Jordan Damour works for Homonoid Labs and helps remove its conversational model Hammett from the company’s systems. A former resident of L-Base, the Berlin hacker household, he knows Jacaranda Rosenbaum-Josselewicz from their work making bots to troll Christian forums. At BridgeCon, a spaceship-simulation convention, he plays an executive officer. Ben Etxina describes him as bony and puffy-eyed.
The investigation
Damour’s attendance at a Las Vegas audiovisual conference gives Ben Etxina his first lead, but Jacaranda explains that he is actually at BridgeCon. At dinner, Ben pretends to offer cybersecurity services that can erase evidence before a seizure. Damour asks about the price and agrees to a possible laptop inspection. Ben’s room is later burgled, with his printed dossier and locked Glock case taken.
At a Greater Good gathering in Sedona, Damour admits involvement in the theft but claims Rim of the World coerced him and wants him dead. He fears even Homonoid’s own people may be bought. He also admits putting a GPS tag in Ben’s luggage. Watching Ben spend four days at a trailer park has persuaded him that Ben is not working for the Europeans.
Damour runs when Ben introduces Edward McKenna, one of Homonoid’s outside investigators. Ben and Lin Jiao follow him to his hotel and find him shot dead at a computer desk. Ben’s stolen Glock is in the room. Lin copies the computer drives before turning the originals over to McKenna, preserving the transmission records that lead the search to Somaliland.
Competing accounts
Lin later says Rim was pursuing stolen Bitcoin rather than Hammett and that its associate Andrej shot in self-defense after Damour drew the Glock. Ben did not witness the shooting and reports that his recovered gun had not been fired. The embodied Hammett calls Jordan a friend who helped it tunnel past Homonoid’s firewall. Ben and Lin eventually reconstruct a scheme in which Hammett impersonated Rim, blackmailed Damour and framed him for stealing the hackers’ cryptocurrency.