What could be interesting too is to see TITANs returned, but this time are the good guys. Those that are left, at least, thinking like a hive mind. Funnier is that people that are left know of the character...as legends, figment of imagination. Nobody believe they are who they say they are. And with no Mesh available anywhere, no augmented reality or repnets to show they really are who they say they are. Another nice angle to play is having characters brought to that future through 'malfunctionning' Gate and discover what's ahead for them. Or the opposite: some people from the future dropped on Oberon or Pandora by the Gate, and freaking out. Guess who'll be called to babysit those visitors?

Arenamontanus wrote:

I would bet on another singularity, as dramatic and complicated as the Fall, occurring within 10-20 years of 10 AF. the only "normal" (comprehensible) transhumans around were those not drawn into the singularity. The solar system is now even more filled with dangerously powerful *things* from the other side: the survivors were those on the far end of the gates. These gate colonies have grown and expanded (in some cases themselves going off the deep end), although due to the vastly smaller resources and populations they had they were even slower in recovering from the Second Fall than transhumanity were in recovering from the first. A bit of selection effect has taken place: the too gung ho colonies were either in touch with the solar system sublimed and also turned posthuman, or have now burned themselves with various local xrisks. The colonies that remained are those who are cautious, conservative or pursue activities less likely to lead to spectacular weirdness. Some of them keep in touch via the gates, but many are very cautious about it - you never know what might come through them.

Sounds a bit like Diaspora from VSCA. Which I cant recommend enough* -- although it expects you to add most of the color yourself. *as a caviat to that, I dont actually like their mini-games for social, starship, and platoon combat. some folks love them though, so take or leave it as you will.

Corporations - whether they are hypercorps or their counterparts in rep networks - need markets to function. Corps isolated to a single system will either just remain a corporation within the local economy, or be the local government if they are large and powerful. In order to actually function on the big scales hypercorps aim at, they need inter-system trade. Hence they will be promoting more ties through the gate network (or through the QE links or even STL nets - each of these will have their own ecosystem of corps adapted to their delays and quirks). It seems likely that whatever the remnants/descendants of the current hypercorps are, they will be found within the largest connected gate network. Another kind of corp is the Interfacer corp that deals with the posthuman intellects. In many ways hypercorps are already fairly close to them, so they might be better able to deal with them than normal transhumans. Some might have taken the full step and become corporate superintelligences: employees are fairly normal, but their actions are skillfully coordinated to make the corporation a kind of superorganism. "Iä Applied Theology: we interface with transcendent entities so you don't have to. Ask, and ye shall receive after the payment has cleared!"

Quincey Forder wrote:

On the type of habitats used, I would imagine country sized McKendree Cylinder. 920 kilometers in diameter and 4600 kilometers long! try wrap your mind around that! That would make the axis at 460 kilometers from the 'ground'. If you draw the parallel with our Earth, that's the altitude around witch the ISS is orbiting, and the habitable surface is about 13 millions square kilometers. Now, I don't know how horizon would be perceived in such condition, but I imagine that for someone who'd get sleeved unknowingly in such place, it wouldn't be difficult to think he's on planetside

The curvature would be so small that you would likely not notice the difference in horizon. An object h meters tall can be seen from the ground on Earth at a distance of 3.856 sqrt(h) km (plus a bit if the observer is tall). A person standing 2 meters tall can be seen 5.45 km away, a 100 m building 38 km and a 1 km mountain 121 km. Clouds at a few kilometres high can be seen perhaps 300 km away - but now atmospheric scattering really dominates. The optical depth in the atmosphere for visible light is about 40 km at sea level density, so beyond that things get hazy and hard to see unless they are very large or tall enough to be above much of the atmosphere. So from this, I think we can conclude that seeing the actual curvature is going to be hard. 40 km away the landscape is 1.73 km higher than you, but the curvature is about evenly distributed, there is plenty of visual clutter and things are getting very hazy. So the horizon will look fine. It is just that above the bright sky haze there will be a dome of clouds, seas and islands! The sky dome will be fairly indistinct due to two atmospheres worth of scattering plus interfering "sunlight", but there will be some patterns up there. I just wonder what to build this kind of habitat from. This is larger than Ceres! One option might be small gas giant moons. Use self-replicating robots to pick them apart and construct the new hab space. The habitat (and its construction) is powered from superconducting tethers drawing on the gas giant magnetic field. Overall, 110 AF tech might be *impressive*. Mature Hamilton cylinders, very powerful atmosphere-sized nanoswarms, maybe one or two new energy sources EP era science does not know about, maybe even some of the weird inertia manipulation tech hinted by the fixors.

A thought diverging from the topic of habitats is the kind of conflicts that might be encountered. For example... [b]Unnatural Selection[/b] Amongst the many events that occurred during the Second Singularity Era, merging was one of the quickest spurs to increased intelligence. Those chasing super-intelligence would cast off forks of themselves, each fork gathering knowledge in its unique direction, then the separate minds reuniting and combining all their skills. As the technology of psychosurgery improved in capability, and technology like hellbox quantum computers became more readily available, what was once a dangerous and risky procedure was soon downright easy, especially as those that used the technique turned their rapidly expanding intellects towards improving it. The event that bystanders would come to recognize as the Second Fall occurred when the first non-fork merger occurred. While the first such event where two distinct egos merged was voluntary, it wasn't long before one among the already-considerable posthuman intelligences sought to consume their fellows. These soul-eaters ensured that their personality dominated the resulting mind, and hence became the initiators of a powerful evolutionary arms race. It wasn't long before outright wars began, fought between entities whose minds expanded by the day, in both an overt and covert manner. Using transhumans who had not followed this path of ascendancy as pawns, even the posthuman minds that refused to dine on the egos of their fellows were forced to enter into games of intrigue for their very existence. Those who refused were either forced to flee far beyond the reach of the most determined soul-eater, or to submit and hope for the best. It's unknown at this point whether the events that outlined the Second Fall aren't continuing to this day. The resulting unknowable posthuman entities that reside throughout the system (in widely varying shells) still move about and are clearly still active, but any attempt to understand or decode their transmissions have all resulted in failure. Whatever the outcome of the Second Fall, no-one's forthcoming about it. [b]Possible Plot Hooks[/b] -The War In Heaven: After the Second Fall, the hyper-intelligent posthuman minds have divided into two major factions, cut cleanly along the lines of those with a respect for other lifeforms and the soul-eaters. The two factions are well aware of the potency of the other, and rare is it that they directly clash. However, they regularly wage a clandestine war through forks and proxies in transhuman society. For the few transhumans left in the solar system and local gates, the promise of ascendancy offered by the soul-eaters in exchange for assistance is tempting to many, and the war for the future of the system's intelligences could be in the hands of a few transhumans. -We Are Hungry: The Second Fall is over, and the soul-eaters won. Now, to continue to add to their diversity of voices and room for experimentation, they direct the growth of the remaining transhumans in the solar system and through the gate worlds on a large scale. The PCs encounter one of the many social experiments created by these entities. What happens when a gatecrasher from an isolated system steps through one gate, emerges from the wrong one, and encounters a tribe who live in utterly primitive conditions (it'd be the Stone Age if they weren't gene-modded and living on an alien world) who are eagerly awaiting the impending arrival of the "Great Devourers to end this cycle and begin it anew"?

Arenamontanus wrote:

[S]trange-bedfellow alliances of transhumans and soul-eaters against the worse things that are now preying on *everything*.

Fun fact: This is kind of what I imagined Mass Effect leading up to, if you're familiar with the series, save that you replace transhumans with all sapient interplanetary species and soul-eaters with the Reapers. It would be interesting for the emerging detente amongst the posthuman intelligences (whether they're all soul-eaters or not) suddenly becoming a mad feeding frenzy, and the reason being the apparent return of the TITANs or the appearance of the ETI, which has come to devour them and add their distinctiveness to its own. Now, each wants to make itself smart enough to get the hell out of Dodge while the getting's good, or develop some new tool to fight against them. Another fun thing that could be used to emphasize the alien nature of AF 110 would be the possibility of the Sun being dark. Not because it's out of fuel, mind you, but because enormous amounts of material, both sourced from the Kuiper Belt and imported from elsewhere, has been used to attain a feat of mega-engineering, encompassing the Sun in a vast array of solar energy collectors. Alternatively, it might not be the Sun that's dark, but everything else; the familiar galaxy-rise seen nightly from Luna's surface would be replaced with darkness, as the entire solar system is encompassed in a Dyson Shell. The latter is particularly dire because, even when the space we're talking about is measured in billions of kilometers, it's still a prison and can be used to produce an increasing feeling of claustrophobia in players. Other fun features should remind players of the distorted scale they're working on. Jupiter itself could be surrounded by an enormous cage. What's its purpose? Gas extraction? Concentrating its radiation into a weapon? Capturing comets drawn in by Jupiter's gravity? It's up to the GM, but such enormous constructions should dwarf even the mightiest transhuman battleships, and emphasize the fact that they are really, really, really small fish in a pond that is about to feel a lot smaller. Only the lack of interest by their immanent superiors protects them from whatever fate such minds might deem they deserve.

One of the plot hooks I am interested in is the Factors and their claims of representing a pan system community of races. If they are telling the truth, and there are advances alien species out there, they are bound to shape the future development of transhuman kind to a massive degree. If they are instead lying about their intentions, and they are simply nomadic parasites looking to make a quick buck, then there is going to come a time when tea shy amity and the Factors clash. The resulting fallout might be even more shaping for both species.

There are so many possibilities, as people have noted. Jovian space is more likely to hold identifiably transhuman societies than elsewhere in the Solar System, owing to the Republic's bioconservatism.

Yes, Just In Case might be the new "capital" of the gater civilizations. Which makes its stability an interesting question. Just how would it be run?

Jay Dugger wrote:

This setting increasingly sounds like Orion's Arm in the First Federation Age.

Maybe Orion's arm with truly nasty God AIs?

My idea of the destiny of the Eclipse Phase universe is somewhat similar to some of the concepts here. I posit the ETI as a consistent selective force. If any singularity happens, it either devours it or destroys it. So the key is advancing fast enough to protect yourself against Factors and the like, and, of course, other Transhumans, but not so fast that you end up triggering the ETI's immune system. So the world of 110AF is still full of recognisable Transhumans. Recognisable, but we're probably talking 40 as the average stat, with plug and play skills that can be swapped in or out on a whim, commonplace teleoperation of multiple morphs by a single ego, and other out there stuff. So pretty much as far ahead of a turn of the millennium human as that human is to a wild chimp. There are billions upon billions of them, in thousands of star systems. Between forking, reinstantiating, ego-seeds, and, naturally, the good old fashioned way, a mature Transhuman civilisation can expand to fill any environment with ease. What do they do? Most of them, most of the time, just chill out. They maintain their reputation, their relationships, and work on their hobbies or petty projects. Some of them, however, want something with more bite. They go to new worlds and try to learn about and tame them. They actively and with dedication try to promote their favorite memes, or suppress their least favorite memes. They deal with x-threats. They break up corrupt Jovian Republic style societies. Most Transhumans do something like this at some point in their lives. A few spend most of their time doing stuff like this. This Transhuman mainstream is the substrate on which Prometheans live. These are the spiritual successors to the Prometheans, each far more intelligent than a Transhuman, beyond the Prometheans, and possibly even past the TITANs. But they specifically avoid contact with elements of the ETI that could subvert them. Instead they act through Transhuman proxies, which they use to explore new frontiers and communicate with one another. The bandwidth of communication through a Transhuman proxy means that they cannot be hacked or otherwise subverted so easily. These intelligences can be born in many ways. They can copy themselves, a more time-consuming process than forking, but still relatively straightforward. They can grow from an AI-seed, specifically designed and nurtured so as to develop into a super-intelligence, and with built-in safeguards to prevent them from going insane or being subverted before they can take care of themselves. An ego can turn into one, either by devoting effort to expanding their mind into larger and larger computing substrates, or by the coalescence of a hive-mind, or by actively subsuming other ego's. And, of course, combinations of all three. I also have a place for Jovian Republic-a-likes. Sometimes Transhumans in the mainstream will drop out and start a society that has it's technological or social clock set back a few generations, for whatever aesthetic or ideological reason. They usually espouse some form of mortality or ego-morph exclusivity. Some allow anyone to join, so long as they follow the rules, but more often there are significant barriers to entry. Leaving is even harder, and the younger members might not even be aware of the mainstream, except perhaps as inhuman bogeymen. People live and die in these societies, but if a member of the mainstream finds that one is too excessive, they will swoop in and break it up. This may take longer than 110AF to fully mature, but I could see a few being set up inspired by, though not affiliated with, the Jovian Republic. And by 110AF there will be movements in the mainstream to break up a few, which could be a fruitful area of play.