302: Vanth

ENTRY 302: Vanth

"The grey dust grew into a tree, tiny glowing advertisements running down its limbs and trunk and the roots that ate into the metal floor. Steam and smoke poured off of it as it vented heat from the transformation, and in moments the tree flowered, blossomed...and gave forth fruit. They were cherries, perfect spheres of glassy red... Maria ate the first one. I remember how she screamed as it ate her from within, saw the pale grey fuzz spread from her lips...and that's when I had the idea."
- Dr. Schloss, explaining the origin of the Vanth Forbidden Zone

Out in the Kuiper Belt are plutinos - small, icy dwarf planets like Eris, Pluto, and the "anti-Pluto" Orcus. Tidally locked with Orcus is a moon, it's only natural satellite: Vanth. While Orcus is the focus of water ice and hydrocarbon mining, Vanth is sealed off by treaty of the major powers in the Solar system, with everyone forbidden access unless approved by the Vanth Commission, a politically independent body that oversees the Vanth Nanotechnological Proving Grounds, informally known as the Forbidden Zone.

Vanth is a live test site for nanotechnological disaster scenarios - the legendary "grey goo" incidents of rogue or poorly-programmed nanotech devices and weapons which could pose a large-scale threat. The media currently estimates as many as 300 nanotech weapons have been unleashed on the surface of Vanth or its subsurface caverns. The exposure to multiple grey goo scenarios has reshaped the surface of Vanth, though regular assaults with EMP bombs, orbital HERF guns, and interplanetary weapons stationed on the side of Orcus facing its moon disrupt and and occasionally clear portions of Vanth from infection - although the Commission only does so in order to introduce new nanotech weapons to their ongoing test scenario.

Ammonia-miners on Orcus have taken telescopic images of Vanth, and describe it as a shifting, promethean surface reshaped by warring rogue nanotech, though cold and lack of sunlight appear to diminish the spread of individual swarms. Some portions of Vanth consist of a single metallic hypermembrane covering a hidden ocean rolling with a sargasso of mercury-like puddle-balls; the north polar regions show spindly towers or antenna and face frequent bombardment from Orcus whenever a radio pulse or signal is detected from that region, and the southern "continent" is an ongoing fractal structure, like a mountain carved by a jeweler into the perfect cut.

Using Vanth

A laboratory on a planetary (well, planetoid) scale, Vanth is ground zero for research into the deployment and counteraction of "grey goo" scenarios and nanotech weapons - critical research for most of the major political and economic powers of the Solar system, but too dangerous to have multiple test sites sitting around. As a setting, Vanth is exotic (and deadly) even by Eclipse Phase standards, with player characters facing near constant risk of infection from multiple hostile nanotech strains the longer they remain on the planet. That said, if the PCs are willing to make a run past the entrenched (and mostly automated) defenses on Orcus and in orbit around Vanth, they could conceivably make landfall and survive long enough to get a few primo samples, which could be worth millions of creds on the open market. Alternately, the Commission might hire them to test their security, to deliver a new weapon and observe/record the results, or even rescue another group - or, if the goo has gotten hold, eliminate them.

Seed

• Rumor has it that the Planetary Consortium has secretly been using Vanth as a prison colony, keeping dangerous and insane mentons locked up in an underground habitat where they only survive by constantly reprogramming incoming nanoswarms. The PCs are hired to find evidence of this prison, and if possible to free the inmates. Unfortunately, a prison break scenario triggers an "Apocalypse Cless" nanowar event followed by a "clean sweap" series of EMP pulses from orbiting satellite weapons. Neither of which are likely to do the player characters any good.

002: Rimwalkers

ENTRY 002: Rimwalkers

There has always been a segment of transhumanity that is disenfranchised, lost, or refuses to be tied down. Some are criminals, others just outcasts, while still others are the detritus of civilization—relicts of old humanity, failed experiments, flawed forks in broken morphs, all gathering at the edges of transhuman society. They thrive in the fringes of habitats, beyond the ambiguous fringes of legal and political jurisdictions, moving on and adapting to each new culture, finding out what they need to do in order to breath, subsist, heal, fuck, and move on. Closer in to the warmth of Sol, they inhabit scumbarges and slip from asteroid to planetoid and back again, wearing many names.  Sooner or later, though, the game grows too hot, debts are called in, and the enemies they make start to close the noose—then they flee outwards, trying to lose themselves in the vast emptiness as they walk the rim.

Rimwalkers are hardy itinerants that move between the habitats of the outer solar system. Poor by most material standards, they sell what they carry with them always: their skills, knowledge, and experience. They are freelancers who often specialize in negotiating the legalities and commerce between habitats, or the make-do technical know-how that doesn’t come out of a text book. Most are criminals in one way or another, though that means nothing out on the Rim, where a transhuman might be a criminal just for wearing the wrong shell. All are opportunists, looking for the next score. They familiarize themselves with the rules and laws of each habitat they encounter, the better to avoid trouble until time to circumvent them.

Among themselves, rimwalkers tend to trade favors and information. Many rim habitats have corners of the local mesh with signs and codewords where rimwalkers have left messages and advice, gathering rep among their contemporaries, helping each other live a little longer. While rarely clannish and never organized beyond small groups, as a whole rimwalkers recognize the need to avoid preying on one another, and con artists or those who prey on fellow rimwalkers quickly become unwelcome—outcasts among outcasts.

Mechanics

Rimwalkers are not quite a faction, and use the Guanxi rep system (g-Rep). Rimwalker characters that betray or rip off other rimwalkers may have the Black Mark or even the Blacklisted negative traits (Eclipse Phase, p.149) relative to other rimwalkers.

Seed

The conflict on Eris has become a beacon for rimwalkers, who sell their services to both sides, rarely on the front lines, but as smugglers, negotiators, spies, subject matter specialists, and teachers. So many have been drawn in to the edges of the conflict, in fact, that something like a rimwalker community is forming, with a darkcast mesh and shared resources—safe houses, false identities, secure data storage, community dead drops, etc. The problem is that a rimwalker called Noface, a neuter splicer, has taken it in their head to play kingmaker—and if either the ultimates or exhumans perceive the rimwalkers as a coherent group they will be seen as a threat, and the whole game will collapse. Senior rimwalkers recognize this, but none wants the black mark that would come from killing a fellow rimwalker out of turn: but if an outside group can kill NoFace or ruin their reputation, they would be very grateful.

001: Void Station

ENTRY 001: Void Station

Most habitats follow the layout of the solar system, transhumanity strung out like a string of lights along the plane of the ecliptic. From a distance they look huddled close to the rocks and gas giants, or shuttling back and forth between them. Yet approaching the north ecliptic pole, far from the sun, orbits the spindle of Void Station, rotating inside a ring of zero-gravity laboratories. An independent research outpost, eyes out to the deep black, beaming back what it sees to the rest of the solar system. With its transhuman population in the high double-digits, split into three research clades, Void Station is barely a blip on the radar for the hypercorps or larger habitats.

Void Station crowdfunds its research, accepting resources from across the solar system to pursue goal-oriented projects, the clades competing and cooperating for access to equipment and materials. All labs are property of the Station itself, as administered by the infomorph Iubit; the clades rent labs, station facilities, and research drones from the Station out of their budgets. Other than that government is minimal; by unanimous acclaim the clades have eschewed pursuing political trappings, so that Void Station claims no official status, avoiding efforts by criminal and dissident groups to use it as an asylum or tax shelter. As a whole the station has a high reputation and is generally trusted with the credits and resources it receives from its crowdfunding.

While amenities are spare on-station, transhumans travel to Void Station to partake of research facilities without eyes on them or just to get a radio telescope pointed out at the big black. The clades are open to any scholar willing to share their research and play well with others, and sometimes attract hypercorp scientists on sabbatical, particularly from Extropia. Deep space probes are sometimes launched from there, out to beyond the bounds of the solar system.

SEEDS

• A probe is coming back from deep space—but it isn’t one that Void Station ever sent out. Now hypercorps, mercenaries, and Firewall operatives are converging on the small habitat as they prepare to capture the probe and unlock its secrets. The surge of inhabitants would overwhelm the Station’s systems and deplete its resources—players may be hired by Iubit as extra security, or by one of the interested parties to ensure they get first crack at it. Firewall may fear the probe carries an Exsurgent threat, and want the players there just in case.
• A scum barge graveyard has built up near Void Station—a small community of trashpickers and datathieves that live off whatever space scrap they can salvage and data they can skim from the local mesh. Iubit finds them difficult to dispense with because they’ve begun to offer biomorph hookers and home-crafted narcotics, but recently they’ve begun to attract the wrong kind of elements—nation starters with fill-in-the-blank constitutions, rogue accountants and banks looking for non-reveal tax shelters, that kind of thing. The scum barges need to go—are the players up to the task?