343: Space Lightning Strikes

ENTRY 343: Space Lightning Strikes

"Initial probe shows that the atmosphere has a high-oxygen content and no toxic gases, but we'll send you through with full breathing gear just in case. We also think that the other side of the gate opens into an artificial construct - there's no sign of life, but we want you to be careful anyway. This could be a first contact scenario."
- Mission Briefing

The latest gatecrashing expedition is to an exoplanet that doesn't even have a name yet; the scientists are still arguing whether it should be Perdurabo or Voltron. Atmosphere is breathable, gravity is a little heavier than Earth-normal but not grossly so, temperature is a very reasonable 78 C, radiation levels are well within acceptable limits, and the first probe shows that the gate is semi-enclosed by what appears to be an artificial structure. While it's not clear yet whether or not this is another Echo V, that's what everyone appears to be hoping for.

The most worrying thing so far is the complete lack of any signs of life - even microbial or plant life. The initial probe sent through came back as clean as when it had been sent. The current hypothesis among the scientists is that the world did once have carbon-based life, but some extinction event killed everything on the planet, leaving only an oxygen-rich atmosphere that would someday perhaps deplete itself.

As the gatecrashers make their last prep and step through, the gentle patter of rain strikes their helmets. There's a hole in the ceiling, and through it they can see streaming grey clouds and flashes of lighting. If they take off their helmets, the air tastes of ozone. Around them, all is dust - scattered bits of rust-encrusted machinery, faded images on the wall, bits of something that almost looks like paper. A little exploration outside the room shows them that they're in a building, part of a larger complex - clearly artificial, or at least artificially expanded from some natural feature like a hill or cliff.

They're also not alone. The noise of their coming attracts a graying, bedraggled member of the Factors. The surprising contact is set off against a bolt of lightning suddenly coming down and hitting their gate, knocking it out of operation.

Alone on a dead world, cut off from home, with no chance of rescue and only a single extraterrestrial to keep them company. Game on.

Using Space Lightning Strikes

A basic set-up for a rather high-concept scenario, no different in many ways from an episode of Stargate or Sliders - but hey, call it an homage. The PCs are hired for a bit of gatecrashing, are given plenty of time to prepare and get whatever equipment they need, step through into a dead world, meet a lonely shipwrecked Factor who has apparently been living off of freeze-dried local food for years, and then! Lightning strikes. The rules of the game change. What was supposed to be a bit of exploration has turned into a desperate struggle for survival, and their only chance of going home might be to get the gate fixed. A lot of the scenario depends on the player character's own ingenuity and approach - if they are hostile to the Factor (whom they might well not be able to talk to right away), getting out of here is going to be very difficult. Don't be afraid to let the player characters envisage (even plan out) staying on Perdurabo/Voltron for possibly months or years as the PCs and the Factor work out a means of communication and then apply their joint technical skills to repairing the gate. The gamemaster's saving throw is that even if the PCs and Factor fail - which they might well - the gate is still operable, and in a couple months the corporation that hired them will try to send another team through, and the PCs (and Factor) can escape then. But give them the chance to get out on their own merits first.

313: The Broken One

ENTRY 313: The Broken One

In their communications, the Factors have made it clear that they were observing transhumanity for some time before they made first contact. Most of those who make it their business to care about these things assume this consisted primarily of signals intelligence - human civilization has long been sending all manner of transmissions out into the void, and as a form of passive intelligence is more than sufficient to generate a good picture of transhuman civilization. Some of the more ambitious suggest more exotic forms of intelligence gathering, mostly involving unmanned probes and quantum entanglement communication or something more esoteric connected to superliminal transportation. It is nearly universally agreed that physical scouts would have been too dangerous and costly to use.

This is the story that Firewall has carefully promulgated and fostered throughout the intelligence communities, the better to cover up the impact of an unknown craft on Venus in AF 2. A single living occupant was recovered, and quickly hidden away in an impromptu secure facility. It quickly became apparent that while alive and sentient, the extraterrestial was severely damaged and, as it was later learned, several of its component parts had died off or become diseased, leaving a fractured personality and crippled form. Efforts at communication with the captured extraterrestrial were ineffective until after the introduction of the Factors. Since that time, Firewall has put what they have learned of Factor biology and language to use in caring for and interrogating their captive.

Given its damaged state, the information received from the captive Factor has been limited - some suggestion of a base or forward operating base, a few notes on its culture and technology, and quite a bit of close examination regarding its biology, but not much in the way of actionable intelligence. Currently, the administrators in charge of its health and interrogation are in a tricky situation - their captive is of limited value, but there is no way to release it back to its own people without revealing its long captivity and exposing Firewall's operations, both of which could spawn considerable blowback from the Factors and the sides they deal with. Further, any use of the intelligence that the broken Factor has provided could tip the Factors off that their missing scout was discovered, again prompting a political incident.

Most worryingly, at least to the truly paranoid aware of the Broken One, is that the Factors may well be aware that some faction of transhumanity has had long access to one of its scouts - they are after all an intelligent species, and must have a full accounting of their surviving scouts. What transhuman spymasters cannot guess is how the Factors may be acting on this data. Some speculate that the damaged Factor was deliberately seeded on Venus to prepare transhumanity for first contact (or as a false flag spreading misinformation), while others believe that even now the Factors are attempting to quietly discover who has their lost member and is offering for their return, no questions asked.

Seeds

• A xenocult has breached the holding facility on Venus and made off with the Broken One. Firewall has begun an extensive but surreptitious alert, and the player character's local handler approaches them for help locating the cult and recovering the "xenobiological mass," though the handler doesn't know the specific details of what the latter is. Of course, things might get complicated if the PCs ever find out what they're actually trying to recover.
• The PCs are hired to break into a remote facility, recover the Broken One, and then allow it to build a communication device to contact its compatriots. The PCs will be told they need to lie low until the Factors come to collect, and may spend some paranoid/boring days in a safe house before the extraterrestrials show up, and the PCs get quietly thanked and paid off. Of course, if any of the PCs get curious, they'll find out that it was a Firewall facility they broke into...and a Firewall handler that hired them. The whole episode was effectively a repatriation, with both Firewall and the Factors working to avoid publicly acknowledging a pre-"official" first contact Factor encounter.
• The time has come for Firewall to clean house, and it has begun removing all evidence of its "guest" of the last several years. The PCs, coincidentally, come into possession of a data file from a flat named Jheri Culkin, who claims to have been the first transhuman to make contact with a Factor and has evidence to prove it. When Culkin turns up dead, the PCs are left holding the evidence and in Firewall's sights.

173: Graviton Trade Talks

ENTRY 173: Graviton Trade Talks

It began, as many things do, when a drunken physicist scribbled something on a napkin. The party was a trade junket at Extropia, with various manufacturing interests discussing the purchase of some novel allotropic alloys from the Factors. In addition to the various official negotiating bodies were various specialists, administrators, and hangers-on at the party, waiting in case their expertise or decision-making powers were called upon. Most of them ended up highly inebriated by hour seven of the meeting; one of them—Jorge-Achmed Long, an experimental physicist, was actually given half an hour of unsupervised conversation with one of the Factors. Which led to the napkin. When Jorge-Achmed sobered up the next day, he realized he’d begun conditional negotiations for purchase of the proof of gravitons.

That was five years ago, and the official beginning of the Graviton Trade Talks, a series of negotiations between the Factors and the Planetary Consortium that still have not culminated one way or another. A large portion of the negotiations involve both parties determining exactly what is on the table. Despite the Initial Drunken Napkin Agreement (IDNA), the Factors have been clear that gravitons as massless particles that mediate the force of gravitation is not quite correct, but they’re being cagey about giving up more details to the point that entire teams of physicists have spent the last couple years of their careers combing over every statement any Factor at the Graviton Trade Talks has ever made, looking for clues as to the real nature of gravity. What is clear is that the Factors themselves are not certain they want to trade over anything related to graviton-tech to transhumanity, or more importantly what the going market price should be.

Using the Graviton Trade Talks

As an ongoing event of some minor importance, the Graviton Trade Talks are a nice background element to roll out in any game—an easy go-to for small talks, news, etc. “Major disappointment today at the Graviton Trade Talks…” “Chief instigator of the Graviton Trade Talks Jorge-Achmed Long vomited on the Factor ambassador today, who apparently thanked J-A for the contribution of nutrients…” “Hey, I heard the Martians are trying to undercut the Consortium at the Trade Talks, cut the rest of the solar system out of the deal…damn Rusters…” and so on and so forth. Likewise, the trade talks are a good place to place any physicist or Factor NPC that the gamemaster needs for an adventure. As with trade talks in general, the Graviton Trade Talks are also an excellent setting for general espionage activities, particularly if the Factors can ever be convinced to bring out an example of their graviton technology.

Seed

• The PCs are hired to bug the Graviton Trade Talks. Security is tight, but their employer has noted a potential weak spot: chief instigator Jorge-Achmed Long, who has a taste for male company after a long day of talking physics. If the PCs can get invited back to J-A’s living quarters they’ll bypass most of his security measures…and from there it’s a relatively painless and easy process for them to attach the surreptitious neutrino farcaster listening device to J-A’s cortical stack. Well, painless for them.

138: The Reliquary Cluster

ENTRY 138: The Reliquary Cluster

Shortly after the Factors announced their presence, astronomers noticed an artificial satellite orbiting Uranus—what appeared at first to be a conglomeration of large, irregularly shaped, partially translucent solid organic polymers with darker objects apparently embedded within. When questioned about the artifact, the Factors displayed their famous reticence, but later sent a probe to attach a navigational beacon to the satellite, which broadcasts a generic warning in fifty human languages to any vessel that comes within about one-hundred and fifty kilometers. The presence of the artificial satellite as much as anything else is responsible for rumors of a Factor settlement in the atmosphere of Uranus.

While all of the Factor’s trading partners have a tacit agreement not to interfere with the object, nearly all of them have trained their telescopes and more exotic sensors on it, and any vessel that goes anywhere vaguely near Uranus on any pretext is sure to have all of its sensor time purchased or rented by various anonymous parties. As a result of this surveillance, researchers have confirmed early reports: the object is a collection of heterogenous macromolecules similar to amber, with colors ranging from red-green to a deep orange-purple, varying in size from clusters less than an inch in diameter to monoliths up to ten meters long. Trapped inside these pseudogems are what appear to be hundreds or thousand examples of xenofauna—everything from insects to a multilimbed critter the size of a small whale, though most appear to be only fragmentary remains such as heads, limbs, shells, and organs. All of the visible specimens appear to suffer the typical degeneration one would expect of long preservation, though a few appear remarkably well preserved.

Speculation on what purpose the Reliquary Cluster may serve the Factors—if it does indeed belong to them, and is not an artifact of the TITANs or some forgotten human faction—is rampant among those who know of its existence; while no-one openly advertises the satellite’s existence for fear of offending the Factors, its existence is a fairly open secret to most of the major governments and hypercorps. The most paranoid believe that the Reliquary Cluster is a honeytrap, designed to lure transhumanity in with its vast trove of xenobiologicals, while others suspect it is a storage facility for when the Factors eventually leave this system.

Mechanics

The Reliquary Cluster is an irregularly shaped jumble of spaceborn amber (or something close enough to it) about 500 meters in diameter, though density studies suggest it isn’t solid and there are probably open spaces or chambers within the body of the object, possibly with atmosphere. On the surface there is no atmosphere, no gravity to speak of, and no more radiation than typical around Uranus, making it safe enough for a spacewalk barring whatever protections the gamemaster may choose to have installed on or around the site. Most transhumans have difficulty looking at the Reliquary Cluster, as the colors of the amber are outside the typical spectrum of human sight; this applies a -30 modifier to Perception Tests when trying to observe any part of the object, including when on the surface.