Left on the Beach

May 27, m0039, continued

The team run some more checks on one more point, but determine that there was nothing odd about those marriage partners, so far as they can tell.

At the same time, they are briefing Florence over Web. They tell her to come back to the embassy, and send Dougal an executive summary of events. In response, Dougal and Florence are somewhat scathing about the team's tactics so far.

Anyway, the team continues watching the building, while Vajra begins negotiation for drone hire. Bastion's people start to troop out carrying packs, small items of gear, and so on, and get into the vehicle. The team note a certain odd saminess about these individuals, and Hugo especially notices a lack of body language. They also put a call in to Dr Vartex to ask if a K-10A would be able to detect a bioshell by scent; he thinks that one might be able to, but isn't sure - so he offers to come down to be sniffed by Woju. (Vediovis, his AI, mutters about his boss never resting.) The team heads down to an American bar to wait for him.

Jianwei takes over the task of renting a drone, pushing his luck a little to put it on the embassy budget, and gets use of one just in time for it to observe the bus leaving the building.

At the same time, a message arrives from the embassy's administration systems, which have been smart enough to make an association; there has suddenly been a rush of legal complaints about Bastion
cancelling contracts - legitimately, it turns out, by the letter of their terms of business, but unexpectedly and inconveniently. Jianwei draughts a standard response to such complaints; he doesn't make it especially sympathetic, as the complainants have nothing that will stand up in court.

By now, Vajra is tracking the bus onto Port Lowell's main street, and sees it joining up with second, similar vehicle; he asks for second drone, in case the two go separate ways again, but that only comes slowly, and at high cost.

Then a call comes in from Mars Development Security, who, among many other things, handle security concerns for the MDC. It was directed to the embassy, but the AIs there route it to Jianwei, who finds himslf talking to a slightly bemused human MDS night-duty staffer. It seems that, a few minutes ago, Bastion terminated the lease they had with MDC on their building, effective immediately. Following standard procedures, MDS despatched a spiderbot under LAI control to inspect the building. It promptly discovered evidence of unauthorised high-temperature processes, and called in. Jianwei looks at the imagery it provided, and agrees that the building is showing evidence of a lot of burn marks. Vajra checks the images, and decides that the building's static computer systems especially have been targeted. It looks like someone has been enthusiastic with the thermite, presumably to destroy all traces some kind of data. The MDC will be filing claims for damages.

The team decides that a little more direct investigation is needed, and calls a fast taxi to pursue those minibuses, which are now heading south out of town towards the lake shore. They also call a security company which has its own boats and pay for one to be sent in the same direction, in case this is mass disposal of evidence by dumping in the water.

It may not be, though. Rather later than they should have, Vajra's surveillance systems spot a moderate-sized transport vessel apparently heading for rendezvous with the minibuses. Jianwei tries calling Abril, but Abril stonewalls him, hard.

The team's taxi gets to the lakeside meeting point around the same time as that boat, and Charles  and Florence disembark - and meet two Bastion employees, whose behaviour, body language, and vocal manner are very flatly obstructive. Florence tries to move around them but she finds herself being blocked. Charles dashes towards lake shore, making unspecific but enthusiastic comments about the scenery as he goes, then turns and starts walking towards the boat. One of the Bastion guards moves to intercept him, while Jianwei talks to the other, who is confronting Florence - but he (or it) doesn't react. Jianwei also sends Woju, who's already spotted  a certain blandness to the guards' scent, to film the boat.

Charles wades into the shallow water, as does the guard who is trying to delay him, then heads for the boat. He's more resistant to cold than his antagonist, who now makes an ineffectual attempts to hit Charles with a side-handled baton. Florence dashes over at the sight of this,  and a rather crude brawl ensues. As Florence tries to bear her opponent down, though, she has an unpleasant and unfamiliar experience; his head explodes in her face, without enough force to hurt her, but very destructively. The other Bastion "employee" heads back to the evacuation boat.

Charles attempts first aid on Florence's recent opponent, although it's more or less instantly clear that this is as terminal an incident as one would expect. Looking at what's left of that head, Charles spots that he's apparently dealing with a bioshell here.

Around this time, the boat that the team chartered from another security company shows up; the team asks it to stop the vessel which most of the Bastion people have now boarded, but it hits a jurisdiction problem; that vessel is Chinese-registered, this is more or less unclaimed territory, and there is no proximate cause for citizens' arrest. The crew offer to maintain hot pursuit, but that's all they can do. Jianwei calls Marshall Kirkowicz and try to get her help - but this isn't something she can assist with. No crime appears to have been committed in American territory, after all.

The Bastion staff simply sail away, and a digital ping confirms that Abril is aboard their vessel. Left on the beach with a badly damaged bioshell-corpse, the team can do little but head back to town. The one other thing they can do is rent the minibuses which Bastion have now finished with, putting a clause in the agreement that they are not to be cleaned, allowing a forensic sweep later.

May 28, m0039

By 4am, Jianwei has completed a careful report to the embassy on the incident, recorded the E.U. citizens who were down as working for Bastion in Port Lowell as possibly dead, details still unclear, and gone to bed. At 6:15am, Danteng receives a congratulatory message from the ambassador; he evidently turned up something quite odd here. At 6:30am, she wakes Jianwei to ask about the security company boat, which is still in hot pursuit of the Chinese-registered craft, which seems to be heading for Chinese territory. Jianwei kicks himself for forgetting about that, and calls off the pursuit, then files an extradition request with the Chinese authorities for Abril.

During the day, word comes in that various E.U. citizens who were recently flagged as possibly dead are in fact on their way home from (actually suspiciously similar areas of) the Asteroid Belt, and are denying that they had anything to do with this when questioned by radio. Meanwhile, Bastion has taken to issuing waffly and largely content-free statements, and Jianwei's extradition request filters into the murky depths of the Chinese bureaucracy. However, it's not certain if it will achieve much before Bastion can extract their man from this mess - assuming that they want to, of course.

In due course, the team and their acquaintances work out some idea of what may have been going on. At a best guess, Bastion have been experimenting with LAI-operated highly-networked bioshell security. This would let them use variants of their standard networked security management systems on jobs like they've been working in Port Lowell, and save on personnel overheads. The snag is, of course, that LAI operation of bioshells  is highly illegal in some places, including virtually anywhere under EU jurisdiction, and has memetic problems in many others.

So Bastion middle management set up this long-shot project, probably hoping to get proof-of-concept data and then quietly leave. They have doubtless been borrowing the names of people working in the Belt, presumably paying them a decent amount to take some time off in a Bastion-run facility out there. No doubt, if they could have proved that this LAI-bioshell system could function and not even be noticed by the public, they could have got clearance from their board to start more overt operations in some transhumanist enclaves and stations where this wouldn't cause much trouble. Unfortunately, the embassy team, representatives of a jurisdiction where LAI-controlled human bioshells are seen as an abomination, showed up and started poking around. It's hard to guess what they thought the embassy was up to, but they may have taken it as an attempt to shake them up and maybe warn them off. The trouble was, they'd broken rather a lot of EU laws, so they  couldn't afford to just ignore this. So they decided to get out fast.

Well, at least the team have thrown a spanner in the works of Bastion's illegal operations, and handed the company a major PR headache. Whether LAI-bioshell security guards will ever work as a business model remains to be seen.

(And here, the campaign went on hiatus for a while.)

Staffing Questions

May 24-25, m0039


The team find themselves based back in Port Lowell for a couple of days, with Florence unavailable to assist them because she is spending most of her time in extended consultations with her psychiatrists, and the rest acting as a pilot/driver for a group of European construction engineers who are helping build a new Japanese industrial plant up at Shibetsu which has fallen behind schedule.At the same time, Jianwei decides to proceed with a major upgrade that he has been planning for Aunty, so she is transmitted back to Earth for a substantial code revision, leaving him dependent on the team's other AIs for software support.

May 26, m0039

Meanwhile, Danteng has been seeking to understand how law enforcement works in Port Lowell, as the study group back on Earth with which he works needs a better idea of the interaction between the various private security companies in the town and its multicultural population. It's rather hard to assess how the town's society will behave without a good model of that, and getting one is one of the things that really requires observation on the ground.

Now, his work on this has turned up an anomaly, involving a company named Bastion Incorporated Reassurance - one of the smaller Port Lowell operations. Some research back on Earth showed that they employed an above-average number of European staff (as indicated by tax data). This looked like an opportunity for Danteng to talk to people who'd be inclined to talk to European government representatives, and who must surely have some dealings with the embassy.

However, no such people have showed up on routine embassy records searches, and a search back through the files has shown that the embassy has had almost no dealings with Bastion staff. This is statistically implausible; security staff are normally pretty good at generating consular business, as Jianwei is able to confirm from experience - they run into legal problems, suffer injuries, and so on. Attempts to contact any of these people have also gone badly, meeting oddly uniform attitudes and refusals. Claims about "heavy non-disclosure agreements" sound rather thin in the context.

So Danteng mentions this to the rest of the team, who decide that an anomaly involving multiple European citizens probably merits their attention. Charles, the team's Martian native, has actually heard of the company, which is known in Port Lowell for providing "human-interface" security - people rather than automated systems, where that is what is needed. Its staff are actually quite widely known not to be big talkers - they show up, do the job okay, and go home. He asks around and gets names of some small companies, bars, and the like, who currently employ Bastion's services.

Vajra, meanwhile, does a lot of very successful digging on the Web, finding that Bastion is registered in Switzerland for tax purposes - which is doubtless a flag of convenience registration, but then many companies in 2100 are essentially virtual entities with no fixed abode. Vajra also finds some relevant records regarding Bastion's European employees; there are thirteen such in town at present, plus the local manager, one Jorge Abril.


Things become even more interesting when he checks their data footprints further. They have virtually none. None of the thirteen post, detectably, on any kind of Web forum, or otherwise generate any identifiable on-line traffic. Then, we Vajra checks their residency information, it turns out that they all share the same physical address; a unit flagged, in Port Lowell's rather relaxed property registration system, as combined industrial and residential. This isn't illegal, but is highly eccentric. So Vajra sends a cybershell to drop some surveillance swarms in the vicinity of the building. Observation for a few hours towards the end of the working day shows a few people entering the building as if heading home from work, but not much sign of anyone, say, going out on the town.

Meanwhile, the team have been looking up a little more about the company. It turns out that they operate almost entirely off Earth - often in the Asteroid Belt, in fact, although they have some other offices and contracts on Mars. Mostly, they provide security services for corporate installations - the sort of thing that usually involves heavy automation and specialist cybershells, not human employees on site. Their Port Lowell operation looks anomalous. Anyway, they're definitely a highly distributed semi-virtual corporation.

By now, even Woju is showing brief and intermittent signs of interest in the case. The team decide to exploit their own more or less official status to further this investigation - by launching a snap Health & Safety inspection. After all, the set-up in Bastion's unit does look a bit anomalous in that respect. However, having themselves authorised to conduct such an inspection will take a few hours - in fact, they can't be cleared for the purpose until the next morning. So they decide to place a more detailed watch on the building by planting geophones around it, just in case anything might happen underground as much as anything. Jianwei takes on this task, pretending to be a drunk wandering around the neighbourhood for the benefit of any security camera systems. He's quiet enough, but his drunk act may need work. Still, he doesn't provoke any particular responses. On the other hand, the geophones don't pick up any particular activity as yet.

Jianwei also has to talk to Ambassador Schmidt over the Web to get clearance for the team's sudden promotion to warehouse inspectors. She signs off on this with no more than mildly ironic remarks, and all is set to go in the morning.

May 27, m0039

The decision for the morning is that Charles will go into the building with Woju. and an official-issue inspector's skill set loaded on his implant. Jianwei will remain back at the embassy to preserve a degree of anonymity and to field any complaints that the inspection might generate. Working AI-to-AI, Hugo initially talks his way past the basic NAI at reception, but it becomes uncertain and tells the pair to wait at the door. Woju gets bored with waiting, though, and slips into the building while Hugo is arguing. Charles takes the opportunity to "chase" him.

At around which point, Jorge Abril shows up with his legal support systems running at full power on the local Web. He and the lawyers manage to bog Charles down with a fusillade of red tape, but Charles and Woju retaliate by each claiming to be in charge (Charles says that this is Woju's first day on this job; Woju claims to be "training the new guy"), confusing Abril. Other human Bastion staff - including several of the thirteen Europeans - show up during these proceedings, but only Abril seems to be stressed; watching over the Web link, Jianwei, the trained psychologist, decides that the others are strikingly affectless. At the same time, Woju notes that they all have very similar scents. As a test, the "inspectors" fabricate an excuse to ask several of these people which is their favourite restaurant in the neighbourhood; the replies are all plausible, but all different, and all come after a very slight but discernible pause.

The building seems distinctly, severely sparse as Fifth Wave living quarters go, although Hugo can't find anything to justify further Health & Safety action. Charles and Woju depart, with Woju accusing the ever-enthusiastic Charles of being weird. The party regroup at the embassy to discuss next steps.

As there is clearly something very strange about those Bastion employees, one possibility that arises is to get DNA samples. This could probably be kept just about legal if the action which acquires the sample is not any kind of assault or invasion of privacy; this would need a plan. For now, though, they decide to act on another point of interest; review of the recording of the inspection suggests that all of the Bastion employees have implants. Jianwei slips around to one of the places where one of the thirteen is working, and Vajra uses his systems to remote-ping the Bastion employee's implant. Cross-referencing to records shows that this is not the implant that this individual was previously noted as using.

Looking over other records also identifies three other European Bastion employees who worked at this installation for a while, then apparently returned to Earth. On a hunch, the team analyse their schedules, and find gaps in their travel records - nothing suspicious in itself, but it looks as though those three would have had to take slightly eccentric journeys to leave Mars at the recorded times, reach Earth at the recorded times, and avoid leaving a records trail. All three now seem like normally active human E.U. citizens; interestingly, two of them have married since they came home - which may be coincidence, but which might just count as curious.

Following through all this record searching also locates biometric data for several of these Europeans. In the absence of full DNA tests, these aren't conclusive, but there are slight divergences - just enough to suggest that someone somewhere may be a surgically adjusted fake.

All this takes much of the day. Towards the end, another message comes over the Web; Florence calls to say that she's coming back on duty, effective more or less immediately. Shortly after this, while checking his surveillance swarms, Vajra spots a medium-sized rover, essentially a minibus, pulling up at Bastion's unit.