Bursting Eagerness Soul
Threadwalking Rating Machine
- Location
- Wisconsin
If they know about them...
Panopticon: A Game of Posthumans, Perniciousness, Paranoia, Politics, and Plasmaguns
1) Our armour comes with very comprehensive anti-spotting defences.
2) Jamelia has Cloaking as a Merit which means they're at a further penalty to finding her.
3) Basic level "I see Correspondence" stuff only works if you can, you know, actually see the source of the disruption. As Jamelia does not want them to see us anyway, that doesn't change things much.
4) If they have the level of Correspondence to lay down a ward over the entire museum which can reliably snag all incoming and outgoing communications (bearing in mind that under the common Technocratic paradigm, you can't intercept a quantum-entangled message without people knowing you're doing it, which makes it vulgar in this Construct), we're fucked anyway because with that level of Correspondence they can scan the entire museum quickly and wouldn't have to, you know, look for us.
5) We goddamn need those Dex buffs, because our OMG strength doesn't mean much if we can't hit someone, and same for the seeker rifle. It's a calcuated risk, unlike your "Not going to work" risk.
6) If MJ starts penalising us for having characters talk to each other, then he'll get fewer write-ins and they'll be shorter, which means he'll have to write more himself.
Going to count the votes and write the update soon. Maybe this time people will actually vote for the giant robot fight!
There is a sad lack of Kaiju and/or Giant Robots for us *to* fight, though!
Really, I think that's what people are waiting for/assuming.
That we deploy the Apocalypse Canceller in response to the enemy's own escalation. (It's Power Rangers logic. Perfectly acceptable logic!)
Spectrum
Tell me a secret~
- Location
- Behind you~
[X] (1.5x) Attempt to convince the Void Engineers that you're on the same side? Please?
Best opportunity to start linking forces up. Kessler, flex your famous metal pecs!
[X] Don't drop it. Keep saving it.
Specifically because yeah waiting for a visible Apocalypse Canceler level threat to use it on. The drop does damage, too, that's important!
Best opportunity to start linking forces up. Kessler, flex your famous metal pecs!
[X] Don't drop it. Keep saving it.
Specifically because yeah waiting for a visible Apocalypse Canceler level threat to use it on. The drop does damage, too, that's important!
FunkyEntropy
Occasionally insightful, possibly grumpy
- Location
- Los Angeles
[X] (1.5x) Attempt to convince the Void Engineers that you're on the same side? Please?
Would prefer to get the VE to realize that we're on their side sooner rather than later.
[X] Don't drop it. Keep saving it.
Can't have a Giant Robo vs Kaiju fight without a Kaiju for the Giant Robo to fight. Otherwise it'd just stand there, being sad.
Would prefer to get the VE to realize that we're on their side sooner rather than later.
[X] Don't drop it. Keep saving it.
Can't have a Giant Robo vs Kaiju fight without a Kaiju for the Giant Robo to fight. Otherwise it'd just stand there, being sad.
Sadly, Jamelia has got one of her patented not-quite-correct ideas in her head. At the moment, she thinks Siddharth is trying to use the TransMat to teleport something in, possibly because the EDE avatar which sounds like Henriette has a way to repair it from this side (as the IBM guys said they would sabotage it). Therefore, if she kills Siddharth she can stop the real threat being let in, and if she fails to do this Henriette will need all the battery life she has to try to close the rift so she can't waste any of it.
Unfortunately, his main mission appears to be "murdering her in the face". Oh, Jamelia. You don't realise that Control is personally annoyed at you. Such modesty!
- Location
- National Capital Region, USA
Its somewhat heartening that this Control sub-avatar seems less emotionless-intellect than 'lightly bratty genius with issues to prove'. Hopefully we can take advantage of the fact that her, Lt Rajesh, and Gretzkov are all starting to react to Jamelia's actions rather than their own plans, and reacting emotionally, thus clouding their thinking. That's her best non-gear advantage here; Jamelia's used to thinking this way, and the Panopticon gang are not. Keep them trying to think this way, and we've got all the home-side advantages.
FlatlineAskari
*feline scrutiny*
- Location
- Elsewhere
- Pronouns
- Any
If they're currently prioritizing 'murder/pith/neutralize Jamelia' over 'Summon Greater [REDACTED]', does this give us an opening to trash the TransMat, just in case? Or is the ItX hardware down there now in an advanced state of fucked?
Whiskey Golf
Being of Editing & Technical Assistance
- Location
- Chained to my desk
...this is somewhat random, but i just realised that the place Kessler was stuck at was FarCry 3: Blood Dragon, turned up to eleven (hundred) or so. 
I hope Jamelia is going to make good on her promise of "rub Rose saving the day in Siddharth's face" before she stabs/shoots/explodes him.
Although I am holding out a thin hope of Siddharth coming out of this alive and without mind control. ... Yeah, a fool's vain hope, but there it is.
Free SeaDart!
Although I am holding out a thin hope of Siddharth coming out of this alive and without mind control. ... Yeah, a fool's vain hope, but there it is.
Free SeaDart!
Last edited:
Update LII: Escalation
JB LII: Escalation
"Oh, for fuck's sake," Kessler growls. "I am John Kessler and I kill dragons!" He yanks on a control lever and leaves his stolen giant spewing plasma at flying targets on autopilot, while he clambers out of the control pod. "And I bet there's not a single goddamn ItX exojock who can do this!" he adds, pointing down at one of the smaller swarming constructs.
"Come on, Lady Grey," he says, coaxing the matter stock synthesizer which had come off a Void Engineer ship which'd crashed down in 1996. Dragons had picked the wreck mostly clean by the time he found it, and he'd cursed because they'd eaten the comms gear, but he'd picked this up to help patch up his 'digestive' system for self-repair. He switches to the language of the dragons. "I promise, when we get out of this I'll take you out and give you a good checkover and treat you right, okay? Just gotta do this for me, or we might get shot by our own side."
It takes some coaxing, but he feels the spirit well up inside him, and a vaguely female shape pulls its way out of his chest. Her skin is the gray of a 90s era void cruiser and her body is covered in 'tattoos', the branding of the goods she used to make to resupply the ship. Stretching, singing a song made up of chemical formulae and brand names and menu items, she casts out a hand.
And like that, the ground under his target shimmers, suddenly turning oil black. He tosses a grenade down after it, and the hydrocarbons ignite. The polygonal alien walkers scream in high pitched metallic voices, flailing and burning.
"Product vended," the spirit protruding from his chest says. "Have a nice day. Buy-cheese."
"… well, I'm convinced," one of the Void Engineers says over comms after a pause. DIGRAWs fire and the air screams as more enemies are cut down. "Okay! HQ, we have confirmed uncompromised friendlies on site! And they've hijacked two of the hostile MoFlakkers and… yes, one of them is John Kessler. How on earth did you know that? Constable Cross from DeeCee, and two of our SISTERS are with him. Orders?"
There is a pause, and some of the Void Engineers leap up onto the backs of the robots with the flare of jump packs, taking defensive positions.
"We're going to be accompanying you for now," one of the marines says. "What's the status groundside."
"Jamming," Cross says. "Something's hit Piero's IFF, so we had to jump out. Lost two SISTERS doing so. Director Belltower ordered it. She's either running or trying to get him back under control." He checks a cross-dimensional display on his wrist. "Tactical situation looks bad." He scans down the list. "Basically every HITMark around seems to have gone rogue, and some Iterators and ex-Iterators or technological RDs. And…" he pauses, eyes widening. "Something's just taken out the mobile command centre," he breathes. "Possibly Piero. No, wait, he'd have done it faster. Those… those ARCs."
"If Belltower's still alive, she won't be compromised," Kessler says confidently. "She's all meat. No headware to hack. You VEs point out targets to me and I'll get them," he adds, blowing up a rank of cars and the spider-like robots hiding behind them.
"One left!"
Kessler feels Cross' eyes on him, even when the other man is busy rodeoing a giant evil spirit-alien-walker thing. "Look," he announces, not turning away from the controls, "I was trapped on a planet in the Umbra full of cyberdragons and worse things for twenty years. I got psychic powers from drinking cyberdragon blood. That's all."
"Why would you do that?"
"Because that stuff is like jet fuel and I needed to recharge my batteries," Kessler grumbles. "And you know how little drinkable water there was in some bits of that place? At least blood was sterile and didn't try to screw with my mind and didn't have aliens living in it which tried to eat me for the affront of drinking their water. And then I find stuff is starting to do stuff when I ask it do, especially when I went and learned the dragon language by spyin' on them."
"So you developed psychic powers by ingesting alien biomatter," the Progenitor says slowly. He pauses. "That sounds perfectly normal to me," he says in a more normal tone of voice.
"You bein' sarcastic there?"
"No," Cross says honestly. "It's a bit out there, but… well. You must've got lucky to not die from rejection, but that kind of thing is established labwork. I've got an entire backup EDE-derived nervous system. And just look at the SISTERS."
"The S-geneline is extensively modified with extranormal plasmid cross-species splicing, S-8 states while trying to hold off a swarm of smaller infantry-scale constructs," intrudes the mechanical voice over the communications. "S-8 would like assistance."
Kessler turns his walker's weapons on the swarm, thinning the ranks and allowing the two remaining SISTERS to retreat up onto the vehicles.
"Your assistance is appreciated, S-6 says, feeling relief she is not about to immediately die with her mission incomplete," the other SISTER says from behind Cross.
"Yeah, that," Cross says. "Just don't let Dr Rosario know."
"Yeah, I don't really wanna get in trouble for…"
"Oh, I wasn't asking you on your behalf. She'd get altogether too fascinated by it and probably start planning to ask for funding to develop a line of dragon-blood-powered constructs. And might test it on herself," Cross says drily, his walker's weapons scything through one of the jamming constructs. "You haven't spent too much time around lab-based Progenitors? Yeah, I know Serafina pretty well. They're not Iterators. At all. They love sticking organic things into their bodies. And Sera really loves to get messy with her research."
There is an awkward pause.
"Don't say it," Cross says wearily. "Yes, I do know that us constructs have to learn to see innuendo with hard experience."
"Dude, you have a scientist girlfriend who's hotter and smarter than anyone else around," Kessler says. "That kind of thing's totally needed for a healthy relationship. My ex went and got the whole emotions inhibitor thing back in '88, which sort of ended that. It's been a lonely… two and a half decades." He clears his throat. "So, what's the game-plan?" he asks the Void Engineer marine. "Kill the jammers and we'll be able to get the HITMarks back under control?"
"Kill these jamming units, and they'll still keep operating under local control, and the enemy has a local relay to feed them data." Despite the fact that the armor the marine is wearing has no distinct head, Kessler's sure she's shaking it. "No, it'll require drastic measures. We've got a EP warhead, that's Entropic-Pulse, it'll wreak havoc on anything using Iteration X quantum computing. Should hard-crash the HITMarks and vehicles, maybe annoy whatever's playing puppetmaster-then they can reboot their systems from inbuilt data fortresses. Total materiel losses should be fairly minimal."
"And everyone who has augmentations?"
"It might cause some brain damage if they've got direct brain interface." the Delta Team marine concedes. "Better than nothing. What we need to do is to take them out and then ensure the warhead detonates. We didn't just drop down here without a plan. Are you in or not?"
Moscow
Director Belltower is a ghost in a museum filled with men who want her dead. Stripping a painting off the wall, she checks the cache behind it. Empty. Damn. She darts from location to location, looting caches and updating her internal map of the place. She just needs a few more things, and then she can head to the control point for the PA system. And in the meantime, she's making some calls.
"Rosario," Jamelia says. "Combat drugs. If I'll survive if I can get to medical treatment in four hours, I want them. Motor control primary. I'm passing observed files on the 'friendly fire'. If Panopticon try to call in Shockwave codes against me, block them. You've got plenty of evidence on their 'gross incompetence'. Otherwise, get Ivan talking to the Daedalians, the local Traditions, everyone. Panopticon is trying to kill me and claiming it's friendly fire. I don't want real blue-on-blue."
"Already on it," Serafina says, her voice almost as cold and flat as Jamelia's. "Ivan's in contact with the Daedalians. Iosefova says they've got Adepts and an off-target Void Engineer drop-squad linking up with them." She pauses. "Sending through dosage instructions to your suit," she says, a hint of emotion creeping through. "Jamelia, listen to me. This is an overdose. INVISIBLE BEAR means you'll not express the initial signs of the nervous system damage, but if you push yourself too hard, you'll tear your tendons from your bones."
"This suit is moving for me so I don't need my muscles so much, and I can work through the pain. Good combination. Thank you." She pauses. "If I die, operational control passes to you. Contact Command immediately and note this contingency has been established. Don't let Panopticon seize control from under us."
"I knew you'd say that," Serafina mutters. "Rosario out."
Jamelia switches channels as she silently leaps up a flight of stairs scanning the landing for hostiles. She sees nothing, and continues.
"Langley," she says flatly. "Elevate to DEAD MAN'S HANDLE. If my vitals redline, this is formal authorization to drop on Red Square. I have IDed what appears to be the primary on-site commander of hostile forces. Lt Rajesh is taking orders from her. Orders which involve killing me. He is compromised. Subject appears to be high-level combat enhancile, capable of surviving a seeker round to the eyesocket. Relaying all information now. Belltower out."
She cuts the communications, and thus is somewhat surprised when Henriette re-contacts her ten seconds later.
"I… I know what this is," Henriette blurts out, words falling over themselves. "What this is. Not who. I… it's one of the things in my nightmares."
"What?" Jamelia says, distracted as she field-strips one of the caches left over by the original Technocrats. Explosives. Yes. She'll be able to kill the clones and robots they have with them if she lures them into traps. When you go up one vs many, your first job is to reduce it to one vs fewer. Preferably one vs zero.
"My mother… when she was killed, she was working on the next generation of hardware. Like this. DSS systems. But better. And they killed her and used her brain and her knowledge. I… I saw things like this. In Autochthonia. And the girl… she's in the nightmares too." Henriette trails off. "She's not a person," she says, voice cracking. "She's an interface terminal. A puppet for the real machine. Maybe even like a human-sized BioVARG, piloted remotely. I… I killed her. I think. But of… of course the doll wasn't her, was it?"
"It's an EDE?" Jamelia asks.
She hears Henriette swallow. "Yes," she says. "It's not… it can't be human. Even if it was made from my… from human bits."
"If it's an EDE, someone had to let it through. That kind of machine is too hard to make in Earth climates," Jamelia says, kicking down to the security office. The shallow, cover-identity "security office" which only existed so the staff here from the Masses could make PA announcements and tell people that their children were, that is, not the real security office. But what it did have was a working PA system. "Someone. Lt Rajesh. He shows up with the EDE, and I read his file. He has the skills to do it.
She pauses, setting up explosives around the door. They won't scratch proper armour like hers or what her hostile counterparts are wearing, but she can blow them to kill their underlings. And she can use this against Rajesh. Oh yes, she can use this. That idiot is breaking his precious Precepts of Damien. The Third Precept. She almost laughs. That's the same one she cited at him to justify why she was working with Reality Deviants. And he took that badly. Now he's letting Computer-serving horrors – possibly ex-human horrors – into reality.
That makes him very nearly the worst kind of traitor.
She won't use it quite yet. No, she'll save it. She wants him angry when they get close. Not thinking clearly. But she'll make a point of how he's breaking the Precepts. With her knife.
"He may be after the TransMat in the basement here," she decides. "It can carry industrial-scale objects. Would that be large enough?"
"Maybe?" Henriette says. "I… the nightmares aren't a good thing for scale. But you can move a BioVARG through a TransMat," she says more confidently.
The IBM sabotaged it, Jamelia doesn't tell Henriette, so it probably won't work. Unless the EDE can get it working again. Fuck. "He may be going there," she says. "Langley, you are in DEAD MAN'S HANDLE. I am going to try to kill Rajesh. If I die, kill the EDE's interface and level the place. If something comes through the TransMat, kill it."
"I understand," Henriette says, sounding suddenly very old. "Director. I want to say… thank you. For putting effort into helping me, rather than just… just sending me off to be mindhacked or sent back to some back-office role. Good luck."
Jamelia smiles, or rather her lips twist into an adrenaline snarl. "I don't need an office drone," she says. "I need one of the best pilots I've ever seen. And don't give up on me yet. This wouldn't be the first EDE-controlled giant robot I've had to stop. When I see you next, I'll tell you about South Africa. And if I give you the drop order, I want you here yesterday."
She cuts the connection. And takes a breath. Carefully, she ties a splice cable around the PA equipment, and boots it up. The standard universal access codes are enough to get her into this civilian gear.
Time to deploy her most dangerous weapon. Her mouth.
"Confusion to all enemies," she mutters under her breath.
Moscow
Serafina sends the edited data of Panopticon's "gross incompetence" to senior leadership using part of her brain while the other parts start tackling the problem of remote-activating the biofeedback systems in the MA-38. Her mentor, McMullen, should have enough pull to at least delay any attempts they make to go through Progenitor channels and will probably have enough reciprocity to keep them away from Iteration X. That leaves them... the Void Engineers, given that they don't seem to have much influence in the Syndicate or NWO. Yes, she thinks. It's a good plan. She sends Director McMullen the files.
She is more than a little surprised when he sends back a few minutes later. Not because he's digested a half-hour of video and several pages of thought-to-text dictation in less than 10 minutes and composed a response-no, accelerated neurology is necessary for Progenitor or Iteration X senior leadership. It's what he says.
"Panopticon has not used official resource channels once since its inception in 1995."
It makes her unbearably curious. She knows Jamelia will probably yell at her for prying, but she has the access and they have "public"-facing sites, she suspects. Something innocuous looking. That, and information on Union servers, on construct chat logs, things that people look at all the time without setting off alarms. Serafina does a random-walk trawl of dozens of internal Union sites to shield herself from being spotted looking And there.
Panopticon. Union internal security. Created 1995, directly answering to Control itself to root out Nephandic corruption and people getting too close to the Reality Deviants. Internal police, specializing in shock tactics. Control specifically kept them from ever officially showing up on any operation. Operations suspended-or at least shady internal door-kickings without anyone to attribute them to ceased-1999. Fully independent of all other Conventions equipment-wise, essentially a Convention in and of itself.
What turned them from covert operations to overt operations? What were they doing for the last 14 years? The information she can collate tells her almost nothing.
The chatter of gunfire and the wail of sirens can be heard through the Moscow night. Through darkness, Lt Rajesh and his team of Loyalists sneak through the night. Hollow dinosaur skulls loom in the darkness. Gretkov holds himself in an easy pose, arrogant in his easy confidence. Siddharth and the machines, meat and otherwise, lead weapons first.
"Is the Adversary destroyed? It must be destroyed," whispers Control. "Destroy the Adversary and resolve the knot in time. This is your mission."
"I am hunting her," Siddharth thinks.
"Are you done yet, idiot?" Control adds. "No? Well, hurry up!"
There is an explosion outside, throwing light through the tall windows of the Museum.
"And so the traitors show their faces." The loudspeakers in the museum crackle to life. "Why are you acting against Command?"
"It's her," Siddharth hisses over comms. "Someone! Backtrace it!" He raises his voice. "Surrender, Belltower! You'll be treated appropriately!"
"She would be a most useful asset with appropriate penance," whispers Control in his ear, and Siddharth feels the echoes of… something. Jealous? Satisfaction? Horror? Whatever it is, it is snuffed out quickly. "Are we not generous?"
The voice over the speakers shows no acknowledgement of having heard him.
"Gretkov. Gretkov, Gretkov," it says. "I'm surprised in you. This isn't in character. Oh, not the hunting down of other loyal Technocrats for petty reasons, or because you were paid, or because of internal splits. That's perfectly in character. It's one of the many reasons your new friend holds you in contempt. You're the man they were so scared would go Nephandi that they kept your analgesics going despite everything that's happened here in Russia. You're the man the Union bribed because everyone knew you'd murder more of your superiors if they tried to act against you. You're the man who's the reason Series-P agents aren't trusted with free will any more.
"No Gretkov, what's out of character is you're usually much better at picking sides. You're a murderous vulture, but you're not stupid. What I don't get is why you'd side with a group which holds you in active contempt, and which will want to have you fixed so you're like the other Series-Ps. Men who've tried to do the same to you before have suffered... accidents. I just don't get why you'd sign on knowing that that's what they're going to do to you. So you're a little meat robot, like the clones and the HITMarks which make up the rest of your f-"
Lt Rajesh takes aim and sights on the nearest loudspeaker. A burst from his underslung rifle wrecks it. No need to waste plasma on it. "She's talkative. She'll try to turn us against each other."
"-orces. Of course, he'll say I'm just trying to turn you against him and try to silence me," the voice continues. The voice is more distant, refracted and coming from several systems. The entire system is broadcasting this, and destroying just one speaker won't do a thing. "But Gretkov, you're working with a man who wants all HITMarks to be wiped frequently so they don't develop personality and who hates that some constructs are allowed to be people as well as weapons of war. A man who would want nothing more than you to do exactly what he says, and nothing more. I don't trust you, but I trust your self-interest and... oh, did he not tell you that your new employers prefer machine-like efficiency and aren't too fond of human elements like yourself? There's just the two of you and all your constructs, and he's more like a construct than a real human. Don't you feel lonely, in your little breakaway branch?"
"Deploy auditory filtering!" Siddharth snaps. "Ignore her! She's loading her messages down with hyperpsych!" He knew Belltower would try something like this, he expected this and that's why he brought only constructs and a man so murderous and sociopathic that rumor has it that he tried to join the Void Engineers post 1999 to see some 'real action' and was rejected. Not something that Director Belltower could play with by appealing to his 'better instincts' or using that weak sympathy she has for broken constructs who try to act like people.
And she's still doing it. She's somehow managing it. She's homing in on human weakness like… like Control! He winces in pain from the blasphemy of that thoughtbut it's true and rightly so as he should not think of such things.
Gretkov shoots a flat glare at him, playing with his knife. "No," he says cleanly. "She's not. Some of us can tell the difference."
"And Siddharth," the unstoppable voice says, "I am very disappointed in you. Very, very disappointed. How does it feel to be a traitor, fooling others into believing you're working for the Union? How does it feel to act against sworn pledges, to betray the Union, betray your Convention, betray humanity? Did they promise you revenge? Or maybe-"
The voice cuts out as Lt Rajesh deploys a noise cancellation field. They can't hear her any more. They're safe from her lies. Her treason.Her words cutting to the bone. If they can't hear her, they can't listen to her hyperpsych tricks. Or maybe she's using Reality Deviant mind reading. That would be another reason to kill her.
"She was always capable," Control observes. "The Adversary was beloved and fell from grace. How else could she be such a threat?"
"Where was she coming from?" he asks one of the eVictors.
"Signal traced to Security Office (Low Sec)," the eVictor reports.
"Move to cut her off!" he orders.
And Siddharth catches the look in Gretkov's eyes, and it looks downright mutinous. It's a situation he has to salvage. But yes, if he's killing Jamelia, that should keep his battle-lust in check. "Go forward and kill her. I'm sure you can do that on your own, no?"
"Yes, sir." The contempt in his voice is like a black roiling thing.
"And what of you?" Control asks. "Idle hands do the Devil's work."
"I will ensure she does not escape. If the Mat-Trans is destroyed, and the underground passage sealed, she will have no choice but to die here." But while that's happening, he can play her game. Control strengthens him. He amplifies his armor's loudspeakers to max, knowing that she's listening.
"Do you really think, Director Belltower, that we're traitors? How can we be traitors if we work for Control itself?" Siddharth asks. "You've been wrong. You've predicated this entire thing on believing that, what? Control is only Autochthonia? A perfect clockwork machine seeking to impose its own order on the world? Is all of the Technocracy just Iteration X? You're wrong. Your plans are based on knowing a quarter of your enemies. Possibly even less, because I know how many times you've lived solely due to a lucky guess."
"And I have a message for you from someone you know. Draconian Time." It's her INVISIBLE BEAR killswitch. Knowing her, he'll only be able to use it once. She'll find someone on the other side, get it excised, or autohypnosis it out of herself. But he needs that edge. He needs it now.
Does he though? Siddharth's mind is a mess of contradictions as he seeks to justify his sabotage. But is he sabotaging the Technocracy on Earth, or his distant masters?
Jamelia's head pounds. She feels frail and slow. She's tired, she can't think as well as she's used to, she can feel the drug overdose killing her, she can feel the pain accumulated from physical exertion. She hasn't felt like this since before- since before INVISIBLE BEAR.
Yes, an hypnotic trigger. Two words from someone recognized subconsciously as a valid user. Multiple safeties built on pitch and tone. A psychological killswitch, implanted decades ago. Of course, that merely means she has all her experience to call upon. She hides behind a suit of Order of Reason armor, thick primium plate that will deflect Gretkov's scans. She waits. She tries to ignore the pain and the ticking time hack in the lower-right of her vision that counts down the timer until she's too far gone for the MA-38's automedical systems to keep intact.
"Serafina." She whispers hoarsely.
"Is everything all right?"
"I need analgesics, now. They pulled something out of a hat, a shutdown switch for my conditioning I didn't even know existed."
"I understand. If you're worried about drastic personality shifts, don't. Neuroplasticity is a wonderful thing. I've got some information on Panopticon, though. They were some sort of internal Gestapo types, until 1999 hit and they seem to, as far as I can tell, have spent the next 16 years twiddling their thumbs doing nothing." The drug infusion hits and Jamelia feels much, much better.
"I'll keep that in mind. Can you reactivate INVISIBLE BEAR?"
"Not remotely and not quickly. And at that point, you might want to look into a more thorough conditioning program."
Jamelia sees Gretkov and a couple of his lackeys, the Victor-1.5s or whatever they are. She waits a few seconds for them to get into the killzone of the trap and-detonation. Without INVISIBLE BEAR, her timing is off. Very slightly off. One of the 1.5s survives, and Gretkov is outside of the killzone in an instant. But she was never intending to kill Gretkov with that.
Her armor's spatial compression system has been on standby for the last minute. It discharges in an instant, and Gretkov is looking in the wrong direction as she plunges the knife into his spine, then into the base of his neck, and then into his skull. His corpse is strangely heavy-and Jamelia notices belatedly that she's holding the corpse of a Victor, in a basic hardshell power-armor, like those expendable clones there.
Gretkov is standing where the last 1.5 was, and she can feel his smug grin. "Did you know what I asked when they demanded I work for them?" Gretkov says, tauntingly. "Immortality. Something 'Command', for all their posturing, cannot offer."
He lazily raises his own knife, a thin stiletto blade that Jamelia senses as phenomenally dangerous, humming with power. "It's a high-frequency knife." Gretkov says. "Cuts through any armor like butter, even that Iteration X softshell you're wearing. Of course, I made sure that it's not very lethal. I want to see you bleed before you die. I want you to finally realize just how outclassed you are, just a little too late. So, Jamelia Belltower. Shall we find out if Command can offer you immortality?"
Oh Siddharth, you are a better team member as a member of Threat Null than you were working for Jamelia.
Kessler, Cross, and Void Engineers:
[ ] (0.5x) Follow the VE's lead on the Entropic Pulse Warhead.
[ ] Yeah no, you're not killing a bunch of people just because it's inconvenient. Do you have another way? (Write-in).
Be Jamelia:
[ ] (3.0x) Run. Get to the tunnels. You don't want to fight an infinitely respawning super-agent.
[ ] (2.0x) Run. Go aboveground, and maybe call Henriette in to deal with her sister.
[ ] (0.75x) Stay and fight Gretkov. To the death. Maybe if you kill him enough times he'll give up?
[ ] Write-in (you probably want to make one).
Be Henriette:
[ ] You may want to help Jamelia right now.
A vote for your next set of Shockwave Codes will be forthcoming sometime later this evening.
"Oh, for fuck's sake," Kessler growls. "I am John Kessler and I kill dragons!" He yanks on a control lever and leaves his stolen giant spewing plasma at flying targets on autopilot, while he clambers out of the control pod. "And I bet there's not a single goddamn ItX exojock who can do this!" he adds, pointing down at one of the smaller swarming constructs.
"Come on, Lady Grey," he says, coaxing the matter stock synthesizer which had come off a Void Engineer ship which'd crashed down in 1996. Dragons had picked the wreck mostly clean by the time he found it, and he'd cursed because they'd eaten the comms gear, but he'd picked this up to help patch up his 'digestive' system for self-repair. He switches to the language of the dragons. "I promise, when we get out of this I'll take you out and give you a good checkover and treat you right, okay? Just gotta do this for me, or we might get shot by our own side."
It takes some coaxing, but he feels the spirit well up inside him, and a vaguely female shape pulls its way out of his chest. Her skin is the gray of a 90s era void cruiser and her body is covered in 'tattoos', the branding of the goods she used to make to resupply the ship. Stretching, singing a song made up of chemical formulae and brand names and menu items, she casts out a hand.
And like that, the ground under his target shimmers, suddenly turning oil black. He tosses a grenade down after it, and the hydrocarbons ignite. The polygonal alien walkers scream in high pitched metallic voices, flailing and burning.
"Product vended," the spirit protruding from his chest says. "Have a nice day. Buy-cheese."
"… well, I'm convinced," one of the Void Engineers says over comms after a pause. DIGRAWs fire and the air screams as more enemies are cut down. "Okay! HQ, we have confirmed uncompromised friendlies on site! And they've hijacked two of the hostile MoFlakkers and… yes, one of them is John Kessler. How on earth did you know that? Constable Cross from DeeCee, and two of our SISTERS are with him. Orders?"
There is a pause, and some of the Void Engineers leap up onto the backs of the robots with the flare of jump packs, taking defensive positions.
"We're going to be accompanying you for now," one of the marines says. "What's the status groundside."
"Jamming," Cross says. "Something's hit Piero's IFF, so we had to jump out. Lost two SISTERS doing so. Director Belltower ordered it. She's either running or trying to get him back under control." He checks a cross-dimensional display on his wrist. "Tactical situation looks bad." He scans down the list. "Basically every HITMark around seems to have gone rogue, and some Iterators and ex-Iterators or technological RDs. And…" he pauses, eyes widening. "Something's just taken out the mobile command centre," he breathes. "Possibly Piero. No, wait, he'd have done it faster. Those… those ARCs."
"If Belltower's still alive, she won't be compromised," Kessler says confidently. "She's all meat. No headware to hack. You VEs point out targets to me and I'll get them," he adds, blowing up a rank of cars and the spider-like robots hiding behind them.
"One left!"
Kessler feels Cross' eyes on him, even when the other man is busy rodeoing a giant evil spirit-alien-walker thing. "Look," he announces, not turning away from the controls, "I was trapped on a planet in the Umbra full of cyberdragons and worse things for twenty years. I got psychic powers from drinking cyberdragon blood. That's all."
"Why would you do that?"
"Because that stuff is like jet fuel and I needed to recharge my batteries," Kessler grumbles. "And you know how little drinkable water there was in some bits of that place? At least blood was sterile and didn't try to screw with my mind and didn't have aliens living in it which tried to eat me for the affront of drinking their water. And then I find stuff is starting to do stuff when I ask it do, especially when I went and learned the dragon language by spyin' on them."
"So you developed psychic powers by ingesting alien biomatter," the Progenitor says slowly. He pauses. "That sounds perfectly normal to me," he says in a more normal tone of voice.
"You bein' sarcastic there?"
"No," Cross says honestly. "It's a bit out there, but… well. You must've got lucky to not die from rejection, but that kind of thing is established labwork. I've got an entire backup EDE-derived nervous system. And just look at the SISTERS."
"The S-geneline is extensively modified with extranormal plasmid cross-species splicing, S-8 states while trying to hold off a swarm of smaller infantry-scale constructs," intrudes the mechanical voice over the communications. "S-8 would like assistance."
Kessler turns his walker's weapons on the swarm, thinning the ranks and allowing the two remaining SISTERS to retreat up onto the vehicles.
"Your assistance is appreciated, S-6 says, feeling relief she is not about to immediately die with her mission incomplete," the other SISTER says from behind Cross.
"Yeah, that," Cross says. "Just don't let Dr Rosario know."
"Yeah, I don't really wanna get in trouble for…"
"Oh, I wasn't asking you on your behalf. She'd get altogether too fascinated by it and probably start planning to ask for funding to develop a line of dragon-blood-powered constructs. And might test it on herself," Cross says drily, his walker's weapons scything through one of the jamming constructs. "You haven't spent too much time around lab-based Progenitors? Yeah, I know Serafina pretty well. They're not Iterators. At all. They love sticking organic things into their bodies. And Sera really loves to get messy with her research."
There is an awkward pause.
"Don't say it," Cross says wearily. "Yes, I do know that us constructs have to learn to see innuendo with hard experience."
"Dude, you have a scientist girlfriend who's hotter and smarter than anyone else around," Kessler says. "That kind of thing's totally needed for a healthy relationship. My ex went and got the whole emotions inhibitor thing back in '88, which sort of ended that. It's been a lonely… two and a half decades." He clears his throat. "So, what's the game-plan?" he asks the Void Engineer marine. "Kill the jammers and we'll be able to get the HITMarks back under control?"
"Kill these jamming units, and they'll still keep operating under local control, and the enemy has a local relay to feed them data." Despite the fact that the armor the marine is wearing has no distinct head, Kessler's sure she's shaking it. "No, it'll require drastic measures. We've got a EP warhead, that's Entropic-Pulse, it'll wreak havoc on anything using Iteration X quantum computing. Should hard-crash the HITMarks and vehicles, maybe annoy whatever's playing puppetmaster-then they can reboot their systems from inbuilt data fortresses. Total materiel losses should be fairly minimal."
"And everyone who has augmentations?"
"It might cause some brain damage if they've got direct brain interface." the Delta Team marine concedes. "Better than nothing. What we need to do is to take them out and then ensure the warhead detonates. We didn't just drop down here without a plan. Are you in or not?"
***
Museum of History
Moscow
Director Belltower is a ghost in a museum filled with men who want her dead. Stripping a painting off the wall, she checks the cache behind it. Empty. Damn. She darts from location to location, looting caches and updating her internal map of the place. She just needs a few more things, and then she can head to the control point for the PA system. And in the meantime, she's making some calls.
"Rosario," Jamelia says. "Combat drugs. If I'll survive if I can get to medical treatment in four hours, I want them. Motor control primary. I'm passing observed files on the 'friendly fire'. If Panopticon try to call in Shockwave codes against me, block them. You've got plenty of evidence on their 'gross incompetence'. Otherwise, get Ivan talking to the Daedalians, the local Traditions, everyone. Panopticon is trying to kill me and claiming it's friendly fire. I don't want real blue-on-blue."
"Already on it," Serafina says, her voice almost as cold and flat as Jamelia's. "Ivan's in contact with the Daedalians. Iosefova says they've got Adepts and an off-target Void Engineer drop-squad linking up with them." She pauses. "Sending through dosage instructions to your suit," she says, a hint of emotion creeping through. "Jamelia, listen to me. This is an overdose. INVISIBLE BEAR means you'll not express the initial signs of the nervous system damage, but if you push yourself too hard, you'll tear your tendons from your bones."
"This suit is moving for me so I don't need my muscles so much, and I can work through the pain. Good combination. Thank you." She pauses. "If I die, operational control passes to you. Contact Command immediately and note this contingency has been established. Don't let Panopticon seize control from under us."
"I knew you'd say that," Serafina mutters. "Rosario out."
Jamelia switches channels as she silently leaps up a flight of stairs scanning the landing for hostiles. She sees nothing, and continues.
"Langley," she says flatly. "Elevate to DEAD MAN'S HANDLE. If my vitals redline, this is formal authorization to drop on Red Square. I have IDed what appears to be the primary on-site commander of hostile forces. Lt Rajesh is taking orders from her. Orders which involve killing me. He is compromised. Subject appears to be high-level combat enhancile, capable of surviving a seeker round to the eyesocket. Relaying all information now. Belltower out."
She cuts the communications, and thus is somewhat surprised when Henriette re-contacts her ten seconds later.
"I… I know what this is," Henriette blurts out, words falling over themselves. "What this is. Not who. I… it's one of the things in my nightmares."
"What?" Jamelia says, distracted as she field-strips one of the caches left over by the original Technocrats. Explosives. Yes. She'll be able to kill the clones and robots they have with them if she lures them into traps. When you go up one vs many, your first job is to reduce it to one vs fewer. Preferably one vs zero.
"My mother… when she was killed, she was working on the next generation of hardware. Like this. DSS systems. But better. And they killed her and used her brain and her knowledge. I… I saw things like this. In Autochthonia. And the girl… she's in the nightmares too." Henriette trails off. "She's not a person," she says, voice cracking. "She's an interface terminal. A puppet for the real machine. Maybe even like a human-sized BioVARG, piloted remotely. I… I killed her. I think. But of… of course the doll wasn't her, was it?"
"It's an EDE?" Jamelia asks.
She hears Henriette swallow. "Yes," she says. "It's not… it can't be human. Even if it was made from my… from human bits."
"If it's an EDE, someone had to let it through. That kind of machine is too hard to make in Earth climates," Jamelia says, kicking down to the security office. The shallow, cover-identity "security office" which only existed so the staff here from the Masses could make PA announcements and tell people that their children were, that is, not the real security office. But what it did have was a working PA system. "Someone. Lt Rajesh. He shows up with the EDE, and I read his file. He has the skills to do it.
She pauses, setting up explosives around the door. They won't scratch proper armour like hers or what her hostile counterparts are wearing, but she can blow them to kill their underlings. And she can use this against Rajesh. Oh yes, she can use this. That idiot is breaking his precious Precepts of Damien. The Third Precept. She almost laughs. That's the same one she cited at him to justify why she was working with Reality Deviants. And he took that badly. Now he's letting Computer-serving horrors – possibly ex-human horrors – into reality.
That makes him very nearly the worst kind of traitor.
She won't use it quite yet. No, she'll save it. She wants him angry when they get close. Not thinking clearly. But she'll make a point of how he's breaking the Precepts. With her knife.
"He may be after the TransMat in the basement here," she decides. "It can carry industrial-scale objects. Would that be large enough?"
"Maybe?" Henriette says. "I… the nightmares aren't a good thing for scale. But you can move a BioVARG through a TransMat," she says more confidently.
The IBM sabotaged it, Jamelia doesn't tell Henriette, so it probably won't work. Unless the EDE can get it working again. Fuck. "He may be going there," she says. "Langley, you are in DEAD MAN'S HANDLE. I am going to try to kill Rajesh. If I die, kill the EDE's interface and level the place. If something comes through the TransMat, kill it."
"I understand," Henriette says, sounding suddenly very old. "Director. I want to say… thank you. For putting effort into helping me, rather than just… just sending me off to be mindhacked or sent back to some back-office role. Good luck."
Jamelia smiles, or rather her lips twist into an adrenaline snarl. "I don't need an office drone," she says. "I need one of the best pilots I've ever seen. And don't give up on me yet. This wouldn't be the first EDE-controlled giant robot I've had to stop. When I see you next, I'll tell you about South Africa. And if I give you the drop order, I want you here yesterday."
She cuts the connection. And takes a breath. Carefully, she ties a splice cable around the PA equipment, and boots it up. The standard universal access codes are enough to get her into this civilian gear.
Time to deploy her most dangerous weapon. Her mouth.
"Confusion to all enemies," she mutters under her breath.
***
Molotek Building
Moscow
Serafina sends the edited data of Panopticon's "gross incompetence" to senior leadership using part of her brain while the other parts start tackling the problem of remote-activating the biofeedback systems in the MA-38. Her mentor, McMullen, should have enough pull to at least delay any attempts they make to go through Progenitor channels and will probably have enough reciprocity to keep them away from Iteration X. That leaves them... the Void Engineers, given that they don't seem to have much influence in the Syndicate or NWO. Yes, she thinks. It's a good plan. She sends Director McMullen the files.
She is more than a little surprised when he sends back a few minutes later. Not because he's digested a half-hour of video and several pages of thought-to-text dictation in less than 10 minutes and composed a response-no, accelerated neurology is necessary for Progenitor or Iteration X senior leadership. It's what he says.
"Panopticon has not used official resource channels once since its inception in 1995."
It makes her unbearably curious. She knows Jamelia will probably yell at her for prying, but she has the access and they have "public"-facing sites, she suspects. Something innocuous looking. That, and information on Union servers, on construct chat logs, things that people look at all the time without setting off alarms. Serafina does a random-walk trawl of dozens of internal Union sites to shield herself from being spotted looking And there.
Panopticon. Union internal security. Created 1995, directly answering to Control itself to root out Nephandic corruption and people getting too close to the Reality Deviants. Internal police, specializing in shock tactics. Control specifically kept them from ever officially showing up on any operation. Operations suspended-or at least shady internal door-kickings without anyone to attribute them to ceased-1999. Fully independent of all other Conventions equipment-wise, essentially a Convention in and of itself.
What turned them from covert operations to overt operations? What were they doing for the last 14 years? The information she can collate tells her almost nothing.
***
The chatter of gunfire and the wail of sirens can be heard through the Moscow night. Through darkness, Lt Rajesh and his team of Loyalists sneak through the night. Hollow dinosaur skulls loom in the darkness. Gretkov holds himself in an easy pose, arrogant in his easy confidence. Siddharth and the machines, meat and otherwise, lead weapons first.
"Is the Adversary destroyed? It must be destroyed," whispers Control. "Destroy the Adversary and resolve the knot in time. This is your mission."
"I am hunting her," Siddharth thinks.
"Are you done yet, idiot?" Control adds. "No? Well, hurry up!"
There is an explosion outside, throwing light through the tall windows of the Museum.
"And so the traitors show their faces." The loudspeakers in the museum crackle to life. "Why are you acting against Command?"
"It's her," Siddharth hisses over comms. "Someone! Backtrace it!" He raises his voice. "Surrender, Belltower! You'll be treated appropriately!"
"She would be a most useful asset with appropriate penance," whispers Control in his ear, and Siddharth feels the echoes of… something. Jealous? Satisfaction? Horror? Whatever it is, it is snuffed out quickly. "Are we not generous?"
The voice over the speakers shows no acknowledgement of having heard him.
"Gretkov. Gretkov, Gretkov," it says. "I'm surprised in you. This isn't in character. Oh, not the hunting down of other loyal Technocrats for petty reasons, or because you were paid, or because of internal splits. That's perfectly in character. It's one of the many reasons your new friend holds you in contempt. You're the man they were so scared would go Nephandi that they kept your analgesics going despite everything that's happened here in Russia. You're the man the Union bribed because everyone knew you'd murder more of your superiors if they tried to act against you. You're the man who's the reason Series-P agents aren't trusted with free will any more.
"No Gretkov, what's out of character is you're usually much better at picking sides. You're a murderous vulture, but you're not stupid. What I don't get is why you'd side with a group which holds you in active contempt, and which will want to have you fixed so you're like the other Series-Ps. Men who've tried to do the same to you before have suffered... accidents. I just don't get why you'd sign on knowing that that's what they're going to do to you. So you're a little meat robot, like the clones and the HITMarks which make up the rest of your f-"
Lt Rajesh takes aim and sights on the nearest loudspeaker. A burst from his underslung rifle wrecks it. No need to waste plasma on it. "She's talkative. She'll try to turn us against each other."
"-orces. Of course, he'll say I'm just trying to turn you against him and try to silence me," the voice continues. The voice is more distant, refracted and coming from several systems. The entire system is broadcasting this, and destroying just one speaker won't do a thing. "But Gretkov, you're working with a man who wants all HITMarks to be wiped frequently so they don't develop personality and who hates that some constructs are allowed to be people as well as weapons of war. A man who would want nothing more than you to do exactly what he says, and nothing more. I don't trust you, but I trust your self-interest and... oh, did he not tell you that your new employers prefer machine-like efficiency and aren't too fond of human elements like yourself? There's just the two of you and all your constructs, and he's more like a construct than a real human. Don't you feel lonely, in your little breakaway branch?"
"Deploy auditory filtering!" Siddharth snaps. "Ignore her! She's loading her messages down with hyperpsych!" He knew Belltower would try something like this, he expected this and that's why he brought only constructs and a man so murderous and sociopathic that rumor has it that he tried to join the Void Engineers post 1999 to see some 'real action' and was rejected. Not something that Director Belltower could play with by appealing to his 'better instincts' or using that weak sympathy she has for broken constructs who try to act like people.
And she's still doing it. She's somehow managing it. She's homing in on human weakness like… like Control! He winces in pain from the blasphemy of that thought
Gretkov shoots a flat glare at him, playing with his knife. "No," he says cleanly. "She's not. Some of us can tell the difference."
"And Siddharth," the unstoppable voice says, "I am very disappointed in you. Very, very disappointed. How does it feel to be a traitor, fooling others into believing you're working for the Union? How does it feel to act against sworn pledges, to betray the Union, betray your Convention, betray humanity? Did they promise you revenge? Or maybe-"
The voice cuts out as Lt Rajesh deploys a noise cancellation field. They can't hear her any more. They're safe from her lies. Her treason.
"She was always capable," Control observes. "The Adversary was beloved and fell from grace. How else could she be such a threat?"
"Where was she coming from?" he asks one of the eVictors.
"Signal traced to Security Office (Low Sec)," the eVictor reports.
"Move to cut her off!" he orders.
And Siddharth catches the look in Gretkov's eyes, and it looks downright mutinous. It's a situation he has to salvage. But yes, if he's killing Jamelia, that should keep his battle-lust in check. "Go forward and kill her. I'm sure you can do that on your own, no?"
"Yes, sir." The contempt in his voice is like a black roiling thing.
"And what of you?" Control asks. "Idle hands do the Devil's work."
"I will ensure she does not escape. If the Mat-Trans is destroyed, and the underground passage sealed, she will have no choice but to die here." But while that's happening, he can play her game. Control strengthens him. He amplifies his armor's loudspeakers to max, knowing that she's listening.
"Do you really think, Director Belltower, that we're traitors? How can we be traitors if we work for Control itself?" Siddharth asks. "You've been wrong. You've predicated this entire thing on believing that, what? Control is only Autochthonia? A perfect clockwork machine seeking to impose its own order on the world? Is all of the Technocracy just Iteration X? You're wrong. Your plans are based on knowing a quarter of your enemies. Possibly even less, because I know how many times you've lived solely due to a lucky guess."
"And I have a message for you from someone you know. Draconian Time." It's her INVISIBLE BEAR killswitch. Knowing her, he'll only be able to use it once. She'll find someone on the other side, get it excised, or autohypnosis it out of herself. But he needs that edge. He needs it now.
Does he though? Siddharth's mind is a mess of contradictions as he seeks to justify his sabotage. But is he sabotaging the Technocracy on Earth, or his distant masters?
***
Jamelia's head pounds. She feels frail and slow. She's tired, she can't think as well as she's used to, she can feel the drug overdose killing her, she can feel the pain accumulated from physical exertion. She hasn't felt like this since before- since before INVISIBLE BEAR.
Yes, an hypnotic trigger. Two words from someone recognized subconsciously as a valid user. Multiple safeties built on pitch and tone. A psychological killswitch, implanted decades ago. Of course, that merely means she has all her experience to call upon. She hides behind a suit of Order of Reason armor, thick primium plate that will deflect Gretkov's scans. She waits. She tries to ignore the pain and the ticking time hack in the lower-right of her vision that counts down the timer until she's too far gone for the MA-38's automedical systems to keep intact.
"Serafina." She whispers hoarsely.
"Is everything all right?"
"I need analgesics, now. They pulled something out of a hat, a shutdown switch for my conditioning I didn't even know existed."
"I understand. If you're worried about drastic personality shifts, don't. Neuroplasticity is a wonderful thing. I've got some information on Panopticon, though. They were some sort of internal Gestapo types, until 1999 hit and they seem to, as far as I can tell, have spent the next 16 years twiddling their thumbs doing nothing." The drug infusion hits and Jamelia feels much, much better.
"I'll keep that in mind. Can you reactivate INVISIBLE BEAR?"
"Not remotely and not quickly. And at that point, you might want to look into a more thorough conditioning program."
Jamelia sees Gretkov and a couple of his lackeys, the Victor-1.5s or whatever they are. She waits a few seconds for them to get into the killzone of the trap and-detonation. Without INVISIBLE BEAR, her timing is off. Very slightly off. One of the 1.5s survives, and Gretkov is outside of the killzone in an instant. But she was never intending to kill Gretkov with that.
Her armor's spatial compression system has been on standby for the last minute. It discharges in an instant, and Gretkov is looking in the wrong direction as she plunges the knife into his spine, then into the base of his neck, and then into his skull. His corpse is strangely heavy-and Jamelia notices belatedly that she's holding the corpse of a Victor, in a basic hardshell power-armor, like those expendable clones there.
Gretkov is standing where the last 1.5 was, and she can feel his smug grin. "Did you know what I asked when they demanded I work for them?" Gretkov says, tauntingly. "Immortality. Something 'Command', for all their posturing, cannot offer."
He lazily raises his own knife, a thin stiletto blade that Jamelia senses as phenomenally dangerous, humming with power. "It's a high-frequency knife." Gretkov says. "Cuts through any armor like butter, even that Iteration X softshell you're wearing. Of course, I made sure that it's not very lethal. I want to see you bleed before you die. I want you to finally realize just how outclassed you are, just a little too late. So, Jamelia Belltower. Shall we find out if Command can offer you immortality?"
Oh Siddharth, you are a better team member as a member of Threat Null than you were working for Jamelia.
Kessler, Cross, and Void Engineers:
[ ] (0.5x) Follow the VE's lead on the Entropic Pulse Warhead.
[ ] Yeah no, you're not killing a bunch of people just because it's inconvenient. Do you have another way? (Write-in).
Be Jamelia:
[ ] (3.0x) Run. Get to the tunnels. You don't want to fight an infinitely respawning super-agent.
[ ] (2.0x) Run. Go aboveground, and maybe call Henriette in to deal with her sister.
[ ] (0.75x) Stay and fight Gretkov. To the death. Maybe if you kill him enough times he'll give up?
[ ] Write-in (you probably want to make one).
Be Henriette:
[ ] You may want to help Jamelia right now.
A vote for your next set of Shockwave Codes will be forthcoming sometime later this evening.
Willpower: 7/7
Prime Energy: 5/5
Health Levels: +1/+1/+3/+3/+4/+4/+6/Incapacitated/Dying
Current Effects:
Soak: 18B/17L/8A (16B/16L/8A from armor, 10/10 Armor HLs)
Shockwave Codes Used: 6
Shockwave Codes Remaining: ∞
Prime Energy: 5/5
Health Levels: +1/+1/+3/+3/+4/+4/+6/Incapacitated/Dying
Very High Pain Tolerance (reduces all wound penalties by 2) [SUPPRESSED]
Current Injuries: NoneCurrent Effects:
CQC Mastery: +2 automatic successes to attacking/defending in melee, +[1] damage level to melee attacks
Killswitched: -1 wound penalty, -1 Dexterity, Stamina, Wits, Intelligence, no augmentations
Paradox: 2Killswitched: -1 wound penalty, -1 Dexterity, Stamina, Wits, Intelligence, no augmentations
Soak: 18B/17L/8A (16B/16L/8A from armor, 10/10 Armor HLs)
Invulnarmor Fiber Layering: Immune to non-magical/Enlightened Science Armor Piercing effects
Dodge DV: 14/14 (+2[ 1] Dexterity from MA-38), +6 difficulty to be hit by mundane weaponry (Corr 3 Point Defense 'ban'-Defensive Mode)Shockwave Codes Used: 6
Shockwave Codes Remaining: ∞
Willpower: 6/6
Prime Energy: 4/4
Current Effects:
Prime Energy: 4/4
Current Effects:
RAVANA-II Coordination Enhancement Series: +4 Dexterity (Jamelia)
MSO "Maso" Pain Management Drug: Reversed + Increased Wound Penalties (Jamelia)
Paradox: 5MSO "Maso" Pain Management Drug: Reversed + Increased Wound Penalties (Jamelia)
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FunkyEntropy
Occasionally insightful, possibly grumpy
- Location
- Los Angeles
Dropping the EMP would probably take out a large number of friendlies, so we should probably try to talk these guys out of it.
Does retreating towards the tunnels mean we're running towards the ItXers? Not sure if that's the best idea.
Gretkov apparently respawns by hijacking a nearby Victor, so a couple of questions we need to answer - what's the range, do the Victors have to be under his control, is it Victors in particular or is any construct a viable target, and how does he accomplish this under the Technocratic paradigm?
Does retreating towards the tunnels mean we're running towards the ItXers? Not sure if that's the best idea.
Gretkov apparently respawns by hijacking a nearby Victor, so a couple of questions we need to answer - what's the range, do the Victors have to be under his control, is it Victors in particular or is any construct a viable target, and how does he accomplish this under the Technocratic paradigm?
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Matrix Agent style, perhaps, although that's getting very Virtual Adept? Or, more mundanely he's a technological body snatcher, jumping to anyone with the appropriate comm-suite. We might also have to worry about him jumping into friendlies with implants.
Depending on how he does his trick, the EMP might shut him or his trick, or his potential victims' vulnerability down.
The way he talks about immortality makes me wonder if he's actually teleoperating a Victor equipped with a projection of his equipment. That, or, even worse, he's somehow got something that retroactively rewrites reality so that he didn't actually die, sacrificing an ally if required for extra verisimilitude.
Cornuthaum
Be kind to each other.
- Location
- Austria
- Pronouns
- He/Him
No, you idiot, he's using spirit charms.
I considered that, but spirit charms still have a mechanism/excuse. A spirit based on a technocratic paradigm should express itself using the relevant props. Indeed, as spirits are more Linear than Mages, he's probably more bound to them than he would be otherwise
I think it's more likely that he's received something equivalent to an Investiture of some kind rather than becoming a spirit or being possessed by one anyway. Those still have a paradigm as well which they need to operate within.
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Which is "I'm a spirit." or more specifically "I'm a Agent."
Forgetting that Spirit's don't even use paradigms, EDE's like this are completely in paradigm for the Technocracy, much less Threat_Null which has a much higher threshold for Hypertech.
Err, no. It might be, for a spirit operating in a Chorister/Hermetic's Paradigm, "I'm an angel of fire, so have domain over that part of the Lord's Creation, and can throw a fire ball at you." It might be, for a Verbena's, "I'm the animus loci of this forest, so that I can control it just as a human can move their limbs and do damage to you by having them smack you."
For a spiritualised/Void Adapted Mage, their Charms are their old Rotes. They still have nearly all the same limitations and the same advantages as they did back when they were Rotes, save that they don't risk/incur Paradox any more. Particularly, this means that for technocrats, Rotes that depend on Foci still need these Foci now they're spirit Charms. That's why Void Adapted Technocrats still look like Technocrats, as they still need tools.
Being in paradigm isn't the point any more - this fits somewhere into the Technocratic paradigm. The point is that a Void Adapted Technocrat is very likely to need the appropriate Foci for his Rotes turned Charms. That means if we can deny him the foci, we might be able to deny him use of the Charms, which handicaps him more than it would a mage, as being a spirit he'd be less able to come up with new tricks on the fly.
If he is a spirit then it might be possible to Banish him, but I still think that it's more like he's the equivalent of an Infernalist that's received an Investment.
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Grin_Reaper
Shadow Cabal Space Pirate
- Location
- Space Battleship Pennsylvania
I wonder if IBM would have any ideas on dealing with Mr. Hax there.
Probably not, no. Remember, they're about two days out of 1999, and they left before Void Adaptation kicked in, and they said they had no contact with other Union branches. And they're Iteration X, who were forbidden from learning DSci pre-1999.
Their plan would probably be "shoot anything he shows up in! He'll run out of bodies eventually! And he's barely a real combatant, so you won't even need the real heavy firepower" Which is true from their PoV, but not very useful.
And again, spirit's don't operate within in a paradigm anymore then a Vampire or werewolf does. There power's do not depend on how they think there power's work, unlike a mage.
Not only is this not true, but you think it would be very clear if you compared the senior leadership of iteration X and The Autocthonians. The powers of a mage can and do change as they become a spirit, especially once they realize the Umbra has turned them into a EDE.
This is not one of his rotes turned charms. He was pretty clearly implying he couldn't do this before with the whole speech about working for Control for Immortality.
Edit: I'm going too be more clear here, and I'm going to outright say expecting A agent spirit to work it's powers like standard technocratic Enlightened Science works, because not only do mages tend to change how they perceive themselves as the Umbra twists from a biological entity to a Spirit/EDE, but the senior leadership was completely aware that they were doing magic pre-1999, that they were imposing the laws of physics on humanity, ect. The assumption that there powers work according to a standard technocratic paradigm that relies on hard science, or even science at all, is definitely not a safe one. For goodness sakes, just getting past Enlightenment 5 means you start outgrowing foci.
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A vampire or werewolf's powers do fit within a paradigm in Mage terms. They're either effectively a type of linear magic that fits within a paradigm/they burn Tass to stave off Paradox. They operate within a paradigm in the same way that a gun operates within the technocratic paradigm. Just about everything operates within a paradigm. Things that work under a paradigm that becomes too far from the consensus Paradigm stop being part of normal reality and get shoved out to become Bygones in the Umbra.
That's why classic european dragons used to be able to roam around freely as real creatures and are now spirits, and why when they use a charm to breath fire it has to be fire, rather than, say, switching to sonic on the fly when facing a resistant enemy, despite it being the same mechanical spirit charm they're using to do so.
It is true, at least if I'm reading Infinite Tapestry correctly.
Remember that the top level Autocthonians were exceptionally high powered mages before. They could well have had this kind of abilities, even if they couldn't use them easily.
That's largely why I think he isn't a spirit, and instead has received an Investment from his new masters.
In any case, this kind of Mage metaphysics discussion isn't going to get us anywhere, I think. We don't have access to the Spheres required to exploit him being a spirit, and if his powers works because of lol!bullshit we're not going to be able to do anything about them anyway.
Would it be possible/safe to get in touch with a Void Engineer for advice? Or would that involve too much risk of information leakage? As a former Adept of Spirit, Donald might also be able to tell us something useful.
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