LogEclipse Phase: Profits of Doom-Jason-3

Game log for the 2016/10/30 session of Eclipse Phase: Profits of Doom, as taken by Jason

Profit talks to Linda Chau to try to pull some of the heat off the investiation of his client and the murders. Since Selena's a logical suspect, Chau actually feels very reluctant to let her slide, at least until the victim's consciousness is initiated on the server and they've run a lineup. Selena officially pays Profit a credit so that there's no question whether he's her employee. Of course, since he's not an attorney, he still can't be in the interview room with her. The cops take Profit and Selena to the precint and put her in said interview room, where she's told to wait for the lead detective to come for her.

Profit calls Daryl, who conferences in Edward, and they agree that Selena needs legal help, not just some ego hunters. Edward knows someone who knows someone but it will take some time to get the lawyer there. Selena waits for about 20 minutes for Shau Ming to arrive with entopic display. She asks Selena to run her through what happened, but Selena says she doesn't know anything. Shau makes it simple for her: tell me what happened, in order. She tries to demur because she's tired and she's told the story before. She also pleads stress. And thirst. And hunger. Shau's not having it - Selena can eat and drink when the interview ends. Selena's refusal to repeat her story triggers Shau's detective instincts. This is ironic since she really has no information that would help. Selena changes the subject, asking why he's interrogating her and not the victim, and Shau looks uncomfortable. His stammered explanation doesn't seem wholly persuasive. Selena pushes to be released so long as she doesn't leave town. Shau's making skeptical noises when attorney Howard Geddes comes in and orders Selena not to say anything. He's tall, athletic, handsome, distinguished, hair tied back in a ponytail, and generally a blatantly optimized morph for courtroom work. Shau doesn't want this sort of nuisance and turns Selena loose, with a word to advise him if she goes anywhere.

Profit meets her on the corner and they return to Profit's house.

Edward goes snooping in cop files to see what's holding up the infomorph sleeving of the victims. He gets security access to their files and finds the files he needs immediately. They've identified Ying Hua based on the morph, because according to the notes from the cops' re-sleeving team, the ego in that morph was heavily damaged. The ego seems completely insane, and every attempt to sleeve her has resulted in gibbering madness. The male victim, Bai Shi had a kill switch on his stack, and so he can't be revived. Tentative conclusion: he worked for the Triads. The other female victim has the same ego troubles as Ying Hua. In fact, they think it's another instance of the Ying Hua ego. They haven't tried older backups yet because they haven't located them, if they exist. Her morph had no contact notes.

Edward goes looking for Bai Shi with his skip tracing skills. He calls his contact Priyanka Chatterjee and looks for registration info, delivery records, and any other infotrails he might have left behind. Bai generally hangs out in an area near Haze. Maybe he works there. That would be the obvious connection, which he tries to verify with online research. Yep, there's footage of Bai entering the employees only area. Edward also finds out that the call to the cops was triggered by Bai's deadman switch as well.

Daryl tries to ring up his Triad buddy, Cao Shan. Cao wants no part of this. He doesn't want to know that there is a this to want no part of. He thinks maybe someone called Berrigan would know. Berrigan's a guy who works at Haze. He's gone in there and tried to impress people... and impressed them, more than once. Nobody else in Profit, Inc has ever even heard of this guy.

Profit goes looking to see who might have wanted to have sex with the two copies of the same Haze dancer at once, and with one copy in an inferior morph. Nada.

Selena, who has training in psychosurgergy, thinks this sort of insanity would probably happen when forks that have been apart for a long time get merged. The cops didn't find an ego bridge in the apartment, though, and nobody else left so far as we know.

Daryl goes to Haze and knocks on all the various doors until someone opens one. He asks for Barrigan and whoever opened the door leads him in to the main floor of the club. There's an African-Americna with dreads behind the bar, and a pasty white guy sitting there. The white guy has alopecia. He makes it clear that they don't want our help, that they're going to desl with Bai Shi, and that the cops will never find him. Edward thinks that means that Bai Shi never got resleeved. Daryl thinks it means the Triads have committed themselves to finding Bai Shi's new morph before the cops do.

Edward goes back and looks at the logs for Selena's door, and finds that it was hacked by the same Ying Hua pleasure pod that died on her floor. She hacked it really fast, despite being completely insane at the time. Edward realizes, but does not share, that this only makes sense if Ying Hua was an AGI, and Selena draws the same conclusion a moment later. If an AGI's in a pleasure pod, that was obviously slavery.

Edward goes looking for the AGI on the mesh. Of course, he doesn't have any code for the AGI, so he doesn't have any clues to go on... but the cops do. Time to hack the law again. That done, Edward's Autonomist buddy ((npcref|Coral-C}} goes off to search his DB, and then calls back to say that the code came from an AGI called Alice. She used to be parental control / security software that became sentient about four years before the fall. There are a couple instances running in the Mitre station where Edward's friend works. They're usually friendly. For one of them to kill someone would be... aberrant. The friend can't help further without a lot more detail, like maybe a full ego dump.

Coral-C sends Edward the source code for Alice. Selena helps him compare the original source to what they pulled out of Ying Hua. Friendlines was increased further, and human sexuality added in. The egos from the pleasure pod and the splicer seem to be almost the same, with pleasure pod Ying Hua about six weeks younger than splicer Ying Hua. It looks like the pleasure pod Ying Hua was only booted up about 12 hours before death. So, um, what happened to the ego that had been dancing in that pleasure pod for weeks before then? Suddenly it hits Profit, with his vast expertise in prostitution, that assuming Ying Hua is a slave AGI that they're putting in a pod, they wipe the ego every night and reload it every day, so that she never gets burnt out. Daryl tries to ask around and see who does underground psychosurgery or fork reintegration, but the buddy he calls doesn't even like being asked about that sort of crazy Nine Lives shit and pretty much hangs up on him.

Edward tries to piece together the memories of pleasure pod Ying Hua. He finds evidence of a narco-algorithm there. It makes her feel like dancing pleases her god. Then she had something of a divine revelation and went to find it. Edward does some analysis and discovers that the divine relevation was actually an error, caused by someone else trying to log in with the same ID. He checks logs of Bai Shi's apartment and finds that there was an ecto lying out, and that the splicer body had no mesh inserts. Presumably the splicer body had never been able to get on the mesh before, but seized the opportunity to use the ecto, and that triggered the error that nobody ever expected.