Interval 91: Complexity
- Pronouns
- She/Her
[X] EXEC.TRAWL
"I don't want to continue this any longer. If we can get this resolved, maybe we can get to Hera before my primary finishes her business. Or just go lie on a beach somewhere." You look over to where Alex is appearing to you. "Can you handle this?"
She smiles. She's playing some trick with your stereo vision, your brain can't decide how far away the woman its looking at is. Then her voice sounds over the channel. <<Of course. Reizay, I'm going to send you some tools. You will be my eyes and my knight in this matter. It's likely the enemy will have deployed some countermeasures in the network to try to attack me. You will find and defeat those countermeasures so I can trawl the whole system.>>
<<Your knight!>> Reizay says, nearly hyperventilating. <<Yes of course.>> There's a pause. <<These are amazing. The kind of tools only the inner cloister has access to back home.>>
<<Succeed and I'll show you how to hide from them.>>
Reizay smiles, then realises she's not supposed to want to hide from the Enclosing Lady and schools her face back to a more professional blankness. For a moment you sit and wait, watching as Reizay runs her network checks and rechecks. "Got it." she says after a moment. <<They'd planted some kind of hmm. I'm not sure what it is. Some kind of Diplomat-derived pattern in the system. I've triple checked it, but there's nothing else that causes the false network to fragment.>>
"The Diplomat is well named." Alex tells you. "It cuts apart and decoheres the networks it interacts with. Always a good approach to take in negotiations. I've developed a false network that can bait its seduction. A minimum viable victim. If it fragments then the countermeasure can be found and isolated."
<<Alright. I've got it.>> Reizay says. <<All clear.>>
Alex leans forward and kisses you. Her other hand rests on your thighs, then pushes between them. You feel a rush of heat, and some shock. It takes you a moment to realise that it's not a hot flush but rather your system putting out work heat. Your nerves are ablaze with her computation; your system vents open across your interface meridians and paints the air with a pattern of heat haze.
Alex withdraws, smirking. You're intensely aware that Luyu is in the room with you and seeing only one side of this. She's watching with some interest. "We're in company." You mutter.
"Playing with your nerves is fun." Alex's hand makes a slow circle on your stomach, touching each overheated meridian "When we get somewhere safe you should let me fully possess you for a while. You'd enjoy that, wouldn't you? Anyhow, we've got the traitor."
She flickers up a report. Well written and authoritative, exposing guilt. You've seen the subject before, on the Echo Chamber submarine. The one who's fashionably Chrysanthe-world monochrome, their third in command. The report catalogues a set of subtle evidence: microscopic signs of security feed editing, sudden dead spots in external surveillance, and highlighted sections of security logs. None of them alone would be enough to prove anything, but combined, they're damning.
"Scrape?" You bring the channel back up and send the results over.
"Yeah. I'm here." She says. You can see from her face she's distracted and in motion. She frowns, showing teeth. "Fuck."
"What's going on over there?"
"I think she's got out. We just had a bunch of our combat inorganics go rogue." She swings the view around to show a squad of Echo Chamber troops clearing through the sub ahead of her. "She's probably noticed what was happening and ghosted us."
"She can't just be running if she took a squadron of inorganics." This is bad. A significant hostile force, unaccounted for at a dangerous moment. "How much did she take vs. leave to cover getting out?"
"About a squad is missing. And I've got a pretty good idea where she's gone." Scrape looks like she's bitten into something sour. "Come over. Word of honour that no harm will come to you and all that, but I think we need to cooperate on this."
You glance at Luyu, who's already picking up her guns. The two of you head out of the Pavilion and past Mirareki and your silent watchers, then along the passage and into the Echo Chamber submarine hanger. They have their own pavilion set up near the sub, but the bay seems more or less in chaos. Floodlights illuminate a whole team outside, weapons ready, checking the bay with their goggles and some kind of hand carry sensors. Drones are crawling everywhere.
"Yo." One of the team outside says with a wave. "The raid leader wants to see you inside. Go straight in."
You pass them and head into the pavilion. There's a security checkpoint, which doesn't make any issue of your guns, then into a command room filled with a dozen Echo Chamber operatives and Scrape. It's a unremarkable version of such a space, with only a few decorative touches that don't detract from its basic sleekness. Not a shrine or a living plant in sight. The meeting is using augmented reality only, and a map of the city pops in as you're integrated with the network.
More ominously, the Chrysanthe woman is standing beside her. Both you and Luyu go for your guns but Scrape puts up a hand. "Easy, Easy." she says. "This isn't the same version."
"Just how much do you remember, Deianeira?" Scrape asks her.
"Enough to beat out integrity sampling obviously." She smiles bitterly. "You could have booted me for an interview and I wouldn't have noticed. But now you tell me I had a mind parasite and it's obvious."
"Fucking infiltrator software." Scarpe looks up at you. "So yeah. I think I know where our doppelganger has gone too."
"Oh, I get it," says Luyu. "Parasite personality? On you guys too? What a bunch of freaks." Luyu says.
"You have your clones on ice?"
"Yeah. We're not cheap." Deianeira glares at her.
Scrape laughs. "Honestly, using a personality infiltrator on us is the most Firewatch thing they've done so far." She shrugs. "Anyhow, she set off some contingency. She had some kind of virus that cut into the control for our combat inorganics. Sent some beserk, got others with her, and booked it out of the aft bay. My concern is what I found in her access logs. She was running solo sim programs on an infiltration mission against one of the installations in this city. Specifically, the main generator plant."
"When you say infiltration, you mean–"
"I mean she's going to try to blow up one of the city's main power generators and flood the area with heat and radiation, yes. If she does it, then that will kill any chance of a negotiated settlement here. We'll have attacked them, and a lot of them might be really dead and I'm not sure they can even catch her."
"Have you warned them yet?"
"Obviously." She laughs. "Using your translator even. They're giving us blank incomprehension. She was cooperating with them up until a little while ago and I think she's fed them some kind of pretty tale."
"You know her entry points and stuff from the sim logs though." Luyu says. "We can get her if we can get out in front."
"How do we get there ahead of her? She's got a head start and it's likely the Nereidi will impede us."
"Oh that's easy." Luyu looks over at you. "Your friend Second can take us, right?"
There are eleven of you in all, each loaded down with equipment. Maybe less than you actually need. No river weapons but instead specially modified low signature carbines, stealthy drone hives and combat inorganics.
All four Luyus and you make up one side of the contingent. On the other, Scrape and Deianeira and four Echo Chamber veterans. You're concerned she might still be infected but scans of her body show nothing. You're assembled in the back bay of the Echo Chamber Submarine, doing final preparations. Support personnel move around the bay making final checks on your equipment.
There's been almost no time to prepare this mission, and you've had only the most cursory briefing and chance to sim the mission first. Fortunately, it seems like both Luyu and the Echos have been studying the structure in question in their own time, as if they were planning to sabotage it. You'd expect this from the Echos, but for Luyu you guess she simply didn't have much to do and got very bored.
The generator is under a brassy bell shape whose smooth mathematical perfection hides the equally mathematical frenzy of the fractal interior. Carefully distributed masses wound round with passages to communicate matter and energy and control. You don't know how it works. Some kind of gravity-wave resonator, what your memories held to still be an entirely theoretical technology among meso-intellects. Reizay claims the Closed Dyson has several, but she's never seen one.
"Here." Scrape hands you a set of the Echo Chamber goggles. "You trust us enough to let us put nano in you?"
"No." You pull them on. "But I think I've got enough data bus that they can work with my sensorium."
"I'll bet." Scrape laughs. You check the goggles and Alex gives you the thumbs up as she connects them. The room picks itself out in perfect clarity as the goggles suck in information. The sensation is a little wrenching for a moment before you adjust to it. Satisfied, you remove the goggles and push them into a pressure sealed pocket on the modified deep sea boarding shell you'll be using for the approach.
"Alright." Deianeira says. "Last thing. Our target is another version of me, but don't hesitate. She's hijacked five ways from feastday. If we get a queue recovery, that's a bonus, but the objective is to stop her."
"Don't worry Dei. We don't like you that much." Sniggers pass around the conflict specialists. Deinaneira flattens her lips.
"What about radiation?" One of the others asks. "If we're ditching the shells aren't we vulnerable?"
"We're all expendable on this one." Scrape says. "This is our mess to clean up. But unless you fall into the reactor core you shouldn't take too much damage. It's some kind of gravity furnace, not a nuclear or spin-state plant." You and the Luyus are also expendable, implicitly, but you suppose you're really not her responsibility. The Communion can carry through the negotiations and get Echo Chamber what they want for the Mockmaids.
"Everyone ready?" The drop master asks. The Echoes give a thumbs up in addition to electronic ready signals. The master steps over to the force field bubble on one side and salutes. The bay opens and you fall out into the darkness of the ocean below.
You wish you had the goggles for this part. It's dark down here. Realistically you can still see fine with a combination of the shell's passives and the tight line from the big array on the sub's keel, but it seems a let down after the perfect clarity of the combat eyes.
The lights of the city glimmer in the murk and flicker out one by one as something moves in front of them. A leviathan sea-creature hauling a mass of cargo pods. The currents of the city traffic coil around it and peel off in sprays of turbulence. With the traffic control so busy, Second Level can hopefully make it in easily to collect you and pull you to the reactor. If she can't make it things could get hot and bright.
And then you see the familiar shape of a worm moving in below. A blob of white marks the top, the recognition code. You jet down and grab onto the side of the pod. <<I am in position.>> Second Level signals. <<I have also moved to try to alert others of the danger.>>
That could make things more complex for you, but you can't exactly blame them. <<Confirmed. We'll be careful. Stay in touch.>>
As you drop, you begin to run a team sim, thinking back to the quick brief you had before.
Your plan was to drop near the target and then infiltrate using an adaption of the Echo Chamber infiltration protocol. The giant bell shape of the reactor is relatively lightly crewed by the Nereidi, mostly run by automation, both mechanical and living. The flux of radiation from the inside allows you to get a good look at its structure.
At the top, above the reactor are a set of mostly empty living areas for crews, perhaps in the event of needing a surge of personnel, with an entrance that could be used to infiltrate. But despite its convenience, this area was down selected on Echo Chamber's planning because while it's on a skeleton crew, it is occupied which threatens both exposing the operation and endangering Nereidi civilians.
There are three possible entrances in the bottom. First, the reserve cooling ducts which Echo Chamber believes is the best route, at least as long as the reactor doesn't suddenly start heat venting, which it might. Second is the maintenance hatch they previously identified as a good way in, which is likely what the infiltrator will use, and thus boobytrap. Alternatively you could go in through the cooling water inflow system, but that will require you to navigate the pump machinery.
Once inside, there were a few options. First, you could move silently to the reactor room and attempt to intercept the infiltrator at her likely destination. This assumes however she's taking the same echo chamber plan. Second, you could deploy autonomous drones throughout the facility and have one alert you when it finds the target. This of course raises the problem of if the drone is eliminated.
Finally you could risk openly taking information superiority across the facility by flooding it with a proper drone screen… and possibly get found out.
The final option here is to call on the help of the Blues that you have and get a guide through the facility and access to local surveillance. This however opens you to problems if the the Blues have any infiltrators or leaks inside them.
Between you, Luyu, and the Echo Chamber experts, you decided to:
Approach:
[ ] Enter the structure via the previously identified maintenance hatch that Echo Chamber identified as their best entry point, and hope that the Infiltrator hasn't got their and laid a boobytrap.
[ ] Enter via the reserve cooling ducts which Echo Chamber identified as a secondary possibility and hope the reactor doesn't get to hot all of a sudden.
[ ] Enter via the seemingly unoccupied crew areas at the structure's top and hope to bypass the crews with or without blue cooperation.
[ ] Enter through the external cooling water inflows (takes you into a dangerous part of the machine)
Execution:
[ ] Move to the reactor control room quickly without deploying a drone screen and hope the infiltrator pursues the plan Echo Chamber had prepped for sabotage (low risk of detection, high risk of missing the infiltrator)
[ ] Deploy autonomous drones to hunt them down even if it risks them taking the drone out. (medium risk of detection, medium risk of missing the infiltrator)
[ ] Deploy a full drone screen to guarantee you find the target even if it risks detection by the Nereidi.
[ ] Use your contact with Second and the Blues to get a guide into the facility (risky if the Blues are infiltrated or unsecure in any way, but a major intelligence and infiltration advantage otherwise)
"I don't want to continue this any longer. If we can get this resolved, maybe we can get to Hera before my primary finishes her business. Or just go lie on a beach somewhere." You look over to where Alex is appearing to you. "Can you handle this?"
She smiles. She's playing some trick with your stereo vision, your brain can't decide how far away the woman its looking at is. Then her voice sounds over the channel. <<Of course. Reizay, I'm going to send you some tools. You will be my eyes and my knight in this matter. It's likely the enemy will have deployed some countermeasures in the network to try to attack me. You will find and defeat those countermeasures so I can trawl the whole system.>>
<<Your knight!>> Reizay says, nearly hyperventilating. <<Yes of course.>> There's a pause. <<These are amazing. The kind of tools only the inner cloister has access to back home.>>
<<Succeed and I'll show you how to hide from them.>>
Reizay smiles, then realises she's not supposed to want to hide from the Enclosing Lady and schools her face back to a more professional blankness. For a moment you sit and wait, watching as Reizay runs her network checks and rechecks. "Got it." she says after a moment. <<They'd planted some kind of hmm. I'm not sure what it is. Some kind of Diplomat-derived pattern in the system. I've triple checked it, but there's nothing else that causes the false network to fragment.>>
"The Diplomat is well named." Alex tells you. "It cuts apart and decoheres the networks it interacts with. Always a good approach to take in negotiations. I've developed a false network that can bait its seduction. A minimum viable victim. If it fragments then the countermeasure can be found and isolated."
<<Alright. I've got it.>> Reizay says. <<All clear.>>
Alex leans forward and kisses you. Her other hand rests on your thighs, then pushes between them. You feel a rush of heat, and some shock. It takes you a moment to realise that it's not a hot flush but rather your system putting out work heat. Your nerves are ablaze with her computation; your system vents open across your interface meridians and paints the air with a pattern of heat haze.
Alex withdraws, smirking. You're intensely aware that Luyu is in the room with you and seeing only one side of this. She's watching with some interest. "We're in company." You mutter.
"Playing with your nerves is fun." Alex's hand makes a slow circle on your stomach, touching each overheated meridian "When we get somewhere safe you should let me fully possess you for a while. You'd enjoy that, wouldn't you? Anyhow, we've got the traitor."
She flickers up a report. Well written and authoritative, exposing guilt. You've seen the subject before, on the Echo Chamber submarine. The one who's fashionably Chrysanthe-world monochrome, their third in command. The report catalogues a set of subtle evidence: microscopic signs of security feed editing, sudden dead spots in external surveillance, and highlighted sections of security logs. None of them alone would be enough to prove anything, but combined, they're damning.
"Scrape?" You bring the channel back up and send the results over.
"Yeah. I'm here." She says. You can see from her face she's distracted and in motion. She frowns, showing teeth. "Fuck."
"What's going on over there?"
"I think she's got out. We just had a bunch of our combat inorganics go rogue." She swings the view around to show a squad of Echo Chamber troops clearing through the sub ahead of her. "She's probably noticed what was happening and ghosted us."
"She can't just be running if she took a squadron of inorganics." This is bad. A significant hostile force, unaccounted for at a dangerous moment. "How much did she take vs. leave to cover getting out?"
"About a squad is missing. And I've got a pretty good idea where she's gone." Scrape looks like she's bitten into something sour. "Come over. Word of honour that no harm will come to you and all that, but I think we need to cooperate on this."
You glance at Luyu, who's already picking up her guns. The two of you head out of the Pavilion and past Mirareki and your silent watchers, then along the passage and into the Echo Chamber submarine hanger. They have their own pavilion set up near the sub, but the bay seems more or less in chaos. Floodlights illuminate a whole team outside, weapons ready, checking the bay with their goggles and some kind of hand carry sensors. Drones are crawling everywhere.
"Yo." One of the team outside says with a wave. "The raid leader wants to see you inside. Go straight in."
You pass them and head into the pavilion. There's a security checkpoint, which doesn't make any issue of your guns, then into a command room filled with a dozen Echo Chamber operatives and Scrape. It's a unremarkable version of such a space, with only a few decorative touches that don't detract from its basic sleekness. Not a shrine or a living plant in sight. The meeting is using augmented reality only, and a map of the city pops in as you're integrated with the network.
More ominously, the Chrysanthe woman is standing beside her. Both you and Luyu go for your guns but Scrape puts up a hand. "Easy, Easy." she says. "This isn't the same version."
"Just how much do you remember, Deianeira?" Scrape asks her.
"Enough to beat out integrity sampling obviously." She smiles bitterly. "You could have booted me for an interview and I wouldn't have noticed. But now you tell me I had a mind parasite and it's obvious."
"Fucking infiltrator software." Scarpe looks up at you. "So yeah. I think I know where our doppelganger has gone too."
"Oh, I get it," says Luyu. "Parasite personality? On you guys too? What a bunch of freaks." Luyu says.
"You have your clones on ice?"
"Yeah. We're not cheap." Deianeira glares at her.
Scrape laughs. "Honestly, using a personality infiltrator on us is the most Firewatch thing they've done so far." She shrugs. "Anyhow, she set off some contingency. She had some kind of virus that cut into the control for our combat inorganics. Sent some beserk, got others with her, and booked it out of the aft bay. My concern is what I found in her access logs. She was running solo sim programs on an infiltration mission against one of the installations in this city. Specifically, the main generator plant."
"When you say infiltration, you mean–"
"I mean she's going to try to blow up one of the city's main power generators and flood the area with heat and radiation, yes. If she does it, then that will kill any chance of a negotiated settlement here. We'll have attacked them, and a lot of them might be really dead and I'm not sure they can even catch her."
"Have you warned them yet?"
"Obviously." She laughs. "Using your translator even. They're giving us blank incomprehension. She was cooperating with them up until a little while ago and I think she's fed them some kind of pretty tale."
"You know her entry points and stuff from the sim logs though." Luyu says. "We can get her if we can get out in front."
"How do we get there ahead of her? She's got a head start and it's likely the Nereidi will impede us."
"Oh that's easy." Luyu looks over at you. "Your friend Second can take us, right?"
*****
There are eleven of you in all, each loaded down with equipment. Maybe less than you actually need. No river weapons but instead specially modified low signature carbines, stealthy drone hives and combat inorganics.
All four Luyus and you make up one side of the contingent. On the other, Scrape and Deianeira and four Echo Chamber veterans. You're concerned she might still be infected but scans of her body show nothing. You're assembled in the back bay of the Echo Chamber Submarine, doing final preparations. Support personnel move around the bay making final checks on your equipment.
There's been almost no time to prepare this mission, and you've had only the most cursory briefing and chance to sim the mission first. Fortunately, it seems like both Luyu and the Echos have been studying the structure in question in their own time, as if they were planning to sabotage it. You'd expect this from the Echos, but for Luyu you guess she simply didn't have much to do and got very bored.
The generator is under a brassy bell shape whose smooth mathematical perfection hides the equally mathematical frenzy of the fractal interior. Carefully distributed masses wound round with passages to communicate matter and energy and control. You don't know how it works. Some kind of gravity-wave resonator, what your memories held to still be an entirely theoretical technology among meso-intellects. Reizay claims the Closed Dyson has several, but she's never seen one.
"Here." Scrape hands you a set of the Echo Chamber goggles. "You trust us enough to let us put nano in you?"
"No." You pull them on. "But I think I've got enough data bus that they can work with my sensorium."
"I'll bet." Scrape laughs. You check the goggles and Alex gives you the thumbs up as she connects them. The room picks itself out in perfect clarity as the goggles suck in information. The sensation is a little wrenching for a moment before you adjust to it. Satisfied, you remove the goggles and push them into a pressure sealed pocket on the modified deep sea boarding shell you'll be using for the approach.
"Alright." Deianeira says. "Last thing. Our target is another version of me, but don't hesitate. She's hijacked five ways from feastday. If we get a queue recovery, that's a bonus, but the objective is to stop her."
"Don't worry Dei. We don't like you that much." Sniggers pass around the conflict specialists. Deinaneira flattens her lips.
"What about radiation?" One of the others asks. "If we're ditching the shells aren't we vulnerable?"
"We're all expendable on this one." Scrape says. "This is our mess to clean up. But unless you fall into the reactor core you shouldn't take too much damage. It's some kind of gravity furnace, not a nuclear or spin-state plant." You and the Luyus are also expendable, implicitly, but you suppose you're really not her responsibility. The Communion can carry through the negotiations and get Echo Chamber what they want for the Mockmaids.
"Everyone ready?" The drop master asks. The Echoes give a thumbs up in addition to electronic ready signals. The master steps over to the force field bubble on one side and salutes. The bay opens and you fall out into the darkness of the ocean below.
You wish you had the goggles for this part. It's dark down here. Realistically you can still see fine with a combination of the shell's passives and the tight line from the big array on the sub's keel, but it seems a let down after the perfect clarity of the combat eyes.
The lights of the city glimmer in the murk and flicker out one by one as something moves in front of them. A leviathan sea-creature hauling a mass of cargo pods. The currents of the city traffic coil around it and peel off in sprays of turbulence. With the traffic control so busy, Second Level can hopefully make it in easily to collect you and pull you to the reactor. If she can't make it things could get hot and bright.
And then you see the familiar shape of a worm moving in below. A blob of white marks the top, the recognition code. You jet down and grab onto the side of the pod. <<I am in position.>> Second Level signals. <<I have also moved to try to alert others of the danger.>>
That could make things more complex for you, but you can't exactly blame them. <<Confirmed. We'll be careful. Stay in touch.>>
As you drop, you begin to run a team sim, thinking back to the quick brief you had before.
Your plan was to drop near the target and then infiltrate using an adaption of the Echo Chamber infiltration protocol. The giant bell shape of the reactor is relatively lightly crewed by the Nereidi, mostly run by automation, both mechanical and living. The flux of radiation from the inside allows you to get a good look at its structure.
At the top, above the reactor are a set of mostly empty living areas for crews, perhaps in the event of needing a surge of personnel, with an entrance that could be used to infiltrate. But despite its convenience, this area was down selected on Echo Chamber's planning because while it's on a skeleton crew, it is occupied which threatens both exposing the operation and endangering Nereidi civilians.
There are three possible entrances in the bottom. First, the reserve cooling ducts which Echo Chamber believes is the best route, at least as long as the reactor doesn't suddenly start heat venting, which it might. Second is the maintenance hatch they previously identified as a good way in, which is likely what the infiltrator will use, and thus boobytrap. Alternatively you could go in through the cooling water inflow system, but that will require you to navigate the pump machinery.
Once inside, there were a few options. First, you could move silently to the reactor room and attempt to intercept the infiltrator at her likely destination. This assumes however she's taking the same echo chamber plan. Second, you could deploy autonomous drones throughout the facility and have one alert you when it finds the target. This of course raises the problem of if the drone is eliminated.
Finally you could risk openly taking information superiority across the facility by flooding it with a proper drone screen… and possibly get found out.
The final option here is to call on the help of the Blues that you have and get a guide through the facility and access to local surveillance. This however opens you to problems if the the Blues have any infiltrators or leaks inside them.
Between you, Luyu, and the Echo Chamber experts, you decided to:
Approach:
[ ] Enter the structure via the previously identified maintenance hatch that Echo Chamber identified as their best entry point, and hope that the Infiltrator hasn't got their and laid a boobytrap.
[ ] Enter via the reserve cooling ducts which Echo Chamber identified as a secondary possibility and hope the reactor doesn't get to hot all of a sudden.
[ ] Enter via the seemingly unoccupied crew areas at the structure's top and hope to bypass the crews with or without blue cooperation.
[ ] Enter through the external cooling water inflows (takes you into a dangerous part of the machine)
Execution:
[ ] Move to the reactor control room quickly without deploying a drone screen and hope the infiltrator pursues the plan Echo Chamber had prepped for sabotage (low risk of detection, high risk of missing the infiltrator)
[ ] Deploy autonomous drones to hunt them down even if it risks them taking the drone out. (medium risk of detection, medium risk of missing the infiltrator)
[ ] Deploy a full drone screen to guarantee you find the target even if it risks detection by the Nereidi.
[ ] Use your contact with Second and the Blues to get a guide into the facility (risky if the Blues are infiltrated or unsecure in any way, but a major intelligence and infiltration advantage otherwise)
