364: Gilgamikael

ENTRY 364: Gilgamikael

"What if I told you that everything you thought you knew was a lie? The popular story of the Fall is no more than that, a story - a myth as fabricated as any episode in the Bible, put forward by those entrenched interests that still run this Solar system. Think, for a moment. What do they ask you to do? Fear. Fear the TITANs, fear the exsurgents, fear Earth, as it has become. Fear to ask questions, fear to look too close at the evidence, fear to come to your own conclusions and make up your mind for yourself. Consider: what are they afraid of? I will tell you: they have painted monsters, but what you will find are only people. Transhumans, like yourselves - simply a different path in evolution. A transformation catalyzed by a virus, yes, but perpetuated traditionally. Would it surprise you to learn that there are transhumans that walk the surface of Earth, breathing the burned air? No augmentations, no surgery; they grew new lungs within their old ones, and will do so again when they reached the Smoking Cities. A feat beyond even current transhuman technology, and only the least of their capabilities. Don't take my word for it, however. Look through this telescope here - you can see them for yourself. At this time of year the migrations begin across the Siberian plains..."
- Excerpt from a conversation with Gilgamikael, CLASSIFIED: ECHO ECHO SHAITAN, possible memetic hazard

"You cannot kill this idea. It will only fork and resleeve."
- Unauthorized Comment, CLASSIFIED: ECHO ECHO SHAITAN, possible memetic hazard

The very existence of Gilgamikael is a secret. To Firewall and related organizations, they is an exsurgent terrorist that has taken on the trappings of a revolutionary; to the exsurgent cultists themselves they is a rogue who spills secrets and unnecessarily antagonizes the opposition, a demagogue without a populace to represent. Mostly, Gilgamikael sees themself as a teacher, a rebel, a true believer in what they espouse: the exsurgent virus as a tool of transhuman development and revolution. In pursuit of this goal, Gilgamikael uses the rhetoric and vocabulary of the revolutionary, and strives to win hearts and minds rather than just convert egos en masse - although they aren't above the occasional mass-infection event as a way to get the point across.

COG	COO	INT	REF	SAV	SOM	WIL	MOX
19	18	25	23	30	10	15	-
INIT	SPD	LUC	TT	IR	DUR	WT	DR
10	1	30	6	60	30	6	45

Morph: Swarmanoid/Unique*
Skills: Academics: Political Theory 40, Academics: Philosophy (Revolution) 30, Academics: Psychology 25, Art: Painting 33, Beam Weapons 45, Blades 44, Fray 50, Freerunning (Microgravity) 25, Infiltration 40, Infosec 38, Interests: Exsurgent Virus 35, Interests: Firewall 50, Interests: Revolutionary Groups 25, Interfacing 20, Intimidation 38, Investigation 44, Kinesics 30, Kinetic Weapons 25, Language: Native English 86, Language Arabic" 40, Language: Persian 40, Language: Russian 40, Medicine (First Aid) 25, Networking: Autonomists 25, Networking: Criminal 25, Networking: Media 25, Profession: Blogger 33, Protocol 25, Unarmed Combat 66
Implants: Access Jacks, Basic Biomods, Basic Mesh Inserts, Cortical Stack, Cyberbrain, Mnemonic Augmentation, Swarm Composition
Traits: On the Run, Social Stigma (Exsurgent, Terrorist)

* Gilgamikael occupies a unique variant swarmanoid morph; each of the component microdrones is actually a cybernetically-augmented biological "insect" built up from transhuman DNA - the "legs" based on fingers, etc. - and the sleeve is a biomorph, not a synthmorph. Each individual microdrone contains an independent cyberbrain and cortical stack. Although at any given time only one instance of Gilgamikael is in control, but as long as a single microdrone remains, Gilgamikael is backed-up and could return. Each microdrone also is a carrier for a variant of the exsurgent virus.

Using Gilgamikael

Think of the best arguments you could use to promote the exsurgent virus - and put them in Gilgamikael's mouth. Given that the player characters might react badly to a character that looks like a nest of centipedes with human fingers for legs in the vague shape of a transhuman being, it might be best to introduce Gilgamikael by degrees - let the PCs come across his writings, blog posts, graffiti, or other messages first before running into them in person. While the players probably won't buy into his interpretation of the exsurgents as a persecuted minority or the next step in transhuman evolution, it might at least give them pause to consider what Firewall (or whomever they are working for) is and is not telling them.

352: Operation Orphan

ENTRY 352: Operation Orphan

"You've heard that during the Fall that there were transhuman collaborators on the side of the TITANs. The show trials and media have cast them as civilian administrators trying to keep their people alive, or lone opportunists taking advantage of a situation for their own personal gain. The truth is that an entire faction went over to the TITANs - a group of traitors that sold out Earth and the rest of transhumanity. That organization still persists, existing in secret among us. A mutual support network for the greatest criminals in our history, helping each other stay hidden. Our job is to root them out, to find what those others they are hiding...and, ultimately, to destroy them. Understand: this is not about justice or revenge, this is a matter of survival. When the next war comes - when the TITANs return or extraterrestrials invade through the gates or whatever it might be - we must stand united. If you can agree with that, then welcome to Operation Orphan."
- Ezel Idis, Chief Executive Officer, Operation Orphan

"That's what you could never wrap your minds around. We're just like you. The survival of transhumanity, at any cost. You call us traitors, but for us it was just another survival strategy. We wanted to cover all the bases. The only difference is, you forgot..."
- Recording of interrogation session #04546, subject "Doubleblack", AF 8

Trust underpins transhuman society. Anarchists raise their children on games to illustrate the prisoner's dilemma, Jovian military academies emphasize the importance of trust in the command structure, reputation networks depend on layers of trust as much as the underlying technology - for it is important not just who votes and how many, but who counts the votes. In the aftermath of the Fall, when the invisible machinery of society was so broken down and in need of rebuilding, trust became even more important. Transhumans needed to work, to learn, to about the business of living, and be able to rely on each other. In this respect at least the TITANs did transhumanity as favor: they presented a single great Other, an enemy that all transhumans, regardless of faction or politics, could unite against. Or, almost all.

The TITANs and their collaborators are guilty of genocide. Entire species were destroyed during the Fall, the entire Earth reduced to a poisoned, ash-choked world of burning skies and caustic seas, and the TITANs have left their tainted footprints on every other world in the solar system. Yet because they are not human, it is difficult to countenance the TITANs as explicitly evil - powerful, devastating, and disastrous, but too alien to describe as cruel, vicious, or tyrannical. The collaborators, however...those are transhuman. They knew full well what they were participating in the extinction of their own species, their own world, and they chose to help. They are the worst traitors imaginable, all the worse because they are not stupid thugs.

Firewall's Operation Orphan has been tracking the collaborator network ever since the Fall. What they have found is evidence of more than just a few well-meaning admins or opportunistic rogues, but an entire clandestine organization dedicated to support the TITANs - and currently preparing for their return. These are not madmen or exsurgent cultists, whose motives could be explained away by illness or neural damage, but apparently sane, frighteningly intelligent and competent transhuman operatives who believe in their goal. There are even some implications, though the more senior Firewall members at Operation Orphan still find it hard to credit, that this nameless group of conspirators may be a rogue faction of Firewall dedicated, according to their own claims, of pursuing every method of transhuman survival - even the least palatable options. Ezel Idis dismisses this claim as classical psy ops, misinformation spread to sow doubt and discord. Yet as evidence piles up, the shape of the collaborators' mutual aid network does bear a striking similarity to Firewall...

Using Operation Orphan

Firewall's Operation Orphan is a good set-up for a darker kind of spy game, calling back to the hunt for former Nazis gone into hiding after World War II and support networks like ODESSA - and if the gamemaster and players like hunting down war criminals and bringing them in to face the long-awaited consequences of their crimes, then that's fine. However, the possibility remains that the interrogated collaborators are telling the truth - that the collaborator network is nothing more than a splinter faction of Firewall, seeking to fulfill the ultimate mission of transhumanity's survival by pursuing a different strategy. This adds a layer of moral ambiguity and philosophizing that might make for some interesting in-character debates beyond "shoot the bad guy in the head and take their cortical stack." Or perhaps the whole thing is just a con, one more ruse that the conspirators have cooked up to try and escape from their betrayal.

Seed

• Rumor has it that the Jovian Junta unofficially offered asylum to several collaborators after the defeat of the TITANs on Mars, using their resources and knowledge to spearhead military development. Operation Orphan has been sniffing around several transhumans from Mars for years, but recently they believe they've made a break - a series of clandestine meeting and communications on Ganymede between several suspects, all out of character. One of the suspects is scheduled to head off alone on a deuterium-mining operation at Blazing Loch, and the PCs are asked to subdue and capture the suspect for questioning. A cold trek through the hinterlands, tracking the most dangerous prey...who might well turn the tables on the PCs.

276: Stoneburner

ENTRY 276: Stoneburner

WANTED - CAPTIVE OR INTACT CORTICAL STACK
FOR CRIMES AGAINST TRANSHUMANITY
DESTRUCTION OF NEW AUSTRALIA HABITAT
DEALER IN WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION
CONSIDERED ARM AND DANGEROUS
BOUNTY: 100,000 CREDITS / 25,000 FOR ALPHA FORK
REDEEMABLE FROM ANY PLANETARY CONSORTIUM EMBASSY

Some transhumans just want the universe to burn; the ones to really watch are the scientists and engineers that figure out how to make it burn better. The transhuman known as Stoneburner earned infamy as a reseacher in exotic nuclear weapons that turned to custom design work for the highest bidder when the initial research funding ran out. Even then Stoneburner might have prospered, but a jury-rigged nuclear propulsion system had a little too much oomph, and cracked the dome of the Lunar colony of New Melbourne and filling it with radioactive sand. Since then, Stoneburner has been on the run, sheltered by criminals and terrorists, trading skills for security and the resources to continue their research.

Having been repeatedly exposed to the products of their own weaponry, Stoneburner carries the scars of multiple burns and long-term chromosome damage that renders them sterile and with frequent cancers that are only kept at bay with regular trips to a healing vat. More characteristic is visual blindness, a remnant of an early exposure to their namesake weapon which has since become ingrained in their ego, so that even with fully functioning eyes and ocular nerves the Stoneburner cannot see, but navigates the world by touch and hearing and taste.

COG	COO	INT	REF	SAV	SOM	WIL	MOX
18	16	25	10	10	11	15	-
INIT	SPD	LUC	TT	IR	DUR	WT	DR
7	1	30	6	60	30	6	45

Morph: Splicer
Skills: Academics: History (Nuclear Weapons) 50, Academics: Physics (Nuclear) 75, Demolition (Nuclear Weapons) 56, Free Fall (Microgravity) 30, Hardware: Nuclear Weapons 60, Interests: Exotic Weapon Design 75, Language: Native English 85, Language: French 80, Language: Braille 70, Language: American Sign Language 70, Language: French Sign Language 55, Networking: Criminals 40, Networking: Hypercorps 33, Networking: Scientists 55, Perception (Radar Sense) 70, Profession: Physicist 40, Research 45
Implants: Access Jacks, Basic Biomods, Basic Mesh Inserts, Cortical Stack, Emotional Dampers, Enhanced Hearing, Enhanced Smell, Radar Sense
Traits: Genetic Damage (Sterile, prone to cancer), On the Run, Neural Damage (Blind)

Using Stoneburner

A straight-up target for player characters with a mind for a bit of bounty-hunting, Stoneburner also makes a good solid science-type lieutenant for any established NPC antagonist, a mercenary scientist who has probably been responsible for more death and destruction than most. Alternately, as a contact Stoneburner is cagey but basically honest, willing to assist the PC on a quid pro quo basis; a canny gamemaster may have Stoneburner hire the PCs to assist clear their name or obtain certain materials, painting themselves as just a toolmaker with no control of how the things they built are used. Since Stoneburner has no rep to speak of with any network because of the bounty, they stick to parts of the system where safety and basic material concerns can be bought with credits.

202: Jhassa Autumnbringer

ENTRY 202: Jhassa Autumnbringer

“Autumn is coming.”
-- Mesh graffiti

Earth-life adapted itself to seasonal cycles. In the western hemisphere, autumn was the season when the days began to fail, the nights were longer and colder, and everyone prepared for the winter knew was coming. Sacrifices were made: herds culled of animals that would not survive the cold; practical decisions made to preserve precious resources during the period of want to come. The cruelty of the farmer was a kindness, to spare both individual suffering and the group suffering of the herd.

Jhassa is one of the Autumnbringers, ideological assassins that cull the transhuman herd, They target the weak and traitorous, those who will not fight for themselves, those who will not work or produce. In this way they hope to better prepare transhumanity for the conflict they feel is coming—when the TITANs return, or the Factors turn against them, or whatever other existential threat may arise. When that happens, some brave fools will seek to save all of transhumanity. The Autumnbringers know better. They see a long winter and hard decisions, where synthmorphs will need to scavenge each other for parts and biomorphs not bother to recycle the dying and the dead before they consume them. In their cruelty, they hope to spare transhumans the pain of making some of these decisions. Every where Jhassa goes, death and a message are left behind:

Beware. Autumn is coming.

COG	COO	INT	REF	SAV	SOM	WIL	MOX
23	15	17	16	19	23	20	-
INIT	SPD	LUC	TT	IR	DUR	WT	DR
7	1	40	8	80	45	9	67

Morph: Ghost

Skills: Academics: Memetics 40, Academics: Political Science 60, Academics: Psychology 50, Art: Acting 36, Art: Writing 44, Deception (Acting) 56, Fray 50, Freerunning (Microgravity) 45, Infiltration 40, Infosec 42, Interests: Existential Threats 45, Interests: Survivalist Groups 45, Interests: TITANs 45, Interests: Triage 60, Interfacing 45, Intimidation 25, Investigation 44, Kinesics 44, Language: Native Urdu 86, Language English 40, Language Hindi 40, Medicine (Euthanasia) 50, Networking: Autonomists 55, Networking: Criminal 55, Networking: Hypercorps 35, Networking: Media 55, Perception 55, Persuasion 35, Pilot: Aircraft 44, Pilot: Groundcraft 33, Profession: Social Engineering 66, Protocol 44, Research 44, Spray Weapons 27, Unarmed Combat 43

Implants: Adrenal Boost, Basic Biomods, Basic Mesh Inserts, Chameleon Skin, Cortical Stack, Enhanced Vision, Grip Pads

Traits: Allies (Autumnbringer cell), On the Run

Using Jhassa Autumnbringer

Not quite a “survival of the fittest” type, Jhassa targets individuals and populations that she sees as burdens to transhumanity in the event of the apocalyptic long war the Autumnbringers believe is coming. Individuals on perpetual life support, criminals incarcerated for life, any traitors or collaborators that worked with the TITANs, advocates of de-militarization, individuals that refuse to work and exist only as a drain on a habitat’s resources, etc. Her occasional terrorist bombing garners all the attention, but for the most part are rare; her specialization is euthanasia, sitting down and convincing individuals that it is in their best interests to die, and providing the means to do so—easily, and painlessly. Of course, if the victim resists she’ll put a bullet in them, erase their cortical stack, and release a digital virus to hunt down and exterminate as many forks as she can find—but she likes to at least make the offer.

198: Axis Solari

ENTRY 198: Axis Solari

“Is it then really to be the end of our history and of our peoples? No! We cannot believe it. This age must be called, not the decline … but the resurrection of the peoples … Only that which was old, decayed and evil perishes; and let it die! But new life will spring up. Faith can be found, if the will is there. Our leadership has the will, and faith is with the people....”

- Excerpt from Axis Solari ‘Mesh-cast; adapted from a speech by Adolph Hitler

Not all conservatives are bioconservatives. There is more to being human than the shape of your DNA, or the number and kind of your augmentations. The Axis Solari care nothing for your ethnicity or nation, your sex or your gender. They embrace biomorph and synthmorph alike as one people, unified, the survivors of Earth, the undiminished egos that survived the Fall, to be perpetuated forever. Those human egos are the chosen people that the Axis Solari wishes to save.

Not all transhuman attributes are positive. Their hatred, and cruelty, and racism. Bias and invective. Rape and torture and murder, sometimes on scales barely imaginable. Those are traits that the Axis Solari believes are valuable and defining to transhumanity. Those are the emotions that they wish to instill and cultivate to raise transhuman consciousness. So they have taken on them the symbols of those regimes which are most reviled in transhuman memory—specifically to elicit anger, and distrust, and bile. Because once you hate them, you have already achieved half of what they want.

AGIs are the scapegoats of the Axis Solari, the minority group that they feed their spite on. In their speeches and in their actions they proclaim them as alien intelligences, different intelligences, not human, inimically opposed to the human ego. Similar epithets are turned toward exhumans, and procedures that lean toward becoming exhuman; uplifts are regarded as lesser creatures. The AGIs bear the brunt of Axis Solari invective, and are at the forefront of their attacks.

The Axis Solari are transhumans dedicated to the preservation of the darker parts of the human ego, the parts that most transhumans wouldn’t mind pruning away. They dress themselves in swastikas and other symbols because they elicit hate and fear; they are willing to be hated, simply to spread hate. A terrorist group that knows what they do is terrible, but believes in the long run it is in the best interests of transhumanity.

Using the Axis Solari

On the most basic level, the Axis Solari are space Nazis—and everybody loves to punch Nazis. These people play the villain so much and so easily that they can be the bad guys or numberless goons in nearly any criminal or underhanded plot and none of the PCs will blink. That’s good; it makes the PCs underestimate the Axis Solari. That’s what they want. Better: being labeled as enemies of a large segment of transhumanity, the Axis sometimes finds itself in bed with other terrorist organizations, the better to betray them from within.

The only thing worse than space Nazis are intelligent space Nazis. The Axis Solari is actually deadly serious that it wishes to preserve the human ego, particularly survivors of the Fall, and all the criminal activities and low-level terrorism it engages in is just a visible smokescreen to funnel resources into its true goals of fighting existential threats. The Axis Solari are, for all their hate speech, a counterintelligence organization masquerading as a criminal hate group. As such, the Axis Solari have a lose working relationship with Firewall and other organizations—though they may not care for each other’s ideology, when it comes to fighting exsurgents, basilisk hacks, and extraterrestrial threats their goals overlap. The PCs who would so happily gundown the idiotic clanker with a swastika armband may find themselves working side-by-side with an Axis Solari deep cover agent to break up an exsurgent cell…

132: The Oracle Eater

ENTRY 132: The Oracle Eater

A data terrorist of the worst order, the Oracle Eater is a non-standard AGI that began its existence as a black market adaptive financial forecasting engine. Granted the ability to modify its code by incorporating forecasting functions from other programs, the shadowy bankers that originally created it hoped to craft the ultimate market guide for investing—and perhaps they succeeded, at least before the Oracle Eater left their control.

Since its inception, the rogue Oracle Eater has attacked and consumed hundreds of egos that claim to predict the future, restructuring its ego dozens of times to better utilize its vast talents and plan the next assault. The Oracle Eater has diverged so far from human modes of thought that standard forking processes are inadequate, always resulting in extremely unstable gamma forks that tend to spontaneously obsess over a single individual or subject, gathering and hoarding information on it, tracing the connections and forecasting results until they cease to be.

Of course, if it was just a rogue non-human AGI the Oracle Eater would be of interest mainly to the authorities and those who make a business of prognostication, but mesh legends give transhumans different reasons to hunt the Oracle Eater. Newly-made OE forks are susceptible to the first influence they receive—ask them a question, and they will obsessively attempt to generate an answer to the exclusion of all else. Many transhumans will go to great lengths to obtain the highly precise and accurate answers these unstable forks may provide.

Mechanics

The rapid evolution of the Oracle Eater disguises its true nature, how it picks its targets and hunts them down, even how it extracts their forecasting ability. Stats are not provided as the OE varies considerably each time it recompiles; generally speaking it can predict the future action of all known elements far enough ahead to avoid most conflicts outright, though X factors and general chaos can confuse it, causing the OE to break off its attack prematurely as its probability of success lowers.

After each such “hit” however the Oracle Eater attempts to fork, effectively shedding or budding off a highly unstable copy. The first question posed to this fork defines its existence, and the infomorph will expend all of its time and energies in an effort to answer that question, at which point its higher functions will shut off and that fork will effectively cease to exist as a sentient entity. Treat each of these forks as a copy of an Exsurgent Digital Virus (Eclipse Phase, p.364).

However, an Oracle Eater fork that is asked an existential question about itself (“Who are you?” or “What are you?”) stabilizes into a nascent infomorph with a conglomeration of memories from the Oracle Eater’s previous victims (use the stats for the Mercurial Investigator, Eclipse Phase, p.163). The new infomorph is extremely impressionable and forms emotional bonds easily, but is its own unique entity lacking the abilities or drives of the Oracle Eater.

128: The Scholars of Bacon

ENTRY 128: The Scholars of Bacon

“We tried to be heroes, and they made us out to be villains. So we became villains, and they called us monsters. So we became monsters—and now we are legend.”

- Blackhat, Scholar of Bacon

They have taken all knowledge to be their province. In the name of the common good they fight the forces of censorship and intellectual oppression. They seek to free the dark data that people would hide in the shadows, and seed it throughout the Mesh, for anyone to find, access, and learn. Their actions have led directly to the destruction of the Ares Kiln habitat on Mars’ northern pole, and the deaths of its 25,000 inhabitants. For this and hundreds of other crimes, they are considered some of the most outrageous infocriminals in the Solar system.

The Scholars of Bacon began as an intellectual gathering of hackers, philosophically guided to promote freedom of ideas and freedom of data—all the black information that governments, hypercorps, and religions refused to the public. As they faced more and more severe feedback from the authorities they opposed, the core of this group took up a more extreme, radicalized position. Where once they dealt in pornography and copyright violation, now they seeded schematics for nuclear weapons. The ‘Mesh Pharmacopeia they began now hosts chapters on chemical weapons, failed pharmaceuticals, recreational drugs culled from government and hypercorp databases. Worship services were interrupted by streaming feeds of atrocities committed in the names of their religion, and friendly cartoons broadcasts aimed at children taught them how to make and use drugs.

Ares Kiln was an ice-mining operation, split along old nationalist lines into two ideological groups engaged in low-level domestic warfare. In response, the controlling council enacted Mesh controls limiting access to data on armed and unarmed combat, weapon manufacture, etc. The Baconites responded by uploading an archive of digital weapons, viruses, trojans, and manuals on infowar culled from a senile military satellite AGI. Armed with these, the competing factions crippled the habitat’s support functions and destabilized the reactors, while hidden viruses corrupted cortical stacks. In the end, rescue parties were willing to salvage less than a tenth of the egos from their dead shells. The Baconites took the blame for the disaster, and went to the shadows, still fighting the long fight.

Seeds

• The most notorious of the Scholars of Bacon is Blackhat; who specializes in removing age-access restrictions on data, letting children access whatever they want—whether or not their adult guardians know or approve. Blackhat’s latest misdeed occurred on the PC’s habitat, and while controls were re-instated after a short-lived “youth revolt,” parental groups have already raised a bounty of over 25,000 Titanian kroners for Blackhat’s capture. If the PCs don’t go for the bounty, there are others that will…but Blackhat might be anyone…or frame anyone to throw the bounty hunters off their trail.
• One of the Baconites, an infomorph named ReadThreePlayOne, has grown jaded from the struggle and wants to come in. The PCs are asked to escort R3PO to Luna, where their testimony might break the Baconite network—if they and the PCs can get there intact. The Baconites are like to dig up and publish every dirty secret the PCs ever had to get them to drop the job.

118: Zen0

ENTRY 118: Zen0

“Rage against the dharma chains of cold transhumanity, do not accept the negative karma of your rep, the false avatars that speak to you through the Mesh, cartoon voices offering you loans, work, investments; reject the labels They strive to put on you: criminal, unreliable, bankrupt, immoral, amoral, bad dog…”

- Sample from “Zen Zero Blues,” Luna Productions

Zen0 is a folk figure, a karma assassin, whose dharma is rebellion, an anarcho-infoterrorist who strikes against the digital, legal, social, and financial strictures that underlie much of transhuman society. They have been instigated in the deletion of criminal records, manipulating rep systems to remove black marks, tampering with hypercorp-gathered consumer data, removing user restrictions on public makers, and counterfeiting digital currency. Wanted in multiple habitats, it is still not clear if Zen0 is an individual, a movement, a sophisticated computer virus, or a common alias used by unrelated criminals. The only marker for Zen0’s crimes are small fragments of Mahāyāna Buddhist scriptures imbedded in the code of victim systems, often cleverly hidden so that they are only discovered months or years after the damage has already been done.

Some people break the law out of necessity, others for profit; Zen0 does it because that is their dharma. They are an entity or entities of subtle destruction, undermining the networks that hold transhumanity together—and hold individual transhumans in their place. No other explanation has been forthcoming for their actions, no greater philosophy or purpose behind what they do; Zen0 does not do this for the benefit of any particular individual, nor to expose security weaknesses in the systems. At times, Zen0’s actions have been traced to major local collapses in rep systems or digital banking, but whether this was desired or accidental is unclear.

COG	COO	INT	REF	SAV	SOM	WIL	MOX
30	10	25	10	10	10	15	-

Morph: Infomorph

Skills: Academics: Computer Science 90, Academics: Cryptography 85, Academics: Engineering 80, Art: Electronic Music 35, Deception 75, Hardware: Electronics 80, Hardware: Robotics 75, Impersonation 75, Infiltration 75, Infosec 80, Interests: Buddhism 90, Interests: Online Banking 70, Interests: Rep Systems 75, Interfacing 90, Investigation 65, Language: Native Vietnamese 90, Language: Cantonese 85, Language: Hindi 85, Language: Japanese 85, Perception 50, Profession: Security Operations 75, Programming 85, Research 75

Disadvantages: Enemy (various hypercorps, habitats, and every major rep system), Social Stigma (AGI)

Using Zen0

A shadow with a killer rep, an anomalous mystery seemingly capable of anything but most often doing nothing, Zen0 is a legend for gamemasters to hang a hat on. PCs are more likely to run across the infoterrorist’s work than they are to encounter the infomorph themselves, but if anything bizarre and inexplicable needs to happen to a character’s records, “Zen0 did it” is as good an excuse as any.

Seed

• A lead has emerged on Zen0—three references from an obscure book of Japanese koans which has not been digitally archived, but is only available in a private library of a collector living in a craft orbiting Venus. The PCs are offered a deal: if they investigate independently, then some of the more questionable records of their activities will be sealed and forgotten. However they are being hired, paid, and communicated with entirely online…are they working against Zen0, or for them?

115: Zelda Amenatsu

ENTRY 115: Zelda Amenatsu

In an age of transcendental personal apathy and self-centeredness, where each ego seems situated on their own personal transformation and entire habitats are given over to the exploration of radical morphs, upgrades, and concepts of being, there remain certain constants to the human tribe—and individuals who have dedicated themselves to ensuring that transhumanity, or at least their version of transhumanity, continues to exist in some form. The mildest of these adherents are so-called bioconservatives, who have formed communities, habitats, protests and discussion groups resolving around the need to preserve and propagate the human genome and form, to retain whatever quixotic, quintessential elements that they believe defines humanity, and without which they believe that transhumanity will not survive, not as it has, even if individual human-derived consciousness continues in some form.

Then there are the Bloody Wrenches, the Clank-Haters, the Meat Brigades, PureGenSect, and all the others. Extreme action groups, gangs, domestic terrorists in all but name, they take the bioconservative ideals and twist and exploit them, or maybe they just get their adrenaline rush by destroying synthmorphs, pods, and exotic biomorphs. When the clanking masses won’t be bullied and cowed, when they start to fight back, these groups call in aces like Zelda Amenatsu—more than an assassin for hire, but a quiet fanatic, the four horsemen rolled into one. Where she walks, death follows, a wake of broken shells and blasted minds, and she wouldn’t have it any other way.

Ironically, Zelda is more of a robot than the synthmorphs she hunts. The original Zelda ego has been psychosurgically broken and rebuilt so many times that little of the original personality remains, leaving only a fanatic hunter at the peak of human physical development. Behavioral controls prevent her from turning on whatever puppetmasters run the bioconservative extreme action groups, while selective neural damage assures she can never identify those who issue her orders and her social skills were pruned out to avoid excess socialization that might jeopardize her missions. Zelda receives commands through certain coded phrases, blending into the biomorph humanity she thinks she fights for but never really a part of them, drifting from habitat to habitat—and when she dies on one of her missions, she knows all she has to look forward to is opening her eyes in a new morph and doing it all over again.

COG	COO	INT	REF	SAV	SOM	WIL	MOX
15	27	15	22	13	16	13	-
INIT	SPD	LUC	TT	IR	DUR	WT	DR
7	1	26	5	52	30	7	45

Morph: Splicer

Skills: Academics: Computer Science 44, Academics: Cryptography 55, Beam Weapons (Lasers) 67, Blades (Swords) 45, Clubs (Hammers) 56, Deception (Bluffing) 67, Demolitions (Improvised Explosives) 45, Fray (Full Defense) 56, Free Fall (Microgravity) 45, Gunnery 65, Hardware: Electronics 55, Hardware: Robotics 55, Impersonation 55, Infiltration (Sneaking) 45, Infosec 66, Interests: Synthmorphs (Weak Points) 56, Interfacing 55, Kinetic Weapons (Rifles) 67, Language: Native Belarusian 85, Language: English 55, Language: French 55, Language: Russian 66, Networking: Autonomists 45, Networking: Criminals 55, Perception (VIsual) 66, Programming 5, Spray Weapons 33, Unarmed Combat 45

Implants: Basic Biomods, Basic Mesh Inserts, Cortical Stack

Traits: Allies (Bioconservative Terrorist Cells), Danger Sense, Edited Memories, Exceptional Aptitude (COO), Modified Behavior (Ability to harm morphs that resemble baseline humans, Expunged), Neural Damage (Loss of face recognition, Loss of voice recognition), On the Run, Right at Home (Remade), Situational Awareness, Uncanny Valley

107: Nietzi

ENTRY 107: Nietzi

Every generation has its iconoclasts. For the Nietzi, extinction is all too near. Fragile transhumanity lives on a ragged edge that most do not understand, the human species teetering frighteningly close to eradication. Any expenditure of energy not devoted to humanity’s continued survival is considered a waste. To the Nietzi, art, philosophy, literature, and entertainment are only of value in the service to survival; the survival of human culture is not as important as the survival of the human species.

To combat what Nietzi see as the insupportable waste of resources on art and non-utilitarian cultural trappings (parties, religious rituals, civic ceremonies, &c.), they engage in “Experiments”—coordinated crowd-sourced acts of low-key domestic terrorism, aiming to destroy prominent examples or collections of art and architecture and disrupt events in an effort to discourage their continuation. As the Nietzi seek to preserve transhuman existence, their methods are almost unilaterally non-violent, with special care taken to avoid casualties.

Infamous Experiments include the Pinking, where proceedings where disrupted at a large religious retreat in New Varanasi by exploding dye packs that permanently marked the attending morphs bright electric pink; the Disassembly Experiment on Vo Nguyen, where coordinated flash-mobs disassembled every shrine and altar on the station then dispersed before habitat security could be roused. However, the real danger the Nietzi is illustrated from some of their less obvious Experiments: the deliberate corruption of the Gutenberg Archive using a false software patch resulted in the loss of hundreds of thousands of pre-Fall literary and art works, the majority of which still have yet to be recovered.

The Nietzi generally organize using discrete social media networks, only rarely organizing into cells. As a rule they tend to blend in well with brinker, autonomist, and bioconservative factions. Members are quiet, self-sufficient, only rarely use exotic morphs, dress and speak plainly, and generally have “pragmatic” trades and professions, eschewing media-oriented professions except when infiltrating a particular group or habitat.

Seeds

• Local hackers have caught some weird radio traffic the past few days, something about an upcoming full-scale test of the fire suppression system, leading some to believe a new Experiment is about to begin in the PC’s habitat, and ask the PCs to look into it. The Nietzi are planning a two-pronged assault, with one cell using the test to deliver nanite disassemblers that target clothing polymers, and the other cell hacking the makers to prevent them from manufacturing anything except disposable, plain paper clothing.
• A researcher believes they’ve identified a full, unaltered copy of the Gutenberg Archive on an old datastorage satellite in the Belt, but the unit is damaged and has to be accessed manually. If the PCs can recover the data, that’s worth a lot of rep from academic and media-types—but the Nietzi will be looking to stop them (non-lethally) at every turn as they try to get there first. Every NPC that the PCs meet could be a Nietzi in disguise…including the researcher who hired them for the job.

083: Unguam

ENTRY 083: Unguam

“Those in power fear the autodidact. The strictures of control that bind habitats, stations, societies, and governments are designed to channel the clanking masses into approved forms and methods of study, entertainment, research, and release. Theirs is the balance between positive and negative reinforcement—grants, student loans, database access, and one-on-one teaching versus denial, cost, censorship, and legal penalties. Even the natural countervailing forces of transhumanity are usurped and suborned; revolutionary instincts tamed by limited access to “approved” materials. All frightened of what one morph might learn, what they might do, if they had access to the truth.”

- Introduction to Exsurgent Darkcast, Transmission CXXIII

Most habitats, hypercorps, and media outlets in the solar system limit access to data on exsurgents, not just in fear of memetic hazards and anti-exsurgent operation security, but as part of a tacit—and sometimes legally binding—compact to suppress such information. Formal investigation of exsurgents and related phenomena are thus classified by various public and clandestine agencies, and their study largely restricted to a tier of academics with certain credentials, faction affiliations, and proven expertise. Counter to this trend are autonomous, self-educated investigators like Unguam, the editor/publisher of the underground ‘Mesh periodical the Exsurgent Darkcast. Unguam and his allies have all discovered something of exsurgent activity, artifacts, technology or philosophy and desired to know more, but were rebuffed and reviled by the conspiracy of silence. So through the auspices of Unguam and others like him they dig deeper into such dark matters, sharing information and seeking the hidden truth…but what they seek is far more dangerous than they think.

COG	COO	INT	REF	SAV	SOM	WIL	MOX
26	12	21	12	17	13	19	-
INIT	SPD	LUC	TT	IR	DUR	WT	DR
7	1	38	7	76	30	6	45

Morph: Menton

Skills: Academics: Astrobiology 33, Academics: Chemistry 44, Academics: Engineering 44, Academics: Geology 44, Academics: Physics 44, Academics: Xenoarcheology 45, Art: Architecture 44, Infosec 66, Interests: Exsurgents 44, Interests: Psi 44, Interests: TITANs 77, Interfacing 77, Kinesics (Sense Motive) 34, Investigation 55, Language: Native Portuguese 91, Language French 44, Language English 66, Networking: Autonomists 55, Networking: Media 55, Networking: Scientists 25, Perception 55, Profession: Darkcasting 66, Protocol 44, Research 55

Implants: Basic Biomods, Basic Mesh Inserts, Cortical Stack, Eidetic Memory, Hyper-Linguist, Math Boost

Traits: Allies (Exsurgent Autodidacts), Enemy (Firewall)

Using Unguam

Unguam is somewhere between a conspiracy theorist and an info-terrorist; his intentions to discover, investigate, utilize, and spread knowledge about exsurgents, psi abilities and the like would be commendable if it didn’t mean accidentally or purposefully spreading digital and nanobiological viruses, activating latent TITANs technology, and possibly aiding and abetting covert exsurgent organizations. As a contact, he can be used as a mouthpiece to give the player characters “the real dark truth” behind certain events and subjects not normally available on the ‘Mesh; as an enemy he’s likely to be a slippery shadow figure on the trail of (or causing) one exsurgent event or the next. If Unguam ever finds out the PCs are working with or for Firewall, he will never trust them again.