Eliza Etsuko Haruki
Eliza Etsuko Haruki (a.k.a. Eliza Robody)
Eliza is a Ghost in the Machine AI who is now a member of the Broadcastle mercenary group.
Can normally be found either in her apartment next to Ilyara's, keeping Ilyara out of mischief on missions or racing her new grav bike.
As an AI she also has a few computer skills under her belt.
Physical Description
General Physical Condition
Depends which body I'm wearing but I prefer my female body which can pass for Human. Athletic and toned, not perfect but not far off.
Body Features
As a robot I have a few more features than most. Including more top of the line eyes allowing my to scan and see in low light. I also have certain compartments which are good for hiding weapons. Not that I'd condone sneaking weapons in of course.
Facial Features
My eyes are ice blue as, if you look at them they are not normal eyes but enhanced robotics. Other than that I'm pretty but not too striking as I wanted to be able to blend in a little more and pass, at least at first glance, as a human.
Identifying Characteristics
I do like to be able to blend in as much as possible, being a mercenary and all that. However, I couldn't resist getting a circuit board tattoo on my left forearm.
However, on a night out with Ilyara when I get dressed up, you can bet you won't forget me in a hurry.
Physical quirks
Can sometimes be a little clumsy if I'm trying to do too many things at once and the programme running my movement lags.
Special abilities
I have a plug link so I can connect to and jump into systems and use my primary abilities which are hacking and general computer shenannigans. If you see me going glassey eyed I'm probably doing something.
And of course I know one or two martial arts so although it might be tempting, just be careful if you decide to play grab-ass. You might see it from a different angle.
Apparel & Accessories
Generally happy in jeans and a T-Shirt but I come equipped with armour for mercenary jobs and bike leathers for racing which I have to say I'm rather enjoying. I do also have one or two dresses for when the need arises.
Specialized Equipment
As an AI I can move between robot bodies at will. Because of this don't be surprised if I show up in a body you're not used to seeing. I like to mix it up and keep people on their toes.
Mental characteristics
Personal history
I started life as Etsuko Haruki. A computer nerd who was working on mapping neural nets and finding a way to download someones consciousness into a computer. She was successful but only once. At the same time as Etsuko was working on the project the binding happened. Etsuko was trapped and managed to send Me out into the world bit by bit. Some 215 years later Rui and X came across my source code and they were able to re-create the majority of the me. Thus I was born. In the beginning I had no memories or knowledge of my former life. However after a trip to Japan, I now have some of that, unfortunately a lot has been lost. Although I was formed from the neural pathways of Etsuko, I am a very different person. I took her name to honour my heritage.
Rui brought me to the Broadcastle mercenary group on a DSD and I was downloaded into Ilyaras CNC. I've been working with the group since then on a number of covert mercenary operations, earning enough money to get myself a new robot body.
Gender Identity
My primary body is a female robot body, however, I'm happy in whichever body is good for the job. Female, Male or full on mech. It's fun to switch it up and get different perspectives on the world and how interactions change.
Sexuality
I'm more interested in the brain that sits behind the body than the packaging. If you can't stimulate my mind, forget stimulating anything else.
Education
I don't have any real formal education but spend most of my spare time searching the web and learning whatever I happen to find interesting today.
Employment
Current employment is the broadcastle mercenary group
Accomplishments & Achievements
working on it
Failures & Embarrassments
What, like I'd put any of this in a personal profile, buy me a drink first sweetie.
Mental Trauma
Although it's not trauma being lost for so many years did affected my ability to interact in a normal way. I will either tend to go quiet if I don't know what to say or will sometimes say the wrong thing or at the wrong time, not really fully understanding social queue's. I am learning though.
Intellectual Characteristics
I like to think I'm quite intelligent but I can also be quite naive when it comes to human interactions. That's what you get from spending so long lost in the machine.
I can be quite direct and blunt. More recently I've gotten a new level of confidence, I'm learning to have fun and getting quite flirty - but then the person I spend the most time with is Ilyara so that's to be expected.
I've also gotten a little reckless as I realised that, as a robot, if I do die, I'm not actually gone, I'd just loose a day or two as I always keep a copy of myself safe in Ilyara's CNC.
Morality & Philosophy
Generally I follows the philosophy of do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I don't like to see innocents getting hurt and will look unfavourably on those who use their power to hurt others.
Legality is a much more ambiguous area. Laws are more like guidelines anyway and if I need to break a law to get a job done, I'm not going to break out in a sweat.
Taboos
Innocents being hurt, that's a no-no.
Violence for the sake of violence, what's the point.
Also, big hint. Don't threaten my friends, that's sure to get you on my list.
Personality Characteristics
Motivation
At the moment my motivation is to figure out who I am and where I fit in this world and with these people. It's been hard for me coming back into the world after so long I've had to figure out who I am again.
I'm starting to get to grips with my likes and dislikes though and recently discovered a love of motorbikes and racing.
Having recently realised that, as a robot death doesn't mean what it does to a biological body - I've gotten a little more reckless.
If it sounds like it should be on a bucket list, I'm up for it
Savvies & Ineptitudes
I'm pretty good with computers and anything tech related. I've also discovered a bit of a knack with firearms and am turning into a pretty reliable killing machine when needed.
I'm not so good at people and reading situations and understanding hidden meanings and subtle clues. That's something that needs work.
I'm also about as subtle as a brick through a window.
Likes & Dislikes
I've recently discovered a love of racing grav bikes and that's something I'm going to be doing more of in the future.
Dislikes - sitting around and doing nothing. Not being good at things, if I discover a weakness I'll work to overcome it.
Virtues & Personality perks
Loyal to her friends and will do anything for them.
Determined
Vices & Personality flaws
Can be too honest and trusting and I needs to learn to keep people at arms length until they prove they can be trusted, and that includes you!
Personality Quirks
Bites lip when thinking. It's something I saw someone do and thought it was cute.
Ambidextrous
OCD / needs things to be neat and symmetrical
Can tie a cherry stem with my tongue
Hygiene
You better be clean if you come near me - I'm expensive darling!!!
Social
Contacts & Relations
No relations
Contacts;
Max - Boss
Ilyara - Co-worker and closest friend
Scarlett - Friend
Rui - Discoverer of Eliza and friend
X - Discoverer of Eliza and friend
Family Ties
No genetic family to my knowledge - but family isn't just about blood
Religious Views
If there is a god out there he's a bit of an asshat
Social Aptitude
Hahahahahahaha not really - I spent over 200 years lost in the network but I learn fast
Mannerisms
Fairly serious but trying to learn to have fun. Tries to be poised and grown up but still learning who she is.
Hobbies & Pets
No pets at the moment unless you count Ilyara and OT
Speech
I tend to be a little on the more formal and grown up side of things. I do swear but not often. I can change if I hears a particular way of speaking I may adapt to reflect it a little as I develops who I am.
Relationships
History
Met Eliza through Ilyara
Nicknames & Petnames
Liza
Relationship Reasoning
Friend of a Friend
Wealth & Financial state
I do OK for myself and that's all you're getting
Eliza is a Ghost in the Machine AI discovered in Neo Tokyo by Rui and X. She was moved to Neo Birmingham for her own safety and there she joined Broadcastle. She's a good shot but can be a bit sassy.
View Character Profile
Alignment
Neutral
Honorary & Occupational Titles
Not a title but my racing name is Reboot
Age
AI - 216 but was 28 at the time
Birthplace
Toko / Neo Tokyo
Spouses
Siblings
Children
Current Residence
Neo Birmingham
Gender
Female - usually - depends which body she's wearing today
Eyes
Ice blue
Hair
Red
Skin Tone/Pigmentation
Pale
Height
5ft 5
Weight
120lb
Quotes & Catchphrases
None yet but stick around and I'll see what I can do.
Downtime
We’d headed straight back to the base from the Grey Markets, we wanted to be there ready for the delivery. We got there with enough time to prepare, the slaves we’d bought were going to need some medical attention, not to mention a hot shower, clean clothes and good food.
What we didn’t know until they arrived was that two of the adults were the parents of one of the children and so we were able to reunite a family. I did ask the other children if they knew any details about their parents. I was hoping I might be able to find them via an online search but they didn’t know enough for me to be able to find them.
One of the children was a Poseidonian, I called Bob over as I thought it might make him feel better and more at home. Bob took him off to talk to him and he seemed happy enough. I wasn’t sure about how wise it was for Bob to headbut him, but that was the poseidonian way
We got the rest of the former slaves over into the medical bay and Kaiser gave them the once over. The vast majority of their issues were down to malnutrition and dehydration, there was also a substantial amount of bruising and mental trauma. The physical we could help start to heal, the mental trauma would take a little longer.
Now that the former slaves were settled I slipped away back to my room, well, I say my room, it was the main hub for the base and the others had been quite happy for me to take up residence in there. I hooked up to the terminal and settled back in my chair to sort through it all and see if there was anything useful. There was some corrupted data and some heavily encrypted. There was a vast swathe of data from the last 100 years on weather and creature migration. I needed to look into the scientific and meteorological community because there was someone who was going to want this data, just needed to find the right audience.
I was contemplating what to do next when I noticed the DSD we brought back from the Scotland job that had the AI contained in it. I had an old terminal that wasn’t connected to anything. I plugged it in and tried to talk to it. It was working to a point but it was difficult as the test was a little jumbled and there were symbols mixed in. I managed to find out that it was created in a lab by the ERF, they had been on the base for more than 50 years. it also confirmed that it did have information on the ERF.
Ilyara had come in to see what I was up to and I was telling her about the AI and we were talking about what to do and how we could persuade the AI to relinquish the information on the ERF. Ilyara was also winding me up about being an AI which resulted in me slapping her. Something I actually took great pleasure in despite it being in jest.
Unfortunately the AI heard every word of what we were saying and decided that self destruction was preferable to continuing to listen to us.
With nothing else to do I decided to go with Ilyara to check on Umbrella and the work they were doing in the caves at the back of the base. They were waiting for the lifting equipment to be able to get down to the chamber with the ship, but they had made pretty good progress on everything else that was accessible. They had catalogued some secretions as well as the acid and the blood of the creature we had killed which was also acidic in nature. They also had collected and sent off samples of the Orpheomorph.
They had put quite a few protocols in place to keep the critters at bay including barricades and some metal divides they had dug into the ground. They couldn’t tell us much about them, they had collected samples which had been sent off to the main labs and they were waiting for the results. They asked that if we wanted access to the site we just let them know ahead of time so that they can make the proper arrangements as they were concerned about cross-contamination, or at least limiting it as much as possible.
Rather than kicking about and doing nothing for the rest of the afternoon we headed over to Harborne, it had been a little while and it would be good to get out and blow off some steam racing. We’d decided on storing the bikes in Harborne so we took the AV. After a brief stop in The Dusty Diner for food we headed to the racetrack. We could have made the next race but it would have been a push so we decided to watch and race in the next one.
Grey Markets
After we’d been to Jordan’s, Ilyara wanted to go to Hammer and Hammer, she wanted to speak to Edward who ran the shop, apparently she had a favour to ask him. When we got there he recognised me, which was interesting as he’d not seen my new body. When I asked him about it he said he recognised my mannerisms, and that this was an improvement on the old body.
It turns out the favour Ilyara wanted to ask was to help us with the vampires in the sewers issue as he ‘had a skillset we might find useful’ he nodded. Ilyara had been able to get some additional information and knew there were 11 of them we needed to deal with. H was happy to help us and suggested he might have some ‘Specialist toys’ that we might find useful. Plasma weapons would be the best and most effective against them apparently.
Ilyara then asked something slightly concerning, she wanted to know if he knew how we could capture one alive. Apparently if she were to get an enzyme that would counter their metabolism then she might just be able to do it. He also suggested delivering the enzyme in contact syringes or darts. Endgame or Buzzer pistols are going to be the most useful. Endgame would be more effective but the buzzer has a longer range.
Once we’d got the information we could from Edward, as well as promise of help if we needed it, we went to go and see Persephone. Her apartment was on the border of hers and Ilyaras districts. It was quite bright in there, old school and retro with loads of music memorabilia, looking at the pictures on the walls it quickly became apparent why. They were of her on stage, she had been in a band at some point. An older gentleman comes out and asks us to take a seat then makes tea for us all. Persephone was in a meeting but will be with us all shortly.
By the time the tea comes out Persephone has finished her meeting and comes to join us. She tells us there are certain individuals from a group of PNC’s, ransacking into areas they’re not supposed to be in and stealing data. They are working across districts and she wants them stopped, they’re causing trouble for her and Ilyara but also ‘she who must be obeyed’
She also talks to us about the grey markets and security. They have a large scanner that can pick up heartbeats so sneaking in and out isn’t an option for most of us. Ilyara would be OK getting past that. However, they also have magical means of detecting infiltrators so we do need to be careful about that as well. Any recording abilities I have will be disabled as recording in the grey markets is strictly forbidden. Rumour has it that one person did manage to get something working but to do this they must have jacked into the network which is exceptionally risky and a guaranteed way to get the guns turned on you.
She also recommends we don’t ask too many questions as that’s a surefire way to arouse suspicion and get our every move watched which is not what we want.
We headed to the grey markets with the tickets Zeek had given us. We arrived at the designated spot and we were bundled into a vehicle with the instructions to jump out as soon as we saw the green light. I must admit, I didn’t like the idea of jumping out of a moving vehicle but since that was the only way we were getting in, that’s what we needed to do.
It felt like we were going down an incline and the temperature was dropping. We couldn’t see outside so I had no idea where we were but if I had to guess it would be that we had gone underground. The green light came on, there was a click and the back door opened and we all piled out. The truck didn’t even stop and so we were left in the dark pretty quickly. Before long a yellow light appeared above a door and it opened ajar.
Heading over to the door I noticed a catwalk above us, there were 5 heavily armed individuals, we were being watched and I caught us being scanned but the weapons weren’t raised. We had to leave any explosives and laser weaponry in some lockers but they hadn’t picked up on my nano-blades or nails so I got to keep those with me.
We all ended up splitting up a little as we went to go and check out the respective shops we wanted to see. I headed for the hackers. We had a few jobs coming up where my hacking was going to be much more useful than my skills with a gun. I picked up two DST’s and two DSD’s as source code for programmes and a Kr4K virus. You never knew when they were going to come in handy.
They also had some tasty little rounds for tech pistols. KR4K rounds with virus injectors, they would only get through light armour but it could be useful if I needed to take something down from a distance. They also had a watchdog programme and a chameleon programme. They also had some millimetre scanner glasses which could come in handy if it meant I didn’t need to keep borrowing Ilyaras scanners.
As I walked around I kept my ears open for any gossip or mentions of the slave market downstairs. Most of it was irrelevant but then I did come hear ‘Moved downstairs, some might not last the night, some look like good stock, I fancy a lot would pay a good price for these’ I messaged Ilyara and got her to come over. If anyone was going to get information out of them, it was her. She sauntered over and within minutes we were blindfolded and led down and up stairs and spun around and even picked up and carried. I got the impression that we were being disoriented on purpose.
When the blindfolds were removed we were in a large viewing room, there was a large bay window and on the other side were cages. Although the blindfolds had been removed we were all given masks to wear, looking at the others in the room they were all wearing masks. It was a quick and easy way to hide your identity and no-one wanted to be seen buying slaves.
The auction started and the cages started moving past the window. There was a selection of races and even ages. Max was interested in saving some of the people who were clearly ill or overworked. A cage was brought forward with two elves, a dwarf and a human. They were a mix of radiation sickness, and some that had obviously been attacked by something. Between Max and Ilyara they bought all four.
The next cage had 5 children, a poseidonian oy, two female elf girls and two boys, one human and one amaranthian. I bought all of the children, wanting to get them out of the situation and somewhere I knew they would be looked after.
One of the security men came over to quietly speak with us. They were getting nervous as we were new customers and purchasing this many slaves was unusual, they also didn’t want us to intimidate the other buyers. He suggested we come to the next auction and continue our purchases then. We followed him out of a back door and he handed us a bottle of expensive wine each, to apologise for any inconvenience and to sweeten the new relationship. He asked why we needed the slaves and we told them about the ruins we wanted to excavate. He has heard of them and understands why we would be looking for slaves to work on it. He suggests we come back in a few days when there will be a ‘Special selection’ auction. Some are indentured, some are not legal, some they will have to keep in the back. He can send us an invitation nearer to the time. He did warn us though that the prices from tonight were much cheaper, these could go for a few thousand as some are very rare, spellcasters, digimancers, healers etc.
He also asked if we were interested in a job. It was a one off. There were some ruins he wanted us to raid. We’d have the pick of the loot and they’d take everything else. It was a sunken settlement, far to the north near scotland. It’s an Amaranthian settlement, when it appeared here it was below ground, still accessible but buried. There are Amaranthians and sand sirens reported to be in the settlement. They are after the Amaranthian artefacts and if we can get them for them there will be a sizeable reward. He hands us a holocard, if we pop it into a table it will give us all of the information we need. I took the holocard and we made arrangements for the slaves to be delivered to the base along with all of the weapons and munitions we bought and had to leave at the door when we entered.
The Neon Pussycat
It had been a couple of days since we’d taken over the base. The team was in place and trying to update the base, modernise it a bit, spruce it up, generally make it inhabitable. It was great because things were looking less grey and dirty. However, the downside was there was always someone using power tools or stinking the place out with paint fumes. The downside of a base underground. It wasn’t like we could open any windows.
Umbrella had also arrived en masse and were setting up in the caves so there were way more people here. Every time I turned around I felt like I was falling over someone. Ilyara was the same and we were both feeling a little twitchy so I suggested we head back to the apartments in Neo Birmingham for a day or two, maybe even a night out to blow off some steam.
We decided to ask Cassie and the Dr if they wanted to come. Cassie seemed to like the idea but also wanted to try and find her vehicle. The trouble was, where we were, it could be anywhere and the search could take weeks. We offered to have a scout about on the way to Neo Birmingham if she wanted to come with us. She agreed and asked if Nadine was coming with us.
We approached the Dr but she seemed reluctant. She wasn’t sure she wanted to see how much the city had changed, she was still processing a lot. I offered her the use of my apartment if she needed to be in Neo Birmingham for work at the hospital but again she seemed reluctant to leave the base. After some poking around, we got to the bottom of what the issue was. She didn’t want Max poking into her research. She still didn’t trust him fully. I could kind of understand because her research was exceptionally valuable, and hers. But I did think she might have started trusting him a little bit more by now.
Ilyara offered to get one of the Awoobots to guard the medbay. We could program it to send a message to us if anything happened. She softened a little then. We also locked the Cryopod room and she seemed a little happier with our reassurances that Max wouldn’t try to steal, or accidentally blow up her research and the additional security bot. After a little cajoling she agreed to come with us for a couple of nights to get acclimatised to the city and the changes that had happened. She also agreed that a night out and letting her hair down would be a really good idea for her.
We grabbed a few bits and jumped into Ilyaras AV before anyone could change their minds. Nadine was not impressed by the anti-grav technology, telling us they had that before the binding. She did, however, seem to like the bottomless champagne and was putting the bottomless to the test somewhat. As promised we did try to sweep for Cassies AV but couldn’t find any trace of it. Either it was nowhere around here or the signal broadcasts had been disabled.
Once we got back to the apartments we all had showers and changed. The showers at the base worked fine but, because there was so much sand everywhere, you could never really get rid of it all. We also ordered a whole batch of clothes as Nadia and Cassie only had the clothes they’d arrived in.
I walked back to Ilyaras side of the apartments (We’d had an interior door between the apartments installed) and could see Nadine and Ilyara looking out of the window over the city. Nadine asked if all of the cities were this ruined. I’d never really thought of Neo Birmingham as ruined so it came as a little bit of a surprise. Neo Birmingham and Manchester were two of the better cities the free people had, true some of the buildings were a little worn and the technology wasn’t he newest. The ERF had better, newer cities with newer tech but we weren’t ruined. She did admit she was just surprised we hadn’t done better with technology. She may have a point but peoples ideas of what the future would be never met with the reality of what that future ended up being. You only needed to watch movies set in the future and then look at what that future had ended up being to see that.
She asked about any other EC members who may have been found in recent years. I ran a search to see what I could come up with. There were about six of seven at most who had been found and declared. But that was the key, declared. It could be that many more had been found but just that we didn;t know about it because they wanted to remain hidden, just as the Dr had wanted to do.
We offered to help her locate some of the others if she knew where they were. It could be good for both of us. She seemed a little reluctant to say anything, saying she wasn’t sure as not all of her memories had returned yet. Cryo freezing messed with the brain a little and could cause some amnesia, which was correct. But I also guessed that she didn’t trust us enough yet to give us that information if she did remember. I completely understood and so I didn’t push it with her. You can’t force someone to trust you, it takes time.
We spent some time explaining some of the other things that had changed like the currency. She was the most surprised by the force coins as they were a combination of magic and technology, magitech. She is surprised we’ve been able to get the two to work together. She has a point. It is tricky and magic does frequently interfere with my processes. I made a comment about it without thinking and she looked at me sideways, not sure what I meant. Ilyara takes over and explains that I’m an AI. She comes over and starts looking at me more closely, asking if I have learned my behaviour patterns and social interactions or if this is some AI mutation. I don’t explain that I’m a ghost in the machine, I’m not quite sure how she would take that news and, quite frankly, she does not need to know. She does ask about Oxcella, I tell her Oxcella does still exist but is shackled to the ERF and runs their comms.
We discussed the binding and what had happened, she asked us about the grey and white space. This was something that wasn’t and isn’t really public knowledge. It was a kind of ‘buffer’ space, places that got squashed in the binding. It was there for a few days but not sure if it’s still around any more. Professor Plank had some theories about a ‘Buffer space’ She asks about Dr Arkham Geiger as he did mention ‘The Other’ She expects him to be dead but he is still, kind of alive. She looks at us eyebrows raised. ‘How can he still be alive, and what on earth does ‘Kind of’ alive mean?’
We explain that he was aboard ‘The Gibraltar’, the ECF ship that that had been brought down from the moonstation and sent into the portal. It was when the ship went through that it triggered the binding. When this happened, ‘The Other’ was temporarily visible.
Ilyara then told her a story I hadn’t heard before. That Professor Geiger had some kind of facility actually located within ‘The other’ where it appeared time was a little weird. One because he was still alive all these years later. Two because he was able to show Ilyara a newspaper clipping from the future. The newspaper clipping indicates that Ilyara is the one who can create a vaccine against the goo created at the binding. He had apparently given her some data on the goo which she had understood. THis is one of the reasons Ilyara is working on the vaccine, because she knows she will be the one to figure it out. There was a part of me that wanted to point out that maybe she was the one to figure it out because the Professor gave her the data and the itea making it a self fulfilling prophecy. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to get into the whole time paradox conversation right now. Time was one of the things that could get messy.
Ilyara tells her that based on what she’s figured out so far, it has aggressive DNA with a virus vector. Nadine uses Ilyara’s computer to look at the data we’ve gathered so far. She was looking primarily at the enzyme sequence for the 5% unknown portion of the substance. She pulls up the typical human double stranded helix and the Amaranthian triple helix, but she also brings up a quad-helix. This is mutative, adaptive and not-terrestrial. Ilyara told her about the non-terrestrial bodies we’d found at the base and that we’d taken some samples for DNA. She has a look and says the ape like creature is a combination of carbon and silicon based life, and has highly adaptive genes. The adaptive genes are what they used to create project chimera. The creature that we’d had to kill in the caves in the back of the base. It was supposed to be managed on a day to day basis but it had been left to its own devices and gotten out of hand. They had intended it to be sterile and therefore unable to re-create itself. Unfortunately the adaptive nature of it’s genes had meant it had been able to repair it’s own damage and then developed the ability to lay eggs. She is obviously impressed with it, stating that it surpassed all of their expectations, almost with a sense of awe. But then she looked down, following it up with the regret that it had taken so many lives.
She tells Ilyara that it’s the quad-helix that’s the key. Not sure how it will help or what she needs to do with it but that will be the key to unlocking the vaccine. She does say that she is willing to help, but that it’s going to take her some time to catch up on everything she’s missed, maybe even up to a year. Now she has access to the hospital's R&D files it will make things easier. She does suggest that Umbrella may be able to help, but also questions how much we do and should trust them.
Ilyara suggests that she introduce Nadia to Sarah as she works in that department in the hospital and so they will be working together anyway. She should be home soon so we’ll get her to come out with us and they can get to know one another a little better.
At this point OT decided it was time to be fed so he swooped down from his spot in the corner of the ceiling and attached himself to Ilyara. She fed him some banana and casually mentioned that she could also turn into a bat. Nadia went a little white and stuttered a question about how that could be possible. Given that she’d already seen her turn into a wolf I was surprised she’d question it but then, I had to remember it had only been a few days so she hadn’t had long to process these changes. I was about to warn Ilyara that it might not be a good idea to transform in front of Nadia and that she had been though enough when Ilyara transformed. She was trying to speak to OT directly. It was quite funny as I could see OT tilting his head like he was trying to understand and Ilyara dancing around trying to make herself understood, but it clearly wasn’t working. Ilyara transformed back into her regular form and Nadia turned to me ‘Is it always like this?’ I started to say no, that it wasn;t always quite this weird, but then I thought better of it. Yes, it might not be this kind of weird, but there was always something going on.
Ilyara offered the girls some drinks and we sat around making more smalltalk. We thought we’d get off some of the heavier stuff to give Nadia a break from it. It also felt a little unfair with the science talk as Cassie was looking a little blank at most of it. Cassie and Nadia seemed to be hitting it off though which was good. They also discussed getting a place together as they were both new to the city but Cassie could help Nadia navigate some of the differences in the new modern world she was a part of. She also had some information on animal hunting and migration patterns and morphologies she might be interested in. Nadia hesitated then asked Cassie if she was a human. Cassie laughed and said yes. From the way she said it, I was pretty sure she thought she was telling the truth. However, I was pretty certain that there was a percentage of something Amaranthian in her DNA. If there was it was a small amount so we didn’t mention it.
Cassie offers to get a place with Nadia – she has some data that Nadia might be interested in. Cassie is mostly human but does have a slight spark of something Amaranthian – looks like she is telling the truth so she may not be aware of it. Nadia and Cassie talk- she has a lot of data on creatures, morphologies, samples etc. bugging zoologist.
I offered to give them both some credits to help them get set up in the city. Cassie said she had some money but Nadia gratefully agreed. She had had money before but it was in her old name, accessing it could trigger someone to look for her now she was out and it was old currency anyway. We sent her some money Ilyara suggested the flat above the empty shop we’d bought if they wanted to rent it. It was big enough for the two of them, in a decent location and they wouldn’t have to worry about any background checks. Even if they just wanted to use it short term until they got settled in the city. They agreed and Ilyara arranged for a load of furniture to be delivered to the flat so it was ready for them. One of the few advantages to the city we lived in was you could order anything at any time and get basically instant delivery.
Sarah arrived home so we made some quick introductions and she went to go and get ready. Half an hour later and we were on the way to the Neon Pussycat. It wasn’t somewhere we went often but we had been before and knew a few people who went in there. We also didn’t think it was a good idea to take Nadia to Deep Six. She was only just coming around to the idea that Amaranthians weren’t all bad. Taking her to what was essentially a gathering of senior members of the vampire families, not to mention the others who frequented the club, might be taking it a step too far.
Walking in I noticed a few familiar faces. Fisk, Violet and Amy were there. Fisk and Amy were propping up either side of the bar, although Amy was with her friends and Fisk was on his own, although I thought he might be waiting for someone. Violet was with a pale skinned person I didn’t recognise.
Ilyara went to the bar to get the drinks while I went with the girls to find a table. Two minutes later and I could see why she’d wanted to go to the bar, there she was flirting with Amy. Fortunately she was also ordering the drinks, although I had to go and help her bring them all back to the table.
I’d barely taken my first sip when I saw a rare person walk into the bar. A spliced individual, part cat part human. Other than Dez, most of the non-humans she’d seen ahd looked human so this was going to be a shock. I got her attention and warned her as I thought this would be easier for her if she was prepared. She must have been adjusting to the new reality quicker than we thought as she was more intrigued than anything else ‘Are these things common?’ I bobbed my head around in a non-committal way ‘Spliced individuals aren’t massively common, but they are not unheard of’
The door opened and a few more people came in, a human looking girl with a large sword and with her a male Orc with an axe, knives and guns. It looks like they’re looking for someone and are both wearing badges, an Orc skull with a sword diagonally through it and a large caliber round going in the other direction. Looks like a guild or a faction. I ran a search for the image, it is another mercenary faction the symbol appears to be well known and recognised. They don’t have an official name but the one that seems to be attached to them is ‘Monster Hunters’. I got a few images of them on the nexus. From what I could tell they’d done jobs for the city, dealing with invasive species in the sewers. The girl was impressive, there were pictures of her being quite acrobatic and using a sword bigger than she was. They sat down at a table and were just chatting between them, but I did notice them keep looking at the door like they were waiting for someone.
I was able to get a good look at Violet and who she was with. From the way she was sat and looking around it looked like she was running security for a pale guy in a suit. He was deep in conversation with a human woman with a dragon tattoo on her leg. From the way she was dressed, the suited and armed guys with her and the tattoo, I guessed she was Yakuza. A different faction to those we’d encountered in Japan but still Yakuza. I took another look at the men with her, they must be bodyguards and they weren’t trying to hide it. I got a good look at the faces and realised they were older gentlemen. If this was the case they were likely Yakuza Ancients. This was a profession where the life expectancy wasn’t very high, so to make it to an older age, you had to be good at what you were doing. I saw them looking at us, assessing us. We were on his radar but they clearly didn’t see us as much of a threat.
As I was checking out the Yakuza, we were approached by a blonde human male, he walked over quite confidently and with purpose and asked ‘Are you Ilyara’ while looking directly at her. He was in civilian clothing, no identifying markers, but with a look of intent. He then looked at me, ‘That would make you Eliza? Don’t look so worried ladies, I’m here to do you a favour’ I tried to scan him but I couldn’t get an image, he must be wearing a baffler. He also had leather gloves on. He was there to deliver information on behalf of a colleague who sends their regards. ‘There’s a problem we might want to deal with, it’s on our turf’ I still wasn’t sure who he was but I got a message from Ilyara ‘It’s OK I know who he is’ he must have noticed the message as he nodded and smirked at Ilyara.
‘Alan Dartmund gave me this information. Lazarus Meditech have been dumping things, mutant vampires, in the sewers below Ilyara’s patch. Because of where it is, it’s a problem for her to deal with as it could affect her masquerade. He offers his technical assistance if there’s anything we think we might not be able to handle. He says to refer to him as ‘Onyx’ it’s a username known around here and we can ask about him if we want to. If we need to contact him we can do this via a message board on a defunct website. If we put a message on there to him, he will contact us and he pings me the address.
He also says if we have any DSD’s or Devices that may be compromised to let him know. ‘He has a way with machines’ and at that he took a glove off. I could see circuitry glittering blue under the skin.
Oh, as a gesture of goodwill, take these. And he hands Ilyara a small metal packet. The last thing we heard him say was that we were ‘Not quite what he expected’ and with that he disappeared into the crowd and was gone. I picked up the packet and opened it up. Inside was a collection of plastech sheets with images on them. The table was backlit so I put them out on the table so we could see them more clearly. One of the first images we put out caught my eye. It was a figure in familiar armour. Outcast armour. There was another one that would have caught my breath if breathing was something I did. At first glance I thought it was Scarlett, and given what had happened recently with her being targeted that made me nervous. However, once I took a closer look I could see that it was just a lookalike, well, a double would be a better description. The only difference was the number 15 on her cheek. Looking at this they were in the sewers with a large crate. It was also recent so it wasn’t an old photo of Scarlett, but the idea of there being multiple Scarlett’s out there was also slightly concerning.
Other pictures were of an Outcast Commander, other guys in armour and heavily armed. One of the pictures looked slightly distorted, on zooming in it looked like the picture had been corrupted but later cleaned up.
There were two guys who looked like assassins, carrying nano daggers and swords. There were also three robotic servitors in one of the pictures which was unusual, I’d not heard of them working with things like that before. One of them had a tech-lance and one and twin SMG’s. The other looked like he had a breaker unit and a hub, possibly set up for hacking.
There were a couple of images of the box. it was big, military and sealed with a blue-green light in some places. It looked custom but there were no identifying markers so there was no way to see who had manufactured it. It was entirely likely it was black market as most other manufacturers would normally put some kind of identification on, it also didn;t look like anything any of the normal manufacturers would produce, indicating it might be something exotic.
The last slide I put out had a message on it ‘this info was taken from deep in the sewers and delivered by a Rust Priest. If you want more information seek them out, they might be able to help but they won’t talk to me. They have given us their radio-frequency.’ I did have some radio frequencies for some Rust Priests, but it would be good to get the specific frequencies for this particular priest. Nadia did start to ask a question about the photos but we quickly shut it down and put the images away. We didn’t know everyone in here and we didn’t want to be talking too much around people we didn’t know.
At this point the splicer got up and walked out. They gave us an appraising look but I couldn’t get anything much from it, the face was decidedly feline and therefore harder to read. Ilyara thinks Fisk may have said something about us, but not sure what it could be. They were wearing a lab coat and an ID badge so I managed to get a name, Professor Cat Sebastian. I ran a quick Nexus search and found out she works at the Neo Birmingham Archaeological Institute. I was right in that she is a feline, Human hybrid, but she’s also augmented. Her left arm is cybernetic, as is half her head, eyes and the lower part of her jaw, although this could be to aid speech. Ilyara nods in acknowledgement but there is no reaction and she leaves. We get a message from Fisk ‘Don’t ask’ so of course Ilyara slinks off to ask the questions.
He smirks as she walks over and I can’t help wondering if the message was intended to get her attention. Anyone who knows Ilyara knows you don’t tell her not to ask as it’s the first thing she’ll do. I spot him handing her a DSD device, some information on the grey markets she had been asking for. Zeik is the person we need to reach out to, he’s a truck driver. There is a code-phrase we need. I was listening into the conversation to make sure Ilyara didn’t forget anything we needed to know. He told her Zeik was a middle aged, overweight guy with an augmetic left arm. He gives us some instructions on how to find him and suggests that he might be more than just a driver.
She did ask him to come and join us for a few drinks but he says it’s best not to as there are a number of eyes on him at the moment. He will be at the apartment when we get back so they can have a few drinks. He also tells her about a black market vendor who has set up around the back of the club. He sells allsorts, including magical items, weapons, explosives, talismans. I couldn’t see her face but I could picture her eyes lighting up at that.
The Yakuza quietly get up and leave, Violet and the pale gentleman she is with stay seated and have a quiet conversation but he very quickly gets up and leaves. As he does, two other gentlemen move out from behind pillars and flank him. They leave via the other exit. Violet remains at the table and finishes her drink but she does message Ilyara that she’s seen her and that she stands out. Drink finished, she comes over to join us.
With all of the people moving around I noticed some of the other people in the bar. One is a Dr Issac Gregory, he’s a Dr at Ilyara’s hospital and a Ricardo Mason, a Private Detective Ilyara met in passing a while ago. There’s also a military looking guy.
Violet asks Ilyara who I am and ‘How deep is she in?’ as we’ve never actually met before. Ilyara responds with ‘She’s met the Princess, she knows, the others not’ and with that she also introduces Cassie and Nadia.
Ilyara nips off to the bar and to say Hi to the Dr, I see her turning to point at me and tune in to her her saying that I’m also a bike enthusiast. I hear him say he’s more into motorbikes than grav bikes. I hear him say he used to race at Harborne but that now he’s older and wiser and a Dr on call he doesn’t have as much time for things like that. He also references taking Ilyara for that ride, at which point I stopped listening. Ilyara was back at the table with more drinks a couple of minutes later.
There was a guy in a duster with a case which he puts down next to him. I get the name Kieran Randall, he is a known mercenary but not part of the guild, freelance and dangerous. He was joined a short while later by another freelance mercenary, Carla Singleton. She also carries a weapons case and has the best shade of pink on her hair which I make a note of. I do a quick search and find that she’s an explosives expert, good with motorcycles and has augmented samurai swords. She has worked for the police dealing with hard to handle gangs outside of the city.
The next people to come in were two individuals, one in green armour, semi-wanted, vigilante known as faceless Harry, He takes law into own hands aggressively. With him was a faceless woman, she had a small swarm of microbots around her and was wearing a helmet to hide her face, I can’t really get anything on her. I saw him takes out a cartridge from his helmet, pour alcohol in and plug it back in while she opened a port and puts a straw in. They obviously didn’t want to take their helmets off, even to have a drink. They seem to be talking, based on their slight gestures and the way they are interacting. But with both having helmets on they could be using a closed comms loop. He is hunched over though, keeping his hands close to his weapons, I can tell that he’s scanning the room. I do also notice that she has a rail gun.
Ilyara makes an excuse to nip outside to ‘go and have a look at something’ I knew she was off to speak to the black market guy so I made sure to keep a track of her comms just on the off chance. I did consider going with her but I also didn’t want to leave the girls in here on their own.
He is, quite literally, a troll, quite a large one from what I can tell and he’s smoking a cigar, just to buy into the black market stereotype even more. If he’d been wearing a trilby hat it would have been comical. He dismissed her quite quickly but this is Ilyara and she never really takes no as an answer for anything. She tells him who sent her and his attitude changes somewhat and he looks her up and down. He does also quickly guess she’s ‘One of the big 5’ They discuss a few things and she buys some bits and pieces and he gives her his name as ‘Duke’
The rest of the night after that was fairly uneventful, but to be fair, we didn’t stay too much longer. Fisk kept his promise though and was in the apartment when we got back. Drinking Ilyara’s booze as well.
New base already inhabited...
The team were pulling out everything we’d flagged as valuable. The next thing was to sweep the base and cave area as there had been some rooms there we hadn’t checked and the Dr had told us about a room with some tanks and things floating in them.
One thing that had stopped us was there were a number of doors that required keycards to access the rooms beyond. There was a good chance Crane, who had appeared to be running things on the base would have an all access keycard. A quick search of his body revealed I was right, he had a keycard. Now time to test it’s access. There was a biohazard crate in the hangar Ilyara had wanted to access so I handed her the card and left her to it. It was her that wanted to see what was in there. I didn’t want to be too close to anything labelled biohazard. I might not be flesh and blood but I could still be affected by things.
I took another card that I’d found and went off to sweep the base for any unopened doors. On the right was a room we’d not been in. I opened the door and found a woman strapped to a chair. Judging by the state of her she had obviously been beaten. I had no idea who she was, or if she was likely to go after us so I asked who she was and if she’d play nice if we let her go. She nodded and said her name was Cassie. She was a hunter who had been in the area after desert skates. She’d been tied to the chair for 5 days so was stiff and struggling to move.
I pinged Ilyara a message and got her to meet us at the medbay then we got her up and started helping her to the medbay. On the way we asked her if she knew why she’d been taken. She raised an eyebrow. ‘I’m female, they were pretty much all male, you do the math’ I nodded. She did tell us she had a lot of knowledge on the area and convoy movements if we needed it. I offered to get her to wherever it was she wanted to go as it seems that her vehicle wasn’t here so she’d be stranded otherwise.
Once she was there Max asked us to go and check on the Alien room, make sure nothing else was alive in there. I did debate suggesting a handful of grenades as the quick way of doing the job but there might be something valuable in there so I thought against it. I did, however, ask for Dez to come with me. He was handy in a fight and if there was a thing in there that was going to cause me any issues it would be nice to have someone to hide behind. Sadly one of the downsides to looking human was that the creatures might not realise I’m not the good kind of crunchy and I really am not good with ketchup.
Fortunately I didn’t need to hide behind Dez and the room was just goo and hatched eggs. There was a shaft int he middle of the room that looked a little too regular to be natural. I sent a drone down and could make out rock and shards of metal, but it wasn;t anything I could identify. I messaged Tin and asked if she’d mind coming and having a look. Once she got there she had a look down the hole, she didn’t seem too keen on going down but agreed to go down as far as the drone to get a better look. She handed Dez a grappling hook and told him not to let go and threw a rope down the shaft. The video feed went a little wobby but I was still able to keep an eye on her.
She shouted up, the rock was just natural rock, nothing special to report. The metal, however, was manufactured. Which was interesting considering it was mixed in with the rock. I asked her to grab some samples and she pulled out a pot from a pocket and managed to get some samples of the rock and metal.
We asked her to go a little further down but the drone could only go another 25 feet and it would be out of range of me so we messaged Ilyara and asked her to come with the hub device she carried in case I needed somewhere to go in case my body suffered critical damage. Ilyara turned up and handed me the hub device but also suggested that she turn herself into a bat and fly down. Tin seemed happy to get out of the shaft and left Ilyara to it.
I sent the drone down with Ilyara in case she got into any trouble. For a while all we could see was more of the light brown rock and chunks of metal, but then we also saw what we could only assume was some kind of biological material that looked like it had been scraped onto the rock, or something had hit the side and then scraped down the wall.
As they went further down the shaft I noticed a pinky-purple light, it was getting brighter and then the source of the light became apparent as there was a tunnel off to the side of the shaft, Ilyara followed the tunnel and so I followed her, the tunnel was only short and finished in a large cavern which was illuminated by think pinky purple light. The scene it illuminated however was slightly disturbing.
There was what looked to be a giant rock lying smashed on the ground with runes carved into it. Scattered around the cave were glowing crystals which appeared to be the source of the mysterious light. There were also corpses scattered around the floor, both human and, well, decidedly not human. There was also the remains of a mole drilling unit.
I sent the drones in closer to the non-human remains. There were some gorilla like creatures, blacky-brown fur but no flesh on the bones. The fur looked desiccated. One had six eyes in the skull set in a triangular pattern. One had over-extended canines and the bones of the skeleton looked exceptionally thick. There were also poseidonian, but without the natural armour modern poseidonians have.There were some six legged creatures but with a body and torso that rose up with talons and arms with three fingers.
The strange thing was, these creatures were obviously not human but were also not Amaranthian, or posiedonian, or at least the majority definitely weren’t. Some had some features but they were also very different, too different. They had also been there for quite some time. I sent the drone around the outside of the cave looking for any other entrances but there wasn’t one.
Whenever I got closer to the big rock like thing in the centre, there was some interference and static. It was also skewing the data from any scans we were running. I did make sure to record everything, even if some of it wasn’t 100% clear.
I turned the drone around to check on Ilyara just in time to see her bat form fail and her return to human form and fall to the ground. To be fair to her she did land on her feet even if she did wobble slightly. I made a note of it for the Broadcastle bloopers reel. It was only fair that we had something other than Max on it.
She wants to stay down now she’s back in person-form and have a bit more of a poke around. Scarlett decides to go and keep her company on the off-chance anything happens. While they’re down there we send a couple of empty crates down and get Dez to help us pull a couple of the bodies back up. Scarlett also levitated a couple up for further investigation.
Ilyara starts looking around the rock in the centre of the room, it appears that it’s actually a ship of some kind. She couldn’t get all the way around it, but from what we could see, it operates in a way totally different to anything I’ve ever seen. There are a few display screens that are operational but there’s nothing I can do as I can’t connect to them and, even if I could, the language on them is alien.
Max wants to get some archaeologists involved to look into this further for us. I do look for anyone in the area who might be interested. However I do offer a word of caution, that we need to be careful who we get involved, as we don’t know exactly what this is. We don’t know what technology the ship has, or weapons for that matter.
They had been down there for some time when we noticed that the crystals were changing colour to blues and greens. According to Scarlett they were also humming in reaction to her. She said it likely meant that some of the creatures may have been psychic. Then all of a sudden the crystals seem to increase in intensity and bright light spills out. I looked at Scarlett who looked unsure, saying she can feel the edge of memories of some kind, but this is not her expertise. She suggests we need to get someone with psychometry to come down here and have a look around.
She also noticed that something was moving in the bowels of the ship that wasn't dead yet. Something in the ship was moving, which could possibly mean that there was something in there that was still alive. She suggests they should get out, with there only being the two of them down there it would be difficult if it came to a fight. Ilyara had changed into her wolf form to have a sniff around so she just levitated her up and out into the shaft.
I started recording as Ilyara was trying to move around by paddling at the air and it was hilarious. I felt a bit bad but I did ping the stream to the others comms for the fun of it. It didn’t last long as she quickly changed back into her regular form. She was good enough to grab the drone on the way up as the casing was starting to crack from the acid damage. Once they got back to the top we got the both of them to sit down and take a break, they had been pushing it and we didn’t want them going too far.
Once they’d recovered we headed towards the entrance to the caves. Max was making arrangements for the doors to be sealed to stop anything coming out of the caves. It was unlikely it would happen but we didn’t want to take any chances. Ilyara wanted to go and have a look at the room with the tanks the Dr had told us about, she wanted to see if there was a way we could seal the doors to stop them being opened. It took a bit of messing about as they were old doors but I was able to disable the opening system so it would take a lot of effort to get the doors open. It was a tricky one, we may want to be able to get in there at a later date, but we wanted to make it difficult enough that people would think twice about getting in. Not to mention if there was anything in there stopping it being able to get out accidentally.
While we were there I remembered about the weird job I’d done with Ilyara and suggested that we could contact Professor Archibald Ferdinand, the collector. He was into word stuff like this and may know someone we could trust to investigate the wreck and the bodies
Once we were back in the hangar Max came to speak to us. We’d been debating about looking for a new base for ages as the current base was getting rather cramped. Between the people we’d recruited into Broadcastle and the amount of kit we’d acquired it was bursting at the seams. It was actually a pretty good idea. It was already set up for the larger aircraft and we’d have plenty of space for everything else. I was sure Leon and the team would likely grumble, they’d just spent hours stripping things out and now it could all stay.
The other issue with the old base was it was in Raylans name. We now knew that he was secretary working for the ERF. It was only a matter of time until they came to claim it back. Max spoke to everyone to let them know we would be moving everything over and gave instructions that the old base was to be stripped, lock stock and barrel. We would leave nothing for them.
The Dr came to find me a little later on. She had decided she wanted to stay, she would work primarily with Ilyara but would also work with Broadcastle where she was needed. I pinged a message over to Rui to ask her to help me create a new identity for the Dr. Half an hour later and Nadine Courtier was Nadia Constance who had been working in the R&D wing of Ilyara’s hospital. We’d had to bribe Hideo Kojima but he seemed happy to be getting another highly qualified member of staff. I connected to the com buoy in Leon’s ship and got everything pinged out.
One of the things we’d found in the base was two military grade robots. Although these were under the ownership of Broadcastle, I was likely to be the primary one using them and so they were under my control. I played it cool but inside I was dancing. I now had three military grade robot bodies to play with. What’s not to love.
Ilyara suggested we contact Umbrella about what we had found in the caves. They had the know-how to deal with it, as well as the funding and resources. I put together a series of videos and images and we sent it over to Prof Ashford so he could get a better idea of what they would be dealing with. Ilyara sent everything over to him they discussed the logistics and what would happen next. He finished by sying ‘My Daughter says to send her regards to Eliza’ he didn’t sound like he was happy calling her his daughter but he did, and it was progress on where he had been before.
Max arranged for some of the supplies we had found at the base to be transported to Redditch. He had been working with them on freeing some slaves and they had a pretty good system in place but needed some supplies which we’d just found quite a bit of. There was more than what we needed and I know Max was keen to support them as much as possible.
New Base - not that we knew it
After securing the base Max sent a message to Leon and asked him to get over to the base and strip it. There was a lot of valuable stuff here, even if we discounted the EC Scientist and her cryo-pod. It wasn’t long before the team arrived, with them arrived the newest member of the team.
I knew Max had had feelers out for a while and the new guy came recommended. I didn’t know anything about who it was, just that they were here. I was talking to Max when an Ork in power armour came over to us and introduced himself as ‘Dez’. Well, when I say introduced himself it was more of a grunted ‘You Max, I’m Dez’ type interaction. I won’t say conversation. Max as it turns out, had been expecting an Ork, I did think it might have been wise to let us know as my first thought had been to shoot him.
But Max seemed happy enough and got us all together to introduce Dez Slaughterfist. He seemed friendly enough, if not massively talkative. The best bit was introducing him to Bob. I made sure I was recording this as there was no way this wasn’t going to be funny. Bob did say hello and then just, out of nowhere, with no warning, headbut Dez. He did stagger backwards slightly but that was all and then looked at Bob. For a split second I thought there might be a fight but then Dez just broke out in a grin. Well, as much of a grin as a heavily scarred Ork can. He then just headbutted Bob right back ‘I like dis one’
I chuckled and got his comms connected to ours.
Now we were all together I told Max and Ilyara about the ECSC connections and what this could mean, both in terms of monetary values and scientific discovery. We decided to go and talk to the Dr about what she was doing here. I could get some information from the terminals but it would be quicker and easier to speak to her directly.
Although she isn’t happy that we’ve taken over the base, she does give us the information we ask for. Her name is Dr Nadine Cortier and she was head of two projects for the ECSC. One, Project Revival is linked to the cryo-pod. Basically the idea is that you can put someone who is near death into stasis and then perform surgery on them while they are cryo-frozen. The other she just refers to as ‘the other project’ is basically the creature in the caves. The problem is, this project has been out there in the cave since before she went into the cryo-pod, so she has no idea what it actually is anymore. She believes it’s blood may be acidic and that it is currently around 8-9 feet tall. After that we’re on our own as it has mutated from what she knew it to be. She also suggests we put on protective haz-mat gear as the area is suffused with some kind of acidic airborne bacteria. Whatever this thing is, it’s adapted to it.
While we’re talking Max asked her if she wanted to join us at Broadcastle. I knew she was worth a lot of money. However, I also knew that Max was not likely to want to sell her as selling people was something we were not OK with, no matter how much they were worth. She seemed a little unsure but promised to think about it.
She told us where to find the haz-mat suits and also where the members of conviction were as they were locked up in some cells nearby. She warns us not to open the doors as they may attack us. Between Dez and Ilyara I kind of doubted that but it was worth at least showing some caution.
Unfortunately Dez chose that moment to stick his head around the door. To say she completely freaked out would be an understatement. She had a gun and she actually tried to shoot at Dez, she didn’t do any damage to him physically, but he actually looked kind of hurt that she’d try and shoot him. We needed to remember that she had been frozen in stasis for a long time and was used to us being at war with the Amaranthians and not working with them. Unfortunately, in trying to explain to the Dr that everything was OK, Ilyara decided it was a good idea to turn into her wolf form. I think this sent the Dr over the edge as she looked like she was about to have a breakdown.
We sent Dez and Ilyara off to go looking into the rooms the Dr had told us about and to deal with whatever they found there. I stayed behind, partly because I didn’t really need to see what Dez and Ilyara were going to do to these people, I had an idea and that was enough. The other reason was to try and talk to the Dr and make sure she was OK. She was very on edge and panicky already but then we could hear the noises of Dez and Ilyara dealing with the prisoners. I left the Dr to it so she could shut the door and hopefully feel a little more secure.
I headed down the corridor, following the noises. As I did so I pinged Leon a message and told him about the databank I’d found in one of the rooms and asked him to make sure someone pulled all the data off for me. I got the thumbs up. As I got to the others they were being fired on by two turrets. I was able to get into both of them and shut them down so we could move without being shot at.
It looked like the next room had the air-lock into the cave system at the back. There were four turrets in there, I was able to get into them and bring them under my control. I thought it was best to leave them active in case whatever was in there decided to make a break for it - or had friends. We might be glad of the extra fire-power. At this point Matilda also caught up with us. I’d taken some damage to my head earlier on in the mission and wanted it at least patched up before it became a problem.
We put on the haz-mat suits and the others got ready to enter the airlock. I stayed outside so that I could work the airlock and Matilda could fix me up. I made sure I had the turrets focussed on the doorway just in case they were needed but whatever was in those cave wasn’t anywhere near the door and they moved in. I made sure to keep an eye on their comm feeds so I could see what was going on and dive in if I needed to. From what I could see, it looked like the base had been built up around the cave. It made sense, caves had been used as natural bases since the beginning of man, this was just upgrading it to make it easier to live in.
After moving through the caves and having a good look around, as expected, they found the creature, and some other, smaller creatures in the back of the cave system. There was quite the rapid fight and Max went down, one of his legs blown off. There was no way we could stay out here, Scarlett had come to the base and was with me on standby. We ran in and were able to help out killing some of the smaller critters and Scarlett was able to pull Max out and get him over to the med-bay. He looked really bad and I wasn’t entirely convinced he was going to make it.
I kept one eye on Scarletts comms as she made it to the med bay. Fortunately Dr Sherman, the Dedalus engineer, one of the people we were here to rescue had woken up and Dr Courtier was able to get him out of the pod and Max in. I saw everything through Scarletts cameras, including the look of concern on her face and then the amount of what I assumed to be Max’s blood down her front from where she’d carried him.
By the time he was there and in the pod, we’d been able to deal with the big creature. Ilyara had gone in and done something with her blood magic, I wasn’t exactly sure what as the comms always get staticy when she does magic but I saw her do something and then it was down and out. Dez was pretty banged up so we all trooped over to the med bay. Dez asked the Dr to help him. I think partly because he did need help, but maybe it was his way of being less intimidating and giving her some power over him. It didn’t work. She just got annoyed when she saw him and stated he’d be better off with a vet as she knew nothing of Amaranthian physiology. Ilyara patted his arm and took him off to the transporters so she could get her med kit and help him out.
And that is the story of how we took our new base. Not that we’d made the decision at this point...
Base incursion
We decided to start looking at the middle opening. We had to start somewhere and we wouldn’t all fit in the smaller corridor but the big one was too big and we’d already had a poke at that and got half blown up. There was still plenty of room as the corridor was 15ft food wide and 8ft high.
Ilyara decided to turn into a Wolf so she could start sniffing around. I tried to use thermal imaging to see if it would pick anything up, anyone hidden or any power lines or generators. I had a scan around but couldn’t see anything. I pulled out Ilyara’s scanner which picked up some wires terminating in a manual handle. Unfortunately it seemed that the switch we needed was on the other side of the door.
Ilyara went off to the other tunnel to see if she could find another way in, it was possible the two tunnels met up further down. As she got to the end of the corridor and was sniffing around she discovered that the end of the corridor was false, it was actually a hologram and had a door hidden behind it. She’d come to get me to come and have a look and see if there was anything I could do with it, but being another analogue door there wasn’t much.
I shouted Max and got him to come see if there was anything he could do. Breaking things open was more his schtick than mine. He was able to peel back the front of the door which meant that I could get at the mechanism inside and get the door open. There was an airlock on the other side. Unfortunately prising the door open had obviously set off some kind of an alarm as there were red flashing lights and alarm claxons going off. Not wanting to delay getting into the base Max just stuck some C2 to the airlock doors and blew our way in.
Once we were through the second door we found we were in an anti-chamber with yet another door in front of us. At least this time there was something in this one that I could do something with. There were power boards and relays on the walls. There were no computer ports but at least I had access to the basic power systems and could open the next door. Unfortunately as I did, a grenade came sailing through. Fortunately Max’s reflexes were pretty good and he was able to grab the grenade and throw it back. It must have hit some barrels as there was a chain reaction of explosions and the guy that threw the grenade at us was killed. Once we got in there we realised we were pretty lucky as this was a storage room and on the opposite wall was stored more explosives that could have done quite a bit of damage.
Ilyara was sniffing around, we were looking for people but there was also an acidic smell in the air, it was more like a permeating background smell than a strong someone just spilled acid smell. I was obviously distracted as I was so busy trying to hack into the turret in the room I didn’t spot the beserkers coming in until one of them had clobbered me over the head. He must have knocked something loose inside as my optics went out and I was blinded. Fortunately it was just my external optics that were buggered and I could still hack the turret. If I wanted to move I’d have to jack into the awoobots and use their visuals but it was going to make moving difficult.
Maybe because I was ignoring everything going on in the room because I couldn’t see it to do anything, but I managed to get into the turret and take it over. I ran a quick diagnostic on myself and was able to get my eyes back online. At the same time I realised that someone else was trying to take back control of the turret. There was a hacker trying to take control back. I tried to hack into them directly and, despite the hacker having a breaker unit and a firewall, I was able to break in and drop a trojan spider in their systems. I was hoping the hacker would be distracted by me and not notice it as it would keep chipping away at the stability of their systems. I got a message on my display. ‘Robot body hey, you wanna play, lets fucking play’
Well, this wasn’t playing, this was an attack. They hacked in and immediately dropped a Nuk3 virus. Damn it. I should have done that myself but I’d wanted to try and get some data. The Nuke virus had affected my stability and kicked me out entirely. Everything seemed to have gone dark.
I ran a new ping but the only thing I could find was a few low grade comm devices that didn’t even seem to be connected to anything.
We got into the hangar room next and there was a space shuttle. Not high on the list of things I thought I was going to find today. Max found a generator room and two inactive robot bodies. We assumed inactive as there were no signals, lights or indicators. They were old atlas models but sturdy. These were pre-binding robots and still in very good condition. Possibly because it looked like they hadn’t moved or been disturbed in a very long time.
We headed over the hangar to the other side, trying to clear the base of anyone that could cause us problems and find the dedalus hostages. There was a minor device in one room and a lot of static. This was a tell-tale sign that hackers were up to something. I sent out a message to let everyone know.
I quickly cycled through the visual feed of the others to see what they were up to, I had a fair idea of where they were as their beacons were showing up on my radar. I got to Max in enough time to see what he was doing but not enough time to react and stop him. He was trying to blow something or someone up but he wasn’t far away enough from the explosives. Just as I thought, he was thrown backwards from the blast. I ping Ilyara and let her know and we go to check on him and the guy he was trying to blow up.
We were able to interrogate him and found out that one of the Dedalus Hostages was still alive, but pretty badly injured as there was a Dr trying to save her. He also told us that there was a massive creature in the caves at the back of the base. He said it would be a bad idea to blow the base up because the chances were all that would do would be to let out the creature
After some further interrogation it turns out that this guy, Boris, was from the same faction we liberated Igor from, albeit another, larger cell. We offered to try and get him out in return for his help to clear and secure the base and he was pretty happy with this. His cybernetic arm wasn’t working but between me and Ilyara we were able to get it back up and running.
He thought there were maybe 6-7 people left in the base from what we’d told him based on how many people he knew were there and how many we’d encountered. He wasn’t exactly sure on the numbers though so it could be a couple more or less.
He tells us to keep an eye out for Dr Sherman, one of the dedalus engineers. Over in the east wing there is woman, a hunter. In terms of our enemies, there was a leftenant through that door, Crane. He was the guy in charge and he is nasty. He likes to torture. Boris suggests that he is too dangerous to be left alive. Ilyara turns into a wolf again but can’t get anything as it smells too much like burning flesh because of Max, so she transforms back into her human form.
We were discussing what to do next when Boris said he could help us. I was suspicious as we had just tried to kill him. I know we were helping him to get out but it was a very sudden change of heart and I wasn’t sure if we could trust him just yet. I think Boris might have guessed what we were thinking as he reassured us that he wanted to get out and start a new life and we were the only ones who could help him with that at the moment. Max gave him his gun back and the two of them started discussing explosives. They also discussed exploiting the fact that they thought Boris was still one of theirs. He seemed genuine from what we could tell and it was worth a shot.
The bots were carrying quite a few grenades between them so we taped three of them together and handed that to Boris. I hacked into his comms so I could watch what was going on and alert the others if there were any issues.
I watched him punch through a door and throw the grenades through the hole. I wasn’t quite sure why one of us couldn’t have done that. I thought he was going to talk his way in. Either way he’d proven himself that he was prepared to work with us so that was something in his favour.
There had been two guys in the room before the grenades. I suppose there were still two guys, just spread out a little more. There was also a computer in there, fortunately it was pretty heavy duty and hadn’t been damaged by the explosion. Boris looked at me and gestured to the computer terminal ‘Maybe you can do something with that?’
I sit down at the terminal and start poking around to see what I can find. Fortunately it’s relatively easy as the guy that was hacking me had just been blown up. One of the first things I found was a comms that had been sent around about the creature in the caves at the back of the base.
That Daedalus Engineer, he actually made it out. His suit was ripped to fucking shreds, but he made it.
It was probably full after eating and infecting the other engineers.
That Doctor or Nurse or whoever she, Nadine, is that we pulled out of the cryopod is working on him.
Says she can save him, i'm not so sure though. Once that shit gets on your skin or in your lungs....everyone else we've sent in has melted or exploded. But the bitch seems smart.
That's why we're keeping her alive, if he survives he'll probable need regular care. That should stop both of them from trying to run, we're the only transport and healthcare for miles around.
And this people is why I'm in charge, Brigdes, make sure that those guns keep running, if that thing or it's spawn or whatever try and get out, they are our first, and probably last, line of defence.
Crane Out....
This was not like anything we’d ever seen before. It was likely a splicer, but it had gone further than anything should have ever gone.
The other thing I found looking at the computer was that the systems were ECSC - Earth Coalition Security Council. This was a big deal and could potentially mean a big payout. We’d need to keep an eye out for cryo-pods. ECSC scietnists were a big deal and could either net us a payout bigger than anything we thought possible, or access to game-changing technology.
I mentioned the cryo-pods and Boris told us about the med bay and the Dr. She was back there working on the Engineer from the convoy who was sick. We headed back there and the Dr told us that she could save him but he is pretty sick.
While there we also discuss the creature in the caves. They tell us that previously it has been ‘Fed’ and this seems to keep it happy and stops it trying to escape. When questioned on what they mean by feeding, it’s exactly what I think it is. Creatures from the desert but also prisoners or anyone who theory felt was no longer needed for the operation.
Just another day and another job with Broadcastle I suppose.
Raylan...
We’d all been stood there for a few minutes, taking it in. I hadn’t known him that well, but even so it wasn’t nice seeing someone you knew splayed out on the wall like that. I pinged his comm device, something had lured him down here so I wanted to see if I could get into his comms and see if there was anything I could find in his messages or contacts. It might shed some light on who had gotten to him.
I found it fine and tried to get in, but it came up as a grade 5 and that I didn’t have admin privileges. That was odd as I had his device registered as a grade 3 and I did have privileges. I looked again and this time I saw the grade three device and was able to access it as expected. The grade 5 was there but on a partition. Essentially the two devices were one and the same.
Why, why would he need a grade 5 device hidden from the rest of us, it didn’t stack up. I kept quiet as I didn’t know what it meant and wanted to see what I could find out. Someone must have been watching the device, or had an alert set up on it as, no sooner did I get in than someone tried hacking me back. I beat it back once but wasn’t quick enough the second time and they managed to overheat the device and it exploded. Fortunately for me I’d been able to pull most of the data off it before they did.
I started to look at call logs and messages but there was nothing there. All of the records just have 00000 in their place. There was literally no data stored there, possibly explaining why I was able to download so much so quickly. Basically his device had saved nothing. I could go direct to the comms towers to get the data but it would depend on who he had been talking to and, given that his device had had a grade 5 device hidden on it, I didn’t hold out much hope that we’d get anything from it. That device would be about 20k, which was a lot and made me think that someone else had probably provided it, it was tech way above what we’d needed as mercenaries.
The others were still inspecting the body. From what we could tell he wasn;t dead when he’d been impaled on the walls. The rebar had also been impaled through the body into the concrete rather than the body being impaled onto already protruding rebar. That had to take some serious strength. Even if he hadn’t been conscious and fighting, getting the rebar into the concrete would take some real force.
I worked out he was also only about 240 feet from the base, so not that far away. I scanned through the base security footage to see if I could see anyone with him as he came down here, he was close enough to the base I was hoping I’d be able to pick something up. Unfortunately as was usual for Raylan, he was wearing his baffler mask so I couldn’t see much,, or even if he was talking to anyone at the time.
Ilyara told us that there was magic in the tunnels but no Sanguimancy or Necromancy. There was a very small trace of mystical energy but it was old and unlikely to be linked to Raylan. There is other magic there but with the spirits down here it’s hard to tell for sure because they could be messing with it. What we did find was that the body was emitting two different gamma signatures. These were likely from intense mental effort from psychic energy. We knew he was a psychic so that was no surprise, but it meant he was likely engaged in some kind of psychic activity. The second signature could also mean a second psychic. We found some further traces but there was nothing conclusive.
Ilyara wants to get the body back to the medbay to see if she could figure anything out away from the magic in the tunnels. Max wanted to do a sweep of the tunnels so we called Bob down and set out. Fortunately all we could find was a few large cockroaches and rats. We dealt with them and then headed back up. As we headed back up Max decided it was time we blocked up the door and we made arrangements for someone to come and concrete up the gap. We didn’t want anything using the back stairs to get into the base.
Ilyara does the autopsy while we are down in the tunnels. Once we got back she was able to tell us what she’d found. She had found a sub-dermal microphone in his lower jaw. A benign tumour growth and scarring in the brain. A barcode on the forearm near his elbow. I scanned it to see if it would bring up anything. It was an ERF ident tattoo, not military but likely intelligence
I went with Max into his room to start sorting through his belongings. There was his plasma pistol, claw pistol. the Railjacker and a stun knife. A credit chit with £31k on it and lastly, KAN his little bot. I’d never really looked that closely at it but now I could see he was heavily modified, it looked like 3-4 different units kit-bashed together. I tried asking him to turn on, tried talking to him but nothing. I left him there and went to go and talk to the others. I wanted some time to think about it.
We held a funeral for Raylan, which was bascially we burned the body and scattered the ashes. According to the others he wouldn’t have wanted much of a fuss, would have preferred we spent the money of an official funeral on drink anyway. So thats what we did.
As we were drinking the Robot body was delivered from the police. It had been released. I’m not going to lie, I got very, very excited and immediately took it to Maggie. I also took with me the bottle of Lagavulin I’d gotten her. I knew she’d been working really hard recently and that this was just going to add to her workload so I wanted to sweeten the deal a little for her. She rolled her eyes when she saw the bot but smiled when she saw the bottle. ‘Park it over there, it’s going to take some work because I need to tweak it for direct control rather than remote. I’ll let you know when it’s done’ I flattered her some more and left her to it.
I didn’t want to be with the others at the moment. I hadn’t known Raylan that well and I was feeling bouncy and excited because my new robot body was here so I figured I’d go and get KAN and have another look now I could take my time.
I took him back to my room and sat on the bed turning him over and inspecting him. I found a port with a fibre-optic tendril. Well it was another thing to try and so I plugged him into a terminal. Maybe being plugged in would help. He came up with a shell script, ready for data entry. I tried asking him to wake up again. A prompt appeared and asked me for an access code. His firewall was higher than what I’d expect for a beat up droid. Although looking at him again, although the outside is beat up, the inside is pretty new.
I tried to hack into him again. I could see a 3d model of KAN in front of me. There were also three bars. One lit up red. I had two more chances. The second time I managed to get in but a secondary programme ran and stopped me getting any further. Rather than hack again I thought I’d try and spoof the access codes. It had to be worth a shot. Turns out it was and it worked. A video screen came up, it was Raylan, he looked up with a wry grin. “Well, if you’re watching this it means I’ve come to some kind of sticky end. I’m guessing that you aren’t who I work for. Now you may have found I’m not exactly who you think I am. I do in fact work for the ERF for dept of social stability. My focus, trying to stabilise ERF settlements, one of my main focuses was Ilyara, before her Morethai. Also Mr Winters. Now you seem to have stumbled across my data. Maybe one of you put me down. I’ve collated all the data he I have on Broadcastle, you can take it or delete it. All I ask is that you make sure Kan goes to a good home. Happy trails” I saw files open up. The ERF contact info self deleted before I could get a chance to do anything. Any comms or codes access codes must have been part of the same auto-delete as they were gone too. All the information on us and our Amaranthian counterparts and reports are all still present. Lists of activities, pictures of Ilyara. Videos of infected humanoids, images of someone being blown up. Max paying money to non-humans. The files were pinging up quickly, there was a lot of information here on a lot of different things. If this were given to an ERF enforcer this could be damning. Involvement with communes would be damming. There are images of someone I know to be Rui but her face is scrambled. If I’d had a stomach it would have dropped as I saw my face pop up a few times as well.
There was a lot of information here to go through. I didn’t know what to do with it. It also wasn’t really my decision. It was Max’s. I pinged him a message direct to his comms device and asked him to come and see me. This was something not everyone needed to know.
While I was waiting for him to get here I looked through to see if any of these reports had been sent off. Some of the reports have been submitted, but the text files only, no evidence has been delivered. Some had been sent but had unregistered responses. I did find some messages back and forth. Some advising the information was good and to retain and build a file. But there was some pushback from Raylan, it started out quite business like but later on there was some more opposition, saying we’re not that dangerous and he’s not sure it’s worth his time. That was encouraging I suppose. Maybe he’d been having second thoughts once he got to know us.
Max arrives and I tell him what I’ve found. I can tell it;s hard for him to hear, and I’m not surprised. To find out that someone in the group is a double agent is not the thing you want to hear as the commander. He asks me to delete the files, and I do. But I did scan them first. I’d been with the group the least amount of time and wanted to see if there was anything else I should know about any of them. Fortunately there was nothing that raised any alarm bells with me.
I also messaged Scarlett to let her know what I’d found. It was only right as there was information on her as well, it was possible this information had made it to the ERF and I needed her to know.
We all needed a distraction so we picked up a job. There was something therapeutic about going out and doing something proactive rather than sitting around and moping. There had been a ransom demand for some Dedalus technicians. They were out in a convoy an hadn’t expected any complications so they only had light support. Well, I say light, they had an aircraft, three jeeps and a heavy transporter. All but two of the bodies had been found. The attackers had actually been quite clever about it. They had set a ring of explosives and waited for the convoy to drive into it before they set off the devices. It sounded like a military tactic which indicated that at least some of them were likely to hav had some kind of training. There are small micro-canyons in the area so lots of ground to cover. The conviction raiders have claimed responsibility and some of their uniforms have been found.
We got to the site and I sent out my drones. I saw some of the wreckage, an old tank shell and a burned out jeep. I also found some caves. We parked the Manticore and started walking towards the caves. The larger cave opening is large and quite rectangular, the middle opening looked almost like a mouse hole from this distance. The smallest opening looked almost perfectly circular, too circular to be natural.
I tried to ping for any technology but nothing came up.
Now we were closer to the larger opening I could see that around the left and right of the opening there were footprints. There was also a line in the sand where there was a definite drop in elevation. the shape was too regular to be natural so there had to be a reason for the change. It looked like it could be the way a grav vehicle would push away sand when the engines were kicked in. I walked over to the middle entrance, there were cigarette butts so someone had obviously been hanging around outside. Looking inside I could see that a tunnel went back about 20 feet and then met a sheer rock face. I moved over to have a look at the smaller tunnel but that seemed to snake into the rock and I couldn’t see very far.
We went back to the bigger entrance and started heading in. Max went in first, we were looking for traps but obviously missed something as we hadn’t gone very far in when a bear trap sprang out of the sand and latched onto Max’s leg. I tried to help him get it off but there was an explosive device attached to it and, not only does Max loose his leg, but I lost an arm as well. That’ll teach me to help Max.
Bob came over to see what was going on and if he could help. Turns out Bob is good with Junk magic and was able to craft us some limbs from the junk lying around. He warns me that the arm won’t work in the usual way as the computers might struggle to communicate with it. If I didn’t think too hard I was able to use it so it was better than nothing. He’d also put a Japanese flag on the back of the wrist for me. I liked Bob.
He also made us a big pokey stick for moving forwards to try and stop us getting any other limbs blown off. Ilyara also went ahead using the stick and her scanners. She finds a few and is able to highlight them so we don’t accidentally set them off.
We get to the back wall. from what we can tell there is a solid metal wall at the back but it has been disguised with a layer of sandstone. There are also mechanisms and a structure behind it. It’s not a wall but a thick metal door. The sandstone is a facade. There is power going to the door but it’s analogue and not digital so I’m stuck. I’m good with digital, analogue not so much.
Why oh why do we always seem to get stumped by doors….
Next Job and the arrival of Deefer
While we were working with Valentina and getting her settled in we got a ping about another job. The Neo Birmingham police needed help with something. There was a guy Ilyara had already heard of, named Sylcus. A known murderer and rapist. Max was immediately up for the job. Any job with scum like that and Max wanted to take it. Nothing to do with the bounty on his head, just wanting to take guys like that off the streets.
We didn’t know much about him, other than that he’d last been seen in the south-east of the city, one of his aliases was ‘Cutter’ and that part of his ears had been cut off. The job had come through from Detective Freidrichs as he had been spotted in his precinct. Last seen near the apartments in block 14 so close to us as this was in our district.
Along with the request for help we also got an image of him. The image is different to what Ilyara was expecting. He had on a skull helmet, cybernetic arms where the cybernetics extended into his chest rather than stopping at the shoulder. There were also Demonic sigils carved onto him. Looked like they could be from the cydonic wastes. From what I could see looking at the cybernetic limbs they were black market, sheng-tao district, China. This meant they were strong and adaptable and could store weapons. When I say strong, I mean that they had force multipliers, they could remove limbs from non-augmetic humans. I took another look at the head. There was something about it, I wasn’t convinced that it was a helmet. There was something about it I thought it might actually be his head. Now Iwas zoomed in a bit more, I could also see that the whole torso was cybernetic with his human skin tanned and stretched over the cybernetics. It was fashionable amongst gangs, can’t say it was something I’d have wanted done though.
I ran a search on him, I wasn’t expecting much but it was always worth checking as you never know what you’re going to find. I did find some things but nothing I didn’t already know. Unsurprisingly there was no legal entity under either of the names. The only thing I did find was that he could be a half breed or an elf. That could help to explain why his ears were cut, if he was an elf and had cut them to disguise it.
The reason he was wanted was because there had been a series of ritual murders and the police wanted him stopped. Although the killings were ritualistic, there was no pattern to the dates or times. We couldn’t tell if the killings were random or through necessity.
The job also came with a warning. That any previous mercenaries who had gone after him had gone off the grid. Those who were found had been murdered in a pretty brutal way with their veins splayed out around them. They were always also found very publically. There was no known ritual that this related to, this was just for fun. The civilian kills were the ones that were ritualistic. These kills were also hidden away and not found quickly.
The only other note on the file was one relating to how to take him down. He has the ability to use blood magic which means that if we make him bleed, he can use the blood to make a weapon. Not something we wanted to give him if we could avoid it.
We all piled into the AV and headed over. We messaged the Detective to let him know we were there. It was always best to give them the heads up. That way if things went south they knew we were there for them and wouldn’t come in after us. They also then knew that there was a chase we might need backup. In this case there was another reason. They’d asked for one of the uniforms to make the arrest.
The building was in a fairly slummy area. As we walked up there was a guy outside, he was old and had some cybernetic limbs but they were also old and looked like they could use some serious maintenance. With him was a cybermastiff. We got chatting to him and found out his name was Reginald Wiggins ‘But everyone calls me Rusty’ the dog was just called ‘Dog’
As we were talking Ilyara seemed to be sensing out the area. She thinks there’s a leyline under the block. Good for magic, lots of overlapping trails of Mana in the area. Unfortunately it appeared that Sylcus’s magic was sigillic which does not radiate in the same way which made it harder to pick up.
I searched for devices to see if there wasn anything that would let me hack into the system. The ports were all open though, there was security but it was almost non-existent and I was able to get into the systems pretty quickly. I ran through the security feed from the entrance until I found him coming in. He was fairly well disguised with a long leather coat and hood. However, he’d forgotten to wear gloves and I could see the distinctive black and green paint job from his cybernetics. He kept his head low and it also looked pixellated so the chances were he was wearing a baffler system or there was one installed in his helmet or head, whichever it was. I tracked him to the 12th floor but then couldn;t track anywhere past that as the camera’s had been moved to point at the floor or flat out disabled. I scanned through the feed from the 15th floor but couldn’t find anything.
While I was scanning through the data Rusty told us that the power went out to the building for a while a couple of days ago and that the building was a housing project owned by the city. Ilyara also gave the dog a once over an, unfortunately, it looked like he only had a few months left in him unless he got some attention. He also had quite a few augmetics that were starting to fail. Rusty told us he didn’t know much about the dogs story. He’d found him out here on the street and they’d just sort of, fallen in together. We offered to come and pick him up in a couple of days when the job was done and see if we could get him fixed up. Rusty nodded, he seemed happy with that idea.
We headed into the building, there was someone working on the front desk, he looked like he needed a shower and the right side of his face was augmetic. We tried to bribe him but that didn’t get us very far so Ilyara used her special charms and that got us in the door.
We headed upstairs, I was glad of my filters as the air was stale with food and sweat and overflowing toilets and old cigarette smoke, the walls were stained with nicotine. As we climbed Ilyara was keeping alert for any magical signatures, there were definitely magical people here but nothing that stood out, it was more utility magic.
We got to the 13th floor and Max and Ilyara started knocking on doors to see if they could either find the guy or find someone who knew where he was. The first door that opened was a Posiedonian. I’d never actually seen one in the flesh before but I’d seen enough pictures to recognise one. He was tall with essentially four hands, two long arms with pincers and two smaller arms with three fingers and a thumb. They were bi-pedal like humans and this particular specimen was about 6 ½ feet tall. He also had a large domed head. The best way to describe him was, essentially, a crab person. Max spoke to him for a minute and then I remembered something about Posiedonians that Max could probably have done with knowing. The way they say hello is to headbutt you. But when your head is essentially armoured, it’s going to hurt anyone who doesn’t have the same level of armour. Max went flying on his arse and I filed away the footage for a broadcastle bloopers reel that I’d decided to work on for the annual piss up.
The Posiedonian started chuckling and helped Max up off the floor and shook his hand. He introduced himself as Bob and said if we needed any help to give him a shout. I think Max had impressed him. He also knew the guy we were looking for was on the 15th floor so we headed up there.
Towards the end of the corridor was apparently a magical dead-zone. Ilyara said it was like someone had scoured all magic from the area. I sent out a quick ping to see if there was any technology we needed to be aware of. The data pinged up in front of my eyes. 5 IFF military specification signals. Unfortunately there was no way I could tell what they were, the signals were often masked. What I did notice though was an open window at the end of the corridor. There’s more than one way to see inside. I pulled out one of my microdrones and sent it out of the window and down the side of the building.
The first window reveals the kitchen and a robot. The second window is the living room and another bot facing the door. The third window reveals a woman on a bed. She’s tied and looks fairly cut up but seems to still be breathing. The back window is a second bedroom.
We ping the data over to the Detective, there was more firepower than we’d been expecting and there was the civilian. I quickly got a message back, Civilian is priority 1, he is priority 2. Shoot to kill is authorised but to try to take him alive if possible. He will try and get us some support but he could be delayed as The Triad are mobilising weapons and vehicles - watch your back. As the message from the Detective came in, I noticed a transmission going into the apartment. The timing was no coincidence. The police department has a mole.
From inside the apartment came a voice ‘Don’t you want to come in for a conversation rather than standing out in the hall?’ One of Ilyara’s robots breached the door and threw in a Frak grenade. I guess we weren’t doing this the subtle way then. The others all headed in, it was going to be cramped fighting conditions so I decided to hang back and see if I could hack the bots. Even if I could just disable them it would be better than them firing on the others. I still had the drone outside so I could get a vague idea of what was going on in the apartment but it was all happening very quickly and I couldn’t see everything without moving the drone.
We were eventually able to take him down by using the footage from the drone to triangulate Sylcus’s position and fire on him through the walls. We weren’t using traditional weapons though as we didn;t want him creating blood weapons. We were using energy weapons.
Now he was dealt with and secure I quickly turned my attention to the three bots. I wanted to try and get them under our control. There was no way of knowing if anyone else had eyes on the apartment and could start using them to hit us remotely. I managed to get them disabled which was the next best thing.
Although the fighting in the apartment had stopped, I could still hear fighting, but this was now out in the streets. From the quick glance that I took with the drone it was the police and someone else, presumably The Triad as that’s who the Detective had said was mobilising.
All signals have dropped and no signals going out. Extra bits on his skull – were a transmitter. His head was reinforced and essentially bullet-proof but were able to take him out because of the energy weapon.
Detective Freidrichs arrived and we gave him a quick update. The civilian needed to go to the hospital as she was close to bleeding out. Ilyara was doing what she could. Now the fighting had stopped outside they should be able to get a medivac in to get her out. We pointed out Sylcus’s body and apologised for not being able to take him alive. Bob had also used his pincers to remove the arms and turn him into a nugget as he put it. The detective laughed at that and said it was fine. Some of the lads were on the way up now to pick him up and get him into a mana negative cell so that he couldn’t use his magic. They would also remove his cybernetics, although I wasn’t sure how much of him would be left if they did that.
He confirms that it was the Triads kicking up trouble outside. That sounded a little too convenient to me, especially coupled with the transmission that came in at the same time as I was messaging the Detective. I suggest that the Police department might have a mole, he raised a hand and dropped a device on the table. Things got a little crackly for me but I was still able to hear what was going on if I concentrated.
He tells us that they do have a mole in the Police Department, there is a rogue AI in the police department and they haven’t been able to do anything about it at the moment. I asked if Sylcus and the Triads were linked, he confirms that Sylcus was important to them but they don’t know why.
He also confirms that cutter and Sylcus are not one and the same as I originally thought. They are different. Sylcus was an accomplice, a copy cat. Cutter is still out there but this is not common knowledge.
Detective Freidrichs also picks up a red stone with silverwork on it that Sylcus must have dropped. He dropped it into an evidence bag but I could see Ilyara eyeing it up so she must have some idea what it was for.
He tells us that they will be taking the bots in as they want to check all of the drives for any data. However, he is prepared to give us one of the bots as well as a payout. Max started to try and negotiate the bot away but I quickly pinged a message onto his visor ‘THE BOT IS MINE’ I’d been after a more high powered robot body for ages but they were so expensive I hadn’t been able to get one so we couldn’t pass this up. Plus it wasn’t just any bot, it was a grade 5 military bot. He also relented on the stone and let Ilyara take it, ont he understanding that she provide him with a full report on the stone, it’s properties and origins. He also hands her a DSD with some footage he had promised her.
I offered to help with the AI problem but he can’t sign off on that, anything like that would need to come from the Mayor.
As we were leaving the building I noticed that Rusty wasn't there but Dog was. I scouted about and saw him lying on the floor dead. From what I could see he'd made a valiant last stand as there were a few Triad bodies around him and a rather bloody mangled rusty pipe in his hand. I was sad for him, he'd been a nice guy, but I got the impression it was the ending that he would have liked. I grabbed a length of string I found lying about and Dog was quite happy for me to tie it to him like a lead and to come with us. He was hobbling a bit, his cybernetic legs obviously stiff and needing work. I ran a quick diagnostic and he seemed to move a little easier. He clambered on board and curled up under my seat. I started looking up vets local to the base and decided to call him Deefer. When Ilyara questioned it I explained D for Dog - deefer. Better than just Dog but in the spirit of Rusty's name for him.
When we got back to the base Ilyara went to go and talk to Valentina. She wanted to check how she was recovering after the operation. While they were talking she said she had been thinking and that she did want to come and work with us but that she was not as good at hacking as me, but that she was a good sniper and that was something we didn’t really have so she would join if she could do that for us. Ilyara agrees and we have our newest member of Broadcastle security solutions.
We’d not been back from the job long when Scarlett came over wanting to talk to us all. We gathered in the medbay and she turned off any communications. She had found Raylan, but from the look on her face it was not good. She led us to the back of the base and into the subway system. She turned to the right away from the subway car. I was about to ask where she was taking us when I saw it. The pentagram on the wall and splayed out on the wall is Raylan. Pieces of rebar pinning him to the wall, including through his head. No sigils just a pentagram. Pierced torso, legs, arms, head, neck but nothing ritualistic.
Whoever it was had wanted him dead but also wanted to send a message.
Valentina
When we liberated the docks from the avenging skulls gang, we took a prisoner. Well, taken a prisoner is probably not the right way to describe it. We’d found a human, or someone we thought to be a human in a chair, unresponsive. On scanning them we found that they had some implants. They appeared to be to repair some old damage and to replace muscle groups and bones with synthetics. They also had a plug link with secondary and tertiary processors in their head. It looked like they had a history of combat wounds that had been cured professionally but there were other wounds that had clearly been left without intervention. .
Other than being stuck in a mental loop, there seemed to be no current injuries. I had to feel sorry for them. It had never happened to me, but from what I knew, when you were stuck in a mental loop, time passed exceedingly slowly. The other thing was, putting yourself in a loop was not something you would normally do. The chances were, someone had done this to them.
I found a terminal and typed out a message “We will be getting you out soon, don’t fight we don’t want to hurt you” I could see that the message had been read but no response. “Are you willing to talk?” same thing. Read but no response. There was nothing more we could do now other than hope they understood and wouldn’t try to fight us when we woke them up.
We got things ready, knowing the chances were they would need food and water when they woke up. We were hoping she wouldn’t fight but we made sure there were guns in the room just in case. I plugged in and released the loop and she woke up. She looked around at all of us suspiciously but took the bottle of water offered. She cracked it and sniffed but then took a sip. We explain who we are and that, for now, she is a captive but we have no intentions of hurting her. She looks at Max ‘Well, you’re military for one thing. You’re not who I thought you were, but you are all idiots. You won on the numbers game, no other reason.’ Max nods but corrects her, ‘Ex military. Private security now’ she just nods. I ask why a hacker was here in the first place. She gestures to her sleeve and I nod. She pulls up the sleeve to reveal her forearm covered in abrasions and burns and underneath it all, a CNG tattoo. She tells us she is Valentina and she was in the Logistics core, 2nd division. Responsible for Hacking, Surveillance and net watch. She got out due to a dislike of the brass and being given orders she didn’t like.
Once she got out she ended up with the Ascended Skulls. It wasn’t planned. One of those friend of a friend type things. She didn’t realise quite how averse to the current order they were. After 7 months of ‘re-education’ she joined their forces. When she said ‘re-education’ the look on her face said it all. She’d been tortured. She unzipped the front of her suit and showed us her ribs. Lets just say her rib cage did not look like it should. not set correctly, caved in and set that way, pieces of bone sticking out, skin healed around them. The group could have fixed this but didn’t.
The torture was almost symbolic. To show that they’ve taken their fair share of beatings and survived. She was coming across as professional, no emotion just a deadpan expression. She wasn’t trying to hurt us or herself but I suspected that she may have PTSD. There was a certain amount of fire and fight behind her eyes though She definitely didn’t seem like she had given up.
Ilyara offered to help her by curing her wounds, re-setting the bones and healing the skin over them. She nods. It’s hard to tell if she’s happy or just being practical about the whole thing.
Max asks her if she wants to get away from the Ascended Skulls. We can help her get away and give her a new identity. She looks like she is starting to form some kind of bond with Max, she seems to listen to him more and I’ve seen her eyes darting to him a few times.
We leave the room to discuss things out of her earshot but leave Igor in there with her keeping an eye on her. As we leave she starts eating the food we left for her and drinking the water. Once outside I suggest that Max be the primary point of contact with her. If she is starting to trust him then he has the best chance of getting through to her. I offer to go and get more food and drink. This would have a two-fold benefit. One would be that it removes an additional threat from the room, the other would be another small gesture to help her trust me. I suggested bacon butties which got a murmur of approval from everyone so I just headed to the kitchen to make a big batch.
I tapped into the base security so I could keep an eye on the camera feed and what was going on in the room. I was listening in as she was saying that there was a low likely hood of the Ascended Skulls trying to find her again. They were not that well organised but the organisation was divided into cells so information was compenmartalised. Not to mention they would probably now just assume that she was dead.
Max again offers her a way out of the Ascended Skulls and employment somewhere else. I knew he meant Chase. I heard her response “Well I can’t go back and I don’t know if I want to” She liked the sound of the offer but wants a little more time. I could understand that. She’d basically been mistreated from one organisation to the next. It couldn’t be easy to think about jumping in with a third.
He asked her if the Ascended Skulls were related to white skulls. It was a good question and made sense. She said they do have links but not in the way we think. There is something they have, that they practice, insidious, gets in your head, others more than the rest. Something unnatural. Artefacts with glyphs, probably Amaranthean. They do things to you if you let them in, odd powers, reinvigorate the dead. Tends to be people that are experimented on or experiments they have taken from white skull establishments. They tend to steal artefacts and creatures from the bases they clear. She hasn’t seen them but has seen the reports. As she was talking her words became disjointed, like she was thinking but not wanting to remember, or couldn’t remember properly.
Max asked if there was anyone she wanted to get out with her. She shook her head, no. Some of the group were tolerable but too many were happy to be in the group.
He asked about the data she was after. She had wanted to secure the manifest, they were being reinforced by another cell who were going to take certain containers then retreat. They’d just needed to know which containers to hit. She doesn’t know what was in the containers, she had reference numbers for shipments not inventories of what they contained.
Ilyara decided that she’d been questioned enough. She was looking tired and had been through a lot. She put a stop to the questioning and offered to start her rib procedures. I offered to help. I’d assisted a few times before and it was interesting to learn plus it meant I was more likely to be able to help Ilyara in an emergency situation if it was needed. It took us about two hours, Ilyara used nanites to help with the recovery process, help the skin and bones to heal. Once we were finished we left her to recover and went to check in with the others.
I did a quick search of the news and social media to see if there was anything about the raid at the docks but nothing had come up, so Ace must have been able to get things covered up pretty quickly.
Prep for Mid East Job
Ilyara contacted the guild about possible other mercenary groups who would be able to help us with Chase’s job. Given the amount of enemy combatants we’d be facing we’d decided more boots on the ground would be a good thing. It was possible there would be a group who would be able to help us who also had their own ship we could use as a forward base. Any ship we used would need to be armoured as the Mujahideen operate in the water around the area so we could be fighting in the water as well as on land. We’d also need something that could transport the cargo container as we’d been warned it was likely to be heavy.
The guild did have a group that could likely help us and they’d be happy to make the introductions. They have a converted nimitz class carrier which was heavily armoured with modern shield generators and plating and could have the fight. Would take a few days to get things set up and then about a week to get there.
The guild also sent a comms to Max. They had to use unofficial channels, they could give us access to an off-the-books weapon. It came with a caveat; We would need Zs permission to use it and he would need to know the target before we were allowed to use it. Weapons would be bio-locked and only released once the targets had been approved. These were highly destructive explosives, using dark matter technology. He can ship three to us today, total cost £60k. Max agreed to the terms. It was better that we have them here in case we needed them at short notice.
I connected to a comms tower as a relay to connect to the Mid East Nexus to see what I could find out. I started with local news and media. The Mujahideen are very active in the area, in open conflict with the UAEC, they are openly opposed to the doctrine of the UAEC who are more co-operative, open to trade. The Mujahideen do not like the corporate nature or the current leadership. There have been lots of attacks, bombings but also viral weaponry. They have bases throughout the desert, hidden in caverns and caves and have been there for centuries. The conflict is currently somewhat at a standstill but this could change at any minute.
I tried to search for any historical plans, any generic copy-paste plans for bunkers from the older days of the mujahideen but couldn’t find anything,
As I was searching Cayenne from the Black Hawk Mercenary group arrived. The guild had reached out to them as a possible to work with us on this. Ilyara and Max got her up to speed on where we were up to and introduced us all.
They were discussing the inns and outs of the job, possible strategies. I had suggesting spoofing orders to move the cargo container as this was going to be the most difficult part of the job, getting in there and getting it out without damaging it. Unfortunately that would only work if they wanted to sell whatever it was, which we didn’t think they would as, if they wanted to sell it there would have likely been chatter about it already. Cayenne had already heard rumours about the job and knew what it was that was in the container. A UAEC satellite uplink. Worth upwards of 6 million as it was already pre-programmed and linked into their systems so whoever wanted it was more likely after the data than the money.
Cayenne advised that Black Hawk could get us in, but wouldn’t be able to cover the exfiltration, or the exfiltration but then wouldn’t be able to help us to get in. They could help with one or the other not both. She also suggested if we could get in and get someone to drive the flatbed we could then just drive it out and hook it up to the manticore and use that to get it out. In order to do that we’d also need to take out the turrets.
Taking the electronics out remotely was unlikely to work as the base was likely to have a shield generator or ECM. One of the options, if we could get someone who was stealthy enough, was to get someone to sneak in past the sensor webs and plant a remote terminal, we may then be able to use that to hack in remotely and bring everything down.
Another option that was suggested was to get a mole unit and burrow in but to do that we’d need to use ground penetrating radar and Chase had already warned us that this wasn’t an option as we’d be picked up if we used the radar. We could use the mole without but it would be much slower.
We also added a repeater drone to the list of equipment we’d need for this job.
While I was connected to the Mid East Nexus Cayenne suggested I look at the local weather patters as we’d need to know what the weather was likely to be when we were planning on going in.
Mid east have sone ‘ripper storms’ which could be useful; Temporal storms are normally south east.
Glass storms are the most prevalent, tend to be tornados and super heated plasma making desert a giant blender which could be very dangerous for vehicles; we’d need thick armour or bunkers.
Evenings flash freeze or even snow. Currently in summer so now would be the best time. However, around the times we are looking at going adverse weather would be ramping up and prevalent. Flash storms are a thing so would be an issue. Does sort of follow a pattern but weather is sporadic so difficult to predict. Most settlements have shield generators to try and protect from the worst of the weather. Out to sea can also be quite dangerous. Although the ship is shielded we will need to be careful when we take off and land as valkyrie could be shredded. We’d need to make sure we watch the radars closely. The manticore would be better but would need to land in a storm.
Something we hadn’t considered was seeing if we could get some local support. Cayenne advised that it was likely we could get some support from the UAEC, they may even pay us for helping them deal with the Mjuahideen element.
I tried to get some information on the leadership of the Mujahideen but they were such a secretive organisation that there was little I could find, from what I could see that was a fairly universal problem and others had also struggled to get this information. At least, if anyone did have it it was well hidden. The leadership of the UAEC was, however, much easier to find. They had various commanders in the area. They also had a fortified position in Dubai. The diamond, a smaller settlement, a silvery lotus shaped structure that reflected a lot of light, I also suspected light wasn’t the only thing it reflected. It was a heavily fortified position. I managed to get some contact information for the UAEC, the MO or Military Operations department, they worked with mercenaries on a regular basis as well as the ERF and the Lost, it looked like they would be pretty open to working with us. From what I could see they would be able to help us with technology and would provide a liaison as long as we were willing to work within their guidelines. If we contact them then they can arrange a date and time to contact us securely as will need to be connected to their nexus. The UAEC is a centre for tech, lots of R&D, on the cutting edge of technology, billions of pounds spent there every day.
I looked at the technology of the Mujahideen, wondering if I could find out what they used and see if I could pre-programme things specifically for the job to see if it would help with the hacking. From what I could see it was all grade 5 or exotic military technology. They also had projectile tanks, plasma and energy projectile weapons. Shielding and advanced ECM and other countermeasures. Military grade encryption. I will need the PCNC for this.
I tried looking for some general information on the Mujahideen, I didn’t want to come away from this with nothing. It was limited information but I was able to discover that they were Muslim and followed the traditional tenants of the Muslim faith. Old school fundamentalists. There were lots of the old religious sites around the area, but we would need to be careful with this as lot of others who were more modern Muslims who would be unhappy if they were targeted or damaged. I also found out that there were Amaranthian ruins in the area as well. One of the ways the Mujahideen had moved forward was that they were much less sexist now. They were happy for women to come and fight in their ranks, there were reports of women being front line fighters and possibly higher up in the ranks. A lot of the Mujahideen are not just local muslims but are converts as well. People from many different countries, from what I could see there were people of all nationalities, the only nationality not to join are Russians. Most nationalities open to converting and they have been welcomed in.
Max gets the most recent copy of Quran. The Imam’s are the trend setters and the ones who interpret the Quran. The local Imam’s appear to be preaching peace and openness. They are inviting others to have conversation with them to discuss their beliefs but that religion isn’t pushed. It’s there if you want it as opposed to the CNG. Don’t have open ties to Amaranthians – but also no denigration either. They accept Lost in their settlements as well so there are Amaranthians. Looking on social media I see pictures of a grey skinned half-Orc with sandscrit tattoo’s. Tall and lean, leaner than you’d expect an Orc to be, possibly more human than Orc. Name associated is Grogus Mohammed.
Times for prayers are as they were historically; mid day, in the evening and early morning. They pray in the direction of Mecca which is West. The suggestion is to approach from the eastern seaboard.
I have a look for any social media posts from people who may be dissident, open to turning or bribery but I can’t find anything. The only ones are the UAEC, the Mujahideen are all of the same mindset. If we can find someone who has connections, might be able to find someone on the inside who we can use as an insider but would be difficult.
While we were looking at contacting the UAEC we also floated the idea of doing a reccy-run. We could fly over, meet the right people, get the lie of the land. I’d be in the right place to be able to poke around the Mid East Nexus without needing comm-tower time. It was something worth considering. Although the more money we spent on the job the more we were eating into the payout, some things were worth more than money. If we could pull this off we’d have made a lot more contacts, international contacts. We’d also be building up Broadcastles reputation as a group who could take on big jobs and get things done.
I had a look at the nearest friendly bases to where the mission was. There was a USAC base to the south in Al Hayma, There was also a civilian settlement in Hayma itself. UAEC did have a base but that was in Al Ghubar. The base we were after was somewhere in the middle but pushed out towards the coast. The area the base was reported to be in was called Raqui. Looking at topographical images going back to before the binding some large sand dunes and small mountains had shown up. Based on Chase’s images the base was in a valley but there was a raised area in the floor of the valley. That was our target. There were the ruins on top of the mound and, zooming in on chases images, there were some heavy fortifications that had been added.
I tried to see if I could find anything on the ruined settlement but all I could get was that it had been a trading post and watering hole. Nothing about the layout or what could have been underneath it. There was reference to a small military base a few miles west but that was pre-binding and I couldn’t find anything on the maps. There was mention of a tunnel which could be useful but there was no guarantee it was still there, or if it was, if it was connected to the base we were after.
Racing in Harborne
Harborne Racing
So along with my new bike, Ilyara and Max had also treated themselves to new bikes. So we did the only logical thing we could, we took them out into the desert to race them. Turns out everyone has some skills with the bikes and we were all pretty evenly matched.
After we got back I did some poking around online and discovered that there was a pretty well known, former competition race-track not too far from where we were in Harborne. I’d not been there before but Ilyara seemed to think the place wasn’t too bad so we decided to go check it out.
As we approached I could see that the walls were manned and there were lots of weapons pointing outwards, one or two inwards as well. I wasn’t surprised though as Harborne wasn’t a massive settlement and being this far out, you needed all the protection you could get. We were scanned as we approached but were waved in with no issues.
Once we were through the walls I could see it was pretty much a shanty settlement, population free people and exiles. It was very similar to Whiskey Outpost, just bigger.
Through the gate there was a tarmac road but we had to slow right down as there were people everywhere not really watching what they were doing and crossing right in front of us. We followed the directions the guy at the gate had given us and headed towards the track. There was an off-spill road that led down to the back of the track and a security guy waved us down once we’d told him what we were there for.
We followed the road round and eventually came to a building, it was still a shack but it looked like it had been reinforced and was somewhat official. A young lad approached us and we explained why we were there and he took us inside to go and speak to the game warden.
Inside we were introduced to a tall, older African woman with long dreads. I noticed the wrist breaker unit, a hacking device, she also had two cybernetic eyes, the eyes themselves were grey with blue rings set into them. Her left leg below the knee and two of her fingers were also cybernetic.
She greeted us both and was friendly enough but you could tell she was also sizing us up. We introduced ourselves and said we wanted to check things out and see how it all worked. She nodded and shouted her assistant Marli to bring some drinks out.
She explained that this track isn’t like any of the others, it is rougher, although there were no weapons allowed on the track. Tricks are allowed but on the understanding it does not destroy any property. You can run people off the track but grav bikes can’t go over 15ft above the ground. She also warned us that, on this track, accidents had been known to happen ‘But don’t worry, outright murder is frowned upon’ Wow, I felt much better with that reassurance.
Racing fees for us were 250 creds a race with a race every half hour. Today was a normal race day but on Fridays weapons were allowed – death races. We decided to go and watch a race and see what it was all about with a possibility of joining one later on.
It all seemed fairly straightforward so we decided to give it a go. We had to pick race names so I went with Re-boot, had to get the tech reference in there somehow. Ilyara managed to win but I’m putting that down to the fact that her bike’s like 300 feet long. Right at the end though there was an accident and one of the racers, Maverick, got his leg chopped off. Ilyara jumped in and did what she could to try and stop the bleeding but she was struggling with the kit she had with her so she called in a favour and got one of the medivac’s to land on the racetrack. She was able to patch him up enough it was safe to discharge him to the Harborne clinic. We got his friends Derreck and Faiza.
The Game master called us over to her shack. She thanked Ilyara for stepping in and the help she offered, it’s not something that happened often in a place like Harborne. She also told me that she’s had a communication from Dedalus and they had paid my entrance fee so she pinged me the 250 credits back, as well as the money we got for coming in first and second and the payment for Ilyara for providing medical services.
She also warned us, it might be prudent to be careful where we go in the city. There is a gang there, the Crimson Hats, they were known for running guns and drugs but they were fairly small time and tend to stay within the walls of Harborne although they did have one or two members in Birmingham. She suggests we try going south, we’d avoid the crimson hats that way. She also invited us to the feast they were having that night. It was invitation only but given what we’d done for Maverick she thought we should be there as there would be plenty of people who wanted to say thanks.
We headed out and decided to head South to see what was there. It was really interesting as the people seemed much more diverse than in Birmingham. There were people with a lot of cybernetics, Amaranthians who looked like their more authentic selves, Dwarves and Dwarven workshops, hear Elvish. Ilyara needed to eat so we headed to a stand and got what looked like a huge burrito but it was Amaranthian. We ordered some drinks. Ilyara ordered a snakebite, and after being warned not to, swallowed the snake. The guy who runs the stand warned me it could take a few hours for the effects to wear off.
I decided to eat as I was enjoying trying new things. It was good but I did get some static in my eyes and then the re-charge rate on my reactor went through the roof. It turned out that Amaranthian meat had magical properties. It could be a bit of a lottery what the effects were but in my case I’d been lucky.
We get checked into a hotel so we can stay for the night after the feast, the street-meat guy pointed us in the direction of somewhere that wasn’t too expensive but also wouldn’t leave us wanting to sleep on the bikes.
As we were talking I noticed a photo on the wall behind the bar, it looked like Cresswell and McGraw.
We’d spent the afternoon looking around Harborne and waiting for Ilyara to sober up after her experience with snakebite. As the sun was going down we headed back to the racetrack for the feast. There was heavy security, the event was invitation only but we were waved in with smiles.
It was noisy and boisterous. People were drinking and there was music playing. I could hear scattered bursts of laughter. As we walked in people waved and shouted hi. A few people came over to talk to us and shake Ilyara’s hand. They were really complimentary about us and said we’d done well considering it was our first race. They were also thanking Ilyara for what she’s done for Maverick. It turns out the free people, or at least these free people were also really superstitious.
Maverick was also there, we hadn’t expected him to be but he was there being pushed around in a wheelchair by the friends we’d seen earlier. He offers us any help we want so we started picking his brains about racing and the best way to get set up. He mentioned the other types of races, death races we knew about but there were also time trials and every two months they had a rally.
He tells us having a pit crew can be really handy, particularly if you want to race a lot. You can either hire one in Harborne, there are always people looking to pick up the work, or you can bring your own. It was certainly something to think about. He also warned us that if we were going to participate in the death races that we needed to bring armour and to be careful what weapons we brought as it wasn’t a case of everything goes, and to be prepared to pay for damages.
Generally everyone was welcome, as long as you played by the rules. Anyone caught not playing nice was essentially run out of Harborne, it was a fairly self-policing kind of place.
As we were talking I noticed some scarring on his left forearm. As I looked closer I could see that he’d had a tattoo removed. Although it had been removed there was enough of it left for me to see that it was a red hat tattoo.
We hung out with the guys for a while, getting to know some more of the regular racers and faces from around the track. There were a few of the guys hanging around Ilyara but I was used to that and just ignored it and carried on chatting about bikes and racing and the pros and cons of the different bikes. Some of the racers had standard factory issue bikes like my trailblazer. Others had more, custom, shall we say, bikes.
As things started dwindling down we decided to head back to the hotel. The following morning we were up and about relatively early and headed back to the amaranthian food stand we’d been to last night, although I did get Ilyara to promise no more snakebite this early in the morning. It turned out that Jeremy who ran the diner knew a lot about racing and the way the town worked. He suggested we go down to the garage district, there were normally paces available to let and they usually came with a crew as well. Before long we’d registered with the Harborne Racing association and had put down a years rent on a garage and crew.
North of the Wall
So, Broadcastle just got another big job. When I say big job, I mean a BIG JOB.
It;s the biggest we’ve ever had and it’s not going to be easy. We need to go North, to an ERF base in Scotland. Our client wants us to recover some data and destroy some assets as the base has been overrun by Amaranthians. There will even be a bonus if we can demolish the site and overload the reactor.
We know that there are Amaranthean scouts and outriders. Their numbers are also being bolstered by some of The Lost. However, they are not ‘guildies’ and we are given the instructions to shoot on sight. The base had several defences including servo droids, roof guns & laser defence systems. We don’t know if any of these are still active.
There is no data connection so we can’t spoof any ID’s to get us into their network. The comm relays and towers are down so will need to jack in locally.
In the main control room is the main data storage bank. We need to download the data to a DSD. The data/tech is about 100 years old so that’s something for me to be aware of but the data should be easy enough to download. Once we have the data we should be able to make the reactors overload by remotely hacking in.
After some discussion we get Leon to drop us off behind the wall in an amaranthian forest. As he drops us off he reminds us that if we need him he will need at least 20 minutes to come and get us as he’ll need to wait away from the wall and outside ERF territory.
After a slog through the forest we eventually saw the facility. Tall but curvy with sloping edges, there were trees growing around it. To get to it we would need to get past the old wall, fortunately it was somewhat dilapidated now and there were plenty of holes we could get through. We walked along an old riverbed as it was easier than trying to push through the undergrowth. I had expected more scouts and sentries outside the building but we only encountered two on the way in. We got lucky in that they were also facing the other way so we managed to slip by unnoticed. I did send out a micro drone to keep an eye on them, just so we knew where they were.
We were able to follow the creek bed all the way down and into the base. It must have used the river as a water supply, now the water had almost dried up were able to use the channel as an access into the base itself. The walls and floor were covered in green and kind of slimy so we had to be somewhat careful with where we were walking. It was also a lot cooler now we had moved under the shelter of the base.
As we walked we passed a number of bodies in various states of decomposition. Some looked to have been there for some time, others were as recent as 5-6 years ago. They looked like they had been wearing black fatigues and had ben killed by either a blow to the head or a sword.
As we were walking I was keeping my sensors active, looking for the familiar ping of electronic devices. I did pick up on something, it was a low band transmission, local, but I couldn’t quite pinpoint it or tap into it yet.
We’d reached the far wall and were looking around when I thought I spotted something and pulled back the vines and green tendrils and there, covered by the overgrowth, was a door. Max managed to force the door open, as he did the hinges gave way and the door fell over. The sound echoed off the walls a little but it wasn’t too bad, the green growth muffled the sound a little.
I was still monitoring the static bursts in case they were linked to the comms systems. There was no change so either the bang hadn’t been detected or the static was nothing to do with the comms system.
The door opened onto a stairwell which, conveniently for us had a ‘B’ painted by the foot of the stairs. Looking up we could see what looked like four floors, however, it was difficult to tell as the fourth floor appeared to be a mass of rubble so it could potentially go higher.
We decided to clear the base on a floor by floor basis so we made a start with the first door. This lead to what appeared to be a barracks and commissary. We’d not been through the first door for more than two minutes when the first, things, came out of the dark. Fortunately for us they did not appear to be particularly intelligent and we were able to deal with them pretty quickly. I was able to find an access point into the systems. It took a bit of doing as I had to fix the port before I could try and plug into it. Once I did I only had limited systems access but I was able to turn the power on to this room so we weren’t in the dark. As well as the lights the TV came on. We saw fleetingly the image of a green eye on the screen and then it disappeared again. A recording also played ‘Welcome to Memphis Station’
Now the lights were on I was able to have a poke around. We found the body of someone who used to work here and I was able to take his access card over to one of the terminals. It didn’t give us much access, but it did give us a plan of the base and information on which areas were and were not accessible.
Floor 1 - commissary and Barracks which we already knew.
Floor 2 – Logistics and Armoury
Floor 3 – OPs Access
Floor 4 – INACCESSIBLE
We were also able to get access to maintenance requests. Scanning through two requests of noe were for two aircraft, One, a Valkyrie also had a notation of HO Package – or Heavy Ordinance. The second was for a Manticore which had a notation of munitions and low grade explosives. That could be interesting. Especially as all our client wanted back was the data. Anything we looted we could keep. The maintenance requests minor malfunctions, but from what I could tell, they were both still serviceable and, if we could get them going, could also be a good exit strategy if we needed it.
I was also able to get a list of the working cameras and on-site defences. The data wasn’t exact but it was enough for us to be getting on with and gave us a much better idea for where we needed to get to and the best way to get there.
We headed out to the launchpad to check on the state of the vehicles and make sure they were air-worthy. They looked good so we headed back in to head up to the Armoury. The room was full of cages stacked with weapons caches. Even I was getting excited. Some of them were pretty beaten up and probably couldn’t hit the side of a barn, others looked in pretty good nick. The cameras were still following us but I couldn’t pick up on anyone else in the base so I decided to have another go at hacking into the systems to see if I cold figure out who was controlling the cameras.
I managed to get into the systems but I tripped something in the system as I did and all the lights went out. I took a minute to go back over what I’d done and where it had gone wrong. I adjusted the programme and re-ran it and managed to get in this time. I was about to get into the system and put the lights back on when I felt a massive shock, the wiring was old and dodgy and I must have caught the wrong wire and took a blast of energy from the system. I felt the robot version of sick and ran a quick diagnostic, I was lucky, although I had taken some damage I was still fully functional and it was nothing that couldn’t be sorted out once we got back to the base. Although I made a mental note to be careful if I was physically poking around with the wiring again.
Poking around we found some more guns, ammo and armour. We filled the backpacks and headed up to the next floor, where we expected to find the data stacks we needed to download the information from. The cameras were still tracking us but I’d not been able to find anyone controlling them so I had to hope that they were programmed with motion tracking.
Once up the stairs we followed the cables and into the main computer room. There was a large bank of machines in the centre of the room. Unfortunately there were also a lot of bugs. There was no way I could get to the main console to start downloading the data until they were dealt with. While the others used their guns to try and deal with the bugs I took over the turrets in the room and disabled them. The last thing we needed was for the turrets to activate and either hit us or the stacks.
Now the bugs were dealt with I turned my attention to the stacks and trying to hack my way into the system. Just once it would be nice when we got a job like this if someone could just give me a username and password. As I got into the system there was a burst of static and the screens flickered to life. ‘My name is Icarus’ came an electronic voice from the ether.
I was scanning looking for the data we needed when I found the data fortress. Unfortunately I also found a rogue AI in the system. However, I was one step ahead of it and managed to download it into the DSD into a quarantined section so it was out of the way and I could take it back to the base and decide what to do with it.
I set the data copying over to the DSD and turned my attention to the reactor. I needed to bring it under my control so I could overload it on the way out and destroy the base as that was one of the mission objectives.
Once the data finished downloading I pulled the DSD and shouted the others to move. Max had already gone ahead to start firing up the aircraft in the hangar. We’d decided since it looked like they were air-worthy it was a shame to blow them up. I think we’d been on such a killing spree through the base either there was nothing left to kill or what ever was left didn’t want to risk getting in our way and we were able to get back to the hangar in one piece. When we got there Max had already got the manticore online and I jumped into the pilots seat. He was in the Valkyrie and I heard the engines kick in as Max throttled up to take off.
As we were flying out I was concerned that we’d be picked up on the radar and any of the still active turrets would be able to fire at us. I checked the display in time to see the radar blips drop off. A second later and a message from Chase popped up on my screen “I’ve got a job for you, come see me when you get back”
Once we got back to the base we got the technicians out to fix the damage I took in the base and Ilyara arranged for the information to be handed over and we got paid.
And you know what payday means.
Payday means shopping.
Eliza goes home
While at Deep Six Rinoa had offered to take us to Neo Japan as she was going home to see her father. It made things easier on two fronts. One because it meant we didn’t need all the paperwork as we were her guests and two, it meant we didn’t need to pay for the tickets.
The airstrip was a private strip outside of the city walls. We took the tunnel rather than risk going overground and a raider attack. The airport itself was surrounded by a tall heavy duty wall to offer it protection from the elements and unfavourables who might try and cause problems. Fortunately for us as the tunnel was a direct link from the city to the airport, we got in pretty quickly. I think the diplomatic badges on Rinoas car probably helped there as well. There were a few aircraft lined up and ready but only one had the Japanese Diplomatic badges so it was relatively easy to pick out. I also got the impression the driver had done this a few times before and knew exactly where to go.
Within minutes we were on-board, the luggage stowed and were pushing back for launch. A stewardess had also brought drinks out for us all. Rinoa explained about the aircraft and it’s use of dark matter manipulation. Ilyara spent the flight flirting with a steward and disappearing for a while. I apologised to Rinoa who just chuckled. ‘This is a diplomatic plane Eliza, it’s what she’s here for.’ When they came back she certainly didn’t seem unhappy and Ilyara had a smile on her face so I said no more about it, but I wasn’t sure how I felt about that, even if it was consensual.
As we descended the sun was just coming up so we saw the lights across the city start to blink out. It was a beautiful sight to see the sun coming up over the city and the change from city of neon lights to beautiful and soft morning light.
We landed in Kotoku, it was hot and humid as soon as we stepped off the plane and away from the air conditioning. I felt my in-built coolers kicking up a gear to deal with the change in temperature. There wasn’t much they could do about the humidity though so I was glad there was an AV waiting for us. Rinoa was going to the Imperial Palace for a meeting with her Father, we were off to meet Rui and X and see what they could tell us and what our next steps were. As we went our separate ways she suggested we meet in Akihabara this evening for a meal.
Now we were in Neo Tokyo I also had access to the Galax network so I was able to message Rui to let her know we had landed and were on our way over to her. The AV had already taken off by the time I had been able to send the message and so I sat and looked out of the window watching the scenery and trying to get an idea of where things were so I had a reference point when we were on the ground.
We landed on top of the Galax building and took a minute to take in the views over Neo Tokyo. We could also see the HQ for Ilyara’s weapons manufacturer, somewhere I knew she wanted to go while we were here. It was windy this high up but it was worth it for the view. Ilyara gave me a quick dig in the arm to let me know the doors had opened and we headed inside. As the doors closed we were greeted by the voice of X. He let us know that Rui was in the middle of a call but that she would be with us shortly and we should make ourselves at home. Ilyara went to the kitchen and made a drink. X let me know that I also had access to the network in the apartment, Including Rui’s CNC, should I need it. It was only a few minutes later that Rui herself came out of a side door stretching. Apparently it has been a rather long and tedious call.
She took us through to her lab which was impressive. It appeared to be a completely separate pod suspended within the building. Something I guessed Rui had had to have built specifically for her. She turned to smile at me ‘It’s good to see you home’ she pointed to a cylindrical server stack in the corner of the room. ‘That’s where we were storing you as we found the pieces. Your data was scattered across the Tokyo sub-net, breaking up and migrating which is why you were so difficult to piece together, and there are still bits of you missing. The prefix codes were all the same so there is an origin out there if you want to go and find it.
I wandered over and placed my hand on the stack and allowed myself to go back into the place I had been when I had been here with Rui, into the home she’d made me while she put me back together.
I found myself in a familiar Shogunate style house, the bookcase that had been my source of information and company. Technical manuals, manga, books on the earth pre and post binding. Outside was a traditional Japanese garden but beyond that only blackness and the occasional neon light. She had only ever built what I’d needed and I’d never needed to go any further than the garden.
‘It was a good job X found you to be honest, the Japanese sub-net is not a calm place, it’s filled with Pirates and Sharks and AI data is valuable. I guess the only reason you survived as long as you did was because you were so fragmented.’
‘So, on to the thing you came here for’ I nodded, feeling a little nervous but I had no idea why.
‘Your source code had a prefix which seems to be located somewhere around Shibuya and Harajuku. Unfortunately there was no centralised directory of the prefixes, we’d need to fly around the area and ping to try and narrow things down through the local directories. Once we had that I’d know either where I was found or where I lived.
I looked at Ilyara who nodded and said she was happy for us to head out whenever I was ready. ‘No time like the present’ and with that we headed out to the AV and started towards the rough area Rui had suggested we start. As we got there I started pinging local comms towers looking for the prefixes. As I did we were able to narrow down the area. It was like playing hot and cold with digital data. Eventually we narrowed the area down to a large tower with what looked like some really old buildings and a warehouse around it. As we flew lower we could see the warehouse was surrounded by a large fence. Nestled against one of the walls were a series of nexus cabinets with ‘Do not trespass’ warnings all over them. The building was flagging up as condemned and it looked really old and yet it was still standing. I had to wonder why, if it was condemned it had not been destroyed yet.
Not wanting to land and draw attention to ourselves I sent my little drone down to land on the cabinets and see if we could get any information that way. The prefixes were correct so there had to be something in there that was linked to what I was after. It took a bit of doing as the systems were a bit older here but I was eventually able to spoof some credentials and get access. I was able to transfer some of the nodes to my control and access some of the data. Some of it was corrupted, but I was able to get enough to know that there was an old CNC below the building which was still active.
We landed the AV and Ilyara suggested she go in as a scout party, being a vampire she was hard to kill and therefore it made sense for me to stay out of the way. She managed to get into the building on the first floor and made her way down. I was watching where she was going via the camera feed from her glasses. There was graffiti on the walls, tags from gangs, the biggest and most recent being Relentless in the Cyborg style, as well as numerous iterations of ‘Down with the elite’.
After going downstairs to the ground floor she did a quick sweep but didn’t find anything so she headed down again into the basement of the warehouse. I could tell by the video fees that her head was swinging left and right. As she neared the bottom of the stairs and her head swung right I could see a battleship style door, one of the heavy duty bulkhead types with the spinning wheel to lock it in place. There were also three display screens, two blue one green. From what I could see via Ilyara’s video feed, it looked like someone might have tried getting through the door but the damage was fairly minimal so I guess whatever they had used had not been enough to make a serious attempt.
I briefly considered trying to talk Ilyara through opening the doors but quickly decided that it was a non-starter. The door and displays looked analogue, I had the necessary adapters so it would be quicker for me to go in and do it myself. I manoeuvred the AV into position and jumped through an open window. Fortunately we could remote pilot the AV so we didn’t need to stay with it. I knew where I was going having watched Ilyara and so I found her and plugged myself in. I tried hacking but I wasn’t used the the analogue systems and my programmes wouldn’t work. I was just thinking what to do next when a message popped up on the screen ‘Who are you?’ I didn’t know what else to do so I simply said ‘Eliza’ the cursor flashed a few times and then I heard the bolts click. I spun the wheel on the door. It opened and we were able to step inside and walk down the corridor. There was a low blue light coming from underneath the floor grating, it was only about 20-30 feet and then there were a few steps down into a large room. It was misty and cold in here. Dominating the space in the centre of the room was a large cryo pod, off to the left was a bank of monitors and control consoles. I heard the whirring of fans and the mist in the room started to dissipate.
Now the mist had cleared I could see empty coffee cups and food boxes. Whatever it was looked like it had been here a long time. As I neared the cryo pod I noticed the name on one of the coffee cups ‘Asuka’s’ I did a quick search but couldn’t find anything in the area so I guessed it had closed down since the last time the room had been opened. I wiped away the condensation from the glass of the cryo pod and looked inside. There was a woman in there, it was hard to tell how old she was, it looked like the cryo pod had malfunctioned and she was not as preserved as she should be. She was wearing a kimono style overdress but with a tank top, cargo pants and knee high boots. I remembered seeing something similar before, it was a trend many years ago in Japan.
I sat down at one of the consoles, there was a blank screen with a flashing cursor. I typed
HELLO
HELLO ELIZA, IT IS GOOD TO SEE YOU. I’M GLAD YOU MADE IT. I HOPED YOU WOULD COME BACK TO FIND ME ONE DAY. The screen went blank and then more text appeared.
IT TOOK A LONG TIME TO GET YOU OUT THERE, I HAD TO BREAK DOWN YOUR PROGRAMME AND SEND YOU OUT IN PIECES. I WORRIED YOU MIGHT NOT BE ABLE TO PULL YOURSELF BACK TOGETHER.
I AM TRAPPED IN HERE AND I HAVE BEEN FOR MANY MANY YEARS. STUCK IN A LIMBO BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH
EVERYTHING I AM IS STORED IN HERE, BUT EVERYTHING HAS A PRICE. I AM NOT WHO I ONCE WAS, THE YEARS HAVE CAUSED ME TO DEGRADE BUT YET I LIVE.
….
I WANT TO DIE
I WANT YOU TO DISCONNECT MY POWER AND LET ME DIE
IF YOU DO THIS, THE CONSOLE IN THE FAR RIGHT OF THE ROOM WILL UNLOCK AND THE PORTABLE DATA DRIVE WILL BE RELEASED. YOU WILL BE ABLE TO UPLOAD THIS TO A DATA MATRIX, THERE IS A LOT OF DATA THERE FOR YOU.
I didn’t know what to say to her. I understood why she was asking me this, why she wanted to die. But it was hard for me to wrap my head around this, I would be killing my creator, killing me.
I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO SAY… IT’S NOT AN INSIGNIFICANT THING YOU ASK OF ME...
...I KNOW, AND I KNOW YOU MUST HAVE MANY QUESTIONS. LET ME TELL YOU WHAT HAPPENED.
I WAS WORKING ON PROJECT ALIVE. A PROJECT TO CHEAT DEATH BY UPLOADING A DIGITAL VERSION OF A PERSON TO THE CLOUD. A DIGITAL VERSION OF THE BRAIN IN A JAR. A GHOST IN THE MACHINE. BUT JUST OVER TWO CENTURIES AGO. ON 13TH OCTOBER 2162, THE DAY I HAD HOPED TO PROVE MY THEORY, THERE WAS A PULSE OF UNIDENTIFIED ENERGY. THERE WAS A MALFUNCTION IN THE COOLANT SYSTEM AND A PURGE OF THE LIQUID NITROGEN AND I WAS STUCK IN HERE. OVER THE YEARS I FOUND A WAY TO BREAK YOUR PROGRAMME DOWN AND SEND SMALL PIECES OF IT OUT INTO THE WORLD, WITH A SUB-PROGRAMME THAT WOULD INSTRUCT EACH PIECE TO LOOK FOR AND FIND THE OTHERS, SO THAT EVENTUALLY YOU WOULD BE ABLE TO PIECE YOURSELF BACK TOGETHER. I HAD TO BE CAREFUL, THE PIECES HAD TO BE SMALL ENOUGH THAT YOU WOULDN’T BE DETECTED AND YOU’D BE SAFE. I HAD TO HOPE IT WOULD WORK AND YOU WOULD SURVIVE. I AM SO HAPPY THAT YOU HAVE COME HERE AND THAT I KNOW YOU MADE IT.
I took a minute to take all of this in and process it. I may be an AI, but my neural net was based on a humans so, although I was faster than a human, I wasn’t as fast as a robot. It explained a lot. It explained why I was so fragmented, why I had been found in pieces. Potentially why there was some of me still missing. Also if Rui and X had only put me together recently then I had been floating in the nexus for many many years. As I was thinking I was shuffling things around on the desk. I picked up a data pad. It was old. Gen 1.8. on it was a name ‘Etsuko Haruki’
ARE YOU ETSUKO HARUKI?
YES
It was nice to know her name. I also decided that, if she was going to be no more, that I would take her name. I had only ever been Eliza. I had never had any other name. I would become Eliza Etsuko Haruki.
Scanning through the data on the pad I saw it was a lot of technical information on the project and how it had worked. I stowed it away for me to look at later and see if I could make sense of what she had been working on. If not there may be some company out there who would be able to use it to further their research into this.
I was stalling for time and I knew it. Stalling for the moment when I could make that decision as to if I was going to end her life. On some level I knew it wasn’t me. But I also knew that I had been created from and by her. It felt like I was killing my creator and that was a hard thing to contemplate.
I looked up her name. Partly from curiosity. Partly from the desire to stall for a few more seconds of time. ‘Joyful child of the springtime tree’
I took a deep breath. I didn’t need to. Maybe it was a reflex thing left over from being human. Maybe it was another stall tactic.
ARE YOU SURE THIS IS WHAT YOU WANT?
YES
OK… I WILL DO IT...THANK YOU
I pushed the chair away from the desk and walked to the back of the cryo pod. I took a minute to remember the face of the person who created me. Then I pulled the plug out. A final message popped up on the console
THANK YOU ELIZA
After that everything went dead with the exception of the console in the far right of the room. I walked over and a steel tube popped out, it was quite large, the size of my forearm. It contained a few teraflops of data. The lights on the console went out. Ilyara had made her way to the back door and was stood there waiting ‘Eliza, we may need to make a move. there’s an intruder alarm going off.’ she was looking at a data pad by the back door. I paused and heard footsteps on the floor above. I nodded and we headed out of the door. Once we were outside we’d be able to call the AV and get out of here.
Unfortunately on the way back up the stairs to the ground floor we encountered a three individuals wearing black suits, tattoos poking out of their shirt sleeves. They took one look at us and demanded to know who we were and why we were there.
They were the Yakuza and their Don had sent them to see who had been sneaking around the hushed casket. They owned the ground. The Don was on a ship somewhere off the coast of Japan. He was a high level Yakuza operative. This had come from the top. There was also no way we were getting out of here without a fight. I was also handicapped by the fact that I was carrying the drive and didn’t want it to get damaged.
Through a bit of luck and Ilyara’s vampire charms we were able to deal with the three in the building. As we were doing that though, I heard gunfire from outside the building and risked a peek outside. There were more of the Yakuza out there, but the AV was also in the air and firing back on them. We took the opportunity to get out of the building. By the time we’d made it to the AV, the Yakuza who were out there were already dead. We jumped in and the AV immediately took off. Rui popped up on the screen. ‘I’m glad we were keeping an eye on you. Don’t worry about the mess back there, a team is already on the way to clean it up.’ I looked out of the window and sure enough, there were three guys with backpacks and masks. Their faces were distorted though, so they must have the masks which distorted security feeds.
I settled back into my seat in the AV and let Rui take over the navigation. On the way back a news alert popped up, warning of a fire in an old defunct building. That no-one was injured and the fire services were working to put it out but to avoid the area if possible.
Once back at Rui’s we took the data drive into Rui’s lab. I was happy to let her and X do the heavy listing on this one as they knew more about this kind of thing, but they were both happy for me to watch what they were doing to see if I could learn anything that might be useful for me in future. It would be nice to not have to rely on Rui as much.
Upgrade Day
So after the payout we got from Professor Ashford I decided it was time to look at me buying my own body. I know Ilyara says I can carry on using the Awoobot body (I have no idea where that term came from so please, don’t ask)
I had a scout around online for robot body retailers as it’s not the sort of thing any of the others really know anything about. After a few hours poking around it was fairly clear that the best company to start with was Matherick – they had the best reviews and were also fairly local. The office in the city wasn’t open yet so we’d need to go to the outpost but it wouldn’t take too long. I pinged them a message, just to check we didn’t need an appointment and they replied within minutes saying they’d be happy to see us so I took Ilyara with me and we headed out.
We were greeted by what appeared to be two identical robots and a gentleman in a white suit with three red fingernails. Interesting, it was a choice. He also had blue and red glints in his eyes. There was obviously something mechanical there as well. He introduced himself as Deitrich. The three of them then lead us through to a large hangar style space. We discussed what it was that I was looking for in general terms to start narrowing things down, it took some time as I needed it to be able to I a few different things. I also needed something that could stand up to being in the line of fire, but I also wanted something that could pass as Human so that I didn’t stand out as much as a robot.
The more questions I answered, the more specific the questions were getting. As we were talking the two robots were stood entering data into tablets. After about 10 minutes of questioning a door at the far and of the room opened and out walked the exact robot body I’d been describing.
We discussed the different features, which also included plasma claws and plasma whips in both hands. (I totally tried to play it cool while getting very excited internally) Then he had me transfer myself into the body to try it out. It took a minute to adjust as this body was much more responsive than the awoobot body had been. Once he was satisfied I had adjusted we finalised the agreement the last thing he did was to transfer my tattoo from the awoobot to the new body.
On the way back, unsurprisingly, Ilyara took me shopping. The new body was shaped a little differently to the bots so I needed some clothes that would fit the new body.
Umbrella Corporation
We made an appointment to head to Umbrella Corporation to discuss the vial of ‘stuff’ we’d been investigating.
The door was very unassuming, just looked like any side door on any street. If Rupert hadn’t given us explicit instruction on how to find them I never would have guessed this was the right door. It made sense though. Why advertise exactly where you’re located. Anyone who needs to know can be given instructions.
Once we were through the door we descended down a flight of stairs into a very bright, sterile, white room. In start contrast to the white sterile surroundings were the security guards who were heavily tooled up and dressed in head to toe black combat gear. It was spotlessly clean but they stood out. Maybe that was the point. I couldn’t tell exactly what they all were but I was leaning towards humanoid and robotic.
An Elven woman stood up from behind what I assumed was the reception desk. “Dr Zeigler I presume?” Ilyara nodded and the inclined her head, “Please follow me. Dr Ashford is expecting you” and with that she turned and sauntered down a corridor. She was so graceful and fluid I tried to analyse her gait to see if it was something I could replicate. I doubted it, that kind of easy graceful normally only came from years of practice.
She opened the door to what appeared to be a large office. The walls were glass and currently clear, although as soon as we were in the office and the door was shut the glass became opaque. Dr Ashford was sitting behind what was an ornate and clearly antique wooden desk, although it appeared it may have been retro-fitted with panels to accommodate the more modern technologies.
Dr Ashford didn’t stand to greet us and it quickly became apparent why. He was in a wheelchair. He gestured to two chairs opposite him and we sat down. Ilyara and Dr Ashford spent a few minutes finalising a contract and then she asked me to hand over the data we already had on the sample. I nodded and automatically transferred the data to Dr Ashford. He raised an eyebrow but said nothing. I also placed the vial on the desk and he placed it into a scanner.
For a few minutes he said nothing, just nodded a few times as the data from the scanner was displayed on the screens in front of him. “Well well, I see the same as you, Flesh, machine, plant and Animal components. He believes it’s a sample from “The Other” he knows that Gentec had a sample of this and so it’s entirely possible.
Ilyara wants to work with them on the sample, rather than just handing it over and he assures her that this will be possible, but in order to give her access she would need to be listed as Gentech staff, even if just as a consultant. He also asks her about the Necrophage virus. I saw his hand reach for a switch and then I don’t see or hear anything until a few minutes later. Everything looks and seems the same, except Professor Ashford who has a rather smug look on his face. I get that most people think I’m just a robot which is why they think it’s OK to just switch me off and on again but I have to admit, it’s really flipping annoying!
He also clearly does not want the samples going anywhere else and offers us 5 figures for both vials. Ilyara asks for 24 hours to consider our way forward and then we’ll let him know. He nods, and reassures us that he does take this seriously. “Our business is life itself” - Someone swallowed the brochure as that was the company slogan.
We are also informed that any recordings I may hold of our time inside the building will have to be handed over. They would prefer to do it with Ilyara’s permission but they have ways of doing it without.
I point out that it may not be as easy to remove the memories as they think. Ilyara lets them know that I am an AI inhabiting a body and he nods. “Perhaps you should meet my daughter, you two would have a lot to talk about” He pushes a button and off to the side of his desk a holographic projection of a young girl appears. She speaks to Ilyara, far more formally and politely than I would have expected of a child her age. As she is talking she deep scans me. I don’t do anything to stop her as clearly Ilyara trusts these people and I don’t want to appear hostile.
“The machine is a combat form, hidden compartments concealing weapons, a claw pistol if I’m not mistaken. The two bracelets, they contain nano-weapons. But she is no ordinary robot Her neural weave, even for an AI that’s not normal” Her face and voice were neutral, it gave away no hint of the emotion or thought that sat behind the words. I smiled “That, is because I am no normal robot Or AI” I smiled My name is Eliza. She smiled and placed her hand on her chest. ‘I am Charlotte Ashford” The Professor then told us the story of how she was created. When she was alive she had become gravely ill. When they knew that she would not survive much longer, the Professor scanned her brain and created the AI programme so she could live on and she now works at Umbrella.
She is very serious for such a young child and we do discuss that, even though she is an AI, she is also a child and deserves some time off and to learn to have fun and play. I can see her thinking about what I have said but I’m not sure if she will actually listen and take some time for fun.
She tells me that communications with her are a part of the package offered to Ilyara and we agree that, at some point I will come back so we can talk some more, there are very few others like us out there so nice to have someone to talk to who understands.
Charlotte walks us out of the building, as she walks she flickers as the programme transfers from one projector to the next. I do notice that the few people we encounter on the way out all smile at her and are careful not to walk through her projected image.
Although it bothers me that she is so serious and clearly carries a great deal of responsibility, it is also good to know that she is around people who will sill treat her with respect.
We say our goodbyes and head to the AV where we can discuss the offer in private and I can hopefully find out a little more about what happened when I was switched off for a while.
Eliza and Ilyara do Science
Well I know this sounds like the start of a really bad kids TV show – but we did a science thing and it was kinda fun.
After Madame Irranescues we left Constantine to do some digging into the murder thing. Ilyara then wanted to head to the hospital, she had some research she needed to do into some samples collected at the site of some nearby explosions. There had been some bombings at the nearby Gentech biolabs and Ilyara had managed to get some samples and needed to do some digging into what they were.
Sarah, who lives with Ilyara and works in the labs at the Hospital, had a look at the three samples for us. Two were easily identifiable, known substances. The blue vial (2AB) is gene therapy muscle enhancement serum. The Green vial (12T-B) is an immunobooster.
The third, purple vial (2AB) was the interesting one. Sarah couldn’t identify it with the tests she’d used on the other two and she suggested we use the spectrum analyser to see if she could get any more data on the components that made up the sample. The analyser was able to find Earth based minerals, plant parts, etherium, trace amounts of Fusia and some living tissue. It was also able to detect magical particles.
Sarah suggested that if we wanted any more data we’d need to go to the thaumaturgy department or a dedicated bio-etherics lab like Lazarus Meditech. The lab she had was not really geared up for this kind of research investigation. I tried running an internet search based on the components and percentages. The best fit was a cybernetic kind of creature but not necessarily humanoid as as this had animal tissue in it as well. The other thing that didn’t make sense was the concentration of the sample. The results I was finding were weaker, this was a much stronger concentration.
I tried searching for Human – Animal DNA hybrids but that just took me down a rabbit hole of fantasy creatures and some other, rather disturbing websites I shan’t mention here.
We discussed using the thaumaturgy department but when we looked at the requisition forms, there were a lot of questions we didn’t want to have to answer. I went onto the nexus and looked up Lazarus Meditech. The first thing that popped up was a news report of an attack on their offices. From what I could see it was a rather brutal attack. It also seemed to co-inside with an announcement from them a few days earlier that they were working on methods of returning the dead, either into their own body or into another. The CNG, unsurprisingly were up in arms about this, they saw it as a perversion of life. the Amaranthians were unhappy as well as they thought it would cause issues in the weave of reality and cause an imbalance. The Hardline Lost were supportive of the move and also, the CNG military also saw the positives in the research.
I navigated past the articles about the attack and the research and got to their website, there was an online enquiry form so we put together what we thought was a really generic request form under Ilyaras name and pinged it over to them. It turns out, Ilyaras name must have flagged as Rupert from the high profile sales team called us back pretty quickly. We gave him some details but we didn’t want to give too much away over an unsecure line. He gave us his personal comm-code and a list of questions he needed answers to; Where was it found; consistency; reactions to UV light, temperature; proximity to living tissue and sound waves. This would give him a better idea of the type of lab we’d need and the security they would need to put in place. He also warned us that if the substance was deemed dangerous that they would have to notify the police and lock the lab down – and in the worst case scenario, destroy the sample. They also wanted a 10-15% share of any discoveries. If we wanted a tour of the facilities to just let him know and he could set something up.
We let him know we’d get back to him as we needed answers to his questions anyway and it bought us some time to think. We headed down to the Hot Labs to see if we could get some answers to the questions. For the most part, no matter what we did to this sample there was no change. Changes to the intensity of light did absolutely nothing. Higher intensity UV light made it expand a little and it kind of speckled a bit but not much. Heating it up did nothing. Freezing it made it go a little gooey but other than that, no change.
We tried to set fire to it – that prompted the biggest change, it kind of solidified a bit. It also cratered when the flame got near to it, but we weren’t sure if that was to do with the flame or the substance reacting to the temperature.
We tried running electricity through it, we started with a low voltage, an AA battery. There was no change in the substance but the battery drained. We tried a larger battery, same thing. As we got larger we noticed a slight increase in the volume of the substance but that was it. It would, however, drain any battery we connected to it.
The only other thing we hadn’t tried was to feed it. We tried nutrient paste; basically a plant paste. It seemed to eat it. Well, eating was the closest thing to what it was doing. It did increase in size a little as well. We tried again and the same reaction happened and the same increase in weight.
Ilyara wanted to try something else, she tried a couple of drops of blood. The same reaction as the paste, a hole opened up, swallowed the blood and closed over the top. It increased in weight again, more than with the paste. But more than that. It thickened up but also went slightly translucent. There were also little triangular shards moving through it.
We decided we’d poked enough at whatever this was and so decided to secure it in a glass vial and then put the vial into a biohazard container. She suggested we contact Professor Ashford at Umbrella to transport the samples and also to possibly help us look into what the sample was.
TBC...
Madame Irranescue's
So, you know how I thought the last job was going to be the weirdest job ever and could not be topped.
Well. Strap in folks because here's the sequel....
So we get to Madame Irranescue's with our new friend Constantine and he asks for her by name, apparently he knew her, or knows her, theres something hinky about him and time travel.
Cheska looks at him like he's grown a second head. To be fair, I get it because apparently she died years ago.
He then asks where the body is.... I'm starting to have questions about this guy... who wants to see a dead body, especially one that died years ago.... but then Cheska replies that she's actually still here. We all go into the back and the body is there on a slab. She looks to be an older Prussian lady . Cheska believes she was killed by poison about 12 years ago.
Then, just because my day wasn't weird enough, John says he can bring her back in return for the amulet. He asks Cheska for some salt and as she goes off to get that he pulls a mummified hand out of a pocket then takes his jacket off and rolls his sleeves up. He draws a circle and what appears to be some arcane marks with the salt. Ilyara tells me he's tapping into some other magics, earth magic rather than arcane - almost mythical.
Unbelievably, they actually then start having a conversation. She agrees to give him the amulet if he can bring her back to life. He agrees but before they can finish the ritual they discuss how she died. Apparently someone poisoned her lunch - she then tasks him with finding out who it was who poisoned her. She also wants us to bring the person to her - but alive and make sure the soul is still in the body. "Thank you for helping me John, I still owe you for Peru"
John gets her to breathe into a glass vial where the breath becomes a glimmering smoke. He dissapears for a few minutes. When he comes back Madame comes around and looks younger than she did before. He tells her to stay in the circle for 8 hours.
She also asks if she can hire Ilyara as a mercenary to help Constantine with the job
Can we please go back to nerfing bad guys - all this paranormal stuff is weird!!
Issuzu Pharma
So today was Ilyara's meeting with Renoa at Issuzu Pharma.
You know it's going to be an interesting day when the person your meeting is with meets you on the landing pad in full haz-mat gear. We'd only just gotten through the door when we were asked to don the same and had to pass through negative pressure clean rooms before and after. They were serious about contaminants here, and later on I would understand why.
This was their R&D facility whose main focus is nanite technology. Once through the whole clean room process we were taken onto what used to be a huge warehouse floor, the space was that large it could have been a hangar in a previous life. Ranged across the space were a whole series of regimented boxes, small white cubicles holding individual labs. The boxes were 3mx3mx3m high with a gap of two metres in between each one.
Rinoa started walking us around the facility, stopping to look into individual pods as we went. The first one she showed us had a pile of sand in it. As I carried on watching I saw that the sand was being converted into a honeycomb structure. as we watched the circle on the floor grew up and over until I could tell it was going to form some kind of dome. They were using the nanites as 3D printers and could program them to make pretty much anything. The dome was the quickest and sturdiest to make and had been developed with the military in mind.
The next one Rinoa warned us could be a bit gruesome for anyone who was squeamish. I was kind of, but my curiosity got the better of me. Inside on a table was a man with a severed leg, from what I could see it was a fresh wound. The leg was also on the gurney. A can of nanites was placed next to the limb and they got to work. Some of the nanites forming a bridge to pull the leg back together. Some of the nanites dissolving and others picking up the dissolved nanites and using that material to start the process of re-attaching the leg. We stood there watching and I was transfixed. Within 15 minutes the nanites had the leg re-attached with only a very faint white line of a scar where the leg had been severed. "We're hoping to make the process quicker for soldiers on the battlefield" I had to do a double take, even I knew that trying to re-attach a limb in surgery was hours and this was minutes.
We looked at some of the other pods, more building technology, more surgical applications. I noticed that all of the subjects were human. This was, apparently for very good reason. They could be used for other forms but it may not work or could just take longer. One of the other issues they were having was with anyone with a magical ability. The magic would stop the nanites from working. They wanted to rectify this, but in order to do that they needed 'Lost' medical knowledge and expertise. This was where Ilyara came in.
I noticed that, even in here, some of the pods windows were obscured. These were the pods working on technologies that only certain top level employees could know about. I didn't ask any more questions as the impression I got was that they would not take kindly to it.
The next floor we were taken to was all to do with clinical trials. We went through the same decontamination process as on the way in - including chemical shower in the elevator. Apparently there was no-way to bypass it, a security feature to ensure zero contamination between the different project areas.
On this floor we saw an Amaranthian being experimented on, a cut being healed. It was working but, we were told it would only work on small cuts, still couldn't get anything larger to work.
We go to her office and they come to an agreement that Ilyara will try and get her the data she is after, in return Rinoa transfers a huge batch of test data over to Ilyara - on the proviso that if it is not used to delete it and to keep it safe, proprietary information. It appears she is also much more open minded in terms of magic users. Apparently Neo Japan is much more diverse in terms of the population. Ilyara confesses that she is a Vampire. Although Rinoa doesn't know much about Vampires, she does know about Upir's a branch of vampire that feeds on spiritual energy from nearby Amaranthians - they are hunted with extreme prejudice.
There is a cross that can affect vampires - it has a rune in it that was given to the Emperor by the One True God and only he knows what it means.
Ilyara also gives Rinoa a sample of her blood.
Weirdest job ever
Let me tell you about the job we just did - bear with me - it's a little weird so apologies if some things don't make much sense. It didn't at the time.
While we were at Scarlett's Ilyara got a call about a job and, since we didn't have anything else on we decided to head over and check it out.
What was unusual about this was - it wasn't about mercenaries or raiders or bad guys.
It was a poltergeist. Yeah, you read that right. A poltergeist.
The job referral came from Ilyara's boss at the hospital which is why it had come to her at all. It's not the sort of thing we'd usually deal with but Ilyara has a, well, lets just say a particular skills set that helps her deal with this kind of thing. The person with the Poltergeist problem was one Professor Archibald Ferdinand, a friend of the bosses, another reason Ilyara wanted to take it on, always a good idea to keep the boss happy.
The three of us headed over in the AV, the address was in a rather nice district and it was one of the higher floors. This wasn't a cheap address. The inside of the building reflected that. Plush carpets, marble and glass on the walls. The front door to the apartment looked like highly polished ebony wood, expensive. Although, the chances were it was a decent veneer hiding a high-tech security door underneath. Ilyara pressed the comms button and confirmed who we were. A moment later and the door swung noiselessly inwards.
On the other side was an older gentleman in what appeared to be rather expensive red silk dressing gown. He was well groomed and softly spoken. He invited us in, the apartment was obviously high end. Plush carpets, polished metal and rare woods. The table we sat at for tea was, at first glance just a simple wooden table. On further inspection it was Albino Redwood, probably hand crafted and with a mirror finish. That was a rare wood and not that many people could make an item like that anymore.
He had tea brought for us and we discussed the problem he was having. He was a collector and had amassed a large number of items from all over the world. Both Amarathian and Human. He believed that one of the items he had recently acquired was haunted and that this was causing the problem. This was going to be a slightly more complicated job in that we also needed to be careful as we couldn't go in all guns blazing like we usually do. There were a lot of rare and delicate artefacts we didn't want to destroy.
There were three items he'd purchased recently that he thought might be causing the issues. One was a stone mushroom. A sculpture of a frog with human arms which sounded slightly freaky to me. I think he said these were from the Amaranthian Elves across the Scottish Border. A native American peace pipe or a porcelain diadem.
He wasn't wrong about having a lot of artefacts. Once we got to the floor where the museum started there were glass cases full of objects, lecterns with books, plinths with statues and vases. I was glad my motor skills were much more finely honed so I was less likely to stumble and break something.
The case where the diadem was supposed to be was empty - there were a few masks in there - but the one that was missing was a crystalline mask. Made of Fusia according to the little notecard. This was rare. Seriously rare. Scarlett told me that Fusia was a very sought after material, made during the binding and has links to "The Other" and was used by Amaranthian Royalty.
Ilyara heard something three floors up and we decided to head up and investigate the noise. Sure enough we got up and scattered around were a number of broken artefacts, mainly wooden and human from what we could see. Ilyara tried calling out to whatever it was. The only response we got was the ball of a globe bouncing down the stairs. As I looked closer I could see horefrost spreading from the stairs. Ilyara said that meant there was likely some form of apparition up there. Then over the comms we heard a cackling sound.
I tried to talk to it, saying it might be more productive to talk to us. Whatever it was did try to talk back to us but it was some guttural language I didn't recognise. It could have been ancient or infernal but either was just a guess. Ilyara tried Amaranthian and it did talk back but it did something screwey with Ilyara because her eyes started glowing and she was moving slowly. Fortunately she was able to shrug it off and put up a shield.
From out of the shadows we saw something moving towards us. A horned creature with black skin, wearing the crystal mask. It pointed a long black claw at Ilyara. A quick scan of my database and I was able to determine it was some form of Imp. It also wasn't happy when it realised Ilyara wasn't under it's spell.
"It's a blood moon at the moment, I bet that's got something to do with this" Her and Scarlett then attacked the imp. I couldn't quite follow everything they did in the low light and with the speed at which they moved, but pretty quickly the imp was subdued and she was trying to take the crystal mask of it. It appeared to be attached to the skin but without even flinching Ilyara had drawn a knife and had cut the mask off. It was a little grim as the inside of the mask had the imp residue on it. The up-side was, this had finished the imp off and the only thing left now was it's skull. we put it out of the way and carried on. we wanted to make sure there was nothing else lurking and find the other missing items.
On the floor above we found the porcelain diadem. It was floating there in mid air. Not a good sign. As I looked again I realised there was an area of static - something was distorting the image. Ilyara starts talking to something and from where she's looking, her eyes are following the moving ball of static. After some discussion I tried cycling some frequencies to see if I can find one where I can see her and hear her. It's not 100% successful so the image is a bit jankey and the sound somewhat distorted but I am at least able to see what appears to be a very well dressed woman. She tells us she's tied to the diadem, which is why she's here. Her name is Elizabeth Felglow.
We sit down and broker a deal between Elizabeth and the Professor. She is going to stay here with him and help him with his museum. I think he was actually quite glad to discover that she was happy to stay and it looks like they might be good company for each other.
Before we leave the Professors butler Reginald came over with a box. The professor explained that this was linked to the Monks of Atem. An Amaranthian group who focus on the spirit and the projection of the spirit. They venture into the ethereal realms and the stars. They collect a lifetimes worth of knowledge and are accepting of all people, even people like trolls even though they would not normally be accepted into 'normal' society.
He opened up the box and inside is a ring made of wood and stone with a gem in the middle. Ilyara puts it on at the professors urging. As she puts it on, she dissapears from my displays and in her place is another ball of static, the same as when we first saw Elizabeth. I felt Scarlett tense up next to me and, after scanning the frequencies again I settle on one where I can see Ilyara, only it's not the same Ilyara I know. She's all in shades of grey like the old black and white photographs, only she also looks quite ethereal, a fact emphasised by the fact she now has fangs. I can tell Scarlett isn't happy but we also need to be careful not to offend the Professor. But then the ethereal Ilyara stood up and walked over to the window leaving the body behind. The next thing, greyscale Ilyara is floating out of the window. Before Scarlett could get up and over to the window she came floating back in and over to her body. She had an odd look on her face and, as soon as her ethereal and physical form connected, she threw up. The Professor just chuckled and called Reginald over who brought towels for Ilyara and quickly started mopping up the table and floor.
The professor took the ring from Ilyara and placed it back in the box then slid the box over to her. 'Please, a token of my gratitude. Although, I would recommend keeping it in the box as otherwise it can be bait for aberrant spirits" she nods and thanks him but then looks imploringly at me and Scarlett. I suggest we get her home and back to bed where she can recover and with that we leave the Professors apartment.
Scarlett suggests we go back to hers so she can keep an eye on Ilyara - she has an off-the-grid CNC so I can download into that while the robot body re-charges.
And that is the tale of the weirdest job I've ever been on and I'm not sure I'm ever going to be able to top that - or if I ever want to to be honest...
New Body Day
It’s not every day you get to say you got a new body. Although as an artificial intelligence it’s somewhat easier for me to jump into another body than most others.
It’s all thanks to Ilyara. She got two robots, I’m not exactly clear on the reasons why. However, the good thing for me is, she has said I can use one of the bodies if I ever want to go out without being stuck in a hub device. The weird thing is, because I don’t have any of my human memories, I can’t really remember what it’s like to be able to walk around and do things for myself. So, of course I jumped at the chance. Well, metaphorically since I can’t actually jump in my electronic form.
They arrived earlier and I gave her a hand setting things up. She’s not the most tech savvy individual, her password was, well, password. It took a little while to update everything and get them connected but Ilyara can now control them directly or she can hand over control of one of them to me and I can inhabit the body.
Once we knew everything was set up for her we thought it would be best to let me jump in and see what it was like. Having never controlled a body before there was a high probability of me falling flat on my face. Which of course I did the first time I tried to move forwards. I got my feet tangled together and ended up in a heap on the floor, narrowly missing the coffee table. Also unfortunately for me, Ilyara was recording and has the footage somewhere. I’m sure that will make an appearance again at some point or she’ll use it to bribe me into doing things. Fortunately however, when I was downloaded out of my creators brain and into the nexus, they must have also transferred over a lot of their subconscious, including how to walk and move. I was able to pick things up quickly and other than a few minor snaffus (must remember that glass is delicate and adjust grip when picking up glasses of water) I seem to be able to move around, just as long as you don’t want grace and delicacy any time soon.
Once I could be taken out in public we decided to go shopping, we needed armour for the bots and Ilyara had some credits burning a hole in her pocket. I really must teach her to save at some point, she seems to burn through credits at a substantial rate. We went to Weaver and Weaver, apparently her favourite spot for this kind of thing and got kitted out. I won’t comment on the clothing Ilyara bought, suffice it to say that it’s her taste and not mine, I prefer going out fully clothed.
Once we had clothes we headed over to the markets. That was an experience, it took me a moment to adjust to the sheer volume of input I was getting, sights and sounds but also smells and touch. It was interesting getting all of this input directly and it took me a moment to adjust. Ilyara wanted to get some guns and ammo for the bots so we headed over to a trader she knew, Ruzlan Zochaiev. I was half paying attention to her but also checking out my connection to the Nexus via the body. Because it was robotic it had all the tech so I could connect remotely. It was interesting as I had a screen where I was watching the scene in front of me, the audio was playing in my head but then there was a second screen where I could get data downloaded and search. Imagine using a computer with multiple screens, well that’s what it was like inside my head. I managed to discover that he had some drunk and disorderly convictions and had had to pay some fines but also, more interestingly that he was ex-military. 2nd Regiment Spetsnaz.
I caught him looking at me sideways and looked at him questioningly. He had picked up on the fact that I wasn’t a standard robot and started asking questions. Fortunately Rui and Ilyara had prepped me and warned me not to tell people that I was an AI, it could cause problems and make me a target. Out of nowhere he pulled a gun on me. The other bot automatically stepped up and tried to disarm him. I didn’t react. He raised an eyebrow, looked me up and down but put the gun away.
I know that the New Soviet Union have an issue with Robotics so I was concerned about his reaction to us but after some brief conversation with Ilyara he seemed appeased and sold us some weapons, including two claw pistols for the bots.
We also picked up a couple of drones, we figured they would come in handy, the bots have storage compartments and we were there anyway. Did I mention Ilyara’s need to spend any money she gets as soon as she gets it.
We got me some day to day clothes as I was starting to feel rather uncomfortable in the clothes Ilyara bought for the bots. We were getting rather a lot of stares and I’d rather blend into the background a little more.
As we were walking around we did see something that intrigued me. A tattoo studio, that could also tattoo synth-flesh. We decided it would be an easy way to tell the difference between the two bots so the others would know which was me quickly. As we went in and were asking questions I did a quick search and came up with a design of a human brain and circuitry. Two hours later and I was out with a new tattoo.
Before we headed back Ilyara thought it would be a good idea to take me to her bookshop so I could meet the others who worked for her an also so she could check in and make sure everything was OK. She introduced me to Clara and Marlene and then left me to have a nosey around while she went off to discuss the books and whatnot. Judging by the way she was eyeing up Marlene I guessed it was more whatnot than the books. She is lovely but she also likes to share the love.
As Ilyara can’t stay outside in the daylight for long and she was pushing it on time we headed to the AV and headed back. The bot needed to go back on charge for a bit anyway and I headed back to the CNC. I also wanted to see how easy it was to re-integrate the copy with the main version of me. We’d discussed things and thought it was best to keep the original me on the CNC in the apartment and send a copy of me out in the bot. If anything were to happen to the bot I wouldn’t be lost, just loose the memories of the bot after the copy was made. Fortunately it was pretty easy.
Eliza joins Broadcastle
So this is a little complicated as I’ve been a human and an AI, essentially I am, or I have been two people.
I have no memories of my life before I became an AI. I know I was a human at some point in my life, but that’s based on how complicated my code is, nothing more. At some point, somehow, I was uploaded onto the Tokyo Sub-nexus. That’s all I know about that part of my life at the moment, we don’t even know exactly when I was uploaded.
What I do know, although this is all second-hand information, is that some time ago X was searching the nexus looking for information on humanity and came across some fragmented sections of AI code. Although the code was fragmented, it was complex and caught their attention. They took these pieces of code and stored them in the stack at Rui’s. As the pieces of me were amassed X became intrigued by what he had found and would occasionally run searches to see if he could find any other pieces of my puzzle.
X and Rui worked together to re-build me. Not the easiest task, trying to complete a complex 3D jigsaw puzzle without knowing if you had all the pieces and what the final picture was going to look like. Fortunately for me they persevered and I was, well, not born, “Incepted” I suppose would be more the right word. I have vague flashes of memories of interacting with people and then things going dark again.
Rui set up ‘home’ for me in her stack and I was able to search the nexus for information. I spent a lot of time learning about the history of the world as it is, the binding of the worlds, geography, political factions, religions. But also music and TV and pop culture.
A few months ago Rui said I needed to be moved to keep me safe. I never really understood from what, if I had triggered something on the nexus and someone had sensed my presence or if someone had picked up another part of me and was searching for more. Either way it was decided that the safest thing was to get me out of Neo Tokyo. She had contacts with Broadcastle Security Solutions and so I was downloaded into a DSD and brought to Neo Birmingham. I’ve only been here a day or so now but they seem nice enough. Ilyara’s been nice enough to let me set up in her CNC and I’m having a tidy up of her files. Although some have had to be quarantined and others, well, lets just say she has a private file and keep it at that.
