JB CXCI: Closing The Deal
Henriette's been working for nearly a day on getting access to a semi-legitimate cover. Well, "working," Donald thinks. She spent a bit of time making a few hacks to websites and spent most of the rest of the time talking to her friends on IM programs, occasionally checking back to see who's taken the bait. Donald is sure that Jamelia Belltower would criticize her for it, but he really doesn't have any room to complain. And Rose would probably pout at him if he tried to make Henriette take her job more seriously, which isn't something he looks forward to. She's pretty good at the kinds of sad pouts which make people want to do what she says. She could be very very scary if she was just a little more manipulative.
"And... we're in." Henriette hunches over the computer, fingers skittering across the keyboard. "Despite the fact I'm having to do everything manually, I might add. I've got user-level access, but that should be all that I need."
"Great," Rose says brightly, leaning over her. "Uh. What does that mean?"
"Well, I'm using a password I stole from a Syndicate human resources officer," Henriette says cockily. "They fell for my fishing scam - of course, it helps being able to create a perfectly authentic frontpage for my redirect and disguised URL. That's what you get when you outsource IT security to the lowest bidder, rather than ItX. We'd have caught such a trick. But that does mean I have to log in without using my ADEI - oh, and don't worry, I'm routing this through New York. I set up some helpful little things in a few places last time we were there."
"Well done," Rose says, still looking somewhat blank. "Hasn't she done well, Donald?"
A regular little Virtual Adept, Donald doesn't say. Even though he really wants to. He wonders if this is how things used to be, when the Virtual Adepts were part of the Technocracy and every amalgam could have their own arrogant tech expert without having to ask Iteration X to borrow one. "Yes," he instead comments. "So you've got HR access?"
"Didn't I just say that?"
"Well, do you have access to the records for Marion Inc?"
"One moment... yes. I do. Full access to payroll, assignments, you name it. You want me to insert you two there? It... hmm. It looks like a pretty normal front company specializing in funding start-ups and the like. Looking at its financial records, it's pretty clean. Lots of tech start-ups and IT."
"Yes," Donald says, sticking his hands in his pockets. "That's why I picked it. Just check that they've got on-books records of investment in Kaze Biochemicals."
Henriette clicked away. "Yep," she said after a few moments, bringing the files up onto the projector.
Rose and Donald scan over them. "That all matches my memories of the cram," Donald says, sounding a little relieved. "Okay, Henriette. Stick our covers in there. How long do you think it's going to take you?"
Henriette looks up, frowning. "Give me six hours and I'll make sure things are as watertight as I can get them. I'll need to insert you into a bunch of US state records too, and you've specified enough foreign travel that I'm going to have to change international records if things are going to hold together."
Donald shrugs. "Good enough. Message me when you're done, at least. Stick to those profiles, because Rose is going to be cutting me up to match that passport picture and it'd be really embarrassing if she has to do it again."
"On it." Henriette gets to work.
Rose and Donald are going to be taking the role of unenlightened Syndicate auditors attached to a Syndic team lead by a Damien 'failure' - an extraordinary citizen with a rich daddy who gets low risk Syndicate missions and plenty of authority to wave around. Mr George Claxton - son of CFO (Aerospace) Neil Claxton - is here to ensure that the Syndicate's investments in the Progenitors aren't wasted. And he always gets plenty of assets to assist him, so two more extraordinary citizens aren't going to raise any eyebrows if they're in his retinue.
"You know, that posture is bad for your spine and your wrists," Rose points out.
"I'm crammed full of healing nanotech. Don't care," is the response she gets.
***
"What I don't understand is why Henriette responds to the world being mean by being mean back," Rose says to Donald sadly. She looks Japanese at the moment, and is dressed up as a doctor. The two of them are in a private hospital owned by a Progenitor front, using the access protocols that the Rosarios gave to them. "She just increases the mean levels of mean in the world."
"That's just how she copes," he says.
"But she can be much less mean," Rose protests, unsealing the cooled box she wheeled in with her. "She's actually all... all soft when we're talking. She's a good friend, at least in private. I think she's like a hedgehog."
That statement confuses Donald. "She likes bread and milk?" he says.
"Well, yes. But I meant that she uses her spikes to stop people getting close to her."
"And then detaches them so they skewer you," he says, with a smile.
"That's porcupines, not hedgehogs," Rose says sharply.
"Is there a difference?"
"Mr Sykes, you know very well there is a difference," Rose says, almost coquettishly. "You're incorrigible. You clearly need a good woman to make you into a better man. And so I have a proposition. Mr Sykes, may I have your hand?"
"Uh..."
She pulls a fast-grown limb out of the coolant box, and waves it around casually. "Don't worry, I have a new one for you. So just unfasten that cyborg thing and I can get to work attaching this thing to you."
Donald wraps his hospital gown tighter around himself. This is an uncomfortable position to be in. Rose has been growing him a new arm in a little cooler filled with synthetic blood and stem cells. He's just a little freaked out right now, because last time he looked in the cooler, he was pretty sure the arm waved at him. Rose reassured him that it was just part of the necessary movements that a growing arm has to be put through to make sure its muscles develop properly and don't atrophy, but there's still a little bit of him that remembers the urban myths about evil transplant arms.
Still, fumbling with his other hand, he undoes the interlocks one by one on his cybernetic arm and lays it down on the hospital bed. There's still the core brace that IBM installed there-Rose will have to remove that via surgery. He doesn't miss it. Objectively, he should-that arm was tough, strong, untiring, and still had all the sensation and precision of a flesh and blood one-but he's decided that he doesn't like its look and feel-the sleek black alien thing jutting out of his shoulder wasn't something he liked seeing in the mirror day after day. He's glad to see it gone, a reminder of those bad times.
"You shouldn't play with my heart like that," he says, trying to get control of the conversation again.
"Mr Sykes, I do declare that if I was playing with your heart, you'd know about it." Rose looks at him over the top of her unnecessary glasses. "Well, unless you were under general anesthesia. But you'd know about it once you woke up and found the incisions."
Donald is a little concerned with what's happened to Rose's sense of humor. She seems to be taking a little too much pleasure playing with people's expectations. She winds up Henriette with mock innocence and too-naive comments, while she goes to the opposite extreme with Donald and does these false-flirting comments. For some reason, she wants Langley to see her as naive and childish, while she wants to be a woman to him. But he can see - and hear - Serafina's patterns in her innuendo. She's just copying the banter of her mother figure. She's acting like a mirror-projecting what she thinks people want her to be. He needs to find a tactful way to tell her that she's trying too hard. Preferably after she's grafted a new arm to his stump, because he doesn't want her to start having another breakdown while she's carrying out surgery on him.
"This won't be permanent," she warns him. "This is just a substandard field-growth. It's got terminator genes in it..."
"So I'll be back?"
"... so it prevents the stem cells from going cancerous by killing the arm before that can happen," Rose says. "I don't have the time or the resources to get you a full organic arm replacement in the long run."
Donald gives a lop-sided shrug. "Oh well. There's no risk of it just rotting and dropping off? That'd be pretty embarrassing."
"Almost no risk at all," Rose says cheerfully.
"And... uh, it won't become self aware and try to strangle me?"
"That hardly ever happens."
"Hardly ever?"
"Well, obviously there are some risks to all kinds of surgery."
The annoying thing about Rose's newfound sense of humor, Donald decides sadly, is that it's too hard to tell if she's joking sometimes. It's a tool she's using to cover up the trauma. He knows that, even if Henriette hasn't guessed it yet and keeps on getting wound up. But at least it's a human response - and a working sense of humour is something she's developed for herself since joining this amalgam. She does it at least in part so people think she's just joking around - but she also does seem to find it entertaining. And he's not going to stand in the way of that.
He could show her some of the series he liked when he was a teenager, but he suspects that 90s teen comedies would just confuse her. And she'd probably get bemused at the idea that MTV used to actually show music.
"So, anyway, once I attach that arm, I'm going to need to get my hands on the rest of your body, Mr Sykes," Rose says with a wide, fangs-exposing smile. "Don't worry. I'll need a lot less than seven days to make you a man."
Donald swallows. "Did... did Henriette show you the Rocky Horror Picture Show?" he asks weakly.
"It was really funny! I liked the songs a lot," Rose says brightly. "We had a sing-along musical night. She only put on that one once we were moderately inebriated and had worked our way through most of Disney!"
"Oh. Goodie." He's going to need to find a way to dock Henriette's salary. "Just remember, Rose. Focus on making me into Benjamin Dickens, a former employee of Goldman Sachs head-hunted by the Syndicate for further induction and asset utilization based on his performance metrics. You've got to keep exactly to the plans. The two of us are going to be inside constructs, and nothing can be out of place. Not my genes, not my hair, not my skin, nothing."
Rose pouts. It's strange to see that very Rose expression on the not-her face she's currently wearing. "Look, Donald, do I tell you how to launder money?" she says. "No. I don't. Don't tell me how to disguise myself - or someone else. I know how to do this. I'm the doctor here, not you."
He smiles. "Sorry, Rose. I trust you." He means it. She's saved his life who knows how many times already. She's been nothing but helpful. Even that unpleasantness in LA could hardly be said to be her fault. "I shouldn't doubt you."
She looks... surprised for a second, then smiles again. "Thank you. It means a lot coming from you."
"More people should say it to you." Donald says, smoothly.
When he wakes up, he's got a different face and look. Less handsome, if he would say so himself-but still good enough. Rose hands him a mirror. "How'd I do?" She asks, outwardly calm.
"You did a great job." He gives her the approval she desires, and her face lights up. It's unsettling-but then again, he knows enough about whatever happened to put the pieces together. Whatever happened with Reina in the Spy's Demise-she modified Rose-changed her. And he knows enough regular psych and hyperpsych to know that that kind of rebuilding requires you to break someone down. And whatever they took out of her-he wonders how constructs see the Technocracy. Is it a father figure? Is it like a nation to them? Or is it something more? Is it god? Either way-he's not surprised that she's so desperate for any level of approval and so afraid of showing any weakness at this point. She's a scared young girl who's been told that Santa Claus isn't real, her parents don't actually love her, and the god she's been praying to might actually exist, but hates everyone, including her and wants them to burn in hell for all eternity, plus a little extra. It's a testament, he thinks, to her inner strength that she's still able to stumble along even now. And it's why he needs to find Serafina, because for all her inner strength he's pretty sure that all he and Henriette can do is keep holding her together with duct tape.
"Really?" Rose's smile is wide and genuine. The heart-melting, heart-wrenching kind. The kind that she's given him so freely before, but has come so much more rarely now.
"Really. No complaints from this end." Donald says. "We're going to find her. Don't worry. We'll find her and everything will be all right." He says it, but he doesn't quite believe it. She's not going to be allowed to be an innocent ingenue ever again. Not with them. Not fighting a shadow war. None of them are. Maybe as a Technocrat-but not as one opposed to things like that EDE in California, or Panopticon, or whatever that
thing was.
***
"Oh shit." Donald says. He's realized there was going to be a lot of disruption around Tokyo because of the North Korean problem, but not like this. Union channels are full of information about temporary lodging, hotels and other fronts which have been used to deal with how the normal facilities are now full. Second-tier hospitals which can provide cybernetics maintenance, UNCMC and JSDF Strike Force Zero bases that are aware of Technocracy augmentations and will be able to handle injured personnel with those features, JSDF and US military bases that are run by Technocracy friendlies and won't ask too many questions. He's overheard some of the Syndicate analysts complain about it. They're getting into fights, upsetting the status quo. They've had to budget for additional use of medical facilities because Shock Corps and DC supersoldiers have started picking fights with Japanese RDs out of boredom and a lot of both are being sent to the hospital. No bodies, thankfully-but when you're dealing with martial artists capable of punching through concrete walls and cyborgs capable of dishing out and taking just as much punishment it's almost an inevitability at this point. They're, fortunately, not dealing with Shock Corps barracks or DC operations. Instead, what they're dealing with is biotech. Kazan Biotechnology is one of the few operations which can produce the basic biotech "A" believes is required. And since the disruptions from Dr. Leon's activities have been local, rather than regional or global in scale, Donald is reasonably sure that's exactly what's happening.
"Things really don't change much, do they?" Rose whispers, a very Reina-like statement, as she overhears the scientists complaining in the break room. She's made sure to eat already-her normal combat construct appetite would immediately reveal her, but that means she has more than enough time to join Donald for breakfast in the break room before they go on their tour and audit of the facility. And it's a good place to listen into the gossip of Progenitors-unlike the tight-lipped NWO operatives, Progenitors seem to love to bitch about their colleagues in public. Bitch about how someone else was given the promotion instead of them. Bitch about office politics. Bitch about this or that order from high-up on a project. And what they're not talking about is telling. They're not talking about Professor Leon, nor are they talking about whatever big project seems to be going on here. He's got enough information about Kazan's resources and power draw to know something is going on.
They send him on a tour first, taking a guided tour from a construct trying to assure him all is well and telling him a minimum of what he needs to know. More than enough that his half-remembered college biology has failed him, and he's just nodding on uncomprehendingly. There's a lot of showmanship-test subjects visibly becoming a decade or so younger, short interviews with junior researchers who assure him, and have numbers and time tables-that this temporary disruption from the resources being diverted to the war effort will not be a major problem, and was approved by higher-ups. They even, wink wink nudge nudge, let them look at the military-grade biotech, show off some videos of Combat Homonculi and how Kazan's are very high-end models compared to the standard. The pretty construct tour guide smiles at him. "Kazan Biotechnology's front may be a public-facing company, but unlike some public-facing Progenitor amalgams we are one of the few locations capable of engineering pre-1999 biotech. We've been at the forefront of advancing the Union's internal knowledge of bioengineering, as well as providing the fruits of this labor to the masses." He says. "I hope this is taken into account during the audit-and I hope you understand that this disruption will not interfere with the scheduled introduction of Type-1 anagathics in 2017."
That's what Donald wanted from this. It confirms that Kazan can build the high-end morphic biotech that Leon would need for a cutting-edge project. But it doesn't tell him what exactly is going on. After lunch, they'll be meeting with the administrative staff of the facility-mostly Progenitors and their pet Syndicate assistants, a couple of Exceptional Citizens-who will probably treat two unEnlightened auditors with contempt and feed them some story that they're going to have to believe.
***
Rose sees the tour differently. She's more aware of the technology here than Donald, far more. She was born in a place like this-not this place, but somewhere similar. Well, decanted, which is the same thing. Except she has dozens of different gene sources which doesn't matter because a mother isn't only someone who shares half your genes and even the masses know that because they have adopted children who have parents who don't and-
-she's falling back into old habits now. Having to reassure herself that she's loved, she's wanted. Isn't that what everyone has done? She's admitted to Henriette how broken she is and nobody's taken her to the recycling tanks. If they tried, she could run away now, live on her own. Run away. A glint of Thorn in a camera lens gives her a thumbs-up at that idea. The only problem is that it'd hurt people who have tried to help her-Serafina, Alexander, and all the others. She's not willing to sacrifice them for her own happiness. And that-that's her choice, not some programmed directive. She knows that now. She loves them because she can choose to love them. Something which even Thorn seems to grudgingly approve of.
So she's here not because she has to be, but because she wants to be. Because Serafina deserves her help. Needs her help. And because Donald does too-even if he doesn't quite understand her position. If he wanted to get out, he probably could. He'd be given a nice large payment to stay silent, and live a quiet life somewhere until his natural death. If even someone like Kessler wanted out, they probably could. The Technocracy would want their augmentations back, which to someone like him would be worse than death-and impossible now for Kessler anyhow, but it's an option. She doesn't have this option. She can't retire. Her body is Union property, its biotech integrated so tightly into her genome that she can't give it up. She doesn't have the option of calling it quits and walking away. Death or service or a life on the run are all she has.
She sympathizes with the construct guiding them-he's clearly a modified M-type, with a little bit of programmed biotech skill, enough to impress some Syndicate auditors by explaining all the big words in simple language, to show them the most impressive biotech, to gloss over failures and promote successes. She can't tell him how much she sympathizes, but she treats him like a person. Like someone from the masses would. The way she'd like to be treated. Even as an unenlightened auditor, even there-the scientists and RAs look at her differently. More warmly. Not like a thing or a dangerous weapon. Even if they are barely holding their contempt in.
Rose recognizes, of course, the high-end equipment being talked about. They're not exactly standard exowombs, but rather advanced bioreactors, capable of generating the kinds of transgenic custom life Progenitors use. Biomods designed to integrate with specific hosts, combat homonculi, hybrid bioweapons. A lot of the technology is familiar, because they're the technology which created her. Some of it, in fact, is the exact same model. She just needs to know what it's being used for. But the technologies they're showing off imply things. Fast-morphic biology. Adaptable base structures capable of accepting xenografts. Recombinant DNA from alien sources. The same technologies which went into her.
The Boring Auditing Part...
So. You've got access. Now you've got to investigate. You're going to investigate by...
[ ] Talking to the lab assistants. On one hand, they almost certainly don't have the big picture. On the other hand, they're more likely to let things slip than any senior researchers.
[ ] Talking to senior staff. On one hand they probably won't give you much-Progenitors gonna Progenitor. On the other hand they might try to baffle you via bullshit, and you have a Progenitor to figure out exactly that sort of thing.
[ ] Trying to get access to the lab computers. Henriette might be helpful here. What's she doing?
[ ] Just moving on from what you know. You know enough-they've been heavily monopolizing Kazan's biotech for advanced cutting-edge equipment. You can move on to other sources of investigation.
[ ] Write-In.
