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

[MJ12 Commando]

JB CLXIII: Graceful Degradation

Elsa squeezes her ICE weapons tight in reflex as she looks at the maelstrom just outside of the Spy's Demise. She doesn't want to be in a collapsing Web area. If it goes down, she... well, it won't be good. She might just die. She might 'luckily' survive as a brain-damaged wreck. There's a bit of her which wants to flee right back through the shapeshifter wormhole.

"We already had a plan for the case that they tried to collapse the place on us," one of the local Hermetics says, a thin layer of arrogance covering the fact that he seems just as scared as she feels.

"Yeah," one of the Adepts agrees, the butterfly patterns that make up her dress flapping nervously. "This place was originally built by us - the Adepts, that is - back when we were still a Convention. It was one of the original hardened places that Turing put in place. Metaphorically, it's anchored in the bedrock of the Web. That's probably why the thing out there couldn't collapse it easily. And the root's even more hardened and stable."

Elsa feels the information from one of the Iterators on her data link flow into her mind. They're telling the truth. The Demise is part of the Old Web. There's a little bit of her which still feels pride in such a VA accomplishment - and after all, as an Adept who's now an Engineer, she sort of is an heir to the old Convention. "So we reset it?" she asks. "Issue - software standards. These old things will be known."

"Yeah," the Hermetic agrees. "We need to have full root access and we need to lock everyone else out. We can start to stabilize things up here - and that'll buy us more time to get everyone out - but it's going to be delicate and if we want to be solid, we need to do it all at once." The world de-rezzes for a moment. "We had suspicions they were trying to metaphorically undermine us anyway. Looks like it's true."

She grins. [If there are hostiles trying to sabotage the root layer], she sends to the battlenet, [they'll have data on their commander. We can complete two goals here at once.]

[Sounds workable], she gets from one of the non-Kessler ones.

[Yes,] Kessler agrees. "Rose," he says out loud. "You handle the local allocation of assets. The ones who can stabilize it should stay here and you'll need to keep the perimeter up, but we're going to need a killteam to wipe out the enemies in the underlayer and get your people root access to allow the downgrade to go smoothly."

One of the other Iterators snaps their mechanical death claws, and what looks remarkably like a cliched entrance to a fantasy dungeon rises up from the ground with a rumbling. "Gotta go down for root access," they say, in the tone of someone who thinks they're funny.

Kessler smirks. "I hope they're dumb enough to take on dragon form," he says. "Probably ain't. Doesn't really fit their aesthetics."

"Given this code will have been developed in the 40s and 50s," one of the Adepts says, "... no, no dragons." He pauses. "Although," he adds reluctantly, "given they said Turing wrote this himself..."

"... Well then." Kessler frowns. "Okay, people? No one eat any apples offered to you by crones. And don't join in any musical numbers."

"I would never think of breaking into song," Elsa says sanctimoniously, checking her ICE and finding it all green.

***
​

"I wish we were worrying about musical numbers and poisoned apples." Riggs says. "This is ridiculous." He looks down at his US Army uniform and around at the city. He looks like he did before Autochthonia and before radical enhancement, human. Unaugmented. Weak. "So this is the core of Turing's proof of concept. Reality 2.0. Not exactly inspiring. Looks pretty much like the 40s did. The sooner we get in and out the sooner we can leave this place to the dustbins of history where it belongs." It turned out that they were basically all the Spy's Demise could spare. The people there-the ones who had gotten out were sensibly going and stretching or taking very long showers-and the rest were necessary to hold the walls against the maelstrom created by the Anathema. So again, the members of IBM had to fight their way through a potentially hostile, alien landscape alone with minimal support, with time against them. Even in here, the Iterators can see the hurricane-like storms in the distance, reminders that they're not here for a history lesson. There's five people here-Kessler, Elsa, Riggs, another IBM cyber-commando, and one last volunteer from the Demise. An old Virtual Adept, his avatar a dignified man in his 50s, familiar with the code structure. The rest are outside, trying to buy them time.

"Speak for yourself." Elsa says, holding a cigarette in her hands. She looks at her reflection in the glass, sees herself in Soviet-era military uniform, tailored just for her. "I kind of like this look. No wonder it defaults to the whole noir chic look when you come in to the main bar. Good taste." The streets are full of simulated people-representatives of routines which run the actual Demise, overlaid above the kernel. It resembles a picture out of a history book, or a Wikipedia page, just in full-color. "But I thought it would be a little more... exciting than this."

"Turing stuck with what was familiar." the Adept says. "He'd have run his tests on Reality 2.0 here. This is the proof of concept code, designed to be resilient, fault-tolerant, and intended more for durability and error-correction than speed. A different design than modern web protocols-less mutable, more anthropomorphic because we didn't want to push the limits."

"So... where's the hostiles?" Kessler says, grabbing the Thompson SMG that his attack programs seem to have coalesced into, examining his bandolier of 'pineapple' grenades. He looks like some sort of propagandist's dream of a soldier, square jaw, steely eyes, and proud chin. His icon has changed the least out of all of them. "We're apparently in the 40s, and the GUI is interpreting our equipment as WWII issue-so where are our vacuum tube equipped killer robots?"

"Hostiles are..." one of the IBM cyber-commandos pulls a map out of a pocket and unfolds a representation of the source code of the Spy's Demise. She marks down several areas with a convenient red pen. "Hostiles are intruding from here. From what I'm seeing, the Demise was originally supposed to be a loading area-something to show off how amazing the Adepts were, that they could have built a new, superior reality, self-contained in its own computational substrate." She sounds annoyed by that idea. "So this region is hardened against accidental or deliberate damage-probably why the MUSCOVITES haven't made much headway in breaking down the foundations. We just need to find the attackers and eliminate them. Which shouldn't be hard because-"

Air raid sirens go off in the false London. The programs point to the sky, where dark delta wings with Luftwaffe markings scream across. Kessler adjusts his ocular zoom, recognizes the planes as WWII-era Union jets. Primitive today-maybe equivalent to a modern Sleeper fighter with their radar stealth and magnetic cannon and guided missiles, bombs slung inside internal bays, they dive upon the Spitfires rising to engage them. He can't see the launching craft, but another adjustment to his optics, searching for stealthed objects shows the dark outline of an antigravity-equipped flying fortress. Kessler shares the picture with his team, passing the Polaroid around the group of soldiers and Elsa.

"-because they're actively attacking this place." Elsa finishes the thought. "Fortunately they're also being forced to conform to this place's... interesting ideas of acceptability." She wouldn't want to fight actual Autopolitan war machines, even simulated ones, as long as she's being forced to conform to near-human specifications. Elsa guesses that the Autopolitans are so limited. "So they're limited by this environment as well."

"Right." Kessler says. "Board the huge flying Nazi aircraft carrier. Kill every Nazi we can. Blow up the carrier. Mission accomplished. Piece of cake."

The old VA looks at him with a shocked expression. "You're not kidding, are you? You're not kidding. Have you fought Nazis before?"

"He's not kidding." Elsa answers for Kessler.

"I feel like I've already done this before." Kessler says. "Some sort of jamais vu."​

---

You know what people didn't get to do in the second intermission? Kill Nazis. Do you know what the Digital Web is great for? Fixing the iffy problems with reality, such as not having good opportunities to kill Nazis. So, you're in the Deep Web, which is significantly more resistant to interference than the Spy's Demise. This lowers the relative capacity of both parties-which makes your Iterators somewhat sad but also makes the Autopolitans much more sad, because they can't push the hard-wired limits of this lower-tech, less-flexible space as much. You're here to punch out a bunch of Autopolitan programs (represented as Nazis) and find what they know, then blow up the Autopolitan attack. Good luck.

You have an old Virtual Adept member of DEMON whose spheres are Correspondence 4 (SIGINT), Entropy 4 (Cryptography), Forces 4 (Electronic Warfare), Mind 3, and Prime 3 as assistance.

Wonder Waffles:
So, talk to me about this ridiculously impractical Nazi flying aircraft carrier. Choose three features that this impractical flying Nazi aircraft carrier has, besides impractical Nazi jet fighters. Do note that the characters will probably not know about all the features until they actually get used.
[ ] It is covered in a veritable forest of flak cannons, making approaching by air suicidal.
[ ] A full battalion of Ubersoldats has been assigned to guard it.
[ ] Shocking everyone, the main reactor will not blow up catastrophically the moment you tape a brick of C4 on it and detonate it, and it has backups for flight.
[ ] The corridors and rooms of the ship are designed to prohibit boarding, with poison gas traps, automated machine-guns, and killer laser traps everywhere.
[ ] The admiral in charge of the ridiculously impractical Nazi flying aircraft carrier is a psychic, and the entire crew is made out of genetically engineered Ubermensch clones who are perfectly loyal, highly fit and competent, and totally unafraid of death, communicating with each other at the speed of thought. Or killing themselves with a thought. You'll have to capture the admiral to get actionable intelligence.
[ ] The Nazi nuclear weapons program has borne fruit. Inside the belly of the carrier is a massive atomic bomb, just in case the perfidious Albionians shoot it down. Which you'll probably want to disarm.
[ ] The flight deck is covered with a retractable housing, as if the flying aircraft carrier might be able to submerge itself.

Kill Six Billion Nazis:
You need to board this goddamn Nazi aircraft carrier. You will do so by:
[ ] Write-In. Come on, this is your time to suggest crazy plans to kill Nazis and save the day, and for them to actually work because this is the Digital Web and we've gone full Wolfenstein.
​

 

[MJ12 Commando]

JB CLXIV: Undocumented Features

The Autopolitan weapon looms in the skybox, its formidable artillery batteries spitting walls of flak at the doomed British Spitfires seeking to engage its fighter-bomber complement. Its main guns occasionally fire, generating large clouds of smoke as shells the size of small cars slam into the landscape. The machine is getting closer to them. There are brief blinding flashes of laser weapons, a painful reminder that even though the Autopolitan assault is being forced to conform to this realm, it still manages to push the absolute limits of the processing space. Gunfire from the ground illuminates it, explosive shells glancing off its thick armor, revealing its shrouded form momentarily when one connects. It looms ever closer, the beleaguered defenders of the

"We've got to look at the design of the space," the old VA-Holland-says, unfolding a cracking map. "This is London, yes? So what does that make the central control point?"

Elsa frowns. "Either... Parliament or Buckingham Palace," she says.

"It'll be Parliament," Kessler says confidently.

"Yeah," the Adept agrees. "Too iconic - and it's the place where the laws are passed. Which is to say, the rules are set."

Kessler looks up at the flying carrier. "That's solidly designed - and heavily armored," he says. "My guess is that it's meant for an end-game run on the core. Some kind of heavy-issue cyberwar program designed to crash the entire place. And look at the flak around that. It's just swatting anything around it out of the sky. What I don't get is why it looks like it can be submersible when... oh." He winces. "Yeah. It's going to land in the Thames, next to Parliament, and then submerse itself. It'll be basically immune to attack when it's sealed itself off - a closed circuit only running connections with the core. Even if we had a nuke in here, the water would shield it."

"Well, fuck," says Riggs, summarizing things for them.

Elsa strokes her chin. "You guys are human weight here, right?" she checks.

Kessler grabs Riggs and tries to pick him up. "Yeah," he agrees.

"Good. A linegun should work. It'll be vulnerable in the descent."

Riggs frowns. "A linegun sounds way too high tech for this place. It'll crash the system."

Elsa opens her mouth in shock. Elsa closes her mouth after a moment. "By 'linegun' I mean 'gun that shoots grapnel lines', not 'directed gravitational weapon'," she manages. "Think about it. If it tries to land next to Parliament, it'll be going right by Big Ben. If we can get up to the top of that tower, we can line across as it descends - and the flak cannons aren't designed for targets so small at that kind of range. Then we can get inside - onto the flight deck - before it submerges. If necessary, take one of their fighter guns and cut a hole through their deck." She looks at them. "It'll work. This won't be the first bit of historic landmark in a European capital city I've swung off of."

"We'll risk being trapped inside," Riggs warns.

Kessler grins a lazy grin. "Oh, we won't be trapped in there with them," he says. "They'll be trapped in there with us."

"If you say so." Holland sighs. He coughs, a cough that sounds suspiciously like "Iterators," and he looks around. "So how exactly are we going to get a linegun with enough range to get us from Big Ben to that carrier?"

"Don't worry about that." Kessler says. "I already have a plan."

***​

"Men! Report!" Kessler demands of a group of faceless khaki-clad soldiers who are milling around by an AA-gun.

"Sah! We're from B Company of the Transistor Regiment, sah! Detailed to anti-air defense!" one of the identical figures snaps off.

"Very good," Kessler says. "Orders from the top, you're to aid me and my team in moving your gun up Big Ben." He gestures towards a truck they 'borrowed'. "It'll give us a vantage point to fire down on the hostiles with the special ammunition we're bringing to the party."

Despite having only a low-resolution texture on a blank face, the soldiers seem to cheer up. "Special ammo from the Yanks!" one of them could be heard to whisper.

"On it, sah!" another snaps. "The Mark 44 disassembles for transport easily, so we'll be on the move in a jiffy!"

Kessler watches confidently as the not-too-smart programs get to work. He turns his head to the rest of his team. "Okay, I can make the changes to get their gun to launch a cable," he says, "but we're going to need something that can support all of us. Ideas?"

Elsa looks over the city. "Barrage balloon cabling," she says quickly. "I'm faster than you. I can grab it."

"Good idea." Kessler flexes his muscles. "With that kind of cabling, even if we're wrong and it's not landing here, we should be able to spike it and climb the cable. I've got demo charges so if we have to get onto the underside of the ship, we might be able to breach it and get inside that way."

She checks her rifle. "I'll be back soon," she says, breaking into a sprint. Behind her, the men start unscrewing the AA-gun.

***​

The shriek and whistle of the Autopolitan dive-bombers is a constant refrain in the background, paced out by the thudding beats of the flak cannons. Elsa Naryskin advances quickly through the nearly abandoned streets of this digital London. There are no civilians, but army trucks and tanks occasionally trundle past, and firefighting crews try to fight the blazes. She thinks that this place is rendering active data corruption as fire. There's something odd about the blue-white flames, something fundamentally unnatural about them. The burned out areas are black and formless, holes in the world. Even a place as hardened as this-with so many safeguards and restrictions-even someplace like this is not immune to the Autopolitan attack.

She ignores them. The faster she gets what she needs, the less damage. Every cinema along the way is showing Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, which is either a sign that this space was trying to tell her something or more likely a manifestation of Alan Turing's somewhat infamous love of the film. Just in case, Elsa makes sure not to eat any apples offered to her by old crones and keeps an eye out for friendly dwarves.

There aren't either. Even if some of the firefighting programs seem a bit shorter than average.

What the fuck has her life become? Technocrats were meant to be the boring, static, safe lot! Ever since she joined the Union, she'd been initiated into a secret conspiracy, gone to space, been chased by a pack of Damons and Smaug, met Jamelia Belltower's adorable noobie past self, been chased by Henriette's evil brain-clone-whatever slasher, stabbed a Special Agent to death, stole a spaceship, gone on the run from at least some of the Technocracy, been at Ground Zero of a weird possibly-psychic incursion, and now she was in the very root of the Digital Web planning to swing onto a giant aircraft carrier to blow it up.

At least it isn't boring, she thinks with a grin. If it wasn't classified beyond literal God clearance, she could probably recount her experiences to get some more Cyberpunks to sign up.

There is a barrage balloon anchored over Trafalgar Square, so she heads that way. Except things here are... off. The lions in Trafalgar Square aren't lions. Elsa narrows her eyes. There is something leonine about them, but they don't belong. They are winged creatures in the shape of a bird, gigantic enough to carry off an elephant or a whale. They remind her of a peacock with the claws of a lion - but they also have the faces of beautiful women. And a nice rack. She looks up and the figure on Nelson's column almost certainly isn't Lord Nelson. He looks like something from Middle Eastern or Indian mythology, with a sun halo surrounding him.

She's distracted by a whistle overhead. There's a dive-bomber swooping down, screaming. Flak blossoms around it and someone gets lucky by shooting its wing off, the clean dive turning into an out-of-control spiral. It smashes into the National Portrait Gallery and goes up in a dirty blue explosion which crackles with thunder. The world around it glitches and freezes, the sky turning white and the burning building becoming weathered stone. Through the glitch Elsa can see one of the same kind of creature as the mental statues, except this one is alive with its brilliant peacock colors. It stares back, inclining its head respectfully as the rift closes.

She looks at the bronze not-lions. They're now looking right at there, and the further away one has half-turned. "Hey there, beautiful," she says, on the grounds that it's best to be polite to a giant lion-bird thing that's big enough to carry off an elephant. And hey, they are pretty cute. "We're just trying to save this place, so any help would be appreciated."

They don't do anything. Because they're statues - at least to all her senses. Which admittedly are more limited than usual, because she doesn't even have her full cyborg HUD right now - this icon is a meatbag. Either way, though, the tethered barrage balloon has plenty of spare cable, and there's a car nearby she can hotwire to transport it.

"I've got the cable. Heading back," she says into her radio. "But this place is starting to fray. I'm seeing other spaces through the gaps in the world. They're really doing a number on this place."

"Yes, that's predicted," the Virtual Adept on the team interjects. "That's a good sign. It means the efforts of the ones higher up are slowing the collapse - if they weren't, you'd just be seeing blackness through the tears. We might be in with a chance."

"Hurry back," Kessler orders. "We're at the base of the target now."

Elsa starts the antique car with the cable in the trunk-and almost immediately realizes that just like her group of cyborgs rendered in flesh and bone-there's a lot more to the 'Nazis' than their external appearances would let on. It's easy to get stuck in this realm of deceptive analogies-but just like how they've kept all their enhanced processing ability and intellect, the Autopolitans have kept quite a lot of their capability as well. She remembers the endless briefings. They're not faceless, identical cyborgs which have no understanding of tactics and defeat things by numbers. No, that would be helpful, but they're smart. Dangerously smart. Excellent pattern recognition, good tactics-maybe a tad predictable.

Unfortunately, "someone might be trying to infiltrate our attack platform" is a fairly predictable line of thought, and "target everyone who might be trying to board the machine" is one of those predictable responses to their actions. Flak shells explode around her as she drives like a madwoman, pushing the simulated antique beyond its normal limits. The speedometer smashes straight into the red-zone as she makes adjustments to the vehicle's properties-improving performance, amplifying traction, and reinforcing the structure. The windshield chips and cracks as shrapnel glances off of it, and she drives blindly through choking dust clouds from the bombardment, trusting in her own memory of the architecture. It's... oddly exhilarating. Even in Moscow-it wasn't like this. The vampires didn't bring out these kinds of weapons. They had their own fast cars and their own guns-not area bombardments with flak and hostile air support. She sees one in the rear-view mirror, an ominous black dot that's getting larger. Her eyesight, inhumanly acute, identifies it as some sort of Nazi attack helicopter, a deadly twin-rotored insectoid heavy with rockets and cannon. Bursts of gunfire pulverize asphalt around her, and a lucky brace of shells tears the roof from the antique British car. Elsa bleeds as shrapnel cuts her side. It hurts for a moment before she reminds herself that this isn't real-her body isn't here. This isn't air she's breathing. This is a simulated environment, one with rules that can be bent, possibly even broken. The attack helicopter comes closer, and Elsa draws her sidearm. It's a revolver here, and she aims it behind her one-handed, firing all six shots at the facist in the pilot seat.

-and the vehicle jerks as the lead slugs implausibly penetrate armored glass which would stop cannon-fire, the helicopter spinning out of control to crash into a tailor shop. She's almost to Big Ben, and the moment she gets into a blind spot for the carrier's flak, Elsa dives out the door and runs with the cable. She trusts that a human will be a smaller and harder to spot target than a car, and it seems to work.

It hurts to run. She feels the dulled pain in her side, the old strain of her heart pounding in her chest and her lungs burning from lack of air-one of those little inconveniences of flesh that she's been more than glad to give up as a cyborg, the soreness of her muscles complaining against the abuse as she dives out the door and runs up Big Ben. She ignores it-it's all in her mind, she isn't actually being forced to run up the stairs carrying loop after loop of heavy cabling, and it fades as her own augmentations damp the simulated sensation. There are still perks to being a cyborg, and perks to being jacked in remotely rather than being directly immersed.

"I have the cable." She pants, as she reaches the top of the massive clock tower. A bunch of minimally-rendered British soldiers, each of them identical to the other yet completely uncognizant of that fact, have attached an anti-aircraft gun, and Kessler, Holland, and Riggs have managed to jury-rig a launching mechanism for the cable.

"Good. Now we wait." Kessler says. "It's coming towards us."

The wait, Elsa finds, is more agonizing than the action. It almost comes as a relief when the modified gun fires, simply because something other than the tension of waiting and drawing breath in a world where every second could be your last is happening. The flying carrier's flak cannons respond almost instantly, taking chunks out of Big Ben, vaporizing the faceless defenders of simulated London, but Kessler's shot rings true and the shell snags onto one of the multitude of external components on the Nazi platform.

"I'll take point." Kessler says, and slides down towards the descending behemoth as the sky is lit with black-orange explosions. Elsa follows, then Riggs, then the female Iterator, and finally Holland. There's a few Nazis who come out, wearing Technocratic-style full body cermet armoring, but Kessler brings them down with long bursts from his submachine gun, firing one-handed as he slides down the cable with the other. He's in his element, Elsa thinks, fighting this war like he was born to do it. A few agonizing seconds, and they're just barely inside as the hatches finish closing, the powerful hydraulics snapping the barrage balloon cable like a thread.

"It's submerging." Holland says, cocking a pistol. "If we're going to finish this we better finish it quickly."

"What's important?" Riggs asks. "We need to cripple this platform quickly."

"Command and control." Kessler says. "Go for a decapitation strike. Standard protocol."

"Yes," Elsa says, "but that's such an obvious part of the Iteration X playbook that the MUSCOVITES probably have countermeasures. I say we should sink this ship. Kill its ability to interact by destroying the power source."

"Not likely." Holland sighs. "Inside here, we can do scans on its design-and it's quite clever. It's got its own self-contained power source and multiple redundant backups. It can't be easily starved, not the way a standard attack geomid might."

"There might be some other way to take it out." Riggs says. "Damage the hull enough so it sinks. Destroy the motive systems. Use its payload against itself."

"Maybe." Kessler says doubtfully. "But that's going to be guarded pretty heavily, especially since they know we're on the ship."

---

Amazingly, I managed an update before the weekend. Let's see if this keeps up.

To Kill A Helicarrier:
Please vote as to where you're going to attack. And suggest plans/rotes if you want.
[ ] The Bridge. Decapitation strike. Fast, efficient, probably very dangerous.
[ ] The Armory. Plant a lot of bombs and blow the entire vessel sky-high.
[ ] The Reactor. Scuttle the vessel.
[ ] Write-In.

 

[MJ12 Commando]

JB CLXV: Core Interests

The intruders are a tight, fast-moving team and so they punch through the outer perimeter quickly, hoping to get away from any internal sensors that might have detected their breach.

Outside, the hull creaks under the water pressure. There's the distinct feeling that they've gone deeper down than the Thames should allow, which suggests everything is going metaphorical.

"Bad news," Riggs says, creeping back from the forwards position. "They're not running their bombers off anything represented as jet fuel. Look like they're electric. I found charging points down in the hangar ahead - and too many guards to easily fight."

"Capacitors?" the female Iterator, Hino, asks.

"Hardened. Not an easy target." Riggs sighs. "We need a new plan."

"Look at how much flak that thing was spewing out," Kessler grates. "The amount of processing capacity necessary to render that level of firepower is massive. And that's before we get onto those giant cannons it was mounting." And then he grins. "They'll need a lot of volatiles to run this thing," he says suddenly. "And that's where they'll be storing their bombers' bombs."

Hino grins similarly. "Volatile memory is volatile," she observes. "It'll probably burn."

"And long cat is long," Elsa agrees. Everyone glares at her. "What? I met him once."

"You met Long Cat? How was he?" Riggs asks dubiously.

"Long."

"Amazing."

"So, go for the magazines," Elsa says, getting back on topic. "If from what I know of WW2 designs is correct, they'll be keeping them in armored citadels deeper in the fortress. Hundreds of mms of steel-equivalent plating deep in the hull."

"Yes," Holland agrees. "Looks like a variant of the F-class airborne assault fortress that the Krauts used back in WW2. And with this design, they'll have a few centralized storage areas under heavy armor and only move ammunition to the surface turrets and to the bombers when needed to reload. Lowers the chance of a penetrating hit setting off less protected magazines. If this is submersible, it really, really won't want a large hull breach."

Kessler nods. "That's what I reckon they'll have the volatile memory represented at. Rules of this place say that magazines are volatile - so we can inject short-term destructive purge programs. Using bullets."

"Plosion.exe," Hino agrees.

Riggs nods, and gives a thumbs up. "Catastrophic internal damage - enough to overcome the interior reinforcement? Better hope so. We don't have enough hardware on us to take this down without something to help."

Elsa glances around. "Who reads German?" she asks, looking at the signs. "Which way to the magazines?" She grins. "Or should we just ask for directions?"

There's a pause.

"Actually," Kessler says, thoughtfully as he spins a knife around in one hand as he hefts the dead Nazi guard's MG42 with another. "That's not such a bad idea. I reckon I can make one of their maintenance programs... talkative. Do you think they feel fear?"

"No," says Holland bluntly.

"Well, then," John Kessler says with a truly malicious grin, "they won't be used to it."

***
​

Kessler examines the killing field which was once a sleeping berth. The corpses of armored guards are sprawled all over the room, staining the walls and the torn remnants of bedding a vivid shade of dark crimson. The Nazis, or 'Nazis' were quite well armored in their full body garb-which meant that they had to use a lot of firepower. The drop-down roof turret sparks and burns, its ammunition feeds ruined from a precision shot. Yet, inexplicably, there is one survivor-an officer whose gun hand may be a bloody ruin, but is otherwise intact. Hino wasn't taking any chances-command geomids are a cut above standard ones in initiative and intellect, and who knows what their attack programs are running.

"We're going to need better guns." Kessler says, and the other Iterators nod, smiling cruelly. Elsa would protest at the insistence, but it's true. "These things are tough."

"Just make it quick." Holland says, sighing. "We don't have unlimited time here. We'll make sure nobody disturbs you for as long as we can, but the ship's already on alert. I'm going to do what I can to disrupt the alarms here"-he points to a section of wiring-"but it'll get wise to me eventually."

"How long can you get us?" Riggs asks, warily eyeing the injured officer.

"Five minutes, maybe six according to my watch." The old Virtual Adept says. "Real-time...that'd be hard to measure. We're getting deeper into the core substrates of the Web right now. The bedrock Turing built it on. The intuitive senses of time, distance, and everything else we have don't mean much at this point."

"I know." Riggs says. "I was running Web ops for thirty years." He watches Holland's technique admiringly. "You remind me of Quixote."

"I taught him." Holland says.

"I can tell. Talented kid, probably would have brought more heat down on him if he did anything other than troll Union listservs. Back when we were still using those things. How's he doing?"

"Dead." Holland says, suspiciously. "Fifteen years dead. He was on Gernsback during the Avatar Storm."

"Real shame." Riggs says, and it's not just about one young man whose life was cut short. It's about two old men, once enemies due to allegiance, now allies fighting on the same side, commiserating about the war. "Lots of good people died then."​

"Yeah." Holland manages to say.

On the other side of the room, an entirely more menacing conversation is taking place. The Nazi officer has been tied to a chair, and Elsa and Kessler are menacing at him.

"So." Kessler says, brandishing his knife. "Mr. Nazi Officer, would you be kind enough to tell us how to get to your armory and your magazines?"

"No, Allied swine!" The Autopolitan program wearing the skin of a Nazi snarls. "I will never reveal our secrets! Not under any circumstance!"

"Wrong answer." Kessler shouts, brandishing the knife. "Here's how things are going to go. Either you tell us what we need to know, or we make you tell us what you need to know. There's no scenario here which ends with you not telling us what we want. So make it easy on everyone and give us the information."

"I'd do what he says." Elsa suggests.

"Are you the 'good cop'?" The Nazi asks.

"No." Elsa says, grinning cruelly. "He's the good cop. I'm the bad cop."
​

***
​

Despite the facade of men and machines that the hostile environment has forced onto it, the Autopolitan attack program is neither. Its subroutines are not flesh and blood, but still tools designed for their primary purpose of forcing a beachhead and taking over a hostile environment. It knows that the attackers have been targeting its components, that they are attempting to stop it from completing its mission objective. It is smart. It thinks. It understands. Its perspective is limited-it only knows that the enemy has been subverting its code and are proceeding to steal its resources to up-arm themselves and contest its brute force capability.

It does not know, and it does not need to know, that in this Digital Web sector, in Turing's entry program, the enemy is five Allied commandos who have breached its armory and killed its defenders. It does not know, or need to know, that Kessler and Elsa have left a bloodied, dead Nazi in what has been represented as a berthing room-it simply needs to understand that they have accessed its positional data and know the locations of various vulnerabilities in its system. In fact, it can barely comprehend the idea. Its subroutines are designed with minimal knowledge and only the most basic roles. They should not have been able to give up these vulnerabilities to hostile interrogation-so it must have been some sort of subversive enemy malware that has been injected. It sees the world as code and programs, not as the physical simulation the realm is trying to force on it. That comes with some advantages-but also it creates blind spots. Exploitable weaknesses.​

The enemy must not be allowed to compromise it until the mission is complete. Then-then the program can initiate its final mission order and self-terminate. But only then. It does not value its life. The idea that it might be alive, a spiritual being, as a Dreamspeaker or Virtual Adept would insist-would be laughable to it if it had the capability of showing emotion. Its only value is the objective. It redirects its own internal security and code integrity routines to the corrupted areas of the program. It will contain the enemy until they can be eliminated or its mission can be accomplished.

In the simulation, squads of Nazi foot soldiers, clad in thick breaching armor, converge on the armory, behind primitive tracked drones with heavy gun shields, armed with large multibarrel machine-guns.
​

***​

The squad of Nazi soldiers has surrounded every door to the armory. Armored in thick layers of black cermet, they wait patiently for the enemy to exit. They aren't programmed with boredom, or fear, or any human emotions which might weaken their response. They have all the time in the world to wait for the enemy. After all, as long as they're contained, as long as they're simply there stealing non-vital resources rather than attacking a vital system fault, they're a nonissue. Even if the resources they're borrowing and the weaknesses they're probing for will provide them the tools to do so, the program understands that time the subversive software spends on this is time not spent hindering the program's mission objectives.

One of the doors creaks open, and before the Nazis in the corridor can react, their advance team is annihilated by a storm of high-explosive shot-shells and lethal barbed flechettes, vanishing in an instant before a torrent of firepower. The rear ranks survive for a moment more, shielded by the smoke and chaos which the fusillade of firepower has created, but soon the enemy steps out of the smoke, guns blazing, and end their short-lived existence as well.

John Kessler lowers the smoking barrels of the two massive Nazi assault cannon he's wielding, and grins. "Gotta say, I could get used to this kind of German engineering." The weapons are massive automatic-firing guns, clearly intended to defeat light tanks. He wields them like they weigh nothing, even while hefting a backpack full of stubby, fat shells for them and with what seems like a literal ton of Nazi armor plate strapped to him.

"The magazines are a few levels down." Elsa reminds them. "Let's go. They're going to be on alert."

"Let them." Hino says, and she brandishes a Nazi lightning cannon. "We're ready for them now. This should be enough to breach any high-security blast doors between us and the objective, and you have all the demo you need for the magazines, right?"

Holland gives a thumbs-up, shouldering a rucksack stuffed with Nazi explosives. He is 'merely' carrying a strange Nazi SMG with discarding-sabot tungsten ammunition, the lightest weapon of the group by far. Even Elsa is dual-wielding Nazi-built assault rifles. "We're more than good on demo. The moment I lay eyes on the magazines I'll know how to sabotage the place. Did more than my share of actually blowing up Nazis back in the War."
​

***
​

If the Autopolitan combat program had emotions, it would be perplexed. The enemy has been more capable than their specifications would have indicated. It was always intended to face off against the harried, tired foes of the Spy's Demise from the outside, rather than an internal breach by soldiers capable and willing to ram themselves right into the maw of the beast and tear it apart from the inside out. Its weapons and tools were intended for that purpose-defeating an already weakened group low on resources and time, desperate and hopeless, rather than engaging against a fresh team of cybercommandos. Nevertheless, the program gamely puts obstacles in the way of the intruders. Its self-defense subprograms are annihilated in high-explosive flechette storms, maelstroms of lightning, or armor-piercing bullets, its hardened firewalls breached by copious use of anti-armor munitions. The attackers' target is clear-they seek to eliminate access to the resources the machine needs to accomplish its mission. Analysis shows that at the current rate of advance, the attackers are likely to succeed.

It sees no choice, then. It activates different subprograms. It ceases its attack on the sector's integrity and powers up its last ditch defensive systems. It cuts outside lines and potential paths of subversion. It does not do so out of self-preservation or fear, but out of simple triage. Should the intrusion cripple its ability to act and its response speed, the entire Spy's Demise will likely survive. Should it be able to eliminate the intruders, it may still be able to eliminate enough personnel in the crash to consider its mission a success. In the simulated London that is the Spy's Demise, the fighter-bombers and helicopters which have been ravaging the city suddenly retreat, diving down into the depths of the Thames. In the simulated helicarrier, in a storage facility labeled "UBERSOLDAT HOLDING BAY 1," a dozen menacing eyes suddenly start to glow. On the emulated bridge, the captain of the ship sinks down into his specially designed chair as heavy metal and hydraulics assemble themselves around him.
​

***
​

The cavernous magazines of the Nazi flying fortress are designed fairly solidly. The ammunition is stored separately with good spacing, with most of the particularly volatile ammunition submersed in pools of fire and reaction-retardant liquid. The heavy cellular storage will stop a detonation of one from causing a chain reaction. In theory. In practice, that just means that a demolitions expert needs more time and ordinance. Holland is one of them. He's done Web sabotage-and a fair bit of meatspace sabotage. He's actually blown up vehicles much like this, vehicles which were written out of history by the Technocracy's insistence that World War II was a perfectly mundane affair. He's proud of his role in winning World War II-the Technocracy and Paradox have spent ages rewriting the history books so that people think it was because of bad Nazi engineering, that their 'wunderwaffe' were not particularly game changing developments. One out of embarrassment, the other because it's what it does.
​

Even if he knows that this isn't a real Nazi flying fortress, and that it lacks a lot of the features of Nazi superweapons-where were the expendable werewolf shock troops? The vampire stormtroopers, provided with Nazi-Progenitor serums and shots to fight perfectly well in sunlight? The Nephandic sorceries powered by blood sacrifice? It's still familiar to him-and perversely comforting.

It takes him some time, but with the help of the Iterators and their implausible strength, and several shaped demolitions charges, he's breached the ammunition storage bulkheads and set up the mother of all IEDs. Well, or what would seem to be an IED in this simulation. The result should cause massive memory allocation errors and force a hard crash and reset of the immediate surroundings of the machine. At which point the internal safeties of the kernel Turing designed should eject it as designed. Even if it doesn't-the hard crash and cascading code corruption should cripple it. Should. Hopefully.

He finishes just as an access door hisses open. He's already in a dive before he can even see the attacker, submachine gun out, firing a spray from the weapon that glances off the assailant harmlessly. He gets his first glimpse at it as its guns spin up and its hydraulics whine as it turns with surprising speed, tracking him with high-explosive gatling fire from a pair of giant gatling guns-one on each arm, and the occasional rocket from a launcher on its right arm. Its left arm has a heavy metal shield, crackling with electrical power, as well as a flamethrower. On its shoulders are crackling lightning projectors, and its back seems to be a massive rocket pack, probably used in conjunction with the rocket motors in its thighs and calves and chest to make up for its bulk. Its hands are spiked three-fingered fists, clearly used for combat rather than manipulation. And its helmet is horned and armored and angled to deflect fire. All in all, it's almost enough to make one regret having another chance to fight Nazis. Almost. In an inspired touch, the Spy's Demise has put a realistic-looking series of Nazi-era medals and rank insignia on the three and a half meter tall powered armor suit. The captain of the ship is seeing to this personally, Holland thinks as he dodges fire. And he's very, very angry.

The shrapnel all misses, of course. The old Virtual Adept has defensive programs for that-alterations to the ballistic trajectory of nearby weapons fire, protections that have saved his life dozens of times in virtual space and real space. And the cavernous magazine's design works against the defender. The massive armored cells will provide the lighter, more nimble assailants cover, and the defenders need to watch their lines of fire-they might be able to kill them all by blowing the ship, but that would stop it from completing its mission-if they were willing to do that, they'd have blown up the entire place already. The Technocrats are already falling back to cover, and its reinforcements come up.

But of course, the enemy knows it, which is why it's brought out every weapon and tool it has. Supersoldiers, glowing eyes and huge steroidal bulk concealed in ugly flat plates of riveted alloy start to appear from other access hatches-hatches Holland isn't sure were there before this attack-bringing up their heavy assault cannons and lightning guns. The enemy knows that its star defender is vulnerable to flanking and has its own weaknesses. So it's brought out other weapons to cover it.

"Hey!" The blonde woman in a Russian uniform, Elsa, calls. "You have a plan? You're the local expert on Weird Science Nazi bullshit!"

"I'm thinking!" Holland yells back. Realistically they shouldn't be able to even hear each other over the continuous fire that the fortress's captain is laying down from seemingly bottomless magazines. But they're all hackers, they're all equipped with EW and combat programs, and that removes a lot of inconveniences. "I was never faced with something like this!"

"Think faster then!" Riggs yells. The Iterator lays down fire against one of the supersoldiers, punching a hole into the thing's armor, then ducks when he finds out that no, they don't seem to react to injury or damage. Glowing orange blood spills from the hole. "These things are tough! Even these amped attack programs aren't doing too much!"

"To kill the cyborg Nazi, shoot it until it dies." Hino adds unhelpfully. "Wish there was more to it than that. So yeah, I second the boss. Do we have a plan yet?"
​

---

Well, Who Didn't Expect This?
Oh hey, Nazi captain in power armor and Nazi supersoldiers as a last ditch defense. Despite Autopolitans being Autopolitans, they are not immune to narrative conventions. So now what?
[ ] Fight. We want to capture the captain and drain what information we need about the Anathema's plans and actions from him.
[ ] Flight. Our primary objective is to destroy the program and cut off this attack on the root access of the Spy's Demise. Getting out (probably via the hangars or some sort of minisub bay) and blowing the entire vessel up would do that.

​

 

[MJ12 Commando]

JB CLXVI: Downfall

They fight - and they fall back. Or from another point of view, they're advancing. Because false Nazis are swarming in from all over, and they need to get through an exit. Having a gunfight in a magazine is not good for anyone's survival odds, and their enemy might decide that the vessel is lost and just blow the place with everyone inside.

There's a rumble, barely audible over the sound of the gunfire, and a cargo lift rumbles its way down, opening on yet another squad of goons in cermet armor wielding MG42s. Unfortunately, Hino happens to be facing them at the time, and she tosses a perfectly cooked-off grenade through the door even before it's fully open. There's a muffled thud, and the cargo lift's armored bulkhead doors slam shut on a red-painted interior.

"Exit," Hino says, turning to toss a smoke grenade at an armored figure her bullets aren't scratching. It blocks line of sight and gives them a respite for a moment - from that direction at least. Fire still comes from multiple other vectors. The ship has noticed their incursion in full-and is throwing everything at them in an effort to take them down. "Naryskin! Get it!"

"Buy me some time!" Elsa snaps, smashing open a panel by the lift with the butt of her rifle and plunging her hands in and tearing out fluid-carrying tubes.

Kessler looks up. In one swift movement, he aims and shoots, knocking off the cap of one of the sprinklers. The response is immediate. The systems are hydraulic, and the loss of water pressure from the sprinklers sends blast walls slamming down from the ceiling separating them from the captain and his supersoldiers. It's a cunning mechanical system for the 40s, he thinks - but he's cunning like a fox. Who has two degrees. Almost immediately, the bulkhead starts to buckle under steroid-strengthened flesh and hydraulic-powered metal.

"That won't stop them forever," Hino warns. "Those things are strong."

"Long enough," Elsa grunts, working a bit of metal into the heavy blast doors protecting one of the cargo lifts. "This should... I cut the hydraulics and... look, help me!"

The others put their simulated muscle to the test pushing the blast doors apart in a screech of tortured metal. With effort, they manage to roll the blast door open. The shaft leads up to the flight deck. The grenade blast has left the lift mechanism ruined beyond repair, but the shaft is entirely climbable. It's sealed at the top with heavy armored bulkheads, but they have the universal key known as John Kessler-and implausible strength and endurance. By the time the Ubersoldats manage to punch through the armored blast wall-Kessler and the others are long gone.

***​

The Autopolitan combat program detects the transfer of hostile information attack forms along an illicitly opened port. It takes too long to track the destination - the interface module which deploys and retrieves Quasi Disposable Attack Programs. This is a concern. There are unused QDAPs stored there, and with their subversive capabilities the intruders will be able to make use of them.

This cannot be allowed. It is aware that they are attacking the volatile memory, but with the defensive measures here the damage may be mitigated. The overall mission may still be accomplished. However, it cannot split its forces and protect both locations. With subverted QDAPs its defeat will be substantially harder to avert. The QDAP storage database does not have strong anti-intrusion countermeasures, and will not be able to withstand such an assault.

It takes an eternity of microseconds to come to its decision.

Triage is its goal. Terminating these intruders is part of its objective. Should it eliminate this elite force from the Demise, the other attack programs may still succeed at intruding into the hostile sector. If it applies full countermeasures against the virus they have injected into the volatile memory, the program may be able to function at reduced capacity. Therefore it should focus on their elimination.

In a view of the world it cannot perceive, the captain charges through the blast wall and sees the pried open lift. Bending down it squeezes onto the cargo lift, and smashes out the ceiling with its powerful fists. Slamming its fist into the wall, it brings down a blast wall to lock off the cargo lift from the magazine - or as it would call it, it closes the subverted port. And like a bat out of hell, it ascends on plumes of rocket fuel.

***​

"It's coming," Hino warns. The hangar-bay is red-lit with emergency sirens and the parked bombercraft are abandoned where they were left, with no sign of their crews. Well, apart from all the people they'd killed after climbing out of the munitions lift. They might have been the crews.

"I know," Kessler retorts, tearing a 20mm cannon off the wing of an aircraft and heading for the stairs. "We need to get it up onto the flight desk. Elsa?"

"Yeah, I know," she said, pulling out a Nazi arc welding tool from a toolbox, and gluing it to her rifle with adhesive from the same toolbox. "If you get his attention, I can try to open him up. And if that doesn't work... well, arc-welded superheated armor won't like cold water much, right?"

In the baymaster's office, Holland gets to work re-wiring controls and linking linkages in ways that they're not meant to be able to go. All the others have to do is slow down the Nazi supersoldier mecha captain long enough to give them controls over the hangar bay doors. It'll give them an exit and at the same time hopefully drown that fucker. Unfortunately, the Autopolitan weapon seems to have ideas of its own. On pillars of caustic flame, the power-armored Nazi captain rises from the elevator shaft, gatling cannons firing. The armored walls crumple and fail under the onslaught of armor piercing-incendiary bolts as the five attackers dive into cover. Aircraft explode and burn as the Autopolitan program sacrifices components of itself to fight the onrushing corruption, consciously choosing to reduce its offensive capability. It has more than enough of it-as long as it can eliminate the enemy.

"They're going to have EOD on site in the magazines!" Hino yells. "We're not going to have much time." She's bleeding from multiple shrapnel wounds, but she doesn't care. It's easy to remember that this body isn't actually hers, that the pain she's feeling isn't real, when in realspace her body is almost entirely synthetic, a full-conversion as is common with IBM. That, and the augmentations to her brain help damp the pain and the concerns. Her arm is twisted and sprained-but she's more than capable of ignoring simulated pain. In the Web, as long as you're still in the sector, you're still functional. She fires back one-handed with her captured lightning gun, and her blasts glance off the armored captain. Everyone is pouring fire on the target-even if its armor is impregnable to the assault, its slow weakening will reveal issues that they can exploit. That they're planning to exploit. Many of its components are glowing a faint cherry-red, and fire and sparks from incendiary rounds are a common sight.

"Almost got it-" Holland says. "-And done." The hangar bay doors start to open, and the sea floods in. He fires into the armored glass of the baymaster's office, shattering the window as the water floods in, and even the metal giant of the Nazi war machine staggers against it, its armor failing as its superheated, cracked surfaces react to ice cold water. Its overheated, overstressed hydraulics fail, and Kessler swims towards it, wrenching its helmet off with a pipe, his hand finding the eject button.

With the captain in tow, the five wounded, scorched commandos break the surface. "Where is your creator?" Kessler asks the Nazi captain forcefully, threatening the man with the sharp end of a rusty pipe. He gets an inhuman keening as response-and then the simulated Nazi captain falls over dead, froth in his mouth.

"Did you get anything actionable from that?" Holland asks, catching his breath on the bank of the simulated Thames.

"Yeah." Kessler says. "Not perfect information, but some of its metadata before it wiped itself. We can probably decode it with some time and the right hardware." By right hardware, Kessler means IBM hardware. Autopolitan hardware. "So. You gonna blow that thing or what?"

"Done." Holland says, and the river rumbles, pillars of water sprouting from the surface. "Enemy threat eliminated. The infrastructure here can handle clean-up. Now we just need to bring everyone in here and wait out the collapse. And..." he pauses. "Thanks. For being here. I know we've had our differences in philosophy... but thanks."

"No problem." Elsa says. "It was our pleasure working with you. We're all on the side of mankind here, even if we have... disagreements."

"Yeah." Riggs agrees. "We're on the same side here."

"You guys remind me of some Iterators I knew. Way back." Holland says. "Back in World War 2. It was... just like old times there."

"I know what you mean." Hino says. She's referring to the escape from Autocthonia, fighting technology so similar to yours yet so alien and different, but Holland doesn't notice. "So while they get in here-I wonder if there's a proper simulated pub."

"I'm sure there's one nearby." Holland says. "Let's tell everyone the place is clear, and then drinks are going to be on me."

Elsa grins. "I'm going to warn you, I can drink quite a lot."

"I don't think that's going to be a problem, Lieutenant." Holland replies.

***
​

It's been a few days since everyone's celebrated the successful operation on the Spy's Demise-where Henriette was partying with the members of IBM and spending some dear family time with her younger sister-and now everyone's mood is the usual wary paranoia that's common for Jamelia but seems so odd coming from Donald and Rose. Henriette remembers that just a month ago, Rose was a touchy, somewhat needy young woman who spent most of her time being inadvertently annoying to everyone with her perfect looks and total naivete. And sometimes scared her with just how much power she packed into that frame. Now she looks different. She's still the perfect vampire seductress she was before, of course, but everything else is different. The way she holds herself, straighter and more martial. The way she scans the room like a combat veteran. And-Henriette's glad she's noticing things like this-the way she looks at people. She's got an air of command, like the Shock Corps commanders she's worked with.

And of course there's the armor she came out of the Digital Web in-a literally priceless historical artifact made largely of pure Primium, and its accompanying sidearm and chainblade. Weapons that were reserved for the most elite Iteration X knights of the 18th and 19th centuries. Henriette's never managed to work up the courage to ask who they belong to. She finds the new Rose more than a little scary. She doesn't want to think about what would have been needed to change her outlook on life this badly. And yet-when she probes, even subtly, Rose doesn't act like anything has changed. She smiles and says that nothing's wrong, she's fine, nothing's changed.

She says it with such insistence that Henriette almost believes it. Almost. Certainly there's nothing that makes her seem incredible in the hyperpsych textbooks-but it just seems implausible to Henriette that Rose's actually fine. And there's the way she behaves around Donald. Before-Rose was often like a little lost puppy around him. Now, there's the way Donald actively avoids looking at her, and when he does he looks guilty. The hyperpsych textbooks Henriette's been studying imply that survivor's guilt should work the other way around. The one who came out of the crucible intact should be the one feeling guilty. The wounds must be deeper. Mental, not physical. And both of them are very good at hiding it.

Ugh. Give her the simplicity of debugging machines any day. She's gained new sympathy for Jamelia and the New World Order trying to figure out all of these things. At least Ceres is reliably friendly and simple to understand. Even if she's avoiding Rose more often than usual-or rather, finding excuses to nap in other people's laps more often than she did before.

"You're thinking about something." Rose says insightfully, as she checks Henriette over again. As the most competent doctor on base, she's become Henriette's physician. IBM's medical nanos have helped with her recovery but their understanding of medicine was a lot more... esoteric. And Rose is a lot more familiar with near-baseline physiologies, like hers. Even if her muscles have been strengthened by myomer fiber weave and her circulatory system is solid-state, that's fairly low-end augmentation compared to some of the things IBM gets into. "And it's troubling you." Again with that insight.

"I'm worried about you." Henriette admits. "From what I've heard it was a bloodbath there. Are you sure you're all right?"

Rose stiffens for a bare fraction of a second and then turns to her and smiles. "There's nothing to worry about. I'm all right." And it sounds a bit like old Rose but only a bit. "The Spy's Demise was... troubling, certainly. But most of us made it out alive. You don't need to dwell on it." Rose says mildly, with a tone which implies that the conversation is over.

"How's Donald?" Henriette asks, changing the subject intentionally.

"It's fine." Rose says. "He's obviously a bit reticent about things given what happened the last time we tried dating but... nothing's changed on that front. How about you? Are you seeing someone now? You seem happier." Rose says, deftly cutting that line of attack off.

"No-" Henriette starts. "I mean, that's none of your business. So how am I recovering?"

"Fine." Rose says. "You're still suffering from deep tissue damage but because of your augmentation you're technically qualified for duty. And, sadly," Rose says, "I don't think we have enough time to keep you on the sidelines forever. How's your training with Harlan going?"

At least Rose, Henriette thinks, is still a good person to complain to. She complains about "psychic bullshit" and how Harlan is insistent that everything is based on psychic powers and that he would probably say that there are such things as psychic staplers, and Rose is a wonderful captive audience who says the right things to keep her from getting truly resentful and lets her finish venting without anything other than acceptance.
​

***
​

Donald wakes up in the dimly-lit bowels of the Russian psychic research base which has been his new home for the past week. And the first thing he sees, again, is his arm. His alien, mechanical, slightly fear-inducing arm. "It's a temporary measure until we can clone you a tissue graft," the Jamelia-allied Iterators had said. For some reason, that didn't assure him much, considering that whatever was fighting them was part of Iteration X. "Besides," the cyberdoc who had fitted him with it had said, "it should be more than adequate for all day to day usage."

He still has nightmares of accidentally getting mad and crushing something that shouldn't be crushed. Even if they're adamant that the software limiters on the cyberarm will prevent any such thing from happening.

"Isn't this military grade?" He had asked. It certainly looked it-all black polymer skin and corded artificial muscle and high-density hyperalloy bone. It's quite a bit heavier than his flesh and blood arm would be. They had answered that no, it wasn't, which didn't reassure him because holy shit what kind of crazy cyborg supercommandos did Jamelia Belltower find who considered something like this not military-grade? His next question was if he could punch through a concrete wall, and their answer was not reassuring.

"It depends on the supporting elements. As your skeleton hasn't been reinforced in any way and the bio-machine weld here is entirely temporary and designed to be easily removable, doing so would probably lead to multiple bone fractures and the loss of your arm." The doctor had said. "The software limiters will ensure that you don't do anything with the arm that would overstress the rest of your body."

What kind of crazy-ass cyborgs could give him, a businessman, a cyborg arm that could punch hard enough to break through a concrete wall and not manage to clone a replacement limb within a day? It's as if they were far more used to augmenting themselves beyond human norms than they were fixing broken parts of the human body. Which scares him.

He is very careful when he shaves and showers. He's already had images in his head of pressing too hard on the razor and accidentally decapitating himself with his (temporary) cyborg arm. Even if they're not very likely, he wants to be as careful as possible with it. It feels like an intrusion of the Anathema-that horrible god-machine, on his own flesh, a permanent mocking reminder of how the god-machine nearly took him over from the inside and only Janice managed to save him.

Speaking of Janice, she's sent a fairly nice email wishing him well since the incident. The only bright side to this whole shitty affair. Rose is some sort of broken killing machine now, who might pretend that everything's all right but clearly isn't-and deflects him whenever he wants to talk-Jamelia seems to have lost almost all of their resources and potential assets and is stuck in the ass end of Russia, and he feels like shit about how he's encouraged Rose's development into a weapon rather than a woman because it was convenient for the 'greater good.'

It's kept his moods foul, and the tasks and leads piled up in front of them are not helping. The early morning meetings don't help either. "Look, you take drugs to not sleep, Kessler doesn't need to sleep anymore being a killer cyborg, and Harlan probably does some psychic bullshit to not do it. Can't I sleep in?" would probably not go well with Jamelia. She'd probably say something like "Mr. Sykes, we are fighting a battle against a superhuman intelligence of incredible power, allied with multiple high-ranking Technocrats inside the organization, and your concern is whether you're getting enough sleep?" and she'd be right.

"Fuck my life." Donald mutters, as he enters the meeting room with the 'command staff' as it were of the construct. A command staff larger than the non-command staff now. Kessler is there, playing with a holomap, and Harlan is as smug and inscrutable as ever. Jamelia starts without any fanfare or announcement.

"Kessler. What do you have on the enemy location?"

"I've traced its initial signals to our old construct." Kessler says. "Other metadata implies it was active in Europe for a while. I can't pinpoint where in Europe, though. It'd have to have gone through the mat-trans to get there-which means that if we can seize our construct back we might be able to find it."

"If." Harlan says. "They're going to have reinforced it fairly heavily under the guise of 'fighting back' against 'hemophage aggression.' I've put some feelers out to old friends in academia and Q Division. Politically speaking, the bloodsuckers seem to have basically cut off the Prince of Los Angeles for his 'rash actions.' They're feeding him to the wolves to avoid the war going hot."

"Smart." Kessler says. "They've got the influence in the Masses to fight us in a game of covert ops, but if we're bringing out the cybertanks and nukes there's not much they can do but die in large numbers."

"Which happily gives the enemy an excuse to bring in heavy units to ensure compliance." Jamelia finishes. "I wonder if there's any good news. Donald-you said you were working on trying to figure out who exactly might be sympathetic enough to our claims that they might be able to be convinced. Besides for the Void Engineers-"

"The Void Engineers are actually a bad choice, I think." Donald interrupts. "They're going to do things their way, and I don't think they're getting that whatever is running these Earthside forces seems to have a grudge against you and you personally. Which brings us to two possibilities. Either they're crazy and stupid, which is possible but not likely, or they're crazy but they think you're very important somehow. And the Void Engineers aren't likely to trust that. They'll want to do things on their terms."

"I don't trust them either." Kessler agrees. He's playing with one of those weapons they found in the crate of historical artifacts, a switchblade knife with a dragon motif on the handle and a blade made out of some weird metamaterial. What a joke, Donald thinks. A bunch of mystic artifacts of incredible importance, and most of them turned out to be some variation of 'a very sharp and large sword.' You could requisition a vibroblade if you wanted something like that. "They've got a lot invested in keeping this quiet, they're probably not going to want a hot potato that can blow this thing open-and I think we're going to have to do that at some point, even if it's to the right people and in the right way. So we should probably figure out how to engage them in a way which leads to them working with us, rather than the other way around."

"That brings up something," Donald thinks. "Something like this should register in some sort of internal affairs somewhere. I was thinking about people we've worked with, and which group is both internal affairs, likes and respects you, and only answers to a member of Command?"

"The Tyrants." Jamelia finishes for him. "Are you sure they're a good idea? They don't seem to know anything about what's going on."

"Now that's a very interesting assertion." Donald says. "You've read their recent operations history, right? I know you have, because you're the one who arranged classified information access for me with those Iterator friends of yours and I bet they're forwarding everything I look for to you."

"Yes." Jamelia says, admitting it. "You suspect that the rationale given for their latest escapades is entirely to cover up their actual operations."

"I do." Donald says. "I think the explanation holds together well enough that it's entirely valid, but it's just too convenient. Call it gut feeling."

"Do you think the enemy knows?"

"Maybe, maybe not. I think if they knew, we'd have seen a convenient Reality Deviant attack take them out. So if we keep it quick and quiet-we might be able to use their contacts. Certainly would be helpful having eyes and ears in the NWO. So, that's the only lead I've got right now. How about you, boss?"

"I think Dr. Rosario is still alive." Jamelia says, dropping the bombshell. The room goes silent.

"We did just terminate a combat construct that looked like her, and the official 'Dr. Rosario' is doing exactly what you'd expect a FACADE clone to be doing-spending her time doing what she was doing before, avoiding contact with close friends or family who might be able to notice discrepancies-something that, mind you, she did herself so it doesn't even look a bit suspicious-and that leaves me wondering why you think this." Harlan says. "Is she more than just an asset to you? Are you making friends again?"

Jamelia ignores the jibe. "I think so because in Mexico, before the deployment of multiple shockwaves and the incident in Christmas led everyone to cover it up, a very interesting HVT notice was passed around, codename FIERY ANGEL. Now, the HVT is authentic, but it was also very recently sent out by Damage Control, and it's interesting how well the capabilities would match up with Dr. Rosario's if she took her abilities out of the lab, isn't it?"

"She's a doctor, not a field agent." Harlan mentions. "It's not likely she'd be able to do this. Successfully."

"No, but it's possible." Donald says, hope rising. Hope that she's alive, because it means that maybe Rose might be able to get some good news in a subjective eternity. "So are we going to Mexico?"

"Maybe." Jamelia says. "We're going to need to hash out everything first."
​

---

Plot Hooks! Plot Hooks Everywhere!​

So your choices are sort of laid out in front of you. Choose one to follow up on most directly. The others may run into you as I desire or as people write-in. Yes, this is a hint that if you write up an outline which leads to being able to run into multiple plot threads, it might lead to you getting just that. Suggestions are great.
[ ] Sic Semper Tyrannis: The problem with trying to find and get into contact with a shady black ops team of heavily enhanced intelligence agents is that they're a shady black ops team of heavily enhanced intelligence agents. Who normally hobnob with the sort of high-visibility people around whom Jamelia's presence would be noticed. Fortunately, their visibility is somewhat higher when they're doing a mission-so you might have to accomplish that mission before them and just lounge around waiting.
[ ] A Thanksgiving Special Family Reunion: Remember when Elissa al-Hallaq was told something by a certain general? She's been doing her own thing, and getting closer and closer to Jamelia even as corruption in the Traditions has tried to isolate her.
[ ] Fallen Angels: Serafina Rosario is alive, Jamelia is fairly sure. Serafina Rosario is in hiding if she is alive, Jamelia is certain. How do you find someone who is very, very good at faking her death? Well, it's going to take a long, long while.
[ ] Gunboat Diplomacy: If you're going to be working with the Void Engineers rather than working as Void Engineers, probably assigned to somewhere on the other side of the galaxy, you're going to need to take the initiative and approach them, right now.
[ ] The Enemy of The Enemy...: The Void Engineers are working with the Etherites, apparently? Fortunately professional courtesy isn't dead. Sure, sometimes it only exists so that you can betray it when it's really important-but the NWO and Shadow Ministry often played against each other with unwritten rules. And some of those rules-and unofficial contacts-might be useful in getting an in here.
[ ] ...Dies First: Prince LaCroix is probably in a very tight spot. The Camarilla are planning to abandon him. His allies are few and far between. The Technocracy wants his head. He's likely to go to his Final Death-but if you find him quickly enough, you might be able to get something out of him. For hate's sake. Vampires, after all, are known to be petty and rather vengeful. That just requires you to, well, find him before the rest of the Technocracy does and convince him that doing this will hurt the ones who betrayed him. Or beating it out of him. Either way.

Interlude Choices:
Yes, one last interlude. Probably a short one like the first Christos interlude. All of them doing something rather different from the main story.
[ ] The Anathema: The Predator
[ ] Yinzheng Li: The Pianist
[ ] Warren Roth: The Knight

 

[MJ12 Commando]

Yinzheng I: A Hero's Reward

A young woman sleeps in an expensive, finely crafted bed. The sheets are smoother than silk, the bedding made quite literally unbelievably soft. Outside of the controlled environment it was fabricated in, it would lose its qualities in a matter of months. A normal observer might consider the lavish surroundings-the mahogany drawers, the expensive classical books in a half-dozen languages, the bedding-and conclude that the woman turning in the bed is some kind of princess. Someone schooled in the occult would realize that the woman is clearly some kind of mystic-her body is made of things other than human flesh from the neck down, and even from the neck up she is barely human. Kinetic dampeners and impact fields crowd around her head, and her pure snow-white hair frames her face like a halo.

Someone with the right security clearances would know that she sleeps in a bed like this because she is no longer a person, but a weapon. Like many Iterators and Progenitors, she no longer owns her own body-it is Technocracy property through and through. The bed is because her sense of touch has been amplified to the point where should an attacker cut out her eyes, made of perfectly-engineered alien biocrystal, she can still sense the world around her merely by the feel of sound waves. Her senses have been sharpened to an almost overwhelming degree by the integration of a lobotomized god-machine in her body, a weapon which requires overwhelming amounts of maintenance. One of the expensive mahogany drawers conceals a minifridge loaded with advanced pharmaceuticals and necessary survival tools-artificial nanotech immune system replacements, Erg Cola, and a smorgasbord of differently colored pills to fight off tissue rejection and other worse fates. The price of power is immense. The New World Order knows this, and prefers its agents to be able to operate in the field with minimal self-maintenance. If the woman had a choice, she would probably give this up as well. Her old body was perfectly fine-stronger and faster than her lithe beauty would imply-in fact, stronger than an Olympic weightlifter and faster than an Olympic sprinter, with the endurance of an Olympic marathon runner. More than enough. Knocking an hour off of her 1-hour fifteen-minute marathon record isn't worth being shackled to logistics bases and relearning how to move again.

But that wasn't a choice. She's young, but Yinzheng Li knows that resurrections of personnel are hard and become more and more expensive the longer someone stays clinically dead. She knows that every day she has bought with her sacrifice has been another day she's earned-and that her choice was to subject herself to the mercies of a senior member of the Technocracy and his unasked-for reward or being dead-and she loves this world and the Union and her family too much to subject them to this. Her family thinks she's found an excellent consultant job in the West. The Technocracy handily covers for her, and as poor rural folk they aren't inclined to ask questions when she sends tens of thousands of dollars to them every year-enough for them to eat meat for every meal, and buy their dream house, and not get bothered by corrupt officials. She talks to them sometimes, and her heart swells every time they're proud of her. Yinzheng Li doesn't want to take that joy from them. Even if it means living forever bound to the Technocracy and its drug therapies and its nanomachinery and its invasive, violating tests.

She's slept for barely 3 hours. More than enough for her mind and body. She opens her alien, ruby eyes, and sees the room in perfect color despite there being no light. "Subdimensional bleed," the manual had called it. She tries not to think about the fact that she now has an instruction manual, like a machine. There's something troubling her, something about her dreams. Something related to what she is.

She's back in the painfully white room, the thin barred windows showing black gloom and the occasional piercing beam of a helicopter searchlight.

The man whose face is eternally masked in shadow turns to her. "Quis custodiet ipso custodes?" he asks. He offers her a cup of tea, which smells just like the sort her parents used to make, all nostalgia and warm memories. "How do you think that relates to you?"

"That's our role." Yinzheng says. "We watch the other Conventions to ensure that they stay loyal to the goal of uplifting mankind to the masters of the cosmos."

"Yet-who watches you? Are you incorruptible?"

"We were chosen because we could be trusted to be loyal to the Union's ideals."

"Perhaps." When he next speaks, it's slow, as if going through painful memories. Or seeming to. "Would you be able to do what's right, Ms. Li? If the choices were your comrades and everything you believed and the ideals of the Union-could you give up everything to uphold the latter? Could you walk the path of the traitor, unloved by all, merely because you knew it was right? Take some time to think of this answer. But you're going to have to answer it sometime."

Another one of these mysterious dreams. She checks herself and her memories-looking for anything that doesn't fit. Nothing. There's nothing wrong with her. She could talk to Jamelia Belltower about these dreams-but that would be taking up too much of her time. It's nothing. Just her having to deal with the stress of nearly dying. Just like how when she sees herself nude in the mirror she feels a sense of... wrongness, even though to naked eyes she looks perfectly like anyone else, if it wasn't for her ruby eyes and translucent white hair. She should get used to dyeing it sometime-perhaps choosing an odd color, so that people notice the oddness of the dye and her fashion choices rather than the oddness of her albinism. She looks down, and instead of flawless pale skin, she sees through herself. Alien tissue appears layer by layer, and the ubiquitous implant network which manages her body's special requirements and interprets its sensory information appear. She looks up at the mirror, and then sees a hazy reflection of herself in phase space.

One day, she will be able to use all this multitude of senses without being overwhelmed by the sheer data. She understands that her enhanced capabilities come from largely EDE-derived sources, but her body is heavily cyberized, largely as a safety measure to ensure she isn't overwhelmed by her senses. She's on nootropics and going through training to make sure she can deal with it without the cutouts, should an enemy Reality Terrorist disable them. Right now, she can handle the input to some extent, largely by ignoring most of it. But she wants to be able to deal with the unadulterated input and her capabilities without reliance on Iteration X subprocessors or the multiple levels of restraining system that have been built alongside her bones.

She takes some time to shower, luxuriating in the feeling of hot water on her skin. Her ability to withstand everyday sensation has been gradually increasing. She hopes that she'll be able to sleep in a normal bed within a month. She brushes her teeth-not that she needs to anymore given how profoundly hostile her body is to terrestrial bacteria, but it makes her feel a little more human-and dresses in carbon-nanotube weave clothing which isn't designed to protect her-her body's capable of generating defensive fields capable of resisting vehicle-scale firepower, and is more than tough enough to protect against all small arms and a large subset of cyborg-portable light artillery-but to withstand the stresses she can put it under. Unlike a Progenitor, she has some modesty. Business casual today-nicely cut suit, skirt slightly above the knees, stockings, moderate heels (with the standard NWO retractable blades). She only almost falls once-she's still not entirely used to how fast her movements are, how powerful her muscles are. Unfortunate, because she could be very useful for field ops.

She spends a few minutes taking her daily dose of nootropics and immunosuppressants and 'blue goo' nanotech and a variety of other pills required to keep her billion-dollar body from cannibalizing itself, then finally leaves the room to take a slow walk through the facility. It's a hidden base in the Swiss Alps-one with quite a bit of history. Jamelia said she was reactivating it out of a bit of nostalgia, although it's still a practical facility-far roomier than the ones she's worked out of before. Far more luxurious, as well. Her new room was originally used for high-ranking guests while the Large Hadron Collider was being assembled. She wonders if a member of Control has ever been in that room. And the base itself-it's so large. To imagine, that once the Technocracy considered this a relatively minor facility and now it's a critical node of Panopticon.

The refurbishing is going on apace. She can see industrial synthetics moving around heavy objects, the black casings of quantum computers, crates and crates of war materiel, and more esoteric tools. She notices the number of combat-capable enhanciles and clones-Vanessas, MiB 2.0s, HITMarks and other stranger things, and she's getting a sense that there's a preparation for another heavy operation going on. Many of them notice her and greet her warmly when she passes. She's killed a major Reality Terrorist. One people have found too dangerous to engage. She's avenged a major leader of Iteration X. It means that even if they're jealous that they're working while she gets to wander around doing whatever she wants, effectively on vacation-they understand how much she's already given for the Union. And how she'll never be recognized for it, because by doing so she'll end up being a target.

She doesn't mind. She just wants to serve the people who made her success possible. She loves the Technocracy and wants to pay back its gifts.

"I see two possible futures here. One is where you go back to your old position in Panopticon. You will not be officially recognized for what you did. However, people will know. You will have your body reconstituted, you will go back to your life, and things will go... better than they have. You will be recognized, people will start to respect you. You might be able to emulate your mentor's meteoric rise, even." The shadowy man says.

"And if I say no?" Yinzheng asks.

"No, madame." He laughs slightly. "This is what happens if you refuse the offer."

She feels like she's been put in this position before, but not in this life. It's such an odd, alien, un-Technocratic thought that it surprises her.

She'd give anything for the Technocracy, and she doesn't like being benched. She needs to master her body. To get better. To convince Jamelia Belltower to let her take over other operations again. It galls her that DIDO got away in the end-but taking out HANNIBAL was more than worth it in the end. Or was it? What was so important about DIDO that a centuries-old Reality Terrorist would sacrifice himself to let her escape? That makes her wonder.

She could task herself to that. Her mind is, if anything, sharper than it was before. She could take advantage of her clearance to work on a few thorny problems facing the amalgam. Or she could ask Director Belltower for another task to take, some light work which she could take advantage of to both get used to her body-and also get used to this facility. Because even now, she itches to serve the Union as best she can. She lives for it. The Union has given her so much, and every day she... luxuriates in this facility, watching other people work, annoys her. She wants to get back into the field as soon as possible.

She knows it's illogical paranoia, but she feels that something bad might happen if she keeps vacationing for too long.

---

You guys also chose possibly the shortest interlude, for various reasons. Mainly the reason is that all the interludes were different playstyles and Yinzheng's is not-quite-slice-of-life. Don't worry, there will be potential plot revelations. Like what went on when Aleph talked to her. Or what Ms. Clock has been doing.

Yinzheng's Day Week Month Off
Yinzheng is going to be doing something right now! She's going to:
[ ] Intensify her physical therapy regimen. It's a great excuse to go outside and get some things done.
[ ] She wants to do more intel work and keep her mind sharp while she's out of action. Maybe she can find DIDO. They've got plenty of constructs, but not that many Enlightened personnel-certainly someone will appreciate having better mission control.
[ ] She's got a full supply of meds, speaks multiple languages, and is in Europe. She can play tourist.
[ ] Write-In.

 

[MJ12 Commando]

Yinzheng II: Newcomer Reborn

A dark suit stands at the top of a gently sloped hill, worn by a woman, pale as the snow that she fades into so well. There's something inhuman about her, crystalline and cold. Yinzheng purses her lips. She knows, intellectually, that their new facility was quite a ways above sea level. Seeing it was something quite different. Her coordination isn't quite up to the point where she'd be comfortable skiing downhill, but then... what's the risk, really? Slamming into a tree at a hundred kilometers per hour was now more of an irritant than a risk, and the only thing a tumble through the snow could injure was her pride. Her impatience demands that she push her limits, get herself back on her feet and ready to serve as soon as possible.

Anyway, she'd rather not take the lift down to one of the garages. Decision made, Yinzheng pushes off, inhumanly keen senses picking up subtle textures in the ice and snow. It was almost meditative, in a way. White noise.

The first time he went skiing, he was twelve years old. It would be a decade and a half before he ended up in Mossad, and another several years before ending up in the NWO. He hadn't ever believed that there could be so much snow, or that winter could be that cold. He spent so long in the resort staring at the plane of white in wonder-and now he was getting his first chance to actually try it in person. So exciting! His mother had become annoyed, because he would spend so little time doing it-waking up at the crack of dawn to watch the sun rise on the snow-covered peaks. As an Operative, he remembered his own joy at seeing the innocent, peaceful world. He remembered the expressions of everyone else there, all the happy vacationers. This was the world he protected. He would shed blood so boys and girls could enjoy peace. He would sin, so they would remain pure. So twelve year old boys could look at the forests there and see only beauty, rather than the shapeshifters and EDEs hiding among them.

Another glitch. Mind-bleed. She knows that her augmentations included muscle memory and limited patterning downloads from top Operatives. But recently-she's been having more memory bleed from them. It's something she might need to see a psychosurgery tech about later. The wind cuts through her suit like it isn't there and she hardly notices, her stolen biology unconcerned with mere tens of degrees below zero. Flesh adapted to the inhospitable temperature extremes of deep sea and deeper space rips the chill from the air and leaves a comforting breeze behind. She refocuses. This isn't a pleasure trip. Mostly. She lets a mental gear shift and her senses expand. Her self expands.

Well, that's what it feels like anyway. She's there, hands running over the bark of an ancient tree, reaching through it, to where she can feel the faint thrum of a nervous system. Nearly impossible to detect, or so the Progenitors boast. Leaves that serve as low resolution cameras, fed into a central network by filaments so thin they might as well not exist. Then her focus shifts and she's examining the ingenious mechanisms used to open the fast deployment chutes. Old tech, but reliable. She wonders how long the Union's had this facility.

From secrets hidden deep underground to subtle shifts in the native wildlife, the security measures are laid bare.

Yinzheng doesn't make a habit of being enthralled by her new body. Grateful, yes, always, because she understands the trust, the responsibility it represents. Appreciative sometimes. Enthusiastic?

Rarely. But it's moments like this that let her understand how the Machine Cult had so many adherents. She feels like she could shout from the sheer joy of it, this feeling of perfect awareness.

Of course it's then that she realizes her body is about to impact with a tree, and the illusion breaks. Her focus is drawn back is, narrowed to the tiny slice of matter she's on course to run into. Yinzheng starts to move to the side, but it's too late to dodge. Time stretches as her hands start to come up, cool mountain air rendered liquid, hot and heavy by the speed of their passage. She's close, now, ruby eyes picking out microscopic details on the bark of the tree from bare inches away. She knows the collision won't hurt her.

Her body doesn't, and it makes it's position known. Violently. Crystalline organs resonate with alien frequencies, shrill in their panicked, unprepared activation. The air in front of her cracks like a glass pane, refracting light in a million impossible colors. Then it shatters, and the sound would be enough to make an unenhanced human's ears bleed. Yinzheng's skis pass around the stump unmolested.

It's then that she collapses, muscles rebelling against her control. The snow almost seems to embrace her as she convulses silently, throat locked, the instinctive use of her xenobiology more damaging than the minuscule danger it protected her from.

Blue blood stains white and she blacks out.

She floats in the suspension tank, unconscious. Some sort of oddity-she should be unconscious-she should be unaware, but somehow she seems to see the world. She feels comfortably numb-the kind of comfortable numbness which tells her that she is so far beyond the point where pain is useful that she has to be dead. She tries to move, but nothing does, as if she is imprisoned, bound to something. The woman gives up and concentrates on the environment. There's a lot of lab equipment she doesn't recognize, and two people talking-a man and a woman. She doesn't recognize either of them. They have the kinds of faces and features which are strangely forgettable. So close to average it's painful.

"Neural reboot is mostly green, some yellow on the board. Mental faculties... stable. Resurrection shock minimal. Memory integration is good. We can make use of her."

"This is a very expensive project you're dealing with. And to integrate her with this technology... it's not something I would call reliable. You're talking about a derivative of the AC Project. Neural interface issues were rampant in the full-size design, as was ideological contamination. Given the psychosurgery she's gone through, the results are risky at best."

"We've already been through the simulations-and we know exactly what we're dealing with here. Our legacy of stealing fire from the gods is long enough that we've gotten so very good at it. The ASE is reliable enough. Its test subjects functioned just fine."

"I will remind you that the project was abandoned for good reason."

"I have high-level approval already. She can handle the side effects, whatever they are. She's a strong woman. And from the reports we've both read, she'll do the right thing when it comes down to it. She might not be the best choice but she's more than good enough."

"I hope so. For all our sakes."

By the time she wakes up, she forgets that she ever remembered this impossible yet entirely true vision.

***​

Ten minutes later, Yinzheng wakes up to carnage. At least three trees lie broken around her, and many more maimed. The earth is cracked and torn.

She'd lost control. She stands up, thankful that her skis are rather more durable than mere rocks, and walks gingerly out of the crater she'd made for herself. She's still wounded, ever so slightly. She will soon heal, but for now it's a reminder. A reminder of how she'd betrayed the Union's trust. She's moving again. More slowly than before, more careful to restrict her senses to a less overwhelming level. She still has her training, her engrams and skill packages. Xenotech is unstable. Dangerous.

The extraction team will be here soon. All he has to do is survive a few more minutes. Against a xenobiologically-enhanced killer. The RD's flaming sword narrowly misses him, and he feels fortunate that NWO standard ties are both fast-detaching and flame-retardant as the armored fabric only smolders. He's clearly more skilled-but the man knows that the RD's glowing armor and flaming sword are not going to last very long in this environment. He just needs to wait for an opening. Eventually it comes when the Chorister pushes too hard and makes a mistake. Fortunately, it comes moments before he loses any of his limbs. The golden aura surrounding the Chorister fades, the painful light sputters, and the Chorister starts burning. His screams echo in the Tehran night. "I hope that came with a warranty-" Joseph Belltower pants, and empties his revolver's magazine into the Chorister. "-and some life insurance."

Her skills as an Operative, however, remain reliable. So she resists the urge to cheat, picking out security features - and flaws - with (mostly) human senses, slips through detection grids with only human skill. Sometimes she fails, her new musculature too fast to be smooth, too strong to be subtle.

But she's getting better. She's more than a platform for organs and weaponry.

And as she makes her way through the foothills, mentally drafting a list of flaws in the facility's defensive measures, she can't help but think the Union would be proud. She can still use her training-she's lost none of it. She hasn't gotten lazy simply because of her enhancements. Her worries are unfounded-simply being so much more than human hasn't made her training and human skill less effective.

She hikes her way back up to the facility with her skis, in a slightly rumpled snow-stained suit. Something slightly sharp pokes at her back, and she realizes that she's destroyed her service weapon in the process. Of course, it's the least effective weapon of her arsenal at this point. The hybrid human-alien xenograft is all the weapon she needs for heavier foes with immense telekinetic and psychokinetic potential. If she just wants to take out a human target, she has her immense strength. Yet the handgun is still the most reliable weapon in her entire arsenal. She's going to need to look into non-NWO issue weapons. Something designed to survive being around the sheer level of abuse an Iteration X or Progenitor heavy might be subjected to.

Speaking of Iteration X-she sees that there's someone on the slopes, bundled up warmly. Unnecessarily, she thinks, because her senses can penetrate his thick winter clothing and tell her quite a bit of it. She can see the Primium grafting on his skeleton, the superconductors which have replaced his spine, the bright nodes of neural implants to let him think faster, react quicker. The nanomachines floating in his blood to optimize his organs and to allow him to survive underwater or in the vacuum of space for hours merely on blood oxygen. The myomer muscle grafts on his heart and lungs so he can breathe even in high-G environments, the subtle threadings of more myomer into his skeletal muscles so he can turn his head and move his body should he have to while maneuvering a fighter or a combat walker at 20 plus Gs.

He's not quite as augmented as she is-of course not, given how she's had virtually her entire body replaced-but he's still quite heavily augmented for an Iteration X pilot. The interface work is far more complex than the basic neural implants she had, or even a standard ADEI. The interface's nanocircuitry is visible on most of his body as the faint glow of electromagnetic activity, circuitry tracing down all his limbs and deep into his mind.

Yinzheng is distracted by the details of the machinery for long enough that she doesn't notice the snowball until it hits her in the face.

"Hey!" She complains. "What was that for?"

"You were staring at me for a while." He says quietly. "I said 'hello' a few times but didn't get your attention, and I threw a snowball towards you but you didn't notice either. So I wanted to get your attention."

"Oh." Yinzheng says. She notices his soulful, slightly haunted brown eyes-large, gorgeous eyes. She makes a snap-guess as to ethnicity based on that alone. Indian, probably. "Sorry."

"It's okay." The pilot says. "I know not many people use this part of the mountain anymore since the base is all underground and warm. So it must be unusual seeing someone like me around. They want me to go through more physical therapy," he says, "so that's what I'm going to be doing. How do you get used to it?"

Yinzheng realizes that he's noticed she's wearing something no unaugmented human would consider comfortable in winter and drawn some conclusions from that. "I try to take it a day at a time. I haven't been fully adjusted to my body either."

"Wearing something like that in the middle of winter?" The pilot asks. "You seem very comfortable with your body-er... I meant that in a purely innocent sense." He manages. Iteration X, Yinzheng things. So amusing at times. You have so much more time to think and yet you still have these gaffes. "I mean... someone unaugmented wouldn't go outside wearing that little this season. I'm auged and I don't like being out in the cold."

Yinzheng smiles. "No offense taken. " Truth be told, she doesn't like the idea much either. She's just doing it for the sake of understanding what her enhancements can do. She doesn't recognize the young man, which means he's probably new. Someone with augmentations like this, though-he's not a mere low level foot soldier. He's here for a reason, she can sense it. "Want to join me?" she offers.

"Certainly." The young man says.

---

FNG:
A highly augmented pilot Yinzheng doesn't know anything about? How mysterious. There is totally nothing odd going on here. Nevertheless, Yinzheng would like to know more. But first, skiing! Competition! Winning!
[ ] Write-In: How is Yinzheng going to sate her curiosity?

 

[MJ12 Commando]

Yinzheng III: The Living and the Lost

Ruby eyes track a dark figure as he makes his way down the mountain. Their owner huffs in frustration. The mystery pilot has very been evasive in his answers, and that's only made Yinzheng more curious. His arrival here is strange, and not just because she'd heard nothing about a new pilot. It's bizarre because of how unnecessary it is. Clarent fills the role of 'heavily augmented, talented combat pilot' perfectly well. Another is just wasteful.

So his purpose must be something beyond the obvious. His augmentations aren't very helpful, being stereotypical, if very advanced, examples of Iteration X pilot enhancement procedures. His mannerisms, all shy politeness when he isn't dryly sarcastic, aren't much use either. So that leaves his personal history. Which he has been very diligent in avoiding, while not actually saying anything like 'classified'.

Stranger and stranger. Still, she's not going to let him slip out it that easily. So when he stops nearby, snow spraying up like an outstretched wing, Yinzheng makes some adjustments. A prouder arch to her spine, a challenging smirk and a predatory glint in her eyes. Nothing invented, just... accentuated. Let the Progenitors keep their pheromone packages and the Iterators their models and spreadsheets. The New World Order would always have them beat when it came to the arts.

"How about we make this a bit less boring?"

The mystery pilot freezes for a moment before turning to her, expression wary. "How so?" he asks.

"A race. First one to..." she makes a show of looking for a finish line, before pointing at a gnarled tree, chosen minutes before. "There."

"What's the prize?" he asks, voice suspicious and something else as well. Resigned?

"To be determined," replies Yinzheng primly.

The pilot shuffles a bit, swaying side-to-side on his skis. But it's not until Yinzheng lets herself look through his scarf and hat that she realizes he's laughing. Quietly, sure, but laughing nonetheless.

He looks at her, and she's once again struck by how expressive his eyes are. They're less haunted now. More... nostalgic, maybe. "Fine. On your mark."

It's not a question, and Yinzheng begins the count. Three seconds later she's off, the mystery man close behind. Now that they're pouring on the speed, caution thrown to the wind, the trees whip by in an undifferentiated blur. The gnarled tree is fast approaching and Yinzheng grins, any discomfort with her new body drowned out by the rushing air. Behind her, the mystery pilot- what.

He's not behind her anymore. They're neck and neck. Yinzheng only spares a moment for shock as she notices the expression on the pilot's face, so unlike the polite stranger she'd spent the past while trying to drag answers from, all iron determination and bared teeth. He's good, she realizes. If the smooth movements he's displaying now carried over to piloting... well. Pilots like that are rare, these days. Very rare.

Then she focuses, and the race, already pushing the limits of human endeavor, gets serious. The wind clawing at her skin and eyes would probably be extremely painful for a normal human, some distant part of her brain notes. She ignores it. She ignores the racer beside her, all her worries, fears and questions. All she sees now is the tree.

Twenty meters. Ten. Two. One.

None. A crack echoes through the woods as her hand makes contact with, and then short work of, the gnarled finished line. Snow explodes in a massive plume as she stops, skids and then finally encounters another tree. She turns to face her compatriot, currently leaning on his own tree. He's covered in snow, and Yinzheng knows she must look much the same.

So she smirks at him, all confidence. The effect is rather ruined by the snow tumbling off her once immaculate suit, and he starts chuckling, which sets off his own miniature avalanche.

"What exactly did you want?" The young man says, after they manage to regain sufficient composure to try to figure out who won that challenge. "I don't suppose it was just for fun, was it? Black suits never do."

"Is there anything wrong with just doing it for fun? Or anything odd about it?"

"I suppose not." He concedes. "But you don't strike me as the fun-loving Bond Girl type." He looks her up and down. "Not with augmentations like that. Seems you take your job very, very seriously."

"I do." Yinzheng admits. "That still doesn't mean I can't have fun some of the time." Even if this excursion was, yes, not entirely for fun. "If you need to keep asking, I'm undergoing physical therapy to get used to these augmentations."

"So. Not voluntary." The young man responds. "My condolences. That must have been rough."

"Not voluntary, no. Nevertheless, they feel good." She says, trying to open a rapport. "Surprisingly good." That, after all, is true. It gives her a whole host of capabilities, as long as she remembers how necessary it is to manage them. "What about you?"

"Same. Just trying to get some of my old skills back. Getting back into peak fighting form is a lot harder than it felt the first time around. Is that normal?"

"I suppose it's because before, every day was just an improvement on your best, while now you know what your best is and it's a long way from where you are." Yinzheng muses. "If we're both trying to recover, perhaps we can help each other..." she thinks.

"We could." He agrees. "I'm Sanjeet Langara. I'd love to help you with your recovery. For the Union."

There's something odd about how he says it, a little bit of misplaced anger there-but Yinzheng shelves it. It's probably just her mistake.

***
​

Yinzheng circles her challenger in the ring, her heart racing. Well, for her new body, which means it's barely beating once every three seconds. She isn't even sweating, while sweat is beading all across his dark skin and dripping in rivers down his face. It's still exhilarating having been given a chance to go... not all-out, but to ease the limiters up a little more. She remembers the pedagogical brain imprints, the neutral voice which talks to her about the equipment. Sometimes she thinks the voice resembles that of the faceless man in her dreams. The imprints are probably the reason she's getting memory bleed. The strange dreams, too. Those are a known side effect.

"The Avatar Slaying Enhancement is mostly made of extradimensional protomatter, cloned and bred from an EDE hybrid. Much like the DSS, this tissue has enormous strength-weight ratios, orders of magnitude higher than human tissue at peak, requiring a heavily reinforced skeletal base created from artificial metamaterial to anchor. In practical terms, the failure of the power supply or structural systems will happen far earlier than the protomatter capacity is reached. Unlike a conventional cyborg, the implants in the ASE are not intended to improve the body's function, but rather to moderate it so that it the quite literally godlike power available to the enhancile is usable without excessive collateral damage effects to the user and the surrounding environment."

She pays for the distraction of the imprints by jerking back and slamming into the edge of the ring when Sanjeet punches her in the face. With boosted musculature, that blow would have knocked out a heavyweight prizefighter. With her skull reinforced by nearly indestructable composites and her brain buffered by inertial dampeners, all it does is moderately annoy her. "You're not supposed to score cheap shots when someone's distracted."

"You've been cheating too." Sanjeet responds. "You never even insinuated that you're in a full-up combat body. Anyways, you aren't even hurt, and it's not like you'd get a chance to stop and think in a serious fight. You never do. You always have to improvise, because you don't know what the enemy will do-or what your allies will."

"You didn't ask about what my upgrades were, and this isn't a serious fight." Yinzheng retorts. She wonders about that statement-as far as she knows, Pilot Langara has fought all of once, in a single combat sortie which also led to his recent retrieval from a hostile subdimension. Those records are highly classified and there's no reason to lie on them, which makes his statements odd. They sound like something a veteran Operative might say, not a wet-behind-the-ears flight lieutenant who never had any sort of command role outside of mindless drones. She responds with a series of quick jabs, which Sanjeet tries and fails to block. He's not as good as she is in hand to hand. Basic training for confidence and discipline, not an actual killing art like the Operatives teach it.

The young man listens to the lecturer carefully as he describes a multitude of killing blows that can be used from behind a hostile, with assistance from an old-style projector. "There will be situations where even the most covert weapons risk discovery. There will be situations where you are disarmed, or at a disadvantage. Only a fool of an Operative will trust their life to a weapon. The skilled Operative understands that everything of his can be used as a weapon."​

This time, the memory bleed is narrow, less overwhelming. She doesn't lose her focus. "Give up yet?" She asks.

"Sure, but remember I'd have won in the rematch." He grins, telling her that he doesn't mean any of it.

Yinzheng smiles. "Of course you would have."

***
​

She spends a few days like this, working with the oh-so-similar newcomer as both of them challenge each other. He's a quick learner and sharp, but of course the vast majority of Technocrats are. He's interested in everything Yinzheng does as physical therapy enough, and she's unused to her body enough, that it means that they can both participate. Yinzheng suspects, and is slightly flattered, that he's attracted to her and is using it as an excuse. Just a little, of course. Which is useful. It means he's likely to open up to her. And there's something intriguing as to why Panopticon needs a dead Iterator pilot when they already have Ling Clarent. A mystery she wants to understand. Why is he here-especially since he's been brought back after a year.

Today they've finally mastered the art of playing the piano at a level sufficient for a professional musician. It's much easier when neither party is a baseline human and can make up via raw reaction speed and precision what a human needs years of training to do. She pretends not to notice how his hands linger a little too long on hers and how he sits closer than strictly necessary. It's in the happy afterglow of that accomplishment that he drops the bombshell of the question.

"I heard that we're working under Jamelia Belltower." Sanjeet says quietly.

Yinzheng nods. This base is hers, now, after all those inconveniences in Los Angeles.

"I was doing some research about her and her subordinates." the young man continues. "Do you know what happened to Henriette? Henriette Langley? She was working with Director Belltower just a half-year ago."

"Henriette Langley... is no longer with us." Yinzheng says. She says it because it's the truth. She knows what happened there. It's not something she wants to share, especially if there was a friendship or something more.

"I know." Sanjeet says. "I was told what happened to her. Killed by an EDE and replaced." He sounds uncharacteristically angry. "I just want you to tell me what you know about her."

"I don't know much. We never really met." Yinzheng says. "She seemed like a nice person when I met her. A bit high-strung, but that might have just been because of her situation." Knowing how much of her augmentation she's lost, if Sanjeet is an example of how she was modified before-it would be very easy to overcompensate.

"Anything else you can tell me? I know your security clearance is higher than mine." Sanjeet says. "Because I can't even access anything in your bio past early 2015."

"That might be because that's all need-to-know." Yinzheng retorts mildly. But it's true. Her security clearance has risen at roughly the same meteoric rate as her career prospects have. She's been considering taking a JB name already-she could ask for almost any one and probably get it, what with who she's killed. But maybe not yet. She can still be Yinzheng Li for a while longer."

"What's in a name?" The white-suited faceless man asks. "A trite question ever since Shakespeare brought it up in a foolish romantic tragedy, but still a valid one. Names are a way of proclaiming our individuality, our existence, to the cosmos. They are a way of forging meaning from chaos. Do you know why the New World Order requests its recruits change their names to a J.B.?"

Yinzheng shakes her head. "It has to do with cutting ties to our family, right? With society and the people who raised us? This way Reality Terrorists can't hunt down our families."

"All of that is true." The man says. "But that is not the entire meaning of the ritual. It is a protection of sorts for your family and your old life. But there is also something more to the sacrifice which taking a JB name means. Do you think you will be ready for that sacrifice? And you must understand-a JB name is no award, even if we act like it. It means that you have lost something, whether it's ignorance or peace or innocence, to protect the greater whole. You have given up part of your own existence to safeguard others. Are you ready?"

Yinzheng doesn't answer.

"When you are ready, you will know."

That time, the hallucination merely took a fraction of a second. Better integration, she thinks. It's probably just a side effect of augmentation. She's heard of Progenitor and Iterator cyborgs who could be incredibly... flaky when they weren't in combat. She hopes it'll get better for her, but it's not as if she's senile or anything, just... she sometimes remembers things that never happened. "But really, there's only the clinical details. Henriette became a hero in Moscow, which lead the MUSCOVITE entity to hold a permanent grudge against her. It created a doppleganger and eliminated her-given the capabilities of its bodies, this would have been trivial. You must remember that the Void Engineers," and Sanjeet looks visibly angry when that name comes up, "stripped her of most of the augmentations which would have let her survive such an ambush." Yinzheng lets Sanjeet calm down before finishing her story. "The doppleganger probably misled the rest of the construct into space via trickery or other means-which means most of Director Belltower's former staff may have been subverted. This is, of course, not something you can repeat to everyone." She's cleared to tell anyone she thinks needs to know that much of the story, and she thinks he needs to know. "I'm sorry. For what it's worth... she was a hero. She saved the world. Saved us all."​

Sanjeet nods slowly, eyes full of sadness and more than a little bit of rage. "And she died for it. Damn it." He says. "I thought I was going to die-I thought I did die to save her, back in 2014. And then she dies on Earth before I can meet her again. Replaced by some sort of alien doll." He slams his hands onto the piano, creating an ear-splitting shriek. "Fuck my life." That's something that worries her about this new Sanjeet. He's moodier than his original psych profiles suggested, prone to fits of anger, odd ones given his history. Fits of irrational anger against Reality Deviants, against the Void Engineers, against the Technocracy. It means that Yinzheng is spending time trying to keep him stable. It's not an official mission, but if he's going to be working with Panopticon, they need him stable enough. There is no room for random violence in the Technocracy. Actions of cruelty or spite may sometimes be necessary, but should only be engaged in to prevent greater harm, to as small a degree as possible. Restraint is key. And so she has become his restraint over these days. She's told him kind words when he's become frustrated with physical therapy or endless tests, complimented his efforts when he was willing to give up, been patient with him when he refused to be patient with himself.

Which, she realizes, is probably giving him a belief that she's attracted to him. Well, yes, but only physically. And now that her mind is attached to an alien god-machine which is merely shaped to be an athletic young woman and a lot of her biological reactions are emulated via Iteration X software, that could be fixed in a single heartbeat. She doesn't, because it's useful to reciprocate his attraction in some limited way. And it makes her feel almost bad that she's not being fully honest with him. Almost.

But in the end, it's for the good of the Union. And maybe if he gets some real closure, when he recovers, he'll feel the same way. He'll understand that this was just... projection. Yinzheng holds his hand until he calms down, a process which takes a while. At the very least he doesn't try to trash the room while he's at it-and it's designed to resist accidents from clumsy combat cyborgs.

He's calmed down when Yinzheng's phone buzzes with new mission orders. She's set it to play a bit from a popular Mandopop song when that happens, which makes Sanjeet laugh a little. "Seriously?" Sanjeet says. "That song?"
​

"Is there a problem?" Yinzheng says primly.

"No, I just expected something from Mission Impossible or the Bond movies or the Bourne ones I guess." Sanjeet says. "For a shady emotionless cyborg superspy you're a rather normal person."

"You're not supposed to advertise that openly." Yinzheng says properly. "And besides, it makes people underestimate me."

"Is that an actual reason or is that an excuse?" Sanjeet asks.

"Both." Yinzheng says. She gets up to look at her phone. Her new mission is... interesting. Perhaps not exactly what she wanted to do, but nonetheless it's something she can handle. She could have handled it easily without the margin of safety her augmentation provides. With it, it should be fairly trivial.

​

---

So all in all, we're hitting the closing of Yinzheng Interlude. The very important revelation has been revealed, the implications of which should be very very dangerous to you. There is also one more thing which is important, and thus it goes up to a vote. If you had been more in-depth in the second write-in, I'd probably have provided more Sanjeet background (or rather, more fluff), but since I got basically a handful of perfunctory answers, I just decided to fast forward. Of course, gay piano was required.

Anyways. One last Yinzheng vote. The most important Yinzheng vote. Then I'll give you a look at what Donald and Rose have begged IBM to give them and their initial update!

The Message:
So what exactly was Yinzheng assigned to?
[ ] "We have spotted DIDO in Europe. You are to assist Iterator Villaret in finding and eliminating the threat."
[ ] "The crashing of the Spy's Demise has led to certain... inconveniences for the Union. You are to eliminate certain targets because they may possess compromising knowledge."
[ ] "Doctor Leon wishes that you assist him in security and oversight of a project. You will be going to Tokyo to provide protection and assist in containing any breaches."
[ ] "Our plans in Los Angeles require additional attention to ensure that they are not disrupted. You will protect Dr. Rosario and Financier Sykes from any potential kill-and-replace attempts or other hostile activity."
[ ] "Continue current operations. We need Pilot Langara stable and combat-capable."
​

 

[MJ12 Commando]

Okay. Let's get the basic reasoning out. I don't want her to get involved in the LA shenanigans just yet. The party isn't ready and forcing a showdown right now is too-fast escalation. We're going to face her at some point, but this is the wrong time, both narratively and setting-wise.

Click to shrink...

I think there's a more important question about whether forcing a showdown is good for the long-term survival of multiple characters. The Avatar Slaying Enhancement is not something to be trifled with, as noted by the italics. Since you chose Yinzheng interlude, it may be interesting to list some features.

For one, it's a fairly high-spec artificial body equivalent to a combat homonculus in raw capability and has rapid healing (like any good homonculus) and unbreakable bones (unlike them, because they don't need a skeleton made out of ItX hyperalloy and Primium), but that's more or less baseline.

The ASE has tons of cybernetic implants running through its cultured flesh and artificial bones (also, the entire skeletal system is basically synthetic) not to improve its ability but to hold it back. Technocrats respect the inverse square law-and something which lets a 30 meter tall giant robot move around like a human and throw other 30 meter giant robots like ragdolls means she's got quite a bit of muscle. And Yinzheng, as a Forces 4 effect, can turn down or deactivate these limiters. If she's willing to eat the paradox effect of 4-8 Paradox every action, with the only mitigation being her own Prime Energy stores, she can easily pull off feats which even Kessler would struggle with. Like rip the turret off of an Abrams tank and throw it. Similarly, as a Time 3/Corr 3 effect, she can deactivate limiters on her body's movement speed, which let her do complete bullshit like instantly get behind you (and then rip your head off, even if you are a HITMark or combat cyborg). The cost is, again, Paradox. Yinzheng, unlike Kessler and Rose, is far more limited in how she can apply her peak strength, because she lacks a Prime 5 self-regenerating reactor or Blatancy benefits. She peaks much higher but runs at a more sedate level normally.

As it's designed to kill gods on a slightly smaller scale than the Deity Suppression System, the Avatar Slaying Enhancement has phase disruptor capability. No, not eyebeams, but Yinzheng has a Forces 2/DSci 3 effect which allows her attacks to affect, and permanently kill, spiritual things. She has a DSci 1 ability to see spirits and the Umbra, and can DSci 3 shift between worlds.

Also, she retains a lesser version of the Deity Suppression System's tensor fields. Well, 'lesser.' They peak at the same power, it's just that without the incredibly advanced supercomputers and other technology behind her sucking up Prime Energy, she can't reliably pull off the Apocalypse Canceller's "fuck you nuclear weapons I have Corr/Forces 5 defenses." She can still try it, though. However, on the smaller scale, the stresses that the tensor field projections can create are significant enough that she can use it offensively and defensively as a Forces 3 effect. Cutting through vehicle armor plate, deflecting anti-tank missiles, etc.

Of course, you can't kill what you can't see, and Yinzheng can see quite a lot. Her senses are extremely powerful and have exceptional range (Correspondence 2). She can see through solid materials (Forces/Matter 1), sense phase space objects (DSci 1) and see Primal Energy (Prime 1). She retains her ability to do rapid biological analysis (Life 1) and sense minds (Mind 1) from her NWO training and augmentations.

Oh and did I mention she's still quite a skilled agent and an Enlightened Scientist with a solid broad base of spheres? Something with the name Avatar-Slaying Enhancement is not something that you want to trifle with.

 

[MJ12 Commando]

Yinzheng IV: Reassignment

"Pilot." Yinzheng calls, when she hangs up the phone. "We're going to Tokyo. Well, more accurately, a high-spec research construct just outside of Tokyo. We'll be joining an automated cargo flight in 12 hours, so we need to be packed by then. Looks like a medium-term assignment, so bring anything important."

"Can it not be Tokyo?" Sanjeet grouses. "Bad memories."

"Sorry." Yinzheng says. "That's where we're heading. Unless you'd like to argue with the boss. Shouldn't be dangerous-they want you for some prototype testing and evaluation. It sounds like a milk run." Thankfully, Yinzheng thinks. She's had all too few of these recently. Panopticon isn't in the habit of giving its operatives easy missions. They're supposed to be incredibly talented, gifted men and women with phenomenal potential. Panopticon gives them the resources to thrive, then demands absolute excellence.

"Oh." For a combat pilot, he seems incredibly morose about the idea of stepping into a cockpit again. Admittedly, most combat pilots don't nearly die on their first real mission. "Okay." He manages.

"Cheer up." Yinzheng says. "It looks like it's mostly noncombat testing so it's going to be just sitting in a cockpit for a few hours a day and then coming back." She remembers the other instructions on the mission orders she got. It makes her a little uncomfortable, but only a little. She's not some sort of NWO honeypot. Sanjeet got that right. She's just an operative, and every operative is expected to be a little like James Bond. She never liked the mandatory seduction courses, but she passed them, and she understands their necessity in a world where you may be stripped of all your weapons, but your charm and sexuality-those are harder to take. And she's not lying. She likes Sanjeet. Just not quite as strongly as he's returning. "It'll be a chance to get to know each other better and finally relax." She moves slightly closer, leans in, gives all the signals he yearns for.

It works. "I guess..." Sanjeet says. "I just have a bad feeling about this mission."

"It'll be all right." Yinzheng says. But truth be told, she doesn't feel too great about it too. Something all too suspicious.

***
​

On the flight itself, Yinzheng Li wakes up startled and consideres her dreams. She's dreamt of strange things, of a city monitored by a man in white, where even at night there are no dark alleys.

In her dream, she was in a world where everyone knows their place, and everything is ordered. Like clockwork. She ran through its too-clean streets and too-ordered buildings, running from something chasing her. Or running from someone. But she knows she can't escape her pursuer, that she's running away from inevitability. Whatever she's running from, she's afraid of it, of having to face it. She doesn't look back. For all she knows, it could have given up long ago-but she also knows that it hasn't. That its inexorable advance will bring her into conflict with it. One day.

But now, she runs. Because she's not ready for it. The flatscreens on the walls, normally filled with propaganda, shifted as she ran.

"FREEDOM IS WHAT YOU DO WITH WHAT'S BEEN DONE TO YOU."

"YOU CAN'T RUN FROM YOUR FATE."

"THIS IS A CHOICE YOU MUST MAKE."

"THIS DECISION WILL SAVE THE WORLD-OR DAMN IT."

"THIS DECISION HAS BEEN MADE FOR YOU-YET YOU MUST STILL CHOOSE."

Normally, she'd dismiss it as nonsense. Dreams aren't some sort of profound prophecy. They're just reflections of your own thinking. Useful in some ways, but to treat them as profound truth is... useless. But there's something compelling about the questions this one brings up.

So she's running from having to make a choice. Why? Yinzheng asks. What choice is so fearsome that she has to fear it? She's never had problems with making choices before. She's been perfectly willing to do what needs to be done-even if she regrets it some of the time. This doesn't make any sense. She isn't running away from having to make a choice. And the rest of it makes even less sense-she has to choose-yet the decision's already been made. What does that mean? She knows people are less independent, less free-willed, than they'd like to think. So many choices have been made for everyone. Nobody is truly free. Yet that shouldn't concern her.

But the juxtaposition-a choice that is so critical, yet meaningless, that she runs away from despite its necessity-that worries her. What exactly was she thinking about? And what does it mean for the future?
​

***
​

The man has been in Nigeria for several days, searching for something. People don't notice him-his skin and hair and dress mark him as a local. Which he is not-the skin is the result of a disguise retroviral, and his face has been altered by integral biomods. Warren Roth, after all, is not exactly a private figure. Normally, this isn't much of a problem. He has his disguises and his tools. And oftentimes, being a billionaire surrounded by PMC bodyguards is the kind of presence one needs-it commands fear, respect, and a little bit of loathing, especially from people who think they could do better.

He's laughed at that multiple times. Challenged people who said that his fortune was the result of inheritance. They didn't know what he went through. They didn't know how hard he had fought because his parents had unconsciously, unknowingly, chosen the side of the Technocracy and their aid programs and their -and some primitivist had decided they deserved to die for it. They hadn't seen how much he had sacrificed to seek revenge. A primitivist who, broken and bloody and dying, told him that she was just part of a greater cause, that he was fighting a hydra. A primitivist who, in a way, had led him to the Technocracy. Unfortunately, the Technocracy itself-it failed to understand that compromise with the Reality Deviants was just letting them get stronger. Letting their feelers worm their way into society. But some others understand. Others, like Panopticon. Like Director Clock. Like Control. They understand that the only fate of the Reality Deviant is conversion or death-and it doesn't particularly matter which they choose.

He checks that the safehouse he's using is clear, scanning the room with a handgun in one hand and a flashlight in the other. He doesn't need the flashlight-his eyes have been modified with gene treatments to have near-perfect night vision, but the flashlight is a weapon, just like the customized handgun and its explosive-tipped shells, each capable of stopping a shapeshifter. A less lethal weapon, but still a weapon. He finishes his sweeps, and lays his weapons down. It's clear this place hasn't been used for years. Good. It means that he can finish the dirty work

And he's one of the few people Director Clock can rely on for eliminating dirty laundry. She could have done it herself-but there are far too many meetings, there is far too much observation on her. Better for someone in the laissez-faire Syndicate, which cares about results more than means, to do the job. Especially when his enemies, of which there are many, are too busy dealing with the consequences of their reliance on quiet understandings with the other side. People who have often disappeared, or were preoccupied dealing with the rumors that it was a Technocratic trap to win the Ascension War via a surprise attack. Unfortunately, that statement was only technically true.

"Director." He says, when Ms. Clock comes onscreen. "Good news. The files and facilities you wanted destroyed are gone. The other HELMETSHRIKE facilities are salvageable, and have been marked. All sensitive information has been purged."

"Any complications?" She asks.

"None. I will be returning to New York to oversee operations there." Roth says stiffly. "Keeping up appearances is important."

"Good." Ms. Clock sends.

***
​

Jaron Belltower waves his badge at the officers cordoning off LaCroix tower and is let through with minimal complaint. They don't know why some sort of shady G-Man is here, and they definitely don't want to ask about it. He can hear them whisper about domestic terrorism. That'll probably be what it turns out to be in the end. He enters the building and joins the forensics team, using his implants to carefully extract information from their computers.

He's not supposed to be here. He's not even using an official Technocratic identity-nothing that can be traced. Working underground. Minimal support. Extensive use of things available to the masses. Or, as he'd call it, being an agent post-Reckoning. It is, at least, nice that his cyborg body is designed for long-term self-maintenance and doesn't need constant lab attention. That's something he doesn't need to worry about, outing himself as a cyborg simply because he needs to make use of difficult-to-source facilities. Even so, it grates. "What the hell happened here?" He asks himself, as he walks up the stairs. It looks like someone's wrecked the place.

He can see the impact marks from bullets, what looks like dried blood. Something came here and killed everything. Gruesomely. It's clear from the patterns of bullet holes that there wasn't much aiming going on from LaCroix's bodyguards. Not normal, given that he'd have been using loyal v-addicts. Superhumanly tough, strong, probably very confident in their abilities. Loyal, calm. Whatever attacked... was enough to scare them.

He finds a deflected round from one of them as he walks through the office tower. A tungsten-cored round, armor-piercing assault rifle ammunition. The penetrator part has shattered on impact with something. The rest of the burst went wild. So. A single lucky shot the assailant didn't even seem to notice. No traces of blood or anything else on the round. Something hard enough that a dense, hard material like tungsten shattered on contact with no effect. Not a shapeshifter then, or a hemophage-unless it was something like that thing from India.

It's that realization, and the subtle nagging feeling of the scenes of carnage being too methodical, that give him an idea of what's happened in the end. "So you faked all of this." Jaron mumbles. "For what? What exactly did you want to come here that led to this?" He checks the server room. Trashed. The computers in here. Many trashed. A rampaging beast, destroying everything. Except- His investigation leads him to realize that some of the computers, out of sheer coincidence, have had their storage mediums destroyed in a way which makes it impossible for even Technocratic recovery experts to deal with.

So that's what it was here for. There's something LaCroix knew, and probably stored as insurance, that the monster wanted to annihilate. It did so by attacking in the guise of some sort of raging beast. That explains the brutality and how it seems perfunctory, a calculated scene intended specifically to evoke an image. He wonders if LaCroix is dead. No, Jaron Belltower thinks. Probably not. He was arrogant and not very bright, but to miss the lead-up to this attack? No, he'd have found somewhere to hide, believing that he might be able to rebuild his power base. In a way, that's fortunate. It means their leads haven't hit a dead end. There's been so many of them in the past few months. Even with the interrogation and help of Jamelia's junior amalgam members, the investigation has been mostly being just a little too slow.

In another way, that's unfortunate, because Jaron is going to have to actually protect that blood-sucking bastard from some kind of unstoppable monster that seems to be immune to bullets.

---

And now you know what the two people you didn't choose were doing. The Anathema's been destroying evidence (and LaCroix's stuff) in the guise of a horrible supernatural god-monster which eats people (technically true) and Roth has been also cleaning up loose ends in HELMETSHRIKE and possibly VIGILANCE. Perhaps, then, some of this will come up in the main story or in the side stories. Roth certainly might.​

 

[MJ12 Commando]

JB CLXVII: Turning the Tables

Serafina might be alive. That thought makes Donald almost irrationally happy. His incredibly aggravating, workaholic, slave-driving boss thinks Serafina might be alive. She hasn't been in the habit of regularly getting things wrong, either. And he's worked under her long enough as her henchman that he knows that if Jamelia Belltower is willing to risk people on this, she's honestly and legitimately believing what's going on. Which on one hand, means that he might be able to meet a respected co-worker, and yes, friend-definitely a friend at this point-again months after he left her for dead. And Rose can have a family member back-a gift that very few people can provide.

It's irrational happiness because Jamelia and her old smug psychic asshole assassin friend have pointed out that they can't go find Serafina, they have more important things to do with the Void Engineers breathing down their necks and a billion other problems they have to solve-and only they can solve. And besides, you're the California native, Donald, why don't you go back and check on your contacts? Who are probably all dead or turned or both now because that son of a bitch (literally, in Donald's reckoning, given that Reina Lior was a big huge bitch) killer robot god machine thing can't be reasoned with, can't be bargained with, and definitely will not stop, ever, until he's dead-and it's a lot less fun when it's not a movie where the killer robot is preordained to lose. Which means that again, he's going to have to go into the field and Jamelia will dismiss his complaints as baseless whining, she's gone through worse.

Which is true. That killer robot god machine is targeting him to get to her, which means that he's just suffering collateral damage from it. It's probably the only reason he's alive. It didn't want to risk its own damage or destruction merely targeting him. Not when it has a more important objective.

"Fine." Donald says. "I'm going to go check on them. Enjoy talking to the Void Engineers."

"We won't." Harlan responds. "Speaking of. You mind borrowing one of them? The Chinese guy. Drag him away from us and to LA, so we can deal with the Void Engineers without him snooping around. He's been trying to eavesdrop on us every chance he gets."

The way he says it makes it clear that it's not a question he can say no to. "Fine. Fine. Just give me more shit to do." Donald grouses. "It's not as if I already have enough on my plate."

"Excellent." Harlan beams. "I knew I could trust your dependability."

"Asshole." Donald coughs.

***
​

When asked about equipment for operations, Jamelia forwards Donald to the same Iterators who gave him his mechanical arm. She tells him to just bring Rose and Henriette-neither of the Void Engineers are allowed to know where her sources are.

Donald suspects that they're the same people who have been contributing to the high-tech equipment around the abandoned Russian base. Jamelia's psychic asshole friend doesn't seem like the kind of person who'd tinker for the sake of tinkering, while Jamelia herself isn't much of a tech head and Henriette would have done something more... stylish. There's something very cold and clinical about the smooth black quantum-computing obelisks or the holoprojectors that Henriette wouldn't do. She'd probably have tried to make them look good. The Molotek building looks like an office building from the outside. On the inside, everything is different. Donald's been wealthy for quite a while. He knows what has true value and what doesn't. And everything in the Molotek building screams "priceless."​

​

The Technocracy Donald's known has always been one where everything, everything, was carefully rationed. It could be the slow trickle of rewards to agents in the NWO, the "mission-necessary equipment" of Iteration X and the Void Engineers, the cutthroat politicking and favor-trading of the Progenitors, or the market economy of the Syndicate. There is none of this apparent lack here. They have HITMarks-clearly high-end HITMarks, which Iteration X would reserve for high-risk special ops missions, working as receptionists and parking guards. Everything looks custom-built, high-end, and there's probably enough deathtraps in the facility to murder an entire hemophage assault like the one which overran his construct without breaking a sweat.

Rose looks around warily. "Is this the right place?" She asks. One of her hands shifts absently to rest on her hip, ready to draw weapons in case something goes wrong. Of course, against what she's looking at, that might be a futile gesture. "I don't think this is a Union facility." Donald isn't quite sure. Rose has displayed some very interesting insights before, but he thinks this is a Technocracy facility. Just not like any he's seen before.

"Of course it is." Henriette says. She seems relaxed, at least. Which means that it's probably right. Donald doesn't think she's been hacked or anything. "Look, we've already called ahead. Armory is underground."

How the hell did Jamelia find these people, in Russia, of all places? Donald thinks. He warily enters the elevators and takes them down, and when the doors open, it's like an entirely different place. The office camouflage is gone, and what's left is a base Donald thinks Ragnarok Command or the Shock Corps would literally kill to have. A lot of the technology here is rare and highly valued outside of this building, this one oasis of plenty in a desert of lack. Racks and racks of high-tech ordinance line shelves, while an entire wall of folded combat robots speaks to the plethora of autonomous weapons in the facility. Donald puts on his Union-issue smart sunglasses, and looks at the AR tags for the weapons.

He glances at a shelf, mouths "Charge, Multipurpose, Adhesive, Low Yield (.001kt)" while looking at the rack full of tiny, palm-sized bombs-each of which would be enough to level a reinforced building, looks at another shelf full of rifle-sized Multirole Munitions Launchers and the variety of 27.5mm munitions ("High-Explosive, Concussive, Incendiary, Plasmaburst, Submunition, Razorwire, Anti-Biological Nanotech, Electrostatic Discharge"), and it just reinforces the odd sense of displacement he feels. This is the kind of gun heaven that Iterators salivated about, not a typical facility.

There's a few workers here-mostly synthetics, human-seeming machines which nevertheless are a little too perfectly doll-like to be real people. They don't seem like proper military models-but Donald suspects that they could still break a man in half or survive gunfire with ease. The fluidity with which they move demonstrates immense strength and agility. The actual cyborgs are more interesting. It looks more like a Shock Corps convention than the Iterators he's more familiar with. All of them are heavily upgraded, with clear inhuman traits like multiple arms or external carapace or simply having an apparent acuity of movement and mind far beyond human.

Donald focuses on the most leader-like looking one rather than the workers or guards-he wonders why they have cyborgs doing manual labor, but if his watch is right on their connections, their minds are probably considering some complex science problem or something while their bodies run on autopilot. The leader-like one looks relatively normal. Relatively. If it wasn't for the fact that his arms and fingers are made of black nanomaterial and have seam lines and joins that imply that they can split-whether for fine manipulation or to deploy implant weaponry isn't clear. If it wasn't for the fact that he's at least a head taller than Donald, and his body is bulked up by cybernetics to the point where Donald can't easily tell where the high-tech body armor he's wearing ends and the cybernetics begin. But he has only four limbs, and a human face, and his proportions are human, if giant, and that makes him quite a paragon of familiarity in a sea of aliens. Donald looks at Rose, who backs away slightly warily. He doesn't know who'd win if they both threw down. Which means that whoever he's dealing with is probably not someone he'd want to antagonize. He wonders how to introduce himself, but Henriette preempts that.

"Hey Mr. Quinn. We're here for equipment." Henriette says to the big cyborg. "Director Belltower sent us, and Comptroller Pajari okayed it."

Quinn nods. "This isn't super-black, right? I don't need to clear the facility for you? We're busy moving some weapons around, resupplying some Constructs." He gestures at the synths carrying heavy armored crates of-something. "It'd be easier if we didn't have to delay."

"No." Henriette says. "That'll be fine. We're just here for protective equipment and there's nothing covert about it."

Rose nods politely. "Thank you Mr. Quinn for your help. If there's anything you can do to help us with security we'd love to have it."

"Anytime." He waves it off. "So. You said you were primarily concerned about security? Want armaments or autonomous systems?"

"Yes." Rose says. "We have espionage equipment. Ms. Langley can build almost anything we need on the fly with the right tools, and I think we can be persuasive in the right situation. What we don't have is firepower-and we're going to need it in case we have to engage anything... hostile. Concealable weapons, preferably."

Quinn grins in a friendly manner. It doesn't reassure Donald. "Sounds exciting. I wouldn't mind coming with, but I've got responsibilities here. So let's see what we can load you up with, shall we?" He doesn't even pause or lose his step before continuing. "So. We'll have you registered for some SGS-2015s, a couple of knife missiles, maybe a multirole launcher on a carbine platform in case. Defensively-we can lend you some softsuits, maybe a few field generators-we'll fab up some casings for those, and maybe an autogun or two. We'll round it out with a suitcase Creation Engine so you can build the bugs and spy gear you need. I see a couple of you have low-grade augmentations," he looks at Rose and then Henriette, "and we've got potential upgrades for those. And of course, if any of you want more permanent modifications than a simple prosthetic, that's also valid."

"I'll pass." Donald says quickly.

"Thank you for the offer." Henriette says politely. "Maybe later."

"Not right now, thank you." Rose chimes in.

"Well," Quinn looks unconvinced. "Fine then. Your funeral."
​

***
​

Rose is packing her bags for returning to Los Angeles. Or that's what she's told everyone. In practice, she's spent more time staring, dead-eyed, into a bathroom mirror. All the important stuff has been packed-her knives, the millimeter-thick, near-transparent softsuit which the Iterators said will stop a heavy rifle round dead on or allow a baseline to survive being at ground zero of a grenade burst, and their weapons-high tech "small arms" which even Damage Control assault teams would consider overkill for most purposes, blades with their own micro-AI guidance and antigravity motors. She's wearing some of the equipment already-discreet shield generators disguised as jewelry. Everything else is not strictly necessary. She can replace clothes and other things in the shops, and it'd be trivial for her to get access to money. She's a high-end combat construct with infiltration skills hardwired in and looks sufficient to land her in anyone's good books.

She doesn't worry about that. It's not the mission itself that concerns her-in fact, it gives her something to focus on. It's the thought of going back which threatens to overwhelm her. Going home again. To a place which is familiar to her, somewhere unlike Russia which is an alien culture full of... weird things, like Iterators with far more equipment than they should have had. A month ago, she'd have brought up her concerns with Director Belltower, because hoarding like that would be against the best interest of the Union. Now? Now she doesn't know. She only has her own thoughts as to what might be best for the Technocracy. The rules and regulations that so guided her are broken and shattered. She's a free agent. She has no remaining loyalty to the Union. She can synthesize the drugs she needs to stay alive, she knows the diet necessary to fuel her augmentations. They can't track her by the nanotech in her blood anymore. She could run away at any time, leave all of this. She doesn't, because all she has left is the few friends and acquaintances she has, and the slim hope that her surrogate mother might be alive. Because all she has are the broken tatters of the ideals the Union bound her with.

It would almost be better to have Thorn there, mocking her, hurting her. But that's not happening as much. Thorn's become much less of a pain. Much more supportive, understanding, sometimes almost friendly-challenging her, but in a different way than the hateful, spiteful thing that had been with her for years. And now Thorn respects her enough to leave her alone now, with her doubts and her half-memories. It'd be almost better to have Reina demand that she-but Reina's an old woman, and even though her memories and feelings come easier now, she deserves to rest, rather than micromanage every detail of Rose's life. And what if Reina gives her another hurtful answer? Rose still remembers the cold slow psychological torture Reina put her through over those days in the Spy's Demise.

The young combat construct knows that it was necessary, and for her own good. She wasn't functional at that point, and had to be rebuilt. Yet Rose can't help but resent Reina's intervention, and she can't help but try to hide that resentment, because it's not proper to dislike someone for saving your life. So no more trying to talk to the tired old woman. Is this what being human means? Being adrift, being lost and alone and not having certainty about what you're doing and whether it's the right thing or not? Is this how all the freeborn in the Technocracy feel, doubting step by step everything they've done and everything that's been done to them? If this is humanity, it gives new meaning to the idea of transcending it that Iteration X and the Progenitors espouse.

A knock on her door interrupts her. She dresses herself and answers it. "Come in." She says. Donald walks into the small bedroom which she's been using, takes a glance at the half-empty suitcase. He's looking better than in the Spy's Demise-his hairstyle and suit less unkempt, his eyes more determined than resigned. He's angry. He wants to set things right. And he's scared. But of course he would be. Rose smiles at him. "Thanks for coming to see me."

"Are you all right?" Donald asks. He looks haunted as well, but he's always been since that night. And it's gotten worse with the synthetic arm-a constant reminder of just how close he came to death, something that connects him, however indirectly, with the god-machine he fought. "It's only a week since... the unpleasantness and you've been very quiet about it. If there's anything you don't feel comfortable saying to anyone else..."

"I'm fine." Rose says cheerily. She doesn't feel it, but she can't let him know. Can't let Director Belltower know. If they knew how much Reina had to cut out of her to remove the vulnerability to that machine-god, they would be afraid. "Thank you for the offer, Donald." She moves closer to him, hugs him. She knows that he has conflicting emotions about intimacy. She knows that the old Rose would be more than willing to get physical with him. She still is, after all. It'd at least be something of her own. Something other than a synthetic personality in a synthetic body. But simply because it's true doesn't mean it's not manipulative. "But really, I'm okay. The Spy's Demise was a bit stressful, but I've been built to handle it. Nothing's wrong with me. Look at me." Rose says quietly. He does so. "Look in my eyes. Look at what I'm saying. Do you trust me?"

"Yes." Donald nods.

"Then trust me when I say I'm okay. I am not going to endanger the mission. I'm not going to endanger Serafina. Don't worry about that. She's alive," Rose says, with a determination she hopes is real, "and we're going to get her back. Do you hear me?" Rose half-whispers, half-cries, just as much for her own reassurance as for Donald's. "We're going to save her."
​

***
​

Unlike previous trips to and from Los Angeles, this one is different. Most of it was spent on masses-owned and operated first class air travel, with weapons and equipment carefully stowed in heavily shielded cases. There's no hypersonic military flight, no private Syndicate jet, no Mat-Trans. Nothing which might show up on the Technocracy's radar. The advantage of being a Technocrat, Henriette thinks wryly, is that you know exactly how the Technocracy would be looking for you, and can therefore do things which they won't pay attention to. Knowing exactly what you're going to face is the best kind of cheat code. They buy their tickets so that random-walk scans won't notice them, timing their boarding to take alongside some big Union op in Russia which will drain surveillance and oversight resources. They know exactly how the AI evaluates potential hazards, and act in a way which minimizes their threat rating. It helps them get back to America without incident.
​

Donald's burned most of his assets, Henriette recalls hearing. But he still has caches and emergency supplies, which is apparently how they've managed to rent a hotel room for their operations. A nice, private hotel room, which gives them the perfect time to unpack their equipment. They're all wearing softsuits now, obviously-there's no reason not to wear them, given their recycling capabilities, biochemical protection, and concealability-"invisible no matter how little you're wearing," Quinn had said. Better safe than sorry. They've also deployed the autogun facing the door, a spidery, scuttling thing with its own active camouflage and an arsenal of guided micromunitions it can spit out at subsonic speeds for whisper-quiet death or at ten kilometers a second to tear through cyborg and vehicle armor.

It's the same reason why one of the IBM-fabricated sidearms is resting next to Henriette's hip. Better safe than sorry. The SGS-2015 is a similar weapon to the one the autogun uses, firing 2-millimeter micromissiles with the explosive punch of masses-built antimateriel rounds that are smart enough to seek user-designated targets, even while blindfired around corners. It's the kind of weapon the Shock Corps would have killed to possess. And IBM has given them a few as 'self defense weapons.' Wufan, at least, hasn't been told that they're 'self defense weapons,' rather that Director Belltower and Lieutenant Langley have burned a lot of favors gaining access, and would you please take care to not lose anything? The Void Engineers can't know that they have access to such assets-that would reveal their ace in the hole too soon.

Henriette is glad that IBM's here and on her side, and not only because they brought her her sister back. Someone's out for a surprise if they think they can jump them with a couple of HITMarks or something-they'll have to take these four people seriously. Speaking of her sister-Mari's called. Perfect timing. She takes the call via her ADEI, noting with approval that it's done via quantum-encrypted piggybacking over various other error-prone connections, so whatever information she gets can be dismissed as mere noise. She sprawls herself into one of the comfortable leather recliners in the suite, and takes the call.

Everyone else is out. Donald's been trying to meet with contacts on the ground, people who might be able to work with them quietly. Wufan's got his own Void Engineer contacts that he's feeling out-no doubt he's also informing them to keep everyone else in touch, and Rose is doing reconnaissance work on facilities which might have been owned by the hemophages and their own construct.

She's been told to stay inside and stay put unless the building ends up under attack, because they're not going to risk her until her internal injuries can be fully fixed. Which should take an evening or two.

"How was the flight, sis?" Mari asks. "I heard you got to go on a masses-built airplane. What was that like?"

"Slow." Henriette replies. "And boring. Boring's good though. Boring means nobody was shooting at me." She hopes that she won't have to change that statement.

"I wonder," Mari muses, "how people deal with everything taking so much time here. Having to take hours to get around the world and everything sounds super-inconvenient."​

"You just get used to it, I suppose." Henriette says. "Just like the Amish folks in the Americas."

"But that's... so primitive! And awful! And wrong! It's inefficient." Mari reminds her of her younger self. Well-meaning, but more than a little patronizing about people who weren't willing to do what it took to perform at the highest levels. But there's not as much malice in it, Henriette thinks. So maybe a better person than she was, still. The heavy burden of self-awareness. But then, if she never realized what she was doing was wrong, wouldn't that make her the same as-that perfect doll? An innocent monster, killing and destroying without any understanding. If pain is necessary to be a better person, Henriette thinks, she'll accept that pain. "There's plenty of people who might be able to help mankind better themselves, wasting their talents like that." Her sister's probably a better Iterator than she ever was. And that's all she has.

So she'll just have to find her own way. "Sure, but we're so good we don't need all those people, right?"

"I guess." Mari says. "I guess we are."

"And we're protecting them so that they don't have to put in as much work as we do in being the best, right?"

"Yep!" Mari agrees.

"So we let people do things like reject modern society as long as they aren't trying to sabotage it and keep to themselves, because that's what we're fighting for, isn't it?"

Mari takes a while to respond. She opens her mouth to protest, and finally nods slightly. She clearly doesn't like the idea of letting people with primitivist sympathies do their own thing. And it makes sense, given how many Reality Terrorists come from those backgrounds. But that's just too... much like the cold unsympathetic certainty of the machines she's fought in the void. Maybe to be human is to compromise, to sometimes let bad things happen because you're unwilling to take the steps to stop them. Maybe that's human weakness-but maybe that's also necessary to be a good person.

"Thanks for checking in." Henriette says. "Bye."

"Bye, sis." Mari sends. "Good luck."

She wants to say that she's good enough that she doesn't need it, but that's not true. Henriette wants every scrap of good luck she can get.

---

Equipment Results

So. IBM has granted you some custom-built small arms, or "what happens when you let a bunch of Iterators with Matter 5 and Correspondence 5 run amok with the CAD/CAM rote and a knowledge that action movies are full of super bullshit gun physics." The SGS-2015 and the multirole launcher are basically the same thing-what happens when you get an Iterator to take a M5/C5 CAD-CAM superweapon and then turn it into a proper Device. Both are ridiculous infinite ammunition guns which fire ammunition with far more punch than they have any right to (for the SGS-2015, it's basically a .50 caliber heavy machine gun in a concealable handgun form, the multirole launcher spits out 6mm micromissiles with the firepower of 40mm grenades), but Forces 2/Correspondence 3/Mind 1 gives them guided capabilities to shoot around corners and other fun stuff and they have much larger magazines than any weapon that size should be capable of holding. The MRL is about the size of a SMG and can fit under a loose coat or jacket, while the SGS-2015s are handgun size. Because they're actual proper Devices, they're not produced in huge lots, but IBM has quite a few of them because they're relatively cheap for actual proper Devices.

And then you have, of course, the knife missiles, which are actual guided throwing knives. In an emergency, someone with a DNI like Rose or Henriette can detonate their capacitors to turn them into improvised explosives, but since they're really good at cutting due to their vibroblade features, primium edges, and incredible sharpness, IBM would prefer you not do that-they're really expensive to replace.

The softsuits are basically super-thin transparent high-tech environmental suits which will protect against sleeper-built guns just fine, or maybe one or two love taps from a werewolf. Past that, they're not very effective, but you're doing an investigation, and power armor tends to be noticeable. IBM has thrown in some fairly useful disguised shield generators, as well as an upgrade to Donald's watch which lets it act as one. These provide limited coincidental protection but are also better than nothing.

You have an autogun, which should probably not matter unless you screw up or take too many risks and bring enemies down on your head back home. And of course, there's a suitcase size Creation Engine. It lacks the complex software which lets anyone use it-it's just a very multipurpose focus for a variety of effects.

Rose Ashford, MD:
Please roll Rose's 10d10e7 to heal Henriette. 10d10x7 if she does it via vampire-blood related shenanigans. Since this is vulgar Life 3 to heal agg damage, difficulty is +3 and she takes 3 paradox unless she does it via Vampire blatancy. Which means that this also requires a vote for:
[ ] Sexy Vampires.
[ ] No Sexy Vampires.

Donald, PI:
So, now you're going to try to get access to Serafina's fake clone because you want to use her access codes to get a fix on where she might be. This is probably going to involve an assassination because you need the clone out of the picture-and the last one was a high-spec combat homonculus. To do so, you're going to have to lay the ground work. So to start off, you're going to:
[ ] Find deniable pawns who can help set up the assassination and make it harder to track you. It'll cost a lot in favors and maybe dignity, but...​

[ ] Let's pretend you're a wizard. Or a vampire. And you're really angry about this. It wouldn't be so hard to go into a forest and talk to some werewolves and turn them into a distraction. The only problem here is having Serafina "miraculously survive." (Write-in: How are you approaching the wolves?)
[ ] If you could somehow get in contact with the vampires, you could probably play on their natural desire for revenge. Somehow. (Write-in: How are you approaching the vampires?)
[ ] (0.5x) Oh fuck it, Donald's going to try to call in every marker he has in the Traditions and see who he can get as a hit-squad.​

[ ] Write-In (+?) If you could somehow, somehow convince Wufan that he should join in on this plan he might know a few people. NSC, right? He might have had to clean up some Traditionalist messes.​

[ ] Just do it quick and quiet. Ambush her in the shower with a Rose. This requires, obviously, knowledge of where she is.​

[ ] There have to be some people who can find her. Let's go talking to Technocrats (Write-in: Who are you talking to?)
[ ] You know the best part of this whole surveillance thing? You don't have to talk to people. Let's just find her via electronic means.​

[ ] You don't actually have to kill her, you know. You could just try to break into a place where Serafina was and steal enough genetic material to fool scanners. Write-In: (Where are you breaking in?)
[ ] Write-In