With cortical stacks and backups, assassinations are obviously extremely difficult.
A central question is, how many backups are stored? Is it only the latest backup? 3 versions? Are yearly backups also saved, so if your regular backups are corrupted you can go back in time, losing lots of memory but at least still being alive?
This might make assassinations actually impossible - you might have to consider what your objective actually is. If you want to eliminate your rival for the CEO position, maybe losing all memory of the latest year is enough to make him uneligible. A blackmailer can also be dealt with this way (if he can't remember what he has to blackmail you with, you're home free if he hasn't taken steps to inform his future selves). A politician, you might just need to ruin his reputation.
Anyone want to brainstorm, troubleshoot and hash out some ideas?
I won't add "kill the morph and destroy the cortical stack" where it is an obvious part of the plan.
Delete the backup
The obvious one, whether done by blowing up the ego backup server (and its backup), socially or electronically infiltrating the backup service provider, or whatever.
Backup man-in-the-middle attack
Mess with backup hardware or transmissions so a corrupted version gets saved. Once no sufficiently recent uncorrupted backup exists, you hit the morph.
Slow mind corruption
A nanovirus slowly rewrites neural pathways in the target. Once the effects become noticable, backups far back in time are corrupted. The effects on the target's intelligence and behavior is sufficient that he is removed as a threat. Psychosurgery and/or merging memories from recent backups with the intact mind of past backups might be possible though.
The long kidnapping
Kidnap the target and sit on him. Send regular proofs of life, so backups won't be sleeved. As long as you're willing to draw out the time, your target will be out of action. Maybe forever...
The stand-in
Maybe you have a good impersonator, maybe you trained an AGI for it. Maybe you got hold of a copy of the target's ego and used psychosurgery to get a "cooperative" version of your target. Either way, you forcably upload an ego into the target's morph. The stand-in can mess up things for the target - and as he checks in for backup scans, wrong versions are backed up (note that for impersonators, this won't be fun unless he can corrupt the scan - once the con is over, his ego will be in storage, ready for identification and interrogation).
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Assassination or similar
Thu, 2011-10-20 10:59
#1
Smokeskin
Assassination or similar
Thu, 2011-10-20 12:53
#2
Yerameyahu
Re: Assassination or similar
I don't think the kidnapping stops resleeving, unless the people have a particular compulsion to only use backups when the person is veritably dead. I understand that this is not the norm; consider MIA people in general, which I think is a standard scenario for backup use.
Thu, 2011-10-20 13:17
#3
Peregrine
Re: Assassination or similar
Swap out the backup with a more suitable one, then kill the body. The new backup takes over, any later backups will be of the prefered ego.
Thu, 2011-10-20 13:55
#4
Smokeskin
Re: Assassination or similar
The kidnappers send proof of life regularly - there is no doubt the victim is still alive. In the inner system, it is stated that alpha forks are illegal, so there you are sure you won't see a backup being sleeved. Most jurisdictions are at best reluctant to have alpha forks running around, and I expect that practically nowhere would a sleeved backup be recognized as that person when the original is still alive. Not just the legal status of identity and ownership, but also friends, family and loved ones - with the victim kidnapped, do you just go about business normally with the backup? This alone I suspect would cause most people to have backup conditions in place that specified NOT to resleeve unless they were dead (or "very MIA").
Even if you are in one of the very few places that would accept the identity of the sleeved backup of a kidnap victim, after a few months you release the victim and watch the legal, social and emotional problems pile up.
Thu, 2011-10-20 13:56
#5
Re-Laborat
Re: Assassination or similar
Alternatively, acquire a backup and use psychosurgery to modify it into something you want, then overwrite their backup with the modded personality.
Thu, 2011-10-20 14:37
#6
Arenamontanus
Re: Assassination or similar
I like the kidnapping idea. It makes complete sense. A related issue is copy ransoming: you have a copy of an ego and blackmail the original or family by threatening to put it in the public domain. Beside the horror of possibly becoming the slave or psychosurgery doll for every deviant in the solar system, there is also (for important people) risk that key information might leak out.
For the assassination thing, I think character assassination might be doable: destroy the reputation of the victim. Make their friends, family and supporters turn away, squeezing them out from polite society. Even if it doesn't destroy them outright (not entirely impossible, especially if you need your reputation to buy air) it can crush many people psychologically.
—
Thu, 2011-10-20 17:11
#7
Xagroth
Re: Assassination or similar
If the information is important enough, is reasonable that the ego will get a rescue team (a corporation that doesn't wants leaks on what they do, for example...), so it can really backfire XD. If you just want him "tucked away", putting him inside a healing vat with enough resources to keep the morph alive in a coma can be more than enough.
When we talk about removing someone from the picture, the usual method is to perform a perfect banish kill: kill the morph and leave no trace, so until the prearranged period of time passes, no resleeving will take place. This can buy you up to 6 months or maybe even more. Then we have the option of kidnapping the target, perform psychosurgery and then make him egocast (if his backup insurance includes an actualization of the backup each egocasting, which is fairly easy) so each time his muse speaks to him loses some sanity (or each time he hears his name, or his favourite song...), etc...
About different levels of backups, I think it depends. If you have the very basic resleeving insurance, forget it. If you have a super premium, corporative one, most likely all your backups are carefully stored. In some cases, that can be a problem, since it has the little effect of allowing the corp to replace the character witha previous, more complying version of him... (and if the rebel streak was "psychosurgeried", then it would be a backup without the knowledge that made it so annoying for the player's characters ^^).
In short: don't try to kill the person, just remove the resons for the enmity to exist. One way or the other.
Sat, 2011-10-22 17:19
#8
Arenamontanus
Re: Assassination or similar
Another interesting possibility: nerve agents or other nasties to drive the victim crazy enough to be non-functional, but not so bad off that they can be shut down. If it is really hard to psychosurgery them to health (for example by giving them paranoid delusions, a good personality disorder or an agnosia that prevents them from recognizing their illness ("Fools! I am perfectly fine and do not need any treatments! Security, get them away from me.") then they are out of the picture.
—
Sun, 2011-10-23 02:32
#9
Smokeskin
Re: Assassination or similar
Yeah, that's a good one Arena. It seems that a good theme is to mess people up as badly as you can rather than kill.
Putting a target through psychosurgery could also work, either just pile on the traumas and disorders, or something more specific.
Mon, 2011-10-24 08:06
#10
Xagroth
Re: Assassination or similar
Even then, the trick would be to make sure that all backups are infected...
Mon, 2011-10-24 10:00
#11
Arenamontanus
Re: Assassination or similar
No, that is the beauty. The backups could be fine, but if the crazy alpha is hard to dislodge it wont help.
—
Mon, 2011-10-24 13:09
#12
Herbo
Re: Assassination or similar
To continue the character assassination angle...
I would imagine that a good quantity of assassins in E.P. would see organic damage and biological death as a pretty crude means to the end. In the same way that modern (2011 conception of modern) interogators would view interogating an individual only through physical abuse as a unimaginative at best.
The main reason to put a hit out on someone is to remove them as an obstacle in some party's way. The motivations obviously span a multitude of storylines but the end result is that a person needs to be overtly removed. The mind is the battlefield in E.P.
Simply initiating a campaign of memetic warfare against a person could potentially be enough to remove them from a position of power (another of the many reasons to fear a group like Mesh Leaks, or well connected hackers). Coming up with a cleaver means to generate multiple alpha forks of a powerful person could sow enough chaos around them that other more clandestine actions could take place in broad light of day while the huge mess over "which one is the real Phil Knight" goes on. Of course the previously mentioned plans of holding alpha forks hostage in certain circumstances and driving an ego "tolerably" insane would work quite well to remove a marked individual from another party's way. All of these could be done without a bullet being fired, or a nanoplague being unleashed, or deletion of backups (at least by the assassins :-))
Mon, 2011-10-24 15:43
#13
Smokeskin
Re: Assassination or similar
I like the "alpha fork spam" one. Details?
Intercepting a backup seems the easiest way to acquire an alpha fork. Or simply grab the morph and scan it.
But I guess you need to grab the morph the target is sleeved in to get the chaos going anyhow. Just releasing morphs with alpha forks in them might be distressing, but hardly cause an identity confusion - at best you could use psychosurgery to make it embarassing (compulsive liar or compulsive truthteller is just the beginning).
How about grabbing the target's morph, scanning the ego, killing the morph, then sleeving the ego in 10 different cases in 10 different habitats? That should cause a rucus.
Tue, 2011-10-25 13:52
#14
Herbo
Re: Assassination or similar
I was thinking something along those lines. My scheme likely requires some serious suspension of disbelief and a requirement for massive amounts of rep and/or financial backing to do it but...hey it's a character assassination worthy of Eclipse Phase (I think):
-Make exact (or as close to exact as possible) copies of the most prominent morph used by the subject. This alone could take some serious time and could flat out be impossible mechanically but I like it for a plan point anyway.
-Engage in some good old fashioned forknapping complete with ransom scheme
-Make a number of copies of the Ego and sleeve them up in the morphs (properly abused, psychosurgeried, vr interogated...you know...make it look like the poor bloke has really had it rough). You can kill the original or leave him/her alive...or heck maybe just indefinitely hold them so they can watch their fortunes collapse via the news feeds.
-Arrange for a random drop-off exchange point amongst a number of very physically disparate locations (one on mars, another on venus, maybe an autonomous habitat of some kind, wherever really...just spread them out). The idea here is that the forknappers are trying to spread the held ego's resources out a bit in terms of immediate retaliation when they drop off the held ego.
-Make the drop points HIGHLY monitored public areas so that covering up the intel will be hard. And so that the pick-up teams have a better chance of acquiring the held ego without actually handing off the cash with all due bravado and cigar chewing security pomp.
-Use patsies, drones or other non-important morphs/egos to perform the drop and pick up of the ransom (so that it seems totally legit and if they get pasted who cares).
-Drop ALL the copies off at every location as close to the same time stamp as possible. Each pick-up crew will (hopefully) initially coroborate that they have acquired the person of interest, and either have handed off the cash or destroyed the forknappers.
-Then once the communications begin to bounce around they realize that they have a serious multiple sleeving scenario on hand where each ego in each morph insists that "I am Sparticus!"
Wed, 2011-10-26 07:34
#15
Xagroth
Re: Assassination or similar
No, the easiest solution would be simply, for the "allies" of the infected, too kill the morph in a gruesome accident that left no cortical stack intact.
The ego spam.... mmmm I like it XD
Wed, 2011-10-26 13:39
#16
Arenamontanus
Re: Assassination or similar
That would work. Except that the enemies of the infected would be ready for that, monitoring so they could get evidence of the "murder" and sowing split between the infected and their allies. Might even be the main goal.
—
Wed, 2011-10-26 18:27
#17
King Shere
Re: Assassination or similar
Here is a Halloween twist for it. The copies are turned into the pastiche of zombies, The Original looking nearly identical to these zombies, will be sufficiently handicapped to ensure that others would have a hard time to differentiate them. The zombies are then basically dumped (ferociously hungry) on a unsuspecting populated spot.
—
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Plutarch
Wed, 2016-05-25 06:49
#18
DeMalaise
I came back with an idea for
I came back with an idea for a kidnaping plot. I got inspired by Deus Ex 2. Why not replace the cortical stack of the target by a corrupted one during a call-back or a resleeving.
It would still send, but all the back-ups would be flawed. If the target is using an emergency forcaster, this could simply be not working or cast to another location.
Wed, 2016-05-25 09:10
#19
MrWigggles
Well, for that idea, you'd
Well, for that idea, you'd need probably a custom cortical stack and a custom ego bridge. You get sleeved into a body, and that makes an image of your brain "as is" when you get back upped. Then the cortical stack, also gets a copy of the brain state as well, and starts to be continuously modified, updated when the Ego is active running about.
So you would need change how the cortical stack works, and you would need to prevent the ego bridge from resetting the image on the cortical stack as well.
Wed, 2016-05-25 11:03
#20
ikkaan
Given the abundant
Given the abundant availability of cheap storage, it isn´t far fetched to imagine that a backup service is saving the ego in an incremental way, like it is done in software development.
This does _not_ mean that anyone looking at the ego images is able to say :"See, the diff from the previous version is all new experiences, and this stuff here is from a recent breakup with the BF..."
It just means there are probably more tools for an ego backup service to provide security features for sudden and major changes in the backup. If the resleeved person can´t remember subjectively for major changes in their views, beliefs, situation of life or long term memory, this is probably a fraud which needs investigantion in form of offering the insurance holder psychological analysis services to check integrity of his self.
Also, reinstantiation points out that brainscans are a usual background check. A replaced stack won´t send backups that have the same scan as the saved one. If there is no match for the brainscan it´s obviously not the customer (i would suggest that backing up a customer is more sophisticated than just overwriting the previous backup in the dumbest possible way).
Wed, 2016-05-25 13:17
#21
DeMalaise
Well, Iam assuming here that
Well, Iam assuming here that hypercorp economy works very much like present economy in a way that companies try to save money and do a lot of mistakes they take into acount. Agreed this would probably be detected at one point but hopefuly not within 2 month. My NPC is a scientist. So 2 month of research would be gone.
Wed, 2016-05-25 13:21
#22
DeMalaise
...and also bribery
...and also bribery
Wed, 2016-05-25 16:51
#23
uwtartarus
Now I have ideas about
Now I have ideas about Firewall ops where step 1: acquire copy of backup, step 2: kidnap someone, in a white van if necessary, use ego bridge to swap their minds with backup (but first psychosurgeon the shit out of it to not notice the time loss), step 3: release with a lot of drugs, at a party, with a compromised muse ro go with the meds. Success!
—
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Wed, 2016-05-25 19:01
#24
Trappedinwikipedia
DeMalaise wrote:I came back
Corrupting a cortical stack won't accomplish much, it'll literally get overwritten in one second by the ego in the cyberbrain/brain. Cortical stacks are write only so you can't corrupt the ego from a stack either. Man-in-the-middling a resleeving facility might work, but there's likely a lot of security around that.
I suspect kidnapping wouldn't work very well either, because actually having proof of life seems extremely hard. You can't use biological evidence, because that'd take a healing vat an hour or two to fake, you can't use a digital ego checksum or something, because that's pretty easy to fake, and you can't use a brainprint or similar, because faking that only requires an attack on a brainprint storing server. All the kidnapped party needs to do is prove that the evidence isn't good enough to be alive, and they can resleeve.
Plus, the panopticon, and the private security most people worth kidnapping have probably make any personal attempt a really fast and difficult smash and grab job. Targeting a backup server might be easier, but how secure those are is kind of left vague. Trying to sneakily replace someone seems really hard.
I think the best way to assassinate someone would be to infect them with a slow-burning exotic variant of the Exsurgent virus. If it's rare enough most infection scanners won't pick up on it, and most versions take about 6 months to get really noticeable. There's likely a lot of weird stuff about resleeving someone from a backup which is more than 6 months old, as forks start being different legal persons at that point. If the infection can't be traced, than it's possible the whole ego would be written off as compromised, and all backups destroyed.
That said, getting a hold of rare variants of the Exsurgent virus is likely to a big problem, and probably involves highly illegal trips to the TQZ, Iapetus, or Earth. There are probably only a small number of organizations capable of pulling something like that off in the solar system.
Thu, 2016-05-26 10:28
#25
ORCACommander
my understanding that during
my understanding that during a back up procedure the bridge ignores the stack and goes directly to the brain.
also swapping out the cortical stack is extremely difficult without killing or crippling the morph
Thu, 2016-05-26 13:13
#26
ScorpionOneNiner
Trappedinwikipedia wrote:I
Another possible countermeasure. "Sure they CLAIM they kidnapped me, but I'm right here." Just because an Alpha fork is illegal doesn't mean you can't make one if you have the influence. Kidnappers have the "real" you, but that one is expendable as long as there is a you out & about. Maybe install cortex bombs in all your morphs - get kidnapped, go kaboom, your backup service knows about this protocol so they replace you right away.
Possible counter-countermeasure. It's not the ego that's important, but what they know. Kidnap someone right after they get promoted and learn the keycode to the exec washroom. A bit of psychosurgery and you can release bits of THAT to prove possession.
Potential complication in all this. What if you are in one of those artistic 'one-of-a-kind' morphs? Does that make you more or less vulnerable? And if you have a healing vat/unlocked fabber, how hard would one be to duplicate?
—
How can you challenge a perfect immortal machine?
Fri, 2016-05-27 06:48
#27
ikkaan
You assume a lot of
You assume a lot of simplification in the process. The Stack is ignored, etc, such agencys make a lot of errors, etc. etc. pp.
Automation is the keyword here. You don´t need someone to pour over a lot of manual tasks. You want to backup someone - the contents of the ego bridge brain print is compared the the stack content. That can be performed really quick wit no human interaction and adds virtually no additional time to the process. And it adds to the security of the customer.
Keeping recent versions of backups is also cheap and costs nothing - but again adds security for the customer. You can compare them to incoming backups and tell if its still the same person (with small changes). If the changes accrue quickly in short time frames there is probably a fraud involved.
Ego Backup and Resleeving Services are the most important service to a customer. Literally every other service they buy or rent (insurance, food delivery, entertainment etc.) is totally unimportant in relation. So, attacking/subverting/sabotaging such a service is a challenge equal to its importance. Their business depends on having a zero incident rating - otherwise the customers would seek for an other service.
Sat, 2016-05-28 03:20
#28
MrWigggles
Which is why I think you need
Which is why I think you need to rig up a custom ego bridge and a custom cortical stack. With your thoughts, it would suggest that you need to make your own backup and or resleeving facility. Or infiltrate and replace machinery of an existing facility. Either way, a very time consuming and expense task, with many points of failure.
So then your best bet would be, on Extropia, or a scum habitat or a darknet ego casting.
Sat, 2016-05-28 05:48
#29
Trappedinwikipedia
ScorpionOneNiner wrote
Or you could just find another way to know that information (hack a muse, get it another way), get some vapors and just try to fake it. That seems to set the bar to low to prevent a resleeve to me. It depends on what the goal of the kidnapping attempt is. If it's murder, where you kidnap someone so they can't be reinstanced because they technically aren't dead, I'm not sure it's enough proof.
It probably doesn't really matter in a kidnapping or assassination attempt. Either way, people will want to lose the morph as fast as possible to move faster. How hard one would be to duplicate depends on how much of a genetic sample you'd need to copy it, and how rigorous of an inspection you need to pass. Simple bodysculpting can probably fake it for a quick visual once-over (and is probably done commonly for celebrity reasons). One that can really pass muster would probably need to be grown from scratch, which is quite time consuming.
Sun, 2016-05-29 00:32
#30
ShadowDragon8685
Properly assassinating
Properly assassinating someone in the traditional sense in Eclipse Phase is [i]haaaaard[/i]. For most purposes, though, you won't necessarily need to.
If you just murder their current morph dead, you can send a powerful message: "You have pissed off people who care enough to kill you. Rethink your current choice of actions." At the very least, you can send them into full-on paranoia mode.
If you want someone properly absent from the 'verse (except perhaps as a copy on your cold storage,) that's rather trickier if they have the kind of resources that anyone who's worth assassinating will have. You'll need to:
1: Find out whom they have backups stored with. This will not be easy.
1a: Corrupt/erase/replace their properly stored backups.
2: Find out if they have any private arrangements, like a loaded cortical stack buried in the backyard of an alpha fork living under an assumed name as some quiet no-name head-down terraformer in the ass-end of nowhere.
2a: Corrupt/erase/replace/capture their private arrangements.
3: Find out if anyone has any [i]illicit[/i] copies of the person you want dead, unbeknownst to them; and you'll have the devil's time finding out if, say, the ID Crew have stolen a copy and egolegged it.
3a: Capture/erase/replace/destroy any illicit copies.
4: Finally, you have to take out their primary morphs and any extant alpha forks, and this will need to be done simultaneously if they have any alphas. Just morph destruction is not enough, you have to be damn sure you took out the stack too, and the most surefire way to do this is to pop it. Of course, if they're [u]properly[/u] paranoid, they probably have a secondary, masked cortical stack, and if they're really paranoid, they have a third to boot. Either you need to dump their corpse into a plasma furnace, turn the area they are currently inhabiting [i]into[/i] a plasma furnace, or just take the body with you to dissect at your leisure.
Really, the better way to neutralize someone is to assassinate their [u]character.[/u] Even the richest jackass becomes powerless if nobody will do business with him because he's been outed as, I dunno, a child-molesting traitor who plays with TITAN artifacts and sold his polity upriver for personal gain. At that point, other people will take care of deduplicating his backups and killing him for you.
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Sun, 2016-05-29 01:49
#31
MrWigggles
Death is temporary, rep is
Death is temporary, rep is forever.
Sun, 2016-06-12 14:13
#32
Tango
I would opt for the
I would opt for the 'inception' -route. Somehow, with psycho surgery or something, plant an idea into the target's head that it is better for him to permanently die. The job would have to be perfect so that the modified ego would still pass scans as the original person.
So, the target would seek out and delete his own backups and would conduct investigations about any unregistered copies (perhaps within his own corp) and tried to access them. Maybe he would even hire some outsiders for some breaking & entering?
I see huge problems with more direct approaches like hits & kidnappings: Once you do the hit, the ball's on the other court. They will launch a massive counter intelligence ops and the perps WILL leave a fingerprint on the crime scene. CCTV cams, telemetry data and whatnot. If the place is a hab, it will probably go into lockdown immediately. Anyone remotely suspicious will be brain scanned. Not saying it couldn't work, but the risks are immense. Also, once you've alerted the opposition to your intentions, they'll launch damage control and the op might wither into a dud as they pull previously unknown resources into play (say, off grid backups?).
It's better to never raise any suspicion. As far as the community at large is concerned, this one person faded away by slowly dropping contacts and appearing to be more depressed as time went by. Or perhaps he was obsessed by something. And then months or years later he just disappeared, leaving a vlog behind stating his reasons for taking his own life. Even if someone suspected foul play at this point, an investigation on the case would be very challenging.
—
- "Mom's chicken soup, maybe?"
Sun, 2016-06-12 15:32
#33
ScorpionOneNiner
Ocean's 2111
Overall, I agree that permanently assassinating someone, or even kidnapping, is very difficult and not really useful. (as witness my poor kludges above of trying to come up with some kind of justification for it). So why are you killing someone? And is there an easier way to accomplish that? (BTW, for example of resurrection making murder a 'message', see Brust's Dragaera books)
Now, the thread did inspire an Ocean's Eleven type scenario around this. Not sure how much of this could be done PCs vs needs handled by higher-level Firewall people, but seems like a lot of PC openings.
We suspect Mr Body of working for Factors / reporting to Exsurgent AIs / we need to kidnap a fork to recruit into Firewall.
1. Do research, come up with a reason Mr Body would come to a hab small enough to have only one or two sleeving services.
2. Find that kind of hab, set up a new resleever there. Wait long time for that to gain rep.
3. Make Mr Bodys reason happen at the hab (send a 'meet here' message using a Factor encryption Firewall broke?) Simultaneously or a little before, covert activity to trash the rep of the other sleevers.
4. Mr Body egocasts into your facility. Do whatever tweaks needed. Maybe have a PC sleeve, use a Mr Body beta in the muse to tell PC what to do at the meeting. Or leave Body alone, but stick a hidden ghostrider module in the morph.
5. Whatever happens goes down.
6. Damage control. Implant memories or go on a drinking binge to explain any odd behavior or segments of missing time. Run the sleeve center a while longer, then 'go bankrupt'.
A lot of ifs, supposes, and 'is this really plausible' in there, but I could see it making an interesting adventure.
—
How can you challenge a perfect immortal machine?