Saturday, October 11, 2008

Iteration X Goes Rogue

The Technocrats move to attack when suddenly somebody in something like Boba Fett armor swoops in. Alexis Hastings! She drops a Digital Web bomb, digitizing everybody in its radius.

Quite clearly, Dante sent her. "I'm going to start owing him," Ambrose mutters. Alexis says he's waiting for them at the Spy's Demise.

Dante has news for them. Ambrose has been declared Marauder by the Technocracy. Their #2 Most Wanted. "Who's first?" asks Ambrose, before remembering it's Dante, who just raises an eyebrow at him. The Technocracy wants this motherboard so badly that Dante's not sure even the Spy's Demise will be safe, but they trade information with Dante while they've got a chance. Worst things worst, he'll e able to get it out to people who need to know.

Dante tells them Donna Matrix appeared to a Virtual Adept a few days ago and told him that Iteration X is trying to capture the Incarna of Science. They're holding it at an Atlanta Construct, planning to trap it in a board and expand the Computer with it. They figure that controlling the embodiment of Science could give the Technocracy the win.

Sonya's alarmed by this. She explains briefly about the Triat, putting this in Garou context: the Technocracy would be tapped directly into the Weaver. Lady Alison says she believes Ambrose is innocent. Ambrose ponders sending the New World Order some anonymous information on all this. He bets the Void Engineers won't like this either. And they learn that the Computer is the Incarna of Technology--that's the sentience powering the Computer itself. This concerns the Garou.

Then the Demise flickers, showing its base code for a moment. Dante does something, then informs them the place is surrounded wall to wall by digital HITMarks. He grabs the board and blueprints and tells them to go; he and Alexis will buy them time to vacate. Ambrose notes Technocratic visitors to the Demise are being specifically targeted along with his group and Dante. No witnesses, apparently. He takes photos for later reference.

The group escapes onto the Silver Path, passing a horned man standing at a crossroads. They fall out into a Nocker freehold, through someone's computer.

"What I get for looking at robot porn," the Nocker in question grumbles.

They're in south London. Outside, it looks like half the Technocracy is surrounding the building. Ambrose's phone rings. "In two minutes, there'll be a distraction," the MiB's voice says. "The only way out is through the Shadowlands. it's 11:40, Dr. Quintrell. Catch a train to Atlanta." "Yes, sir," Ambrose quips.

This they do. Looking back, they see the Wild Hunt tearing into the Iterators.

They make their way quickly to a train station, but Aila has no wraith money. Ambrose, on the other hand, does. He picked up some before, curious about the composition of it. In addition, Rey has chocolate. Wraiths don't get to eat chocolate very often.

The train pulls in. Aila steps forward, then stops. It's 11:59. She points this fact out to other wraiths on the platform, and that...that's a Spectre taking oboli. Wraiths flee screaming. The spectre is ticked. He takes a picture of Aila, so Ambrose takes a picture of him. He snarls...and is distracted long enough for the Midnight Express to crash into the back of the spectre train. A wraith in ragged black robes leaps forward to kick the spectre's ass.

They board the train. Ambrose is excited, chatting with wraiths on the train, and is fascinated to note that they arrive in Atlanta also at midnight.

They stay in the Shadowlands to do recon, heading for the Construct. It's strangely...perfect. Having noticed the effect before, Sonya uses the entropic properties of the Shadowlands to look for weaknesses, but there are none. It's truly,impossibly flawless. And the security's pretty damn tight, too.

The MiB calls again, warning them to get rid of any money. Ambrose warns him not to trust the Computer. Sonya gets in touch with some Glass Walkers to arrange a hotel room, and asks them to warn kin and friends about the Technocracy and the Black Spirals. Ambrose sends a report to the New World Order using his own laptop, which has VA-designed security protocols.

They stake out the Construct for a couple of days. The top three floors are absolutely locked down. The Construct is leeching energy from the city's...well, life force, for want of a better term. The spiritual energy of the city. it would have to be cut out of the city in order to shut down the power.

The Adepts tell Ambrose that the Crosshairs group took out a chantry in Washington state.

Aila's out reconnoitering the comings and goings of the Construct's personnel when someone sits down on the bench next to her: a man in a white linen suit, who greets her in a warm Southern accent. He knows she's Garou. She's nervous, but he assures her that no one in the city is looking for them. He has to lay on the hints pretty broadly before she gets it: this is Atlanta's City Father. He's here to offer to cut the Construct's power for them to break in, and to inform her that "the cleaning crew is in tonight." And asks them not to use fire.

Aila heads back to tell the others immediately. They have to explain City Fathers to Ambrose, who comments, "Wow, Hong Kong's must be really pissed off."

Sonya tracks down that cleaning crew: eight people. She takes Jonas and RF to ambush them in order to take their place. That night, they head in, the power goes down, and under cover of the anonymous dark, they sneak up to the ninth floor (there'd only been eight floors from the outside, but Ambrose tells them that Constructs sometimes have Umbral pockets).

Checking one floor up, the tenth floor is the records division. Ambrose flips through, finding something called "Arcadia Project." He quickly makes a copy.

Somebody comes in while he's working, so they hide and watch an Iterator upload info on the group, along with some Project Arcadia updates involving the cyborg girl. Ambrose snags the update after he leaves, along with a copy of Project Crosshairs. And then they clear out, as quietly as they came in.

Ambrose forwards copies to Dante and Dreamsoft before he tries to crack the encryption, wary of triggering something and losing all the data.

The Incarna is being held on Darkside Moon Base, part of an over-arching project to map the Moon. The Void Engineers landed in the 1920s, invading a jewelled city where they fought armies of what sound remarkably like fae. They've been there, besieging Arcadia ever since. They believe that slaving the Incarna of Science to the Computer will give them the advantage. The latest data is that there's been a sudden turn in the last two days as fae-like horned beings arrived to reinforce Arcadia. The Moon base is destabilizing. Reports indicate that Nephandi might have taken over sections of it for some purpose, tainting parts of the base.

Astonished, the fae can only ask, "Where is Arcadia?" Ambrose can't tell them yet; he needs to do more work to break the encryption on the calculations and coordinates. He finds out that theey're currently listed as allies of Mikaboshi. Additionally, he spots notes that a Nwo group called Project Invictus are listed as possible traitors. Ambrose recalls that--the guys with the pins on their collars.

The Computer is out-and-out lying to the rest of the Technocracy. There's an internal Most Wanted list, on which Ambrose and his friends are listed as #3. Dante is #1, of course. The IX girl's twin is #2. She has similar implants, but they're made of clockwork, and filled with glowing blue mists of ether. She's listed as "Ally of Science."

Cracking open the other file, Ambrose finds that Project Crosshairs is an attempt to create super-soldiers for eventual Digital Web deployment. It's carried out with implants, which take a month to set into permanence. It's been three weeks. The Project scientists are still looking for Aila.

Ambrose finds a dispatch from the Ivory Tower: the New World Order has removed Ambrose from the black list, claiming the Computer's information is wrong. The missive is signed Johannes Kepler.

"He's still alive?" Aila gasps.

"For a given value of alive," Ambrose replies absently, rather shocked himself. "He could be a brain in a jar."

Drawing connections, they realize that the Computer is a spirit. The Dreamspeaker Nephandus, is he using the IX Girl to tap into it and twist it? Is that why it's going haywire? Ambrose sends the NWO dossiers on the cabal of Nephandi.

The NWO thanks him by sending back a dossier on Undrech Rastov, who's working for Baba Yaga to find the Soul Egg--playing both ends against the middle between her and the Giovanni, because there's no way he'd truly work for anyone but himself. He hasn't told other vampires about Baba Yaga, acting as her agent outside the Shadow Curtain. He's also looking for something buried and trying to build a vampire army.

Musing on the prophecy briefly, they wonder if the bit about the fragile path is a reference to cooperating with the Technocracy. Maybe the Men and White finding Horizon is a good thing?

Anyway, the next thing to do is catch up with Project Crosshairs. They need to find their next target, which is conveniently in the file: a chantry in Hawai'i staffed by VAs who monitor the Digital Web. Iteration X wants them taken out so they can't warn about the invasion of the Digital Web.

While they're there, the pack can pay a visit to the puma spirits who live at the volcano and learn what they know about purification rites.

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