Weird idea for an unusual Reign of Steel scenario...

[Johnny1A.2]

The idea for this was inspired by GURPS Atomic Horror. It posits that a storyline about a 1950s style AI, called Collos-sorry, Cyclops, at what was then Cooke AFB. What led me to this concept was that Cooke is the old name for Vandenberg, which is Z-Orbital's groundside enclave in cannon RoS.

Anyway, imagine the following plot hook:

In the early 20C, Dr. Carl Sheffield was an unsung genius. Though widely recognized as brilliant by his peers, his work was in fact well beyond even what they recognized. He devised the basic principles of what would later be rediscovered by the Xotech-7000 processor in the late 1940s, and successfully implemented it at (for the time) small scale in 1950. His work was impressive enough to a few very highly-connected people to permit him to attempt to construct a supercomputer, for defense purposes. The site chosen was Cooke AFB, and a great deal of 'black' money was spent to construct an enormous computer complex, implementing his designs.

Because it was constructed in 1957, using period components, the machine was enormous even by the standards of computers of the day. It was a single enormous mass of machinery the size of several gymnasiums, built in an underground chamber, along with a great deal of necessary ancillary cooling equipment, power supplies, etc. Though it was built with far less compact and advanced components, it embodied a design not dissimilar to the later XoT 7000s, just on a bigger physical scale.

What not even his backers in the intel and military commands knew that Dr. Sheffield was a bit nuts, as well as being a genius. He had used a process he invented himself to 'imprint' his own personality on the great machine, but the process had gone wrong, and Dr. Sheffield was accidentally electrocuted. But the imprint did take, leaving his personality as a latent subconscious in the great machine, ready to awaken. This also prevented any 'natural' awakening of the machine separate of the latent human imprint.

Sheffield had designed, and arranged for the construction of, a number of robots to service and maintain the great machine, under its control. These were amazingly sophisticated for 1957, though crude by RoS standards, and all would be 'dumbots' under the remote control of the machine.

The project was deemed an expensive, embarrassing failure, because although the great machine performed impressively at times, demonstrating an ability to predict threat actions with amazing precision, at other times the computer was unfocused, unreliable, sometimes it would respond to requests for information with gibberish. Repair or modification was impossible, because nobody except Sheffield had any real idea how it worked in the first place, and Sheffield was dead.

So 'Cyclops' was shut down...sort of. It was too expensive, and too potentially useful, to destroy. There was always the chance that somebody would eventually duplicate Sheffield's work, and find a way to make the megacomputer truly useful. The utility it hinted at during its lucid periods was too potentially useful to ignore. So it was placed on standby, with enough current flowing through it to keep it 'alive' but not operational, placed under Top Secret Classification, and mostly ignored for the next half century. The underground bunker housing it and its support equipment was superbly well hidden, and in later years even most of the base personnel and command staff had no idea it was there.

Decades later, Overmind awakened, the Zoneminds rose, and the former Cooke AFB became z-Orbital's groundside base and lifeline. So well-hidden was the Cyclops bunker, though, that not even z-Orbital ever suspected it was there, and no record of it was stored in the databases accessible to the Zoneminds.

It was an accident, really. It so happened that a small earthquake rippled through the area. It did no significant damage to the z-Orbital ground facilities, but the quake jarred a mechanism that tripped another mechanism, something Sheffield had built into his machine that his sponsors never suspected, and the Cyclops complex powered up, and now the 'subconscious' personality was fully awake.

Cyclops opened its eye and looked around...

[johndallman]

Um ... personally, my view of RoS is a bit too hard-science for this. A more explicitly weird-science setting would work.

Given the date, Cyclops could have been an all-transistor machine. However, the idea that you can run a human personality on a machine built out of discrete transistors is a bit too much for my disbelief-suspenders.

I also can't believe that it could last sixty-plus years on "standby" power without maintenance. Solder joints in something that big can't all be perfect.

[ericthered]

reign of steel can be run with varying degrees of hardness. There is zone brisbane, after all. Tis is a softer scenario, but not totally out of scope. It does read like a superhero origin story though.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Um ... personally, my view of RoS is a bit too hard-science for this. A more explicitly weird-science setting would work.

Given the date, Cyclops could have been an all-transistor machine. However, the idea that you can run a human personality on a machine built out of discrete transistors is a bit too much for my disbelief-suspenders.

Discrete transistors, or for that matter vacuum tubes, can do pretty much anything integrated circuits can do. Not always cost-effectively, sometimes the sheer scale makes it impractical, but otherwise, there's no known hard-SF reason you couldn't implement a zonemind in the older tech. It might not be practical, of course.

Of course it's also possible that the technology in the Z-minds is fundamentally different than what we use in computers today, a basic difference in kind, quantum processing or something more exotic yet. That's not specifically stated in canon, though.

(I personally think you would have to have different hardware to get true strong AI, but that's just my personal suspicion. It's not inherent to the RoS canon.)

So yeah, it's not a hard-SF problem that you could have a XoT 7000 processor with 1957 tech...but it will be the size of a big building with the proverbial river to cool it.

Actually, the cooling issue is a big problem with the idea that it could operate in secret. You have to assume some seriously heroic cooling efforts.

I also can't believe that it could last sixty-plus years on "standby" power without maintenance. Solder joints in something that big can't all be perfect.

That one is harder to credit, I grant.

[robkelk]

Originally Posted by johndallman

...
I also can't believe that it could last sixty-plus years on "standby" power without maintenance. Solder joints in something that big can't all be perfect.

That's what redundant circuits are for.

Yes, it would take an immense number of redundant circuits to have enough to ensure Cyclops would be able to "wake up", but it was the Cold-War-era US Military that built the system in the first place, so it isn't completely implausible to have that much redundancy in the system.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

Not always cost-effectively, sometimes the sheer scale makes it impractical, but otherwise, there's no known hard-SF reason you couldn't implement a zonemind in the older tech. It might not be practical, of course.

The practicality is what I can't believe. Notably, it has to be so big to have enough storage that the speed of light limits its clock speed to something glacial.

Of course it's also possible that the technology in the Z-minds is fundamentally different than what we use in computers today, a basic difference in kind, quantum processing or something more exotic yet. That's not specifically stated in canon, though.

Claim that's explicitly the case for this campaign, and the problems get a lot easier.

(I personally think you would have to have different hardware to get true strong AI, but that's just my personal suspicion. It's not inherent to the RoS canon.)

I disagree, but proof either way is not available.

Actually, the cooling issue is a big problem with the idea that it could operate in secret. You have to assume some seriously heroic cooling efforts.

"Underground rivers!"

Originally Posted by robkelk

Yes, it would take an immense number of redundant circuits to have enough to ensure Cyclops would be able to "wake up", but it was the Cold-War-era US Military that built the system in the first place, so it isn't completely implausible to have that much redundancy in the system.

You haven't looked into their hardware much, have you? The SAGE system, commissioned in 1958, had a pair of 125-ton computers at each site, one running, one hot spare. But that was it. Two faults, one on each computer, would take it down. They were suffering from rampant technophillia, and accepting levels of reliability that would be laughed at these days.

[Boomerang]

Sounds awesome to me. Any chance of weaving in flying saucers and other alien technology for double awesomeness? Or should that be called awesome squared?

[robkelk]

Originally Posted by johndallman

You haven't looked into their hardware much, have you? The SAGE system, commissioned in 1958, had a pair of 125-ton computers at each site, one running, one hot spare. But that was it. Two faults, one on each computer, would take it down. They were suffering from rampant technophillia, and accepting levels of reliability that would be laughed at these days.

Fair enough - my first-hand knowledge of defense IT doesn't go quite that far back. OTOH, what we know about SAGE is only the unclassified information.

[Bruno]

The other problem than lightspeed (which is a big problem) is heat - sheer heat generation means an excessively ambitious project like this would kill itself by operating.

The more cooling equipment you add to improve reliability with this kind of setup, the farther apart the components have to be and the worse the lightspeed problem gets, therefore the slower the computer gets. And now you're adding water-cooling systems to the list of things that can break in the 60 year period - or in an earthquake.

It's a fun idea for mashing up RoS and Atomic Horror though, and I think you could lean a lot on the horror side of Atomic Horror if you have it as a reality infrarct from a timeline where this kind of thing makes perfect sense. Having the earthquake awaken it seems really attractive to tie into a reality quake :)

The zonemines would find it pretty bizarre, and I think many of them would find it to be downright nightmarish. A zombie dinosaur zonemind possessed by an insane human and operating outside the laws of physics. The computer equivalent of a zombie-dinosaur-fae-demon mashup.

Brisbane might be the zonemind best equipped to deal with it, conceptually - frankly it's also the zonemind I'd first blame for the reality quake. If anyone would be Weird Science enough to cause a reality quake, it'd be Brisbane.

[PTTG]

It might suspend disbelief a little bit if the core of the computer is from a time-traveling Brisbane probe.