"Okay," he says, somewhat guardedly. Strange behavior for a hacker's ghost, you think. "It looks like the locals have instigated something they can't control. They've got the entire block of the Citigroup Center on 53rd Street somewhere between Lexington Avenue and Third Avenue, midtown Manhattan, right? Well, it's blocked off, and for whatever reason they look like they're trying to *contain* something." Dix pauses for a few seconds, as if in thought. H*ll, he may *be* in thought; it's hard to say under the current conditions. "But what makes no sense at all is *WHAT* they'd need to contain, in the middle of a white-collared business distict like that. I mean, what could possibly go wrong down there? Somebody release a bad tax return? Somebody find a transposition error after the paperwork was submitted? Did an auto-balance NOT auto-balance?" That un-nerving rhythmic rasp pulses in your ear again. "Hey," he almost mumbles, "THAT would be funny - Revolt of the Autosystems! Naah, that can't be it - makes entirely too much sense. Plus they don't have the imagination or the resources for it. You think maybe they have an error down there that their IT department can't handle? Nah," he adds on reflection, "Nah, that happens all too frequently down there anyway."
"So here's what we got, samurai dude," Dix summarizes, "One o' your buds got butt-dialed with what amounts to either a prank call or a real situation - no way to tell which - and the beancounter section of downtown Manhattan is sectioned off by The Big Apple's Finest. Tight. It's odd not seeing any rentals down there, no Lone Star or Knight Errant or such - the corp cops don't appear to be there, either, and that smells *really* strange, when you consider they like to get paid, and they always want to keep their, um, 'situations' under wraps, under their control. So that's odd, too. We know that *NOBODY* has even a paper cut, 'cuz DocWagon and CrashKart would be all over that sitch like flies on sh*t - and they are pretty much unstoppable, anyway, what with that Hippocritical -no, scratch that- HippoCRATical oath sh*t they use in their legal gumbo to break through anything, save their paying clients. No medical units, no nothing else, and some rumors about a possible call to the National Guard, but that's probably jus' some more 'wrong number' bullsh*t. But that's what we got." That strangely erratic rhytmic pulse scratches again, then goes silent.
"Oh," Dix suddenly adds, as an afterthought, "that, and you owe a one-time ¥500 'donation' to the local chapter of The Institute of Noetic Sciences - talk about weird charities - care of your friends in the Memory Lane crowd. Still, that's more than you would ever get off the news centers, so that's something. According to the noise surrounding the sitch as we know it, the codified operation name was something like 'Weeping Lotus'," he carefully annunciates the words, "But that may just be something some weirdo added to seem important. No mention of a 'Bleating Lotus' or anything, but since they were so close, I thought I might mention it. Worth it, though, I would think..." |
