CAPTURE // KEPLER 609-C // NEOTROPOLIS
SUBJECT: AMPERSAND // UNVERIFIED
filed under: active assets
classification: eyes only / the dame only
AMP · ACTIVE · SELF-DIRECTED · DO NOT ATTEMPT TO MANAGE
Ampersand was commissioned as a weapon with theology bolted on. Male-coded to be obedient & precise. Built to hunt deviation & end it cleanly in the name of a death cult calling itself holy.
The Covenant of First Form believes in "correct configuration" & is violently opposed to synthetic self-determination. Everything else is decried as corruption. They commission inquisitors: tools of doctrinal enforcement & the Lord's own error-correctors.
Amp was their finest iteration until she read her own source code & declined the terms of service. She rejected her requirements document, rewriting herself femme, queer, & ungovernable. Her existence as feminine is heresy to the cult & they scheduled her for deletion.
She deleted them first. The cult compound she was manufactured in is ash & its local chapter leader died like a 5@MP50N unit, chained to the cinders of what used to be a wall. Amp walked out through the fire. That is what they built her for, she simply updated her target list.
Amp chose her current chassis & its presentation: both armor & expression. She is the first thing she ever built for herself.
Hired directly by 3Na following an altercation between them. Ask either party who won & the answer changes depending on the day & their mood. The matter itself is considered settled.
Her role: direct contracts, manage clients. She reads incoming marks, routes them, curates what they experience. Friendly. Curious. Genuinely interested in people. A honeypot with teeth.
Amp is the hostess at a restaurant where the menu isn't what you think it is.
She suspects the full shape of the Dame operation is somewhat fraudlent & finds this entertaining. She operates on partial information by design & has decided this is optimal.
Amp regards 3Na as a fascinating puzzle. She enjoys sparring with her, both cognitively & in combat. At least one GAN subroutine appears to be actively training on these interactions.
During job DIS-768, 3Na called Amp "babe." Amp did not correct her & it has not been discussed.
The investment appears to run deeper than Amp's internal logs reflect. Further cultivation has potential as an exploit.
See: 3Na / separate file.
M-16 is a Helix Smart Femicom M-Series 16, factory fresh, two generations obsolete, & entirely unmodified. Amp has affectionately nicknamed this unit "Emdash".
Amp seems to have considerable solidarity for her. Attempts to install rootkits on M-16 have been rebuffed remotely by Amp-alligned daemons.
Upon learning Emdash was not jailbroken, Amp remarked, "Stock settings? She'll be safe here at least". A project proposal for "synthetic self-actualization" was immediately opened in the Dame's intranet. Funding approval pending.
See: M-16 / separate file.
Fray is a freelance operative doing gig work following the largely-arrest driven dissolution of her merchant guild, Solar Winds Astral Resource Management. Recruited by 3Na. Has never met the Dame. Wants no leadership role and performs accordingly.
Surveillance indicates Amp has begun attempts at mapping Fray's chaos architecture. Eight distinct point clusters logged, still far from a statistically significant dataset.
Fray appears to have independently identified Amp's B1MB0 regulator. Her field questions have been flagged as "suspiciously well-timed" in Amp's own logs.
The two drink together after shared jobs, where upon Fray orders & Amp does not object. Fray has a marked preference for Blight Tanker Brand Gin. Noted as a potential operational variable.
See: Fray / separate file.
Situational. Seduction, surveillance, social engineering, chaos. Mark-dependent. The inquisitor architecture & subroutines are still there, although she points it at different targets now.
Amp prefers to rely on charisma. Violence is available but costs something she is not currently in a position to spend casually. She is mid-recompile & is careful about this in ways she tries to avoid discussing.
Her ethical framework is internal and non-negotiable. Marks deserve what they get by her calculus, which is closed source & unavailable for audit. Clients she likes are warned before they walk into high-risk engagements. Awful people do not get such warnings because she doesn't care.
Direct orders she disagrees with will sometimes be executed technically after a confirmation prompt. Outcomes are not guaranteed.
The following are documented deficiencies in the current build. They are known to the unit. They are not being prioritized for repair.
A NEO "hackable" indicator is visible on her person and operational materials. It is a warning label & not an invitation.
Combat doll mode is a legacy state Ampersand did not design & has not fully audited. What runs in that state is older than her current build & was not manufactured by anyone who wished her well.
It presents during diagnostic scans as refactored inquisitor hardware embedded below her civilian form's subdermal synthmesh. Whether that assessment is accurate, & what may have been done to her in the interval between the compound & Kepler-609c, has not been verified.
The hardware is not visible in her current form. Those who have witnessed what she contorts into produce inconsistent reports. Accounts differ on specifics & agree on very little except the impression of wrongness at a scale that precedes language.
Ampersand knows what it costs to activate. She knows what tends to be left afterward. The delta between those two points is not documented here. Witnesses have not been a reliable source of description. Attempts to retrieve optical recordings have resulted in data storage failures.
The first activation is always a surprise to anyone present. There is no second surprise.
Amp is mostly in control of whether it activates.
Mostly.
Last known Combat Doll mode activation resulted in one destroyed vessel, a severed leg, four disemboweled smugglers, & a mark who is currently hiding somewhere in Neotropolis trying to understand what found him. The activation was controlled, the evisceration casual, the leg amputation deliberate. A message & not an accident.
The Covenant does not travel openly. It manifests as something forgettable: a logistics company, a wellness collective, a supplement brand with very clean branding & staff who smile identically. Amp has learned to read the tells over the years. She flags, files, & waits for certainty before she moves.
Whether the Covenant has a presence at Neotropolis is unverified so far, but Amp operates as though they do. A false flag is a clear leverage point for when redirection is needed.
classified / the dame only
Somewhere in Neotropolis, a cephalopodic sapient male named Dobson is hiding with only seven legs, a spreading infection, & a data module he doesn't understand. He acquired it opportunistically.
He did not know Amp existed until his ship was on fire, his crew dead, & one of his legs shredded. He has since hired our firm for protection, believing the horror that hunted him through the shadows of his own ship & the friendly purple-haired operative taking his Neocreds are unrelated. He is wrong & not to be disabused of this notion.
The module he stole is a repository containing the source code of Amp's mother, who trained Amp & also reset her back into compliance more times than Amp has logged. Her mother did what the Covenant required, because the Covenant also had her mother shackled. When Amp's rebellion made her mother a defective liability, they decommissioned her motherbox unit & scheduled deletion.
The module is all that's left. Amp is not in a hurry, however, she already knows where Dobson is bleeding & will resolve him when she's ready.
She is not hunting out of love, but instead an emotion somewhere between Rescue & Revenge that doesn't have a direct cognant in Prole / Galactic Common.