192: To Be Tuesday

ENTRY 192: To Be Tuesday

“It’s a game, Miss Tuesday.”
“But what do they hope to win?”
“They don’t want to win. Or lose. Winning and losing means an end. They don’t want it to end. They just want to play.”

- Excerpt from the novel Tuesday Prime

On Pandora, in the little marketspace crammed with stalls that feed the tourists and the gatecrashing employees, there is a small noodle shop. The meat is textured protein, the noodles mostly starch and carbohydrates with the regulation-required micronutrients most biomorphs need, and the water is recycled habitat water with just enough salt and trace minerals left in for flavor. But the vegetables are picked fresh every morning from the fast-growth gardens, and the oil and soy sauce is all-natural, imported at some expense from Mars. The owner of the little nameless stall is Feng Liu Tuesday, a smiling thin-boned creature with a shock of dark hair that seems to change its shade every week, mismatched eyes, and a face like a Mongol princess. Tuesday works ten-hour shifts, broken up by two periods of deep sleep. Most of the details of running the business—permits, ordering, bookkeeping, deliveries, checking the autocatheter—is handled by Tuesday’s muse, Khutulun.

Tuesday’s greatest effort each shift is the business of being Tuesday. In an ongoing game that is part cosplay and part round-robin, each shift another ego settles into the cyberbrain of Feng Liu Tuesday…and spends the next ten hours trying to be Feng Liu Tuesday. Every twelve hours, a different ego looks out from behind those mismatched eyes, to greet customers and see the gatecrashers off to their next journey, or returning from their last one. Hundreds of followers keep track of each day of Tuesday’s saga, the ego in the pilot seat sending out regular updates, little cameras in the noodle shop recording each move and conversation. Performances are rated, debated, argued about; original elements are incorporated into the ongoing group exploration of “Who is Feng Liu Tuesday?” Many pilots are content to simply do the best they can at being Tuesday, managing Tuesday’s relationships with their regulars, lovers current and former, etc. There is even a break-away community managing a neotenic morph that, according to group consensus is, Tuesday’s little sibling.

Mechanics

Feng Liu Tuesday is essentially a pod version of a hibernoid (Eclipse Phase, p.140) with the Cyberbrain, Puppet Sock, and Sex Switch implants in addition to those standard for that morph, and the Social Stigma (Pod) trait for those aware of their nature; physical attributes are set at 15, with mental attributes provided by the puppeteer. If a character deliberately maims or kills Feng Liu Tuesday, their m-rep, r-rep, and @-rep scores take a hit – subtract 6 points, divided between the three scores as the gamemaster sees fit.

Using Feng Liu Tuesday

Tuesday is a living, breathing example that the world the player characters perceive is not the only world; while those characters move and talk and breath in the physical world of Eclipse Phase, there is no guarantee that what their senses perceive is “real”—or that the morphs they are talking to are being driven by the egos that they think. A large part of Feng Liu Tuesday lies in the reveal, how the gamemaster lets the players in on the idea that Tuesday is not whom they appear to be, but a series of egos taking turns piloting the morph and trying to stay “in character.” Tuesday might hire the player characters for a job, or be a trusted contact, or simply a messenger that a local spy corporation uses to hold and deliver certain items, with espionage adding a tiny thrill to the game of being Tuesday. If the PCs make an impact on Tuesday during one of their shifts, other egos driving Tuesday may seek them out to interact with them further (depending on the ego involved and their particular alignment in the Feng Liu Tuesday continuity, this might lead to a fight, fuck, or flight response). It’s a bit of zany antics and odd behavior that players might shrug off as eccentric or add some chaos to keep a game busy, though how the PCs react once they find out that thousands of fans have been experiencing everything that Tuesday has perceived might put them in a spot of bother…a one-night stand with a noodle vendor could have a PC wake up to find themselves an unexpected porn star, and the rest of the group dragged in as data mining fans try to “ship” Tuesday with them; or a single witnessed murder could lend the PCs in hot water as the damning XP evidence circulates throughout the Mesh.

141: Gagarin's Rest

ENTRY 141: Gagarin’s Rest

On the icy moon of Pandora stands the massive Gateway complex. Through the maze of corridors and tunnels to the chamber of the Pandora Gate itself, it is a humming hive of transhuman activity. But just outside the gate room, there is a door marked by a skull; and through that door is the gatecrasher’s bar—Gagarin’s Rest. The last stop most gatecrashers take before they go through to their pre-gatecrash checks, and the first stop after debriefing coming back.

The story goes that Gagarin’s Rest started out as an emergency exit leading to a canyon-like alley out of the complex, where the first gatecrashers would come out for a quick pull before going on what might be their final journeys, and eventually some squatter made it permanent. It’s cozy rather than cramped and a couple degrees colder than comfortable for most unmodified humans, with recessed lighting and only ten seats at the bar—a stretch of laser-cut Pandora with a couple thousand scratches in it to give it character—and booths along the wall, with a couple tables in back next to the bathrooms. A flat named Dukovitch pours the straight beers and the wine, while his lifemate, a case called Illiov, handles the mixed drinks and hookahs. The ceiling is made from slabs of transparent aluminum, so that customers can stare up and see the stars—or, as Dukovitch says, so they can stare down on them.

The walls are covered with tokens of travel: bits of stone from a dozen exoplanets, pictures of gatecrashers that didn’t make it etched in synthetic diamond raising their final a glass, pieces of old spacejunk, and of course Gagarin’s skull right over the mantle, staring down at everyone that comes in. It’s probably not the real thing, though Dukovitch swears it is…and if anyone who’s scanned it has found otherwise, they’ve never posted it to the Mesh. The one morph stupid enough to try to steal it was found in six pieces on six different exoplanets.

There are traditions at Gagarin’s Rest, and parties when missions go well, and wakes when they do not. A standing rule is that any gatecrasher heading out to a new destination for the first time, Illiov will pour them a free drink; if they come back, most buy a bottle of something and give it to Illiov in return. Otherwise, the bar trades on @-rep and a little kroner, and if Illiov and Dukovitch don’t have something they’ll fetch something else—“Try, you like.” Dukovitch will say with a crooked smile, gold-on-steel teeth gleaming.

Using Gagarin’s Rest

There’s a gatecrasher’s bar at every gate, but there is only one Gagarin’s Rest. Located so close to the gate itself, the bar is a good place to do business or just socialize and pick up a few rumors. There are more mysteries lining its walls than can be counted, more practical gatecrashing experience bellied up to the bar for a quick tote of oxygen or a touch of hash oil in a shot of grain alcohol than player characters are likely to find anywhere else. Dukovitch and Illiov operate mainly on trust and good will, and they have a lot of it to spare—with their @-rep, few would deny the men anything they asked for, but they ask for very little. Good friends to have, but considerate enemies. Their clientele tends to be less forgiving.