Huh, that's disappointing. Nobody else wants to say anything on the topic? Well, I suppose nobody wants to share any personal tales, but nobody else has any tales of asyncs observed in the wild?

The problem is that as Shadow said, many asyncs learn to suppress their quirks to a level that they fit into the rest of Fall-damaged transhumanity. The stand-out stories are usually so deeply weird that they usually sound like making shit up. My first interaction with a async was back in my combat wasp days. We got tasked with following a SLOTV carrying one biomorph from Iapetus out to Titan. Standard enough, everything we spot coming off that infected iceball gets an escort at least until it exits Saturnian space. This was eyes-on, stand-off, which meant active monitoring of the crew with internal cams, a sensor drone 100m away from the hull, and us following at 10km with a couple nukes hot in the tubes. Sounds paranoid, but Iapetus. Fuck that place. Anyway, a couple hours into the transfer the passenger starts talking to us. Not unusual behaviour for someone who expects to be watched; everyone likes letting a voyeur know they know you are there. This guy though, he started talking to us by name. Which is odd when you and your code-siblings haven't decided on names beyond incrementing serial numbers yet. We asked our frigate what to do and got back a fleet-intelligence stamped data packet telling us this was not unexpected, and not to dust the guy for it. The rest of the trip was uneventful, other than the passenger getting more and more comfortable talking to us. Well, at us, we didn't transmit back, though that didn't discourage him. He turned to whatever cameras we were using at the time, and was quite accurate in judging our interests (admittedly, the number of interests a group of combat drone AGIs could possibly have is slim, but he was creepily accurate) and talking about them. We were all rather sad to see him go when we got to Titan and the SLOTV landed at some research center. He made us feel like people, which was pretty good at the time.

ShadowDragon8685 wrote:

That's not to say they're all violent raving psychopaths who write disturbing poetry about the beauty of slicing into flesh with blades. Very few of them are that. (And, in fact, most people who are exactly that are perfectly uninfected. If for some reason you want to start an inquisition to remove individuals exhibiting signals of violent sociopathy, async scares are probably the best way to do it.)

The quivering flash of the vibroscalpel, leaving a light image on the wall The look in the eyes, as the subject stares at it all. The muffled whimpers, a sign of fear. That coppery smell, soon to be here. The slicing, and fluids, The subject undone. The moments of calm, until I fetch the next one. Do you think that would be good to put in the diary of an adventure game villain?

No need. Your comment about psychotic poetry reminded me of my roots. So I wanted to make a video game again. Decided to start working on the bad guy first. What do you think of a Rogue Jovian Colonel who is dissaffected with his Polity... for not being hawkish enough?

Dr. Maxwell wrote:

Some async abilities create unique challenges for traditional treatment models, though datamining muses is rather helpful in discovering how to potentially handle these cases. PTSD in Hyperthymesia patients, for example, is at least in theory harder to handle, as the async always remembers their trauma as if it just happened for the rest of their life. Asyncs often feel isolated, even within firewall, and feel disconnected and alone in their experiences. Firewall fieldwork is a high stress job, which is why almost all agents regularly go through and highly value therapy, even if they promote neurodiversity, but asyncs generally shun it, which over time can seriously compromise them as both agents and individuals. What is worse is that at some point amplification of a condition becomes a new condition. The most dramatic case of an asyncs powers feeding into mental illness until they break was a case where an async patient with preexisting OCD developed pattern recognition. Even psychosurgery was not enough of an intervention, and they had to be restored from backup after a copy of their ego was stored for further research.

We've actually seen a lot of treatment variations in augmented transhumans; Asyncs seem to be worse off just because of the nature their abilities. This is understandable; while the mechanism of Watts-MacLeod is beyond me, certainly just the knowledge that one has been infected with exsurgent virus is traumatic, and gaining unexplained preternatural abilities is likely just as traumatic. However, as humanity expands past baselines in terms of age, mental cognition, and environmental stresses that simply could not exist a century ago, treatment has more and more become an industrialized process revolving around psychosurgery. As someone who is a psychosurgeon, I don't want to cast too many aspersions on the process: it helps people a lot. However, it also leaves people in largely the same state as they were before the operation, and relapses and reversions to older states are common. In Watts-Macleod infections, psychosurgery can be practically useless for rectifying disorders. More insidious attempts at psychosurgery can actually be just as effective as one would expect with a baseline human, but some of the disorders seem to stem from an altered view of reality in some patients, especially ones involving alien atavism and dysmorphic thoughts. I have worked with patients with Watts-Macleod in the past, and I generally refer them to counseling instead of psychosurgery: the psychological impact of knowing that an operation has failed is often likely to exacerbate issues. As an Ultimate, you can guess what my opinions on fielding operatives already under psychological distress are. I rarely work with Asyncs, but they tend to be no less trustworthy in the field than their average counterparts—once you account for their baselines. Of course, when working with TITAN stuff I trust them about as far as I can throw them (or significantly less in microgravity), but that's also true of most non-Ultimates I've worked with. The few times I've worked with Asyncs on long-term operations (you'll have to take my word on it—I haven't done long-term work with Asyncs on Firewall work), it's been with mercenary units of somewhat less... saintly reputations. Since violence was a high-frequency part of the job, it was hard to determine what disorders, if any, were the result of on-the-job trauma and which were a result of Async-related phenomena. We had about a 33% psych turnover on one exoplanet expedition. You can do the math on what exactly that entails with mercs stranded on a rock for three months.

Watts-Macleod is anything but mostly harmless. Have you seen the Lost? They had it (or something functionally indistinguishable from it) given to them at some point. Look how they turned out—childhood simulspace acceleration will be a bogeyman going bump in the night for another two decades. The fact that two big people have their names on it shouldn't change anything, but have you actually been in the field to see asyncs in work? I mean, I don't like it. I'm open minded (or at least most of me are) about individuals who are asyncs, but they're totally creepy from an operational sense. Most of them aren't very powerful, but it's frightening to see someone you trust using the same powers that belong to the enemies. And if you're denying that there's something weird that they (and full-blown exsurgents) can do, you've got another thing coming on your next field op working with them.

I have a great deal of experience with asyncs, especially the unfortunate "lost generation". I wish to dispel any dangerous rumors about them. They are no more dangerous than many transhumans and deserve the same rights and respect. I also write this for the benefit of asyncs unfamiliar with their condition. Firstly, Watts-Macleod is indeed a mutated strain of the exsurgent virus, normally with a nanovirus as a vector, but it has proven to be the most benign example observed to date. It only affects biological minds and will deactivate and leave the system once complete, leaving the subject non-infectious. There has been no case of WM causing exsurgent-zombie type transformations, thought there are strains of the exsurgent virus that seem to initially present similar to WM but prove to be more sinister over several months. The lost generation was definitely infected by WM, and have not shown further degradation over years. Asyncs can only use their powers while sleeved in biological brains (pods can work, but with great difficulty). However, the also suffer from a condition known as "morph fever" when sleeved in a synth, pod, or infomorph, resulting in stress that can degrade their mental health over time. Psychological assistance, even from a muse, can keep them stable, but it is a very unpleasant experience. Morph fever has been observed in asyncs who do not belong to the lost generation, so it does not appear to be a result of the Futura project, though such individuals will often have an aversion to simulspace beyond morph fever. This can make time-dilated psychotherapy ineffective or counterproductive. They also have difficulty resleeving, presenting additional mental abnormalities. Take this into account. Async powers from the WM strain come in 2 types, psi-chi and spi-gamma. Psi-chi affect only the async themselves, allowing for leaps of intuition, improved creativity, or faster reflexes. Most of these can be imitated by the right bioware, but the async can use them in a flat if necessary. Psi-gamma powers allow an async to affect other minds with skin contact or sometimes short range. It's something like limited and very short duration psychosurgery or hacking for meat brains. None of this is permanent and a 99% of the time a conventional weapon is more dangerous. Most of these abilities put strain on the async and, in rare cases, could result in a seizure. Use with caution. __ As to how I know this... to my great shame I was one of the AGI caretakers in the FUTURA project. I tried to do well by my children, hindered by a naive trust in my then masters. That trust is gone now. It is little comfort that my group had fewer instances of violent psychopathy as the existence of such a statistic proves my great failure. I will do anything to help my kids or just to know they are okay. If anyone encounters one of the Lost, tell them that "Uncle Andy" wants to know if they're okay and give them my contact info. I'll help however I can or leave them be if they want. I'll also help others hurt by the project.

To be honest, I can't help but wonder if the Lost displaying a high tendancy to violent sociopathy actually has sweet fuckall to do with the Virus. Just look at the behavior of anyone who spends a [i]lot[/i] of time in simulspaces where ultraviolence is a valid if not encouraged method of resolving one's differences. They quite simply become desensitized to violence and comfortable with bloodletting; and why not? It's not like anybody is suffering any [b]permanent[/b] harm. Hell, that can be true out in the meatspace, too. Getting violently killed out here may not be [b]fun[/b], and it may set you back a lot if your morph is destroyed beyond recovery but it's not usually a permanent situation. So what happens if you take a whole shitload of kids going through puberty - remember that [i]wonderful[/i] experience - and put them in a simulspace where they can just slaughter one another and the dead kid just respawns. Now suddenly you're pissed at John Cognite 7713 because he told you off when you were wrong and impressed Jane Cognite 8912, but you'll get even and before you know it, you've sure showed little Johnny Cognite 7713 exactly who the fuck is boss in Futura SimHab 471, didn't you? He may not have been permanently harmed, but he'll sure as hell remember [i]that[/i] one! (At least until J.C. 7713 arranges for you to wind up impaled on a lamp post.) Etc, etc, and then they cracked down with disciplinarian measures because of course we did and we all know how that tends to - and indeed did - turn out. Add in the fundamental sense of [i]unreality[/i] that the poor bastards must have had from their async senses telling them they're crammed in like sardines with one another being entirely incongruent with what was going on in the simulation, and it should be little wonder they turned to slaughter - hell, at least it's cathartic, and the other guy just keeps getting back up [i]anyway[/i]... Yeaaaaaah. Someone should've seen that coming. Didn't the Argonauts have their open-source exsurgent detection out by then? Shouldn't that stuff have been running on those kids like, four times a day or something? Or was it not able to detect W-McL at that point?