109: Apsych

ENTRY 109: Apsych

There have been many efforts to define transhumanity, to find some universal common ground that unites everyone on some basic, fundamental level—not in an abstract sense, but as a real material denominator. Scientist-philosophers have mapped the brain, dissected the process of memory, explored the thresholds of consciousness in every morph of every spectrum of transhumanity, looking for the link, the pattern, the signal, the combination of things that differentiates human intelligence from…something else. Some think they’ve found it, their peers generally think they’re full of shit. No one has been able to definitively isolate and prove that they this universal key to human consciousness even exists.

Except that it can be taken away.

Apsych is one of the more frightening expressions of the exsurgent virus, because the change it makes is so subtle that the mechanism is still unclear, and researchers who have had a chance to study the effects are still debating what it does, but as near as can be determined the infection leads to ego death—the catastrophic and irreversible cessation of human intelligence. Aside from a slight spike in certain neurotransmitter levels, there is no apparent physical mechanism to the change; exploratory surgery has shown that the individual biomorphs afflicted are still perfectly functional, the brain still receiving and recording sensory input—indeed, all the memories of the original ego are still intact, encoded in the grey matter or cyberbrain. But the ego that once caused that body to move and feel and think is just…gone.

The current best guess by researchers is that apsych may be an incomplete form of the exsurgent virus, originally intended to rewrite egos into sleeper agents. The alternative is a bit more stark: apsych is a killswitch, a weapon of genocide designed to dispose of transhumanity when it has finished serving its purpose. A minority opinion, generally held by exsurgent terrorists, is that apsych actually frees the ego somehow, leaving the morph behind.

Mechanics

Stage 1 (initial infection to 1 day):

Upon infection, the individual gains 1 mental stress per hour, manifesting as an increased tendency toward daydreaming. Minor physical symptoms—slight headache, heightened blood pressure, and stiff neck are common. During this stage the character is highly infectious to other biomorphs.

Stage 2 (1 day to 2 days):

After 24 hours, the character begins to suffer blackouts, initially only a few seconds, but with periods increasing geometrically during the day. Early symptoms appear to coincide with epilepsy, and treatment with antiepileptic drugs can extend this stage almost indefinitely, though most morphs develop a tolerance within a few months.

Stage 3 (2 days+):

At this stage, the character’s ego is gone, and their morph is just an empty shell. Forks in cortical stacks retrieved after this point are typically corrupted and irretrievable. The character is essentially dead, even if their morph is still breathing. At this stage the morph is no longer infected; the apsych virus rapidly breaks down and is no longer present in their tissues. If the morph has a cyberbrain, a new fork (even a copy of the old ego) can be downloaded into it.

108: Kentotis Masamiliano

ENTRY 108: Kentotis Masamiliano

Scholars have long speculated on the origin of transhumanity’s religiosity in sociology, psychology, and biology. Whatever the answer, the theistic impulse is not a simplistic drive dictated by any one region of the biological brain or aspect of the ego; the ability and desire to believe in supernature appears to be a part of transhuman nature, tied into fundamental functions like pattern recognition and abstract thinking. To alter or remove the human penchant for religion is to change what it means to be human—a prospect which until recently transhumanity did not have the technology to attempt, and even now only a daring few psychosurgeons have begun efforts to “correct” what they see as one of transhumanity’s central flaws.

Kentotis Masamiliano is an exhuman scholar of religion, neuroscience, and psychosurgery, an explorer of the transhuman mind who seeks as their quiet goal to isolate and eradicate the religious impulse. Following the Transhumanist brand of philosophy, Kentotis abides by a moral framework arrived at through reasoned discourse, absent of the trappings of religion, and generally performs their experimental psychosurgical treatments only on willing patients who have a full understanding of the process they are about to undergo—though in extreme cases where Kentotis feels the individual’s quality of life is detrimentally impacted by extreme religiosity and unable to give informed consent, they may act in what they believe is the patient’s best interest.

Unfortunately, one such “emergency intercession” performed during the course of a standard treatment to correct an eating disorder forced Kentotis to flee Luna and assume a nomadic practice while maintaining as engaged with the scientific community as possible.

COG	COO	INT	REF	SAV	SOM	WIL	MOX
27	15	16	15	10	10	20	-
INIT	SPD	LUC	TT	IR	DUR	WT	DR
6	1	40	8	80	40	8	60

Morph: Synth

Skills: Academics: Neuroscience 80, Academics: Psychology 80, Academics: Religion 75, Deception 40, Interests: Mental Disabilities 60, Interests: Religious Sects 55, Interests: Synthetic Personalities 60, Interfacing 50, Investigation 50, Kinesics 55, Language: Native German 86, Language: English 66, Medicine: General Practice 50, Networking: Criminals 25, Networking: Scientists 66, Perception 45, Profession: Religious Scholar: 60, Programming 60, Protocol 45, Psychosurgery 80, Research 70

Implants: Access Jacks, Basic Biomods, Basic Mesh Inserts, Cortical Stack, Cyberbrain, Mnemonic Augmentation

Mobility System: Walker (4/20)

Traits: Armor (6/6), Black Mark (Lunars, Level 2), Social Stigma (Clanking Masses), Uncanny Valley

Using Kentotis Masamiliano

Kentotis lives something of a double life: on one hand a respected scholar and scientist actively engaged in research, debate, and publication, and on the other hand a highly skilled blackmarket psychosurgeon. Either or both of these aspects may be useful, depending on how the gamemaster chooses to use Kentotis. As a scholar and scientist, Ken makes a good contact to consult for any adventure involving religion and/or psychosurgery, a target for hypercorp extraction, the producer of some valuable research, or the doctor with a dark secret in an NPC ensemble. As a blackmarket psychosurgeon Ken is more likely to be an asset that the PCs may be directed to (if they need blackmarket psychosurgery), or the target or villain of a piece where Ken’s experimentation has gotten out of hand.

Ken’s psychosurgical techniques to remove religiosity from the transhuman ego are as yet still in their early stages, although refined enough to generally avoid permanent damage. While Ken offers the treatment to any client that shows interest, they will not perform the psychosurgery on anyone unwillingly unless the subject shows signs of a severe religion-based mental disorder such as scrupulosity. The exact effects of Masamiliano’s imperfect treatment are up to the gamemaster, but mechanically often involve Edited Memories (to remove or dampen any strong religious experiences) and Neural Damage (to remove the ability to experience religious ecstasy). At the GM’s discretion, this treatment may provide the character a +10 modifier on tests where someone is attempting to convert them to a religion or belief.

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.

106: Modular Ganges

ENTRY 106: Modular Ganges

Trailing from the outskirts of New Varansis are a series of triangular arches, fifteen feet at the apex, and between them are sloping transparent walls through which a ribbon of gleaming blue can be glimpsed, and down each bank of this captive river bounce individual pilgrims and tourists. Sometimes visitors may even catch the rare cremation ceremonies, where the ashes of the pious deceased are immersed in the river for their salvation, and then almost immediately removed by scuttling filter-bots so the waters run pure as Lunar ice-melt once again.

One of the major community projects of the ethnic religious communities in New Varanasi on Luna is the recreation of the sacred river Ganges—eventually. Given that it is not currently feasible to reproduce the entire 2,000+ kilometer river in scale on the lunar surface, devotees of the project have embarked on a more workable approach, stringing together a series of 100-meter-long self-sustained habitat bubbles with separate airlocks for foot traffic along the riverbank and water locks that permit continuous waterflow from one module to the next. Each section has separate solar powers and back batteries for power, temperature control, oxygen supply, air filters, water pumps, and filtration system managed by an AGI. Like with most distributed habitat projects, in the event that a micrometeorite strike or other such incident punctures one or more of the bubbles, the remainder of the river network will automatically seal itself off to prevent loss in the non-damaged modules.

Currently, there are fifty-two sections of the Modular Ganges, for a total of 5.2 kilometers of river. Artists and ecologists are sculpting the first twenty modules into an arboretum, filled with traditional Indian flora to grace the walking trail. Long term goals for the project include a re-establishment of a freshwater ecosystem, including the eventual reintroduction of the Ganges river dolphin via cloning, though pragmatic estimates suggest that the river may take generations to complete at the current rate. Still, for the time being the ethnic communities in New Varanasi that view the river as sacred and the Modular Ganges River Trust, which maintains and extends the sight, has authority on all public and private usage of the river.

Seeds

• Not everyone in New Varanasi is in favor of the Modular Ganges, with some traditionalists considering it an affront to the true sacred river which (presumably) still exists on Earth and some non-believers that think it simply a waste of resources and sentiment. To this end, a group of local art provocateurs ask the PC’s help for a monumental prank—rearranging six segments of the modular river into a self-contained loop, an “infinite river.” All they need is some industrial vehicles and a big distraction…
• Citing concerns over radiation exposure to regular hikers, the Modular Ganges River Trust is exploring the possibility of partially burying the modules. A test module (#53) in the new configuration was placed at the end of the line and seemed to work perfectly, but soon operation malfunctions became apparent throughout the Modular Ganges as temperature and air controls became erratic, sometimes toxic. The Trust suspects a hacker or even a rogue AGI, and wishes to hire the player characters to find and eliminate whatever is causing the problem. This is a high-profile assignment that’s good for a bit of cred and rep.

105: Blazespiders

ENTRY 105: Blazespiders

Ecological controls in living habitats require finesse and patience, at least for the least intrusive and most economical means. Neo-avian habitats and scum barges in particular tend to suffer from recurrent insect unwanted infestations of ticks, lice, and weevils—personal pests whose populations expand tremendously without natural predators, but most large-scale means of eradication involve chemicals or radiation that are toxic to transhumans as well, or at least undesired. So instead of trying to eliminate the bad bugs, the neo-avians of Mahogany implemented a two-fold approach to suborn the pesky critters and control their population.

Mahogany pest populations were selectively interbred with genetically modified specimens to produce a hybrid species that produces photoproteins—the chemical luminescence making the tiny specimens easier to identify. Then the neo-avians introduced a predator arachnid species designed to target the spectrum of light put out by the glowing lice, ticks, and so forth. Additional ecological controls are required to track and maintain the balance between the population, but Mahogany habitat’s bug problem has dropped significantly without needing to resort to chemical agents, and is entering trial periods in other neo-avian habitats.

A side-effect of the designer spiders are the webs they weave, which incorporate the excess photoproteins they intake from their prey. The result are startlingly beautiful webs, growing in dark dusty corners where few people disturb them, and under the leaves and between the leaves under the dark forest canopy of Mahogany. It is these pale glowing cobwebs that have given the Mahogany spider its most popular nickname: the blazespider.

Seeds

• A corpse has been found on a slow transport from Mahogany to the player character’s habitat—a desiccated, mummified thing covered in blazespider webs. The cause of death is unknown, and tensions are flaring in the habitat as people start to come down sick. Someone hires the PCs to look into the blazespiders aboard the ship, which should not have been allowed past Mahogany’s biological quarantine—unless the former incumbent circumvented those safeguards because they were smuggling something else…
• A legal dispute has arisen between Mahogany, which holds the rights to the blazespider genome, and Titanian microcorp Attercorp which breeds the transgenic spiders to brew a specialty cosmetic/stimulant called “Attercop.” Jurisdictional differences mean the suit is unlikely to come to a quick resolution, so Mahogany hires the player characters to contaminate the Attercorp stock with a bacterium that will break down photoproteins—then Mahogany can sell the cure along and make the licensing fee part of the deal. If the PCs refuse, another group is hired for the same job. Unfortunately, the contaminated batch of Attercop hits the market and causes fatalities, and the authorities blame the PCs.
• A mentally unstable ghost-morph name Piotr Benevich was bitten by an experimental blazespider while touring a lab. While the spider was not venomous or radioactive, the bite (and the characteristic glowing bitewounds) has triggered a psychotic break in Piotr, who believes he is infected with blazespider DNA. Piotr’s aunt and uncle contact the PCs and ask for them to find and restrain him before he can do any harm to himself or others.

104: Maya Undo

ENTRY 104: Maya Undo

Oldthink psychology and spirituality liked to breakdown the human ego, to posit different divisions of mind and soul—id, ego, superego, ka, ba, oversoul, conscious and unconscious, &c. These were frameworks grasping at a self-perpetuaing organization of data, a continuous consciousness aware of itself that arose from and fed back into an organic system they did not even begin to comprehend. For some people, the concepts helped—crude tools from which psychosurgeons and neurochemists fashioned finer theories—but in this day and age it’s dangerous to take such concepts literally.

In another life, Maya Undo had a different name and a whole host of labels she called herself by; she remembers that much. She was considered a berdache, two-spirits, man and woman in one, and that left her conflicted as to her identity, the role she was raised to play, what she wanted for her self and her community. There are a lot of coulda-woulda-shoulda-beens on what Maya did next; gender reassignment, psychosurgery, and rebellion generally top the list. Instead, Maya Prime decided to cut that second spirit right out. Two forks, heavily pruned—one to live her life, and the other to become Maya Undo. Then right before she committed ego-death, Maya Prime egocast that “bad” fork as far away as she could.

So Maya came into being fully-formed but not sound of mind. Maya Prime had seen fit to unload more than her lesbian inclination and a butch attitude; Maya Undo came into being with all the bad memories and little things that simmered underneath the surface. She knew her family from all the slights and insults and cold silences they’d shown her, but none of the love and good times; her first boyfriend exists only as a confused collection of bumbling, invasive encounters that left her sore, violated and unsatisfied. Her inheritance from the old Maya was all the questions and all the doubt she had ever known, all the opportunities she’d missed, all the secrets she’d burned to keep, and all the shame and tears.

So maybe it’s no surprise that Maya Undo is a bit of a mess, but she’s strong too. She makes the art that old Maya Prime never could; rises above the dark past that is her inheritance.

COG	COO	INT	REF	SAV	SOM	WIL	MOX
15	13	15	13	10	14	15	-

Morph: Infomorph

Skills: Academics: Gender Studies 35, Art: Electronic Media 55, Art: Electronic Music 55, Deception 35, Hardware: Electronics 45, Impersonation 45, Infiltration 50, Infosec 36, Interests: Experimental Music 65, Interfacing 52, Intimidation 3, Kinesics 40, Language: Native Cherokee 85, Language: English 55, Networking: Autonomists 50, Networking: Firewall 55, Networking: Hypercorps 45, Perception 50, Profession: DJ 50, Profession: VJ 50, Profession: Music Producer 45, Programming 40, Research 33

Advantages: Allies (Support Group), Pain Tolerance (2)

Disadvantages: Addiction (Narcoalgorithms, Moderate), Edited Memories, Mental Disorder (Androphobia), Neural Damage (Mood Swings), Social Stigma (AGI)

Using Maya Undo

Maya is a broken bird, and she knows it. Her personal history, what there is of it, is a disaster; she’s left a string of broken hearts behind her because she has trust issues; and her head is full of bad memories that color her reactions. The thing is, she is actively trying to rise above what she was—she is afraid of men, but she knows that is not because men have done anything bad to her, but because all of the memories she got from Maya Prime are bad ones. So while she may instinctively shy from male characters, she will work with them. As a friendly NPC, Maya is a good contact in the music and media scene, and a Firewall stringer that can provide local intel or even backup hacker support in a pinch. As an antagonist, Maya’s past will probably drive her actions; for example Maya Undo could hire the PCs to help track down her “sister” fork, or that Maya could ask the PC’s help in putting an end to Maya Undo’s harassment and intrusion into her life, or because Maya Undo holds some vital piece of information that Maya Prime knew. If either of the Mayas go off the rails, they could target the other for a forced reintegration to get back the memories they’re missing.

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.