365: Greetings from the Future

ENTRY 365: Greetings from the Future

"Entry 000...Test...Transhumanity lives...already lived and died..."
- Luna archive, unknown transmission from Earth, 12:31:01:00:00 BF 1

"Entry 000: Test Item. Transhumanity lives in a universe where alien intelligences and civilizations have already lived and died, leaving behind remnants for them to paw through, analyze, and reverse..."
- TitanWiki entry on Test Item, published to the Mesh 12:31:01:00:00 AF 9

For the past year, researchers on Titan have identified bizarre similarities between recent entries to TitanWiki and a series of unsourced radio transmissions from Earth, archived at various receiver stations on Luna. Initially believed to be a case of copyright infringement or an elaborate prank, independent research has proved that the timestamps on all of the Luna archives appear to be authentic...and deep background checks of the contemporary authors of the entries show no connections to the recordings. What is more, the archived messages clearly deal with events, places, and transhumans that take place after the Fall.

The best theory for the mechanism involved is a closed timelike curve - a concept of theoretical physics that could allow information, even radio transmissions or possibly even physical travel back in time. The idea of such a time machine, usually using a ring laser to bend spacetime, is far from new to transhuman science. However, most physicists agree that a CTC would require either infinite power, a ring larger than the observed universe, or a singularity to be realizable. While the first two options remain unavailable, a few physicists have pointed out that the Pandora Gates do represent singularities - and while no one has yet attempted to construct a closed timelike curve with them, it would at least be theoretically possible.

While they do not agree on the nature of the phenomena, scientists have pinpointed the source of the transmissions: a "hot spot," just north of the Arctic circle, far away from previous transhuman settlements...perhaps an isolated research lab. No records remain of who might have built it, but obviously the site must have an independent power source, radio receiver and transmitter. Equally obviously, throughout the year the signal has been getting weaker, suggesting that the power source is gradually failing.

Using Greetings from the Future

Time travel is one of the great conceits of science fiction, because it poses one of the great questions: what if? Time travel can open up vast probabilities to player characters, with some interested in using it to go back and change things for the better, others looking to exploit it for their own gain, and more than a few who will start on about paradoxes. If the CTC device exists on Earth and is not a hoax, gamemasters will have to work out many of the details on their own - but here are a few things to remember.

The CTC device is built around a Pandora gate or equivalent artifact, and has been running apparently continuously for ten years. One characteristic of a theoretical CTC is that time travel before the date it was turned on would not be possible. If the first recorded transmission was in fact the first one, that means that a transhuman could potentially travel back to just before the Fall - to save a loved one, or archive material lost in the present so that it can be recovered in the future - provided that the CTC device is actually set up to allow physical travel; given power and space limitations, it might be restricted to radio broadcasts, but even that could allow important information and information to be transmitted into the past. Also, the CTC device is apparently failing. If it has been running autonomously since the Fall, then it is likely badly behind on basic maintenance and needs to be repaired, and the power source (probably an atomic battery, although geothermal, tidal, wind, solar power, or some combination might be possible) supplemented or replaced - because once the power fails, the window into the past closes. Likewise, the CTC would allow travel from the present into the past, but probably not the reverse - although combined with relativistic time travel (see entry 182), this could be less of an issue.

If nothing else, the Greetings From the Future make a great way to introduce other Farcast entries to your game.

Seed

• Firewall has detected a troubling possibility: the remnants of the TITAN forces on Earth may be aware of the CTC device. If they get their mechanical tentacles on it, the TITANs could theoretically transmit back important information on the future to their past counterparts - transforming the "defeat" of the TITANs into a tactical withdrawal. To remove this possibility, the PCs are equipped with a ship and as many weapons as they can hold. Their mission: destroy the time machine!

341: Technomysticism

ENTRY 341: Technomysticism

"No one knows everything. An' anything you don't know, that's magic. Unseen forces. The dark programs. The things I've seen in the subcurrents of the Mesh...an inheritance of a thousand generations of shamanic pharmaceutical knowledge...the telluric currents of Mars and Luna...mine to cajole, conjure, and command."
- Big L'il Zee, Circuit Freak & Psychosorcerer (AF 8)

"Ignorance breeds superstition, as true for a synthmorph on the surface of Luna staring up at the ruined eyesore of Earth today as it was a hundred centuries ago with the sun-baked farmer standing in awe and incomprehension as the river rose to his knees, leaving behind a layer of rich silt on his drowned fields. Too much of the Mesh is awash with bad research, general education too broad and patchy, wikis and online courses filled with pseudoscience, paid advertisements, pet theories without supporting evidence, and a seemingly endless supply of kooks willing to tie it all together, forming networks that feed on passing the same bad information back and forth until it becomes accepted as fact. Long gone are the days when peer review could weed out the papers that were not even wrong, and in the collapse or corruption of academic and professional journals there is nothing to stop anyone from publishing whatever they want. In such an environment all transhumans become skeptics out of self defense."
- Professor Brainbug, guest lecture

The hardest part of answering any question is wading through the crap that pops up in the search results. While the vast majority of transhuman knowledge is available online, much of it for free, most of the hits are garbage - bad information, pet theories, ads, copypasted repeats recombined to look like a new article, porn, and other forms of junk. Even the most secure and vouched-for wiki and database is sure to have some questionable crap sneak in via a well-mannered and convincing bot or a lack of judgment in citing a source. For most transhumans this is just an annoyance - something that they learn to identify and deal with as naturally as breathing - but the ongoing corruption has detrimentally impacted the technical skills of more than one generation. Most transhumans, if pressed, could not give an accurate account of Newtonian physics, and their ideas of quantum mechanics are derived mostly from big-budget XP productions and Meshcomics involving stick figures. In such an atmosphere of readily available knowledge and widespread ignorance has come the spread of technomysticism - not necessarily the belief in paranormal activity, but a flawed understanding of contemporary technology, it's limitations and how it works. This environment breeds pseudoscience, weird beliefs and superstitions, and promulgates many fallacies and misunderstandings.

Technomysticism tends to follow pseudoscientific principles, or applies fallacious theories to explain the working of existing technologies. On Mars and Luna, for example, mistaken beliefs about geomagnetically induced currents abound, with even quite respected and intelligent transhumans choosing to follow popular superstition with additional ground straps and other remedies to keep from getting "fried." In Extropia, variations of the gambler's fallacy are especially prominent, with shares in gatecrashing corps sometimes increasing after a failed expedition on the expectation that the next one "must" be a winner to balance out the probabilities. Programmers in particular swap procedure manuals dealing with "black magic" code - programs that underlie the existing Mesh, but which are so old, patched, and undocumented that no transhuman knows exactly how they work - only that if they fiddle with this value in this screen, they can fix the problem. The spread of exonatural materials and other bioproducts as cure-alls or miracle substances, despite or because of lack of documented testing, is another example of technomysticism in action.

Using Technomysticism

First and foremost, technomysticism is an ass-covering mechanism for players and gamemasters. Not everyone has the time or inclination to become read-up in space exploration, physics, chemistry, anatomy, biology, electrical and mechanical engineering, business theory, philosophy, computer science, and psychology before a game, nor should they be expected to. Eclipse Phase is set in the far future in a science fiction world of high technology - a rather hard sci fi world as these things go, but still fiction. It's a setting you want to live and play in, but you don't need to build every little thing in your head, even if you could. So when you do run up against the wall, don't be afraid to say something silly or admit the character doesn't know the answer. Chalk it up to legitimate character error and ignorance, even if the PC or NPC should know better based on their skills. Anything to keep the game moving, rather than get bogged down into a technical argument over the details of how some hypothetical technology may or may not work. If it really bugs a player character, ask them to research it on their own and if they come up with a satisfactory answer at the next session, give 'em a bit of rez or a no-prize.

Secondly, technomysticism permits players and characters to conceptualize some technology in terms of magical thinking - "Where do AGIs go when they die?," "Organically Grown Augmentations are better for you," "This plasma rifle has the Green seal of approval, I want my violence to be environment-friendly," and so on. This can be played as anything from a source of cheap laughs to a segue into a "shaman," "technomancer" or other type who assumes the mantle of hidden supernatural and technical knowledge to gain influence and extract gifts and credits from the community. Some of these characters mean well, and as particularly knowledgeable about certain "black magic" exploits and the like, but the worst are little more than swindlers, thieves, and back-alley surgeons offering highly questionable augmentations or other services. Such characters tend to be charismatic (or else very poor), but in the right circumstances be influential through their friends and followers. In rare cases, they may even have some genuine paranormal psi ability, but such individuals are touched by the exsurgent virus and much more dangerous than scam artists selling "blessed" firewall programs.

340: AF Torture

ENTRY 340: AF Torture

"Everybody talks under hard interrogation. That's the problem: hurt someone long enough, intensive enough, and they will say anything to make it stop. Worse, torture distorts the process of recollection so that the key information you want is lost. The brain physically rewires itself! Memory associations in the ego shift and are destroyed! Lies and truth melt together until the subject cannot tell what really happened. You don't know what it's like until you've been in that chair. Your mind keeps working as they question you, it catches everything the interrogators say, rolls it around in its mind, and regurgitates it as the fantasy it thinks the interrogator wants to hear. The signal to noise ratio of hard interrogation is simply too high to be dependable. Fortunately, we currently have technology that makes it unnecessary. I want you to understand that, because there's nothing you can say right now that will make me stop. I'm not doing this because I want something from you. I'm doing this for fun."
- Ignacio Carcesa, voice journal

Most transhumans still register pain. All transhumans that are still sentient are subject to psychological manipulation and duress - lack of sleep, phobia exacerbation, traumatic roleplay scenarios. Torture is generally seen as a primitive and wasteful tactic whose hard limitations have long been recognized by professional military, security, police, and intelligence organizations, but as a toxic meme continues to permeate transhuman media and culture. Criminals, particularly amateur ones, still think that pain can get at the truth. Some even use pseudoscientific methods to inflict pain or debilitating circumstances virtually, torturing the ego rather than the body, or attempting to "prove" a subject is lying by measuring and analyzing non-voluntary physiological responses and behaviors. Their victims make good work for the psychosurgeons and therapists, but any success they see is incidental. Even the hardiest and iron-willed transhuman will say something if pushed, and the more stress that is applied, the more distorted the subject's memories will become - after prolonged interrogation, nothing the subject says can be trusted, and that's without the distorting effect of drugs and personal augmentations brought into play. No pharmaceutical or narcoalgorithm is guaranteed to make a subject tell the truth, and when combined with pain or stress is likely to distort the subject's memories and perceptions even more. Even the threat of death and dismemberment isn't the stressor it used to be for many transhumans, where backups, vat grown organs, and resleeving are a way of life.

Fortunately for interrogators, transhuman forking technology presents much more reliable alternatives. While programmers cannot yet dissect forks apart to find specific memories, they can treat an ego backup as a ROM construct - a snapshot of the target at a specific time, from which infinite copies can be made, each a separate entity with no information being passed between them. At that point, the problem of interrogation begins to borrow techniques from hacking and decryption. A common technique is word association - set up an automated virtual scenario with ten thousand copies of the same ego and you can perform a frequency analysis on the results, and use that to refine your technique. After a few thousand repetitions of the procedure and the forks will have revealed considerable information - all without the original ego even being aware that it has spilled any secrets at all. Some intelligence operations even go for repetitive roleplay scenarios generated by genetic algorithms - each failure or rejected scenario causes the next scenario to be refined and retried on a new fork from the original backup. With time dilation protocols, the perceived time in each of these scenarios can run into months or years on the part of the subject, while minutes or hours pass in real time - a good interrogation programmer can just set a scenario to run automatically and go home for the night. Military field interrogations are less subtle; hasty and aggressive pruning is performed on the forks in an effort to eliminate traits like loyalty or dishonesty, and the result is subject to a direct and straightforward series of questions.

Using Torture

There are only five basic scenarios where player characters will encounter torture and interrogation in a roleplaying game: threatened with torture, being interrogated, interrogating someone else, witnessing an act of torture, and viewing the outcome of an act of torture (the victim, the recordings, etc.) None of these scenarios are generally considered fun, nor should they be. Interrogation is, at the best of times, the equivalent of an extremely stressful job interview; torture is simply sadism dressed up as necessity, and sometimes not even that. Torture is more than just physical or mental pain - it can be cumulative mental stress from lack of sleep, forced humiliation, extreme temperatures, prolonged exposure to stressors (an annoying song, spiders, darkness, small confined space, etc.), - and that's just the traditional tools in the arsenal of interrogation. In Eclipse Phase, torturers and interrogators are limited only by their means and imagination, sending egos to virtual hells for artificial eternities. The bottom line is that none of that stuff is nice, and none of it is guaranteed to work. While threats of violence may have use in your game and interview-type interrogations may be roleplayed, it is advised not to hype the validity or efficacy of these methods, or go into visceral detail about actual torture - if players and gamemaster get into a contest of who can squick the others out, no one really wins.

Fork interrogation is a different ballgame; no less cruel in many ways, but more reliable and with fewer visible victims, as the forks are typically deleted after interrogation. The focus of fork interrogation is not to cause pain, but something closer to an extended hacking attempt against the target ego, and should be played as such. Again, the question is not if the subject will reveal some crucial bit of information, but when the interrogators feel they have sufficient statistical likelihood that the data is valid (or at least that the subject believes it is). Fork interrogation adds another wrinkle to the already complex issue of ego backups, forking, and resleeving - because if the antagonists can get a copy of the subject's ego, then it is essentially only a matter of time before they have virtually all of the character's secrets and information, and the actual character will never know about their "betrayal."

No mechanics are provided for torture and interrogation because this is not a skill contest at which any character can conceivably "win." A successful Intimidation Test can make someone talk, but it won't make them tell the truth. Fork interrogation, likewise, only deals in statistical probabilities - there is no absolute guarantee that the information derived is going to be completely true and accurate, only a likelihood brought on by analysis of a large set of raw data - the math can be crunched by an app, the software and processing is rarely anything special; a successful Programming or Psychosurgery Test might speed up the process, but it cannot improve the results. Characters subject to interrogation or torture should receive mental stress commensurate to their experiences.

310: Ishnigarrab

ENTRY 310: Ishnigarrab

"This is a society of non-negotiable affection. Every transhuman deserves love, company, and companionship; without cost, without condition. We give without asking, because we know how difficult it is to free ourselves of the desire to take, to possess. Ours is not a transaction, there is no haggle or barter. You do not offer more than you wish to give, you do not ask for what is not offered."
- Corrupted Chrysanthemum, the First Lesson

"I saw a bouncer, coming in off the asteroids, step out of the gate from Customs. Covered head to toe in rock dust, straight out of an airlock. I don't think he'd seen another transhuman in the flesh for months, maybe more. He just stopped and stared at the crowd, the noise, all the great mass of people moving around, moving around him. So alone. Then a young splicer came, a pink flower tucked in their hair, and gave him a hug...and he cried, he just cried, tears carving muddy canyons down his cheeks."
- Joy of Sparks, Extropia Customs Agent

One of the most exceptional traits of transhumanity is the ability to be...nice. To show affection without expecting reciprocation or reward, to give companionship without obligation or contract, to be kind and warm and caring not because you have to be, but because someone needs you to be. It is an expression of empathy that can cut through economic ideals and social constraints, and for the unprepared it can be confusing when first and unexpectedly encountered. For the Ishnigarrab, non-negotiable affection is a confirmation of their transhumanity, a promotion of positive thought and emotion that is universal in nature.

Considered by many a reaction to the Carnival of the Goat, the Ishnigarrab are an open society on many habitats that offer physical companionship and affection - not explicitly sex, unless both parties desire it, but friendship, company, sometimes hugs and kisses, hand-holding, massage - whatever the Ishnigarrab chooses to freely offer. Some habitats have established forums where the Ishnigarrab gather and welcome visitors, in other habitats they wander freely, bestowing affection at random to whomever seems to need or desire it. Their symbol or costume is a flower tucked behind the right ear (often a plastic one, given the cost), and augmented reality tags flit about them, explaining their philosophy.

The Ishnigarrab are not without controversy, nor has their spread and development been without trouble. Many transhumans fail to grasp the nature of their enterprise, and make rude demands or offer violence. Others mistake them for prostitutes or monastics, both of which are gross misinterpretations that the Ishnigarrab actively work to avoid being associated with, not because they disapprove of sex work or religions, but to better distinguish their own unique policy of free and open affection. This is made all the more complex and difficult because some Ishnigarrab do sidelight as sex workers, nuns, monks, etc., and have difficulty separating their profession from their volunteer work with the Ishnigarrab. Visitors that become violent, abusive, or obsessively clingy are dealt with by the standard protocols for the station wherever possible, though many Ishnigarrab visitor centers include at least one security officer, and provide effective small, concealable defensive weapons and defensive courses in how to use them.

Using Ishnigarrab

The universal mission and appeal of the Ishnigarrab mean that they are a society that can appear in any habitat, at any social strata, and often carry with them a certain dignity and respect ordinarily reserved for political, religious, or hypercorp representatives, though the Ishnigarrab explicitly avoid being associated with those groups while volunteering. For gamemasters that want a group that can effectively fill roles for nuns, monks, sex workers, etc. without being explicitly tied to a religion or with the stigma of prostitution, the Ishnigarrab are a good alternative. They also work as a handy counterbalance against the Carnival of the Goat, which they disagree with on philosophical grounds as well as on their particular approach. Being compassionate, and having access to some moderate resources, the Ishnigarrab will sometimes hire mercenaries to undertake missions of mercy, rescuing transhumans that are indentured, enslaved, imprisoned, or abused - solid employment for the player characters.

Of course, gamemasters that desire a deep dark secret below the open affection of the Ishnigarrab are welcome to explore that angle as well. They could be a splinter of the Carnival of the Goat whose visitors centers work as recruiting ground for "fresh meat," particularly vulnerable to exsurgent infection, a deliberate political ploy to undermine a local sex workers guild, or any other underhanded or dangerous scheme. In this case, the Ishnigarrab's surface act effectively disguises their true colors - PCs may be misled by the social distrust some feel toward the Ishnigarrab, feeling that the volunteers are victims of prejudice when maybe the truth is some people know better than to believe the philosophy they profess.

303: Hyperia Light Mining Co.

ENTRY 303: Hyperia Light Mining Co.

There are estimated to be over one million asteroids with a diameter of at least 1 kilometer in the Main Belt alone, with a total mass only four percent of Luna - and yet that represents a greater exposed mineral wealth than has been mined in all of transhuman history. Miners tend to focus on the metal-rich M-type asteroids, looking for the easy pickings in the form of close-to-the-surface nodes and exposed veins. Yet even though there is wealth enough out there for generations of bouncers to ply their trade, stories roll in of "played out" mines and being "beaten to the punch" as an indie miner rolls up to a promising specimen and finds that the richest outer takings have already been worked over by a previous miner. Outside of any habitat's legal jurisdiction, claim fights can quickly get vicious.

Hyperia Light Mining Co. aims to solve that problem. Originally a microcorp asteroid miner based out of Ceres, Hyperia specialized in surveying, and quickly found that they did not have the resources to exploit their finds, and that it was more lucrative to sell their findings to other miners than try to capitalize on all of them. So Hyperia has begun the transition to a data services corporation, buying and bartering for astronomical, fiscal, and survey data, building up the biggest archive of the Main Belt currently in existence. Complicating the matter somewhat is that their main "competition" is also their customer base.

FreeMiner is a Mesh-based app where surveyors and miners in the Main Belt (and beyond) can upload their data to a volunteer community database, showcasing asteroids, claims, mineralogical surveys, core samples, distinguishing features, amusing rock formations, graffiti tags, individual profiles, etc. As with other community projects the quality of the data varies, made more difficult because follow-ups and confirmations are expensive undertakings and many miners prefer to keep data to themselves, or even seed FreeMiner with false or misleading data. At least one mining corporation tried to close FreeMiner over use of its proprietary data, but couldn't find a suitable jurisdiction to pursue the case - and when their hackers tried to hit the site, they found themselves facing every miner with an access jack and quickly backed off.

Hyperia deals with FreeMiner by working with the app instead of against it. They pay credits for verified, high-quality survey data; post "bounty lists" of asteroids that they particularly want miners and surveyors to check out; issue surveyor qualification tests and digital certificates; and issue updates to FreeMiner via a 'ransom' model, averaging once a week. The microcorp makes no bones that this is a business as well as a community service, and sometimes attempts new products like "elite memberships" for FreeMiner with access to advanced algorithmic tools that suggest asteroids which are unclaimed and mathematically likely to have good deposits, but such efforts have had little 'stick' so far, as the data is often pirated and posted onto the normally accessible FreeMiner in short order. Still, individual miners and hypercorps sometimes hire Hyperia for private computations or even early access to their regular updates.

Seeds

• The player characters are hired as security by a Hyperia surveyor out to catalog an unusually small, compact asteroid family which is being picked over by rival miners - one of which is one bad job away from turning into full-blown space pirates. If they can keep the surveyor alive and get the data out safe, they'll find that not only do they get paid, but they've developed a small rep in the Belt community and have several job offers waiting when they get back.
• A malicious hacker is going to obscure corners of FreeMiner and changing key data, costing the community considerable time and effort to clean up their work - enough that a group of sysadmins gets together and offers a bounty if the PCs break their limbs and tell them to knock that shit off. Of course, when they get to the hacker's domicile, it turned out to be a 12-year old menton who was just having a bit of fun...
• Hyperia wants to expand beyond the Main Belt, consolidating data from other Mesh apps into a single pan-Solar Mining Registry. The project is still in its early stages, and dealing with all the different local apps and miners is proving a headache, especially for a microcorp that doesn't have much presence outside the Belt. The PCs are hired to act as Hyperia's representatives on their habitat to negotiate with the local miners, surveyors, app-programmers, etc. However, the locals are suspicious, and to earn their trust the PCs will have to join the local Mining Guild and be certified as surveyors. Hyperia will pay for the classes, but can't prepare them for the initiations, which may venture from the ridiculous ("the hair vacsuit") to the dangerous ("dead man's spacewalk" - a short trip through vacuum without an vacsuit - don't hold your breath!)

296: Sweeps Squad

ENTRY 296: Sweeps Squad

Catharsis is the heart of attracting and keeping a prime audience, and in their quest for higher market shares media producers big and small will plumb the depths of love, heartache, pornography, violence, transgression, blasphemy, awe, devotion, and spectacle, leaving the transhumans that plug into their feed satiated, fucked out, brain numb, emotionally and physically exhausted from the experience, with creds and upvotes trickling into the accounts and profiles of the producers that worked hard to bring them the visceral entertainment they so crave. Yet in the vastness of the transhuman media sphere, with more content produced each second than any single audience member could experience in a lifetime, viewers aren't just spoilt for choice, their feeds are overflowing with content with no way to sort the million-volt-main line entertainment from the grainy, raw space hamster meshcam put out by a six year old with a My First Meshfeed sitekit.

Of course, the Mesh is rarely the perfect anarchist environment it appears, and different groups gather to consolidate shares of the market. In the Jovian Republic access controls subtly channel and limit content, trying to filter out illicit access to state-disapproved media through ever-evolving tag filters, self-contained genetic algorithms that sample metadata and pre-emptively ban incoming content based on what they think the next big fetish or philosophy will be; in the Main Belt anarachists data pirates have made it their mission to liberate the sum totality of adult entertainment on their peer-to-peer networks, undermining any effort by any second party to corner the market in pornography by making it available to all with a pay-what-you-want scheme that ensures creds and favors trickle down to the performers and crews; and in the Planetary Consortium media hypercorps dominate with vividly interlinked, self-referential fictional universes. Facing such dedicated competition, new players in the media need extreme measures to break into the business.

They're called Sweeps Squads. Often violent, always mediagenic, the Sweep Squads are pirate programmers, violating personal and media space to bring the gift of new media to the masses, often against their will. Flash operas erupt in Olympus, surprise audience members get co-opted into team bloodsports in the corridors of Extropia, prospective porn stars converge anonymously on New Varanasi for the Olympic Bang, and on a scumbarge out Mercury-way ten thousand subscribers have their feed hacked to experience an XP documentary about transhuman body dismorphic disorders. Freelancers are always welcome, and Sweep Squads are always hiring: in a market where viral advertising gets lost in the background noise, sometimes the only way to get noticed is to get in people's face.

Using Sweeps Squad

Smile for the camera and check that your sensory feeds are clean, it's time to get mediagenic. Sweeps Squad is an easy way to embrace all the excesses of media from every era, and the player characters can be hired to be as insane, dedicated, or ultraviolet as you're comfortable with bringing to your game. Sweeps Squads typically go over the edge of legality, and PCs will have to deal with an often confused and/or irate "audience," authorities, and competition as they try to get the people involved with their program. Given Sweeps Squad stunts might be as impromptu or elaborately choreographed as players and gamemasters care to make them. In any event, PCs at least have a clear idea of success: if the media ratings for their particular production go up, they've succeeded.

Seed

• The PCs are on another job when they find another team shadowing their every move, recording everything, breaking into their quarters while they're out, interviewing contacts, witnesses, po-po, relatives, sex partners...they've been targeted by a Sweeps Squad that's making a reality/documentary on the PCs, and the brains behind the show try to roll with the PC's style, working in social commentary, psychological analysis, violence if the PCs get confrontational. A smart player might try to crash the ratings by being boring, but that just means the producers will try to spice things up by adding complication's to the PC's lives. The good news is, there's a built-in time limit because no new media fad lasts forever...but can the PCs survive that long?

294: AF Slurs

ENTRY 294: AF Slurs

"Why do I need a Chinese word for 'cunt'? Or a Venusian word, whatever. Why do I have to use a made-up word to say what I really mean? What's wrong with the word 'cunt' that I can't use the one we have in English?"
- John Tecumseh Jones, What A Cunt I Am

Hate, fear, and prejudice always find expression in the syntax of the time. That said, few swearwords, insults, and slurs have real staying power beyond general cultural inertia: the word 'fuck' has been in the English language in some form or another for a thousand years, and will probably continue to exist for as long; the Lunar trend of 'cuntoid' for female-identifying synthmorphs is already dying fast. Still, where there is anger and discrimination there will be words to describe it, and the changing social norms after the Fall provide plenty of raw material for new and injurious expressions. So in addition to all the hundreds or thousands of slurs still in use with regards to an individual's ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, intelligence, appearance, odious personal habits, ancestry, etc. there have arisen thousands or tens of thousands of terms discussing new ethnicities, religions, morph types, political and social beliefs and preferences, just to name a few. Few of these really catch the metacultural awareness, and remain tied to specific networks, habitats, and social circles, but a few have spread fairly wide throughout the system.

"Nutes" as a disparitive descriptive for genderless biomorphs is one of the most common, though nowhere near as insulting as some of the more inventive names for them in Vo Nguyen, where bioconservatives have painted neuter biomorphs as sexual deviants and "unnatural."  Gender identity still remains a point of contention for nominally sexless synthmorphs (and, less often, informoprhs), which spans the spectrum from synthmorphs-that-identify-as-a-given-gender ("Cuntoids," "Princkbots," etc.) to mixed-biomorph-synthmorph-sexual-relationships ("Toyboy," "toyboi," "toygirl," "toygurl," "toyfag," "toyqueer," etc.) Xenoreligions and new religions see rather widespread distain, with any number of insults based on their beliefs, the least contentious of which is the Mesh media labeling them all as cults. Even some specific morphs and factions get their share of nicknames, such as the Ultimates and Remade ("ussholes," on Olympia, "Ulticunts" in Nova York, etc.) This is but a small sampling of the vast number of new slurs being generated, used, and abandoned every day.

Using AF Slurs

In moderation, where and when you must. The issue with fantasy slurs in a science fiction setting is less an issue of being politically correct as it is sounding like an asshole by spouting a bunch of silly, obviously made-up words designed to be quasi-offensive. I mean, c'mon, "cuntoid" sounds like something a thirteen year old boy would come up with to shock his friends. A number of sci-fi insults often come across the same way, feeling artificial and silly on the tongue - feth, feck, frak, frag, frell, shazbot, bleep, tanj, gorram, smeg, shock, smurf, bastich, Belgium, blotching, slitch, etc. Sci fi slurs are little better, often based on some basic physical characteristic or disparaging resemblance to Earth organisms/objects, like crab, bug, spoonhead, clicker, clanker, suckhead, spacehead, flatlander, socialator, smeghead, etc. These terms aren't offensive to contemporary ears because they aren't culturally ingrained as offensive, and so miss the desired impact (unless you just want to sound slightly silly, which is perfectly acceptable), whereas real-world ethnic slurs are likely to offend people you're playing the game with, which is generally undesired.

So what's the point? Well, sometimes you do want a non-offensive but patently supposed-to-be-a-slur-or-swearword in your campaign. Fair enough, more than one science fiction writer has written pseudo-swears just to get past the censors or for verisimilitude. However, this kind of language is also a strong indication of what characters in your game hate and fear - these are the focal points for social, sexual, gender, and ethnic commentary in the setting, and the new slurs you introduce can be a springboard for highlighting or examining those issues. Given the propensity of new insults to borrow from old insults, it is up to you to determine whether your group is comfortable or mature enough to handle such topics in a game - I would encourage you to talk with your players about it before Marvin d'Mars describes Rusters as "Martian Niggers," for example. That's going to send a shock through the table - and so it should. The 'n-word' is the ethnic slur to end all ethnic slurs in the United States, and busting it out at the table could cause an argument or at least several minutes standing around looking uncomfortable.

291: Blind Tigers

ENTRY 291: Blind Tigers

"They say it is all in our heads. Of course it is. The universe is in our heads, the shadows on the wall of the cave..."
- Dzen Stephanopolous, Sight Beyond Sight

One of the peculiarities that became apparent once resleeving took hold in transhumanity is that for a significant part of the population physical injuries and disabilities coincide with or led to related psychological damage which was carried with the ego to the new morph. These conditions appear to be distinct from forms of neural damage (such as cortical blindness) that become inherent to the ego, but the effects are largely similar - an individual who had some physical limitation in an old morph such as blindness, deafness, limited mobility in a limb, partial paralysis, etc. carries some of their physical handicap or disability forward into the new morph as a mental handicap. Unlike neural damage, psychosurgery and therapy has often proven effective in treating individuals facing these mental disabilities.

Some individuals facing these conditions do not respond well to therapy, or choose not to undergo it. Instead, they embrace their disability in their lifestyle. Popularly called "blind tigers" (or deaf tigers, crippled tigers, etc. as appropriate), these transhumans are the leading edge of the population working to accomodate habitats and services for transhumans with disabilities, by coding alternative sensory input into Mesh sites and channels, working braille translations next to written instructions, designing systems designed for mobility-challenged morphs, giving alternate-sense skill training classes, etc. A large part of their efforts are simply providing a community of like-disabled individuals to provide continued encouragement and opportunity for both the community of disable transhumans and individuals.

Using the Blind Tigers

If a character in Eclipse Phase suddenly goes blind, one of their first instincts is probably to hack the nearest camera (or even ghost another character's visuals) and so regain their sight that way. If the blindness is a purely physical phenomenon ("Aargh, the laser got my eyes!") this is fine; kudos to the player. For other characters who have blindness as a result of mental derangement or neural damage however, this will not work. This isn't meant to be a way of screwing over the player character and gamemasters shouldn't inflict psychological disabilities willy-nilly, but the basic concept of being an inherent trait of the ego instead of the morph is that the disadvantage is completely removed from physical capability - it is a psychological block on the ego's ability to perceive certain information or utilize certain abilities, not a a matter of having defective parts. A character with Mental Disorder (Blindness) just can't process visual information, a character with Mental Disorder (No Left Arm) cannot use their left arm (or equivalent limb), etc.

Again, the point of this is not to screw over PCs ("Ha ha, sucks to be you."), it's an optional limitation for players and gamemasters to consider to promote roleplaying - how would you get around if you were blind and simply swapping out cybereyes wasn't an option? How would you make the universe a better place for other blind characters? In most cases, these disadvantages are not completely unsurmountable by any means - muses can act as go-between translating speach or visual stimulus into a form that the blind tiger character can interpret; sonar, radar, lidar, and other augmented senses can easily make up for vision in many (though not all) instances; the Mesh alone generally has options available to accomodate any number of disabilities, and so on and so forth. Blind tiger characters who work to integrate the solutions of their disabilities into their lifestyles are not working to deny their disadvantages as much as embracing them as key aspects of their character.

A particularly appropriate occasion to pick up a Mental Disorder of this form is when mental stress from resleeving, where a physical limitation or bit of damage from the old morph is carried over as a Mental Disorder of the ego. Again, this isn't intended to be a death sentence for the character, and the disorder can be dealt with via psychosurgery or therapy as normal.

Seeds

• The player characters arrive on Pallwyn, a "dark habitat" where the primary sense is sonar, not normal transhuman vision. As a consequence, the PCs will have to find their way through a habitat full of "blind" morphs, where all the signs are in a sonar-reflection language and concepts like color are not in general use compared to terms for texture, jitter, delay, echo spread, etc. The habitat is currently suffering a series of murders, but some of the key clues are being left in visual media that the investigators are missing...one of the local blind tigers approach the PCs and ask them to find the killer, whom they are afraid is another one of the blind tigers. Of course, as strangers with full visual faculties, the authorities might grow suspicious of the PCs if they get involved.

289: Monadarchy

ENTRY 289: Monadarchy

"Groups form from collective experiences. Shared memories that lead to common ground and from the basis of interrelationships. Team-building exercises have always focused on this aspect of transhumanity, forcing individuals to live, suffer, and work together to achieve common goals, hoping that this would develop in hours or days what takes months or years to do under normal circumstances. Of course, today we can literally share memories - and we can do so on a much greater scale..."
- The Monadarchy, sales pitch

Transhumanity values its individuality; each unique ego is precious because it is different, and represents a distinct perception of the universe. Some see in individuality a hedge against extinction, the multitude of viewpoints more likely to perceive a solution than any single ego with a million forks. Others consider it an aspect of the transhuman condition, and an inviolable part of transhumanity - to be separate and individual among others, to possess the instincts for self preservation, self realization, and self promotion that have driven history and development. For without selfishness and individuality, how else could transhumans appreciate self sacrifice and groupthink?

On the other paw, transhumans are social animals that rely on coming together for common purpose, to specialize and proliferate, to produce more by the sum of their efforts than they could as individuals. In habitats which have experienced tremendous growth with the influx of refugees there has been the desire to form communities and communal identities, to better serve and preserve transhumans in this delicate period of transition from their home planet to the stars. Not an easy task with the billion distractions of the Mesh, where local politics often give way to tribes based around common timeframes and personal preferences, where transhumans can claim membership in groups as diverse as the Militant Neo-Pony Fancier Federation and the Left-Handed League. Community investment is a difficult concept to sell, and group activities intended to foster community spirit often ill-attended.

One competitive technology in the nation-forming field is the Monadarchy. Technically a microcorp operating out of Mitre Station, the Monadarchy is a technological co-op that aims to enhance group experience while preserving the individuality of egos, an effort at team-building on a grand scale without forming any accidental hive-minds. Monadarchists simply download an app into their cortical stacks that backs up their ego to the Mesh as they sleep; the forks are then subject to a trade secret recombinatorial process that distills the group collective experience and applies it as a software patch which is then uploaded to the sleeping transhuman. They awake with a common cultural experience imprinted in their memory - not the individual memories of all the transhumans in their network, but a digest of events major and minor. Monadarchists know, on a gut level, the feeling of the group majority toward issues and individuals, even if they cannot cite the statistics without tapping into a newsfeed, and they always have common ground with other members of the network based on the shared memories downloaded from the night before.

The Monadarchy proclaims this as the fundamental cultural basis of a new society in transhumanity, although for the most part it remains a purely optional choice in those few habitats that have embraced it, mainly Argonaut strongholds like Mitre Station and Markov. The truth is that many transhumans remain suspicious of the localized Monadarchy networks, afraid of another Synergy incident, or the "rolling emotional trauma" bug caused after a serial rapist joined the monadarchists on Markov, necessitating quite extensive group therapy (not helped when the Monadarchy reps temporarily claimed that the group activities would help bring the survivors even closer together).

Using the Monadarchy

Loss of individuality is a familar science fiction trope; this plays with that idea while trying to undercut it. The real benefit of the Monadarchy to a game is a sort of assumed cultural background knowledge - PCs wake up already knowing the best places to eat, what the three seashells are for, that the local population doesn't want McAlister to run for re-election as Supreme Overlord/System Administrator (SOSA), etc. - including things that wouldn't make the local Mesh newsfeed, at least not above the fold. How gamemasters play this is up to them, though generally it should be seen as a sort of accelerated acclimation and acceptance to a group, not characters finishing each other's sentences or engaging in flocking behavior. Unless there's a glitch...

Seeds

• The PCs are accosted by an Argonaut splicer named Numero 17 (he had to fight over fifty transhumans to keep that name, and would kill fifty more to keep it). No. 17 is an insomniac that has been up for eighty-odd hours, and he swears that the members of his Monadarchy network have forgotten an important event from seventy-eight hours ago - the disappearance of the Tiajing Triplets. All the local news media archives of the event have been wiped, and nobody else remembers it. No. 17 is afraid that when he falls asleep and it updates, he will forget as well. The PCs might question No. 17's sanity (and why he doesn't just uninstall the app), but if they're willing to humor him, they'll have to keep him awake while investigating this collective amnesia.

280: Data Is Not Forever

ENTRY 280: Data Is Not Forever

"To all things, there is an end. This is not philosophy, this is mathematics. Statistically, there will be errors. Data will be miscopied, garbled, destroyed, lost. All data is subject to this. Your books, media programs, XP recordings, memories...you. Your ego is data, and eventually it too will fail. Perhaps not for a century, perhaps not for ten thousand years, but as time stretches to infinity, the limit of certainty approaches one. Already you have lost things you will never know to miss, either through accident or because there is no one there to save them. Mark my words, there will be a time, perhaps within your lifetime, when no one will be able to tell you how to get where the air is sweet, and or ask 'will you be my neighbor?'"
- Prophetbot of Doom!, Doomsaying #255

All data storage is imperfect, and given sufficient time data loss is inevitable. This is not something most transhumans want to hear; they have already lost old Earth and the vast amounts of cultural and scientific media that was on it. People are supposed to be the mortal ones, not data. It enrages and saddens people when they learn that all copies of a childhood program, or a painting, or a book, are lost and gone forever. There are archivists that have given their entire lives to scrounging in old datastores and servers, digital archaeologists searching for bits of lost data, incomplete peer-to-peer downloads that continue to ciculate in the Mesh, hoping against hope that someone with the final bits will log on and complete it. In a society where truth death seems often on the verge of being vanquished, data loss is still a universal experience, accompanied by mourning and depression. Some find solace in kind words and the company of friends, others craft ceremonies to mark its passing and celebrate what once was and now never will be again; some just get drunk and high and break things. Most everyone understands. There is a finality to all things, and the older you get, the more there is to lose.

Seeds

• On Thought and Phobos, a sect known as the Rogerites keeps alive old children's programs based on memory, re-enacting them as live-action morality plays. Recently, rumor suggests that a cache of the original recordings may exist on an old satellite in Earth-orbit, attracting scavengers as well as hypercorp archivists who wish to sell the recordings for a profit. The player characters are hired to reach the satellite first and reclaim them for the Rogerites...but even should the succeed, they will find the satellite damaged, and the recordings corrupted. It will take years to make anything of the recordings, but the Rogerites are still grateful for what the PCs have done, and give them lifetime tickets to view their plays.
• The Antinationalists out of Olympus are databreakers, seeking to crush down the barriers of old Earth politics that remain to infect post-Earth culture. The PCs are hired and entrusted with an archaically formatted data station on a remote Lunar outpost, to monitor and protect it against the Antinationalist forces as translators convert the media to modern formats. Very soon, the situation devolves into a siege...and the PCs, trapped within, learn that the media they are translating is an archive of ultranationalist recordings, texts, and war propaganda from the mid-20th century. Will the PCs continue to put their lives on the line to protect Mein Kampf and the speeches of Mussolini?
• Much was lost in the flight from Earth - not just media, but knowledge of technology and medicine. As advanced as transhuman technology still is, no one today remembers how to create silly putty, or to recreate the "orphan drugs" for obscure diseases, or the theory and operation of magnetic amplifiers. A high bounty has been put on recovering or rediscovering this information, and one transhuman may have done so - Rodriguez Michaelangelo Cruz-Corella. However, RMCC has himself been missing for eight months after a fight with scumbarge pirates, lost in the Belt. If the PCs track RMCC down, they will discover his ship broken and open to space, the computers erased, and RMCC dead, still strapped into the captain's chair. However, if they try to contact his ego, they will discover that the lost data has been downloaded into his cortical stack - his last act to overwrite his own consciousness with some of the lost data of Earth.

250: Statistical Tradecraft

ENTRY 250: Statistical Tradecraft

In the spy game, human intelligence is almost dead. HUMINT is slow, subjective, inefficient, and unreliable. All major intelligence communities, militaries, and hypercorps rely on technical intelligence-gathering, focusing on intercepting and decoding signals, analyzing massive Mesh-based databases of statistics and metadata to identify trends, key phrases, patterns, and other vital information, often branching out into obscure keyword-coded super-specialized subdisciplines looking at electronic signatures, time stamps, image analysis, and other minutiae. Yet spy organizations have also grown decentralized from the bloated bureaucracies of the past, now more closely resembling the cell-like networks of resistance movements and linked peer-to-peer networks; number-crunching nerds devoted to their own arts, processing Big Data, and passing it on to the next group for analysis and discussion.

Yet there is still work to be done, clandestine and public. Agents that represent the spy orgs, their eyes and ears and tongues and voices in the narrow hallways of the habitats and on the vast reaches of Mars and Luna, Titan and Europa. Yet if HUMINT is dead, it still has its analogues and parallels in new forms of tradecraft: transhuman intelligence (TRANSINT), posthuman intelligence (POSTINT), and extraterrestrial intelligence derived from the Factors (XINT), each of which deals with entities so far beyond the statistical models that interpreting their raw data is fraught with difficulties and misunderstandings. When the signal-to-noise ratio is too high, the results must be independently confirmed by agents in the field—through cultivating relationships, espionage, and even interrogation. These field operations are categorized as a form of statistical tradecraft, seeking to confirm or deny the findings of analysts because the data is too wonky for them to extract reliable information.

Counterintelligence also has its place in statistical tradecraft: manipulating the numbers to hide correlations in masses of data. These operations seek to throw off rival organizations’ analyses and predictions by manufacturing artificial extreme data points which distort their opponents’ projections and defeat their models, protecting their own secrets at the same time. Sometimes that requires a well-placed murder, but most of the time it involves subtle manipulation to increase the average height of a group of morphs, or the formation and promulgation of bizarre organizations that make use of known key words and search terms to help throw search analysis off. A tricky business where the ultimate results are hard to judge, but the effectiveness is always quantifiable.

Using Statistical Tradecraft

It’s hard to be James Bond in the panopticon. While great cinema, as files become declassified the ultimate effectiveness of a lot of Cold War-era tradecraft is debatable, and the shift to more reliable and quantifiable results in technical intelligence-gathering becomes understandable. That said, there is a place for Jason Bourne in Eclipse Phase, but you may be stuck with the question of how to seduce a posthuman and get them to pillow-talk, social engineer your way into a brinker outpost, or figure out how exactly to get a Factor inebriated. Statistical tradecraft means that the PCs, if they want to be useful parts of the intelligence-gathering apparatus, need to be prepared to go to the weirdest places and interact with the weirdest people, because that’s where the mathematical models break down.

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.

084: Decoded Transmission

ENTRY 084: Decoded Transmission

Cosmic transmissions from the deep dark vast emptiness, decoded in non-real time by the distributed consciousness of post-humanity, distilling meaning into poetry and pornography, weapons against the forces of extinction. The measure of time is a fluid, broken thing and if we have lost our history it also means we are no longer bound by it, the human caterpillar emerging at last as a fractal-winged insect thing with glittering genitals that asks what it means to be human...

…and so on and so forth, in an epic stream-of-conscious prose-poem that is consistently being added to, amended, analyzed, edited, reworked, and rehashed by transhumans across the system. The Decoded Transmission is part group artistic project, part game, spooling out on forums and sites throughout the mesh, bits and pieces of it archived and published in different media. There are stanzas from it carved onto the mountainside of Mars, and a few million lines etched in microscopic characters along a meter of wall in Extropia. Spies use it as a public dead-drop, encoding their secrets into drabbles, and portions have been removed from public view because they are encoded with basilisk hacks and dangerous philosophies.

Using the Decoded Transmission

Aside from indulging in a bit of prose or poesy, the Decoded Transmission is a transhuman art project on a monumental scale, a group effort that can show up nearly anywhere transhumanity has been, and contain nearly anything. As a gamemaster tool, the Decoded Transmission is an excellent way to provide a critical phrase or theme to the campaign, a recurring image or words that the player characters come across, time after time, to reinforce a sense of continuity about a game. This is best done in a subdued, unforced manner—tattoos, logos, background paintings with fragments of words, etc. Of course, the GM can also simply use the Decoded Transmission as a prop, providing fragments of messages hidden in plain sight, prophecies and predictions, or just shout-outs—if their reps are legendary enough, someone may capture the PCs and their adventures for all time as a fragment of the Decoded Transmission.

Seeds

• It’s said the oldest-known archive of the Decoded Transmission is on Luna, with parts dating back before the Fall. Leira 6, a female-identified infomorph and sixth-generation fork of one of the original contributors, hires the player characters to find it and make a copy—but at least one of her “aunts,” an fourth-generation fork called Ariela, is willing to kill to prevent that from happening.
• Firewall has identified a loose group of individuals assembling the Forbidden Transmission—the parts of the Decoded Transmission written during and immediately after the Fall, long suppressed for fear that they may be dangerous and contain basilisk hacks and digital viruses. Whether it contains the secrets of the TITANs or bad homemade transhuman erotica, Firewall believes the group must be stopped. The player characters are tapped to handle the situation, peaceably if possible, but if not, they have carte blanche to handle the situation as they see fit.

019: Long Speech

ENTRY 019: Long Speech

For some, transhuman consciousness is a matter of scale. The biological wetware of early humans adapted the speed of thought and reaction to the limitations of its equipment; the perception of time was relative, but always constrained within the narrow band accorded by neurotransmitters, nerves, and muscles. While the transhuman body may constantly receive data, the bulk of it is ignored and interpolated for faster processing—a movement “too quick for the human eye” appears as a blur, the sampling rate of the human brain automatically discarding the intervening steps and producing a distorted image as a result.

The freedom from the traditional bodily limitations has brought about experimentation with new modes of time-scale perception. Mayfly attention spans can perceive the individual flaps of a hummingbird’s wings, or catch the individual frames of a video image; and on the other end of the scale are geologic consciousnesses that perceive at a slower relative time rate, ignoring the statistical abnormalities of small events to catch the slow changes of erosion, or read the patterns of transhumans flocking through a mall.

Communication with transhumans experiencing different time-scales can be difficult, with either party apt to lose patience with the others' too-slow or too-quick responses. Success is usually accomplished via technological arbiters, with both parties varying their time scales with relation to one another until within an acceptable limit, speeding up and slowing down until they can understand one another easily. The most successful and widespread such method is Long Speech, a buffering protocol that places both participants in a simulation that induces a temporary state of non-real time, then interpolates the result respective to the individuals’ time scale to produce the similitude of a conversation at that frame of reference.

Long Speech sees its greatest use in long-distance communication, allowing individuals light minutes or hours away to experience what feels like a normal conversation, eliminating the delay caused by the communication medium. In the simulation, both parties perceive time passing only at the rate of the conversation, even though hours or days may pass while they are talking.

Seeds

• The Rothbart Wei, go master of Mars has been engaged in a match via Long Speech with an AI in a probe beyond the rim; each move takes at least a week to make, and tension is building up on the mesh as the match slowly heats up. However, the match organizers have received intimation that someone is trying to sabotage the tournament by introducing a digital virus that mucks with Wei’s perception of time, trapping him to experience a relative lifetime before his next move. They ask the player character’s help in stopping the virus.