Session Log 9

Mercury Tier

Automation

As John 117 hacks at the leads connecting the steel morph to the system controls there is a split second in which a dread stillness settles over the automated factory. The universal shuddering stops. The incessant twitching calms. For two heartbeats, nothing moves. It’s as if the mechanical landscape has lost power and is frozen in time.

Then, in that quiet, the exit queue of fused biomorphs shambles forward, and Piv sticks his head out of the Jeffries tube saying, “Hey guys, I lost your signal?”

Then, like breaking glass, the moment shatters and all hell breaks loose…

Every mobile bot, waldo, servo, tool platform and automated system bursts to life and begins moving. Not with the twitching vibration of moments before, but with the frantic, directed motion of lethal intelligence. With a thunderous vibration and a low-g downpour of sparks, the entire factory lurches, springs and spins to life and begins to kill you.

Roll initiative...

1. Cutting laser - the beam from the oncoming industrial emitter slices wildly through surrounding objects - machinery, struts, cables - as if they were only holograms. Sparks follow the invisible ray as it leaves a glowing orange track that arcs toward you. Uh oh.
2. Welding torch - a small blue jet flares into a meter long, actinic wand of burning death as the wildly maneuvering torch races along the overhead track towards you, melting everything in it’s path. Oh wait, you’re in it’s path.
3. Diamond grinder - with a horrific whine and the screech of diamond on metal the spinning grinder head cuts through the scaffolding behind you and lunges towards your back with shocking, mechanical speed. You’re not worried ‘cuz you don’t see it coming.
4. Spot welder - the pop of sparks and smell of ozone marks the spasming tool as it jerks out from among a row of flailing manipulators and tries to spot weld the front of your skull to the back of your skull. Ow - burny!
5. Pincher/cutter - a massive hand-like claw sweeps down from above to grapple you as the industrial cable cutter in its palm snips at your arm. And your leg. And your other leg.
6. Mono jig - the innocuous yoke moving quickly towards you along the rail seems harmless enough - no spinning blades, no jetting flames, to laser beams - then you catch the harsh glint of the overhead lights along the invisible mono-wire as the retracted armature springs toward your throat. Didn’t someone once say what you don’t see can’t hurt you? No, wait, that’s not it…
7. Laser drill - jets of vaporized metal escape the line of holes that races towards you like the impacts left by invisible machinegun bullets. Puff, puff, dead, dead.
8. Cargo mover - the inert machine springs to life and the manipulator claws - designed to lift and move thousands of kilograms - rip through the intervening machinery as the robot death machine lurches towards you. Being squeezed to death. Yup. That’s a new one.
9. Diamond drill - the small maintenance bot leaping towards you looks innocuous enough until the carapace-like shell snaps open and the spinning diamond drill-head hidden inside stabs at your - no not the face! Not the face!
10. Fabber blades - the extruder heads on the fabber amature twitch to life and faster than your eyes can follow print a set of razor-edged ceramic blades with which it’s manipulators then try to kill you. Slice slice, stab stab.
11. Disassembler swarm - the cloud of colored dust that puffs out of the overhead grill covers you in a fine orange powder. Meh - better than being covered in lasers, or fire or blood. Wait - why is my suit dissolving? Ow. Ow. Oh shit ow!
12. Acid etcher - the unassuming nozzle is immobile, bolted to the frame of the large machine, unable to hurt you, even if it could reach you. Sweet. The stream of acid spaying from the industrial etcher however is more than sufficient to turn you into organic goo. Why is this as a weapon! Oh God, why?

• The frenzied battle with the automated factory was chaotic and frightening but ultimately proved short and one-sided. The team members blasted, shot, cut, blew, wrenched, tore and ripped the facility apart as they ducked, dodged, zigged, zagged and frayed their way through the machinery. In the end they left the equipment in smoking, slagged ruins.

• John 117 collected the cyberbrain from what the party assumed was the remains of the Oz-4 entity - which had been ripped to shreds by the lethal machinery.

• Terry and John moved to investigate the armatures into which the multi-morph ring entered and out of which it exited. Terry could make little of it but John became convinced it was some kind of Pandora Gate-like device and that not only did it allow objects to pass through a wormhole-like construct from one point in space to another, it allowed those objects to do so 6.3 seconds into the past.

• Piv, in his dragon-fly form, decided to fly through the gate, and in doing so, appeared on the other side 6.3 seconds before he left, despite the fact that Terry grabbed him out of the air and held on like Piv was a football. 6.3 seconds later he simply vanished into causality - a paradox that perhaps can’t be explained but must be accepted. While passing through the portal Piv had no sense of even being conscious let alone aware of where he was.

Piv attempted to make several copies of himself by flying through several times but instead only managed to give himself the mechanical equivalent of a concussion.

• Kru and John 117 raced to the facility’s reactor and shut it down. As they did so, the rest of the crew reported that the portal control panel was giving off some kind of warning sound and a string of green power indicators was quickly blinking out. Realizing that if the power controlling this high energy physics experiment went out while it was still operating the resulting release of energy would turn the massive crater into an even bigger one, the sentinels sprinted for the crater rim.

• John 117 stayed behind hoping to dive through the portal right before the explosion. Instead, he was unable to pull himself through, ceasing to exist along with the rest of the facility - at least as anything other than highly energized plasma.

• The surviving sentinels, bruised and battered, stumbled the 10 klicks back to their crasher truck and began the 19 hour drive back to the Lazarus mining station. They contacted Dr. Sternhagan to report in and gave her a full briefing on what they had seen and what they had done. At first she was overjoyed at the fireworks and grateful she could finally leave “this empty fucking rock!” As the briefing concluded however, she got a little nervous and kept glancing off camera. She asked someone if “that was enough?”,  a voice said yes and Rentlov leaned into the pickup. He said it was “a matter of operational security,” reached over and pushed a button. “Nothing leaves Caloris 18. Nothing.”

The truck and the sentinels riding inside ceased to exist in a bright and silent explosion. Well, most of them anyway. At the last second, realizing what Rentlov was about to do, Terry flung himself into the airlock and was blasted out onto the surface of Mercury. When he came to, he realized he was alone, unequipped, a 19-hour drive from the nearest habitat and running out of air.

Progress Station Tier

• The sentinels (all save John 117) fled the axis tower, headed for the next closest Oz ego. Kru had located each of them and noted that all but one seemed to simply be standing around, as if they were decoys. The 11th had entered a high-rent residential building so was no longer on the public panopticon.  

• The team arrived eight minutes later, just in time to see the ego they were intercepting collapse - in fact, all 9 of the decoy egos collapsed at the same moment. Terry scooped up the body with a ruse about first aid and they all hid out in a nearby alleyway.

• Meanwhile John launched himself from the tower and used his stolen fairy wings to get to the residential tower the active ego had infiltrated. After a surprisingly skilled landing in the roof garden, John infiltrated not only the highrise, but the penthouse too, with consummate ease. Upon arriving he learned two things. He saw that the target morph, a handsome, well-dressed man, and two body guards were dead. The second thing was that there was a private farcaster with blood on it and that the logs indicated two egos had just been sent to a private receiver in Pathfinder City on Mars.

There was some other odd elements in the log, but John 117 was unable to grasp their significance. He then forked himself using the integrated ego bridge and sent the copy to the same destination. John’s primary then snuck out of the building as easily as he’d snuck in - pocketing what appeared to be some historically valuable jewelry from a display case as he went.  

• As all this went down Kru hacked the apartment’s security system and used this new access to id the grey-haired man as Darius Whitegate, a powerful member of the Planetary Consortium’s elite and secretive Hypercorp Council. According to the Firewall’s database, The Eye, he is also thought to be a high level player within Project Ozma - the Consortium’s version of Firewall, though one more likely to try to acquire and use rather than search out and destroy TITAN tech. Additionally, the data the party recovered from the Song Cai Flower indicated that Whitegate was responsible for several of the projects aboard that very lab ship and that he had actually be aboard her several times.

Sharing this information triggered recognition in most of the characters.

(Your individual characters know these facts, but unless you share them, the other characters do not. I revealed them at the open table as a storytelling meta-trick to thicken the plot.)

Kru - Whitegate is the man you once called Director Whitegate and from whom your military company took orders. Oh yeah, and he is also the man whose son you left to die on Earth during the Fall when you hacked the manifest and put your parents in his place.

John 117 - Whitegate was your target from your last mission - the one that took you aboard the Song Cai Flower. The files you were to recover were his.

Nikolas - Whitegate was upper management within the Cartel - one of your direct bosses. And Angel’s father.

Pim - Whitegate was your black ops unit’s last handler

Terry - You’ve never heard of this asshole before in your life

Rentlov - When you see the image of Whitegate a strange file icon appears in your entoptic display. It asks - “Load Memory” and there are two options. Accept and Decline.  

Accept: Whitegate is your father and in case I need to remind you about your original background write-up, you loathe him.

• After receiving John’s report the party raced to follow the bodies, but since Whitegate was being whisked off by a private ambulance and the three other corpses were being taken to a local public hospital the party had to split up. Terry went to the hospital while the rest of the crew followed Whitegate to what turned out to be a private, high security resleeving facility.

• While the team set up a quiet perimeter outside, Rentlov used his implants and skills to impersonate Whitegate, enter the facility and intimidate the technicians decanting Whitegate’s new morph into not only putting it back on ice but into giving him the backup stack as well. He then called for a car service, walked out, got in and rode away. Easy peasy.

He then uploaded the Whitegate back-up into his own ghost rider and, keeping him on sensory lock-down, engaged him in a conversation that quickly devolved into an exchange of threats. The Whitegate backup assumed there was some sort of security breach and that he was being ego-napped to some nefarious end. He quite convincingly warned Rentlov that he would regret his mistake and that the whole weight of the Planetary Consortium was about to come down on his head. Not so easy peasy.

• Terry cased the hospital - specifically its resleeving wing - and eventually opted to pull the fire alarm. He was surprisingly successful at bluffing his way into the wing where he quickly tagged the bodies for incineration, destroying any potential infection.

• The party made its way to the spaceport and took its shuttle to the Martian surface and Pathfinder City.