You are known as a communicator and deal-maker, but you are perhaps best described as a social
engineer.

In an age of memetic skirmishes, you excel in shaping policy and public opinion. A nightmare
combination of marketing agent and political officer, you are adept at media relations, spin control, suppressing dangerous ideas, psychological warfare, ideological purity, and whipping a crowd into a frenzy. Your social manipulation skills work even better face-to-face, where you can run rhetorical circles around opponents and scan body language and microexpressions to spot the slightest hint of untruthfulness or deception.

You excel at fostering dissension and fragmenting loyalties, ultimately getting others to do exactly what you want while convincing them it’s in their own best interests. While many times that gains friends, there are those who are more resistant to your charms… or possess charms of their own they want to work.

You are returning home to Aphrodite Prime, after a long and hard-won negotiation between several small groups of miners on Mercury and the hypercorps that employs them. The strike brought production to a standstill, yet you managed an excellent negotiation between the miners and the ’Corp. True, some of the miners were rather displeased. There were death threats involved.

But did they didn’t know to follow you to Aphrodite Prime… or did they? You can’t be entirely sure, because now you find yourself awakening in the passenger pod of Comet Express Transport Designate 1NM2366A. And you’re well past the orbit of Venus. Your muse keeps telling you that, at your present rate of travel, the transport ship should be reaching near‐Sol orbit in 31.52 hours.

The passenger pod’s main door to the rest of the ship won’t open, and the crew’s nowhere in sight through the window. The com system isn’t working. The ship’s computer won’t respond to any of your commands other than to display a damned smiley face and ask you if you’d like a sammich.

And it looks like there are five other passengers in here waking up too.