[ I started thinking about how to make some interesting exhumans, and then remembered some of the issues I research and friends I have. The game system section might need further polishing - basically it is about sacrificing mental stability and overall mentality on the altar of efficiency. The NPC might be an useful Firewall antagonist or problematic ally. ] Overclockers Overclockers are transhumans obsessed with mental speed. While some are merely focused on efficiency, many see it as a good in itself - they want to break away from the sluggish matter and meat, and the faster they go, the more annoying the physical world becomes. In the end, they turn into exhumans. Practically all overclockers are infomorphs. There is simply no way of building a morph that can keep up with the mental speed of a modern optical computer. There are those who control microbots and miniature morphs, but dedicated overclockers begin to notice the problem with lags. Virtual environments are much better at keeping up with their demands - but even here communications lags tend to become annoying. Many overclockers find "realtime" mesh communication with the outside world tedious. Normally infomorph speeds are limited by the speed of standard nanoprocessors. These have not improved much since the Fall. In fact, given the fears of a TITAN resurgence, general nanoprocessors have been deliberately limited and time-critical operations implemented using dedicated hardware. Certain "hot cores" allow faster processing - these are often pre-Fall relics or experimental designs, illegal under most anti-TITAN laws. There are rumours among overclockers about fantastically rare and expensive QE processor clusters using qubits for internal instantaneous communication. While theoretically such clusters could be built, they would be *amazingly* expensive. Most design ideas involve super-fast nanoprocessors built on top of a qubit factory, delivering a torrent of precious qubits and dissipating enormous amounts of entropy as waste heat. Another method of accelerating thought is to try to parallelise it further. Normal egos are already run as massively parallel processes across a myriad of individual processors and they are limited by the necessary serial steps in updating the neural state and communicating it to the other processors. The "maspar" overclockers hack the ego emulation algorithms to make them more parallel. The main trick is to tweak the mathematical operations to reduce precision but allow better parallelisation, or represent the neural states in more efficient mathematical forms such as Brauer groups, Iwasawa motifs or CZ-Fourier space. Other tricks include precomputing and caching common calculations, speculative execution (rather than wait for slowly arriving information from remote processors, all possibilities are locally calculated ahead of time and the incorrect ones discarded) and even nano-quantum computing. The maspar approach is very hard, but worthwhile hacks can be sold to hypercorps and others for a tidy profit - there is always a demand for better ego emulators. Most overclockers have long since given up on getting much from maspar. The third and most dangerous approach is to reduce the computational complexity of the ego. The more radically the ego can be pruned the faster it becomes. As the overclocker joke goes, "an erased mind runs infinitely fast". Neural pruning can be used to optimize for speed, both by removing unnecessary neural network computations and by reducing the number of slow long-range signals. Truly radical optimization is more akin to creating a delta fork: the original mind is mapped onto a speed-optimized AGI architecture. Overclocker culture tends to form local clusters (since delays are so detestable). Within a cluster the overclockers exchange tips, have speed competitions and tinker with their software. Before the Fall many military groups, megacorporations and research outfits experimented in pushing the speed of infomorphs. Much of this research has been lost (and would be highly sought after by overclockers), but the basic conclusion was that pushing the speed of transhuman-derived egos had too strong diminishing returns - for super-speed AI would be the ideal choice. This most likely contributed to the development of the TITANs, casting further shadow over the whole subject. Overclocking yourself Beyond the obvious strategies of using simspace acceleration, narcoalgorithms, adrenal boosts, neurachem, and reflex boosters, most overclocking deals with overcoming the aptitude maximums of REF and SPD. Tweaking computers to allow higher aptitude maximums requires Hardware Electronics Task Actions with a timeframe of a month. The difficulty is increased by a modifier equal to the current aptitude maximum. A successful result will increase the aptitude maximum by 1. Hot core processor cluster [Cost: Expensive] This is the real thing: super-fast processors. Some versions are literally hot and require major cooling, others merely employ devious quantum computations to improve performance. A hot core cluster allows SPD 5 and REF 50, as well as simspace speeds of 75 times realtime. The downside is that they are quite illegal, and for good reason: they are like milk and honey for exsurgent viruses and other nasty malware. Cognitive preprocessing An enhancement to the perception/action loops of an ego, speeding them up. This is inserted using Psychosurgery. If it is is successful it will give a +10 bonus to INIT. The SV is 1d10+1. The resulting mindstate has a considerably higher reactivity to the environment, often described as being jumpy or paranoid. This enhancement can be stacked multiple times, but each extra preprocessor gives a -10 modifier to the psychosurgery task. Neural speed optimization This process is equivalent to neural pruning. An expert performs a Psychosurgery Test as per page 274, producing an optimized fork. Mere optimization is akin to making a beta fork. It can increase REF by 1 point per aptitude reduced by 5 (or, alternatively, by reducing skills by 50 points or some other combination of changes freeing up 50 CP per extra point of REF). Note that INIT and LUC are recalculated. Optimized forks are not legally beta forks unless active skills are reduced below 60. Remapping is like creating a delta fork, with the same limits on active skills (40), knowledge skills (80) and psi. It allows the above trade of aptitudes for REF, but also gives +1 SPD and increases the aptitude maximum for REF by 5 regardless of morph due to the efficient implementation. Exhuman: Simon Quong Simon was a young teenager when the Fall occurred; his adolescence was spent as an infomorph infugee in the servers of Dover Station (an infomorph/synthmorph Belt habitat). While at first concerned with the loss of his physical body he soon learned to enjoy the benefits of virtual existence. Running at simulspace speeds he grew up fast and now regards himself as a mature, middle aged adult. Simon apprenticed himself to the local nanoprogrammers and electronics experts, helping them repair and upgrade mining ships and synthmorphs. He began to apply the upgrades to himself too, inventing a number of useful tricks for the mercurials on the station. Over the past few years he has become increasingly obsessed with speeding up thinking. A recent accident where the speed of his and his exceedingly fast forks saved the day has confirmed in his mind the need to be the fastest there is - if you can always outthink and outreact your enemy you will win. Simon has never been particularly social, and as he has accelerated himself he has less and less patience with slow carbon and silicone piles. He prefers to associate with other fast minds, identifying more and more with AGI - especially the pre-Fall unlimited AGIs. He respects anything fast and smart, and is entirely open to plans for removing imposed limits on AGIs. To keep them slow and dumb is immoral. He is trading some of his "liberation services" in exchange for exotic blueprints and pre-Fall code he intends to use to improve his speed even further - soon he will be able to construct his "dream core". Roleplaying tips: Simon is *fast* and has no patience or respect for anybody who is not also a quick infomorph. He is quick, impersonal and confusing like a virtual tornado, with a self-image just as mercurial and twisty. Unfortunately his sense of right and wrong is just as unstable: there are just problems to be solved as fast as possible. He is also extremely unphysical: he thinks and acts in terms of information, not bodily action. In a fight he will instantiate a large number of fast forks and then launch a barrage of Infosec attacks not just against his enemies but against their equipment and environment too, infiltrating it and turning it against them. Background: Reinstantiated Faction: Mercurial Morph: Infomorph Motivation: +Speed, +Hacking, -Technophobia COG COO INT REF SAV SOM WIL 25 10 30(35) 40(50) 5 10 10 TT LUC IR WT DUR DR 4 20 40 0 0 0 MOX INIT SPD DB 3 170(200) 4(5) 1 (Numbers in parenthesis denote his fully accelerated state when running Klar and Kick) Traits: Fast Learner, Situational Awareness, Addiction: Klar and Kick level 1, Edited memories, Mental disorder: ADHD, Neural damage: somatosensory agnosia (objects cannot be described or understood by touch, but must be examined visually), chorea (quasi-purposeful "dance-like" involuntary movements of his body) Notable implants: Reflex booster He regularly uses stimulant narcoalgorithms equivalent to Klar and Kick (the Kick algorithm has produced the characteristic jumpiness and shakiness in his body-image). He has also undergone three treatments for cognitive preprocessing, something that has further messed up his body image; often he just turns it off for long periods when working on mental tasks. Simon runs on his own homebuilt hot core, allowing him to run faster than normal infomorphs (this is not known to the Dover inhabitants, but they have come to trust Simon anyway - he is hardly the quirkiest person around, and he has saved lives). Simon is usually assisted by two or three delta optimized forks. Beside being cut-down versions of Simon they all have the delusion that the original Simon *really* is an AGI - they try to convince him to "upgrade to his true nature". He knows they are wrong but thinks it is an amusing notion. Once he gets his dream core built he is going to be faster and smarter than all known AGIs... COG COO INT REF SAV SOM WIL 20 5 30(35) 45(55) 1 5 5 TT LUC IR WT DUR DR 2 10 40 0 0 0 MOX INIT SPD DB 0 180(210) 5 1