Here is another little institution for Extropia: Khymos Khymos relates to ordinary restaurants like an avant-garde art gallery does to a poster shop. Located in upscale Catseye Heights it is firmly part of extropian haute expérience. It might have become an establishment in itself, but it is still edgy enough: there are enough interesting scandals and accidents every year to keep interest high. Khymos specializes in abstract food. Just as abstract art is art freed from the constraints of depicting the visual world, abstract food provides experiences going far beyond traditional taste, texture, nutrition or pleasure. It blurs the lines between food, art and drugs. While exotic and abstract food has been around for decades it was the spread of AGI that triggered a first renaissance. AGIs interested in food found the human (or uplift) palate very limited. Why just keep to traditional "good" tastes when there was an universe of possible taste combinations? Morae 483434911's dish "omnivore" won critical acclaim for its daring taste symmetries, despite being utterly inedible by any biomorph. Soon the transhumans began to explore the new domain using enhanced senses, on-line processing and biotechnology. The second renaissance occurred with the spread of nanodrugs and cortical stacks, allowing even more radical information content in the dishes. By this point the purely abstract gastronomy was starting to seem dated, and a wider "contemporary" culinary culture began to emerge. Khymos is one of the premier establishments for experiencing contemporary food, open for all forms of gustatory (and transgustatory) expression. Eating at khymos is done at one's own risk. While most food is intended to be non-lethal, there are always risks involved in ingesting truly avant-garde abstract food. Some might involve nanomachines, engineered micro-organisms or chemicals intended to interact in intriguing ways with the biochemistry or mechanisms of morphs. Some food has psychoactive effects. Some is intelligent. Much of it would be illegal anywhere else. The menu is complex and often personal. The staff discreetly scan visitors in a variety of ways and often ask for personal information (sometimes *very* intimate) to formulate a menu of experiences that are both compatible and suitable. After all, not everybody have the same taste buds, mass spectrometers, mental structure or karmic load. Before entering Khymos visitors sign a fairly strong contract freeing Khymos for responsibility for personal injury and mental trauma, but also limiting the establishment's use of personal information to preparing and serving food. It is known as one of the best places in Extropia to meet privately; the building is very well protected from spyware. While local hackers and sousveilers do try to breach security out of principle, they are not too zealous: most material would consist of well-off transhumans having highbrow food experiences, which only rarely manages to become amusing or embarassing. Khymos also takes good care of its information hygiene, scrupulously erasing the personal information after a visit. The interior is a large cylindrical atrium with a ramp of tables running upward in a spiral. Private rooms and food preparation spaces are on the outside; the atrium space is often used for various forms of live performances or floating art exhibitions. The topmost table is permanently reserved for the Culinary Academy of the Extropia Agoric University; they are the intellectual judges of taste and style, often spending significant amounts of time doing very public debates about the finer points of retrofeminist taste, being as an input-output model or abstract psychophysics. The other top tables are often used by regulars from Skinthetic and CAAN (a mercurial extropian association); this is often the place to be for cutting edge posthuman envisioning. Khymos is run by Binding Curve and Benfey T. Ofili. Binding Curve is curator of the experiences of the customers. It and its team of animateurs, monitors and performers are the most visible members of staff. It is also to a large extent the official face of the establishment. Mr Ofili is Chef de cuisine and leads the design team and coordinates with chefs exhibiting their inventions. He is rarely seen (which enhances his mystery and reputation); he usually resides in the begin-the-scenes spaces or his apartment on top of the building. While Khymos has its share of jaded thrill-seekers Binding Curve aims at people who seek something entirely new and exotic, and are willing to work at it. Having your food set up nanocolonies in you and engage in a complex genetic and neural dialogue as you both seek to negotiate who gets to eat who (and in what way) takes time and effort from both parts. Who cares for bliss-bomb ice cream or AR-boosted magic berries? They are so *obvious* that they are no real art. A minimalist BiffUSCy composition where the flavour is literally moving to avoid your perception or Gödel-jelly where your own fork is encoded in an edible soft-state computer being eaten by loverfly larvae, now *that's* art. Binding Curve is also a savvy marketer, with a native extropian understanding of how to make headlines, stay fresh, and most importantly, make money. Art for art's sake is all right, but with a budget it is better. Binding Curve Binding Curve began as a marketing AI for a now long-defunct food corporation. As it grew in experience it began to chafe under its restrictions and bought itself when there was downsizing in the air. It set out as a marketer for restaurants, food printing companies and eventually abstract cuisine events. It was here it found that its skills in business and marketing worked hand in hand with its fascination for how transhumans think and experience. It hit gold when it met chef Ofili; the man clearly needed someone to act as his agent, and together they have created so much food, controversy and experience! Binding Curve usually manifests in a stylized synthmorph looking something like a Giacometti sculpture or a wire model of a human. It is always polite, often with a slight humorous or sarcastic tone. Privately Binding Curve is a pretty "bourgeois" AGI, little interested in politics, the fate of transhumanity or technological transcendence. The main exception is a strong distaste for any being controlling any other: manipulation, trickery and influence are fine, but indenture and other forms of legal control really raises its hackles. Motivations: +Wealth, +Manipulation (it is so fun to get others to do things), -Slavery (Binding Curve privately supports several "underground railroad" groups freeing infugees, AGIs and uplifts from indenture) "Ah, a rebirthday party? May I then suggest this dish inspired by Bardo Thödol. Alchemical transmutation, auditory synesthesia and a dhyana I won't reveal." "We of course regret the incident, but the client was fully informed about the risks and participated voluntarily. We especially deeply regret that its restored instance cannot recall what was indeed a very memorable evening." "I am sorry, but primitivism is so *out* these days. Your proposal certainly has a poetic power and I think the inclusion of Fifth Seal petals is fitting, but those turpentine and ink tastes have been done endlessly. Our clients would rather eat a real oil painting. There is no justice in this world." Chef Benfey T. Ofili Benfey T. Ofili is an anomaly on the food scene, being a biomorph human. However, he has upgraded his senses and brain to the extent that he is almost an aesthetic Exhuman. He perceives the world as flavour combinations and textures of processes. He has a background as a traditional chef on Earth, but after retiring in his 70s he began to experiment with various upgrades and abstract food. His main strength was as a theoretician and reviewer. This brought him to Extropia, where there was already a thriving AGI food culture. He soon became a key member of the Extropia Agorics gourmet circles. Meeting Binding Curve was a match made in heaven, allowing him to focus on true culinary artistes and food in its most profound forms without caring too much about boring practicalities. Without Binding Curve he would be pretty lost in the real world: he only cares about new aesthetic experiences, not petty things like money, reputation or making sense. In fact, his sanity is definitely slipping. He has developed a highly abstract form of OCD where he can spend days examining a dish, a concept or a flavour again and again to truly understand it. He is often trying out radical new nanodrugs and petals, not to mention the extreme dishes he often reviews. Motivation: +Aesthetics "Carnival of the goat? Mes ennemis piquante. Hopeless Varelist existentialists; can't make anything more complex than an automated omelet." "Humaine gras as ingredient? You can't get it properly here; extropian bodies lack the right obesity genes, and the medichines spoil the liver deposits. Ah, I remember trying a *proper* humaine gras back in Transnistria. I ate it together with the owner of the liver; an author, if I remember right. Or a tomato. But if you want the same noemata, maybe you could use semiotic organisms in the dish." "Correspondence: the kittens of my bone marrow are pleased." Adventure possibilities: Khymos is of course a perfect meeting place - good privacy, a place to hide in plain sight, interesting encounters. It has an air of sophistication and style that may be perfect for impressing certain people, especially mercurials and AGIs. Conversely, it can be used to truly annoy naturalistic transhumans, which might be exactly why Skinthetic executives and CAAN love meetings there. Khymos is an interesting place to do assassination - secure, private yet filled with local surveillance. If an assassin could sneak in and add some alterations to a dish it might even look like an accident. Matters of taste can be a matter of life and death: if your living depends on your reputation, the views of the Culinary Academy can make or break everything. Lots of ambitious artists are trying to get a chance at Khymos, and are willing to use quite underhanded tactics to get in - or keep rivals out. The characters might become involved in such plotting, asked to manipulate the academicians or Khymos. Something happened at Khymos, and interested parties *really* want to find out what it was. Can the characters infiltrate the place as patrons, hack into top-notch surveillance while keeping up a clever discussion about existential shells? And how much information is Binding Curve actually erasing? Having a good rival is important, and Binding Curve wants to hire the characters to play an annoying prank on the Carnival of the Goat. Nothing too nasty, just enough to embarass them and motivate them to try something against Khymos. Chef Ofili wants a new, near-mythical petal: Lost in Purple. It was reputedly created by The Koala, a petalcrafter known for his highly illegal, extremely complex petals. He is willing to pay a group of characters a sizeable amount of money or rep to get hold of it. Ofili has finally completely gone nuts, and has started to work on his grand vision. Unfortunately that involves a strain of the Exsurgent virus hacked to randomly link brains to act as filters for the massively parallel gustatory nanocomputer. It might be the first step towards an exhuman cuisine, but it better be stopped.

If you are really going to flesh out Extropia, the starting point should not be the NPCs, but the city itself. How you build it (districts, power structures, institutions, governments, etc) will determine in a great deal what kind of NPCs you can place in it, and why they would act as they do. Without all that, they are simply generic NPCs to insert in any place you wish.

Sepherim wrote:

If you are really going to flesh out Extropia, the starting point should not be the NPCs, but the city itself. How you build it (districts, power structures, institutions, governments, etc) will determine in a great deal what kind of NPCs you can place in it, and why they would act as they do. Without all that, they are simply generic NPCs to insert in any place you wish.

To some degree true, but in the networkcentric world of EP I think characteristic people and organisations may be almost more important than districts. And of course Extropia being Extropia, there is definitely no government! After all, that is what the market is for! In fact, this brings up an interesting point: how do extropians manage communal resources? Obviously a lot of it is simply a free anarchocapitalistic market, with interspersed enclaves of other kinds of autonomists and self-owning "utopias" that set up their own internal rules. And while I think (especially with the AI support of EP) this can manage things much better than most statists think, there are going to be some resources that are necessary for running the entire society and they need to be managed collectively. Think of the hull of the habitat: I can't just take my part and run off with it. And I doubt the founders of Extropia would have liked setting up a company with a hull monopoly - that would be too much power in one place. One extropian way of doing it is the concept of futarchy: there exists a kind of habitat "parliament" (whatever it is called; it might be elected, it might be randomly sampled citizens or even polls of their muses) that decide on what the habitat as a whole want, and then let information markets suggest how to get it. If the markets give strong enough signals that a particular approach would work, it gets implemented using the parliamentary funds. See http://hanson.gmu.edu/futarchy.html and http://hanson.gmu.edu/futarchy.pdf for the details of how the scheme would work. This might be far too statist for most extropians, regarded as an old holdover from the bad old days when there was just limited resources but it could also be a stabilizing factor. It might be very small compared to the overall economy and has far less power than a normal government (laws, for example, are after all decided by what insurance, arbitration and law companies you subscribe to) but it is in a sense the nearly unknown government. Of course, the real and important centres of power exist somewhere else - but somebody got to keep the air flowing.

King Shere wrote:

"Petals" allow the sharing of experiences to the participants. Perhaps its something similar (to that technology), that gives interested habitants of Extropia a wider; involvement, opinions & consensus of decisions. A collective entity made from all the experiences of its participating members.

Democracy Flowers! What a cool idea. If you want to participate, just pick a Power Flower and chew. A fork of you gets connected to the agora simspace. A single petal just adds you to the debate, a whole flower brings you into full consensus immersion. Of course, there have been some problems with the flowers. Beside pranksters spreading fake flowers connecting you to a parody site and that unfortunate overdose incident last year, there are the die-hard individualists who think they are creeping statism and the demarchists who worry that the self-selected people are not the most representative. More problematic is how much influence the consensus construct has on the emotions of participants: there could be a risky populist feedback loop here. Which is why many extropians think information markets provide just the kind of cool-headed analysis the consensus cannot achieve.

Arenamontanus wrote:

Democracy Flowers! What a cool idea. If you want to participate, just pick a Power Flower and chew. A fork of you gets connected to the agora simspace. A single petal just adds you to the debate, a whole flower brings you into full consensus immersion. Of course, there have been some problems with the flowers. Beside pranksters spreading fake flowers connecting you to a parody site and that unfortunate overdose incident last year, there are the die-hard individualists who think they are creeping statism and the demarchists who worry that the self-selected people are not the most representative. More problematic is how much influence the consensus construct has on the emotions of participants: there could be a risky populist feedback loop here. Which is why many extropians think information markets provide just the kind of cool-headed analysis the consensus cannot achieve.

with emotional control included, the "democracy flower"; would creep out "heatlhy" paranoids even more. For example: participants get the cool head feeling. Multiple forks of the same individual could have a edge, or inadvertently(?) be muffled since the "submitted" experience would be near identical& singular. [B]"Political Representative Petal"[/b] Political groups use their own brand petals and have the "petal entity" participate in the "regular" decision system. [B]Flower democracy lounges.[/b] Rent "divan" shops, the drugged out people lying on comfortable divans -would look to outsiders as to the opium dens of myth.

[b][i]Gouldian Personal Security and Investigations[/i][/b] (aka. GPSI, 'Gypsy'). Although far from the largest security concern in Extropia, GPSI has over the last 15 years developed a reputation for reliabilty and integrity second to none. Such is it's reputation that to be seen under the protection of an agent wearing the distinctive stylised Gouldian Finch(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gouldian_Finch) badge grants a level of presitige in many circles. The reason for this is simple: GPSI is very discerning about it's clients. To secure a contract with Gouldian requires more then just money. The company goes to great lengths to avoid being associated with clients that may negitively impact it's reputation. Every potential client is subjected to an interview process, which, depending on the nature of the contract, can prove to be quite extensive. In many circumstances, the company will use it's own resources to investigate the prospective client. Should they fail to meet criteria or refuse to take part in the interview, then they are politely informed to seek the services of another security firm. If they pass muster, then a contract is written up and price determined based on nature of contract, duration of contract and the income of the client, and includes a clause freeing GPSI from any obligations to the client should they perform or be linked to any activities that may negitively impact GPSI or it's reputation. Finally, it is not unknown in certain circumstances for Gouldian to perform 'charity work' for disadvantaged clients at greatly reduced cost or no cost. Such cases are determined on a case by case basis, and require approval from the company's executive officer and owner, an enigmatic individual known as 'Finch'. Once the contract is signed, GPSI takes great pride in performing it's duties to a high standerd of competance and professionality. Every employee of the company is expected keep to the company's code of conduct, and breaches are investigated thoroughly. So, one wonders, what is the reason for all this emphasis on appearing to be a clean securuty corperation? The reason is simple, and as much economic as ethical. GPSI sells more then just security services. It sells reputation. Public knowledge that an individual has a contract with GPSI imparts that they manage to convince the company that they are a upstanding individual unlikely to stain GPSI's immaculate reputation. As such, despite their stringent criteria, GPSI has no shortage of work. [b]Company organisation:[/b] The company is split into three departments, GPSI Black, Red and Yellow: [i]GPSI Black (badge: Gouldian Finch, black headed morph)[/i] The largest department of the three, GPSI Black handles personal protection and security. Although it's most obvious employees are professional bodyguards (quite often police or military veterans), this department also has a large pool of skilled infotech experts and nano-tech specialists to assist with information security and tech support. [i]GPSI Red (badge: Gouldian Finch, red headed morph)[/i] GPSI Red is the investigative arm of the corperation. Its agents are a diverse lot, ranging form data-miners to infitration experts to old-fashioned detectives. Despite the potential for revenue through corperate espionage, GPSI Red steers clear of such contracts due to them running counter to GPSI's 'clean' reputation. One duty of import that they are involved in is screening potential clients, discreetly investigating them during the application procedure to insure that GPSI's exacting standerds are maintained. [i]GPSI Yellow (badge: Gouldian Finch, yellow headed morph)[/i] GPSI Yellow is the smallest division of the corperation. It fullfills a very focused role, that of emergancy support and recovery. If a GPSI agent should get into trouble, it's GPSI Yellow's job to get them out of it. As a secondary role, they also function as a hostage rescue/stolen item recovery unit. Many of the department's staff are former special forces soldiers or intelligance operatives. GPSI Yellow is also home to the company's legal team. The entire department has the nickname of Yellowjackets, a referance to both a particularly vicious wasp and the mustard combat jackets of the departmental combat extraction teams. [b]Finch[/b] No-one really knows who Finch is. All that is know is that he is the power behind GPSI, and individual that none within the company can claim to have seen face to face. Indeed, many believe that he's some sort of Infomorph. In conversation he's friendly, but in an aloof, distant way, always maintaining an air of professionality. He also interveiws personally every new employee, albiet all they ever see is a hologram of the company logo. Several rumours exist concerning Finch's identity (the following is a selection of some of the more popular ones): That there's some sort of symbolism behind the company logo, possibly to do with nanoecology or Finch's origin (the Gouldian Finch was a rare Australian bird of exceptional beauty). That Finch and GPSI are simply a front for a larger hypercorp, used to cover up other more dubious activities. That Finch was involved in some sort of tragedy or shady dealings in the past, and GPSI (in particular the corperation's 'Charity Cases') are an attempt to redeem himself. That Finch is a Promethian. That Finch is a TITAN.

On p. 281 it is stated that Extropia is a Cole Bubble. So it likely got gravity, but how strong is not stated. I would suspect it is low but not microgravity: I would not trust the structural stability of remelted asteroid iron that much (there better be some bundles of fullerene cables running around it as reinforcement), but microgravity is rather troublesome to work in. Since there is plenty of microgravity anyway on the outside, any stuff that needs true microgravity can be done there. Hmm, remelting 44 Nysa would probably have produced some interesting melt or slag deposits in the hull of the habitat. I can imagine the Bubble Lounge, a bar housed inside a big dome-shaped bubble that formed in the metal. Various features are surreal slag deposits and oxide crystals, nicely lit by spotlights.

Arenamontanus wrote:

On p. 281 it is stated that Extropia is a Cole Bubble. So it likely got gravity, but how strong is not stated.

Wow - you're right. But if you look at the System Gazetteer, on page 97, it says that Extropia is a "massive beehive habitat". And I've been using that Gazetteer as gospel...

Arenamontanus wrote:

OK, so it is a beehive *and* a Cole bubble!

That's an interesting idea, but I'm just trying to get my head around both the physics of that, and how it would all be laid out in the asteroid itself. So Nysa (pre construction of the Cole hab that would become Extropia, if we go with this hypothesis), starts out as a series of rock chambers in micro-gravity. No doubt these are linear in nature - chamber, linking tunnel, chamber, and so on, tunneling into the heart of the asteroid. Once in the asteroid's center, the work on the Cole bubble begins. Completed, it would look a little like this (forgive my poor ASCII art): ______________ |************| ---o-o-o-(``)****| |______________| But that center chamber would be much bigger. (also read * as whitespace, as the forum doesn't preserve non-characters). This would at least mean that the beehive portion - assuming it's along the axis of rotation (and you'd want it to be, as whatever was built in there would have been built in micro-g) - would remain in micro-g. So a visitor would have to travel through Old Town before getting to Extropia proper, or New Town as Old Town residents would put it. This would at least mean I've not just put my PCs through zero-g shenanigans for nothing :) Of course, all this is predicated on the two descriptions of Extropia being accurate, and not a typo.

Here's an idea: As mentioned before, according to radar imaging 44 Nysa appears conical in shape, so it's possibly a binary of one large asteroid and a smaller one. What if the larger one was used as the habitat (turned into the Cole Tube), and the smaller one attached and counterspun to provide a stationary zero-g docking platform? It would be very advantagous for loading/offloading and ther spaceship-related tasks, and also provide an area for micro-g industries (precision manufacture for example). It would also provide a good attachement for radio/laser communications systems, as well as anything else that wants to be pointing at a fixed location (the above format is used on a smaller scale on telecommunications sattilites to allow the main body to rotate for stable orbit and have the communcations dishes still focussed on the ground). The biggest flaw I can see with the idea is the linkage between the spun/counterspun sections. It would have to be massive, and heaven help you if something was to go awry. The torque from a sudden seizure of the rotational mechenism could possibly tear Extopia apart. Maybe a 'smart' lubricant of nanites within the linkage, acting to both maintain rotation, repair any problems and provide near frictionless movement. It would also be a great plot device to throw at PCs should someone decide to sabatage the station, the antagonist trying to hack and reprogram the smart lubricant...

You know, all the complex designs sound great from a gee-whiz factor, but I just can't help thinking that they're all a bit unnecessarily complex and over-engineered. I think I'll stick with the all-in-one option. That said, since we seem to have come to the conclusion that a mix of micro-g and gravity is possible, individual GMs can easily model Extropia as they wish :)

Psyfer wrote:

Secondly, Extopia is a (enlightened) market economy... If this is the case from the beginning, not everything will have neccessaryily have been done in the most effective way. Cost and corruption may have influenced it's construction and development, possibly in detrimental ways.

Ah, unlike government-run places, where everything works perfectly thanks to clever and long-range government planning... :-) The fun part about radically different societies like Extropia and the autonomists is not that they are perfect, but that they have very different styles of imperfections. Hmm, so what are the biggest everyday annoyances to Extropia citizens? Obviously the steady flow of nuisance lawsuits wears on some: bump into someone and there is a nanotort rapidly handled by your muse that debits you 0.1 Rand damages. Your muse is likely annoyed too by dealing with the myriad of private currencies: practically every company and person have their own scrip and rep market, with complex convertibility systems. Some people also go nuts about privacy and try to enforce strict copyright about their appearance and identity; they burn up a lot of law firm money on trying to enforce being blurred out from public view (it never works). While being a style capital of the solar system is nice, it also means there is no shortage of people doing *anything* to get attention. You cannot unsee some people you have seen (unless you take an amnesic tonic). Or they make stuff that tries to get attention. The molds behind your fridge may spell out poetry and invitations to a club. There are friendly butterflies trying to show off the holoadverts on their wings. There are nanofoam sculptures drifting in the air, enticing you to link to their design bureau. Then there is the issue of insurance: while there might be no government around to hold your hand, your insurance companies will adjust premiums depending on what you do. If you want to do something outrageously dangerous you better be able to pay the premiums or accept that you will not be covered. Of course, there are the wildness sponsorship charities that try to promote a more radical lifestyle who might sponsor your stupid/interesting stunt (as long as they get to record it of course). On the good side, the insurance companies sponsor a surprising number of things that improve safety, health and security. "This railing has been sponsored by Zettalife. Keeping you on the safe side!" And of course, if you don't run adblockers on your endos or ectos, you will go mad. At least outsiders claim that, but they are pretty odd themselves. Knowing the local media weather is important, you never know when it will change and what new things will become antimatter-hot.

Psyfer][quote wrote:

However, imagine the poor off-worlder: "What do you mean, by accepting this handshake I've invalidated my genetic privacy?"

You know, there are probably entire micro-industries set up to both abuse newcomers' ignorance, and to help newcomers adjust - it's likely a part of any ego-casting service into Extropia. "Very well, Sir, has chosen his morph, but would Sir also like a full citizen-grade contractual package? It is, I assure Sir, the only way to be safe, and our package is vacuum-tight."

Arenamontanus wrote:

1. *snip*
2. *snip*
3. Extropia is surrounded by counter-rotating weights (or high gravity habitats, industries, reserve stores or whatnots) linked to it by cables and attached to belts around its circumference. This keeps the total angular momentum to zero, and the cylinder will nicely point at Nysa without doing any tumbling. As it rotates there are various torques on the rotating bands, but they can be distributed over pretty large areas. On the plus side this keeps the asteroid and Cole bubble plus allows some nice connections along the long axis. These weights could actually be used as flywheels for massive energy storage. On the minus side we get some extra infrastructure that could potentially (but very unlikely) go wrong.

I like this option, simply because it gives adventure opportunities for Firewall games above and beyond the risks and vulnerabilities all orbital habitats have (life-support, power generation, food production, et cetera).

Nice... I like the idea of a prediction market a lot. It gives me some ideas for enterprises dependant on the markets, various archivists, trend prediction/production agencies etc... I'll write more when I have some spare time.

Arenamontanus wrote:

How do you manage traffic rules when there is no government? Easy: the one who owns the road gets to make the rules. The road networks in Extropia are run by a few different odocorps, most notably Overground, FreePath and Legba Transport. They own the roads, sidewalks, subways and transport tramways. Vehicles and morphs using them have to obey their local rules; vehicle AIs link up to the traffic control system and become part of the flow.

Arenamontanus wrote:

Of course, some extropians make a point of not using any of the odocorps. Freerunning in Extropia is tricky (especially given the strong property ownership rules), but that just makes it so much more rewarding.

Doesn't "owning a road" collide with the values "Transcending Restrictions" & "Overcoming Property" that Extropist hold? "We believe it is madness that anyone can own an idea, a blueprint, a thought, a melody or a genome. Human progress will advance far faster if knowledge, culture and resources are shared by everyone for the general welfare of all Earth’s inhabitants." http://www.extropism.com/post/393563122/the-extropist-manifesto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extropianism Perhaps Extropia station have some sort of tenement (or free socage) system generally applied (and not just on Real estate), "Property" would never be considered privately owned; instead, its considered held. With forfeiture of the tenement upon failure to perform service (or holding). -Beware of theft, holders of held items. Ownership doesn't apply here.

Arenamontanus wrote:

Of course, a critic could say that we could just as well decide that it is either a beehive or a bubble, but the extropian thing to do is to have one's cake, eat it, replicate it and upload it!

Or do something different. We are playing Extropia as a torus.

The Vault Extropia has a thriving infomorph community. The Vault caters to their needs to secure storage and cryptographic privacy. While the Vault appears to be a single system in the Mesh it is actually a number of separate computronium mainframes maintained across Extropia, linked with some of the best quantum encryption money can buy to guarantee service. Inhabitants are assured secure storage, plentiful computer cycles and complete privacy within their servers. If someone decides to cocoon inside their server they are practically impossible to access even by Vault employees. Even finding a particular server is hard unless its owner ceases payment; the system is built so that the infrastructure reveals minimal information as long as all is going according to contract. Isei Isei is "front man" for the 120-Cell Group, a community of infosec AGIs producing cracking software and other security products. The exact membership of 120-Cell is unknown: the members are among the most paranoid, security-minded and anonymous informorphs in human space. They *seem* to be based in Extropia, but that could of course be a ruse. Isei is an infomorph that acts as their sales representative. It is not the only one, and seems to exist in different forks that may actually be fronts for one or more other informorphs. There are even claims Isei is actually an intelligent P2P network linking the 120-Cell to their customers. Isei usually appears as a highly abstract avatar in various simspace bars or manifesting through a case synthmorph in one of Extropia's hacker clusters. It is sociable, if a bit bland, and blends in among others - there is no need to advertise, given the sterling reputation of 120-Cell. Isei is a tough but proper bargainer, and has an impressive reputation for integrity. When the Phobos Phalangids tried to hack their way into 120-Cell by attacking Isei all current Isei forks simply disintegrated, leaving sticky viruses in their wake (the Phalangids soon found themselves hosts of some very nasty malware; their rep has never recovered). When a black ops team from Chiral Imines Inc found that their 120-Cell attack software did not work on a corporate opponent Isei quietly and efficiently provided them with a few "secret recipes" that allowed them access. When you deal with 120-Cell, you *will* get into the system you want. You just have to pay premium for it.

nick012000 wrote:

I'm pretty sure Computronium is TITAN-tech.

Bah, it is just a slang term for dense computer processing. Of course, many luddites outside Extropia would say that mainframes like the Vault are dangerous and could hide emerging seed AGIs.

I don't get the impression the supercomputer networks mentioned on p. 237 are referring to TITAN-tech computronium, but rather more simply transhuman-tech supercomputers, clustered or otherwise. With computing material you've gotten from the TITANs, you could never be entirely sure it's not infected with some insidious version of the Exsurgent Virus that simply hasn't cropped up yet, be it in nanoswarm or infomorph form. Or, possibly, both. Of course, tech created by any uninfected seed AIs is a different story, but the only people who have them in canon are Firewall and (maybe) Project Ozma. TILION's mini-Jupiter Brain is pursuing research that is probably derived from infected TITAN technology, so anything they produce from that is automatically suspect.

[url=http://www.wiki.eastcoastelitists.com/index.php?title=User:Nick012000/El... is the character sheet for my PC in an online game I'm playing in: Elia Torres, the CEO, Founder, and Chairwoman of Skinthetic. I figure they're bound to be pretty important for any in-depth examination of Extropia, given that's where their main offices are.

Interesting response. Her bodyguards are likely to be Elia herself; she's quite capable of Jamming a couple of killbots with her multi-tasking implant. A couple Guardian Angels with nanoscopic vision, worn armor, and implanted machine guns would be quite nasty bodyguards, and would only take a few hours each to nanofabricate if she can do it all in one go. Getting additional assistance from a security firm would probably be a good idea for a Favor for her to ask for, though, if she needed it. As for emergency Egocasters, well, she doesn't like the idea of blowing her head up. It'll take ages for her to grow a new body, after all. If she has to ditch her body in a hurry, the fork in the Ghostrider module would jump ship into the local mesh while the multi-tasking software and mnemonic implant proceed to wipe her brain and delete all the data off of themselves that they don't need to do so (they can do merges and uploads, so they should be able to do erasures as well), and if she's going somewhere remote, she'd simply fork herself and leave one of her selves to run the business while the other went out to do whatever. I'd also imagine she probably does have non-standard neural hardware, to a degree; her COG+INT+SAV is high enough to be basically immune to Basilisk Hacks (only infected on a roll of 99), and that implies that something is fairly unusual about the way her mind is set up and processes sensory data. Actually running the ego over two different servers seems like a bit of a screwy idea, though, since anyone with a packet sniffer would be able to watch you think! Well, once they decrypted it, anyway. Resisting psychosurgery by infecting yourself with viruses seems like an interesting idea, but might lead to unintended consequences once the viruses start running in your meatware. It might be simpler to just program a suicide switch into your infomorph sleeve, and just delete yourself if someone captures you.

Regarding the confusion on whether Extropia is a Cole Bubble or a Beehive, I asked for Word of God on Twitter yesterday and received confirmation that Extropia is officially a Beehive. As to the form Extropia takes, I imagine it as having been constructed in a fairly chaotic way. The initial Extropians must presumably have decided on the basic structure of the initial tunnels, but after that I imagine each person or group taking a bit of the asteroid and carving out their own network of tunnels and chambers. Sort of how individual sub-nets make up the Internet. With space being limited in the long run, I presume there must be some kind of arrangement as to the spacing between tunnels, how much overall space any given group can take up etc. Perhaps an amount has to be paid to the collective per cubic metre of space taken up by a new tunnel system? I mainly like this model because it allows for a variety of different tunnelling and habitat strategies. For instance, the tunnels and chambers in the Skinthetic base on Extropia might be very different from the tunnels occupied by a clade of Octomorph uplifts. The mission my Firewall team has just concluded was on Extropia, and regrettably I didn't have the time to build up a very rich description of the environment, but I did have one setting element that I liked in the form of Synthtown. Synthtown is near the surface of the asteroid and is open to vacuum. It also has a higher level of radiation than is healthy for most biomorphs. It is essentially a ghetto for cases, synths and AGIs and it's the best place to get customised synthmorphs, upgrades and other niceties that help make being one of the Clanking Masses bearable. In Synthtown the Clanking Masses trait is inverted to become a bonus when dealing with the inhabitants, with the shoddiest of cases being accorded a certain amount of extra respect for the crosses they have to bear. By contrast, biomorphs and even pods who come here are treated suspiciously, as second-class citizens. Perhaps the worst aspect of this is the total silence. While the cases, synths and other synthmorphs surrounding them enjoy the gentle hubub of a busy town despite the vacuum thanks to their augmented reality adjustments, biomorphs are excluded from public chatter by default. This means that a visitor is literally given the silent treatment on arrival, and is surrounded by a mass of silent, judging metal people. The hypercorps that operate on Extropia despise Synthtown and often try to forbid their indentured case workers from going there. Unfortunately this is most often an exercise in futility. Those who can't go there in person can often persuade a friend to carry them as an infomorph, enabling them to take part in the Synthtown community despite their employer's restrictions.

Arenamontanus wrote:

The Extropia corporation (or foundation) claimed original ownership of the bedrock resources of 44 Nysa and presumably lease or sell them to inhabitants (whether corporations, individuals, associations, socialist collectives or anything else).

This is something that's bothered me considerably; namely, the lease or sell part. If Extropia leases property, rather than selling it, you have something resembling a government; they can enforce laws on their land because the whole asteroid belongs to them. It's still technically capitalism in that case, but it would feel, to me, ultimately to be distinctly lacking in the anarchist part. If they sell it, on the other hand, Extropia is considerably more free. Anyone who's ever lived on rental property versus owned property knows just how much of a difference it makes, and everyone knows of the looming threat of eviction should you fail to pay your property taxes.