Session 3. Recovering Kojiro
Score: 631 | 8/10/19 |
Lynx (JJ) and O (Imre) headed out to follow a scrambled distress call from Kojiro (Daniel) while Flavius (Anders) provided a red herring for potential bounty hunters after O and the party.
Three weeks ago, they escaped Bailiff's Crown. A week later they sold the shiftercraft to anarchists. 19 days after Bailiff's Crown, they got a garbled message from Kojiro that they sifted to find originating coordinates; that took a day to figure out, and two days of travel time to get to the coordinates.
Put Out the Dozen Eyes
During this time, O discreetly checked the networks looking for news of his faction of the Gestalt Digital, the Dozen Eyes, to see if there was news of what happened with their secret project that teleported him into Kojiro's place and disappeared Kojiro. He discovered that all the Dozen Eyes and affiliates involved in the project were gone, including President Entropics (a name, not a title.) The only contact he could reach was Wire Ferret, who communicated that the only leadership still extant was Mirroranda, a fashion model and assassin based on the art planet Vanseel.
A frenemy faction in the Gestalt Digital called the Caliphate of Starsand put a bounty out on any survivors of the Dozen Eyes and snapped up as much of their contracts, caches, real estate, and role as possible with their own digital space nomads. Their leadership, the Strata Collective, appeared committed to preventing the resurgence of the Dozen Eyes.
Saving Kojiro
The crew arrived near the coordinates that originated Kojiro's focused distress call, and found the wreckage of the Heede, a heavy freighter, in the middle of a weird storm of ionic energy. O's telepathy was vulnerable to an overwhelming psychic noise around the wreck that felt like hacking, so he shut it down.
They contacted survivors through a drone that approached their ship, the Witching Hour, with transmitting gear, and followed the signal through the debris to the broken bridge of the ship, where they rescued Kojiro along with two contract spacers, the captain Dubious Ellen and the engineer Fisher Price. Those two ran the whole operation with drones, so there were no known casualties on the wreck.
Apparently they had been traveling along their tesserarch tunnel when energy fluctuated weirdly then something crashed into them and they dropped out of the tesserarch, somehow surviving. The engines were reduced to molten sand, and communications were fried, but they found Kojiro unconscious in the engine compartment and revived him while bolstering power and life support from drone energy sources. Kojiro managed to send a directed message to his allies, who came to find him as the air was getting stale.
Out of the Frying Pan
There was some posturing and threatening, but the spacers all gathered on the Witching Hour as a rescue craft. As they tried to figure out what happened, there was a signal of something big coming out of a tesserarch tunnel; they scrambled to jump away from the crash site before it arrived. Fisher Price worked with them to tesserarch a drone back to transmit a signal to see what it was that dropped in.
While they were fleeing, the energy wobbled, so they dropped out to avoid a repeat of what happened to the Heede. As they ran diagnostics and LYNX and O both connected their cybers to the system, both were hacked by something, infested as with a malignant wetware virus. In the process, O's brand new drone activated itself even though it was not connected to a signal, and built itself a body out of energy and parts; it resembled a medic that had adventured with the crew until she was dragged screaming into a psychic rift. Her face was scarred by molten tear tracks, and she said something creepy about wanting the world that's coming. Then she discorporated into O.
The Incident
A gel had oozed form Kojiro's ear and nose more than once by now; they thought it was blood, but O recognized it as the neural conducive gel that surrounded those who participated in the great experiment in secret. Now shaken, he told the crew about it.
The Dozen Eyes built Iris Point, a space station on the edge of the Roil, an area of space where the laws of physics wavered. It took them five years to build it, and the idea was to gather over a thousand cyborg psychers from all over the galaxy and synch up their neural networks to create a consciousness that could rewrite the reality of the core of a small sun, flushing its energy through a stable pinhole in space to create an alternate dimension that the Dozen Eyes could shape with their wills. This would be a safe space for them that could not be spied upon or attacked.
The fractals were resolving, when something went sideways and O was ejected from the meld, transposed through time and space to swap out with Kojiro (which is likely why Kojiro still occasionally leaks the neural gel even though he was never immersed in it.)
Kojiro reluctantly shared more of his own story, where he was transported physically into the digital realm of the Elysian Fields, the hardcode network maintained by the Gestalt Digital. His physical presence rippled corruption into it, but that was nothing compared to the damage unfolding there; rez flame dissolving the environment, avatars peeling open and pouring out corruption, the screaming of a digital hell. He tried to escape, and in some kind of transmission error, was pasted from the impossibly vast digital clipboard into realspace as his energy packet on the hardcode network collided somehow with an intersecting tesserarch tunnel with the Heede with impossibly precise split-second timing.
What Now?
Dubious Ellen and Fisher Price refused to leave the bridge to let the spacers talk about this alone, to the point of meeting threats of violence with threats of activating explosive decompression through Fisher Price's hijacking of the ship systems (just in case.) Knowing these secrets, they had little choice but to go along and help out.
If an alternate dimension was created, but went wrong, then possibly all those psychic ghosts of the networked cyborg psychers at Iris Point were now in that alternate dimension that served as a different kind of connecting medium (besides wi fi signals or physical touch). If that taint was now rooted in the ship and in the cybers, then those aggressive and insane ghosts might somehow spread through the galaxy if taken back to a tech point. Somehow they seemed to be able to manipulate and meld both matter and energy, as demonstrated by the echo of the medic forming from a recon drone and discorporating into O's energy and matter. If the key to reshaping matter with cybernetic psionics was now in the hands of insane otherdimensional ghosts, how would this threat play out?
The crew grimly decided to visit the top-secret and hidden site of Iris Point (a location Kojiro did not know but could somehow see in his mind's eye) to figure out how to deal with this new threat and, if possible, cleanse themselves of the ghosts before their reality was rewritten from the inside.