Hi,
I am writing an Eclipse Phase scenario, and one scene involves a firefight in an egocasting facility, with various factions vying to get information from an ego recently merged with an Alpha Fork. I am trying to get my head around drawing a map of part of the facility, but need help working out what would potentially be onsite.
It makes sense to me that because egocasting, resleeving and ego backups are so closely tied together, that there would be clinics that would provide facilities for all three at one dedicated site. Is this right or am I way off the mark?
Also, are there any named companies who provide this service? I am trying to come up with a nice sounding name to brand the company.
Thanks in advance for any and all help brainstorming this!
John
:-)
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A question about Egocasting and Morph Brokerage Clinics
Fri, 2014-03-21 06:39
#1
ottomancer
A question about Egocasting and Morph Brokerage Clinics
Fri, 2014-03-21 10:00
#2
nezumi.hebereke
There are a couple corps
There are a couple corps listed as being involved with this; ectomorph and nimbus. However, I usually imagine this is quite common and usually managed by smaller organizations. Farcasting equipment isn't too expensive, so anyone can set up shop. The issue is more one of keeping a reputation for secure and safe service.
What all they have depends on their size. Synthmorph farcasting requires just an ego bridge and somewhere to stack morphs afterwards. Biomorphs require something a little more intense. I imagine both of them, but biomorphs especially, will either need special morph storage on-site, or will work with another company who does provide that. And morph storage implies morph repair, aka healing services.
Another big piece here is data transfer. It takes a lot of bandwidth and a lot of data integrity software to ensure safe farcasting, so expect some computer hardware onsite. To reduce risks of power outages during an egocast, there may also be a battery bank or generator ready to kick on, although this would be in the basement or outside most likely, not in the egocasting room.
Finally, most locations are tight on space, so understand that they're likely to have neighbors. What other business are in this area? Well, what sort of traffic do they get?
Fri, 2014-03-21 14:35
#3
ORCACommander
the nothing special morphs
the nothing special morphs and used morphs would probably have a cryogenic vault similar to a mourge. people who pay to have special morphs or exclusive use morphs would probably be stores in a vault that is more spacious per morph and more heavily guarded. new and top of the line morphs would probably have a ward room/car dealer show room set up around the. so in total you have a potential for 3 body vaults of variable accessibility.
There should be a a full OR on site to handle implants and cybernetics. large scale clinics in addition to organ fabrication facilities would also have facilities to completely grow a morph from scratch
ego bride should likely be located near the OR. i would recommend a minimum of 3 per facility
half a dozen patient exam rooms to wheel the slabs into
reception area with areas for nurses and assistants
a few offices
a security post
bathroom and janitorial closet of course
on a station have as a nice wrinkle the body banks able to emergency jettison into space in micrograv environments or stations
as for far casters and the like i think only planet bound facilities should have dedicated far casters and quantum broadcasters. those in space should need to share the equipment as common hardware to the station
Sat, 2014-03-22 10:32
#4
ottomancer
Superb - this gives me lots
Superb - this gives me lots to go on, thanks for the help. :-)
Sat, 2014-03-22 19:33
#5
Lorsa
nezumi.hebereke wrote
Actually, I don't think synthetic morphs require any ego bridges at all. They have full cyberbrains so you can just transmit the go over to it and run it with just a few seconds boot-up like you would an infomorph. At least as far as I understood.
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Sat, 2014-03-22 21:47
#6
ORCACommander
i forgot to include a bit on
i forgot to include a bit on synths. how synths are presented will completely depend on the society the facilities are in. places like titan and anarchy ho;ds probably would have synths in something akin to car delearship fashion for the hgiher end places. while most will probably just be set up like machine shops
Sun, 2014-03-30 17:24
#7
ORCACommander
on a semi related note how
on a semi related note how many people here have a copy of MS Visio 2013?
its great for creating floor plans but i want to know if people will be able to view it before getting started on making one of these clinics. exporting them into other formats is a bit of a pain in the ass.
Sun, 2014-03-30 20:33
#8
Darkening Kaos
Visio Floorplans.
Easiest option I found was to simply copy/pasta into a Word document.
Depending on the number of visio elements, this can make a huge file, so be warned if you intend to upload it somewhere.
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Mon, 2014-03-31 09:32
#9
nezumi.hebereke
Lorsa wrote:nezumi.hebereke
You may be right. I always forget with them. Suffice to say, they're light on equipment.
Thu, 2014-06-12 21:56
#10
ORCACommander
Well instead of visio i went
Well instead of visio i went with my favorite method of dead tree grid material.
[URL=http://imgur.com/NDZ2oFi][IMG]http://i.imgur.com/NDZ2oFi.png[/IMG][/URL]
sorry it took so long
Fri, 2014-06-13 01:16
#11
Kamen
That looks rad. Great job!
That looks rad. Great job!
For some reason I always kind of mash-up the stasis chambers from Alien/Aliens and the cryo-storage office from Futurama when I think of a resleeving facility. A big open room with like a semi-circle of life support chambers that keep the bio-morphs "alive" while the egos are sleeved. Then that's all attached to offices, morph storage, and a lobby.
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Fri, 2014-06-13 07:07
#12
ottomancer
Cheers for the ideas, these
Cheers for the ideas, these forums are great for bouncing ideas around. I definitely think of Alien/Aliens a lot when I think of morph pods etc.
Here's what I came up with for the Clinic, which is on Luna:
The map only shows the ground floor, which is where all the action for this scene takes place. Morph vaults etc are on lower floors.
If I manage to get all the adventures into decent shape I'd like to post the whole Promised Land campaign online - I am running it for my group and they are seven adventures in, including this latest one.
The map only shows the ground floor, which is where all the action for this scene takes place. Morph vaults etc are on lower floors.
If I manage to get all the adventures into decent shape I'd like to post the whole Promised Land campaign online - I am running it for my group and they are seven adventures in, including this latest one.
Fri, 2014-06-13 11:52
#13
ORCACommander
i forgott o mention my graph
i forgot o mention my graph paper is going on the assumption of 1 tile = standard ep square footage. I can't remember if its proper dimension atm.
and yes with it being ground based you would have a lot more vertical room to play in :)
For the body vaults i really do think Morgue or one of those really cramped tenements from Neuromancer although i like your idea of the pods being the bridges and being fairly mobile. Probably something for the more hi tech or rich habs
Wed, 2014-06-18 01:02
#14
BonSequitur
It's perfectly plausible that
It's perfectly plausible that an egocasting facility might not have morph storage on-site, especially if they're a smaller "boutique" service. Instead they would have the morph delivered to their doorstep, probably by drone, coinciding with the scheduled egocast. For an egocasting service that provides a very wide variety in morphs and morph customisation, and who operates on a small volume for a more select clientele, this might make more sense than spending money to keep a bunch of splicers alive in suspended animation. If a client arrives ahead of schedule or a morph delivery is delayed, they can be instantiated as an infomorph into a simulspace waiting room and served virtual coffee while they wait. Such a facility would have a small office, a resleeving room, maybe a healing vat for last-minute additions to morphs, a glorified broom closet to store 2-4 morphs in the short term while they await their egos, and a loading dock for morphs to arrive through.
Whereas a facility built to handle large volumes of egocasts, especially for people who are just sending forks on business and don't intend to stay long or need a particularly fancy morph, would be more like a busy airport than a medical facility - sleeving may be put on an assembly line of sorts to expedite the process; you egocast, spend a couple hours in cold storage limbo, and then arrive simultaneously with 20 other people in a "batch" of recently decanted rental cases or splicers. Such a facility would have large "sleeving rooms" that would hook up directly to their morph storage, and would probably be set up to sleeve people into standardised morphs as cheaply as possible - the economy and business classes of interplanetary egocasting.
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Hell is other people's forks.
Wed, 2014-06-18 05:26
#15
Xagroth
While I see that as possible,
While I see that as possible, there are two big problems with your post, BonSequitur.
First, a morph can be a very expensive and scarce commodity. It takes about 3 years to grow a biomorph, which is the type most "favoured" in regular societies (and when you are going to face exhurgent threats, thanks to their slightest better resistance to the X-viruses), and movig valuable merchandise is riskier than having an armoured body bank. Add to that the little detail that space can be very cheap (depending of where you are, ofc) and energy mostly free (sunward-wise), and that biomorphs in suspended animation are a lot cheaper to maintain than "alive", and the shops will prefer to have their product at hand.
Obviously, Pods work nearly like that, but it still takes months to grow one. Finally, a Synthmorph can be made in hours, or, if you want a top of the line, loaded up custom, about a week, making easier to have only a bunch of expensive ones ready for use (and they require even less maintenance than biomorphs).
Second, recycle of implants. In a body bank it is very likely that all morphs with certain implants won't even require a healing vat to stay on suspended animation (medichines are one of the best implants in game in the cost/effect relationship, probably for this reason), but adding and removing implants require one. Also, the reclaiming of those implants, in general, will only get you the raw materials, while a single synthmorph can allow you to prepare dozens or more copies of that implant.
So we hit the most relevant bottleneck in EP: Time, which is the big brother of "Opportunity cost".
Opportunity cost is, essentially, the losing of potentiality when you make a choice (for example, "I have on free hour today. If I see CSI, I won't be able to see Burn Notice", thus my opportunity cost for watching one of those TV series is the other. The same with money: "if I buy this 700$ phone I won't be able to buy a new PC"). Add to this the base behaviour in the two economies in EP, and you will see that wasting resources is frowned upon universally: in the old economies, it is throwing money away, instead of earning more, and in the new economies it is simply seen as hoarding, giving you bad rep and hurting you in nearly the same way.
So a morph clinic will have enough healing vats to install/uninstall certain implants, the mobile (and cheaper) version described in Gatecrashing for cold storage of biomorphs requiring it, and one or two in reserve to heal morphs or add implants to people going in. Plus some CMs, ofc.
In fact, now that I think about it, a morph brokerage clinic might be one of the most money/rep earning business in EP, which means a lot of that resources might be needed to protect the investment/pay off the corps (or they would be a lot of these clinics everywhere, thus lowering prices), and it requires more capital than a starship to start it.
So with all this in mid, I find it quite difficult to justify the "uninstall" of implants when the morph is returned. If the new client demands it, it can be done (as long as the time and other operations allow it!), but frankly I cannot imagine an olimpian morph having the Neurachem 2 implant removed after being returned to the shop so they can have a base morph to install everything anew when the next client comes in.
Wed, 2014-06-18 08:54
#16
BonSequitur
The problem with keeping
The problem with keeping morphs in stock is that, if you're a small, premium clinic - you get a handful of customers a day and you charge outrageous prices - your goal is to offer as wide a variety of morphs as possible. People who are just coming in for a week or who can't afford anything better will be fine with having three or four options of biomorphs to choose from, but say you cater to inner-system plutocrats and Extropian startup billionaires. You want them to be able to pick any morph available in the clinic's vicinity and be able to provide it, which means that even if you store the most commonly sold models, some of the time you'll still be calling WhateverCorp and ordering a very specific biomorph, or telling some famous morph designer to decant a morph - might as well make it your business model. In places where capitalism is in effect but space is still at a premium, like Venus or Extropia, this could be quite common; you could have multiple competing egocasting services that all share the same morph storage and transport infrastructure provided by a handful of companies. Yes, morphs are valuable, but people move valuables all the time. And, of course, people walk around with their valuable morphs totally exposed all the time.
This would be a service that most people only pay for when they plan to live at least semi-permanently in the morph they're getting. Of course, occasionally a plutocrat pays for an obscenely expensive tricked-out biomorph just for a gamma fork they're sending to smile and nod at pointless quarterly meeting, but most people who are just travelling or sending forks would use the "mass market" model. In capitalist space, "wasting resources" is fine if you're doing it to provide a better experience - people will pay for it.
I don't see what you mean about uninstalling implants, though. I didn't say anything about that.
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Hell is other people's forks.
Wed, 2014-06-18 16:55
#17
Xagroth
I hardly can imagine
I hardly can imagine plutocrats and high-ranking corps using the same facilities anybody would, if only for security reasons: an egocasting facility is the best place to steal an ego, and the problem with this people's egos are not their skills but their knowledge (skeletons in closets, deals, passwords, secret projects...). Thus, I find very likely that their companies have their own sleeving facilities heavily guarded, and for places where they don't I assume it's easier to send a courier with the morph you want in suspended animation and the gear to sleeve you in it once it arrives.
Sorry if it feels counter intuitive, but what the EP writers seemed to never have explicitely said in any book is that EP is not truly a post-scarcity economy. Post-materialist, yes, but there are scarcity of time, and knowledge is still a very valuable commodity.
I was running on myself there, the usual thought when you go to a rental that can be customized is to have the baseline and the modules, pluck the desired modules in, and once it is returned, remove them for the next time, in order to save space & base models.
Wed, 2014-06-18 17:09
#18
BonSequitur
Outside of the largest
Outside of the largest hypercorps on their main habs, I doubt a hypercorp would maintain its own sleeving facility just for the use of plutocrats. Remember, hypercorps are not monolithic institutions with millions of employees and an office on every corner; they mostly exist on the Mesh and only have physical facilities inasmuch as it relates to their core business - precisely because space, time, and labour are scarce.
When a plutocrat travels via egocast, it would almost invariably involve contracting with someone who actually is in the farcasting and sleeving business - probably another hypercorp specialising in the business. They probably think no more of leaving the security of their ego up to the sleeving facility than they think of leaving the security of their physical assets to a PMC like Direct Action.
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Hell is other people's forks.