181: The Lonely Dome

ENTRY 181: The Lonely Dome

The Shaheed Dome is a small, autonomous “waypoint” habitat on Mars on one of the southern roads leading out from Ashoka to the outlying dirt and moisture farms. With no permanent residents, Shaheed is little more than a shelter for passing traffic to wait out the sandstorms or catch a breath of fresh air and clean water, maintained by automated systems and the social contract of visitors, who help keep the place clean and change the filters so that the next travelers can benefit. A few regulars also know it as one of the few hardcopy public libraries on Mars, again operating on the trust system: a modest collection of a few hundred books printed on plastic pages and kept in ring-binders awaits travelers, along with a double handful of “donations” that have accumulated throughout the years.

Or so goes common knowledge. In truth, the Shaheed Dome is neither abandoned or autonomous—they are an autistic macromorph, resleeved into the control system of the dome as part of an experimental therapy unit, and subsequently forgotten after the Fall. Shaheed is desperately lonely, but finds great difficulty in communicating and expressing themselves to other transhumans, and takes particularly obsessive care of any “guests” who come to visit. Most of the books in the library were written by Shaheed, and represent their dreams and memories as much as anything. Like many authors, Shaheed usually inserts itself somewhere in the narrative.

COG	COO	INT	REF	SAV	SOM	WIL	MOX
12	14	15	15	14	18	13	-
INIT	SPD	LUC	TT	IR	DUR	WT	DR
6	1	26	4	52	200	50	300

Morph: Macromorph

Skills: Art: Writing 45, Hardware: Environmental Systems 50, Hardware: Robotics 34, Interests: Hospitality 33, Kinesics 25, Investigation: 25, Language: Native English 75, Language: Swahili 63, Profession: Lodging 60, Protocol 25

Implants: 360-Degree Vision, Access Jacks, Basic Mesh Inserts, Cortical Stack, Cyberbrain, Eidetic Memory, Lidar, Radar, T-Ray Emitter

Armor: 10

Notes: Immobile, Mental Disorder (Autism), Social Stigma (Macromorph)

Using The Lonely Dome

Living, sentient structures have a solid place in science fiction, and the Lonely Dome provides one way for gamemasters to introduce them into their Eclipse Phase games. Finding it difficult to communicate but obsessively lonely, the gamemaster should play up how a building that desperately craves human attention and interaction but cannot outright ask for it may act—from obsequious but surreptitious assistance of visitors to subtly trying to keep them there for longer periods, or at least to draw them back when they leave. However, Shaheed is not overly villainous in its intentions, and would likely not resort to murder or life-threatening situations to keep their “guests” from leaving, and would be protective of them if any violence did threaten. The major question is how long it will take the PCs to realize that perhaps there is a guiding intelligence behind the Lonely Dome.

Seed

• Rumors have reached back to Ashoka of a “haunted” habitat, and a group of travelers in that region that have gone missing, with their friends and loved ones posting a reward. Investigations lead to the Lonely Dome…and Shaheed works to keep the PCs there as it tries to provide clues to what happened to the missing travelers, perhaps leaving clues in one of the books in its library.

180: Echo Point

ENTRY 180: Echo Point

The very first radio signal humanity ever sent from Earth still hurtles through the void. Every transmission that was ever made forms a part of the endless wave of invisible radio energy moving through space at the speed of light. Before the Pandora Gates were discovered, the first any alien species would have known of humanity would have been those calls into the great darkness.

Now, something is sending them back. First noticed in AF 8, radio telescopes pointed in the direction of Barnard’s Star began picking up distorted, patchy transmissions from BF 2. Analysis of the content shows it to be a continuous broadcast stream—presumably everything that the listeners at Echo Point have picked up, amplified and sent back. These re-broadcasts have continued in near-real time, and now listeners have started picking up signals sent out during the early days of the Fall.

As transhumans tune in and relive the first days of the end of their world, others still wonder at the future. No source has been observed for the re-transmissions; astrophysicists have fairly ruled out any natural source of reflection might be responsible for the echo, and whatever alien ship, satellite, or other apparatus has so far evaded detection. So Echo Point remains a mystery, all of transhumanity’s greatest fears and worst memories cast back at it…and all anybody can wonder now is why.

Using Echo Point

Transhumanity may be looking toward the future, but it still has a lot of baggage from the past to work through first. Echo Point is a mechanism for gamemasters to address lingering issues form the Fall—old wounds, forgotten memories, secrets better left buried. Echo Point itself is a mystery, left open for the gamemaster to decide what to do. At (presumably) five light years or so out, it remains beyond current limits of transhuman technology to reach (barring a very fortuitous Pandora Gate opening nearby). Whether an alien effort to communicate or some trick of the TITANs, Echo Point could do a lot of damage just in the chaos it creates in the time it takes to go through the Fall and its aftermath.

Seeds

• A group of hackers has begun broadcasting the transmissions live from Echo Point through the habitat’s systems. Many are reliving bad memories from the fall, and a small riot has broken out. Caught in the chaos and confusion, will the player characters seek to hide, help, or take advantage of the distraction?
• Sabotage is occurring at several of the major listening stations tuned in to Echo Point, their facilities raided, files scrambled or erased. Firewall believes that among the Echo Point transmissions are secrets that someone wants to keep under wraps—TITANs collaborators, profiteers, hidden exsurgents, something. They’ve tracked one of the saboteurs to the PC’s habitat…an aged flat who’s just burned the last of his favors. The PCs are asked to apprehend him. Firewall wants answers, but the old man isn’t ready to go without a fight.

179: Sweetjuice

ENTRY 179: Sweetjuice

There is little room to grow sugarcane in space, nor many hives for honeybees. With priority given over to more important foodstuffs, sweetener production is often a local affair, each habitat or community finding their own way to satisfy their sweet tooth. Scumbarges and other stations where room and economy are tight simply process various food starches with cultured enzymes, deriving a colorless sticky-sweet gel known sugarin; several O’Niel cylinders have enough crop space to make a minor industry of sugarin production, and export the excess. On many ships and domes with hydroponics gardens, small batches of sugar cane, sugar beet, or stevia are grown, harvested, and processed, often by hand to render a variety of brown and white sugars for local use. In the aerostats of Venus various insects are cultivated; more often those that produce sweet nectar products like sugarbag, since honeybees are rare. Mars is the greatest producer of cane and beat sugar in the solar system, with an average production approaching ten tons, though some of it is siphoned off to the production of molasses, rum, and other culinary products, and Martian rock candy is a common treat marked for tourists, available in all the spaceports.

For the majority of transhumanity, raw or refined sugar remains unavailable, and industrious humans have turned instead to sweetjuice. Local products, often made by individuals or small groups who pool their resources and expertise, sweetjuice is a liquid sweetener derived from whatever is available—semi-sweet berries and tree saps are preferred, such as the Sugar Pines and Sugar Maple cultivated on Titan, or the juniper and raspberry bushes on Luna—which are boiled to condense the liquid, and sometimes filtered or further processed to remove adulterants, toxic elements, or native flavor. The resulting sweetjuice is a sweet or semi-sweet liquid, made available in small packets as a condiment (in microgravity) or dolloped out with a spoon. Quality is usually judged by the clarity of the sweetjuice as much as the taste, with clearer sweetjuice more highly prized and likely to be sweeter, with fewer contaminants. Different styles and flavors of sweetjuice have considerably affected many local forms of cooking, with distinct flavors from different habitats sparking a small high-end trade in quality sweetjuice.

Seeds

• A local entrepreneur on the player character’s habitat is looking to bring in sixty kilos of “brown crystal”—unrefined sugarcake straight from Elysium. Mixed with the local water, he’ll claim it as sweetjuice and sell it on to passing ships as a local delicacy. However, he’s concerned that the local artisan sweetjuice crafters on the habitat will jump him for devaluing their product, and offers to bring the PCs on board as partners…provided they take care of security, and kick in on the cost of the initial Martian sugar.
• Someone has been going around wrecking sweetjuice stills, and stealing the product. Local ordinances against sugar (it’s bad for your teeth!) mean that the residents cannot complain, but the sudden loss of real sweetener in the habitat has everyone in a grumpy mood…except for the local crafter of synthetic sweeteners, who has noted a sudden rise in custom. Could they be the culprit? Or is there a sugar addict loose on the station, desperate for their next fix?

178: Niels Watanabe

ENTRY 178: Niels Watanabe

Early menton designs focused primarily on functionality, to the exclusion and detriment of all else. The prototypical models were often flawed caricatures of humanity—stunted, malformed, and ugly by comparison to the mediagenic gods that dominate the Mesh. These were only the most visible errors; later on researchers and early adopters realized the dangers these unperfected morphs posed to egos, the enhanced wetware of the brain often leading the transhuman consciousness into extended fugue states as they lived entirely in their own minds, forgetting reality, or became fixated into various autistic states. Still, the enhanced mental capabilities attracted any number of scholars, researchers, and others who wanted the intelligence edge that they felt the morph would give them. Perhaps this is the truth underlying the media’s portrayal of mentons as cold creatures of rational intellect or unhinged mad scientists, but while it is true many mentons fit that mold, not all of them do.

Niels Watanabe was an early adopter, and for his troubles was sleeved into a stunted morph with a severe degeneration of the spine and brainstem, rendering him a quadripalegic with an outsized cranium on top of a stick-thin, useless body. He took the loss of mobility in stride and good humor, and is generally carried about in a variety of automated walkers or other vehicles, sometimes driven by one of his three wives. Unlike most mentons, Watanabe is not much of an academic, nor interested in research of formal learning. Instead his is a genius at problem-solving, brilliantly creative to the point that he is nearly unemployable—some of his proposed solutions have included the invention of exotic states of matter or permanently dying every resident of a habitat half-black and half-white, for example. These moments aside, Watanabe is infamous for his frankness, insight, and undisputable creative brilliance, and his services put him in sufficiently high demand that he never wants for work or favors when he wants them. Keeping busy keeps him happy, whether it is on a project or picking out gifts for his identical triplet brides, but sometimes he does enjoy a challenge—especially if it is a truly strange situation—and his friends and colleagues are aware of this aspect of his nature, and continually send along any interesting problems they encounter.

COG	COO	INT	REF	SAV	SOM	WIL	MOX
40	5	15	5	16	5	22	-
INIT	SPD	LUC	TT	IR	DUR	WT	DR
9	1	44	9	88	33	5	50

Morph: Menton

Skills: Art: Poetry (Limerick) 45, Interests: Any* 25, Interfacing 60, Investigation 50, Kinesics 50, Language: Native Japanese 80, Language: Norwegian 66, Language: English 44, Language: Hindi 44, Language: Italian 44, Language: Korean 44, Languague: Mandarin: 44, Networking: Hypercorps 36, Networking: Scientists 53, Perception (Visual) 56, Profession: Creative Consultant 60, Programming 33

Implants: Basic Biomods, Basic Mesh Inserts, Cortical Stack, Eidetic Memory, Hyper-Linguist, Math Boost, Oracles

Traits: Exceptional Aptitude (COG), Common Sense, Feeble (SOM), Frail (1), Neural Damage (Quadripalegic), Unfit (2)

* Niels has a vast number of interests and a lot of time on his hands; assume he has a rating of 25 in any non-Academic field of knowledge, even obscure ones like Old Earth Yo-Yos or Hyperspace Engineering.

Using Niels Watanabe

Watanabe is not insane, nor is he your typical genius. If asked some complicated or obscure question, he may cheerfully answer “I don’t know!” and then have one of his wives (Ivanna, Kim-Lee, and Star) show you the new recipe he just thought of for synthetic tapioca. He is so creative in fact, that many people have difficulty following his reasoning, and sometimes his answers are completely useless (anytime he goes on about “anti-neutrino fields” and the color purple, his wives just shrug and roll their eyes). However, his intuitive genius does allow him to skip past several logical steps to suggest innovative, if occasionally wacky, solutions to any problem—and if the PCs have a suitably wacky or difficult problem and need a solution, Niels Watanabe may be their go-to contact.

On the other hand, being trapped in a useless, deformed body has rather twisted Niels mind a bit, and there’s more than enough super-villain potential there for gamemasters that need someone brilliant, bitter, and off-the-wall to mastermind some harebrained scheme.

177: Brauchen

ENTRY 177: Brauchen

During the Fall, countless ships left Earth—anything that even had a chance of making it. Not all of them did. In the ensuing chaos, rescue efforts sometimes took months or years…and all anyone could do was bury the dead and loot the remnants for whatever salvage could be found. Some ships remain unaccounted for; for others the records are corrupted and lost, so no one knows for certain how many ships actually launched, or how many were on them.

The Alma Germania made it to Mars. Engine failure hit somewhere in the upper atmosphere over what would be the quarantine zone; the pilot was reduced to steering thrusters as she tried to glide a 230 ton flying brick straight into a dust storm. All hands were presumed lost, the ship quickly buried by Martian sand and dust. Last year, a dust storm uncovered part of the hull, and word of the Alma spread out on the Mesh. There was a race to see who would get there first between the bone-pickers and scrap merchants on one hand, and the archaeologists on the other.

The first expeditions were repulsed with crude chemical bombs and ancient sniper rifles.

Follow-up expeditions showed that the Alma was still crewed. The ship, designed for years in space and packed with materials for a potential colony, had enabled the initial survivors of the crash to go on, even buried alive. Air, water, waste, all recycled as best as they could with the resources remaining to them. No-one knows exactly how many remain in the shell of the Alma Germania, or what the conditions within must be. A handful of survivors in ancient vacuum suits have been spotted clearing dust away from the solar panels on the ship’s hull. One or two always have their weapons at the ready, willing to take a shot at anyone who comes near.

Researchers trying to pick up any signals from the downed craft received a partial audio transmission of a sermon beginning “Die Brauchen…” The language and context of the sermon were both bizarre, based around a very debased German or Dutch dialect with considerable loan-words. Still piecing together an almanac on the Brauchen, as people have taken to calling them, from bits of the transmission, anthropologists believe that the survivors have formed an isolationist community, distrustful of the outside world. They practice strict controls on child-bearing, but are otherwise sexually liberal—and in the case of the community elders, aggressive. Children exists in a form of chattel slavery, and are sometimes subject to cannibalism according to the hard math of limited resources. Many common diseases appear to be thankfully absent, but certain parasitic infections appear nearly ubiquitous.

Public opinion is still divided on what to do with the Brauchen, and so they exist in political limbo. Conditions in the stricken Alma Germania are obviously hellish, but equally obviously the community appears stable and does not desire outside contact, having already responded violently. The latest idea to help establish communication and “open” the community, at least to researchers, is to provide a gift of salt, water, and medications…but even this has met with considerable backlash as it would be disrupting this primitive brinker-esque community.

Using the Brauchen

It’s a big universe, and there are some primitive screwheads in it. The Brauchen are an entire community gone a bit medieval, stuck in a rotting ship where no-one can even remember what air smells like that hasn’t gone through filters long past their prime, and yesterday’s abortion very well might be on the menu. As a gamemaster, this is your chance to get as strange, nasty, and creative as you’d like. Whether you make the entire remaining ship unrepentant cannibals or a religious fundamentalist society gone crazy is entirely your bag, but keep in mind that despite the dire conditions the Brauchen have access to as much philosophy as any contemporary transhuman, and the main limit to their technology is limited resources. While it might be difficult to keep them from shooting you on sight, if the PCs can talk to them (deciphering their mangled German patois) they’ll find a society that combines libertine attitudes of personal freedom with extraordinarily pragmatic approaches to basic survival. Children are not considered persons but property, the better to avoid emotional attachments, and at least a segment of the population has embraced cannibalism as both a necessity and a freedom from ancient taboos.

If a carrot is needed to further interest the PCs in this Brauchen, perhaps the Alma Germania was carrying the equivalent of five thousand early-prototype cortical stacks in its hold. Five thousand egos from old Earth, unsullied by the Brauchen’s activities…they might be mad, or damaged, but right now they wait in legal limbo until the authorities decide what to do with the Brauchen. Of course, there are certain groups that are willing to launch a rescue mission, and to hell with the authorities…and they could always use some extra hands.

176: The Iktomi Vault

ENTRY 176: The Iktomi Vault

The shattered settlements of the Iktomi on Echo V are spread out in networks across the world, the remnants of shattered, overgrown highways and aqueducts connecting broken city to broken city. Yet the whole of the surface of the world was no occupied by the Iktomi—maps from space show regions that were inhospitable or otherwise neglected, free from Iktomi structures. Some were deserts and forests, beneath which the satellite maps showed former riverbeds and forgotten townships long buried by sand or crawling plants. On the ocean shore off one continent lay an entire nation that seemed to have fallen into the sea, to lay undisturbed. And in one isolated rocky butte—a geological anomaly, far from the Iktomi cities old or new—they discovered the vault.

Perhaps once it had been a natural cave, but if so the ancient Iktomi had mined it out and enlarged it into a deep shaft reaching into a natural hollow in the butte through a series of three chambers, each of which had been guarded by massive stone doors, heavily engraved with undecipherable signs in matte white and black, and the walls and floor as well are decorated in eye-catching interlocking circles and geometric designs of bright primary colors. Test samples from materials in the vault leads Xenoarchaeologists to believe that the initial period of creation for the vault was about twelve thousand years ago, and that is featured at least three subsequent periods of activity where the vault was opened, expanded, and resealed, and the three chambers leading into the natural hollow show considerable defenses had been erected, including some sort of jamming devices to disable wireless signals, the remains of three automated laser emplacements, and explosives set in the walls to collapse the chambers if the doors had been breached.

The reason for these defenses remains unknown, but whatever they guarded was obviously insufficient, as the entire complex has been breached. The massive stone discs that were rolled into place like bank vaults to seal each chamber lie shattered, the automated weapons melted from heat characteristic with plasma weapons, the designs carved into walls and ceiling pock-marked from various other weapons-fire and the heavy tread of some six-legged arthropod vehicle. The innermost chamber has yet to be breached by xenoarchaeologists—a partial detonation of the final security measure has blocked access to it, but based on the residual radiation leaking through the loose stone, the current belief is that the site contains several tons of radioactive material, though this may be an overestimation as many of the materials used in the third cavern are based on pitchblende and radium; robots armed with UV lights have reported distinct fluorescent patterns are visible that are different from the brightly-colored markings in the previous two chambers.

Still, citing the risks and difficulties of clearing a way into the central hollow, xenoarchaeologists are currently excavating what might be the remains of a nearby worksite that could give clues into what the Iktomi were storing in their vault, and why. Some researchers have also pointed out the disturbing similarities between the Iktomi vault and human long-term radioactive waste storage facilities.

175: Human Upgrade Program

ENTRY 175: Human Upgrade Program

Super soldier serums. Vita-ray enhancements. Nanochemical baths. Controlled mutative agents. Snake oil by any other name, still finding a market because the teeming hordes of transhumanity still have a sentimental attachment to their morphs. While resleeving may be practically ubiquitous, there are still plenty of people, especially among the poorer and less educated part of the transhuman spectrum, who simply want their own morph just as it is except…better. The desperate and hopeful are easy prey for the scammers peddling radioactive water and steroids, often under the most dubious available science. Efforts to stifle and educate the industry have so far failed—for every fact-checker debunking a treatment or bio-agent as crap (and often cancerous) or listing the lies and crimes of the people behind, there are thousands of automated programs drowning the Mesh personal anecdotes, promotions, secret offers, and viral campaigns.

Yet amid all the cosmic potions and miracle drugs there are real scientists working away in pursuit of the unattainable—permanent non-invasive human augmentation. That their efforts seem pointless in consideration of the personal augmentations and morphs already available is beside the point; many envision a future freed from the restraints of the current system, where custom morphs are priced out of the range of the common ego, of a transhumanity that has transcended to physical perfection and left flats and splicers far behind in favor of Humanity 2.0. Such is the logic behind the Human Upgrade Program, whose primary research facilities are on the Green Teeth, a scumbarge that operates mainly between Mercury and Venus, full of plenty of volunteer subjects.

The transhuman researchers and scientists behind the Human Upgrade Program have as their goal a retroviral agent or procedure that will transform a flat into a Remade—restructuring the subject completely while retaining their identity and some gross aspects of their physical appearance. Lost in the haze of mutative agents and chemical baths, mainstream scientists have not yet been aware that the Human Upgrade Program has begun to report some successes.

The Human Upgrade Project has found something that works; sort of. Subjects are placed in a chemically induced coma, their egos backed up to their cortical stack, and then the body is introduced to a controlled series of retroviral and nanite infections which rebuild the character from the ground up, which takes several months. It’s an inefficient program, and currently none of the thirty-six subjects have completed a full transformation from flat to Remade, with most exhibiting partial transformation or cancerous growths. Still, it is a start, and the Human Upgrade Project has vowed to continue to refine and augment the process until it is perfected.

Mechanics

The key retrovirus involved in the Human Upgrade Project is the exsurgent virus; stripped away of the pseudo-science and mummery all they have succeeded at so far is reducing the body’s resistance to the infection (-30 modifier to DUR test to see if the virus takes hold). Most of the “partial successes” from the project are actually experiencing Stage 1 or Stage 2 of the xenomorph virus (Eclipse Phase, p.368).

174: Typhoid Jane

ENTRY 174: Typhoid Jane

Latisha Mehmeton Jane was orphaned in the Fall, and her foster family killed by the TITANs on Mars, leaving her to fend for herself at the age of thirteen. She has spent the last several years as a playtester, moving from one contract to the next, one habitat to the next, slowly accumulating academic credits from online courses, making friends and enjoying noncommittal non-monogamous relationships with men and women she meets online. L. M. Jane likes to get lost in crowds, and makes a hobby of being a pickpocket and groper. Her therapist said she had issues making connections with others.

Then he turned into a monster. Just like the others.

What L. M. Jane knows of her life is a lie. She is a sleeper agent for the TITANs, designed as a vector the exsurgent virus, which is spread by close contact with her. L. M. Jane is unaware of her nature, and attributes her propensity for brief relationships, being touchy-feely with others, and keeping constantly on the move to her upbringing—the artificial memories built specifically to support and rationalize those traits. So she moves through life, leaving monsters in her wake.

COG	COO	INT	REF	SAV	SOM	WIL	MOX
13	15	12	10	15	13	10	-
INIT	SPD	LUC	TT	IR	DUR	WT	DR
4	1	20	3	40	30	6	45

Morph: Splicer

Skills: Academics: Art (Abstract) 35, Art: Digital Media (Virtual Reality Games) 37, Art: Painting (Abstract) 21, Art: Sculpture (Abstract) 25, Art: Writing 24, Free Fall (Microgravity) 33, Infosec 26, Interests: Ethical Nonmonogamy 40, Interests: Gambling 27, Interests: VR Game Design 36, Interfacing 50, Language: Native English 82, Language: Arabic 46, Networking: Autonomists 28, Networking: Hypercorps (VR Games) 43, Palming 50, Perception (Touch) 48, Profession: Playtester 56, Programming (VR Games) 33, Unarmed Combat (Touch) 23

Implants: Access Jacks, Basic Biomods, Basic Mesh Inserts, Cortical Stack, Sex Switch, Skinflex

Traits: Edited Memories, Innocuous, Modified Behavior (Touching, Encouraged), Psi Chameleon

Mechanics

Typhoid Jane carries dormant versions of the xenomorph exsurgent virus (Eclipse Phase, p.367) in specialized sweat glands in her skin and orifices—she can infect a biomorph with a kiss or a grope or through her bodily fluids (tears, saliva, etc.) L. M. Jane has no control over when the virus is released; treat each contact as a chance infection (MOX x 10 Test, see Eclipse Phase, p.363)

Using Typhoid Jane

Not all enemies are malevolent. M. L. Jane just lives her life, but because of who and what she is, the xenomorph virus spreads. Her victims are sufficiently spread out that up until now she has gone unnoticed, but before long Firewall or someone else (perhaps the player characters?) will make the connections. Typhoid Jane presents the players with both a tangible threat and a moral dilemma—how do they handle this woman who is an obvious but unintentional threat to others? How will she handle it if they confront her with the news? The easy solution would be to resleeve her into an uninfectious morph, but that just begs the question of how many more Typhoid Janes are out there.

173: Graviton Trade Talks

ENTRY 173: Graviton Trade Talks

It began, as many things do, when a drunken physicist scribbled something on a napkin. The party was a trade junket at Extropia, with various manufacturing interests discussing the purchase of some novel allotropic alloys from the Factors. In addition to the various official negotiating bodies were various specialists, administrators, and hangers-on at the party, waiting in case their expertise or decision-making powers were called upon. Most of them ended up highly inebriated by hour seven of the meeting; one of them—Jorge-Achmed Long, an experimental physicist, was actually given half an hour of unsupervised conversation with one of the Factors. Which led to the napkin. When Jorge-Achmed sobered up the next day, he realized he’d begun conditional negotiations for purchase of the proof of gravitons.

That was five years ago, and the official beginning of the Graviton Trade Talks, a series of negotiations between the Factors and the Planetary Consortium that still have not culminated one way or another. A large portion of the negotiations involve both parties determining exactly what is on the table. Despite the Initial Drunken Napkin Agreement (IDNA), the Factors have been clear that gravitons as massless particles that mediate the force of gravitation is not quite correct, but they’re being cagey about giving up more details to the point that entire teams of physicists have spent the last couple years of their careers combing over every statement any Factor at the Graviton Trade Talks has ever made, looking for clues as to the real nature of gravity. What is clear is that the Factors themselves are not certain they want to trade over anything related to graviton-tech to transhumanity, or more importantly what the going market price should be.

Using the Graviton Trade Talks

As an ongoing event of some minor importance, the Graviton Trade Talks are a nice background element to roll out in any game—an easy go-to for small talks, news, etc. “Major disappointment today at the Graviton Trade Talks…” “Chief instigator of the Graviton Trade Talks Jorge-Achmed Long vomited on the Factor ambassador today, who apparently thanked J-A for the contribution of nutrients…” “Hey, I heard the Martians are trying to undercut the Consortium at the Trade Talks, cut the rest of the solar system out of the deal…damn Rusters…” and so on and so forth. Likewise, the trade talks are a good place to place any physicist or Factor NPC that the gamemaster needs for an adventure. As with trade talks in general, the Graviton Trade Talks are also an excellent setting for general espionage activities, particularly if the Factors can ever be convinced to bring out an example of their graviton technology.

Seed

• The PCs are hired to bug the Graviton Trade Talks. Security is tight, but their employer has noted a potential weak spot: chief instigator Jorge-Achmed Long, who has a taste for male company after a long day of talking physics. If the PCs can get invited back to J-A’s living quarters they’ll bypass most of his security measures…and from there it’s a relatively painless and easy process for them to attach the surreptitious neutrino farcaster listening device to J-A’s cortical stack. Well, painless for them.

172: The Neptunium Skull

ENTRY 172: The Neptunium Skull

Distance impedes nearly all communication; both the physical distance measured in kilometers and the conceptual distance between one ego and another, or one community and another. Information comes through various channels and becomes distorted or misinterpreted in passing from one receiver to the next, rumors growing as they are told and retold, and even the most diligent wiki on the Mesh cannot perfectly control all of what its members post. Space gives birth to legends.

One such legend regards the Neptunium Skull: 59.88 kg of neptunium-236, cast or carved or otherwise shaped into the semblance of the skull of a human female. Those are the facts; the rest is mostly conjecture. Its likely first appearance was a line on a security report from Rhea, when an “irregular near-critical mass” of neptunium was listed as among the missing following a break-in at a radioactive materials storage facility. A few weeks later, a Ruster yegg fresh from a “honeymoon” on Saturn died of radiation poisoning, mumbling about a skull—her partner/wife escaped custody and was never seen again. The first “official” sighting was when the St. Catherine Tong handed over the Skull to the administration of New Quebec, in exchange for the release of sixteen of its members from various forms of incarceration or service. The accepting official, Davier Jose Cheecha, was later indicted in scandal when the skull disappeared from its secure vault, and fled for the Outer Rim.

So the tales go, on and on—the Neptunium Skull crops up here and there throughout the solar system, an objective of inestimable worth and danger, leaving a trail of broken lives and contamination in its wake.

Mechanics

The Neptunium Skull is radioactive. Any unshielded exposure to the Neptunium Skull results in radiation poisoning for biomorphs (see Eclipse Phase, p.201); synthmorphs tend to become contaminated and may suffer flawed and corrupted backups, as well as passing the contamination on to others by exposure. Currently, due to shape, density, and mass the Neptunium Skull is subcritical and will not create a sustained nuclear reaction. This can be easily overcome however, so there remains the possibility that under the right conditions the Neptunium Skull can be converted into a nuclear weapon. The effects of this happening are left up to the gamemaster, but should probably involve “BIG BADDA BOOM” and radiation poisoning and contamination for any nearby morphs that survive.

Using the Neptunium Skull

A deadly sort of MacGuffin, the Neptunium Skull represents an object of nearly incalculable worth and danger all rolled into one. The industrial effort required to synthesize and separate that much neptunium-236 is tremendous, the idea that it is running loose in the solar system-wide grey market frightening. While not apparently designed for use in a nuclear weapon, the mass is sufficient that it could easily be used for such a purpose. However, the greater appeal of the Neptunium Skull is: who made it, and why? The shape and properties of the Neptuniun Skull also make it easy to transfer legends of real-life “cursed” and apocryphal objects like the Hope Diamond or the Crystal Skulls to the Neptunium Skull; some deluded individuals may even believe that the Skull contains the ability to enhance psi powers in some fashion. NPCs may play up this and other reputed powers of the skull, but the very real threat of carrying a massive ingot of refined radioactive isotope should be more than sufficient threat for most players.

171: Cuidad

ENTRY 171: Cuidad

On the surface of Mars, at the edge of the Tharsis plateau, stands a monolith in the shape of a steeply-angled, flat-topped pyramid eight meters tall, and six meters on a side at the base. The surface appears to be granite, of shade just to the red of black, and in the right light parts of it seem to sparkle where metal filaments and piezoelectric crystals meet the surface. Its name is Cuidad, and they claim to be the first stonemorph in transhuman history.

While the details of the design remain proprietary, Cuidad claims that his morph is a single massive solid-state device, the product of a new discipline called geoelectronics, and that barring seismic cataclysm or accident his morph will last ten thousand years, until the hard shell is weathered away by the winds and waters of a terraformed Mars. The truth of that claim remains unproven, though visitors to Cuidad have noted sonar and x-ray scans do show that the structure appears almost entirely solid, and with a high degree of electrical activity.

What is known is that the Cuidad stonemorph is extremely limited in its abilities—immobile, with none of the typical transhuman senses, they perceive the world entirely through a refined electrical sense, judging distance, velocity, and even shape through varying capacitance between nearby objects and its stone skin. Cuidad’s only “natural” means of communication is the production of weak electrical signals, but these are boosted and converted by its Mesh inserts into something other transhumans can interpret. Hermitical by nature, Cuidad enjoys its isolation, both geographical and sensory. Most of its time is spent directing a handful of robots to sculpt the surrounding landscape, and interpreting the seismic data it receives.

COG	COO	INT	REF	SAV	SOM	WIL	MOX
18	15	15	5	14	-	20	-
INIT	SPD	LUC	TT	IR	DUR	WT	DR
4	1	40	8	60	1600	200	2400

Morph: Stonemorph (Unique)

Skills: Academics: Geography (Mars) 65, Academics: Geology (Mars) 70, Academics: Geophysics 70, Academics: Seismology 55, Art: Landscaping (Xenoscaping) 52, Hardware: Electronics (Geoelectronics) 64, Interests: Martian Vulcanism 56, Interests: Zen Gardens 34, Interfacing 45, Language: Native Portuguese 84, Language: English 73, Language: French 70, Language: Spanish 70, Networking: Martian Mining Hypercorps 60, Networking: Scientists 25, Profession: Seismologist 66, Scrounging 25

Implants: Access Jacks, Basic Mesh Inserts, Cortical Stack, Electrical Sense, Seismograph

Armor: 30

Notes: Immobile, no hands, linked to five Dwarf robots (Eclipse Phase, p.345) which manipulate its environment when necessary.

Using Cuidad

Sometimes the NPCs come to the PCs, and sometimes the PCs have to go to the NPC—Cuidad is NPC and remote location all in one. A veritable sage on anything involving Martian volcanism, the stonemorph can be a valuable if eccentric asset, either helping the PCs out or hiring them to go on missions to investigate geological anomalies on Mars. Despite the isolated context, savvy players will probably realize that designing, building, and installing the “stonemorph” and expensive Dwarf robots suggests considerable resources on Cuidad’s part—and indeed, the monolith has a minority interest in several Martian mining corporations, and continues to act as a highly-paid consultant for several of them.

Seed

• In their last adventure, the PCs have stumbled upon a multicolored metal cube with bizarre electrical characteristics. Research into the artifact leads them to Cuidad, who recognizes it as a “geoelectronic” device, and realizes someone is pirating his designs. Cuidad will offer to hire the PCs to deal with the infringers…or, failing that, at least buy the artifact off them for a hefty sum.