Shadowrun
Shadowrun General => The Secret History => Topic started by: Moral Wiz on <04-17-12/0911:54>
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Ok, definitely file this under wild speculation, but... Well, we've seen a fair bit of co-operation between Technomancers and AIs, in Emergence, Twilight Horizon, a little in Corporate Intrigue. And it makes sense, they're being oppressed by the same people, share similar goals, and people tend to link the two anyway.
There's just one thing that's been bugging me about it though. Resonance.
They're the same to everyone else, but Technomancers and AIs function very differently within the Matrix, the 'mancers bring Sprites and have a connection to something strange that AIs don't understand and can't see (the Resonance) Dealing with regular Matrix users is one thing, but Technomancers function in very different ways, and do so in what the AIs might consider their own natural enviroment
And they still maintain a pretty much united front? So much co-operation and good will between people who normally probably wouldn't trust each other... anything more going on here?
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It is the age old issue of "The Enemy of my enemy is my friend." Seriously, they are both hunted by the megas and exploited, for many of the same reasons. They both have to deal with matrix threats like out of control viruses and Dissonant technomancers. Whether the good feelings and cooperation remain after they've brought their joint enemies down a few pegs and gotten some solid rights for themselves is unknown. I think, however, that they will tend to be, if not united, very sympathetic to eachother's causes over the long term.
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*nods* I got that for the immediate, definitely during Emergence, but we've had Pulsar since then, independent AIs getting their own jobs, Technos being hired as 'super Spiders'... and there's been no flare up? Rights are still a big issue, but with the original fires starting to fade....
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Think of the factions in meat-space terms... A.I. are Street Samurai, Technomancers are Mages.
While the average joe-blow on the street may be freaked out by both Mages and Street Sams, the two both know the other can be a valuable ally in a cruel and hostile world, and that they work better together than alone. Plus, nobody else is going to give them an even break, or understand what they see and live on a daily basis.
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Also, while some technos and AIs have gotten some good jobs, the majority are definitely oppressed, and not likely to take kindly to it. Mitsuhama is still cutting TMs' heads open, and not getting pulled to the mat about it. There is still experimentation on AIs happening. Things might not be at the 'lynch mobs in the street' level like they were in Emergence, but that doesn't mean things are happy shiny now.
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Hmm... Good analogy :) I agree, and all this does make their relationship staying cordial make more sense to me.
Still, I'm not quite sure... a Street Sam and a Mage are the same species, they live in the same world and have the same origin point; the mortal world. Technos aren't the same to AIs..If they choose, they can 'deck out', and simply play cat and mouse with the AI. Plus, the Dissonance is associated with them... The two've definitely got more holding them together than dragging them apart, but still... long term?
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There's a few different things going on here.
For one, with the advent of the wireless matrix, you have technomancers, which are people who can wirelessly hack 'anything' and have been blasted by a heavy PR campaign to keep them agents of fear. The average person doesn't know much about them, other than "They can erase your SIN!" and so forth, which is pretty horrifying.
AIs arern't as attacked and are far more rare. People don't really know how to judge them, so are a bit afraid (Didn't that one take over a sattelite and kill all those people? What, nobody actually died? That's not what I heard...) but aren't sure on what to think overall. (That Pulsar guys is kinda cool...)
AIs look weird but act vaguely human.
Technomancers look human but could be ANYWHERE, just waiting to hack your commlink! Stay alert!
Trying to conflate themselves with AIs is a path that Technomancers can take to try and gain public legitimacy. AIs, meanwhile, are darn curious about these Technomancers who can create sprites out of thin air. Some of these sprites even go free and become AIs! Technomancers can CREATE LIFE, which is just ... wow.
Both of them are victims of corporate experimentation, and that's a pretty strong bond. Top that off with some AIs being fascinated by Technomancers and with some Technomancers worshipping AIs, and you can get all kinds of layers of inter-dependence and co-reliability.
Technomancy and AIs aren't exactly the 'A' plot at this time, however, so don't expect to see lots on this cropping up.
But there might be something in the pipeline for you. :)
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AI has always had a strong but complex relationship with the Deep Resonance going back to the birth of the otaku.
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... Really?
Not doubting you, I don't know much about the older stuff, but I thought I remembered reading that AIs couldn't interact with the Resonance stuff beyond the same degree any Matrix user could.
(Learn something new every day. :))
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Deus pretended to be the Deep Resonance, and so ensnared many of the Whites, who came to worship him.
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I think he might have been related to Dissonance in addition.
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No. The Dissonance started with Pax, as she tried to fight her Fading (what happened as otaku grew older and lost their powers). Pax turned to the Dissonance, gathered followers, and worked with Winternight to bring about the Crash. In the wake of the Crash and the advent of the WMI, Pax emerged as a Dissonant technomancer, and is leading a group called the Discordians. It is also possible that she is one of the dissonant paragons, Nemesis (named after an ancient god, and sometimes called by the god's full name, Pax-Nemesis).
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The Dissonance started with Pax ...
... not ... technically. She may have been the first to use it so extensively, though.
As for being both technomancer and Paragon, well, no. A paragon may be functionally modeled after her, though ...
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AIs were able to "create" otaku, Dues and Mirage have both done this. One of Mirages otaku is now the Empress of Japan, also possibly a techno.
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The Deep Resonance is one of the possible "X Factors" that turned SKs like Psychotrope into Mirage and the AEP into Deus.
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Funny thing: While everyone keeps turning over rocks to try and fine Deus, no one seems to care about Maegera and even less about Mirage/Psychotrope.
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I'm not sayin' nuthin', I'm just sayin'.
:)
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Well, only one of those three took a hundred thousand people hostage for the better part of a year performing experiments on the survivors.
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That we know of.
(bum bum BUMMMMM!!!)
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Deus and Pax are kind of like roaches just when you think stomped on them, they just pop up somewhere else.
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Deus and Pax are kind of like roaches just when you think stomped on them, they just pop up somewhere else.
Which is why I'm convinced that Deus is not gone, he's just hidden himself somehow.
If, for instance, Deus has somehow gotten his hooks in Horizon, that may explain their attitudes towards TMs, for instance...
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Don't forget Evo; they're possibly friendlier to AIs than Horizon is.
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Well, only one of those three took a hundred thousand people hostage for the better part of a year performing experiments on the survivors.
Sure, but one of the others was the source code for that one, and the OTHER of the others took sixty times that number inadvertently hostage ...
Besides, we already know what happened to all three of them. If y'all ain't ready to acknowledge what's blindingly clear, that's y'all's problem. ;)
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Yes, because no one who was thought to be dead has in fact turned out to be alive and looking for vengeance... *cough*Alamaise*cough*
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Alamaise. Sounds like a new kind of sandwich spread. "Mustard, mayonnaise, or alamaise?" Maybe that's what Miracle Whip actually is.
In any case, they already pulled the 'back from the dead' thing with Deus. Gauche' to do it more than once. Also, please note that I didn't say 'him', I said 'all three of them'.
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Well, that hasn't stopped Jean Grey, so why would it stop Deus? ;)
Personally, I like Deus as a villain, if only because once you understood his motivations, he became an almost sympathetic character, much like Magneto. Much more poignant than someone like, say, Roxy, Villiers, or Knight.
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Personally, I like Deus as a villain, if only because once you understood his motivations, he became an almost sympathetic character, much like Magneto. Much more poignant than someone like, say, Roxy, Villiers, or Knight.
I like Deus as a villain for his motivations as well -- because IMO, they ultimately make him a far more terrifying villain. I can't think of anyone offhand, but this is someone who understands the morality of what he's doing, recognizes that it's wrong on many, many, levels, and yet from microsecond to microsecond he makes each individual choice anew to go ahead and continue tormenting and experimenting on these tens of thousands of people. He's not a soulless machine; he's utterly and completely driven to escape, counting no sacrifice too great to succeed. It might have been interesting to see whether or not he would have mellowed out once he had become the God of the Matrix.
Interesting side note -- has anyone else noticed how most of the previous edition's 'Good Guys' -- Villiers and Knight being two prime examples -- are slowly morphing into Bad Eggs? I may not (okay, I don't) like what was done with Buttercup's look (for me, it's 3e Corporate Download, pp. 111 and 113) and personality (even in the midst of her utter ruthlessness I thought of her as sweet, kind, and seemingly naive), but at least she's still a Good Guy. She and Harlequin (and no, not everything is about the Laughing Man, dammit -- stop trying to drag him into everything!!) almost seem to be the only lights left in the growing darkness ...
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Okay, I'm going to shut up now. Pattern recognition and I have just made friends again.
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Lights glowing in the darkness?
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Are we reading the same books? :P
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Yes, but not in the same way. There's a reason the Wyrm does what he does.
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Wyrm, I think Ehran the Scribe might have come around to that way of thinking after Big D died. It certainly seems he's left the plotting of the other IEs behind, to concentrate on the DIMR.
But I wouldn't say that Knight and Villiers were 'good' guys in the last edition. Ares did a lot of questionable things, purely for their own interests. The Firewatch teams hunting the bugs were doing so because not only was it good for the Ares brand, but it also gave Knight test subjects to work on. And Villiers destroyed Fuchi, destabilized Renraku, and ruined countless lives for profit. No, I don't think they were 'good'. But when compared with people like Pax and Winternight, they certainly seem that way.
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There are no "Good" guys in this. ... Well, OK, maybe in the 2070s as we're heading into Post-Cyberpunk.
But in the early stuff, no.
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Yeah, Villers had two men killed to get the first cyberdeck information, then, when Fuchi wouldn't buy in, one of the two founders was suddenly killed by his chauffer, who then was killed in turn before talking to the police, and the founder's son was happy to include Villers afterwards.
He's *never* been a force for good, old chum.
There're a few, but they're hard to see through all the smog.
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Guys, please don't try to sell me the box of goods I've already gotten. Yes, I know that the two examples I've given are not paragons of virtue, but unlike the debate about Aztechnology, in this I do mean relative good.
Ares cleared out bug nests; this is a good thing. Sure, they did it because it's good press, but before Chicago they weren't even getting THAT out of it. It's only been later (Threats 2, when even then it was suggested that it may have been a hallucination, and now confirmed in 4e) that it's come out that they were 'grabbing test subjects' as well, doing something that is definitely Not Right.
Villiers is a shark, sure, but in all of this, he's been portrayed as a sympathetic shark -- that he loves his family and ex-wife, but that living with Samantha would have torn both of them into little gobbets of flesh; they get along well, but in the long run their personalities would have totally wrecked them. Now, though, we have Samantha trying to do something, and Richard doing stuff back to 'punish' her, that make them sound more like the highly dysfunctional Shiawase family.
These two used to be 'yeah, he's a shark, but he's OUR shark' sorts of individuals -- doing more-or-less what's right by any means necessary, people we could look forward to meeting as players. Now ... now they're just assholes that the players would reply with 'eh -- he's a dick.'
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I never really thought about the CEOs in Shadowrun being good for the sake of being good, they are most interested in what is good for the value of their stock and sometimes that is also good for public too.
I will exclude Awakened CEOs from that list only because they tend to have a much different view of things.
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Well, only one of those three took a hundred thousand people hostage for the better part of a year performing experiments on the survivors.
Sure, but one of the others was the source code for that one, and the OTHER of the others took sixty times that number inadvertently hostage ...
Besides, we already know what happened to all three of them. If y'all ain't ready to acknowledge what's blindingly clear, that's y'all's problem. ;)
They became /dev/grrl/?
I know Villiers isn't a good person or even a nice person, but I've always had a softspot for him. The way he always seems to bounce back really gets me.
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I will exclude Awakened CEOs from that list only because they tend to have a much different view of things.
Maybe Buttercup is pushing the Transhumanism point so that human thinking changes enough that she can understand us?I know Villiers isn't a good person or even a nice person, but I've always had a softspot for him. The way he always seems to bounce back really gets me.
Wonder what he'll rename his Megacorporation next time? ;D
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Assuming the corp will is still his.