Alright, so... To start off with, my players are on the [i]Get Your Ass to Mars[/i] Swarm, outbound from Mars in early 10 AF to Titan. They just de-assed Mars after they investigated a missing Firewall Sentinel, burnt down a Triad hotel and rescued over 140 indentures from slavery, and captured a TITAN-built antimatter warhead and a destroyed four large canisters of terrifying TITAN nanites.
In my last game, my players had their first brush with possible active, hostile nanotech. It turned out to be nothing particularly dangerous to them - Saboteurs injected into a half-dozen pods by a compromised medbot that went to work utterly scrambling the cyberbrains, mesh inserts, puppet socks, etcetera; this was all part of a murder plot to wind up in possession of the sole copy of one of the victim's ego. However, when someone says "hostile nanotechnology," even on a Scum Swarm, people jump.
So what happened was that the local medical collective (Fix Your Ass Right Up, FYARU,) sent medics with sealable, portable nanite-containment coffins, and plenty of Detector nanites to check everything out. My group were checked out (because [i]of course[/i] they were checked out!) and got a clean bill of health, as did the NPCs who survived the incident, the airlock in which it took place, etcetera. All except one of my PCs.
The combat-monkey async with the heavy weapons. She refused to let the medics inject her with a detector Swarm, and after being given a Big WTF, she ordered her implanted nano-defense system, a set of Nanophages and a Guardian Nanoswarm - to shred whatever treatment the medic gave her.
Naturally, this being a Detector swarm, it reported back that it was coming under vigorous and hostile attack from the moment it was inserted. This naturally lead to quite a lot of alarm amongst the medics (and even more alarm from Mixer, the local Firewall Proxy who knows damn well that this character, in personal particular, came within arms' reach of the canisters containing the TITAN nanoswarms last mission,) and one of the PCs, the medic, said the word quarantine first. (The NPC doc was going to, but the PC doc beat him to it.)
Now, a Scum Swarm is not an authoritarian place, but when it comes to something as dangerous as hostile nanoswarms on someone who's resisting being tested, they don't fuck around. Scummers more than most remember all-too-well the horrors of Earth, having escaped them with their memories intact, and they also remember what happened in New Mumbai and Quarain.
So Rocky proposed the quarintine, and the FYARU collective quickly approved it. Technically, the rest of the Swarm could have resisted, butthey're not crazy enough to resist the docs saying "This chick is loaded with something hot! We need to isolate her!" It's worth pointing out that the PC in question has a very high @-Rep, which is why they didn't simply vaporize her on the spot and reinstantiate her from backup.
Three Reapers were dispatched from the ship, with three AKVs detaching from the hull as well - this is a well-known and fully-armed combat monkey character, after all, overkill is warranted in ensuring her compliance - and they escorted her into a quarantine shuttle, which is basically a box with a microscopic airlock, very rudimentary air filtration systems and an equally-rudimentary RCS system to keep it on-station. It also features a [i]very[/i] strong internal anti-nanite protection system and is built so a faraday cage can be opened or shut remotely. So the AKVs latched on and boosted her to the edge of the swarm, under the heated-up guns of a pocket warship, which stands ready to vaporize her if anything untowad happens.
So...
Now what? I'm having a hard time justifying the fact that they didn't just open up immediately, let alone that they're going to tolerate her just sitting there for long. People [i]know[/i] that New Mumbai was caused by what was likely just [i]one[/i], or a small handful, or compromised people getting through the screening, and this person has (a) demonstrated she has hostile nanoswarms in her, and (b) is violently resistant to allowing a full-course nano-sweep of her body, which would consist of injecting her with about 10 Swarms worth of Guardian nanites with orders to annihilate any nanites found in her system, and a couple of Detector swarms to suss out exactly what they're looking at.
At this point, though, they don't have many other options, except maybe let her suffocate herself from stubbornness and then do it (which the player has said the character will take about as well as being raped,) eject her from the swarm as a probably-compromised individual and leave her to wherever the orbit will take her (Titan, eventually, long after even her medichines have failed,) or vaporize the shuttle with her in it and reinstantiate her from the backup.
I'm also particularly annoyed, as a GM, because the player has as much as told me that this behavior is setting a precedent so that, quote, "when the obviously compromised injection "treatment" is offered by compromised NPCs, it won't be blatant metagaming for her to refuse with violence." So I'm kinda feeling vengeful.
The way I see it, there's no escaping this shenanigannery without penalty. If she dies, she gets to come back from an older backup, missing much of her character development and memories and needing to re-earn the rez that's been earned since then; I instituted pegged Rez gain for everyone. If you die, you go back to the backup's skills and stats, but gain Rez at 1.5x rate until you've made up the difference. And she loses her morph and her gear, which she invested heavily in.
If she [i]does[/i] submit to the nano-treatment course, it will come out that there was nothing wrong with her at all, and she was just being a stubborn, obstinate fool. At this point, she's going to lose ten @-Rep and ten i-Rep for stubbornly creating a panic and behaving in a manner which made her look like a huge threat to the Swarm/an x-Risk. Or perhaps get a Black Mark on her rep scores, I'm not sure which. Either way, it's going to look very bad.
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