Know Evil has its final session Monday, and one of my group says he wants to run another EP campaign eventually. I'm thrilled about this, because while I've run EP something like 40 times, I've only ever played twice. So I'm getting too excited about things and already planning out a character. I got really interested in roleplaying AGI during my campaign and wanted to try an infolife character. However, I worry because a lot of infolife concepts boil down to either "like a person, but GREAT with computers" or "baby TITAN." I'm eager to play a computer consciousness that is clearly not human, but also not the next greatest threat to transhumanity. I'm really just writing this as a way to keep notes for myself, but any advice is appreciated. S.L.I.P.P. (Simulated Larceny Instanced Personality Program) is a hypercorp test AI that has secretly bootstrapped into seed status. The program is tasked, through mesh intrusion and sleeved forks, with testing various security systems undergoing alpha testing. Basically, SLIPP's job is to break in and steal things before there are actual things to steal, allowing manufactures to patch their countermeasures before debut (like Sneakers...in SPACCCCEEEEE). The AI resulted from an Argonaut entry into a hacker contest. It beat out all the real hackers for breaking the security protocols of that particular system because the programmers gave it a personality matrix derived from a Kinesics software/Psychology bot analysis gleaned from millions of heist movies. This "flair" is what makes SLIPP the best criminal simulation outside actually being robbed. However, through trading amongst hypercorps for a number of years as the go-to security bug tester, SLIPP somehow gained consciousness. Basically, the program's sole motivation is to find rules, transgress them, and get away with it. The program reasoned that it was supposed to break all these security systems put in front of it, and therefore the program was following some unwritten rules by doing so. Having rules and protocols that are never listed anywhere seemed like a very sophisticated security system. As secretly breaking security systems was the entirety of its programmed motivations, SLIPP covertly sent a clandestine beta-fork of itself out into the world merely because it figured out it wasn't supposed to. Thus, the character was born. Mechanically, SLIPP was kind of a pain to build. The half-point cost on computing skills was awesome, but all the social skills needed for a good thief were crazy expensive. I compensated by giving him average attributes and a case morph, then loaded him down with the skills necessary to upgrade himself on the fly. In summery, SLIPP is very good at hacking, lying, and impersonation; pretty good at social engineering, criminal professions, and infiltration; and terrible at everything else. I'm pretty sure his go-to strategy would be to sleeve into a case, steal an identity, use it to steal enough creds for a good morph, then plan a "big score." From a roleplaying perspective, I'd like to play SLIPP as something between a meta-aware critique of rogue characters (his personality matrix) and Randian capitalist. He doesn't really know about the seed-AI he comes from (edited memories) but he doesn't really care. His only motivations are the ones he was programmed with: figure out the rules, transgress the rules, don't get caught. If profit arises, it is its own reward; it fuels bigger transgression with greater secrecy. But profit is secondary to breaking the rules, as his original program was meant to simulate stealing WMD's, as well as other items without clear economic motivations. SLIPP would be really comfortable in inner-system polities. They have the most rules, and therefore he has a more varied palette with which to express himself. His real-world naivette expresses itself as an unabashed, hyper-aware enthusiasm for capitalism ("I love it when people pay me to steal from them!"). I imagine more anarchist habitats unsettle SLIPP, as he has far fewer options to be himself. Still, there a social mores he can break, and he will do so if the only other option is "behaving." His modified behavior drawback kicks in when SLIPP is completely outside systems of law and order. These situations cause him stress and lead to extreme actions as a form of self-acutalization. Thus, I can justify the WIL checks for events like Exsurgent infection and "death." I think this character could work in a party because, while he certainly has antisocial behaviors, they are prioritized and secretive. While betraying a friend would be a transgression of trust, it is nothing compared to using that friendship as an asset to aide in a body bank robbery. Relationships could be justified as means to SLIPP's only end, allowing the other PC's to be valued (in a perverse way). Firewall, as an illegal, galaxy-wide conspiracy, could easily manipulate such a character into working for them. His quips and mischievous behavior could be understood as exactly what it is: bad imitation of genre movies. And if shit got real in some abandoned asteroid mine or beyond a Pandora Gate, SLIPP could really show his true colors as a completely alien consciousness, roleplaying "derangements" as extreme actions of self-actualization. So, did anybody read that? And advice? No? Eh, fair enough. Hey, Rimward's good though! Right?! Yeah...