347: AF Healthcare

ENTRY 347: AF Healthcare

"Every transhuman is their own physician."
- LGM of Mars

"Hold on, let me check MeshMD."
- Earl Boutain

Not everyone can take a trip into the nanobath every time they get a cut or a sniffle, but most habitats and transhumans recognize the need for general, preventative, and emergency care. The exact form of that care and what's available depends largely on the resources available: larger and more established habitats tend to have dedicated on-call medical facilities subsidized by hypercorps or political bodies, staffed by physicians who have passed through a formal course of instruction supplemented by practical experience, and supported by trained nurses, medical technicians, and specialists. Smaller habitats make do with what they have - often little more than a dedicated nurse with a Mesh-based education and certification (or skillwires) with locally 3D-printed tools, and probably an agreement with to wave fees and restrictions so that traveling physicians can farcast in to deal with emergencies beyond local capabilities. Anarchist and Autonomist habitats rarely even have medical farcast agreements in place, relying on Mesh-based medical knowledge and expert systems to diagnose and treat injuries and illnesses to the best of their ability.

Most transhumans out on the Rim trust the calm, reassuring voice of their medkit over the confusion of Mesh-based medical databases, though in reality the medkit expert system is often based off of and regularly updates from the sprawling, discipline-jumping wikis which touch on everything from chemistry to medical engineering to genehacking to psychology. In the Main Belt, where miners and prospectors are often alone for months on end with very limited supplies and regularly deal with vacuum-walks and high explosives, most habitats keep live medical personnel on-hand at the communication stations to give advice and opinions, perform virtual triage, and to help direct potentially lethal injuries to the nearest station or habitat. Prospector hypercorps that operate in the Belt recognize medical necessity as one of the few legitimate reasons to ransack remote or currently-uninhabitated facilities, and most have signed the Reciprocal Emergency Medical Agreement that forces hypercorp employees to lend aid and assistance in medical emergencies under most circumstances.

While most transhumans think of healthcare in terms of medical emergencies or life events, the most pressing issue for most habitats is the ongoing management of infectious disease, which in the relatively high-radiation, high population density habitats tend to spread and mutate quickly. Traditional antibacterial agents produced by natural or genegineered micro-organisms tend to be as scarce as natural food; most habitats rely on synthetic antibacterial compounds that they can manufacture locally - and even then, habitats are regularly ravaged by antibiotic-resistant superbugs, which are usually only kept in control by counter nanoinfections and smart viruses. Animal, plant, and even some mineral-based medicines too are relatively rare, though genehackers with a philanthropic bent have made some progress in publishing open-source gene sequences to produce certain substances, with instructions on how to work them into common workhorse bacteria or drug glands.

Using AF Healthcare

This brief article barely scratches the surface of an ocean that is as deep as you desire it to be; the gist is that healthcare in Eclipse Phase is varied and limited by local restraints - often medical knowledge is in good supply, but medical experience and many common medicines of today are relatively scarce. On the other hand, in the face of extreme need transhumanity has applied their greater technology to the task, so that in the event of medical emergencies a habitat could literally download a doctor into a waiting morph (or have medical staff fork themselves repeatedly to deal with a sudden rush in demand), a surgeon on Luna can operate a surgical pod on Titan, and even in a Brinker stronghold you can download a step-by-step guide on how to facilitate the birth of a transhuman baby through the Mesh. The emergencies are good fodder for adventures, or for when the PCs themselves get hurt and need treatment, but for most transhumans though, healthcare is not about treating beam weapon burns, bullet holes, and slight explosive decompression - it's getting a drug gland that looks like a third nipple but releases anti-migraine medications, figuring out whether the growths on their back indicate it's time to upgrade the radiation shielding, check-ups for micronutrient deficiencies, and all the other regular day-to-day stuff of life. Background, in other words, but potentially important background that can be used to heighten tension in some scenes, or provide solutions when the PCs think they're out of options.

341: Technomysticism

ENTRY 341: Technomysticism

"No one knows everything. An' anything you don't know, that's magic. Unseen forces. The dark programs. The things I've seen in the subcurrents of the Mesh...an inheritance of a thousand generations of shamanic pharmaceutical knowledge...the telluric currents of Mars and Luna...mine to cajole, conjure, and command."
- Big L'il Zee, Circuit Freak & Psychosorcerer (AF 8)

"Ignorance breeds superstition, as true for a synthmorph on the surface of Luna staring up at the ruined eyesore of Earth today as it was a hundred centuries ago with the sun-baked farmer standing in awe and incomprehension as the river rose to his knees, leaving behind a layer of rich silt on his drowned fields. Too much of the Mesh is awash with bad research, general education too broad and patchy, wikis and online courses filled with pseudoscience, paid advertisements, pet theories without supporting evidence, and a seemingly endless supply of kooks willing to tie it all together, forming networks that feed on passing the same bad information back and forth until it becomes accepted as fact. Long gone are the days when peer review could weed out the papers that were not even wrong, and in the collapse or corruption of academic and professional journals there is nothing to stop anyone from publishing whatever they want. In such an environment all transhumans become skeptics out of self defense."
- Professor Brainbug, guest lecture

The hardest part of answering any question is wading through the crap that pops up in the search results. While the vast majority of transhuman knowledge is available online, much of it for free, most of the hits are garbage - bad information, pet theories, ads, copypasted repeats recombined to look like a new article, porn, and other forms of junk. Even the most secure and vouched-for wiki and database is sure to have some questionable crap sneak in via a well-mannered and convincing bot or a lack of judgment in citing a source. For most transhumans this is just an annoyance - something that they learn to identify and deal with as naturally as breathing - but the ongoing corruption has detrimentally impacted the technical skills of more than one generation. Most transhumans, if pressed, could not give an accurate account of Newtonian physics, and their ideas of quantum mechanics are derived mostly from big-budget XP productions and Meshcomics involving stick figures. In such an atmosphere of readily available knowledge and widespread ignorance has come the spread of technomysticism - not necessarily the belief in paranormal activity, but a flawed understanding of contemporary technology, it's limitations and how it works. This environment breeds pseudoscience, weird beliefs and superstitions, and promulgates many fallacies and misunderstandings.

Technomysticism tends to follow pseudoscientific principles, or applies fallacious theories to explain the working of existing technologies. On Mars and Luna, for example, mistaken beliefs about geomagnetically induced currents abound, with even quite respected and intelligent transhumans choosing to follow popular superstition with additional ground straps and other remedies to keep from getting "fried." In Extropia, variations of the gambler's fallacy are especially prominent, with shares in gatecrashing corps sometimes increasing after a failed expedition on the expectation that the next one "must" be a winner to balance out the probabilities. Programmers in particular swap procedure manuals dealing with "black magic" code - programs that underlie the existing Mesh, but which are so old, patched, and undocumented that no transhuman knows exactly how they work - only that if they fiddle with this value in this screen, they can fix the problem. The spread of exonatural materials and other bioproducts as cure-alls or miracle substances, despite or because of lack of documented testing, is another example of technomysticism in action.

Using Technomysticism

First and foremost, technomysticism is an ass-covering mechanism for players and gamemasters. Not everyone has the time or inclination to become read-up in space exploration, physics, chemistry, anatomy, biology, electrical and mechanical engineering, business theory, philosophy, computer science, and psychology before a game, nor should they be expected to. Eclipse Phase is set in the far future in a science fiction world of high technology - a rather hard sci fi world as these things go, but still fiction. It's a setting you want to live and play in, but you don't need to build every little thing in your head, even if you could. So when you do run up against the wall, don't be afraid to say something silly or admit the character doesn't know the answer. Chalk it up to legitimate character error and ignorance, even if the PC or NPC should know better based on their skills. Anything to keep the game moving, rather than get bogged down into a technical argument over the details of how some hypothetical technology may or may not work. If it really bugs a player character, ask them to research it on their own and if they come up with a satisfactory answer at the next session, give 'em a bit of rez or a no-prize.

Secondly, technomysticism permits players and characters to conceptualize some technology in terms of magical thinking - "Where do AGIs go when they die?," "Organically Grown Augmentations are better for you," "This plasma rifle has the Green seal of approval, I want my violence to be environment-friendly," and so on. This can be played as anything from a source of cheap laughs to a segue into a "shaman," "technomancer" or other type who assumes the mantle of hidden supernatural and technical knowledge to gain influence and extract gifts and credits from the community. Some of these characters mean well, and as particularly knowledgeable about certain "black magic" exploits and the like, but the worst are little more than swindlers, thieves, and back-alley surgeons offering highly questionable augmentations or other services. Such characters tend to be charismatic (or else very poor), but in the right circumstances be influential through their friends and followers. In rare cases, they may even have some genuine paranormal psi ability, but such individuals are touched by the exsurgent virus and much more dangerous than scam artists selling "blessed" firewall programs.

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.

322: Soulless

ENTRY 322: Soulless

"What am I now?"
- Harold Meson, after resleeving

Every transhuman believes in something that they can't see. Atoms, distant stars, the shadows on the cave, there is always something that they accept as existing, even if they haven't personally experienced it, or if they have seen it than not able to trust their senses. Even people who believe in scientific research and evidence have limited educations and perspectives; even the most critical have to accept some things, if not on faith, than as a matter of convenience. The true test of a transhuman's adherence to their beliefs is how they react when those beliefs are challenged. Some slip into denial, others try to rationalize it away, a few re-examine their beliefs and may even change them. Yet it is an individual process for every transhuman, something that everyone has to deal with on their own, in their own way.

Millions of transhumans still believe in the soul. Some attribute this to the core teachings and dogmas of religions old and new, others have a more vague notion of a spiritual self. The "invisible you" has gotten complicated in a time of resleeving, forking, and AGIs, and viewpoints on what these developments mean with regards to the concept of the soul have been multifarious and often divisive. Pseudoscience-cultists claim that the self is a form of meta-data, carried and copied and split between forks; most Catholics claim that the soul is tied to the physical body, and disapprove of resleeving and ego-manipulation; some Hindus and Buddhists claim resleeving is a form of realized reincarnation, though opinions are divided on the effects of this on karma. Yet it is one thing to espouse or study these beliefs and something else again to internalize and live them, to act on their certainty. So what happens when you resleeve a devout Catholic who believes the soul does not continue on past the death of their physical body?

The soulless are those transhumans who held - or sometimes, still hold - belief in the existence of the soul, and that it does not continue when an ego resleeves or forks. They are faced then with an intimate test of self and faith: what are they, that continues to think and feel and exist? Some adapt their beliefs to their new situation, and there are no shortage of sects of those in like situations willing to accept them. Others reject their old beliefs, and become rather lost in themselves and what to do as they explore outside their old paradigms. Some accept their status in stranger ways; the Jovian Republic is said to have a hospital with an entire ward of "living corpses" - transhumans that believe so firmly that they are dead, that they do not move or talk in any way. Most transhumans are unlikely to encounter those comatose victims of their own beliefs, but are likely to encounter the "walking corpses" - those individuals that think of themselves as just digital echoes, unnatural soulless things that continue to move and think and influence the world. Some rage at their status, the heaven or reincarnation they believe was denied to them; others accept that this is the only world they will know, and work to make of it a heaven. A few commit suicide, erasing themselves, unwilling to face existence without a soul.

Socially, soulless must deal with the relations with their old communities, families, and friends, many of whom probably held the same beliefs that they did before resleeving or forking. Some find acceptance, most face rejection, epecially in habitats and legal systems that do not recognize them as the same person - in an instance, the soulless lose their property, family, and social support network. New soulless often fall into the outskirts of their societies, where there exist predators designed for them - agents, career managers, and headhunters eager to guide them into indentured contract employment; communal property sects that seek to see to their emotional needs, but are little better in terms of not exploiting the talents of their members. A few manage to access enough old accounts to sustain themselves, or find their feet and build new lives for themselves.

Using Soulless

Science fiction is not about technology; sci fi is about the questions that arise from science, how new developments impact the human story. Eclipse Phase as a science fiction setting where these questions can be played out - and maybe your table finds the answers that work for them, or maybe they do not. The Soulless are a concept for players and gamemasters to employ if they want to explore elements of belief and transhuman ego technology. There is no right or correct way to play a Soulless, whether as a PC or NPC; the details of any character's beliefs regarding the ego and the soul are often unique to them. Most transhumans get along fine without asking those questions; materialists think the concept of the immaterial soul is ridiculous, or at least unprovable. Whatever the players or gamemasters personal beliefs, Soulless characters can be a great way to introduce these philosophical concepts to their game - although in both cases, GMs and players should beware of preaching their personal beliefs at the table. Remember, the point is to have fun, not to convert anybody.

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.

294: AF Slurs

ENTRY 294: AF Slurs

"Why do I need a Chinese word for 'cunt'? Or a Venusian word, whatever. Why do I have to use a made-up word to say what I really mean? What's wrong with the word 'cunt' that I can't use the one we have in English?"
- John Tecumseh Jones, What A Cunt I Am

Hate, fear, and prejudice always find expression in the syntax of the time. That said, few swearwords, insults, and slurs have real staying power beyond general cultural inertia: the word 'fuck' has been in the English language in some form or another for a thousand years, and will probably continue to exist for as long; the Lunar trend of 'cuntoid' for female-identifying synthmorphs is already dying fast. Still, where there is anger and discrimination there will be words to describe it, and the changing social norms after the Fall provide plenty of raw material for new and injurious expressions. So in addition to all the hundreds or thousands of slurs still in use with regards to an individual's ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, intelligence, appearance, odious personal habits, ancestry, etc. there have arisen thousands or tens of thousands of terms discussing new ethnicities, religions, morph types, political and social beliefs and preferences, just to name a few. Few of these really catch the metacultural awareness, and remain tied to specific networks, habitats, and social circles, but a few have spread fairly wide throughout the system.

"Nutes" as a disparitive descriptive for genderless biomorphs is one of the most common, though nowhere near as insulting as some of the more inventive names for them in Vo Nguyen, where bioconservatives have painted neuter biomorphs as sexual deviants and "unnatural."  Gender identity still remains a point of contention for nominally sexless synthmorphs (and, less often, informoprhs), which spans the spectrum from synthmorphs-that-identify-as-a-given-gender ("Cuntoids," "Princkbots," etc.) to mixed-biomorph-synthmorph-sexual-relationships ("Toyboy," "toyboi," "toygirl," "toygurl," "toyfag," "toyqueer," etc.) Xenoreligions and new religions see rather widespread distain, with any number of insults based on their beliefs, the least contentious of which is the Mesh media labeling them all as cults. Even some specific morphs and factions get their share of nicknames, such as the Ultimates and Remade ("ussholes," on Olympia, "Ulticunts" in Nova York, etc.) This is but a small sampling of the vast number of new slurs being generated, used, and abandoned every day.

Using AF Slurs

In moderation, where and when you must. The issue with fantasy slurs in a science fiction setting is less an issue of being politically correct as it is sounding like an asshole by spouting a bunch of silly, obviously made-up words designed to be quasi-offensive. I mean, c'mon, "cuntoid" sounds like something a thirteen year old boy would come up with to shock his friends. A number of sci-fi insults often come across the same way, feeling artificial and silly on the tongue - feth, feck, frak, frag, frell, shazbot, bleep, tanj, gorram, smeg, shock, smurf, bastich, Belgium, blotching, slitch, etc. Sci fi slurs are little better, often based on some basic physical characteristic or disparaging resemblance to Earth organisms/objects, like crab, bug, spoonhead, clicker, clanker, suckhead, spacehead, flatlander, socialator, smeghead, etc. These terms aren't offensive to contemporary ears because they aren't culturally ingrained as offensive, and so miss the desired impact (unless you just want to sound slightly silly, which is perfectly acceptable), whereas real-world ethnic slurs are likely to offend people you're playing the game with, which is generally undesired.

So what's the point? Well, sometimes you do want a non-offensive but patently supposed-to-be-a-slur-or-swearword in your campaign. Fair enough, more than one science fiction writer has written pseudo-swears just to get past the censors or for verisimilitude. However, this kind of language is also a strong indication of what characters in your game hate and fear - these are the focal points for social, sexual, gender, and ethnic commentary in the setting, and the new slurs you introduce can be a springboard for highlighting or examining those issues. Given the propensity of new insults to borrow from old insults, it is up to you to determine whether your group is comfortable or mature enough to handle such topics in a game - I would encourage you to talk with your players about it before Marvin d'Mars describes Rusters as "Martian Niggers," for example. That's going to send a shock through the table - and so it should. The 'n-word' is the ethnic slur to end all ethnic slurs in the United States, and busting it out at the table could cause an argument or at least several minutes standing around looking uncomfortable.

291: Blind Tigers

ENTRY 291: Blind Tigers

"They say it is all in our heads. Of course it is. The universe is in our heads, the shadows on the wall of the cave..."
- Dzen Stephanopolous, Sight Beyond Sight

One of the peculiarities that became apparent once resleeving took hold in transhumanity is that for a significant part of the population physical injuries and disabilities coincide with or led to related psychological damage which was carried with the ego to the new morph. These conditions appear to be distinct from forms of neural damage (such as cortical blindness) that become inherent to the ego, but the effects are largely similar - an individual who had some physical limitation in an old morph such as blindness, deafness, limited mobility in a limb, partial paralysis, etc. carries some of their physical handicap or disability forward into the new morph as a mental handicap. Unlike neural damage, psychosurgery and therapy has often proven effective in treating individuals facing these mental disabilities.

Some individuals facing these conditions do not respond well to therapy, or choose not to undergo it. Instead, they embrace their disability in their lifestyle. Popularly called "blind tigers" (or deaf tigers, crippled tigers, etc. as appropriate), these transhumans are the leading edge of the population working to accomodate habitats and services for transhumans with disabilities, by coding alternative sensory input into Mesh sites and channels, working braille translations next to written instructions, designing systems designed for mobility-challenged morphs, giving alternate-sense skill training classes, etc. A large part of their efforts are simply providing a community of like-disabled individuals to provide continued encouragement and opportunity for both the community of disable transhumans and individuals.

Using the Blind Tigers

If a character in Eclipse Phase suddenly goes blind, one of their first instincts is probably to hack the nearest camera (or even ghost another character's visuals) and so regain their sight that way. If the blindness is a purely physical phenomenon ("Aargh, the laser got my eyes!") this is fine; kudos to the player. For other characters who have blindness as a result of mental derangement or neural damage however, this will not work. This isn't meant to be a way of screwing over the player character and gamemasters shouldn't inflict psychological disabilities willy-nilly, but the basic concept of being an inherent trait of the ego instead of the morph is that the disadvantage is completely removed from physical capability - it is a psychological block on the ego's ability to perceive certain information or utilize certain abilities, not a a matter of having defective parts. A character with Mental Disorder (Blindness) just can't process visual information, a character with Mental Disorder (No Left Arm) cannot use their left arm (or equivalent limb), etc.

Again, the point of this is not to screw over PCs ("Ha ha, sucks to be you."), it's an optional limitation for players and gamemasters to consider to promote roleplaying - how would you get around if you were blind and simply swapping out cybereyes wasn't an option? How would you make the universe a better place for other blind characters? In most cases, these disadvantages are not completely unsurmountable by any means - muses can act as go-between translating speach or visual stimulus into a form that the blind tiger character can interpret; sonar, radar, lidar, and other augmented senses can easily make up for vision in many (though not all) instances; the Mesh alone generally has options available to accomodate any number of disabilities, and so on and so forth. Blind tiger characters who work to integrate the solutions of their disabilities into their lifestyles are not working to deny their disadvantages as much as embracing them as key aspects of their character.

A particularly appropriate occasion to pick up a Mental Disorder of this form is when mental stress from resleeving, where a physical limitation or bit of damage from the old morph is carried over as a Mental Disorder of the ego. Again, this isn't intended to be a death sentence for the character, and the disorder can be dealt with via psychosurgery or therapy as normal.

Seeds

• The player characters arrive on Pallwyn, a "dark habitat" where the primary sense is sonar, not normal transhuman vision. As a consequence, the PCs will have to find their way through a habitat full of "blind" morphs, where all the signs are in a sonar-reflection language and concepts like color are not in general use compared to terms for texture, jitter, delay, echo spread, etc. The habitat is currently suffering a series of murders, but some of the key clues are being left in visual media that the investigators are missing...one of the local blind tigers approach the PCs and ask them to find the killer, whom they are afraid is another one of the blind tigers. Of course, as strangers with full visual faculties, the authorities might grow suspicious of the PCs if they get involved.

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.)

135: Outcaste

ENTRY 135: Outcaste

Formal castes are often considered a relic of an unhappy past to most transhumans; a remnant of bronze age societies carried forward hundreds or thousands of years after they had served their original purpose. The truth is perhaps more complex, and individual egos are so bound up in social and ethnic identities that even in contemporary times some fragment of caste-mentality may exist—the Brahmins of New Varanasi, for example, or the subtle distinctions still maintained in Barsoomian society from when the rusters suffered under indentured servitude. Overall the caste systems of old Earth have slowly lost their grip on transhuman society, in no small part because the differences in education and relative wealth have grown smaller thanks to the Mesh and makers. The vast majority of transhumans are outcaste, completely removed from the ever-shrinking social stratification practiced by the remaining few traditionalists.

But some ideas die hard. While most transhumans today no longer hold to the old taboos against handling the dead or dealing with refuse, there remains at least one force that the majority of transhumans are raised to fear and respect: radioactivity. Radioactive morphs, contaminated through accidental exposure, improper shielding and equipment, or simply long periods working in radioactive environments or with radioactive equipment, are effectively untouchable—a burden, expense, and danger to the community by their very presence. If the morph cannot be decontaminated cheaply or effectively, most egos abandon them, at the encouragement of the habitat authorities. Radioactive morphs are barred entry from most habitats, often on threat of ranged destruction. On Mars, rusters who worked with badly-shielded radioactive materials were ostracized rather than treated, forced to live and work separately from the other indentured servants, feared and hated less they contaminate others, prone to cancer and radiation burns. Many scumbarges likewise have large segments of untouchables, usually those forced by poverty or circumstance to spend too long near the engines, and in extreme cases entire vessels have been forbidden to dock at habitats because of the radiation danger.

Using the Outcaste

Social commentary has its place in games; the topics that stir up debate and emotions in the real world provide strong motivations to players and characters in the game as well. That said, it is also easy to offend people if these issues are handled poorly or blithely—racism and caste-discrimination are still with us today, and a game that makes light of the suffering and seriousness of those topics can cause a game-conflict to turn into a real-world conflict at the gaming table. Gamemasters or players that want to address these topics without offending people can do so by paralleling or satirizing the issue; consider the Star Trek episode “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” as an example. In this case, the idea of the untouchable caste—a concept familiar in many societies, for a variety of reasons ranging from profession to sexual orientation—is married to the very real hazards of radiation. How the players and other characters react to the afflicted versus to how they are treated can provide a very strong dynamic for an adventure.