As we manuevered back to the Futai Hira, Tariq, using the station's comm array, began messaging his cousin, Nur, who lives on Extropia. She had an interesting proposition: in exchange for setting Tariq and his friends up with morphs, living quarters, and security on Extropa, Nur wanted the trio to investigate a mystery. The mystery was summarized in some data files Nur sent over:
Tariq passed the info on to the rest of the party. When we got onto the station, Makina began to question the station's AI, Roma some more. Roma confirmed that the station had been infected at the Fall. When questioned further, Roma also confirmed that there had been a ship that docked with the Futai--that three people got on with a bag, one of them was killed (leaving their fury morph in the entryway), and then the remaining two (sleeved into a menton and another fury) left with the bag.
Not sure what additional information we could obtain here, we decided to egocast to Extropia at this point, taking Roma and the survivor along with us. Before we did this, however, Makina and Tariq re-wrote the egocasting software from scratch to ensure it would not be infected by the exurgent infection. We transmitted ourselves to Extropia, and had a fairly easy time getting through customs. Tariq and Makina were identified as having criminal records, but were simply told that they should stay out of trouble. We all sleeved into our morphs (Tariq a menton, Makina another synth, and Jax a gorilla (naturall)), and were informed that we had had a residence set up--a small tin can hab orbiting Extropia. We also met with one Sally Tailbreaker, a security contractor who had been hired to work with us.
Tariq, who was feeling weird about being sleeved into a biomorph for the first time in many years, decided he was hungry, and so proceeded to The Noodle, a district in Extropia famed for its restaurants. Jax and Sally went along with Tariq. Makina, meanwhile, went straight to work. Initially hitting up some of his criminal contacts, he found out about a project called "TITAN Now". They were a cult-like group dedicated to brining about the Singularity. They operated somewhere on Extropia. Also, in The Shops district, at the display of a programmer's shop, there was an obfuscated AR display that one could only see if they tuned to the right frequency. So Makina hacked into the programmer's shop, downloaded all the data that was there, and set up spyware that would transmit and data passing through the shop back to Makina.
Tariq was still feeling a bit dysphoric about his new morph, so he took a shuttle up to their tin can hab, and chatted with his muse some more (mechanically, he was healing his Stress Points from failed Alienation roll). Makina, meanwhile, told the party about what he had uncovered thus far, although he failed to mention that he had set up that spyware on the programming shop's comm array. Makina and Tariq also realized, at this point, that both Roma and the survivor had gone missing. So Tariq and Makina spent an hour trying to locate the two missing, to no avail.
Meanwhile, Jax and Sally decided to visit the programmer's shop in-person. Jax posed as a technician looking for work, but was so awkward in his spiel that the shop owner simply demanded he leave the shop. Sally came around to "rescue" Jax from the social awkwardness. The two left without uncovering much useful. However, immediately after this, Makina's spyware pinged him that the programmer had tramsitted a message: a message directed at an "empty" region in space. So, Makina asked for some time on one of Extropia's infrared telescopes, and was able to locate a ship at that location--a ship that seemed to be going somewhere.
+~5 hours post-start