DivineWrath wrote:

That is a bit of an odd one. I suppose the nice thing to do would resleeve the guy. If the medical storage still works well, the head might be preserved enough that you might be able to throw it into a healing vat and come back a few days later. However, you probably want to check if the guy is alive and active at first, otherwise you might have two alpha forks of the guy running around.

Well, IIRC the oldest person in the setting was born in 1983, and since Musk was born in '71, that would imply he is not currently alive in 10 AF.

DivineWrath wrote:

Of course, the prudent questions are why was he decapitated and why hasn't he been resleeved yet? You might want to contact Firewall first to see if there is any important problems you have to watch out for. If everything is cool, you still want to research the guy a little bit first, to find out if there are any other problems to watch out for. Also, is there any psychological damage? If he was decapitated while alive, it might cause a few problems when he wakes up.

Well, I believe I've read in the past that Musk has expressed interest in cryogenics and other hypothetical post-death preservation tech, so my assumption was that the preservation of his head was A) intentional and B) at his own directive. Correspondingly, given that his head was preserved in this manner, and given my previous conjecture re: his not being alive in 10 AF, I assume that he died before cortical stacks became available, which makes sense, since he would have been at least around 140 by the time they were invented (even the major medical advances alluded to in the core book's timeline would have been around when he was around 110). So given that he doesn't have a stack, would it be technologically possible to "revive" him and upload his ego into a stack?

There are a couple of possibilities I'm toying around with, at the moment. 1) Encourage the players to revive him, induct him into Firewall, and use whatever pre-Fall assets he stashed away to act as their patron. 2) Sell the head to the highest bidder. 3) Given that Musk has expressed in the past his desire to colonize Mars, perhaps in the EP universe he actually was one of the leaders of the initial colonization, and thus his descendants (he does have five sons IRL) are now immortal oligarchs of immense influence on Mars. And so...see 1 and 2.

Ok, I've worked up some rough notes in anticipation of the campaign eventually getting to the point where the players can do something with the head. Criticism would be appreciated. ----- Elon Musk is an extremely well-known figure within transhumanity, known for both his early advocacy of Mars colonization as well as building one the most powerful megacorps in human history, Monolith Industries, with his eldest twin sons, Griffin and Xavier. Elon, under the auspices of Monolith, led one of the first groups of colonists to Mars, decades before the terraforming process truly began. As the end of his life approached, he became more and more interested in the nascent reputation economy, eventually innovating CivicNet (only the second reputation network after the @-list). While CivicNet eventually caught on in the inner system, it was initially viewed with deep suspicion by the hypercorps, and Elon was made a pariah among his former social circles. The twins ousted him from Monolith and changed their last names to Haldeman (their grandmother's maiden name) to disassociate themselves from him in a public fashion, and Musk spent the last years of his life founding a half-dozen autonomist communities based entirely around CivicNet. Called Ebb 1 through 6 (because they would be the high water mark of traditional capitalist economies, to Elon's thinking), they were entirely self-sustaining colonies. The hypercorps, of course, hated them. After Elon's death in 60 BF, they waged almost ceaseless memetic warfare against them, painting them as supporters and incubators of autonomist terrorism across the system. During the Fall, all six colonies were destroyed by TITAN attacks (in fact, hypercorp security forces did everything they could to lure the TITANs there, although this has been covered up and only a few immortal oligarchs, including Griffin and Xavier, are aware of this). Unknown to everyone else, Elon had his head severed at death and placed in a highly-advanced (for the time) medical preservation tank and hidden in an underground cache at Ebb 6. While the TITANs temporarily used the bunker for storage before security forces pushed them into what would become the TQZ, the head was never discovered and the bunker was re-buried by dust storms and forgotten. - Griffin Haldeman is the head of Omnicor - Xavier Haldeman is the head of Starware - The triplets: Saxon was killed in a car accident in his twenties, Kai died during the Fall, and Damian was a playboy who eventually became of gatecrasher of some repute, but disappeared with his entire team during an expedition to [placeholder] and has not been heard from since

I'm going to go ahead and say that his head was stored in some kind of incredibly advanced prototype preservation tank that prevents the depolarization of his brain, mostly because I'd really like to give the players the chance to scan his ego into an ego bridge and potentially resleeve him, for the campaign possibilities that opens up. That being said, NimbleJack, you're right that I need a plausible reason why nobody did this already, between when the tech was invented and the Fall. Especially since they found it in a buried bunker in the middle of Ebb 6, and you'd think a settlement founded by the man himself would have plenty of reasons to upload him.