LogEclipse Phase: Profits of Doom-Jason-2

Game log for the 2016/10/09 session of Eclipse Phase: Profits of Doom, as taken by Jason

We're still laying low at Peackock Tower. Selena's got her mesh shut down, and is chowing down on Comfurt and trying not to dwell on her woes. Edward's trying to research the situation. Daryl digs through news feeds and public police records and finds that there's nothing out there about Selena. We really expected a different result. Daryl promptly tells Prophet and Selena that social media has nothing on their case. Prophet asks Callisto to make sure there's nothing about to go down right outside the Tower, but the sheer volume of incoming surveillance data means she's going to need time to check that out. Selena, a media expert, tries to figure out why our adversaries would be playing it that way. She concludes that either she isn't a suspect, or they're made a deliberate decision to keep the entire investigation quiet. The former option only makes sense if whoever made this frame really sucks at their work; the latter only makes sense if Selena's enemy is connected. Prophet knows that the cops, right now, ought to be downloading the victim's stack and asking it to testify. If they're doing that right now wih Ying Hua's brain, it is dimly possible that they're already cleared Selena... if you believe in good luck. Prophet prevails on his old friend Cao Shujuan to get a room in her name in which we can stay, getting us off the grid. We move between rooms using the service elevator and corridors, so at least it will be harder for the bad guys to find the surveillance footage and run facial recognition on it.

About an hour later, the police blogs announce that two bodies came out of Selen'a building, names not yet released. Loose ends: all tidied up. Prophet decides to go to a known cop bar called O'Connors, and see if we can't find someone who feels talkative after a few beers. Prophet gets a beer and makes conversation with his buddy Francis, while Daryl gets a stool with a view of the door and a beer of his own. Francis doesn't know but Lois was, and she's sitting right there. She thinks it was a lover's quarrel, though it's not clear how the guy got stabbed but the girl got choked out, but of course the real story will come out when they restore the stacks as infomorphs and put them in interrogation. Lois says the lead detective is Shau Ming, and he's at the crime scene. Daryl offers to go make contact while Prophet drinks with the po-po.

When Daryl arives, there's a cruiser and presumably some unmarked cars there. The cop in the lobby tells him that there's no room for freelancers on this one. On the plus side, he doesn't stop Daryl going up, either. Turns out that the cops have the room across from Selena's blocked off. The door's closed, the reporters know nothing, and Daryl's attempts to convince the reporters to try some procedural games with the cops don't really go anywhere. Daryl gives up and tells seedy reporter Suzy Loo that he's a cut rate PI looking to drum up work. She heard, through the grapevine, that one of the bodies had a deadswitch. No revival.

Edward has gotten the victim's history - heavy debt, credit history showing she came to Erato from Nectar, otherwise fairly nondescript. Deeper examination shows she got the debt when she got sleeved. She had been a computer expert for a hypercorp, someone bought her debt, and she moved to Erato. He rolls the surveillance footage for Selena's hallway forward, and finds a shot of the Ying Hua sleeve. knife already in her back, walking across the hallway from apartment 802 to Selena's 801. She didn't enter any sort of security code for Selena's apartment, just walked right in. Since Edward hacked surveillance during our escape, there may be other events that we missed. Edward suggests that maybe the murder was meant to flush Selena out into the open, rather than getting her into jail. Edward offers up "his cousin's house" as a safe house, and Daryl goes back to the hotel to pick her up, while Prophet also goes to ask her for her door code (and also to perform a Comfurt intervention).

Prophet, knowing the access code, heads off to Selena's apartment. The cop logs him up to apartment 801, and nobody interferes with his access to the room. The dead body's still there, so Prophet comes running back out to get the cops. The cop uses his police override to get in, clears the room, and tells Prophet to leave the crime scene. The cops are calling for backup and now shit's going to get hectic. Since Prophet's a witness, they keep him away from the reporters.

Shau Ming comes over to interrogate Prophet, and wonders why he's discovering dead bodies in his life again. Of course he doesn't know where Selena is right now, but he'd be happy to join the investigation and help find her. They stash Prophet in 802 to keep him out of the reporters' way, and after much harassment, provide him a glass for his whiskey and some gloves. This gives him a great chance to observe the scene. He uses his drink as an excuse to hit the head and search that room, but finds nothing.

Daryl stops on the way to pick up Selena to buy her a clean ecto, then escorts Selena to "Edward's cousin's house." Once in a safe location, Daryl suggests that she should call Prophet, creating a reason for her to know the cops are looking for her, and then she can return home and talk to the law. That works nicely and gets all the journalists really going.

Edward broadens the time scope of his surveillance search and sees Ying Hua go into 802 a few hours earlier. He sees an Asian man come in and out of 802 as he goes back several days, but never sees a sign of the other dead woman.

Selena enters the building while Daryl waits well outside. The lobby cop sends Selena straight up to Shau Ming. Prophet offers her a sandwich as she arrives.

Edward digs into ownership of Ying Hua's indenture, and discovers that it's owned by an investment firm called Lane & Ewan, and specifically someone named Ray Dawn. Ray's an alias. No such person exists on Luna.

Shau eventually caves to Selena and Prophet and lets him sit in on her interview. He gets to watch her lie her ass off to the law and stone cold get away with it. Meanwhile, Edward works in a flurry to back-hack surveillance to make her alibi stand up. Her story's pretty flimsy but she tells it with complete convictionand no sign of deception, leaving Shau no choice but to accept it at face value. He gives her the usual cop "don't leave town" speech and then drops the Columbo "one more thing" by asking why one of her bots had its memory core pulled. She has no idea, of course, and Shau still doesn't see any sign of deceit. Prophet takes her back to his place, and Daryl once again scouts ahead. He sees nothing... but Prophet notices a car following them. He notifies the team and Edward begins coordinating tactics, directing them to a spot where Daryl can get there first and set up an ambush. Things go badly. Prophet can't manage to activate self-drive and the taxi pulls over to get rid of him. Daryl has to scramble to catch up by rerouting his robo-taxi.

Now Prophet and Selena are on foot, trying to get away from a silver sedan. Edward routes them in ways meant to be inconvenient to vehicles. The traffic works in their favor and they pull away by running through some stores and a restaurant. Prophet calls Shau and soon police drones are swarming the area.

Daryl sees the sedan circling the block, undisturbed by the cops. He tries to follow it to keep an eye on it. Shau sends a car to pick up Selena and Prophet, but he refuses to get in unless Shau's in the car, personally, and insists on staying mobile until Shau arrives. Shau threatens to arrest Prophet, and Prophet curses him and tells him where they can meet instead. Eventually the silver car bails, and Daryl sees no sign that anyone is following them.

Selena and Prophet arrive to find grumpy cops waiting for them, lead by Lt Linda Chau. Prophet insists on going back to his office and having Selena retreat to his bedroom. Linda asks Prophet for a full explanation, and gets told that he has no idea for her pains. Prophet, hoping to avoid lying, sticks narrowly to the question of the car following them, and truthfully says that he has no idea why anyone's following them, unless it has to do with the dead body. Chau's suspicious and wants them to come down to the station. Edward, seeing all this go haywire, dumps surveillance footage of Ying Hua crossing from room 802 to room 801, then spends some F-rep to have the media accept it without media attribution. As a result, Chau's interrogation gets interrupted when social media gets the story and goes wild with discussion of a triple homicide. Twenty minutes later, they social media have Ying Hua's name and goes wild with speculation about the crime and possible culprit. Clio can't even keep up with incoming requests, but all Serena's saying is that she has no public comment and she's fully cooperating with police investigation.

Edward goes looking for the silver car's digital trail. The ID on the car was fake, of course, but tracing mesh IDs shows it was Triads who put it into the system. He locates the car and tells Daryl to go do some forensic processing on it, but Daryl doesn't know a dang thing about forensics, forcing Edward to do it himself. Unbeknownst to Daryl, Edward will now have to sleeve for the first time ever. Hah hah! It's a rough trip, this first time in the physical universe, and it will be a couple days before he gets comfortable in this basic pod. People are crossing the street to get away from him. At one point he yells at one of them, "Don't poor shame, bitch!" He nonetheless goes to the garage and spends a long time trying to find the silver sedan. Having found it, he hacks the surveillance, looks at the logs of its arrival, and sees a man and a woman get out of it. He grabs their images for future identification. He tries to get in, but can't figure out the electronic security system on the car. He does use the cameras in the garage to confirm that the people who got out didn't try to wipe it down or otherwise eliminate all trace of their presence. It also looks like the driver may have left the key in the car - he certainly left something. Edward tries to lift fingerprints from the outside of the car but 20 minutes later he's still flailing around, and he sees that the toner he brushed onto the car is being removed. There's a cleaner nanoswarm working on the car. Apparently what the guy took out of his pocket was a cleaner nanoswarm. Edward tries again to jimmy the lock, fails, and then, disgusted, breaks the car window with the brick and then "runs" away. He then goes to buy some brisket and leave it for Daryl. He reports the whole business to Daryl and tells him about the food.