Please forgive my blatant ignorance, but I have a few questions I have been thinking about recently while brainstorming campaign/adventure ideas that I'm hoping people might know the answers to.
What is there to stop a power-hungry individual from alpha-forking his/her infomorph a million times over to try to dominate the entire solar system or even a single habitat? I understand that the forks would be independent entities which may rebel against the original ego's plan, but at least the original ego would be able to spread his/her core beliefs throughout and unduly influence transhumanity.
Why do groups profit from fork-napping or otherwise capturing random egos? Why not just fork members of your own group? I can't think of anything a captured ego might provide (other than information via interrogation or specialized skills the group happens to need) which makes random ego-napping a profitable venture.
On a related note, can you use captured infomorphs for anything other than interrogation? I feel like I've read a couple of places that captured ones can be put to work on things like surveillance. But don't they still have a will, and wouldn't they be very unlikely to assist in any tasks they are asked to do by their captors? Also, wouldn't a fork of yourself be much more likely to assist you in any activities than an infomorph you captured? (excepting, as in the previous question, an infomorph with particular special talents/information)
Are there multiple insurance agencies which provide backup coverage? If there are more than one: for each one, where are all the backup egos physically stored? Do the companies collaborate at all so that if one has a massive loss of egos, another can replace them?
Wouldn't it make sense that whatever companies which control the ego backups would have inordinate political and economic control over the habitats they service? It strikes me that these companies could (ab)use their position of controlling the relative immortality of transhumanity for massive profits.
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General EP Setting Queries
Sat, 2012-01-28 22:26
#1
tsedeq
General EP Setting Queries
Sat, 2012-01-28 23:02
#2
Tyrnis
Re: General EP Setting Queries
There are multiple agencies that offer backups, yes. Pretty much anyone with an ego bridge and some data storage space could potentially make a backup and market themselves as an agency, although I'm quite certain that there are strict legal standards to do so within the Planetary Consortium. Anyone with a less than stellar performance record is going to get nailed on their rep scores in the outer system.
The companies almost assuredly do NOT collaborate, however. Would you turn over a backup of your research team to the competition? I imagine people in sensitive positions often sign agreements that they'll only house their backups within company run facilities.
You'd really only run much risk of flagrant abuse of power by the companies in isolated independent habitats. If I'm a Pathfinder employee on a Pathfinder station, it's not in company interests to try and hold my immortality hostage (unless I'm an indenture...then yeah, the fact that the company has my backup is very much being held over my head.)
Mon, 2012-01-30 17:35
#3
Elfface
Re: General EP Setting Queries
The main restriction on mass-forking is that, in many places, Alpha forking is illegal and lesser forks don't have civil rights. While you can do it in private, if you want your million copies to be anywhere other than your basement, you need a lot of sleeves and fake IDs. Even infomorphs have a location somewhere that can be tracked, and if whoever owns the servers realises you're mass alpha-forking, you're getting shut down.
Re-merging is a problem too. If you're apart more than a few hours, even a successful merge causes memory loss and stress damage. You either have to dedicate yourself to suddenly having a lot of siblings, or accept that you won't be remembering everything you did.
Finally, your forks may not want to come back. Away for a few days with a mission in mind, you're probably alright, especially if you want to know what the other you was up to for the duration. A week or more, and long-distance, you might have other commitments or new friends. Or maybe just like the new place more than wherever you were before.
Once you get past those problems though, setting up in a remote location, forging a lot of IDs, arranging for a lot of sleeves and resolving to further your own goals and then aid your forks across the galaxy, then you have a very successful business model. One that has already been used in-universe, most notably by the criminal group Pax Familiae, in which most of the members are old backups of the leader, a year or so behind so they don't have the resources to take over, but trusting each other enough.
Now, fork-napping. A hell of a lot in EP is information-based, and locked into your head. Brainscan-coded encryption is a big plus, so only you or your fork can access the info. Capture a rich individual's fork, and you can extort them into handing over their credit accounts, corporate secrets or anything else you like. Even if they don't know anything, while the captured egos do have free-will, they can be used as slave-labour. Getting them addicted to a drug is a good start, then withholding it if they don't work.
Finally, ego backups. There are companies that provide this service. They're mostly based in one area, but others are clouded over large areas. You may even be able to get a discount on your backup, by carrying fragments of other people's backups and syncing every evening.
Rep-economy ensures that most backup agencies are honest. A legitimate backup agency would go out of business overnight if it came out that the stored egos were being used as labour. Less legitimate backups, you get a discount, but the cost is knowing that your backup may not be safe. Having your backup encrypted, and a trusted friend, family member or lawyer as a second keeper of the key, is a workaround here, and the cost if it taking a little longer to get re-sleeved when it transpires that you die.
Mostly though, soul-banks aren't running for the hills with their stored egos for the same reason today's banks aren't running off with all the cash.
Wed, 2012-02-01 12:26
#4
Herbo
Re: General EP Setting Queries
That's debatable :-)
The way I have been rationalising things to my players regarding proliferation of weapons, and abuse of technology is general human nature. We are tribal & social creatures. And while the sanctity of the human form and even the "soul" has been mothballed considerably by the time of Eclipse Phase, one of the last bastions of human nature is that of the mind. It's that ancient concept of knowing "I am." Tampering with the way a discrete personality percieves, experiences and interacts with the galaxy around them is still very much a social & tribal thing. Meaning that customs and social norms will vary WIDELY but rarely will it immediately devolve into a chaotic grab for the nearest nuke or copying George Washington 1000 times.
Today I can go to Walmart and buy a pump action shotgun, go get some shells and start going bananas with organic damage. But I don't, and most people don't, because we're busy worrying about whether or not Jimmy thought our email was funny and if we can get home in time to log in for our World of Warcraft raid...and then there's workin' for the man...etc. Similarly I could post my US social security number, all other pertinent forms of my ID and my various financial account details on every torrent site on the internet...but I don't because I'd rather be in control of my life.
Some of those ideas can transfer into a setting like Eclipse Phase. People don't "usually" copy themselves a hundred times because they want to know that they are who they think they are, and don't want to deal with the hassle of "I'M SPARTICUS" all the time. NOW this doesn't mean that stuff doesn't happen (as mentioned previously about the Pax Familiae), but it tends to be a notable exception that proves the rule (and probably invovles our friendly neighborhood firewall agents invenstigating the abnormality). This is also why alpha fork ego-napping is "profitable." You can nab a person and use their identity to falsify someone else's ID and then they've got access to your rep. Not to mention the horrible things they could do to your Alpha fork and then release it back in the "wild" so to speak. And since people rarely have multiple Alpha forks...nabbing their Alpha is a pretty reliable way of taking someone down. At the very least you are triggering a backup that won't have certain sensititve memories, or experiences that you find...damaging :-)
Similarly people don't arm themselves to the teeth and shoot up every morph they encounter because...they've got other things on their mind and probably wouldn't choose to terminate a morph even if they had a gun placed in their hands. Why? Probably the same reason you wouldn't shoot the bus driver on your daily route or murder the coffee house barista...it's a sick thing to do. This is why murder still matters in Eclipse Phase. Sure the person can be reloaded, but the kind of mind capable of ending a random transhuman life after 95% of them died in the Fall? That's the kind of person that needs to be watched, or at least have their motives checked out. But that's the stuff of roleplay and adventure :-)
Insurance companies DO exert a lot of control over people. This doesn't mean that they have to be all draconian about it. Afterall they can strike fear into the hearts of a transhuman ego with fine-print alone. In terms of where the backup is stored? I'd imagine that there are parts of an ego spread over a lot of different locations with multiple redundancies. In the end these companies/entities have a reputation to maintain as well. They wouldn't get very far by putting the screws to everyone they cover. Just like Farmers Insurance paid for my wife's bumper even when it was a bit above and beyond their requirements...sometimes people can do good things. Yes...even corporate people. BUT in terms of roleplaying...its always fun to strike paranoia into players with thoughts of voiding their backup insurance.
It's human nature in a transhuman universe baby!
Wed, 2012-02-01 13:48
#5
Azathoth
Re: General EP Setting Queries
I didn't see it mentioned above, so I'd just like to add another thing that keeps people from alpha forking like crazy and conquering the system:
Morphs are relatively expensive, and relatively slow to build (except maybe cheap synths).
So if you had the resources, as with Pax mentioned above, feel free to go nuts. Given that most people are suffering through hellish indenture to get one cheap morph, those individuals who can afford multiple morphs are in the minority, and then only a small subset of those would have the desire to fork themselves so drastically, or attempt such a take over, so it becomes rather a rare occurrence.
Thu, 2012-02-02 14:00
#6
tsedeq
Re: General EP Setting Queries
Thanks for the feedback everyone, this helps a lot. Related to forking, just to clarify - my question was only about alpha-forking as infomorphs which never attempt to sleeve into anything physical. Also, the motiviation would not be to have any of the forks merge back with the original - the goal is merely to spread your influence and philosophy be sheer force of numbers of entities that agree with you. I'm picturing a PC who sees himself as some sort of religious/political figure, trying to make his world view dominate the rest of transhumanity (or at least influence it as much as possible). Just trying to gauge the limits of what he could do, because knowing my PCs, they will try to break the campaign setting in as many ways as possible.
Thanks for the points about why nabbing a random ego could be profitable. I completely forgot about the identity theft possibilities that result. As far as enslaving an infomorph, though, I still don't see how it's possible if there is free will involved. Would need to use psychosurgery or some other method (drugs were mentioned I believe) to alter the character. That seems like a lot of effort when you could just fork off a much more loyal entity to do whatever menial tasks you would have assigned the captured infomorph.
My inquiry about the hardware behind ego backups was an attempt to see what sort of risk the setup is to transhumanity. It strikes me that if those backups aren't insanely redundant across the entire solar system, there are some key targets TITANS or Factors could hit to devastate transhumanity. Alternatively, if we demand such a vast amount of redundancy, then there are other threats exposed, such as breaking into a single data center and stealing thousands of copies of egos. Also, such a setup requires a vast amount of resources, limiting the number of companies able to provide the service, giving them a huge thumb on the scale when it comes to negotiating with governments.
Anyways, thanks again for all the input.