http://www.flickr.com/photos/x-ray_delta_one/5932300025/sizes/z/in/photo... At first everybody thought Jin's new 'pet' was cool. Just the kind of thing a bionegineer graduated from the Carnival would create - a biomorph looking like a human nervous system, able to slither around using its nerve tentacles. But as time went on it began to become disquieting. It seemed to do things that were vaguely meaningful, like move objects into strange patterns, gesticulate towards people and then running off, or fumblingly trying to operate the bridge computers. It was clearly smart, but just how smart? Then we discovered what had happened to Jin's wife.

They are Fractals (Core book, p.382)

Fractals can be *nasty*. I had a PC shoot up a fractal quite badly, but it charged him and did a nasty "unarmed attack" on him - think a monofiliament punch in the gut. Which of course left a lot of little fragment inside him and his armour, where they quietly began to regenerate. The PCs did not figure it out until well after he was in the healing vat, where the growing fractal was happily subverting the software and dissecting the PC alive...

Fractals are workers, not warriors, so giving them equipment before the fray is quite irrelevant. The real threat they pose is that, for example, they can turn from a mountain of wreckage into a huge number of fractals. And of course, being disassembled while alive at the nano level calls for heavy Stress Value, Wounds (no matter the actual damage you roll), etc... Sure, the PC's can blow one or two in the time they take to reach melee... but you know how much a bother are PC's using Cornucopia Machines to craft more Cornucopia Machines? Well, fractals are much, much quicker... As for the "monsters" in the Core Book, yeah, they are quite easy to defeat. That happens with hardware that has been known for 10 years, after all... I would fear the new stuff the GM makes... Oh, yesterday I just ran "Glory". The players didn't even wanted to get inside the station after watching the video from Bey, and they had really intimidated the other hacker (critical sucess interpretating the scene of Die Hard 1 where the japanese guy is asked about the combination of the lock... using a Shredder and pointing at the morph's genitalia instead of the head... and the guy failed the WIL test. Mind you, I had a terrible streak of luck there, he failed all the lies with 90+ in the dices...). So they put tons of explosives in the hull using infiltration gear and silent-killing the drones that were refitting the engines. First went the life support and the comms, then the choke points and a chunk of the control room's bulkhead they used to insert some big amount of explosives. Telling Firewall it was a "Code E" (for Exurgent XD) really payed off... XD So, if they are careful and intelligent, let them win. You can always get them when they drop the guard... and that wouldn't be bad: they also have backups...

Stefan Martiniere. Stefan's also responsible for several other EP covers, including Core, for which he won an ENnie. Martiniere is [b]bad ass[/b]. Among numerous other projects, he's done a few covers for the Pyr editions of novels by my teacher, Ian McDonald (check out their 2040s vision of Turkey & India some time!). The ENnie was just gravy; Martiniere had won a Hugo for his art the year previous.