Episode 33: Sphagnum, P.I. - kaseido/NeoTokyo GitHub Wiki

10 -12 Thatcher

The dosed moss Star ingested has kicked in, and she’s starting to see memories, as real as if she was actually there. The team suspects there’s going to be a song out of it: “Trippin Balls On Information Moss” A lot of conceptual theremin and then the bass drops. That’ll be the name of the docudrama with Shift. The actual soundtrack title will be like “the pearly gates opened wide,” it won’t explicitly reference drugs but everybody will know.

Your well-manicured fingers are steepled before you as you sit at a conference table – once commonplace, now the mahogany literally worth far more than gold. A panorama window looks out on the Earth from orbit. You explode in anger: the Arasaka fools ruined everyone! They should stay and grub in the radioactive dirt like peasants! It’s not enough that you’re outvoted; the others at the table literally turn from you and continue their plans as if you weren’t there. Just a flash – cloning labs, tubes filled with bodies floating in liquid. And then you run! Wen-Yi, choking on his bitterness as he bows to the ancient gaijin. (You know that face! it’s the Netwatch director, but male, and even older). Hidden Arasaka once again has suppressed the work, taking what they want and forcing BSP’s alternative approach to shut down. But they missed the secret manufacturing facility on Yamato Station, and the data backup at the tourist noodle shop. You’re a middle-aged woman in some sort of very well equipped if old-timey lab. Sirens are wailing. An older man in a business suit trots into the lab. “Leave it! You need to get to the shelter now!” But you don’t leave it. They think it’s a foolish dead end: they’re pursuing a cybernetic solution. But you’re sure the key to recording memory is biochemical. You just need the right storage medium. Still, it is time to go. You pack up notes and vials into a titanium suitcase. Finally, you carefully take off and fold your lab coat, leaving it on the bench – the Arasaka logo neatly centered as you were taught. Wen-Yi again, recently, overcome with melancholy, looking down at the bonsai, fully believing it will be safe in the care of the strange, devious pop star who drove his sister beyond all reason. Good enough to choose her, right there – but she’s a legacy of the centuries-long battle herself, and has a needed perspective that he quite lacks. You’re standing on a yacht. You know it to be Tokyo Bay. The railing is cold and clammy beneath your hands. The horizon is barely beginning to glow lavender, but you turn from it – and there is a searing flash. Your vision is gone. The last thing you saw was your beloved city beginning to burn. The intense memories fade, but Star still hears – and is recording –a deafening cacophony of voices.

“Who’s got the popcorn? Are we ready for some story time?” Carbide was not aware of the need for popcorn. He’s got half a bag of kibble in the workshop – Paragon can put some butter on it. Vir has electrolytes and vodka.

“In fairness, have you been post-trip and required popcorn before?” “Have you let anyone know post-trip popcorn was a thing?”

Star projects her braindance directly to the screen on the wall.

“Well, I definitely need to crack that noodle recipe, don’t I?”

Paragon: “Arasaka: they were primarily a military security type firm, but they did a lot of other shit. And certainly their last CEO lived way longer than he should have.” Vir asks about clones in jars?

Carbide wonders if he was the one who looked like the Netwatch director. How the fuck would she know? They didn’t give us pictures! She digs up a photo.

Only the Director is a Soong associated with NeoTokyo in the public record. We are not on good terms with the Director and will not bug her about her ancestor.

Star makes grabby hands to the vodka with electrolytes. The voices are maddening: “When you’re in a club and everybody’s talking to you and you’re trying to think your own thoughts?” She starts humming along with the chatter as she drinks: she’s working on a pretty good song for being super high.

Vir offers Rapid Detox to counteract it, but Star says they probably shouldn’t stop it till they get all the information. “The only thing I can’t turn off is my own brain because it’s all I’ve got left, and not one of you has gone to get me popcorn.”

Doordash and Grubhub are mortal enemy boostergangs. There’s a surcharge for deleting your address from their system, or they’’ll sell it to your enemies. They’re both 100% owned by ConBrands. You have to know which territory you’re in. UberEats held out for a couple hundred years before being burned to the ground.

Carbide will run to the bodega, but can’t promise real popcorn. It’ll be some sort of butter-puff-thing, but it’ll have butter and salt on it. He does the popcorn run. There’s a pull tab on the bag, and it pops in the bag. He got a box of bags. The steam doesn’t bother her, she can’t feel her skin right now. She remembers to turn olfactory and taste back on and eats her popcorn. “I haven’t had popcorn since I was 15 – it was our last movie premiere, and I was allowed one cup because of the weight gain. My nutritionist worked for The Mouse. I think they also didn’t want us to set a bad example.”

“By eating popcorn at the movies?”

“Too much over indulgence, we were role models.”

The movie was “Dancing on the Open Range.” She asks Paragon to pull the footage of the premiere, the audience shots. Dozens of social media feeds and the official PR. One kernel at a time, looking at each one. Twirly inhaled hers, which is why they were limited. Moongleam Fawn ignored hers entirely to be better than Star. Twirly carefully stole Moongleam’s.

Carbide grew up eating what he could steal out of the pantries of abandoned apartments, and even he thinks that’s bullshit. And popcorn’s shelf-stable and you can find it in the back of a lot of pantries. And Paragon wasn’t that limited on calories.

Star lets herself slowly come down, and eats four more bags of popcorn along with the vodka. Paragon starts working on the noodle recipe and having nonsense conversations with Dino about cryptography, and Carbide doesn’t let friends have a bad trip alone. Vir does too, whilst muttering about an obscure religious festival. They think it was inevitable Lady Satan was involved.

Carbide easily untangles the six audio streams, writing a quick program that includes a keyword search, particularly “noodle,” flagged for Paragon’s attention. She gets the whole process, and searches for what octamethyl dicyanoargenate (IV) is. Nothing on that, but similar chemicals are used in anti-senescence and memory. She takes the plain-text version onto a data chip, wipes it from Dino’s memory, leaving only the noodle recipe on him. She puts it on three different data chips. One goes into Dino’s padding, one stays with her, and the third goes to Carbide. He puts in an RFID-blocking pouch and sticks it behind some plastic drawers for holding tool bits: Paragon doesn’t know where that one goes. This way there’s no way the decoded version will make it onto the net – without physically tearing Dino or Paragon apart.

Paragon: “OH GOD ARASAKA IS NETWATCH!” They recall it was Antoine who wanted it, for leverage over Wen-Yi.

Star checks the recordings for fashion to date them, and then sends them to Friction for a true expert. The one with the Soong was the season in which her parents were killed. She knows from Antione that Wen-Yi signed the kill order, and concludes Hidden Arasaka forced him to as part of suppressing the work. Carbide says it’s possible the noodle recipe has to do with her parents’ work. She makes an additional copy for Dino’s pooch.

She’s going to actually ask permission first! If Netwatch is Arasaka, she feels she should let Killswitch know. The Gnu would get a real kick out of unearthing Arasaka, or pissing them off. And it’d be a good idea for someone outside the group to be in possession. Carbide says netrunners don’t have impulse control, but ask them to sit on it till they’re off planet. She says, “open in case of death or departure.” He knows what an actual emergency is. Carbide’s good with that.

Not a copy for Night: Paragon doesn’t trust her definition of “emergency” – “Arasaka exists and they’re still dicks” qualifies right off. Even Carbide thinks that’s information you don’t want to handle to a bunch of radical communists: they want it sat on till they’re out of the firing range, and handing it to The Party is not going to do that. But they do need to tell her about this job.

They pour coffee into Star as they discuss around her. They need to explain again. She’s good with it. She’s got a wicked hangover. “Turns out, when all you are is a brain, overclocking your brain is bad” She’s just automatically drinking whatever Vir hands her – she’s reverted to autopilot “nutritionist control.”

Star gets a call through all her filters, doesn’t recognize who it’s from, and forwards it back to her agent. “If it’s important, I will get a call back form my agent, who will tell me.” 27 seconds later she gets a call from her agent. “That was a senior executive at Izanami, and she does not sound patient!”

Oh yeah – Star remembers Vanta talking about a possible job from her. She calls back, but she’s still so hung over she’s not really tracking.

Avril hangs up on her.

“Oh. Yeah, fair. Vir! I have to be not hung over!”

RapiDetox and Star is sober and full of caffeine. She calls back. They’ll meet at the aquarium hotel: they wouldn’t let her sleep in there! They’re all still salty about that. Star always pays for the day you get there and the next day: she pays for days, not nights, of course. She arranges a time for the next day. She worked yesterday! She’s giving herself the night off to go dancing, and give Paragon and Carbide the chance to dig into the potential mission.

They all go. Star dresses them appropriately for nondescript. They do an amazing job. Give Carbide a hairbrush and a comb for his beard, and he’s unrecognizable. Avril is “I am trying to keep my identity hidden but want you to know I’m important enough that you’d recognize me.”

In a hotel suite, Avril briefs them. Star takes the Nate Ford position in the chair.

She’d like to hire your team for some investigative work. She explains that Izanami isn’t quite like the other members of the Temporary Committee. Nobody trusts the people who theoretically can weaponize the entire planet, so they have to put up with an immense level of corporate espionage. Now, not being able to keep a lot of secrets is more or less fine. But somebody’s engaging in active operations against them. Their internal security is investigating, but they can’t go after another one of the big nine – the most they can do is burn an agent, discreetly. An outside team, though, could act more decisively. She understands extreme prejudice isn’t their thing, and that’s good – but extreme humiliation would be greatly rewarded. Since two – two? – of you already have Izanami corporate ID’s, she can move you around in the system to give you substantial physical and Net access. But remember, those IDs can’t be tied to any retribution! She’ll pay the team NB500/day each that they’re working the case, but wants results in a couple weeks, at least. She explains that their facility in Shimizu was hit once, corp HQ twice, and Baikonur once -the incursion you investigated. They were all erasures of satellite reconnaissance data of abandoned areas of wilderness. The one Vanta hit was an Izanami forestry center, abandoned for decades, but really a forestry center.

Carbide says something must have happened in those areas. Two areas have roads. He says you can get a lot done by hiking in and out.

They didn’t discover the deletions in time to get physical evidence. Carbide says that’s not their skill set anyway. If they find out who, they’ll find out why. He thinks it’s an interesting job, Star thinks they’re well capable of doing it.

Avril offers first day’s fees. Paragon set up the cash pipeline, but Carbide handles the actual arrangements: he’s credible as the token adult white man. Star doesn’t handle the intake.

Carbide thinks they do know a two-man crew that’s been in the wind for a while. Does a two man crew with experience in corporate infiltration sound like anybody they know? Vir thinks it’d be fun to humiliate them at this point. But they’re used to working their way out of the shit. Paragon thinks they might actually have to kill them. Carbide respects the hustle. Vir doesn’t think they’d be the kind of people to be smuggling people. He thinks they might not be in on that angle, but hired to do corporate espionage and embarrass Izanami – and that’s right up their alley. If it were anyone but them, they might be able to turn them by pointing out they’re working for people who’re kidnapping kids. Star says they weren’t completely awful last time, just still trash. Paragon thinks it might be worth a try.

Vir and Carbide think they do have another contract for something that is missing…. This could super be human trafficking. A shuttlecraft or helo, you could move people around the backwoods real easy, as long as you delete the satellite survey data, which they did.

There will be an f2f with Killswitch for the basic lowdown. it will also ensure killing Paragon or wiping her mind won’t solve the problem. There’s no one in a better position to stick it to Netwach if it has to – that’s a real long knife in his hands.