Shall have have some habitat description in the book? habited or derelict alike I have this nice abandonned station in mind, going by the name of LaPlace. an O'Neill Cylinder in shape. Most of it is abandonned, save for a well maintained manor on the north end of the station it's inhabitted by a Seed AI. an insane one, at that, who believes she's the (deceased) lady of the house. Outta be creepy, an abandonned station then the PCs go up and discover a southern France styled manor surrounded by roses. Actual, geniune, roses. Alive and thriving. (yes, picking my idea from both Mobile Suit Gundam UC and Magnetic Rose (Memories))

One thing I think should be brought up: not every evil AI needs to be a Seed AI. An AGI servant who went psycho, or an AI Muse carrying out its final orders would suffice perfectly for this scenario. Bonus points if they are infected with the Exsurgent virus. Actual Seed AI are [i]extremely[/i] rare in Eclipse Phase, and are best used like eldritch horrors and sci-fi gods than mere antagonists.

in the Mars trilogy by Robinson, there's a really neat group of Barsoomianesque insurgent, led by that petite environementalist. one of them, Desmond, would be a prime exemple of what Alpiners would be. re Memories; do you know if it was released in DVD? I'd love to see it again. Planetes is great too. Good inspiration for the Keppler Syndrome going on around the Earth. Will it be treated in Sunward, too? Planetes also touched a sensible matter; the radiations astronauts are exposed to. there was an episode in which the Half Division went to the Moon, and Hachi was reunited with his mentor whom was dying of cancer because of the radiation. really poignant arc. that made this anime an important inspiration of any and all space-related stories I've had for the past three years.

Because very very few people even know they exist.

the Prometheans want to remain a secret, probably but there certainly other AGI or Seed AI who are known to public as benevolent, but likely mistaken for excentric informorph rather than artificial born being are all AGI Mercurials? or could they belong to other faction? Imagine a Barsoomian AGI! or the CEO of a new rising corporation being a SAI An AGI Crimelord (All hail MODOK!) ?

Well, more specifically, I was talking about Decrive's post. I know that the general populace doesn't know (and would probbably go berserk if they did) about the fire-bringers-- I was talking more about in GM-ing terms. But that is an interesting point on the second part. Another thing I wonder about is why, with all these forks and data streams flying about, no AI's have been randomly born out of the mesh. I guess Jane, from the Ender series, comes to mind here...

Brushfire wrote:

Well, more specifically, I was talking about Decrive's post. I know that the general populace doesn't know (and would probbably go berserk if they did) about the fire-bringers-- I was talking more about in GM-ing terms. But that is an interesting point on the second part. Another thing I wonder about is why, with all these forks and data streams flying about, no AI's have been randomly born out of the mesh. I guess Jane, from the Ender series, comes to mind here...

That's kinda why I used both of the terms "eldritch horror" and "sci-fi god". Even the benevolent ones will come off as beings far beyond our capacity to understand, and will essentially be deities of the setting. To that end, "eldritch horror" does not necessarily mean evil. Part of what made Lovecraftian horror so interesting was that the cosmic horrors had senses of morality so very alien to human morals, [url=http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BlueAndOrangeMorality]that there wasn't even a comparable analog[/url]. At some point I even talked to a few of my fellow players about how interesting an analog the Fall is to such mythological events as Ragnarok or Titanomachy (especially the latter). Irony cannot be lost in the fact that the Prometheans are named after a Greek primordial diety, and the TITANs are named after the group of dieties he was a member of. As an allusion to that, our group has even started to name all of the Seed AI our game has had introduced after various gods. As for AI being born spontaneously, I think it's because digital data isn't like genetic data. Unlike the latter which develops through random mutation, there is no random mutation when it comes to computer code ([url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_algorithm]though people have theorized ways to do it[/url]). Even if we were to design such systems, however, they would have to be designed with such purposes in mind, and not mutate over a series of generations like life did. And [i]even if all of that was possible[/i], we'd still have to take into account the actual speed of progress created by mutation... it took us a [i]very long time[/i] to get where we are genetically, so I highly doubt that computer code can get to this point in such a significantly shorter period of time (orders of magnitude, people). However, I do think that there are ego anomalies out there that might qualify as spontaneous AI. Gamma forks that, by sheer miracle, actually function would be the most common way I'd see it happening. I highly doubt that most people keep the end-product of a failed egocast, however.

Quincey Forder wrote:

Do nanoswarm (not the morph kind) have some sentient, hive intelligence, unrelated to the Exsurgent Virus infection? look at the N-REPO in Broken Angels, those form a really nasty, smart bugger

Other than TITAN-designed nanoswarms, the human-manufactured ones are not capable of sentience in any form. They are simplistic programmable bots. Now the TITAN swarms, those are some intelligent bastards.

Spacewhales. Aside from supporting british habitat, I fail to see their use. what do they do, aside basking in the corona of our sun (I knew about sunbathing, but that's friggin ridiculous!) can you enlighten me? (CONTEST) ----- ( FORGET )

Will there be more info on Project Ozma? Say...in the area of running an Ozma based game?