WMD || Howard Williams Crosses the Line

[Williams-Mordhauser]

WMD Corporate Headquarters: July 28th, AS 823, 0730 Hours

Ctesiphon Jones was not having a good day.

To be fair, Ctesiphon Jones hadn't been having much of a good life either. Oh, the first two-thirds or so hadn't been so bad: life on Detroit had been pretty harsh, especially with his moms working eighteen hours a day for the company, and his pops nowhere to be seen, but he'd studied hard, and gotten himself a full-ride scholarship to Crichton City U. By the time he was twenty-six, he had a couple of well-respected papers under his belt, and a Doctorate of the Arts in pre-space Earth history. Things had been on the up and up.

Had.

There was only one acceptable job for an arts doctorate in Liberty: teaching. Unfortunately, with Liberty being Liberty, academics didn't get cushy teaching jobs without a fair contribution to the tenure committee - and Ctesiphon Jones had been worse than broke.

The rest of his life had been downhill: in a desperate bid to pay off sixteen million credits in student debt, he'd tried his hand at all sorts of jobs, none of which he'd been any good at. By the time he'd hit his 40s, he'd been rattling around the outer systems in a falling-apart old freighter, living on synthpaste and canned water.

That was when Williams-Mordhauser found him.

Since then, things had been... actually pretty good. WMD had gotten him back on his feet. He'd paid off his loans, gotten himself a new ship, made some fresh cash. Aside from that time he got mugged by some Kusari pretender-state out in New Tokyo, things had been pretty alright. He'd even moved his personal effects into WMD's corporate headquarters.

That evidently had been a mistake, because he'd woken up today to find it all missing.

Ctesiphon Jones wouldn't have minded if he'd lost all of his credits - he was used to being poor - he might not even have minded losing his ship, but in his personal strongbox had been his assembled papers, notes, and research documents: all that had been left of his once-glittering academic career.

That rather explained why he was angrily striding down the hallway towards the office of WMD's CEO, Howard Williams. If Mr. Williams was going to just sit by and let his employees get their memories stolen, well then, Ctesiphon Jones wouldn't stand for that.

Unfortunately, Ctesi's righteous indignation was no match for the sheer storm front of latent, incandescent rage that greeted him as he rounded the corner to the CEO's office, for there, at the door, stood Caroline Convair, WMD General Secretary, looking for all intents and purposes as if she were only a half-step away from snapping and tearing out someone's throat with her bare teeth.

"Uh, 'lo there Miz Convair," Ctesiphon began nervously. "Is- Is Mr. Williams in?"

"Mr. Williams is under administrative discipline for the next twenty hours and sixteen minutes," Convair replied, her voice hard enough to carve abstract patterns out of fullerene, "-which includes a state of solitary confinement in his office."

"Oh, I uh-" Ctesiphon didn't know what to make of that, except for the fact that Howard Williams was practically a force of nature, and the woman who'd evidently locked him in his own office was both standing right in front of him, and quickly running out of patience.

"Could I, uh- talk to you 'bout this then?" he finally began, his voice a little too high and a little too quiet for his own liking. "I've got some things missin' from my lockers: my old research notes, papers, my master's thesis-"

"Hold on," Convair cut in, her voice somehow even more menacing than before. "Research papers? Your field of expertise is pre-space Earth History, isn't it, Mr. Jones?"

Ctesiphon Jones felt the sweat drip down the small of his back. He could have sworn he saw Convair's eyes shrink into black, pits of shadow and cold malevolent fury. "Uhm, yes ma'am," he managed to squeak.

"Come with me," she said flatly. "You need to see this."

WMD Corporate Headquarters: July 28th, AS 823, 0740 Hours

"He did what?" Ctesiphon shouted, not sure if he should be laughing, crying, or putting his gun to his head and squeezing the trigger.

"Apparently the subject of your master's thesis piqued Mr. Williams' attention," replied Caroline Convair, her voice still razor-sharp. "He found a certain similarity between the secret shibboleths of these pre-space dictator-cults and the ethos of... shall we say, certain uniquely costumed elements within Kusari space."

Ctesi's eyes lit with the flame of revelation. "You mean the boy in the skirt and-" he cupped his hands in front of chest, miming a gigantic brassiere.

"Yes," Convair replied with the slightest and most contemptuous of grins. "The so-called 'Blood Dragon Shogunate': apparently, Mr Williams thought it would be a good idea to construct a fraudulent identity out of these ancient memetics and send them to their 'shogun'. His reasons for doing so remain unknown to me, by the time I had managed to restrain him, he had been reduced to drunkenly slurring ancient political slogans in a broken mix of German and Japanese."

"Aww hell, you gotta be kiddin' me," Ctesi replied, the waves of shock still lapping up against his thoughts. "So who we at war with now?"

"Nobody else, yet," Convair replied. "The Blood Dragons were already in a state of vendetta against us. The main reason Mr. Williams is under confinement now is because he was in the process of yet producing more of said messages, directed at other factions - groups which we are not yet in a state of open hostilities with." Convair handed Ctesiphon a text slate. "Here, he was about to send this one to the Rheinland Military."

By the time Ctesiphon Jones got through the first, short sentence, his eyes had gone wide, and his face had turned the palest dark brown Caroline Corvair had ever seen.

"Oh God why. I should have just bribed that tenure board," he whispered as he slumped against the wall, a look of utter despair on his face.

---

Williams-Mordhauser Distributing - Official Faction Account
Official Motto: "For space is wide and good friends are too few"
Unofficial Motto: "Try and stop us"