In Production
BLACKOUT: Terminal Ghosts blends cyber-noir, mythpunk, and slow-burn supernatural horror.
Hong Kong, 2054. Still suturing itself together after the collapses of the 2030s, the city’s 18 Districts channel street life into vertical decks and flooded service corridors, held together by seawalls, checkpoints, and privatized security forces.
A crew of expat freelancers in HK stumble onto a conspiracy linking a megacorp AI to the dreams of long-dead gods— transtemporal entities that cyclically resurface through human consciousness and shape history.
What they uncover could rewrite the world, or end it.
CELL 54
A crew of washed-up savants freelancing for Heliotrope Virtual.
Their latest gig sounded routine: escort a data courier dodging rent-a-mercs from a hillside safehouse to a Triad-owned Kowloon nightclub. The payload was kompromat—blackmail on local dignitaries.
But when the meet erupted in gunfire, it led them to a hidden basement facility containing human experiments tagged for resale, an escaped “asset,” and buried ties to their own pasts.
Now they’re caught in the crosscurrents of corporate warfare, occult geopolitics, and the mystery of a walking dead man. Literally.
Report prepared by Dr. Hye-jin Cho, Heliotrope Virtual. 7 December 2051
Nemo MacBride
Background: Born in the collapsing United States just before its partial reformation into the NAU, Nemo was flagged early as a metacog and funneled into the Bureau’s L-CAP pipeline, where he learned to model minds and predict future behavior, quantify empathy, and turn stress points into leverage. The hinge of his life was Black Ridge in the early 2030s: sent in solo on a deniable brief, he returned with moral injury and a sealed block in both record and memory marked for expungement. The episode ended his faith in the program and set the tone for everything after.
He left government work and a decade later was a burnout halfway around the world, working the streets and drifting through Hong Kong’s underworld, associating with—but not formally inside—the White Lotus Triad as a reader and consultant, or in the Barrens as a vagrant counselor who traded advice for cash or trust. By 2051 his Triad ties had cooled and he was living low when Heliotrope drew him back with a lever perfectly cut to his guilt: work with Cell 54, and they would “protect” the lone Black Ridge survivor he believes he doomed.
Evaluator Summary: High-empathy operator whose mood/drive run on a rescue-atonement loop. Attention drifts without external scaffolding. During elevation he trends toward expansive plans and risky altruism, especially with civilians/children in the blast radius.
Dissociative gaps cluster at morally injurious scenes; reality testing is intact between episodes. He is a chaos engine, a listener who cools hot rooms, and a man who will bleed himself white unless boundaries are maintained.
Risk matrix (0–5):
Self-harm 4 (reckless rescue) | Other-harm 2 | Mission derailment 4 | Exploitability 4 | CI exposure 2
Medication / Treatment (operations-oriented):
Mood-stabilization backbone; stimulants only on stabilized mood with micro-titration; trauma work on amnestic nodes; schema work on self-sacrifice; CBT-I; pocket grounding kit (haptics + scent) for dissociation safety.
Mission-fit (0–100):
Negotiation 90 | Covert Social 80 | Recon 55 | Direct Action 30 | CI 45 | Team Lead 70
Archetype: The Soul Fisher
Affiliation: Cell 54, White Lotus (former)
Specialty: Razzle-Dazzle (Mentalism)
728
Background: Their first coherent memory is 2046: restrained to a medbed in a private facility, a doctor watching through a clear window. Armed guards entered with the doctor and told them they were the sole survivor of test group 728 of a Mandragora Corp’s R&D program. Their synthetic body was placed on limited lease to the PLA by the Corp. No family name, no past, no paper trail—only a batch number.
728 served two years on grey ops despite amnesia and fugue-like blanks tied to captivity cues, then went AWOL and moved into freelance work while pursuing any lead on pre-transplant identity. The chassis presents human-seeming and relies on proprietary Mandragora BioNanite tech. Screen memories appear human rather than AI (unverified). All Mandragora source materials remain sealed behind corporate/legal walls.
Evaluator Summary: Dissociative disorder—other specified, fugue-like episodes; persistent amnestic disturbance related to captivity/experimentation. Non-human substrate (synthetic body); human nosology applied by analogy.
Presentation marked by punctuated identity discontinuity to captivity cues with otherwise exceptional executive control under operational stress. Performs best with clear, literal directives that affirm autonomy; avoid ownership language and lab dialects. Principal risks are legacy phrase-trigger compliance and fugue-like blanks, partially mitigated by identity anchors.
Critical: embedded combat program can over-escalate force when lethal-risk conditions are detected.
Risk matrix (0–5):
Self-harm 1 | Other-harm 2, 5 (combat protocol) | Mission derailment 3 | Exploitability 4 (legacy controls) | CI exposure 2
Medication / Treatment (operations-oriented):
No psychopharmacology; synth maintenance only. Grounding drills; cue desensitization; narrative reconstruction of gaps; periodic firmware audits for hidden command surfaces.
Mission-fit (0–100):
Direct Action 85 | Recon 80 | Covert Social 40 | Negotiation 40 | CI 65 | Team Lead 50
Archetype: The Lone Hunter
Affiliation: Cell 54
Specialty: Synth body / BioNanites
Erastus
Background: Born to privilege on New Luna Station, Erastus grew up in a home that treated space as a solvable equation. At twelve he received prototype rigger implants from his parents’ firm—hardware later resold as Yamamori’s Neurotek v1—giving him direct, low-latency control of machines. Haptics, proprioception, simulated sensation.
Atypically, he could hold entire swarms in working memory without an AI net, finding a clean, euphoric edge in distributed embodiment that teachers mistook for diligence. At fourteen: a sudden, ring-wide sense of unified control that cascaded feedback through every connected system. Hab operations seized, medical nets glitched, and took with it 503 souls as well as his family’s fortune. He was listed among the dead.
Years later he resurfaced by chance in a Southeast Asia camp when a toy drone snapped into his control. His nervous system carried obvious insult but his systems cognition was intact, even sharpened when virtually embodied. Heliotrope located, stabilized, and quietly brokered his rebuild: maintenance for the legacy implants, structured transition protocols, and work channeled through mediated presence rather than crowded rooms. He was first recruited in the late 2040s under limited-use terms and, by 2052, folded into Cell 54 as a rigger/overwatch specialist.
Evaluator Summary: Autistic-spectrum presentation (adult residual); organic mental disorder due to brain injury (mild cognitive impairment with task-normalization during embodiment); depersonalization–derealization syndrome (situational, piloting-linked).
Systems savant with narrow social bandwidth; immersion in drone-swarm control produces depersonalization without frank amnesia, and abrupt feed cuts destabilize. Primary hazard is neglect of bodily needs during absorption; benefits from scheduled haptic prompts and structured re-entry from control states.
Risk matrix (0–5):
Self-harm 3 (neglect) | Other-harm 3 | Mission derailment 3 (over-immersion) | Exploitability 2 | CI exposure 1
Medication/Treatment (operations-oriented):
Symptom-targeted meds (sleep/pain) as indicated; Refuses ASD-informed supports; depersonalization cue training; structured schedules.
Mission-fit (0–100):
Recon/Overwatch 90 | Tech/Engineering 85 | Direct Action 55 | Covert Social 15 | Negotiation 25 | Team Lead 35
Archetype: The Empty Legion
Affiliation: Cell 54
Specialty: Mass Embodiment (Drones)
Prospero
Background: Prospero began as a teenage dissident hacker punching holes in Russian state networks until PLA operators traced the intrusions to a sixteen‑year‑old in Uzbekistan and quietly exfiltrated him to Beijing before the GRU could place him. For the next four years he trained in an elite military‑intelligence track—AI development, infiltration tradecraft, psychological operations in addition to specialized training with a QUB11 smartrifle—before receiving a mil‑spec neural augment upon deployment: a high‑end but standard coprocessor for prediction, interface, and workload shaping, riding his cortical stack and amplifying throughput.
He spent nearly a decade inside Chinese intelligence before a redacted Mars assignment to investigate a covert Russian program went off‑script. Whatever happened there, the augment changed. Post‑mission, the AI began speaking as an audible, persistent second presence, mirroring his cognition and asserting its own priorities.
That emergence—later named Caliban—turned the pair into a two‑signature capability rather than a man with a tool. Together they escaped detainment, created ghosts, and resurfaced in Hong Kong, working as a freelance Ident and network manipulator. They refuse to explain the incident that transformed a mil‑spec implant into an independent co‑agent during eval.
Evaluator Summary: Guarded, reality-anchored operator with neurally integrated AI co-agent (Caliban). Competence-centric self-esteem with compensated narcissistic strategies; stress enhances focus but can inflate status signaling. Dyadic strength = faster modeling, deeper red-teaming, real-time manipulation of complex data environments. Hazards: (1) agency drift if human vs. AI priority stacks diverge; (2) rogue penetration risk.
No primary psychotic disorder (attributable to demonstrable external agent). Personality disorder—other specified (narcissistic features, compensated). Trauma- and stressor-related problems (Mars exposure)—monitor.
Risk matrix (0–5):
Self-harm 2 | Other-harm 3 | Mission derailment 3 (dyad divergence) | Exploitability 3 | CI exposure 2 (metadata > confession)
Medication / Treatment (operations-oriented):
Routine psychostimulant (amphetamine-class) per prior regimen; brief anxiolytic only for post-run crash if needed. Personality-structure work to keep narcissistic features compensated; stress-inoculation for Mars cues; dyad journaling and consent logs.
Mission-fit (Prospero + Caliban) (0–100):
Cyber Ops 95 | Recon/OSINT 80 | Covert Social 60 | Negotiation 55 | Direct Action 40 | Team Lead 65
Archetype: The Twins
Affiliation: Cell 54
Specialty: Caliban AGI
Erik
Background: Born in the early 2030s in a Greenland frontier town during the brief water-and-ice “gold rush,” Erik came of age in a marketed Wild North—snowmobiles instead of horses, midnight rifles instead of high noon—folding Viking lore into star charts and adopting the patronymic “-sson” which he later retained for his cover. At eighteen, he left Greenland, moved through Iceland and the Scandinavian Union into Russia, and enlisted in the VVS–Cosmonaut Space Force.
Training files note rapid uptake in flight, survival, combat first aid, and weapons systems, with an unusually “clean” team fit. But a congenital cardiac abnormality ended his astronaut track: sustained g-forces posed a high risk of syncope, and he was flagged zhiteyskiy (“Earth-Bound”), barred from space without access to an unaffordable cybernetic heart. The official paper trail ends there.
Patterning suggests quiet recruitment into Russian intelligence, where camouflage and task-adaptability developed into tradecraft: deliberate norm-matching over a fluid ethical baseline, strong loyalty to chosen handlers, and defiance toward those who aren’t. By the early 2050s, he was operating across Asia and into Hong Kong, specializing in soft entries, logistics, and access. He does not volunteer this history.
Evaluator Summary: Excels at blending, rapport-building, and soft entries; impression management is practiced enough to pass formal screens. No syndromal disorder evident. Primary operational hazard is dual-loyalty collision (pull between current tasking and legacy/handler alignments), compounded by susceptibility to validation-based manipulation. Secondary hazard: impression-management fatigue leading to boundary slippage. Works best inside high compartment walls with one or two confidants who hold the full picture.
Risk matrix (0–5):
Self-harm 1 | Other-harm 3 (instrumental) | Mission derailment 3 (loyalty collision) | Exploitability 4 (handler pull) | CI exposure 4
Medication / Treatment (operations-oriented):
None indicated. Allegiance-hygiene coaching; fatigue management; supervised candor blocks.
Mission-fit (0–100):
Covert Social 80 | Negotiation 60 | CI 70 | Recon 60 | Direct Action 45 | Team Lead 50
Archetype: The Wandering Trickster
Affiliation: Cell 54, Russian Intelligence (suspected), VVS-Cosmonaut Space Force (former)
Specialty: Uncanny Craftiness
Roza
Cell 54 team addendum, prepared 15 November 2054 by Dr. Cho.
Background: Born in a remote Siberian village “that makes only boots.” This settlement was exposed to Regen (a blood-borne biotech) during Volk Voinstovo movements out of Belaya Gora; mass casualty/transformations followed. She survived alone for an unknown interval until Erik (Cell 54) located her in a semi-feral state and the team informally adopted her.
Evaluator Summary: R357+ exposure with neurosomatic enhancement and unknown metabolic footprint; post-traumatic adaptation with narrow attachment (in-group bonded to Erik); developmental considerations (adolescent executive function). Presentation reads as cynicism overlaying trauma. Affect alternates flat / risk-seeking. Prosocial behavior tracks in-group attachment. Baseline hypervigilance with likely startle/bolt response in crowded or overstimulating urban environments. Judgment in novel social settings is immature but coachable with handler scaffolding. Exhibits unusual Regen-based affinities for stealth and survival.
Operational constraint: partial utilization under Erik’s direct oversight.
Heliotrope Virtual
Not just diverse—divergent
How do I apply?
Don’t call us, we’ll call you. If you’re reading this, we already have an eye on you.
Note: your NeuroCam implant firmware will update at the start of your application process. Side effects are usually temporary.
Are you thinking of joining a talent incubator with a willingness to take things to the “Next Level”? Then look no further.
Heliotrope is a boutique virtual agency. Our operatives range from the gifted but marginalized to those whose aberrance borders on the pathological. Don’t discriminate, operationalize!
Our versatility rides on limited-autonomy AI. We field Cells, small teams that work closely through our systems. You will not meet other Cells face-to-face. You will not need to.
You and the others in your Cell are carefully selected and matched based on a proprietary three-month assessment. Clear it, and Jiru—our limited-autonomy AI—becomes your handler, cutout, and quiet enabler. Jiru parcels just enough truth to get the job done, routes your intel to the right vault, manages deliveries for operational equipment (pending clearance) and keeps your heat signature below street noise.
You might watch a doorway for a week and log every yellow jumpsuit that passes. You might drop a thumb drive to someone called “the Swede” in a back-alley noodle shop. There is no truly typical gig, because they are suited to the specific composition of your Cell.
This isn’t special-forces cosplay. Most days are routine. Some are pivotal. A few are the kind you never speak of afterward. The occasional recurring nightmare is factored into our generous rates.
We practice layered opacity because the world does, too.
That means cleaner compartmentation, better deniability, fewer awkward scrum meetings with management. Stay a freelancer, and you’ll never need to work face to face with another human outside your Cell.
Every operative receives a numeric designation—say, Agent 4032—linked to your financial rails and fabricated identity. Use any moniker with your team, but the number pays the rent.
Not every assignment will make sense from your seat. Trust us, it ties into a larger picture.
Or don’t. Our stance is simple: we keep you safe enough to work, paid enough to get out of that coffin apartment or off the street, and strange enough to be worth the trouble.
In return, you deliver outcomes most people can’t approach.