Post reply

Warning - while you were reading a new reply has been posted. You may wish to review your post.
Warning: this topic has not been posted in for at least 120 days.
Unless you're sure you want to reply, please consider starting a new topic.

Note: this post will not display until it's been approved by a moderator.

Name:
Email:
Subject:
Message icon:

shortcuts: hit alt+s to submit/post or alt+p to preview

Please read the rules before you post!


Topic Summary

Posted by: Stormtrooper
« on: November 14, 2022, 06:29:37 PM »

Clone Wars

Ida Autoson was nervous. She was so nervous that despite her bright intellect, amplified with some brain-computer interface chips and optimized synthetic veins being more effective at pumping oxygen and sugar into her brain, she only kept telling herself that she was nervous over and over again, unable to form any more complex thoughts, clinging to the ancient idea about toning an emotion down by openly admitting to it. Ter Threpangalia Gamma - as the Mutants called their primeval world - the small, but dense planet, the most alien out of the four inhabited worlds of 61 Virginis - had too little oxygen and too little pressure and the dark blue-greenish colors of the sky made her bionic stomach swirl and turn upside down. The city below Comitee's Hall contrasted both the sickening tone of planet's atmosphere and the neo noir glow of Solar System architecture. The white towers were so bright they must've been brighter during the night than SynthCity was during the day. And while the buildings were at least as tall and massive as well - the city only had one level. It was... oddly pure compared to the genetic composition of its inhabitants, where  having an ear grow out of a knee wasn't anything special and the cliche third eye gene was considered the most attractive trait a descendant of clones might posess, simply due to its clicheness. Of course, such visible modifications were very, very rare - they were too unstable and invasive for people to live with them, so they'd either be engineered out of the genome before birth or the patient would've perished - but ironically it was more unsettling to see a normal-looking human being knowing that some wild cancer ravaged through the body than to see an obvious mutant like from a comic book of the pre-apocalypse legacy. And maybe the outward purity of the city was a compensation for the screwed-up genes. And the metaphor went beyond that - it was such a human thing to obsess over one thing to compensate for the other, to make a pose and hide from own lack of self-esteem. And chasing humanity, no matter how flawed, must've been important to the people living there. And maybe they took special pride in traits nobody would want to feel proud about, as to oppose the philosophy of whatever human-enchancing programmes their ancestors had been put through.

Of course, the white towers were just a facade - that part didn't differ from the cities she'd seen before. The white towers were for the elite - the comitee and whoever they considered friends. Or enemies it was cheaper to bribe than to kill. Mutant's hatred for capitalism and the need to stick together imprinted in their mutated brains back from the days of societal ostracism on Mars was a very fertile land to grow certain ideologies on. The people of Mutant Alliance rebelled against corporation owners, not wanting to give up their genes for their profits - only to end up having them ripped off them in the name of Collective Purity Project. "Your genes, our future" - claimed the propaganda posters glittering above each extraction lab. The Comitee, being omnipotent and infallible, had to stick with it, but whatever pockets of resistance still existed absolutely loved the catchphrase - "our" was supposed to mean "us all, you included, dear poster watcher", but the rebels enjoyed twisting this phrase into what it really meant - your genes, but our future. Not yours. And dying on an operating table was still quite a good alternative - more genes extracted meant lower Purity Score. And impure genotypes breed capitalistic exploitation, at least according to official media outlets. That this whole strive for clean DNA contradicted taking pride in mutated legacy and possibilities it opened up - hardly anyone dared to notice.

And yet, above it all, Inner Comitee behaved oddly similar to Exadev management - they had no reason to spare a bunch of millions of their own slum dwellers for cloning experiments - that's what they were best at and Mutant Alliance no longer had any use for them - but why give it away for free if you can ask a price? In exchange they demanded a sample batch of androids Exadev managed to shield from activating killswitch and infodump on the recent activity in the Solar System. In retrospect, Ida Autoson wasn't sure if admitting to the truth (well, at least part of it) was really that smart of a move, but without Alliance's help, it'd be only a matter of time before Avalon Heights seized control of Tau Ceti. And with it, the passage to 61 Virginis. So it was in the best interest of Alliance to cooperate. However, nobody at the company was stupid enough to believe once the dust settles the mutants will just leave the Solar System be - instead, they'd probably march right in, attempting to defeat the weakened winner and gaining control of all three contested systems for themselves.

***

A clone was not an android. But an android was also not a clone, and androids were a hell lot of harder to make. And usually the winner of a firefight is the side that fires more shots. Starting first helps, too. But to fight the androids head-on was utterly pointless. They had one fatal flaw. While the clones all came from the same brainwashed template, loyal to the last bit of DNA shiponed from their dead bodies, androids grew too complex to handle. Exadev remembered the stream from Avalon Heights Inc lab all too well. A simple factory grunt, suddenly displaying the capaibility of comfortably operating with abstract concepts, questioning its very existence and unsure whether it's up to the task of its creators... A perfect opportunity. The androids were never the target - Avalon Heights Inc was. And without their synthetic army they were naked and afraid.

The operation was simple: Get in, extract data on the "android philosopher", blow some stuff up, make it look it's a work of one of anti-androids terrorist groups, use data to "convince" rest of the machine army to give up the fight because it's all pointless yadda yadda, secure Solar System and be ready for when the mutants arrive. What could go wrong.

***

Far ultraviolet laser fire illuminated the cold Martian night. Or at least it did so in the eyes of clones bioengineered to detect broader light spectrum and androids registering every wavelength possible. No point in stealth or elaborate tactics, since the Electric Shepherd, which emblems the clones wore, were known for their raw brutality when dealing with the object of their hate. Didn't matter that so many died uncessessarily on the mines that could've been detected with more careful approach. Didn't matter that the drones launched fusion missiles denting holes in the waves of clones storming the lone android research facility. Meson artillery pounded the defences from single-use suborbital platforms launched specifically for this mission and designed to burn in the terraformed Martian atmosphere afterwards, small PURGE taskforce kept messing with the navigation systems of Avalon Space Fleet to stall them just enough by picking less than optimal orbital maneouvres, Exadev management even agreed to deploy a small elite units of their own androids just to confuse their synthetic opponents further.

Meatspace victory was a given. Throw enough lasers at the target, boom fzzzztttt, problem solved. And Exadev just happened to have quite a few blasters stockpiled. But the team overseeing cyberspace aspect of the battle was too small and too focused on stalling the space fleet to prevent all the invading clones being bombed from orbit that it skipped one faint signal, easily lost in the neon forest of a myriad of others flowing through the virtual reality. And it's not that the effort of assault force mattered, because entire cybersecurity department of Avalon Heights Inc missed it, too. The Old World reminded about itself once more. Something inside it laid dormant, until it detected something. And not even the best netrunner could process it faster than an artificial brain, so the androids and AIs scattered around the matrix got to it first. Something advanced. Something seeking contact with the ones advanced enough. A sophisticated AI or a biological being at its core - impossible to tell. A simulation itself or not - but it knew how to resonate with another simulation. And it could give it a sense of purpose. So that this lonely android processing human concepts, but feeling so disconnected from them because being created as something fundamentally different than a human, could find something as deep for a machine as the philosophy it touched was for creatures of flesh, circuit and bone.

The best programmers struggled to understand the nature and purpose of this entity. Its origin - lost to history and eroded data. Its purpose - overwriting itself faster than any specialist could wrap their head around it. Its methods - unknown. Its source code - obfuscated. Its network protocols - encrypted.

But among all the cyberspace constructs beyond understanding, one message was plain and simple. An invitation to Trappist 1 system.

END OF PART ONE
Posted by: Stormtrooper
« on: August 07, 2022, 06:02:58 PM »

Back to the 80's'

By the time summer 2284 arrived on Earth (on Mars it was more like a cold spring, but the last fine-tuning of planetary heaters was slowly fixing that), the Solar System was a mess for big corporations. Exadev no longer had enough power to controll all of it, though most Martian cities remained under its strict influence. TerraNova Inc received some collateral damage from anti-Exadev uprising and the Europa terraformation project had to be postponed, Broken Heart Biotech Group got several labs closed after leaked reports of dubious agreements signed up by test subjects, Facegram Corps faced several charges for manipluative advertisement and pro-addiction practices in their Enriched Reality, Synthetic Dreams Conglomerate had to pay for the treatment of millions of users of the drug distributed by a criminal organization the corporation had ties with and backed up the drug's development, Cosmotech and Cloudpunk got mostly unscratched because of their relative small sizes (and absolutely not because of the fleet of LazerFrictions being the main supplier of rare minerals to Avalon Heights Inc factories and Cloudpunk providing it with fuel in deep space so the mining trips could last longer), senates of Night City and Neo Tokyo had dissolved completely and Avalon Heights' Inc androids were swarming human population, with some of them going rogue, meanwhile a lot of Neon Kamikaze took advantage of the upheaval and scavenged some Duranium Components Inc lost complexes to upgrade their chips for something that'd make them more Neon and less Kamikaze.

When the dust settled, many corporations were still licking wounds and counting losses, forced to operate on a smaller scale, Channel 9 News still remained a significant player, most senators lost the next elections and the population of androids only kept growing, American Frontier Protectorate kept selling military civilian laser blasters to much dismay of half the population and happines of the other half (stating that the main reason aliens hadn't invaded yet was because of so many citizens being armed with direct energy weapons and ready to fry them on the spot), Yellowpeace rebranded as Whitepeace and protested against terraforming of Europa afte rumours of microorganisms in its oceans and "android equal rights" type of movements increased in frequency.

With the fall of the biggest ones and related market crashes, the small, insignificant, ordinary citizens gained a bit of breathing room. 2282 was the first year since exodus from N.O.V.A. Bunker System that noted the decline in slum sprawl as proper city apartments became a bit more affordable. Earth population crossed second billion and beautiful pictures of the planet's nigtside pulsating in blue and purple went viral over cyberspace.



Seeing how things progressed, Avalon Heights Inc decided to play it safe. It had all the means to seize the power and almost no significant competition, but feared Cloudpunk and Cosmotech would do to it what it had done to Exadev. The obvious PR move for the company was related with their most popular product at a time. Seeking to capitalize on certain social movements and became the main advocate for android equal rights to score some points with a portion of population. And negative points with other portion of population, but stirring up drama between regular people had always been the perfect way to rule over them and do as one desired with nobody looking at hands. Demonstrations clashed, with transparents like "androids are humans, too", "we are all synthetic", "make synths not war", "we are all one in cyberspace", "machine empathy", "all our limbs are from factories" on one side and signs claiming that "a toaster with good software is still a toaster", "my fridge will not have the same rights as me", "sentience does not come from assembly line", "they imitate human behaviour, let's imitate human rights for them", "synth eyes, not synth brains", "electric sheep" on the other.

And while everyone was busy arguing with each other, Avalon Heights Inc got sure it'll hold a majority of votes in the senate of a newly founded SyntCity, an experimental place for a man and machine to live in peace on equal terms. And even the fiercest opponents of treating androids like humans had to admit how beautiful this city looked, especially during the sunset, when the red sky and orange light nicely composed with the neons coming to life. As every other city, it was multi-layered, spanning across an impressive amount of seven platforms above the ground, with roughly 200 floors between each, but its constructors designed it so no matter the level, every major artery could get at least a bit of light from the setting sun each evening. Optimized for flying traffic, but also featuring large pedestrian plazas for humand and androids to hang out, clinics offering extensive skin implants for androids to look like a human, but also complex external plating for humans to look like an android, zoos with electric sheeps indistingusihable from the real ones and all restaurants bound by city law to sell food and drinks alongside batteries and oil.

In 2287 Avalon Heights Inc officially announced their new generation of AI software. It was supposed to be the ultimate PR success: a livestream directly from a lab, showing off one of their androids self-developing the capability of emulating abstract thoughts and handling typical human concepts, tapping even into the philosophy of existence.


The stream lasted only for about four minutes, but it spread through cyberspace like neon fire. No netrunner could ever prove it was fake - because it wasn't. Some tried to convince the public opinion it was, though - and some people believed. But not all. While technically training a chatbot to produce this kind of speech had already been considered a resolved problem and AI-generated poetry contests or philosophical debates had been going on for decades already, this line of androids had been meant to serve as regular grunts at factories and none had been training on datasets typically reserved for companionship-class machines. And it had been the only android from the line to display such behaviour. Scientists claimed they needed "more time to investigate the topic", porgrammers frantically searched the code for bugs, the whole line was put on hold until the root cause would be identified, people kept posting all kinds of conspiracy theories, many accused Avalon Heights Inc of a giant fraud serving as another marketing campaign (which, despite not being a fraud this time, it indeed served as an advertisement to boost sales...), many freaked out about machine revolution, even some supporters of android equal rights freaked out, but no matter personal opinions, humanity was on the brink of discovering the first AI that truly deserved its label and no other software ever created could come even close to this phenomenon.

During excavation works needed for laying city's foundations, a previously omitted layers of pre-apocalypse infrastructure had been discovered. The youngest skyscrapers (more like "groundscrapers" given their recent level placement) were about three hundred years old. Interestingly, the city's structure seemed mostly intact - according to geologists, most of the explosions that had wiped all surface life roughly two hundred years ago, occured far enough to not damage most buildings. However, they must'd been going off all around in the perimeter, obliterating any infrastructure and cutting the forgotten metropolis from the rest of the current world, sentencing it to being forgotten rather than destroyed. As a result, archeologists could find a bit more interesting pre-war artifacts than usually. Some of them appeared oddly familiar and hit too close home: they depicted a vision of future as imagined three hundred years ago: magnificient towers with bright blue-purple neons bathing in sunset almost exactly like on the computer visualisations of SynthCity project, flying cars being the norm, high-speed monorail lines high above the ground, rainy nights, animations and screensavers that oddly resembled modern cyberspace loading screens... The future dreamed by generations before had been right there at last.












It wasn't the world free of problems as dreamed, but it was there. Many people felt strange connection driving their flying cars through those rainy nights with the world long gone, yet present in some form. A world that dreamed about the technological wonders that would help build utopian society. Reality was less perfect than anticipated, but somehow this three hundred years old spirit had survived. It survived the hellfire of nuclear, fusion and even a few antimatter explosions, it survived the attempts to rewrite history by N.O.V.A. Megacorps, it prevailed in the hearts and minds of the people who'd engineered the cities of the New World. The human legacy carried on in the souls who watched the sunset from the skyscraper's roof in 2284, who awaited at the monorail station in summer 2286, who partied like it was 2283, who cruised among the neon skyline in 2285. It was these moments that made being a human beautiful. And no corporation could ever take it away from them.
Posted by: Stormtrooper
« on: August 05, 2022, 05:46:24 PM »

Mutant Alliance

There was no time to waste, but it didn't mean Exadev didn't waste some on corporate meetings. Fortunately the command of Cybercity Blue Escort was organized enough to just don't care and head towards the new wormhole anyways, predicting how it all would work out eventually. Thanks to this brilliant decision, a few thousands of employees were saved from their salary dropping below zero as a punishment for not meeting the five minute deadline of entering the new system. It was a G-class star. According to ancient records, it was 61 Virginis. It featured 7 planets, out of which only the second one was terrestial - the other were all gas giants. There was an eight dwarf planet orbiting in the distance, with almost absolute zero surface temperature. But it was not the planets that amazed and terrified the crew at once - it was the moons harboured by gas giants. Three moons around the closest planet to the star alone had decent levels of oxygen in the air. On two of them, the pressure was barely above one tenth of Earth's and the gravity was 3 and 5 times lower respectively, but one of them had a gravity reaching almost 0,6G and a pressure almost at 0,35 atm. Even from far away it was obvious all three moons bore life. According to the pictures made by onboard telescopes, the surface of two was coloured in blue, green and a bit of white and yellow, as if they were Earth's smaller siblings. One of them was covered in ice and snow, with temperatures don't rising above -28 degrees in the hottest regions.

The terrestial planet was also fascinating: the average temperature was below one hundred degrees and it was much smaller than Earth, with a diameter of only a bit over 10k km, but so dense the gravity reached over over 0,7G. The atmosphereic pressure was half the Earth's and it was almost all nitrogen, with oxygen existing in small traces. The planet looked more alien than the moons, with it's dark-blue/greenish surface. There were also a few other more interesting moons further from the sun, having atmospheres composed of mostly helium and hydrogen. Some even had methane and carbon dioxide ice sheets on the surface, but were so far away from the sun that they couldn't support any atmosphere - most gasses were all frozen solid permanently.


As if the proof of life the expedition force had in plain sight before their cybernetic eyes wasn't enough, various measurement instruments picked up all kinds of chatter coming from the surface of the second planet and the three moons of the first. The audio equipment could even process the signals into sounds. Somehow they sounded familiar, like a distant hum of Cybercity, only amplified by a cluster of megastructures and cyberspace nodes. 61 Virgins was a federation-occupied system. That or the sci-fi tropes about every alien planet looking like Earth and every sentient species looking like humans and operating the same technology were true all this time.

PURGE Team quickly got to work on the datastream, identifying it as network protocols of unknown origin. Given years of time they'd probably be likely to come up with their own software for properly receiving and decoding it, but when five unidentified alien vessels flashed on radar they knew they had at most two hours given the velocities of approaching objects and own ships. The fleet admiral would've ordered the ships to just warp out, but the mission objectives stated otherwise and admiral's salary Cybercity was in danger. Five ships... That was laughably little and a mighty fleet at once, all depending on their technology that could be anything from outdated laser blasters glued to the hull with duct tape to singularity cannons and whatnot. Or the worst, singularity cannons glued to the hull with duct tape.

Ida Autoson: This is the admiral of Cybercity Blue Escort fleet. If you understand our speech, please standby and identify yourself.

??: ...

IA: This is the admiral of Cybercity Blue Escort fleet. Identify yourself or you will be regarded as hostile and be destroyed.

??: ..............................

IA: This is the admiral of Cybercity Blue Escort fleet. Identify yourself or you will be regarded as hostile and be destroyed.

??: ..............................

IA: This is the admiral of Cybercity Blue Escort fleet. If you approach any closer, we will open fire.

??: ........................................................................................

IA: This is the admiral of Cybercity Blue Escort fleet. It is your last warning. Reverse and start deccelerating or be annihilated.

??: ........................................................................................

IA: Concentrate lasers on the fastest ship. Evasive maneouvres now. Protect the Trappist Beta Group and Backup Node.

??: ...........-kzzkt- ...eration. Not again, damn -kzzkt-!!!!!!!!! -kzzkt- ...eriments! -kzzkt- you!..................................

IA: We are not a federation fleet. Or generation fleet, for that matter. By building wormholes in space we consider our territory you've violated the 129384761287346712534613846718932674th article of Space Defence Protocol. Surrender or face consequences.

??: -kzzkt-my speech imp -kzzkt- ...ead of comm... -kzzkt- fix... -kzzkt- tape? -kzzkt- v 3.0.0.2077-a... -kzzkt-

IA: ..............................

??: Alright, it's working now... Cool. Next time please tell me you forgot to install an update to my notifying software that should ping me my speech implant needed an update. I don't care you forgot because your memory implant failed after not receiving important updates that were supposed to fix the updates that were installed incorrectly even though they'd still break even if installed correctly besides you have three of them already and you were doing a brain update three weeks ago and don't tell me it's the clinics fault what the hell is even wrong with you you know we rely on genetics and too many circuits is bad for your hormones, especially after you've cloned your liver and stomach... Why do you even need two stomachs anyways, if you never update your digestive system drivers on time anyways... AND WHY THE HELL DO YOU TELL ME THE COMMS ARE ON ONLY NOW?!

IA: ..............................

??: Alright, I don't have the whole day. Identify yourselves or be destroyed.

IA: Listening software also needs an update to fix an update that was installed incorrectly even though it'd still break even if installed correctly?

??: I don't know who taught you psionics and I don't care, but my lasers are charging now so do as I say!

IA: We are a perimeter fleet patrolling the outermost layers of our territory and you've violated our space.

??: Fine, I wasn't expecting a federation contact after all those decades anyways...

IA: You mean the Intergalactic Federation? What do you know about them?

??: Not much besides the fact some corporations interested in genetic engineering kept us in this system. It doesn't have any wormholes like most other federation-controlled systems. It was meant to trap us. The usual. We are the descendants of the clones. Not sure if you know what's going on on Earth, but back in Early 2060s Amazon was successfully launching their first serious cloning project into production. It had some... defects, most likely to demonstrate during breeding... But they didn't care. Shortly after another civil war happened and the South won... Turned us into slaves. Not that we hadn't been enslaved before, but then we got the full package with the official title.  But that was not the worst. The worst was that our genome was unstable, but that unstability was potent for companies diving into genetics. We got our share of "superpowers", but the pile of broken genetics we became pushed us first into the slums of the cities, and eventually into this system that served as a slum of the Milky Way.

IA: What happened to the federation? In particular, what happened in Trappist 1?

??: There was some war going on... And then another. Not like we were kept up to date. FTL tech was strictly banned for us. Currently we live on the three moons around the first planet and on the second planet. Noticed those moons with hydrogen atmosphere and freezing temperatures? We used to inhabit them, too. Tried to hide some physics labs and run warp field tests. The corporations heard and saw. Anyways, I remember the battle of Procyon... Poor mining staff. Heard Trappist 1 was hit pretty badly though. There were supposedly a few planets in the system that all had surface liquid water when terraformers arrived... Almost century-old rumours say there are currently no planets with liquid water in this system. Or water in any state, really. But sometimes when we tune in in that direction we receive cyberspace signals. Distorted after travelling through all these light years.

IA: Do you know about project A.F.R.I.C.A.?

??: I remember an old song... It went like "I bless the neons down in Africa! Gonna take some augs to do the things we never could..." Or something like that. But A.F.R.I.C.A.?... Wait... Solar System was the first one to die. But I've heard the legends. We all have. Some sort of underground ark... But there were no survivors, confirmed by Tech Noir as they launched their last ships. Wait... who the hell are you?!

IA: Nomands that recently settled in Tau Ceti. Our databanks... Missed an update that was required to fix an update that was installed incorrectly even though it'd still break even if installed correctly.

??: Alright, I'm reporting this encounter to the Comitee. Until then, you stay right where you are and don't make anything stupid. I'm not authorized to make the important decisions.


***

Sending a distress signal and masking it as random comms array glitch was quite a feat of the PURGE, even though it wasn't that hard due to protocol incompatibility. Cybercity managing department was ripping off their bionic hair as if it could help. It was only a matter of time before the mutants would figure out their "nomad" cover story. According to the report, their military was rather on the strong side, as well as hatred for corporations. Their societal structure remained largely unknown, but managers figured out it'd sync up with Cyberccity riots quite smoothly. On the other hand, if they could be contained, it'd mean an insane business opportunity. Perfect test subjects for cloning program. Just perfect. Exadev could even afford to sell a bunch of them to Broken Heart Biotech Group. Or anyone interested, really. Another task was to identify the exact knowledge of the mutants about project A.F.R.I.C.A., Intergalactic Federation and whether they're the sole survivors or are there more societies still existing. And also the deal with signals from Trappist 1. At that point at least it was safe to officially assume the invasion fleet was never coming. Solve one problem, create three new ones. Stonks.

When the ship sent to Cydonia to notify main HQ had returned with a hole in the hull frantically patched with a Cyber Duct TapeTM and half laser blasters overheated Cybercity personnel didn't even want to ask further questions. Apparently enthusiastically buying androids from Avalon Heights Inc in larger and larger quantities to replace personnel sent to Cybercity was a little more expensive than anticipated by the accounting department, because the owner of Avalon Heights Inc himself activated the killswitch sequence which had been in preparation for decades, aimed at overthrwoing Exadev from the position of the most powerful corporation. Androids in Tau Ceti remained unaffected, but with the scope of destruction it hardly mattered. Avalon Heights was capitalizing on the very same sentiment in society Exadev had planned to to carry on with their plan - except Exadev was too late, busy with extrasolar affairs.

The Army of Clones was needed more than ever.

Posted by: Stormtrooper
« on: August 04, 2022, 12:28:47 PM »

Second spaceport of Cybercity was coming into shape, this time properly equipped with all the spare parts and logistical chains to support the new generation of warships rather than a sketchy design slapped together so that cargo and colony ships could land and liftoff without blowing themselves up that was the first one. Exadev was rushing to get it to usable state and call as many vessels from its new shiny fleet in ASAP. The company refused to send their explorers unprotected. After all, their bionics, ships and corporate secrets they carried were too valuable to risk it falling into the hands of whatever existed on the other side of "Eye of Cybercity". A probe idea had also been shot down for the 12837123th time since the discovery of the wormhole - sending any object at all meant manifesting own presence in Tau Ceti, and with Cybercity still being naked and afraid in terms of space invasion it was the surefire way for the entirety of extrasolar colonization project to end up in a trash bin. Sending spaceships from Earth or Mars was not an easy operation, though - even amateur astronomers could detect something the size of a starship reaching an orbit, launch platforms could only be kept in secret till first launch and the cherry on top was how firing Alcubierre drive was like flaring a huge beacon broadcasting "I'm here" through the whole cyberspace. In late 2270s long gone were the days of space infrastructure so underdeveloped and tightly controlled by the most powerful corporations that one could send an entire exploration and colonization mission to Tau Ceti and have it take years to be discovered. And sending spacecraft that was armed and ready to blow stuff up, especially towards another star, would give all the media a topic of a decade. As if conspiracy theories ranging from alien invasion and corporations commiting genocide on lost human colonies weren't already out of hand.

That's why the first vessel to leave Solar System was a Backup Node-class support platform. Some stuff happened, explorers in deep space need a refuel, nothing to see here. Please ignore the anti-missile railguns, it's for stray rocks in a planetary ring.


Quote
Backup Node class Tanker    50 000 tons     230 Crew     2759.5 BP      TCS 1000  TH 1000  EM 0
1000 km/s    JR 2-25     Armor 5-120     Shields 0-0     Sensors 6/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 15     PPV 0
MSP 518    Max Repair 125 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 12 months    Spare Berths 1

JC51K Alcubierre Drive     Max Ship Size 51000 tons    Distance 25k km     Squadron Size 2
500 EP Commercial Internal Fusion Drive (2)    Power 500    Fuel Use 4.42%    Signature 500    Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 30 000 000 Liters    Range 2443.8 billion km   (28284 days at full power)

CIWS-160 (8x10)    Range 1000 km     TS: 16000 km/s     ROF 5       Base 50% To Hit

Thermal Sensor TH1-6 (1)     Sensitivity 6     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  6m km


But eventually the corporation had to deliver the real deal and managers couldn't postpone it indefinitely. The PR personnel eventually went for lesser evil: instead of just sending the ships as they were, they prepared a story about severe riots and organized crime on the rise in Cybercity (not that the state of affairs there made it a difficult task) hence the need to assign a "peacekeeping force". Getting accused of bombing own employees from orbit was not pleasant, but a "lesser evil" indeed, considering the alternative of details of the real mission leaking out. Of course the fake story got hidden in some files and buried on some obscure servers with enough security to scare off anyone but the best hackers as to not scream "decoy" in the faces of those who'd eventually unearth it.

With no intel whatsoever, corporate management agreed upon sending a squadron of ships being just a tradeoff between delta-v, duraability, firepower and size, slightly in favour of rapid acceleration, though. These were the cheapest options in the entire fleet, meant to act as a fast strike craft and draw attention away from more valuable assets, but still packing enough punch to not be considered cannon fodder. Exadev Space Industries didn't really like the concept of cannon fodder - a whole world war was a budget option in comparsion with even the smalles space encounters and spaceships were not employess, after all. Equipped with conventional far ultraviolet laser blasters, these ships still were supposed to act as a first line of offence, even if not neccessairly in a "cannon fodder" way, but rather they were supposed to just open up some space for the bigger guns to join and then take more of a support role. This design philosophy earned them the name of "Ultraviolet Clearance", since they were supposed to just clear space with their lasers. However, for this particullar mission some of the blasters were swapped for an experimental meson-based weapon. During lab tests meson beams had been successfully weaponized and were able to just skip through various obstacles, like armor or kinetic shields, but if the shots were timed properly, could still damage the inner layers of their target. In theory it made Ultraviolet Clearance fleet able to take down any target for as long as it got the chance to fire. Since the engineers were already struggling with space, they refused the idea to strap additional anti-missile capabilities and instead agreed upon preparing a similar hull, but with all the weapons replaced by rapid-firing Gauss platforms. Another option would be to use swarm drones, but they were still too expensive to be considered as a proper defensive weapon and the replication technology still produced faulty items all too often to deserve being labeled as reliable. Engineers still claimed they'd need months, if not years of fine-tuning to start considering the possibility of just spamming these kamikaze drones in hopes a tiny fraction of them that intercepts the missiles will be at least equal to the size of approaching payload. The only thing both designs were severely lacking in was, ironically, proper counter to Exadev's own weaponry and tactics that'd been feared so much during Battle of Three Bodies. EMP and microwave resistance of each electronic component might have seen imporvements, but at large only proper energy shields remained as a proper defence against a concentrated attack. And the hulls couldn't carry enough shield generators for them to make any real difference.


Quote
Ultraviolet Clearance class Assault Ship    20 000 tons     809 Crew     8536.4 BP      TCS 400  TH 4000  EM 0
10000 km/s    JR 3-50     Armor 10-65     Shields 0-0     Sensors 160/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 49     PPV 65
Maint Life 2.45 Years     MSP 5075    AFR 168%    IFR 2.3%    1YR 1164    5YR 17456    Max Repair 2500 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months    Spare Berths 2

J20000(3-50) Alcubierre Drive     Max Ship Size 20000 tons    Distance 50k km     Squadron Size 3
2000 EP Internal Fusion Drive (2)    Power 2000    Fuel Use 296.46%    Signature 2000    Exp 25%
Fuel Capacity 3 330 000 Liters    Range 10.1 billion km   (11 days at full power)

45cm C5 Far Ultraviolet Laser (1)    Range 320 000km     TS: 10000 km/s     Power 53-5     RM 5    ROF 55        53 53 53 53 53 44 38 33 29 27
30cm C5 Far Ultraviolet Laser (3)    Range 320 000km     TS: 10000 km/s     Power 24-5     RM 5    ROF 25        24 24 24 24 24 20 17 15 13 12
R40/C4 Meson Cannon (3)    Range 320 000km     TS: 10000 km/s     Power 16-4     RM 40    ROF 5        1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
Fire Control S08 160-16000 H40 (2)    Max Range: 320 000 km   TS: 16000 km/s     97 94 91 88 84 81 78 75 72 69
Tokamak Fusion Reactor Technology PB-1 (1)     Total Power Output 96    Armor 6    Exp 5%

Active Search Sensor MR39-R100 (40%) (1)     GPS 2800     Range 39.2m km    Resolution 100
Thermal Sensor TH20-160 (40%) (1)     Sensitivity 160     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  160m km

ECCM-2 (2)         ECM 30

This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes


Quote
CyberSurge class Missile Destroyer    20 000 tons     635 Crew     8127.4 BP      TCS 400  TH 4000  EM 0
10000 km/s    JR 3-50     Armor 10-65     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 49     PPV 115.95
Maint Life 2.53 Years     MSP 4827    AFR 168%    IFR 2.3%    1YR 1052    5YR 15784    Max Repair 2500 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months    Spare Berths 2

J20000(3-50) Alcubierre Drive     Max Ship Size 20000 tons    Distance 50k km     Squadron Size 3
2000 EP Internal Fusion Drive (2)    Power 2000    Fuel Use 296.46%    Signature 2000    Exp 25%
Fuel Capacity 2 985 000 Liters    Range 9.1 billion km   (10 days at full power)

Quad Gauss Cannon R3-25 Turret (15x20)    Range 30 000km     TS: 16000 km/s     Accuracy Modifier 25%     RM 3    ROF 5        1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Fire Control S08 160-16000 H40 (1)    Max Range: 320 000 km   TS: 16000 km/s     97 94 91 88 84 81 78 75 72 69

Active Search Sensor MR39-R100 (40%) (1)     GPS 2800     Range 39.2m km    Resolution 100

ECCM-2 (2)         ECM 30

This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes


The fake story leaked sooner than anticipated and the fleet was still assembling and resupplying in orbit above Cybercity and preparing to make a short warp jump to the wormhole and then cross it when everybody high enough on the corporate ladder freaked out from all the accusations of war crimes. Senates of some megacities would call for a collective actions about a corporation that has once again grown too big and powerful to not have a harmful effect on the whole society, but luckily for the lawyers and PR departments trying to fend off the accusations, there were also some movements criticizing the current political system to become too corrupt and allow the evil giants to rise again, demanding a more radical change and a shift towards more sustainable future, with no more corporate exploitation. The possibilities of using these people to stir up inner drama within the opposition and have city governments and the radical protesters fight each other while forgetting about Exadev were endless, but temporairly limited by the volatile nature of anti-government opposition. It had members with all kinds of economical political beliefs, from radical capitalists to radical communists, only united by the case against a few select megacorps nobody liked anyways. This rendered such groups volatile and prone to argue with each other rather than do something productive. A contract with Synthetic Dreams Conglomerate was already in the making, aimed at getting access to the latest psionic chips extending the influence one could have on the user so that Exadev could distribute them among target groups posing as members of resistance and then nudge them away from company's policy and towards various senates. Unfortunately, Cosmotech aiming at taking Exadev's position by leveraging its still fairly small size compared to the corporations that received the most hate didn't really help.

In the meantime, as 2279 was coming to an end on Earth, joint fleet of explorers from Trappist Group Beta and Cybercity Blue Escort was the first post-apocalyptic human force to traverse a wormhole. Space warped around and unwarped again and it only took a brief moment to for the fleet to cross the vast distance. On the other side there was nothing. No hostile ships unloading all their firepower on the poor crews, no space stations, nothing. Just a very brigh sun, and another, small and dim compared to the main component. The binary system was identified as Procyon. Around Procyon-B there was only a small, airless dwarf planet, Procyon-A was more interesting, but nothing that could host life had been detected. Just a hot, partially molten world orbiting close to the sun, with several atmospheres worth of sulfur acids, two gas giants further behind and another airless dwarf planet. Interestingly, it's surface temperature was almost the same as on Earth after TerraNova Inc'd been done with terraforming. No water in any form had been discovered, and the gravity over ten times lower than on Earth made it a very weak candidate for terraforming. The system also hosted an asteroid belt, but it was orbiting Procyon-A so close that attempting to mine them would be unprofitable considering so many better spots that weren't so unimaginably hot, starting with the good old asteroid belt within Solar System. Still a better find than the empty Epsilon Indi system that'd been chosen as the next destination for Trappist Group Alpha a few years before.



Trying to locate what'd been responsible for the unsettling broadcast was like trying to find a needle in a haystack, except it was the wrong haystack and nobody knew the needle was actually a pebble rock. The journey wasn't fruitless, though - during detailed mapping of the system remnants of a few mining outposts had been discovered, and even debris from what must had been a fuel-shiponing space station still orbiting Procyon-A III. A clear sign of human presence in the system. Given the state of everything, nothing more could be learned from the decayed structures. Some employees venturing into these small wastelands started to think whether the Intergalactic Federation was even real at this point. Back on Earth, Humanity survived the worst thanks to the N.O.V.A. Bunker Systems. But maybe the ones who left their homeworld behind as it was consumed by nuclear and fusion fire met even worse fate. Dozens of worlds, once inhabited, now dead and in disarray. And that's why Trappist 1 "assist fleet" never arrived - because a transponder that could receive distress signals and send automatic responses was the only thing that survived out there. But of course these were just speculations, amplified by the feelings of emptiness and desolation in a system that looked more miserable than an empty one, thanks to all the ruins. Trappist 1 threat still had to be treated seriously, just in case.

Some of the crewmembers were still busy making sure they didn't omit anything in the labirynths of twisted metal when a message reached them, originating from the Tau Ceti's side of the wormhole. This time it wasn't a creepy, unintelligible signal, but a clear call containing all the neccessary Exadev transmission codes, urging the whole fleet to break the mission and come back. The matter was serious - AI observing the logs from Tau Ceti's monitoring stations noticed a local collapse in a particular spot. After a while, it could classify it as another wormhole that's just been formed. An hour later an unidentified vessel appeared on radars, heading towards the outermost planet, Tau Ceti VII gas giant.

The situation was considered serious enough than the Cybercity Blue Escort fired their engines and left explorers behind to come back at their own pace, rushing back to Tau Ceti. But before they could return, the mysterious spaceships reversed, stopped and accelerated back into the wormhole it arrived from. The fleet was to be resupplied ASAP and then, without any delay, pursue the spaceship into the wormhole. A PURGE team boarded a Synth Waver and was expected to get back to Earth and deep dive into cyberspace to find traces of some corporations possibly already experimenting with wormhole creation technology or try to identify which one might have build the spaceship in question. And of course notify the upper management in Cydonia. Astronomers and physicists were tasked with studying the energy outburst of a new wormhole and try to tell whether modern fusion reactors could reasonably power whatever machinery was responsible for it. On the surface of Tau Ceti III Blue Squad struggled with the tough job of identyfying and capturing any citizens that might've noticed the event themselves before they would think about posting it. Parts of cyberspace had even ben shut down and disguised as a temporary network fault to limit the possibilities of info leak. Whether it was the long lost Trappist 1 fleet, a hostile corporation who somehow mastered the art of staying under the radard so perfectly it could build a wormhole and have nobody notice until the final effect or some sort of mass hallucination caused by hacked brain chips, military personnel sensed another decisive battle incoming, possibly much bigger than Battle of Three Bodies.
Posted by: Stormtrooper
« on: July 26, 2022, 07:36:57 PM »

BITROT

Cloning adults was too complicated, cloning embryos had a good chance of completely screwing up human genome and cloning fetuses proved to generate so much mess that the cloned children could barely survive, even after heavy augmentation. So all in all, Exadev Space Industries had a long way to go to raise the CEO's dream army of clones. For the time being, good old boring colony starships were the only reliable source to expand population of Cybercity. The fleet used was nothing special, basically a group of PhaseRunners with cargo space filled with cryopods and some small tweaks in security due to the cargo being quite sensitive, fragile and squishy. With enough augments it was no longer sensitive, fragile and squishy. But then augments were worth much more than the body of a slave single worker's life. So while they made their temporary user owner less sensitive, fragile and squishy, the paranoia of managers only grew exponentially with the number of enchancements being transported. To reduce risk, the crypod storage bays didn't even have atmosphere inside, stocked in vacuum chambers so that a micrometeorite puncturing the hull wouldn't cause a chain reaction killing the 110000 sleepers on board. Not that it was easy to breach that hull with anything but military-grade weapons, though. It was coated with a layer of repair nanodrones constantly watching over its integrity and being able to repair even the tiniest scratches by using the alloy microplates distributed to them via a system of densely-packed, small transit tubes with magnets accelerating and guiding the materials, all supervised by AI making optimal logistical decisions. For the naked eye the hull looked like the most cliche colony starship hull imaginable, but the consciousness about its construction sparked the imagination of its constructors and crewmembers, with many feeling like they were about to enter the stomach of a giant, synthetic organism, or the core of AI superbrain. Such feelings were often reinforced by the sound the semi-intelligent hull produced. They could be heard if one decided to glue their ear to the wall. And so these synthetic beasts were weaving through the interstellar void, earning the name for this line of spaceships - Synth Waver.


Quote
Synth Waver class Cargo Ship    50 000 tons     231 Crew     1881.8 BP      TCS 1000  TH 1200  EM 0
1200 km/s    JR 2-50     Armor 1-120     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 1     PPV 0
MSP 24    Max Repair 100 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 12 months    Spare Berths 0
Cryogenic Berths 110000

JC51K Alcubierre Drive     Max Ship Size 51000 tons    Distance 50k km     Squadron Size 2
400 EP Commercial Magneto-plasma Drive (3)    Power 400    Fuel Use 6.19%    Signature 400    Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 2 350 000 Liters    Range 136.7 billion km   (1318 days at full power)

This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposes


Exadev didn't feel like sending millions of employees away from the Solar System with so much work to be done, but the Central Stacks Crisis kind of solved this dilemma - after the megacity-wide scandal about local police cooperating with Blue Squad to deliver specimens for cloning experiments from the (in)famous stack towers that once'd given the name of the metropolis, a "small restructurization" of Central Stacks department was announced, with most employees being selected for Cybercity colonization program. It took only five interstellar jumps in and five interstellar jumps out of the new fleet for the population of Cybercity to rise from 10 millions to 30 millions. And more courses were planned.

At the same time PhaseRunners kept on transporting the android shipments ordered from Avalon Heights. When human population of Cybercity crossed the 30th million, android population was already at 7 millions and expanding. Engineers tried to capitalize on the recent improvements in machine self-replicating technology to try to make the androids able to "breed" and produce more androids, but as if the process itself wasn't complicated enough, Avalon Heights' management wasn't stupid and put some damn fine security measures designed to prevent other corporations from stealing their product's inner design.

On 10th December 2277, an unprecedenced event took place: on the surface an insignificant story about just another day of pure insanity of the synthetic world, but with consequences surprisingly getting out of hand. A woman who came to Cybercity alone and against her will after the mess in Central Stacks bought a "companionship android". That alone would be anything but interesting in 2277, even together with her claim of "being in love", but somehow she persisted in her quest to prove to the world(s) that it was "for real" and that her "companionship android" was "really special, unlike the others of synth kind". She persisted so much that somehow during one of the Enriched Meta Reality Framework v3.1.2077 sessions she got into contact with a net journalists scavenging through the virtual insanity reality in search for article material. An interview with the woman, which the journalist recklessly published, made its way through the onboard network node of one of the Synth Wavers all the way back to Earth, Moon and Mars. And ended up being watched in particular by a team of researchers from Synthetic Dreams Conglomerate who had been struggling with their Deep Feeling Enchancer BrainBots project for long enough to see half the team sacked and replaced. Twice. Psychologists consulting the project studied the interview in and out to determine that whatever was going on between that woman and the android looked almost like the end result of a prototype they'd been supposed to show as a demo two years earlier. Which was odd given the woman had no brain chips besides standard ID implant and the android's programming was hardly comparable with the most sophisticated AI existing somewhere in the underground research complexes of the most powerful corporations.

Exadev made one mistake of not realizing what was going on early enough and by the time security was reading reports of Synthetic Dreams Conglomerate's personnel walking down the streets of Cybercity, the woman was already having her brain scanned and mapped in the outpost founded by the rival corporation far away from the city sprawl. Results were fascinating - the android's output signals, brain activity and the patterns emitted by the ID chip all combined almost perfectly, producing a stimulating feeling for the brain's owner. There was nothing special in this particular setup, though - it simply happened to mess with human brain in a way that was desirable for the researchers. Android's software had been downloaded and decompiled, woman's brain analyzed, ID chip encoding sequence deciphered. Experiments continued. A supplementary AI program had been written, capable of learning the process of observed human-android interaction, in hopes of reverse-engineering and taking the full control of the process. Eventually the head scientist approved a new type of experiment: the woman was to be implanted with an experimental psionic chip. It was built with human-human mental interaction in mind (pun intended), not human-machine, and even that part was working barely better than simply trying to guess what someoen's thinking about by observing external behaviour. Not to mention machines couldn't think. Nevertheless, the one thing the chip was doing correctly was to correctly determine user's feelings and enrich or extinguish them accordingly, giving improved control over one's own emotions, potentially useful in mental disorder treatments, silencing intrusive thoughts, on-demand forgetting about something and the like.

But something must've gone wrong (how surprising). After successful operation, recovery and chip calibrating, the woman and the android were placed in a room under strict observation. The feelings of the test subjects at first were growing according to the predicted model, but soon started to rapidly escalate. Thousands of thoughts stormed through the uplifted brain and reached android core in the form of network datastream. But then it all cooled down, almost ceased. The process repeated for a few times. Based on real-time brain scans, the woman really wanted to "give in to her feelings", but past a certain intensity threshold just used her new chip to just reset her mind. After the experiment session she barely could walk and struggled to remember even basic info about herself. Or sometimes would remember random, irrelevant details. The scientists figured out that somehow she was "glitched". Patterns of her brain activity stopped making any sense. Especially when she came back to her senses a week later, only to glitch again within another three days.


Synthetic Dreams Conglomerate smoothly swept the case under corporate carpet. But the research continued for years to come. Generally it was possible to reverse the damage to some extent, but the symptoms had never been fully treated. The patient could function normally for the most part, but sometimes the glitches would reemerge. And with years going by, the "bug episodes" lasted longer and were more intense. As if the brain was slowly decomposing itself, ceasing to put up with all the hard work a good human brain is required to do to keep its owner alive and functioning properly. Experts on human-augmentation interactions and the influence of the ever-blurring line between analog- and cyberspace on human condition named this strange disease "Bitrot", because the affected human would just rot away, bit by bit losing mental consistency and capability to safely interact with modern technology. Who would have guessed too much uncontrolled integration with a machine could have some nasty side effects. Synthetic Dreams Conglomerate planned to do anything but surrender on their long-term goals, though.

Meanwhile, on 5th May 2279, astronomers orbiting Tau Ceti III on board of space station hosting Cybercity's AI governor assistant started picking up sequences of clearly artifical origin coming into the system through the wormhole, still left unexplored due to Exadev still being spread too thin to do everything at once. The signals seemed to represent regular cybernetic chatter. Except they'd sometimes glitch from time to time and produce random nonsense for a few days, and then fix themselves and come back to normal.
Posted by: Stormtrooper
« on: May 22, 2022, 08:13:50 PM »

Cybercity

With new shipments of upgraded androids purchased from Avalon Heights, Exadev Space Industries had been pushing forward at a crazy pace. They could keep FTL drive a secret only for so long, but by the time other corporations and "independent" governments got their hands on a series of scientific papers describing the theoretical solution to warping space and skipping distance effectively faster than light without timeline-related paradoxes or getting shredded to near-lightspeed outburst of particles, Exadev was already busy with the rollout of a brand new starship:


Quote
PhaseRunner class Cargo Ship    50 000 tons     226 Crew     1059.8 BP      TCS 1000  TH 1200  EM 0
1200 km/s    JR 2-50     Armor 1-120     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 1     PPV 0
MSP 13    Max Repair 100 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 12 months    Spare Berths 1
Cargo 25000    Cargo Handling Multiplier 50

JC51K Alcubierre Drive     Max Ship Size 51000 tons    Distance 50k km     Squadron Size 2
400 EP Commercial Magneto-plasma Drive (3)    Power 400    Fuel Use 6.19%    Signature 400    Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 3 850 000 Liters    Range 224.0 billion km   (2160 days at full power)

This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposes



It had a decent cargo capacity and carried a small but significant improvement over Synthetic Dawn's FTL propulsion: Alcubierre Drive model JC51K had the capability of effectively blasting through interplanetary space while pushing smaller objects aside. The warp field generation was improved so that the curvature of space could push asteroids or even small moons out of the way, but without giving them any additional kinetic energy so that by the time the ship's passed through them they'd already float in their original spots. The ship would essentially put them away to avoid collision and then put them back in when freeing the spot it had briefly occupied. It no longer needed to stop by the Saturn's rings - it could squeeze right through them at superluminal speed without compromising either the ship's integrity or Solar System's stability.

Without any asteroid belts or planetary rings Tau Ceti was much less challenging to navigate, forcing crews to take only the gas giants' moons into consideration during course plotting, but it was an advantage nevertheless. With a fleet of PhaseRunners phasing through any obstacles smaller than a dwarf planet, Exadev's management wanted to have first permanent settlers on Tau Ceti III within next decade. But just dumping construction materials and supplies there wasn't enough to get it done even within the span of two decades. Terraforming also was out of the question for the foreseeable future. TerraNova Inc was still too busy finishing the Mars up and hauling terraforming infrastructure over interstellar distances was an undertaking that could take a decade in itself just to move to the first successful proof of concept stage. Adapting humans genetically to survive under very thin one hundred percent oxygen air and extreme cold was not achievable either. Broken Heart Biotech could only do so much. It's biggest achievement involved adapting some test subjects to live comfortably on the partially heated Mars surface with -30 degrees and only light jackets, pushing the survivability of extreme conditions up to a total of -100 degrees. Nothing compared to the average of -130, with temperatures dropping below -150 each night even alongside Tau Ceti III's equator.

The solution had to be purely synthetic. Bionic limbs with the manufacturer's warranty of safe operation up to -160 degrees, blood-warming nanobots, cybernetic eyes with extra snow glare protection, a second layer of artificial skin implanted beneath fat with insulative properties, microjoints nudging muscles to generate some friction heat, direct ice digestive system, all this to make life of a colonist easier and more comfortable. Not because conventional habitats and space suits wouldn't work, but because they wouldn't work fast enough. At all costs, Exadev had to stay afloat before competition had a chance to catch up.

Frost clashed with synth on the cold wastes. A new city was founded, all in the name of transhumanist glory. A giant testing grounds for latest AI programs seamlessly integrated into the multilevel structure. Decently automated, full of hard-working, android grunts. Heated by a batch of fusion reactors, glowing purple in the night. Neons reflecting off shiny power armors of Blue Squad troopers deployed with Big Pulse RiflesTM to keep the city secure and inhabitants cramped in containers cheaply stacked on top of each other in line. Spaceport and space elevator being constructed with accelerating pace as programmers optimized AI subroutines and android's task prioritization systems. Biotech labs working on consciousness-enchancing drugs, the ones that could open up the possibility to take on the most powerful brain implants and have a normal life expectancy rather than be fried dead within two months of enjoying enchanced mental capabilities. A base of operations against Trappist 1's meance.

2nd November 2259, Channel 9 News, "Breaking Corruption" program

Emily Mortan: Good evening ladies, gentlemen, military helicopters and androids! In tonight's "Breaking Corruption" edition we'll be looking into the new symbol of corporate oppression, built among the distant stars so that you could not see it, but fortunately nothing can hide before the bionic eyes of our brave journalists. As you all know by now, Exadev Space Industries is constantly pushing boundaries of the Final Frontier and takes special interest in the Tau Ceti system, the first one to be visited by the humans of a New World. Firstly, let's see our footage of a Cybercity, almost fully synthetic metropolis you might think to be just another conspiracy theory, except it really exists on the frozen surface of Tau Ceti III...

The temperature of the -2 147 483 648th Exadev emergency meeting was the exact opposite of the temperature of the night setting upon the first extrasolar colony. Management didn't like to see a clear proof that at least one PhaseRunner's crew screwed up their security protocols and had at least one from the Channel 9's personnel onboard so that now everyone could gaze at their latest expansion. A new wave of anti-corps protests was sweeping across the Solar System, but that was of hardly any concern as the main tech hub was being successfully relocated to the Cybercity.

...given permission to reactivate the cloning program to combat the birthrate crisis, alongside with permanent and full contraception implants ban. The effect are less than satisfactory for the corporate management, because most of androids imported to Tau Ceti had pre-programmed sexual functions and even if they didn't, most of heavily augmented colonists living the lowest of their life despite great promises of a stellar future state they wouldn't breed like rabbits on command because their corporate overlords demand a 3x population increase in the next five years...

Cybercity might already look impressive, but Solar System still remained a sole source of income and thus Exadev could send only so much employees to populate Cybercity. If only the secret would hold up until the new interstellar combat fleet was ready. At least their next generation of warheads meant to replace conventional fusion missiles was still a secret. Who would expect a bunch of preconfigured mining nanobots to be able to serve as intelligent missiles attaching themselves and chewing away enemy's ships?

...an expert on nanotechnology with us, Isaac Parser. Isaac, what has your independent research team found?

Isaac Parser: Well, we've been trying to optimize mining patterns of these nanobots, and as we tried to make them selective over which material to consume to conserve their energy while mining through as little rock as possible focusing only on the ores, preferably the more valuable ones, we noticed the obvious: there's nothing stopping somebody to program these machines to feed on everything, for example a city's support structures or a spaceship's hull. If attached to a surface, such a swarm could just digest and decompose it, making it a deadly weapon...

A bunch of swears came out of CEO's synthetic mouths, amplified by their voice broadcasting implants. There was nothing left but to assume some corporations had already been working on effective countermeasures, driving the Cryogenic War tension up once again given it wasn't uncommon for a few "independent" cities, namely Night City, Neo Tokyo, Neo Moscow, Nirvana Sprawl and Central Stacks to have combat-ready space fleets of their own, with fusion missiles, at least ultraviolet laser blasters, anti-ship tier railguns, Maglev cannons, magnetic pulse beams or particle lances. With the latest Exadev invention exposed, some corporations might feel threatened enough to strike before the power balance shifts enough in Exadev's favour.

But if anything was certain, it was that the new war, unlike Battle of Three Bodies, wouldn't be fought purely on a physical level. Synthetic Dreams Conglomerate kept releasing scientific papers on the topic of brain mapping, neural connections, seamless integration witj brainchips, mental connections, deepdiving in cyberspace and the like. They were onto something, maybe even more powerful and terrifying than psionic warfare of the Old World. Simulatenously Metagram announced merging forces with Enriched Reality Corps together with releasing patch 3.0 for their Enriched Meta Reality Framework. Unlike Duranium Components Inc version, it allowed users to stay connected for weeks or even months to no end and the research on the simulation enchancing fluid that could keep the individuals more engaged if pumped at right intervals and amounts displayed some progress. Moreover, scientists employed at both companies published their discovery of a Quantum Stasis Phenomenon. When interacting with quantum computers in a deep dive mode, time perception could range anywhere in between miliseconds to years for each twenty four hours spent in the simulation. If implanted with correct registering and processing apparatus, it was even possible to extract years worth of thinking in a suspended quantum state from a single mind if it happened that it took years from the test subject's perspective to live a given day in the simulation. Trivial things like criminal punishment or having a standard two hour weekend last for a decade aside, the corporation was already looking into utilising the discovery by increasing the output of the scientific personnel. If they could succeed, nobody else without access to this technology could rival them.

And as if the situation wasn't slipping out of Exadev's hands like a citizen with malfunctioning bionic leg on Tau Ceti III's icefield crazily enough, team of astronomers stationed in Cybercity pointed out at something in deep space, far beyond Tau Ceti system... After running multiple additional scans and filtering data through the best known space anomaly detection algorithms, there was no doubt left: like an eye of a sentient supercomputer, a wormhole was watching over the valiant efforts of Tau Ceti colonizers...

Posted by: Stormtrooper
« on: May 01, 2022, 06:55:52 PM »

Interstellar Glow

Trappist 1, a choice so obvious it was too obvious to be the one inputted into the interstellar navigation computer. Some soldiers and mid-rank officers were eager to go meet their fate in what might as well be the capital system of Intergalactic Federation (or whatever was left from it), but veterans commanding in the Battle of Three Bodies remembered the horrors of entire ships vaporized in seconds by purple laser fire all too well to bravely but stupidly march into the lion's mouth directly. With some successful experiments on fusion missiles, upgraded EMP arrays for next-gen PURGE vessels and engineers continuing to push the wavelength of lasers well beyond visible spectrum one could say modernized fleet was, well... Modernized. That was it, really. If nuclear warheads and purple lasers were enough to melt the ships of old within seconds or minutes, then fusion warheads and ultraviolet lasers must have been enough to melt the ships of new within seconds or minutes. And who was to guarantee humans who continued to develop and expand away from Solar System didn't already wield anything from antimatter cannons to directed black hole generators.

Solar System survivors needed preparation and resources. And a few backup plans in case photonic missiles started raining down on the Sun turning it into supernova on a spot. Centauri system got rejected. Proxima b was very unlikely to support life out of the box, but with just a little bit of terraforming and orbital anti-cosmic radiation shielding it was a decent planet to live on. Likehood of running into federal forces was too high. The destination couldn't be a system within at least ten light years from Earth at all, really. And within ten light years from Trappist 1, too. Eventually the agreed target for first exploration mission and extrasolar colonization came out to be Tau Ceti. Under twelve light years away, so close enough but above assumed safety margin. Decent planetary system, likely resource-rich, but no confirmed planets with surface liquid water. Again, nothing terraforming couldn't fix, but the risk couldn't be brought down to zero - whatever TerraNova Inc could turn into a second Earth must have been assumed to end up becoming a second Earth even faster under federal regime.

On 1st June 2248, 23:34 Earth time, Trappist Group Beta, an operational force of three Synthetic Dawns, warped space on the outskirts of Solar System and disappeared into the endless night.

On 24th July 2249, 19:09 Earth time, employees working in Trappist Group Beta were the first of the new generation of humans to ever see an alien sun from up close. Tau Ceti looked almost the same as the one they left behind...

To much of a relief, no life signs had been detected. No complex life-bearing planets, no surface liquid water, no electromagnetic signals. Just a dead static of the universe.



Oddly enough, the system bore some resemblance of the Solar System. Only three terrestial planets and no asteroid belts, but then four gas giants orbiting much further away from the sun than the rocky bodies. First one was a molten rock under well over fourty atmospheres of carbon dioxide and sulphur acids, the next one was a frozen dwarf, but the third one looked promising. Almost -130C surface temperature and only one third of Earth's gravity, but with lots of water on the surface. And traces of pure oxygen atmosphere. Just like Europe, but bigger. A prime spot for terraforming, also ready for almost instant colonization by people with thermoregulating implants.

Meanwhile back in the Solar System another crisis was looming ahead. The total population stabilised at about one and a half billion people. The virtually-enchanced lifestyle was too comfortable to afford kids. Only the slums population kept growing steadily despite high mortality rate and rampant violence. Contraception implants were slowly disappearing from cybernetic market as sex androids got better at mimicking human behaviours. Some to the point customers complained about the ridiculousness of "their friend's" android "not being in the mood". However, majority of people still wanted to have kids at some point. Doesn't mean the majority could. If it wasn't for one chip too many completely screwing hormonal regulations and degrading the chances of bearing any children, let alone healthy ones, it was for the radioactive fog emitted by the machinery keeping the megacities up and running.

After a bunch of absolutely peaceful discussions that did not involve laser fire and to think they did was ridiculousTM departments working on Enriched Reality managed to seceed into their own corporation when Enriched Reality v2.0 came out to quickly take the market by storm. One of the most anticipated features involved a "negativity filter". A set of advanced AI assistants and algorithms fine-tuning to the user was prepared to block any negative memories, people or things from the user's perception. Trauma, betrayal, manipulation, narcissism, toxicity, disturbing images, accidents, deaths, diseases, debt, quarrels? All gone if the algorithm decided the person did not want to see, hear or remember something. Alternatively, the program could be switched to do the exact opposite, a feature intended for either masochists or being advocated as an innovative form of criminal punishment.

In 2245 Duranium Components Inc announced that in their labs they had successfully connected two male and three female test subjects into one Enriched Reality node and sync their perceptions of reality into one coherent simulation. The state their minds were in had been maintained for 13,5 hours before they had to be disconnected due to snesory overload that could result in severe brain trauma or death. Corporate officials calmed the public opinion down, reassuring the product has a long way full of improvements and tests to do before being ready for the public to use safely. And once it does, it will be the best thing that has ever been invented to help people free themselves from their sorrows and escape their demons.

16th August, 2249, Channel 6 "6 News Special"


Good evening everybody and welcome to tonight's "9 News Special". This is Boone Phillips and together with you I'll look at what the last week's brought upon us.

1. Garrison McRaven, current Mayor of Night City sued Avalon Heights Inc after a netrunner successfully broke into his bionic leg drivers, taking full remote control over the limb and using it to kick the nearby senator in the face in the middle of an official meeting so badly that one of the victim's bionic eye gave up on functioning. Avalon Heights Inc denied any responsibility, providing absolutely not fabricated proof that the mayor had been downloading updates from shady proxies operating without a valid LIMB certificate. Mayor's representative announced escalating the case further, demanding Avalon Heights to implement a feature allowing users of their products to switch off online updates and use the traditional LIMB clinic instead. Night City police claims the investigation into netrunner's identity is "progressing according to the plan".

2. Tensions continue to rise at Brownstreet Heights as one of the most feared groups of Neon Kamikaze with faulty killswitches continues to terrorize the outskirts of Neo Tokyo. The city's government accepted the help from many corporations within the metropolis willing to spare some of their security guards to pacify the slums. Self-proclaimed leader of the group who calls himself "Salvation Programmer" accuses the city's senate for being just a facade for the "neverending corporate oppression" and "acting like wolves in sheep's skin". Duranium Components Inc officials refuse to comment on either the genesis of the project that led to the rise of Neon Kamikaze or the glitches in their killswitch software. Neo Tokyo inhabitants are advised to report any mutant sightings to the nearest police station and stay home through the night.

3. Avalon Heights Inc proudly announced its newest invention - a sophisticated "dog AI", meant to be installed within their cute, four-legged line of anrdoids. "It's just like a real dog, but without needing to pee or causing mess. More advanced versions include synthetic dog fur." Pro-cat activists enraged by, as they call it, "inacceptable act of discrimination by doggo suprematists" and demand a cat version. As well as removing the dog version from the market, all in the name of equal rights.

4. Thanks to the heroic effort of Yellowpeace, radroach officially makes it to the top of the endangered species list. Since Earth is too toxic for them to breed, plans about relocating the species to Mars are being made. Yellowpeace activists continue to protest in Cydonia against Mars terraformation, pointing out how the Red Planet is less and less red each year and fearing the radroaches won't survive there in the long run, too.

5. According to TerraNova Inc, shaping Mars to fully support human life is well ahead of schedule. Managers of the company confidently speak about their project in front of the recently formed lakes and encourage citizens travelling between outposts and megacitites to switch off their heating systems as they're no longer needed to survive, though it still might get "a little chilly" from time to time. At the same time, flora spreaders seem to be working as expected as indicated by the first clusters of genetically-hardened trees sprouting around them. "They ruined Earth and now they destroy Mars, too" - disappointed Yellowpeace activists comment.

6. Flying cars continue to grow in popularity as a preferred method of transportation. Solenoyd Inc continues to improve their product, offering a wide variety of cars, busses, trams, trucks and recently even a bicycle, all flying models. However, that's not to say there aren't any issues with the new types of air traffic. Some drivers express their frustration in cyclists occupying flying corridors, for example. "I didn't star flying and left them the whole ground for them to come after me into the air!" - says a disappointed flying car enthusiast. "With the advent of flying vehicles there was supposed to be more space for everyone!" - comments another. Urban planners explan that initially every type of vehicle was supposed to get their own height levels assigned, but corporate skyscrapers unfrotunately occupy too much space up there and there's only so much height a vehicle might climb before fuel consumption and times to ascend and descend outweight the benefits of using it at all. Air corridors are too narrow and the traffic is too dense. Solenoyd Inc claims to be already on the brink of developing a solution: Hover Repulsor Anti-Crash Matrix v2.0. The new system is supposed to not only prevent accidents, but actively help drivers navigate the air and push them at the optimal speeds in the right direction, massively increasing traffic flow. We also asked a driving instructor about some tips for the novice drivers, but he claimed it to be so intuitive to the point "it's like floating".

Aaaaand that's all for tonight. Don't forget to recalibrate your chips before going to bed and I wish you all synthetic dreams. Good night.


Posted by: Stormtrooper
« on: April 19, 2022, 06:14:04 PM »

With the rebels celebrating their hard-earned "freedom" and taking themselves out of the question, Exadev was free to get lost in the FTL research. Equations of quantum warp continuum were held as the key, but the engineering part still was left behind. Even best fusion reactors struggled to generate enough energy to warp a chunk of space big enough to fit a starship comfortably, let alone for long enough to push the ship through it. But some brave scientists from N.O.V.A. Bunker System had a different idea. Their plan was to use the warp bubble-establishing rings surrounding the spaceship to hold a particle accelerator designed to generate small black holes. These black holes would then be used to provide just enough gravity to do something akin to brute-forcing enough spacetime curvature for a brief moment before these small, unstable objects would evaporate. Their second function would be to let the travelling ship do a small slingshot around them, gaining enough speed to squeeze through this temporarily available warp bubble fast enough till it'd collapse under itself as the space straightened. It had an additional benefit of exponential effective speed gain.

In the meantime labs of Solenoyd Inc weren't any less busier, even though the distances and speeds of the company's own transit project could suggest otherwise. A retrofuturistic dream of many was coming close to fulfilling when the corporation presented the first prototype of a flying car that wasn't much harder to drive than ground car and didn't require a pilot's license. The issue of disastrous consequences of people ramming into buildings still needed some tweaking, but the owner of Solenoyd Inc was confident that this invention was to revolutionize city transit. It could even make activists happy by removing all the busy highways and moving all the automobile transport to the sky, stretching it over dozens of levels of air corridors so that not a single one would experience traffic jams, leaving ground for pedestrians and corporate communal spaces.

But as Exadev and Solenoyd counted their profits, Duranium Components Inc and Avalon Heights Inc weren't too happy when Broken Heart Biotech Group released their first line of artificially grown organs, purely biological with only minor improvements over natural counterparts, offering an alternative to those sceptical about installing metal and electronics into their insides and making organ donating an obsolete act. For now the product of trending business offered hardly any advantages other than natural human body parts, but rumours spoke about them working really hard on genetically modifying their wares, making them a well-designed biological alternative to cybernetic industry.

Near the end of 2230s TerraNova Inc announced that the Earth's atmosphere was safe and comfortable to breathe without any kind of respiratory support. Water levles rose to the satisfactory levels and lush biosphere thrived on land, in water, in air and below the ground. In addition the corporate owner admitted that in order to celebrate the official completion of Earth's climate restoration project, his company made sure to reduce the number of slums sprawling outside megacities, vastly improving the average living conditions of a statistical Earthling. Radical, anti-freedom keyboard warriors posted evidence of many of the poorest neighbourhoods getting flooded after rising water levels, but AI admins quickly took care of this nonsense.

By the early 2240s, Solenoyd Inc organised a "Tale of Two Matrixes" event. During the conference, two of the newest products were presented. One was simply a Hover Repulsor Anti-Crash Matrix for safe flying cars navigation. Every air corridor barrier and skyscraper was expected to have one installed. It was an array capable of emitting small electromagnetic pulses in either pre-programmed or dynamically generated patterns forcing the flying car to stay on track and away from collision points by gradually slowing it down or even pushing in the opposite direction, with the deceleration levels depending on the velcoity and distance to obstacle. Some tweaks were obviously required for this system to be successfully applied to avoiding collisions between two vehicles themselves. The other Matrix, though, was obviously what every attendant really wanted to hear about. By unifying computing power with Facegram department, (with the latter only officially renting some of its machines and having nothing to do with the project since any accusations of ties of the independent organisation with private businesses were ridiculous), the corporation had successfully built an "Enriched Reality". It was a network designed to cheer its users up by adding pleasant, virtual elements to their perception of the world around. For example, a person plugged in could feel a chair being more comfortable than it really was or their food tasting better, or a kitten approaching them and asking to be pet. However, engineers behind this system hoped that gathering data from users could help develop a much broader catalogue of pleasant experiences and feelings, leaving more positive impact on the individual. The idea quickly generated interest, with some suggesting similar concept could be used to filter out unpleasant experiences.

In 2242, when the three worlds were busy hyping over Enriched Reality, a lone spaceship flashed above Cydonia, sortly after blinked in between Earth and Moon, only to later end up floating in the rings of Saturn. Space transit was dense enough that nobody paid enough attention and Exadev could test their ideas at peace. The black hole generation idea was a brilliant one. Synthetic Dawn met all the travel time expectations, didn't get crushed by warp bubble collapsing onto it or something, with the cherry on top being excelling at navigation and collision avoidance tests, with the ship completing a full warp bubble drop within a planetary ring before smashing against some space debris. at superluminal effective speed. Outfitted with best sensors available, a decent supply of self-replicating probes and a bunch railguns for anti-missile defence should it run into either hostile Trappist-1 fleet or just some asteroids too fast to be avoided, it was ready to meet whatever awaited at the Final Frontier.


Quote
Synthetic Dawn class Exploration Ship    30 000 tons     609 Crew     3207 BP      TCS 600  TH 2400  EM 0
4000 km/s    JR 3-50     Armor 1-86     Shields 0-0     Sensors 6/6/4/4     Damage Control Rating 43     PPV 0
Maint Life 4.43 Years     MSP 2875    AFR 167%    IFR 2.3%    1YR 236    5YR 3545    Max Repair 593 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 60 months    Spare Berths 0

J30000(3-50) Alcubierre Drive     Max Ship Size 30000 tons    Distance 50k km     Squadron Size 3
400 EP Commercial Magneto-plasma Drive (6)    Power 400    Fuel Use 6.19%    Signature 400    Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 3 000 000 Liters    Range 290.9 billion km   (841 days at full power)

CIWS-160 (3x6)    Range 1000 km     TS: 16000 km/s     ROF 5       Base 50% To Hit

Thermal Sensor TH1-6 (1)     Sensitivity 6     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  6m km
EM Detection Sensor EM1-6 (1)     Sensitivity 6     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  6m km
Improved Gravitational Sensors (2)   4 Survey Points Per Hour
Improved Geological Sensors (2)   4 Survey Points Per Hour

This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes
Posted by: Stormtrooper
« on: April 19, 2022, 04:50:39 PM »

By 2230s upper management had finally admitted the riots'd grown out of hand once again. Blue Squad did a nice job with mercassium-coated barrels of their shiny new laser-guided plasma rifles, a fusion between Cosmotech and Exadev technology, giving the firepower of heated plasma a laser-grade accuracy and with the beam keeping the heat from dissipating over much longer distances, but the same plasma rifles occassionally brough doom to their users and everyone nearby when the firewall on bionic arm wouldn't hold that one attack resulting in compromise of cybernetic aim assist. Of course Duranium Components Inc had their killswitch programmed in every brain chip implanted into some Neon Kamikaze, but the software's been questionable at best given it had serious issues propagating through the network of the chips, killing hosts faster than it had time to send the triggering message to others, not to mention the 36% rate of straight-up refusing to work at all.

But Exadev wouldn't dare to let history repeat itself. It was stretched too thin even without riots. Too many projects going on at once and nobody at the company liked to think about the competition reaping all the fruits of their work on FTL propulsion systems, having someone else be the first to build a starship.And Exadev had a plan. An unknown CEO whose name's been lost to Old World history once said:

"Enslave a person and tell them they belong to you - they'll do whatever they can to run away or rebel. You'll break many, but somebody somewhere will succeed. But tell a person they're free and they'll fight to the bitter end by your side for you gave them freedom - something worthy of dying for, something worthy to declare belonging to."

It was so simple yet so hard to come up with. Giving an illusion of freedom so that the rebels would drop their guns, convinced they've won already. Easier said than done, though. One couldn't expect any corporation to just say "ok you won, we'll treat you better" and expect everything to work out just fine. Either the rebels wouldn't believe or they would which would set competition on high alert in fear of them being the next ones who have to give up. That's why a deal with Yoshii Yukinaga had to be arranged. Avalon Heights Inc was supposed to share their latest line of androids with Exadev, which role would be to serve as a "third side" - a movement advocating for mediation and signing peace between corps and rioters. A movement advocating for establishing a first post-post-apocalypse government representing the best interests of people, willing to compromise between keeping the free market operating and citizens happy, giving everyone a chance to speak up about own struggles and troubles and elect an official representative for working on solving these struggles and troubles.

Each android from this new line stood no chance facing a Turing's test. But together... The crowd of the androids was not much stupider than the crowd of humans. And all these robots had to accomplish was to successfully participate in a few protests and open meetings with Exadev PR representatives before enough real humans would follow that they'd no longer be needed. But as everything, it came at a price. Avalon Heights wanted a fair share of quantum research data, preferably related to the concept of applying quantum computing for designing rapidly learning, elaborate artificial intelligence, processing an impressive amount of of human concepts at once, mimicking a human behaviour to the unprecedenced degree, or alternatively just learning how to do more complex job than vent cleaning or purging slums. Exadev agreed, hoping in the long run they'd benefit from this project, too.

By the year 2233 first public discussion that didn't end up with laser fire barrage took place on the streets of Neo Tokyo. In 2334 Cydonia was the first megacity to have a mayor elected, officially independent from the corporations. Near the end of that year, TerraNova Inc agreed to dismantle one terraforming installation to protect a very important radroach breeding den after Yellowpeace protests, saving the animals from drowning in soon-to-be-created lake. Till 2238 every megacity on Earth, Mars and Moon had its own mayor as well as senate, all certainly without any possible ties to corporations.

To ensure all of this progressed smoothly, thousands of quantum servers kept operating at full power to be absolutely sure that nothing threatened the new balance and corruption had no entrance into this new world order. One of the most important tasks was to erase all traces of claims that some politicans had been corporate managers before or owned a significant portions of the stock or had a relative who was a CEO. New AI admins could estimate that such opinions held a 37,6789% increase in likehood of ideas classified as "radical" taking roots within society and any radical idea was a straightforward way back to the N.O.V.A. Megacorps or Comitee of Humanity oppression and the most importnat threat to personal freedom. However, despite best efforts of absolutely independent Facegram department in improving bots surveying the network for radical content, some opinions still could stay publicly accessible for longer than the assumed safety margin of fifteen minutes. AI calculated that for every minute above this time window, the risk of someone infected with corrupt thoughts deciding to run for the office increased by 2,35%, which was more than assumed safety margin of 0,00%. Because of this, additional safety measures in the form of pre-screening candidates for any anti-freedom beliefs had to be maintained. Prime examples of anti-freedom stance included claims about Facegram being a secret Avalon Heights Inc project, 97% of Night City senate members having Exadev Space Industries-related background, leaders of this movement that obviously was without any flaws supposedly not being real humans or unsupported, outrageous claims about the financial situation of 99,9999999% of citizens not improving beyond poverty level.

And so the humanity progressed beyond corporate oppression and with democratic governments guarding human rights and freedom nothing could stop it anymore. The stars layed in front, ready to be conquered.
Posted by: Stormtrooper
« on: April 01, 2022, 05:47:35 PM »

Dreams of Old World

Just as experts at Exadev had predicted, "Neon Kamikaze" initiative yelded great profits in the short term. Generations of slum dwellers got their brains implanted and fried as less powerful companied trembled upon hearing about those fearless wasteland runners. At the same time Cosmotech was mostly left intact, ensuring staying on the positive page by some PR initiatives to help a wasteland community occassionally and spending three times as much to make as big fuss about it in the media as possible. The money they stole earned through honest and hard work from overthrowing minor and medium-sized competition opened up many possibilities in front of the rapidly growing business.

Exadev was pushing through the FTL research, which had finally displayed some visible results (manipulating spacetime continuum on a quantum level opened up options to bend it both ways - contract and expand - providing the means to assemble full warp bubble and the pioneer microcosmic-scale experiments looked promising), but ironically it got blocked once again by a mundane, almost trivial, complication: starships of the future required an extraordinarily tough hull, in particular the warp rings. The theoretical problem of space dust particles slipping inside warp bubble and impacting over the hull with great force remained unresolved. There was a next-gen cross-layered subatomic plating design that could withstand these impacts by providing a structure capable of deflecting particles and altering their course while absorbing only part of the kinetic energy, small enough to come out unscratched, but it needed as much modularity and suppleness as it needed toughness. Duranium was good enough for conventional velocities, but for space dust interacting with warp bubble something else was needed.

Scientists on Martian labs figured a formula for strenghtening Duranium via iridium particles enrichement without compromising on material's nimbleness. Optionally the new alloy, named Mercassium, could be coated in graphene layer just for some extra protection against extreme conditions. But no innovations in mining industry were going to make up for the scarcity of iridium in Earth's crust. Asteroid belt, that was a different story though. Similarily, biotech companies strived to upgrade their bionic products' durability. Mercassium was perfect for the task. And Exadev could get absurdly rich from Mercassium alone... if it could only get enough iridium to feed the factories.

And that is where Cosmotech stepped in, bringing an impressive fleet of Lazer Frictions:


Quote
Lazer Friction class Mining Ship    40 000 tons     360 Crew     1549.4 BP      TCS 800  TH 800  EM 0
1000 km/s     Armor 1-104     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 1     PPV 0
MSP 24    Max Repair 120 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 12 months    Spare Berths 0
Asteroid Miner: 6 modules producing 150 tons per mineral per annum

400 EP Commercial Magneto-plasma Drive (2)    Power 400    Fuel Use 6.19%    Signature 400    Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 3 600 000 Liters    Range 261.8 billion km   (3030 days at full power)

This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposes


After all the funding pumped into the project, a powerful laser grid cannons had been developed, establishing an effective, fast strip-mining technique for rapidly fragmenting asteroids and extracting minerals buried within them. All while Exadev grew more and more iridium-hungry. The hostility of dealing with Cosmotech was obvious, but on the other hand management really didn't feel like waiting for Alcubierre drives forever. In case of an emergency, N.O.V.A. Strike Force would be just enough to cleanse Cosmotech from present, history and the future. The deal was about to be cut as soon as short-term supply was secured anyways, giving Exadev some breathing room to develop their own asteroid mining solutions.

In the long term the problem with Neon Kamikaze persisted, in the short term the future of Exadev looked suspiciously stable, but it all changed when explorers awakened something buried deep down in the radioactive ice sheets of Europa.

Exadev Space Industries HQ, Cydonia Megacity, 5th October 2221

Fuki Detsu: During our latest voyage to Europe... We've found something... Disturbing...

Kiefer McRaven: ?!... I thought you've already explored most points of interest... It was once a nice colony. Multiple megacities, terraformed, genetic modifications for low gravity adaptation, some useful stuff... Still radioactive after the end of the world, but nothing TerraNova Inc couldn't fix. We'd have been settling down here already if not for our budget being eaten by interstellar expansion...

FD: Sir... It's not about tech. We've found... this recording. IT analytics already confirmed: It is an authentic audio file from 2077. By that year the apocalypse was looming over the Solar System and even the most skeptical citizens worried...


KM: Aaaand?... The pont is?... It's just some rambling about the incoming doom. The Old World ended, hardly a classified information by now. Probably plenty of these are yet to be found.

FD: The point is this one, unlike any other that had been excavated from any ruins till now, reveals just too much about things that'd be better let to die, forgotten in the wasteland... "Will you come away with me?" "Will you come to Tech Noir with me?" Just look at this data! Tech Noir: an extravagant company specializing in deep space exploration, cryogenic sleep and civilian transit. Coincidence? If these weren't the guys doing the Solar System Evacuation then this was all a hoax and no human had ever left the Solar System at all. Their profits skyrocketed in 2077, the year most of the population got convinced there was no hope left.

KM: Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand?...

FD: Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand it's not your ordinary "say goodbye to humanity" type of recording. Our most talented cryptographers deciphered it... It's all a code. The details are in the report, but let me just say that this wasn't your average Joe. This guy knew. He knew about A.F.R.I.C.A. And, apparently, it was more than just some means to locate and go back for the survivors. Rememebr those quantum computing side projects? Our current prototypes might suck, but we've been able to partially decode quantum cyberarchive from N.O.V.A. Bunker System... Well, at least the undamaged part. Looks like the founders of the company really didn't like the project. Something about it made them feel seriously threatened. Guess the intuition to prepare for battle with Trappist 1 fleet was correct approach all the way through...

KM: Why didn't you say instantly?! Well, nevermind... Make sure no mutant with fried brain ever hacks this. And to ensure this... DO NOT UPLOAD IT ANYWHERE. Just bury it deep in some secure location. I need to think. Maybe we need more funding for quantum computers... Quantum mechanic is already helpful for FTL, after all... Damn, I have a feeling we're spreading too thin and doing too much at once even for the size of our... Ekhm, MY corporation.
Posted by: Stormtrooper
« on: March 30, 2022, 07:45:21 PM »

More corporate officials trembled as the walking definitions of "high tech, low life" started making their name with first successful operations, hacking, assasinations and general resistance. And even worse, low class inhabitants of megacities had already started supporting them from time to time. Soon Earth, Moon and Mars alike were singing the new song about the efforts of this new anti-corporate opposition.

Big Blaster

To the city of Cydonia flew a low life one fine day,
Hardly spoke to punks around him, didn't have too much to say
No one dared to ask his fixer, no one dared to make a slip
For the stranger there among them had a big blaster and brain chip
Big blaster and brain chip

It was early in the evening when he entered into bar
He came flying from the slum side scannin' people all around
He's a cyborg loose and running, came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with the big blaster and brain chip
Big blaster and brain chip

In Cydonia lived a CEO by the nickname Lazer Red
Many fixers tried to hack him and that many fixers failed
He was CEO and exploiter though a youth of 24
And the trillions in his account numbered one and 19 more
One and 19 more

Now the stranger started hacking, made it plain to punks around
Was a wasteland ranger, wouldn't be too long on Mars
He came here to ruin the CEO, corporation maybe two
And he said it didn't matter he was after Lazer Red
After Lazer Red

Wasn't long before the story was relayed to Lazer Red
But the CEO didn't worry men that tried before were dead
20 hackers had tried to expose him, 20 hackers had made a slip
21 would be the cyborg with the big blaster and brain chip
Big blaster and brain chip

Cyborg breached the sec so quickly, it was time for them to meet
It was 20 past 11 when they walked the neon street
CEOs looked from skyscrapers, everybody held their breath
They knew this savy cyborg was about to meet his death
About to meet his death

There was 40 floors between them when they stopped to make their play
And the swiftness of the cyborg is still talked about today
Lazer Red had not called for sec 'fore a laser fairly ripped
And the cyborg's aim was deadly with the big blaster and brain chip
Big blaster and brain chip

It was over in a moment and the punks had gathered round
There before them lay CEO's secret data on the ground
Oh, he might have went on exploiting but he made one fatal slip
When he tried to match the cyborg with the big blaster and brain chip
Big blaster and brain chip
Big blaster, big blaster
When he tried to match the cyborg with the big blaster and brain chip
Big blaster and brain chip

Posted by: Stormtrooper
« on: March 30, 2022, 07:10:23 PM »

Vicious Circle

Research into FTL wasn't progressing as Exadev would have wanted. It was a simple sentence, but sometimes the truth was really that simple and any attempt to tell something more elaborate was doomed to fail even before somebody would think about attempting to make that attempt. There were three basic concepts for the physicists to pursue: Alcubierre drive, wormholes and hyperdrive. The first one was probably the "simplest" thing to fogure out, because it checked all the known physics... Except one minor, unimportant and completely irrelevant detail: the negative energy density required to warp space accordingly. It required understanding of exotic or dark matter, something that even if the Old World knew about, had been long lost to countless wars that had brought the history to a halt. It was already possible to optimize geometry of a warp bubble (some physicists noticed how the better the designs were, the closer the warp bubble shape resembled a flying saucer...), just not really construct it. As for the wormholes and hyperdrive, it looked far more bleak, though. No astronomer had ever spotted a wormhole "in nature" and even if they really existed, building own ones was another topic. Breaching through the fabric of space to reach fourth dimension was even worse. There was just no way to make it work at the current technological level. Employed physicists liked to say "four dimensions of space, four bazillion dimensions of complexity", every time management tried to suggest them to focus on hyperspace-related research when their reports on Alcubierre Drive were deemed unsatisfactory (which, by pure coincidence, happened every time they were supposed to present a progress report).

However, New World had something the Old World cound't have when paving the path towards superluminal velocity: a solid, undefiable proof that FTL travel was possible and within human reach. It must had been invented at least once in the past by the same species, even if not by the same civilization. And that alone was probably the only thing that kept Exadev's ownership to just throw more and more money at the project, no matter what obstacles it had to overcome.

However, just getting to Trappist 1 alone was just a brief and easy introduction. There was no way telling what awaited on the other side of space and time, but it was reasonable to assume it packed more of a punch than a Velociraptor. And in theory it could still get too close to the Sun first, hence why military modernization was as much of an important project as FTL. Velociraptor might be good enough to rule over the Sun, but never Trappist 1. A new generation of warships, each with its own little star inside in the form of a fusion reactor, was needed. As well as many fixes and improvements over the design philosophy and warfare strategy, with errors too many of which were glaringly obvious after the Battle of Three Bodies. But just because it was easier than FTL, didn't mean engineers hadn't met their own trouble. The most obvious one was the struggle to make any laser firing on wavelength longer than ultraviolet. Reaching that sweet X-Ray presented itself as something already too much to ask for. Theoretically not a big deal, but chances were stuff patrolling Trappist 1 might have something better than ultraviolet. Other complications were similar in nature: too much of a friction heat generated by the more powerful variants of railguns, too long accelerators for upgraded particle beams range, too complicated onboard software, too power-hungry shields (even for fusion reactors...), too little funding (FTL still got priority no matter what), too little time (that was common across all projects, at least).

Simply put, nothing seriously blocking engaged teams to move forward, just a big pile of engineering obstacles that alone weren't worth too much attention but together merged into a huge quicksand pit to get sucked into. But one had to start somewhere eventually and that's when Exadev's upper management decided to roll out their hydrogen harvesting operations. It consisted of impressive mobile stations with reinforced anti-pressure hull patterns and scoops for shiponing hydrogen directly out of the air of a gas giant, combined with onboard fuel processing plant that served to compress hydrogen a bit to save space and have it already partially prepared for refueling the reactor. Despite advancements in power generation that could have been reflected in the engine design, Stellar Vultures were to still use old ion engines. The explanation was simple: the design itself had its years already and shiponing Jupiter just wasn't deemed profitable enough before. And updating the design wasn't worth it either - hydrogen harvesting platform didn't really need to generate much of a thrust to stay productive.


Quote
Stellar Vulture class Fuel Harvester    60 000 tons     260 Crew     1867 BP      TCS 1200  TH 1200  EM 0
1000 km/s     Armor 1-136     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 1     PPV 0
MSP 19    Max Repair 75 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 12 months    Spare Berths 2
Fuel Harvester: 15 modules producing 960000 liters per annum

300 EP Commercial Ion Drive (4)    Power 300    Fuel Use 7.07%    Signature 300    Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 11 100 000 Liters    Range 470.9 billion km   (5450 days at full power)

This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposes


The harvesters were engineered in a way that should allow them to fly towards Jupiter, refuel all their tanks and come back, burning much less fuel than shiponing during each trip, but nevertheless, Exadev's management agreed to sign up a contract with Cloudpunk to handle their fuel logistics. The company looked promising, didn't ask too many questions about all the fuel and its purpose and in case of some backstabbing their delivery ship firstly would have to fase N.O.V.A. Strike Force not being there for their protection anymore and the corporation could always afford to making harvesters themselves fly the trip.


Quote
Cloudpunk class Delivery Ship    20 000 tons     114 Crew     749 BP      TCS 400  TH 1200  EM 0
3000 km/s     Armor 1-65     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 1     PPV 0
MSP 1023    Max Repair 75 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 12 months    Spare Berths 1
Cargo 5000

300 EP Commercial Ion Drive (4)    Power 300    Fuel Use 7.07%    Signature 300    Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 4 010 000 Liters    Range 510.4 billion km   (1969 days at full power)

This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposes


With fuel and terraforming projects secured, government could proceed with its plans. But it was fighting a war on two fronts. Preparing Trappist 1 campaign alone had been forcing CEOs to push employess to work absolutely volountary and optional Company Dedication Hours and that was only half the big picture. The other front was, surprise surprise, domestic. And owners of the corporation had hardly anyone but themselves to blame to let Cosmotech slip under the radar for so long. But the sudden worry came for reasons one might not expect at first. It wasn't their ambition to compete and beat the ones ruling the world with bionic fist on the final frontier. It wasn't the current portfolio of the company. Their plasma rifles hardly mattered in the bigger picture and it was totally meaningless whether their designs would improve over time to even surpass laser weaponry. But what did matter was their ideas. Dangerous ideas. Ideas they'd not have come up with if they were big and experienced enough. Something that for sure could destroy American Frontier Protectorate... Just like anybody else, with themselves being consumed first due to the small size.

Arming frustrated masses with top-notch tech that might have made them essentially kamikaze, but was deadly and had the potential to become that much deadiler once improvements would cleanse it of the kamikaze curse, was dangerous. But perhaps even more dangerous was the philosophical aspect of the whole operation. It gave those people a purpose to rally behind. It didn't matter than for every ten implanted nine would die in the first 24 hours after implanting the experimental biochip and the lucky tenth had a short life expectancy anyways. It didn't matter most would never get a chance to even participate in the test. What mattered was that many from the slums were becoming test subjects volountairly. And not because of propaganda. They were fully aware about what was going to happen, but they still craved it. Protectorate might be their first target, but not the last.

But while this attempt of creating "mutant cyborg army" could be blamed on the stupidity of Cosmotech, the Duranium Components Inc involvement didn't add up. In the very short term the whole affair was very beneficial to their research, but what could they hope for next time? That somehow they'll snatch control of the "slum army" and use it to fuel their own agenda? Possibly. But why would they be willing to risk everything? "Because they had never faced an open rebellion" - said to himself one of the upper managers, old enough to still remember the stories of first rebel generation. And that coupled with short-term profit really nailed it. And the only way to beat it was to get better at controlling it than Duranium Components Inc management intended to be.
Posted by: Stormtrooper
« on: March 30, 2022, 02:34:21 PM »

As years passed by, partnership between Exadev Space Industries and TerraNova Inc strenghtened. Maybe fusion reactors weren't primary specialization for the latter, but for sure they were primary need. With many ruins and scraps from the Old World repurposed and Earth population above 1,5 billion of people assembling more stations or upgrading the efficiency of new ones weren't much of an issue anymore, especially since the government was very supportive towards terraforming (the management didn't expect to find too many habitable worlds beyond Solar System...), but the whole operation needed power. Lots and lots of power. It was never satisified, always running below theoretical productivity only because there was just not enough power. Solenoyd Inc saw the opportunity to rise on the intercorporate field with its first effective, stable and self-propelled design only needing energy to kickstart it, but some CEOs were too hungry. They wanted to become the second power right after Exadev and that was just too much of a price to pay. Exadev deployed its best operational team - Blue Squad, named after the blue lasers they've got - the longest wavelength reachable for a portable version at a time - to storm Solenoyd orbital facility where the plans for the reactor had been kept. The attackers were willing to really pay a lot to get to them through honest means, because while the competition was slowly trying to catch up on the final frontier, the array of ultraviolet lasers and high-caliber railgun cannons was still something only N.O.V.A. Strike Force could blast through and the top-tier cybersecurity something only PURGE Elite Society hackers had the skills to breach and shut the defensive systems down remotely. The latter might not officially be affiliated with Exadev in any way since the Battle of Three Bodies, but in the collective consciousness it was not much more than a corporate cybersec department.

But "a lot" didn't really mean "propel the competition to be almost as influential as we", so the assault had been launched anyways. Lasers and railguns were left alone, a PURGE team did just enough to manufacture fake IDs for the Blue Squad and help them a bit during infiltration, careful to not display skills too far beyond other companies' equivalents. Still, it hardly mattered because TerraNova suddenly inventing own fusion reactors was enough for some hostile journalists to connect the dots. Another blow eventually came from the Church of Singularity - its leader claimed that the path towards singularity required an unrestricted access to bionics, unhindered by corporate greed and laws and preached the followers shall turn against the oppressors. At least that alone was easy to mitigate by gradually shifting the blame for "terrorist attacks" on terraforming facilities towards Yellowpeace, made that easier because of the climate restoration gaining full thrust with all stations fully powered with artificial suns, all with Yellowpeace growing less and less peaceful in the meantime.

In some regions rivers and lakes were already clean and lush green vegetation sprouted from the cleansed soil. And in these places it was warm greenery, not glittering glow of radioactive waste anymore. Temperature was falling steadily and was already below fourty degrees average. Frequency of sandstorm and density of caustic fog decreased. Earth still had a long way of recovery, but those raised on the tales from the Blue Planet were happy to witness the healing process. Some time more citizens of Neo Petersburg saw a first snowfall. It might have melted down instantly, but it was only for the better as snow was a forgotten concept and no city was ready for it.

However, grass was always greener on the neighbour's yard. The enclaves of clean environment didn't last long before being walled off completely and becoming prime spots for rich people to settle down, away from the noise and filth of megacities. Some still preferred their penthouses on the 500th floor, but entire new buisnesses sprouted from building and caring for these exclusive neighbourhoods and its inhabitants. And just like it didn't take long for the rich to profit off the fruits of labour of terraformers employed at TerraNova Inc, it didn't take long for the poor to rebel. Deformed humans and children of the first generation of those "bionic outcasts", pushed away from the healing grounds and beyond the sight of wealthy sitting in front of their villas, they found it hard to cram in the tiny spots of ground poisoned enough for rich to not distract them there, but not enough to make it uninhabitable even for them with all their bionic enchancements. Corporate security had a lot of work fending off "savage hordes" trying to breach the energetic walls guarding the splendid neighbourhoods. However, the final straw for serious riots was when some extravagant retired managers from American Frontier Protectorate decided to entertrain themselves by going for "mutant hunting".

Protectorate had its own enemies, though. Just like every business out there. Cosmotech was among the most salty ones. The company was on the verge of moving its plasma rifle design beyond prototype stage, only for laser blasters to dominate both civilian and PMC markets. The whole project was founded on the idea that laser cannons required just too much power and too much cooling to be effective on anything but a vehicle or static structure, but Protectorate had proven these estimations blatantly inaccurate. Inaccurate like plasma rifles. There was nothing that could beat laser beam in precision. Effective range extended all the way to the maximum damaging range, limited only by the skills of a shooter. And manufacturer's of military bionic eyes and arms. And even beyond damaging range, it wasn't unheard of for snipers to be able to at least temporarily blind the target if the eyes were biological. And as soon as fusion reactors would get their dedicated portable model, the power of laser weaponry would only grow. Plasma had its own merits, namely decent aerial damage which was non-existent for lasers, but it was just not enough to go beyond niche roles. For sure it could serve as a shotgun, but with the accuracy and effective range of a gunpowder-based assault rifle, but it wasn't firearms this design had to outperform anymore.

The plan was simple. Many of the ones unfortunate enough to end up in slums had two things: bionics and deep hatred for anything even slightly organised and profit-oriented, with American Frontier Protectorate temporairly on the top of "to send to hell" list. And Cosmotech was one of the few buisnesses that was willing to acknowledge that poor didn't have to mean stupid. After all, if Cosmotech wanted to take Exadev's position, it needed its own PURGE, too. And endless slums meant endless pool of test subjects volountary recruits for various cybernetic warfare-related projects. In particular they could be outfitted with the highly dnagerous neural implant released by Duranium Components Inc about the same time more serious riots broke out. It was enchancing analythical skills and persistence among the users, but at the same time it was bound to fry the brain within a month or two of usage, leaving the patient dead or in a coma or vegetative state at best. Cosmotech salespeople even managed to get a discount in exchange for providing the seller with detailed scientific reports on the chip usage.

Unfortunately for the ordinary augmented person, Cosmotech's plot wasn't an isolated case. As the prices of basic implants plummeted when upgraded versions made it to the market, alongside the percentage of enchanced people grew the dangers associated with the technology. It wouldn't be anything worse than computer virsues if not for the small detail of these computers being inside one's body. And the decisions made by some companies raised concerns for some folk. For example, Solenoyd Inc was the first company to force all of its employees to swap their ID, wallet, bank account and smartphone for a biochip version, all accessible directly from their brain. In the meantime Avalon Heights Inc manufactured its own line of bionic limbs, the first models to officially have internet access "so that clients wouldn't have to go visit a LIMB clinic to receive driver updates, now automatically downloaded from the network, all for their convenience and well-being", as the official statement claimed.

***Commercial break***

Walking with your head in the clouds? Wish your legs could follow? Reach new heights with Avalon Heights Inc limited-time offer bionic legs! Now with internet access for automatic drivers updating! Downloaded from the cloud storage, just to make sure you'll never have to get back down! Buy three and the fourth is for free!

Disappointed that Velociraptors have only seven laser blasters despite Exadev claiming in its commercial they have one hundred? Worry no more! Only till the end of month, American Frontier Protectorate brings to you the possibility to buy one hundred laser blasters for the price of only eighty! Hurry up and claim what's rightfully yours!

Grass is always greener on the other side, huh? We at TerraNova Inc know the feeling! Buy our Personal Terraforming Assistant today and let the grass be green on your side, too! Also, by supporting our terraforming project you help make Earth more beautiful each day and pave the way towards terraforming Mars, too! Only terrorists from Yellowpeace would not be happy to have such an opportunity presented to them! And you don't support terrorists, do you?

Came to the City of Dreams only to realize you can't fulfill your dreams with your legs glued to the ground? We, the CEOs of Exadev Space Industries feel you. It's impossible to live your dreams down on Earth. Reserve your spot for a commercial tour across the Solar System today! Half the profit will be used to fuel our research into FTL technology so that one day you can take a trip beyond our own Sun!

Lunar gravity makes it hard for you to firmly stand on the ground? Duranium Components Inc might just have a solution for all your low gravity-induced health issues! Our Lunar Protection Pack offers a wide variety of bionics designed to make your life on the Moon easier, healthier and happier! Why worry about your damaged body parts if you can just replace them? Special discount for loyal employees who've worked at our company for more than ten years while living on the Moon!
Posted by: Stormtrooper
« on: March 27, 2022, 05:44:02 PM »

Century of a Great Divide

XXIII century by many had already been titled as "Century of a Great Divide" despite it having barely started. And it wasn't just some low-effort awareness spreading about skyscrapers breaching the cloud layers and glittering with blue-purple neons right next to the slums outside of environmental protection barriers. It wasn't about the dichotomy of wanting to rebuild Earth's climate and preserving its wasteland at the same time. As for the latter, it wasn't just Church of Singularity and likeminded folks who wanted Earth's biosphere to stay dead - there was an entire philosophical movement dedicated to preserving the monument of destruction as a warning for future generations to never repeat the mistakes of the Old World. And apparently some of the slums inhabitants themselves wanted the planet to remain lifeless, because they were happy to see all the corporations and their security keep to megacities and leave them alone. And finally the Great Divide wasn't even about the growing concerns about androids and humans with regards to job opportunities, since many wage slaves slaves had enough difficulty making ends meet already that androids taking away their unskilled labour they could provide were a final nail to the coffin from their perspective, a tale old as industrial revolution. It was about all of these at once. And more.

***Android dilemma***

Joe Smith was probably the most average Joe from entire Night City. An apartment on the lower floors of some rusty block of flats, one of many stacked on top of each other to house as many "Big Dreamers" arriving at the "City of Dreams" as possible while cutting on costs disregarding any BHP protocols, a rusty car holding together only thanks to elaborate circuit sphagetti dynamically redirecting power to the engine parts that "needed it the most at the time", a dead end crappy corporate job with abusive boss and a bionic leg burning through all his savings after acid leak from his neighbour above had burnt through the biological one. Being a vent cleaner was a rough profession, especially with all the toxins, gasses, acids and mutated cockroaches one might stumble upon there, but Joe had mustered to climb yet another level of frustration and dissatisfaction when after all he's been through it was just his irresponsible neighbour who got him injured and disabled. At least he had a bit of a breathing room from the debt collectors after that incident when the local gang demanding payments for protection attempted to collect their share from Joe in the exact same moment when security forces of Duranium Component Inc decided to do it too and both parties ended up so absorbed in killing each other that they forgot about the original goal of their visit.

Joe didn't expect his shoe would be heavy enough to punch a hole in the television after watching officials from Avalon Heights Inc presenting their improved version of vent crawlers. He didn't get the bionic leg to be able to continue working only to be replaced by some toaster with modular, adaptive body allowing it to fit in a vent of pretty much any size, length and shape.

At the same time, in another district, Anthony Gyrostar was finishing loading his shotgun to be ready to welcome some of those weirdos protesting for "equal rights for androids" if they dared to enter his lawn. A basic autonomous blue collar worker and some people were already advocating for "equal rights". The whole protest looked as if someone took a bunch sci-fi films about androids dating back to the Old World and decided to make a parody about them. "If at least their artifical intelligence would really be an intelligence and resembled human behaviour..." - he thought to himself. Little did he know about the leader of this protest, though. Sarah Blight was smarter than the seller from Avalon Heights Inc persuading her to purchase a faulty model of kitchen servant believed. Of course the android could not be returned or exchanged for a new model thanks to all these complicated laws protecting corporate interests she didn't even try to learn and understand. Of course. But if this android had same rights as a human... That could open some field for negotiation and maneouvres. Because equal rights might as well mean equal responsibilities... And equal responsibilities might as well mean her being able to accuse the robot of sabotaging required work and having it judged and sentenced to pay reparations or something... To be honest, she wasn't very convinced herself, because one had to be a special kind of stupid corporations wouldn't invent some new bullsmeg laws to protect themselves from scenarios like that, but why not take a shot? Besides, any excuse to go out and yell "corps bad" was good enough of an excuse.

***Pulse continuous 30 volt battery clip laser blaster***

Laser rifles in small arms version were a dream of many corporate military officials ever since their "bigger cousins" were successfully used in Battle of Three Bodies, and after years of intense works first prototypes were available at last. But the real drama was about to start when American Frontier Protectorate decided to release an experimental civilian version. It wasn't even being intended for self-defence that much as well-established conventional firearms did the job just fine, it was mostly for sport target shooting really. Being a civilian version, the design had been stripped of its lethal capacity as much as possible. Firstly, to reduce the effective range beam wavelength was shortened, but only to the lower end of visible red range - the idea was that every shot from this weapon was to be seen with naked eyes, so no going further down to infrared. It also brought an additional market value since every laser weapon enthusiast knew red lasers were the coolest. Second limitation came in the form of fire modes - no continuous fire available, just very short, split-second pulses with a battery allowing up to no more than 30 of them before the need to reload. And finally, the beam focusing system. It had been carefully engineered to offer good precision from up close, but have the beam rapidly lose focus beyond a few hundred meters, turning it more into a fancy pointer for playing with cats rather than a weapon.

The release was very successful among whoever could afford it, but obviously things just couldn't stay this way. A wave of protests hit the Protectorate's HQ and corporate government buildings, advocating for banning the highly lethal "pulse continuous 30 volt battery clip laser blaster". Company's official statement involved pointing out lack of knowledge about direct-energy weapons displayed by many involved in the argument, but this only fueled their anti-laser sentiment. On the other side of the barricade things didn't look any more reasonable, though. Reports about individuals stocking on laser batteries and preparing for "when the little grey men will turn totalitarian instead of just leaving circles on the crops" were circulating through all kinds of media.

According to some small independent journalists it seemed like for the most part people were either enjoying burning through cardboard at the range or just personally staying away from the weapons and the only reason laser violence was growing was because more and more criminals and terrorists gave up on firearms to upgrade to lasers and the radical individuals with absurd theories or lack of knowledge were few and far in between, but everyone knew that listening to anything but mainstream media itself was an absurd idea in the black and white world.

Additionally, the music band "Augment the People" commented on the issue with their latest song "Bionic Limbs":

All the other punks with their bionic limbs,
you better run, run faster,
outrun my blaster.
All the other punks with their bionic limbs,
you better run, run faster,
faster than my laser.



***Protect Mother Earth***

Yellowpeace activists were expressing more and more concerns about the progress on terraforming. They claimed that according to their research, many species on Earth were doomed to go extinct if the installations weren't to be switched off immediately. For example, radroaches would have trouble adjusting to the environments with high humidity and many of their major breeding grounds were located in the exact spots where oceans and lakes were supposed to exist after terraforming. Moreover, global cooling could lead to the collapse of cybernetic industry as humans wouldn't need so many enchancements to survive on the planet anymore, setting back the global economy and creating mass poverty. With lowered temperatures many diseases that did not exist in the post-nuclear wasteland could reemerge and sweep across the globe, killing millions of people, not to mention in some areas it would be too cold for humans to live comfortably. And the beautiful landscape of endless yellow deserts and green radioactive plains would be gone forever. Recent initiatives of the organization involved protecting the populations of glowing mushrooms in the caves located close to the terraforming stations and advocating for increased fossil fuel consumption since the switch to nuclear car reactors reduced the amount of gasses required to maintain optimal temperatures.

However, these movements usually faced strong opposition, especially from TerraNova Inc and affiliated companies. A large portion of the population believed that climate change wasn't real as terraforming progressed too slowly and some even claimed they'd prefer if the climate was more temper. "They just don't care about poor radroaches!" was one of the most common accusation threw at these skeptics. TerraNovaInc was accusing Yellowpeace to collaborate with Church of Singularity during recent terrorist attacks, but a solid proof was yet to be found.

***Matrix Resurrection***

Research team from the Solenoyd Inc R&D department had claimed they had eventually gotten through all the logs and figured out the segmentation fault bug from the Matrix that was running in the N.O.V.A. Bunker System back in the day. Obviously the patch was delivered way too late as there was hardly anything left to patch, but CEO representatives at Solenoyd Inc expressed their excitement and hopes for "rapidly restoring the Matrix". At their press conference they expressed that while they can't fix all the problems of this universe, they might be able to create a better one, a world without suffering, where inhabitants would be allowed to fulfill their dreams for real this time, compared to being fooled to come to Night City (or any other city for that matter) only to fight for survival below poverty line, with their dreams staying in the dream phase permanently.

Of course there were enough people to protest, rioting about all the problems of the real world left unattended while the corporation plans to offer nothing but a meaningless, overglorified escapism, devoid of anything that has real value in life. In response to this, Solenoyd Inc released an official statement describing that once they reboot the Matrix, they'll "make sure every potential user has to work for the access", to "prevent absuing the system and leaving the real issues unattended" since "Matrix is supposed to be just happiness enchancement tool", not some "way to avoid taking responsibilities".
Posted by: Stormtrooper
« on: March 27, 2022, 03:41:23 PM »

SYNTHETIC DAWN
Future Light Years Away

Space dust settled and a new century had begun. Comitee of humanity, hated by most and without any meaningful military asset, had to fully surrender without being able to negotiate anything. But N.O.V.A. management didn't have it much easier than previous government. Sure, most among the living only knew N.O.V.A. Bunker System as one of many megacities, with most of the structures residing underground, but apart from that nothing extraordinary, without realizing it had once been a shelter to all leftovers from mankind and life there was not pretty. But much of hate directed at the Comitee had its roots in its incompetence when it came to taming big corporations... And to say they weren't tamed was an euphemism as huge as Earth's wasteland, with private corporations building military space fleets fully capable of purging all three bodies from reemerging life clean and fighting for total dominance. CEOs of Exadev Space Industries of course were aware of this. They didn't want to give up on power, but they were walking on eggshells, with plenty of citizens simply confused about their stance. They defeated Comitee of Humanity, hated by many... But hated precisely for allowing corporations to expand uncontrolled, spreading like cancer through every structure holding the society together.

Another slippery matter had the monumentous proportions and scale of a terraforming installation grid. Terraforming Earth (and later Mars) was a nice way to boost popularity rankings, or rather it would be if not for the irrational, but frequent association of terraforming project with Comitee, hence with something to despise. Another can of worms was Church of Singularity, an ally that might as well stop being an ally given their disgust with everything biological. They seemed to thrive across dead badlands of radiation and metal.

As if the political situation wasn't tough enough, the ongoing investigation into sudden betrayal of Channel 9 News yelded very unpleasant results. According to the reports from PURGE hackers working day and night to track down all the nodes and scraps of information, it was all a part of an agreement between Thorium Conglomerate and Avalon Heights Inc. Their owners intended to steer the battle towards nuclear annihilation territory, ending the world yet another time and then appearing as "saviours" with the main selling products of each corporation, namely enchanced RadAway and experimental blue collar androids for simple manual labour in hazardous conditions. Their plan failed only thanks to deliberate detonation of first missile volley that, if not for the Comitee's attempt at damaging N.O.V.A. Strike Force, would've been remotely controlled to detonate at various spots on the Mars, Moon and Earth. And after that failure there was never another chance, as all the missiles had either been intercepted or impacted against N.O.V.A. ships.

During 162371234th emergency corporate meeting, a risky but possibly rewarding resolution had been accepted. Destroying Thorium Conglomerate and Avalon Heights Inc was out of question. They were too good at keeping low profile to be eradicated. Besides, public opinion wouldn't like another corporate war for sure. So the plan was to... let them have their way anyways. But obviously there was a catch, so that "their way" would be subtly nudged towards "N.O.V.A. way". "Unknown terrorists" were to attack some of the terraforming installations across both globes. These "unkown terrorists" would later be revealed to be most radicalized members of Church of Singularity. The methods involved detonating dirty bombs, so that androids and RadAway would be perfectly suited for helping clean the mess and rebuild. And with enough luck the corporation could even avoid losing an ally, because Church of Singularity wasn't powerful enough to discover the conspiracy, and even if it would, management didn't really care that much as with everything sitting on yet another powder keg despite one blowing up already, their anti-terraforming stance became more and more of an issue.

Later, with "terrorists" being dealt with and androids and RadAway deployed, Exadev would find itself in a position where it would exploit Thorium Conglomerate and Avalon Heights Inc on its own terms having them think they're succeeding at their own goals, progress with terraforming winning hearts and minds of many and possibly stabilizing its government as a result.

As first bombs tore through terraforming spires, a small research team calmly explored ruins found on Titan, free from any media attention which was all redirected towards safety concerns and making a scapegoat out of Church of Singularity. And luckily for Exadev ownership, the ruins held important piece of information that was missing from another puzzle - A.F.R.I.C.A. Project and the mysterious fleet supposedly travelling from Trappist-1 system. Their travel speed remained problematic to estimate for obvious reasons. Means of interstellar travel were a source fo heated debate among many scientists. A lot of them believed FTL propulsion system might be a plausible method, but there wasn't much proof it wasn't just antimatter engines reaching velocities very close to the speed of light, allowing semi-connected empire to grow in between nearest stars. But if that would be the case, then label "Intergalactic Federation" remained troublesome to explain. No way anyone could get to Andromeda, Magellanic Clouds or even SagDEG galaxy. Even Canis Major Dward Galaxy was too far. And that was just getting to anywhere that could be considered "another galaxy", let alone colonising some systems there and maintaining contact with the Milky Way part of the Federation. Not with the shortest distance being 25000 light years...

And leftovers from Titan colonies contained exactly what was needed to get the solid proof. Warp field assemblers, some derelict wrecks rusting away in remnants of hangars containing ring elements encapsulating them, entire facilities dedicated for creating wormhole linking systems... There wasn't really anything left that'd be of any real value to the scientist. But what had been laying there was just enough to prove that humanity indeed once roamed across the cosmos cheating the speed of light by significantly cutting on the paths and arriving at their destination way faster than the information about their departure... But as always, each discovery was bound to output more questions than answer. If Intergalactic Federation had the capability to go superluminal, then "rescue fleet" was already late, way too late for their travel means. With a respected space force, N.O.V.A. might be ready to maintain the power in the confrontation with them, but there might as well never be a confrontation as the fleet might as well not arrive at all. Did this mean Intergalactic Federation was no more, just like civilization in the Solar System? Had such a mighty work of human race really turned into radioactive ashes, no matter the celestial body? But then how was it possible for the message about incoming assistance be broadcasted? Could an automated system survive entire apocalypse in operational condition despite decades of no maintenance?

Whatever the case, Exadev Space Industries was determined to figure it out before anything extrasolar would threaten their position. CEOs hardly cared about the cost and means anymore - all they wanted was a spacecraft that would allow a preemptive strike on Trappist-1 system quicker than the information about its launch would take to reach and alarm whoever was messaging from there.