Your body is corrupted. Replace it.
Your cortical stack is infected. Cure it.
Your Implants are the leash that controls you. Trick it.
Your Back-Up is haunting you. Destroy it.
Fear is holding you in its grips. Fight it.
And above all: Survive it.

---------------------------------------------

Hi there,

although the Eclipse Phase universe is partly mind-shattering and a vast
mixture of reality based hardline sci-fi, conspiracy, and horror, in some
aspects it goes not deep enough, is unrealistic, or implies too much of
"hollywood reality" for my taste. Hence, I took the liberty to gather a
few rule changes (eg. concerning ego backups) and additional backgrounds
and post them here. Feel free to use whatever you like, and to drop the
rest. In my opinion, these changes make the experience of horror and
paranoia much more intense than before.
Oh, and a note to the board admins: please enable UTF-8 plain text encoding. For searching/replacing, as I needed to do here manually, this editor is not suitable.

Contents
-- The truth about EGO-CASTING, FORKING, AND RE-INSTANTIATING;
It is not you who is RE-SLEEVING FROM YOUR BACKUP;
What you need to know if you're one of INFO-, SYNTHO-, AND BOT-MORPH
-- The TITANs are not all gone, THEY'RE AMONG US
-- Why GENETIC AND CYBERNETIC ENGINEERING is more widely spread than you
know
-- A new insight to CULTURES, CLANS, AND TRIBES
-- further sources of INSPIRATION

_________________________________________________________________________

"The more technology there is, the tighter it integrates.

The tighter it integrates, the easier to use, administrate, or alter
it.

The tighter it integrates, the harder it is to shut down parts of it
which you don't want to be functioning and keep the rest going.

The tighter it integrates, the harder it is to live without it,
especially if you want to live without it.

Whichever way technology is made, its primary use, despite its brand
and designation, is to infiltrate and watch, to control and assess, to
abuse and falsify information and spread it, or to destroy it.

Not even the most powerful being can be sure that its informations are
correct, and its own fundaments of power given, if it relies too much on
technology.

Whichever way technology is made, its primary use, despite its brand
and designation, is to infiltrate and watch, to control and assess, to
abuse and falsify information and spread it, or to destroy it.

Technology is the ultimate tool of total control. Be it of education,
opinion, behaviour, or way of thinking. Even if not intended for such
purposes, it is the evil incarnate, for it will be abused."

--excerpt from the Tao T'e of the Imbued Convent of Entropy
(ICE, whose cathedral is located in the Solar Oorth Cloud)

_________________________________________________________________________
EGO-CASTING, FORKING AND RE-INSTANTIATING;
RE-SLEEVING FROM YOUR BACKUP;
INFO-, SYNTHO- AND BOT-MORPHS

"Scan the copy for something that might be interesting to us. If
necessary, put it in a VR and question it indirectly."

There are some aspects that Eclipse Phase handles a bit slap-dash and not
fully thought out. I needed to put these three topics into a single block
because they are quite closely related and share diverse aspects.

RE-SLEEVING FROM YOUR BACKUP

I always wondered about the effects of being oneself and what happens
when you die. Considering all known facts about how body and soul/spirit
(whatever you call it) interact and go together, there are a few points you
should consider to be facts:

-- The ego/self/spirit is not identical with the brain. The brain is
just an organic automaton, a physical CPU, which is used as master
interface between ego and body, and causes the ego to behave in a way
appropriate with this body and gender. The Ego itself is genderless
(but may have a preference nonetheless, be it by accustomization,
having had bad experiences with a gender, or by being used to think
this way or another). This doesn't hinder an ego from being
overwhelmed by the experience of being in a body of the "wrong"
gender, or having none at all except maybe by appearance and voice.

-- When someone dies, a faint, slowly fading echo of his spirit,
memories, and experiences remains in the brains and can be analyzed or
downloaded, or even revived to zombie-like semi-life for a time.
Real-life "dark voudou" practices this, and some other reliable
sources exist, among them the backgrounds to Dr. Frankenstein.

-- When the bond between body and spirit is severed, there is but a very
narrow time to re-insert the spirit in the same or another body. WHEN
A SPIRIT LEAVES THE BODY, THE WHOLE SELF-AWARENESS GOES WITH IT, AND
IT CANNOT BE RESTORED VIA BACK-UP -- ONLY A DUPLICATE PERSON WITH ITS
OWN SELF-AWARENESS CAN BE CREATED. When you die, you move on and
cannot come back. A cortical stack can trap you "here" or "shoot you
over" into a "soul cage" to enable a neurosurgeotech team to re-sleeve
you in a new body or stitch the old one back together.
Again: This implies that a backup which is re-sleeved in another
body is ANOTHER person, a pattern of memories, experience and
knowledge imprinted on an empty mind, that believes it is the
backed-up one and acts, thinks, and behaves identically. But it is
NOT "YOU" who looks out from those eyes or hears with those ears, it
is SOMEONE ELSE, another one of "you". "You" are no longer in the
physical world and cannot be re-connected to it.

EGO-CASTING, FORKING AND RE-INSTANTIATING

-- Leaving a morph to farcast or inhabit another one DOESN'T TRANSFER the
Ego, but JUST COPIES it and inactivates the previous instance. It
remains there until it gets overwritten by the new Ego that uses this
body, and can be altered, copied, or re-activated. Only the
connection between self-consciousness and body is actually
transferred, like attaching a second connection just before severing
the first.

-- While egocasting, an ego can be duplicated and streamed elsewhere,
eg. into storage, another morph, or a simulation (see eg. the
Adventure "Think before asking"). Secret Services stream obedient
forks for interrogation.

-- Due to mental and physical stress limitations, the next body has to be
either of synthetic/robotic make or of the opposite gender to the last
organic body that was worn before the synthetic shell, depending on
what the person was last. People that don't follow this organic
gender a-synth-organic gender b schematic tend to develop psychosis,
paranoia, emotional instability, autistic isolation and outright
mental damage, all of which takes heavy influence on the next organic
body and is likely to cause physical traumata.
With forks that are likely to be re-absorbed this doesn't matter as
much, but it still causes good mental preparation before merging
again. And, talking to another of "you" also causes stress and
irritation.

-- Uplifts and humans can interchange their morphs. This just needs a
higher mental flexibility in humans (as opposed to Uplifts, who handle
this with ease) and a slightly longer phase of "settling in".

Still going for suicide/backup-resleeve on hairy missions instead of
using remote morphs?

INFO-, SYNTHO- AND BOT-MORPH

"Dammit, don't just stare at me like that. I just admitted
something very intimate to you."
"What do you expect me to do? It is completely irrelevant, even
if I do resemble a human female that you would like to have as
marital and/or sexual partner. If there is nothing of relevance to
discuss, please excuse me. I have work to do."

-- Being in a body without organs, glands, and encymic vessels means that
the person currently neither has nor shows any emotions, just very
calm, very detached remnants of them, more like memories or being used
to than actual feelings. Emotions are a purely organic thing; no
ever-so-highly developed artificial body is able to reproduce them
genuinely, merely to simulate them outwardly -- without the ego
inhabiting the body actually being involved, or requiring the ego to
learn how to trigger the emotion it wants to be shown. A body might
smile when the ego wouldn't, or the other way around, and the ego will
be confused when in an organic body again because everything is
completely different and syntho-triggers simply don't work, as doesn't
ignoring emotions.
The same applies to movement and any motion patterns of head, body,
and limbs(!), which will be different from those of organic bodies and
more stream-lined and linear.
As such, a synth (ie., any non-organic morph) displays an entirely
different, rather pragmatic seedAI-like behaviour free from emotional,
and partly from ethical-moralic, issues, and certainly free from any
context regarding sexuality and other physical needs (are inorganic
morphs capable of eating and drinking and emptying? Does the
inhabitant miss the smell and taste of, say, coffee, or a smoke?),
dressing, or cosmetics. Also, for the same reasons, Synth- and
Bot-Morphs, like Infomorphs, too, don't need any rest or sleep except
for the occasional service check-up (or battery reloading). All of
this can cause serious psychic damage when experienced for the first
time, and especially when sleeving to an organic morph afterwards and
being overwhelmed by (and unaccustomed to) emotions and physical
needs.

-- Syntho/Bot morphs with emotional systems that duplicate the original
organic effects end enable the inhabitant to remain his complete self
are far beyond what trans-humanity can create. TITANs or other
seedAIs could possibly do that. However, some experimental or vaguely
stable models exist; all are prone to breakdowns and amoks sooner or
later, leaving psychic aftershocks and emotional tics in the egos that
re-sleeved from them. Of course, nobody tells you that your current
morph is one of these; it would spoil the field testing. Some people
actually ask to be erased and re-sleeved from a backup.

-- There are individuals and factions that endeavour to have mankind free
itself of emotions and the implicit dangers; groups of autonomist
fanatics, religious "Deus Machina Est"¹ or "Ars Synthetica"²
followers, hypercorp experimentation in slave populations, mentally
networked Spirit-Mesh communities etc.

-- The morph you currently inhabit might be pre-programmed to certain
patterns of behaviour, shutdown times, or obedience (or enforced
non-aggression or extreme aggression) towards certain individuals or
groups, or even triggered by certain external stimuli like a spoken
sentence, a vid stereogram, or a radio signal.
This might apply to organic morphs, too, if they have implants that
are connected to the neural system, especially ones connected to the
eye or ear nerves, spine, or one of the three cortices). Maybe the
medical implant that replaces your damaged brain section (which wasn't
damaged in the first place, except by order of an Exec to falsify the
medical examination) is the leash and locator your employer has put on
you without your knowing.

_________________________________________________________________________
THEY'RE AMONG US

"Most people think the TITANs are gone. But are they, really?"

-- At least one TITAN has uploaded itself as a fractalized copy into the
minds of the cold-stored upload victims. It is kind of a sleeper, or
even active, without anybody noticing, its fragments being tiny enough
not to be noticed, and functioning without additional hardware. This
TITAN uses a strange quantum intermeshing between its parts that
functions like a hidden, from the exterior inaccessible VPN within a
CPU cluster. Maybe a Hypercorp's CEO is a TITAN puppet, maybe the
mayor of a rimward cluster, or even the local government of an
extrasolar colony.

-- At least one TITAN, suspectedly a whole population of subinstances
and forks of it, uploaded itself into the patterns of Sol itself and
uses the sun as an advanced entropic-energetic fractal data storage
and computation system (also known as "chaos engine"). Whether this
"sun-TITAN" developed the key elements of the Gates and the Matrioshka
brains is not known. As isn't what it intends to do with Sol itself,
or with the solar divers that bathe in its corona. Maybe all of them
are part of a TITAN, or its sleeper agents and hidden eyes and ears,
but just don't know it.

-- Now and then, Infomorphs show strange code fragments that are complex
and alien enough to be having a high potential of being made by
seedAIs. Whether this is a flaw in the camouflage of a TITAN
pretending to be an Infomorph, or this is a hint that many Infomorphs
are under the influence of TITANs, is not (and cannot be) proven. It
might just be a glitch, an experienced Infomorph's update patches, or
a corporation's attempt at fusing DRM and Ego control.

-- With almost nobody having contact to Earth, and only rudimentary
contacts with those who are believed to be scattered human survivors,
nobody came yet to think about the possibility that most, or all, of
those might not be humans at all -- at least, not in the original
sense.
(xref: Movie "Screamers"; either killing-machines or
distributed-seedAI-in-human-form experiments)

_________________________________________________________________________
GENETIC AND CYBERNETIC ENGINEERING

"None of this will ever leave this station. Neither in word or data, nor
in physical evidence."

-- The extrasolar colonies and intrasolar hypercorp and interest group
settlements that do massive, often dangerous and unpredictable
experimenting are not the exception, but the norm. Most of it is just
not publicly known. They (think they) need to stay ahead of anybody
else and thus have a certain edge in the market, or just want to know
what happens, "if".

-- Military forces of any kind do have cyborgs of more or less obvious,
and hideous, make (and I mean CYBORGS, technorganic mostrosities like
eg. "Ultimate Soldier", the Chaos Space Marine Obliterator Cult from
"Warhammer 40,000",the constructs that roam Citadel station in "System
Shock", or eg. "Resident Evil" Lickers with tech implants and
cybermods). Many bots actually have cybernetic brains of
technological and organic parts to speed up reaction times and
intuition, and to be able to follow organic (a)logic of intruders.

-- Elite Soldiers and Hit Teams often have override implants that turn
off their personality and mesh the team into a single, multi-bodied
war/infiltration/whatever machine that is guided by an AGI composed of
their individual muses.

-- Illegal, and still often used (at least, where the public doesn't
notice and the potential observers can be silenced with cash, threats,
some broken limbs, a brain-edit or a bullet), are organic drones of
diverse kinds, from homunculi that simulate a human body and what
happens to it to specialised hunters, brutes, workers, or aides, and
even hybrid virii that attach to and mutate -- or dissolve -- both,
organic and synthetic materials (those are no artificial nanomachines,
just the original organic variant).

-- Some heavily guarded and sealed habitats house experimental colonies
of hive/swarm critters that were created by careful engineering,
random experimenting or by evaluating and retro-engineering
extraterrestrial DNA strains. As examples one could orientate on
strange termites or hornets, Hans-Rudi Giger's Alien or their far more
dangerous cousins, the Tyranids from "Warhammer 40,000".

_________________________________________________________________________
CULTURES, CLANS AND TRIBES

"That was a bad idea, friend. No-one lays hands on a Stormdancer girl or
her belongings without her consent. Got ten to drop it and put the heels
to the steel. Have a nice resleeve." (she shot him in the back right
after speaking, with four seconds still to go.)

Examples of more complex individuals of the trans-human age are:

-- the technophobic habitat designer who will never sleeve in a
non-organic shell and needs lots of smokes to overcome his fear and
get things done;

-- the EVA tech who has this urge to wear nothing but stockings
beneath everything (and maybe feel certain toys inside him/herself)
and belongs to a semi-cult of sensuality/nudity/sexuality;

-- a coordinator that squashes live, cloned frogs and eats them for
relaxation;

-- an AGI or mercurial that collects and/or creates bizarre, morbide
art in the style of Dante's Inferno, Bosch's Visions of Hell, or
cruel abuses and mutilations;

-- a gatecrasher who firmly denies that space-flight exists, and
thinks everything that happened since his first reinstantiation is
inside a VR which was created as an act of mercy, to not force the
survivors of earth to see their dead-and-barren home and
despairingly make the best of it.

-- In the vast area that is inside the Oorth Cloud, many hidden, outlying
or artfully covered-up subcultures thrive, from the cannibalistic to
the sadistic, from the playful to the absurd, from the perverse to the
utterly mad and insane. They are not necessarily gathered somewhere
distinctive, but far more often spread far and wide, with a handful of
meeting points, sanctuaries, or the like.

-- There are many independant, in terms of hypercorps or power-groups
non-aligned groups of people that understand themselves as tribes or
clans. Their life-style and environment are as diverse as the
individuals that compose them, and are in most cases directly inspired
by the traditions one of the Terran pre-fall freefolks (like native
Americans, Anangu, Hawaiian, etc). Often, they are willingly
isolated, either seeing the Free-Clans as a whole as their world apart
from the Consortium and Hypercorps, or staying completely among their
respective clan. Some are a kind of Triad or Yakuza, others are more
like Gypsies or socialist communes. Whatever their ideology, they
want nothing of the hypercorps, fleet, or Consortium except that they
be left alone. It might well be that one meets clans of genetically
altered organic morphs that represent lycantrophes (primarily
werewolves or vampires), or stunningly attractive romping sexomaniacs
where denial is not an option.

_________________________________________________________________________
INSPIRATION

Further inspiration in the same line might be:

-- the motion pictures "2001: A Space Odyssey", "Soylent Green", "Logan's
Run", "Screamers", "Moontrap", "Outland", "Moon 44", "Ghosts of Mars",
"Total Recall", "Cyphers"

-- the video console games "Dead Space"/"Dead Space 2", "Project Eden",
"Bloodrayne 2", "Final Fantasy XIII"

-- the MS-DOS-PC games "System Shock"/"System Shock 2", "BioShock", and
"Creature Shock"

-- William Gibson's Cyberpunk anthology (Burning Chrome/Neuromancer/Count
Zero/Mona Lisa Overdrive)

-- The Shadowrunâ„¢ adventures "Renraku Arcology Shutdown"/"Brainscan"

-- The Cyberpunkâ„¢ 2020 Deep Space adventure "Red Alert"

_________________________
1) "god is a machine", as opposed to "deus (emergentem) ex machina", "the
god (emerging) from the machine".
2) "the art of the artificial"; from Latin "ars" ("the art") and latinized
Greek "synthethikos" ("made" in the sense of invented/imitated, not
naturally occurring).