Panopticon: A Game of Posthumans, Perniciousness, Paranoia, Politics, and Plasmaguns

[MJ12 Commando]

Can i get some clarification MJ?

I was under the impression the VE ships followed a consistent design philosophy, with a tear drop shaped hull. They tend to be described as looking like armored insects bristling with weapons.

Click to shrink...

They do in fact follow a consistent design philosophy, but that philosophy is not aesthetic, but rather, practical. Pre-1999, those constraints were generally:

1. The capability of carrying a significant amount of crew for extended operations. Pre-1999 Void Engineer operations were often very long-term, with times measured in months if not years, and you wanted enough of a crew, and separate enough chains of command, that it wouldn't be too lonely there.
2. Sufficient size to mount a FTL drive and extended stores for long-duration patrols in the Umbra
3. Generally, the ability to mount a Creation Engine and a full Medical Bay w/Clone Capability so you could actually run an invasion if you found a world you wanted to subjugate or needed to throw a thousand Bobs at Cthulhu to distract him.
4. An emphasis on survivability over firepower or speed-you wanted your Voidships to be able to limp back, and pre-1999 you didn't need all that much conventional weaponry. If something was too nasty for you to deal with, you left the scene with your Endeavor-class multirole explorer vessel, told your buddies in Thunderchild III-class Long Range Assault/Suppression Vessels (LRASVs) and then they fired a couple of SATNUCs (Saturation Nuclear Cluster, Matter 5/Corr 5/Prime 2) at the enemy and dropped off some space marines to plant a flag in the rubble.
5. Adaptability. A Voidship in those days was generally going to be adapted to a wide variety of missions. You could fight, you could explore, you could even diplomacy or do mapping or scientific missions. They were designed to be easily Technobabbled into doing whatever their captain and crews wanted.

Post-1999, the constraints change to:

1. Capable of leaving and reentering atmosphere due to limited exoatmospheric facilities for Voidship construction and maintenance
2. Easily maintained and upgraded in the field with various Technocratic and pseudo-Technocratic devices
3. Improved modularity and cross-unit compatibility so that any design can be built from already-extant building blocks and voidships can be easily taken apart to patch up other voidships.
4. Terrestrial backwards-compatibility so you can 'downgrade' technology if it's not available. The newest model of the QLM, the X205, demonstrates this best. Although its 4 Point Defense mounts are intended to mount Iteration X-built Close-In Interception Clusters consisting of various hard- and soft- kill systems like pinpoint barrier modules, continuous-beam lasers, railguns firing guided ordinance, and Screen Launchers (canisters that project very short-lived high-power hardfields, great for making fighters very, very annoyed when they crash into walls at 10 km/s), but in practice both fielded X205s have been equipped with Chinese Type-1130 CIWS guns and FL-3000s modified for space use.
5. Emphasis on military operations over civilian ones, and operating in mutually-supporting units. This means that a lot of them have heavier frontal armament and armor, losing a lot of nice-to-haves like crew quarters for everyone (generally for long-range patrols everyone gets a week or so in an actual room and spends the rest of the time stuck in a life support pod), high-end integrated medical facilities, decent Autochefs, and scientific/research equipment that also works really well to improvise Procedures in a hurry.

I'm giving you this information because it's all publicly available.

A post-1999 Voidship probably looks something like these designs below:





Aerodynamic enough that it doesn't suffer from unacceptable stresses in atmosphere, looks significantly smaller from a distance than it actually is, has wings. They generally come in much smaller sizes than the pre-1999 designs, because they are leaner, meaner, killing machines, with any exploration duties relegated to low priority secondary systems or 'dual-use' systems. Nuclear ordinance is not uncommon, and the Syndicate financials heavily hint that the VEs probably have their own totally mundane nuclear-weapons-manufacturing fronts hidden somewhere on Earth. The Void Engineers may have been the "Star Trek" Convention, the one everyone thought was the nicest and most idealistic and most cooperative with RDs for all that they were paternal imperialists. Those days are long over.

It's pretty common knowledge now. If it came down to it and the Void Engineers decided to take over the Union by force? They could do it. NWO commandos would take a toll on their Earthside constructs, Iteration X ASAT and STO weaponry would shoot down many of their ships, Iteration X heavy shock units could probably make a great accounting of themselves against the hordes of men and materiel the VEs are hoovering up (after all, much of that is relatively mundane), and the Syndicate could gut their resource base. But the outcome of such a conflict is not in doubt. The VEs would win barring some very lucky surgical strikes, or the wildcard of 'how many resources Panopticon has'.

Which, of course, should hint to people why Command may be less than willing to censure Panopticon...

Etherships on the other hand follow no common design, and that's why you get Czar Vargo's flying cigar, and Rocket ship etc. The Saucer makes me think of Iron Sky esq design, which seems to be more inline with an etherite warship.

Click to shrink...

Etherships stick the middle finger to what 'practicality' means in Panopticon, which is their general defining point rather than having no aesthetic similarities. In fact, because the Society of Ether is obsessed with the aesthetics of Science!, it is Etherships which can generally be identified by having a similar design aesthetic, which is generally 'WWII battleships in space'. The most powerful and infamous Ethership (and also the best illustrator of the space operatic 'WWII battleships in space' thing) is the Bismarck, which is, yes, basically what happens when you take Space Battleship Yamato and Arpeggio of Blue Steel and combine them in a blender to have a spacefaring nano-machine super battleship that opens up to shoot millions of missiles at you.

It is probably capable of taking the Earthside Void Engineers' best warship in a straight fight. It is also a one-off vanity project that basically bankrupted some very influential Etherites, resource-wise, but why be an Etherite if you don't blow your massive stores of tass and artifacts on making something cool like a nanomachine space battleship. Also, the purists of the Etherites dislike it because it uses nanomachines and weird quantum physics technobabble instead of STEAMPUNK.

So my question is, is the Saucer a well known VE design? Is it significantly different (void adapted) that it's possible to spin it off as some mad etherite getting their hand on a wrecked VE ship?

Click to shrink...

The specific saucer is not a well-known VE design, but it's clearly a modified 80s-era lifting-body dropship. Kessler, having worked very closely with VEs in the 80s/90s, would know that the inertialess drive has handling issues at high speeds in low altitude flight, which is why it has backup fusion rocket engines (the air intakes for those are vulnerable, which is why they have covers), and that its weapons outfit consists of a plasma projector and a few retractable missile hardpoints, but its main use is as a dropship. It's also probably primium-armored.

The VEs used saucer-styled units a lot because it was the optimal geometry for inertialess drive systems. (Read: People believed in UFOs and thus incredibly out-there performance was coincidental from a flying saucer shape). Modern VE designs don't have that issue with their inertialess drive systems (Read: In Panopticon sci-fi fans now regurgitate 100+G X-Wing and Halo fighter calcs), although they prefer to use them in low-power with fusion rockets.

Kessler, again, would be able to tell you more, but he's not here and Jamelia needs to punch through their jamming to call him. All Jamelia knows is "probably a VE 'saucer' dropship", "probably not all that heavily armed", "is still capable of vaporizing her either with plasma gun shots or with its missiles".

 

[MJ12 Commando]

JB LXVI: Subjugators

Jamelia glances out the window, again, fixing her eyes on the saucer and the hostile marines. She tries to take in everything she can about them, working out what gear they're carrying and comparing them to her known lists of various bits of Union gear. And as she does that, her new psychic powers nudge hints about what she's looking at. Psychic powers. Jamelia shakes her head with mock sadness. At her age. And she's just apparently become a Euthanatos as well, at least by the standards of the posthuman who was once the Senex. And honestly, when you're told you're a member of a Tradition by the person who was the de facto head of the grouping for as long as you've known... it's quite hard to say 'no'. And she's also apparently the reincarnation of the founder of House Janissary who was a member of a secret cross-factional alliance, because why the fuck not?

They're not quite EDEs, but not quite men. There's the orange traceries of EDE-derived technology in their nervous system, coursing through implants woven out of alien biometal, their bodies swollen on hypersteroids and nanotech growth enhancers, their muscles rewoven by retrovirals to have better performance, their bones hardened honeycombs capable of stopping bullets. A outgrowth of Progenitor A-type clones. Ares. And their equipment is hardened, solid, Void Engineer spec. Guided gyrojet launchers, smart-shell railguns, and a few heavy weapons specialists with fully-automatic heavy plasmas and high-maneuverability guided warhead launchers. It's not the strange alien pseudotechnology she vaguely remembers seeing on a few joint operations, the damnably reliable stuff that alien crashes generally left. It is, however, still heavy, reliable, and tough. They are followed by a pair of Void Engineer mini-spidertanks, arms heavy with 15mm gatling guns, a bulbous turret tracking back and forth with another smartshell launcher. Drone pods with Eyebots inside, football-sized hovering robot cameras with SMGs. Reliable, 80s cybertechnology, gallium-arsenide chips and sensors. In some ways, more primitive than modern vehicles. In others, more advanced, but reliable. They're fanning out to secure the perimeter, waiting to make sure she hasn't hidden any surprises outside before going in. Predictable.

If she gets out of this and people found out, she'd never live it down. Possibly literally. Because she has enemies who are more than willing to take full opportunity of the political weakness of her having dabbled in Reality Deviancy here and now, and who wouldn't listen to the perfectly reasonable excuse, "But I had amnesia". And Reality Deviancy. Jamelia doesn't grin this time. It's an adrenaline snarl. She's very impressed at the way that everything she's been taught to date might have only been true from a certain point of view. No, really, she's genuinely impressed. Professionally she's in awe.

She's known for decades that Genius and Reality Deviancy are cousins - that every Reality Deviant has a spark of Genius, and it's that understanding that allows them to selfishly break reality to force their own whim on the world. Her spark of Genius means she's smarter, faster, better at analysing situations than most people.

But... but it didn't feel any different when she used a Euthanatos artefact to do things. And again when she used her newly found psychic powers.

Maybe Reality Deviancy is just a use of Genius which works against the world rather than with it. But if that's true... what does it say about all that experimental hypertech which is about as unstable as a wizard with a staff? What does it say about her when she fired the Singun back in Hong Kong?

No time to think about that. She has ex-Void Engineers after her trying to silence her. Rather than the current Void Engineers who she spent half of Moscow worrying if they were going to silence her.

Void Engineers. So annoying.

Well, that's enough of that. She melts away into the shadows of the house, keeping well away from the scanners. The clumping men in power armour will come in the front door, just like she didn't. She'll keep well away from them. They'll follow predictable sweeping patterns, designed to prevent the chance that anyone will bypass them, and she'll ghost through the gaps in their lines left by their engagements with the exhumans which fill the place.

It's inevitable, really. They look like they were once the kind of Void Engineer jarhead who thought that the only way into an enemy fortification was through the front entrance. And there's all kinds of ways you can bypass a sweep if you're light on your feet, able to get through narrow gaps in rotten walls, and coincidentally able to run up vertical rainslick surfaces. They can try to search for her. They won't find her. One of them kicks down a door, and she hears the echoes of his voice, a mechanical rasp relayed by loudspeakers. "ENTRANCE. CLEAR! ADVANCE."

She dashes away from the voice, stops only to grab one of the trenchcoats a dead Nazi was wearing. She recognizes it as ballistic spidersilk backing specially treated synthleather. Proof against pistol fire, might stop a weaker assault rifle bullet if it doesn't get a good angle or isn't at close range. Against the VE gyrocs and railguns, its protection is minimal-but she doesn't plan on getting hit. She plans on avoiding contact, such that the most she has to worry about is blindfire and shrapnel. And it'll provide more than enough against that.

Carefully, she ghosts up a wall, and lands on a crouch on a balcony. There's a dead Nazi Technocrat here... or rather, half of one. She doesn't know what tore him apart, but it looks like it was nasty. But what her eyes are drawn to is the radio still pinned at his belt. There's a slight hiss of static from it. It's incredible what these old radioisotope batteries could live through. Jamelia Belltower grins broadly. And there she was thinking she was trapped alone in here being hunted by massively superior forces. She stoops down, and picks up the old radio. It's weighty, but it'll fit in her bag.

And it's a weapon. And not just in the sense that it could brain someone. That'd be a waste. Her German might have been learned for use in the DDR, but that just means she'll have an east German accent. And as long as she doesn't call them comrade, things should go well. After all, the pre-War period was one of the the hot topics when she was in training, so she knows the proper communications protocols. She'll be able to add this to her list of Things I've Done. 'Commanded posthuman Nazi Technocrats in the defence of an Order of Reason facility'.

With her RK-35 in hand and wearing a Nazi coat, Jamelia ghosts through the halls of this mansion, and smiles inside her own head. Ghosting, indeed. Slinging her rocket rifle - well, might as well get into character, slinging her Raketengewehr RK-37 - around her back, Jamelia Belltower, Operative of the New World Order and honorary Euthanatos assassin runs up a wall, fingers hooking around half-bent nails, around the age-worn frames of paintings. She backflips off the wall, catching a crossbeam near the rafters, pulls herself up, over the bear trap with the many-limbed skeleton and the dulled mono-wire.

The steady THUMP-THUMP of power armor followed by by Room Clear, Brother-Sergeant echoes from below her. Void Engineers. They wouldn't know subtle if it snuck into their base and stole all their guns.

Precariously sitting on the rafter beam, between mechanical defenses that did their work seventy years ago, Jamelia raises her radio to her mouth and mutters her war-cry. Confusion to the enemy.

"Obersturmbannführer von Ingersleben?" The name of their commander was easy enough to find. Enough panicked radio-calls that still echoed through the building, especially the room with the prototype war-squid. "Obersturmbannführer, do you hear me? This is Sturmscharführer Salzwedel! The perfidious Albionese called for reinforcements! The Amerikaner scum are coming! Your orders, sir?" The voice of a dead man comes easily from her throat, panicked and high on only half-faked adrenaline.

She drops from the beam she's sitting on, climbs forward. Ahead of her, a ghost in an SS uniform does the same, jerks as it is impaled upon something. The woman still has a set of breaching charges strapped to her hips, status lights glowing in the same light blue as all the other nazi tech here. Explosives. Jamelia loves explosives.

She ghosts out of the room, scrabbling up the wall and through the bombed-out decorative window above the ruins of the door below. Her foresight is rewarded by not stepping into what is probably a monowire grenade trap.

Jamelia sits there and speaks with the voice of a woman who died screaming as the wall spike unfolded a rotary blender inside her guts. "Obersturmbannführer von Ingersleben? This is Rottenführer Kleeb, sir. The Amerikaner are sweeping the ground floor, sir. The Kriegsaffen and I are in position to execute your orders, sir!"

Getting down to groundlevel would have been - should have been hard. But Cemal's memories guide her hands. Every bullet hole, every plasma scar, every bone shard sticking out of the wall, her fingers are as fishhooks.

She looks at the scene before her. One of the Nazi soldiers, his dried guts hanging out of his body, slumped against the wall, his armor's faceplate marred by a single bullet hole in the forehead. The skeleton of a Kriegsaffe half draped over him, a pistol in its bony hand. Jamelia's newfound powers pick efficiently through the pattern-scraps left behind in the shape of a man, the psychic imprint left by his untimely exit from the world. There's a power of sorts in his death, an echo of his thoughts and feelings and Genius, and Jamelia seizes on those lingering scraps as she whispers furiously into the ancient radio.

Johan was nineteen, an inexperienced lieutenant nominally commanding a team of war-weathered veterans. Though young, he alone had Genius among the group, and his ability to safely wield '40s-era hypertech made him powerful. "Little Bear," the soldiers called him, the gangly child supposed to lead them into battle, and Jamelia can hear a note of fondness in their memories. Though they might complain about the insult of a boy leading men, the unEnlightened soldiers recognized the power that Johan had at his fingertips, and his accidental charm and endearing awkwardness had won them over.

The young officer's face takes shape in Jamelia's mind: a face made pale by lack of sunlight, close-cropped hair able to fit into a primium helmet, and watery blue eyes squinting with adrenaline and fear. Johan had been terrified as his men had approached the blasted manor, his rifle constantly twitching from one shattered window to another, yet his death had not met him outside. It was on the manor's second floor, as he tried to keep the manor's ancient defenses from springing to life, that a primium shell had found its way into his skull.

He was a Nazi, yet Johan was still human. Jamelia could work with humans.

"Achtung! Loyal Technocrats of the Union!" she whispers furiously into the old radio. She can see the ghosts taking shape below her, the fragments of dead men knitting themselves into semblances of life. "Americans have arrived to prevent the Union from rightfully taking this manor's assets! You will prevent them from taking this place at all costs!"

"Obersturmbannführer von Ingersleben? This is Scharführer Beutel. Mortally wounded, sir. Autocannon round, sir. Sending you the Kriegsaffen-Einheit Siebzehn, sir. Blut und Ehre für die Union! Hans, tu e-"

Below her, there's a burst of high-explosive shells pulverizing a wall. RNEs, Brother-Sergeant. For Control and Empire!

Jamelia moves up through the corridors, over a breastwork of Kriegsaffe bones. They used their own dead as cover, her trained eye sees, all to buy just another few meters. At the far end of the corridor there's a heavy machinegun emplacement beneath the icon of the Order of Reason and the words that she can't forget. Ipsa scientia potestas est. Knowledge itself is power. Confusion and machineguns help, though.

She ghosts forward, sees the dead officer, the trigger cord of his Model 2-a Plasma Stick Grenade still in his hand. So close to his objective, but not close enough.

"Obersturmbannführer von Ingersleben? This is Sturmscharführer Wörner! We're through the Maschinengewehr nest on the second floor. Casualties are heavy, sir, but we've got the Brits boxed in and can send help!"

She checks every room. The voices of the dead call out to their commander, one after another. Lead us. Fight the Americans.

The fire from the ground floor intensifies. For a moment, Jamelia worries that it wasn't enough. But then her radio crackles and a voice not her own speaks through it.

"von Ingersleben an alle verbleibenden Elemente des 2. Reisser-Batallions: Sammelpunkt an der Treppe zum Erdgeschoß! BLUT UND EHRE FÜR DIE TECHNOKRATISCHE UNION! VORWÄRTS!"

"For the Union," the dead Nazis chorus in unison, and Jamelia can feel a lump in her throat.

"Yes," she says hoarsely, "for the Union."

They're not going to win, she knows, even as she barks orders at them to contain the incoming Subjugators. They are too outdated, too stuck in the ways of their era. They don't have the armor or the weapons, gyrojets pinging off of high-tensile ceramics and superstrong alloys, occasionally staggering one of the enemies as they get hit unluckily in a armor component insufficient to fully stop the force of WWII-era Technocratic weaponry.

"RNEs. Use Plasmic Disruptors. Glory to Control."

Two dozen soldiers swap magazines reflexively. "RNEs. Eliminating."

The Not Void Engineers, the hostiles, are playing riskily. She would say recklessly-but that would imply some level of incompetence, and they are not. They have merely judged that seeking cover takes time, and they need to contain her immediately. A few damaged limbs or flesh wounds are minor compared to that. Jamelia feels slightly honored that they're doing that, except for the minor issue that it greatly shortens her expected lifespan. She listens to the sounds of battle, guttural German and the gruff echoing voices of these not-Void Engineers.

She needs to get out. They'll have the tanks outside, deploying Eyebots to watch the area. They'll have soldiers in patrols. They're going to have minimal overlap space. Difficult, possibly doable. She leaps out of the window and makes a break for it. She can guess at what the pattern will be, dodge through it with millimeter-precision.

She makes it halfway through the killzone before one of the eyebots sees her. Heavy-caliber gatling fire from the cybertanks pounds centimeters behind her, throwing wood splinters and rocks at her stolen Nazi trenchcoat. She keeps running, inhumanly fast-fortunately the enemy tanks are calibrated for someone moving at human speeds. She calculates in her mind how long she has before they compensate for her movement. Not enough.

She stumbles as the shockwave from an explosion reaches her, and suddenly the fire slackens, retargets. She can still hear them firing but they're targeting someone else, devastating brush and forest. She sees another shot, a Void Engineer plasma lance, something they'd normally use on a ship as a point-defense weapon, but... maybe not. There's something strange in the harmonics, something her new "psychic powers" are telling her about. Whoever the firer was is clearly suicidal, firing without other support, but he or she has bought Jamelia time.

Time she's going to need. She's being chased in the middle of nowhere by enemy personnel with heavier equipment and armor. Her weapons are barely sufficient to hurt them if she hits them in joints or in the eyepieces. Her armor is barely sufficient to survive the shrapnel their weapons kick out as a matter of course.

On the other hand... she's been through worse.

****************************************************************************************

Donald Sykes is not in his element right now. Driving at high speed towards a Void Engineer assault squad is about as far from his element as you can get, really. He's not the cavalry riding to the rescue, he never was. At least they're going to be meeting up with the LX-5, and that might survive a little bit of punishment. The Paladin Security driver was ordered to drive it into the middle of nowhere and meet up with him. He doesn't want another person in on the conspiracy. Mostly because he's pretty sure Jamelia would have the random guy shot, and that's always inconvenient. Life insurance payouts, hush money, faked autopsies and cause of death, and oh yes, common human decency.

He knows where Director Belltower is, though, and that means he can find her and maybe, maybe beat that honeypot thing to her. And if she needs some support, being able to lend a remote helping hand would be nice. He takes his smartphone, opens the case, and sticks a black SIM card into the second slot. Instead of his normal beach wallpaper, the phone loads plain white-on-black text. Every erg of computing power in the SIM and in his phone has been used for this purpose, leaving nothing for the normal graphical wizardry of modern computers.

OLYMPUS INDUSTRIES SOFTWARE ENGINEERING DELPHI V5.221

EMH-STRONG ENABLED, COLLATING ALL INFORMATION

COMPENSATING FOR MARKET DISTORTIONS DUE TO RECENT ACTIVITY

COMMUNICATIONS LINK ESTABLISHED

SWITCHING TO STANDARD TELECOMMUNICATIONS

"Director Belltower?"

"A little busy here!" She responds.

"Is that- is that gatling gun fire?" Donald hears the sound of what must be a building getting rendered into a pulp.

"It is. Made a mistake. Went through the open because I thought I could predict the patterns. Didn't expect them to be smart. Went back into the house to look for exits."

"We're about an hour or so out. We're switching vehicles and Henriette's found some software optimizations you can make to the engine to have it run at 300% power or so for an hour before you need to turn it down to normal cruise speeds."

The phone vibrates, a sign of a forced conference call. "Who is this?" Donald asks.

"Serafina. First, I've got your location and I have a few people I can-"

"Negative." Jamelia says. "Negative. DO NOT ENGAGE. Do not send in any Union assets to my location, there is a non-zero chance doing that would spark a inter-Technocracy Civil War."

"Second, your neural degradation is accelerating. You have approximately 12 hours of remaining full function left. And third, I may be able to attempt a remote patch. You read as being in a Union facility, please advise?"

"It's a Union facility of a sort." Donald says. "Says it was a historical archive?"

"It's a slaughterhouse." Jamelia says. "And it was a historical archive. Most of the equipment dates to the 1930s. You're not going to manage a remote patch."

"All right." Serafina says, sounding disappointed. "Rosario out. I have the full augmentation workup back home ready for you to look at. You'll probably be impressed." She disconnects.

"I can't provide much remote help, but I want to do whatever I can. Tell me more about the situation."

"Enemy is busy fighting its way through dead Nazis, Residual Noetic Entities, to get to me. I'm armed, but it won't do me any good if I don't have surprise on them. Dropped one on my escape with an eye shot, and I saw another casualty, but that leaves them 18 more and 1 tank. One VE, engaged with a plasma lance, but I think he's KIA now."

The LX-5 in all its glory is pulled up in front of them. "Out!" Jamelia's beta-level says. "You can make the call while you're transferring!" Rose obeys without question. The Paladin Securities driver is a lithe man in a tailored suit and dark sunglasses, nodding to Sykes. "Congratulations, sir." He's looking at Rose.

"She's not my gir- it's complicated, okay?" Donald manages.

"Don't worry. I won't tell anyone." the PMC contractor says, and Donald is sure he's winking. As he gets into the cabin, he realizes that normally, he'd feel a lot more relaxed in the vehicle than he does now.

"Oh. They're moderately annoyed now. They just started firing incendiaries." Jamelia notes. "Minor issue. Are they attracting Union attention?"

Donald does a quick scan using the LX-5's computer systems. "No. Union channels are talking about something else. There's nothing at all scheduled around your location. Panopticon's deployed to Afghanistan due to some RDs there, though. Big military operation. There's a Project SLEEPYTOWN mentioned-looks like some sort of NWO weapon."

"Panopticon? I want a summary when you're free."

"But your survival?"

The line cuts out as the radio is dropped for a few moments. Donald's heart almost stops, but then he hears Jamelia, the real Jamelia, talk again. "Sorry. Seventeen enemy soldiers left. Had to take one out in hand-to-hand. I have his weapon now, which is helpful. No reloads, they're apparently deployed by the armor."

"What's the weapon serial number?" Donald asks.

"Why would you ne-right. VE-SJC-A5T-4RT-35."

"Excellent. I can keep real-time tracking on you as long as you're holding that weapon."

"Good work." Jamelia says.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jamelia now has a select-fire gyrojet launcher. It's a electromagnetic launch system that fires 20mm semi-guided gyrojet munitions at high velocities. It is pretty coincidental. She's also gained a few Paradox from having to fight things out.

Serafina's Pet Project:
Vote on what Serafina's new biotech augmentation for Jamelia emphasizes! 1 is most important, 5 is least important. It will already be discreet, so no wolverine claws or things like that.
[ ] Mental Ability (Intelligence, Wits, Perception)
[ ] Physical (Strength, Dexterity, Stamina)
[ ] Social (Charisma, Manipulation, Appearance)
[ ] Procedures (Enhanced Combat Skills, Multiple Action Penalty Reduction, Improved Dodge, etc)
[ ] Defensive Systems (Innate Life/Mind Countermagic, Self-Healing, Soak)
[ ] Stealth Systems (Innate Life/Mind/Corr Wards)

Also:
[ ] (2.0x) Make Donald Suffer
[ ] Don't Make Him Suffer But He Has Primal Utility 3, Make Him Pay For The Boss's Augmentations (And Also Add In Some Innate Counter-Procedure Ability)
[ ] Don't Make Donald Suffer

Be I-50-B31:
[ ] Oh no! You're sure the Mean and Nasty Subjugation Corps is currently annoying rogue agent Belltower! That won't do. If she's annoyed she'll be less likely to be convinced to join Transhumanity! You have to go there and help her to show how the Technocratic Union are great! (Write-in procedures and other ways to get there Very Fast)

Be Donald/Rose:
[ ] Focus on augmenting Jamelia so she can better escape
[ ] Focus on getting there faster
[ ] Write-in

Be Jamelia:
[ ] (2.0x) Search for an escape route
[ ] (1.5x) Hole up, there's a lot of stuff underneath and you know rescue is coming in an hour. You're sure they can figure out a way to deal with the cybertank and the saucer, because they're actually pretty good at their job.
[ ] You have a weapon that can kill them. Well, two if you count your fists. Go hunting.
[ ] Write-in.
________________________________________________________________________________________

Spoiler: Real Jamelia's Status Panel

Willpower: 7/9
Prime Energy: 4/5
Health Levels: -0/-0/-1/-1/-2/-2/-4/Incapacitated/Dying
Current Injuries: Severe Migraine, Pulled Muscles (1 Bashing level)
Current Effects: None
Special Abilities:
Freeflow: +1 automatic success to jumping rolls, ignores fall damage, can run straight up vertical surfaces
Paradox: 2
Soak: 7B/4L/0A (Nazi Impact Trenchcoat, 5B/3L/0A)
Dodge DV: 11/11
Enlightenment: 5
Spheres: Correspondence 2, Dimensional Science 1, Entropy 3, Forces 2, Life 2, Matter 2, Mind 2 (f), Time 2

Spoiler: Fake Jamelia's Status Panel

Willpower: 8/9
Prime Energy: N/A
Health Levels: -0 x 6/-1 x 4/-2 x 4/-4 x 2/Incapacitated/Dying
System Integrity Monitor: Disguise Breached, Jugular Severed, Minor Spinal Damage (3 lethal HLs)
Special Abilities:
IX-22 Chain Gun [RETRACTED], [AMMUNITION: 20mm PRIMIUM x 40/20mm HVAP x 100/20mm HEAB x 50]
Monofilament Primium Talons [RETRACTED]
Stealth Shielding [OFFLINE], +2 difficulty for Life/Matter scans to detect HITMark
Paradox: 5 (5 permanent)
Soak: 10B/10L/4A, +3B/3L/3A against magical attack (Stylish black suit, 0B/0L/0A)
Dodge DV: 8/8
Enlightenment: None
Spheres: None

Spoiler: Rose's Status Panel

Willpower: 5/8
Prime Energy: 0/3
Health Levels: -0x 4/-1 x 4/-2 x 4/-4 x 3/Incapacitated/Dying. Regenerates 1 Bashing/Lethal HL a round no matter what. Heals Aggravated damage at normal speed.
Current Damage: 5 aggravated, 1 paradox bashing health level (primary heart destroyed, severe bruising)
Vampire Heart: 0/10 Blood Points-Spend 1 Blood Point to gain an automatic success on Strength rolls, get an extra action for the turn, or heal 2 Bashing/1 Lethal health level instantly.
Undead Strength: 1 Aggravated HL to activate, adds up to its rating in automatic successes to Strength rolls for feats of strength and damage.
Predator's Pheromones: 6/6 Prime Energy. Activate to add +3 automatic successes on social rolls based off of sexuality, majesty, or simply dominating someone else's will.
Current Effects:

Mindshield (+5 Mindshield)​

DV: 14/14
Paradox: 4

Spoiler: Donald's Status Panel

Willpower: 3/6
Prime Energy: 0/4 (may only spend up to 4/turn)
Health Levels: -0/-0/-1/-1/-2/-2/-4/Incapacitated/Dying
Current Damage: 1 bashing (bruised nose)
Current Effects:

Severe Nosebleed (+Attention)
Marked for Death (+Serafina Anger)
Counter Procedure Training (+10 countermagic)​

Current Paradox: None

Spoiler: I-50-B31's Status

Virtue: Child (regain WP when you win someone over with your innocent demeanor)
Vice: Follower (spend WP to disobey orders, regain if you obey really bad orders)
Enlightenment 3, Spheres: Forces 3, Correspondence 3, Entropy 2, Mind 2, and Prime 1
Notable Traits: Strength 9 [4], Dexterity 7 [2], Stamina 8, Appearance 8
Health Levels: -0 x 25/Medical Stasis x 10/Finally Dead
Injuries: Primium Poisoning (6 Aggravated HLs)
Soak: 12B/12L/4A (+2B/2L/2A against magical attack)
Implanted Biotech:

Hemophage Organic-PE Conversion Cycle (Prime 5 Prime Energy generation)

CELERITY Biological Overcharge System (spend 1 PE to take 1 extra action, up to +2/turn)
POTENCE Biological Overcharge System (spend 1 PE to add [1] to Strength, up to +[5])
FORTITUDE Biological Overcharge System (spend 1 PE to add +1B/1L/1A to soak for a scene, up to +5B/L/A)​

Hemophage Terrestrial Adaptation (Prime 5 Mitigate Paradox)
Noetic-Pumped EM/Plasma Generator (Forces 3/Prime 2 Aggravated Damage Weapons System)
Radical Morphological Shifting (Life 4 weapons transformation)
Total Genetic Disguise (Life 3/Prime 3 disguise system)
Cognitive Absorption (Mind 4 Memory Read)
Pheromonal Weapons System

Covert (Mind 1 social trait enhancement)
Overt (Mind 4 mind control)
Allergenic (Life 3, Correspondence 3, lethal or nonlethal modes available)​

Rapid Regeneration (roll [Stamina] every round, each success heals 1 Bashing or turns 1 Lethal into Bashing)

Regeneration Overcharge (spend Prime Energy, heals Aggravated damage)​

Willpower: 5/8
Prime Energy: 19/36 (may spend up to 1/round to enhance Enlightened Science)

Bygone: Consumes 1 Prime Energy/Day​

Paradox: SPECIAL (is ejected from reality if she ever paradox backlashes)

 

[MJ12 Commando]

JB LXVII: Left Hand, Meet Right

I-50-B31 puts down the phone in... in something. Mr Sykes hung up on her. She's experiencing an unfamiliar emotion. One which her assembled independent personality takes a moment to identify.

Shock. With some annoyance. Yes, that had been experienced by separate minds now in the Hivemind, but not since they joined it. It can't have been her fault! It can't have! How could someone who managed to withstand all the powerful things which the Union threw at her in Moscow have problems against some inferior power armour filled with clones who had been obsolete by the time even something as weak as Mr Sykes' nice construct was made? How did that make sense?

I-50 gets the sinking feeling that she may have miscalculated how dependent baseline humans were on their equipment. She may have just done the equivalent of spending an entire squad of traitor Void Engineers in their best power armour against... well, her, if you cut out most of her muscles and form-locked her innards into organ emulation and blew large holes in her and... and stupid baseline humans! How dare they be so weak without easily removed tools? Why did they have to be that way? Why... why couldn't they see?

Shaking her head, I-50 flushes the anger from her system. She's just being silly. If she finds Jamelia Belltower and she's been injured, she can even give her partial field upgrades to help her survive better! After all, her own cells are polymorphic and could probably save Jamelia Belltower's life and then she'd see how much better being a transhuman was! Leading by example! Showing people how the Technocratic Union can help them!

So! Her mission may need to change a little bit. And she better think a bit differently, because she made a bit of a mess of things and transhumans are always ready to adapt to new circumstances without attachment to old ways of thought. So naturally she thinks like Jamelia Belltower, so she can see if she can think how the other will act. Mr Sykes certainly had the right idea there, getting a HITMark imprinted with her mind!

Find Jamelia Belltower. Extract her. Protest to the Void Engineers to see if she can slow them down, but don't waste time doing it. She has an objective. She will complete it.

And it's not like the Subjugation Corps clones are really members of the Void Engineers, so if she has to kill a few of them and drink all their blood to refuel, then it's not really acting against the Union. It's just a necessary sacrifice in the line of duty. Anyway, if any of them look like they're about to kill Jamelia Belltower, she'll kill them first, because she is not going to let some inferior clone who doesn't get how to serve the Union properly get in her way.

I-50-B31 smiles to herself awkwardly. It's a strange feeling, but running that personality engram of Jamelia Belltower does make things easier! It's such a simple line of thought! When you're cut off from Control, and the people on your side don't understand properly how to serve the interests of the Technocratic Union... well, you might need to help them see the way to do the right thing for the Union. You can do it later, properly, but if you fail now, everything will be worthless. Yes! It's wonderful! She likes thinking like this!

So she needs a car. A new one. A fast one. She accelerates, heading to the M25 and looking for something which will meet her needs. She finds one; a very expensive looking Ferrari being driven by a balding man on his way to work.

I-50-B31 clears her throat, expands her lung capacity radically, and does her best impersonation of a police siren. It is a very good one. She has it pitch and volume perfect.

The other car slows down, the driver looking around, and that gives I-50-B31 her chance. She leaps out of the side door of the cab, in through the window of the sport's car, and headbutts the driver with a skull which could bounce antimateriel rounds. There's a cracking noise, and he goes limp, and then she's pushing him out of the driver's seat and taking it herself and gunning the engine and she's off, engine roaring as she does so. And the man driving the sport's car is still alive! Ish! The subural hematoma won't kill him for a few hours, so she can save him!

Her old car goes swerving off into the middle embankment with a loud crunch.

Oops. She didn't mean to do that. She meant to assimilate the man she'd left stuffed into the trunk, not kill him! But the mission got in the way.

Oh well, she considers. If he survives, she can find where he's taken to hospital, and if there's time she can go in and assimilate him. It is her fault, after all. And people are always so happy when they join the Hivemind and realize everything they were missing! But the mission comes first.

I-50-B31 punches into the car's electronics, and lets the modified hair follicles in her hand interface with the system, turning off all the limiters and linking it directly to her nervous system. That feels better, better than using some inferior steering wheel. And now she can handle the car like it's an extension of her own body.

So she does. Driving at a speed which would win most professional car races, she swerves through traffic with a vehicle that seems to almost lack inertia. It's not that, though. It's just her boosted reactions and her programmed driving skills pushing the vehicle to the limit. She takes a guess at how long it'll take. Probably around 30 minutes at this speed. Good. Very good.

Even a meat-thing can survive that long, right? She grabs the phone she borrowed from the first man while driving with one hand, multitasking effortlessly to call the Subjugation Corps.

"What is it? We are currently in the middle of an operation."

"We're here to capture Jamelia Belltower, not eliminate her! Why did you deploy an A-variant Subjugator Marine Strike Team?"

"Our orders are clear. We are to neutralize and capture Jamelia Belltower."

"Yes," I-50 says, pouting. "So why are you sending these soldiers in?"

"The target is an extreme threat after Moscow and we are engaging with minimal necessary force. The personnel carrier is equipped with an Abductor Suite, we can provide emergency medical care. All marines have been told to attempt no headshots on Belltower herself. As long as her brain is salvageable the objective can be accomplished. Do you have any issues with this?"

"Yes I do! This isn't going to help convince her to defect!"

"The likelihood of her defection is less than 1 percent. Control in its infinite wisdom has provided you with these odds."

"Well of course it is! If you're trying to kill her, obviously she won't defect!"

"But," the voice replies, infuriatingly smug, "Reality Deviants defected to us all the time and we never stopped shooting at them."

"Oh. Right." I-50 says. "I suppose they did. But this is different! She's not going to willingly give up if you keep shooting at her!"

"Willing was not part of the objectives given by Control." The phone hangs up.

"Stupid Void Engineers." I-50 mutters. She's going to need to get there as soon as possible. She's going to need to stop them herself. And then she'll have to convince Jamelia that she is, in fact, right. An easy task, for someone so enhanced, right?

****************************************************************************************

Henriette Langley hasn't been able to focus on her work all day. Oh, she has things she's meant to be doing in preparation for the Tribunal, but she can't keep her mind on it. Not when all of this is going on.

The chime on her implanted comms is almost a relief.

"Langley," Director Belltower says. "Stop everything and listen to me."

Henriette frowns. "You still haven't found the real one?" she asks the HITMark.

"No, I am the real one," the woman says.

"I can confirm that isn't me," says an identical sounding woman, cutting in on a new comms channel with the familiar HITMark ID.

"Langley, get me everything you can get on Order of Reason architecture and see if there's a marked escape route in this location," Director Belltower says with her characteristic brusqueness. "They're using incendiaries, this place is coming down on top of them and me, and they have a perimeter set up which I really don't want to try to run again."

"On it." Henriette Langley doesn't even blink as her ADEI grabs a data-dump of... sigh, Early Modern Architectural Techniques In the Order of Reason, and feeds the contents of some intensely dull Ivory Tower academic papers into her memory. She now remembers the analysis they've produced. Nothing on this specific location, unfortunately, but she has some things on some other similar hidden manor-bases across Europe from approximately the same period.

"Okay!" Henriette announces. "I don't have the map for this facility, but the Oh-Oh-Arr was into labyrinths and hidden passages in a big way. They had really, really advanced techniques for concealing them - to the extent that most of them can even avoid detection by modern ground surveying techniques. Except when they're open, of course. But they usually marked them in a number of ways. Director, look for... uh, rose symbols, crests of the Oh-Oh-Arr, white-painted arrows hidden in artwork pointing towards Jerusalem... uh, if you know which Oh-Oh-Arr group built this place, they might also have it hidden in icongraphy of their own things, especially if they have one of the other symbols combined with it."

She clears her throat.

"It's going to be a tight fit, probably. Might just be a crawlspace, might be wide enough for one person if they squeeze." With a perfectly straight face, Henriette adds, "You're the best person in the amalgam for that. Kessler might have more problems. Serafina too."

"Ahem!" Serafina interjects.

"Look, I'm just saying that you won't be a fan of trying to squeeze through a tunnel made for short people in the olden days," Henriette lies. "Big thing is? They'll have plenty of 'tests', not just the ones at the entrance."

"Tests?" a Jamelia asks sharply.

"Uh... various things. Usually logic puzzles. Things to prove the 'worthiness' of the person trying to use the tunnel in either direction. Meant to show that the person can reason properly, according to these papers."

"Wonderful," the HITMark Jamelia says. "So the alpha of me will need to solve the Tower of Hanoi puzzle at some point."

"Oh yes," meat Jamelia agrees. "Everyone always uses the Tower of Hanoi puzzle. I'll get to looking for these signs. Tell me if you find anything else in the analysis, Henriette.

****************************************************************************************

"You got all that?" Donald asks, hunched over his laptop in the much more comfortable limo.

"Trying to look for a hidden tunnel here," Director Belltower says through clenched teeth. She pauses. "A thought. Rose?" Jamelia asks. "What do you know about Series As? They look like a variant of them. Any weaknesses? Please tell me they're basically Victor-thick."

"Uh, not exactly," Rose says from the front. "80s refinement of Victors... a sort of pre-Vanessa. Maybe baseline human smart, but very, very linear thinkers. If they're presented with a wall and there's no obvious door, they'll try to smash through, rather than check the rest of the building. Incredibly monofocussed. They never saw much use outside Damage Control, and then Vanessas started showing up and everyone stopped making them. I think most of the research got merged back down to eVictors."

"... huh. I was expecting 'no, they're all super-geniuses'," Jamelia says, sounding very nearly slightly happy. "I can use that."

"Yes. I'm sure you'll be able to act unpredictably enough that they won't be able to follow you," Donald says. "You're good at that. And if you get back, we can finish off that day-off which got so rudely interrupted. I'm going to make you spend 24 hours off duty. And see if I can find another thing you like that you don't know you like. Think of that as an incentive not to get caught."

"Are you trying to persuade alpha-me to throw herself in the way of a high explosion?" Jameliabot asks drily. "Taking time off means bad things happen."

And then a shocking, dreadful thing happens. The real Jamelia laughs. "Fine," she whispers. "Only if you can promise that nothing like Moscow will happen if I take a day off."

"I promise nothing," Donald says, and then pales. Enough with the psuedo-flirting. There's something else he has to tell her. "Oh yes," he adds, "and... uh, watch out for an ultra-naive and seemingly-friendly EDE body-riding a vampire-based human-shaped war machine that's... uh, about forty technological generations ahead of Rose and has a pheromonal package which could brainwash towns and which is specifically out to try to recruit you for Our Mutual Enemy."

"What."

"I've trapped her with an applied economics hyperpsych and DSci trick, but she can wriggle out of the contract in some ways and she may be heading your way incredibly quickly. She may try to kill the rogues in the power armor, but she'll be doing it to protect you so she can flip you so you're batting for the other team, if you get my drift. And not just the sexy kind of batting for the other team."

"Donald..."

"Look, keep yourself safe," he says seriously. "She can shapeshift and knows what we look like, so be suspicious if you see just one of us."

"... we'll talk about this later. Only contact me if you have new info or it's vital. Belltower out."

****************************************************************************************

Jamelia Belltower is almost glad she's dealing with dumb muscle. She's been on the other end of this, the commander trying to direct linear-thinking clone supersoldiers against a single target who was infinitely more resourceful but also much less heavily armed. The commander of these soldiers is reading her playbook, it seems.

Of course, Applications of Intelligence-Limited Assault Bioforms In Search and Destroy Operations was one of her magnum opuses. And it was published before the Dimensional Anomaly. So obviously they've read it. Even if they know she was the author-and they probably do, Jamelia concludes, because although it's always tempting to consider the other side incredibly stupid it's always better to assume they're only stupid when that might cause your plan to collapse and otherwise assume they're geniuses, they are working under her exact limitations.

Limited ability to affect the environment outside of the soldiers. Soldiers with a weapons and capability gap or parity but an intelligence deficit. A vulnerable target capable of extreme improvisational tricks. Well, Reality Deviance in hers, but she's not doing that. So even if they built their own playbook, it'll look very much like hers. So, then. How would she try to kill herself?

The A-series, according to Rose, are intelligent, loyal, and have excellent memories but are extremely linear thinkers. That means that the limit to their effectiveness is going to be the speed at which the commander can give orders. Given how they're advancing through the former Nazi technocrats, that speed is probably a little above what she could do post-INVISIBLE BEAR.

At least these rogue not Void Engineers aren't grossly superhuman, Jamelia thinks to herself. If they had been some hyperintelligent computer mastermind like Henriette's sister, then she'd have no chance at all. She sees a rose symbol over a small cupboard. She hides in it seconds before one of the Subjugation Corps soldiers smashes through the wall.

Smashes through the load bearing wall. She takes a risk and looks.

The clone has collapsed several of the beams on top of his armor, and has been knocked down. He seems to have

-ah, right. They'd probably have sacrificed joint flexibility for protection. When your legs are that heavily armored and balancing you, that wouldn't be a problem, but if you were knocked down on your heavy backpack and have no easy bracing to climb up on- it'd be embarrassing.

One of his comrades moves to assist, and she considers. She could hide there indefinitely-if the thin primium-flecked paint in the cupboard would hold up to in-depth scans. Maybe. If they didn't just trash it out of principle, and they might. On the other hand...

She rolls out of the cupboard fluidly and empties the half-full magazine of the SP-Charge Driver into both Void Marines. It hurts, and she thinks she's torn something in her shoulder from the punishing recoil of the autofiring rocket-launching railgun, but the result is worth it. Explosions batter at their thick armor, and both fall. She checks them for ammunition. Six shots in one magazine, thirteen in another. Sadly, both Etheric Disruptors, poorly optimized for killing Void Marines. They're still better than the RK-35 and -37 she has, and she ditches the rocket rifle here, retiring it in favor of the oversized charge driver and its punishing recoil but more punishing high-caliber ammunition. One of them has a mangled leg-she looks closer, and sees the ruined flowers of detonated ammunition.

So they're using volatile propellants for their gyrojets. Which means leg shots might set them off. Good. She goes back to the cupboard, looks for some sort of secret exit, some sort of crawlspace that might be there. Good. She finds one, neatly disguised.

Jamelia crawls through twisting passages for what seems like eons but she knows is mere minutes, and ends up in the inside of the base proper. There is another fallen Void Marine here, taken out by a shot to the chest from a "Storm Cannon"-a directed lightning gun. There are the telltale disruptions of disassociated ghosts, hit by multiple ED rounds, and mutilated corpses.

The A-series clones are emptying shots into the corpses to make sure they're dead and that keeps them from spotting her. It's creative thinking of the strangely linear and rather inhuman way combat-clones tend to do without proper socialization. It tells her that they aren't veterans who have been working alongside humans. They're new. Cloned, programmed, expendable. Fresh meat.

She wonders what the enemy's master plan is. Distract her with this issue and then what? Do they have actual, legitimate shock troops? And what would they be? Do they even have a master plan, or is this some sort of reflex, a complex Chinese Room of unthinking EDE singlemindedness that combines in arcane ways to create the illusion of a worryingly-hyperintelligent-yet-completely-insane foe? Whatever it is, she feels glad that it seems to be sabotaging itself, using multiple assets with weak cooperation instead of having a coherent battleplan.

Because with the assets and intellectual firepower they have, if it wasn't for the issues she's already spotted, if they simply got out of each other's way, or kept the self-sabotage at a low level, she'd be fighting a hopeless battle. She doesn't even have to take a guess, or run on gut instinct, or put a 'probably' in there. If they were as sane as even most Marauders, they would not be a potential threat. They would win. Always. Without exception.

There's another set of symbols and clues that she follows, dodging fascist jackbooted enforcers of an evil empire on one hand and undead fascist jackbooted enforcers of an evil empire on the other. She doesn't have the ammunition to play hunter-killer, although she's satisfied when one of them manages to collapse a stone ceiling over his head via excessive use of his armor's shoulder-fired micromissiles. If the armor's as tough as she thinks it is, he'll survive, but digging himself out will take time, and lots of it. Given expected losses to the fascists-that'd leave maybe a dozen. And the tank.

Henriette's voice crackles in her ear. "I found a tunnel behind a hidden wall ten meters forward. There's a puzzle there that's pretty well hidden and-

"No, I don't think that it's the key." Jamelia says. "I think it's the bait. The key is to discard your preconceptions and just..." she runs at the tunnel wall at speed, hopes that she's right. The wall slides downwards just before she slams into it and gives herself a concussion. "...just take a leap of faith." She finishes. "Because in the end, that's what the Order of Reason did. They took a leap of faith that a better world could be made, and they made things happen."

"Anyways the tunnel leads to an exit in the woods. But I think they've got some guys watching it."

"The tank?"

"No, worse. Things that might actually be smart. They look like cops from satellite, but-"

"But no cops have any reason to be there, because they wouldn't know the Order of Reason exists, nor would they know that there's a secret tunnel leading through the woods. Send your data over to Sykes, he may have a Dimensional Science scanning tool he can use, and if all else fails Rose can do it. Hopefully he knows what to do." Jamelia doesn't need tools and scanners to make a guess. They're probably EDEs, of the same type that Henriette encountered. Possibly the exact same EDE, in fact. If she didn't know, she'd probably open the exit and immediately end up perforated a dozen times by a Desert Eagle or similarly impractical firearm wielded by a suit-wearing special agent who calls himself Agent... well, probably some sort of somewhat sinister occupation like "Butcher" or "Exterminator" or "Sweeper".

Then again... she knows what Donald's going to try to do, and his not-quite-fully-controllable EDE not-quite-pet. She tries to enjoy the claustrophobic confines of the tunnel as she considers plan and counterplan, considers whether it's safe.

She decides that it's probably safe when she opens the artfully-concealed hatch to the surface and to freedom, of a sort. There are a trio of dead police officers around the exit, surrounded by spent shell casings that they couldn't have fired, as they lacked the weapons to fire them with. A fourth agent of Control is standing there, looking rather excited, despite for the dozen smoking holes in her clothing-clearly stolen men's clothing, Jamelia notices.

"Oh hi! Jamelia Belltower, is it? I'm I-50-B31! Nice to meet you. Sorry about the mess, we just got into a bit of an argument about whether or not you were supposed to get shot or talked to! But anyways, I'm here to represent the Technocratic Union and Control, Miss Belltower. Can I call you Miss Belltower? Or do you prefer Jamelia?"

"Miss Belltower is fine."

"Oh all right then, Miss Belltower. I'm sorry for the way my colleagues have treated you, and if there's any way I can make that up to you I'll do it. Any way at all. But I haven't done a single thing to hurt you, and okay I may have defended myself with lethal force against your other Construct and tried to stab a HITMark disguised as you after she shot at me, but I didn't want to kill any of you! Really!"

"Right." Jamelia says. She expected someone like her to try to seduce her into joining Control, not this... naivete. Someone to point out how their goals are aligned, how she'd do more good on the other side, someone using her own tactics against her. But not this. Maybe this I-50-B31 is a master manipulator, though, creating a persona that nobody would expect.

"But really I'm not just here to apologize to you for all the dreadful things that have happened to you in Moscow and now in London! I think you should join the Progenitors. You're so lonely and isolated from the world with your position, and if you join together with me, you'll never be alone again! And I know it's hard for you to admit it, but I think you need a good friend or a few hundred, and we can provide that! We can provide that easily. Everyone in the Progenitor group-mind is loved in ways mere human language can't describe!"

Jamelia barely resists the urge to say a flat "What". She tries to collect her thoughts, considers that debating the extremely charismatic and unbelievably sexy (how did that get there? Jamelia wonders) Faux-Technocratic killing machine might be a bad idea, but getting into a gunfight with it would probably be at least as bad.

________________________________________________________________________________________

There really isn't a good vote here to end this interlude, sadly. Meanwhile, I'm going to need to count up all the enhancement project votes, but we'll have Serafina technobabble that later. Or I can just bribe you guys and say '+2 XP for all characters if someone does that job for me'. Hmm maybe I'll do that.

Dealing With I-50-B31:
[ ] (2.0x) Find an excuse to have her disabled. Probably involving running her over. With a tank. Repeatedly. And then shooting her to make sure.
[ ] (1.5x) Or you could take a quick trip back to Moscow. You know a few people who could probably dominate her and maintain control, and then you can spend lots of time getting her to open up to you and reveal her most intimate secrets... of Threat Null, you perverts.
[ ] Maybe you can convince her that Jamelia's already properly joined the Technocracy? Or that her mission should be altered to something more amenable to your needs. Like protecting Jamelia.
[ ] Write-in.

Serafina Write-In:
[ ] Write-in: Deal with Donald and Rose's... romance issues. And/or end up on a 'date' with Donald because GODDAMNIT ROSE.

Rose Seeking? Maybe?
[ ] Rose is potentially chancing an Enlightenement 5 here, especially if she can read more about the Order of Reason from Jamelia's stolen stash. This is also an opportunity for her to buy off Demented Eidolon if she so wishes and it is justified in the Seeking.

 

[MJ12 Commando]

JB LXVIII: Songs of Innocence And Experience

Jamelia looks at the Transhuman construct. She knows it's got a pheromone psychological warfare suite, one that's very, very advanced. She's experienced pheromone warfare before. She knows how to handle it.

"Miss Black." The man talking is perfect, with soulful eyes right out of a romance novel and chiseled features that look like they came straight out of some sort of god of beauty's portrait. "I'm Stephen. I'll be your cover and assist in your infiltration of the Etherite meeting." His mannerisms are polite, probably because he's survived enough missions to grow beyond his nature. He's a M-Type clone, a honeypot, a succubus-well, an incubus in this case, but the point's there. Enhanced beauty, high emotional IQ.

Jamelia-no, at that time her name was different-Jasmine? Janine? almost swoons. She knew she was getting support but she didn't expect it in this. She tries pulling herself together, remembers that he's designed for this, that any love she might be feeling is artificial, that she shouldn't feel this, but it's hard to resist being pulled into the thrall of fantasy, or worse yet, the steps it'd take to make that fantasy real.

"Whoa. Easy now." He says. "Sorry, biosystems test, it probably didn't wash off."

"You ever get used to it?" Jamelia manages, steeling herself. She suspects that there's some hazing there too. Give the new recruit a blast of aerosolized aphrodisiac, see how he or she reacts.

"What, my design purpose or the pheromones? Yes to both. At some point, you get used to everyone vaguely interested in your gender, and then some, falling head over heels in love with you. If you've been exposed to them enough, they tend to stop working very well on you. Familiarity breeds contempt and all that. Anyways. You're supposed to be the eye candy here, I'm just supposed to be a dirty old scientist who's used aberrant bioscience to make himself look good."

"I'm supposed to?" Jamelia's new enough that she doesn't mind being lectured by a mass-produced clone. Well, not quite mass-produced, S-Types were handcrafted so they wouldn't be flagged by automatic scanners. Just enough, and just the right kind, of randomness to distinguish them and make them look like people who might theoretically be born from human lineage, unlike the more generic manufactured beauty of HITMark designs. She's been spending most of her spare time in Union libraries checking everything she could. The hidden world, not only the mundane world outside of her impoverished childhood, but the world of the Technocracy, was just so interesting. She knows, in her heart, that she's found her one true love, and that any other romance, anything else, will pale next to this.

"They're the Sons of Ether. Misogynist chauvinists. They're going to pay a lot less attention to a woman. I'm shielded against biotech scans, so that shouldn't be a problem."

She's experienced the thrall of pheromones, she's been exposed to them again and again that she's been hardened against them. At least here they don't have much to work with, although she suspects tailored Progenitor hypertech might be able to deal with even that issue in time. She pushes rebellious thoughts into the back of her mind, makes sure to remember that her mind isn't entirely coherent right now, she needs to be careful with what she says or does. "That's a very interesting offer, but you haven't sold it very well." She remarks. "I think you should tell me exactly what you are, and what the hivemind is, before we get into making any long term decisions." The not-Progenitor construct is a combination of lovesick and born-again, and would probably spill all of the secrets she knows if someone was willing to listen. The Administration wouldn't have allowed that. That means something important-what is it?

"Of course!" I-50 says. "You know the Order of Reason, right?" Jamelia nods, and I-50 launches into a speech about the history of the Technocratic Union that is word-for-word identical to the historical lessons Jamelia was given in-in Conditioning, Jamelia realizes. She listens patiently as I-50 sums up the events of the 90s. "Well, in 1999 the Technocracy was cut off from Earth because of the Dimensional Anomaly. We were worried what that meant for Earth, especially because communications were sporadic and none of us could get back. We were really worried about everyone."

"So what did you do?" Jamelia asks.

"The Administration had always been willing to enhance themselves, but they were afraid of losing their fundamental humanity in the process, so they stayed fairly close to human norms." I-50 explains. Jamelia resists the urge to laugh-they were probably more afraid of losing their lifestyle of being eternally young and beautiful, with the bodies of gods. "But," I-50 continues, "with the Dimensional Anomaly they had no choice. They dusted off a lot of papers on radical human augmentation, things like EDE-derived telepathy, radical neural reprofiling, and the secondary changes to support these enhancements. We also sent messages to Iteration X, on Autochthonia and their other stations." I-50 says.

"What were those messages for?"

"Well, even if we could only communicate, that wouldn't be enough, right? We needed the brainpower to do more than that. So we needed their understanding of computer networking. Silly Autochthonians. They think the mind is software, but it's so much more complex and delicate than that. But their understanding was useful to give us a jumping-off point for what we needed to do. The Administration started the enhancements on themselves, and then on everyone else, creating a new race far beyond humanity. Well, I say a new 'race', but there were three starting strains. Workers, Thinkers, and Explorers. Workers did the work, which was mostly intellectual but sometimes required heavy lifting or going into hazardous environments, Thinkers were specialized for thinking, and Explorers were, well, just that. Transhumans who were specialized for hostile environment survival and anti-EDE combat, because during the Dimensional Anomaly there were plenty of hostile EDEs. As that grew, the Explorers split between the Surveyors and the Soldiers..."

"Right. So you became a hivemind by choice?"

"I wouldn't say hivemind, Miss Belltower." I-50 retorts. "That implies that we didn't have any individuality, which is nasty evil Reality Deviant propaganda. We have individuality! Sort of. It's just-have you ever been in love, Miss Belltower?"

"A few times."

"Have you ever had a child?"

"No."

"Imagine the best parts of every kind of love, romantic, platonic, familial, echoed throughout the entirety of society. We all love each other, and that's why we do what we do. We love each other and we love everyone else. Even those who hurt us, because they really don't understand what they're doing." I-50 says. If she wasn't a heavily armed killing machine, Jamelia would have laughed at the naivete. As it stands, Jamelia can only feel a slight chill of fear. A civilization of supermen, with perfect command and control outside of Earth. And moreover, they aren't ruthless locusts or oppressive fascists or capitalist parasites. They genuinely love mankind-love it so much they'd be willing to do anything to uplift it.

"But you mentioned computing. How was the network set up?"

"Well, the Administration administrated, but we were more than happy to obey. After all, it was their job, just like infiltration is my job, or a Surveyor's job is to find new and interesting resource bases to tap or trade to the Autopolitans in exchange for their equipment!"

Hivemind. No free will. No matter how the construct dressed it up, she didn't have a say. And the idea of having her most intimate thoughts on view to everyone else was... distasteful. "Keep going."

"Well, we thought we'd be able to get back to Earth someday, so we started preparing for showing Earth the joy and love that could be possible if humans could just let go of their worrying attachment to privacy, and we made contact again with New World Order and Syndicate higher-ups, but then we found out what happened to the Void Engineers. They've split into factions, and although some of them were nice and loyal-okay, maybe not so nice-most of them are evil. Some of them have gone full-on Nephandi, others have decided to make their own path in space or create their own colonies, and yet more just decided to fly off into deep space. The only two left are the Annexation Fleet and the Subjugation Corps, and they're weird." I-50-B31 leans forward, as if telling Jamelia a secret. "Personally, I think they're mean and kind of silly, but they're friends of Control so they're friends of transhumanity."

"Explain to me who the Annexation Fleet and Subjugation Corps are. And Control? What happened to them?" Jamelia asks. She offers the bracelet of hers to the construct. "Also, can you hold onto this for me for a moment?" She knows that Reality Deviant artifacts can often influence the minds of their users. It's a weapon she can use. I-50, thankfully, doesn't question, and just takes it. Naivete at its finest.

"The Annexation Fleet are the Void Engineers' pride and joy. They spend most of their time finding new worlds to colonize for us, and sometimes they eliminate threats to Control that exist out there in the void. They're nice, compared to the Subjugation Corps, who are the Void Engineers who work earthside! They're mean, and they're angry, probably because they don't get any of the shiny new technology and have to deal with using primitive equipment like Charge Drivers and whatnot!" I-50 peers at Jamelia's appropriated weapon. "Like that! That's old and only useful for hostile environments, like Earth. We have better weapons, like disintegrators or nanite cannons or vectored beam launchers for more permissive environments."

"Great, but about the other half of my question..." Jamelia says. "I'd like to know more about the Technocratic Union as you see it before I make any decisions."

"And Control? Oh, Control made contact with us a few months later. Got us together and told us to plan on how to retake Earth from Reality Deviants. You see, every Technocrat on Earth went rogue during the Dimensional Anomaly! Strange, isn't it? Especially the Void Engineers on Earth, who have been spending the last decade keeping us from attempting to get back to Earth and giving orders because... well, I don't know how rogue agents think. Control doesn't like that, so you might be all rogue agents and Reality Deviants but they're double Reality Deviants! But don't worry! We forgive Reality Deviants if they join us. I mean, they're only Reality Deviants because they're mistaken, rather than because they're evil, right? The Agency keeps saying that sin is what happens when someone goes against the tenets of the divine, and claiming that the divine clockwork allows for something like Reality Deviance is both apostasy and sin, but even sins can be forgiven with the right actions! And they're weird and strange and mean, not like us nice transhumans, so if they can forgive you for going rogue after Control lost contact, we can too! Also, we'd give you a much better body, not like your current one, which is so... tiny and fragile. Why, if I wanted to, I could break it in half with one hand." She pauses, reconsiders. "Of course, I don't mean that as a threat. Please don't take it as a threat, Miss Belltower. If it was a threat I'd have carried it out or at least stated it in a more menacing fashion."

Jamelia looks at I-50, trying to project honest interest. "All that's a pretty good sales pitch, but I'm afraid we're not out of hot water yet. There's still that Void Engineer saucer, and I'm not willing to go along with anything you do when there's that show of force showing bad faith. I think you can understand why I don't trust good faith, when your agents were waiting to murder me here - and there was a vicious, superior-murdering sociopath who tried to kill me in Moscow - and Henrietta Langley was casually shooting starship grade capital weapons in an urban area. I do realize I'd be asking you to put yourself at risk, but I can't stop them on my own and if I have to try I'll probably die."

I-50 looks pensive for a moment. "Well, I suppose you're right, looking at it from your perspective. I guess if you're human and not backed up in transhumanity, you'd find something like this more perturbing than I do. Which is, obviously, another good reason to join! Someone trying to kill you isn't annoying at all. I suppose I should go and ask them very nicely to stop shooting at you. I'll be back! Please stay where you are, Miss Belltower, so it's easier to find you. Otherwise I might have trouble finding you and that'd be terrible." She heads off, humming to herself happily.

Jamelia sighs in relief when she gets picked up by Donald and Rose. Rose looks worried. "Are you all right? I was afraid that stupid not Progenitor construct had you killed all trip! I'm so glad you haven't been maimed, murdered, exposed to mind control, or-" she proceeds to list a long litany of ways that I-50-B31 could have made life difficult for Jamelia.

"Yeah, where have you been, boss? You know how much it costs to purchase a replacement boss?" Donald asks. "Anyways, good to have you back."

Jamelia smiles weakly at the humor. "It's good to be back. And I'm glad this happened, because it's taught me quite a bit about the world."

"Where are we going next?" Donald asks.

"Anywhere but here." Jamelia and her beta-level reply simultaneously.

"Also, due to secrecy requirements I'm going to have to-"

"-have me wiped, yes. That's the curse of being a beta-level." The HITMark responds. "I'm aware."

"So you-"

"-don't have any objections? None at all. It's for the good of the Technocratic Union, right?"

"Well-"

"-Of course it is, so you don't need to waste your time answering this question. So we're heading for Safehouse 528 right? A perfect combination of disuse and amenities? And it's got an abandoned psychodynamics lab so Dr. Rosario can do the upgrades there if she brings a field kit."

If Jamelia was like Agent John Courage, she'd have made a quip about how great minds think alike, but she just nods. "528 is good. Good work."

"Ugh. You don't know how good you have it." The beta-level grumps. "What with human intuition and all, not this weak Iteration X synthetic replacement. I wonder how Iterators even function in day-to-day life like this."

"Director Belltower, is that how you really feel?" Henriette's voice echoes in the LX-5. "Because I heard that."

"No, of course not." Jamelia lies reflexively, automatically. She's distracted, planning her next move automatically. "Of course I don't feel that way. What I feel right now is that I want Dr. Rosario here to get me my upgrades, and then I need an actual day off, with absolutely nothing terrible happening in it."

***************************************************************************************
24 Hours Ago
Unknown Location
Panopticon Facility ALPHA

The General looks at himself in the mirror. For a moment, he feels fear. He does not remember his name. What was it? General? Commander? Strategos? Hegemon? Enforcer? Agent? Praetorian? The Eye? No, that's not it. That's what he is. But what is a name-but a term that lets people identify who you are? He is the State. He is the General. He represents the government's ability to wage war, its complete control over legitimate violence. Its complete Control over legitimate violence, he could say.

"General. Good to see that you're awake. The process of braintape restoration from backup can be- traumatic. And so many times." The man talking is his personal medical assistant. A perk of being The State. A perk that he's sacrificed so much for.

He first gave his loyalty to the Technocratic Union.

Then he gave his clean hands to Control.

Then he lost his innocence when he started ordering the hits instead of committing them.

He lost his dignity when he realized it was all a lie.

And then, because he was too used to giving of himself and too invested in the Union, he gave them his name. He became. "Posthuman" was a rare term amongst the New World Order, far more common in Iteration X or the Progenitors. But that was because of a difference in definition. The Utopian Conventions defined human by its limitations, things to exceed. The New World Order defined it as identity, the good things about being human. Gnosis, willpower, individuality. To become posthuman was to lose identity, was to abandon these traits.

The General is a posthuman. Not by body-although this body is built with Progenitor-designed improved protective structures, probably to avoid what killed him the last several times. Suicide, he thinks. The body is intended to prevent him from killing himself again. Not by mind, although his mind has NWO tac implants taken to a level its augmented agents would find impossible, sufficient to coordinate the armed forces of an entire nation, an entire world.

No, he has given up far more. He has given up almost everything that has made him human, and he's afraid of the next step. Afraid enough that he suspects that he keeps killing himself when he finds out what that next step is. But curious enough that no matter what he does, he always ends up taking that route, and then-

"The Technocratic Union needs you, my friend. My dear friend and ally in these trying times." He recognizes that voice. Blake. Jerome Blake. Control. "Perhaps for one last time, our victory-it is so close that we can taste it, the promised land is nearly here." There is something strange about how he whispers. He knows only he can hear it, and he suspects it's because of the nature of his augmentations.

Deep in the core of the nanotech-grown web is a black box, one that holds a mystic artifact, a method of ancient correspondence through the storm-wracked Umbra. A technological web that serves solely to hide a lie because the truth would shatter the world, the General ponders. A fitting analogy for the Technocracy as a whole. What do I need to do? He thinks.

"You have been aware of the happenings in Afghanistan, have you not? They are... most unfortunate. The horrors of ancient times should never have been unleashed. This man thinks he can make Afghanistan the graveyard of empires again, except this time he wishes to bring down our empire, with the help of those god-damned Taftani and their Chorister allies in the Taliban. Are you a religious man?"

I don't know. The General responds truthfully. He doesn't know if he's religious. He doesn't know if he's a man at all. He thinks he's a man, but can he call himself one after he's given this much?

"I'll assume yes, then. Religion is important. Only a loving God could have created a world capable of supporting so much wonder, but sadly there is so much evil in the world that we must fight. Men like him brought down a utopian age long before recorded history. Men like him are the Antichrist. Men like him beckon an End of Days. Men like him are not men at all. They are deluded hosts to a parasitical alien superweapon that has long since served its purpose."

I understand. So I am to kill him?

"Kill him, yes, and imprison the EDE weapons system that has grafted itself onto his immortal soul. I suspect we might be able to destroy it, given enough time-but we have better uses for it. Someone said that those who play with the devil's toys will be brought to degrees to wield his sword-but we know better than that, don't we? Technology is morally neutral. A gun can do God's work, as well as the Devil's. It all depends on the wielder and how it's used."

The General, the leader of Panopticon, nods. I understand. The statements bother him to an immense degree. What could be the purpose of this? Control's resources are phenomenal, its reach immense. Even interdicted as they are, they have been giving him materiel to support his own sizable stocks. Materiel that according to them are literally table scraps. With what they've found in the void-why do they need him at all? They might as well be gods. It would explain their hubris, anyways.

But he knows. He knows he'll do it anyways because he's given Control too much of himself to start disobeying their orders, but he'll start investigating what's going on while he does it, because he didn't get to becoming Control's Right Hand by being stupid or ignorant, and he'll find out something about himself, or Control, that leads him to kill himself. And the cycle will begin again.

General Augustine Aleph, Control's Red Right Hand, Panopticon's Overseer, does not mind. That's justice. Let him die a dozen times, or a hundred. His suffering pales against the suffering he's committed for a vague greater good. When he's done with this job, there will be no place for him in the world. In Utopia. Just an old war-criminal, a monster to scare the children with. He wouldn't have it any other way. It's the only way he can do right by the man he thinks he was.
________________________________________________________________________________________

Aaaaaand... cut. Right now, we're going to be going for [X] The Tribunal. This is going to change the nature of the votes you're going to be able to get, as we head into the mid-game. I may well make a new thread, because you're going to have to start thinking about how you're going to beat, or at least hold off, Threat Null during that time.

I was originally going to do the bottom half of this post as a teaser, but I added it in here because why not. But, as the timeline advances closer to the final conflict, things are going all out of whack. Which I'll show you with the votes for operations and missions that currently exist, and potential ones.

Don't Choose One:
[X] Union Command: Legacies
[ ] North Korea: Quo Nemo Sequi Potest

After leaked intelligence from MI5 has conclusively proven North Korea is responsible for Chechnya's act of nuclear terrorism, a unanimous Security Council vote has led to the approval of a massive multinational force to bring the hermit kingdom to heel. Reluctantly, the Technocratic Union supports this invasion, leading to demands to the Void Engineers to send some of their more reliable warships into atmosphere to support Multinational Force-Korea (MFK) operations. Your job is to 1) convince the Void Engineers to actually do so, and 2) capture the black marketeer who HVT MOONLIGHT FAIRY gained his EDE-parasite from before the invasion commences.​

[ ] The Void: Glimmer of Hope

Iago has contacted you with a mysterious statement and a single map location, Area 51. A Void Engineer base. "You will find your answers amongst the stars." The Void Engineers have a plan. It's a pretty suicidal plan, but that's describing all their plans for the last several years.​

[ ] Cape Canaveral: Bringing It Into The Open

Go up to the Void Engineers on your own, with your various contacts, and get in on the secret. Officially. Also, try to not get yourselves killed while doing it.​

"See? We should have chosen to go to North Korea!" someone says. I think your original mission is kind of irrelevant now, isn't it? Oh yeah, votes.

Experience. What did Jamelia, Donald, and Rose have as their greatest strengths and weaknesses in this? And finally, Senex's wisdom is...

Choose a Discounted Sphere Purchase
[ ] That all things are connected (Correspondence)
[ ] That there are more things than merely Heaven and Earth (Dimensional Science [well okay spirit but Jamelia's interpreting it through her lens])
[ ] That everything is fated to have an end (Entropy)
[-] Forces (cannot choose)
[ ] The true beauty of life and its freedoms (Life)
[-] Matter (cannot choose)
[ ] How thought and questioning begets correct action (Mind)
[ ] How the world is different depending on perspective (Prime)
[ ] How all things move in cycles (Time)

I'll tally the votes for enhancements up and tell you what Jamelia's new augmentation set is going to be, unless someone is kind enough to do that manually for me (and give Jamelia +2 XP, which is enough for another Bioenhancement dot!)

 

[MJ12 Commando]

[84] Defensive Systems (Innate Life/Mind Countermagic, Self-Healing, Soak)
[70] Mental Ability (Intelligence, Wits, Perception)
[65] Physical (Strength, Dexterity, Stamina)
[50] Procedures (Enhanced Combat Skills, Multiple Action Penalty Reduction, Improved Dodge, etc)
[43] Social (Charisma, Manipulation, Appearance)
[24] Stealth Systems (Innate Life/Mind/Corr Wards)

Click to shrink...

Also, excellent. I can work with this.

Anyways, Jamelia's new Enhancements are fairly broad. She has broad physical enhancements giving her peak physical capability with marginally superhuman Stamina, an effective +1d bonus to all combat rolls, a significant boost to her Mental attributes (she now has Perception 5, Intelligence 5, Wits 6), and Manipulation 5.

But that's not all! Donald's contribution has been licensing the Hyper-A adrenal reconfiguration from Praetorian Military Solutions, an INVICTUS-controlled private biotech researcher. The Hyperadrenal reconfiguration of Jamelia's endocrine system replaces normal adrenaline and her normal adrenal glands with synthetic h-adrenaline, which hyperoxygenates the user's musculature and also has nootropics that greatly accelerate cognition. The brain activity in such a state looks like a seizure, but... rather more effective, since victims of seizures do not generally grab two guns and get four headshots in 0.38 seconds.

Of course, the issue with Hyper-A is that it causes heat buildup, especially in the brain. Using it for too long (more than [Stamina + Endurance] turns) starts to cause unsoakable bashing damage from heatstroke.

Yes, Jamelia can say that she has harnessed 100% of the human brain simultaneously. The Progenitor military research labs really, really hate Praetorian because they always make the joke whenever they talk about Hyper-A. And it is a bad joke.

Donald's also licensed Praetorian's counter-intrusion nanoweb. It's an implant network of about a thousand small-scale interference field generators, like the ones in the Qui La Machinaes the Void Engineers use to defeat Reality Deviance. It's countermagic. Serafina has kindly implanted most of them along the brain and spinal cord, and also set them to 'discreet', which will make sure that anyone looking who isn't looking Very Very Hard and specifically at Jamelia, especially given her Cloaking, will find it impossible to notice Jamelia. The field generators are also absolutely tiny (a fraction of a mm in size each) and thus invisible to surgical procedures as well.

All of this has cost Donald a pretty penny but he has cash to spare, right?

 

[MJ12 Commando]

White Wolf mechanics are broken, but I am pretty leery of using them to come up with a conclusion that is probably completely unsustainable in the face of the fluff, IE that Solars are punk bitches who can be effortlessly killed by Mages; who after all are empowered by shards of broken Sidereal Exaltations, and thus should probably not be more powerful than full Sidereals, to say nothing of the Incarnae and the Primordials.

Click to shrink...

It's not so much that they're punk bitches, but it's that Solars are weak to "tons of guys with industry behind them and fast OODA loops stabbing them in the face", which is what the Technocracy specializes in. This would involve them using Correspondence to localize him, then firing Hellfires at him from Predator drones until he goes "blargh I am ded" and explodes.

Taliban Zero here has a lot of advantages, though.

1. Laws of Creation also include paradox dependent on whether you violate them or not
2. Taftani magic bullshit is pretty much all coincidental or concensual around Chaos Repelling Patterns (in Creation, shooting fireballs is totally legit)
3. Taftani and Batini assistance mean he's not vulnerable to scry-and-die (which is generally how the Union deals with 'linear magicians' of particularly high power-very few of them have the defenses to survive constant Hellfire bombardment)

This is why The General and Sleepytown are being brought in. Bringing the Batini onto an even level ("almost everything magical is vulgar no matter how subtle") mean that the Technocracy, controlling the vast majority of the world's nodes, is at an advantage, because they can just throw in the hundreds of Prime per engagement needed to keep themselves from dying from paradox, while the Batini don't have that much Prime in general.

Also, speaking of The General, have an update on Union Command. This is IC information, the sphere ratings and whatnot are estimated due to what you could find on them.

Technocratic Union High Command Leadership
Updated 2015

Structure: There are seven seats on Union High Command: One for each of the five original Conventions, one for Ragnarok Command, and the Empty Seat or the Seat of the Eye, the seat for Panopticon that has almost always been unfilled despite technically existing. Each one of the leaders has a single vote, with no leader having more or less power than any other. Rumors are that Project Sunburst is seeking to apply for an eighth seat as a formal Convention, which would shift the Union's focus from the Progrom and advancing the Time Table to a greater degree of anti-hemophage operations.

Representatives:
New World Order
Professor Joseph Bastion, Ivory Tower (ex-Operative)
Notable Traits:

• Fairly recent (~1995) promotion out of field operations
• Combat record largely classified
• Former associates believe he is professional and logical, with emotions greatly under control
• Will probably try to do what he thinks is best for the world as a whole
• Cynical statements about world hide idealistic leanings

Major Sphere Ratings: Entropy 5, Time 4

Iteration X
Senior Comptroller "Ada Lovelace"
Notable Traits:

• Age and background unknown
• Name is obviously false: Possibly former Virtual Adept?
• Moderate cyberization: Cognitive augmentation, omnitool implant, no directly combat-relevant equipment
• Former assistant to Comptroller Kenneth Watson, Inner Circle, lost in Dimensional Anomaly
• Unpopular due to anti-Progrom stance with Iteration X combat wing, may lose her seat if she keeps taking a soft anti-Ascension War stance.

Major Sphere Ratings: Matter 5, Mind 5

Progenitors
Professor Jon Li
Notable Traits:

• Professor emeritus of the Progenitors
• Extensively pro-Progrom, most militant voice on Command
• Seeks suppression of all Reality Deviance with little quarter given or asked for
• Die-hard Utopian, has extreme faith in the Technocratic Union and a strong sense of personal morality
• If forced to, will likely choose to have the Union shatter rather than compromise its ideals
• Has spent significant amounts of time funding/encouraging grassroots promotion of modern technology and thought in poor countries

Major Sphere Ratings: Life 5, Mind 5, Prime 4

Syndicate
Chief Executive Officer William Brandenberg
Notable Traits:

• Attempted a failed bid for Syndicate leadership in 1936
• Personal wealth is nearly infinite
• Donates significant amounts to charity
• Self-made trillionaire who grew up poor, seeks acknowledgement of own success from others
• Anti-Progrom, believes that suppression of Reality Deviants is best done via bringing prosperity rather than military force
• Suspicious of Void Engineer secrecy on funding usage
• Was one of the members of the cabal which suggested stripping USSR Constructs of assets and funding

Major Sphere Ratings: Primal Utility 5, Entropy 5

Void Engineers
Admiral Anastasia Ivanova
Notable Traits:

• Trained by rogue agent Catherine Nichols in the 1950s
• Was generally relegated to rear-echelon roles due to the stigma (despite her personal excellence), which kept her away from the Inner Circle
• Suddenly was promoted to a leadership position in 2004 due to an "internal review"
• Captained a X160 Qui La Machinae, Indomitable Spirit of Victory, from 2004-2009
• Promoted to leadership and command positions post-2009
• Has constantly made requests for more recruits, war materiel, and funding with very little reason why, save the words "Threat Null" and very brief briefings
• Moderate anti-Syndicate sympathies due to fall of USSR

Major Sphere Ratings: Dimensional Science 5, Forces 5, Correspondence 5

Ragnarok Command: Ragnarok Command is a post-Dimensional Anomaly arrangement of most of the Union's critical anti-existential risk assets (such as the Apocalypse Canceller)
General Charles Starborn (Iteration X)
Notable Traits:

• Youngest member of Command at 65 years old
• Former liaison between Iteration X and Void Engineers
• Has often voted in support of Void Engineer proposals but is also a loud voice in seeking more transparency from the Void Engineers
• Moderately pro-Progrom, but generally willing to accept surrenders or peaceful non-subversive activity
• Retains heavy combat augmentation
• Was originally a member of Assault Team K65 (Codename: Juggernaut), was instrumental in lack of official sanctioning for SSgt. John Kessler

Major Sphere Ratings: Forces 5, Life 5, Matter 5

The Empty Seat
The General/General Augustine Aleph, Inner Circle (ex-NWO)
Notable Traits:

• Rumored to be receiving direct orders from Control
• Has been absent for over 90% of Command meetings ("The Empty Seat")
• Only non-retired Inner Circle member confirmed to have survived the Dimensional Anomaly
• Controls Panopticon, a pseudo-Convention made from all five original Convention members to enforce Control's will
• Active in World War I, World War II, currently active as head of ISAF. Used alias "General Julius Butcher" in all wars (possibly ex-Operative?). Sleeper media has not picked up on this association.

Major Sphere Ratings: Correspondence 5, Prime 5, Time 5, Entropy 5

 

[EarthScorpion]

SEEKING FUCK YEAH III: ROSE-VENGE OF THE THORN



"Tell me who stole your heart, so I may take their head," Piero grates. "I will flense them alive! I will tear the marrow from their bones while they still live! They shall know only pain until I permit them to die for the affront!"

If one were to look at his image on the screen, one would conclude that he is currently in the state of mind most men only occupy briefly, before they flip out and bludgeon their partner to death with a golf trophy. That would be wrong. Piero sneers at such petty rages. And he is quite angry today, even by his standards.

Rose lies back in the hospital bed and smiles at him. She's aching somewhat, because the surgery required that she have her regeneration inhibited and it always hurts a bit when it's deactivated. It's a reminder to her that she's vulnerable now in a way she normally isn't. But least she has Piero and Maria to talk to. It's so sweet that he cares to make these kind of threats!

And he's not making them about Donald, thank goodness! No, he only wants to agonisingly kill the person who literally removed her secondary heart. Admittedly because he doesn't know about Donald and… and however she's feeling about him, but that's not something she has to worry about!

"I don't know who it was," she says sadly. "Heavily enhanced. Possibly some kind of shapeshifter, but if so… I don't know. Donald is investigating if it was some kind of Nephandic shapeshifter." She smiles again. "He's nice like that," she adds.

"Donald?" Maria asks, concern in her almost painfully beautiful voice. Maria, who has the genes of Helen of Troy, is to honey traps and seduction as Piero is to 'murdering everyone in a building and demolishing the building'. For reasons of public safety, she is, much like her brother, kept in VR simulations when not deployed. In her case, it is to avoid unnecessary collateral damage from riots, coups in African nations and double homicides between lifelong friends – all of which happened the one time she went AWOL.

"Oh, haven't I talked to you about him?" Rose says happily. "Executive Financier Sykes. He's the head of the Administrative section of my amalgam! But he's really nice for a Syndic! After Hong Kong, he got us all treats! He took me to Disney World! And then I was his bodyguard in LA and I got to have lots of nice dinners and I got to be in a film and I read up on hypereconomics and I learned how to diagnose primal utility and… and I feel bad for enjoying myself so much when Serafina was in so much trouble in Moscow, but I did enjoy myself!"

Piero was clearly still seething about the idea that someone had hurt his – well, she could probably call herself his little sister for certain now, considering everything! – but there was a strange expression on Maria's face. Rose felt a sudden sinking feeling in her stomach not caused by the inhibited regeneration as she realised what the expression was.

"Rose!" Maria says, hand going to her mouth. "Do you have…" her voice drops, "… feelings for him?"

Rose blushes. "Um," she manages intelligently. "I don't… know. I mean. Um. I like him and he's nice and he hasn't tried to hurt me at all and… and I got all angry when I saw him with… with another woman and I don't understand it and I haven't felt like this before and… and I don't know." She takes a deep breath. She can't blurt out any of the actual truth about what had happened in London. Even though she still felt the seething, burning feeling in her stomach at the sight of that… that stupid, pretty thing snuggling up to Donald in the back! She swallows. Since they've found out… "Can you help?" Rose asks. "Um, that is, explain some things."

"Oh dear," Maria says sadly. "In my experience, this only ends in tears. Everyone I've had real feelings for has wound up dead inside of twenty four hours." She frowns. "I need to stop falling for my targets," she adds brightly, but Rose can hear the brittle note under her voice.

"I've spent much longer than twenty four hours around him and he's still alive," Rose points out.

"That's a start! That's certainly a start!" Maria says hopefully. She runs her hands through her dark hair. "Oh, Rose. I'm sorry, I'm terrible at this kind of advice. And so, so sorry I can't be of more use! I'm not a very good big sister. And… and somewhat jealous that you managed to pick up the basics of primal utility in less than a month. Someday you'll have to show me how you manage to learn things so quickly!"

"Tell him I will watch him," Piero says flatly. "I am no more sympathetic to metaphorical heart-breaking than literal ones."

Rose groans. "Not you too!" she says. "You're as bad as Serafina! She…"

"Ahem," Serafina says, poking her head in the door, as if the mention of her name had summoned her. "Who's as bad as me?"

Rose blushes. "Piero," she says reluctantly.

Serafina looks momentarily nonplussed. "That's… uh. A thing," she says. "I… I don't think I've ever been compared to him before."

"I do not believe I have been compared to Dr Rosario either," Piero says through clenched teeth, to giggles from Maria.

"Well, Rose," Serafina says, "when you're done, I'd like to see you in room 23B. More checks, I'm afraid."

Rose swallows. "I understand," she says, throat suddenly feeling dry. She finishes off the rest of the conversation as best as she can, trying not to look too worried. Piero doesn't notice it, but she's worried that Maria might have seen something.

She wishes Alexander was here, but he's still in a medically-induced coma from the damage he took in Moscow. She misses him.

Rose feels like a condemned woman as she drifts through the hallways in her hospital gown. That's wrong, of course. She volunteered for this, told Serafina that she'd need to do it, but now she was regretting it. She didn't want to forget. She didn't want to have her memories altered.

The papers Director Belltower recovered were… informative. Yes. Very much so.

"With the death of Lady Reina Lior, the senior members of the Invisible College withdrew from the world. To critical eyes the fear of mortality caused by the loss of a long-standing member overcame them, but the College – now calling themselves Control from behind their veils of obfuscation – argued that the demoralisation of the recently formed Union caused by the death of one of their lantern-bearers threatened the fledgling institution. There are certainly those who pin the disillusionment of the Electrodyne Engineers on the death of the so-called Mother of Mechanised Armour, and that her absence caused them to question the commitment of the Technocratic Union to the principles of the Order of Reason. Certainly, the resultant perceived isolation of Control and the disruption of this reformation was not useful, but it could not be helped.

"Men and women were mere flesh and blood, vulnerable, mortal. The Invisible College had to become Control. It had to become an idea, for ideas are not vulnerable to the knives and bullets of querulous fortune."

That must have been why they covered up who she had been enough that the Director had only been able to find paintings and no concrete date of her death. Control hadn't wanted to be thought of as mortal. Rose could certainly believe that they would have tried to ever have it forgotten that Reina Lior had died like any other mortal woman, a seven hundred year old who made a mistake and was cut down by Traditionalist assassins aiming for one of the Invisible College who had left herself open.

She had been a stubborn, mulish woman, who refused to compromise and refused to retreat to the safety of the secret fortresses of the Order of Reason and then the Technocracy. Her name was still honoured by modern day proponents of the Pogrom – especially those who wanted to refocus it on non-humans. She had been one of the foremost proponents pushing for the eradication of all haemophages, shapeshifters, and other such creatures of the night.

Reina Lior had hated vampires just as much as Rose did.

And that explained other things. Like why Rose herself was so very durable, tougher even than dedicated combat constructs like Alexander. The Progenitors had wanted the new Reina Lior to be less vulnerable than the original, and able to be revived even if small bits of her could be recovered. They had built her body with the expectation that it would be pushed to the limits of what it was capable of. Why else would they have made her so she was biologically immortal and – ha – able to survive little things like getting her heart torn out?

She knocks at the door.

"Come in," Serafina calls out.

It's just another one of the small lab rooms in this Progenitor facility which Serafina is using for the 'vital maintenance work repairing battle damage' which is to say, making sure Rose doesn't have to run on her haemophage heart. That thought reminds her of how nice it is to have a human-normal core temperature again. When she's running off the haemophage heart, it makes her feel angry and combatant, because it normally only happens when she's mainlining infused blood from it and that only happens in the middle of combat. And stressed. Yes, she certainly feels stressed. The states are irrevocably linked.

Regardless, it could be a Progenitor medical bay anywhere in the world. The walls are white and spotless, there's racks of computers in sealed cases up against the wall, and a white plastic machine fills most of the space. A member of the Masses might think that it's a compact version of an MRI scanner, but that's just ignorance speaking.

"Dr Rosario," Rose says formally.

Serafina rises from the desk, smiling with a hint of sadness in her expression. "Oh Rose," she says, "you only Dr Rosario me on missions, or when you're feeling worried or stressed." She wraps Rose in her arms. "Oh, yes, you're certainly feeling much better," she says, after a while of the hug. "You're warm again, and your pulse is the human one."

"I feel better," Rose admits. "It's not fun being all cold."

"I can bet," Serafina agrees. "Let me just see if the…" she tugs down Roses' neckline. "Hmm. The scar isn't gone yet."

Rose tries to look down at her own chest, and struggles. "Oh, yes," she says. "My regeneration is back online, too. It was very traumatic damage, though."

"Well, I'll schedule some time in for me to fix that," Serafina says firmly. "You shouldn't be scarring. There was what looked like an anti-regen serum in your wounds. It should have been all cleared out." She purses her lips, and pulls Rose to the seat. "That was a… an experience I never want to have to go through again," she says. "I was so worried about you! And… and with everything on top and having to keep track of everything and the things which you found out… I really wish I'd put my foot down and got Donald to take Henriette instead."

"If I hadn't been there, things would have gone worse. Henriette would have died. I don't want that," Rose says simply.

"Well, I don't think Mister Sykes would have been quite so… casual about provoking something like that if you hadn't been there," Serafina retorts, and then sighs. "Perhaps I'm being too harsh there," she concedes, massaging her temples.

"You look worried," Rose observes, breaking off the hug to cup Serafina's chin in her hands and examine her closely. "You haven't been sleeping. That's bad for you."

"I haven't," Serafina admits, pursing her lips. "Through choice, that is, but it's just… everything. An old friend called me up last night and talking with her a bit helped, but it's still just… everything." She sighs. "The Tribunal has been worrying me, and now this on top of everything? It's just… all the ways it could have gone wrong. If you didn't have a backup heart… and let's not even get started on what Jamelia did. I just… it's a mess."

She shrugs. "Well, that's for me to worry about. At least you get to avoid some of this stress," Serafina says, the humour somewhat forced. "All right. I'll just bring up the standard EM isolation so nothing can interfere with the tests, and do a few other things Director Belltower told me to, and then we can get started."

Rose can hear the noise of the jamming technology coming online, even if Serafina can't. It's a whine in the ultrasonic which makes her teeth stand on edge. She fiddles with her hospital gown, smoothing down the cloth of her lap.

"How are you feeling?" Serafina asks suddenly, and continues without pausing. "Well, I suppose it isn't quite the same for you as it is for me. You were born post-1999. It… it was bad enough thinking that the Computer had gone evil and… and all of that. But… but there were people I knew. People I'd been at school with who'd got off-world placements. I could have had them if I'd wanted them. They were doing cutting edge things out there, and I was really interested. But… well, I spent a bit of time out there, and I just couldn't stand it.

Serafina clenches her hands on her lap. "The science being done out there was everything I was meant to love and I… I did like that. But nothing else. It was out in space and everything was rules and regulations and 'things you had to do to make sure you didn't compromise station integrity'. So I took a less prestigious offer – disappointing my parents in the process – and stayed on Earth. Back in '99 I felt guilty about feeling relieved that I didn't get lost out there. And now? Now I find out that the Administration went and hooked everyone up into a hivemind and… and now they're dead and the hivemind is this rampant thing that genuinely thinks it's helping people by… by assimilating them and making them just a little cog in the machinery.

"And I was almost out there. If I hadn't been so difficult, so troublesome, so disobedient, I wouldn't have gone and taken that Damage Control placement with MSS. I thought I'd got over the 'wow, I nearly died' years ago, but this… it's worse."

Rose blinks. She doesn't know what to say. Serafina doesn't normally talk like this.

Serafina's hand goes to her mouth. "Oh, Rose, I'm so sorry for bringing it up like that," she blurts out. "I didn't mean to feel unsympathetic about… about the fact that you were in a similar position and…"

"EXEMPLAR III," Rose says gently. "Yes. I thought about it and realised that… that Reina Lior was dead, and if you look at the ones who didn't go crazy, I suspect that they'd also have gene donors who died before 1999. And it was just luck that I wasn't kept in the same facility… just like it was luck that you didn't go out there." She smiles down at Serafina, despite the churning – which isn't literal churning – in her stomach. "But you didn't take that offworld placement, and because of that I got made and I didn't go crazy. And if you had done it, I wouldn't exist because you were involved in my creation. Maybe someone genetically the same as me would, or maybe they'd have had different enhancements and they would have properly been who they were meant to be.

She reaches out and squeezes Serafina's hand. "None of that happened, though."

"Oh, Rose," Serafina says, shaking her head. "I should be the one reassuring you here. I'm sorry, I'm just on edge. But yes. Do you want to sit over there, and I can start prepping you for the NMIH. You'll need to shed your hair first… oh, why am I telling you this? You know this just as well as I do. Try not to make a mess, though."

The process is all too familiar for Rose. It was in a room not to dissimilar to this that she first gained consciousness. She's seen this kind of room and this kind of machine time and time again. Often with people talking about her as if she's not a person. Sometimes Serafina trying to deal with Thorn, and always failing. Regardless, she instructs her biology to shed her hair. She'll just grow it again once this is over.

"Hold still," Serafina mutters, as she paints Rose's scalp with conductive gel.

"It tickles."

"Yes, yes, I know that." Serafina places the skull-cap on Rose's head, locks it securely, and there is a faint whine as the self-sharpening diamond-tipped hair-thin needle drills start work on getting through Rose's skull. It takes them quite a while, but eventually the display on the console has them all marked in green. "Okay, hmm, now go get started while I begin the diagnostics of your systems." Serafina shakes her head. "You really haven't had much luck since you joined this amalgam when it comes to injuries, have you? First Hong Kong, now this."

Rose obediently lies down. It isn't very fair, she wants to say. She didn't get shot at once in Los Angeles. Especially not at Disney World.

"Will I be able to remember what I found out about me?" Rose asks nervously. "Me and… me and Reina and why they chose to put her in EXEMPLAR III?"

Serafina shakes her head. "It raises too many questions about how you found out, I'm afraid," she tells Rose. "We'll just have to cover that bit up until the Tribunal has passed. You shouldn't be involved too heavily because you were away from Moscow, but we can't risk anyone out to get us pumping you for information to use to discredit us."

"I know. It's just…" Rose works her hands.

Serafina pats her on the shoulder. "I do understand," she tells her. "Trust me; I do know how important it feels to find out something about yourself which you've never known before. I'll put it all back once it's safe."

"You will?" Rose asks in a tiny voice.

"I promise," Serafina says reassuringly.

"Liar." Thorn's voice comes echoing out of the glass screen on part of the machinery. "You don't really think she won't tinker a little bit?"

She won't, Rose thinks hard.

"You don't even believe that yourself, do you?" Thorn sneers.

"You know," Serafina says, all at once, completely unaware of the argument going , "after this, I… I could probably pull some strings to get you a nice safe role in… in MSF or… or something else, anything else which would be safe and you wouldn't need to hurt people and… and you'd be away from all of this. All of everything. Safe." She pauses. "You won't need to remember this. And if something happens to… to us, it wouldn't take you down too. I'm in too deep now, but you… you still have a chance."

Rose locks eyes with her mother-figure. "I know you're trying to protect me," she says earnestly, "but I've been happier here than anywhere else. I have you here, and Director Belltower is the nicest boss I've ever had, and everyone else is… is nice." She swallows. "I can't go back to how things used to be," she says faintly. "I don't know what I'd do if I ended up in another amalgam like… like some of the earlier ones. And! And and and! If I'm not here, who'll keep you safe?" Rose pouts. "You're being selfish, wanting me to be safe when you're in danger!"

"I'm pretty sure that's not how selfishness works," Serafina observes, and sighs. "Are you sure I can't change your mind about that?"

"Of course she can," Thorn sniggers. "You're the one letting her stick needles into your brain. She can do pretty much whatever she likes to you, her little guilty failed experiment. I wonder, if you poked around in the censored records of EXEMPLAR, what would you find? I wonder what role she played in your failed development?"

Machinery whirs and computers buzz. Rose lies back, and lets it happen, knowing that even her memories of having the memories removed will be gone by the end of it. Nothing she does here will matter. Will be permitted to matter. And although Serafina says that she'll have the memories back once the Tribunal is over, Rose knows that it won't matter to future-her if she doesn't.

She hates Thorn. She hates her so much. She says all these mean things and she's always so hard to argue against. Like what she says about Serafina. Rose knows she owes her. She loves her. She keeps Rose safe.

Except… does she? That's the nagging little question Thorn asks, again and again. Why does Serafina spend so much effort and so many political favours trying to help one failed construct? What's she getting from it? Rose thinks – hopes, hopes beyond belief – that Serafina just loves her for who she is. She almost always believes that.

But sometimes she wonders why, because – as Thorn constantly reminds her – she's a failure. She's good for killing and good for seducing and there are all those people out there in the Union who see that as all she's worth. Of course, Serafina doesn't see her for that, and neither does Director Belltower. No matter what Thorn says. Serafina is her mother and loves her, and Director Bellower doesn't seem to care whether you were grown in a lab or recruited off the streets or born into the Union, as long as she can find a use for you – and she's a lot nicer than she pretends to be.

And then the world twists, and she knows it's beginning.

Cold. Yes. It's a cool feeling in her head. No, not in her head, inside her mind. It feels like mint tastes, and it's slightly numbing as well. Rose relaxes, because there's nothing she can do. It's already happening.

Except as far as she's aware, it doesn't normally leave her lying down on the tarmac under a van, getting wet. Rose blinks. No, she doesn't remember a thing usually. Wincing, she pulls herself out from under the van and into the torrential-yet-unmoving rain. Sodium lights wash all red from the scene, leaving the world lacking in colour.

And there's the car they'd had in London, frozen in place. Presumably it had been driving off, but time didn't seem to be passing. Rose looks around, and sees a figure with an umbrella standing on the street, looking in her direction. They're moving, they're there for real, unlike the rest of… of this place.

"Hello, Rose," Thorn says, a malicious grin on her face. Fangs flashing, she leans against the lamppost, holding a black umbrella. "Fancy seeing you here."

Rose snarls, momentarily baring her teeth before she gets a grip of herself. "Here?" she grates.

"Here," Thorn says, tapping her head. She takes a step forwards, and where she steps plants blossom. "Your memories. Imagine that. You can experience being as pathetic and servile as you were in London, all over again. You get your kicks off that way, don't you?" She spreads her arms wide. "Well, have fun before you let your dear mama gut your sense of self. Insofar as you can have fun in a place this boring. Why don't we take this somewhere more interesting?"

"I shouldn't be 'here' at all," Rose says. She won't rise to the bait. "I'm pretty good at biology, and I happen to know that you don't go into a dream representation of the memories when they're being wiped. That only happens in things written by hack writers." She pauses. "Also, it's never happened before," she adds, in supporting evidence.

Thorn stares at her. "You always say that," she remarks.

Rose pouts. "You're trying to scare me," she says.

"Maybe. Or maybe every time you go through one of these treatments, we have a conversation and they wipe it when they're done with the main wipe. And every time you go running away or crying because you're too weak, too pathetic to face up to what you are." Thorn steps away from the lamppost, which loses all colour, becoming an untextured blank object. "You don't even try to protest it recently. Maybe it's sinking in."

Behind her, the lamppost starts dissolving, melting and warping.

"Welcome to your mind," Thorn says, her smirk growing wider. "Welcome to this playground of whoever wants to use and abuse you. Watch as your darling Serafina tears apart your sense of self and puts someone else together who's almost you. Almost, but not quite."

"You're just saying this to hurt me," Rose says quietly, one hand slowly drifting down to her thigh holster. "I can't be allowed to remember this. I'm compromised. They can make me talk. I don't want to get people in trouble through knowing too much."

"How adorable," Thorn says, sneering. She runs her hand along the side of a car, which is suddenly overgrown with moss. "Who needs to beat a slave when you can train her to beat herself. And…"

Rose doesn't shriek as she throws herself at Thorn. She doesn't scream. She doesn't make a noise. She's wanted to do this for a long, long time, and this time she won't get in trouble for breaking a mirror, trying to hurt Thorn. She was made to be a killer and she knows how to kill.

The knives sink in. Of course they do. It's her mind. She has her knives if she wants them. And then she's stabbing and stabbing and it feels good. She stabs and stabs as around her the memory-world melts away, leaving great rifts and tears in the dreamstuff.

Only that isn't right, is it? She was made to be Reina Lior. They made her into a killer after they realised she was defective. It was a patch job. That's why she's a killing machine who doesn't like violence.

Except for against Thorn. She's enjoying this a lot.

"You do know thinking about hurting me doesn't actually hurt me?" Thorn observes, white-teeth smiling from a split open ruined face. Rose stabs her again, and her blood flies away, blooming into flowers wherever it splashes. Two mangled hands grabs Rose by the wrists and, wounds already closing, push her away. Thorn is stronger than her. "How very Technocratic. Kill anything which disagrees with your worldview. Don't even try to contemplate anything else. Don't try to open your horizons. No, just violence."

"I hate you," Rose growls, trying to force the knives back on target.

Thorn yawns. "You've said that so many times," she says, dissolving into shadow before reappearing by the hole in the world. One of the many holes. This dreamplace is falling apart as… as Serafina erases it.

"Because it's true." Rose sniffs, lying there on the ground. She can't even make the voice in her head shut up, even when she's in her own head. What good is she? What good is anything?

The lamppost dissolves into nothingness, and Rose notices that the cars parked on the side of the road are starting to look like half-melted sweets, all rounded edges and sloping sides.

"I think I preferred it when you were trying to stab me," Thorn says, smirking. "At least then you were trying something. Aww, is ickle Rosie going to stop and cry? What's the matter, Rosie?"

"I hate you. I hate you I hate you," Rose whimpers.

Thorn laughs, and the gardens by the side of the road seem to laugh with her. "You're pathetic," she says, wiping away her tears of laugher. Rose is crying, and that just seems to make her laugh harder. "Really. What good are you for anything? Well, I'm sure you'll be a nice mistress for Donald. You're pretty, at least for now, you'll do anything he says, and you've even fooled yourself into thinking that you love him. You really are good at self-delusion, aren't you? Mistaking what they did to your brain so you're nice and obedient and the modified hormones they have you pumping into yourself for love."

The words strike like a blow. This isn't just a simile. Rose feels it like a punch. "What do you kn-kn-know about that?" she retorts, trying to keep the shake from her voice. She'd rather be angry than crying.

"Vastly more than you. You're just a weak little child in a freak's body. And you think you know about love? Hardly. You think you love him, just because he acted nice to you, and took you to Disneyland. That's the kind of treat you might give a small child. How pathetic can you get, that that's all it took to make you think you loved him?"

"He's nice to me," Rose says, her voice numb. "He didn't make me kill people. I had nice food."

"He's a Syndic," Thorn says mercilessly, as the road begins to collapse, revealing the roots working their way up from underneath. "All those nice things were paid for with human suffering. That money he has is only there because there are billions suffering worldwide in an economic system which people like him have set up to advantage themselves. He knows all about the power of bribery. And didn't you see him using spirit-binding. You know Dimensional Science can't do that, because it's a weak, neutered product of Technocratic stupidity. So I guess he's the sort who gets easily bought, if he'll defect to your Union just for money."

"Shut up, shut up, shut up," Rose moans.

Thorn stretches. "Well, just remember. You're up against your precious Control, now. The Union is corrupt and rotten on Earth, full of men and women who are just in it for the power. And in the spirit world, in 'space', it's monstrous. The little freak who was so much like you… well, men don't change their fundamental nature when they become spirits. Your precious Progenitors were always amoral assimilationist monsters who made everyone like them, forcing them into an idealised model of beauty. You're just the same as her.

The woman smirks, fangs gleaming in the half-light.

"Only you won't remember, will you? Because you're just going to run away from the truth. Have fun with that. You'll get the pleasure of discovering it all over again. Because you're weak and pathetic. You run away from your roots. You run away from anything you can't kill. Or you roll over. One of the other."

"Shut up!"

"You want to stop me? Then confront what you are! Face up to the truth!" Thorn hisses through her smile.

Something snaps inside Rose. Something which only has broken once before. She throws her head back in the melting world, and screams.

…​

Everything is going red. Everything is going wrong. Serafina's hands fly over the keyboard trying to maintain brainstate integrity and keep Rose in the dreamless sleep she should be in.

But isn't. Oh no, she very much isn't.

Serafina pauses, conflicted. She could pull a hardstop. But that would risk permanent brain damage. But not doing so might risk permanent brain damage. But something is going very wrong. 'Might' and 'would' war in her head and all the while she's staring at the extremely abnormal neural activity.

There's patterns in it. Oh yes. Patterns which she could work out if only she looked deeper. She's sure of it.

No. No, she can't risk Rose this way. She grabs an injector from the table, and…

She didn't even see Rose move. One moment, she was lying in the machine. The next she has her hand around Serafina's throat. She's still connected to the wires. Somehow she hasn't torn them. She's squeezing hard enough to bruise.

Rose screams in her face, a bestial, inhuman shriek.

No. That's not Rose.

…​

The world has changed. It's a chimeric tableau, half luxurious wood-panelled room and half charnel house with blood-stained walls.

Rose doesn't feel like herself.

"This meeting of the Invisible College is now called to order." The words are strange and echoing, like a half-remembered dream. They come from one of the nine great chairs arranged in a circle around the room, each carefully constructed so shadows fall over the occupant despite the good lighting of the rest of the room. She can tell that they are incredibly comfortable chairs, because she sits in one of them. The Chair of Unification shall summarise Jeremy Bentham's latest report on social development and the development of the third iteration of the Pannomion text."

"Thank you. The Chair of Unification expresses its thanks to the Chair of Chancellors, but must pause because the Chair of Generals has requested a moment to speak to us," says an old female voice, with a strong Russian accent. "This is unorthodox, but the Chair of Generals has notified me that she wishes to make an announcement."

Rose-not-Rose clears her throat. "Thank you," she says, her body and mouth moving for her. "I just wished to a notify the Invisible College that I have received word that the node on Dartmoor has been successfully captured. The assault formation lost many brave men in the process due to heavier than expected resistance, but our artillery dispersed chemicals which disorientated their counterattack, and when the fire projection tanks managed to break the threshold, the heat of the flames forced them back. The spearhead of mechanised troopers managed to slay many of the monsters before they retreated back to the world of the spirits."

"Look at her," Thorn says quietly, leaning against the side of the chair. There is quiet applause, echoning in this hollow room. "Look at you. A butcher among butchers. You ran away from who you were. And so you sank into these memories of who you could have been." She snorts. "Even when you face up to the past, you're just so pathetic about the whole state of affairs that… well, it pisses me off!"

"That is good news indeed," the Chair of Unification declares. "Those mangy things were a great annoyance. Now, if we may return to the matter at hand…"

"What… I…" Rose begins in her own voice, working her jaw. It feels strange from having someone else talk through it. "This isn't my memory!"

"Your brilliance never starts to amaze me," Thorn drawls. "But you were just too weak to actually stand up to me, face up to what you know you should want to learn about. So instead you surrendered to the memories. You didn't master them. You disgust me."

Rose tries to ignore her, tries to listen to the voices of the Invisible College – of Control before they were Control – instead of the horrible voice in her head. Who is outside her head. When she's inside her own head. Oh, darn it, she'll just think of her as the voice in her head.

Rose watches. Rose sits back and lets Reina speak for her, walking through the memories of her last day.

She feels strange. Her body aches in small ways it never aches normally. And there's always Thorn, harping on and on.

She feels old.

Reina was an old woman, Rose realises. Not only in the sense that she'd lived a long time. No, she was old and tired. Her body, even with the best treatments available to the late nineteenth century, wasn't everything it had been. Her scars ached in the rain. The painting Director Belltower of her had been when she still looked young in the way that senior Technocrats tended to look for a long time. She was past that point. Her hair is almost completely white, and there are deep crow's feet around her eyes.

But she keeps going. Rose thinks what she thinks, feels what she feels, and she seems to be made of steel. Not in the sense that the proto-HITMarks she sees are. In the sense that she somehow pushes her flesh to keep on going. She doesn't seem to question herself. She doesn't seem to weaken. She doesn't even let herself doubt. She's sure that what she's doing is the right thing, even as she has meeting after meeting and plans to wipe out haemophage nests and inspects production lines of some kind of early power and so on.

Rose wishes she was like that. They're opposites. Reina might have had weak flesh, but she was strong. Rose knows she can take an anti-tank missile to the gut and be fine in a few moments, but for all that, she's weak.

But she also sees other things. The Technocratic Union is changing. When Reina goes for a walk through the vast underground cavern that Rose recognises as the London Geofront, she can see things that Reina can't, because they're only just happening. There are men and women in dark formalwear, who have something of the New World Order about them. Reina talks with one of them – an Operative, Rose realises, no wonder they resemble the New World Order – and she doesn't seem to see quite how the woman in the smart black dress seems more interested in killing haemophages because they're rivals, not because they're monsters. A doctor trailed by workers who have dull eyes and clear signs of surgical scarring around their heads.

Little things about the Union which are the seeds for things Rose will recognise.

"Lobotomised slave-workers, Frankensteins, power-hungry murderers who could be Director Belltower's grandmother," Thorn says, smirking as she ambles beside Rose-Reina, trailing blood-red flowers in her wake. "You've noticed them. Look at the wonders of your Technocratic Union."

Rose tries to ignore her. It gets much harder when Reina gives the orders to deploy 'sympathetic units from the British Army' to a remote village thought to have people suspected to be relatives of werewolves. Rose wants to protest, tell her that she should at least try to separate the innocent from those who were working with those murderous monsters but of course the memory doesn't care about her protests.

She's never seen the high end of commanding before. Rose has always been on the ground, the one getting orders. Even Director Belltower just seems to produce these orders from nowhere and sleeps even less than her despite being baseline human. Here, it's talking to people. Turning people into numbers. Things to be erased as needed.

She feels sick.

And there's one last moment which stays with her, even as Reina's death approaches. She locks herself in her room, as she strips down and puts on a leather undersuit. Rose almost smiles at the realisation that it is the n-greatgrandfather of Henriette's piloting suit. But dressed like that, Reina kneels and prays.

Or perhaps something else, she realises as the memories wash through her.

"Gabriel," she-Reina says. "Gabriel? Please?"

There is no answer. There has not been an answer in the waking world for a hundred years and more. Once he appeared to her as a dove, a burning fire, a handsome young man with eyes ablaze and curls which flickered in the air like flames. Now he only comes to her when she sleeps, and only then rarely.

A weaker woman might have doubted. A weaker woman would have listened to the lies of the Council of Nine – such a name, for an organisation where but eight of the seats are filled! – and given credit to their mewling claims that the Order… no, now the Union is an instrument of stasis.

No. She knows the fault is her own. She is too old. Too tired. She cannot reach the old fire; she does not burn like she used to. The leaden years weigh down on her. She was born in the winter of the Year of Our Lord, 1210, and she is less than two decades short of her seven hundredth birthday. Of course, she has not lived all these years – no, she lost a hundred and fifty of them to the burning of fae-tainted lands where the flow of time was not as it should have been, and a hundred more to the siege of Shangri-La – but time's weight lies heavy on her shoulders. She can feel her too-extended life whenever she leaves the sterile halls of her hidden fortresses.

Perhaps that is why she leaves. It reminds her that it is only by the grace of God that her life is maintained, for the science and knowledge he wove into the world from the earliest days lets her do so. But she still fears that perhaps she steps into hubris, that she has lived too long, that perhaps it is time for her to go to her long-deserved rest. She welcomes that fear. The fear stokes the embers of her life, lets her burn brightly once more knowing that she has nothing to fear in death if it serves the divine plan. She will live as long as she must, and no longer.

And in the meantime, she will act to see the wicked and monstrous scourged from this Earth, so that the innocent need not suffer their depredations. Those who deviate from the divine plan for creation shall face a pogrom. Mithras, the vampire Prince of London, is her foe and bane. He survives no matter what she does. She will not - cannot - stand for that.

He will die today, if God wills it.

"I could play 'Gabriel' for you," Thorn drawls. She is wearing a snow-white dress speckled with dried blood, and though she has a glowing halo and lush white feathery wings, closer inspection reveals that they're held on with wire. The gleam in her eyes suggests she's doing this deliberately. "Abandoned by her Avatar. Tch. And in the end, she's just a tired old woman who's trying not to realise that she's on the wrong side. That she has more in common with the Celestial Choir than she has with your precious Technocratic Union. That's the 'hero of the Technocratic Union' they decided to clone. They wouldn't have done it if they'd known."

Rose feels her heart beat faster, even as her-not-her begins to slowly put on her dented mechanised armour, with all the solemnity of a knight dressing for battle. It's Reina's anticipation, and it's also her own.

"Maybe that's why you're you," Thorn continues, mercilessly. "She wanted to stay dead. She wanted to rest. All the others in your madmen of Control were greedy maniacs grasping for life, but in the end you're a clone of an old tired woman who just wanted to die, who didn't let anyone see it. I'd laugh if it wasn't so sad that your entire life is a joke." She chuckles. "Oh, what the hell, I'll laugh anyway. The mockery the 'Crats made of your life is pretty funny. And you're a whipped dog who refuses to see it."

Rose hates Thorn. Rose hates Thorn more than she's hated anyone. Apart from maybe I-50-B31. No, the hate is different there. There's more contempt in what she held for the Transhuman. And yes, an edge of fear. Thorn, though, is just unadulterated loathing.

"What do you want to do?" she asks. It's a formality. She knows what her reflection will say, and isn't surprised.

"Burn it to the ground," Thorn breathes, blood in the scent. "Break its hegemony, and let the world start again. That's the way it works. The revolutionaries come to power, get greedy and corrupt, and must be overthrown. Why do you think they're called revolutions? Because they always come around, time and time again. The great wheel turns, and now it turns for your Union. You know this in your gut. We've known it for a very long time. We are the green-eyed gardener of the world."

She does know it. She feels it, in a memory so ancient it bubbles up without feeling, without sensing, without words. This is a truth which was written in blood under a starless, sunless sky. The tree must die so the seeds grow.

"No," Rose says quietly.

"What?"

"No," Rose says again. "I know you're right. The Union has a lot of bad people in it. They do a lot of bad things. But I refuse. I'm not going to be the one who burns down the world to let some kind of… of hypothetical new growth happen." She squares her jaw. "The Union needs trimming. I know that's true. But if you're going call us a gardener, I refuse to burn down the… the whole plant."

She swallows. "Go away! You don't want me to be a person! You… you just want me to be a construct-killer for your beliefs! You're just the same as them! Whatever… whatever superstitionist 'destiny' or great plan you want me to fulfil, I won't do it! Just like I won't be a loyal killing construct anymore!"

Thorn chuckles. "Was that meant to be some kind of profound character building revelation?" she asks mockingly. "You can't even stand up to the scientists who made you. You'll bend and fall apart at the first real problem, just like you always do, and go back to servility to the Union." She snorts. "Too bad. Tough luck. You fail." She essays a little wave. "Be seeing you!"

And the world fades to white.

…​

Rose opens her eyes to find her hands around Serafina's throat. She lets go immediately, and slumps down, starting to cry. What just happened? What had her body been doing?

The two women collapse down, each one gasping for their own reasons.

"How long?" Rose whispers through the tears.

"Wh-what?" Serafina manages, hands rummaging around for an injector. She jabs herself, and the livid red marks around her throat fade. Pulling herself up onto all fours , Serafina tries to lever herself up the wall.

"How long was I doing that?" Rose asks. "H-how long was… was I hurting you?"

"You literally… literally just grabbed me. Rose! What on earth was that?" Serafina demands, eyes wide. Her full red lips are drawn into a thin line, and her hands are unconsciously clenching into fists. Rose can see the worry on the other woman's face. "Did I do something wrong? Or… Rose, what was going on? What is going on, even! Your brainwaves are still strange!"

"The place. The car. In London," Rose whispers. "I was there. Time wasn't moving. Th-Thorn showed up. She… she kept on being mean. I screamed. I… I lost it. And then I was in Reina's m-m-memories. Felt like… like a day. H-her last day."

"Rose," Serafina says, rubbing her lab-coat sleeve against her forehead, "remember what I told you? Naming the atavistic tendencies 'Thorn' and acknowledging it will only aggravate the symptoms. It's not healthy for you to personify it like that."

"I know." Rose hugs her knees. "Please don't have me recycled," she whispers.

"Recyc… Rose!" Serafina almost snaps. She marches over to Rose, and puts both hands on her shoulders. "I am not going to have you recycled, do you understand? I don't understand why there are strange readings coming from you, but just because I don't know why doesn't mean I'm… I'm going to have you taken out back and shot like Ol' Yeller!" Her jaw is squared, and she locks her eyes on Rose.

"Who's that?" Rose asks.

"… I'm not having you put down," Serafina says. "Do you understand? We'll just find out what went wrong here, and… and I'll make it work this time. It's my fault, not yours! And I will not have you recycled, so don't… don't even suggest that!"

Serafina busies herself preparing the machine to run again, and Rose is left alone to think.

"Why do you feel guilty?" Rose asks, out of the blue.

Serafina whirls, and then pauses, trying to calm herself down. "Rose, what are you…"

"Why do you feel guilty?" she says again, thinking of something Thorn had mentioned. "You have this guilty look in your eyes when you look at me sometimes. I used to wonder if maybe you were lying to me when you said you loved me, but I don't think that's it. But there's guilt there." She swallows. "And since you're going to alter my memories anyway, you should tell me. I deserve that much."

"I don't feel guilty," Serafina insists, her expression calm in a subtly forced way.

"And… and!" Rose continues, "you were also doing it when you were being all… all controlling-y about me going with Donald to help Director Belltower!" She frowns. "I don't get it. Why would you be guilty about that? Because you didn't stop me? But I helped keep her safe! I don't mind getting hurt if I can help!" No. She doesn't. Not if it will show Thorn.

And there it is again. "Rose," Serafina says. "I just…"

"You did it again! Why are you feeling guilty? And… and now that I think of it, it's happened a lot! Serafina. Please, please, tell me. Why are you feeling guilty about me?"

"Because you're five!" Serafina snaps. "Okay! That's it! You're five and it's not at all fair to you that you're stuck with an adult body and hormones you're not remotely prepared for and which take the rest of us years and years to come to terms with! You're a little girl who's never been allowed to be a child! It's not fair on you that everyone expects you to be an adult when you're not!

She laughs, a trace of bitterness in her voice. "I wonder if that's why the Void Engineers went for accelerated growth in VR sims for their own pet projects. It's obsolete tech, but it's easier to do and most importantly easier to patch because if something goes wrong in development you've still got a normal-ish basis to work from. We didn't give you that much. I've tried my best and I couldn't make things much easier for you. I couldn't fix your brain or your body or your life. All I can do is throw on patches and it never seems to be enough!

She wipes at her eyes. "You think me and Alexander like having to file harassment complaints on your behalf? You think I liked finding that they'd signed you up for a swimsuit calendar by telling you that you could wear nice clothes? They moved you away from where Alexander could protect you and I remember the first time you came back crying because an utter bastard used you as an off-the-shelf combat construct and threatened you with destruction until you 'sterilised' a location and the witnesses. You were two at the time! I was only just learning to read when I was two! And then you went and signed up for a cross-convention amalgam on your own and you managed to pick someone with the reputation of Jamelia Belltower of all people and I… I couldn't…"

"Fix my brain," Rose says quietly. "Make me not me."

Serafina pales. "Rose," she says, a crack in her voice, "I… I didn't mean it like that."

"You said it."

"I wouldn't… I…"

"Well, what did you mean it like?"

"I just meant the… the stress atavism and… and the visual hallucinations," Serafina says, arms wrapped around herself almost defensively. Serafina is shaking, Rose realises, and she doesn't know why. She takes a deep breath. " You get so miserable and it might be a risk to you and… and I wouldn't… I wasn't going to affect you. Not since you became you. I still wonder what would happen had the demilitarisation option won out, but… but that's not an option anymore."

"Demilitarisation?" It's strange, Rose thinks, feeling almost cold in her emotional detachment. Serafina, her mother-figure, is the one falling apart here in front of her. It never normally happens like this.

Serafina sniffs. "It was one of the… the options for when we realised you weren't Reina Lior," she says reluctantly. "Transfer your brain to a near baseline body, one closer to your mental age, reuse the body in a dedicated combat development programme, and try to see how much of the Reina personality could be salvaged and built upon with the proper education. It was still being argued over, especially since you were showing signs of Genius, and then the others… they just…" Serafina sighs. "I sold you out," she whispers.

It's like a blow to the gut. "What?" Rose says sharply.

"I… I threw my full support behind 'let's put the construct to use so we can recoup some costs from this disaster'," Serafina says, staring down at her hands. "It… it was the only way I could think to save you, but I still wonder if… if maybe I hadn't panicked, we could have got demilitarisation through to 'make you not a threat'. But I didn't even try. So I sold away any hope you'd have of a childhood and let them send you out to kill and… and worse things. And every time you've come back crying from what they had you do… it's my fault for not fighting harder to get you a normal life."

Rose is silent for a few heartbeats. Then she reaches out and squeezes Serafina's hand. "Don't feel bad about that," she says gently. "I thought it was something really bad."

"It is really bad," Serafina protests.

"No, it's not," Rose says. "You did it to protect me. And with everything that happened with EXEMPLAR III… I don't blame you." She takes a deep breath, and hugs the other woman. "I forgive you."

"You don't understand because you don't have the experience to understand what you're missing," Serafina moans.

"That's enough," Rose says sharply. "That's pretty patronising, you know!"

"It's true. You didn't get a childhood and… and some of it is my fault. And I can't give you what you're missing out on." Serafina sniffs. "And when I try to send you away so you can be safe, you say 'no'. It's sweet, but… Rose, I just want you to be safe and happy and… and all those things you've never been."

"I am happy," Rose tells her seriously. "You say I didn't get a childhood. Well, you're still my mother, for what I did have. I like the people here. And I know the truth too, remember? No one is safe. If… if Control breaks through to Earth, it's over. And… and it might be worse for me, because Reina was on the Invisible College. I saw her memories. Her death was what made it become Control." Rose swallows, her mouth feeling dry. "If they got through, they'd make me into her, and then make her into them. I'd rather be dead. There… there are worse things than death.

"Reina… Reina wasn't perfect," she continues. "She was a… a grumpy old woman, by the end. Tired. Very tired. She ached and hurt and was too proud to let other people see it. And she didn't see how the Union was changing, because she was obsessed with wiping out haemophages and shapeshifters and everything like that. But she'd have hated what Control became. She'd certainly hate what they are now." She pulls Serafina closer. "I'm staying and that's that."

"I could force you to go," Serafina says numbly. "I… Rose, you don't understand, I don't want to. I'm… I don't want to be my mother. My parents. But I just want to keep you safe. I don't want to force you to do anything, but if I could stop you going down with me, I… maybe I should."

"I'll fight you with everything I've got," Rose says. "You'll have to try your very hardest to m-make me." She tries to stop her voice shaking. It's hard to say this kind of thing to a senior Progenitor, and doubly hard to say it to her mother figure. "I'm not Reina. I'm not as strong as she was. But I'll try my best. Even… even with all the Conditioning in my head. I'm going to stay here and I'm going to keep the bits of the Union which are good – which is the people who make things better! – safe and… and… and I'm going to help you stop Control!" The words almost burn coming out, but she forces them out, and resists the urge to bite out her own tongue for saying such a thing.

It's like a noise in her head which she didn't even realise was there has just stopped. It is elation, it is grace, and it is freedom.

"Oh, Rose," Serafina says sadly. "I hope I don't live to regret this." She kisses her on the forehead. "But I saw how hard that was for you, and… I'll see what I can do to help, but I am proud of you. I know I'm not a very good mother. I'm 'flighty' and I never planned this and… and I can't keep you safe."

"You're the best one I know," Rose says loyally. She takes a breath. "And now you need to put me back in the machine. I said I'm staying no matter what, and I can't let them use me to hurt you, so I can't be allowed to remember this for now. Everyone I care about in the world who isn't an EXEMPLAR is here. I won't let me hurt you."

"I understand," Serafina says. "Thank you. I… I promise I'll let you remember as soon as we're safe. And I'll try to keep as much of the determination and… and everything in. Even if I have to make up a flaming row between us so I can still confess about EXEMPLAR. I'll… I'll try to be the best mother I can. Live up to the expectations you just put on me."

She helps Rose back into the bay of the machine.

"I love you, mama," Rose says softly.

 

[MJ12 Commando]

JB LXIX: Stand And Be Judged

Jamelia remembers the first time she saw the city underneath London, the London Geofront. Once the largest Order of Reason lodge after it had been taken from the fae which had inhabited it and constructed the cavern, constantly expanded by the Order of Reason and then the Technocratic Union, looking at the cavernous space that the Union's largest and most powerful construct occupies still fills her with a sense of awe today, decades after her first time. She walks through streets, noticing that like many long-standing Union facilities you can see the history of the Technocracy in reverse. The outer rings of the London Geofront, the ones which the security checkpoints and hidden entrances lead to, are high-tech, futuristic designs with haptic-enabled holography in their signs, directions and instructions and reminders floating in midair in colorful angular light. Past that, there's the 90s and 80s, all cyberpunk chrome and concrete with obvious surveillance systems and defenses, a sign of the peak of the Ascension War. The post-WWII era comes next, all art deco futurism evoking a sense of optimism at what the future holds, interrupted by the hastily assembled defenses when WWII broke out, reintegrating with more art deco optimism. And then-and then the Victorian architecture, the birth of the Technocratic Union, a circular ring surrounding the original lodge that the Order of Reason worked out of, the underground gardens and the marble-and-stone buildings, temples to knowledge.

All of it is inhabited. It's a literal underground city. Many agents, especially the heavily augmented, practically live down there. Restaurants advertise all-you-can-eat buffets for agents with high caloric requirements. Small franchises, nominally owned and operated by the Syndicate, getting Syndicate products, advertise high-end Imperator Tailoring suits and dresses. Progenitor and Iteration X biomod facilities exist to provide elective augmentation to agents who can pay via the Union's complex internal credit network. Jamelia passes through into the Victorian ring of the Geofront, smiles at the irony of a Gothic Revival building with a holographic sign outside advertising the Icarus 2015 high-performance cyberleg. "Outrun a cheetah with Icarus. Discounts available for Damage Control and Iteration X personnel."

She turns a corner and sees a few shops. The Syndicate's influence has become pervasive-but then again, it was inevitable that they'd encourage free enterprise and the shadow economy, even here. The market, they said, was the best way to allocate resources-and thus why not have an internal market even if the NWO insisted that standard mission equipment involves requisitions? There's a toy store advertising Baby's First Nanoengineering Kit. A daycare. There's signs pointing to an indoor park with an underground lake, a brick building that advertises test preparation to get your child into Damien Academy-it reminds Jamelia that this is the Technocratic Union. It's fundamentally human, in a way its detractors don't understand, and if it has flaws those are still human flaws, human mistakes to be corrected by human hands.

Something worth defending. The Union itself concurs. The security forces and police are Vanessas or HITMarks or Sleeper sympathizers in black polymer body armor wielding futuristic EM rifles. At strategic points massive fortresses full of war materiel tower over the city itself, ready to deploy titans of mechanical might or antigrav assault fortresses or cybertanks should there be an actual invasion. An entire nation's military could invade, and the guardians of Union Central would cut them down.

Jamelia can see, with a trained eye, the more subtle security. The more recent facades in the older circles where combat mechs have been sealed into, the careful architectural design which makes it nearly impossible for attackers to avoid open streets bereft of cover while giving defenders excellent vantage points to slaughter incoming threats, the subliminal messages broadcasted to encourage loyal Union members and discourage Reality Deviants. She knows about the free-floating nanotech in the air, that can instantly deploy to kill invaders or create barriers to prevent their movement. About the reinforced walls that are specifically designed so that they will collapse in a way to stymie invaders even further should they attempt to undermine the Construct.

The EC Construct-Earth Central, the London Geofront-has never been attacked with any success for nearly three hundred years, despite the best efforts of Reality Deviants. She can see why. There's a reassuring feeling of safety here, almost enough to forget that she's not here for pleasure, that the enemy she's fighting has resources far beyond EC and the Earthside Technocracy.

She's here to account for her actions. The Technocracy gives its members trials when they've done something particularly wrong, a last chance to explain their actions to their peers and hopefully avoid punishment. It's one of the concessions the Union has made to 'human rights' instead of efficiency, one that surprisingly enough dates back before Control, and to the early days. With such influence from Queen Elizabeth and her son, why wouldn't they take some influence from British judiciaries? Of course, her trial is rather more severe than the usual sort, which is why it's a Grand Tribunal, which is why instead of the normal panel of judges they have Command itself sitting on the trial, with their own advisors, but fundamentally nothing to prevent them from voting whichever way they want. On one hand, that means she can't rely on precedent. On the other hand, it means she can rely on Command to be... human. Manipulable. Pliable. Sympathetic.

Except for Panopticon. She's done her own probes on the General, the man whose name seems to predate the New World Order. His history is a mystery, his life story redacted. Even with her clearance, the documents on him have so many redactions that The holder of the Empty Seat and the Throne of the Eye is a mystery.

All she knows is that his name, or 'name', is Augustine Aleph. He was a member of the inner circle of the Technocracy, technically part of Control even as he spent most of his time out of the orbital facilities Control existed in. Everything else was information that was so self-contradictory that attempting to piece together his background caused Jamelia a splitting headache, a literal one. She can, however, guess a few facts from his position.

He has to be taking orders from Control. The rumors say that, and the actions of Panopticon support it. He has the stature to refuse orders from anyone less, and she doubts someone appointed to control Union internal security would be chosen for their tendency to make a power-grab. In fact, if that was the plan, why do it now, instead of 15 years ago? During the chaos of the Dimensional Anomaly Panopticon could easily have enforced a state of emergency and become the de facto leaders of the Technocracy.

No, he's getting orders. Does he know about what happened in Moscow, or does he only have the half of the story everyone else does? How much of Moscow was his doing? Worst-case, she needs to have a backup plan to keep him from starting a civil war in the Union via martyrdom.

The rest of her amalgam is there, waiting for her on the steps of the central building, where Command now resides. They've put in modern communications and control equipment in the ancient lodge, reinforced the walls with structural enhancement fields and nanocomposite infusion. But Command was careful, very careful, to keep the legacy intact. The Order of Reason's history, and their legitimacy.

"Hi, Director." Rose is the first to greet her, standing there and looking at the place-wistfully? There's something very old in her expression. "It's been a long time since I've been here." There's something of Reina's voice in that statement, and Jamelia knows Rose isn't referring to her own trial. "We'll be fine." Jamelia can't quite tell if that's Rose being brave, or Reina speaking through Rose.

"We're scheduled in ten minutes." Kessler says. The exojock has finally changed his hairstyle from a mullet to a soldier-looking crew cut, and has found a suit that looks presentable. Jamelia suspects it's made out of ballistic spidersilk, like a NWO suit. "We were waiting for you."

"This is a really nice place, though." Henriette says. "I haven't been to London since my mother was around." She sounds sad, but it's the sadness of someone who's lost her parents, rather than the brittle shell of a woman she was before. "I'm sure this will be easy."

"Last time I was here I was telling them about demon possessed money." Donald says. "This is probably going to be a piece of cake, especially since I wasn't there and can't tell them anything about Moscow. Sadly, your job isn't as easy as 'sit there and fall asleep with your eyes open'." Jamelia smiles weakly at Donald's encouragement.

"I'm ready." Serafina says. She's done her hair up in a bun and is wearing a suit, rather unlike her normal long hair and preference for less formal clothing. "We're going to make this work. It's going to be fine, Director. Stop worrying."

The cavernous entrance hall has deep-level scanners, millimeter-wave, X-Ray, DNA sampling, hyperspatial, and a few dozen more methods of making sure you are who claim to be and you aren't smuggling in any weapons. Guarding it is an Iteration X spidertank, its stubby arms tracking every entering person with high-caliber gatling cannon, and a pair of HITMark VIs styled to look like the mechanized knights of the Order of Reason. The primium-bladed glaives they carry are vibroweapons, capable of carving through the armor of a main battle tank.

"Weapons are not allowed in Union Command. Please leave all weapons here. Integrated weapons will be disabled by the suppression field." one of the HITMarks says. "Any hostile action will be met with immediate lethal force."

Jamelia nods. She doesn't have any weapons on her. She passes through the scanners, leads her amalgam through the corridors. She sees an empty room, where the early Control might have given their orders from. There's something almost mystical about it, how it's arranged around some sort of artifact. Something that Jamelia's only noticing because of Senex's statements.

Control's hypocrisy is irrelevant for now, though. She pushes the armored doors, a facade of oak over high-grade primium, and is in the Tribunal room. There is another HITMark acting as bailiff, a high-end security model, and a few more acting as security. Jamelia notices that outside of the judges and her amalgam, there are no living things in the room. This is to be a closed discussion.

"Director Belltower and associates, please be seated. The judges will introduce themselves." The HITMark says in a deep, soothing voice.

"Joseph Bastion, New World Order." A man, apparently in his 50s with silver hair and a wiry, agile build. He looks like he'd be more comfortable in a warzone than wearing a suit and behind a desk, or playing judge. Jamelia remembers him. He's a soldier and a loyalist, but also a pragmatist. If she can sell her actions as being best for the Union, he'll probably back her.

"Ada Lovelace, Iteration X." The woman representing the Clockwork Convention is clearly young from rejuvenation treatments and nanomedicine, reasonably attractive but not suspiciously so. Her eyes are high-grade prosthetics, human-seeming except for the subtle azure traceries of optronic circuits. She's largely an enigma-possibly a defector, possibly a member of the Virtual Adepts who stayed loyalist and changed her name out of embarassment.

"Jon Li, Progenitors." The youth sitting at the Chair of Life has an easy smile and a handsome face, a face designed for maximum appeal. Jamelia can sense the steel behind it, the fanatic's fire. He will break rather than bend. Dangerous, but if she can manipulate that-useful.

"William Brandenberg, Syndicate." The CEO of the Syndicate has a jovial smile, but behind it hides a man who gained his wealth and power by playing hardball every step of the way. A mercenary, but a mercenary who already has plenty of power and influence as long as he can deliver on his promises.

"Anastasia Ivanova, Void Engineers." The woman saying this has the thin limbs of someone who has spent too much time in zero-G, and looks at Jamelia first, as if she could peel away the layers of deception by sight. Jamelia wants to open up to the admiral, but-but not yet.

"Charles Starborn, Ragnarok Command." Jamelia is surprised General Starborn can fit in his chair. He looks like Kessler, almost, a massive giant of a cyborg. If Kessler hadn't been lost on Xanadu-maybe Kessler would be the person sitting in that chair right now. Like Kessler, the metal outside isn't the important part, it's how the machine outside reflects the steel in the spirit of the man. A paladin, in his own strange way, a soldier fighting what he sees as a just war.

"Now the amalgam being tried should-"

A voice interrupts the bailiff. Jamelia's worst-case scenario.

"Augustine Aleph, Inner Circle." She can't see his face, the shadows in the room perfectly hiding it as he walks confidently to his chair. She didn't notice him enter, either.

"Has the holder of the Empty Seat chosen to grace us at this point because this is important to the Union, or because he fears accusations of incompetence?" Starborn asks. He's supposed to have heavy combat assets, and that seems to be creating some level of tension between him and Panopticon's large supply of equipment. Good.

"I act, as always, for the good of the Technocratic Union." The General responds, tone carefully neutral. "In any case, bailiff, I do not think introducing the amalgam and swearing them in is necessary. We all know who Operative Jamelia Belltower is, and no less than three of her subordinates have been before a tribunal before. Mr. Kessler, after his escape from Xanadu, Mr. Sykes, to talk about the corruption within the SPD, and finally the rather interesting Ms. Ashford. We are already familiar with them, or rather our seats are."

Brandenberg's eyes narrow at the mention of the Syndicate's Special Projects Division. "Fine. Let's get on with it." The Syndicate and NWO have never gotten along. "What are you getting at?"

"I would like to suggest that the preliminary reports she's given of the events in Moscow should be taken as accurate and this tribunal be closed." A gambit. Close inquiry quickly, leave smelling like roses. Make it look like generosity.

"Unacceptable, General." Iteration X's representative says. "We did not spend this effort to set up a grand tribunal solely to dismiss everything. Even given that Operative Belltower's statements are trustworthy and backed up by evidence, part of the reason for having such a tribunal is to understand what happened in Moscow. And, I would like to note, Panopticon's operation is also in question here, as is its secrecy."

"Agreed." Admiral Ivanova says. "In any case, I would like to hear Director Belltower tell us in person about her experiences in Moscow, as completely as possible."

Jamelia nods, repeats her prepared story about the rogue Iterators of unknown origin having made pacts with alien invaders, Henriette's performance in the DSS against the alien war machines that invaded Moscow, and her dealing with hostiles in the Museum leading to her injuries.

"One question. The one thing that I'm interested in, Operative Belltower," Brandenberg asks, "is about the EDEs you fought. The sensor recordings from surveillance satellites at the time showed the EDEs as being-well, similar to certain Union designs, were they not? Something similar to various biomechanical titan projects we've funded. Would you care to theorize on this?"

"I don't think that's an important question." Admiral Ivanova says. "And you'd only get supposition, rather than anything meaningful."

"I do." Starborn says. "I'd like to know more about them so if it happens again we'll be ready."

"Agreed. I'd like to hear more about these EDEs with Technocratic design principles." Professor Li says.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

New Game Concept: Purchases

Most of the time, agents are assigned equipment on a necessity basis, with other factors such as "how well the leadership likes you" and "your reputation". Fortunately, for agents who have no willingness to brown-nose but still need gear, you have the Syndicate to thank, because they've made equipment available for the highest bidder.

Purchases are generally done for Prime Energy, although mundane resources are often a valid method of purchasing lower-end equipment. The most common sources of Prime Energy are werewolf caerns and hemophages, as werewolf caerns are often rich in valuable materials and EDE exotic matter which can be processed into devices, and hemophage blood and organs are likewise similarly useful in creating components. Werewolves themselves are also a good source of biotech resources like regenerative hormones.

This encourages agents to kill werewolves and hemophages and harvest their parts when they're short on equipment. The Syndicate, whenever asked, steeples their hands and goes "working as intended".

_______________________________________________________________________________________

An Excuse:
[ ] Write-in: Make up an excuse to answer Brandenberg's question without going "oh shit Iteration X EDEs".

Hearing Preparation:
How are you approaching the tribunal?
[ ] (0.5x) Defensive: Focus solely on avoiding trouble.
[ ] (1.5x) Self-Aggrandizing: Focus on emphasizing your successes
[ ] (1.5x) Aggressive: Focus on attacking Panopticon
[ ] Write-in

Free Time:

[ ] Studying: Go learn things. Spheres, Skills, maybe improve an attribute or two.
[ ] Raiding: Go raid some werewolf caerns in the Amazon or something to get yourself more Prime Energy to buy things with.
[ ] Investigation: Choose a topic that's come up that you're going to want to read into.

[ ] The Ixoi (start globetrotting)
[ ] The Order of Reason's Remnants (this may involve contacting the Sons of Ether)
[ ] One of the members of Command (choose who)
[ ] Control (go take a tour in the Union's museums and historical archives!)​

 

[MJ12 Commando]

JB LXX: A Union Divided

"One question. The one thing that I'm interested in, Operative Belltower," Brandenberg asks, "is about the EDEs you fought. The sensor recordings from surveillance satellites at the time showed the EDEs as being-well, similar to certain Union designs, were they not? Something similar to various biomechanical titan projects we've funded. Would you care to theorize on this?"

"I don't think that's an important question." Admiral Ivanova says. "And you'd only get supposition, rather than anything meaningful."

"I do." Starborn says. "I'd like to know more about them so if it happens again we'll be ready."

"Agreed. I'd like to hear more about these EDEs with Technocratic design principles." Professor Li says.

Jamelia has prepared for this. She knows how to answer. "Firstly, I would like to point out to this panel that I have no formal training in Dimensional Science, so can only make educated guesses on their precise nature," Jamelia begins. It's a simple opening gambit; one which reminds them that whatever she says should not be taken as definitive, and that she's aware of that herself. "However, yes, CEO Brandenburg, I did note the resemblance to our own cyberbiological weapons platforms. I also noted that the apparent field-commander of the hostiles, despite her apparent human guise, appeared to be some high end combat gynoid enhancile, and that the hostiles went to compromise the largely obsolete HITMark systems in use in Moscow first and jam our own IFF protocols. That suggests to me that at least some of their plan was to cause blue-on-blue friendly fire incidents among our ranks."

She takes a breath. "Moreover, we also know that the cyberbiological platforms were being remotely powered by wormhole interface from some unknown locations. It seems likely that we cannot judge the enemy force which launched this attack merely by its use of equipment which resembled - but was by no means identical to - modern Iteration X equipment. Given that the only enemy assets we saw were remote-operated..." she shakes her head, "well, I cannot shake the suspicion that perhaps we only saw what they wanted us to see. Certainly, considering the sheer amounts of materiel lost in 1999, any hostile power in space who could salvage lost equipment would have a lot of high end Union tech to begin their own weapons programs, even as we reeled from the loss of so many assets. Hence, we encountered an advanced HITMark-alike presumably based off lost HITMark VIs, and advanced cyberbiological war machines which resembled our own projects." Jamelia clears her throat. "I was out of action for the actual main engagement; Dr Rosario, do you have anything else you would like to add based on your own observations."

"Yes, Director," Serafina says, straightening up almost imperceptibly. "I observed that the hostile cyberbiological units seemed notably less efficient in combat than DSS-03, and were forced to resort to cannibalism early on for power conservation. I suspect that means that they are ill-adapted for terrestrial environments, and despite their superficially more advanced design, that suggests that a lot of their 'advancement' is crude and brute-forced without the Union's characteristic efficiency of design, intended for space use exclusively. As a result they were power hungry when operating in Earth-normal environments, even compared to DSS-03. This is common to extradimensional variants of earthly lifeforms - take how xenografted equines which resemble the mythological 'unicorn' must feast off flesh, despite their metabolic rate being much like that of a horse."

"Clever." Starborn concedes. "So the enemy in your opinion has a relatively sophisticated understanding of Union protocols, and was wishing to use our response against us? And the actions of Panopticon played into their hands?"

"The actions of Panopticon in Russia were a local autonomous response, which the greater organization had no part in. Even so, you are blaming the locals for failing to predict the future when someone was using a high-spec tachyon jammer to ensure no acausal computing could be done. Shall we next blame Ragnarok Command for failing to station DSS-04 and the Titan Series there as well, leaving only one assault carrier's worth of munitions and DSS-03 to defend against them?" The General's implications are clear. He could go further. Talk about how DSS-03 wouldn't have won if it wasn't for an unknown feature that might not even be kosher and nobody wishes to talk about in polite company. The General has power. Panopticon has power.

Starborn, damn stubborn Starborn, doesn't take the hint. "General Aleph. With all due respect, I think we can talk about the failures in coordination that resulted from your secret police playing games with the Union at large."

"General Starborn." The ex-Man in White's voice is measured, neutral, betraying no emotion. Jamelia is almost impressed. "If we wanted to go into the failings of everyone and measure out blame, I think absolutely nobody here would be left standing. Let's talk about Ragnarok Command, for example. You had no assets stationed there, save DSS-03, which, I may note, was only deployable because Operative Belltower's amalgam, out of pure luck, had a pilot who was interface-capable with it. This territorial pissing match, no matter what your intentions, does nothing for the good of the Union. Which is, incidentally, my opinion on this tribunal itself. Yes, significant amounts of munitions were spent, and assets were lost. But we have made a career, a very long one, on fighting apocalyptic doomsday scenarios and stopping them. We have done it again, and again, and although ideally we do so in such a way that nobody ever knows of the truth, we have succeeded in Moscow." He pauses. "Please, Operative Belltower. Continue."

"I object." Starborn growls out. "I believe Panopticon's behavior is much of the reason Moscow was so unsalvageable."

The General, Augustine Aleph, is playing these men and women. She can sense no hyperpsychology tricks, no massive social augmentations. He knows Starborn is aggressive, and resents Panopticon, and has used that to completely overturn the plans Serafina has drawn up, the plans Jamelia stamped, to play Panopticon off as questionably competent. These are not children, but against a member of the Inner Circle, they are playing into his narrative. Jamelia is reminded of Moscow, of using Serafina to confirm her suspicions, of how just by sheer grit and experience she was capable of manipulating someone with massively enhanced emotional and logical intelligence. In a way, of all the obstacles the enemy, the false Control, has thrown against her, The General is the one she can respect the most. Iteration X had knowledge but no wisdom, the Transhumans had wisdom but no knowledge-Augustine Aleph possesses both, and knows exactly how to use them. And unlike the false Control-he has human strength, rather than EDE insanity.

"Overruled." Joseph Bastion speaks. "Second-guessing failures in a situation with near-nonexistent intelligence is something we should leave to office gossip, not a Grand Tribunal."

"I agree with my colleague Bastion." Jon Li adds. "We're here to ask questions not because anyone is accused of impropriety, but because we want to understand how Moscow lurched so close to apocalypse as to prevent it from happening again. We don't want a repeat of India 1999."

"Agreed." The Iterator says.

"I concur with my colleagues." Brandenberg says. "Examining this in too much detail would be... painful to everyone."

"The majority has agreed to table this issue." The Bailiff-HITMark concludes. "Continue with your report, Operative."

Jamelia switches tacks, understands she needs to improvise. Siding with Ragnarok Command here might be dangerous, might be exactly what The General expects. Instead-instead think of the long term. Focus on getting herself the resources to fight Panopticon on more equal terms later. Or, a little rebellious part of her mind thinks, The General is human. That is a strength-but with it comes the ability to doubt. Does he know what Control has become? Does he know what masters he now serves? If he did-he wouldn't be here. Sabotage the Void Engineers, start a civil war-leak evidence that the VEs are suppressing the Earthside Union. So many options she hasn't had a single hint of. Or maybe those are part of the web of lies woven by the enemy. Jamelia hates working with such an information deficit.

Jamelia talks about how well Henriette held up in an unfamiliar machine, how well the Russians did against such an unexpected attack. She talks about the Void Engineers' heroism, and yes, she points out that her actions, although possibly unconventional, led to a spate of defections from hostile forces such as the Tunguskans and Virtual Adepts. That, she notes, leads to some approval from Brandenberg and Lovelace, and Ivanova looks to be satisfied, even as the others disagree. Questions come, mostly about details of the operation, and as they come Jamelia notices that there's a subtle deference to the Seat of the Eye that slowly develops, not enough to concern her, but it's there.

Henriette helps. She's regained a bit of her self-confidence, the brash hotshot pilot that existed a year ago is... not quite back, but at least a little bit of the old Langley fire is there. She gives a blow-by-blow of fighting the EDEs, a story about how she managed to take an unfamiliar weapon, even if it was, in some ways, her mother's child, and almost take on the EDE threat without having to activate the undocumented feature of the Apotheosis Protocols.

"The Apotheosis Protocols." the General says. "How did you activate them?"

"I don't know." Henriette says truthfully. "I don't remember much about what happened then. I may have been hallucinating." This, at least, is true.

Panopticon's leader does not push the issue. "Understandable, given that catastrophic damage to DNI-used machines can cause altered perception. Good work. I move for the preliminary hearing to be concluded and for this tribunal to resume at a later date, after more evidence can be recovered from Moscow and more context developed on these EDEs."

"Iteration X assents."

"The Syndicate agrees."

"The Void Engineers abstain."

"The New World Order agrees."

"The Progenitors wish to further question Operative Belltower about her... unconventional methods."

"Ragnarok Command wishes to do the same."

The closing is just a formality, setting up another date a few weeks later to meet again and go into her claims in more detail. A temporary suspension of official activity without sanction, and with full pay. A friendly 'suggestion' that she stay in regular contact with Another meeting, maybe two or three if she's unlucky.

As she turns to leave, she hears The General address her personally. "Operative Belltower, a word please, in private?" Jamelia thinks for a moment, kidnapping situations. She takes a chance, makes the reasonable assumption that if he wanted her out of the picture in that way he wouldn't have made it obvious.

The General, the keeper of the Empty Seat and the throne of the Eye, is old. He looks to be in his late 50s, which means that he's probably even older than that. Jamelia thinks he could be as old as Reina was, maybe. As old as Cemal. It's not likely. He reads to be younger, perhaps only two or three centuries old. Perhaps even younger than that. She waits for him to speak.

"Operative Belltower. I apologize for the happenings in Moscow and if you have any evidence that there was significant wrongdoing-anything at all, I would like to see it first as to take preventative action as soon as possible. Despite what you may believe, I am absolutely loyal to the Technocratic Union and its ideals."

That she doesn't doubt. She just wonders which Technocratic Union he's referring to. "I'll keep that in mind."

****************************************************************************************

As twilight falls on the Geofront (an artificial sunset, admittedly, but a sunset nevertheless), Jamelia goes to the memorial. Those who have fallen in service to the Technocratic Union and the forces of Reason are written here, interred in spirit if not in fact.

There are very few bodies. The Union rarely can spare the resources to recover them, and even a body is a resource. Dead exojocks are salvaged for components. Brains, if mostly intact, can be used as templates to create combat constructs. Kessler's belief that there are ghosts inhabiting his cybernetic components is surprisingly accurate. Even when the Union doesn't believe in ghosts, there is something a little more than figurative about carrying the tools of your ancestors. There are many HITMarks and MiB who are literally dead men walking. The Union expects you to sacrifice, body and soul, even after death.

Of those who did not end up being recycled in some form or another-they very rarely left recoverable, recognizable bodies. "Vaporization from Reality Deviant lightning strike", "thrown into vat of molten steel", "eaten by xenomorphs"-it was relatively rare that a Technocrat died in a way where there was something that could be considered a 'body' and yet was not recyclable in some form. And then there was the Dimensional Anomaly, and none of those bodies are likely to be recovered. Even if they are listed as 'MIA' on the ghostly holograms, everyone knows that those people are almost certainly dead, the few ships and refugees who manage to return from the Anomaly being celebrated the same way a miraculous resurrection might be.

She finds Henriette there, in a somber black dress, leaving another set of flowers on the base of the memorial. Dealing with her ghosts. Jamelia has her own ghosts to appease. Men and women, often good, sometimes bad, but all people, who she has felt responsibility for, who she has directly or indirectly killed. Some of them were necessary sacrifices, some were pragmatic decisions, and some were mistakes.

She has a lot of mistakes to answer for. That's why she's there. She pays her respects to the dead, finishes long after Henriette. It's simulated nighttime.

"Director." Her voice is raw, her cheeks streaked with tears. For all that, she looks to be in better shape than when Jamelia had first met the young pilot. Henriette has nothing to say. What can you ask in a place like this?

"Henriette. I'm sorry for interrupting you." It isn't much of an interruption, to be fair. But yet-this is so intensely personal.

"No, no. It's fine. I was just... remembering the fallen. I'm ready now." She starts to walk away from the memorial, one of the few places in the Geofront where there is actual quiet, rather than the constant bustle of activity. Underneath London, the Union's capitol never sleeps.

Jamelia follows, but even as she does, she can sense the presence of the watchful dead. Senex's teachings have corrupted her, she thinks ruefully. She wonders if the Void Engineers know, if they care. That house on the surface, those Nazi RNEs-ghosts, and that mysterious benefactor and his plasma lance- "Faithful even after death" indeed. They walk away from the memorial together, quietly, even as the somber atmosphere enforced by the Technocracy's war dead fades for the cheery utopian optimism of the capitol's populace. "Henriette. I need your help." Jamelia finally says, after a few minutes of silence.

"I'd be glad to return the favor." Henriette responds. "I owe you a lot for... everything."

"I want you to help me find out more about Iteration X's chair on Command. She isn't very popular, last I heard?" It's late, and she hasn't eaten, so Jamelia gestures in the direction of a automated cafe. Henriette turns in its direction and sits down, orders a sandwich. Jamelia echoes the young Iterator's movements. Mirroring her almost unconsciously. She glances at the surveillance systems around, double-checks that yes, Henriette's chosen a place out of view.

"Well, no." Henriette says, between bites of sandwich. "Not with the soldiers. She's been cutting military-grade augmentation development, emphasizing civilian and quality-of-life enhancement. It's why the Masses are getting thought-controlled prosthetic limbs now and we're still on the HITMark V and Gen 3 exomusculature." Henriette thinks for a moment. "Yeah, when I was training to be a BioVARG pilot all the vets were bitching about how Lovelace was cutting this program or that program, how the NWO's fighter jets can now beat ours with just 5-1 odds, and how if the eggheads were getting so smart, why didn't we get a HITMark VIII or something out of it? Or maybe a new OGRE. The scientists and engineers? They love the new path Iteration X is taking."

"It's just that Iteration X has always been a science and engineering department in service to a paramilitary arm and they have less influence." Jamelia finishes.

Henriette nods. "Something like that. I'm not exactly up to date on Iteration X politics, and Kessler's even worse about it."

"Which is exactly why he's not here right now, although I suppose I'll have to call him if he becomes useful. Let's start figuring out who we're dealing with."

________________________________________________________________________________________

Investigating Iteration X
How exactly are you two starting this investigation?
[ ] (1.25x) Personal ties: Go back in Henriette's family history and look up people who may have been family friends.
[ ] Kessler's Gang: Assault Team K65 and Iteration X soldiers who know him might be useful-persuadable.
[ ] Record trawl: Go through a lot of boring Union internal messaging data with Jamelia's shiny security clearance to see what internal opinion is like and who you could probably lean on. Boring and predictable but safe.
[ ] (0.9x) You have some (former) Union leadership in IBM who have been mysteriously sort of integrating their less visible people in fits and starts. That's a favor network you could make use of. Discreetly.
[ ] Write-in

And now, what's everyone else doing? This has relatively low plot impact, although personal plots may be resolved or character details emphasized. I may or may not write them if they're interesting or if someone has an idea. This is a hint, people.

Rose:

[ ] Volunteer somewhere. Somewhere where you don't have to hurt people. Do something nice for a change.
[ ] Drag Donald and Serafina off and see if you can't actually find a solution to this whole 'romantic tension' thing.
[ ] Explore Reina's history by walking through the Geofront.
[ ] Confront... and maybe reconcile? With Thorn.

Donald:
[ ] Check up on old contacts who might be able to give you a little tit for tat.
[ ] Check up on older contacts. The Reality Deviant kind. It's what the Syndicate does, it's not going to look bad on people's records, even if it somehow gets out.
[ ] Check up on new people who are successful because of you.
[ ] Check up on people whose lives you've harmed and try to pay a little back.

Kessler (Who totally could get a Seeking if he has a revelation of how he doesn't fit into civilian life)
[ ] Visit old friends who have actually managed to transition to peace.
[ ] Reenact Rambo. The first movie. No, I don't mean the part where he goes crazy, but that quote where Rambo talks about having so much power and respect there and nothing here.

Serafina
[ ] Talk to Donald about this whole "my daughter who should probably be considered underage is crushing on you and I know you're sexually attracted to her" thing.

[ ] (0.5x) Sympathetically.
[ ] Unsympathetically.​

[ ] Go visit the Damien Academy again. You're a pretty respected alumnus, they'd love having you back. In fact, you could totally do a presentation.
[ ] Visit the Void Engineers. You have a fangirl, and Elsa might want to hear back from you.
[ ] Visit that unofficial shelter for Constructs you were looking at, of all the old failed war-constructs who were possibly willing to take in Rose. [1] Before you gave in on keeping her in service.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

[1] There are a surprising lot of Progenitor constructs who, because of their focus on long-term operations and broad-spectrum enhancement versus "I have a sweet plasma gun cyberarm", accidentally/accidentally on-purpose had far too much empathy[2] or a monkeysphere that was too large[3]. This makes them rather useless for 'killing people and taking their stuff'.

[2] Empathy is actually a pretty important trait for long-term infiltration. The problem happens when empathy becomes sympathy. It's a problem both FACADE and the NWO grapple with all the time. Unflinching sociopaths like Gretkov are sometimes useful soldiers, but are kind of shit at any long-term infiltration op.

[3] Similarly, it turns out massive intelligence boosts to both emotional and logical intelligence can make people more than a little bad at ignoring the human costs of their actions.[4]

[4] On the other hand, if you have the resources of the pre-1999 Technocracy, you can just leave them in a position where they can bodyguard NGOs trying to reduce blindness in Africa or something, or if they're also smart, make them work on R&D for, like, reducing infant mortality.[5]

[5] The two ironies are: 1. that by being very, very good at reassigning people with moral qualms to places where they would never have to face up to, or even know of, the stuff the paramilitary or black ops arms of the Union get into, the reformers were generally sabotaged by being able to sweep it under the rug. "I am only responsible for making disadvantaged people better off" is a pretty true refrain in a lot of the R&D Conventions (including the Syndicate). 2. The pre-1999 Union saw constructs as a lesser and more expendable race but had the resources to take defective constructs and use them in places where their defects were unimportant. Again, this was out of sheer pragmatism ("if constructs learn that they'll be recycled if they're defective they'll be less likely to report their defects to us, thus making it harder to rely on them"), rather than any form of Advanced Ethical Enlightenment. The post-1999 Union is much more sympathetic to their pleas for rights but is also much less capable of finding the uniquely shaped hole they fit in.[6]

[6] If it was pre-99, Rose would probably have been reassigned to some job bodyguarding doctors in Africa helping the poor with no second thoughts. Post-99, Command has to go "look, she's got a high-end militarized body that we can't spare. Either make her useful for things high-end militarized bodies are used for, or we're recycling her."[7]

[7] Demilitarization would possibly have worked. No wonder Serafina feels so guilty.

 

[MJ12 Commando]

JB LXXI: Future History

In a semi-drunken state of mind, Kessler dreams. Kessler dreams of war. Sort of. He knows enough about his psychic powers and the Umbra to know that this isn't just his dream. The collective unconscious of mankind, according to those redacted NWO files on their 'failed psychic program'. What the Akashics call the Akashic Record. What the Dreamspeakers call the dreaming. His dream has popped him right into the part of the Dreaming that impinges on the concept of War.

In the Dreaming, reality doesn't matter. He sees warriors of every past conflict from prehistoric tribes to wars he wasn't around for-Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya-and warriors of conflicts that might happen, all in the same hazy non-existence. Technocratic weapons, mystic swords and enchanted armor, unicorn cavalry and Union cybertanks-all of them are here in the slaughter, a war that never ends.

"Nice symbolism here." John Kessler says. His voice is echoed from behind, and he turns. He sees someone familiar, yet different, a Chinese martial artist with a engraved straight-sword. A Order of Reason crusader in half-plate wielding a miniaturized gatling gun. A young American fighting in the Civil War, wearing Union (and not the Technocratic kind) blue. A Greek hoplite who stands with the gift of Genius. A British redcoat. A masked vigilante with a Thompson SMG. People he could have been. All soldiers. All people who have walked this same path, possessed this same shard of cosmic knowledge.

There is a mountain there, a literal mountain of skulls that the two sides seem to be fighting for. A valueless point that may have once been strategic but now is just a symbol of loss. There is a blinking query on his HUD, a text message.

John Kessler. Why do you fight?

"I fight because I want to do the right thing."

John Kessler. Why do you fight?

Insofar as there is any way to tell the emotion of plain green text, he senses disapproval.

Is this how heroes are made?

The Dreaming fades, and he is walking through a sand-swept desert. Around him are overturned vehicles and burning soldiers. His HUD notes a chemical warning, tells him that internal NBC filters have engaged because of the toxic fumes in the air. He sees them moan, beg, cry. Dead men in a dead realm. He steps through the carnage, aware that this is some kind of test. Around him, soldiers in US Army uniforms, soldiers that-soldiers that could be him, suffer. Nevertheless, he does not react. He's seen so much that something like this doesn't faze him. Not anymore. He's seen worse.

Why do you fight? This path you're walking isn't one you are ignorant of. You have always known of it. You know how easy it would be to make this mistake. How one simple accident can cause so much carnage.

Colombia. Belize. San Antonio. Los Angeles. Yes, he's seen what happens when agents go rogue, or when they don't but they just forget what they're fighting for. Berlin. Kandahar. New Delhi. Xian. He's seen what happens when mistakes get made in the use of heavy ordinance. He's made a few himself. "I fight because if I didn't, someone else would have to. I don't want to be responsible for some fresh-faced kid being shot because he thought war was a game."

Better. Still incomplete.

"And that someone else might be a lot worse at it." He is constantly walking uphill here, ignoring the screams. In the distance, there are only the sounds of more war, of more potential nightmare scenarios. Of more death and carnage and horror. He keeps walking.

So what is your purpose then? You see all these horrors of war, you recognize how easy it is to commit them even with the purest of heart and the noblest of deeds, for war is chaotic at its best and actively malicious at its worst. Yet you still refuse to lay down arms. You saw your colleagues last night. You know that it is possible. A crazy old relic of the Union like you would even be encouraged. You could request a discharge. You could be like so many soldiers and retire. Your service is done. Insofar as a soldier's service can be admirable, yours was. Minimal civilian casualties, relatively low collateral damage-well, for a heavy assault element. High success rate. Your job could long since be over. But yet you still fight. You are jealous of those colleagues who've transitioned to peaceful retirement. Yet you don't wish to join them. Why?

He mangles a quote from a movie. "Out here, I'm managing multi-million dollar equipment, I'm someone to be respected. Back there-I probably couldn't get a job parking cars."

So, then, John Rambo. Your path is fixed, unchanging. Your reasons for walking it are...

"I'm walking this path because I was born to it. Because I'm good at it, and I've always known that I would walk this path. I don't think I could do anything else. I'm fighting for the right thing in my mind, and maybe so's everyone else I'm fighting against, but someone's going to be doing that job anyways. Maybe I'm not fighting for peace, but that doesn't mean I can't be fighting to make the world a bit better than it is now. And just look at everyone I've seen. Mai, the others, I talk to them and they talk about what they've done, and it's just so profoundly empty. Me? I've fought an enemy that wants to kill us all, faced down an army, beaten a half-dozen vampires to a pulp, narrowly avoided being in the range of a nuclear strike. They have boring days of dealing with newfangled 21st century technology that doesn't have VR and talking about network implementations and going over intelligence reports. They have corporate meetings and 'exciting' mergers. That's not a life I want. Me? I'm happy with this life. I'm going to kill things that threaten humankind until I die of it or until there's nothing left to fight, and that I'm entirely fine with."

An acceptable answer.

The Dreaming fades, leaves him with nothing more than half-answers... and a slight giddy feeling of new revelations. Yes, he's going to be fighting this war until it kills him. He's not going to live forever, there's eventually going to be a dragon too big for even him to slay, and maybe he's going to fail and damn the entire human race-but it doesn't matter.

If John Kessler dies, it's not going to be in retirement. He's going to die with a gun in each hand and a cigar in his mouth, staring death in the face and daring it to come and take his life if it's got the balls to do so.

****************************************************************************************

The knock at her door is early. "Come in," Jamelia says, looking up from her paperwork. Much like any office she has been in for a few days, new filing cabinets have appeared seemingly from nowhere. The New World Order has been holding a valiant rearguard action against the attempts by the technological Conventions to enforce paperless offices, because it's much easier to secure paperwork than computers.

Jamelia knows she's pretty. Not too pretty, of course, but enough that people who don't know to be wary of her get put on ease. Ms Williams has the same kind of 'natural' attractiveness, and Jamelia can see the carefully applied discreet cosmetics which reinforce it without being too obvious. In some ways, it can be even more effective than the superhuman attractiveness beloved of Progenitors. Attractive enough to make your way through the world easier, not so attractive that you're the center of attention.

A little shorter than average, naturally brunette but dyed blonde, in shape - reinforced recently with NWO basic - some traces of some Progenitor gene-tweaking of the 'cleaning up a possible condition' level, and someone entirely in home in her still-stiff black suit. Entirely used to business dress, unlike Brakowski, who still looks uncomfortable in a suit and tie.

Hmm. She'll need to make sure Williams gets the proper elocution training - the kind you'd give an Operative, not just a Watcher. And maybe some statistical modelling as well. An investigative journalist should have a solid base to build on, and once she has some NWO tricks for finding the most vulnerable person in an organization up her sleeves, she'll be a useful asset for those disruptive little phone calls that Jamelia finds can so cripple things in her way. Like police responses.

"Director Belltower," Rachael Williams says in greeting. "Sorry, I'm a bit early."

Jamelia smiles. "Turning up early rarely results in ill-opinions," she points out. She can see the faint smile which flashes onto the other woman's lips. Yes, that was entirely deliberate on her part. "I just felt we should talk. I have your three week appraisal from Dr Rosario... all perfectly fine." She carefully lowers her voice, pitching it to sound trustworthy. "I do understand that you might not have realized quite what you were getting into when you were assigned to this amalgam. Please, sit down."

Rachael looks momentarily awkward as she takes a seat, and tries to cover it up with a smile. "Ah... yes, I'm sorry Director, but it came as quite a surprise."

"Well, I didn't plan it this way myself," Jamelia says calmly. "I submitted the request for more Enlightened personnel and designation as a field-training amalgam even before Hong Kong happened." She smiles. "I think you just have to consider it your good luck that this didn't clear until after Moscow."

The other woman laughs. She seems to be relaxing somewhat. Good. She's seeing Jamelia as someone more human. Just as planned. It's so annoying, the myths which build up about senior New World Order operatives sometimes. She blames the ones who show off how they can control someone's thoughts with a few well-chosen subliminal words. It makes it so much harder for everyone else, and also means people are looking for subliminal messaging in your words which is a pain when you're actually trying to use it.

"Regardless," Jamelia continues, "you seem to be settling in well. I've noted a few areas for improvement which I will seek to remedy. Don't be concerned; I do that for everyone. Do you have anything you wish to raise at this point?"

Rachael Williams is an idealist. Very much a fresh-faced Utopian member of the New World Order. Jamelia wonders how well she'll preserve that facet of her, or whether the Watchers' duties will lead her to jaded voyeurism.

"I'm... still quite new to the Union," she says. "This entire place was hidden under London... well, it's amazing. The architecture is... wow. I've been to a few of the museums and..." she shakes her head. "Uh... points to raise. I'm not sure. I've been doing much the same things as before I was assigned here, but things are quite disrupted. I'm not sure. I think it's a bit early to say. I can't say anything seems very wrong, though."

Jamelia nods understandingly. "I understand if you feel a little neglected," she says. "The senior staff are a little distracted right now." She crosses her hands on her lap. "However, I do believe something has come up which your personal skills are well-suited for. Specifically, I need the skills of an investigative reporter."

Watcher Williams perks up, paying more attention. "What for, Director?" she asks.

"You've covered wars - and the political machinations which cause them. Well, now it's time to look into the internal politics of another Convention. You can consider this a bit of a test if you really want, but some of it is me wanting a fresh opinion on their current state - and some of it is mild concern about some of the internal tensions I'm hearing in their ranks."

You might prefer the wars, Jamelia doesn't say.

The ex-reporter grins. "What's my assignment?"

"I need someone to help me look into Iteration X. I have my own methods, but multiple viewpoints aren't ever redundant."

"Iteration X? What kind of internal politics do they have? I thought they were just tech guys who made computers and robots and gadgets."

"Not quite." Jamelia says. It's a common misconception. "They've been intertwined with the Ascension War since their inception." Since they stopped being the International Brotherhood of Mechanicians. Since they started listening to the Computer, Jamelia thinks. "Nowadays, after more than a century of being on the front lines of the Ascension War in both ways-both technological and military-the soldiers have a surprising amount of pull. I'd like to know more about the hardliners and the political viewpoint of Iteration X in general. Is there anyone who might be second in line to the throne?"

"I can get you a report in two weeks." The other woman says enthusiastically. "If you need it any sooner, it'll probably be rushed."

"Excellent. Two weeks will be fine."

****************************************************************************************

Henriette knows that she should be putting more effort into understanding the political leanings of her fellow Iterators, but when they told her that since she was in the area, and since this was a tribunal for the purposes of procedure, rather than a tribunal which would be punishing, and that she was now the Hero of Moscow because she was the DSS-03's pilot when everything went down so maybe she should check out and receive a new vehicle to replace her old assault walker-

-well, that sounded far more interesting. And she was doing her job by socializing with the technicians! Although most of it involved going through the specifications of the Variform Ground Vehicle-3, the Interceptor with the design team.

"I thought I was getting an assault walker replacement." She looks at the Interceptor, and although it's certainly a beautiful vehicle that looks like it's breaking the sound barrier, let alone the speed limit, when standing still, there are some things vehicles need limbs for. No matter how sexy a car is-and this one looks like it's the child of a Syndicate-built sportscar and a Iteration X stealthed superfighter-it can't grab a shapeshifter and throw them over the horizon.

"Variform Ground Vehicle." the technician, whose AR nametag reads "R. Gibson" replies with some level of exasperation. "It's a multimodal combat chassis that can switch to a humanoid combat mode. It's just that we're putting it into more than a handful of relatively rare vehicles now. I'm loading a full summary of what it can do now to your ADEI."

The young pilot whistles as she reads the data for the Interceptor. Dual 30mm railguns with a variety of payloads that link up for sniper functions while transformed, smart grenade dispensers firing programmable microgrenades, a point-defense laser system, high-power compact fusion reactor, high-tensile shape-memory alloy internal components that double as musculature in humanoid form, heavy primium chassis, and a piezoelectric-reinforced vehicle skin that also provides thermal, radar, and even visual stealth. Henriette whistles. It's a hundred-million dollar supercomputer that happens to be able to go from 0-300 km/h in 2.5 seconds.

Henriette wonders what happened to the first two versions of the VGV series and why she hasn't heard of them, and she brings up the information on her ADEI. A surfeit of technical errors and bugs, some of them fatal in the colloquial, rather than the information technology, sense. She's a very good pilot who's used to vehicles dangerous to their users, but she's gotten to this level by being concerned about potentially deadly features. "I assume the VGV-3 doesn't have the same conversion issues as the previous two?"

"We fixed those, more or less. It's reliable if it's transforming at high speed, but not if you're moving slowly or in areas with a lot of EMI. There's a safety warning in the event malfunction is likely."

"Good to hear. So can I take this out for a test drive?"

The technician grins. "I thought you'd never ask."

****************************************************************************************

Jamelia is a little surprised when Henriette calls and says that she wants to leave the Geofront and visit someone. It seems like a distraction, but she still has time, so Jamelia reluctantly assents.

She raises an eyebrow as Henriette's car comes into view. It looks-well, it looks very Iteration X. Sculpted artificial beauty in the form of a high-tech vehicle that might be the offspring of a stealth fighter and a Lamborghini. She notices the subtle signs of militarization-'rear-view mirrors' with fairings designed to conceal machineguns, 'air intakes' that conceal weapons, tires made out of dense nanotube mesh-she has no doubt that it's a bit more powerful than a Paladin. Iteration X has always been good at building military technology, even with the cuts to military R&D priority.

Iteration X has, however, never been good at making subtle war machines, and this vehicle seems to be just another one of a line of unsubtle designs. It'd draw far too much attention for her normal work.

"Iterator Langley. I assume we're not taking this out of the Geofront?"

"If it's okay with you, we are. We're going to visit a Construct in Hereford. Talking to the techs and pilots, there's a General Michael Garrison the hardliners respect. I'd like to find out a bit more about him, and he basically runs that mixed Construct."

"Hereford, where the SAS are based? That's one of our processing centers for combat operatives." Jamelia knows a lot more about Union recruiting than Henriette does. There are plenty of people who don't quite make it in special forces training, but have the right attitude and just enough bitterness to sign their lives up with a shadowy global conspiracy, especially when that shadowy global conspiracy can cure your weaknesses, whatever they are. "I don't recall Jessica Belltower being removed from control-and no, she's not related to me."

"He's not actually officially running it, but the pilots and techs think he's basically the one guy who's making all the decisions at this point, since he's running the regional shapeshifter and hemophage culling programs. It's why I want to take this car here, just in case we might end up getting into a fight or three, because they say that shapeshifters often attack exiting convoys"

Makes sense. Iteration X can play politics just like any other Convention, and if you're the one primarily doing combat ops-the Union's still got a lot of people who think that the Ascension War is the kind of war that's fought by firing missiles into houses. Depressing that so many intelligent people find it so hard to think about their approach and whether it actually works, but if everyone thought like her-well, she'd be out of a job, wouldn't she, Jamelia thinks.

She settles into the memory-foam bucket seat that reminds her of a fighter jet's ejection seat, looks at the driver console, which is closer to a cockpit, including the MFDs, than any car she's ever seen, and digs into the glove compartment for the instructions. There's an interface port for any Technocratic PDA or smartphone, and she plugs hers in.

"Welcome to the Variform Ground Vehicle Model 3 (the Interceptor) User Manual".

Iteration X, Jamelia thinks. She suspected that a multi-million dollar sportscar was still too subtle for them.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Yeah, this is probably pretty crappy. I had a very busy week, sorry. If someone wants to make the Donald writein feel free.

Jamelia and Henriette's Adventures:
So what happens during the trip? (Note that very few of these are going to threaten the VGV-3)
[ ] Nothing
[ ] Talking more about Henriette's issues/backstory
[ ] I-50-B31 runs into you again. How inconvenient.
[ ] Rogue Council Terrorism
[ ] Werewolf Terrorism
[ ] A detour into something Cemal remembers.

Your approach with General Garrison:
[ ] Write-in some sort of plan.