Iga's Blog - The Song Kai Flower

Shortly after we arrived on Titan we were contacted by a Professor Ming from the TAU (Titan Autonomous University). He offered us a job in return for restoring our lost gear, paying for re-sleeves and any egocasting we might need during the mission. He wanted us to locate a colleague called Tara Yu who had been missing for a month. She had gone on an infiltration mission to recover some military hardware that was purportedly related to a Titan called Myrmidon. He wanted us to track her down, ascertain her status if alive, recover her cortical stack if dead, and if necessary continue or assist her search for the missing hardware.

We did some social media research and discovered that she had called in favours from two people, Mason Wang and Morteza Bey and investigated a crime syndicate called the "White Khahns" which had originated as Triad gang, and a former member called Nia Zheng. She also had several forks egocast to the Vishnukam station in Earth orbit to interview people and research the missing Myrmidon hardware. Vishnukam station had been the scene of a riot in the past because the Thai Government had needed to evacuate a lot of its people from Thailand to the habitat and forced them all into Infomorphs without their consent, which led to the riots when the news leaked out. After the riot, the White Khahns had cut a deal with some of the staff there to help with running the habitat. The Song Kai Flower habitat was also run by them. Then slightly over a month ago, Yu egocast to Casa Arturo, and never returned.

We created a simluspace meeting room to contact Wang, Bey and Zheng. From Wang we discovered that he had built Yu a custom infiltration robot called Achilles and an AI called Tortoise to infiltrate a habitat called Song Cai Flower which was controlled by the White Khahns, but he lost contact with his robot at the same time that Yu went missing.

Bey knew Yu through his Lover Anton Saul. From Bey we learned he wrote some infosec and infiltration software to aid her, and was to send a fork with her on a shuttle to oversee her mission while she was on board the Song Cai Flower. After his fork left for the mission Bey egocast to his home, a garden habitat. His habitat was subsequently attacked by creatures which might have been Ex-humans. Following the attach he was re-sleeved from a backup as his cortical stack wasn't recovered. His fork never returned form the mission.

Bey also showed us some footage which had been recorded by nano cameras deployed inside the flower and transmitted back to a secure store. It showed a White Khahns enforcer by the name of Dexter Vo eating noodles as well as Tara Yu entering the ship in a chameleon suit along with her robot. A hideous man-like creature, possibly an Ex-human was also recorded. The creature did not spot Yu or the robot for the period of the video recording. He also offered us access to some massively corrupted data which was beyond anything he had encountered before. He believed it had been infected with a virus and warned against accessing it.

From Zheng we learned that Yu had been asking him about the White Khahns. He offered to help us infiltrate the Song Cai Flower if we could retrieve his fathers cufflinks that he left behind on the flower prior to him leaving the gang. He mentioned that the White Khahn's attitudes had changed and there was even rumours of cannibalism. He told us what he knew about the Song Cai Flower and gave us his infiltration plan.

We decided to make an assault on the Song Cai Flower and Prof. Ming arranged for us to be egocast to Casa Arturo after making backups. There we resleeved into some combat morphs. I got a reaper.

We waited several days for a SLOTV to be ready. Half way to the Song Cai Flower we got a proximity alert. It was caused by a ship anchored to an ice asteroid. We moved to investigate the ship further. It had a stealthy profile. Its engines were overpowered for its size and it had large fuel tanks. I scanned it with a T-emitter. There was no one on board, and objects were floating in the cabin including a Flexbot. There was a morph in the cockpit but it was not moving. We crossed to the ship and found it was running on low power. The morph was Bay's fork and had been shot at close range. The cortical stack had been removed. The starboard airlock had been blown from the outside with plasma torch.

Sai Cong FlowerI hacked into the computer and started downloading the logs but aborted when unknown code was detected in the datastream. Instead I got the logs to play on a screen. Sequences showed Bey, Yu, and a robot were board. The ship was Docked with the asteroid then moved to dock with the Song Cai Flower. We saw Yu ordering Bey to return to asteroid after dropping them on the Song Cai Flower. Fusion rockets had been added to the hull of the Song Cai Flower recently, salvaged from two SLOTV type vessels. They were not fully fitted yet. The SLOTVs from which they had been removed were still docked to the Song Cai Flower. The umbilical was pierced in several places and in a vacuum.

ImmolatorThe log recorded telemetry from Yu. She reported proceeding with caution, entered a utility bay and crept around. She saw an Ex-human there. She then entered a life support pod and went through a large airlock into a machine shop. She found hardware fragments stored in a bin which looked to be large chunks of a military satellite. Yu reported it might be Myrmidon hardware She attempted to wirelessly connect to it. There was a flash of static and everything went dead. After Bey had returned to the asteroid the outer hatch was blown open and three Ex-humans boarded. They killed Bey and popped his stack.

We returned to the SLOTV and continued to the Song Cai Flower. We docked and entered. I detected human sitting and working in utility bay using a T-emitter. Lucas rushed him, causing him to flee through an airlock to the reactor room. Lucas jammed the door shut. We then went into the machine shop where Lucas shorted the bot charging bay. We found the bins containing the Myrmidon hardware under a workbench. A box about 1 ft cube was on the workbench. It had a porous surface. We took bin of parts onto the SLOTV.

We then moved into the crew taurus. It was filled with junk. There were 4 spokes leading to crew quarters where we detected 3 heat sources with plasma weapons. We burst in and attacked three Ex-humans. I drilled one with a laser pulser, killing it instantly. Nova killed the second then I killed the last. Lucas, Cornelius and I took the plasma rifles. I had a vision of trying to create the box we saw in the workshop and detected an attempted virus infection, so quickly ejected the rifle. The others did not detect anything amiss.

Ketrah found a cortical stack in the corner of the room. We found Zheng's cufflinks in a bag in his quarters while we searched the rest of the ship. We also found and recovered Yu's robot. It had been deactivated. We put the stack in a servitor robot. It was Beys fork. He was disoriented. HE was plugged into the ship at which point he screamed and the servitor bot shut down.

We returned to Casa Arturo after leaving the stacks from the ex-humans on the stealth ship. We put the cufflinks, Beys stack and the hardware parts in storage and ego cast back to Titan where we reported to Ming and told Zheng where he could collect his cufflinks. He said he would destroy the Song Cai Flower, recover the stealth ship and everything else. He also revealed he worked for firewall and offered for us to join the organisation.