180: Echo Point

ENTRY 180: Echo Point

The very first radio signal humanity ever sent from Earth still hurtles through the void. Every transmission that was ever made forms a part of the endless wave of invisible radio energy moving through space at the speed of light. Before the Pandora Gates were discovered, the first any alien species would have known of humanity would have been those calls into the great darkness.

Now, something is sending them back. First noticed in AF 8, radio telescopes pointed in the direction of Barnard’s Star began picking up distorted, patchy transmissions from BF 2. Analysis of the content shows it to be a continuous broadcast stream—presumably everything that the listeners at Echo Point have picked up, amplified and sent back. These re-broadcasts have continued in near-real time, and now listeners have started picking up signals sent out during the early days of the Fall.

As transhumans tune in and relive the first days of the end of their world, others still wonder at the future. No source has been observed for the re-transmissions; astrophysicists have fairly ruled out any natural source of reflection might be responsible for the echo, and whatever alien ship, satellite, or other apparatus has so far evaded detection. So Echo Point remains a mystery, all of transhumanity’s greatest fears and worst memories cast back at it…and all anybody can wonder now is why.

Using Echo Point

Transhumanity may be looking toward the future, but it still has a lot of baggage from the past to work through first. Echo Point is a mechanism for gamemasters to address lingering issues form the Fall—old wounds, forgotten memories, secrets better left buried. Echo Point itself is a mystery, left open for the gamemaster to decide what to do. At (presumably) five light years or so out, it remains beyond current limits of transhuman technology to reach (barring a very fortuitous Pandora Gate opening nearby). Whether an alien effort to communicate or some trick of the TITANs, Echo Point could do a lot of damage just in the chaos it creates in the time it takes to go through the Fall and its aftermath.

Seeds

• A group of hackers has begun broadcasting the transmissions live from Echo Point through the habitat’s systems. Many are reliving bad memories from the fall, and a small riot has broken out. Caught in the chaos and confusion, will the player characters seek to hide, help, or take advantage of the distraction?
• Sabotage is occurring at several of the major listening stations tuned in to Echo Point, their facilities raided, files scrambled or erased. Firewall believes that among the Echo Point transmissions are secrets that someone wants to keep under wraps—TITANs collaborators, profiteers, hidden exsurgents, something. They’ve tracked one of the saboteurs to the PC’s habitat…an aged flat who’s just burned the last of his favors. The PCs are asked to apprehend him. Firewall wants answers, but the old man isn’t ready to go without a fight.

103: FORBIDDEN REACH

ENTRY 103: FORBIDDEN REACH

Extinction is coming, at the speed of light, and with the inevitability of gravity. Deep space probes and radiotelescopes are giving very different pictures of the Milky Way than are visible from pictures taken from within the solar system, and comparison with archive stellar data confirms that something—probably some things, ultradense objects whose gravitational pull is sufficient to distort starlight—are moving, just beyond the limits of the solar system, manipulating the million-year old photons to create a new picture. The project is of such a massive scale and so subtle that at first only a handful of astronomers and astrophysicists noticed it; it took years for Firewall to become aware of the phenomenon and its significance, when said scientists began looking at their models and suffering seizures and spontaneous generation of the exsurgent virus.

Basically, it’s a basilisk hack. Being executed on a cosmic scale, using technology and resources beyond current transhuman abilities, and when it is complete the entire solar system will face constant risk of annihilation. For while the effected visible segment of the Milky Way only covers a miniscule fraction of the visible sky, all it takes is the wrong look out of a habitat window or a glance through a telescope to be affected. Firewall classifies all knowledge of the phenomenon and its containment protocols as FORBIDDEN REACH, and is actively trying to keep a lid on possibly-tainted astronomical data, but anyone can download the necessary software to model the movements off the ‘Mesh. It could be forty or fifty years before the basilisk hack pattern is visible, and Firewall is already dealing with a potential exsurgent crisis.

They will fight it. Programs are already underway, satellites and deep space probes suborned and repurposed to the task. The objects responsible for the distortion are being catalogued, tracked, examined—out of the reach of transhumanity just now, but there is time yet to look, to understand, and if possible find a way to stop or destroy them. Still, the niggling question remains in the back of everyone’s mind: if it took us this long to see this threat, if they can plan this far ahead, then what else is waiting, out in the dark?

Mechanics

When complete, the FORBIDDEN REACH asterism will function as a sensory reprogramming basilisk hack (Eclipse Phase p.364-5), although this configuration will not be complete for about 50 (+/- 2.776) years. In the meantime, the main risk of exposure is high-resolution models of that section of the Milky Way at the period when it is in the correct configuration. The mathematical modeling programs and raw astronomical data are openly available on the Mesh, but relatively few transhumans have access to the vector data associated with the unknown objects necessary to accurately render an image of the basilisk hack.

Seed

• A datathief named Minoataka has lifted the private datastore of an astrophysicist named Jinjin, a Firewall associate who was working on a neuroprogramming “vaccine” for FORBIDDEN REACH. While Firewall isn’t sure of the exact contents of the datastore, a worst case scenario is that it includes a weaponized FORBIDDEN REACH program that Jinjin was using in their work. The PCs are given a briefing on FORBIDDEN REACH and made aware of the consequences of what Minoataka may have—and asked to retrieve it, by whatever means are necessary.

028: Graveyard Trajectory

ENTRY 028: Graveyard Trajectory

Until recently, death has always been a part of the transhuman condition, and there remain many among transhumanity that feel the need to honor the departed egos they once knew. Many habitats accompany the recycling of the morph—if there is one—with a simple ceremony and a celebration of their life that leaves lasting memories. The more social infomorphs often earn digital memorials, archives that preserve their life and work. Friends, family, and admirers throughout the system may accomplish some creative act, feat, or thing and dedicate it to the deceased. A few very old and conservative habitats and colonies maintain physical memorials—sometimes containing the decaying remnants of the morph.

Then there is the Graveyard Trajectory.

Burials at space are almost as old as space-travel, and take many forms in different cultures. Among the habitats of the Inner System however, the Graveyard Trajectory has taken hold: a designated path off the main shipping and mining lanes where remains can be released for a long, lazy elliptical orbit around the Sun. It is estimated that the majority of such remains fall into Sol within a year, but there are accounts from ships plying the space between Earth and Venus of corpses mummified from five or ten years’ cold soak in space.

Most ships that accidentally interrupt such journeys through eternity send them on again. Certain clannish families install mesh transponders to track their ancestors’ progress, and even automated messages providing a small remuneration to those who return their ancestors to space. The empty eyes and faded plastics may be taken as a reminder of their own mortality—or the limitations that transhumanity still fights to overcome.

Seeds

• A Firewall agent in need of a quick escape committed suicide—with stipulation in its will that the corpse be vacuum-sealed, fitted with a beacon, and set on the Graveyard Trajectory. Now it is up to the player characters to retrieve the corpse, and retrieve the Firewall agent’s fork from its cortical stack before the power runs out, or someone beats them to it.
• Crossing the Inner System, an errant remnant from the Graveyard Trajectory impacts the vessel—a container of ashes dating from the time of the Fall, or maybe earlier. The crew and passengers are divided about what to do: cracking the seal and analyzing the remains could reveal important archaeological and anthropological information, but may also risk exposing them all to an Exsurgent virus.
• The Greenteeth, a morbid or pragmatic scumbarge, has begun trawling the Graveyard Trajectory, harvesting the corpses for whatever of value they can derive—genetic information, scraps of metal, antique tech, or even “space jerky.” A consortium of outraged mourners has taken up a collection and issued a sizeable bounty on anyone that can bring the Greenteeth in to a habitat where such practices are punishable under the law.