=Red Five Advanced Heuristics Lab=
**Posted by:** Das Frettchen, Proxy <**__Info__ __Msg__ __Rep__**>
The Red Five Advanced Heuristics Lab attempts to recover and reverse-engineer TITAN memetic-warfare techniques. They possess a dangerous store of knowledge on TITAN psychological experiments on transhuman subjects.
After Red Five accumulated several flags in our scanners’ databases, Firewall decided to take a closer look at this Martian hypercorp. Our vectors arranged for them to have a bit of a misunderstanding with their insurance company, prompting them to acquire the services of a new one. We helped that deal along, which enabled us to schedule an assessment inspection, made by one of our undercover sentinels. Surprisingly, Red Five invoked corporate extraterritoriality provisions to exempt part of their facility from the inspection. A hypercorp’s desire for secrecy is leavened only by their greed, so when they want to exclude part of a facility from the possibility of making an insurance claim, you know we’ve found something of interest.
We arranged a black bag team to conduct our own inspection a short while later. Unfortunately they hesitated to gun down a PR flack who discovered them, and she triggered a video-wall basilisk hack that reduced them all to whimpering, shitting puddles of nerve endings. Only one team member survived by quantum farcasting away. What they discovered has piqued our interest … and concern.
==Overview==
Red Five is a niche advertising and public-relations firm in the Nytrondheim neighborhood of Valles-New Shanghai. The firm employs thirty people and about twice that many infomorphs and infugees. Most are involved in legitimate operations; only about a dozen people work in Advanced Heuristics. Management is fully aware of what goes on in Advanced Heuristics; their goal is to find marketable applications for the technologies being investigated there.
Advanced Heuristics is headquartered in an annex of the Red Five building in Nytrondheim. They’re an R&D arm of the hypercorp, though there are persistent rumors that some of their discoveries have actually been deployed for Red Five’s clients. The firm’s secrecy and the failure of Firewall’s initial attempts to pierce it mean that we can only speculate on what sort of practical applications they’ve devised for their amassed knowledge. Rumored use of transhuman test subjects and infugee backups in experiments and simulations is suspected but unconfirmed. AHL also does experiments using focus groups from outside. These are conducted in a less secure area of the lab and may represent a possible avenue for infiltration. Firewall suspects the lab may occasionally abduct focus group participants who appear promising as transhuman experimentation subjects.
==Research==
Red Five is extremely subtle as organizations of interest to Firewall go. We’re accustomed to dealing with exhumans of both the predatory and brain-in-a-vat variety, criminal opportunists of every stripe, and armed hooligans packing TITAN wargear. The Advanced Heuristics Lab is unusual in that they’ve recovered and begun to reverse-engineer some very dangerous technology without physically recovering any of it, or even performing mesh intrusions to seize data.
Rather, most of their efforts are based around data mining. They’ve extensively studied surviving spime recordings, comm traffic, and other records from the Fall and from subsequent flare-ups of TITAN activity. In the process, they’ve gained a frightening store of practical knowledge on the workings of basilisk hacks, YGBM attacks, apple-of-knowledge hacks, and other memetic-warfare techniques. More worryingly, they’ve begun to assemble a picture of the scope and direction of TITAN psychological experiments on transhuman subjects and are now following some of those research paths themselves.
==Mikhail Eng==
AHL’s chief researcher is Mikhail Eng, a skilled psychosurgeon. In public, he comes across as a fresh-faced, wunderkind hypercorp researcher, if a bit eccentric. From tracking his mesh habits, we notice he has a range of interests that definitely would put him in the singularity-seeker camp. He also engages in frequent forking. We know that he insists upon all potential employees undergoing a great deal of psychological screening, which seems largely designed to weed out those who might have too much empathy and not enough moral flexibility. At least one former freelancer has filed a grievance with Red Five’s management, claiming that Eng psychosurgically modified them without their consent; the board quietly filed the complaint away and did nothing.
==Corporate Ties==
Red Five isn’t itself a major hypercorp, but it has powerful patrons in the Planetary Consortium, notably Experia and the Oaxaca-Maartens family. Experia views Red Five as one of a small stable of bleeding-edge media research corps and is an important client. The ties are personal, as well. Red Five’s CEO, Helene Chang, is a regular guest at the Palazzo of Elysium, and the law firm of Hector Oaxaca-Maartens handles many of the company’s affairs. Conversely, other Nytrondheim ad firms hate Red Five; taking a job there is viewed as going over to the enemy. Valles-New Shanghai’s native oligarchs don’t care much for the place either, viewing it as an outpost of Oaxaca-Maartens influence. So Eng has some powerful patrons protecting his experiments, but an equal number of people are gunning for Helene Chang and her company

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