he expires.
***
Harlan and Jamelia have gone on to raid the base for supplies and hardware. That leaves the three of them-Wufan, Kessler and Elsa-to hack the network node. Or pretend to hack the connection and draw the attention of the Autopolitan thing out there. It makes sense to send both of them, seeing as they're both heavy cyborgs and therefore would make sense for a hacking operation. It also means that the Wufan has been trying and failing to make sense of Kessler's idiosyncrasies whenever there's a lull in the screaming, asking probing questions about his involvement with Iteration X and the Void Engineers. Elsa doesn't know if it's because of suspicion or if Agent Guo wants to use a source the Void Engineers have cleared as a potential in to recruit the rest of the amalgam. Elsa hopes it's the latter, but much like NWO spooks, Guo plays his cards close to his chest, and his expression very rarely shifts from 'carefully neutral' through it. For Kessler's part, his answers are noncommital and vague, as if the big cybersoldier was used to this sort of questioning.
Elsa moves ahead to scout the network node room as they follow. She's got the fiberoptic spinal cord and the wired reflexes and all the shoot-first combat enhancements. She moves like greased lightning compared to a heavy-spec 80s cyborg or a commando in a suit with some minor gene tweaks. A borrowed explosive from Kessler's seemingly endless supply shatters the door, and she moves through it. There's a few security bots in there-she takes them down with concentrated fire to weakpoints, reloads her rifle, and enters the network room. The room is below freezing, and she shivers slightly because of her biological emulation. Her skin prickles in simulated goosebumps, and she looks at the server racks, black boxes containing quantum computers, their smooth faces broken up only by diagnostic lights. She's going to be simulating a probing attack on them. She starts to move to attach a remote hack device to the systems and-
Elsa notices the faint ripples on the wall and the dimensional shift a split second before a fusillade of hypervelocity spikes hits where she had been a heartbeat ago. She returns fire as the bulky black armor suit walks through the wall itself. It's huge, designed for someone with a heroic build like some sort of testosterone-mainlining super action hero. In its hands it carries a high-powered railgun, and emitters glow blue across it. The cold cryogenic mist swirls around her. Her rounds deflect, stopping dead as the shielding system drains them of kinetic energy.
"Die, Deviant!" it shouts, amplified loud enough that she can hear it even over the echoing screams of the... damned? Whatever these EDEs are. She doesn't understand them at all. Harlan has smugly lectured her about psionic projections, and how these entities are projections of Langley's fears. She didn't have the heart to tell him that he was sounding like some sort of Hermetic spiritualist with his psychic mumbo-jumbo. She's had to listen to more than a few in her time.
"Get down!" Wufan shouts as he clears the door, and she dives aside, as he empties a magazine of explosive rounds from his varigun-such a useful little handgun-which explode against the shielding systems of the armor. It staggers-but doesn't fall. The response from the enemy agent misses him cleanly, his aim knocked away by Wufan's precision gunfire.
"This is going to get fun." Elsa whispers to herself.
Death of a Superhero
You're currently being harried by a single guy in a powered armor suit, with a very big gun. You want to fix this issue. You have a Void Engineer in a black suit, a Void Engineer who is a lesbian cyborg, and a 80s action hero with more augmentation than your average 80s cyberpunk protagonist. You're going to do it by...
[ ] Making a stand in the server room. Not like it's going to matter if you damage it right?
[ ] Doing a running gun battle.
[ ] Dragging the guy back towards the armored vehicles on automated sentry mode, so he gets vaporized.
[ ] Retreating to Jamelia/Harlan, and the armory with heavier weapons in it.
[ ] Trying to trick him into some other room in the subbasement with less space, so you can take him out in hand-to-hand.
[ ] Write-In.
Looting: The Plundering
So you're in the armory. How much effort are you putting into looting?
[ ] None at all. (One roll, no bonus)
[ ] (1.1x) Doing a little digging. (Two rolls, +1 success)
[ ] Making some effort to grab useful equipment. (Three rolls, +2 successes)
[ ] (.9x) Going through everything in-depth (Four rolls, +3 successes)
[ ] (.8x) Turning the entire armory upside down. (Five rolls, +4 successes)
.
