The little annex kitchen of the hotel room has become the impromptu office space of the team, and as a result the next morning everyone is gathered there for two purposes. Firstly, they are having breakfast. Secondly, Rose has a proposal for them.
"Okay, okay!" Rose says brightly. Her disgustingly sugary brightly coloured cereal is already finished, as is her hot chocolate and the half pack of butter she ate for lack of proper high-energy-density nutrition supplements. "Now, if everyone could just settle down…"
"There's only three of us," Henriette points out, wrapped up in a big fluffy jumper and holding a mug of black coffee. She's fiddling with some flash-printed microchips in front of her, a cable running from her headset into the hardware.
"I know, but I just need to get things underway," Rose continues. She gestures to the laptop beside her. "I made a briefing and everything."
"I know you did," Henriette says. "I had to spend half an hour yesterday trying to explain to you how to use templates and I really have no clue how you managed to-"
"Now, if everyone could just settle down," Rose said more loudly, "I have my slides on the operation proposal I've devised in front of me." She rummaged through her bag. "Here's the text copy," she said, passing it to Donald, "but I thought I'd explain the summary and field questions."
Wufan sits back, no emotion at all readable in his eyes. He has his hands folded on his lap, and he had inhaled his food almost as quickly as Rose did. "Go on," he says neutrally. "I'm listening."
Running her hands through her night-black hair, Rose purses blood-red lips and takes a breath. "The previous plan to have me assume the role of a haemophage will not work," she says, trying to not let her voice quaver. She hates admitting to defects. "My morphovariant biological systems are damaged and working irregularly due to damage I took in the Demise, and I have not had access to the proper Progenitor labs to verify the integrity of several other high-end systems. At the moment, I cannot assume any other human appearance and while I should be able to bring them back online again within a few days, I cannot guarantee that they won't malfunction again."
"Paaaaaaaradox," observes Thorn from the mirror behind the others, leaning on the kitchen counter. She's only wearing a baggy t-shirt, has mussed hair and looks hung over. The fact that she's apparently drinking beer along with her breakfast doesn't help matters.
"To that end," Rose continues, ignoring the hallucination, "I have come up with a new plan that… I hope you'll consider."
She taps the mouse, and accidentally minimises the window.
"Um."
"Press F5 to show it as a slideshow," Henriette says with a yawn and a mouth half-full of cereal.
"Oh, right, thank you! Uh… oh yes, there it is. Okay. Yes. Okay. Uh… yes. Here we go."
Donald winces. Apparently Damage Control doesn't teach PowerPoint, at least to the combat constructs.
"We have two problems at the moment," Rose says, as the screen shows THE PROBLEM in big red letters. "We need access to Union networks so we can use it without people knowing what we're doing, because we don't have enough intel - and the higher, the better. The fake Serafina is formally in charge of Amalgam-451, because their fake Director Belltower heads up a different Amalgam, which means she'll have Director-level access. It will probably be restricted, but even if she isn't really Serafina, she'll still have to be very clever to pass as her, which means she can contribute to the Union as a Director even if she won't do it as well as Sera could.
"But! We also have the problem that our allies and friends might be fooled that she's really Sera, and that'd be really bad! They'll be able to use that against us! So we also should try to neutralise the threat that her and her influence and her ability to use our contacts poses."
"We're agreed on that," Donald says, feeling slightly relieved that Rose managed to catch her stumble after the initial problems with the screen. "So what's your proposal?"
Rose taps the mouse, and CAT-A TYPE-3 CONSTRUCT ACUTE PERSONALITY REJECTION DISORDER comes spiralling in with a comic boing.
"As a FACADE facsimile which is engineered to pass as a transhuman modified senior technocrat liable to be exposed to RED threat detector sources, standard protocol would be to ensure that the MUSE-category personality mesh - which is probably a FALSE EIDOLON subtype but I'm not sure about that - is composed of an active self-integrity component with EGO verisimilitude and a passive underlying SUPEREGO which carries the mission information which the EGO is not permitted to know and can assume perfunctory control in response to appropriate stimuli. Through exposure to appropriate stimuli and dissociative drugs, an Ashford Inversion can occur and the EGO becomes dominant over the SUPEREGO, removing the monitoring authority of the Ego in a classic locked-in phenomenon. Knowing Serafina as I do, her behaviour thereafter as the EGO locked in a dominant position without SUPEREGO monitoring will be predictable and can be guided," Rose says cheerfully.
Donald and Henriette stare at Rose. "Uh," Donald says. "Could you maybe downgrade the explanation for those of us who aren't biologists? Or, you know, Progenitors?"
"Interesting," says Wufan, clinically. He drums his fingers on the desk. "Which dissociative drug?"
Rose turns to face him. "Assuming the duplicate is a combat construct like the one observed before, I'd really need a more detailed analysis of her to know which of the narrow-spectrum compounds I could select would work. If she was baseline, this would be trivial to compute, but without more detail I can't tailor something without risking her likely wide-band immunities would trigger on them."
"And stimuli?"
"She's my mother figure. I know her routine, her personality, and the fact that if she undergoes such an inversion and suspects that she's not the primary personality, her response will likely be to find an excuse to meet up with Alexander Cross from Damage Control."
"She'll go straight to Ethical Compliance?"
"I believe so."
"Role as a distraction?" Wufan asks, leaning forwards. His eyes gleam, and he's skipping words. There's something very cold about him here. Rose briefly contemplates the irony that despite the fact he's the one with the least cybernetics of any of them at the table, he's the most machine-like one here.
"Yes. If it works, they won't be able to just replace her, unlike if we terminated her."
"Hmm. Expensive to cover up," Wufan says, pondering out loud, albeit tersely. "What if Ethical Compliance is compromised?"
Rose purses her lips. "It can't be too obvious," she says. She doesn't want to think about the risk that Alexander might be… might have had done to him what the Anathema did to her. But it's a risk. "Ethical Compliance is frequently vetted because of its role."
"Who else might she go to?"
"She's not close to her parents," Rose says. "I can't think of anyone she trusts more than Cross who she won't suspect. Their false Director Belltower, for example, will be the prime suspect for this sort of thing." She frowns. "She might also suspect herself," she admits. "I don't know what she'd do if she thought she might have left a duplicate in her own place. But I think she'll link it to the assault on the construct, so she won't trust anyone else who might have been replaced."
Wufan cracks his knuckles. "Workable," he says laconically.
"It's not guaranteed," Rose admits. "Even if we successfully induce the personality self-realisation, there's always the risk that she gets taken up by whatever monitoring they have on her. Or just bad luck that they happen to have a check-up on her when she's undergoing the trauma and they catch and avert it. Or the risk of Cross being compromised you raised." She swallows. "That's why the first stage of the plan is to acquire the biological samples. Even this idea is non-viable, we'll need them if I can get my morphovariant systems back online and am to assume her identity. After that, we can consider the viability of dosing her with low levels of dissociative drugs and subjecting her to stressful situations to induce a breakdown in the monitoring of the shell personality."
***
"Rose." Donald speaks softly. The other two have already left to acquire a vehicle. "What made you think of that scheme?"
She shrugs. "It's just the most viable way of eliminating the threat from the fake," she says. "That I could think of, at least."
"Is it?" he asks.
"Yes."
He looks at her, eyes sad and slightly wary. "Well, I hope it works," he says eventually, shoulders slumping.
She can read him. Easily. He's thinking that she's doing it partly because she wants to make someone who's nearly Serafina suffer through what she went through herself. Which is nonsense. She's not
cruel. She doesn't want revenge.
"And look how you leap at the idea that you might want revenge," Thorn observes, polishing her claw-like nails. "There's a little bit of you who is jealous of dear old Mama. You two are more alike than you both think, and it makes it hurt more. The way that she was grown in a vat too, but she never had to kill people when she was little. The way that you were both sculpted for beauty, but for her sexuality is a fun little thing while for you it's a question of predators and victims."
Rose really wants to strangle Thorn right now. More than usual, that is.
"If you want to know the truth," she says softly, leaning towards Donald and pitching her voice huskily, "at least some of the reason was that I was looking for a way which meant I might not have to kill her. I… I know she's a fake. But I don't want to be in a place where she might plead for her life and I might pause and put you in danger."
Donald perks up at that. "I understand," he says, reaching forwards and giving her shoulder a squeeze. "Hmm. Biological samples, biological samples. Ideally we want fingerprints as well as DNA, which… hmm. Fingerprints on a wineglass, I think."
"I notice that his first go-to plan involves alcohol," Thorn says archly.
"I notice that your first go-to plan involves alcohol," Rose repeats, on the grounds that while it is a bit mean, it's also quite funny.
"Bitch, stop stealing my lines."
Donald looks slightly hurt and then chuckles. "I deserved that. But seriously. This wouldn't be the first person's biometric data I've picked up from glasses. People leave fingerprints, lip-prints and DNA on them. In one of my first amalgams, we had a Progenitor on-team who insisted we pick them up for everyone we had dinner meetings with." He sighs. "Otherwise they wouldn't approve our expenses for business lunches."
"Such cruelty!" Rose says with wide-eyed ingenue innocence.
"I know," Donald says miserably.
