Move 2.4b Recap

Discussing Jedao

Seyli thanks Sasha for remembering they prefer to avoid alcohol while on duty, then blurts, "I don't like any of this, you all know that. I don't trust him farther than I can throw him. I know I'm not the smartest person on this ship, but I am...was...Kel, and think I've earned my fear of him." Sasha nods at Seyli; Reshad murmurs, "I want to discuss this."

Sasha presents her agenda for the team: "We are going to toast to a successful enterprise, because we have achieved our objective smoothly, and learned even more than we had hoped, due to your coordinated action. Next we are going to discuss the strategic recommendations we will make to Ashari, regarding our guest. In particular, will we tell him about the moths, or will we wait until we can consult with them? Finally, we will address Seyli's specific question, about the security restrictions to place on Jedao, once our strategic plan is clear." She toasts, "So. To a successful enterprise!" knocking the shot of arak back and letting the glass clink on the table. She then asks the team members "who spoke directly to Jedao" about their "assessment" of the conversation.

Ione says that though she "did very little speaking," she was able to sense many of Jedao's emotions: "He wasn't throwing strong, viscerally negative feelings to hurt me or put me off my game. He didn't know what I was sensing, though he may have picked up on something at this point. But, I mean, I can tell when people are faking disruptive emotions in order to put me on the wrong path or get me out of a room and this wasn't that." She expands, "I wasn't probing because I need skin-to-skin contact for that, so what I've got is choppy, but he mentioned being blackmailed, and that person sounds like a much bigger concern than Jedao himself. I mean, verbally we picked up on that but also emotionally, I thought I was going to be sick for a second, without skin contact." She believes Jedao "hopes that we are the answer to an impossible problem, and maybe we are. Which means he'll be much more inclined to work with us than against us, especially if ... I caught almost a fear of something that might happen, not something that had happened. So my educated guess is if we can help him out of a path he might otherwise be stuck taking, he'll help us as well."

Sasha is disconcerted to learn that Ione's empathy does not always require touch. She asks, "Can you give us some background on the emotions you can detect without touching someone? Is there some baseline required intensity? How do you deal with conflicting impulses, or layers? How much contextual information do you need for interpretation?" Ione explains, "Anything I'd notice without touching someone has to be overpowering for that person. Of course my usual comparison is angry telekinetics, which doesn't help here -- if it's bothering me without being deliberately looked for it needs to be pretty much the only thing that person's feeling. Blinding rage, primal fear, that kind of thing? I have very strong shields that even I can't deactivate, so it takes intense and focused emotion to get through them." Sasha curls her fingers, instructing the grid to record the phrase "angry telekinetics" so she can research it later.

Ione adds that she only understood the context of Jedao's reaction because she was listening to the conversation at the same time: "Emotions alone are junk data." Moreover, "But -- if something's got layers to it it probably isn't strong enough. Conflicting impulses just overlay each other so it's not hard to separate them out; a conflicting impulse by itself is a relatively strong feeling? Usually not strong enough though. It's because of the nature of the situation that I think Jedao projected so much. More than I was prepared for or expecting. I'd have worried it was intentionally amplified for me to sway me to his side if I had any reason to believe he knew anything at all about me."

Sasha sums up, "So Jedao is terrified of this contact whose name he didn't give us. Sulen, Virmad, Gerae--does that match your reading?" Virmad assents, glancing at Sulen and Gerae. "His signifiers indicated some uncertainty about our intentions — understandably, I think — but few about his own: he seems to be earnestly and surprisingly honestly committed to ending the -archate. He was fluctuating between a few signifiers; only the Immolation Fox worries me, but we knew already that he had...unpredictable tendencies." A bit nervous about speculating, Virmad adds that "reading between the lines," and using information about Jedao's signifiers, he believes that "this ‘co-conspirator’ who's blackmailing" Jedao "may be the one responsible" for the events that transpired in the team's timeline at Hellspin Fortress. "Or, rather, that Jedao did what he did on his co-conspirator's orders. Not exactly a strong character recommendation, but if it's true it would alleviate some of our concerns about Jedao's reliability."

Gerae says he wants to know if drugging Jedao "affected his emotional stability": "It was subtle, but he seemed to have a hand tremor that he was trying to disguise." Ione is confused: "Stability? No, just lability, and only during the first hour or so - wait, what? No, if anything it would treat a hand tremor." Sasha asks the grid to play back its footage of Jedao's hands during the interview. As the recording begins, Reshad says, "That's not a tremor. It's Shuos sign language. That was 'heptarch's orders?' If you turn the camera to me, you can spot the other half of the conversation. I thought it would be useful to approach the interrogation on multiple levels."

Sasha instructs the grid to display Reshad's hands during the same time period on another screen, and asks Reshad to summarize her signed conversation with Jedao. She thinks the sign must be what Reshad had wanted to ask earlier, and wonders why Reshad didn't discuss this plan with Sulen. Reshad says the silent conversation "was short, and parallel to the spoken conversation. He asked me if I was there on heptarch's orders, and wanted to know my era of origin. I told him, and mentioned 'hexarchs' just before the Rahal did so. It could barely have gone better." She adds that Jedao "mentioned that his co-conspirator is Nirai," and at the end, "He said, 'my life is in your hands.' I took it as surrender."

Sasha wonders whether Jedao meant that his life was in the team's hands, or was specifically speaking to Reshad. She tells her, "Thank you. I believe I mentioned, Jedao has been corresponding with an anonymous Nirai. There is a draft of a message protesting the collateral damage from an experimental weapon design, but he never sent it. We'll want confirmation, but I expect Jedao's correspondent and this co-conspirator are identical." Addressing the whole team, she asks, "Are our adversaries cooperating with each other?" On the one hand, "Jedao's co-conspirator" was "interested in the rifts" and "Jedao believes he is undying." On the other hand, "We know that Quill wanted to eliminate Jedao, or at very least keep him from all knowledge of the rifts. Might these be related? What evidence would we need to confirm or disprove this hypothesis?"

Alaric asks, "Do we know how this co-conspirator is undying? I'm assuming from context it's not just some simple biological trick to prevent senescence. Anagathic drugs or medical micro-machines are a dime a dozen, but methods of stopping violent death - reliably - is a lot harder and usually involves some sort of exotic effect." Sasha says, "Jedao says he killed him, and it didn't stick. Remi thought it was an exotic effect, too. I think he had some ideas about how to get there, from the calendar in his time. Is there information Jedao could give us, or data we could gather about the high calendar, that would help you pinpoint the specific effect?" Reshad muses, "I wonder if there's more than one way to be immortal?" She explains, "Jedao had come back a minimum of three times, in my era. Real details are thin on the deck, but history shows him well past when he could have been kept alive. If he failed in a way that got him immortality..." Sasha says, "It seems simpler to assume that the mechanism is the same, for both the future Jedao and his collaborator, but that the price of the bargain is too high."

Alaric tells Reshad there are "a lot of ways" to be immortal: "People have been trying to live forever since people became people. Good ways, that's the problem. It's like any other sort of exotic effect or even invariant engineering - it's easy to come up with ideas, hard to implement them without a lot of work, and the calendrical math often means that enabling one technique excludes others. Which makes me think that Sasha's right about them sharing a mechanism." He tells Sasha, "It would be useful to know anything else Jedao can tell us. Killed but it didn't stick is a good start, since it rules out things like making yourself physically immutable or, I don't know, a cloud of nanomachines." Sasha sums up, "You recommend, then, that for threat assessment, we engage Jedao in detailed conversation. Is there information that we need to keep from him, or control his access to, while we are doing so?" Alaric says he can't think of anything: "The only secrets we really know are the nature of the moths, which he might already be aware of and any high-ranking Nirai collaborator definitely has, and our information on the rifts. That's the technical part, anyways, there's probably gobs of horrifically dangerous political and historical data just sitting around in our entertainment database, but I leave advice on that to other people." Reshad says, "I suppose it depends on what our strategy is. We've already denied him to the Kel, and learned something about his blackmailer. We're in process of denying his death to Flute. If we mean to seek his collaboration, he needs the same information the rest of us have."

Notes

Virmad: Sasha already thinks he’s an unreliable flake who gets distracted by every pretty face he sees

Ione's abilities - Reshad's worry