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To:  sam, talia
From:  tjpierce
Subject:  planning for the future, living for the present
Timestamp: FRI 14 JUN 2137 13:21:46

I have some time before I have to take a meeting with our local rally 
master to dig up some insider election news, so I figured I'd use a bit of 
it to try and get myself organized.


Let's start with the Legion, because, hey, who doesn't love a good (and 
unnecessarily gory) mystery?

I'm going to start with some assumptions.  Maybe a few of these will have 
to be discarded when more facts come in, but maybe not.  At any rate, 
it'll give you an idea about the shape I think this particular story is 
taking, and the kinds of directions I think might be worth pursuing.

This is the first big assumption: that the Legion is being both honest 
and correct when they say that Robin wasn't the suicidal type.  I'm 
willing to believe that: not only do their reports seem to be consistent 
with that opinion (at least to my keen and thoroughly untrained medical 
eye), it doesn't make sense for her to kill herself.  She was well on her 
way to getting a ticket out of the arcology, which is something she 
definitely wanted.  She knew the Legion was more than willing to back her 
up if her parents or the arcology raised any static about it.  From her 
v-mails, it sounds like she was doing a lot of reading about the Legion 
and wasn't even close to changing her mind about signing up with them.

Assumption two:  since she's not the suicidal type, someone else compelled 
her to kill herself.  Someone who could influence her to do that without 
actually being in the room with her.

Assumption number three might be a bit out there, and I expect a few 
quizzical looks from you guys when I share it with you.  Hell, I'd give 
/myself/ a quizzical look for it, if that wouldn't give me eyestrain or a 
cerebral hemorrhage.  But still, I'm going to say it:  my third default 
assumption is that the S.C. arcology is not involved in Robin's death.  Or 
that, at the very least, the security office of the S.C. arcology is not 
aware that the arcology is involved in Robin's death.

I'll explain:  they're absolutely panicked about the idea of bad 
publicity, right?  And yet, here we are, looking at legal, seemingly 
untampered-with documents about a death that has BAD PUBLICITY in 
ten-foot-tall holographic script rotating and flashing all over it.  Yeah, 
sure, they want to sweep this under the rug.  They don't want headlines on 
it, or the hassle of saying "No comment" and "Our attorneys will be 
contacting you soon" to any journalist who might dare to ask them 
questions about it or to anyone who makes a comment peripherally related 
to it on the OpNet somewhere.  But they're willing to let the Legion (or 
its informally-appointed snoops) take a look at the investigation anyway, 
and that to me says that they don't think they've got anything to lose.  
And guilty people, they always know that they have something to lose.  So 
for now, at least, I'm going to go with "it's not the arcology."

Yeah, I know, I can't believe I'm saying that, either.  That place 
irritates the hell out of me.  I just can't figure a way of scanning this 
that puts them in the driver's seat when Robin went over the cliff.

Though I will point out a tantalizing possibility:  the arcology's report 
on Robin's meeting with the Legion says that /they/, the arcology, found 
her "inappropriate for recruitment."  As in, "hey, we just found out one 
of our residents is a latent psion, should we offer her a job?"  That says 
to me that the arcology is interested in hiring some psions.  And given 
the way they run their little compound over there, I'd be willing to bet 
the psions they'd most like to hire are telepaths.  At least, until they 
can figure out another way to extend their security grid into the heads of 
their residents, right?  Arcology security might be more than just one 
agent and a lot of surveillance gear, and there's no reason why that agent 
would necessarily be aware of that.  But that's pure imagination, I've got 
nothing to back it up and don't have any reason to believe it right now.

Assumption four is, thankfully, less disreputable: the Ministry's interest 
in this is aroused because it does look a lot like their area of 
expertise, and therefore they either need to make damn sure that it has 
absolutely nothing to do with one of their guys (and therefore unrelated 
to them in any bad-publicity kind of way), or they have a deep desire to 
settle on this badness themselves (and therefore offset potential bad 
publicity).  In other words, it ain't them, and they want it settled even 
more than anyone else on the planet does.


And that's the four basic assumptions I'm going to use to make this pitch: 
call it MIND versus MATTER, round one.

We'll start with our VICTIM, played by Robin.  She's stuck in a horrible, 
oppressive place that she hates, and she wants out.  As our story begins, 
she's just been handed a chance to do exactly that: she's got herself a 
latent talent, and she's getting herself a ticket into the Legion as soon 
as she can be dunked in the appropriate tank.

We'll call the horrible, oppressive place OCEANIA, and cast the S.C. 
arcology for that part.  They'll love it--it's the role they were born to 
play.  OCEANIA looks at VICTIM and says "we don't like her, and we won't 
miss her when she's gone, but while she's here she'd better not piss us 
off."  VICTIM gives OCEANIA the finger and gets on with the process of 
getting the hell out of there.

Enter THE SHADOW, who for some reason has decided that VICTIM should not 
be able to redeem her ticket out of OCEANIA.  From at least one week prior 
to her death, THE SHADOW uses some kind of surreptitious mental influence 
to drive VICTIM over the edge.  That last week is torturous...VICTIM 
cannot sleep, and the pressure on her keeps increasing.  And, most 
tellingly, she seems to ask THE SHADOW "What do you want from me?!"

A question, it seems, that may have been answered soon afterwards at the 
end of a knife.

In fact, there are two ways to spin that part:  the first is that, yes, 
the goal was to kill VICTIM, in such a way and under such circumstances 
that the local authorities would have no viable murder suspect and no 
reason to look for one.  The second is that THE SHADOW botched the job: 
VICTIM was herself a latent telepath, as it turns out, and perhaps she 
really did kill herself in order to /not/ give THE SHADOW what it wanted.  
After all, it's not like VICTIM had anyone in OCEANIA she could go to for 
help.


But this is obviously a very sketchy tale, because the audience can't see 
any motivations here.  And that's fine, if all you want to see is the 
gore; any flimsy excuse works for that.  But it's poor storytelling, and 
it makes the roles of THE SHADOW and VICTIM totally irrelevant.  If we 
want this to be a better story, we need the motivations.  We need a reason 
for THE SHADOW to be interested in VICTIM, and that means VICTIM needs to 
be something special.

But, you say, we've already got that: she's a latent psion, that's pretty 
special.  And maybe that's enough, I'll admit.  But why /this/ latent 
psion in particular?  The choice of VICTIM /could/ be random, but to me it 
plays as personal.  THE SHADOW has to have a reason to notice VICTIM in 
particular, a reason to spend a week or more attacking her mind, a reason 
for this whole sordid tale to unfold the way it does.  And since we can't 
put the cameras on THE SHADOW without giving away the ending, the focus 
will have to be on VICTIM.


So here's the direction I see this one going: what we've got on Robin 
herself is just the barest outline.  It's cookie-cutter angry misfit 
teenager stuff.  She lives in a rotten, overly-restrictive environment and 
chafes at it.  Her parents don't get her, and her home life is just more 
stress piled on what she's already carrying.  That's easy to explain, but 
it doesn't actually TELL us anything, right?

And I think it would help if we could figure out more about her.  Big 
things like "did anyone investigate her /before/ she died?" and "who, 
specifically, knew she was a latent psion?" and "who came in contact with 
her that week before she died?"  Me, I figure she had to have at least ONE 
friend or reasonably close acquaintance in that arcology, or her school 
record would have had more incidents on it than just a determination that 
she was rebellious and pissed off about living there.  They would have 
given us a security file showing a bunch of bad things she'd done, so we'd 
be able to go "ah, an unstable juvenile delinquent" and nod sadly at that 
as if it could explain why she died.  They didn't do that.  I figure she 
had a safety valve somewhere, something she could do to get herself 
focused on a decent goal (namely, getting out of there) and therefore make 
random acts of resistance unnecessary.  Maybe someone she could talk to, 
if we're lucky.

Her parents are probably a poor choice for following that up.  But 
friends, ah...friends are a better possibility, I think.  If we could 
figure out a way to ask her friends what was up with her, we might be able 
to get some interesting answers.  And I have a few ideas on how that might 
be done, all of which are guaranteed to make you guys uncomfortable!

Me, I'd be willing to give it a shot, but let's be honest: me asking 
questions around the arcology is a recipe for bad trouble.  Any of us 
asking is probably a recipe for bad trouble, for that matter, even if 
kindly Agent Norwood didn't know who we were.  For one thing, we're too 
damn old to really get anywhere with the 18-20 year olds who might have 
known her best.  Which got me to thinking...

Talia, you've got your little cadre of foundlings, some of whom have 
legitimate birth records and no inconveniently low loyalty scores or 
burgeoning criminal records, right?  And the arcology, as oppressive as it 
is, /does/ have a nice, upscale, kid-friendly mall which dearly loves to 
take money from outsiders, right?  Or failing that, Sam, you've got your 
friend Rose whose criminal record may have been expunged as part of a 
sweet licensing deal, yeah?  A smart, canny person with the right age 
and demeanour and no visible connection to us could maybe get the answers 
we can't.


And so, you now see why I am using v-mail for this instead of telling you 
guys over dinner or something like that.  If I asked you this in person, 
I'd expect to get punched.  And I will admit that I am suggesting this 
course of action because I /am/ assuming that arcology security is not 
involved in Robin's death.  I wouldn't suggest recruiting someone and 
sending them in there if I thought it was dangerous for them.  I'm 
thinking that someone goes in after the arcology's schools let out, kicks 
around the mall food court for a few hours and asks a few surreptitious 
questions about Robin to get a better idea of who she was or what might 
have been going on in her life the week before she died, and then walks 
out.  Think about it, okay?  If you disagree, that's the end of it; we can 
always find other avenues to investigate.

And seriously, don't punch me.  I know that I'm straying into some very 
dangerous terrain by suggesting this, and you know I'm not doing it 
maliciously or thoughtlessly.  It's just an option, and a simple "no" 
works just fine.


One last thing occurs to me:  I want very much to agree with our helpful 
Ministry liason that this has nothing to do with one of their guys.  I 
don't want it to be one of their guys.  I know that they say that the 
people they dunk simply don't go rogue, and I want to believe that.  Hell, 
if any Order can claim to be able to suss out potential rogues before they 
go running off on their own, it'd be them, right?  So I'm not, at this 
point, committed  to the idea that what was pushing in on Robin /had/ to 
be telepathic.  It seems like a possibility (especially given Baja), and 
I'll entertain it as such, but I'm looking for all the other 
possibilities, too.  Could be Aberrant, after all.  Could be alien.  Could 
be something else entirely.  I can honestly say that I'm not sure what's 
behind all this.

But I am 100% /positive/ that the Ministry's interest in this is primarily 
centered on excluding the possibility that it has anything to do with 
telepathy as it is practiced by their dunk-ees.  So I'm willing (and I 
think it's wise) to keep them in the loop on this, but only after we've 
gone as far with it as we can if what we're looking at seems to be 
pointing towards telepathy.  It's not that I don't trust them, it's more 
that I'm aware that they have to pay close attention to their reputation, 
especially in the FSA, and that they will have to make that their main 
concern in this investigation.  And that's not what I think this should be 
about.


So, to sum up:  I think we need to think about why someone would want 
Robin dead (or would want something from her that she would rather die 
than provide).  I think that we should keep thinking about how what 
happened to Robin or to Talia's friends in Baja could have been 
accomplished (telepathy and any other possibilities).  I think that the 
Ministry can help us, but shouldn't be the first people on our 
speed-dials.

And, perhaps most importantly, I think I'd better wrap this up before I'm 
late for my meeting.  Next time, maybe I'll take a swing at Baja, which is 
another tantalizing tale of mystery and intrigue.