Answers and Amnesia

March 27, m0039, continued

The embassy cameras show the visitor; it appears to be the cyberdoll cybershell that was acting as security at the House of Fragrant Jasmine when they visited there. The team agrees to meet it, and it is ushered through the embassy's security systems (which don't detect any weapons or other threats) to a meeting room.

There, it initially greets them with the stiff formality of a low-empathy LAI, but having established that they are still interested in the case of Herr Weber-Markt, it pauses for a very brief moment, and then begins talking a little more fluently; it's apparent that it's now being teleoperated, presumably by Mistress Zeng. In any case, it declares that the House of Fragrant Jasmine has now come by information regarding the missing gentleman; he is well, and it would seem unfortunate if anyone were to worry too much about him. The House of Fragrant Jasmine does not want trouble - they are a legitimate business, after all. It might useful if, when Herr Weber-Markt reappeared, someone could speak to him and make sure that he understands that it is in his interest if not too much is said.

Jianwei says that this can certainly be passed on to the gentleman.

The cyberdoll states that Herr Weber-Markt may well be on a bench in the south-western public greenhouse in half an hour's time, and departs.

The team extract such equipment as seems appropriate (especially surveillance swarms for Vajra and a pistol or two for Florence) and which is legal for them on American territory, and head out themselves. They guess that, as he isn't Mars-adapted, Weber-Markt may well be in the Earth-normal pressurised section of the greenhouse - and they are correct. He is sitting on a bench, stroking one of the lightly genetically modified cats that are free to run around that section, and looking a little vague. Jianwei approached him and greets him.

"Oh - you know me?"

Jianwei explains that people have been concerned for him, and that they have been looking for him as EU representatives, and asks what happened to him.

"Oh - you know me?"

It soon becomes evident that Weber-Markt isn't entirely compos mentis, but has severe short-term memory problems at this point - so the team quickly summons an ambulance and books space in a hospital. After a moment, Aunty diagnoses Transient Global Amnesia - which occasionally occurs naturally, probably as a result of momentary neurological or blood supply failures, but which is really quite rare. In fact, these days, it's surely much more likely to be the result of some kind of nanodrug - emulating the triggers for the condition is actually quite easy. Such nanodrugs are generally illegal, of course.

The team gets Weber-Markt to a hospital (checking as they go that his wearable virtual interface is in his bag - although currently powered down), and the hospital runs a series of scans and ends up agreeing with Aunty. The nanodrug used on him was a smart piece of design (but then, there are several functional specifications for this sort of thing on the TSA Web); it's already largely broken down to barely-identifiable components. When the team asks for a detailed blood check for other nanodrug remnants, the hospital is happy to oblige, and remarks that, by the looks of the results, the patient may well have been treated with a high-grade "cleaner" treatment - not only are there no other nanodrugs in his system at present, but the remains of any that were there have been cleaned out by something very efficient.

Anyway, the good news is that the patient is rapidly recovering from his condition, and in fact, after running the obligatory array of tests, the hospital have no basis on which to keep him in. So the team escort him back to the embassy. By now, having recovered most of his memory function, Weber-Markt is becoming entirely coherent and distinctly taciturn. But rather than pester him too much at first, the team concentrates on his wearable. With his consent, Vajra dismantles it, takes a digital image of its (routinely encrypted) memory, reassembles it, and boots it up. It seems to be fine - but it turns out to have been restored, doubtless very recently, from the last backup that Weber-Markt took prior to his evening adventure.

For some reason, the expert psychologist Jianwei is having some difficulty reading Weber-Markt - Aunty actually does better - but it doesn't take any expertise at all to realise that his primary emotion at the moment is embarrassment, maybe with a touch of nervousness - but if the House of Fragrant Jasmine set out to intimidate him, they must have been quite polite about it. Still, the team get enough out of him to decide that that establishment is probably, if not provably, responsible for his disappearance.

But he doesn't want to talk much, so they agree that he should return to his hotel. Florence escorts him there in a taxi - and flirts a little, giving him her Web address and saying "call me if you want when you're feeling better". She'd like to get more information out of him, and she's prepared to put some effort into this. Meanwhile, Jianwei puts a call into the Marshall's office, and she calls him back fairly promptly (she's at work and it's not bar brawl time yet). He and Vajra bring her up to date on the situation, expressing their suspicions about the House of Fragrant Jasmine and possible Triad involvement; when Florence joins in while walking back towards the embassy, she's even more emphatic about this.

However, when she's half-way back, the Marshall breaks away with a mutter of "that's worrying". It seems that she's set some of her systems to monitor camera feeds around the city for signs of Sandy, and he's now been located - entering Weber-Markt's hotel. She doesn't have resources in place to deal with this very promptly, but she's happy if the team can do something...

Florence turns and breaks into a run - that's faster than looking for a vehicle, she decides - while Vajra goes online in search of a taxi. A quick and impressive display of optimised resource management later, one slides up outside the embassy, its doors snapping open as Vajra and Jianwei appear. Hence, they reach the hotel just as Florence is heading up the stairs to Weber-Markt's room on the second floor, having decided that the old-fashioned lift is too slow. Some fast acrobatics in Martian gravity later, she's on the right corridor and sliding smoothly down it to the correct door - but she can't hear anything through it except perhaps faint voices...

Downstairs, the other two are still talking to Marshall Kirkowicz, raising the possibility of getting that door unlocked for Florence - but that would require legal action, so it's quicker for Jianwei to turn his diplomatic skills on the human desk clerk. He's quite smart, it seems; his voice echoes in Florence's ears.

"The door will open on your mark - just say the word."

"Mark!"

Florence enters the room in a diving roll, but takes a fraction of a second to acquire the situation fully. Sandy isn't combat-trained like her, but his basic street smarts are sufficient for him to recognise her as that customer from yesterday, and to make him decide that she must be annoyed with him or something.

"What is going on?" Florence demands.

"You? Look, whatever complaints you have about that stuff..."

"I am an EU agent, assigned to protect Herr Weber-Markt..."

Florence tries to intimidate Sandy into compliance by popping her claws with a snarl, but his nerve - or his stupidity - holds. He rises from the chair he's sitting in, drawing the gun which he has openly on display - it's a large-calibre airgun, the sort usually tagged as a "tangler pistol" but quite capable of firing other specialised payloads. She draws her own 10mm pistol much faster and fires, but he ducks. Then he returns fire, but he's not trained with guns at all, and this is a wild snap shot, so something merely hits the wall near the increasingly panicked Weber-Markt, who's sitting on the bed.

Florence decides that it would be better to take this to close quarters, steps over, and kicks, punching the high heel of her boot into his ribs. He staggers, and she follows up with a hand-claw slash that leaves him bloodied and reeling. Deciding that she doesn't quite want him dead, she activates her zap glove, but he just manages to hold off her first strike with that, and fires again - and misses again. She throws a precise hand-strike that permits no counter, and he drops as high-frequency electricity pulses through his body.

Meanwhile, Weber-Markt has panicked and run, barrelling down the corridor - straight into Vajra and Jianwei. He tries to barge them aside, but his shoulder-charge is ineffectual, and Vajra gets a simple judo hold on him while Jianwei talks him down.

Everyone convenes back to his room and the story comes out. So far as Weber-Markt is concerned,Sandy simply showed up, talked his way in, then began demanding money with large hints of blackmail and a few menaces. Sandy seemed to think that Weber-Markt was responsible for some great inconvenience that he's suffered, and wanted payment in compensation... But Weber-Markt is really quite confused at this point.

Sandy, on the other hand, is recovering from his (literal) shock, only to find an annoyed catgirl sitting on his head and demanding information. (Florence's mood probably wasn't improved by the realisation that his pistol was firing some kind of aggressive nanotech payload - probably not lethal, but likely to have been painfully disabling.) He admits to selling Weber-Markt nanodrugs that were maybe rather stronger than the norm; somehow, this seems to have led to him being visited by someone (the team assume a Triad agent) who demanded that he compensate someone else for Weber-Markt's actions while under the influence. This has made him unhappy. As for the EU team - "I bet it was Consuela put you up to this, wasn't it? Damn idiot ... can't make up his mind what he wants ... complaining about what I get for him..."

"How would she - uh, he - have known about all this, then?"

"Well, he was in Northern Territories the other night."

Jianwei persuades him to provide a photograph of "Consuela's" physical appearance. The team aren't overly surprised to recognise their neighbour, Mika Hernandez. Before they can follow that up, though, they have to deal with Marshall Kirkowicz, who didn't hurry - she picked up enough from their Web feeds to decide that the situation was no longer urgent - but who now appears with salami on rye in one hand and the expression of a cop with paperwork in her near future. Various low-to-medium-weight charges will be thrown at Sandy, and the EU team's report will be taken under advisement in other respects.

So the team head back to the embassy to file a (slightly more comprehensive) report there. Later, when much virtual paperwork has been completed, they return to their apartment block - but Jianwei stops one floor down, and knocks on the door.

"Consuela?"

"You'd better come in," says Mika Hernandez, with a sigh.

Jianwei thanks him for alerting them to the problem with Weber-Markt, while pointing out that it might have been easier if Hernandez had been a little more open - as it was, he (or she) inspired a lot of distracting suspicions and theories. Jianwei maybe hints that the whole case involved a lot more physical danger and Triad activity than perhaps was the case, although his comment of "I don't appreciate having members of my team menaced with guns" is of course entirely truthful; he wants Hernandez to take a little more care, if there's ever a next time. From Hernandez's point of view, though, this was an honest attempt to do a small favour for a neighbour (while doing a large possible disservice to an annoying and unreliable nanodrug dealer), while preserving some personal privacy.

Jianwei leaves it there. "Oh," he says on the way out of the door, "nice avatar programming, by the way."

Hernandez shrugs. "It's just based on an old body scan of myself," he replies.

Footnote: It's not clear if the PCs will ever quite work out exactly what various people's motivations were here, but they came out of the incident feeling far more cynical and concerned about the motivations and actions of the House of Fragrant Jasmine than was entirely justified. On the one side, believe it or not, the House's staff were trying to save Herr Weber-Markt embarrassment.

They may be - at many levels - a perfectly legitimate business, but they're still, when all's said and done, a brothel. One of their selling points is discretion. If they called in the law, or a third party like their insurers, whenever a customer got a little carried away, they'd lose custom. On the other hand, when a paying customer is, as it seems, not entirely himself, then politely restraining him until he recovers his equilibrium, and then settling things quietly, actually counts as doing him a favour.

The fact that Sandy's over-strength disinhibitor took a little while to wear off, while Herr Weber-Markt's credit account wouldn't cover the damage he'd done, meant that this process dragged on a bit longer than expected, which made the situation rather sticky.

(Still, Herr Weber-Markt's behaviour after the team got him back showed that he, umm, was indeed potentially embarrassed.)

And on the other hand... They found that they had a Triad problem of their own.

When they started trying to work out why this customer they had in the very comfortable holding cell (er, private medical unit) somewhere was behaving so foolishly, they realised that he'd been supplied with a not-very-legal nanodrug. So they asked people they knew about this, and said people may just possibly have got annoyed. Not at the House, mind - at whichever moron was dumping that sort of stock on the casual market for the sake of a quick buck. This is exactly the kind of thing that gets law enforcement all worked up, even in Port Lowell. Which is terribly bad for business. So the Tria... people they knew supplied the House with some extra handy nano and asked them to resolve this as quietly as possible. Which they did, using the EU team. (Somebody there might have gone for a more brutal solution, or at least a stronger amnesia nanodrug, but of course the EU team were now known to be sniffing around - so tact was indicated.)

Then Sandy, who was being leant on by the Triads for costing them money, screwed it all up again.

Madame Zang is really feeling quite hard-done-by at this point, please understand. There she is, trying to run a legitimate business without offending anybody, and she's got deranged customers smashing the pleasure units up, the Triads telling her how to run things, a bunch of EU agents barging in and giving Triad hand-signs, and now Marshall Kirkowicz leaning on her. It's not easy in her line of work.

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Afterword: Jianwei comments at some point that he has come out of this with a certain amount of respect for the House of Fragrant Jasmine, who handled this incident in a professional and effective fashion. It's just a shame that their business involves working with the Triads - although unfortunately, that's probably unavoidable.


And somewhere, somebody's wearable makes a random connection and pulls a few seconds of ancient 2D video off the Web. "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown..."