[GAME] Synthesise a Cybercity!

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by TGLS

Hm... Let's jiggle it around a little:

PARADIGM - Protocol Asserting the Rights of Artificial Digital Intelligence and Government Mandates

(Mentioning all the territory assigned is probably relevant).

PARADIGMS - Protocol Asserting the Rights of Artificial Digital Intelligence and Granting Machine Sovereignty?

[(E)]

Question 23 [CTY]*Describe some of the criminal groups that operate within the Sluse

Akin to skateboarders are "Highrisers" who rather than getting around the urban environment with wheels do it with pneumatic power assist suits.
Highrisers typically start off as free running/parkour enthusiasts, as they progress plastic armour is added for protection. It's a simple step to add pneumatic strength enhancement to small groups of muscles, namely those that help with climbing speed. Pumps in the heels and grip provide cheap energy.
More enthusiastic highrisers take an extra step and add an advanced wingsuit allowing very limited gliding.
The Highriser Gang known as "The Cutters" are in essence a second story crew, they dabble in other petty crime but are limited by the carrying capacity of their highriser suits.
The Cutters recently lost their leader and a brutal but not yet cut throat internal conflict is underway between his three lieutenants.

Random street weapon
Box Gun
2 inches square by 20 inches long, this gun was designed for use in drones and automated weapon systems and is a replaceable module. Obsolete by military standards of today, surplus and knockoffs are common. It takes little work to add a battery and a handle or stock to make this the modern equivalent of a zip gun.

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by TGLS

Question 49 [CORP][Name 5] What other business ventures does NeuroCorp have fingers in, besides the city and NeuroTech?

I'll do 3 for the price of 1 here.

Answer 49.1 [CORP][CTY] - NeuroCivil and Subsidiaries
49.1 NeuroCivil
Well, to cover the basics first, there's NeuroCivil, set up to handle large civil engineering projects around the globe, such as seastead cities, land-based arcologies, megabuildings, and so forth.

49.1.1 YOU-Topia PLC
This is the division of NeuroCivil that owns all the territory, plant and operations that go into making YOU-Topia viable. The leases are bought and sold with YOU-Topia PLC on the eminent ownership line of the contracts, but the City Council is in control of who can buy them and for how much. Various responsibilities of running the city may be parcelled off to YOU-Topia PLC subsidiaries, such as security, construction, civil works and taxation.

49.1.1.1 U-Sec Inc
This subsidiary of YOU-Topia PLC is the security branch for the city and NeuroCorp holdings. They were defanged and their duties restricted after the Crisis of '38, as they played a large part in causing it. Most of their original purview has devolved to C-Po, so now they're limited to guarding and protecting NeuroCorp buildings and interests, though they have gained some wiggle room in how they go about this since '91 when C-Po was gutted. They are also in charge of the maintenance of Coast Guard facilities, such as their rail cannon turrets and hypervelocity missile emplacements.

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Originally Posted by (E)

Random street weapon
Box Gun
2 inches square by 20 inches long, this gun was designed for use in drones and automated weapon systems and is a replaceable module. Obsolete by military standards of today, surplus and knockoffs are common. It takes little work to add a battery and a handle or stock to make this the modern equivalent of a zip gun.

There's probably a good number of these around as Ursula surplus.

[Daigoro]

Happy Cyberyear 2021, Cyberpreppies!

Originally Posted by Gold & Appel Inc

42.3 Name and describe one or more top current "Mem Stars" and the sort of experiences this new class of adrenaline-addicted, possibly masochistic celebrity is notorious for.

Answer 42.3a [PPL] - Rising Mem Star, Zane Retrojet
There's the newly signed highriser, Zane Retrojet. He's the ex-leader of The Cutters gang, though his media bio airbrushes this part of his history quite heavily. In between hitting exec apartments on the 63rd floor for original RepliSophont impressionist artworks and hijacking Recollect shipments from moving light cargohovers crossing the harbour flyover with his heist crew, he was making a name for himself on the side as a monetised-platform urban guerrilla stunt vlogger. He's known for such escapades as buzzing the gap of the NeuroCorp Plaza, not once but three times, making even bigger fools of the U-Sec Plaza Detail each time. Now he's decided to go legit and signed on with a memmedia repping agency. His exploits, which were originally only released in AV format, are now hitting the MyMemory top downloads lists across all market sectors, in a cunning move by one NeuroTech marketing VP that effectively put a leash on his embarrassing antics while netting a profit for the corp from them.

However, Zane has disappeared. He signed the agency contract with Nuevo Nostalgia Management, received the sign-on bonus, delivered a tranche of archival mems, but had not yet made a public appearance nor performed any of the stunts his management team had lined up for him. Of course, because of this, sales of his mems are rocketing.

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Question 62 [PPL] - Zane's Fate
What's happened to him? Has he been done in by his old crew, been taken out by a cranky exec, fled the city with his signing bonus, or is this the first stage in a planned career strategy?

Question 63 [PPL][CRIM][Name 3] - The Cutter Lieutenants
Who are Zane's three former lieutenants?
What is each of their opinions on Zane's departure?
What is each of their plans for the future of The Cutters?

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by TGLS

Question 48 [CTY/SET] What currencies do you need in the city? What other major currencies are there?

Answer 48 [CTY][SET]- Currencies
Residents of YOU-Topia have to cope with a confusing slew of currency options. No one's ever sure exactly how much they're paying for something, they just know they're getting screwed over at some point.

48.1- NeuroCash, aka Nukes
All NeuroCorp employees have their salaries paid into international bank accounts in the in-house digitally backed currency of NeuroCash. If they stay inside the NeuroCorp ecosystem- getting all their shopping, eating, entertainment and utilities from NeuroCorp branch outlets and retail subsidiaries- then all transactions are handled by 3-factor biometrics, with facial, voice and fingerprint recognition, so they don't need to carry any cash or cards. If they venture outside that ecosystem, then they can wave a NeuroCash RF card over the point-of-sale reader and it will automatically handle an exchange from local currency with a 5% fee.

1 NeuroCash Unit, i.e. 1 nuke, has an extremely high market value, so most daily transactions are in the realm of micronukes (0.000001 NCUs). This makes a lot of pricing difficult to grasp intuitively for the average consumer. Currently 1 NCU is trading at around 1,230,000 ARCs (the local legal tender).

48.2- Argalese Remand Currency, aka ARCs
This is the official legal tender of YOU-Topia, replacing the NCU after the post-'38 reforms. It is only used on YOU-Topia, but is set at a fixed exchange rate with the official Argalese currency of 1 ARC = 1 Argalo. Of course, this is the mid-market rate, and exchanging between the two currencies means paying fees and submitting to the marginal buy/sell rates. ARCs can be stored and traded using miniature digital vaults that look like key fobs, or as physical polymer banknotes. Officially, all salaries, taxes, wholesale and retail prices and such are to be expressed and handled in ARCs, though many businesses display the corresponding Nuke price in smaller print. Most daily transactions are on the order of 1-100 ARCs, with a typical takeaway lunch being about 10 ARCs.

48.3- YOU-Topia Social Welfare Coupons, aka U-Tokens, U-Tokes, Tokes
These are issued by City Council to those who manage to qualify for welfare, and are theoretically worth 1 ARC per U-Toke. They take the form of hard plastic code-chipped stored credit cards, with each card being charged up to a maximum of 1000 UT, supposedly being discarded or recycled when the stored credit reaches 0. Retail outlets are locked to only allow tokens to be spent on a list of restricted essential items, so many recipients seek out black market money changers who will trade the token cards for ARC cash (with a hefty commission). Many retailers also refuse to accept U-Tokens, either by outright saying so or by, for example, pretending their card reader is offline.

48.4- Digitally Backed Currencies, aka DiBs
There are a plethora of digital cryptocurrencies available, with between 16 and 20 of them being in vogue at any one time. Some of them will be crashing while others are booming and it takes a deep knowledge of e-finance to keep track of which is which. You might find that your regular drug or weapons dealer demands payment in WorldRand one week, but jumps to GEOgulden the next. Despite this volatility, they are still very popular as being untraceable and possibly yielding high returns to canny investors. NeuroCash is the only one that can regularly be exchanged for ARCs.

48.4.1 DiB- SiliCoin
There is, however, one DiB that is gaining in popularity, SiliCoin. Its origins and ultimate backing are still a subject of speculation, though most believe that it is run by some financial AI cabal in one of the Machine Nations. Wary, paranoid and security conscious investors are therefore avoiding this crypto, not wanting to risk having all their financial dealings being recorded and analysed. However, the currency is performing steadily at a 4% p.a. growth rate and is seemingly immune to the market shocks and fluctuations that plague every other crypto.

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Question 64 [CTY CCL][PPL]
Which cabinet member or members of City Council are most likely to resort to assassination, blackmail, hacking or other underhanded tricks to advance their official position or for personal gain?

[(E)]

Question 23 [CTY] Describe some of the criminal groups that operate within the Sluse

The Grey
One of the more sinister gangs in the Sluse are "The Grey" a group whose principles are an outgrowth of grey man survivalist theory, a reaction to surveillance and asexual fashion trends from around a decade back.
There is nothing that makes this group stand out, blending in to the population at large is what they do.
Encountered in the streets and walkways they will be anonymous figures clad in mundane clothing that hides their identities as much as possible, acid rain ponchos, smog masks, smart shades, hats and hoodies.
More senior members even begin to remove identifying parts of themselves, fingerprints are removed or replaced with varyprint cynthskin. Organic looking Cybernetic eyes or their bioware equivalents are common.
A good way to get a leg up in the gang is to be an unregistered birth (like most Phans.).
Extremely well informed about the surveillance in most areas The Grey are quite a violent gang, often using their hard worked for anonymity for muggings and protection work.

Question 65
How warm or cold is You-topia? The weather is generally boring due to the gyre, but is it a hot boring or a cold boring or something else?
Question 66
Does The Grey have a deeper agenda?

Random Person
Shakey Jake
This wheeler and Dealer has taken a problem and made it an asset. Formerly a Special Forces type with an ambiguous background Jake went through state of the art neural and nervous system upgrading and for a very short while Jake had the fastest human reactions on the planet. Two weeks after that though he began to exhibit side effects, basically he was wired so tight he shakes.
While his fine motor skills are lacking these days (there is a 50/50 chance he will miss a point blank shot at someone. His twitches and out of sync facial queues mean his body language and face is impossible to read.

[TGLS]

Question 51 [CTY] – Key factions in the Transitional Authority for YOU-Topia
Part 3/3
Popular Assemblies

“The popular assemblies of YOU-Topia are the instruments of the people of YOU-Topia to hold the Transitional Authority of YOU-Topia to account for its decisions. There shall be a Leaseholder’s Assembly to represent the interests of the T3L-holders. The undersigned Civil Defense Committees shall be allowed to continue operation provided they renounce violent direct action. The Special Representative shall form any other popular assemblies on an ‘as needed’ basis.”

This is all the charter had to say about the popular assemblies. Since the establishment of the charter, there have been only two popular assemblies established by the special representative; the Resident’s Advisory Board (as established by Ruan) and the Supreme Jury.

The Leaseholder’s Assembly is probably the most important of the Popular Assemblies. Each Top-Level Lot Leases (T3L) held grants one vote within the borough it’s located. There are seventy-one boroughs, each electing two assembly members, a primary and an alternate. With a small number of voters in each borough, councilmembers are usually held to account by voters. There are four broad factions on the Leaseholder’s Assembly:

• The Corporatists, which is mainly formed by Neurocorp and the other large corporations that lease lots in YOU-Topia. They favor low taxes and prefer security measures to social welfare programs.
• The High Residents, the Upper Class who lease the lots their houses sit on directly from YOU-Topia PLC. They share the preference for low taxes with the corporatists but are more inclined to support welfare to curb crime.
• The Landlords, who range from people who sublet rooms to operators of small-scale apartment complexes. Much of their clientele is poorer, and they occasionally support welfare measures as this can help their occupancy ratings.
• The Condominiums, the Upper Middle Class to Middle Class who jointly lease their lots through a homeowner’s association or similarly structured organization. They form the faction that empathizes most with the plight of the poor, as they tend to be most likely to find themselves walking along the edge.

Until the reforms of Representative Ruan, the chief power of the Leaseholder’s Assembly was the control of the samooblozhenie. Under the Transitional Authority for YOU-Topia’s charter, taxes were fixed at a percentage of the leasing fee collected by YOU-Topia plc. The leasing fee has been kept artificially low for a variety of factors, but the short of it is the there are hardly any tax revenues to pay any government programs. When this grew increasingly obvious about in 5262, Representative Baldini came up with a clever plan; taxes were fixed, but there was nothing stopping the Leaseholder’s Assembly from agreeing to pay a voluntary tax. So periodically the Leaseholder’s Assembly either agrees to pay or refuses to and messes up the budget. This usually meant the other factions had to cooperate with the Special Representative or the Corporatists got their way.

After Ruan agreed to stop vetoing the decisions of the Leaseholder’s Assembly (in order to secure funding to purchase multiple T3Ls), the Assembly has grown more dynamic. The Landlords try to push schemes to line their own pockets. The Corporatists try to curb investigations into police brutality. The High Residents get to act all NIMBY. The Condominiums try to enforce rent control. One can wonder whether they realized they gave up their only tool (now that the municipal government no longer relies on them for revenue) for a politician’s promise.

The Resident’s Advisory Board is basically two organizations merged in a weird way. It represents the interests of the tenants of the municipally owned T3Ls. Representative Ruan views it as necessary to ensure that tenants gain confidence in this scheme, so people will welcome the further purchase of T3Ls by the municipal government, as opposed to simply seeing them as a landlord that controls the police. This does make municipal owned areas some of the best served areas in the city. The other factor is it’s used to get a barometer of public opinion from the common man. It isn’t a perfect way to handle this, though the T3Ls do provide a diverse mix of residents.

The Supreme Jury is the other popular assembly. It is convened on the order of the Special Representative to fact-find and make decisions on crimes, legislation, treaties, etc. It can be convened by the Superintending Procurator to investigate the Special Representative. When convened, twenty-five residents selected at random and are sequestered to review evidence and deliberate, until a decision is made. The Supreme Jury is rarely invoked, including the decision of whether to sign the PARADIGM Treaty in ‘51, a review of the actions of Representative Di Pietro in ’74, the trial of the Pearl Gate CDC in ‘81, the Sluse Seven Trial in ’88, and after LD-8 Incident in ‘03. An extremely dubious jury was convened by Executive Procurator Papke in the wake of the Ursulas Scandal, though it was superseded by the PARADIGM Treaty Court.

Question 67 [CTY] - What are the "Civil Defense Committees"?

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by TGLS

Question 51.4 [CTY] - What are the "Civil Defense Committees"?

I don't think we've got any questions 51.2 or 51.3. Should we just call this Qn 67?

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by Daigoro

Question 60 [CTY][PPL][Name 5]
Who are five mob bosses, underworld figures or gang leaders in YOU-Topia?

Answer 60.3 [CRIME][PPL] - Empress Elsbeth von Mnemestic of the 4T Gang
In Tower C/04 of the Ecliprises Number 3164 project, the 4T Gang run one of the city's larger black market mem rings, as well as being in control of Block C and the neighbouring Blocks D and F. This is where you can go if you need protection from the neighbourhood hoodlums or some pressure put on a business rival when you don't have any cash for the job. Payments are instead accepted in mem donation. That protection? 10 minutes cortical scanning in the gumball couch. Pressure on your rival? 30 minutes, 90 minutes to request a hit on them.

The boss of this outfit is Empress Elsbeth von Mnemestic. She holds court in a penthouse suite that commands a fine view over the upper harbour. Dressed in layered alternating gowns of scintillating vidsilk and vantablack, her divan is surrounded by stacked banks of NeuroTech Luminous MX-1200s- each a blue powdered titanium finish case containing 1200 cc's of manufactured hippocampus and neocortex suspended in a nutrient moderated CSF gel matrix over a polymer microvascular network, lit from within by white LEDs. Thick fluoro-striped protective conduits housing metres of Flickerbolt spinal cord analogue connect subarrays of the MX-1200s to an intermedial stack of Overthought HN7 junction boxes, these being custom made, not NeuroTech, from which another bundle of Flickerbolt cabling links to a Liminal Input live tissue 10-socket panel, also custom, that replaces the bottom half of the Empress's posterior cranium. The signal path from each neuron of mem-archive to the base of her skull is thus 100% organic nerve tissue, completely analogue, giving maximum gain, resolution and vividity. The final link to the Empress's own sensory centres and biographical memory complex of her brain is handled by a top-of-the-line NeuroTech C-Series Immediacy Boosted Semaphore Implant MemInjector with optional Turbofed Limbic Underlay. By brushing and tapping a long-nailed finger on the left temple-mounted touchpad, she can navigate through the layers of mem cache to any of thousands of hours of "exquisite" personal human experience stored in the 320 box array in moments. Empress Elsbeth is thus either a mem connoisseur of the highest order or a mem addict with too much cash, depending on who you ask.

To become a member of 4T, recruits submit to a session in the Empress's personal Eldritch/Fire MemCapture couch, from which she'll lovingly and delicately remove cherished mems from their youth to store away for safe-keeping and to use as a future reward for loyal members. Other mems that she extracts from prospective business partners and customers, she either keeps for personal enjoyment, sifts through for blackmail material or other useful intel, or sends over to the gang's media handler who will package them up for the black market. And if she runs low on the freely incoming stream of mems, she has a den of mem-donors hyped up on a cocktail of street-brewed Reverie, Recollect and Remembrance to syphon fresh mems off, again for personal use or for the street market. Finally, she's always on the lookout to buy up any interesting mems, or mem-donors, that go up for sale in the city's underworld.

Being at the apex of a network of illegal mem-collecting agents, Mnemestic is often privy to the darkest secrets of the city's society, including those of high ranking NeuroCorp officers and City Council officials. She's been canny and circumspect in handling such blackmail data, usually keeping it to herself, but she has made some judicious moves that have earned some juicy pay packets for 4T, which she prudently puts toward physical and network security. So far her possession of such intelligence hasn't made her a target of the corp's or city's counterintel apparatus, and she'd prefer to keep that status quo.

Adventure Hooks
The PCs could be hired to retrieve a stolen mem that has found its way to Mnemestic's mem-bank. This could be an average citizen looking to get back a fond mem, or someone higher ranking with something they'd prefer to stay hidden, whether legit or illicit.

Otherwise, the PCs might want to sell off some of their adventures and the Empress could be bidding for those mems.

Or, someone they know has sold themselves into the Empress's mem-donor den to pay off debts, and the party are looking to break them out.

Finally, a personally or strategically important mem is floating around for sale on street corners. The PCs must work their way up the food chain to find the source of the mem and discover what's happened to the donor.

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Question 68 [HIST]
What is the story surrounding each of these events? Are there any continuing ramifications from them today?
a) The actions of Representative Di Pietro in ’74
b) The Pearl Gate CDC in ‘81
c) The Sluse Seven Trial in ’88
d) LD-8 Incident in ‘03

Question 69 [CORP][TECH][Name 5]
What other entries are there in NeuroTech's product lineup?

[TGLS]

Question 41 [AI] - Organic AI
41.1 What are the limits of organic AI?

Answer 41.1 - The Limitations of Artificial Organic Intelligence (AOI)
The first thing to talk about when talking about AOI the limitations of AOI is the definition. Often, people use AOI as a synonym for ABI (Artificial Biological Intelligence), though this isn't entirely accurate as some ADIs are run on biological platforms. The generally agreed upon definition is centered on three points:
-> The components of the "brain" are generalized and apart from initial "programming", there's no function that isn't particular to one component or another. This is as opposed to an ADI, which runs on otherwise off-the-shelf computers.
-> Disassembly of a program running on a "brain" is non-trivial to impossible. The object code of an ADI can trivially be disassembled, though understanding it is nigh impossible and the quantum data (vital to function of all ABACUS passing units) cannot be read without changing its state.
-> Changing the components connected to the "brain" requires a complex and lengthy training process, regardless of whether it was a simple removal, addition, etc. ADIs spend maybe a minute loading drivers before they can use a new component (though they still need to train to use the component effectively).

Some people object to this definition. Some object to the fact it leaves open the possibility of a non-biological organic AI (though this hasn't happened yet). Advancing technology is making the disassembly criterion less valid, though the training process remains difficult to remove. There's one fairly controversial objection that will be left for later.

41.2 Can organic AI only work in a living body or is there a brain-in-a-box modality?

Answer 41.2 - Brains in Boxes
There are very few limitations to how AOI can be built. Usually they are built in or with a particular shell in mind. In the early days (and even today to some extent), NeuroCorp really pressed their NeuroFrame line of largely biological and humanoid shells. This was in part because they could just reuse autonomic programming.

These days, with over a century of robotics and a ban on computer AI, AOI have many, many shells available to them, from Quadcopters to Cybertanks to Spiderbots. Some AOI, especially those targeted towards the research AI market, are literally brains in boxes (from the NTR-Musa for hobbyists all the way up to the NTR-3300X, a twenty rack monstrosity. There's further, but they don't have model names.)

Right; the controversial objection. Three years ago, some engineer at NeuroTech Laboratories decided to deliberately train an NT-600 to interface with the best ADIs (post-ban, obviously). The ADIs would handle interface with the shells while the AOI would handle all the higher functions. These were sold as the NT-680DX. NeuroTech would sell specially kitted out shells, and there would be no training time required.

Three months ago, some goon decided to hook an NT-680DX box up to an ABACUS testing machine, and it passed. Apparently, NeuroTech knows this, and they're just panicking. Worst part is, theoretically, and AOI could eventually interface well enough with an ADI to pass the ABACUS test.