Looseleaf's Diary - 22 / 04 / 2120

"Sauron's taint," I said. "This place is unfuckable."

"Nothing and no-one is unfuckable," Carvedinstone said with absolute certainty.

Around us, porn looped on the walls of the digital space we had rented, Dwarf holes taking an endless parade of Goblin cocks. It was the Matrix equivalent of an hourly motel, designed for discreet rendezvous. The privacy and security protocols were the best either of us could afford without risking undue attention.

So against the backdrop of endless pornographic imagery, we sorted the files that Carvedinstone had taken from her run on Drake Industries. I added details from my end of things, mostly open source intelligence, historical studies, newspaper and police archives. What we both stared at was the information on the Black Labs complex.

Historical sources were the easiest for me to come by. The settlement of Blackwater had started out, about two thousand years ago, as the easternmost of the Black Numenorean colonies, built around a mineral-rich hot spring. Blackwater had traded hands between the Numenoreans, Haradrim, and Orcs more times over the centuries than any could count. By the end of the War of the Ring it was the furthest outpost of Sauron's empire, the spring turned into a saltworks.

King Elessar II rode in during the last of his mopping-up campaigns, chased out the Orcs, tore down the walls in one of the final sieges. The town that had grown up around the saltworks over the centuries was burnt, the population dispersed into the hills, leaving only the castle itself. His heirs over the next thousand years generally ignored Blackwater, the garrison dwindled. Gunpowder and modern artillery made the old fortifications useless, militarily. Economically, the low-quality salt was of little interest, and the Orc-influence too strong to attract tourists to the warm waters. By the time of the incorporation of the Reunited Megacorp a hundred years ago, Blackwater was abandoned, one more ruin designated as a national park.

The Reunited Megacorp needed funds. Drake Industries needed somewhere quiet and isolated to do research away from prying eyes. The exact price wasn't public, but I'm sure it was quite affordable. Blackwater became Black Labs.

More recent data was harder to come by. There was only one road to the Black Labs, built and maintained by Drake Industries. Maybe sixty researchers, guards, administrative, and janitorial staff. Everyone who worked there lived on-site in megacorporate housing, a little arcology, totally self-contained. There were no other settlements nearby, all the food and consumables were shipped in monthly by truck or helicopter. Most of the public information was locked or hidden by Drake Industries, even satellites turned blind when they flew over Black Labs, but there were still shipping manifests, flight plans, social media posts from former on-site employees.

Which left us with a few grainy photos and a lot of pieces missing from the puzzle.

"Lots of new construction," Carvedinstone said. "This email shows a shipment of water filtration equipment, but their source of potable water must still be the old aquaduct, the spa is too mineralized"

"Fence can't be just normal," I added. "Your receipts suggest electrified, razorwire, all sorts of sensors. These smaller structures could house wargs or giant spiders. There were requisition requests for a mine field, automated weapon emplacements...and enough weapons to outfit a platoon of corporate security."

"Completely cut off from the Matrix. Even independent power. This email suggests they installed a geothermal tap in the late 2090s...makes sense, given it's a hot spring," Carvedinstone's voice sounded aggravated. She wanted something out of there. One obsidian talon tapped an open space on the southern end of the property, outside the ruined old walls, but inside the fence. A photo had caught people digging, a long wooden box. "Graveyard."

"Are you sure your friend is still there?" I asked. "And alive?"

Carvedinstone withdrew her talon. We had muted the porn, but her obsidian features still reflected distorted images of gaping assholes dripping with Orc spunk. It was like watching bukkake through a shattered mirror.

"I have to believe so," the hacker said, softly, almost to herself. "What we need is a specialist. Neither of us is experienced in this kind of infiltration."

"I...might know someone," I said. "They have skills. But they'd need convincing. Not just money."

Carvedinstone's strange, glassy face turned toward me, head tilted at an odd angle.

"Who?" they asked. Then quickly added: "If you can share."

"Rowena Rowethasdottir. Ex-Ranger. Experienced. And...she might have an interest in what's in there," I said. "It's how I get interested in Drake Industries. How we attracted each other's attention. She rescued an Orc tattooed with Drake Industries military biotechnology coded markers. I think she's one of their genetically-engineered, vat-grown Uruk Hai."

The hacker's avatar's face didn't betray anything, but their body language indicated surprise.

"Your turn to share," I said. "Who are you trying to rescue? What is Drake Industries doing with them?"

Carvedinstone lowered her head. The worst thing about working with someone you didn't really know was how much to trust them. I'd given a few things away. Not everything, but enough. Yet if we were going to make this work, we needed more cards on the table.

"I grew up in New Moria. Learned to crack IC growing up outside the Deep Cores, tapping into the system near the coolant intakes, where the water of the dark lakes feeds into those pipes, and comes out a few kilometers away, warmer and reeking of metals and plastics," Carvedinstone said. "That's where I met Bob. They lived down there, in the dark, eating the blind fish and stranger, crawling things that lived down there. We became...friends."

"Lovers?" I said automatically, and then regretted it.

"We were intimate," Carvedinstone said. "Bob was SINless. Intelligent. Had...special talents. Some megacorps were interested in those talents. Drake Industries had an agreement with the Deep Bank. Swept through one day, picked Bob up. Took him away. I couldn't follow right away, and by the time I got out...Bob was there, in their Black Labs. I don't know what Drake Industries has done to them, what experiments they're running. But they went to a lot of trouble to get Bob. Enough trouble to keep Bob alive as an asset."

"Okay," I said. "So, the question is: do we invite Rowethasdottir into our planning? What can we promise her, besides our support?"

Carvedinstone was silent. Then, something seemed to catch her attention.

"What do you want out of this, Looseleaf?" the hacker asked. "I thought you had a personal interest in Drake Industries, and this was strictly business. Is this Rowethasdottir a...friend?"

"We've never met," I said honestly. "But there's...more to their situation. It started out as just research, but the deeper I dig, the more I don't like what I'm finding. I don't like people trafficking."

"Neither do I," Carvedinstone admitted. "But I don't know if we can stop that. I just want Bob back."

"And I want to find out what they're up to with their Uruk-Hai program and trafficking," I said, not sure if I was saying it for their benefit or to justify what I was doing for myself. "Some of that data I can sell, some of it I can feed to news outlets. Maybe it won't stop them, but the bad press might cause them to scale back their operations."

Even as I said it, the words sounded hollow. It was a big world, and megacorps did as they pleased. If there was money in trafficking Orcs, for sex or anything else, one of them would do it. Hell, maybe all of them did it already, and I just didn't know about it. Yet I couldn't just sit by and do nothing about it.

Soon, our time in the sex room would be up, our little strategy session at an end. It was up to me to decide how and why it would be the best way to contact Rowethasdottir with our proposal.