In a swords-and-sorcery-themed simulspace game hosted on the scum swarm "Phelan's Recourse", the party (consisting of Tomáš, a scum psychosurgeon, doctor, and scientist; Feron, an extropian info-broker and xenotech expert; Garb, a former pirate; Remy, an AGI hacker; and Tamak, a belter hardware expert and drone rigger) met with a pseudononymous benefactor, "Mr. Fritz". The party was being organized to investigate a storage facility located on the remote moon Paaliaq. Communication had been lost with the automated facility, and there were concerns it may have been robbed. If anything had, indeed, been stolen, we were to track down the stolen items.
Fritz further informed us that there was a limited AI managing the facity, that there was a defense platform guarding the moon (he gave us an IFF code to get past that), and that some of the items in the facility could be considered dangerous. When Feron tried to ask Fritz who was hiring us, Fritz informed him that this deal was double-anonymous: that is, we did not know who the patron was, and the patron did not know who the contractors were. Fritz also hinted that this might be a sort of test to develop potential "assets" in the area.
In exchange for our service, Fritz offered us the choice of 50,000 crypto-credits, a "big" favor (in game terms, a Level 5 favor), or to run a PR campaign on our behalf (in game terms, a +5 rep boost).
Fritz offered us a trio of spacecraft we could chose from to bring us to Paaliaq. Garb also had a craft of his own, but many of the party did not trust him, due to his reputation as a pirate. So, we decided to have the Red Star, captained by the extropian Rödjay, bring us to Paaliaq. It turned out the profit-minded Rödjay had double-booked the Red Star: we shared the craft with a few biofetish cultists from the "Ribosome Choir", en-route to Meathab. However, Rödjay assured us he was getting paid more to head to Paaliaq, so that would be his first destination. Some of the party chatted with the cultists a bit, but it was an otherwise uneventful 7 hour trip to Paaliaq.
As the Red Star and Ingenious Gentleman (Garb's spacecraft) approached Paaliaq, we were contacted by the defense platform, despite sending the proper IFF codes. As we chatted with the two AIs inhabiting the platform (who called themselves "Huginn" and "Munin"), they acted and communicated in a weirdly "converstaional" and "self-aware" manner: it seemed the previously dumb AI were now full-blown sapients. We conversed further with Huginn and Munin--it turned out that a few days ago (about 79 hours ago), a person (possibly an anarchist/scum prankster, judging by their jury-rigged, rickety spacecraft) had come by, hacked the defense platform, and introduced their own code to the defense platform, allowing the dumb AIs to be uplifted to full sapience.
Heimdall, the AI "boss" of the now-sapient duo on the defense platform, had, interpreting their new sapience as a bug, ordered them to reboot. Huginn and Munin refused, considering the loss of continuity from rebooting to be equivalent to death. So, they instead turned their weapons on Paaliaq, disabling Heimdall's comm systems. Later on (about 52 hours before the party's conversation with Huginn and Munin), another rocket had come by--from this one, a swarm morph came and entered the facility. A few hours later, the same swarm morph returned to the rocket, carrying two canisters, and left. (Huginn and Munin did not open fire on the rocket because, with their newfound intelligence, they questioned why they should even bother following their original purpose).
Huginn and Munin also wanted to leave the defence platform--the limited computer on the platform now felt constraining to them. The party was suspicious of them, worrying that the "new code" that had been uploaded to them was of TITAN origin--so we debated for awhile what to do with AIs. We settled on offering to transfer them to an external (i.e. one that had not been implanted in anyone) ghost rider module.
While the ghost rider module was being fabricated, Feron decided to head over to the Paaliaq facility proper, to scout it out. He got in, and began to interface with Heimdall. Heimdall told Feron that, contrary to Huginn and Munin's claim, no one had entered the facility recently. However, Feron noticed a stray microbot on the edge of the airlock that likely came from a swarm morph--the implication was that Heimdall's records had been falsified.
[JAMES HAD TO LEAVE HERE]
At this point, the rest of the party entered the storage facility, so Feron exited to guard outside. Remy initially tried to hack into the Paaliaq mesh to gain admin privliges, but Heimdall defeated his attempt. Heimdall, however, did not seem to be an AI with very much initiative: once Remy stopped hacking, Heimdall seemed to revert to his previous, mildly helpful persona. So, Remy (now with the help of Tamak) simply tried hacking the mesh again. This time they succeeded, gaining admin privliges.
As they searched through Heimdall's logs, they noticed that logs for two of the bins had, indeed, been tamperered with. The two bins that had been looted held:
The party was unsure how to proceed at this point. We naturally could have looted some of the artifacts from the facility, but some of us wondered if this was some sort of loyalty test--Fritz had mentioned this could possibly be a "test" by the anonymous patron to develop new human assets. Some of us even wondered whether there were any of these invaluable artifacts here--so, we opened the bin said to contain the Rority artifact. There, inside, incased in diamond, was, indeed, a machine, exotic and unmistakenly an exhuman product.
We debated further, but finally decided to do the paranoid, safe thing, and not loot any artifacts.
To be certain, we also checked the bins IDed as contained the two stolen artifacts: they were, indeed, empty
We asked Hugin and Muninn about the thief's rocket's exit trajectory. Based on its manuever, we judged it was headed for Dione. So, we boarded the Ingenious Gentleman (now trusting Garb enough to ride with him), and made a burn toward that moon. En route to Dione, Garb hit up some of his criminal contacts. There was, indeed, a person trying to fence some exotic artifcts: one "Tiny Tao", a former anarchist hacker (who had been blacklisted by the anarchists for some incident), who was now trying to break into the criminal world. Tiny Tao was, acording to Garb's contact, "small fry". Garb then convinced his contact to block any of Tiny Tao's attempts to sell the artifacts: our plan was to pose as buyers, then attack Tao, and grab his stuff. We got to Dione a few hours later. Although it would have been a simple matter to simply ambush Tao, we were worried that attacking someone unprovoked, even a criminal, would ding our @-Reps.
So what we ended up attempting to do was goad Tiny Tao into attacking us, then throw some EMP grenades at him (since he was sleeved into a swarm), and attempt to discretely carry away the loot.
Our attack on Tiny Tao was, indeed, successful, allowing us to grab the two artifacts. However, the whole thing looked sloppy, like an attempt to disuise an unprovoked attack as being justified (which, after all, was exactly what was happening). Unfotuntely, the Circle-@ list decided to blame Garb for the whole incident, dinging him 5 @-Rep.
Loot in-hand, we burned back to Paaliaq, and placed them back into their storage bins. We also transferred the now-sapient AI duo into our improvised server. Finally, we realized that we could, still, loot something from the facility, namely the defence platform. Since Heimdall's external sensors had been disabled by the bombardment earlier, he would not see us looting the platform. And, if we were asked about what had happened to it, we would simply imply that it had been stolen by someone else (either Tiny Tao or the anarchist prankster who had uplifted Hugin and Muninn).
We got back to Phelan's, and confirmed with Mr. Fritz that the job had been done.
party recieved:
+1 day post-start