2020-10-01: Web of Horrors Chapter 1A: Ghost Recon
| Ghost Recon | |
|---|---|
| Vic infiltrates the hospital where apparent Linkdead Sleepers are being treated. She confirms the status and tracks down the lost mind of one of the victims to a set of addresses in the Digital Web. | |
| IC Date | October 1st, 2020 |
| Players | Vic Rasmussen and Vivian Starr (ST) |
| Location | Prospect General Hospital |
| Prp/Tp | Web of Horrors |
| Spheres | Mage |
Having become aware of a wave of unexplained illnesses spreading throughout Prospect, with off front -page articles in the local newspaper discussing people ending up at the hospital seemingly brain dead, Vic has become suspicious that something semi-common in her own world, Internet Overload Syndrome or IOS (pronounced "Eye-Oh-Ess"), has cropped up in her adopted world.
Feeling that she is uniquely qualified to investigate this situation, Vic, having picked up an inexpensive set of VR goggles at Tech Addiction and a set of nurse's scrubs at a uniform store the evening before, is found getting off the bus at the hospital in the early hours of the morning, almost an hour after sunrise. Before heading into the building she takes a deep breath and checks that her hair (which is devoid of its normal rainbow dye) is still pulled up into an appropriately severe bun.
The hospital is typical for its type, the interior that mix of bland and efficient while giving a token throwaway nod to comfort and style. Occasionally, voices over the PA system sound, chanting out their usual pages for doctors and nurses and jargon. Rows of plastic seats sit in the reception area beyond an airlock of two sets of wide automatic doors, some of them occupied by worried and/or bored family members of patients, some reading magazines. A reception desk lies at the end of the reception area, the corridor extending in both directions to either side of it. Said reception desk is manned by an efficient (if seemingly slightly stressed) brown haired woman with her head bowed as she types at a computer.
Vic, putting on a demeanor of detachment and distraction of a woman who's prepared for a long shift of the same old thing, walks though the reception area as if this is just another day in the office and that is not her responsibility to deal with those in the waiting area.
The receptionist at the desk does look up as Vic passes, her brows furrowing and eyes narrowing. But it only lasts a moment before the woman shrugs and returns to her work, apparently unconcerned. There are lots of nurses in this hospital, after all, and one that looks unfamiliar isn't that shocking.
At the end of the right hallway is an elevator, while the left seems to go into a further reception area and beyond that is the ICU (according to the helpful sign on the wall).
Vic quickly glances over the directory listing by the elevator in order to find two items (and is hoping beyond hope that they are on the same floor)... IT and intensive care. After looking she steps into the first available elevator and turns to press the appropriate number to reach her chosen destination...
The Directory lists the ICU at the other end of the hallway, while the IT department is in the basement (near the morgue, so it would seem).
... basement it is and Vic says, "Going down," to dissuade others from getting into the elevator with her. And hoping she's not got a member of the hospital's geek squads (dieners and medical examiners heading to the morgue /or/ the ever present in modern society computer experts of the information technology department) trying to join her.
Fortunately, there doesn't seem to be anyone else who is willing to follow along to the basement. Once inside the elevator and the button for the basement pressed, the vertical conveyance springs to life and begins to descend. That slightly floaty feeling that comes from going down in an elevator only lasts a very brief time before there's a ding! and the doors slide open, revealing a hallway going left and right, lit by the ever-present glow of florescents. A helpful sign right on the wall lists the primary destinations: left goes to the Morgue, and right goes to the IT Department.
As the elevator opens Vic sees the sign and, quite naturally, heads neither directly to the right or to the left but instead in the correct shorter direction to reach the women's bathroom and steps inside.
After a quick check to confirm that nobody else is in there currently she takes the stall closest to the right-hand end of the floor. She makes herself comfortable on the toilet by sitting cross legged on the seat and then out of her bag comes first her camp stool. After the stool is set up on the floor in front of the toilet her computer comes out and is powered up.
Now she takes a moment to center herself and prepare to do some magically enhanced hacking! Focusing her will on her desire to forge a wireless connection between her laptop and the nearby hospital servers and on her foci, said laptop, Vic applies a Data Sphere connection across the relatively short distance between the computers and immediately puts fingers to keyboard as she begins to hack her way into the patient database on the server.
Like a digital ninja, Vic slips into the hospital's server, quietly and adeptly sashaying through the unprotected files. Meanwhile, in the server room (kept a temperature below comfort to cool the computers), the underpaid and overworked IT guy munches on a vending machine snack, the crumbs of which dribble down his completely inappropriate T-Shirt. It's a good thing the overweight lout is rarely seen outside of his domain as there would no doubt be complaints to the hospital about his slovenly appearance. Regardless, the man is blissfully unaware of the intrusion into his precious system, continuing to devour the small plastic bag's contents with abandon. Wiping the cheese dust on his shirt, the guy moves the mouse on the screen to select a video to watch -- and, of course, it's porn. Truly a class act this guy is. No doubt the money the hospital pays to his salary is worth every penny.
In her impromptu office, Vic continues to fly her fingers across the keyboard and mousepad of her laptop. So focused is the V-Dept that the tip of her tongue sticks out from between her lips and her eyes narrow. She executes a search for patients (or cadavers) that have the symptoms described in the news with secondary flagging searches for symptoms of IOS from her world to see how/if they correlate.
It doesn't take long, not with the Virtual Adept's aptitude for searching. Soon, the information is scrolling across her screen: In this hospital, there are five people with the Linkdead (or IOS) symptoms. Two are teenagers. One is a young adult. One is in middle-age. And one is an elderly woman. Included in the information are logs of how each was found by the emergency responders: all were in their homes with no signs of trauma. Some were found by family members, one by a neighbor, and the elderly woman was discovered when she failed to show up for a medical appointment and repeated calls to her house were ignored.
Vic executes a subroutine on her computer to capture all patient information for the five locally to her computer - total HIPPA violation here! - and pops up a quick ePostIt window to make a note to remember to investigate their financials and purchase history to see what sort of links may be there (at the bottom of the note she adds - "Outsource to Rufus?" as part of the reminder). She then reads the nursing notes to try to figure out which one(s) have no family or are children of single parents so as to decide which one to check out in person.
In short order, the patient information is downloaded, all while leaving the hospital unaware of the violation. As far as the other query is concerned, several of the patients fit the bill, or close to it:
Edna Stein, the elderly lady. She lives alone (her husband is deceased) and her children live out of state. To date none have visited her in the hospital.
Vincent Rhys, middle age. A lifelong bachelor, he was the one found by a neighbor. No known family.
Yolanda Rice, teenager. She lived with her single mother.
The other two -- Alice Langley and Charles Castor -- have more family.
Decision made, files copied to her computer - and quickly duplicated on the smartphone tucked into her bra - Vic releases the magical connection between her laptop and the server and powers off her computer. Packing up, first the computer goes back into her bag and then the camp stool is folded up and put into the pocket she uses for it.
Unfolding her legs, Vic stands and exits the stall. She washes her hands incase anyone is observing or enters as she departs. Returning to the elevator she selects the floor where the ward that all five patients are in is on.
During the trip up from the basement she smoothes away any wrinkles she's developed in her uniform away with a static lint brush she extracts from her bag and returns to it before the conveyance stops.
The elevator goes up to floor three before there's that ding! and the doors slide open. At this time of day, the ward has doctors and nurses going about their duties, but no one seems to spare a glance at yet another uniformed nurse in the elevator. Nearby there is a nurse's station, the older woman manning it giving off a presence of world-weary professionalism as she writes on something out of sight.
Acting as if she's where she belongs, Vic steps out of the elevator and mentally curses herself for not consulting a floor plan while she was on the servers. Instead she makes a quick glance around to see the ubiquitous signs that indicate the directions to go to specific room number ranges that can always be seen in hospitals.
Fortunately, there are signs which indicate the room number ranges and the rooms themselves are labeled. Given the information already gathered from the server, it's pretty easy to find the numbers -- and given that the cases have been happening over a couple months, they've all been moved to close quarters. The only question now... is which one to go to first?
The elderly woman is deemed an outlier for now and a child's room is at greater risk of being noticed so there's really only one choice. With what she hopes seems to be an air of belonging, purpose and resignation of dealing with someone whose death is not a possibility but a question of when, Vic turns and walks towards Vincent Rhys' room to check him out first.
There he is, laying down on the hospital bed dead to the world. With a fairly short crop of hair just beginning to thin and a mustache with just a few streaks of white, Vincent Rhys is actually not in bad shape for a middle-aged man -- or rather, he wouldn't be if he hadn't been bedridden for weeks. He is hooked up to the requisite monitoring systems constantly checking his heart rate and other vitals, an IV drip hooked up to his left arm. He seems to have definitely lost weight and muscle tone while in the hospital, his skin hanging on his unmoving form loosely.
Vic's hand goes into her bag as soon as she's approaching the bed so as to retrieve her vintage head mirror. Alighting it around the unaccustomed bun in her hair makes Vic take a pause but once done and the mirror adjusted to be in front of her left eye, the V-Dept begins to focus Life and Mind to craft a magical effect. She speaks words of power softly to herself ("Algorithm. Boolean. Bug. Compilation. Framework. Iteration. Operand. Variable." the choice in this case doesn't matter as its just to focus her mind and aren't /required/ to be related to the matter at hand but she tosses in a "Lifesigns" and "EKG" into the mix randomly in the matra).
A simple sensory enhancement scanning for anything unusual about the mind and body of the patient is being brought into effect. The resulting information will be visible and tailored to her (limited) medical knowledge: equal to that of a well trained Boy Scout and enhanced by the local and alien medias' representation of medical science over the years.
Lifewise, poor Vincent is suffering from the typical muscle atrophy one would expect from lying in a hospital bed for several weeks. There's electrical activity in his brain, but only in the peripheral and autonomic nervous system -- the rest of his brain really is flatlined. The Mind portion reveals similar: all his psyche is missing and all that is left here is an empty shell of meat. It is pretty much a textbook case of Internet Overload Syndrome from the home dimension.
Despite the seemingly cut-and-dried aspect of Vincent's affliction, there's still something niggling at the hindbrain, telling you you've missed something. Perhaps a scan with Prime or Spirit would help gain additional information?
Having seen the results of the Life/Mind scan, Vic pulls her smartphone out and unlocks the screen. Navigating on its screen to a storage folder location she continues chanting ("RAM. Anamnesis. ROM. Cognizance. CPU. Mind's eye. Memory.") while also focusing on the screen in front of her so as to make a copy of the results of the previous scan appear on the handheld computing device as a Virtual Reality simulation.
Seeing the file come into existence and trusting her L33T V-Dept skillz as far as that is concerned she continues chanting ("LAN. WAN. PAN. Span. Separation. Remote. Internet. Intranet. Extranet. Double-U Double-U Double-U. Gap. Absence. Expanse. Air-Gap or Cable.") while she pulls up an active mapping site focused so that the entirety of Prospect and the areas around it show. As she attempts to have an impression of a best location in the D-Web to start searching for the rest of the patient's mind appear in her own mind she finishes her chanting and says, "Find him for me," at a conversational level of volume... one that is unlikely to be heard beyond the room itself.
After ten minutes of chanting the mantra, and the luck of the devil that a real nurse didn't walk in during the middle of this (somewhere in the back of her mind where Vic could have a stray thought without shattering the building effect she makes a half-hearted mental note to bring a partner to keep watch next time she does something like this!), she releases the effect by finally saying the "Find him for me," to the universe at large... her computer... herself... her avatar? Her shadow, cast behind her from the filtered sunlight coming though the window on the opposite side of the patient from her, begins to flicker like an old style CRT screen when the TV isn't tuned to an active channel. But the ritual works!
Cascading through the data-filled halls of the Digital Web the little search algorithm goes, shalloming through the conduits of information that connect the varied Sectors in the network that make up that hallowed realm. Fortunately, it doesn't need to go too far; the mental breadcrumbs of Vincent nascent mind lead right to a subnet situated in the meatspace of Prospect itself! And what is found there is... disturbing. A crawling chaos, a growing cancerous mass of corrupted sectors are there, the datalines connecting them sickly and disordered. The interior of this scar upon the beauty of the Digital Web is nearly opaque, the rules by which those Sectors are formatted so completely out of sync with everything else as to be virtual static... but the periphery of this mass is a bit more sensible. Five different addresses come back from the little algorithm, all of them at the edges of the corrupted sectors but accessible.
Still, though, as successful as the ritual was, it was quite taxing. The skin around the VA's face feels taut and stretched, an indication of just how much Paradox her little adventure so far must've generated. Not to mention the fatigue around the eyes and the blur of the screen. It's not severe enough to cause any distress, but there are definite warning signs from Reality that she's been pushing things a little too far today.
Releasing the effect and a sigh of relief at the same time, Vic slips her smartphone back into her bra and then removes the headband and mirror from her head and slips it into her bag. She then prepares herself mentally to leave the room and, departing it, for the short trip to the elevator.
Once in the elevator, alone again thanks to a quick Data/Entropy/Time rote that makes it so that Nobody Goes Her(My) Way, she pulls her off her scrubs and shoves them into her bag which she briefly sets down to put her army shirt on over her black sports bra. Picking up the bag she situates it and brushes out any remaining wrinkles in the cloth miniskirt she's wearing along with her customary boots. As the elevator goes ding she remembers to loose the bun and shake out her hair then steps out of the elevator and walks out like any other guest.
In the server, as Vic departs the hospital, the worm-style virus she left there finishes eating up the evidence that she was there, replacing moments she was on camera with blended loops of the moments before and after she was in view. Its job finished it finds a sector of heavy data use and lets the porn the IT slob is watching slice it into data fragments.
