Lockheed Martin Prototype "Cascadia" Crasher Truck

Lockheed Martin Contingency Depot

Contingency Depot

Washington State Highway System

The Exurgent Earth

Session Log 21

Earth Tier

• The sentinels conducted enough recon to realize two things. First, Blackrock was too dangerous to clear out on their own. Second, by reviewing the recent system logs, Kru determined that the Oz-4 ego had uploaded a mass of data from the networked artificials and transmitted it to a receiver at the US submarine base in Bangor, Washington, North America.

• Rather than wasting 1.5 days waiting for the Swarm to reach them the team used the farcaster aboard the Disco Inferno to return to Three Sheets to the Wind. Once there they logged into the Eye through the Fruity-Oaty interactive ad-game and attempted to contact Proxy Luna. Instead, Stan the Man answered their light-speed delayed message and told them to farcast to an unregistered receiver somewhere in Earth orbit. They backed up or forked as per personal preferences, said their goodbyes and broadcast themselves towards the homeworld.

Put Out to Pasture

You rez into a simulspace, but one run on the most powerful server you have ever experienced practically indistinguishable from meat-space. You quickly realize you are all integrated into the same space station, wearing it like a morph. Below you hangs the dead earth - brown continents, black seas, contaminated skies. Inside there are cybersystems and infolife, all intently focused on countless tasks. State of the art surveillance systems spanning the EM spectrum scan the planet’s surface and track every near space object. A large manufactory is fabbing small satellites and orbitals which are launched into orbit as you watch. Still other more enigmatic systems work diligently within the station’s environs, executing unknown and mysterious tasks.

A voice speaks and you realize it is your muse - apparently co-opted by what must be a uniquely potent program. “Welcome to Pasture. I am The Shepherd. I am pleased you have volunteered to save transhumanity…”

• In addition to the countless parsed aspects of The Shepherd the party members realized there were three other autonomous entities in the server - Proxy Luna, Stan the Man and Proxy Evo. Shepherd explained that not all recursive AIs are threats to transhumanity and that in fact a cadre known as the Promethean’s survived the rise of the TITANs and works to guide and preserve transhumanity. Shepherd claimed that it is Firewall - that it is the originator and director of the conspiracy. This information seemed to provide an actual sense of relief to most of the team members - as if they were reassured by the fact that there was intent opposing the darkness.

• The Shepherd congratulated the team on its success in fighting the machinations of the Song Cai Flower entity and offered them one more mission. The Shepherd believes that the entity has targeted the Bangor Sub base because the base is suspected of being the location where the first TITAN was activated. The Shepherd believes that if the pattern of its behavior is an indication the Flower ego is going to attempt to use what it has learned about TITAN control systems and gate technology to build a gate to the local past and use it to try to prevent the activation of the first TITAN.

The Shepherd said that there is “insufficient data” to predict what effect such an attempt would have on the present day - time travel being a hypothetical science at best. Therefore Firewall’s assessment is that it is too dangerous to allow the entity to even attempt the activation of such a gate. The Shepherd therefore asked the team to go to Earth and simply prevent the potential destruction of all existence...

• The Shepherd told the team that it would be farcasted to a Contingency Depot - one of many  cashes of morphs and equipment secreted across the Earth by the organizational precursors of Firewall against future need. There they would gear up and secure transport then travel to the Bangor Base. The target depot was in the Seattle, Washington Lockheed Martin proving ground.  

Deja Vu

Some philosophies hold that existence is a series of cycles we are destined to relive until we reach enlightenment. You wonder if this might in fact be true as you wake with a powerful sense of having done exactly this only weeks ago. You are wearing one of a number of synthmorphs hanging on a rack in an otherwise empty bay. The lighting is dim - several overhead fixtures are dark and one flickers with power fluctuations. The gravity is high and strangely natural. There are moisture stains on the ferrocrete walls and a slimy puddle in one corner. A single black-and-yellow-striped, roll-up, metal door occupies one wall and is labeled “LM Contingency Depot - Equipment Storage.”

• The party instantiated and quickly searched the facility for gear. It was clear that others had been here before them - empty racks, open cases, spilled ammo, half assembled weapons - but there was still plenty of useful and dangerous toys to go around.

• In a meta-concession to the approaching climax of the campaign the party members were allowed to sleeve into the plausible synthmorph of his choice and raid the facility for a primary and secondary weapon, any one rare or specialized piece of gear and any standard supplies they wanted.

Terry - Reaper morph

Kru - Synthtaur

Rentlov - Fighting kite

John 117 - Takko

Nikolas - Guardian

Piv - Diatya, combat mod

• Scrounging around Kru discovered a subterranean munitions well and a single tactical antimatter device still in the inventory. He nonchalantly strapped it to his sythtaur’s back like a saddle bag.

• A vehicle bay provided slim pickings except for a well-used Cascadia Class crasher truck prototype which the party quickly commandeered. Heavily armored and equipped with a turret-mounted multi-barreled railgun the vehicle promised to be formidable transport. Like most of the gear in the facility the truck had been tagged with a crude red symbol implying that it had been “wireless disabled.”

Wishful Thinking

Less than 8 weeks ago you woke up from a 10 year sleep and learned that the Earth had been destroyed and abandoned. You didn’t see it happen. You didn’t live through it like everyone else. You’ve seen the pictures, the vids, and you’ve now seen the brown and black ball from orbit. You’ve seen all that but you still don’t believe it’s true - that the Earth is dead and most of humanity with it.

If it’s not true, what is? What does your character believe - or hope - he will see when the big metal door rolls up and he drives out onto the surface of the Earth?

• Each team member shared his thoughts on what lay beyond the door and they were universally dark and disheartening. In the end, they were all obviated by the anticlimactic fact of the spiral ramp that apparently lead up to the surface.

• The top of the ramp let out through a breached metal door and the wrecks of several corroded vehicles blocking the ramp access. The walled proving ground beyond was barren - devoid of any sign of life or even organic material - and covered in a gray, flake-like substance that seemed more ash than dust. The sky was a flat white that lent a subdued brightness to the terrain and the sun was just a slightly brighter glow in an otherwise featureless pale void.  

Downtown

The half-submerged streets of the Seattle waterfront are clogged with stagnant water, stinking muck, the corroding hulks of old vehicles and the rubble of collapsing buildings. The going is slow and frequent dead ends force you to retrace your course and try other roads. Though you are uncertain, you think you catch movement here and there among the ruins and rubble. Furtive animals that have survived the ecological collapse? Abandoned humans drawn by the sound of your truck? Or TITAN artifacts, warmachines or exurgent artificials still hunting transhuman prey?

A wrong turn, and other rubble-blocked alley. The truck splashes to a halt and begins to back up. The weighted nets and gunfire seem to come from nowhere and everywhere as the feral raiders spring their ambush...

• The fight was short and chaotic. John 117 was almost destroyed, the turret gun was dismounted and the truck half-buried in rubble. If not for Nikolas driving skills, Rentlov’s air support and Terry’s lethal destruction the mission would have been over before it had really begun. Ultimately, the team killed or chased off their ambushers who retreated to some sort of encampment hidden in the stadium complex to the south.

Uninfected Corridor

Personnel Access Hatch

Blackrock Docking Amature

Blackrock Asteroid

Session Log 20

Stars Tier

• In the end construction of the courier missile proved surprisingly simple and the high acceleration chase somewhat anti-climactic. The sentinels were able to transfer with only minor freefall difficulties to the “Disco Inferno” and hack the workbay hatch to gain access to the ship. Once inside John 117, Kru and Terry quickly transferred from their spares, and reinstantiated their compatriots, into a collection of synthmorphs. They then armed themselves against unknown threats with various kinetic and plasma-based mining tools.  

• While searching the ship the party discovered most of the crew had killed each other in a bloody rage. While assessing the carnage the party was attacked by one apparently insane young Tenorio, who they quickly dispatched. As John 117 collected stacks from the bodies he found that several had already been crudely harvested.

• Piv jury-rigged the fuel delivery system into a self-destruct mechanism and had to be talked off the ledge by his exasperated teammates. While this was going on the sentinals felt the characteristic hull vibrations indicating that the “Disco” had docked. Rushing to the bridge they discovered that the closest airlock had just been cycled and that someone - or something - had left the ship.

• Leaving the ship the team found that the main facility airlock had been subsumed in a mass of jerky-textured meat - a hardened covering of flesh that made an esophagus-like throat out of the lock tunnel. The party opted to access Blackrock through a smaller, auxiliary personnel hatch.

• Once inside, the sentinels discovered that the exurgent meat infestation had enveloped perhaps only 80% of the station. Using old station plans provided by Piv’s salvage buddies from the “We Come to Probe You” the team did what it could to avoid the meat while finding it’s way to the comm/ops center. Comm/ops was a large hollow sphere with work stations on the inner surface and on a smaller sphere suspended in the center of the larger. Unfortunately most everything was encased in exurgent flesh.

• The fugitive Oz-4 ego was at a station on the center bulb and seemed to be doing something with a collection of a dozen of the artificials manufactured back on Thoughtcrime when it took over the autofactory. As the party moved to engage it a defensive force of humanoid meat puppets jerked out of the shadows to intercept them - fleshy marionettes controlled by sinewy tethers that connected their headless necks directly to the greater meat mass covering the wall.

• The fight was clumsy and brutal with only mining tools as improvised weapons and the jerky marionettes attacking from all directions. It seemed the focus of their attacks was to somehow plug themselves into their targets systems and hack them from within. Both Nikolas and Rentlov eventually went down. Piv - instantiated in a pair of morphs - took out the Oz-4 and then joined John in killing - or perhaps more accurately, deactivating - the local infestation by destroying a trio of fleshy, fluid-filled nodes arrayed about the room.

• During the fighting, Kru hacked Blackrock’s main system to cut power in an attempt to prevent whatever Oz-4 was up to. He met strong resistance by an almost overwhelming TITAN consciousness and it remains uncertain whether he was successful. Whatever success he had was only possible because Nikolas sacrificed himself to defend the captain.

Void Diciples' Radio Telescope

Liberty City Spaceport

Session Log 19

• Progress Station Tier

• The party members found themselves in a well-appointed penthouse staring out a large picture window at the artificial sunset of Progress Station. They had drinks in their hands and little finger sandwiches. They were listening to an earnest, believable man talk about how someone had made illegal forks of their team and turned them into terrorists. They couldn’t help but agree that something must be done - that these criminals must be stopped.

• Rentlov threw his sandwich at the man and Piv, Terry, John 117 and Rentlov stormed out of the apartment. As they did so, the man sighed, said “Well, fuck,” and pushed the button on a small, handheld device. Everyone dropped like puppets with severed strings.

•  The party members found themselves in a well-appointed penthouse staring out a large picture window at the artificial sunset of Progress Station. They had drinks in their hands and little finger sandwiches. They were listening to an earnest, believable man talk about how someone had made illegal forks of their team and turned them into terrorists. They couldn’t help but agree that something must be done - that these criminals must be stopped.

• Rentlov threw his sandwich and Piv made it down the hall before the strings were cut again.

•  The party members found themselves in a well-appointed penthouse staring out a large picture window at the artificial sunset of Progress Station. They had drinks in their hands and little finger sandwiches. They were listening to an earnest, believable man talk about how someone had made illegal forks of their team and turned them into terrorists. They couldn’t help but agree that something must be done - that these criminals must be stopped.

• Piv stormed out and the team was wiped a third time.

• The party members found themselves in a well-appointed penthouse staring out a large picture window at the artificial sunset of Progress Station. They had drinks in their hands and little finger sandwiches. They were listening to an earnest, believable man talk about how someone had made illegal forks of their team and turned them into terrorists. They couldn’t help but agree that something must be done - that these criminals must be stopped.

Afterall, it is the only right thing to do. And this time there was no Piv - but that seemed right too,  to everyone’s dull and hazy minds.

Liberty City Tier

• The conjoined party worked it’s way across The Zone - the worker residential/entertainment section of Liberty City - toward the central lift tower. With John 117 in control they tried to steal an ID scanner from a patrol car but were caught in the act. Fraying through the crowd they just managed to escape and went to ground in a backstreet alley.

• Kru spoofed the scanner to crash the whole scanner system, effectively forcing every checkpoint to manually confirm each ID as residents passed through. This allowed Rentlov to use his unique “powers of persuasion” to convince each checkpoint guard that the random ID the party got from the wall rats looked just like their morph. The trip was tense but this got them through a series of checkpoints and up the lifts past Fiddler’s Green (the administrative level) and to the Liberty City Space Port.

• Posing as a shipping clerk the party stole a vacsuit and exfiltrated to the port. They made contact with their local Firewall handler but were intercepted by Jovian security. Insurgents posing as ship mechanics ambushed the troopers and rescued the sentinels and hid the team’s morph among some outgoing cargo. They then used a small runabout as a decoy to draw away the attention of the security forces and stage the team’s deaths.

• After the dust settled the party morph was hustled aboard a shuttle and delivered to a waiting cargo ship. There was an attempt to farcast them to Pontes Station in Mars orbit, but the receiver was offline and a message from Stan the Man directed them to The Stars Our Destination. They opted to transmit to the Swarm and either merged with their Stars forks or were left as independent instantiations.

Stars Our Destination Tier

• The team spent some time trying to salvage their reputation scores and debating about what to do next with Pontes Station and Proxy Evo offline and Whitegate’s secret plans apparently coming to fruition through the efforts of a series of TITAN infected Whitegate/Rentlov hybrid forks.

• Rentlov convinced everyone that since it seemed to work so well on Ganymede, forming a hive mind with their Jovian forks would be a great idea. Though everyone was strangely, uncharacteristically up for it the only multi-mind morph he could find was a multi-bodied, zebra-colored human centipede, and given recent events and Dr. Mindfuck’s issues, few could bring themselves go through with the plan. In the end only Rentlov and Terry downloaded and only as separate egos.

• Though most of the errant robots had been destroyed, reports indicated that those that were left had somehow bridged the gap between ships and were spreading across the fleet. Kru also determined that each of the mobile storage devices contained approximately 10% of the massive Rentlov-like TITAN ego presumably recovered from the old, archived satellite the team had found.

• The Ferryman, the rest of the party and in fact the whole of the Swarm, were invited to the strange party being hosted by the Void Disciples to celebrate the activation of their new and long anticipated radio telescope. It did not take the sentinels long to realize that a super receiver could probably act just as effectively as a super transmitter and that the Oz-4 ego they had been chasing was likely going to use the wild artificial mobile storage devices to deliver the satellite ego to the radio telescope and transmit it to wherever it was trying to go.

• The party wasted no time calling in Swarm security and trying to pass a referendum that would keep the Disciples from activating their telescope. Considering their rocky reputations and unfamiliarity with promoting memes the party’s initiative failed.

• While investigating the Void Disciples collective aboard Abstinence Only, John 117 discovered wild artificials in and around the telescope. Piv subsequently planted an explosive charge within the telescope and alerted the fleet to its presence in an hopes the information would push people to a safe distance and keep the Disciples from activating it. Instead, they tried to disarm the explosive and blew up the scope, Piv, half a dozen of the stargazing cyber-monks and bunch of innocent, bystanding party goers.

• For the third time in as many days the sentinels caused a Swarm-wide pulse of news, debate and consternation with their dramatic actions. Some loved them, some reviled them and others were simply enjoying the show.

• During the aftermath of the exploding telescope, it was discovered that the mining tug, Disco Inferno had broken with the fleet and was making a hard burn towards the Blackrock Relay Station. All attempts to communicate with or farcast to the vessel were being ignored and there was not enough surplus fuel to chase after them. In fact the ship was using so much fuel it would not be able to make it to Venus considering the unexpected expenditure of reaction mass after the recent collision of Thoughtcrime and Three Sheets. On its projected course it would arrive at Blackrock a day and a half before the fleet’s original rendezvous.

• Some on the Swam thought the Tenorios were in trouble and needed help. Others thought they were just being assholes and were trying to snake the salvage rep ahead of the Boytoy vs We Come to Probe You head-to-head salvage mission broadcast. Still others - those paying attention to the underlying concerns of the past few days, were afraid that the Tenorios had been compromised by TITAN infection.

• The party sponsored another referendum - one that would give them authorization to shoot down the Disco Inferno before it got to the station and the Oz-4 ego could execute whatever it was planning. The referendum failed - people were reluctant to kill the Tenorios without a more urgent threat - but there was approval for a hairbrained plan to catch up with the Disco by loading a team into what amounted to a semi-guided missile and firing it on an intercept course with the fleeing tug. Crazy and dangerous but wild enough to capture the imaginations and support of the Swarm.

Now, if only the missile-ship can be built in time. And does not explode on launch. And the cargo survives the acceleration. And the vessel can be kept on course. And it can be stopped - or at least crashed without an ensuing fireball - when it reaches its destination.  

Session Log 18

Stars Our Destination Tier

• Kaiber Singh called the team to Thoughtcrime where one of the automanufactories had begun fabricating an army of small artificials and setting it free to infest the Swarm. Singh assumed it had something to do with the team and told them to “clean up their mess.”

• Kru took a digital approach and worked to reprogram the system and the artificials.

• John 117 fought his way through the battling robots to cut the power to the manufactory.

• Terry, Piv and Nikolas took up covering positions and started shooting up the place.

• In the midst of the skirmish the altered Oz-4 morph the team had identified after the collision sprung from ambush and attacked Piv. Terry shot it up as John 117 garrotted it’s head off.

• Kru managed to co-opt production and force the system to fabricate new mini-bots (each class with a different team member’s bobble head) that would hunt down and destroy the infestation. Nonetheless the infestation spread throughout the Thoughtcrime and even to other vessels, and it would take some time for Kru’s bots to eradicate it all.

• Kru also determined that most of the artificials contained inordinate amounts of storage space and that the contents consisted of large chunks of some kind of ego-like programming.

• The skirmish was watched in real time by much of the Swarm and afterward the team used it to build some positive rep - Hey look at us! We were protecting the Swarm!” The group was also subjected to an open interrogation by members of most of the major collectives in the fleet which was also watched - and virtually participated in - by most of the Swarm. The team ultimately shared most of their story - editing out any mention of Firewall - trying to play it like they were simply victims of historical circumstance and good samaritans who just took on the responsibility of hunting down these errant TITAN-made egos as a social duty. The story went over more or less convincingly depending upon the individual - some losing, some gaining a little rep.

• The party decided - not quite unanimously to incinerate both the program Kruger had captured within the manufactories control systems and the Oz-4's dead morph.

• During the aftermath the team had a discussion that lead to a meta, out-of-character recap of the central elements of the campaign. It served as an intentional meta-reminder to the players of things that are otherwise hard to realize or remember when unfamiliar with the setting and playing only twice per month.

-The party members all ended up on the Song Cai Flower independently and through their own individual back stories. Most of these reasons had something to do with Darius Whitegate, but since the Flower was his base of operation at the time, this makes sense.

-Whitegate was in charge of a number of projects aboard the Flower and around the solar system. One of these was the Recursively Enhanced & Networked TITAN-Linked Operant Vitae project, or R.E.N.T.L.O.V. for short. It was intended to create an AI choke collar that could be used to weaponize TITANS, allowing transhumans to fight fire with fire.

-R.E.N.T.L.O.V. was based on Whitegate’s cognitive and personality architecture.

- The TITAN the Flower researchers were trying to control apparently got loose and compromised the ship and in the resulting takeover the vessel was forced into a cometary orbit.

-Ten years later, enter Firewall and the random collection of egos Darwin found to help him destroy the Flower - the characters.

-Whitegate used his own cognitive architecture and personality profile in the R.E.N.T.L.O.V. project so presumably some of his own knowledge and motivations remained in tact. Given that data about all his projects was presumably aboard the Flower it was likely that the escaped ego had access to this data and, sharing Whitegates motivations, wanted to complete Whitegate’s work - or at least a nihilistic-crazy-TITANesque-version of those projects. To facilitate this, it needed to find Whitegate and “update,” hence the initial farcast to Mars and the capture/merging with Whitegate on Progress Station.

-The ego then scattered to various locations where specific projects and experiments were being conducted, presumably to collect the products or results. The TITAN consciousness the Cognite team had recovered from the Iapetus matrioshka brain, the gate/time displacement experiments on Mercury, the mobile portal from the TQZ and now the recovery of the R.E.N.T.L.O.V. project from the old satellite hidden aboard the Stars. TITANS, control mechanisms and gates - oh my!

• What this thread of facts actually portends is up to the party characters/players to decide.

• Through John 117's sloppy seconds with Amrita Shah the team was put in contact with Proxy Luna. Xie ordered the Sentinels to eliminate the Oz-4 ego, figure out what it was up to, mitigate any fallout and then contact xer when they had finished the assignment.

Thoughcrime Manufactory

Session Log 17

Stars Our Destination Tier

• The party decided to leave the satellite core in the vault. Piv rigged it to blow, but did not verify its destruction (he critically failed this test).

• There were a lot of group and individual conversations about what to do regarding Angel’s offer to join Project Ozma. Some were dead set against it. Others were all for it. Some were simply curious. The party even had an awkward, not quite contentious meet up with Angel where lots of innuendo and accusations were thrown around. Piv made his contempt particularly clear. Angel referred to Piv as Lieutenant, Kru as Captain and seemed disgusted with Rentlov. Her pitch sounded good - maybe too good to be true.

• Rentlov, with help from Kru’s and a infamous Swarm psychosurgeon named Dr. Mindfuck, decided to make a Trojan fork and send it along with Angel while also keeping an active fork on the Swarm. Terry went too, but also left an active fork on the Stars. John 117 had no interest in joining Ozma and did not even come to the initial meeting with Angel. Kru decided not to go.

• Piv contacted his primary fork back on Mars and learned that something was up as Evo had ordered the Mars team to ground.

• John 117 farcasted to Mars and merged with this primary fork. Then he farcasted back to the Swarm reinstantiating in the same morph. He is now up to date and verifies Piv’s story.

• Those who were leaving met Angel at Gentrix Interplanetary and as they were preparing to depart Kalber Singh and some additional security volunteers show up to officially run the party members off the Swarm on a proverbial rail. Seems someone (John 117) anonymously notified security that an agent of Project Ozma (Angel) was recruiting on the Swam and had found some converts. Singh just wanted to make sure that she and her new crew were actually leaving.  One by one the team farcasted out with Angel putting in the code and going last.  As she was about to send Rentlov she leaned in and whispered “we got you asshole.”

• John finally pulled the trigger on revealing himself to the Swarm elders and asking to make amends. He was invited to a dinner in Alice Cho’s quarters where he met representatives from most of the major Swarm collectives. Terry also got an invite and the initial discussion was all about Angel and Ozma, what the hell were they doing here and how was Terry/John's cohort involved. Singh was actually called away by some new crisis and left without getting satisfactory answers from either John or Terry.

• John spent the next several hours getting lambasted and reamed by the collective representatives. While they shouted and accused and broadcast across the mesh John was able to maintain his cool and be sincerely contrite and penitent. Though different groups across the swarm called for blood and others for forgiveness the debate centered on the question - how can we live forever is there is no chance of redemption?

• Finding out from Piv that Angel was alive and on the Swarm Nikolas’s primary folk farcased from Mars to the Stars and made contact with the rest of the team, wondering aloud if he should have trusted Angel after she betrayed him the first time.

• While the various versions of the party members sat in Notorious, Singh contacted them. Something is out of control aboard Thought Crime and the factory is pumping out hordes of wild artificials. He said it smells a lot like “your fault” and asked for them to help clean up the mess.

Liberty City Tier

• Rentlov worked a deal - if the party could fix the “red” food dispenser the wall rats would trade them some clothes and a work pass that should get them to the Green. Peg and the surly teens eagerly showed them the way to the food dispenser which turned out to be the purging valves on the back of the industrial maker that produces faux-foodstuffs for a particular quarter of the Zone. John 117 made short work of fixing the problem, winning the admiration of the kids. They all returned to the camp carrying buckets of slop.

• The wall rats made good on the deal and provided a surprisingly clean worker's coverall and a plastic ID card that they claimed would get the one man party up the worker lifts. Peg lead morph to a disconnected air circulator and they crawled out into an alley that lead to a crowded, neon-lit, underground slum.

Interlude

• A gorilla morph and an attractive female were prepped for farcasting aboard a space station in orbit around Mercury. The gorilla was sent first.

• A very similar female was checked out by a medical technician post-farcast. As she pulled on a silk robe an attendant handed her a small case containing four cortical stacks. She dropped it into her pocket with a satisfied smirk and walked out of the facility. (A slow retreating pan shows she is aboard a Planetary Consortium space station in orbit around Venus.)

Session Log 16

Mars Tier

• The crew climbed from the wrecked shuttle and prepared for an overland hike. They debated whether team Shuttle Crash should meet up with team Titan Townhouse and it was decided that the crashed team would join up with the ground team. As they prepped to leave, they noticed that the crash had attracted another group of pack hunters. Some murderous fire drove them off.

• Regrouped at the TITAN dome site, the party did some exploring - cutting into some of the buildings with John 117’s monofilament sword. They discovered some kind of gate alternative or energy source that transmitted or disintegrated any part of anything that touched it. They also determined that the buildings seemed to be constructed of some kind of structural nano-tech that was self-repairing.

• Someone got the idea to make an open broadcast reporting the “discovery” of a large stash of TITAN tech in hopes that some other smugglers would intercept it and walk into an ambush. It seemed to work when several hours later a pair of buggies carrying heavily armed thugs rolled over the ridge. Abrasive demands and suspicious behavior made the smugglers wary and they retreated, driving off before anyone thought to actually launch the ambush (-10 to any future networking rolls involving TQZ smugglers).

• Eventually the party gave up and called Firewall for an evac.

Interlude - Operations Ice Balls

• The party made short work of the security drone and basically walked into the beta fork worksite where the only other defenses seemed to be the workers confusion. They took out the morphs in various ways - threats, electroshock and murder - and redirected the thruster pods and navigation system even as the iceteroid began nudging the upper atmosphere and breaking up around them.

• As they stole the ice-wrangler’s shuttle and launched for Mars, the team members got a call from Stan the Man asking if they could make a pick up in the TQZ - right at the iceteroid ground zero they had just finished targeting. Hot-landing in the Zone the erasure squad evaced the errant band of sentinels seconds before the screaming, sublimating iceteroid crashed to Mars in a stupid stupid stupidly dramatic close call.

• As they made their way back towards Olympus City, using the dust and confusion of the impact as cover, they sat staring at each other across the passenger bay, wondering at the sense of deja vu-like familiarity they felt looking into their opposites’ eyes. Exfiltrating the Zone and stashing the shuttle in the outback they reluctantly took the sentinels back to their base of operations to lay low for a couple days while both the real and figurative dust settled.

• For the second time in as many months the party had created a social, economic and political upheaval that rocked the Red Planet.

Liberty City Tier

• The party - sharing only the single freeman morph - made it’s stealthy way across the locked-down Tombs and into the machine spaces within the city-cylinder walls. Climbing up through the ducts, piping, conduits, delivery rails and along the maintenance gangways and shafts, the party realized it was being paced. Turned out a grimy and very hungry kid was following them - a local urchin with monkey-like agility in his dark and native, metal jungle.

• After bribing him with “rabsberries” nutrition bars the boy lead the team to a surprising place - a ramshackle village of sorts - some kind of wall-rat, homeless camp - with a dozen or so down and very out inhabitants.