I'd say that the value of a soul depends highly on a) its abilities b) its memories and c) its rarity (if there are 1000 copies of it around in the system it's probably going to be worth far less than if it's the single surviving copy and no other "similar" souls are around). For a good idea of how much it should be worth I'd suggest looking at AIs and XP/Petal costs. A soul with no significanty useful or rare skills or experiences can probably be located at Moderate cost. A soul with useful abilities / experiences has probably a High cost, like a Muse. A soul with rare and/or exceptional abilities or experiences is Expensive - possibly *fiendishly* so.

What would be the best way to use an enslaved soul as a personal assistant?

CodeBreaker wrote:

Extrasolar Angel wrote:

What would be the best way to use an enslaved soul as a personal assistant?

Why would you want to? You would probably have to put them through rounds of Psychosurgery just to get them subservient. Much easier to just use your Muse. It is what they are designed for after all.

Migh be easier, but less fun. Welcome to the Post-Singularity Future human ! Anyway- I am thinking of creating a villain who would harness human infmorphs and use them as his tools in infiltration and research. This is for purely speculative design, as I am not running any campaign, but wondered how would it be doable in EP.

The thing is, that "little bit of Psychosurgery" is expensive, dangerous, and almost certainly illegal (Not an issue for Ego traders I know, but still). Finding a skilled Psychosurgeon who is not going to melt your dudes brain would take some poking and proding, and if you poke and prod in the wrong place the PC or even Firewall might come looking to see why. To get a good, skilled Personal Assistant from someone unwilling you are probably going to want to do Behavioral Control, Memory Editing and Personality Editing. There is quite a bit of potential SV damage there. Much easier to just buy a dumb AI and slot it with some Skillsofts.

No matter how powerful the AI it is never going to be as skilled as an Ego that is an expert in the field. I've been running a character with multiple Multiple-personality implants. At the moment she's running multiple identical Alpha forks but I was toying with the idea of collecting other Egos that had different skill sets. I was going to use Psychotherapy to compel obedience and then to remove all memories completely and replace them with the main Ego's core memories up to about age 8. It fits nicely with the core Ego's back-story, she lost most of her original Ego to dementia before the first Ego-bridges became available and has had much of her memory since then erased. I reckon a completely amnesiac Ego with scattered memory patches that are the core memories of another Ego is going to effectively become that other Ego. edit You know I'm finding that in actual play it is disturbingly easy to pick up copies of other peoples Egos. Even fellow players. If you're the party head-shrinker there is a degree of trust placed in you that is entirely too easy to abuse.

root@Soul-Traders [hr] Imagine selling a cortical stack as similar to kidnapping. The price you can get for the stack depends on who cares about it. If no one cares about it, then it is in the same position as millions of infugees in long-term data storage, and is only worth the base cost of a ego (at least High). As for grabbing egos and making them be your personal secretary, there are a number of ways to get an unwilling person to work very, very hard for you. If I were an evil, mustache-twirling villain, I would grab the stacks of a family. I would then put the less useful members of the family in space somewhere with an antimatter bomb strapped to them, and set the on a vector that I could trace.

"Welcome back to life Mr. Baum, I have need of a secretary. I expect a certain level of performance from you, details of which you will find in the file "Or Else" on your new system. I have your families last backups strapped to a bomb, so do be a good lad and do your work well. I also require you to learn to love me, and I'm recording your kinesics at all times."

root@Soul-Traders [hr]

Rhyx wrote:

There, I fixed it for you Root!

Indeed you did. Now riddle me this: Where does a mustache-twirling villain find a good railroad track to lay distressed and bound damsels in Eclipse Phase? I guess it could be done in a simulspace, but that lacks flair.

Yep, I'll second mars! And plus those maglevs go REALLY fast so extra points for gruesome splatter! And what's more you can use the victim's cortical stack to record the last moments and sell it as XP entertainment. So you can be a villain AND fund your next evil project by recording the results of the last one!

Extrasolar Angel wrote:

Anyway- I am thinking of creating a villain who would harness human infmorphs and use them as his tools in infiltration and research. This is for purely speculative design, as I am not running any campaign, but wondered how would it be doable in EP.

I'm also developing such a villain, a Nine Lives troubleshooter. As I have planned things he has access to a "Well of Souls", a database of useful egos he can instantiate and get to do his bidding. When he needs hacking, he just activates a stored hacker. When he needs goons, he puts forks of a suitable goon into the available morphs. When he needs to scare victims-to-be, he releases some past victims to meet them and show them their fate. I think the easiest way of using egos is to turn them into gamma forks, which are after all little more than AIs pretending to be the ego. I don't think they are hard to make perfectly loyal, but they are also rather ineffectual. Beta forks of egos can be much more wilful, but presumably neural pruning can force them to behave. But again, they are not fully functional. Real slaveowners use alphas who have been turned loyal. Psychosurgery is just one way of doing it: some people can be enslaved psychologically ("Tell me how much you like me to control you, slave 5"), through blackmail ("If you leave or disobey, I or my muse will activate the scorcher program inside your ego."), addiction ("Your pleasure system is keyed to my body odour. I am the only one who can make you happy.") or contracts ("Each time your forks fulfil a mission, your family gets 100 credits. You do want to keep them out of debt, right?") I think one of the big activities of Nine Lives is to condition enslaved egos. They already have plenty of egos, the hard work is to figure out what they are good for and make them profitable. The price of a soul depends both on its skills, importance to others and how well it can fulfil what the new owner wants. I would say an ego gains one level in price by being successfully "broken in" to do what it is told using one of the above methods. The price may increase two levels for a truly loyal slave - in this latter case a lot of psychological and social pressure needs to be skilfully applied to not just force them to obey but actually make them *want* to obey (without hurting their other abilities and traits). Such prime slaves are rare but also status symbols among nasty people: like bonsai they take a lot of effort and skill to develop. So my price list of souls would be:

• An ordinary person: Moderate
• An useful person (skills 60+, interesting experiences, or extant family): High
• A very useful person (Skills 80+, exceptional abilities, experiences or traits, family with larger ransom potential): Expensive and upwards
• Conditioning increases the price one level (achieved through psychosurgery, effective blackmail, addiction, working contract)
• True loyalty +2 levels
• Mental traumas and other misfeatures decrease the price one level or more (psychological problems, neural damage, rebelliousness, exsurgent infection)
• Beta fork: one level cheaper.
• Gamma fork: two level cheaper (includes loyalty)

As for tying damsels in distress to railroad tracks, I think placing somebody in front of Cannon on Mercury would also be a nice touch.

Novelty. Thousands of Forks of the same boring twit are no fun. I have considered creating a library of interesting Egos merely as a way to keep my character company during extensive periods where she is disconnected form the rest of transhumanity.

While to some extent I agree with you there, there is a reason solitary confinement is used as a punishment in prisons. There is only so long you can go without human contact before your Ego starts to unravel or to lose perspective in extremely unfortunate ways.

I find your breaking down of prices actually quite perfect and will use it in my games Arenamontanus if my players ever evolve in that direction. Only one actively uses forks, and uses them to help in what he does already good, so no sense probably in using other people. And when they found their first ego-dealers they were sickened to the bone, so...