066: Dewitt Y.

ENTRY 066: Dewitt Y.

The ubiquity of the Mesh has given rise to generations where autodidactism is almost universal among transhumans with access to these resources. Traditional educational techniques have given way to vast databases of academic texts, automated lesson plans, virtual training sessions, XP live-and-learn recordings, edutainment games, and various other multimedia learning experiences. Dewitt Yousef is the equivalent of a post-graduate in this kind of curriculum, an entirely self-taught, independent intelligence agent. He has spent thousands of hours on stake-out and tailing procedures, self-defense, marksmanship, languages, and dozens of other courses and tutorials, all aimed at making himself a competent spy.

In practice, Dewitt Y. has very little practical experience in “official” operations, but he effectively lives the life of a spy all the time—randomly fixating on individuals for months-long stakeouts, infiltrating facilities, stealing garbage to analyze the contents for possible intelligence content, etc. In this way he tends to accumulate masses of mildly confidential information, which he sells to various brokers, and also accepts assignments on a freelance basis.

COG	COO	INT	REF	SAV	SOM	WIL	MOX
16	13	14	14	9	13	14	-
INIT	SPD	LUC	TT	IR	DUR	WT	DR
6	2	28	5	80	30	6	45

Morph: Flat

Skills: Academics: History 40, Academics: Linguistics 30, Academics: Political Theory 40, Beam Weapons 35, Blades 35, Climbing 25, Clubs 35, Demolitions 20, Fray 45, Free Fall 27, Hardware: Armorer 45, Infiltration 60, Interfacing 50, Interests: Intelligence Agencies 65, Interests: Spy Gear 75, Intimidation 33, Investigation 55, Kinesics 33, Kinetic Weapons (Holdouts) 45, Language: Native Czech 84, Language: Dutch 55, Language: English 55, Language: German 44, Language: Hungarian 44, Language: Russian 66, Language: Turkish 44, Networking: Autonomists 55, Networking: Criminals 25, Palming 55, Perception (Visual) 47, Persuasion 25, Profession: Freelance Spy 60, Scrounging 55, Swimming 33, Unarmed Combat (Subdual) 34

Implants: Basic Biomods, Basic Mesh Inserts, Cortical Stack, Enhanced Pheromones, Enhanced Vision, Medichines, Neurachem (1), Radiation Sense

Traits: Mental Disorder (Paranoia), Situational Awareness, Unattractive (1)

Using Dewitt Y.

Dewitt Y. can be an asset, an annoyance, comic relief, or just simply a convenient corpse to hang the plot of the adventure on. While he has some skills thanks to his years of intense training and bizarre lifestyle, he also has no real friends, no social life separable from “work,” and no professional attitude or common sense when dealing with things. As such, his reactions to even the most innocuous of situations can lead to installing tiny surveillance drones in the neighbor’s cupboard, hacking public records looking for secret files, or planning the assassination of random individuals, all while maintaining one or more alternate identities, whose universal expression is slightly affable but persistently perplexed by normal transhuman behavior. If he was ever as good at his job as he wanted to be, Dewitt Y. would probably be killed—and that may just be where the PCs come into the story. Alternately, they may employ Dewitt, or be the subject of one of his assignments (real or imagined).

065: Mme. Bleu

ENTRY 065: Mme. Bleu

Madame Bleu is an establishment on most major and many minor habitats, a small podcasting service that operates discretely and does not advertise through regular channels. It operates a single kind of morph, the eponymous Mme. Bleu—identical female pods with a few specific enhancements, as well as a basic cover identity and associated peripherals (ecto, clothing, living quarters, etc.). The Mme. Bleu pod is designed as a cover identity for conducting autonomous business at a distance. Clandestine and criminal elements have caught on to the nature of Mme. Bleu, so that the majority of professionals know what they are dealing with, even if they do not know exactly who is puppeting the morph. In this way Mme. Bleu has become something of a generic feature of clandestine communities, a mainstay whose presence signals an expectation of a certain level of professional behavior from both parties. Damage or destruction of a Mme. Bleu pod never results in physical reciprocation, but given that the pod’s identity is usually very well connected throughout transhuman space, the assailant’s rep usually takes a severe hit in response…at least until amends are made.

Mechanics

The standard Madame Bleu pod is essentially a pod version of a sylph (Eclipse Phase, p.140) with the Cyberbrain and Puppet Sock implants in addition to those standard for that morph, and the Social Stigma (Pod) trait for those aware of her nature; physical attributes are set at 15, with mental attributes provided by the puppeteer. If a character deliberately maims or kills a Mme. Bleu pod, their g-rep, c-rep, and @-rep scores take a hit – subtract 6 points, divided between the three scores as the gamemaster sees fit.

The hypercorp or group behind the Mme. Bleu pods is well-concealed, but not unreachable. The day-to-day operations on individual habitats is usually handled by an “office” of two or three local, detail-oriented personnel that take care of the Mme. Bleu pod and “her” cover identity; they report back to “corporate” and do not have access to the details of operations. If confronted or asked about the service, they can provide contact information for “corporate” and little else; company policy for “office” personnel is to comply with requests for information as much as possible.

Using Mme. Bleu

Madame Bleu is a puppet, designed for puppetmasters to interact with the player characters from a safe distance. As such she may approach the PCs with an offer of employment, or blackmail, or even be the mastermind behind whatever plot or operation the PCs are currently facing. In all such situations, she is the cut-out, the place at which the trail tends to end—if the PCs get too close, the puppeteer will simply leave and the PCs will be faced with a twitching and drooling lump of meat.

On the other hand, the identical nature of the Mme. Bleu pods also means that she is a familiar face, once the player characters may encounter many times, on many different habitats, for different purposes. This familiarity can be used to the gamemaster’s advantage; first as a surprise (How did she get there? Why is she dealing with the enemy?), and then as they discover the pod’s nature their compliance as they understand that they are dealing with a mouthpiece. Once the PCs accept Mme. Bleu, they will begin to look for her as the potential hook for an adventure—an expectation that the gamemaster may fulfill or subvert, as they see fit.

064: 60% Plumbing

ENTRY 064: 60% Plumbing

Sixty percent of the Extropia habitat, by mass, consists of plumbing. This includes only the movement, treatment, heating, processing, and refinement of liquid water and waste throughout the system; the plumbing also interacts with many other subsidiary systems such as oxygen generation and air control, power generation, cooling, hydroponics, and various industrial processes.

Beneath nearly ever panel is at least one pipe carrying liquid water, color-coded for steam (white), fresh (blue), waste (yellow or brown), radioactive (pink), hot (red), and reclaimed (grey).  Also present are automatic and manual shut-offs and redirects to prevent loss or reshunt water to prevent pressure build-up and bursts. They line the maintenance corridors which lead to the hidden reservoirs and pump stations that are built into dead spaces throughout the habitat structure to best service the community and to manage the considerable mass of moving water form unbalancing the structural stability of the habitat.

The aquatechs that work Extropia’s plumbing have access to rarely-walked spaces, kept away from the commercial thoroughfares, out of sight of recreation areas, and like all transhumans who are in on a public secret, have their share of small jokes, amenities, and lore. They make no secret of the tiny stills and soda fountains that had been set up early in Extropia’s history, buried among the commercial boilers and mass of piping, tapping a few drams of pure or carbonated water to mix with homemade syrups or thin out home-made moonshine, and laugh about “line 212” which was marked radioactive but actually ferried pure alcohol from a collection point to a hidden reservoir not on any of the plans hundreds of yards away, where the ‘techs would get together to stage parties or just jam.

Perhaps more such hidden spaces still lurk among the complex web of Extropia’s plumbing, and other secrets besides. A ‘tech that knows the ins and outs of the plumbing architecture might know where the sensors are planted to detect movement, and how to bypass or jam them, and know enough to bring a headlamp or oxygen bottle because certain sections not in regular use are kept sealed and without light or air circulation most of the time. Certainly in their less sober moments the aquatechs hint at saboteurs and others who met dire fates beyond the watchful eyes of security cameras, and whose remains no doubt still exist in some quiet corner or behind some disused access panel, away from prying eyes.

Using 60% Plumbing

Most players and gamemasters do not always appreciate the scale of habitats, which must recreate in miniature an environment suitable to a broad spectrum of transhumanity. So no matter how large a habitat might appear from the outside, the actual living space is often considerably smaller. So it behooves gamemasters to remember that this additional space—within the walls, beneath the floors, above the ceiling (unless a dome)—exists as part of the setting; it is space where things or people may hide, where shooting up a wall has immediate consequences as lights go dim or steam and water (possibly radioactive or unprocessed waste) spout out and start to flood the compartment. Likewise, where these spaces are available to transhumanity, especially for a relatively long-lived habitat, they become less uniform, full of dead-ends, quick fixes, makeshift stills, hidden recreation areas and holo-posters of naked biomorphs, all the signs and detritus of human habitation.

063: Transbovine

ENTRY 063: Transbovine

Cattle are part of humanity’s cultural heritage, but they don’t translate well into space. Massive ungulate methane factories are impracticable for most habitats, and are inefficient as a food supply. So only a tiny fraction of the different breeds of cattle known to transhumanity made the transition into space. Some post-Fall societies with strong cultural attachments to bovines make do with miniature breeds, which are less costly to maintain—fifty-centimeter high zebus are a relatively common sight in the largest Indian-influenced habitats.

On the other hand, the bovine genetic code had been completely sequenced long before escape from Earth became an issue, and even if physical cows rarely if ever made it up the gravity well, transhumanity still had a massive database of genetic data, and, in many cases, sperm and egg from breeding operations. The average transhuman may only see a classical cow in a rare zoo (or more likely on a live feed over the Mesh), but the genetic legacy of the cow has not been lost, and in many cases is opensource and available to genehackers throughout the solar system.

The result are transbovines, grown from synthetic DNA in growth vats, and often with a number of tweaks, fixes, improvements, and transgenic infusions. The urge to craft chimeras is so widespread that the majority of cattle retain only 25% to 50% of classical bovine genetic material in their make-up; transbovines intended for the production of milk and meat typically have up to 3% human DNA incorporated to make these products easier to digest by flats. Rumors abound that the Carnival of the Goat and some criminal syndicates has access to transbovines with a much higher percentage of human DNA to facilitate customers for prostitution.

Seeds

• A breed of lunar miniature cattle known as “Chameleon Cows” for their environment-reactive skin color is under threat of extinction from neglect; the PCs are asked by a preservation society to try and recover a breeding pair. Unfortunately, the minis’ genetic code is under a long-going intellectual property dispute, so transporting them off of Luna is illegal—not only do the PCs have to find the hiding transbovines, but they will have to smuggle them past the authorities as well.
• Firewall asks the PCs to transport materials from a remote outpost to a facility on Mars, including a six-limbed transbovine named Mahri with a high percentage of transhuman DNA—she looks like a slender, blue-white-black furred cow with a disturbingly human face. Mahri is believed to be an effort at uplift, and may have minor Psi abilities. Possible complications may include an attack by Exsurgents trying to reclaim Mahri; infection of the crew by the xenomorph exsurgent virus through Mahri’s milk; or Mahri giving “birth” to an exsurgent biomorph.
• Superaurochs are high-gravity, densely overmuscled, legless transbovines developed by some of the Trojan and Jovian habitats—they look like brown, cow-shaped slugs on steroids and produce the best steaks in the universe. A prime cut is worth a premium in the Inner System, and the PCs are approached by local criminals planning a raid. All the PCs have to do is stage a suitable distraction for the heist, and they get 25% of the cut from the sale.

062: Gailteach

ENTRY 062: Gailteach

In every war, there are casualties, the disruption of social systems, and people who fall between the cracks and out of the human networks they knew. Gailteach was an operative, though for what agency, hypercorp, or government she does not recall. Doctors who have examined her believe that at some point Gailteach was exposed to multiple basilisk hacks, either at once or in close succession, and the damaging information is still cascading through the menton’s nervous system, causing rolling neural damage that continually rewrites the neural connections between individual sequences in her long-term memory. So while her recall remains perfect, the result is an asynchronous fugue, Gailteach’s recollection of past events continually shifted out of order.

Despite the damage, Gailteach maintains her significant linguistics skills, though in her personal speech is prone to rambling in multiple languages, not all of them natural. She maintains an existence as a researcher and translator, publishing original papers and articles on linguistics, and serves as a tireless on-call community literacy teacher, translator, and interpreter for her habitat. This selfless service has given Gailteach an excellent reputation, and the community provides more of her material and medical needs. For other matters, Gailteach relies on the assistance of her muse Egon, who is programmed to only communicate in certain synthetic languages.

COG	COO	INT	REF	SAV	SOM	WIL	MOX
28	15	20	15	15	10	20	-
INIT	SPD	LUC	TT	IR	DUR	WT	DR
7	1	40	8	80	35	7	50

Morph: Menton

Skills: Academics: Linguistics 85, Academics: Neurolinguistics 80, Art: Logograms 50, Interests: Accents 60, Interests: Dialects 75, Interests: Synthetic Languages 80, Interests: Xenolinguistics 80, Interfacing 50, Investigation 50, Language: Native Gaelic 95, Language: Any*, Networking: Firewall 25, Networking: Scientists 25, Profession: Interpreter 75 Profession: Linguist: 80, Profession: Teacher 60, Profession: Translator 65, Research 77

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

Traits: Fast Learner, Mental Disorder (Severe phobia of psychosurgery), Neural Damage (Amnesia, Blackouts)

* Gailteach knows hundreds of human languages and dialects; common languages (Arabic, English, French, Hindi, Japanese, Mandarin, etc.) have a typical rating of 75; uncommon languages 60, and synthetic & obscure languages (Esperanto, Klingon, Sumerian, &c.) 50.

Using Gailteach

While she doesn’t advertise it, Gailteach is an occasional resource for Firewall, and the PCs are most likely to encounter her in that respect. Gailteach is aware of her memory issues and so will remember the PCs (and any NPCs) in different contexts on subsequent encounter, so that at any given time her general reaction to such characters may be positive, neutral, or negative; however Egon’s memory functions perfectly, and anyone who takes advantage of Gailteach’s faulty recollection (for example, she may mistake the character for a relative, wife, or old lover) will find themselves cut off from contact with Gailteach by all the means at Egon’s disposal. Playing Gailteach may be difficult for the gamemaster; keep a list of random foreign words and phrases around to pepper into her speech can help, and if the nature of her neural damage is difficult to grasp, treat it as early on-set senility.

061: Wormfeed

ENTRY 061: Wormfeed

A half-forgotten satellite station in orbit of Mars goes quiet and dark. Fifty-three criminal digital intelligences in a Xiphos e-prison are lost, splintered into thousands of pre-sapient feral intelligences. Freelance digital archaeologist Antekles Costanzas delves into the cortical stack of a dead Solaris courier; three days later they find what’s left of Antekles crawling across the floor. Slowly, from the edges of transhuman society, the wormfeed spreads.

One of the lesser-known expressions of the Exsurgent virus, wormfeed has been identified as both a digital virus targeting infomorphs and nanofabricators, and a biological nanovirus. Both forms of the virus attack the ego, splintering the minds of the infected. Infomorphs are forced to fork again and again, backups corrupted, each time resulting in more unstable copies of the original ego, until finally reduced to feral intelligent programs, little more than new carriers for the wormfeed. Infected nanofabricators produce self-sustaining nanobiological constructs similar to planarian worms that act as carriers for the nanobiological version of the virus. The worms have limited mobility, but are drawn to make contact with biomorphs and spread the nanobiological version of wormfeed.

Infected biomorphs experience a steadily degenerating mental state as different personalities manifest and the brain struggles to adapt to the conflicting signals. At the same time their body begins to produce purely biological versions of the wormfeed construct, typically manifesting as internal parasites that are expelled with waste matter. These transgenic worms appear free of any form of the wormfeed virus, but contain DNA from the infected host which is passed on as they reproduce. As far as anyone can determine, the transgenic worms are the lifecycle endstate of the wormfeed virus.

Mechanics

Stage 1 (initial infection to 24 hours):

When infection is complete the host’s ego automatically begins splintering; for digital intelligences treat this as forking except that the alpha ego becomes two new beta egos, then beta egos become delta egos, deltas become gamma, and gammas become new copies of the wormfeed digital virus. Gamemasters that want to give the character a slim chance may allow each new fork a COG + INT Test against the virus to avoid infection, giving them the opportunity to shutdown and reboot.

Biomorphs infected at this stage acquire multiple personality disorder (Eclipse Phase, p.214), with each new personality effectively an Exsurgent NPC. The mental condition of the infected biomorph steadily worsens the number of personalities multiply. NPC personalities may display psi effects, though this is rare. Backups in cortical stacks or connected with the infected host are treated as if exposed to the wormfeed digital virus.

Stage 2 (1 day to 3 days):

Biomorphs begin to express the transgenic worms from their living tissue; typically the worms isolate existing peripheral nerves and bud off, so that the host doesn’t immediately register their absence. Number of worms produced depends on the health of the target and available biological reserves; hosts on life support could produce dozens or hundreds of worms within a matter of days.

Stage 3 (3 days+):

The host body begins to cannibalize itself to produce more transgenic worm constructs; the process continues until the remaining tissues fail. Though the host can be preserved almost indefinitely with advanced medical care and intravenous feeding, at this point they are little more than a biological factory for the worms, which may begin to feed on the host’s remaining tissues.

060: Death-of-Self

ENTRY 060: Death-of-Self

Immortality is not for everyone. Even if physical existence can be sustained indefinitely without mental degeneration, not everyone can adapt to changing times, or sustain themselves against a looming eternity, or deal with loss. When it comes time for a crisis of mortality, many habitats provide therapeutic services. Sometimes it is enough to help these people cope. Other times, it only discusses the options. The disposition of assets, possessions, intellectual property. Suicide is wasteful, and anathema to most communities, as much the waste of resources associated with the physical cessation of existence than the loss of a member, so habitats look for more positive and economical alternatives.

Death-of-Self is a radical ego pruning procedure used by those who cannot continue as they are. The process retains the subject’s existing morph (if any), but trims away the subject’s specific memories, retaining only key reflexes, and sometimes basic skills. In an age of forks and digital resleeving the loss of continuity of consciousness is less of terror for many than it was, but for those individuals that choose to lose themselves in this manner the idea that some core of their personality, behavior, or thought-patterns may pass on to another is often a source of comfort in their final moments. Death-of-Self is also a possible though relatively rare punishment for extreme crimes in habitats that do not subscribe to capital punishment and after psychiatric evaluation are unwilling to accept lesser rehabilitation schemes.

The pruned ego is, essentially, a new individual. Some retain a few mental and behavioral characteristics of the old ego, or even a key language or skill, but all specific memories are erased. They look at the universe through new sensors and a clean mind, full of potential.

Mechanics

Death-of-Self is a long-term psychosurgery ego-pruning technique (Eclipse Phase, p.274) which effectively ceases the existence of the character (although other forks and back-ups may exist, sometimes preserved as a muse). The new ego that results may share some ego-specific traits (Eidetic Memory, Math Wiz, mental Addictions, etc.) but should generate new skills and aptitudes as a starting character. If the new ego retains the old morph, it may be mistaken for its old self, and run into difficulties from old lovers, enemies, debts, social stigma, etc.

Using Death-of-Self

Practically, Death-of-Self is a convenient way for players and gamemasters to modify a character that just isn’t working—the build is wrong, the morph is good but the skills were ill-chosen, too many negative traits, circumstances have rendered the character difficult to play, or the player simply doesn’t care to play that specific character anymore. Death-of-Self provides a quick transition between the old character and the new one, to keep the game flowing. For NPCs, the story possibilities are considerable, as the loss of self in this manner has been a popular science fiction theme in stories such as Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man or Bruce Sterling’s The Artificial Kid.