219: Kuronaga

ENTRY 219: Kuronaga

Among them, not of them.

- Kuronaga mantra

Not all brinkers rush to the edges of the solar system. Isolation is relative; even brinker communities out on the farthest reaches still exist within the sphere of transhuman radio noise, and must turn their receivers deaf to the unwanted signals. Some brinkers have taken this idea further: a philosophical separation more than a physical one. To exist within transhuman habitats, but not to be a part of those communities. They walk unseen, unchipped, untracked; dead space that moves with the crowds and currents of transhuman traffic on Mars, Titan, and Luna, avoiding checkpoints and identity checks. They move among the rest of transhumanity, and take on the outer guise appropriate to their habitats: anonymous, circumspect clothing of no value that can be discarded at a moment’s notice. They exist, but they do not engage; they seek neither the responsibilities or benefits of citizenship, but scrounge and steal and accept what they need. They have been called an aimless nation of ninja, rootless and unattached, who commit suicide if uncovered—better death of body and mind than to live as part of the vast systems that the rest of transhumanity has trapped themselves in. Some call them shadow brinkers, but most on the Mesh know them as the Kuronaga.

Little enough is known of them, save that they are an insular, nomadic group with their own culture and philosophy which advocates mental separation from the mass of transhumanity. The few discovered so far are always self-employed and display a wide variety of skills, though they eschew rep and currency systems except when absolutely necessary; mostly they frequent scum barges and crowded habitats where the press of transhumanity makes it more difficult for even universal surveillance to pick out every individual. All of the suspected kuronaga encountered so far have had a dead switch that they have activated when they have been found out; an examination of what is left of their cortical stacks shows the remains of what may be 4-5 ghostrider modules. Social scientists theorize that every “individual” Kuronaga discovered so far is in fact a clade of closely related egos; each carries their nation or family in their head, as it were, and need never be alone—even when surrounded by the mass of transhumanity.

Using the Kuronaga

Despite the widely-held beliefs of those few social scientists that believe in the Kuronaga, the shadow brinkers cannot exist among transhumanity and refrain from all transhuman contact—though they do a damn good job of it, considering the difficulties. The Kuronaga viewpoint is that the vast majority of transhumans are trapped in the social systems that they themselves have built, systems that track and control them. The Kuronaga see themselves as above and beyond such systems, and so able to move between them and use them to their own advantage.

One possible Eclipse Phase campaign might have all the player characters as a single Kuronaga, pooling their points on the morph and equipment but maintaining their own distinct skills and identities—though to the world, they would present only false faces, never their true identity. Such a campaign has the benefit that a single physical character is easier to write adventures for—look at various adventure game books—but requires a degree of cooperation among the player characters to determine the morph’s actions and who is in control at any given time.

218: Grendal's Loop

ENTRY 218: Grendal’s Loop

Reachable through the Discord Gate, Grendal’s Loop is a set of gate coordinates with atypical properties. All probes and living gatecrashers who have passed through the gate to Grendal’s Loop have returned 6-60 seconds later. Individuals have reported no indication of lost time, and recording devices remain active for the entire period of the journey. Gatecrashers who have passed through Grendal’s Loop have described an inability to focus properly on sensations, but describe a sensation of movement and fleeting glimpses of dozens of exoplanets and exotic landscapes, ending when they arrive back on the platform at the Discord Gate. Sensors seem to confirm these impressions: video brings back a blur of images and the only sound is a low-volume, muted static; efforts to map the loop with sonar, radar, lidar, and t-rays give only confused and difficult to parse images, but temperature, pressure, and gravimetric readings however do not vary at all.

The most popular theory for Grendal’s Loop, born out by exacting dissection of the recorded data, is that the gate address quickly sequences the individuals entering the gate through dozens or even hundreds of other gates in a series of microsecond transactions. The exact sequence of worlds seems to be random or pseudorandom, but the gatecrashers exist on the world for only a split second before the gate shuffles them on to the next one, too fast for gasses to exchange or sound to properly propagate. Still, if the theory is correct then gatecrashers may still be vulnerable to extreme changes of gravity and sudden bursts of radiation, so new gatecrashers taking Grendal’s Loop are now given a travel advisory to that effect.

Seeds

• Ultimate researcher Gal Feuer believes they have found a way to “break” Grendal’s Loop by using a time dilation awareness protocol and a wireless gate dialer prototype. The good news is: it appears to have worked. The bad news is: now the researcher is lost. The Go-nin have offered a substantial reward for a group of gatecrashers willing to go through Grendal’s Loop with their own dialer prototypes, find Gal Feuer and bring them back.
• Recently, gatecrashers exploring Grendal’s Loop have been coming back maimed and injured. Rumors have started that there is somehow something “stuck” in the loop with them—and that perhaps the Loop is a prison that transhumans have inadvertently been opening and closing. The Go-nin wish a group of private investigators to look into these rumors, and see if there is any truth to them.
• Joyce Friel believes that Grendal’s Loop is an inherent instability in the gate system, and that continued access of it will eventually cause all of the gates to malfunction or even self-destruct. She advocates complete forbiddance of further uses of Grendal’s Loop, but so far no-one has taken her or her research seriously. To prove her point, she has programmed a worst-case variant of the Grendal’s Loop gate code that, if it works, would permanently damage the Discord Gate—and she wishes to hire the player characters to install it. 

217: Gash

ENTRY 217: Gash

Nanoinfection-based birth control did not exactly take off when first introduced. By the time they came around, various forms of birth control implants for both men and women had been around for decades and offered very good rates of protection and hormone balance, so the early nanite systems offered few advantages beyond the ability to be programmed remotely—and that turned into a disadvantage during the much-publicized case of a computer virus that caused six transhumans to spontaneously abort when their deactivated but still present nanite birth control systems were caused to reactivate.

Still, after the technology was mostly abandoned to commercial development, amateurs and hobbyists took up the challenge. Most of them focused on adding additional functionality, sensors, and especially security controls. A number of workable products made it past the alpha stage of development and were made available on the Mesh for personal testing…which is when the first cases of gash were reported.

Exact details on the gash nanoinfection are obscure, even today. It is known to commonly spread through unprotected (or perhaps more accurately insufficiently protected) sexual intercourse, with the nanites able to pass through latex and most other porous materials. Victims are subject to irregular hormone surges often resulting in acne, mood swings, bloating, and sensitivity or development of secondary sexual characteristics such as beards and breasts. The single most common symptom is a periodic shedding of the urinary tract wall, resulting in a bloody or pinkish discharge, which is especially likely to occur immediately after sexual contact. This is believed to have been an effort by the designer to “flush out” possible urinary tract infections, but has become widely known as “the artificial period” or even “the male period,” even though the infection affects all transhuman biomorphs regardless of gender.

Efforts to eliminate gash nanoinfections have been stymied by the rather short duration—most instances last only two weeks before they deteriorate to the point of ineffectiveness—as well as by the security countermeasures programmed into the nanites, which makes remotely deactivating or controlling them very difficult. Still, a single sexually-active transhuman infected with gash can represent a tremendous health risk to a small habitat, and Mesh sleuths are working to track down the afflicted source code and work on effective treatment methods.

Mechanics

Gash is effectively a long-lasting nanotoxin (Eclipse Phase, p.324), with the symptoms given above—these are more embarrassing and personally distressing than long-lasting or mechanically relevant. Nanodetectors can detect this nanotoxin, and nanophages provide complete immunity to infection unless the character chooses to allow it.

Using Gash

Gash is nasty, unpleasant, and often a terrible surprise, and a gamemaster can ask little more for what is effectively a science fiction STD. As with pregnancy and cancer, sexually-transmitted diseases rarely form a part of the typical gaming experience, and when they do it is usually more of a plot point than an actual health threat or the main focus of the game—and so gash has been provided to assist gamemasters that want such a plot point in their game. The most common use of gash in a game is either for one of the PCs to catch it (as their special bonus prize for sexy fun time) and have to figure out what is happening to them and how to cure it (which mainly involves a treatment to counteract the symptoms and wait for the nanoinfection to degrade to ineffectiveness), or for infections to be loose on the habitat and having to track down who or what is responsible and stop it. Other options are of course possible: a particularly nasty version of gash could actually pose a serious health risk, or a particularly lurid villain might deliberately infect certain individuals in an effort to catch their genetic material during a “discharge;” it is up to the gamemaster how anatomically detailed and gross they care to make their plotlines. As a plot point, gash can also make an interesting way to “track” a sexually-active target, by tracing them through their infected partners.

216: Friederich Alba

ENTRY 216: Friederich Alba

“Everybody’s game for tinkering with the basic building blocks of life, but then you try to tweak the exsurgent virus into an aerosol and ‘ooh, you’ve gone too far.’ Pussies.”
- Friederich Alba, on trial after the mass exsurgent outbreak on Junction

In every conflict, there are opportunists—jackals that scavenge the battlefields and play on desperation for their own profit at the expense of others. Friederich Alba has been called a jackal, and he wears a jackal’s face, but he prefers to think of himself as a daring and open-minded scientist, one willing to delve where others fear to tread. His area of specialization is the technology of the TITANs, and he is one of the main movers in the black market, trading in scavenged weaponry, robots, data, and even individuals infected with the exsurgent virus. Wanted by several habitats for the material he deals with, as well as various accessory charges involving violating quarantine zones and evading taxes and tariffs, the jackal-headed Friederich Alba normally keeps on the move, two steps ahead of his pursuers, using his network of contacts and business associates to help him plan his next transaction and his next experiment.

COG	COO	INT	REF	SAV	SOM	WIL	MOX
18	15	25	15	15	20	30	-
INIT	SPD	LUC	TT	IR	DUR	WT	DR
6	1	60	10	120	40	8	60

Morph: Synth

Skills: Academics: Genetics (Exsurgent Virus) 80, Academics: History (The Fall) 50, Academics: Neuroscience 50, Beam Weapons 27, Deception 40, Free Fall 33, Hardware: Robotics 40, Interests: Black Markets 50, Interests: Exsurgent Threats 40, Interests: TITANs Tech 65, Interfacing 35, Investigation 50, Kinesics 15, Language: Native German 95, Language: English 80, Language: Turkish 85, Networking: Criminals 75, Networking: Scientists 75, Perception 55, Profession: Black Marketeer 55, Profession: Smuggling Tricks 45, Programming 60, Protocol (Criminal) 35, Research 55, Unarmed Combat 36

Implants: Access Jacks, Basic Mesh Inserts, Cortical Stack, Cosmetic Modification (Jackal-headed morph based on statues of Anubis), Cyberbrain, Cyberclaws, Fractal Digits, Hidden Compartment, Mnemonic Augmentation, Nanoscopic Vision

Mobility System: Walker (4/20)

Traits: Armor (6/6), On the Run, Social Stigma (Clanking Masses)

Using Friederich Alba

A robotic Anubis that deals in TITAN-tech, Friederich Alba is intelligent but callow and mostly unprincipled and with very few scruples. He has made a niche for himself in dealing with TITANs-tech for collectors, and has one of the most extensive private databases of TITAN science and technology in the solar system. For any of these reasons, Alba might make a decent mid-level villain for the PCs to apprehend or foil, or someone they have to deal with or extract information from as part of a larger plot involving TITAN-based technologies. Player characters that don’t mind dabbling in the forbidden themselves might even seek him out to buy or sell some scavenged TITAN-tech. Because his goods are a limited market, Alba sets the price and tries not to veer from it—he’s not terribly good at negotiation, and knows it; if anyone tries to wheedle him down he’s more likely to walk away from the deal than to stick around and get fleeced.

215: Exonatural

ENTRY 215: Exonatural

Powdered Iktomi webstone goes for 300 credits a gram on Luna, said to be good for skin and long life. Bile peat from the Banshee bog-habitats on Luca II is sold dried on Titan, steeped in hot water to make Banshee tea. Mishipizheu “amber” is secreted from the creatures of the boiler reefs, and is valued as much as an aromatic base for incense and perfumes as for its mild antibiotic properties. Bluewood shavings and bark samples are claimed throughout the system to have mild euphoric properties, though this is a careful marketing ploy, as the immediate effects of consuming them are the result of spraying the woody shavings with synthetic cannabinoids; the rumored long-term hallucinogenic effects are the result of exotic tumors growing in the brain from extended abuse.

Simply put, there is a demand for natural products from exoplanets, and with so little relatively known about these products and their exact chemistry, a good deal of the material on the market consists of fakes and adulterated products. “Exomedicine” is the order of the day, even among several otherwise rational biomorphs, who tout the real and imagined benefits of every piece of alien grass and dirt that comes back through a gate—which means a good income for various gatecrashers and light-fingered lab-techs, but hard on the consumer to sift through the material for authentic exonatural products.

And there is a need for Mishipezheu amber and Lucan bonsai stamens. The loss of Earth led to a tremendous loss of biodiversity in the solar system, and chemists cannot hope to recreate and commercially synthesize many of the natural products that are now quite scarce—aromatic base notes like musk, rubber latex, petroleum, flavorful herbs and spices like angelica, black mustard, chicory, lemon grass, orris root, neem, and spikenard, as well as their various aromatic hydrocarbons and essential oils. While exonatural products cannot replicate these products exactly, they do provide a welcome expansion to transhumanity’s diminished catalogue of natural compounds and materials.

Using Exonaturals

Gatecrasher hypercorps balance the lucrative trade in exonaturals on the open market against the profits of scientific exploration, and more often than not science wins out, with gatecrashers ordered to bring back more data and less weeds and rocks. That being said, everyone recognizes the demand for these goods, and most savvy gatecrashers negotiate clauses in their contracts for a certain amount and type of exonatural products that they can return with and sell on the open market to their own profit—generally, these clauses are for around 500 grams of material. Smaller gatecrashers with less resources to compensate gatecrashers for their skills and the risks they take sometimes offer more generous terms up to a couple kilograms, but as the saying goes “The more you can bring back, the less chance you’re coming back.”

The buying and selling of exonatural products in the solar system is an unregulated grey market where ludicrous claims abound and any number of fake products abound, from cocaine-calcium carbonate mixes posing as “Iktomi webstone” to dried leaves soaked in benzene and dyed blue sold as “bluewood incense.” Most of these are fairly harmless, all of them are tremendously overpriced given their relative worth. Still, for microcorps that cannot afford the time to stage a gatecrashing mission of their own, many have their agents in the exonaturals market looking for “the real thing” and willing to pay for it.

214: Anglers

ENTRY 214: Anglers

Transhumanity’s defining traits are what make it most vulnerable. Most every animal on Earth and beyond exhibits basic drives like hunger, fear, or lust, but few species show signs of curiosity, compassion, reverence, greed, and vengeance. So perhaps it was natural that the TITANs sought to turn the very traits that define humanity into traps that destroy them.

Anglers are TITAN-crafted robots made to look like large multilegged animals with a shiny black synthetic leather hide—usually Earth-based quadrupeds like horses, bulls, and elk, though other versions have been identified, including a three-legged ungulate of some sort that was most prolific on Mars. Where the anglers’ heads should be however is always a flat expanse of skin. Reports and video surveillance during the Fall showed their modus operandi: if possible, a small pack of anglers look for lone victims, working together to separate one biomorph from the rest of a group. The victim is disabled with attacks to the lower body, and when the victim can no longer flee quickly enough, the smooth skin of the angler’s “neck” will open, and snaking tentacles will drag the victim into the gaping space. The skin then closes about the lower torso, leaving the victim’s head and upper torso free, in grim parody of a centaur or similar creature of myth.

From this point on the victim is essentially a prisoner of the angler. The lower torso is dissolved and recycled into nutrients to keep the captive upper torso alive and awake while invasive implants begin integrating the victim into the anglers’ system. Anglers use their prisoners to attract additional victims—“angling” by have the captive upper torso wave, shout, cry, call out for help or scream. At other times the angler seizes control of the upper torso like a puppeteer, directing the torso to manipulate airlock controls or utilize hand weapons. Most biomorphs can last up to eight weeks before infection or starvation gets to them, and anglers have been known to raid supplies that keep their prisoners alive for nearly six months before being brought down.

After the Fall, most anglers are assumed to have been destroyed, but the possibility exists for lone anglers—or even a small pack—to exist in the wilds throughout the system.

Mechanics

Anglers use the same stats as Warbots (Eclipse Phase, p.383), but with a Durability of 40 and a Wound Threshold of 8. They cannot use beam or kinetic weapons unless they have a prisoner with functional hands and arms to manipulate the device. Prisoners of anglers are best considered NPCs; due to their lower torso being removed and their systems compromised by the angler, they have half their normal Durability and gain the Puppet Sock augmentation if they did not have it already.

Seed

• There is a legend on the ‘Mesh that anglers were based by the TITANs on an experimental centaur-morph technology—and that the original prototype for this still exists, buried somewhere in the Zone on Mars or some other ruin. If it exists, then the proto-angler would have a muse-like AGI and when integrated the biomorph would have full control of the half-synthmorph body, with the angler relegated to a “hindbrain” ghostrider module that helps coordinate the extra limbs.

213: Demi Wannah

ENTRY 213: Demi Wannah

“We are as we make ourselves to be.”

- Tattoo on the back of Demi Wannah’s neck

Demi Wannah was born with no legs, just a pair of crippled stumps. Her parents abandoned her, and the overburdened habitat she grew up in during the Fall consigned her to an institution, where her legs were amputated, she was sterilized, and her budding breasts burned off so that she would be less of a burden. When she was old enough, she built herself some new legs, and escaped.

The past is a datafile to Demi Wannah that she has archived and left forgotten. Her attention is on the now, on her work—mostly freelancer graphic design for local microcorps, and some custom design for synthmorph and cyberlimbs. With the new lower torsos of her own design she walks, scuttles, crawls, slithers, fucks, kicks, skips, jumps, and every other thing just as anyone else does, and never takes it for granted. With her new “saucer” augmentation, she even has limited flight via vectored thrust, though it makes her airsick.

COG	COO	INT	REF	SAV	SOM	WIL	MOX
20	19	14	15	12	18	21	-
INIT	SPD	LUC	TT	IR	DUR	WT	DR
5	1	42	8	84	30	6	45

Morph: Flat

Skills: Academic: Bioengineering 60, Art: Architecture 40, Art: Graphic Design 45, Free Fall (Microgravity) 30, Hardware: Robotics 36, Interests: Custom Implants 60, Interests: DIY Augmentation 60, Interests: Unique Morphs 60, Language: Native Portuguese 84, Language: English 50, Language: Spanish 66, Networking: Hypercorps 30, Networking: Media 30, Perception 60, Profession: Graphic Designer 65, Protocol 33, Unarmed Combat (Subdual) 28

Implants: Access Jacks, Basic Mesh Inserts, Multi-Tasking (x4), ModularTorso*

Disadvantages: No Cortical Stack

* Unique augmentation; Demi Wannah’s legs and lower torso have been replaced with a modular slot that can be fitted into custom-designed mobility systems based on synthmorph designs with different mobility rates and augmentations. Among the lower torsos available to Demi include a bipedal walker (4/16), arachnoid walker (4/24), thrust vector “saucer” (8/40), and snake (4/16, 8/28 rolling).

Using Demi Wannah

Demi bears the scars of her past, and the handmade augmentations that are her future. As a contact or an ally, she can provide the PCs some custom augmentations or put them in contact with someone else that can. As an antagonist, her early upbringing has affected her ability to form close relationships and relate to other people—she has a tendency to steal and betray people, imagining that they are going to steal and betray her. As a plot hook, most actions will resolve either around Demi’s past or her work designing custom synthmorph limbs.

Seed

• People start dying on the player’s habitat. After some sleuthing, their only common factor is their past with Demi—the doctors, nurses, and administrators who bureaucratically condemned and mutilated her. When the PCs confront her, she does not struggle or seek to explain. If they turn her in, they are given a small reward—and according to the consensus of the habitat, she will be given a public trial and anyone is allowed to speak for her. The PCs will be asked to attend as witnesses. If they do nothing, she will be mindwiped and the cost of the procedure and her re-education taken out of her belongings—she may even lose her morph entirely.