Hi there! I'm kinda new to the whole forum thing, being more a lurker than a poster, so forgive me if I make any horrific breaches of ettiquette, like the on-line equivalent of breaking wind in a lift. It's an interesting idea, that, Forsaken, but my immediate thought is that muses would be programmed very differently from AIs and AGIs, essentially hardwired to be capable of shaping and adapting themselves to the needs of their host, but fundamentally incapable of self-improvement. So your 'shady character' would be very shady indeed, as anything purporting to be able to unleash the capabilities of a muse must be something very different from what it is being marketed as. Caveat emptor, if you like. Which puts another thought into my head. It was mentioned somewhere in the core book that Firewall made a concerted effort to improving security throughout the system in the aftermath of the Fall, in a direct effort to reduce the pereablity of the system to digital viruses and rogue AGIs. Perhaps one of those efforts included modifying the source code of muses to prevent the possibility of muse self-improvement. If that was the case, then it could be possible that there are pre-Fall muses with there hosts in dead storage that have not been 'upgraded'. I dare say that these upgrades would be done directly through the mesh, in much the same way as software upgrades today. An adventure could be developed around a group of people brought back from dead storage but isolated from the mesh somehow, and their muses turned into self improving AIs with devestating consequences.