309: Macroforge

ENTRY 309: Macroforge

"We built the pyramids with bronze tools and rope. We assembled the Eifel Tower with less than two hundred people. We chiseled Mount Rushmore out of the mountain with dynamite. Now look at us, living in tin cans, cramped where ever we can fit when all the solar system is ours. Why did we ever stop? When did we start thinking so small? Microtech, nanotech. Fuck that noise. Let's build something they'll see from another planet. Dream big."
- Jaq Prime, First Among Engineers

Vast city-habitats float above a half dozen worlds. Spacecraft with a volume measured in cubic kilometers drift silently through the vacuum. Space elevators stretch into orbit, millions of meters of nanotubes linked together. Three-dimensional printing is nearly ubiquitous in the solar system, nanotech makers pumping out all manner of goods, but they are limited in scale and capabilities, and while their products are adequate for most purposes few are suitable to large-scale construction. With their little printers, most designers and techies dream small, playing at lower scales. But there are some transhumans who are not afraid to dream big.

Orbiting Mercury, where solar power is cheap and material from the Belt is plentiful, is the Macroforge, a clunky grey donut with six great spokes, between which hangs a spiderweb of solar cells hanging on nanocarbon cables. The bulk of the industrial cluster habitat is one massive three-dimensional printer, which can assemble entire spacecraft and habitats within its depths. The bulk of this work is automated; each megaconstruction is embodied in a single Grand Design, which is broken down into component parts, which are in turn broken down into generic 3D printer designs - right down to the tiniest screws and linkages. Boundary printers churn out the materials, which are transported to treatment and manufacturing bays to be processed and fitted together, and so on and so forth with larger and larger component sections finally being brought together to form the finished product.

The engineers, technicians, and programmers of the habitat work predominantly to refine the processes and designs, testing and evaluating new materials and methods, and troubleshooting any errors that crop up in the Grand Design. Most of the inhabitants are autonomists, though the habitat eschews politics in favor of a mutual purpose: to dream build, and to build big. The organization is a representative meritocracy, with each engineering discipline headed by the most knowledgeable and effective of their members, who takes the lead in internal design philosophy, doling out work assignments, and communicating with the other engineering disciplines. First Among Engineers is Jaq Prime, a multi-disciplinary engineer who has been authorized by the other engineering heads to negotiate contracts and represent the Macroforge when dealing with the Planetary Consortium and other reps, though she has no local powers or authority - and likes it that way. Most of the accessory duties (technical writing, technicians, logistics, etc.) is handled by the engineers' family and hired staff, including some services purchased from hypercorps.

Using the Macroforge

Scale is a tricky concept in roleplaying games. Climbing a mountain means nothing when it consists of a single skill check; distances measured in light minutes are transversed by player characters during a potty break. Sometimes players need to feel the size and scope of what they're up against - to stand in awe and soak up the flavor text, when the shadow of a passing habitat being towed into position temporarily blocks out the sun and stars; or they walk and walk for hours on the side of Mons Olympus, only to pause at the edge of space and look back to see the fragile web of lights om the plains and hills laid out below as night comes on. It is so easy in Eclipse Phase to forget how vast the scale is of planets, how terribly far away transhuman habitats are from one another, how tremendously huge that transhuman science and engineering can now build when they choose to dream big. The Macroforge is a setting where PCs can see the guts of titanic ships and the monumental skeletons of habitats as they are being built; to stand in awe for a few moments in the cathedral-spaces and wonder at what transhumans can create.

272: Jun ibn Shiloh

ENTRY 272: Jun ibn Shiloh

Cannon crawls across the surface of Mercury, a city-sized insect-factory spitting building-sized ingots into orbit. Built and owned by Jaehon Offworld, the majority of the population works directly for the hypercorp...but not everyone. Jaehon has long recognized that having individuals outside the corporate structure can be convenient, economic, and even necessary at their installations. Deniable people that the employees can interact with to obtain what the corporation, for its own reasons, cannot provide them. Not simply whores, drugs, and illegal media, but less tangible services such as loans, confession, lovers, espionage, and assassinations. Vital functions that need an outlet to prevent disruption in the corporate environment, made all the easier if the corporation has an understanding in place with the individual.

So on Cannon, there is Jun ibn Shiloh. Officially, he is a free agent, kept in place on the station as a representative-for-hire for various groups, hypercorps, and criminal syndicates. Instead of the cost and expense of sending one of their own down to Cannon, someone who does not know Jaehon's corporate structure or the social underbelly of the habitat, they hire Jun. As such on any given day ibn Shiloh may wear several different hats, meeting in the morning to inspect that Cannon is disposing of its mining slag properly according to its agreement with the Association of the Exploitation of Mercury, and in the afternoon having a quiet word with a mid-level supervisor on paying her gambling debts to the Night Cartel, and in the evening acting as a puppet sock to entertain a husband whose wife is out on a mineral surveying expedition for a month.

COG	COO	INT	REF	SAV	SOM	WIL	MOX
13	18	18	12	17	13	22	-
INIT	SPD	LUC	TT	IR	DUR	WT	DR
6	1	44	8	88	30	6	45

Morph: Flat

Skills: Academics: Geology 47, Art: Dance (Erotic) 43, Blades (Knives) 37, Clubs (Wrench) 30, Fray (Full Defense) 26, Free Fall (Microgravity) 25, Infiltration 40, Interests: Gambling 50, Interests: Gossip 40, Interests: Mercury 33, Interests: Mining Law 34, Intimidation (Verbal) 67, Kinesics (Sense Motive) 45, Kinetic Weapons (Pistols) 45, Language: Native Japanese 87, Language: Arabic 73, Language: English 62, Language: Mandarin 68, Language: German 81, Language: French 37, Networking: Criminals 35, Networking: Hypercorps 44, Perception (Visual) 50, Persuasion (Negotiation) 56, Profession: Escort 35, Profession: Representative 47, Seduction 34, Unarmed Combat 25

Implants: Basic Biomods, Basic Mesh Inserts, Cortical Stack, Puppet Sock

Traits: Genetic Damage (Marfan syndrome), Mutant, Striking Appearance (1)

Using Jun ibn Shiloh

Depending on how you count his immediate ancestry, Jun ibn Shiloh is either a second or fourth-generation spaceborn flat; the details of which would probably make for an exciting Mesh-based dramatic series. As a result of this inbreeding between close relatives, Jun has Marfan's syndrome - resulting in a tall, lanky appearance and some ongoing health issues - and some abnormal (though fully functioning) genitals, including four testicles and two penes. On any other habitat Jun would probably be a prostitute or a porn star, but on Cannon he is more valuable for his independence than his freaky genetics. As such, no matter how cool Jun may come across, he will get agitated if anyone brings up his genes or "extra attributes" in a negative light; he's tossed at least three people out of an airlock onto the surface of Mars because they called him a freak, it's not a label he appreciates. As an NPC, Jun is valuable to the PCs either as an agent - i.e. someone to engage to snoop around or do things because they don't want to or cannot go to Cannon themselves - or as a local guide, helping the PCs find their way around and showing them where they can score drugs, weapons, gambling, or anything else shady and not-so-shady that they desire. Ibn Shiloh has a lot of friends and a lot of favors locally, so he feels fairly secure in the event someone threatens him, but by the same token he is very antsy about leaving Cannon for any reason, or for anything that can seriously disrupt life on the habitat. As an antagonist, Jun will probably target the NPCs as outsiders, easy scapegoats for a big crime or as direct threats to his own position.

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.

203: The Green & The Black

ENTRY 203: The Green & The Black

Sunshine is a power-generating habitat out Mercury-way, a vast array of solar panels cranking out electricity, which is converted or stored in a variety of high-energy density storage units destined for the Vulcanoids and other Mercury habitats. The work is neither as cleanly efficient or pleasant as one would hope; involving a considerable amount of heavy chemical, industrial, and radiological processes, depending on type and amount of batteries involved. A communistic endeavor, with shared principles of clean energy and nudism Sunshine has a mixed population of morphs, the Green and the Black.

The Green are biomorphs of every stripe with a skin augmentation based on a plant’s leaf system, allowing them to perform photosynthesis. While the majority of them really do have green skin, a minority use a more efficient augmentation derived from the Black Pearl Pepper and are actually black-skinned. The Black are synthmorphs whose outer layer is covered by thin layer of photovoltaic cells that charge their own batteries when exposed to light. Both augmentations share attributes of directly providing energy that the morph requires and producing a pleasurable sensation when exposed to bright light. Central Planning regulates work schedules so that every part of the population spends four hours out of every ten basking in sunlight on one of the three sundecks.

However, after nearly eight years of operation, cracks have started to appear in the system. The majority of the Greens in the station receive administrative labor assignments, while the majority of the Blacks are assigned the more dangerous industrial job slots, and overall statistics show that the administrative group receives nearly five hours of sunbathing out of every ten. This, along with a rising disparity in the number of Greens versus Blacks, concerns about falling oxygen vs. carbon dioxide levels, and other glitches have set the stage for serious debates about the long-term plausibility of the Sunshine system.

Seeds

• A black-skinned Green has fallen in love with a Black member; but their family-groups are opposed to the relationship because they’re upset it will limit procreative choices and further exacerbate the imbalance between the two sides. The Green and the Black lovers have sent out an order for a surrogate pod to gestate new Green morphs and hopefully alleviate the approbation of their family-groups—all they need is the PCs to deliver it. Unfortunately, that means heading out during a period of heavy sunspot activity, and possibly dealing with a deadly micrometeorite shower! Will the PCs risk it to save two star-crossed lovers?
• A Green worker with an industrial skillbase has suffered severe, crippling injuries as a result of insufficient safety procedures for biomorphs on Sunshine station. Now undergoing surgery to accept various cyberlimbs to save their life and restore their functionality, the Green has had a vision to bridge the gap between Green and Black—but to do it, they need to apply the Black’s solar-power skin augmentation. This procedure is normally restricted, so they need the PCs to find a way…if they succeed, the Green/Black worker could be a strong ideological influence on the Sunshine communist habitat.