Ten days of hotel rooms and food tend to bleed together in the best of circumstances.  But Whisper does get a few highlights out of the experience.  First of all, Oscar (and he insists that Whisper call him Oscar) turns out to be a genuinely good guy for all the technobabble that he spits out of his mouth.  And he's more than happy to talk all kinds of corporate strategy and business in and outs with his bodyguard.  It's like the guy has been dying for someone to talk to.

"Nerds," he asides to Martin at one point after a talk about velocity bleed in the Martian atmosphere when rare alloys collide with dust storms. "Jesus."

"Aren't you..."

"I mean, yeah.  But I was a musician, man, long before I made delta-v sing." The fifty something round man pats his belly and orders another beer.

Most of the time Martin spends eye-cruising the area.  The important folks are easy to spot, they've got their own muscle moving through the area with them.  A lot of sizing each other up occurs between solos and corporate law, some of it polite with nods of recognition.  Some of it nothing more that dick measuring.  Especially the guys with so much cyber they're eating nutrient slop instead of real food.  It's real entertaining to size up who is going to be sport-fucking who in the evening: Between the Corps, the security, and the entertainment there's going to be some world class hookups and bad decisions going down.  Because Orbital Air knows how to throw a goddamn party.  Oscar pulls some handsome little blond thing that is just eating up his derivatives.

It's the second to last night when Martin spots the newcomer.  His radar sense immediately pings and returns a signal that reads "techweasel."  Small, skinny, and trying to fleece the room, looking for illicit tech deals.  That wouldn't be a problem.  Martin has picked up on the fact that Oscar has a pretty decent BS detector.  The problem, as Martin sees it, is that the TechWeasel's security is one Wendell "Snack Attack" Lee looking distinctly out of place a third hand suit, a poorly concealed, and a nervous grin.  The weeflerunner might as well be wearing a sign that says: "please don't hesitate to kill me on the way to my client."
This message was last edited by the GM at 18:22, Sun 11 Apr 2021.

There’s whiskey in the tumbler.  Martin can hear the ice crack as thermodynamics wages an eternal war of heating and cooling here on this roof top in Night City.  If the solo is any judge, there’s more than whiskey in the tumbler as well.  Something is rumbling through his nervous system, unlocking the walls he normally keep built up inside the emotional centers of his brain.  If he wasn’t paying for the experience, it might be concerning.

Across the from the padded chair Martin currently occupies sits a small table.  Whiskey in glass.  Whiskey in bottle.  Whiskey in another glass.  Behind that table ChrisAlice sits serenely, nearly perched on a small round stool, hands calmly folded in their lap, business casual attire carefully chosen to mimic Martin’s sense of propriety.  A carefully calm and neutral face, held just so, for compassion and patience.

Martin knows he’s being played.  But it’s not like it isn’t worth it.

ChrisAlice takes a sip from the glass in front of them.  Clicks the ice cubes against the glass three times, the sound nearly hidden in from the rumble of a passing truck.  There’s air up here on the roof.  More than would have been inside the doc’s home.  Probably chosen to stand in opposition to the basement of the Listeners.

“Tell me, Martin,” ChrisAlice says, placing their glass down. Their voice is silk, not quite a command, not quite a request. “Tell me again about the fear.”
This message was last updated by the GM at 15:29, Sun 10 July 2022.

Martin focuses past ChrisAlice, on the city's shining mylar towers and neon vistas, and lets whatever is in the whiskey do its job.  His mind doesn't skitter away from recalling those moments in the Listener bunker, which is a change from the past week.

"It wasn't mine," is what comes out of his mouth.  He pauses in mild surprise and unpacks that.  "We've talked before about fear and how and why it works.  And I see that a lot on jobs, in myself and in others.  So I've been working on how to own my fear, how to pay the right amount of attention to it.  I don't think I could have said that at the time, but I think I recognized that it wasn't something I owned."

He takes another sip, savoring the flavor even as he uses it as punctuation.  "So I think that's how I figured out that it was infrasonics.  Mostly.  That and RTFM for the So-Senns."  Reading the entire manual for every implant wasn't always one of Martin's values, but one of ChrisAlice's earliest admonitions was about being very aware of what he was having someone insert into his flesh, and this isn't the first time it's paid off.

"But even after I shut it off, and after Alex hosed the speakers, the place still felt wrong."  He lets his eyes slide over the horizon and searches for a word, comes up with something Teagan had said about her visit to Six Bullet Sally's.  "Desecrated?  Yeah.  And that's what's been stuck in my head for the last week."

And then he tells ChrisAlice about the chamber of horrors, and the audio taps into whatever was beneath the basement, and the woman in the wolf mask.

“Desecration, yes,” ChrisAlice nods. Whether it’s cybernetic modifications or just practice, the transhuman therapist accepts the story of the Listener temple without interruption or even reaction. “And a violation,” they continue.  “Of these victims and of your worldview.”

ChrisAlice unfolds briefly, gracefully.  They take their own tumbler of whiskey and sip.  Pause not releasing the glass. “Each of the towers behind me that you search for answers was built on belief.  A belief in physics and math and material strength.  Should the rules the architect believes in be changed, the architect would be left scrambling in a new reality while the buildings themselves tilted and failed.  Given time, the structures could be changed.  Rebuilt to accommodate a change of belief in how the world works.”

The therapist sips again and places their glass down on the table with only the tiniest of clinks.  “I am not suggesting that what these ‘Listeners’ believe is true.  They clearly believe it to be.” . ChrisAlice opens their hands, looks Martin deep in the eye.  A second pupil flits out from behind the iris of the right eye before hiding again.  “I am asking you to consider whether your sense of desecration comes from having trouble processing that other people could believe such things and act in such ways or if you are afraid that the stories they whispered in your brain might be true?”

"I'm afraid they might be true."  Martin doesn't hesitate, and the talky-drug cocktail is definitely working now.  "Not that they might be literally true, although that would be a fuck shit stack, and that's what the emotional reaction is.  Monsters under the bed, right?  But you've said stories like that are often metaphors for real things that we don't want to look at directly.  So there's something behind their metaphor with real power, and if they have a way to tap into that power to change the world's rules... that lets them reshape the world to match their vision."

He keeps his hands steady on the chair's arms, controlling the urge to feel the Consigliere sync with the silicon and gold threaded through his nervous system.  Just for comfort.  Just like he's awakened, reaching for the gun, every night since the last op.  "From where I sit, what they believe isn't any more fucked-up than what half of the execs and boostergang chiefs in the City believe."  He thinks about Karma and, not for the first time, wonders what in her belief structure compels her to treat him and Kenji as equals, if not exactly peers.  And what she's using them for.  And when she'll run out of uses for them.

"It's their power to, um, implement that belief that scares me.  That, and the question of where that power is actually coming from.  Of who thinks it's a good idea to back them and what that person is getting out of the deal, and why they might want the Listers to plug us all into their signal."
This message was last edited by the player at 17:24, Wed 13 July 2022.

“What voices would we all hear, what sights would we see, should we be plugged into their machine?” ChrisAlice summarizes easily.  “And why should we be forced to experience them?  These are answers I don’t have. Answers you don’t have.  Not yet.”

ChrisAlice folds their hands and places them in their lap.  “Are these answers you wish to have?  Would you chase these truths on your own or would you prefer to acknowledge your pain then walk away?  I do not suggest a path, you know that I won’t.  You must see your own way forward.

“You live in a dangerous world, voluntarily experience difficult things. Terrible things.  That you continue to sit with me in your pain shows that you have a…soul for lack of a better word.  This is good, though not easy.  It will never be easy to remain a man of war, plugged into the machine, while seeking peace.  The value is in the struggle.  The question remains, what do you want in this?”

The drugs are still compelling loquacity but Martin takes a moment to prioritize.  "Long-term?  Stability.  Security.  A slightly less shit world."  He deliberately puts his fingertips on the Consigliere, emphasizing its presence without drawing it or engaging the link.  "'Man of war,' right?  What I do, what I am - it's hard to make a positive contribution.  It's hard to do good with a gun.  The best I can hope for is that I'm preventing more bad outcomes than I'm inflicting."  He flashes on Gerald's furious and flash-banged expression the moment before the Deacon got to discover the truth of his God, examines that memory, and decides that moment's killing, at least, was righteous.  He smiles slightly and explains, without context, "motherfucker won't be burning any more girls alive."

ChrisAlice cocks their head in a this will be unpacked later, please emote but doesn't otherwise interrupt.

"What do I want out of the scene that we're dissecting now?  I want to know."  Martin deliberately breaks contact with the Consigliere and leans forward, elbows on knees.  "I want to understand what the fuck was happening down there so I can recognize it and stop it before whoever was behind it restarts it.

"I want to go hunting."

“If I were a normal therapist, and you were a normal client, I would tell you the story of Moby Dick and obsession.  I would point you to Nietzsche and his words on monsters and the abyss.  But these are things we are not.  And these are not things that will change.  Your peace comes not through acceptance, but through action.  This is how you are.  This is why you come to me and not the other thousands of therapists that could tell you that you are special, that your flesh is valuable, that human life is inherently noble.”

ChristAlice spreads their arms.  Internal biochemical pockets secrete phosphorescent  algae engineered to survive inside the flesh matrix of a human.  Their arms glow in revelation, patterns swirling on their neck, an unfolding of worlds.

“We know these things are a lie.  We know that the world is dark and that it takes a prepared mind to stand against that.”

The oratory stands somewhere between operatic truth and blowing smoke up Martin’s ass, but with the drugs coursing through his neurons, it sounds really compelling.

“I quibble with ‘inherent’ as a concept.  Except in this.  You Martin Lowell, are a decent man. You are not good in our traditional morality.  How could you be?  But you can trust your instincts on what needs to be done.  You can trust that this pain keeping you awake at night is an arrow.  A guide post telling you what you need to do to remain whole.  Because it is pain driving you.  Not anger.  Not fear.  Pain.”

The show ends, ChrisAlice calming back down.  Settling.  Folding back up.

“Now,” they say, coming back to regular conversational tones, “this whiskey isn’t going to finish itself and it has been formulated for your specific biochemistry.  So what else did you want to talk about?”