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Byzantine Protocol: An Eclipse Phase N-log

017: LLA Identity Fraud Task Group 5

"No One Expects The Lunar Clinkquisition!" - common Mercurial meme.

In most Lunar habitats, AGI is property. In all LLA habitats, members are bound to respect the laws of all other members, including (especially) property rights. In addition, existing as a 'free' AGI means, inevitably, committing at least one form of identity fraud in order to live as citizen, own property, sign legal documents, or otherwise enjoy the rights granted (in theory) to all members of a society.

Yet while anti-AGI research laws are firmly enshrined in the LLA in the wake of the Fall, and vigorously enforced by the so-called "Turing Police", agreement on what to actually do about existing AGI is more scarce. Not all habitats hold AGI to be non-persons, or are consistent in the what that non-personhood means. Above and beyond the legal mess this creates, creation of dedicated anti-AGI task forces is politically radioactive, demanding intrusion of a strained political system on sensitive moral grounds.

This means that the front line of Lunar law enforcement on AGI rights is, frequently, an overworked branch of the Identity Fraud Task Group. But if consensus on enforcing anti-AGI laws is hard to come by, so too is any concerted action to reign in a branch of the law enforcement that sees itself as protecting good Lunar citizens from the prospect of AGI amongst us. This is where the Identity Fraud Task Group 5 finds itself.

TG5 is led by Major Alan Burnside, a hard-nosed veteran of the British Campaign of the Fall, a controversial figure whose public statements ride the line on what is acceptable for a serving official to say, as he denounces the Steel Liberators and Mercurials. Within the LLA's law enforcement bureaucracy, he and like-minded supporters, supported by influential patrons such as media mogul Joshua Yi, have assembled a clique empowered tackle the 'problem' of AGI rights, with the grudging but full acceptance of the LLA's legal framework.

The department's primary remit is cases of identity fraud, and identity fraud rings. Local habitat cops can handle small scale fraud; TG5, like its siblings, targets bigger fish. Where they differ is that traditional targets for investigation include Nine Lives, ID Crew, Triad, LLACO outfits, and the Night Cartel - but TG5 has other priorities. It sets its sights on AGI-rights activist organizations, and synthmorph rights organizations where those have any connection to the former. Its active personnel include around forty active special agents at any given time, and another two dozen special investigators rounding out the team. Perhaps more formidable, though, is the large support staff of researchers, analysts, legal experts and infospec specialists. Perhaps ironically, due to the focused nature of the department, they rely very heavily on specialized AI to do much of the mundane work that keeps a department running.

Within their broad remit, TG5's activities targeting of AGI activists have been done quietly where possible, and engineered to be sympathetic where not. Its most publicly effective measures have been seizing records from AGI activists, and using them to track down finding 'rogue AI units' for decommissioning. Where that isn't possible, either because the activists have no contact with illegal AGI, or have solid opsec, they have run defacto 'dirty' political campaigns against them, using police powers, spurious legal action, and close coordination with the media to discredit AGI activist groups. They have similarly targeted anti-synthmorph groups, less as a goal of itself (though they are, politically, against synthmorph activism) and more as a strategy to isolate AGI and mercurial activists from the (much more broadly popular) synthmorph activists. More rarely, they will target criminal networks that sell identities to AGI, and are willing to go in hard and heavy to target such groups, emphasizing putting pain on the enterprise over solid arrests. The message is clear - have anything to do with giving an artificial intelligence a new life, and they will come down hard and fast. Turn in suspected AGI, and any other criminal things you might be doing, short of actual forknapping, can be quietly forgotten.

For the most part, this campaign leaves individual AGI 'hiders' alone, so long as they did not receive their new identities from an AGI-focused organization, or attempt to organize politically. They will raid an individual, from time to time, but mostly in the service of larger objectives (like finding out who supplied them with the identity). While the Task Group is independent, they work out of the same office building (and digital networks) on Remembrance as many of the other identity theft divisions, and will happily trade favors or cases to get things more matching their interests.

The best news, perhaps, for those advocating for AGI rights is this: TG5 hasn't won, and doesn't think they're winning. More and more they see themselves as being surrounded by 'botlovers' (as opposed to 'clanklovers'). Their media victories seem to have pushed public opinion their way to a degree, but LLA law enforcement is increasingly tired of their self-aggrandizement. The Turing Police, which often relies on cooperation and tips from AGI researchers or people in the AGI community to rein in real, dangerous research has publicly denounced TG5's antics.

The fight for the future of AGI in the inner system is far from over.

Plot Hooks
  • TG5 has made a major coup; arrest of Mercurial activists supposedly linked to Chmod 700. Worse, they may have access to all of their data. Can the PCs get the data out of TG5's HQ, and get a warning out to dozens of AGI 'hiders' - before it's too late?
  • Even a stopped clock is right once in a while, and TG5's special agents have found a genuine singularity seeker cult. The only problem is, they're in over their heads, and their political considerations are getting in the way of the PC's Firewall operation to dismantle the cult.
  • Joshua Yi's daughter is fast becoming a prominent mercurial activist. The PCs get some inside information that not only is she a mercurial activist - she's an AGI. What game is Yi playing, then?
 
018: Stack Encryption

The most important information a transhuman possesses is in their brain, and in their stack. Everything else - their mesh inserts, their accounts, their public records and social networking sites - can be burnt, if necessary. Scrubbed from the net or rendered irrelevant. The threat of forknapping, on the other hand, denies both the possibility of recovery, and the possibility of safety through compartmentalization. Without extensive, and often experimental, psychosurgical modification, it is impossible to keep an ego from knowing a great deal of potentially relevant information when it resleeves in an insecure environment, or from taking that information everywhere they go to potentially be attacked. Worse, the ego itself may be an important target, one that can be leveraged - or even worse, modified to act as a sleeper agent or unwitting accomplice. And as a final horror, the modern transhuman conception of the self dictates that the captive ego itself is the person who was forknapped, creating a potential hellish existence that one can be confined to - torture boxes, slavery of various types, and more.

It is thus absolutely vital that one's ego never be copied. Even skimming a random ego is unacceptable, so major commercial and autonomist services for egocasting undergo regular audit and use quantum encryption to guarantee that egos are not copied in transit. Depending on the organization, many hypercorps (and almost all autonomist egocasting outfits) offer strong guarantees that even local habitat legal authorities cannot legally compel them to turn over an individual's ego; where possible they build this directly into their machinery so no record of an ego is ever stored, and decryption occurs as close to the point of resleeving as possible. Getting around this requires subverting the resleeving facility, modifying the equipment, and bypassing both physical and electronic anti-tampering systems, with up-to-date AI and Firewalls.

Where habitat laws are so stringent that egos must be turned over, or where leaving metadata of ones trip is undesirable, darkcast networks can be used. In order to assure no copying of ones ego takes place, it is usually necessary to have an independent witness who verifies the setup, and does not provide a decryption key until the transmission is received and the hardware verified.

If interception in transit is prevented, the other way to illicitly acquire an ego is through violence. The taking of an ego through violence - whether by cold operators acquiring a target, psychopathic scum, or inhuman machine intelligences - is the ultimate nightmare, one made easier by the existence of cortical stacks. No need to preserve messy brain matter, or bring along an ego bridge; simply pop the stack and read the data.

Modern cortical stacks include a number of countermeasures for this. The first is that attempts to physically crack open the cortical stack, or drill into it using molecular tools (such as the covert operations tool) will cause the stack to wipe its memory when breached. The second is that the data in the cortical stack is stored in an encrypted format, and can only be decrypted by the backup service. The third is that, to even acquire the data, the interface device must pass a challenge-response test, and any attempt to brute force the code will result in deletion of the stored ego. The codes to the latter two are set by the resleeving service, when the ego bridge is first used, and cannot be altered without the cortical stack wiping its current memory.

Even without the stack, the brain can simply be uploaded by force. Countermeasures to prevent this are less common than the ubiquitous stack defenses, but are reasonably common - a great many transhumans were forcibly uploaded by the TITANs, and preventative measures are thus considered more socially acceptable than they might have pre-Fall, when such things were more often seen as for fringe paranoids or professional spooks. The most obvious and drastic is the use of cranial microexplosives, thin threads of superthermite laced throughout the morph's brain. When severe trauma shuts down the morph's body - such as put the morph into medical stasis, or when voluntarily activated - the detonator triggers, triggering a micro explosion that will shatter the skull (but not exploding the morph's head) in a number of places and render the morph's brain - cyber or otherwise - utterly useless for uploading. Critics of this approach point to the possibility of abuse, such as infiltrating nanites or even software to trigger the explosives prematurely, though most designers go through great lengths to prevent such a thing. Less drastic measures include cranial bugzappers designed to fry nanites infiltrating the wetware, preventing them from reading an ego from a biological brain. Such systems often include emergency methods to contact the authorities if unauthorized access is detected, including antimatter comms.

New Gear (Personal Augmentations)
Cranial Explosives: A thin thread of microexposives is woven into the brain, and will detonate if unauthorized uploads are detected or other conditions (set at resleeving) are met, such as morph medical incapacitation. For security reasons, this is usually lacks any form of external communication, even with the cranial computer. [Low].

Cranial Bugzappers: The interior of the skull is lined with micro-emp devices that prevent uploads. Some versions can be activated or deactivated at will via mesh inserts, while others require some kind of verification from a verified ego bridge before turning off. Extremely high end versions include an implanted communicator that will signal local authorities or private security, using either quantum communication or minute amounts of antimatter for neutrino comms [Low / High for implanted comms].

New Gear (Armor)
Microexplosive Headband: A gear version of the microexposive augmention, using shaped charges to destroy the brain if compromised. Takes the form of an adheasive headband. Considerably less popular than the cranial explosive, but often easier to acquire than a healing vat access for an unlicensed morph. [Low].

New Service:
Ego Second: A service that, for a fee, verifies that an upload from a less-legitimate source is intact and no unauthorized copy of the ego is attempted. The cost is high due to both technical skill to verify the transmission, and finding someone of sufficient integrity and record that they can be trusted. This service is frequently purchased with rep rather than credits. [High].
 
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019: Exhuman Fringes

Most of the solar system likes to think of exhumans as, primarily, psychopathic anti-social survivalists with a penchant for extreme psychological and physiological mods - best represented by monsters like Silent Mercy, or legions of predator exhumans stalking the night like a creature from a horror XP, or giant vat-brained masterminds secretly scheming to ineffable ends.

The reality is frequently more prosaic. While exhumanism is defined as a kind of social darwinism by much of the solar system, the majority of 'exhumans' do not ascribe to this or any other 'hardcore' philosophy; instead it could be described as a dozen or more fringe movements (often at the edges of other factions) connected by two common threads; an explicit rejection of value of 'humanity' as an ideal, and a common political and economic cause generated by their isolation from the mainstream of transhuman society.

The first is both a simple rejection, and something more. At first glance they would appear ideologically aligned with Mercurial movements, which is sometimes described as rejecting the 'human' in transhuman. In practice, the groups are often radically at odds. Exhumans see the rejection of 'humanity' in more starkly utilitarian terms, and look to explore a broader space of possible minds and beings, where Mercurials, in general, look for an authenticity or center around a different mind space, whether AGI or uplift, and to protect the rights of different members of the transhuman family as transhumans. Exhumans, where politically active, generally seek to abolish restrictions on biotech and cognotech rather than extend restrictions to protect more entities.

The second is a reality of post-Fall politics. Exhuman movements and organizations exist on the fringes of society. While a few - admittedly extremely dangerous - exhumans are capable of operating autonomously, and welcome the identification as exhuman even in the heart of transhuman society, most avoid calling attention to their beliefs and avoid being openly exhuman at all costs. Exhumans, like singularity seekers, are widely hated and many of the protections that apply to regular transhumans are not considered to apply to exhumans, or are considered to justify the use of emergency power to 'deal with' the problem. The nature of this response means that, for those who hold exhuman-leaning beliefs or interests, mutual support is necessary. Those who live in jurisdictions less subject to sanction often support their farther flung members. Tying it all together, custom social networking software and rep scores help exhuman organizations verify who can be trusted to keep the practices of the community discreet.

Reactions of the exhuman 'community' to those that most exemplify it in the minds of the public are varied. Many are repulsed, and want nothing to do with the psychopaths and monsters, or reject them out of fear (of the exhuman extremists themselves, or the potential backlash). Others recognize that they are already damned by association, and might as well learn from and trade with the worst of the worst. And some have internalized some or all of the extremist exhuman mindset. The most famous and dangerous exhumans generally lack significant reputation scores in this regard, and need to get by using groupies or sympathizers to connect with the wider network. The famous killer Silent Mercy is an exception in this regard.

A small sampling of the individuals, organizations, and places of the exhuman fringe.

Marsform is a clique of biotechnicians and cyberneticists that believe that the terraforming of Mars is fundamentally pointless and wasteful, and that humans should instead endeavour to adapt their bodies to Mars and a new Martian society. By itself, this isn't an extreme belief, but their specific ideas of what humans 'should' become is closer to the predator-exhuman ideal than most are comfortable with, and they are willing to engage in experimental psychosurgery to make volunteers "fit" in their morphs. They operate a pair of morph production and research labs in minor settlements of Sidereal and Nova Delphi in the Martian hinterlands.

Fulfillment Sanction is an 'applied hedonics' group, whose chief complaint with transhumanity is that it doesn't possess the capacity to be happy. This is an inevitable problem, in their view; immortal transhumans, despite having boundless capability and resources compared to their predecessors of centuries past, are still not very happy, on net, and even radical improvement have tended to just 'reset' our baseline. Getting humans to stay happy is difficult, and getting humans who want to be and stay happy even harder. Their solution is various mixes of task hedonism and 'ladder' programs designed to mold humans - step by step - into their ideal, psychologically correct person. This group is based on Venus, and is highly mobile; they are believed to have an airship, or a deal with a criminal group that does.

Frankie Boanuk is well regarded on B-net, at least by their handle of "Syscatraz", as an entertaining personality and advocate for different sorts of 'fringe' exhumanism. Syscatraz does not acknowledge a gender, but is known to be a Brinker, on a relatively isolated habitat in the outer system (actually, it's a spacecraft on a Neptune-bound trajectory), and collates and comments on exhuman events. Vir interest has been in multiple-personality modules, leading to some speculation that Syscatraz's off the wall mood-shifts and entertaining self-arguments are really different personality modules, something Syscatraz has never fully denied.

Extremis is an asteroid habitat in a close solar orbit that gives it a surface temperature close to Mercury, with both surface installations underground and in orbit. Far away from most established solar habs, it was a mining venture taken over by indentured workers after the fall, who then sold the venture to an exhuman forking enthusiast with the alias 'Twenty More'. Approximately half of the habitat's population is part of Twenty More, but the other half are B-net members using extremis as a waystation and testing point.

New Social Network:

B-net/b-rep: Short for 'Beyond Network'. Used to contact exhumans, and get exhumans to trust you. As a secret social network, embedded in other networks and dependent on verification through trusted parties, it is not always easy to determine if someone is actually a member or not. Frequently, contact is done by alias or false 'civilian' identity. The associated skill is Networking: Exhumans.
 
Because I still write stuff about Eclipse Phase from time to time, and this is as good a place to put them as any.

020: Incarnate Steel

Lunar attitudes toward synthetic shells are infamous. Disdain, derision, fear, and paranoia directed at the 'clanking masses' suffuse the population of middle and upper-class Lunar citizens. At the same time, Luna's harsh environment and limited resources make providing biomorphs and pressurized living space for its entire population difficult; for all the fear, the synthetic masses are an aspect of Lunar life that that grows by the day, and with them the social pressures on biological and synthetic sides of the divide. And into this mix steps the fastest-growing religious group among the Lunar synths - Incarnate Steel.

Incarnate Steel is a branch of Technocreationism; like other Technocreationists, they believe that the Earth's destruction was a divine sign, showing transhumanity the error of its ways; that in order to prosper transhumanity must rededicate itself to technological advancement and through social engineering achieve harmonious coexistence with the diverse aspects of transhumanity. Incarnate Steel in particular emphasizes the importance of diverse forms, including the synthetic, and the need for the adoption of technological solutions for immediate problems, and has largely caught fire among synthetic Lunar laborers on the backs of those stances.

The sect began the old-Nectar Nakshi Mandir, with roots dating as far back as 1.1 AF with the work of local refugee aid groups. Tushar Prateek, a New Mumbai-native refugee partnered with the overwhelmed administrators of refugee policy to provide religious services. Building on mesh-based mystics such as 811 Flowers and Substrate River who'd gained immense (if fleeting) popularity in the post-Fall and mindfulness exercises centered around synthetic shells, Prateek's teaching grew in popularity; as they did his followers pioneered techniques to help recently synth-sleeved refugees feel comfortable in their new bodies and pressured refugee aid groups to bend or even break Lunar prohibitions fabrication and robotics technologies to improve the community.

It hasn't hurt their cause, that many older Hindu sects that have established themselves on Luna do not believe that egos instantiated in cyberbrains have atman, and that among those that choose to stay on Luna rather than move on to Venus or Mars have some sympathy for Earth and want very badly to believe that its destruction was for some particular reason rather than the hubris of American weapons designers. With aggressive recruitment tactics, and tangible benefits - protection, technological assistance, psychological help adapting to a synthetic shell - Incarnate Steel has become a popular cause and quiet political powerhouse in the tunnels of major Lunar habitats.

The intersection of Incarnate Steel with the larger synthetic pride cause is an uneasy one. The practical goals of Incarnate Steel and groups like the Steel Liberators are aligned, but many Steel Liberators have more narrow final aspirations than technological enlightenment that Incarnate Steel envisions for Luna, and ultimately transhumanity. More directly, if the average middle-class Lunar feels uneasy about the Steel Liberators, they are terrified of Incarnate Steel. Conservative media feeds and bloggers frequently share images of Incarnate Mandirs full of synths praying, or draw elaborate conspiracy narratives linking Incarnate Steel to consortium interests or suspected singularity seekers. In some cases this has been used by leaders of both movements tactically in a sort of "good cop / bad cop" routine, but the temptation for more 'respectable' synth rights advocates to throw Incarnate Steel under the bus for a shot at mainstream influence remains a sticking point.

With the old religions dying, scattered, or captured by powerful state actors, it is new movements like Incarnate Steel which see themselves as the inheritors of humanity's spiritual tradition, reincarnated into this new age. It remains to be seen if they will plot a truly new course, fall into the mistakes of the old, or simply be swept away like so many others.

Plot Hooks:
  • Incarnate Steel has begun making forays into more biochauvanist parts of Luna, seeking to find believers among Luna's upper and middle classes, and too that end has constructed a new Mandir in New Nectar. It has, predictably, become a target for terrorism and hate crimes, and the police are distinctly disinterested in helping. It's up to the PCs to provide security and stop a wave of bombings before it forces the Mandir out.
  • The group has reached out to the Neo-synergists on Venus, as an extension of their beliefs on group enlightenment. Signs show that they've begun rolling out trial runs of hypermesh networking with increasingly large groups. Worse, this is exactly the kind of thing the LLA is looking for to justify a crackdown. Can a group of sentinels stop them without turning Luna's tunnels into a war zone? Should they?
  • A small group of AGI wants to join Incarnate Steel, one of the few religious groups that will openly welcome AGI. A friend in the group reaches out to PCs to verify that these AGI are who they say they are, and help find a way to give them identities and a new life on Luna.
 
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