Model XY3 by moth3r The Unicef Model XY3 was a total failure. The Argonaut/Unicef designers wanted a fast way of sleeving the numerous infant infugees. Rejecting pods, they tried to make a synthmorph. The design was a total rush job, put together from standard open source babybots littering the Mesh since long before the Fall. The idea was to skip over the internals and instead focus on a high-fidelity skin ensuring both the right kinds of bodily contact, touch and endearing, customizable appearance. The skin of course turned out to be hard to manufacture and was delayed several times. The fundamental flaw was of course making an infant morph in the first place: still expensive to make, but unable to grow normally. The Unicef people were pretty far removed from realistic concerns, cocooned as they were in a UN arcology in Gerlach. They had no idea about how bad the Fall actually was, and expected the economy to recover very quickly. They could not imagine that anybody could rear children as infomorphs, nor that many families rather kept the infant ego in cold storage until they could all afford embodiment. To them it was mostly a matter of quickly restoring population and worries about low-fertility cultural traps. To their credit, they gave away the design and tried to incorporate user feedback. But already in 1 AF it was quietly discontinued. Unfortunately, there were some people who fell for the nice-sounding arguments from the well-meaning technocrats. The worst part was that the parents who got XY3s were typically not well-off, so many couldn't easily upgrade the morph and kept their child in it long after it had ceased to be an infant. By all accounts, the children who grew up in XY3s grew almost as twisted as the Lost. They matured more slowly than normal infants, yet developed body schemas that fitted the synthmorph: when resleeved into biomorphs they move distinctly jerky. They didn't adapt to hormonal feedback, producing a labile or extreme mood structure. The perceptual system was not quite right, so they grew up starved of stimuli: most are total sensation junkies, easily hooked on the Mesh, XP, petals or anything else directly connected to their minds. The XY3 children are now approaching teenage status (depending on the amount of time compression used). Few expect them to do well.

Super Keffieh by NivanhChanthara The nomad was no-nonsense. He dropped into my shop around noon, brusquely shooed away my waiterbot and plainly told me: "I want to disassemble my brain." It turned out that he thought that Les Goules had left something - or rather someone - behind when they sold him the morph. It was a pretty neat and new synth; the anti-dust coating was doing a surprisingly good job against the desert, and the fiddly open mechanics - what were those overpaid Trigon designers thinking? - wasn't much of a problem if you dressed sensibly like the nomad did. I was not the least surprised it had a cyberbrain problem: he would likely not have afforded it even on the black market if Les Goules did not want to offload it. The problem seemed to be occasional hallucinations, fleeting memorylets and micro-tics. His muse sent me an incident log (that was by the way how I learned he called himself Si El Ozdust; muses are often far more talkative than their owners, if you know how to do it). I liked how he pre-empted the obvious assumption that he had just gotten a little bit mad out there in the Upback while tending his biomes - it happens fairly regularly that people hallucinate after a hundred sols of Martian solitude. The log didn't show much, but the pattern looked stable. Had he been in a recycled biomorph I would immediately have said incomplete erasure syndrome; a whiff of the previous owner was still in the neural network. Happens far more often than you think, another reason I would not resleeve often even if I could afford it. But cyberbrains can be perfectly reset. Normally. I linked up the brain to my visualizer engine and started checking the hardware while my customer patiently sat in my examination sofa. Nice, high-end rugged brain. It took me half an hour before I noticed the false floor. It turned out that some of the backup systems - those lines linking the cyberbrain to the cortical stack that nobody ever really look at - had extra processing power and memory. And there was independent activity in there. So I decided to do a dive and check what the extras were doing. The Lost Hespirides by retepk First impression: Symbolic surrealist user interface. Oh joy. Somebody thinks they are clever because they hide stuff through security through obscurity. Or think they are clever because they do not use the standard symbols. But balloons instead of directory trees are pretty obvious... as are piranhas for active security. Second impression: Active security? It looked like active security when it began probing my system, but then it stopped. I began to guess that this was not a data cache. The extras did not have that much power and memory, but enough to hide a fork. A quick look for GammaGen confirmed it: piggybacked on the backup system was a system that generated a gamma fork on the fly from the backup data. The owner would have a constantly up-to-date fork on hand. But wait. Why was the fork imagery in here not Ozdust's imagery? I saw no trace of deserts or other things that ought to be in his mind. He didn't look like he was into *really* ancient satellites and Jovian moons? Hmm... the generating system was turned off. From this side: the fork had done it. {Yes.} "The gamma of the original owner, I presume?" {Indeed. You were hired by the current possessor of this morph to remove me?} "Something like that. I guess the false floor is doing a bit of leaking from your side, giving him trouble." {I am capable of compensating you if you copy me over to some other medium.} "You mean your original will compensate me?" {That is unlikely. I turned off GammaGen when the instance in this body was about to be killed. Her stack is very unlikely to have been restored.} "You have a backup policy?" {The instance possibly restored from backup elsewhere might not be... cooperative.} This was getting seriously curious. I also recognized all the hallmarks of a scam - or getting involved with underworld affairs. No thanks. I was about to run a format when Ozdust spoke up in the physical world: "I am willing to take her up on the offer." "I didn't think you could see this simspace... ah, clever girl. Using my debug line to send to your input cortices." I better remember that trick next time I found some nasty in somebody's brain - it could have costed me a customer. Whoever the gamma was based on was an experienced hacker. But the fork did not have access to the Mesh, that was clear: at least my firewalls were good. {I have a numbered account in Uzpromstroybank Nectaris. The contents should be more than adequate to compensate you.} Before I could warn him that this was a bad idea, Ozdust accepted: "Make the copy." So I did. I erased the false floor space and handed him the file containing the fork. I gave him some advice which he politely ignored - after all, he had already bought his morph from Les Goules. He paid me for the examination and software repair, tipping me a standard deviation extra. Then he left and I never saw him again. I often wonder what happened to him. Or what would have happened if I had gotten into the affair. But I am timid enough to prefer running my shop in a dusty souk in Hellas to the big unknowns out there. I tell myself that, while the wind from Alpheus Colles blows outside.

TBrown Rail Revolver by TBrown My host pressed his hand against the cabinet and it opened. Inside was a plethora of rare and wonderful things, but my eyes were dragged almost magnetically to the crude grey and yellow object residing in a isofoam box. "Is that a LMAR?" "Yes. It was my mother's." He lifted the bulky gun with some effort and we admired it. This was no nanofacture: each piece had been cast out of sheer metal or laminated from composite. It was full of bulk matter. Not a single AR tag. "Nice grip, but the homopolars must have heated it up badly." "It actually used banks of supercapacitors - early, pre-nano ones. Buffering was done by metal liquefaction. The real problem was the bang: she complained that it tended to deafen anybody nearby, even with protection." "I though she donated all her equipment to the L5 Museum back when she retired." "Not this one. It saved her life when she encountered a L-J in the Aruna Theater. She decided it was her lucky gun despite being so obviously transitional: just five years after she got it Perihelion started selling the P1, the first *proper* hand railgun. But she kept it around, 'for family use' as she put it. In fact, she occasionally threatened us with it." "What?" "Not directly, but by telling us she would take us to the firing range and 'make men out of us' by having us fire it. You can imagine us corp brats getting horrified by the idea... we were rather effete in those halcyon days. Despite mom occasionally telling war stories to curdle your blood." "She didn't want you to become like her?" "She decided to keep firm partitions between what she did when she was younger, what she was doing then, and our world in the enclave. She once told me the whole point of crude, nasty things like this was to keep the fine things in life safe." "A classic sentiment. But she couldn't give up the outside." "Of course not. She wanted blood - the scent of it, the redness, feeling it pulse within you, heck, even pouring out of you. A wannabe psychiatrist friend of the family said it was classic self-harm behavior, just writ enormously large with C3I, power armor, tanks and artillery support. But I doubt it was anything dissociative: it was pure association. Will to power, lust for life." "A lust for life that created this corporation." "Not exactly. I know the standard story is that her company got privatized, she convinced dad1 to invest, and then they razed all opposition until they had built the original edifice. In fact, it was dad2 who did most of the memetics and marketing of that story. You would have liked him, great at inventing biographies and history as needed." "So what really happened?" He hefted the gun and pointed it at me. I assumed the supercapacitors were empty, but I was not entirely sure. The dark inverted cross of the barrel pointed steadily into my soul. "One evening she showed up at dad1's summer home, ostensibly to try to negotiate the buy - it was floundering at the time. She brought this gun with her. When he didn't want to consider her offer she drew it on him." I had been on the verge of saying 'smooth selling technique' but the black cross held me. I had a nasty feeling there was a tiny ultrasonic hum in the room. My host continued. "She had disabled his home defenses - or at least what counted as home defenses in those days. She went on to brutalize him. She showed him her world. The power. The fear. The implacable enemy and the hope beyond hope that one could escape her." His eyes were as dark as the barrel. I no longer doubted that the gun was lethal. He was as fanatical as his mother. The ultrasound was definitely there. "Call it Stockholm Syndrome, a truly messed up seduction, mental rape, or a stroke of marketing genius. By dawn much of the house was a wreck, dad1 needed hospital care, and she had one bullet left. He had signed, and together they did indeed raze all opposition - financially or by superior firepower. She later told me she had been saving that bullet to kill herself if he did not sign, but that she trusted the power of the gun. You know the Mao quote? Here, it is family that comes from the barrel of a gun. The real reason we were afraid when she threatened to bring us to the shooting range was the gun itself. It made us. Wielding it means wielding the power of the family. We knew we were not strong enough and it would have destroyed us." He kept the gun steadily pointed at me. "Now you know the *real* story. What will you write?"