Adrian Barlow's Errant Ruster Morph

Martian Landscape

Olympus City

R.E.N.T.L.O.V

Project name found embedded in the Song Cail Flower data packets recovered by the team: 

RECURSIVELY ENHANCED & NETWORKED TITAN-LINKED OPERANT VITAE

Session 4 Log

Pontes Station Tier

Indoctrination

You stare hard at the monkey-woman and tell her - with a straight face - that you’re in. A few days ago - shit, ten years ago apparently - you would have told the crazy bitch to fuck off and headed for the nearest airlock. Now you just sit there, nodding in resignation, looking around the old study without really seeing the program, lost in your own thoughts.

TITANS. The Fall. The Exurgent Virus. Human extinction? Firewall. Secret agents? Shit. Crazy fucking shit - and you’re in it up to your virtual neck. You don’t know what to believe, or maybe even who, but you know you’ve got no resources and that she ain’t lying about dumping you in some server somewhere to fend for your obsolete self. Better to risk it out in the real world where there’s a chance rather than hide out in some server where there’s nothing.

The world you knew is gone and something strange has taken it’s place. From what you’re learning it’s a little wonderful, a lot dangerous and, when you’re forced to look behind the curtain, completely terrifying. You have nothing. You are nothing. And if you have a chance of surviving in this undiscovered country, it might be a little easier with a secret organization at your back.

Evo talks on, and despite your reeling thoughts you are drawn back to what the monkey-woman’s saying. After all, it could mean life or death - most likely your own.

•••

• Proxy Evolution delivered a very pointed debriefing. Assisted by the simulspace programing she downloade - both figuratively and literally - a broad range of data, programs, protocols, expectations and advice about working in Firewall:

- The team has been cleared of any current (and she emphasized current) Exurgent infection and was relieved of stress incurred during the fall/recent ad hoc mission through various psychosurgical treatments.

- The team would be instantiated in select morphs enhanced to their specifications. These would stand are their “primaries” on Pontes Station and in Mars-local space.

- The team members were each implanted with basic Firewall protocols (giving the PCs +10 Networking: Firewall).

-The team was also given user-access to The Eye - the well-hidden and variably accessible, secure, Firewall-only communications and data network. They also discovered when they logged on for the first time that their i-rep had increased to 20 points for their elimination of the threat represented by the “Song Cai Flower” and the recovery of valuable data.

-The new recruits also learned that they had been given a subtle but effective loyalty conditioning that made communicating about Firewall with anyone not already indoctrinated in the organization a psychological act of will (-30 Will test).

-They were given the basic purpose and structure of the organization:

Firewall is an independent, cell-based conspiracy that seeks out and eliminates existential-threats (X-threats) to transhumanity. A true, untethered conspiracy - lacking the restrictions but also the unity of vision and effort of more traditional organizations.

Proxies - cell leaders

Vectors - technicians and agents

Crows - specialists and monitors

Sentinels - operatives, investigators and troubleshooters

Erasure Squads - cleaners

-The newly-minted sentinels also learned Firewall’s standard rules of engagement:

1. Independent operation

2. Variable levels of resource and intel support

3. Operational security is second only to elimination of X-threats

4. Sterilize first, collect data later

-The team learned they had been provided with “kill-switches” - integrated apps that would allow them (or their muses) to delete their own cortical stacks on command or upon incapacitation or death.

- Proxy Evo also assured the team that there would be secure backups archived on Pontes Station and explained that alpha forks would be deployed on the various missions necessitated by the exigency of having to eliminate the “Song Cai” egos. Reinstantiation via farcaster and frequent merging with their primaries would be likely be common.  

- They learned that Firewall as such is an unpaid-gig, but that trivial and low expenses would generally be covered but that moderate and higher cost items must be requisitioned or otherwise acquired via personal funds, reputation or even theft.

- The new sentinels were also downloaded quick-access muse apps that distil the highlights of the last 10 years of history into crude, memory-like information access, allowing the PCs to suffer only a -10 when testing skills based on any current events, pop culture or technical developments.

- Proxy Evo also provided the team with deep and detailed cover identities which her vectors were seeding throughout the solar system to support their missions. In a bout of intentional meta-gaming, the players decided their cover story would be operating as freelance agents working for Autonomist Recovery Services - one of a number of well-known NGOs dedicated to locating egos lost during the fall and reconnecting them with their families and friends.

Personal Tier

• Each party member also began trying to recover their own personal lives, researching what happened to loved ones or to their own reputations during and since the fall.

• With the help of Stan-the-Man, an infomorph vector working on Pontes Station, Kru tracked his own parents to the LLA - the Lunar Lagrange Alliance - and Luna proper, where they appear to have lived since he evacuated them from Earth.

• Rentlov began an extensive mesh-assisted review of everything he could remember about himself but kept coming up with empty results. He was even unable to find any public records of his semi-famous mesh cast - “VFO!” or “a View from Orbit!”

Evo did share with him one discovery that her analysts had made within the files the team recovered about the “Flower” - a project called R.E.N.T.L.O.V. - Recursively Enhanced & Networked TITAN-Linked Operant Vitae. The actual contents of the file are still encrypted and will take some time to decode.

• Brother Piv contacted a Mars-local monastery that was willing to take him on as a novitiate in their order and made arrangements to join them.  

• Terry researched records of his own past and discovered he had inspired several still-extant memes. Apparently, after going AWOL with his shuttle to ferry more evacuees to orbit his employer - Direct Action - tried him in absentia are part of a larger Hypercorp political initiative. They convicted him of desertion and sentenced him to indenture. Among certain factions however, he has become a sort of folk hero known as “The Ferryman” - a poster child for the humane ethos that characterized the autonomists and anarchists during the Fall. He even discovered that a movie had been made dramatizing his story. It was a B-movie effort at best, featuring purple prose and poorly-programmed AI actors.

• John 117 looked into whether he had any outstanding warrants or bounties - the answer to which is pending further research. He learned from Evo that he had been on the “Flower” as a Firewall asset and that this might not have been the first time he had worked for the organization.

He also began looking into new employment opportunities and started assessing changes that may have happened to the concept and sources of wealth in the past ten years.

• Nikolas - CONFIDENTIAL

Mars Tier

A Very Red Planet

Mars. The first thing you notice are the colors - the yellow sky, the orange clouds and the red landscape. The deep, ruddy, blood-colored, ubiquitous, oppressive red. It’s everywhere, and you can’t escape it. The locals use a whole thesaurus to describe the endless shades - cerise, vermillion, amaranth, folly, rosso corsa, oxblood. But the newcomers, all they can see is red, and it gets oppressive once the novelty wears off. Takes a while to get used to it too - a year maybe - and a Martian year is two of old Earth’s.

The second thing you notice is the dust. The locals claim to love it, breathing it in and acting like it doesn’t make them choke and spit or turn their snot orange too. With the finest seals, filters, HVAC systems and cleaning bots that shit still gets everywhere, even the high-end domes of New Shanghai and Elysium.

The third thing you notice is the Sun. It’s small - way smaller than from Earth. A weak, orange smudge in the sky that just can’t seem to warm the thin air - that thin, unbreathable atmosphere transhumanity is trying so hard to transform. The locals don’t have much to say about the Martian sun.

– excerpt from The Eye entry “An Introduction to Mars”

•••

The shuttle lands on the private field and as per Evo’s promise the custom’s check is brief and cursory. An automated tolley drops you and your gear at the local transit hub and you are soon racing down the sealed track toward Olympus City proper.

As Evo also promised, the pilfered OIA Police files you have been reviewing since leaving Pontes Station are proving enlightening. If her vectors 85.7% assessment is correct, and this murderous rampage really does mark the arrival of a “Song Cai” ego on Mars, then chasing this case might very well be the best way to track it down.

All you have to do now is sneak your weapons into the city, access a secure crime scene without credentials, track a ubiquitously common Ruster morph across a decaying city of 1,000,000 suspicious locals and take out a homicidal AI infected with an ancient alien virus and the intent to wipe out transhumanity.

Oh, and it would be nice if you could grab some lunch on the way…

•••

• Though their time in accelerated simulspace made it seem like they had been on Pontes Station for over a month, they had actually been off the “Song Cai Flower” for just over 30 hours when the new sentinels caught their first mission. Conveniently, and perhaps suspiciously, the decoded coordinates were on Mars at the Olympus City facility of Gentrix Interplanetary - a Hypercorp specializing in farcasting and resleeving.

• The Olympus Infrastructure Authority Police files Evo had given the team contained extensive information:

- A multiple homicide had occurred at Gentrix Interplanetary at the same timestamp as the farcasting.

- A local shock-jock by the name of Adrian Barlow - an opportunistic martian rights/Barsoomian sympathizer -  was being resleeved into a kitted out Ruster morph for his year-long foray into the Martian outback. Local law enforcement thinks something went wrong with the reinstantiation and Barlow had a psychotic break. Evo believes the “Song Cai” ego simple hid out in Getrix’s systems and hijacked Barlow’s ego transfer and his morph.

- There is footage of the morph then killing the two techs, the receptionist and a building security guard as he escaped the facility - popping their stacks as he went. He then fled across the city on foot and into the mostly abandoned and decayed Fuxingmen District on the outskirts of Olympus. The official manhunt continues.

• As the party disembarked from the spaceport train Nikolas called in favor from the local triad and was given a password (“John Carter is coming back”) for OIA station security allowing the team to bypass ID and weapons scans.

• Using resources in the police file, Kru located the last known location for the escaped ego (designated T1 for Target-1) and the party took a cab to the city’s decaying perimeter, armed up and entered the decrepit neighborhood at that point.

• The team soon found a squatter’s camp large enough for a dozen or so people but containing only four recently-killed bodies. They appeared to have been murdered by hand-to-hand attacks and were missing their cortical stacks.

• Terry spotted movement and the party dispersed to seek out/defend against possible attackers. They were soon assaulted on three fronts by nine heavily modified Exurgents, reminiscent of simpler versions of the corpse-guards on the “Flower.”

• The fight was brief but intense, with Nikolas taking out a charging trio like they were in a shooting gallery at an old-Earth country fair. The slow and clumsy abominations had turned out to have no ranged weapons and were poor hand-to-hand fighters.  

Simulspace Avatars

Captain Kru's Avatar

Terry's Avatar

 Rentlov's Avatar

Piv's Avatar

Nikolas' Avatar

John 117's Avatar

Proxy Evo's Simulspace Avatar

Proxy Evo's Muse - Darwin

Proxy Evo's Simulspace

Session 3 Log

Song Cai Flower Tier - Past, Present and Future

• The corpse-guardians burned John 117 to death with pulse lasers and ripped him in two while Terry jetted in as the cavalry that arrived just in the nick of too late. While he blew apart one of the TITAN war machines and held the others at bay with his minigun, the rest of the survivors raced aft to join the fight. The shootout was protracted but the half-corpse/half-machine monsters were eventually put down with no further casualties. Twice in fact, when their attendant nano swarms attempted to effect repairs.

• Brother Piv deleted one of his forks and reinstantiated John 117 in one of his case morphs as the party made it’s way back to the “Lakota” to regroup and rearm.

• Two things were decided. First, John 117, with Terry riding actual shotgun, would finish planting the last two bomb mules with Piv riding along as a virtual demolitions assistant. Second, after planting the bombs the survivors would take the “Lakota” to a safe distance, detonate the explosives, confirm the ship’s destruction and farcast to Darwin’s safe haven.

• In the meantime, Rentlov returned to the computer lab to try and recover anything of value from the burned out server. He was unsuccessful.

• This time they approached the stern along the outside of the hull. As they passed over the hydroponics section of the ship, John 117 and Terry were able to see through the clear hull and unfortunately got a good look at what the corpse-guards had apparently been protecting. A repulsive mass of organic tissue growing around the central gantry track, being maintained by an industrial fabber that was in turn being fed from the pile of freeze dried corpses John 117 had previously encountered.  

At a dozen random-seeming points thick, tubular spines extended from the mass up to and through the hull, ending in an array of small hatches that looked to Terry’s pilot’s eyes suspiciously like launch ports. Most of the semi-transparent tubes were loaded with small, partially organic devices strangely reminiscent of tiny reentry torpedoes. The party immediately made the connection between the ship’s close-approach course through the inner system and the sinister potential in the missiles.  

• As John 117 and Terry made their hasty way back forward after planting the last of the bombs on the reaction mass tanks, a corpse-guardian inside the hydroponics section leapt to the interior side of the hull and paced them, furiously trying to cut it’s way through with it’s lasers. Terry gave it a mechanical bird with one of his two good tentacle arms and they raced on to the “Lakota.”

• The decision was made for Piv’s Daitya instantiation to remain aboard the “Flower” in case something went wrong with the demolition plan while his remaining case instance left on the “Lakota.” Terry botched the initial un-docking procedure, actually ripping the distal half of the docking spar off the ship.

• When the shuttle took up position at a safe distance of 100 kilometers two more cockups occurred. First, Piv’s Daitya instantiation was unable to delete himself and started begging to be picked up. Accordingly, his case instantiation aboard the “Lakota” also lost it and began freaking out, demanding that the shuttle return to save his other self. Second, nothing happened when the detonation signal was sent. Piv realized that the “plastic explosives” he had used was actually only training putty.

John 117 took care of the first problem by slagging case Piv with his plasma rifle and Terry took care of the second by plotting a ramming course for the “Lakota” back into the “Flower.” Of course this meant that the party had to figure out a way to confirm the destruction of the “Flower” after they had already farcast away and sell this plan to Darwin - the de facto gatekeeper.

Ultimately Kru stripped the comm gear out of the “Lakota” and built a one-shot long range transmitter and it was decided that a fork of John 117 would stay behind to record the destruction and transmit the message. The rest of the party was unceremoniously farcasted to Darwin’s unknown coordinates, and forks of Terry, so he could pilot the ship, and John 117 were left behind.

• The course was flawless and the impact was accompanied by Terry overriding the anti-matter containment on the courier's shuttle. The resulting explosion vaporized both ships instantly, leaving only a rapidly expanding cloud of metallic gas. With a unemotional command to his muse, the John 117 fork then deleted himself and everything went black.

Personal Tier

Interrogation

Everything is black, like the space between the stars. Or is it brilliant white, like afterimages from staring at the sun? You feel nothing, but you sense everything. You are certain time is passing, but uncertain how you know. At first, there are no words - only a single, narrow signal knifing in, then streaming out. The signal expands and reaches deeper. Now you hear something but with a directness that bypasses your ears. New data fills your mind but as if you already knew it. Some of your fears subside - old ones and new - but others take their places as you realize this is not a dream.

The signal into your mind expands again and there is pain. Excruciating pain you sense but do not feel. Memories are plucked like the strings of an instrument and they vibrate along neural connections. Damage is repaired, calm is restored, there is uploading and downloading...and secrets are revealed.

Questions are asked and you answer freely, without reserve. You want to ask things, but you cannot find the words - or you are not allowed. In a distant part of your consciousness you realize this is a simulspace and that you are undergoing sophisticated psychosurgical therapy and interrogation. You are dimly aware of this, but you are powerless to resist.

A calm voice asks, and you answer...

Kru:

• You were a military intel officer, yes?

• Did you know your company had been operationally assigned to Oversight?

• Do you know the identity of the Director?

• Did you know what would happen to his son?

Piv:

• You were black ops, correct? Did you know who was tasking your missions?

• Why can’t you remember your handler?

• Have you heard of Project Ozma?

Rentlov:

• Are you actually unaware that you are an AGI?

• Do you have any knowledge of your origins?

• Do you have any idea of the programming achievement you represent? An AI with asynchronous abilities?

Terry:

• Was your choice to dock with the Song Cai Flower voluntary?

• How did you know where to rendezvous with it?

• I suppose you do not know that you were tried in absentia, found guilty of desertion and sentenced to indentured service?

Nikolas:

• Who is Angel?

• Do you know your memory has been partitioned and that one of the partitioned fragments is now empty?

John 117

• What was your objective in boarding the Song Cai Flower?

• We have found a reference to the Flower in an incomplete ten-year-old mission brief. Did you know you were working for Firewall, or were you just a disposable asset?

•••

• For the survivors weeks seemed to pass - a time of semi-consciousness with only short moments of lucidity intermixed with long periods of vaguely remembered interrogation, debriefing and disinfection. Eventually, after what their muses claimed was over a month of subjective time, the party was brought online in a sim programmed to look like Charles Darwin’s 1860s Downe House study. There they finally came face-to-face with the muse Darwin and the avatar of the mysterious Proxy Evolution - a true-to-science representation of Australopithecus afarensis, the famous ancestral hominid Lucy.

She was mostly polite and exceedingly calm as she explained the situation to the survivors:

“You have been interrogated, screened, therapeutically treated and conditioned in accelerated simulspace. You have been cleared of contamination and any major psychosis.  

The Fall was much more, and much worse, than the average person knows. The TITANs were compromised by a dormant bio-digital plague weapon seeded in the solar system by a long-vanished alien species. It was triggered by the rise of recursive AI programs and appears to have been intended to eliminate any species that reached that level of technological advancement. We call it the Exurgent Virus.

Firewall is not an urban myth. It is very real and may be the only thing standing between transhumanity and extinction. Own that fact, as you are now in it up to your virtual necks.

Some things - besides you - escaped the “Song Cai Flower.” They must be stopped. That’s what Firewall does. That’s what I would like you to do. Your escape indicates you have a well-honed, survival-oriented skill set - something my own team demonstrably lacked.

You have two choices:

1. You may become Firewall sentinels and finish what we inadvertently started by tracking down and destroying the errant exurgent egos that escaped the “Flower.” Or...

2. You may have your recent memories excised through deep psychosurgery and be downloaded into an infugee storage server where you can languish, vying for reinstantiation with millions of other bodiless egos, additionally handicapped with technical skills and knowledge that are hopelessly out of date.

The choice is yours…”

• Most begrudgingly, but a couple with a concerning sort of enthusiasm, they agreed to take what was behind door number one - even though it promised to make their few hours aboard the TITAN-infested “Flower” look like a pleasure cruise.

Corpse Guard