With the Pebble in the Sky swarm approaching Mars, the party was summoned to a briefing by a Firewall proxy. Meeting in a corner on the Front Row Seating, we were told of a Cognite exec, Danny Jim, working on a project that could present "dire consequences"--besides this, the details were sketchy, the nature of the project still ambiguous.
Huey Lewis hit up some of his hypercorp contacts, asking them for info about Danny Jim (and also asking that they keep quiet about the request for information). Huey was able to get access to some old archives, from a semi-private executive mesh forum. Danny Jim seemed to be a ruthless person (though on the surface friendly); Jim also liked to use fall guys to get blamed for negative externalities of his schemes; and Jim was among the first to start using indents.
Kimiko hit up some of her autonomist contacts for info on Danny Jim. She was able to discover that Jim has made job offers, and offers to buy ego forks, from various autonomists (many/most of whom ended up refusing). Within our swarm, three people had been contacted by Jim: the famed void jumper Nietzsche; the top-notch psychosurgeon Galacia; and the AGI janitor Janitor (with whom we were already acquainted).
Kimiko first interviewed Nietzsche about the offer: it turned out that Danny Jim had offered to buy an alpha fork of Nietzsche, but Nietzsche ended up refusing due to a general dislike of hypercorp types.
Next, the entire party decided to pay Galacia a visit. Galacia was based out of the sub-swarm, "The World Has Yet To Recognize My Genius". That sub-swarm being made up of various "mad scientist" types, resulting that the rest of the swarm made them keep a safe distance away from everyone else. So we had to hitch a ride aboard the Valhalla to get there. As we approached the sub-swarm, Huey, when prompted for our reason for visiting, gave the excuse that he wanted to investigate various neuroscience experiments as they related to the tentacle morph he had observed on the Magical Realm. So we docked with the TWHYTRMG, and made our way through exotic experiments of disembodied brains being speed-grown, before coming upon Galacia.
Galacia had been offered a job by Danny Jim, but ended up refusing: although the terms were quite favorable (unlimited budget for project, room and board paid for, etc), she preferred not to work for the hypercorps: for one, they tended to not allow her more "mad science" methods (Galacia had a reputation of pulling such "pranks" as turning people psychotic); and also, she had moral objections to memory editing. She revealed that the job offer had been about "4 or 5 months" ago, and the return address was from somewhere in the vicinity of Mars.
Finally, the party interviewed Janitor (who was presently cleaning the outside of the IHNIWID). Danny Jim had offered to buy an alpha fork of Janitor, but Janitor, while tempted, eventually decided the bargain was too Faustian. Significantly, Janitor had saved a copy of his correspondence with Jim (despite Jim's request/order that the correspondence be deleted afterwards). Parsing the thick legal-ese, we were able to determine that it was, indeed, Faustian: a copy of Janitor's soul would essentially become the chattel property of Danny Jim/Cognite.
Besides that, we were able to determine that the source of the message was from the vicinity of Mars; so, we assumed Danny Jim was currently living somewhere on the Martian moon, Phobos (the moon being majority-owned by Cognite). We debated for awhile how to get access to the Cognite facilities on Phobos (Huey Lewis, an ex-Cognite official, indicated that it was not just the sort of place you could casually walk into). Huey Lewis also hit up his contact, Nwabudike Morgan. He relayed the information we had found so far. Morgan suggested that Huey should seek assistance from the network of allies that Huey still maintained around the Martian hyperelite types.
The trio of Herpert, Skripatch, and Derpina continued to do some more research (both mesh-based and social). They determined that Danny Jim had made similar offers throughout the system: offering jobs to top people in psychosurgery, neuroscience, etc; and offering to buy ego forks of people who were in the tops of their fields (although for the fork offers, there seemed to be no particular focus area to the talents). More importantly, Derpina was able to pinpoint Danny Jim's location: he was not, in fact, living on Phobos, but instead on the habitat of Nova Timbuk.
Nova Timbuk had been established by the Malian government pre-Fall. After the Fall, a corrupt national treasurer sold the hab to Cognite (before pocketing all the money and subsequently disappearing). It is an O'Neill cylinder with a present population of about 2 million.
With still a few days remaining before we got near Mars, Huey Lewis started corresponding with old friends from Mars, many of whom inquired whether he would be hosting one of his infamous parties; some were disppointed that Huey invited them to the swarm (his old friends being more accustomed to wild hyperelite soirees than wild scum raves). Meanwhile Kimiko decided to swap out morphs, from her old splicer, to a (can't remember what new morph was).
Huey Lewis was also curious about his contact, Nwabudike Morgan, so Lewis sought out a favor on The Eye to get info on Morgan. It turned out Morgan was the one who had tipped off Firewall to the threat of Danny Jim. Besides that, Firewall viewed Morgan as very profit driven, but also held strongly to his own personal ethos (OOC, I would describe him as "Randian", although I'm not sure if that is accurate).
Finally, Herpert, Derpina, and Skripatch decided to fork themselves, and egocast early to Nova Timbuk. Arriving in digital customs with all sorts of restricted software packages, they were initially detained for about an hour, but eventually the customs officers decided that the "blip" that had been triggered by them was a mere anomaly. Now on the Nova Timbuk mesh, they were able to locate Danny Jim on the public spimes. They continued hacking, eventually locating Danny Jim's office. Hacking into there, they were able to get more surveillance records from a private spime within the office, as well as various records by Jim (which Herpert, a technoprossive open source advocate, planned to eventually release on the public mesh). The trio of forks continued to mess around on the Nova Timbuk mesh, adroitly evading security. They considered sending a message back to the party still on the scum swarm, but decided against it (as any messages would have to pass through a screening bottleneck).
+ ~15 days post-start