Chapter #6A Short Hop by: imaj   You step through the door and look round the penthouse suite sourly. Too small. Far too small. The little man in the suit beckons your further in and starts showing your round. You dimly remember that he is the manager of the hotel. Of course it has to be the manager showing you round, because it's your hotel, or at least it belongs to the company headed by Portia Lovelace's father. Since you became Portia, your new father has been blindly devoted to your every whim in the way that only a golem can be.
The Portia part of you makes a mental note to have the man in the suit fired and replaced with someone who can at least decorate the suite in a way that makes it seem bigger. The other part of you, the part that is in charge suppresses her childish impulse.
"Yes, yes," you complain irritably. "I'm sure it's lovely."
The man stops mid sentence as you give him a pointed look. He bows his head obsequiously before scurrying out the room, almost tripping over Fi and your luggage in his rush. Your PA closes the door behind him.
"Don't worry about the luggage right now," you tell Fi as you collapse into a plush leather covered sofa. You sink into the deep cushion and it almost swallows you whole. At least the idiot of a manager got some things right. "Give me the reports."
Fi perches on the edge of the sofa beside you and hands you her tablet. You grab it from her greedily and stare at the index. Where to begin...
There were a lot of reasons for stealing Portia Lovelace's life. She is, or was you suppose, beautiful. For all that it annoyed her persona, that second place position in the pole that Reet Saraf referred to was well earned. Admittedly it was earned with lots of money and surgery rather than anything else. The fact that you are now fantastically wealthy is important too. You effectively control the wealth of the Lovelace business empire, even if it still in the name of Portia's father.
The real reason though, and the reason that would still have made you Portia Lovelace even if she was a poverty stricken troll rather than an international party girl, is Fane. The hydra-headed organisation was an adversary, back when you were still one of the Stellae. They would certainly consider you as such too, if they were even aware of your existence. Now though, they are a resource.
Years of painstaking research after your parting of ways with the Stellae led you to the Lovelaces, and to the Committee. You'd first heard the word in Saratoga Falls of all places, on the lips of Curt Straussler. He'd died before you'd been able to learn more (technically, you'd died too, but that is another story), but eventually you'd realised all the Dark Star projects you'd come across - even the people in charge of them - were only pawns in Fane's long and complicated game. You'd gone looking for the men behind the men, and then the men behind the men behind the men.
You'd found the Lovelaces, and a few months ago you became Portia and taken her father's place on the Fane Committee. You met the other members, for a given value of 'met'. Perhaps years ago they gathered in dark cellars and hooded robes, but today they meet electronically, through anonymous proxy routers and with digitally manipulated voices. It had been near impossible to tell each member apart through the electronic buzz of their speech.
The big dividend is access to information. Fane guards its secrets jealously, from both within and without, but Committee membership grants you more access than most. Fi has been invaluable in scouring their data and chasing down leads, but that is what you built her for.
You look at the tablet she gave you again. You decide to start with Pendleton. You always wondered what happened to him after Project Ishtar. You tap on the screen and his fate unfolds in front of you.
Pendleton, David Bartholomew
Date of birth: 14/01/1983
Grade...
You scroll down through some meaningless personnel files, filled with information that you don't need till you reach the last entry.
Pendleton was one of the few survivors of a [redacted] attack on the [redacted] Ishtar facility, and certainly the most senior. His subsequent debriefing was carried out by [redacted] shortly after his arrival at the [redacted] Vulcan facility. The Professor judged that Pendleton's escape had been facilitated by the consumption of enhanced P2 elements acquired by Ishtar. [redacted] judged this, in combination with Pendleton's failure to rescue any other Ishtar resources, sufficient grounds for the termination of Pendleton's contract.
As the only remaining tangible resource of project Ishtar, the consumed P2 elements were subsequently extracted at the [redacted] Nerio facility. Pendleton did not survive the process. A road accident was staged using a dummy corpse to cover Pendleton's death
Additional note: Following [redacted]'s decision to reacquire the Fane assets misused by Pendleton to facilitate his escape from Ishtar, Pendleton made numerous attempts to bargain for his survival. Pendleton promised secret knowledge in exchange for his life. He refused to divulge his claimed without assurances as to his survival. Given Pendleton's extensive training in information retrieval resistance techniques, the loss of whatever knowledge he had was judged an acceptable cost for the recovery of the enhanced P2 elements.
Personnel file close by [redacted], Human Resources division 14th November...
You close the file. A tiny smile creeps across your lips. You no longer care for the Stellae - in fact you have plans of your own for them - but you appreciate the irony of Pendleton suffering the same fate he had inflicted on Hilda Gunnarson.
The other important report is from a Spartacus team detailed to watch Kali Valentine. You weren't surprised to find out that Fane kept an eye on the few Stellae they'd managed to identify, usually using small teams from Fane's in house paramilitary arm Spartacus and telephoto lenses. Amusingly, their method for tracking Rick Breddon turned out to be periodically hiring him.
You break open the report and skim through the dull military language with its odd jargon and lack of plain English. It confirms the important facts: Kali is still living here in Glasgow, at the same address as she did when you last met her. More importantly, she has novitiate in care as well - seventeen year old Vidya Mukhopadhyay.
You know what that means, even if Fane don't: The young Viritrilbia / Kenandandra Stellae is being readied to be formally apprenticed and you have a good idea of exactly who Rosalie is going to pair her with.
Which means it's time to make your move.
You throw the tablet to one side. You don't particularly care about the other reports. You don't even want to read the latest Fane update on your own suspected whereabouts. It does give you a certain amount of guilty pleasure, but all it ever adds up to is a series of different ways of saying 'we don't know'. Fi starts to move to pick the tablet back up, but you bid her to sit down.
She's an odd creation. She isn't a golem, but she isn't exactly human either. She has an anima of a twisted sort and a little mundane essentia as well as the imago that gives her shape. The truth of it is that she's a little like you: You aren't really fully human either anymore, not since your trips back and forth through the Libra fifteen long years ago. In some ways Fi is your attempt to understand yourself better, but she's also something more.
You concentrate, fixing on the remote control sigil that you discovered a few years ago. It's etched onto Fi's very substantia, hidden below the imago you have set on her. The connection opens, but you don't leap in to control her. Instead you focus on the connection itself. It isn't wide enough, not for what you need to do. Slowly it dilates until it reaches sufficient size.
You dive through, not just with a thin thread of essentia to control Fi's body, but with everything. All the aspects of your being - your anima, your essentia, all the imagos you have collected save Portia's. You feel Fi's anima and essentia passing by you going the other direction.
The sudden change in your viewpoint is disconcerting, as is the now outside view of the body you inhabited till just moments ago. Still, a grin spreads across your face. This body swap is another key step in your journey to immortality: Even if you somehow get caught or captured you can escape simply by hopping back to Portia, or to anyone else you create with the same techniques.
Portia looks back at you, the haughtiness vanishing from her eyes to be replaced with the same look of adoration Fi regarded you with moments earlier. "Mistress," she asks in a confused voice. The warped and devoted anima that you gave Fi is in there now.
"Yes," you smirk. "Enjoy your promotion. I, however, quit." You pause for a moment, enjoying the sudden spike in pleasure in your new Fi persona. "You have no idea how much I wanted to say that, but couldn't, not while you were in here."
Portia's face falls. "What will I do?"
"Keep on being Portia," you tell her. "Her personality is in there and you'll find it's a lot of fun. I'll be in contact with you." You stand up from the sofa and smooth out your skirt.
You have plans to make.
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