Reroll

The other interviews go well enough, both for my television appearances and investigations into PR firms.  I do end up signing with Signal 69, using the “delux” option they presented: The cost wasn't really a factor (I'm pulling about a million a day selling a reasonably valuable mineral in factory quantities with basically no expenses).  

My hacking shadow has some mixed news for me: “She turned her phone in to their tech guys. I wiped it.”

Hmm… “Annoying. What about her workstation?”

“She was too focused on the phone, and thus never noticed.  She ran a few scheduled virus scans, but of course those didn't find anything: I'm in her hardware deeper than those can look.”

So she's not on board… pity. “Good enough.  How'd it go with getting into the other systems?”

“Full access to all but a few air-gapped research facilities… and I managed a 2400 baud connection to one of those.”

But it's air-gapped… “How’d you manage that?’

“Ah, well…” my minion sounds pleased with herself, “I found an HR discipline report about an employee caught charging his cell phone on his workstation; so I hacked that employee's phone to get a bug on their network.  When next he charged his phone at work, the bug got down to business: It infected their network, and is using some microphones and speakers - paired with a similar setup in their online security and intercom system - to pass data encoded as audio outside the human range.”

I consider, “2400 baud is crazy slow, isn't it?”

“It's still sending me file listings, yes.  But I'm in!”

And will have a useful amount of data from it in a year or two, “So what kind of things do we have from the online locations?”

“Everything.”

Wait… “what do you mean, ‘everything’?”

“Just that.  I have all of their data. Passwords, API tokens, MFA secrets, employee records, bank account numbers, email archives… I have all of their data packed away shipside in a non-executing format, available for the VI to peruse.  I do have some bad news, though.”

Figures, “Lay it on me.”

“The ‘Federal Bureau for the Preservation of Human Rights’ is a local branch. The actual Inquisition is very global… and still uses paper, exclusively. I have nothing on them.”

Still, “Good work. What's this branch's annual budget?”

“A hundred billion.”

So tempting… but if I just nuke them from orbit by cutting their financing and locking them out of everything, they'll also stop suppressing the actually bad Mythics too… and then there's the issue that it's a ‘local’ branch of a larger organization.  “Thank you. Keep digging, please… see what you can dig up on the larger organization by indirect means - someone's going to have scanned their mail, or done a full draft electronically before hitting print to mail it, and that kind of thing will have names and addresses, things you can look up in terms of utilities, taxes, and things like that.”

“Yes boss.”

I let that shadow get back to work, and get on the comm with my VI: “So you have all the data from the local Inquisition?”

“Yes. What would you like?”

What would I like? “A listing of a hundred videos of the Inquisition abusing harmless Mythics, suitable for American news, ranked by how viscerally disturbing people will find the Inquisition's actions.”

“Certainly…” I get a message notice on my comm, “I recommend starting somewhere past fifty if you want to able to ‘sleep at night’ so to speak.”

I pull up video fifty-one: A little butterfly-winged kid (he's proportioned like an eight year old child, but about a quarter the size a human child of that age would be) with a pair of antenna sticking out of his head is strapped to a table: Naked and screaming, he begs for them to let him go, saying he'll be good.  A dispassionate voice over calls him “Infection subject eighty-six” of “outbreak seventy-eight” of that year, and goes over the procedure very calmly as four guys in full hazmat outfits meticulously take the boy apart with scalpels.  The blood wants to flow right back into him, but the supposed human beings bottle it. The poor child doesn't actually die, the severed pieces of him continuing to twitch and try to shuffle towards each other within the containers as the dissection progresses calmly, the monsters in hazmat suits putting the chunks of the boy in separate plastic containers as they photograph, measure, and weigh everything at each step as they go.  The screaming finally stops when they remove his lungs, but it's obvious he's still trying. That's about where I shut it off.

…and that didn't make the top fifty, after filtering out the things the news could never show at all?

I suppose the VI may have different definitions... that's solid social ammo, at least, “Do you have supporting documentation on these?”

“Yes.  Taking the video ranked fifty-one as an example, I have the full report, all photographs, all measurements, all notes - including the warehouse where the fairy child's pieces are stored: They check once a month to see if he's still alive… and he is, technically, as of a week ago on check number seventy four - and all records of personnel involved.  Would you like to see them?”

I am seriously contemplating wiping my own memory of seeing what I already did, honestly… and I could arrange that: “No thank you; save the list and cross-referencing with supporting documentation, however.”

“Complying.”

I hang up with the VI,  go purchase a few dozen large backup USB drives at a nearby mega box mart, and fly them to my ship… where I make another Computers shadow minion, tasking her with copying that top one hundred most disturbing list, with all supporting documentation for those videos, to each backup drive in a nicely organized manner.

That takes several hours (the USB drives are a lot slower than the science-fantasy tech on board ship).  While the shadow is working, I build a few dozen visually-identical copies of ‘Alice’ (one per USB drive), this time equipped with the Warp sphere (to keep the drives safe during transit) and the Diplomacy skill (they're primarily skill based, but do have magic) and use Alteration to make them vacuum-rated: They end up with a Diplomacy modifier of thirty-nine.  For comparison, turning the average Joe from “wants to kill you” to “doesn't really care about you, one way or the other” would require a check result of thirty.  After that, my minion can make a request with the same skill… and asking a news person to run a story is a pretty easy request.

Once the Computers minion finishes the drives, I hand one drive to each Warp Alice, have them stow them, and have them head down to a large listing of news organizations.  They're to find the person in charge of what they actually report, wait until I give them the telepathic signal that I have made them visible, hand the drives over, and try to convince the organization to get it on the news as soon as possible.

The waiting is a killer.  It takes between one and two hours to get from orbit to a spot on a planet (any spot, from any orbit: Starfinder travel rules are weird)... and with dozens of travelers, there's a lot of them that need the full time. After that, of course, they all actually need some time to locate a suitable bigwig.  Once I finally have confirmation from each… I set them to be globally visible, and tell them to get to work while I start monitoring a few major news channels.

I also have my hacker disable the Inquisition's communication channels for a few hours.  I really don't want them doing an immediate coordinated response.  I'll need to turn their communications back on eventually: They have to be able to respond to the actually dangerous outbreaks, after all… which is, basically, the same reason I haven't shut them down already: They serve a valid purpose, and stopping that cold for very long will get a rather lot of uninvolved people killed - I can't have that.  A few hours should be fine, though. Probably.

I don't expect an instant response after I give the go.   It takes a minute or two to get into someone's good graces and make a request, and it takes a while for the folks involved to see the clips, stop retching (seriously, my agents report that about a third of the people they showed those to lost their lunches), have them select their presenters, censor out the chunks of their chosen videos they don't think they can have on their media, review the supporting documentation, spot check what they can, figure out how they're going to spin it, get everyone together, brief them, and actually get things online and/or on the air.

But everyone's in a hurry to be the first to break the news.

So, the lion's share of one day after I decide that yes, this is the trigger I want to pull… chaos reigns supreme on the news and online.