root@Simulspace Universe
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There are millions, if not billions, of infugees kept in cold storage after the Fall. Some altruistic groups work to find morphs for each and every mind, but the expense of resleeving infugees is very high. Since the expense is so high, it cannot be justified in the face of other existential needs, so most infugees stay in cold storage unless they have something special to offer transhumanity. Since not every infugee can be resleeved into a morph, it seems like it would be morally justifiable to stop trying to sleeve them, and start waking them up in simulspaces and telling them that they have been resleeved. On a long enough time scale, some of the infugees will figure out the deception, but for the most part the Matrix solution would work.
One could even argue that this sort of deception is a moral imperative. When considering a moral imperative, the question must be asked "What if everyone did this? Would I want to live in that society?" In this case, the alternative is either cold storage, or an existential angst from knowing your reality is an illusion. With those as alternatives, I would argue that the answer is yes, deception is preferred. Therefore, deceiving infugees into thinking the simulspaces they live in are the "real world" is a moral imperative until transumanity has the resources to sleeve everyone in a new morph.
From an in-game point of view, this is a way to introduce settings and plots that otherwise would not make any sense (arguably, psionic powers and Pandora Gates mean that the normal setting is a simulspace), or are contradicted by some aspect of the setting. Even if they players aren't interested in being in a fully simulspace game, the Holodeck Malfunction is a standard trope for a session or two. In fact, it works better in Eclipse Phase, because your infomorphs aren't restricted to the holodeck, so there isn't a safety net if things start to spin out of control.
- "Did you hear? Jack the Ripper is back! Some jackass was playing detective in a simulspace, and somehow the Jack the Ripper subroutine ended up inside a Futura morph and it got off the station before thermonuclear containment could be deployed! This is so awesome! The Ultimates Predator League is offering a fat stack of rep as a prize for the first transhuman to capture Jack's stack!"
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root@Simulspace Universe
[hr] Yea, it probably wouldn't work if any of the residents looked too closely. But, as you say, bad solutions and ideas are fun, and nothing makes a bad idea more fun than trying to fix bad ideas on the fly with even worse ideas. Did all of the simulspace infugees (simfugees?) figure out they were living in the Matrix because they overloaded the modeling software? Reduce the level of technology they have to work with because "TITANs infected all the tech, so we are Luddites now". Did they figure it out by examining the clues in their environment and seeing how it doesn't all add up? Introduce a psychosurgery behavioral modification inhibiting questioning reality. Did that fail because people worked out a way to think around a hard coded block? Add another psychosurgery behavioral modification promoting social conditioning away from questioning reality. Did someone in your clave point out that by now what is being done to simfugees is horrifically illegal and immoral? Throw that idiot into the simulspace with heavily edited memories. Watching the process spiral out of control with bad patchwork solutions would be entertaining, and a great reason to inject a sentinal team into the mess. The sentinels could be sent in to a rapidly deteriorating simulspace reality to locate and liberate a simfugee target in the "American midwest" before the internal contradictions in the simulpace cause it to crash and damage all of the connected minds. They have a time limit that gets shorter with every action they take that violates the internal physics and social structures of the system, but they have too little information to find their target. They start out with the datam that their target is somewhere in the midwest, but their spacial resolution gives them a whole timezone to work with.@-rep +1
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[hr] "Immoral? No way! If we weren't so generous as to give these infugees a simulspace to run in, do you think anyone would ever give them a morph? The cream of the infugee crop got pulled out of cold storage early, these people have nothing to offer except in groups like this. We should receive a reward for being so moral and good hearted. Yes, there is the occasional ontological disaster, but that's more than statistically balanced by the quality of life we give them!"@-rep +1
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