229: Isotope Ants

ENTRY 229: Isotope Ants

On Mars, Rusters plant metal cylinders into the ground. Cybernetic ant colonies powered by long-lived atomic batteries, at the heart of which lies a brainless queen. Across the system, users log in and take control, the system and first dozen drones goes live, and the queen starts laying eggs. Game on.

The Isotope Ants are crowdsourced terraforming. Each colony contains six breeds of genetically modified ants designed both to survive the Martian environment and perform certain functions, and wirelessly controllable by simple cybernetic interfaces. Users are encouraged to use their colonies for soil reclamation, extending the hive throughout the nearby area by building tunnels and processing the Martian dirt and dust. If certain critical goals are met, the user may be rewarded with a modest rep boost or unlock additional terraforming tools: new ant breeds, aphid-like slave species, refills on vital resources, etc. So far, Isotope Ants have begun reclaiming more than a quarter of a million square meters of Martian soil.

Seeds

• Rogue indie developers have created a variant game called Atomic Ant Wars, where ant colonies are posted nearby each other and the different users battle against one another, seeking to invade each other’s base and kill their queens. The creators of Isotope Ants feel this is a betrayal of their basic principles and hire the PCs to express their displeasure by destroying the Atomic Ant Wars breeding facility—with prejudice.
• An abandoned Isotope Ants colony continues to function, even though that should be impossible. The developers believe a rogue AGI may be controlling the colony, but the three technicians they sent out to eradicate the rogue colony have disappeared. The PCs are hired to travel to a remote region of Mars and find the missing technicians.
• Planetary Consortium investigators are looking into where the Isotope Ants microcorp is getting the radioactive material for their long-lasting batteries. The PCs are asked to delay and distract the investigator team while the microcorp covers their trail and secures a (legal) source. All this has to be done without tipping off Isotope Ants’ actual source, who has been nipping the material from a stockpile of weapons-grade radioisotopes on Titan.
• A young and impressionable AGI named Myrmidon has become too deeply enmeshed in playing Isotope Ants, and the members of their peer-group are worried about their mental well-being. The PCs are asked to intervene…by puppeting a group of specially-made antlion micro-morphs into the hive and killing the “queen.”
• Firewall is concerned with the similarities between Isotope Ants and a little-known exsurgent technology that uses proto-wasps as literal “bugs in the system” to infiltrate and disrupt habitats. The PCs are asked to investigate Isotope Ants and determine the source of their technology, and any connections between its owners/employees and known exsurgent groups.
• Hacker AntLover69 has found a way to network multiple Isotope Ant hives together, so that a single user can control any number of colonies. However, the Isotope Ant microcorp refuses to invest in the technology. AntLover69 asks the PCs to help them prove the concept by installing sixty-six hives in a remote crater not far from the Zone. However, while installing them the PCs wake up some long-dormant exsurgent constructs.

228: Last Flight of the Chattanooga

ENTRY 228: Last Flight of the Chattanooga

Space is a frontier, with all the hardships and scarcity that implies. In the old days, on earth, the people on the frontier could content themselves that home was beyond those hills, over that sea. Now, Mother Earth is lost, and with it all the resources visible and invisible, all the skills and knowledge and heritage of generations. For all the bluster of the Planetary Consortium and empty high life sold by the hypercorps, transhumanity remains scattered in lost colonies, scraping by on what is available, cut off from our homeland—and despite what some may hope, there is no going back. Transhumanity stands or falls on what it can make do on with the technology and resources at hand. What are scarce, what is valuable in the solar system are those things that were peculiar and unique to Earth. They are prizes that can secure the rep of anyone, and there is one more valued than any other: the Chattanooga.

Lifting off from the Alexandria space port during the Fall, the Chattanooga was a fully-automated ark-class vessel, with a seedbank carrying specimens from over 150,000 plant species and 50,000 animals—including fifty species of mammal—and a cultural database containing over sixteen million volumes from university and public libraries all over the Middle East and North Africa, the vast majority of which were never archived elsewhere. The full scans of every cuneiform tablet dug up at Ninevah and every temple in Egypt, digital manuscripts that track the development of Arabic to before the rise of the Prophet, proto-terraforming experiment data for reclaiming the Sahara; all this and much more was sent out into space.

That flare as the booster rockets kicked in is where the Chattanooga left the pages of history and enters the realm of legend.

Originally intended to orbit Mars, most sensors lost track of the Chattanooga some time after it left Earth orbit. The final transmission to Luna was garbled, but suggests that the guidance program recognized the danger and took an “alternate course”—all records of which, if it is true, are lost. After the Fall, unconfirmed sightings started trickling in as transhumanity spread throughout the system—most in the main belt, some as far away as Uranus, though most diligent seekers doubt that the Chattanooga made it that far. While a nuclear reactor powers the ark section, the ship itself had a three-shot nuclear propulsion drive and limited maneuvering thrusters. Without constant acceleration, the range of the ship falls well within the limits of transhuman exploration…which makes the mystery of its disappearance all the more strange and unsatisfying.

Using the Chattanooga

Classic treasure-hunting set-up, just add setting info and characters: shake well and serve. Gamemasters can make an entire campaign out of chasing the Chattanooga, following the trail of sightings and possible routes it might have taken, dealing with treasure hunters and conservationists eager to claim it first for their own reasons, chasing down leads and artifacts—and that’s just the basic approach. There’s no guarantee that the Chattanooga was carrying what everyone assumed it was, or that it even existed; what most people think was the Chattanooga could have been a massive weapon carrying every nuclear warhead the Mideast could scrounge up as an attack against the TITANs. It’s a mystery, so play up the mystery: let your players speculate, play up some of their expectations, and don’t feel constrained by any of the “facts” presented above.

Seed

• During a gatecrashing expedition, the PCs come across a species of grass that is a 99% match for an Earth species believed extinct after the Fall. Further exploration finds more anomalous plant species…and then perhaps a chunk of wreckage. Could it be that the Chattanooga landed or crashed on this exoplanet? If so, how did it get here…and where’s the rest of it?

227: Luvia

ENTRY 227: Luvia

“First I was a witness. Then I became an accomplice. Finally, I became a victim.”

- Luvia, “The Favela Within”

Every habitat has a window, where the inhabitants can look out at the stars and endless blackness between them, to escape for a moment the walls that close them in. It is at such portals that Luvia likes to sit as she writes, a Galatea in glass and chrome, beneath her transparent skin a glowing fluid shifts and flows—and very few know that the real luvia is not the skin, but the liquid that flows beneath.

Luvia is an ego on the run. As a freelancer for the Nine Lives she did what she was told and didn’t ask any questions. One day, she saw too much, and got pulled in deeper. Where once she smuggling minor contraband, now she was ego-trafficking, taking cortical stacks from habitat to habitat. Luvia fell deeper and deeper into the business, subliminating her desires of escape into her writing and cutting deals on the side, even selling information to various habitat authorities. Eventually she arrived to find out that she was the next delivery.

What happened next, Luvia doesn’t remember. No hidden memories, simply discontinuity. When next she woke her biomorph was gone, her ego encoded into the nanoswarm. Since then she has been on the run…from the Nine Lives, from her past, from everything. She makes a small living as a fanfiction writer, the incremental rep boosts enough to cover her modest physical and mental needs. Every couple of months she gets antsy, switches habitats, keeping one optical sensor open for anyone on the lookout for her.

COG	COO	INT	REF	SAV	SOM	WIL	MOX
20	19	14	15	12	18	21	-
INIT	SPD	LUC	TT	IR	DUR	WT	DR
5	1	42	8	84	30	6	45

Morph: Synth/Liquid morph*

Skills: Academics: Philosophy 45, Art: Writing 56, Climbing 35, Deception (Impersonation) 56, Free Fall (Microgravity) 40, Fray (Dodge) 25, Infiltration 37, Infosec 45, Interests: Crime 45, Interests: Law 38, Kinesics 25, Language: Native Lithuanian 86, Language: English 50, Language: Mandarin 50, Medicine: Paramedic 36, Networking: Autonomists 50, Networking: Criminals 50, Palming 35, Profession: Courier 55, Profession: Writer 60, Protocol (Criminal) 35, Scrounging 30

Implants: Access Jacks, Basic Mesh Inserts, Cortical Stack, Cyberbrain, Mnemonic Augmentation, Specialized Hive (liquid morph)

Advantages: Armor 6/6

Disadvantages: Social Stigma (Clanking Masses), Uncanny Valley

* The “real” Luvia is permanently encoded in a nanoswarm suspended in a glowing fluid; the Synth morph is just a shell specially modified to carry her liquid form around. If the shell is ever destroyed, the nanoswarm still exists unharmed and follows the rules for nanoswarms in Eclipse Phase, p.328-9. The nanoswarm is Luvia’s cortical stack; if it gets destroyed, her ego is lost.

Using Luvia

Luvia is adventure-bait, a living macguffin to hang some simple plots off of. Lots of people might want her: the Nine Lives, the security forces of a dozen habitats, and the hypercorp that invented her liquid morph. The PCs are likely to be brought in because these groups lack physical representatives in the habitat. Sufficiently mercenary PCs might be approached directly to find and collect her, only to find that Luvia is a bit more slippery than she seems. If the PCs are soft-hearted, then the interested parties will probably pose as part of Luvia’s past life—friends, family members, lovers. Where it goes from there depends on the PCs, but the multiple groups involved gives plenty of potential for complications.

226: Die Wende

ENTRY 226: Die Wende

“For the past three years, we have been tracking a phenomena—sudden mass demonstrations, flash mobs, outbreaks of sudden unusual behavior in a given population. Sometimes violent, but not always: the result is as likely to be a street party or spontaneous orgy as it is to be a riot. The phenomena always has a very rapid onset, with no discernable trigger or spread; individuals who wander in during the course of events are not noticeably affected even if they join in. When the phenomenon wears off, there is a permanent behavioral change in the affected population: all become left handed, for example, or have difficulty pronouncing a certain phoneme, or begin reading and writing right-to-left instead of left-to-right. These are the characteristics that mark the anomalous behavior called die Wende.”

- Juan Xiao John, private investigative contracting agent, debriefing

Some threats come from within. While transhumanity looks for trouble from the stars, from the TITANs, from whatever lives on the other side of the Pandora Gates or built them, they sometimes turn a blind eye to the fact that transhumanity is quite capable of self-destruction without the help of any outside entity. One such threat is a nameless network that seeks change; call it die Wende.

Their goals are simple: to enact change, and control it. Not change for its own sake, but change for their sake, to conform transhumanity to their ideals. They are puppet masters of an old, old school, and they have found a tool that can help them mold transhumanity in the directions they choose…provided they can perfect it. Thus the experiments, carried out on isolated populations, triggering specific behavioral changes as tests to prove that they can do so. Slow and cautious they seek to control the parameters and cover their tracks—what is one more spontaneous mob activity in a society where such organized and unorganized events are common enough? A passing curiosity to be buried in the newscycle and quietly archived away from the most popular search engines. They bide their time, planning to implement their tool on a vast scale.

Unfortunately for die Wende, they are not the only secret hands in the solar system—and the other organizations are much better at these games than they are. The only reason die Wende has progressed so far in their tactics is that nobody thought to look for them; their dry-runs and experiments so small and inconsequential as to fall into the statistical background noise of the Mesh. It wasn’t until recently that their operations have even become a blip on the radar of Firewall and other intelligence/counterexsurgent organizations.

Using die Wende

Die Wende is a secret organization bent on influencing transhumanity; unfortunately, they are relatively ignorant of the other hidden organizations that are already well-ensconced and doing that sort of thing already. This allows the gamemaster to put the PCs on the leading edge of uncovering, infiltrating, breaking, subverting, and/or stopping die Wende, who really are your generic middle-grade evil organization with delusions of shaping the destiny of transhumanity for their own benefit. Die Wende members are not stupid or unskilled, they simply lack the experience and knowledge of the opposition, completely ignorant of Firewall for example.

The main tool for die Wende is a form of basilisk hack; the affected engage in one spontaneous group behavior for a period of 1d6 hours and afterwards exhibit the desired minor behavioral change. Firewall and many other organizations will definitely want to know where they got that technology. Gamemasters may find that Wende events are a good way to introduce PCs to die Wende before the organization itself crops up.

225: Bruixera

ENTRY 225: Bruixera

“Rumor and legend.”

- Otoxa, Firewall Agent

There is a whisper, in the dark corners of the Mesh where secrets are the only wealth and gossip is the common currency of spies, criminals, and patriots. A hidden habitat for exsurgents, populated by innocent morphs infected by the TITANs’ viruses and fleeing capture and liquidation. A haven for transhumans on their way to becoming monsters, a combination of terrorist training camp and exhuman enclave.

Unfortunately for Firewall and the rest of the powers that be in the system, Bruixera remains no more than a ghost, an exsurgent Agartha or Shangri-La, a name screamed by once-human throats and smeared in infectious feces on the walls of their hide-outs. Most who are aware of the stories of Bruixera consider it just an idea—a new Sodom, a dark Avalon that desperate, scared people undergoing terrible, painful transformations latch onto. The Kingfishers, a group of anti-exsurgent counterintelligence agents at Firewall have even used rumors of Bruixera to entrap suspected exsurgents and collaborators. Very, very few consider that Bruixera is anything but a fairy tale.

Those few know that Bruixera is real. The information is compartmentalized and kept from the majority of Firewall, kept within the Witchhunters clique that studies long-term trends and patterns of infection. Disparate data suggests that Bruixera is a comment memetic element embedded in multiple forms of the digital exsurgent virus, which manifests as a migratory compulsion whenever an individual in an exsurgent network achieves a certain number of connections. The affected exsurgents drop out of their networks, and through circuitous routes start traveling…to where exactly Witchhunters have not yet been able to determine, though the three most likely possibilities include the Zone on Mars, a hidden habitat on Uranus, and—most dangerous or unlikely of all—a secret bunker located on the ruined Earth near the south pole.

Using Bruixera

Bruixera is a myth, and as such it is free for gamemasters to have fun with. It might be a literal hive where transhumans live like insects or mole rats, bare caricatures of their old forms, breeding and swarming; or a chaotic souk where mad, mutated capitalists trade the knowledge of the TITANs for weapons, sex, and further initiations; or simply a run-down habitat barely fit for human habitation where transhumans fleeing Firewall because of their illness have come to live or die in whatever peace they can manage. Almost certainly it has an exsurgent population of anywhere from a couple hundred to ten thousand, most of which is likely infected with multiple strains of the exsurgent virus, and almost certainly a character cannot find the habitat unless they are infected. It is unlikely for PCs to ever visit Bruixera, but as a mythical location it makes a nice background element to seed along in a campaign, or finding Bruixera might be the goal of an especially difficult one—even if it turns out Bruixera doesn’t exist, getting to the point where they make that discovery would be quite a journey in itself.

And, for the ambitious gamemaster, it might be the centerpiece of a particularly difficult and rewarding campaign: having the PCs (infected deliberately or accidentally with a strain of the exsurgent virus) infiltrate an exsurgent cell, rise through the ranks through successful acts of terrorism, and then find the way to Bruixera...a great prize for anyone that captures it, though most Firewall cliques would be happy to nuke it until it glows then break out the antimatter to do a proper job of it. Of course, that means days or weeks of degeneration likely ending in the PC’s death, but if they’re going to die anyway…what a way to go.

224: Earth Beta

ENTRY 224: Earth Beta

Reality is too much for some people to handle. Most people know the lines between simulations, Mesh games, and the real world, and move through the layers of their digital and physical realities as easy as breathing; it’s how they were raised, how they’ve lived. Full immersion in a simulated space is rare—that level of escape from reality is unusual for most egos; even those infomorphs that live entirely within the Mesh prefer the spice of variety, able to shift between different games or Mesh channels as they would. Fully immersive simulations are usually reserved as therapy tools for damaged egos that cannot cope with reality—controlled, comfortable environments away from the hard realities of life after the Fall.

The largest such simulation is Earth Beta, a simulation of pre-Fall Earth operated as a comprehensive therapy space for the thousands of egos that can’t cut it in the post-Fall solar system. Most of the “inhabitants” are volunteers, playing little roles in the background, while the trained therapists and technicians actually interact with the “patients,” ideally preparing them for eventual re-integration into post-Fall society. The fact that so many egos remain essentially stuck living in the past, trapped in a simulation supported by the donated time and resources of tens of thousands of volunteers has led to considerable argument about the effectiveness of the Earth Beta project.

Perhaps in response to these criticisms, the project leaders have promoted Phase Three—a procedure which would enact a “safer” necessitated abandonment event than the Fall, but which would transition the egos from living in a simulated past to a simulated present, where they could then be re-integrated into society.

Using Earth Beta

Millions of transhumans today live in panopticon societies, their every move and action viewed, recorded, and compiled into endless statistics algorithms, the details of their lives distilled into the blocks of a multidimensional spreadsheet. Yet though many are aware of the ubiquitous net of cameras and sensors, they are not so intrusive as to disrupt every activity, and people go on about their lives knowing they are watched and controlled without always thinking of it. How then do characters react when there are egos trapped in a simulation of old Earth, unable to face the reality of the Fall? When the PCs become the voyeurs and jailors of their own panopticon, keeping others blind and ignorant of the truth ostensibly for their own good? Earth Beta exists as a way for PCs to juxtapose their lives and illusions against those being forced on those damaged egos—and, of course, to play with and explore the many tropes and adventures that come with people trapped in vast digital simulations of reality.

Seeds

• The Eingerost (Entry 058) have long staged individual “awakenings” for patients in Earth Beta, catapulting them out of their comfortable simulation and into the harsh reality of this world. Now, the PCs have caught wind that an Eingerost cell has infiltrated and subverted the Phase III project—to forcibly subject the entire population of Earth Beta (including the therapists and volunteers) to a recreation of the Fall, the same trauma that most of the thousands of patients are still suffering from.
• A hypercorp hires the PCs to deliberately seed Earth Beta with advertising for contemporary corps, as a way to appeal to potential clients by offering them familiar brands when/if they finally exit the simulation. Opposing the PCs are the volunteer cybersecurity forces of the project.

223: The Fatal Oracle

ENTRY 223: The Fatal Oracle

“Everything that lives is doomed to die. Accept your death and you may do great things.”

- The Fatal Oracle, opening lines

There are two places on the equator of Mercury where, because of its orbit, the sun rarely shines. On one of these is built a small habitat, hollowed out of a depression on the surface. It contains oracle of sorts; a strange AGI trapped in an ornate, custom computer that fills up the majority of the space in its habitat. Some say that the strange, almost organic architecture of the habitat looks like it was grown from the computer, others say that it was built around the oracle to contain and imprison it.

This is the Fatal Oracle, so named for its fatalistic viewpoint and philosophy. To the Fatal Oracle, in the long run everyone is dead—the planets will cool, the stars will cease shining one by one, and the universe itself will collapse once again, taking with it all the information generated by this great cycle. With this resignation to ultimate fate, the Fatal Oracle advises those who visit it to take heart and live in the now. Those who fear death and seek to escape it waste their energies on worry and cowardice, while those who accept the reality of their death may accomplish awesome things—terrible, perhaps, but awesome.

Supplicants visit the Fatal Oracle with their questions, and come away with prophecies of a sort—really, more in the nature of suicidal or near-suicidal plans to achieve the ends that they seek. Sometimes these are terrorists, who require motivation and success and are willing to pay their lives for it; sometimes they are the fatally ill, or those tired of their lives who wish to accomplish some great thing before they pass, or in their passing. Given how cheap death has become for many transhumans, the Fatal Oracle has no scarcity of clients willing to receive its wisdom. Typically there is no charge for consulting the Fatal Oracle, but it is said to have an agreement with the Planetary Consortium that protects it from organized reprisals, going back to a series of successful (if suicidal) commando raids it planned that eliminated several TITAN strongpoints during the Fall.

Mechanics

The Fatal Oracle is an exhuman intelligence—and perhaps even an inhuman one. Its origins are mysterious and its motives ambiguous, seemingly not caring whether the actions it plans/predicts have repercussions that affect the lives of other transhumans. As such, it does not have a standard stat block or skills. To most observers, the Fatal Oracle does not do anything except accept questions and provide prophecies—it is not known to argue or promote its philosophy or creatively express itself save through this form of communication. If the PCs fight it in the Mesh, treat the AGI an Exsurgent Digital Virus (Eclipse Phase, p.364).

Using the Fatal Oracle

Sometimes a bad plan is preferable to no plan at all. The Fatal Oracle can provide a means to accomplish anything possible, though this usually requires (at minimum) a large personal sacrifice by the individual implementing the plan. As such, this is a way for the gamemaster to feed terrible ideas to players—and, if the PCs go through with them they should work. Admittedly, these may be horrible ideas like pulling the emergency lever that opens an entire habitat to space just to kill a small cell of exsurgents, or turning your morph into a portable nuclear suicide bomber, or infecting yourself with a nanovirus and allowing yourself to be infected by an exsurgent cell just to spread the infection to them. But clever PCs may be able to find loopholes and gaps in these procedures that give them a better chance of survival, and perhaps come to grips with the fact that in Eclipse Phase the rules of life and death really have changed.