5punk

Professor Ming wrote:Greetings, greetings! Can I offer you anything to eat or drink? The coffee they produce here is really quite terrible, but there is fruit grown in this very garden that is exquisite. Please, sit if you wish. May I welcome you three to our little club, you come highly recommended by my colleagues but I understand that this is your first official engagement for Firewall? Oh, don't worry, you can talk freely here, I have taken necessary precautions. Probably more than necessary, but I have been doing this a while and developed quite a healthy paranoia. Forgive me, I am babbling. Maybe we should start with some introductions.
I, as you may know, am Professor Magnus Qiao-Sen Ming, and along with my public role as the Chair of Computational Archaeology here at TAU I less publicly function as a Router for Firewall. I will be your main contact for the organisation, passing you tasks, information and organising resources, as well as taking your mission reports and requests. Please understand that Firewalls resources are limited and stretched, so although we will of course do what we can to help when it is necessary, I should remind you that resources you use will go unavailable to other Firewall teams, so we would appreciate you sourcing things for yourself where at all possible.
And yourselves? A brief introduction and description of what skills you bring to the team?

DCOM wrote:Greetings Professor. I am DCOM. Unfortunately that is the designation of this morph really, Disposable Combat Operations Mechanoid, but I like the acronym. I primarily bring a little resilience to the team, but I suspect I was procured because of my negotiation skills. I find there is some overlap, anyway.

Usagi wrote:Professor. I am Usagi Keroro, mobile scientist. I am fascinate with new forms of life natural and unnatural, alive or dead. It sometimes gets...messy. I have helped police forensically with such messy cases in past. Recently I lecture here in TAU Xenobiology department - the students very much like to hear about messy parts. I ran into Firewall operatives after helping some colonists out with a particularly nasty infestation. Of course I not tell students about that part.

Unlabelled wrote:...

Professor Ming wrote:I am sure you will get to know each other better in the coming days, but I fear time is against us, so to business.

Firewall needs you to find a missing agent, Tara Yu. To the best of our knowledge, Yu was most recently investigating the current whereabouts of military computer hardware recovered from a station in Earth orbit that was destroyed during the Fall, in the Battle of L4. Yu has been missing for over a month now. Long silences are not unusual during some of her undercover research missions, but she missed her last scheduled check-in. Last we knew, she was on Locus. We need you to track her down, ascertain her status if alive, recover her cortical stack if dead, and if necessary continue or assist her search for the missing hardware.

Any questions so far?

DCOM wrote:Who and where, specifically, was her last check-in? Did she provide any information to her contact point?

Her last check in was to myself, via encrypted mesh communication. It was on her arrival at Locus, minutes after leaving the ego casting station she had arrived at. She did not say much, just that she was there following up a lead. This is not uncommon, many Crows prefer to keep mesh communication minimal even when encrypted. I would not have expected more until her return, where she was to give me a full report in person.

DCOM wrote:I take it we can assume that you do not possess a description of her morph then. Please continue.

I am afraid not, but I can give you the date and time she checked in with me, which being just after she left the station should make it easy enough to track down what morph she sleeved into. Assuming of course that she has not re-sleeved in the meantime.

I suggest you try and retrace her steps. Where she has been and who she was talking to may lead you to both her and the hardware. Begin with investigating via the mesh, as I would not want you going all the way to Locus only to find there is nothing there for you. I suspect it is highly likely that you will be heading in that direction anyway however, so I have organised for transport there to be available to you if required. I am afraid our budget will not stretch to a further 3 ego-castings that distance, but the transport ship is quite fast.

I wish there was more information I could give you, but that is all that is available.

This is a QE communicator. It is a direct and completely secure line back to me and me only. I don't know if you are familiar with them but it can be used for instantaneous communication from literally anywhere, and require a kind of fuel in the form of Qubits. The level remaining can be seen on the display here. It is set up for voice or text communication only and is has approximately 2 hours of Qubits remaining. Use it sparingly, but keep me updated with any progress or requests you may have for support.

DCOM wrote:Thank you for the advice. Do you object to us performing our mesh research in your garden?

Prof Ming wrote:Be my guest. I have to get going, but feel free to use this space for as long as you need.

DCOM wrote:It appears that Ms Yu was expecting some kind of action when she arrived at Locus. I wouldn't expect anyone to take such an expensive morph otherwise. I wonder if she has gone into hiding.