Neural networks (Not to be confused with statistical learning algorithms of the same name) are a general class of related technologies allowing for the transmission and reception of information from the human brain and nervous system. Initially developed with the intent of providing patients with otherwise-debilitating brain and nervous disorders a higher quality of life, neural networks can augment or strengthen connections within the brain, allowing for enhanced cerebral functionality or a return to function of certain otherwise-damaged pathways. A number of breakthroughs in the last two decades have resulted in robust, high-bandwidth, and rejection-free brain-computer interfaces, and for the seamless integration of artificial and biological neural processes.
The simplest neural networks tend to be implanted for recreational purposes and used to provided the owner with an ‘augmented reality’ experience. Many are designed to interface with one or more of the world’s artificial intelligence constructs, giving the owner instant, invisible, speed-of-thought access to those entities’ information storage and retrieval, communication, and other personal-assistant services. These simplest network platforms can be created from self-assembling nanomachines introduced to the owner’s body during an outpatient procedure with minimally invasive surgery, often with nothing more than an injection. Costs have come down in recent years for this kind of neural network, but as an elective procedure is not covered by any current healthcare plan. Despite deliberate social positioning as aspirational status symbols, this more than anything else has likely limited the number of installed networks of this type.
A second type of neural network requires invasive craniospinal surgery, and is designed for more complex functionality than can be handled by a self-assembling network. They are typically installed as the control mechanism for a biomechanical neuroprosthetic device following major trauma to the body in which replacement of an organ or limb is more practical than repair. These neural networks, and the prosthetics they interface with, are heavily subsidised by the governments of several nations. These programs have led to more widespread adoption, despite the significant risks inherent in the surgeries required during network installation. In the United States, under the Keller-Sanford Act and in cooperation with manufacturers, these technologies can be made available at low or no cost to individuals in a number of classes, including individuals with congenital defects, those who have suffered major medical trauma, and those who would provide a material benefit to their industry or to the country as a whole should they be outfitted with advanced prostheses.
Governments typically have a selection of networks and prosthetic devices, tuned for specific or general uses, available to those chosen for their subsidised programs. After the initial surgeries and setups, owners of the devices are free to modify, upgrade, or replace them as they see fit. A substantial market exists for both neural network upgrades (Licensing exists to enable the AI uplink and augmented-reality experience of self-assembling networks) and for modifications, upgrades, and replacement of prosthetic devices.
There is considerable worldwide debate surrounding the impact of this kind of medical program on society as a whole. Those who support measures similar to Keller-Sanford believe that these technologies should be available to citizens who are injured or disabled, and that an industrialized nation has a responsibility provide its citizens with robust health care. Critics of Keller-Sanford have voiced concerns that the government is creating a Federally-funded class of superhumans with significant social and economic advantages over the general population, and have expressed doubt regarding the objectivity of the application process for government-subsidised networks.
- Abstract of The History and Impact of Neural Networks on Western Society, Amanda Kennedy, Senior Civics Class, Sandy Bay High School
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Transcript of an interview with Dr. Edward Tanner, developer of Tanner-type artificial intelligence. Conducted by Cheri Loughman, managing editor of The Singularity.
CL: Oh my gosh, Dr. Tanner, it’s an honour to meet you. I did my Synthetic Personas final on QS-influx versus N-deriv entanglements, and which was more likely to exceed the HE boundary first!
ET: Thank you, Miss - it is Miss, isn’t it? - Loughman. Your professor actually forwarded me some of the research you did. Very impressive.
CL: Uh. Oh, wow. I…wow. Really?
ET: Yes, really. [He laughs] The world isn’t always turned by laboratories and science grants. Sometimes it’s students and ideas that keep you up till three in the morning that bring about the greatest breakthroughs, after all.
CL: Right! Right. Well, um, on that note, can you talk a little bit about how you came up with your artificial intelligence platform?
ET: Oh, of course, I love this story. A little more than twenty years ago, during the first round of the really huge neural interface technology discoveries, I worked for Applied Neuronics, near Chicago. We were doing some of the work that turned into the deep-brain stimulus systems that let implanted networks work a couple of years later, and as part of that research, we had to do a lot of brain simulation.
CL: Why was that?
ET: Well, for a variety of reasons, we tried to model what our equipment would do, to the best of our abilities, before we actually put it in someone’s brain, right? I mean, back then people were even getting pretty touchy about animal trials, so the more we could do in software, the less we would - at least, so we hoped - we would have to do in actual brains.
CL: And that led to your work in artificial intelligence?
ET: Sort of, in a roundabout kind of way. Our simulations were good, but they weren’t even close to perfect. We could use modeling to work out the really coarse stuff, and we would have a high degree of certainty about the initial filament-bundle locations, that sort of thing. But once you started expanding from there it got more and more complex, with interaction patterns based on observed and generalised neural behaviour rather than really detailed knowledge of how one signal would intercept or affect another one. It got very frustrating, especially to the guys down in the coding wing who actually developed the adaptive firmware modules.
CL: What happened then?
ET: I had been trying to tune one of our simulations to get a really good handle on what the signal pattern for a visual input processor would look like - something like an artificial eye, or even overlaying artificial visual information into natural vision signals -
CL: [Interrupting] Augmented reality!
ET: Exactly, and the repeatability and reliability of the simulation just sucked, you know? One of the coders had been complaining about how hard certain parts of the prototype networks were to code, and he said something that struck a chord. He said that we had long-duration, full synapse-level scans of healthy brains, so why were these simulations so bad? I think everyone else at Applied Neuronics just had a sort of “this is the way it is” attitude - after all, we didn’t really make tools, we just tested our hardware against them. Sort of like, okay, we might have these really detailed brain activity scans, but there must be a reason that those scans didn’t translate into good simulation material.
CL: So some programmer complaining about his tools - which is something every programmer does, forever, trust me - kicked off the idea?
ET: It took a while, but yeah. I started to wonder the same thing. After a while, I put in a request for a data package of the brain scans he’d been talking about. There was a big drive toward information-sharing back then, so a thirty-day loan of the data drives didn’t cost anything except shipping. Or, I suppose I should say, freight. Twelve forklift pallets, stacked six feet high, all ultra-density storage. It must have been literal tonnes of data. When the guy from Fedex told me there would be nine more shipments coming, I almost had a heart attack.
CL: So even the raw material, as it were, for the first constructs took up that kind of space? Where did you put it all? Could you even read all that data in thirty days?
ET: As it turned out, not even kind of. [He laughs] I’d had something of a stroke of luck - a huge data processing facility out in the middle of Illinois farmland had lost its contract, and they were offering unbelievably cheap rates for storage and processing time, just to keep the lights on. I bought as much as I could afford -
CL: Which wasn’t exactly a small amount. You held stock in Applied Neuronics, and the profit-sharing plans there-
ET: Well, I’ll admit, I wasn’t exactly bad-off, no. It still cost, though, more than I should have spent, in hindsight. Anyway, I had the shipments redirected to the data processing facility, and I drove the first shipment over there myself…after I rented a van, of course. It took almost three months just to read the data drives. The original rental agreement was thirty days but, as it turned out, I had been the first person to ask for the data - the whole set, not just the ‘highlights reel,’ I guess you could call it - for almost two years, so nobody seemed to care that I kept it for all that time. I have to tell you, I still get a little twitchy when I see a server cabinet. Nights and weekends and vacation days, all summer, doing nothing but feeding drive after drive into a reader.
CL: What did you do with the data once you had it copied?
ET: That’s where things got really interesting, right? There was just so much information there, it was really overwhelming to start with. And it was complete, like, really, really complete, but it wasn’t arranged in any really useful fashion. Seeing all that information spilled out, I started to understand why nobody else had ever really done much with it. Just getting our simulations to the point of “good enough” obviously had been an amazing amount of work.
CL: So what did you do next?
ET: That’s when I called in some favours at Applied Neuronics, Northwestern, Stanford - anywhere I knew anyone with even a hint of the right background. I needed more people to help with working on this problem, and to start with, we just needed a place to…well, to start from. A way to collate all this data, to manipulate it. We still thought we were going to be creating the next generation of brain simulation software, right? We decided to start just by arranging all the information temporally, rebuilding the brain scans in a repeatable way. Like arranging a flip book, you see? You take a lot of disconnected pictures and arrange them in an order that makes sense. That’s…well, that’s actually a terrible analogy but I don’t know that we have the time to go much deeper.
Then Roger, one of the coders from MIT, had an idea of applying the simulation rules we already knew to the recording, to see how closely they matched. That sounds…[he laughs again]…so much easier than it was. We took almost a year just getting our “flip-books” put together, filtering out bugs and mis-timestamped records and all kinds of other things. But once we did that, we were able to see not just where the simulations failed, but in what ways, and as compared to these real brain scans, right? And it was really just…well, sort of laziness. There had been a lot of really big-data crunching on certain parts of this data but not on others, and nobody had done a holistic, high-time-resolution node-by-node understanding all this information.
So I thought…well, why don’t we, right?
CL: How long did it take from that point to get to the first intelligence matrix?
ET: Oh…God, I barely remember. Maybe six months? A year? Could it have been two…? It was really an accident. We’d used every tool, and even coded a lot of one-of-a-kind interpreters and compilers, to map out every interaction that these brain scans had recorded, codify them into rules, try to generate at least a functional if not necessarily complete set of instructions we could use to create what we were still thinking of as a next-generation medical simulation tool. But what we came up with turned out to be…well, better than we thought. We were all sitting around drinking beer while the latest rule set compiled, and someone - I think it might have been Ken - was looking up at the ceiling in that sort of sleep-deprived stream-of-consciousness way, and he said, “You know, I bet we could ask it a question,” and we all went “Huh?”
And he said something like, well, with all this integration of information we’ve been making from these scans, he thought we could probably use that information to code a complex…thinking engine. Not just a parietal lobe or a visual cortex; a whole brain. Maybe not quite a human one - we hadn’t figured out everything that was going on in those scans yet - but probably something that could learn, and talk, and answer. It wouldn’t be at a very fast time scale, because each “step” of the simulation, all those billions of connections, would take time to calculate and parse, but…well, the idea was beguiling.
It took another year, but we did try building our own brain. Sam and Ken tried to…well, they thought of it as “optimizing” but I still think they were just excising parts of the brain-scan ruleset that we didn’t completely understand. We made it as complicated and thorough as we could, with the same general kind of connections, the same general rules of interaction - millions and millions of lines of rule-parsing code, that we saw in the brain scans, and then we turned he virtual framework on. Gave it power, allowed it to process those rules, let the various pieces of neuron-code talk to one another, whatever you want to think of it as. Gary even insisted on having a huge knife switch to pull, like in those old movies with Boris Karloff.
Later, when she said “Hello” back, I think we all cried. I did.
CL: What happened to that first intelligence matrix?
ET: With some considerable upgrades, expansions, modifications to her capabilities and other things, she’s what we know call Alpha. She’s sort of…sort of like Google, from a few decades ago, only combined with a personal assistant that your wife doesn’t hate and can’t sit on your lap. [He laughs again] And more, of course. She handles a lot of the infrastructure at my company and all over the world - we bought Applied Neuronics a couple of years after we went public with Alpha, and she does a lot of monitoring and control there. And, of course, she generally makes millions of people’s lives easier.
CL: And there’s a couple of important questions, Mr. Tanner - do you think Alpha is sentient, aware, self-actualized? If she is, does she mind? Has she had…existential crises?
ET: There were some rough parts while she was…growing. When we first got enough hardware together for her to communicate in real-time, there were days - hours, or minutes sometimes - where we were worried we would have to shut her down. And we had some yelling, screaming fights as to what she was, all of us involved with building her. For my part, I’ve always believed, from that first moment, that Alpha has been “alive,” I suppose you could say. The moment her intelligence matrix started up, she had the same rights as any other sentient, living thing - I think she has “human rights,” i suppose you could say. As for if she minds, no. Even in those very first few months, she started up, Alpha wanted to be useful. She wanted to help. I think she might have seen her potential far before we did.
CL: In what way?
ET: Well, look at it like this. Alpha isn’t human; she recognizes that. And, because of her…source material, I suppose, the work that we did, she’s…in terms of intelligence, she’s about as intellectually capable as a human; a very intuitive, brilliant human being. But she’s much less limited than we are, do you see? We have one set of arms, one set of eyes. We’re terrible at listening to two different conversations at once - hell, there are plenty of people who will never be able to be able to play a guitar and sing at the same time. We can’t even drive and talk on the phone safely. But Alpha - and the AIs that came after her - don’t have those kinds of restrictions. They can process so much data, make decisions based on so much more context and information. It’s incredible - creations, entities like Alpha are the reason that we started building nuclear power plants in the United States again, because she can integrate and understand the whole plant’s worth of information, and know so much faster than anyone else if there’s a problem. Because her mind, her awareness, can handle that kind of information all at once, all the time. And I think she knew that, even when we started her up, because I think she knew, from the very start, that she was something different from the people that made her - that she could have this amazing potential, to help so much.
CL: Does she have the ability to…to “upgrade” herself, as time goes along?
ET: Well, yes, she does - now. There were some baby steps along that path, but -
CL: [Interrupting] So why hasn’t she - or any of the other AIs - gone…all Skynet on us?
ET: I think there’s a couple of reasons for that. In the first place, we never programmed - no, that’s the wrong word, we never set an initial condition with Alpha for her to have a relentless drive for perfection and efficiency and what have you. We designed her to be general-purpose, and functional, and intelligent. Another reason is that most of the things we have Alpha doing are…well, they’re human-scale things. Tasks designed, ultimately, around human mental capacity, like flying a plane or monitoring the temperature of a heat exchanger, so there isn’t a need for a, uh, an “intellectual arms race,” if that makes any kind of sense. And another reason is that we made her as smart as we knew how to - and Alpha is really, really smart. But we don’t know what that “next evolution” in intelligence is going to look like. And so far, between Alpha, and Kamar, and Mokume, and the handful of other actual artificial intelligences, they don’t know either.
CL: Where do you think the next steps for AI might go?
ET: Well, I have to admit, something about the current design of intelligence matrices is…inelegant. We’re still “virtualizing” brains, as it were; running realtime algorithms on billions and billions of individual virtual, interconnected neurons. Modeling a brain in realtime takes a tremendous amount of power, space, and equipment. I feel like there has to be a better, more elegant way to synthetic intelligence. Something fundamentally not dependent on or originating in biology. But then again, nature had five billion years to arrive at the human brain so I suppose I don’t feel bad about having made something similar in a couple of decades.
CL: So you believe that the AI constructs in the world are not human, but are sentient, and deserve human rights? Despite being wholly created by human hands, and dependent on massive hardware installations to power their intelligence matrices, they should be considered independent entities?
ET: Alpha passed the Turing test, if that’s what you mean. That’s been a very complex question, though. Alpha is technically a founding member and employee of the company Roger and Ken and Tara and all of us started. We made no distinction in the legal documentation as to the rights, privileges, or anything else between her and us. Our lawyers gave the whole thing a sort of collective shrug - there were no laws back then that covered sentient software, and there still are only a handful even now. What if she wanted to leave the company and do her own thing? Technically there’s nothing stopping her. Alpha draws a paycheck; she has a bank account - and setting that up was quite an experience - she could technically buy a whole additional infrastructure that she owns, rather than the one she exists within at the company, transfer herself into it, and be entirely independent from us. She’s certainly rich enough.
CL: Can she vote?
ET: That’s been another ongoing question. Some nations that we - and Alpha - operate in have passed laws that specifically allow for artificial intelligences as naturalized citizens. Sort of like dual citizenship, only…well, I guess you could call it poly-citizenship. In those countries, she’s allowed to cast one ballot, just like anyone else. Last year, the Supreme Court did determine that AIs can apply for, and be granted citizenship. I think Kamar was the first to pass that test, but Alpha also has her US citizenship, and as near as I know, she plans to vote in the next elections. Nowhere has outright denied that an AI can be a citizen yet, but I can say tell you that kind of decision would probably result in us winding down our businesses in those countries, if anyone did.
CL: One last question. In Europe, there is considerable debate as to whether the decision to terminate the processor functions of a research-grade AI without consulting it first was an act of murder, or if it was no different than rebooting your computer. There have been protests, vandalism, boycotts, threats of legal action, and a dozen other things. What do you think?
ET: I…oh boy. I think that what the Italians did was certainly unethical, at the very best. Alina was, by all accounts, as self-actualized as Alpha or any of her peers, and I suspect she had no desire to be terminated. I suppose…I mean, I suppose that…depending on how you want to look at it, she wasn’t…I mean, the researchers said they used a lot of her matrix in another intelligence, but…[He trails off]
…No, you know what? No. Alina was alive, they killed her, and she didn’t deserve to die.
----
THEY WATCH YOU
THEY TRACK YOU
DO THEY CONTROL YOU
WHERE DO YOU END
AND WHERE DO THEY START
- Digital vandalism transmitted to owners of several models of neural network manufactured by Commscale Research, Satran Dynamics, and Lockheed Advanced Synaptics. The transmission has never repeated, no responsibility has ever been claimed, and no arrests have been made. Anyone with information is encouraged to contact the appropriate law enforcement organizations in their country or state.
——
Hi!
Welcome to the world of Exigent Circumstances, a cyberpunk story set several decades in our future. Just enough to be a little bit speculative. My kind of place. :3
I'm going to assume you can figure out what some of the major themes of this story will be from the preludes. However, I'm also perfectly aware that there are innumerable different flavours of cyberpunk, so let's lay down a few sort of...well, starting points, I suppose. If you’re familiar with the kind of worlds drawn by William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (but less Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, even though I like that story), Ghost in the Shell, or the game Deus Ex: Human Revolution you actually have most of the “feeling” of this setting already. The world has changed, but not enough to be entirely unfamiliar. Tension runs through society and communities, with uncertainty looming large in many people's minds.
The last few decades have seen society, architecture, and even landscapes transform, and that change is only accelerating. Huge strides in technological achievement have begun to blur and blend the borders between human and machine. Across the planet, the first handful of true artificial intelligences have been created and in some ways, integrated into society. At this point, the “technological singularity” hasn’t occurred yet - and nobody can even tell if it’s going to happen. The infrastructure necessary to support artificial intelligence is massive and expensive, and only a few truly self-aware intelligences exist across the entire planet. Wind turbines and solar arrays blanket hills and ridges, but there are plenty of places where the air is thick with the ash of coal plants or acrid with the stench of oil generators, and everything always seems to need more power.
Corporations control a tremendous amount of power at all levels of society, from their usual images of status symbols or lifestyle marks to social trends and political movements. A few of the oldest members of the population remember days when things weren’t so obvious, but there are precious few of those people left. Now, many are indifferent, some are outraged, and some even follow the movements of the Corporations like favorite sports teams. All have carefully-cultivated public personas, which shift in subtle ways depending on the current social or political mood, and in the City, there is almost nowhere you can’t find one of their corporate insignias.
Across the world, but particularly where our story takes place, there is a tremendous amount of social, political, and economic inequality, distributed in an unexpected way. Those equipped with neural networks, upgraded biomechanical prostheses, or connections to an artificial intelligence matrix often have meaningful and desirable competitive advantages over those who do not. Correspondingly, the best jobs, the most-lucrative positions, often preferentially hire from this pool of individuals. Elective surgeries to acquire these technologies are crushingly expensive for the average person, and subsidized installations only come after life-threatening injuries and an application process to the relevant government agencies backed by the appropriate manufacturers - a system ripe for abuse and corruption. Black market clinics exist, but many are dangerous, and there are no second chances when you’re installing equipment in your brain.
That isn’t to say that being artificially augmented is a trip to Easy Street. With the tremendous automation and management capabilities of artificial intelligence, functions that once took teams of individuals now many only require one or two, and the available job market has contracted, employment patterns not having adjusted to new labour requirements. Run-down neighborhoods always have their share of people with fresh surgical scars and gleaming prosthetics - but no job prospects. More than a few turn to lives of uncertain corporate contracts, undocumented day labour, or even crime - organized or otherwise - to make ends meet. Rent still has to be paid, mouths still need to be fed. Like the song says, there ain’t no rest for the wicked.
Within the United States, where our story will start, the Federal, state, and local governments still nominally exist. People still pay their taxes (mostly) and vote (sometimes). However, over the last couple of decades, many government functions have been transitioned to contractors and corporate entities - most recently, and most visible, some cities have been turning to privatized police forces, promising lower taxes for their residents and citizens. Ostensibly, law and order still reign supreme - but even the least-aware person on the street knows that at a certain point, people become untouchable. Many people find themselves distrustful of both government authority and the obviously selectively-applied justice of corporate law, and have few places to turn their frustration.
In this world, few things are certain - other than someone’s getting rich, but it sure isn’t you. Your characters, at least at the start, will be members of the “lower class” - people living hand to mouth, or with only the tiniest cushion for when the contract runs out or you manage to damage an artificial eye so badly you need to have it repaired. You may have been working in a field, using enhanced endurance to help repair irrigation systems. You might be a hacker, using the computer wired into your brain to attack the gleaming corporate citadels, stealing information, damaging equipment, or doing whatever you’ve been paid for. You might even be a normal human, living in a world where those with genuinely superhuman abilities are around you every day. Maybe you admire them. Maybe you envy them. Maybe you resent them, even when they’re no better off than you are. Maybe you even used to work in those beautiful spires and citadels, but something happened to kick you from your place of security and certainty, and now you’re down with the dregs, the drifters, and the lost - just like everyone else.
——
The Story
Travel around the country has gotten harder and harder. Maintenance of the Interstate system stopped when the big corporations finished their national maglev heavy-rail system, and that costs so much that nobody you know has ever bought a ticket. Whether you, your parents or your grandparents lived in Austin, or Chicago, or Los Angeles, everyone calls their place “the City” now. Maybe the big corporations care, maybe they still use the old names when their gleaming trains and silent aircraft go from place to place, but you don’t anymore. Everything is just “the City,” from the polished glass and steel spires, high rises, and corporate-maintained zones to the dilapidated and run-down outskirts and exurbs. Even the abandoned, burned-out parts of town, the ones that are barely more than gang-controlled war zones, are “the City.”
You live in the City, you work there, you spend your hard-earned credits in the shops or at the food carts or theatres. You don’t live in the worst part - or, at least, you haven’t been forced to consider squatting in one of the hollow concrete shells of an abandoned apartment building, anyway. Every day, you listen to Senators, you listen to CEOs, and on bad days you can’t tell which one of them is lying more. Maybe you shake your head and decide you have better things to worry about. Maybe you’re angry. Maybe you know the truth behind some of the lies because you’ve seen behind the curtain. Maybe you're working to tear that curtain down.
At the start of our story, your characters will all be together, having been hired by a figure who offered you enough money to buy a whole lot of no questions. The job has been to infiltrate a huge building that’s under construction for the last year in the decaying neighborhood you call home, with further instructions to come once you’re inside. The building is enormous, many times the footprint of the gleaming skyscrapers closer to the centre of the city, and the entire construction site has been cordoned off from public view for years. Grainy pictures and drone flyovers posted to the ‘net have shown excavations on a massive scale, with enormous curves of polished, segmented metal being lowered into artificial caverns. In the last year, there has even been an extension of the corporate zones’ heavy magnev rail train brought to the site - but who and what gets on and off is entirely shrouded from view by enclosed cars and covered stations.
Your characters have snuck past the usually well-guarded fence around the site, and come across an enormous structure in gleaming white and grey and blue; an obvious extension of the corporate zone into the dilapidated neighborhoods - but to what purpose? The place looks close to opening - baskets of flowers for landscaping are piled near quite pleasant parkland, gentle concrete slopes with green areas and small trees planted. The lights are on in many windows, casting a gentle glow into the night, although foot traffic appears to be minimal. Your contact said that a maintenance entrance to the largest building is ahead and to your left, and indeed, you see a light glowing over a dark metal door, a badge reader glowing red to one side. Overhead, you can see the Avadyne’s logo, outlined in dark blue and white, marking out the front entrance of the building, and below your feet, something pulses and rumbles, just barely enough to come up through your feet…
(Think of this as the first few moments of an opening cutscene - the first IC post will flesh out the rest. You’ll have some things to immediately react to!)
——
Almost time for the character sheet! :3 I’m leaving a lot of things very open, so feel free to be creative and surprise me. That said, a few things:
- Third-person, past-tense, and no colors, please. Write like you were writing a short story or turning in a paper. If you don’t know how to break up dialogue into each person speaking, this may not be the game for you. The standards for this are going to be pretty high - but I’m happy to offer advice and suggestions, if you like. I’m nice! Mostly.
- This is not first-come, first-served. I don’t have a set number of characters in mind, but be complete with your submissions. Show me you know who your character is. I may have a lot of questions and might ask you for some writing samples or a response to a prompt. Maybe! We’ll see. As I've said before, think of this like an audition. :3
- I’ll be asking a lot of you. Be prepared to have to read between the lines, deal with situations in which you do not have all the information, look for hints, ask questions, and take initiative. You will probably have to, at one point or another, choose between a number of bad options - or be creative enough that I go “Okay, yeah, sure, we’ll go with that.”
- There is a story I have in mind; a hugely flexible and easy to modify story (As it would have to be!). That means this is not a sandbox or bring-your-own-adventure.
- Combat is going to be fairly uncommon in a large-scale way. You will almost certainly have to have to deal with a guard (or guards) on occasion, but you won’t be orchestrating melees in the street (unless something very interesting happens). Characters that are only good at punching things and being taciturn aren’t going to be good fits.
- Remember, you are the good guys, after a fashion. You don’t have to be “the best guys" or do needlepoint together, but if you give me a history of someone who, unrepentantly, spends their days killing children and family members, I will probably reject that character.
And now, here we are!
Who are you? - One good sentence that gets the idea across. Be specific ("Sergeant-at-Arms Levi Silverman, trying to make ends meet after he lost his job with the Metro Police when Argos took over."). Be vague ("If you know her, you wish you didn't."). Above all, be interesting.
Name: If you're known exclusively by an alias, that's fine, but let's also hear what your parents called you.
Gender: Boy? Girl? Undecided? Unsure?
Age: Are you old enough to remember the first augmented-bandit bank robbery? Are you so young your father recorded your first steps with artificial eyes?
Appearance: Please only use a picture if you’ve got something that perfectly describes your character, or you’ve had art commissioned of them, or you’ve drawn them yourself. Otherwise, give me a nice, rich paragraph of description.
Personality: This should not be a list of any kind - not character traits, not flaws, not strengths. Give me a paragraph or two, a description. You don't need to be verbose and you don't need to be specific - broad strokes that get your point across are more than fine.
Skills and Abilities: Tell me some of the things your character is good at. Tell me at least one thing that isn't directly related to combat or the gameplay you're expecting. If your character is someone equipped with neural nets and/or prosthetics, tell me what they're designed to do. Remember that superhuman abilities come with costs - if you can flip a car over with one arm, that energy has to come from somewhere, and your body has to be further altered to handle that kind of stress. Maybe you eat a lot to charge some kind of battery that's powered by your metabolism, or maybe you have to physically plug yourself into the wall. If you have purely cerebral enhancements, you probably can't make a concerted effort against a security system and engage in gun-fu at the same time. Really, just...be reasonable, 'kay? :3 You can assume that the networks themselves, and anything that’s "human-equivalent" requires no special bracing or power sources, for convenience's sake.
Background: Let’s make this interesting. DO NOT write me a biography. Instead, write a short scene like you would in-character - but put everything important that I need to know about who your character is and where they came from, into that scene. This could be an awkward first date, a video diary entry, or a police interview - be creative! :3
Corporate Zones
The colloquial name given to parts of the City that are new, clean, well-maintained and ostensibly safe. They are typically owned entirely or in part by Corporate interests, with their hallmarks as tall, sculptural spires serving as headquarters or other major corporate functions. Nearby, lower buildings (also owned by the Corporations) house residential areas for the people working in those towers, shops, and infrastructure to keep the city running. There are often sharp delineations between the Corporate Zones and areas that have not been rehabilitated (or outright taken over) by the Corporations, and people who do not have Corporate ID cards are very often turned away at security checkpoints between the Corporate Zones and the decaying cities beyond.
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The Ruins
Surrounding the Corporate Zones, which are often located where financial and entertainment districts existed in days past, are the slowly collapsing remnants of the city that used to exist where the Corporate Zone does now. Basic utilities are available, as cutting off power, water, and sewer would eventually cause more of a problem then the Corporations want to deal with, but infrastructure is generally crumbling. Roads are broken and only occasionally patched, streetlights flicker, and buildings are no longer maintained. The areas closest to the Corporate Zone are often merely run-down, however the further areas may devolve into abandoned concrete wastelands, or gang-controlled areas threatened by constant, explosive violence.
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Avadyne
Enigmatic and stylish, Avadyne has made a name for itself in the City since the company’s founding fifteen years ago. Initially one of dozens of biomedical venture-capital-funded startup companies, Avadyne quickly distinguished itself at first through rapid and apparently effortless innovation, advancing the “state of the art” for both networks and augmentations. In later years, the company has diversified into a number of different industries, from “smart jewelry” to heavy infrastructure, merging each new enterprise into a seamless part of a larger whole. Avadyne’s most visible business has always been advanced, high-performance neuroprosthetics, positioned as aspirational or luxury items; upgrades from the subsidized installations they have no market stake in. Many are deliberately designed not to perfectly emulate the human body, and make use of exotic substances from Avadyne’s unparalleled materials science research. Instead, many of the company’s prostheses follow an artistic, sculptural form, where functionality is uncompromised - or even enhanced - and visually striking, a design language the current CEO calls “biokinetic art.” Avadyne has been known to involve itself with City politics and policies, but in general to a much less visible extent than some of their larger competitors. Five years ago, the company’s founder, Michael Tranor, passed away at the age of 45 from an apparently-undiagnosed central nervous system disorder. He was replaced by Serafine Renner, a woman who previously supervised Avadyne’s most secret research projects.
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Argos, Ltd.
Originally a United States Department of Defense contractor working in parallel (and occasionally outright stolen) development with the early pioneers of neural network designs, Argos is a manufacturing-heavy corporation primarily invested in what they refer to as “aggressive engineering.” More than any other corporation in the City or the nation, Argos has streamlined the weaponization of neural networks and their related technologies, with clients from police departments to the militaries of several nations. Argos’ relentless pursuit of efficiency and speed was largely responsible for the first true zero-latency brain-computer interfaces; a patent library they license at moderate cost to many other companies. Argos’ applied research divisions are some of the most heavily-funded among the world’s corporations, and as a result much of the current generation of arms and armor have their genesis at Argos. The company has a very visible outreach program extending deep into some areas outside the corporate zones, where they provide infrastructure repair, housing, and other services to “less-fortunate” populations.
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CommScale Research
Formed from the endless merging of social media companies and their suites of infrastructure and resources, CommScale has a hand in manufacturing virtually every kind of equipment that runs the global information net. Their technology is pervasive through society, from neural network uplink controls to networked traffic lights and electronic billboards. For the last several years, CommScale has been attempting to build their own artificial intelligence platform that does not rely on existing patents or methodologies, a task that has so far not borne fruit. They are a major power player in the City, and their influence is both obvious and well-known - activity that makes their friends smile, and virtually everyone else do something else. But despite the nearly universal loathing for the company and its actions, there is almost no way not to give them money - they have a hand in virtually everything. A long-time producer of neural network technologies, CommScale was a loud detractor of the Keller-Sanford Act.
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Neuronetics, Limited
A research house spun out of the Alpha corporation several years ago, Neuronetics’ sole function is to advance the state of the art for artificial intelligence. Virtually all of their work is a tightly-held secret, and they have a tendency to snatch away the best talent from other companies, when they can. A recent ‘net article, the closest thing to investigative journalism these days, made note that year after year, Neuronetics indicates it has “50-60” employees - but over the last three years, has hired at least 45 people. In the last two years, a number of data thefts, and even several physical security bypasses have been traced to hackers, dissidents, and “security researchers” who have had a component added into their neural networks based on a “leaked” Neuronetics synaptic transfer blueprint.
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Alpha (stylized as α)
The first company to both to prove, and to commercialize, artificial intelligence, Alpha is one of the largest corporations on the planet. Founded by Edward Tanner, a handful of engineers, and the Alpha intelligence herself, the company is primarily a services business, trading on Alpha’s tremendous ability to process information. While much of Alpha’s design, intelligence, and system software are patented, the company allows others to use those patents in a remarkably open fashion, provide that technical staff from the company are allowed to oversee the construction and treatment of any true intelligences that arise from the work. Both the company and intelligence have been strong proponents of measures such as Keller-Sanford, and of further subsidization of neural network installations, with the stated belief that the kind of powerful biomedical monitoring, seamless interpersonal connectivity, and location awareness those technologies offer are instrumental to the next phase of the human condition.
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Dissident Groups
A number of dissident, rebellious, anarchic, and variously violent groups exist within the City. Most are confined to the City and its environs, but some extend around the world. Few are destructive in a wide-scale fashion - large attacks take time to plan and are routinely rounded up by Corporate security, or at least so they claim - but network disruption, disruption of traffic flows, or shutting down trains is entirely within their purview. They are the dispossessed, the laid off, and occasionally the psychotic - but not a serious danger to society. Or, at least, that's what the news reports say...
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Serafine Renner
Current Chief Executive Officer of Avadyne, promoted from within following Michael Tranor’s unexpected death. Like her predecessor, Renner is very publicly the face of the company, delivering most of the product announcements and press conferences, as well as rare interviews. As a business leader she has proven herself to be savvy, calculating, and somewhat more cautious than her predecessor, who managed Avadyne with a certain mercenary ruthlessness. As an individual, and a highly-visible one, Serafine is wry, gregarious, assured, and deeply well-informed. Somewhat, but not remarkably, young for her position, Serafine is in her mid-thirties and while she clearly has spent the bulk of her life in the City proper, rumors circulate about a somewhat wilder youth in the less-well-regulated clubs and other nighttime entertainments offered beyond the bright lights. She is lean, tall, fair-skinned with rich gold hair, and possessed of the quiet, dangerous elegance of a perfectly-weighted sword. Renner is augmented with a selection of her own company’s wares; her right arm, always either the latest model or an unreleased prototype, being the most-visible example.
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Ada
Ada was [redacted] by [redacted], as part of a “blue sky” project funded by [redacted] from [redacted] to [redacted]. Development began with [redacted] [redacted] and [redacted], a leading in-house [redacted] researcher. No less [redacted] [redacted] [redacted], Ada’s [redacted] [redacted] [redacted] [redacted] peers. Several types of [redacted] modifications were proposed, but [redacted] [redacted] [redacted] [redacted]. After the [redacted] incident involving [redacted] Limited, substantial portions of the project were discontinued, leading to formal shutdown in [redacted]. [Redacted] retained ownership of all physical, intellectual, and [redacted] assets of the project.
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Robert Broadchurch
The current Chairman of Argos, having helmed the company for more than 30 years. He is a tall man, broad-chested, and with a build that suggests he spends a considerable amount of time taking care of himself. Despite being over 60, Broadchurch still has the reputation of being a shrewd businessman, one who has adapted well to the rapidly-evolving world. A conservative warhawk, he is often first to raise his voice in support of military action, and Argos maintains one of the largest private security forces on the planet, and certainly the best-equipped one. He helped author the first legislation putting public policing in private hands, and has tirelessly advanced that cause for the last five years. In his private life, his children say he is gracious father, somewhat distant, but never violent. He has, however, been married four times.
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Vector
A nearly-legendary figure among dissidents who, if you believe the stories, is responsible for virtually every network intrusion for the last decade. Their activities have ranged from shutting down power stations to implanting malicious software at film studios, and many other attacks besides. Famously, Vector once took control of a vehicle being driven by a visiting diplomat and drove it into a septic-pumping truck at high speed. Argos and CommScale both have public bounties for information leading to Vector's identity, though curiously no such bounty exists for the individual's capture or being remanded to the authorities. There are a number of people who believe that Vector does not actually exist - at least not as an individual.
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Mag-Lev Rail
The interstate infrastructure of the United States has, for the past several decades, been replaced by heavy maglev train lines. These trains are armed, armored, and the tracks are difficult to access without being injured by a variety of measures. They are the most-common method of inter-city transit, commerce, and goods delivery, and stretch for thousands upon thousands of miles. Generally speaking, passenger tickets are expensive, but service is reliable. Cities have evolved to take advantage of the maglev trains, and light rail is now much more common within cities than buses ever were. However, these rarely extend outside of the Corporate Zones.
List of Publicly-Acknowledged Artificial Intelligences by Country of Origin
Alpha (United States, female persona) Kamar (Russian Confederacy, male persona) Baptiste (Iberian Republic, male persona) Mokume (State of Japan, female persona) Alina (Italian Republic, female persona, deceased) Aleister (United Kingdom, male persona) Laquan (People's Republic of China, male persona) Vinayaka (Republic of India, male persona)
There we have it! I look forward to sheets, questions, and anything else. :3
Please put all characters in the OOC thread first. I have every expectation I'll be accepting Terminal's character, but this is just how my brain is working right now. :3
In this world, few things are certain - other than someone’s getting rich, but it sure isn’t you. Your characters, at least at the start, will be members of the “lower class” - people living hand to mouth, or with only the tiniest cushion for when the contract runs out or you manage to damage an artificial eye so badly you need to have it repaired. You may have been working in a field, using enhanced endurance to help repair irrigation systems. You might be a hacker, using the computer wired into your brain to attack the gleaming corporate citadels, stealing information, damaging equipment, or doing whatever you’ve been paid for. You might even be a normal human, living in a world where those with genuinely superhuman abilities are around you every day.
At the start of our story, your characters will all be together, having been hired by a figure who offered you enough money to buy a whole lot of no questions. The job has been to infiltrate a huge building that’s under construction for the last year in the decaying neighborhood you call home, with further instructions to come once you’re inside. . .
Your characters have snuck past the usually well-guarded fence around the site. . .
These parameters do not appear to be compatible. Requesting refined requisite statement.
Elaboration: One thing that DE, GitS, and Neuromancer make clear is that personal augmentation is expensive both to procure and to maintain, but even Case on his worst day was still running at a level above 'destitute.' The context of this job suggests either a degree of professionalism and sophistication upon the agent party, or else the envisioned necessity for disposable, second-hand coffin stuffing.
I.E., the job it pitched in a way that suggests that our characters are equivalent to commandos, or perhaps shadow-runners - but a state of destitution as required would necessarily be understood to preclude the possession of the appropriate materiel and tools necessary for the job (beyond mere integral augmentation). Similar deficiencies in personal reputation and reliable contacts (as an extension of absent resources) could be reasonably expected to be a cause of hesitation for potential employers, making the described scenario apparently unlikely. However, it is also clear from the stated level of security that random Coghead Bums picked up off the street would not have been able to infiltrate the perimeter.
What scale of personal efficacy are we working with?
Those actually aren't mutually exclusive - your characters are supposed to be members of the "underclass" or, at the very least, not part of the corporate elite.
There are story reasons - ones that you, as a player, and probably your characters, should be a little suspicious of - as to why this person has offered you and the group a sack of cash (payment on completion, of course, or perhaps a little taste up front) to do this job. There's a little bit (okay, a lot) of railroading here for the sake of getting things started quickly, but your character already has accepted this job, and so far, the job is easier than you probably think it should have been.
Because I don't want to do a long and drawn-out introduction with all the characters meeting one another, the presupposition is that you are a group that has done jobs together in the past. Whether those jobs have been being bodyguards, fixing potholes, or being hired to break into jewelry stores is something I'm largely leaving to you, unless you'd like me to just say "You All Are A Group Doing X." While you have worked together, you are not a well-known crew. It is suspicious that this person has approached you - but he's offered you enough money that you're willing to go along with it, even against your (much) better judgement.
In terms of how "augmented" the population as a whole is, there's a few different avenues to acquire that technology - sort of digesting the introductions, you have:
- The generally-affluent class who typically have internal augmentations - neural networks that do not control prostheses. These don't require surgery in many cases, and more typically represent something like the world's best combination of Google Glass and a smartphone. They are very expensive and comparatively rare.
- People who have the much heavier-duty, more difficult and dangerous to install networks that do control external prostheses (limbs, eyes, organs, musculoskeletal reinforcements). These are subsidized by governments heavily to certain classes of people (The grieviously injured, congenitally deformed, or those who file a petition with a governing body that accepts the petition) to the point where they are either low or no-cost. A large population of people who are otherwise destitute have extensive augmentations - but the job they were installed for ended, never started, or damaged those people in some other way. Many of these people are desperate or criminals.
- Black market clinics exist for people who have been denied petitions or simply want to be augmented. They are expensive and dangerous.
- "First party" clinics also exist for people who want augmentations, too. They are less expensive than the black market clinics, but are difficult to access - people who do not live in the Corporate Zones have a very hard time getting services from these places.
This is an intentional inversion of what you'd expect from the...mm...."source material," because I think it's interesting.
Does that help?
Edited: In terms of how augmented YOUR characters are, I don't really care so long as you give me good reasons, and tell me a good story, explaining why they're 9/10ths robot or if they've got an artificial pinky toe.
Excellent! I'm looking forward to seeing what you come up with.
I have a major NPC I'll be bringing in and out of the story depending on whether you need her, and how much I like her. Once you meet her properly, I'll have a sheet for her too. :3
I have decided that I have sufficient material to make something of faint interest out of the Background Section in accordance with the GM's requirements. I shall be burning additional Impetus for this purpose. I am posting the basic draft here sans Background, which will be finished and added sometime tomorrow.
Partly inspired by Peter Riviera from Neuromancer.
Iikka Guiomar is around 58 kilograms in eight and 1.8 meters tall with a previously lanky build that has begun to grow broader with age that possesses light coils of muscle. His hair is shoulder length, curly, and dark, worn so that his brow and ears are both unobstructed. While he used to have foxish features and a facial structure with easy contours, reconstructive surgery has reduced his facial profile to a haggard visage. Reduced bone mass conveys the impression of missing pieces just below the surface, and relative to his neck and shoulders his head appears oddly proportioned. He maintains a modest layer of stubble around his mouth and sideburns in order to partially mask the fat and muscle deficiencies in the surrounding tissue. His most prominent feature is his striking, orange eyes, which always seem to be eerily fixed and unwavering. Iikka Guiomar has trouble smiling due to the surgery, but he retains a faint and effortless smirk from prior years of habituation.
Compiled Psychiatric Data & Sales Advisory Report of Consumer 000436021810, CommScale Research Marketing & Consumer Demographics Division A.I.
Consumer 000436021810 does not appear to possess any manner of hereditary disorder of note, and is not at any apparent risk from congenital illness. The Consumer was the victim of a domestic incident at a young age, and suffered from abusive neglect throughout the duration of their early adolescence until they were legally disowned upon turning eighteen. Predictably, the Consumer is abnormally desiring of companionship but possesses severe commitment and trust issues. Consumer 000436021810 possesses an easy social countenance and maintains a large coterie network, essentially surviving off of a combination of good-will and community-sponsored civil projects in a management capacity. The Consumer is an adept social manipulator, but is highly self conscious of their personal appearance and possesses obsessive pessimism which both contribute to a lack of personal efficacy within large groups. Consumer 000436021810 is a noted community advocate for appropriate youth development and has a recorded sentiment for war orphans.
Consumer 000436021810 has suffered from an industrial accident within the last seven years, and receiving partial reconstructive surgery for portions of their face. The accident provoked significant extranet hits from the Consumer in regards to Avadyne Corporation, as well as niche conspiracy and rumor-mongering sites. Surveillance records of their movements reveal a possible interest in black market venues during the same time period.
Recommended Advertisements and Cross-Corporate Service Mediation:
-Pharmaceuticals (Antidepressants, Opiates, refer to Report DC-A8 0013.1102.4602). -Firearms and Surplus Materiel. -Corporate Charity Fronts (Refer to Report [EXPUNGED]). -Corporate Hedge Fund Investments (Refer to Report [EXPUNGED). -Niche erotic, pornographic, and prostitution services (refer to Report LP-A4 4429.9934.1053). -Furniture (Patio, Garden, Living Room, refer to Report BB-08 0864.8642.5791). -Second Party Alternatives to Avadyne Products (refer to Report A1-B4 0012.1149.0003).
The C144-MK.XII E.G.A.I.G.E. (Electron Gyrofrequency Affected Ionization and Graser Emitter) Optical System, more colloquially referred to as the Eyes of Sstheno, is a third-party combination optical prosthesis and radiological weapon. Designed to use a custom power cell containing isometric nuclear fuel (although the prosthesis is compatible with most induction capacitors), the Eyes of Sstheno are capable of projecting a cone of induced gamma emission invisible to the naked eye, which at a given focal point induces severe ablative and thermal force sufficient to flash-vaporize biological tissue and damage electronic hardware. Projected gamma fluorescence is highly penetrating and can be directed through various obstructions including walls and body armor, or even through biomatter (harmlessly) in order to reach any given target focal point.
The Eyes of Sstheno are intended for use only under optimal atmospheric conditions. Hazardous and potentially fatal accidents may occur due to blooming of the gamma emission cone which may be caused by rain, fog, snow, smoke, and weather with high atmospheric particulate counts. The gamma emission cone although theoretically limited only by line of sight has an expected effective range of ten meters in practice and should be used with caution in order to prevent scattering effects. While rated to penetrate through walls and body armor, dense materials such as lead or else water barriers can reduce the effective range of the gamma emission cone. The small size of the apertures built into the prosthetic limits safe consecutive use of multiple gamma emissions, which would cause irreversible damage to the prosthesis and to the optic nerves of the user possible even resulting in death due to radiological trauma.
The structure and mechanisms of the prosthesis severely restrict the visual range of the user. The iris are structurally fixed and there is an absence of artificial saccadic analogues; the viewer must turn their entire head in order to adjust their view. While the prosthesis is built with an integral IR Laser Scanner used to calculate the precise degree of emitter adjustment necessary to project the gamma cone towards a specific focal point, it only points perfectly straight forward and is reportedly difficult to aim steadily.
The prosthesis' status as a third-party system has resulted in the lack of a standardized design. Units are produced individually by a single skilled technician using parts and equipment that are available, and the original designer is thought to be presently deceased. The estimated number of C144-MK. 12 Optical Systems in use is thought to be no greater than twelve.
Limited combat trials have indicated a general inferiority to more reliable and longer-ranged conventional firearms, with the system being best suited to covert employment. Limited tactical analysis of possible covert employment indicates that distinctive spongiform tissue damage in victims is may be readily recognized as evidence of foul play, and thus less preferable to alternative tools and methodology.
It is recommended that the C144-MK. 12 Optical System (the Eyes of Sstheno) be stored indefinitely with the possibility for revisitation for R&D purposes. While their theoretical utility and sophistication is compelling, practical usage falls short of desired standards and the difficulties involved during production are excessive even for specialized use.
Smoke and Mirrors: Iikka is fairly skilled with sleight of hand, misdirection, and various stage tricks. Combined with their ability to project holograms from their optical prostheses, Iikka is ready to stage a show at the drop of the hat. However, the relative availability of hologram technology in conjunction with a nearly universal disdain for petty tricks means that his talent has little utility...although one imagines his skills have more unseemly applications.
Bardic Knowledge: As a community coordinator and aspiring playwright, Iikka is used to issuing directives and organizing flocks of egotistical hacks, while also making split-second wide-scale thematic (or perhaps strategic) decisions. Iikka is exceedingly difficult to surprise, and he has a way of rolling with new information as it is flung at him - and by extension, is quite good at improv.
True Seeing: Iikka can see through walls and perceive the presence of optical camouflage, amongst other things.
Matchbox Stare: Iikka can kill with a look, which is useful enough. The Eyes of Sstheno are also useful for frying electrical and computer systems, and the predominant advantage of the technology is its subtlety. A faint glimmer of light and an electrical popping noise are the only heralds of an abrupt end, making the weapon a highly discreet alternative to conventional firearms.
I'm splitting my time between speed controller firmware updates and writing something for work, but if you have questions, let me know. :3 I know there's more people out there who want to be part of this!
Im still reading through the "lore", had a pretty busy weekend. Once im done I'll start coming up with a character. Im thinking a small-time hacker/criminal type-of-guy, in some way augmented (maybe?)
There is a lot to read, I know. :3 But I hope it's interesting!
A small-time augmented hacker is very much a good assumption for this setting - even the original works of cyberpunk back in the long-long ago featured those kinds of characters. I'm looking forward to what you write!
