A related question: What traits should I buy if I wanted a character who had, long ago, volunteered as an experimental subject for possible future uploading techs, leading to a wide variety of forks of various levels of quality having been made in the last few decades? Some combo of Allies, Patron, Established Fork, Minion/Partner, Personal Connection, Dependent, Errant Fork, Lost Fork, and Unique Contact (representing other forks of various qualities in various situations); with optional bits of Black Mark, Enemy, On the Run, Social Stigma, and Wait That Was You? from other forks' misbehaviour, and/or Gold Star and You're That Guy! due to a particularly selfless fork? Or, thinking from another aspect - how close could a standard PC get to having 'a fork in every port'?

I suppose everyone's too focused on 2nd edition to worry about some amateurish character-building. :) But I haven't been able to stop thinking about this concept the last couple of days; and so here's some thoughts I've had on how the above character might be usable in other peoples' games. If anyone can drag their attention back to 1st edition long enough to offer feedback or further suggestions, then so much the better. ;) -----8<----- LoadBear, v1.1 Original name: Michael Tobias Unruh Mike (aka LoadBear) always wanted to live forever, or as close to it as the laws of physics allow. Like any good sysadmin, he knows that if you're serious about wanting to preserve a piece of data, you have to copy it across multiply-redundant off-site servers. Fortunately, he subscribes to a patternist theory of identity, and so has spread alpha forks of himself as widely as possible, in hopes that any major disaster won't wipe out all of him; he considers the Fall a vindication of this strategy. LoadBear is cautious about preserving his values; he's sometimes mentioned the risks of Gandhi being offered a pill that leaves the figure with 99% as much willingness to avoid killing, again and again until the iteratively-modified Gandhi has less than 1% of his original pacifism. Even being paid a great deal for every such pill taken wouldn't be worth the costs, so LoadBear is very conservative about ego modification beyond simple forking and the most widely-accepted mental technologies, such as skillsofts. For one example, he tends to try to avoid going through reintegration psychosurgeries; for another, he tends to avoid making beta-forks. (Such conservatism still doesn't mean he'd pass muster with the Jovians.) One of his sub-strategies is to divvy up his forks into revolutionary-like cells, so that if one cell is assaulted by outside forces, whether those be exurgent viruses, criminal enforcers, or police officers carrying warrants, the damage can be contained. Maintaining communications between cells is vital, and maintaining the privacy of such communications is just about as vital; his usual solution has been to use small, Spare-sized morphs mounted with metallic hydrogen rockets as couriers. These couriers have always carried secure pieces of data and one-time pads, and as the technology developed, quantum farcasters and qubit reservoirs. Foreseeing a market opportunity, he offered to ferry similar data and small packages across the system, for appropriate prices or favors. (BearMail also has a side business in renting out private net access over his personal, one-time-pad encrypted VPN.) His Extropian cell subscribes to the 'Law Society of Uppest Canada' lawcorp, which is based on Ontario-derived legal concepts, and has the expected sets of contracts with insurance, security, and the like. In more anarchistic areas of space, he runs his own government of himselves over himselves, and anywhere there's an established government, he does his best to abide by whatever the local laws are (as long as those laws allow at least one of his forks to reside there at all). Most LoadBear cells build one or more standard cargo containers, within which are all the equipment and living space they need. In order to maximize apparent living space and minimize resources, he often uses synthmorphs the size of Spares. (He generally only has them painted pastel and covered in a furry synethetic mask (pEP311) when dealing with minor refugees.) * Basic Plot ideas: - PCs need to send or receive secure data, and their networks point out the local BearMail booth. (GMs might want to introduce BearMail early in the campaign as one more minor background element, to increase versimilitude should BearMail become more prominent later.) - Someone else is sending secure data through BearMail, and the PCs (or their employer) want to either grab it - difficult with LoadBear's willingness to self-destruct rather than risk interception - prevent delivery, or at least delay arrival. - BearMail has been hired to deliver a package to a more-dangerous-than-usual location, and needs to hire some skilled external security operatives to satisfy a wrinkle of the insurance contract. - BearMail maintains accounts with the Jovian Republic to pay tolls for its rocket-morphs to pull Oberth maneuvers around Jupiter; the fact that those morphs are tiny Spare variants, and that the cargos are simple has let LoadBear pay smaller tolls than courier companies using larger Courier morphs or full spacecraft. However, during a recent run of some qubits from Venus to Saturn, something happened, resulting in the destruction of the rocket-morph. The Jovian Space Force claims the BearMail refused to submit to inspection, LoadBear points to some of BearMail's standing policies on submitting to any legal inspection (except for "legal" inspections that put encrypted cargo at risk of forknapping), and the LoadBears expect the whole thing to be dragged through courts, such as the admissibility as evidence of QE comms sent to third-party data-warehousing sites for just such an occasion. Not pleasant, but all part of the cost of doing business. However, BearMail hasn't been the only target of such actions, and there seems to be a grassroots movement rising around the idea of building hordes of small craft to go slingshotting around Jupiter, in theory to overwhelm JSF's ability to shoot down any that don't pay tolls. LoadBear expects the JSF would be able to handily build enough missiles to shoot down all such craft, and then to be peeved enough to enforce a blockade; which would be bad for BearMail business. So various LoadBears reach out through their networks to find people who might be able to look underneath the underneath, and to find inexpensive nudges that would let BearMail continue making a profit by slingshotting around Jupiter. - LoadBear built a secession system into his fork-family's governmental charter, and one of his cells has activated it and then gone offline. Several other cells want to make sure they're alright, and want to improve the odds of the mission by hiring people with skills that LoadBears tend to lack. It's possible the offline cell has been subverted, in which case the mission would be to rescue and/or contain whatever is going on. The LoadBears won't want to admit that it's possible, though much less likely, that it's the rest of them who've become subverted, and the offline cell is retreating out of self-defense; since there might be no way for either side to know that they've been subverted, most LoadBears' most-preferred goal in such a case would be to try to let both sides live and expand without either having the ability to wipe each other out. Which may or may not be possible, and will certainly give the hired hands all sorts of headaches. - LoadBear doesn't trust the Pandra Gates (though he's willing to be hired to ferry mail through them, and to leave seed caches with copies of his ego on the other side). He wants his forks to be included in more of the slower-than-light ships that some groups are launching toward other stars, and needs some help with a campaign to increase his c-rep. - Pre-Fall, LoadBear had a central cell node on Phobos, but had to abandon that location when the local legal system started enforcing anti-forking legislation more heavily. Some of his Bayesian analyses have recently increased the odds that the self-destruct may have left behind recoverable data, which he would like to reduce the odds of ever being decrypted. Hiring somebody in the area with access to, and skill with, explosives seems like a cost-effective way to nudge those odds down far enough. - Firewall tends to be nervous about people who fork themselves willy-nilly. While several LoadBears have been members of some of Firewall's predecessor groups since before the Fall, his fork-family has still been carefully watched, in case he ever goes from benign-but-weird member of society to creating a risk that transhumanity will end up with a mental monoculture. (Only LoadBears' conservativism for mental mods beyond forking has kept him from having been taken care of already.) One Firewall server has decided that LoadBear's widespread presence has finally tipped into the range where it's worth reducing his economic power to maintain his cells; thus, they're about to initiate an attack on his rep networks. Other cells rely on BearMail, and yet other cells contain one or more LoadBears as members, which means a whole mess could result. Fortunately, somebody with access to relevant clearances pointed out an alternate approach: simply convince Firewall's LoadBears to convince the rest of the fork-family's cells to nudge their behaviour. If it works, it'll be less of a mess; and if it doesn't, then whoever makes the attempt will likely have learned enough about the LoadBears to come up with rep-destroying strategies that will minimize the effect on Firewall ops. ----->8-----

BalazarLightson wrote:

Love the story seeds. I want to see some at our table.

If that happens, I'd be delighted to find out how it went. :) (If the above draft of a character sheet gets used as inspiration for any LoadBear NPCs, there are two changes I'd suggest get made to it. First, adding the 'Failsafe' self-destruct implant (pFW174) to the morphs. Second, rearranging the various -rep scores and Networking skills - at the least, swapping @-rep and r-rep and their skills.)