191: Eyebrow Network

ENTRY 191: Eyebrow Network

“You are your rep. A wise transhuman takes no more than they need, gives no more than they can afford, and through their work achieves merit and accumulates a higher rep. Those who seek rep for its own sake are often doomed to failure, others successful beyond their dreams. To borrow against your rep, your name, to commandeer the resources of a tribe, a network, a gang, a habitat, a planet to your whims—if you succeed, to the benefit of others, you will earn it back again and then some. If you spend it selfishly, your rep will wither and die, and black marks will stain your rep beyond fallible human memory. Remember, each to their own need, and by each to their own ability.”
- Fuck-the-Money-I-Have-Rules, Anarchist Philosopher

Transhumans exist not just as egos and morphs; each individual is also their informational footprint, the tracks and records they leave behind them in the Mesh, in every gateway and airlock they pass through, all the accumulated data of their life. These traces exist for everyone, even the dead, and vast engines and innumerable egos make it their work to sift, compile, and organize these heaps of data into comprehensible chunks. The business of data mining is not just in the finding and sorting, but the précis and presentation. There is value added in taking ten thousand receipts and distilling them into the salient data points “Enjoys Chinese food, particularly mushroom chow mein.” Entire organizations and databases exist whose sole purpose is to derive and update pithy, accurate profiles of transhumans, living and dead. The most popular is the Eyebrow Network.

The Eyebrows are a stateless, anarchist organization formed by Fuck-the-Money, designed to operated autonomously without administrator or rank above peer; the data is said to be backed up in servers from Pluto to Mercury, sustained without advertisements or hypercorp money by generous donations and the occasional outright larceny. The workers are all volunteers and vested interests: to join they must provide an accurate, detailed, but brief and fully documented (public sources preferred) profile of themselves and one other, which are subject to peer review. With acceptance comes access: the Eyebrow Network has profiles on over two billion transhumans, living and dead; and responsibility: regular tasks of file maintenance, review, updates, and new profiles as needed. Failure to contribute causes loss of access; efforts to intentionally deceive or provide spurious information are call for a black mark. Everyone is entitled to their secrets, the blank spots on their reports, but false data is punished with ostracism and derision, not to mention a hit to the rep.

Mechanics

The Eyebrow Network is a service associated with The Circle-A List, and accessible to egos with @-rep; contributing to update and verify Eyebrow profiles is part of regular @-rep maintenance and growth. Characters can make a Networking: Autonomist Skill Test to see if a particular transhuman’s profile is available, and call in a Trivial favor to access it. While not quite public access, these profiles are so generally accessible and editable that few will reveal major secrets about the transhumans—but they are guaranteed accurate (to the best of the Eyebrow Network’s ability), and can give the character the basic biographical details of the transhuman so they have an idea of who and what they’re dealing with. Of course, the PCs might also be interested in seeing what their own profile says as well…

At the gamemaster’s discretion, other rep systems may have their own related profile networks, though these tend to be specialized—The Hypercorp Directory (CivicNet/C-rep) for example, might contain profiles of every corporate entity, rather than every transhuman.