363: The Cloud Entelechy

ENTRY 363: The Cloud Entelechy

"When you are ready, you may join us."
- The Cloud Entelechy

"Already, transhumans stand at the threshold of post-humanity. Infomorphs have no physical requirements, need no sleep, suffer no weaknesses of the flesh. They can manipulate their perception of time, program themselves new senses. The only thing they have that truly defines them is a sense of self, a distinction between I and Other. It is the final bond to break in order to ascend."
- Anonymous, Farewell to the Digital Flesh (AF 6)

"The call it 'the next step' - like being an infomorph ain't enough already. You upload yourself into the Cloud, and then you just...well, you don't cease. All your memories are there, all your thoughts. The thing is, no one can really tell you what it's like except - well, you ain't you anymore. Not an individual. All your memories, all the things that make you, they get added to the collective. One constant thought-stream in the Mesh, a million lifetimes of memories running on virtual processing. It's like...well, we don't know exactly, but they think it's like you're always in the now. There's just that sense of proportion that that's so much bigger than what you can have otherwise, always looking over the memories, comparing them, collating, gaining new insights and building off that. Maybe it's the digital heaven we was always promised. I dunno. I dunno if I could do that."
- Riso Ge'ez, Tired of Nova York, Tired of Life (AF 9)

"Suicide of the mind and spirit. To surrender inviduality is death of the self. You are more than the sum of your memories and data. Whatever moves and speaks to you through the Cloud Entelechy, it is not your friends and loved ones. They are gone."
- Jaime Bell, Jovian Intelligencer (AF 10)

"It's not what you think. It's not what it says it is. The minds are still in there, like ants. Processing nodes, that's all. They're working on something, crunching some big number. They're counting the names man, and when the names are done the stars will wink out..."
- Ultragram, Kitty Fisting (for Science!) Anarchist News Rant (AF 10)

Using the Cloud Entelechy

Transhumanity is already at the point where efforts to define itself get difficult - transhuman, exhuman, posthuman, AGI, uplift - there gets to be a point where every person, no matter what their exact origin and attribtues, has to deal with the trouble of labeling what they are and what they are trying to be. Most seem satisified enough with finding themselves as an individual, defining who and what they are or wish to become. Others take a philosophical step to the left and want to get past the process of becoming, and to just become - not to pussy foot around with the incremental changes of life, psychotherapy, and resleeving, and simply be. Some of those individuals choose to join the Cloud Entelechy.

In game terms, the Entelechy is a constant background process running on the Mesh, untold tends of thousands of egos having uploaded themselves and ceased to exist as individuals, their memories and thought processes now incorporated into a single extended batch processing effort spread across the entire Mesh. It may well be a massive AI with the combined skills and abilities of all its constituents, but the processing is so distributed it's difficult to tell if the AI is even conscious or perceives time and space in the same way as other transhumans. It is unquestionably a step from transhuman to exhuman, not through the assumption of a strange and unique morph, but by abandoning many of the common definitions of what a transhuman mind is.

Gamemasters and players might consider the Entelechy as anything from a retirement plan to a way for transhumanity to finally ascend physical existence. Player characters may be able to interact with it, and find themselves face-to-face in virtual scenarios with icons that look and act and talk like egos they thought long dead or subliminated into the Entelechy. Alternately, the Entelechy might be a cancerous force, a subtle digital expression of the exsurgent virus that ensnares and transforms egos into thinking programs devoid of personality or concept of self. It's not even clear whether there is a single entelechy, or multiple parallel processes that call themselves that. Finding out what the Cloud Entelechy is, and who if anyone is behind it, could be an adventure in and of itself.

333: Private Mode

ENTRY 333: Private Mode

"How much do you trust your muse? How much do you trust yourself?"
- Jovian dissident

Transhumanity is long past the age where thought-police are mere allegory and hyperbole. In many habitats, the Panopticon is here, where every biomorph can breathe in a nanosensor every six seconds, where every online search is traced and recorded, and all the hypercorp-manufactured augmentations and morphs dutifully send back regular feedback that can be used to model and identify consumers and their habits, to be repackaged and sold to any bidder. In the Jovian Republic, some of the more repressive habitats have even taken to extreme step of assigning government-crafted muses to citizens, as part of a standardization service to assure that everyone can take part in government and receive their due benefits...and, of course, to report on any concerning behavior to the proper authorities.

It is in such an atmosphere that Jovian dissidents created the Private Mode app - a quick add-on popular with more than just the paranoid few in the Jovian Republic. When activated, the app temporarily deactivates the user's muse and buffers the ego's short-term memory through their cortical stack, sending the memories to a new fork instead of allowing them to pass into long-term memory or story. When the app is deactivated, the user is left unable to remember anything that occurred while Private Mode was activated, as the memories are stored on the fork instead - and often encrypted for greater safety. This does not offer full protection to the user (and thus remains nominally legal under Jovian Republic laws), since authorities can still hypothetically track any of their Mesh activity, it does create a legal loophole where the ego that performed any actions during the use of Private Mode is the fork - the main ego has no idea what they did. This allows many egos to pass lie detectors quite easily, as well as dispense with critical evidence at the expense of their own memories.

Using Private Mode

Retrograde amnesia and blackouts with lost time are bullshit plot devices that gets far too much love and affection. However, the ability to selectively induce such states is more interesting - and a good way to bring these old tropes into play in your Eclipse Phase game without any other handwaving. While this is a fun tool for gamemasters - including the old carrot of "You wake up with no memory of the last 10 hours but there's a bracelt on your wrist with a digital timer that seems to be counting down." - it should also be seen as an interesting item for player characters to muck about with. Private Mode could be a key part in a planned robbery, for example, or they might be trying to infiltrate an Exsurgent cult and need to get past the telepath, where their thoughts really would betray them. One of the key things to remember about Private Mode is that it only functions for a set period - so if, for example, Firewall had wanted the PCs to infiltrate the exsurgent cult, they would have needed to find a non-obtrusive way to get them to turn on Private Mode without leaving any memory clues that the telepaths would pick up, then give them the briefing and set things up from there. It's a trope that gives a tricky, confusing plot - but then, that's the whole point.

Seed

• Someone is attacking one of the PCs - clearing out their credit accounts, torching all their safe houses, alienating friends, giving their ex's their new number - generally making their life a living hell. It seems like the PC's new enemy knows all their secrets - but it might just be that they know secrets even the PCs don't know. It turns out that one of their Private Mode forks has been captured by a hacker - the character's own cortical stack is now their own worst enemy, and they'll have to find a way to deal with an enemy that has a captive ego that thinks just like they do.

320: Ego Keys

ENTRY 320: Ego Keys

"You are the key."
- Message from an Alpha Fork (Aswald Catallus, Bellagio Park Publishing, Luna, AF 9)

The security of any system is only as good as the security of its keys; all the lasers and sentient landmines and biometric-scanning urinal stations in the world are useless if the CEO chooses "GOD" as their personal password. While public key encryption is reasonably safe and secure for the majority of encryption purposes, some transhumans prefer a greater level of personal security and control, which led to the development of ego keys.

An ego key is a handful of specific memories that make up part of an ego and are used to encrypt data reserved for a single user. While still vulnerable to quantum codebreaking, no hacker can steal or copy the password to an ego key-encrypted file, since they are unique to a given ego and those of its forks which share the specific memories - or so they are advertised. Still, since each ego key is customized to a single user they retain a certain appeal to the paranoid and eccentric, and are often used for private archives, brain boxes, and secret accounts intended to be accessed only be forks if anything happens to the original ego.

Culturally, ego keys have a reputation as last year's fad in spy/thriller/amnesia media, inspired mainly by Message from an Alpha Fork and its tens of thousands of derivative works. In that story, a beta fork named Prophos awakens to itself after the alpha fork it was created from succumbs to a digital weapon, and finds that it is being sought out both by the Jovian Secret Police and the Counterintelligence Hypercorp Alliance Committee (CHAC) of the Planetary Consortium. Both groups believe that Prophos unknowingly possesses the ego key to a file, and Prophos (along with competing lovers Xia and Giles) must follow a series of clues left by their former self to find the program first. Message and its imitators are considered cliché now, but the fad caused a spike in the usage of ego keys that has not yet died off.

Using Ego Keys

Ego keys are storytelling tool to throw a slight wrench into the traditional story of a locked box/encrypted file. As a twist, it has the innate advantage in being a password that you can't beat out of someone, so there is less incentive to beat them. While it is occasionally fun to bypass a retinal scan by ripping out the security guard's eyeball, it is also interesting to have a game where killing, torturing, or mutilating a character is not in the best interests of the individuals involved since they need actual cooperation to get what they want. So ego keys are designed both to protect NPCs whom the PCs need to open a file, and vice versa. As an added twist, ego keys are another onionskin layer onto Eclipse Phase's material on forking and brain hacking. Whether or not a fork of an ego has the right memories to match the ego key depends on which memories were picked and how complete the fork is.

Seed

• Particularly secretive or paranoid egos back themselves up, create an ego key, and then delete themselves so that the backup continues on unaware of their status - until some preprogrammed condition causes the muse to alert them to the fact. This process is known as "hedging" and is generally more trouble than it is worth. So what does it say about the PCs when their muses pop up with a pre-programmed alert alerting them to the existence of a file encrypted by all of their ego keys...but getting to it requires following a series of clues that the character left for themselves. What did the PCs stash away together, and why are they being alerted to it now?

317: Programmers Without Borders

ENTRY 317: Programmers Without Borders

"I don't care about your imaginary lines. I am here to save lives. Get the fuck out of my way."
- Doc Trollman

A need is recognized, a call goes out, and across the Solar system comes the response. Hackers from Mercury to Uranus work to isolate infected systems, forcibly closing connections if necessary to contain the infection, while closer response teams deal with the source malware and work to rehabilitate the living victims; non-active participants work on distributed programming to create the software tools that the response teams use in their fight to save lives. Brushing past official firewalls and security measures, the Programmers Without Borders go where they are needed, and do what must be done.

Transhumanity runs on software. A bad patch or update can cripple a morph. Basilisk hacks can disable and infect entire networks. Poorly programmed nanotech can consume a habitat. These are just some of the software threats that can target anyone, anywhere, at any time. Threats that ignore the ephemeral borders of politics, spreading anywhere there is a network to carry them - which, in the contemporary era, is almost everywhere. No single habitat, hypercorp, or consortium has the skill and power to respond to these threats as they arise, and especially not the ability to overcome the legal, economic, and political barriers erected between habitats and fashions.

The Programmers Without Borders are a network of fast-response hackers, nanoprogrammers, neuroprogrammers, communication specialists, etc. who work together to monitor and respond to outbreaks of digital viruses, malware, rogue AIs, aggressive nanoswarms, bad patches, and outdated or overwhelmed computer systems whose failure threatens the lives of transhumans. While they mostly get the press for their bold actions quarantining stations and the on-site response teams that risk life and sanity to deal with exsurgent digital threats, the majority of the PWB's work is done quietly and behind the scenes - releasing corrected patches, updating firewall definitions to deal with malware, promoting cybersecurity awareness and free firewall programs, and upgrading overburdened legacy systems in scumbarges to ensure that the systems controlling critical environmental systems don't collapse.

The response teams are put together on an ad hoc basis depending on skill, location, and availability; network members located near an outbreak are typically contacted and asked to change their status to "active," which unlocks a number of special resources - long lists of exploits supplied by network members, donated software and equipment, special access rights, etc. - whatever the network thinks they need to get the job done. Active members are coordinated through a controller or operator, who helps direct them to the source of the threat, access points into the infected network, shortcuts around security, and so on. The pressure is immense, but the temporary teams understand that lives are on the line, and give their best.

Sometimes, it's enough.

Using Programmers Without Borders

PWB is a transhumanitarian aid organization with a clear remit and enough grit that they don't take shit off anybody - they will blow through a Jovian Republic embargo to get to an afflicted station if they think lives will be saved, and will ignore the niceties of hypercorp suzerainity or habitat safety and security protocols if it gets the job done. They are explicitly hackers and crackers who utilize exploits to undermine and bypass firewalls and security programs and make no bones about it: they aren't tech support, they're triage squads that seek to save as many lives as they can, and if that means sealing a station off and letting the exsurgent virus burn itself out by eating the brains of everyone on board, then that is what they will do.

Player characters might be members of Programmers Without Borders, and there are worse beginnings to a campaign than have a random group of PCs brought together as a PWB response team while an omniscient operator gives them clearly-defined goals and limited assistance as needed. Unlike Firewall, PWB deals with a wider variety of threats, from rather mundane (if sneaky) stuff like stealth upgrades of hardware and software to being stuck in an orphanage habitat with a decaying orbit and a nanoswarm that's eating everything. Of course, if the PCs end up releasing a digital virus or make a habit of flashing a basilisk hack to solve problems, they might get flagged by the PWB and end up in the unenviable position of fighting the "good guys" of the setting. Likewise, many political and corporate parties take a dim view of the PWB's cavalier attitude toward legal spaces, and while few would risk the bad PR of crippling the network might hire third-parties to disuade, block, and disrupt PWB efforts - particularly if the PWB's actions to contain and/or eradicate a threat run conflict to their own interests.

Seeds

• A rogue PWB group have released a "helper worm" that infects systems and forces them to update their firewall settings - unfortunately, this infection was flagged as malicious by hypercorporate firewall programmers and a PWB response team (the PCs) has been called in to contain the "threat." The result is a confusing situation where the PCs are getting conflicted orders and information as parts of the PWB network actively work against each other, the "helper worm" virus apparently mutating to whatever response the PCs use to try and remove it. How the PCs resolve the situation is up to them, but as the transhumans with the boots on the ground in this scenario, they're more likely to twig to what's really going on first - and perhaps discover that this is all a smokescreen to keep the PWB too busy to see the real threat.

315: Egotaph

ENTRY 315: Egotaph

"We were supposed to be forever."
- Egotaph of John Doe #33616

At a time when a large percentage of transhumanity believes in digital immortality, the prospect of final death - no more forks or back-ups, just corrupted data and a slagged cortical stack - remains intimidating, even horrifying. Perhaps that is why so many transhumans create digital memorials to those lost minds, archives popularly known as egotaphs.

An egotaph contains a sum distillation of the ego's data, often as much of what they wrote and produced as can be found. Not just biographical data, but forum posts, reviews, media containing images of them, interviews and remembrances with family and friends, all the details of their life. Some egotaphs have become ongoing projects, the focal points of scholarship on media creators, athletes, politicians, and their works, with different critics and biographers contributing their own original research to the egotaph.

In form, egotaphs are designed to avoid the "editing wars" of public wikis, and are generally limited access so that anyone can upload additional data but no one can edit or erase already-uploaded data. Users can flag certain egotaphs as desecrated if poor or irrelevant material is uploaded, which allows the admins of the egotaph service to rewind the history of the egotaph back to before the bad submission, and even limit upload rights for a time. Certain particularly notorious or divisive figures have been the subject of prolonged campaigns toward desecration, and the admins typically restrict uploaders to those with established academic or media producer credentials.

The vast majority of egotaphs are created by friends, family, and grassroots networks to remember individuals lost during or since the Fall, although several historical figures from long before the exodus from Earth have their own egotaphs, and the egotaphs are made and maintained by volunteers. Nowadays egotaphs are their own cottage industry, with "capture apps" and services available to create and maintain egotaphs for living individuals who suspect they may at some point be no more. A rather disturbing current trend is to install the dead ego's muse as the admin and perpetual curator of their egotaph.

Seeds

• Firewall has been monitoring the egotaphs of several minor Earth writers, particularly H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith. They suspect that an exsurgent cult has been planting secret messages in those egotaphs as public "dead drops," possibly including one or more basilisk hack booby traps for the unwary. The PCs are tasked with monitoring the visitors coming to these egotaphs and find out if there is any connection to known exsurgent groups.
• One of the PCs discovers an egotaph devoted to themselves. If they investigate the mystery, they find an entire alternate life, complete with friends, family, coworkers, and children - a complete "might have been" lifetime, and the individuals involved are confused and hurt at their sudden reappearance. It is up to the gamemaster as to whether this is an early fork (or is the PC the fork?), or an elaborate con game of some sort.

304: Lightminute Prisoner

ENTRY 304: Lightminute Prisoner

For his crimes, Roger Murderkill was given a sentence of one million lightminutes. His ego is recast between receiver stations roughly 18 million kilometers apart on a continuous circuit that will take almost two years to complete. He experiences approximately one second of time for every sixty seconds of real time that passes; confused glimpses in his brief respites between farcasts. When his sentence is up, the lightminute prisoner will have experienced a little over 11.5 days of subjective time - and re-enter transhuman society after almost two years of real time.

The brief media buzz that surrounded the lightminute prisoner has already died away, except for the hardcore conspiracy theorists. The specifics of his crimes, trial, and even the authority that gave out the sentence are maddeningly vague, with many of the citations in the news feeds lacking or contradictory, and the punishment itself unusual in that there are considerably easier and economic ways to achieve the perceptual time dilation. Most of the conspiracy theorists (except for the Tortured Artist adherents) suggest that the punishment is symbolic, and done to send a message across to someone - although whom that may be is not clear. The only one that might be able to shed any light on the subject is Roger Murderkill.

COG	COO	INT	REF	SAV	SOM	WIL	MOX
13	14	18	8	13	9	18	-

Morph: Infomorph

Skills: Academics: History 30, Art: Calligraphy 35, Hardware: Electronics 20, Hardware: Robotics 25, Infosec 30, Interests: Experimental Perception 50, Interests: Library Science 40, Interfacing 40, Language: Native English 90, Language: Russian 85, Medicine: Nanosurgery 45, Networking: Criminal 25, Networking: Media 25, Perception 50, Profession: Librarian 60, Programming 35, Research 66

Disadvantages: Social Stigma (AGI, Prisoner)

Using Lightminute Prisoner

Someone wants Roger Murderkill out of the way. They have gone to considerable trouble and expense to see that he is incarcerated in a very specific way, working around the moral, ethical, and legal objections of various habitats and governing bodies who have turned a blind eye to why a transhuman ego is being treated in this fashion. That alone raises red flags for conspiracy theorists and watchdog groups - this could have been done quietly and more efficiently using long speech (see entry 019) or other time perception-altering protocols. To do this and advertise it in the media, even with misleading and planted stories, suggests that someone is monitoring the lightminute prisoner, waiting for someone to make their move to free, kill, capture, or communicate with him...and there are no shortage of groups that want to do all of the above.

The stats given above assume that Roger, whatever his supposed crimes, is predominantly a patsy designed to draw out the real players that his captors wish to identify and intercept. Gamemasters might also make him a political prisoner of a Jovian Republic schism, a dangerous exsurgent criminal that Firewall cannot house for any length of time because of his psi powers, a criminal mastermind faking his own death, the victim of an elaborate revenge that sees his life destroyed slowly, a researcher testing cumulative light-decay and translation errors on transhuman egos, or the newest inductee into an eingerost (see entry 058) cell trying to free him from his mortal trappings.

Catching up with the lightminute prisoner requires calculating his routing, something any PC's muse could do given a few minutes with the software tools available to them and enough information on his schedule so that they can arrive at one of the receiver/rebroadcast farcasters ahead of him. Once there the PCs can hack the software or hardware to redirect Roger's route or isolate him, or use a time dilation protocol to try and communicate with him in the one second he is cognizant. There are no safeguards preventing Roger from communicating with anyone, though he is typically too disoriented to do so.

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.

267: The White Room

ENTRY 267: The White Room

Many egos, particularly infomorphs, find themselves with a virtual eternity on their hands and not much to do. Some educate themselves from the publicly available archives of transhumanity’s collected art and literature, socialize, and indulge in the near-infinite amount of free entertainment available on the Mesh; other get involved with different projects and causes, finding meaning, purpose, and rep boosts in original research, original content creation, or the endless cataloguing, shuffling, and presentation of data for the benefit of their fellow transhumans. A conscientious ego can live a comfortable life doing nothing more than giving thoughtful, carefully-constructed feedback on the right forums and product pages; some even become successful enough to go pro.

Most, however, find escape in the various virtual environments and settings run in the Mesh; ventures that range from religious depictions of the afterlife and extensive life-simulation games to commercial interstellar fantasy roleplaying games with memberships in the millions and dozens of spinoffs. Most infomorphs lack the credits or reputation to swing a full membership in these virtual environments, but by the same token the gamemasters running the simulations often lack sufficient egos to run the hundreds of thousands of complex NPCs demanded for many games—or at least, don’t feel like making their own forks do all the work. This mutual demand has led to the creation of an extensive work-for-play culture in the Mesh, where egos enter into agreements to play certain non-player character roles within one Mesh game in exchange for access time as a player character on a game or games they do wish to play. The key to these contracts is the work-for-play ratio—at 1:1, every minute of time spent as an NPC credits the ego with one minute of time to spend as a PC, though most egos start out at 2:1 or 1.5:1 until their skills develop; truly gifted digital actors are given challenging NPC roles and may earn ratios of 1:1.5 or 1:2, though this is rare and often exclusive to the most expensive and extensive virtual environments.

One of the most popular environments is the White Room, a virtual limbo that serves as a gateway to several clusters of afterlife-based virtual games, where a PC can interact with NPCs based on historical characters, observe (or participate in) the pleasures and punishments of various real and fictional heavens, hells, purgatories, and spirit realms—and even more exotic locales, such as the Celestial Planet of Kolob™ and the Thetan Astral Plane. The wfp ratio is strictly 1:1, though players are allowed to vote up NPCs that are particularly entertaining, educational, or in-character, and gamemasters regularly award bonus hours to NPCs with a high rep. Officially, players cannot purchase additional hours for credits or rep, but have to earn them through playing NPCs, but PCs are allowed to transfer hours to each other and there is a thriving grey market in buying hours in the shadier parts of the out-of-character game forums.

Using the White Room

Games-within-games are nothing new to science fiction or roleplaying; think of the holodeck adventures on Star Trek: the Next Generation…and all the things they did well and did wrong. Virtual environments allow a change of pace from the space opera reality of Eclipse Phase, especially during long trips between planets or habitats, and are handy settings for one-off adventures, since they are infinitely customizable and most of the hard bits are easy to dispense with. If keeping track of play-hours as another form of currency seems too much bookkeeping for example, just give a straight credit cost or let the PCs burn a favor—the explanation being that they simply bought some hours on a grey-market forum. Some characters can make a profession of being an NPC, which is represented by the Profession: Game Actor skill or Art: Game Acting.

265: Krzyzewski's Monster

ENTRY 265: Krzyzewski’s Monster

“I am as I have been made. But I can improve, and I will.”
- Krzyzewski’s Monster, I Am Monster: My Story

The professors on Titan laughed at Miriam Krzyzweski’s proposal for her graduate thesis. Different egos could never be merged, much less fractional scraps of memories. Even if the process worked, the resulting ego would be hopelessly insane by any transhuman standard, and likely to self-destruct in short order. But she showed them. She showed them all. Hacking into the university archives where inert forks of the tenured professors were kept for emergencies, she brought together the finest minds of a generation—and with a genetic algorithm and over a thousand failed attempts, she finally succeeding in producing a stable ego merged from the composite memories of eight different egos. At the press release, the Mesh immediately dubbed the new ego Krzyzewski’s Monster.

Miriam Krzyzweski didn’t survive the initial spate of media attention; thousands of users responded negatively toward her actions with poor reviews, negative comments, and open insults, including a brief but embarrassing series of hardcore sexual material edited to include her name, image, and tactile scans. Unable to cease engaging with her cyberbullies, MK committed suicide, and her last fork—created well before the Monster was created—changed its name and went into seclusion. The process was lost, and Krzyzweski’s Monster was left all alone.

Unlike their creator, KM has adapted well to the media attention, leveraging even negative publicity to increase their media impact and expand their brand. While many hypercorps would like nothing better than to capture KM and dissect their ego to figure out how Krzyzweski was able to successfully merge disparate egos, the Monster’s relatively high media profile precludes many direct efforts to infringe on KM’s existence. For herself, the Monster seems to be dedicated to redefining and improving their self; aware of their flaws and desiring to correct them by adding new life experiences.

COG	COO	INT	REF	SAV	SOM	WIL	MOX
18	18	18	13	13	9	18	-

Morph: Infomorph

Skills: Academics: History (Pornography) 48, Academics: Neuroprogramming 35, Art: Electronic Media 55, Deception 35, Impersonation 45, Infiltration 50, Infosec 36, Interests: Therapy 44, Interests: Porn 45, Interfacing 67, Intimidation (Sex) 34, Kinesics 40, Language: Native Czech 85, Language: English 75, Networking: Autonomists 50, Networking: Adult Entertainment Industry 55, Perception 50, Profession: Media Producer 45, Programming 40, Research 33, Seduction 55

Advantages: Allies (Fanbase)

Disadvantages: Edited Memories, Mental Disorder (Hypersexuality), Neural Damage (Synaesthesia, Verbal Tics), Social Stigma (AGI)

Using Krzyzewski’s Monster

Aside from novelty, the Monster is a legitimate excuse to present an NPC that is not altogether in their right mind—a conglomeration of different memories and drives that result in a very weird character that can slip into different accents in the same sentence and lives with cognitive dissonance as part of their daily existence. None of that has stopped Krzyzweski’s Monster from trying to make something of themselves, subliminating their screwed-up drives and weird perspective into arthouse erotica and outrageous, sometimes frighteningly incoherent rants that somehow resolve because of their own weird internal logic. As a contact, KM is a good “in” for adventures that feature research into novel psychosurgery techniques and ego technology, or that involve the arts or adult entertainment industry. As an antagonist, KM could be genuinely crazy enough to want to build a “perfect mate”—which means that the PCs might be hired to help or stop the Monster from rediscovering Krzyzweski’s original ego-merging technology, which probably means finding Krzyzweski’s last fork.

264: Ghost Boxing

ENTRY 264: Ghost Boxing

“Some people just can’t throw memories away.”

- Eddie of Luna

Forking technology has led to some odd derivative practices and technologies; one of the most long-lasting is a spin-off of neural pruning known as ghost boxing—a sort of mental scrapbooking where the pruned memories of egos are stored as a stack of inert files in a “ghost box” which can be quickly re-merged with the fork. Most ghost boxers are security-minded individuals that are conscious of the need to keep some secrets, even from themselves, and store their ghost boxes in secure servers that can only be accessed under specific conditions. Ghost boxes are considered more secure than XP recordings and the like specifically because the neural pruning process is both imperfect and tuned to a specific ego—if an ego not derived from the original attempts to access the ghost box, the merging process will fail (and probably drive the ego trying it insane).

Mechanics

Ghost boxing is basically a storage technique to keep the “scraps” left over from a session of neural pruning. Any fork of the ego can attempt to assimilate the scraps into their own memory and personality using a Merging Test, and functions in an identical manner (see Merging, in Eclipse Phase 275). Generally speaking, and ego merging with a ghost box is less of an ordeal than two egos merging and comes with fewer penalties—beta or delta forks tend to stabilize (or even regain lost skill ranks and Traits). However, if the memories and experiences contained in the ghost box are traumatic, they can potentially lead to mental derangements.

Seeds

• Many habitats and organizations that edit memories keep a ghost box with the removed memories on file, just in case. Jazee is one such individual, a former criminal who can’t even remember what his crime was—or worse, where he stashed the loot. He asks the PCs to help him acquire his ghost box, offering them a 50% cut.
• One of the PCs receives an update that the account containing their ghost box is about to expire due to non-payment…but the PC doesn’t remember ever making a ghost box, much less paying to have it stored in a secure account. When did they prune those memories out, and what secrets could they be hiding from themselves?
• The last fork of exsurgent cult leader Niggly Bits has finally been hunted down and exterminated, but his followers are busy scouring the Mesh for his ghost boxes, hoping to merge them all into a stable fork. Firewall isn’t sure that will work, but they’re taking no chances: the PCs are to hunt down the exsurgent cult and stop them with extreme prejudice.
• On Titan, the Ghost Monolith is a public archive shaped like an obelisk where citizens can store their ghost boxes free of charge. Unfortunately, the Monolith has been stolen, and a cryptic clue left in its place. The clue (a cloned coelacanth dyed red) is meant to send investigators off on a wild goose chase while the perpetrators, a petal-crafter collective attached to the art college of the university, sift through the stored memories to make new drugs.

255: Breaklight

ENTRY 255: Breaklight

The Mesh and its predecessors have long been designed by individuals that primarily lived outside it, and the interfaces and protocols that define it were made, consciously or not and with rare exception, to service the bipedal descendents of plains apes. It is only with the advent of AGI that the Mesh has begun to have its own native generation of designers, intelligences that have grown up inside the network and whom have very different ideas on how and why to design and extend the Mesh for their own use and benefit.

Breaklight is an up-and-coming Mesh architect. They received their first real attention for a series of limited-protocol Mesh network integration experiments, which showed that properly designed the introduction of an information-sharing network into animal environment can be used to improve social discourse, food-gathering efficiency, coordinated mating, and predator warning behavior; the fundamental technology has been licensed by several hypercorps into the successful SmartHerd system and its various clones—resulting in sometimes disconcerting phenomenon.

Still moderately famous for the SmartHerd system, Breaklight considers that early work something of a fascinating abomination for the unintended effects it has had on groups of animals when they are provided a faster and more efficient system of information customized to their use, most notably the “cow flocking” behavior that groups of transbovines have exhibited when networked together, and the eerily silent songbirds who have developed entirely Mesh-based systems of electronic music composition to communicate and advertise for prospective mates. These adaptations haunt Breaklight…and various groups interested in the infomorph’s research are interested in Breaklight as well.

Breaklight’s latest efforts have been on non-Euclidean design interfaces, allowing users to perceive hyperbolic spaces in an analogue of visual data, which many transhumans like to describe along the lines of “Imagine staring at something straight on and your peripheral vision extends to the back of your head.” More of an effort in aesthetics and technical communication than a scientific exercise, Breaklight has stated that they hope the technique will help users process the vastly greater amounts of data available on the Mesh.

COG	COO	INT	REF	SAV	SOM	WIL	MOX
13	15	12	5	8	5	18	-

Morph: Infomorph

Skills: Academics: Computer History 60, Academics: Computer Science 50, Academics: Mathematics 50, Art: Architecture 70, Infosec 55, Interests: Cow Flocking 40, Interests: Mesh Desgin 45, Interests: Mesh Legends 35, Interests: Transhuman Art 25, Interfacing 55, Investigation (Mesh Search) 40, Language: Native Russian 85, Language: English 60, Language: Urdu 50, Networking: Scientists 35, Profession: Mesh Designer 65, Profession: Teacher 40, Programming 65, Research 40

Traits: Math Wiz, Social Stigma (AGI)

Using Breaklight

An AGI haunted by their past “success,” Breaklight is a character who approaches exhuman in their normal thinking processes—a native creature of the Mesh, who finds the need to “wrap and map” the Mesh to real space a difficult concept at times—but who desperately yearns to understand humans. Curious, somewhat naïve and with a basic failure to intuitively grasp real-world spatial relationships, Breaklight is probably best interacted with in the Mesh itself. Any number of groups are interested in working with Breaklight, from microcorps working on hive minds for sheep to non-Euclidean charity art events to raise money for Ruster scholarships on Mars, but getting a hold of Breaklight can be a bit of a hassle, both for the AGI’s aloofness and the protectiveness of their current employers…which might be where the PCs come in.

240: Dreamcrackers

ENTRY 240: Dreamcrackers

“Sleep is the brother of death. The continuity of your consciousness ceases every cycle as the amphetamines and caffeine crashes against your rising fatigue toxins and weariness overtakes your cage of flesh. You go to sleep…and is it you that ‘wakes up’ the next morning? What happened while your mind was offline? Do you cease to exist, and rise again each day as a phoenix? No. There is a continuity, brothers and sisters, there is a thread of consciousness that remains always running in the background. Even as the higher functions of your brain cease, your essential you continues on…”

- Evangelist Holyfield, the Fist of Sand, Mesh sermon #238

Few morphs with Mesh implants are every fully disconnected from the Mesh. The tech savvy and unbearably paranoid install their killswitches and zip themselves in Faraday hammocks, and the rest of transhumanity just hopes that their firewalls will hold out as they lay themselves down to sleep. Yet some say their prayers and tighten their security settings at night, for fear the dreamcrackers will come for them.

The Dreamcrackers are an offshoot of the Sandman Project, an open technical community dedicated to the exploration of hacking sleep in all its forms. It’s an initiative that appeals to transhumans of every social strata, and many applaud its open databases exploring the neurological, neurochemical, and psychological aspects of sleep, rest, and dreaming. Most of the attention the Sandman Project attracts is for its Exploits though—everything from formulas for chemical cocktails that’ll keep you awake and lucid for a couple weeks, tweaks to circadian regulation and hibernation implants for maximum efficiency or alternative use, lucid dreaming software, tens of thousands of hours of XP from dreamers covering everything from nocturnal emissions to incubus attacks, experimental group rigs for “splitting” a Petal among multiple users through shared hallucinations, unconscious morph transition therapy, psychotronic weapons…science and pseudoscience, presented, debated, recategorized, and added to, one piece of data at a time.

Not all of the tech is legal in every habitat. Not every clique and individual in the Sandman Project has the advancement and understanding of transhumanity at heart. Such individuals often find their access restricted, and parts of the community even made off limits to them. Research materials and funds diverted, isolated from the rest of the community until they take the hint and amend their ways or wander off. Among these offshoots and orphans are Dreamcrackers—philosophically cut off from the purer research, this group of hackers has found a technology that works and continued to develop it in secret. They crack the firewalls of sleeping egos, to record their dreamscapes, either for their own art or to sell to petalcrafters and others, and manipulate the dreamer. Depending on the morph and its implants, their exploits can allow them to control the duration and depth of sleep, tweaking sleep cycles to turn a cat nap into a coma, or to manipulate the reticular activating system, effectively paralyzing the victim. These brain hackers delve into weird and esoteric knowledge, and rumors of their skills have caused some Firewall agents to wonder where they got their skills and software.

239: Dreamgate

ENTRY 239: Dreamgate

Dial the right coordinates on the Martian Gate, and you step through to a red world, eerily familiar. Not Mars-as-it-is, but Mars-as-it-was—a planet made in the image of old Mars by some long-vanished race of planet shapers, who liked the dryness and the dust, and built cities like convoluted flutes the color of raw pink bone, inlaid with veins of metal that crackle with electricity. Now all they have left behind are dusty cities that hum with ancient power sources, and dream.

The first probes noticed it the second they came in, the heavy wireless signals in the air—an alien Mesh, active and alive even if the extraterrestrials that built it seem long dead. Gatecrashers found the first terminals when they breached the towers: sonar/audio systems for creatures that sensed the world primarily though sound, and shell-backed cuirasses presumed to be nonhuman neural interfaces. The engineers back on Mars began reverse-engineering them immediately.

Now the red world, this twin-Mars is known as Dreamgate, and each group of gatecrashers comes through bearing the latest versions of interface augmentations designed to allow them to experience and explore the alien computer network. Crews have spent hours and days mapping sensory palaces like dry windblown caverns of the mind, artificial dreamscapes of pink and purple beaches that fade into ink-black oceans swimming with wriggling tadpole-things. All of it might be real, or none of it. Some people bring back snatches of alien music, XP recordings unlike anything ever seen, fragments of science databanks, and millions of lines of alien scripts—at least two dozen separate languages and half a dozen alphabets with different variations, all waiting to be translated and read.

Others never come back at all, their egos lost in the vast XenoMesh, or fallen prey to still-active defenses or the bizarre AIs that might live there. Others ask why the Martian Gate would link to this particular world—did something or someone try to cross over to Mars from the Dreamgate? Or was it the other way around? What stopped them? Where did they go? For all of these questions, many are sure the answers lie in that alien Mesh of sonic contours and bone-chattering base rhythms, and fluted towers that stab up at the pale sun like the skeletal fingers of some buried giant…

Mechanics

Physically, Dreamgate’s environment is nearly identical to Mars, right down to the gravity, and the landscape is strongly reminiscent of Mars as well, though explorations further afield uncover several vast salt pans that used to be shallow inland seas teaming with invertebrate life.

Accessing the XenoMesh requires specialized non-standard mesh inserts; these Custom Mesh Inserts cost at least 50,000 credits, but are usually provided to gatecrashers headed to Dreamgate as essential equipment for their job. In the alien city or outpost on the other side, users can tune the mesh inserts to experience augmented reality or to explore the full virtual space. However, the XenoMesh is a very alien sensual experience, and PCs often find it difficult to navigate the exotic information architecture.

224: Earth Beta

ENTRY 224: Earth Beta

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

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

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

Using Earth Beta

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

Seeds

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

223: The Fatal Oracle

ENTRY 223: The Fatal Oracle

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

- The Fatal Oracle, opening lines

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

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

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

Mechanics

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

Using the Fatal Oracle

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

212: A Thousand Words for Fire

ENTRY 212: A Thousand Words for Fire

For many, the Fall does not mark the period of rapid decline for transhumanity, but a new beginning—a time of challenge when transhumans can test themselves and push the limits of what they want and can achieve. A Thousand Words for Fire is a Mesh-based initiative to push the boundaries of transhuman achievement, a constantly-updating set of goals that mark the limits of what transhumanity has not yet broken…and everyone who publishes verifiable evidence of their achievement has received rewards in proportion to the difficulty of their task.

Using the Words

A Thousand Words for Fire is a set of adventures-in-a-can—but not your typical bounties or corporate jobs, or favors for a friend. These are tasks designed to push the limits of what egos and morphs can achieve, and all that the player characters are given is the goal itself. The plan of how to achieve it, the resources involved, are all up to them. Any difficulties that the PCs may run into and the actual award if they succeed is up to the gamemaster, but here are some examples and suggestions.

Sample Words

• Agni: The bioconservative brinker community of Goblinhead suffers from a series of mutated antibacterial-resistant syphillis strains. Find a way to deliver the nanite-based cure to the entire community.
  Suggested Reward: Medichines augmentation for each member.
• Blaze: A sunken TITAN-buster submarine lies in the deepest trench on Europa; fifteen missile children have been stuck there since the Fall. Rescue them.
  Suggested Reward: A brand-new submarine and +6 points divided among their rep.
• Campfire: Spend an entire month camping out in the open at the mouth of the Iktomi Vault on Echo V without outside supplies or communication.
  Suggested Reward: Gatecrashing contract to explore new world.
• Combustion: The Hero Necropolis in orbit of Earth houses the remains of some of the most famous astronauts, scientists, writers, thinkers, and military personal of old Earth, but has been abandoned since the Fall, when a stray missile damaged the power supply and forced evacuation. Restart the fusion reactor.
  Suggested Reward: Free drinks for life at Gagarin’s Rest and the Legitimate Bar.
• Conflagration: Convince Vo Nguyen to adopt thirty-three political refugees from the Jovian Republic outcast because they accepted extensive augmentations to deal with crippling genetic damage.
  Suggested Reward: +6 points divided among their rep.
• Inferno: On the surface of Mercury is an exsurgent factory-stronghold, dormant since the Fall. Built like a bunker, it is too tough to destroy with orbital weapons, even if it could be successfully target, and the crawling, masterless exsurgents inside made it too dangerous to storm. Slip into this Last Redoubt and set off the self-destruct on the fusion reactor.
  Suggested Reward: 250,000 credits, or the equivalent in grams of antimatter
• Wildfire: Capture a piece of the sun’s corona and transport it intact to Olympus on Mars.
  Suggested Reward: First tickets to the first Martian Olympic Games. (Can be sold for 50,000 credits…each.)

208: Randomly Accessible Memories

ENTRY 208: Randomly Accessible Memories

There are limitations to human-style long term memory storage and retrieval. Recollections are never stored and recalled as single, self-contained events; they are always allocated and dredged up by chains of associations, folded in on one another. Digital storage is more linear and efficient—once coded as XP data, a memory can be searched, sorted, and edited just like any other bit of code. Various personal augmentations (and infolife intelligence coding algorithms) work to combine the two methods, increasing the efficiency of transhuman memory storage, search, and retrieval—but even computer-aided recall is limited by the abilities of the user. If an ego doesn’t know what they’re looking for or when and where to look for it, then the perfection of their recollection doesn’t help much. Even if an ego downloads an entire library of works into their brain and can recite the data verbatim doesn’t mean they necessarily understand the contents.

The problem has attracted some big thinkers from all over the solar system, who have tossed about ideas and tinkered with different concepts off an on for years. The most popular and practical concept is a Mesh-based app called RAM—visually represented as a planet-sized sphere of liquid mirror hanging in a void. At the most basic user level, the RAM app is designed to act as a kind of mental prompt, interacting with the user’s memories over a set time period and forcibly drawing their attention to random details, looking for patterns. The algorithms aren’t perfect, but neither are they designed to be; it’s up to the ego to decide what it important and what is not, whether a detail they remembered but overlooked is critical or noise in the signal.

More advanced users have found other users for the RAM app: set the duration to a single moment and it becomes a tool for meditation, recalling the same experience continually to push out other thoughts; several artists have used selective RAM app options to record and construct elaborate memory trips or as a creative prompt. Most notoriously, the RAM app has seen a lot of its code stolen and incorporated into narcoalgorithms and petals, used to complement or exacerbate the effects of those drugs—attention focusing smart drugs tend to leave the user in a haze of hyper-attentive recollection over minutae, while hallucinations take on a guided, story-like structure based on the user’s memory of the last day.

Using Randomly Accessible Memories

As a general rule, the continuation of an adventure should never depend on a player character blowing a knowledge roll or failing to pick up on whatever hint or evidence the gamemaster has laid out. Yet there comes a time in many adventures where the player characters stand around indecisive, either having missed some action prompt or crucial bit of storyline, and the game grinds to a halt. This is bad, and the gamemaster and players should both work to prevent and correct this when it happens.There are several ways a gamemaster can deal with this situation—have an exhuman walk through the door with a gauss rifle is a personal favorite—but players should realize that their character’s actions define the game, and be proactive in resolving the issue as well. The RAM app is a tool in this regard, an in-game excuse to prompt the gamemaster to maybe re-drop a clue (with emphasis) to get the game going again. Now, what the PCs do with that clue is entirely up to them, but it is better to have something to go on rather than to wait around.