PSEUDOPOD

PSEUDOPOD is the operant you find in a coma. He’s the entire inciting incident of the game.

He’s an Operant Bureau agent sent to Portofiro in ‘96, and by the time Hershel Wilk arrives to back him up, he’s already been silenced by something he played on a small red audio disc. You spend the rest of the game trying to find out what he was supposed to be doing — and what put him down.

The assignment that called Hershel back

PSEUDOPOD’s job in Portofiro was, on paper, a clean takeover. Tempo del Sur — cryptonym TAXMAN, one of Hershel’s old assets from her ‘88–‘91 Portofiro tour — had surfaced offering intel on the Weeping Eye. The Opera sent PSEUDOPOD to be Tempo’s new handler.

Cover identity: sock importer. Specifically, head of the hosiery department of the Portofiran branch of the Import-Export Bureau of the People’s Republic of Kohila. The Opera builds these covers obsessively. Safehouse: second floor of Foto 24, in Quisach.

Then the cover hit the wall. Tempo had given his middleman, The Boatman, one strict instruction: only talk to CASCADE. Nobody else. PSEUDOPOD couldn’t get close to his own asset. He bounced the problem back up the chain to his handler, Melita, and asked the Opera to pull Hershel — CASCADE — out of the Freezer and ship her to Portofiro as his double.

His last day

The day before Hershel arrived, PSEUDOPOD was running normal sock-importer errands in the Bootleg Bazaar in Quisach.

• He took an order for ten pairs of socks from a vendor named Carmuna Pessoa.
• He asked around about a strange red audio disc he was carrying.
• He went home to the Foto 24 safehouse. Constanz, the Photo Lady saw him return.
• He played the disc.

The disc somehow erased itself in the playback and left PSEUDOPOD in a catatonic state. That’s where Hershel finds him.

”Zeroed out”

In Opera language, an incapacitated operant is “zeroed out”. Hershel makes the call to Melita. Melita cancels the assignment, orders Hershel home — meaning back to Satellite Facility B, the Freezer in Novessa.

Hershel doesn’t go. She decides to stay in Portofiro, work out what PSEUDOPOD’s actual mission was, and find out what the disc did to him. That decision is the game.

What you’re doing for him

For most of the game, PSEUDOPOD is unconscious on a cot in the safehouse while you reconstruct his last 48 hours. The work splits into a few threads:

• What he was after: the Mysterious Red Disc, the people in the Bazaar he was asking about it, the angle his cover was working.
• Who he talked to: Carmuna, Constanz, Tempo’s middleman.
• Why his cover stuck: the sock-importer routine and how it intersects with the Bazaar economy.

The task is What’s Wrong PSEUDOPOD? and it sits underneath almost everything else you do in Quisach.

What he says

You only hear PSEUDOPOD speak in fragments. The line that gets used as his epitaph:

“This is a dangerous place, CASCADE. I should never have come.”

He’s right. Whatever he wandered into, it was already running by the time he got there.

What’s known vs. unknown

What’s confirmed in the game’s opening hours: PSEUDOPOD’s name as an operant cryptonym, his sock-importer cover, the safehouse at Foto 24, the disc playback as the trigger event, Melita declaring him zeroed out. What’s left for the player to dig out: what was actually on the disc, who handed it to him, and what the Weeping Eye intel was that Tempo was sitting on.

That’s the whole shape of act one.