What happened in India 2.0

[hitodama]

I’m trying to untangle some of the Great Questions TM I mentioned here, and I’m starting from this one because I feel like there’s a lot of information available, but still not overwhelmingly much. I’m trying to construct a timeline of what led to the stuff that happened in the apartment in Dharwad in order to see if that seems to paint any sort of picture with answers.

Here’s the raw data I first gathered, in chronological order:

Summary

2040-2048

March 3rd 2040
Spencer Hagen tries to kill Connie Muren.

March 4th 2040
Muren disappears in Berlin, Germany.

2042
Pokrov hides Muren and constructs a secret basement for her in Innopolis, Russia.

2043
Matvey Kozlov is hired by Yuri Golitsyn to assemble a team to protect Muren.

2046
Kozlov is promoted to Director of Operational Security.

2047
Kozlov starts acting as Golitsyn’s personal bodyguard.

???
A shell company linked to Pokrov leases an apartment from Dharwad, India.

2049

September-October
Kozlov travels with Golitsyn to China, both using baffle technology to stay undetected.

September 30th
Efua Amankwah-Crouse meets Sunil Cariappa in Düsseldorf, Germany.

October 1st
Golitsyn is assassinated together with Xu Shaoyong.

October 1st
Hong Lian is arrested as part of the investigation of the murder of Golitsyn and Shaoyong.

October 2nd
Lian is released and taken back to her home in Chennai, India.

October 2nd-3rd
Lian receives an anonymous delivery drone from Dharwad, India, that carries a collocidal.

October 3rd
Lian uses the collocidal and disappears from her friend Jarrod Sim’s apartment.

October 3rd
Amankwah-Crouse is implicated in the murder of Shaoyong and Golitsyn, but can’t be arrested due to her going missing.

October 5th
Matvey Kozlov has reportedly been missing for several days.

October 8th
Amankwah-Crouse issues a livestream from the Pokrov apartment in Dharwad, stating that Muren was shot by Kozlov, who in turn was shot by her in self-defence.

October 8th
Amankwah-Crouse is arrested and an investigation starts at the crime scene. She states that Muren’s death was part of an ongoing cover-up.

October 8th
The investigation finds baffles, collocidals and delivery drones linked to Pokrov from the crime scene.

October 9th
Cariappa publishes a posthumous message from Muren.

October 9th
The investigation reveals that Hong was present in the crime scene and shot Kozlov, likely through a baffle. It is not known if she shot Muren, too.

October 10th
The investigation reveals that Muren had been recently implanted with a colloid.

And here’s all of that data in color-coded form, arranged in different columns depending on who it mostly concerns: (I have no idea if this forum supports image files of this size… [EDIT] The image files do work! Just click them to zoom in or open them in a new tab and you should see them in full size.)

Like you can see, there are a lot of holes in that version. In order to fill it out, I continued to gather info and do my best to deduce what these people were doing when their movements were not reported in Omnipedia. Here’s the filled out version; grey texts are added facts found from Omnipedia, pink texts are my assumptions:

So… That’s that. It does make the events a bit more clear, I think, but there are still soooo many unanswered questions. Like:

• What was Muren doing when she was hiding in Pokrov for years?
• Why was Muren recently implanted with a colloid and what sort of colloid was it?
• What was Amankwah-Crouse’s role in this? Everyone else I more or less can understand, but why was she in India and what was she recently discussing with Cariappa?
• Why did Amankwah-Crouse seemingly lie in her livestream about the events? If you believe the evidence, at least her claim that she killed Kozlov is untrue. If that is, what else is, too?
• Who sent the drone to Lian? It was sent from Dharwad in the night of October 2nd; I doubt Kozlov would’ve had enough time to get there from China if he left after Golitsyn was murdered, so it was likely Muren and/or Amankwah-Crouse. What else did they send aside from the collocidal that made Lian find the apartment?
• Why on earth did Lian kill Kozlov? I know he seems like a bad guy, but the longer I look at this mess, I don’t really see how he would’ve benefitted from threatening anyone involved in this.

If anyone has any speculation related to this, I would love to hear it!

[hitodama]

I’m continuing this by trying to form a better picture of some of these people who were present in the apartment in Dharwad.

Hong Lian

(First of all I forgot that in some cultures family name comes first in the full name, so from now on I’ll call her Hong instead of Lian, like I accidentally did previously.)

Hong was young woman living alone in a foreign country, having a job in a workplace that was known to be unkind and harsh for its employees. She was likely not the biggest fan of G6 system, Zhupao or Omnius, as she knew how flawed they were and she even had friends like Jarrod Sim, who previously took part in a strike against Omnius. I’m not sure what her motive to use the offered collocidal and leave Sim’s place was, but it could be that she got fed up with the system that had mistreated her and decided that she’d want to see where the rabbit hole goes rather than staying still and doing nothing. She could’ve also just been afraid of what sort of punishment she’d get from accidentally accepting the ticket that activated the drone that shot down the helicopter, but that doesn’t make complete sense: after all she started to seem very suspicious to the authorities only after she disappeared. But then again people who are afraid do not always make smart choices.

The distance from Chennai to Dharwad is over 700 kilometers. That’s not a distance you can walk in the five days she was missing, so she must’ve used some form of transportation. (I think I remember hearing that India has a lot of trains and railroads, so that could be an option.) I’m not sure how much traffic surveillance India has, but to me it still seems unlikely that she could’ve travelled that far when the whole country was looking for her - not without baffles at least. So I think along the collocidal she received some sort of contact information, maybe instructions of how to send a secret message through Vessel or something, which would singal to Dharwad to send her more help and instructions. She used the contact info, and Dharwad sent her an address and a baffle… And possibly a gun. I don’t know if that’s how it went down, or did she somehow get the gun on her own, but at least we know she got one at some point.

Then she went to Dharwad. With trains, busses or cars the distance can be travelled in a day, but she had to be discreet so it could’ve taken her more than that. All in all she possibly arrived to the apartment in Dharwad somewhere between 5th and 8th of October, nicely in time to kill Kozlow.

I can’t find any reason why she would’ve wanted to kill Kozlov as a person. Sure, he was a far-right militant, but there’s nothing that would indicate that Hong would’ve had any sort of grudge against people like him. He worked for Pokrov and Golitsyn, but again I don’t see why she would’ve hated either of them. So what I think is that either Kozlov must’ve indeed shot Muren first and then Hong shot him as self-defence, or there was some other sort of conflict that Hong, maybe in a panic, ended up resolving with a gun. Muren might’ve been killed during this by accident, maybe even by a ricocheting bullet. (That’s why we don’t shoot guns inside buildings, people.)

The remaining mysteries are why did Amankwah-Crouse lie about who shot who, and what part did the baffle with holes play in this? Amankwah-Crouse could’ve tried to simply protect Hong by leaving her out of her story, even though in the end it was in vain. But the baffle, well, baffles me. The evidence indicates that the bullets were shot through it, but who was hiding behind it during the shooting, Hong or Kozlov? That I don’t know, because right now I have no idea why either of them would’ve used it in the apartment.

Matvey Kozlov

Kozlow seemed to be a man of mystery who didn’t like to draw attention to himself. Very little is known about his past, but he did join the Russian army, then a private military company Vspyshka as well as Frontovik, an ultranationalist group of dissatisfied military personnel. When the latter one got disbanded, Pokrov offered him a job. His first task was to form a team that would protect Muren in Innopolis. Later he got as far as becoming Golitsyn’s personal bodyguard.

That’s why he travelled together with Golitsyn on his secret mission to China to meet Xu. Golitsyn had been planning to leave Pokrov and move into politics; it’s not known if Kozlov supported this or not, but I’d believe it was to his liking as they seemed to support the same sort of right-wing ideals. But then again we have no idea what Golitsyn and Xu were discussing about, or if Kozlov ever learned it either, as he wasn’t in the helicopter with them when it blew up. Where he was is not known, or why he wasn’t with his number one priority Golitsyn. Maybe he had received orders to go somewhere alone… Somewhere like Dharwad, India.

To be fair I don’t understand why he would’ve headed to Dharwad when Golitsyn was still alive and able to give orders. It would make a bit more sense if the aparment in India was some sort of Pokrov’s safe house where he headed after things went badly south, but who really knows. There he anyway went, using the same baffles that he had used to get to China.

And then things went even more south and Kozlov ended up getting shot to death in the apartment. This is the first news we got from the event: “Amankwah-Crouse issued a livestream from a rental flat in Dharwad, India, claiming that Connie Muren has been murdered by a Russian man identified as Matvey Kozlov, and that she managed to kill Kozlov in self-defence.” We now know that she lied about who killed Kozlov, but that’s not all. What caught my attention was the wording “a Russian man identified as Matvey Kozlov”, which to me sounds like at least Amankwah-Crouse didn’t know who he was when the shooting took place. That would indicate that he wasn’t just casually spending time in the apartment together with the women, but instead appeared at the door and started the conflict that resulted in his death immediately.

There’s still the mystery of the baffle that was shot together with Kozlov. There’s basically two possibilities: either Hong was hiding behind it or Kozlov was. If it’s true that Kozlov wasn’t at the apartment with the rest of the people like the previous wording indicates, it seems like he was the one wearing it when he came to their door. Maybe he indeed had evil intentions, maybe he even shot Muren (although I still don’t have any idea why he would’ve) or maybe Hong just overreacted when an unknown man hiding behind a baffle appeared at the apartment where some of the most wanted women on the world resided.

If I follow my train of thought here, I think Amankwah-Crouse sent Hong away to hide and decided to shoulder the blame herself. Hong was after all an innocent youngster who got tangled into this mess just by being at the wrong places at the wrong times. Then Amankwah-Crouse did the livestream in order to get the information out as well as to protect herself, as after everyone knew where she was, making her “mysteriously disappear” by authorities would be much harder.

There’s also the Muren’s message to Cariappa as well as Amankwah-Crouse’s claim that "Muren’s death, as well as her 2040 disappearance, were part of ‘an ongoing cover-up’.” Was it really though? I don’t see why any of the people involved would’ve wanted to protect the secret of ADIRA. Maybe that’s just what Amankwah-Crouse assumed when she didn’t know who Kozlov even was. The message to Cariappa on the other hand could’ve been timed; maybe Muren had it prepared for all of these years, ready to be sent automatically in case she didn’t personally postpone the sending.

…okay, that’s a lot of text for now. We’ll see if I can comb through Muren’s and/or Amankwah-Crouse’s info later.