Stars Our Destination Tier
• Kaiber Singh called the team to Thoughtcrime where one of the automanufactories had begun fabricating an army of small artificials and setting it free to infest the Swarm. Singh assumed it had something to do with the team and told them to “clean up their mess.”
• Kru took a digital approach and worked to reprogram the system and the artificials.
• John 117 fought his way through the battling robots to cut the power to the manufactory.
• Terry, Piv and Nikolas took up covering positions and started shooting up the place.
• In the midst of the skirmish the altered Oz-4 morph the team had identified after the collision sprung from ambush and attacked Piv. Terry shot it up as John 117 garrotted it’s head off.
• Kru managed to co-opt production and force the system to fabricate new mini-bots (each class with a different team member’s bobble head) that would hunt down and destroy the infestation. Nonetheless the infestation spread throughout the Thoughtcrime and even to other vessels, and it would take some time for Kru’s bots to eradicate it all.
• Kru also determined that most of the artificials contained inordinate amounts of storage space and that the contents consisted of large chunks of some kind of ego-like programming.
• The skirmish was watched in real time by much of the Swarm and afterward the team used it to build some positive rep - Hey look at us! We were protecting the Swarm!” The group was also subjected to an open interrogation by members of most of the major collectives in the fleet which was also watched - and virtually participated in - by most of the Swarm. The team ultimately shared most of their story - editing out any mention of Firewall - trying to play it like they were simply victims of historical circumstance and good samaritans who just took on the responsibility of hunting down these errant TITAN-made egos as a social duty. The story went over more or less convincingly depending upon the individual - some losing, some gaining a little rep.
• The party decided - not quite unanimously to incinerate both the program Kruger had captured within the manufactories control systems and the Oz-4's dead morph.
• The party decided - not quite unanimously to incinerate both the program Kruger had captured within the manufactories control systems and the Oz-4's dead morph.
• During the aftermath the team had a discussion that lead to a meta, out-of-character recap of the central elements of the campaign. It served as an intentional meta-reminder to the players of things that are otherwise hard to realize or remember when unfamiliar with the setting and playing only twice per month.
-The party members all ended up on the Song Cai Flower independently and through their own individual back stories. Most of these reasons had something to do with Darius Whitegate, but since the Flower was his base of operation at the time, this makes sense.
-Whitegate was in charge of a number of projects aboard the Flower and around the solar system. One of these was the Recursively Enhanced & Networked TITAN-Linked Operant Vitae project, or R.E.N.T.L.O.V. for short. It was intended to create an AI choke collar that could be used to weaponize TITANS, allowing transhumans to fight fire with fire.
-R.E.N.T.L.O.V. was based on Whitegate’s cognitive and personality architecture.
- The TITAN the Flower researchers were trying to control apparently got loose and compromised the ship and in the resulting takeover the vessel was forced into a cometary orbit.
-Ten years later, enter Firewall and the random collection of egos Darwin found to help him destroy the Flower - the characters.
-Whitegate used his own cognitive architecture and personality profile in the R.E.N.T.L.O.V. project so presumably some of his own knowledge and motivations remained in tact. Given that data about all his projects was presumably aboard the Flower it was likely that the escaped ego had access to this data and, sharing Whitegates motivations, wanted to complete Whitegate’s work - or at least a nihilistic-crazy-TITANesque-version of those projects. To facilitate this, it needed to find Whitegate and “update,” hence the initial farcast to Mars and the capture/merging with Whitegate on Progress Station.
-The ego then scattered to various locations where specific projects and experiments were being conducted, presumably to collect the products or results. The TITAN consciousness the Cognite team had recovered from the Iapetus matrioshka brain, the gate/time displacement experiments on Mercury, the mobile portal from the TQZ and now the recovery of the R.E.N.T.L.O.V. project from the old satellite hidden aboard the Stars. TITANS, control mechanisms and gates - oh my!
• What this thread of facts actually portends is up to the party characters/players to decide.
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