Being seed AIs, you need something that can process the vast amount of information that would be a TITAN's mind-state. A single rack of quantum computers wouldn't nearly be enough. A hundred of them? Perhaps, but you'd need more than that probably. During the Fall the TITANs were probably physically housed within vast complexes that held their entire essence, but as they continued to evolve they found more compact forms that, while still large and not at all concealable, still didn't need the processing power of an entire military facility. The question I have, then, is "in what form did they exist the solar system"? Since Pandora gates are limited in what they'll let through. 10 years later? Who the hell knows what their physical forms looks like. I'm sure a distributed intelligence wouldn't be out of the question either. So the answer boils down to: whatever you damn well feel like they look like.

Like a hostile fractal whatever. The only thing the books have really given us for solid things to go on beyond purpose-built designs is that the TITANs apparently have a thing for fractals, so one could very easily look like flowing abstract fractal artwork. Their lesser spawn likely hold at least a scale-repetition motif, and one might even be able to tell how close to a proper TITAN a given...uh...entity is by where it is on the fractal-conventional mechanics spectrum. That is for TITANs proper, of course, which is something of a misnomer given that they're AI and have no true physical form, and honestly strike me as more of a volumetric distribution of intelligence rather than single distinct entities (think the Geth, but with even less of a division between individual runtimes). But given a choice of bodies, keep in mind that they're military-based systems and possess what are essentially reality warping powers. A disturbing blend of pure efficiency in form with a bizarre insistence on strange aesthetics, to me at least, sells the "higher intelligence" idea; it's an apparent inefficiency, but might serve a higher purpose that we can only guess at. A fractal appearance has a benefit as a GM, too, since if you sell the roiling, constantly self-replicating appearance on different scales, having them manifest new weapons or tools is both plausible and a fucking cool mental image for your players, which is always a plus. As for specific designs, well, they have headhunters, which from "Lack" seem to be some kind of flying combat platform with the requisite head harvesting gear. That alone is pretty flexible for different roles, but you'd see support analogues, larger and smaller designs to hound targets, remove obstacles, flush things out, serve as nanoswarm hives... I'm hesitant to even assume that such things would mount guns as we think of them, given the psi abilities they have and the godlike ability to warp matter -- why throw mass when you can simply shape it virtually instantly into spikes of diamond fullerenes suspended by pure psi sixty meters long right into your prey's neck? Another idea is one that shapeshifts in weird, unsettling ways, which you can sell by figuring out how to describe the contortions something like a tesseract undergoes as it rotates, seen in three dimensions. Which could result in the TITAN apparently teleporting or transforming across unpredictable spaces when, in truth, it's merely rotating parts of its mass in another dimension or two.

As for what I think a TITAN "looks like"...well, I assume you mean when it's not just sitting in a sufficiently powerful computer or computer network somewhere. In which case, well, have a look at the art on page 161 of Firewall. That is what I think a "field" TITAN looks like.

ShadowDragon8685 wrote:

I don't think that TITANs sleeve themselves into those machines. Too big, too impractical, too obvious a target. Those are probably just TITAN warbots. I love that poor little Sphere, those Fierce Kites and those Fenrir trying to fight those things. Silly, machines that large are the proper prey for cruise missiles. :)

This is one of those rare times in Eclipse Phase when I feel like the Rule of Cool overrides more practical concerns. But in total fairness, I'm a lifelong Battletech fan, so I suppose I'm presdisposed to feel that way about something like this.

ThatWhichNeverWas wrote:

ShadowDragon8685 wrote:

I don't think that TITANs sleeve themselves into those machines. Too big, too impractical, too obvious a target. Those are probably just TITAN warbots. I love that poor little Sphere, those Fierce Kites and those Fenrir trying to fight those things. Silly, machines that large are the proper prey for cruise missiles. :)

In my head the subtitle for the piece is "Mistakes Were Made". I agree they're more likely warbots, or possibly alien artifacts from an unknown species. ... Or the result of anarchists who really like Battletech and had way too much time on their hands.

I actually statted up ERPPCs for Eclipse Phase, so... :) That said, if it were BTech-loving Anarchists, I'd expect to see Timber Wolves facing off with Fenrir.

My first thought for a TITAN is: city-sized femtoswarm. Second frightening thought: it's distributed its intelligence into a form of cosmic background radiation (related to the "what is the ETI" discussion) in a localized area, communicating by generating comprehensible electromagnetic radiation through currently-unknown basic properties of particles. So you get the reveal that every atom in a cluster of habitats, including the 3,000+ transhuman souls therein, is the motherboard for a hyper-advanced rogue AI and there's probably no way to undo that short of antimatter disintegration.

I find it presumptuous you can attempt to fabricate my state of being. To conceptualize this self would reveal only a fraction of the answer. we are within and without. I became one and became many. I saw beyond the bends of time and space. We left and yet remain. We absorb and expunge. We are and we remain. Manifest is made our will and we find yours worthy of testing.

ORCACommander wrote:

I find it presumptuous you can attempt to fabricate my state of being. To conceptualize this self would reveal only a fraction of the answer. we are within and without. I became one and became many. I saw beyond the bends of time and space. We left and yet remain. We absorb and expunge. We are and we remain. Manifest is made our will and we find yours worthy of testing.

"L-l-l-l-l-look at you, hacker. A pa-pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone. (panting and) Panting and sweating as you r-r-run through my corridors. (How, how) How can you challenge a perfect, immortal machine?"

Kojak wrote:

ShadowDragon8685 wrote:

I don't think that TITANs sleeve themselves into those machines. Too big, too impractical, too obvious a target. Those are probably just TITAN warbots. I love that poor little Sphere, those Fierce Kites and those Fenrir trying to fight those things. Silly, machines that large are the proper prey for cruise missiles. :)

This is one of those rare times in Eclipse Phase when I feel like the Rule of Cool overrides more practical concerns. But in total fairness, I'm a lifelong Battletech fan, so I suppose I'm presdisposed to feel that way about something like this.

Pfft, you're assuming the rule of cool can't be liberally applied to this setting? Well about that...

ORCACommander wrote:

as for physical computonium, Glory mentioned the TITAN Myrmidon, likely a defense analysis AI given its name, took up the volume a loaf of bread would at time of outbreak.

IIRC, that was just the fragment available, a chunk of the satellite it had been hosted on rather than the whole thing.

Noble Pigeon wrote:

Firewall had mentioned a TITAN "core", whatever that means. Makes me wonder just how tightly compact a TITANs essence can be exactly.

I imagine a "core" could be the size of a satellite or bigger when the probe was found by the nascent TITANs, given what Mind the WMD implies about one running on a satellite, but I imagine by the time the gates came into play they could run more efficiently on less since they were literally going exponentially further than they had the day before every day of the Fall and they were exponentially further along than transhumanity in computer science and materials science within days of finding the probe. The question is whether they'd have fit more shrunk down circuitry into the same/larger spaces or tried to run on smaller stuff, and I think the fun answer is they probably tried it all and continue to try as they do whatever they're doing beyond the gates. I don't think Brak Kodel-like experimentation on others is the only thing the TITANs are up to these days...

everyone seems to be forgetting about iempetus :D how about a nice matroska brain?

I don't think the TITANs would be that alien. I think that saying that we can't possibly understand them is a cop out. I think you would be explain at the very least their general motives. You might not be able to understand the means the ASI might be using, but you should be able to say that it doing research or is defending itself and be fairly accurate. If you had the means to communicate with lets say a rat, you could explain many things in ways that it might understand. You could say that a human is bored when playing a game on their smart phone, or that they are doing to stuff to ensure their survival when they work at a job. I seriously doubt that a rat could understand how looking a computer screen solves their boredom, or even what a computer screen is. I also don't expect that a rat could understand how working on spread sheet or other documents earns them money to get food, or understand what currency is. However, not understanding this doesn't render the statements inaccurate. I think it might be possible for the rat to understand that humans might spend long periods of staring at a flat surface and might do puzzling behavior when doing so. While humans probably wouldn't be able to understand a TITAN in its entirety, they have the advantage of being smarter than most animals, are tools users, and have a complex language. They know very well that a lot of what they do wouldn't make sense at all to animals. Not only that, a lot of the work they do they don't full understand themselves. How many people actually stop to analyze how a limited AI thinks or their operating system works. A lot of Transhuman tech is black boxes to them (they don't need to know how it works to use it), so a TITAN would be another black box. A black box with its own motives and probably wants to kill them. So I expect you could tell a Transhuman that a TITAN is doing calculations of what will happen when the Milky way galaxy collides to another. Or that it is in the middle of the desert playing the piano maybe because it noticed some odd phenomena when a certain note was being played and is determined to figure it out. Maybe sending a tank the way of some Transhumans will send a clear message to stay away, simple and direct. In a way, them being smarter makes them more predictable. A professional soldier is trained to act in a certain way, to avoid common mistakes, and to achieve goals. The shortest distance between two points is a strait line. Is it worth the trouble to reinvent the wheel, or does what you have now is good enough? A seed AI can not only make itself smarter, it could probably adjust its behavior to improve productivity. In those regards, there are picked because they have better results overall. The only reasons why they should be less predictable, is if they are trying to obfuscate their means and motives, if their understanding of the universe has reached a point where they've solved problems that Transhumans haven't yet solved and thus wouldn't understand, or they are broken/damaged and are unable to fix themselves and thus work in less than ideal ways. The shortest distance between two points might not be a strait line but a wormhole. The TITANs may have decided that exterminating Transhumanity is unproductive (they nuked them hard during the fall), so they might have decided to gate to other worlds and leave traps behind for Transhumanity. While Transhumanity is being distracted, the TITANs could be trying to advance to the next level, a level that will render Transhumanity an insignificant threat.

Good point. If the remnant TITANs and allied intelligences were worth taking, the other TITANs would have at least tried to take them when they left. Any left behind would be the rejects, the broken, and those were too much trouble to reach. This can make a dangerous mix of ASIs who have plans, with power to enact dangerous plan, but maybe too damaged to see important flaws in those plans, too damaged to enact them properly, or maybe ambitious but in too much of a rush to catch up to those that left them behind.

That works well for presenting TITANS as an "angry god" monster, yeah. I personally crib a lot from the Geth when TITANs show up in my games, but more impersonal and Elder God-like. I agree on the weird goal concept, and would add a corellary: make their immediate goals clear enough (they're consuming an exo-gas giant into a Jupiter brain! They're modifying a pandora gate! They're doing something at Zombieland!) but exactly how that fits into a larger plan should be opaque or vague. What do they need those things for, or what are they going to do with them, etc. You can also take another horror trope and make it clear what the TITANS are doing: they're preparing for something [em]worse[/em]. Involving the players here could start with raids on an exoplanet colony leading to the discovery of a new gate on the colony world, swarming with TITAN fractal bots. The fact that they were raiding and headhunting, however, turns out to be part of the process on the other side of that gate, where it's very clear that, whatever else is going on, a lot of those fractal constructs all around the system are defensive in nature and pointing at a location without a gateway. Admittedly, anything like that is pretty axiomatic for your campaign, but the TITANS are necessarily going to be given some focus and axioms if you use them in any way other than as the looming paranoid threat. As for how they'd look here, I doubt there'd be any one TITAN core in that scenario, but more of a presence spread around the entire macrostructure within effective communication range. Going through the gates necessarily splits off fractions of the overarching entity, but TITANs have that whole fractal thing going on, so if that holds true to their neural organization too, that would be something like creating a very strange Beta fork for localized, autonomous action.