Hopefully, someone will survive getting off of Thought on Monday. Since Bartelby has a TacNet, as long as one person gets their stack off the station in one piece, everybody will at least be able to catch up in terms of evidence and how they died.
Either way, it shouldn't take us too long to see how that plays out, debrief, and nominate for rez points. Then we'll just being the merry chase to figure out what happened. Here's the introduction to the plot thread y'all chose to follow last week.
THE BLACK CAT
FOR SERVICE: CONTACT LAM CONG DUNG OF GERLACH FOR TRANSPORT TO C-9 MANUFACTURER
This AR spime was attached to the dedicated fabricator for the Augustine AI on Thought, or what was left of Thought. Lam Cong Dung, a cell leader in the Nine Lives criminal organization, was responsible for the shuttle that brought victims for Cognite’s experimentation, and now it appears she knows something about the manufacture of the AI. Considering the hellish events that occurred on the station, one could do worse for leads than a criminal mastermind responsible for an illegal machine intelligence.
But going after Lam means going after Nine Lives, the most feared criminal enterprise in the system. Nine Lives doesn’t just kill you: they torture 200 forks of you and then reintegrate them into a single, insane mind. They lock you in Kafka-esque hells through psychosurgery. These are some bad people, and in the Morningstar Constellation, they are pretty much the only thing keeping the government independent of the Consortium. So, make that bad people with desperate, powerful friends.
Lam already knows something is up. She wasn’t feeling great about the unusual number of crazies signed on for the last Amnesia Express, and then The Three-squared Chance never came back. She’s on the run now, shutting down operations on Gerlach as fast as she can.
Will Firewall catch her before she ditches Gerlach for parts unknown? And if they do, will they get the information they need about the disturbing events on Thought, or merely entangle themselves in the seedy underworld of transhuman slavery?