JB IX: End of Innocence



Jamelia sighs, reaching for her phone. "Comptroller, please don't force me to make the call."



Wong looks up from his datapad, perturbed. "Call who? Control? Look, this is a one-way street here."



Jamelia shrugs her head in defeat. "No. At least Control understands the concept of subtlety."



Two of the power-armored types behind Wong shift their feet, seemingly nervous. Wong just looks confused - for now. "Who's more powerful than Control?"



Jamelia shakes her head. "No, not more powerful. Worse. Hidebound, rules-lawyering, sticking to every dotted 'i' and crossed 't' of the law."



Wong checks his datapad again, tapping a few keys. He looks up, his face a mask of horror. "Does this 'someone' happen to be on your team?"



"Yes!" Jamelia snaps. "And if you don't work with me here, I'm going to sic Siddharth Rajesh's black, paperwork-obsessed mind on every last one of you!"



The two NWO operatives stir in their powered armor as she announces that. Jamelia's glasses report a sudden spike in encrypted chatter across their squad net, and she doubts they're talking about post-op drinks yet. She can smell weakness, and she's quick to capitalize on it. "Yes, Mr. Rajesh's dossier claims that he has a certain...reputation of sorts among the NWO's Asian branch."



"You could call it that," the comptroller mutters, cursing under his breath. "I spent three goddamn days filling out every goddamn form from that op. Use-of-force justifications, political analyses, weapon expenditures - did you know the Technocracy technically requires you to document every single burst fired during a Class Three incident or up?"



That's new. "Really?"



"Yes!" Wong snarls. "And I know this because that bastard Rajesh held out crucial information on us until we'd filled out every last piece of fucking paper!"



All perfectly legal, all entirely within the letter of the law...and yet he'd managed to tie up an entire NWO team for days? Perhaps she'd have to re-evaluate Siddharth's grasp of subtlety.



Jamelia gives Wong a wide grin. "Mr. Wong, Siddharth Rajesh is my backup on this op. Technically, I should have called him in already, but...well, I'd rather face bullets than the 993-T again. Work with me here, and you don't have to see hide nor hair of Mr. Rajesh on this operation. Deal?"



"Not a deal. You're not in our chain of command, and neither is he. Threatening us with him and then confirming that he isn't actually here to file the reports in question was a bad idea, Director. Lin, get the artifacts and prepare them for destruction. The corpses too." One of the NWO agents shoulders the flamethrower and immediately starts spraying the corpse of the demonic shapeshifter/hemophage, and whatever items were in that Hugo Boss suit, with blue-white cleansing flames.



Some Time Later:



Jamelia waits until they're back in the van before talking to Rose. She's not about to show weakness or anything which can be used against her in front of the spooks who claim to be Panopticon. That's just common sense. Likewise, common sense dictates that she sweep them both down for bugs or snoopers, and activate the jammers. If she was them, she would have bugged someone she was investigating, so she assumes that they did it. Just common sense. She finds a few microrobot spies, and deactivates them with an EMP wand.



"Rose, Rose, Rose," she says softly, leaving the girl guessing to what she means by that. "What am I going to do with you?" It's almost funny, really. She can't shout at Rose for pushing the limits of her orders and skirting what's permissible, without being a flagrant hypocrite. Jamelia has done exactly the same thing more than once. The main difference is that Jamelia is a veteran agent who's got plenty of experience with creatively skirting the edge of what her orders allow (and yes, ignoring things when her higher ups aren't in full command of the information), while Rose is a naive vatgrown construct.



Of course, she's totally a hypocrite when it suits her. But Rose doesn't need to know that, does she?

Rose shrinks down, shoulder half-turning to shield herself. A woman who could tear her in half was acting like that to a possibly verbal reprimand. It's a little pathetic, in a slightly sad way, Jamelia thinks. To all appearances, Rose looks like an adult - and a supermodel on top of that. But it's at moments like this that it's very clear that in a sense she's also a child, and that memory dumps don't replace real world experience or even a real childhood. She can't treat her like a MIB or a normal field agent, or one of those accel-time VR-sim raised constructs.



"Rose, the Union requires agents who will follow orders," she says sternly. "If we cannot trust our subordinates to do what is necessary, then everything might collapse. Do you understand?"



Rose nods, full lips wobbling. "I understand and I'm so, so sor..."



"However," Jamelia adds, letting a smile creep onto her lips, "the Union also requires agents who can think on their feet when things go wrong on missions, and agents with a conscience. It's always a difficult balance, between orders and conscience. I have the Men In Black for perfectly obedient soldiers who lack initiative or mental flexibility. Enlightened agents are expected to be able to react to the facts on the ground. The Reality Deviants of the Traditions would tell you that we're all a bunch of bleep-bloop robots, whether meat robots or flesh robots, and you know how ridiculous that is, right?"



She sighs. "This mission deviated from the plans," she says honestly. "We didn't have full information on the capacities of the haemophages - this local species is completely unlike the ones I've encountered before. That brute took several grenades to the chest without even being scratched, and another was still alive after taking primium fire from five of us. I'm not exactly happy that you lured them after you without informing me, but it worked out for the best. I'm not sure if we could have held out if all of them and their henchmen had stayed in that room. It was touch and go there for a moment. I had to resort to experimental technology to take one of them down, and... that was risky indeed. Considering how tough they were... no, I don't blame you for not throwing your life away trying to fight them all. I don't have enough Enlightened agents to be able to waste them like that.



"And I am pleased with how you thought on your feet to tag him with your blood," Jamelia adds. "That was very well done. I'll be noting that on your file. We can track him now. That is possibly the best way the mission could have turned out. This way, we should be able to find his hangouts, his contacts... it's possibly even better than if we'd captured him. Very well done there, Rose. Likewise, the low civilian casualties was another success considering the issues we had."



She smiles inwardly at the almost luminescent blush on the other woman's cheeks. Now, the stinger to go with the praise, to link them together.



"However," she adds, "as you get more experienced, you'll learn there are times when you can push the limits on your orders and times when you have to stick to them. Cases like this, where the facts on the ground don't match with the plan, are one of the times when you have more latitude. If things had gone wrong because you didn't follow orders, or you had been taking orders from someone who's too rigid, you would be in hot water right now. Do you understand, Rose? There is a time to bend the rules and a time to follow them, and you will likely get burned when learning the difference. We all do when we're young. So, please, take care." She sits back, waiting for the other woman's response.



Rose takes a moment to compose herself. Jamelia looks into the other woman's eyes and sees that she's blinking back tears. "T-t-thanks Director Belltower. For understanding. I'll do better next time. I'll get him. I'm sorry for being so weak. You've placed so much trust in me and I won't betray it."



You won't. Because she doesn't trust you. She's only playing nice because it's less effort than recycling you. Thorn tells her.



"No. That's wrong. She's not like the others. She's not like the cruel men you keep saying she's like." Rose whispers. "She's nice."



Jamelia arches an eyebrow slightly when she hears that. Homonculi aren't supposed to talk to themselves. Normally. Definitely not about personal matters, either. The ones who do tend to be near the end of their lifespan, but Rose is still young and still fully capable, isn't she?



Well, don't mind me, just laughing at reality about to come down on you like a ton of bricks. I guess you are a good Technocrat, after all. So good at denying reality. Thorn snickers. Rose simply goes beet-red.



Donald:



If the rumours about Ms. Belltower were true, she had a body count larger than some armies. Certainly indirectly. Donald poked around when he found he was being assigned to her Construct, and he's fairly sure that she was in Teheran post-Revolution - which would have surprised him more if he wasn't used to the way a certain kind of NWO agent defaults to their late 20s in appearance - and her name popped up in various case reports over the years. Usually in contexts like "The hostile was so infuriated by Agent Belltower that, contrary to predictions, he did not retreat despite his injuries. Agent Belltower then eliminated the hostile." So she's not someone Donald wants to disappoint. Which is why he's in the Spy's Demise, meeting with someone who could very well kill him in six hundred different and probably painful ways with a nail clipper.

Donald takes a somewhat oblique approach to his intended target. He strolls on through, meeting and greeting a few of his other contacts and doing them small favours. That little sixth sense at the back of his mind which tells him when he's getting in deep is nagging at him, and whenever he does that, he seeds favours. A small investment here and now can pay dividends, and unlike some of the people here a few thousand dollars are small change to him. In fact, there's a charming, bookish Hermetic who he's only met in passing before who turned out to be looking for certain examples of 1800s literature, and he was able to direct her to a book supplier who he helped expand specifically so he could have someone like that around. She seemed to be very grateful to the help, so who knows? VR hookups are safe hookups, relatively speaking.

However, once he's made a half-loop of the room, he's up to the table where the assassin-supersoldier sits. Donald moves across the almost-room to the super-assassin with a calm certitude. A consipratorial mien has its time and its place, but he can read the ambiance, and looking furtive would just attract the attentions of the predators here—literal, metaphorical, or virtual. Donald slides in next to the man he wanted to meet. There are friendlier people here, yes, and certainly people he has more leverage over. But he suspects what he dealing with is black ops shit, and who better to talk to about black ops shit than the man he knows who... uh, now that he thinks about it, is pretty close to being a Traditionalist version of Director Belltower. Only someone he'd probably be safer sharing a drink with. Probably.



"It's been a while," Christos says. "To what do I owe the pleasure?" In this VR sim, you could almost mistake him for a Technocrat. Christos was a tidy man years ago, and if this avatar is any indication, he's only become more fastidious with age. He has uniformly dark skin, his dark hair sticks up to a very precise two centimeters, and his clothing is totally free of wrinkles and waves. Reality may not be capable of containing clothing so unruffled; fortunately, this space is virtual. His voice is abrupt. Hell, the man's capable of making the usually-mellifluous word 'pleasure' clipped and curt. At least he's willing to indulge social niceties, though he doesn't sound friendly while doing them. Still, Donald's willing to bear it, because this is important.



Some people collect stamps, admirers, strange creatures from beyond normal time-space, or conspiracy theories. Christos collects the last of these. It's a common enough habit; there are many collectors of conspiracy theories. But many conspiracy theorists seem to have something of a broken filter. They'll believe in one conspiracy, then ten, then all of them. The assassin isn't a true believer like many are. He's rigorous. He's methodical. He rejects the vast majority of theories as garbage. In sifting through enormous reams of information, he might've found something Donald can use.



"Can't we pretend to make small talk before we get to business?" Donald asks.



"No. Information is power, and it costs wealth, even the most trivial tidbits."



"Anyone ever tell you you'd be a great Technocrat?" Donald jokes.



"All the time. Most people who say that end up dead." Donald isn't sure if he's joking or if that's literal. Superstitionist politics, he knows, can often get incredibly violent. The wonders of a pre-modern legal system where dueling is an entirely acceptable method of conflict resolution.



"I need you to tell me everything you know about Panopticon. They're Technocrats, use a moebius strip symbol overlaid with an eye as a symbol--Director Belltower had been kind enough to forward the data she could collect on them before his VR jaunt, don't answer questions, seem to have access to a ton of hardware..." Donald notices Christos blanch slightly. It tells him that whatever he's dealing with is no usual rogue Technocratic amalgam. "Look, if they're fucking with you, I'll do everything I can to get them off your ass. They're fucking with us, too, pretending to be some hooligans working for Control and-" Christos interrupts him.



"This is a dangerous path you tread. In the end, this might be the last time you can turn back and decide to live in ignorance of history." The Euthanatos says. "You ran away from the truth once. Are you going to do it again?"



Donald knows the other man's manipulating him into making a certain statement, he tries to not rise to the provocation. "Look, I chose my path because I figured sitting in a bar getting high and having sex all the time was meaningless. What has Ananda done to change the world, eh? A little hippie free love? The Union might be full of bastards, but it's got the power and the flexibility so that someone can do at least a little bit of good."



"Ah, but do you do good because you wish to do good, or because it assuages your guilt?" Christos asks, then waves his hand. "No matter. What does matter is that Panopticon, or people meeting your descriptions of Panopticon, have been going around kicking over our Chantries, assassinating our students, and in general making themselves a pain. Given that we've got our own hotheads who claim to be listening to dead politicians, this has created somewhat of a powder keg."



"There hasn't been any escalated Reality Terrorist risk in years."



"That's because neither of these parties have gotten big enough to make big splashes. Yet. Look, you might call me a chicken strangler behind my back, but I can do the hypermathematics as well as any of those inflexible steelhead Time-Motion Managers, and I can probably do it without a room full of supercomputers to boot. The number of incidents is statistically significant, on both sides, and that's just the incidents I can solidly confirm. I don't know what they are, ghosts or shades or just the old bosses being incredibly, incredibly bitter about everything that's happening, but I do know that there is something going on beyond the Gauntlet, and that it has something to do with your Control and our Council of Nine." Christos finishes.

"Okay, that's helpful. Anything actionable?" Donald uses the term to sound cool. Like a real spy. It doesn't work when the other party was probably doing wet works commando operations before Donald's grandfather was in grade school. He's never been able to figure out Christos's age, not from voiceprint, not from writing. But Donald suspects that the man was born in the first half of the 20th century, and far closer to '1900' than '1950'.



"Panopticon seems to be legitimate, from what we've recovered whenever one of their raids fails, which is rare. They legitimately believe they have orders from Control, and our various Adepts and Etherites think the orders look legitimate. They definitely look like the directives that the Adepts and Etherites have gotten until their differences of opinion with Control. Given what you've told me, and given my intelligence sources, I think there might be some issues with either bandwidth, who they can reach, or what they want to do. Who knows? Maybe the majority of the Technocracy is no longer okay with casual genocide and war crimes nowadays."



It doesn't make sense, Donald thinks. If they actually were Control, why would they be running a secret super-shady operation that none of the Union actually knows about? What would be preventing them from just waltzing in and resuming day to day operations? There is something he doesn't know, and he understands that pressing Christos about it is futile. "Still not actionable. Thanks for the total lack of help."

"Anytime." Christos gives him an infuriatingly smug salute and goes back to enjoying his VR liquor.



OOC Notes:

MJ12: d10

Threat_Null: MJ12 : BOTCH! ( 4 1 4 4 3 6 5 1 4 3 )



You botched the roll to convince the Iterator. The stunt was good because it gave me a great jumping off point for ANGRY ITERATION X TIME.



Vote Time:



About Those Annoying Panopticon Douchebags:



[ ] Walk away. He's not worth it.



[ ] (0.5x) Try to escalate above his head to a regional superior or higher, or at least enough that he might consider backing down. This may cost permanent levels of standing in the Union. Stunt this roll.



[ ] (1.5x) Try to smuggle out whatever you can. You've got someone capable of dimensional translations and you're pretty sure there's nobody who can detect that on the team. Also, you're pretty good at palming important evidence. Stunt this roll. Jamelia has a base 10d Dexterity + Subterfuge pool for doing something like this.



[ ] Write-In.



Oh Dear Rose:



[ ] (0.75x) Say nothing. Nothing wrong with talking to yourself. Well, okay, it might be the sign of serious mental breakdown in someone who can trivially tear you in half, but it's not actually a problem. Right?



[ ] (2.0x) Start prying. If your local combat construct is having hallucinations or mental instability, you need to know now. Rose will definitely use Willpower to resist, and probably Procedures, so you'll probably need a stunt.



[ ] (1.25x) Construct is broken, send to factory for maintenance. She's still covered by warranty, right?



Be Donald:



[ ] The First Rule of Threat Null is that you do not talk about Threat Null. Look, either Christos has finally gone completely senile or he's saying that, fuck if you know, space alien ghosts wearing the faces of Control are secretly trying to infiltrate the Technocratic Union and that's true. You've spun a lot of bullshit to impress people, and you're pretty sure that: 1. This sounds even more bullshit than the fake stories you made up, and 2. Even if it wasn't Director Belltower wouldn't believe you anyhow.



[ ] (2.0x) DONALD SYKES IS A MAN ON THE EDGE WHO DOESN'T PLAY BY THE RULES. Yeah, you know it's a bad idea to say what you found out, but it is so absurd that it has to be true, right? Also, telling Belltower nothing means you're going to get less respect, which means you get less power, which means you lose. You can probably sell this to her in a way that she can believe.