[GAME] Synthesise a Cybercity!

[TGLS]

Originally Posted by Daigoro

Question 90 [NTCH][Name 5] Name and describe five popular Organic AI models.

Answer 90.1 Models
From Artificial Models Quarterly, a publication that focuses exclusively on the most impractical AOIs:

Best New Model: Boutique manufacturer Calypso Shelltech has launched another smash hit. Type-modelled by Cynthia ver II (2 months/1 year), the CS-Cutie series brings an easily flustered charm and a more natural look to the budget market. Right now, the only mass produced model number is the CSC-100. The designers may have overcompensated slightly when coming up with a cheap way to keeping them from becoming boring; CSCs tend to absorb pop culture like a sponge and often need to be told to shut up. 90,000 ARC, 2,700/month with a down payment of 25,000 ARC.
Stats:
Attractive [4]
Pitiable [5]
Pop Culture Maven [5]
Classic Features (Boy/Girl Next Door) [1]
Will - 1 [-5]
Chatterbox [-1]
Poor Confidence [-1]
Slight Lisp [-1]

Best Athletic Model: An old standby from NeuroTech, the NT-Olympian series remains the best Athletic Model. The Olympian remains type-modelled by Rhea ver XII (15 months/32 years). While there is some argument on which particular model number is the best, but we feel that the NT-4330 provides the best mix of athletics, looks and price. The NT-Olympian-4330 boasts an impressive physical baseline, though usually they downplay the higher eating costs. The NT-Olympian-4330 has a strong will relative to other AOIs, though some feel it might go too far. 193,750 ARC, 2,890/month with a down payment of 25,000 ARC.
Stats:
ST + 2 [20]
DX + 1 [20]
HT + 1 [10]
Will + 2 [10]
Attractive [4]
Natural Athlete 1 [10]
Classic Features (Athlete) [1]
Increased Consumption 1 [-10]
Overconfidence (12 or Less) [-5]
Persistent [-1]
Enjoys Taunting in Sport Matches [-1]

Best Chimeric Model: Despite being the newest category, Best Chimeric Model seems to be the most competitive. While the last year had many interesting new developments, we have to award it to Tendriloid series from Primedia Labs. The series has made great strides over the past year, especially now that the brain has been modified to be better equipped to handle all of the tentacles. The previous type-model has recently been replaced by Hariyō Pāla ver I (7 months). Tendriloids are extremely well coordinated and capable at multitasking. From a physical point of view, they are surprisingly strong, and aren't terribly disadvantaged when using their tentacle legs as arms. Their higher than average IQ seems to feed their curiosity. 801,000 ARC, 27,800/Month with a down payment of 150,000 ARC.
Stats:
ST + 5 [50]
DX + 1 [20]
IQ + 1 [20]
HT + 2 [20]
Ambidextrous [5]
Beautiful/Handsome [12]
Classic Features (Tentacled Legs) [1]
Constriction Attack [15]
Double Jointed [15]
Extra Arms 3 (Extra Flexible) [45]
Extra Arms 1 (Extra Flexible, Foot Manipulators) [12]
Extra Maneuver 3 (Compartmentalized Mind (No Mental Separation) [40] + Extra Attack (AA) [5]) [135]
Curious (12 or Less) [-5]

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by Daigoro

Question 34b+ [SET] What are the most recent innovations in aerospace?

Answer 34c [SET] - Laeker-Rad Coleopter Annular Wing Ramjet Interceptor
The Laeker-Rad Interceptor was originally produced by Nordhuss Aerospace, based on a coleopter ramjet design that had been tried unsuccessfully and discarded in early-era VTOL, but whose shortcomings can be dealt with by modern engineering. These are tail-sitting jets that have a barrel shaped wing-body, instead of planar wings, surrounding the central turbojet engine and cockpit body. From vertical take-off and on passing stall speed, they can transfer to horizontal flight before accelerating up to ramjet speed. They have the advantages of high manoeuvrability at high speed, as they can instantly bank in any direction without having to rotate, operational flexibility, needing no runways, and Mach 6 capability.

When Nordhuss was dissolved in 91, the Laeker-Rad program was bought up by the GD-Kaung-ARM Consortium, who overhauled the 23 year old airframe by upgrading the electronic warfare suite, swapping in the more responsive laser-heated Kaung Starflame jet engines, and experimenting with organic AI co-pilots.
---

Question 96 [CORP][Name X] - The Securities
How many Securities are there?
Global Defense (from the GD-Kaung-ARM Consortium) and NeuroCorp are two, who are the others?

Question 97 [CORP] - The Commercial Marketplace
97.1 What level of non-NeuroCorp corporate presence is there in YOU-Topia? Are they only minor companies or do other major megacorps have presence there? How much are they tolerated?

97.2 [Name 5 each] What are the brands of everyone's guns, vehicles and clothes?
97.2.1 Weapons brands
97.2.2 Vehicle makes or models
97.2.3 Clothing and fashion brands
97.2.4+ Other brand categories as needed

97.3 [Name 5] What are the supermarket chains, convenience stores, shoe shops, food dispensaries, drug stores and fast food joints?

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Originally Posted by TGLS

Just expanding on this a little:
-> The official rate is still supposed to be 1 Toke = 1 ARC
-> The 10:1 conversion rate was meant to be a compromise between like "Oh look! There's 25% admin fee on U-Token purchases.", "You want to pay with Tokes? OK, I'll charge you for five loaves of bread so I can mark a bunch of old bread I was going to throw out as sold. Want the moldy bread anyway?", and "Wow, you mugged a busload of welfare recipients. I'll give you 1000 ARC for the bag of tokens."

Ok, that makes sense. But even though we're going for post-capitalistic hellhole that seems a bit bleak. However, I have little idea how much one would expect to get for their welfare fraud. My morning's research suggested disreputable shopkeepers split 50-50 for a cash out off a benefits card, taking $20 for themselves while giving the card owner $20 and claiming $40 from the welfare scheme.

[Daigoro]

One extra for...

Question 9 [CTY][Name 5] Name and describe five popular hangouts.

Answer 9.6- Hangouts: The Casino VIP Bar
The casino VIP bar is one of the most exclusive establishments on the N; so exclusive that it doesn't have a name, so exclusive that you're only allowed in by member's introduction.

The space is several storeys high and hemispherical, one glassed side overlooking the marinas of the Upper Harbour, the other side comprising of a stunning quarter-dome abyssal-zone aquarium, teeming with luminous fish and marine life, with 350 bars of pressure held behind a metre-thick wall of diamondoid glass.

Guest tables and lounges sit on platforms projecting from either wall at irregular intervals, each equipped with sound and light quenching privacy fog controlled by a table-top dial. Retracting spiral staircases and gangways of polished black chrome allow access to the elevated guest tables. A whale carcass feeding a colony of bone-eating worms and molluscs backdrops the 30 metre long granite bar, where synthetic servers mix cocktails from bottles of 1000-ARC whisky and chill rehoboams of champagne.

Entertainment for the clientele is provided from a raised, round centre stage, alternating between torch singers singing mid-century classics and death bouts between 2 metre tall sumosynths from the casino's stable, the loser's death-mem made available for guests after each torikumi.

[TGLS]

Originally Posted by Daigoro

Question 92 [PPL]
What happened to Izchak Vandale ver IV in 5260? Is there still an instantiation of him out there?

Answer 92: A Brief Bio of Izchak Vandale
Vandale ver I was killed in the same terror attack that claimed Musa ver I and the rest of NeuroCorp's directors. After that, Vandale left the day-to-day management of NeuroCorp to Musa to work on various flights of fancy under Polyinsight. After the introduction of AutoSophonts, Vandale began quietly divesting himself of his stock in NeuroCorp; when this was leaked NeuroCorp's problems only compounded.

To be fair, Vandale wasn't that unconfident in NeuroCorp; he had decided to get involved in space development and needed seed capital. Polyinsight Astrosystems was a major contractor on the Thalethrāy mission, and founded the Themis colony. The decision to not to use ACI in the colony was primarily an effort to bury the hatchet with Musa. Of course, this series of good moves made Vandale look like a wizard.

Izchak Vandale was quietly removed from Century's top 300 in 5260. Literally no one had reported hearing from him in over three years, and he had delegated all operations at Polyinsight to a team of AOIs. Whether he is dead is questionable. Unlike many other MuLTIs, Vandale had little attachment to his original body and changed shells with each reversioning, sometimes even mid-version. Vandale was also a vocal proponent for deliberately instantiating several copies of a person at once, an illegal practice.

There are many theories relating to what has happened to Izchak Vandale, ranging from plausible to ridiculous. One of the most likely is that the team of "AOIs" aren't actually AOIs but several instances of himself. Another is he's somewhere in deep space, either deep within in an asteroid concerned with riding out some apocalypse or possibly on a STL starship. More unlikely theories include:
-> He was kidnapped and killed by some enemy
-> The delegated AOIs are holding him captive somewhere
-> He deliberately vanished and is living off his investments
-> He is posing as a member of the lower class to get a feel of the man on the street
-> Polyinsight's small line of AOIs are all based on Vandale
-> There was a mistake while inserting Vandale into a new shell and he has literally been misplaced.
-> He joined a secret cabal behind conspiracy du jour.

[Daigoro]

Question 22 [CTY] Name and describe 10 different districts or locales in the city.

Answer 22 - Makers Market (11/10)
Makers Market covers a six-block stretch of canal-side real estate just below the Knee, in the cheaper, seedier commercial district that services the industrial and lower-end residential parts of the city. The canal is a narrow tributary to the main district canal, only wide enough for two water taxis to pass abreast, and is criss-crossed by pedestrian bridges that fill up with hawker carts and stalls from the early evening. Likewise, the roads paralleling the canal on either side are narrow two-lane thoroughfares that are all but blocked off by the nightly encroachment from market stalls and throngs of shoppers. The whole district is illuminated by an overly bright kaleidoscope pattern radiating from shop-fronts, stall lighting and the advertising signage strapped to the lower 10 storeys of the buildings fronting the canal.

The district, Sector 07/16 by city maps, started its life as an entertainment quarter. The blocks are broken up by narrow alleys leading away from the canal, each alley lined with dimly lit stairway entrances and elevator lobbies, on each upper floor the staircase or elevator opening onto a long corridor lined with a dozen or two establishment doorways, arranged more like an office building than somewhere to bar crawl, each establishment with a handful of seats and a tiny stage or claustrophobic dance floor and DJ booth. They might have been little cookeries specialising in one dish or just home-style cooking for a particular migrant culture, tequila, sambuca or home-still liquor shot bars, dating clubs, wine cellars, oddly themed beer bars to sit and jaw with the barkeep and a couple of strangers, karaoke boxes, clubs catering to one subculture or another, shisha cafes, curated media libraries, live jazz, reggae, zen-metal or cerebrotone venues, art cribs, more carnally oriented establishments, or a thousand other variations and possibilities.

But that was before.

The district is still a 3D maze of fabbed twenty to forty-storey cubical building blocks, but decades upon decades of crime, riots, civil unrest, gang wars, tribe wars, CDC wars, police or U-Sec raids, crackdowns and assaults, bombings, cyber-psych massacres, mem-psych massacres and the general decay of society's fabric have somewhat changed its complexion.

The core food, leisure and night-time entertainment mission largely moved out and moved on as the economy crumbled. In its place, with each bar and club closing its doors, a different kind of proprietor moved in, taking advantage of the lowered rent and unmindful of whatever degradation each premises had suffered. These were the makers, modders, street docs, just legal experimental drug labs, 3D fabbers and modellers, gadget builders, brainware grow ops, machinists, OAI hobbyists, gene crispers, custom armourers, organ farmers, codesmiths, mem-artisans, digital designers, upcyclers, downcyclers, recyclers and their associated network of electronics and parts suppliers that keeps the whole techno-cottage industry going. They started catering to the changed needs of this end of the city, with its large off-grid populace and poorer residential population no longer able to afford brand new consumer imports, and in need of everything from clothing to electronics to home defense to health care. There is still a selection of the old businesses in the entertainment industry mixed in with the new maker/repairer industry, but they are a disappearing shadow of their earlier heyday.

Makers Market is now neutral ground for the city's tribes, gangs and CDCs, partly as a result of much bloody warfare in previous years, but also recognising the importance of the district to the city's underground economy. To preserve this peace, and to quell any other disturbance that might arise, the district is protected by the Market CDU, for Commercial Tenant Defence Union, set up in similarity to a CDC but with local business owners as client-members instead of residents. Of course, membership is not optional but the rates are only slightly extortionate. One visible and notable feature of the streetscape, assisting with keeping the peace, is the Market CDU logoed crowd control mechs stationed on various bridges and street corners, each with a unique design fabbed up by one of the Market's different maker collectives.

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Question 98 [MKRMKT][PPL]
Who is in charge of the Market CDU?

Question 99 [RBT][SET]
How do human nations keep tabs on what the Machine Nations are doing?

Question 100 [RBT][CTY]
Are there many Machine Nation citizens in YOU-Topia? What do they do?
(It's been established that there are some attached to the PARADIGM investigator teams, and that some Ursulas remain with various kinds of employment.)

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by Daigoro

Question 90 [NTCH][Name 5] Name and describe five popular Organic AI models.

Answer 90.2: Pilots
Small, cheap, and reliable, pilots were initially designed as navigators. They are trained when young for a specific spread of vehicles, but after the first few months become uninterested in activities beyond getting their vehicles to the correct location. They are famously resistant to fatigue and boredom, and they can understand speech, but are only suited for a task that can be structured as navigating a path... Which is not as large a limitation as one might expect.



Pilots live in little metal boxes with interface jacks and a whole to put in food to process. They occasionally get used for some odd things.

[Inky]

Ooh, that last sentence is giving off huge philosophical science fiction vibes for some reason. Don't know exactly, but I'm vaguely thinking of somebody realising that something very surprising can be made mathematically equivalent to navigating the shortest route through a certain map.

[Daigoro]

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

Answer 69.1 - NT-Piccolino-M3, Glimjims and Glimtins
The NT Piccolino-M3 is a small, thumb-sized pod containing 3cc's of mem-retaining cortical tissue, enough for roughly one day's worth of recorded mem. It's intended as a single-use device so it has no bio-support, being a very basic polished aluminium case with a glass window showing some wrinkled grey matter inside, and with a pair of contact terminals on one end. A battery powers its mem-cache access and control electronics, an internal heating system and the white power-on LED lighting. They're usually shipped on ice, stored at -173°C for warehousing and shipping, bringing up to -18°C for short-term retail and consumer use, then the internal heater raises it to body temp for mem-access. The tissue lasts for about 12 hours before biodegradation occurs, but attaching an NT-Glucomax metabolic fuel cell (aka a "sugarcube" or "lolly") allows an extra 24 hours of operation.

On the street, such mem-pods, whether genuine NeuroTech, counterfeits, cheap clones or hand-fabbed, are called "glimjims." They're usually used for storing illicit black-market mems, "glims," such as the latest POV celebrity scandals, death mems, illegal skill learning mems or just pirated copies of popular mems. A glim-dealer might have a case of dry ice nearby to store their product or handy access to a deep freeze. If buyers don't want to deal in organics, dealers will sell "glimtins" instead, which are digital chip-based versions of the same glims, usually lower rez and with a crushed empathic response.

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by Daigoro

Question 31 [CTY] What is the coast guard equipped with?

You know what? Lets make this a name five. A comprehensive answer is just a little daunting:


Answer 31a: Knocker Drones
Built to track watercraft coming and going, the knocker drones make up the eyes of the Coast Gaurd. Built extremely rugged to prevent them from being shot down, and extremely quick to keep up with fugitives, the coast guard has found that they are a useful weapon for ramming into things, especially radio antanea and propellers.

Question 34c+ [SET] What are the most recent innovations in aerospace?

Answer 34c: Orbital property line lawsuits. The treaties with the machine nations have only vaugely hinted at for instance, the various rings of Thalethrāy's solar L4 point.

40.4 What was the conduct of the Robotic Rebellion?

Maybe this should be name 5, covering different aspects and interesting points of the conflict?

Answer 40.4a In the areas where the machines eventually prevailed, such as the Dataran Segar, a lot of effort was placed into moving, hiding, tracking, destroying, and capturing large central mainframes containing the "leadership" of the rebellion. Some of these figures gained public recognition from the reporting of the time.

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by ericthered

You know what? Lets make this a name five. A comprehensive answer is just a little daunting:

If we consider the Coast Guard to be YOU-Topia's de facto military, it could be quite sizable. I was looking at Singapore's military for comparison, and it's surprisingly big. For a country with half our island's population, they have 70,000 regulars, 320 aircraft and 33 ships and submarines, spending 4.9% of their GDP on the military.

Would we have much reason for YOU-Topia to have less protection than them? I don't mean that rhetorically- I can't think of any valid reasons for it to be considerably smaller. Unless maybe YOU-Topia's Coast Guard/military has a significantly different regional role than Singapore's would. What kind of external threats are likely against YOU-Topia? They'd be geared up to fight off a robot war, for one thing.