OIPAN’s Final Gambit
The audacious endgame of Carl’s vanished sponsor, the Open Intellect Pacifist Network: former crawlers who want the crawl to fail. Days earlier OIPAN spent a fortune steering Carl to a Homestead, Florida homeless shelter with a benefactor-box flyer, gambling that getting him within earshot of a Residual’s daily speech would end the crawl one of two ways: either the liaisons would be forced to yank him mid-broadcast and enrage the newly-primal System AI into killing everyone, or the speech would prove so dangerous the Syndicate Council would pull the failsafe and snuff this solar system’s star. Either outcome buys the galaxy a long reprieve from the dungeon. It fails: Orren had pre-negotiated the yank with the AI, the speech turns out to be ‘long-debunked folklore,’ and OIPAN are left fugitives with frozen assets and ruined lives. Hauled to Orren’s office, Carl is forced to surrender the looted bin of Valtay neural-enhancer pills and a forbidden communicator, trading it (by Quasar’s caselaw) for three Cracker Jack scrolls, a wand-recharge scroll, and the right to keep his four cretin mercenaries through Floor 9.
Related entries
- The Open Intellect Pacifist Action Network (Character)
- The Residuals (Lore)
- Orren, the Syndicate Liaison (Character)
- The Failsafe (Lore)
- Quasar, the Null (Character)
- The System AI (Character)
- Carl (Character)
Browse
- All Events & Milestones
- Everything debuting in Book 6, Chapter 51
- All of The Eye of the Bedlam Bride