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.

338: The Immix

ENTRY 338: Immix

"Jovians must not pander to a culture of fear and stagnation, nor surrender what is most precious to us for the yoke of security. Freedom is our calling - freedom to believe as we would, to practice those beliefs, to decide for ourselves how to govern our bodies and minds. We wish, in no uncertain terms, to defend our right to chose - to die as men or live as artificial intelligences, to resleeve according to our needs and means, to utilize according to our own conscience the technologies we have so painfully uncovered."
- Johann Zimmer, suspected Immix cell leader

"The Immix say: we do not hate you! We do not wish you to fear us! We are not your enemies but would be your friends! To cut ourselves off from the universe is to stagnate and die."
- Kylie Aragones, underground journalist

"Let it be known: we are not all as you see us. There are good Jovians. There are Immix."
- Prisoner 1999-09, final words

Outsiders call it the Jovian Junta. Millions of transhumans simply call it home. The media of the Planetary Consortium makes it the butt of jokes and the concern of military-political channels - a dangerous remnant of Earth oldthink, blind to the possibilities of transhumanity, a society of oppression ruled by fear and a small elite, the poison spawn who trace their lineages back to ancient oil barons and monopolists and papists. A place where individual choice is curtailed, intellectual thought stymied by superstition, old economies kept churning through military production, and the whole house of cards repeating the same damned mistakes that led to the Fall. That is the caricature; the truth is more complicated.

The Jovian Republic rules by the general approval of the populace. By and large, the people there are content - they do not want to resleeve, they hold value in their religions and secular institutions, they honor and praise those who put their life on the line in the defense of others. To be a Jovian is not necessarily to be stupid or superstitious; they are as intelligent and hardworking as any other sample of transhumanity. There is a government which seeks to mold and constrain them, but by and large the options that they restrict are options that the majority of Jovians do not wish to exercise. Outsiders rarely grasp the fundamental truth that Jovians know very well how to rebel - and do.

The mechanisms of the Jovian Republic - the military-industrial conspiracy of private and public interests, the agencies that monitor every message and transmission, the secret police that come during the night-cycle under a mask of terror - they are effective, but they are old. The Jovian Republic was born long after transhumanity had mastered the arts of domestic insurgency, and there are very few so ignorant or naive that do not understand the balance of power in the Jovian state rests, always, in its transhuman population. Every Jovian is a potential traitor or rebel. If pushed too far in a direction they will not go, the Jovian Republic faces the possibility of its civilian support evaporating, its military arbitrarily choosing not to pursue an immoral or unethical course of action. There are far more rational transhumans amid the Jovians than fanatics, and more than one cruel and unethical political officer has found their orders disobeyed, or suffer a nasty accident. When such things happen, if they are investigated, they are blamed on the Immix.

The Immix are the conceptual revolution of the Jovian Republic. Certainly, the government has uncovered any number of plots and incidents of sabotage and anti-government action it has blamed on the Immix. Equally certainly, there are those groups and individuals who have taken the name for their own, who prowl the unmonitored hallways and storerooms of habitats to discuss the atrocities of the Junta, or to rail against the particular corruption and failed policies of individual parts of it. Some even go so far as to take action, spreading viruses that replace political broadcasts with outside newsfeeds, corrupting school texts with uncensored histories and philosophies, or forging licenses and permits for forbidden tech. Yet there has never been a single central ethos or structure to Immix, and many Jovian politicians and military commanders are kept awake at night by the thought that they fight a ghost - that the Immix is simply the idea of rebellion, a convenient title by which any Jovian, at any time, can decide to follow what they know and feel is right instead of the lawful orders of their superiors...and they fear that more than the TITANs.

Using the Immix

As presented in Eclipse Phase, Jovians are conservative and old-fashioned - politically, socially, and technologically. The bulk of them are not in favor of resleeving or AGI or any of the cooler technology in the book; the population is overtly fascist and religious; and the leaders rule an enforced regime birthed in a coup and based on a monopoly on military and political power. However, conservative does not automatically mean bad, nor are the Jovians automatically villains. Even as given in Eclipse Phase, the Jovians are not a monolithic group of rabid Roman Catholics or United States Republicans looking to outlaw all space abortions because God told them to. There is room for intelligent Jovians who just happen to not want to resleeve, or who despite the relatively recent technical advances of transhumanity still hold spiritual and philosophical beliefs, and there are plenty of non-Jovians in the system that might agree with them - and plenty that Jovians might disagree about among themselves.

The crux of the Immix is that idea that the Jovians are not stupid, and will not follow orders blindly. Some citizens will question the direction of their society, some soldiers will refuse to launch a missile or gas an orphanage, some teachers will disobey and teach transhuman sex ed to their students. Most Jovians have some line they will not cross, and if pushed against their beliefs they will rebel. Sometimes they will join together as an Immix cell; others will simply try to do the right thing and blame it on the Immix bogeyman. For player characters Jovians, the Immix is a handy label for still holding to some Jovian ideas and identity without being associated with the Junta; for gamemasters the Immix are a ready-made (if diffuse) rebellion that they can use to help stage adventures involving the Jovian Republic, and to show that not all Jovians are goose-stepping primitive screwheads with too many boomsticks.

252: Bioconservative Ethics

ENTRY 252: Bioconservative Ethics

“Finally we have the technologies to build a utopia, but almost a third of the human population is at or below the Sustainable Energy Consumption Index. Millions of egos reside in digital limbo, cut off from the human experience, because of the selfish desires of others, who want nothing more than to force more junk into their bodies, or to change morphs at their whim, rather than devote the time and resources to alleviating the suffering of infomorphs. They cast aside their humanity in favor of becoming Other, and so they should be treated—and when at last their systems break down, and they are too far gone to look back, we who preserved our forms will still be here.”
- August Jo Vern, Jovian Republic pundit

“There is nothing wrong with you. You are perfect just the way you are. There is no one like you. You are unique and special. Are your friends really your friends if they ask you to change that? Don’t give in to peer pressure. Stand up for yourself. Say no to augmentation.”

- Kyle Mantra, Vo Nguyen spokesperson

“Some believe we are created; I choose to believe we evolved. There is nothing sacred in our forms—only millions of years of practical refinement. Why throw that away for a process or piece of technology that has only been tested for a few years? The governments on Mars won’t let hypercorps sell landspeeders without years of testing; but genetic enhancements are approved in as little as six months. Do you really think they have worked out the bugs in six months?”

- Amana Milos, Anarchist bioconservative

“Treat others as you want to be treated. We all live in different systems, but that does not mean they have the right to tell us how to live our lives, any more than we have the right to tell them to live theirs. We do not try to rip the implants out of their flesh, or force them back from their robotic shells; do not let them tell you what to do with your own body and mind.”
- Ja Ja Jones, mother of six plus one

Using Bioconservative Ethics

People can justify any set of beliefs, and they do. In Eclipse Phase, it’s very easy to paint the bioconservatives as the strawmen of the setting, in no small part because their positions and beliefs are presented through the lens of the people that fundamentally disagree with them. That doesn’t mean that all of their beliefs are stupid or that none of them can muster up arguments (rational and otherwise) to support them; it is entirely possible for there to be disagreements where both sides have valid points, and when those arguments hit the table they can lead to some very rich roleplaying possibilities. That does not mean that players or gamemasters should write lengthy tracts about various bioconservative vs. augmentation arguments and read them aloud at the table. Instead, sit down and really think about the subject, make your best arguments, and try to work them in when things make sense to do so. Intelligent NPCs that can justify their beliefs are generally more interesting than caricatures spouting about the divine purity of the human form.