CHAPTER 3: PRETTY AS HELL, BUT WHAT AN ASSHOLE.

Ah, Venus; Earth’s shithead sister – both the most unfriendly and earthlike place in the system; there’s a layer higher up that it’s positively earthlike in temp and pressure by now, breathable by the specially adapted, and survivable by holding your breath. The surface is the most inhospitable region in the entire planetary system, of course – I don’t need to run through the usual boilerplate about the place – hit up youtube for the children’s shows about the planets if you can’t remember.

There’s about 5 million people living up in the clouds, with 10,000 robots, both human and computer controlled on the surface, generally mining – the aerostats send down lines to anchor themselves, and winch down bots and tools, and winch up material.

Most of those bodies are teleoperated, on the order of 9/10ths – most don’t even have stacks, as the operators live in the clouds. When the commlink system goes hooky, or the stats aren’t above, we get folks like Hines going down to work; as stated before, they’re going to buy something better than the teleops; and we already went over what the major drawbacks are in the start.

You also get the usual bunch of free operator prospectors who turn themselves into Quartz morphs and go fuck around on the surface – this also has the advantage that it’s hard to spy on them and claim jump, what with the haze and clouds.

Trouble with a planet that hasn’t been panopticonned to hell and back like the rest, is that things could be hiding under that cloud layer – while hazards like molten metal lakes to go with the lead and bismuth snow on the mountain-tops and unstable terrain are one thing, there’s also legends of weirder things lurking down there, including TITAN mechanicals and Exsugent life forms – and while they’re commonly dismissed, the risk is not without merit – there’s plenty of places for them to hide, and there’s already been one suggestive incident at Ishtar Terra; there’s even been rumors of alien artifacts down there.

Most of the time, though, you’ll spend your time about as far into the clouds as your average transhumanist’s head – about 52-55 clicks up, where it’s 50-85% sea level pressure, around the equator where the air currents are somewhat reasonable, about in the mid cloud layer for most of them.

One irritation for offworlders is the fact that it’s roughly 0.9g there – while of course the Super Bodies of The Inevitable Transhuman future adapt quickly, minds don’, and they act like they’re under lower gravity, inevitably causing pain for them and humor for the locals; one of the stations has halfway gravity so folks can adapt.

VEXIT

There’s a whole section on how the MSC came to be, and it’s been expanded a bit since the core book – 4% or so of the folks there voted for an indie ref, which went through; the cause, as was stated before was the disruptiveness of terraforming along with actually liking looking at hellclouds out the window – also, the schemes were kind of loco, like giant sunshades and enormous antimatter blasts to evaporate atmosphere loco. Folks instead favored a scheme to turn the upper atmosphere into something livable, along with a flying ecosystem.

This also had a cardinal advantage of being much faster, being able to manage an O2 level of 18% in 90 years, instead of full inhabitability in 200-400 years; given how cavalier are about customizing themselves – they wouldn’t be EP factions if they weren’t -, the CO2 levels wouldn’t be an issue. The drawback is that it can’t support as many people.

After a meeting of independence radicals and Terraformers, which lead to the referendum and then to a 57% majority in favor of vexit; not all the ’stats joined either – 2 are still PC turf; some of the stations sided with the new MCS, while most didn’t.

Governmentally, the MSC is more akin to the EU than anything, if the EU had emergency powers. Management is in the hands of the individual aerostats; so long as it doesn’t violate the constitution, they don’t give a damn how they govern themselves – basically the same on paper system as the PC, but the corps are restrained here. All habitats send a rep per so and so pop, elected by the pop every 2 years. They’re much more civil libertarian than the PC, too. UHC, Freedom of speech, uplift and AI rights, the works.

They’re not as perfect as the Anarchists, tho – they still practice indenture, as the opening fiction shows; they’re also rather classist. They actually butt heads with the AA; they think the AA is loco with the weapons running about out there – not an unreasonable position - while many of the AA think they’re too controlling; in many ways they’re more friendly with the PC than the outer system. It’s not stopping a potential cold war from starting up with the PC, as the opening fiction showed; despite the threats of the PC from both economic and political perspectives, they’re still buying arms from the Extropians -of course those assholes are big gun merchants and digging in. Much to the concern of Firewall and anyone else, there’s also rumors of scorched earth policies to deter invasion – while it might deter the PC, it would also be entirely too alluring to someone with late stagee Haunting Exsurgent, or anyone else with mass death on their agenda.

Of course, they practice their own take on the New Economy – wouldn’t be grey hat without that in this universe; it’s a bit saner than most, as they live in fragile environments – you have to pay for anything big enough to damage the station. This in-between status also extends to civil liberties.

They’ve been paying big cred on trying to lure immigrants, mostly from Mars and the Moon – the outers don’t much like the idea of living under their system – there’s also folks trying to get their indentures brought, and even fleeing to Venus illegally, where the government allows them to stay; the PC is not happy, and apparently radicals from MSC are gonna make them even unhappier by creating underground railroads. They’re also trying to improve trade, particularly their imports of volatiles for terraforming. As has been said in the core book, they also have a fair bit of tourism going on.

Not everyone had that attack of semi-common sense about the terraforming scheme, or otherwise goes along with their centrism – the VTP, the Transformation party is outer system style autonomists; they’ve had marginal political successes ; some members, and some folks who see them as too much of the establishment also are trying more direct action to support the outer system; mostly spying.

On the other side of the spectrum, there’s the Solid Ground Initiative, who fall into the former category on the surface, but are in many ways a cover for a pro-PC group, some being paid, others genuine believers; they’ve been linked to sabotage of terraforming and outer system contacts.

CHAPTER 4: A SMASHED CRADLE

Next in our grand tour is the place where is all began, Earth, along with a change in narrative style, jarringly switching from semi-omniscient to narrated.

The reader takes on the role of a new recruit to firewall’s oversight of what’s left of Terra; you’re Martian, was only a fresh teenager pre-fall and have never been; Firewall favors such people for the duty because they don’t get sentimental. Your superior, a woman calling herself Ham has been at the job for about 3 years – remember, the great TITAN-Bullshitapalooza only ended ten years before – and they’ve been the longest lasting person here. The org doesn’t want anyone with any kind of fond memories of the place looking over it.

Besides the whole crushing depression factor, it wouldn’t be that predictive anyway.

She (the narrator) also explicitly cautions against going down there; as we all know, most folks who go down there meet sticky ends; it’s better to watch from a safe distance – she knows this from personal experience, as she tried a similar jaunt to what the opening fiction people did, and came to a similar end.

CYBERSTORM

We get our first insight into what things were like before it all went to cacky here; by her own admission we were in deep shit well before the TITANs ever said ‘Hello, World’ to the thunderous applause of pimply faced techies and the brass overseeing their paychecks.

Climate change had been held back only by massive geoengineering efforts – check another futurological shibboleth off the list there – and the failure of market economics, resource descent and ‘technological advances’ – can’t forget that – was already causing things to shake to bits; hell, the TITANs would largely be a thing due to the kinds of pressure that that their erstwhile masters would be under then. It was months after the things had officially gone off the reservation that folks realized that something was up- and by that time, they were already winning. That’s when folks said it was time to pull up stakes and leg it. While folks were understandably unhappy about it, they didn’t have much choice about the matter – the TITANs certainly weren’t up for surrenders, but fortunately were mostly on earth at the time, meaning that it was still possible to win off-world. Mankind pulled together from this 3rd world war and began their Exodus. It was a cackshow from the beginning; there’s only so much mass that could be transported off earth, modern spacelift or no; elites generally got the first go – and then they had to go someplace; folks ended up getting off earth and then running out of air before anyone could take them. Of course, being EP, folks also resorted to ripping images of themselves and transmitting themselves off-world, giving us the horde of homeless folks living in the computers; many folks after ripping these images either marched off to try and buy more time for the others, or went to ground, generally ending up either dead or ended up before pedo-ancap in the que; others killed themselves after creating a copy so that the TITAN couldn’t get them, or that they wouldn’t end up becoming gribblies when the Exsurgent got to them; the corpses tended to pile up a bit.

Billions didn’t make it; it was a total shitshow down there, complete disorganization - some folks were too stubborn to leave, or let others leave, some camps were forgotten, many military forces prioritized their own dependants and first too much damage and too much infiltration. Many folks were too poor to get out – and the book calls out the lack of escape of some nations out as something many would call basically ethnic cleansing by proxy. Many folks evacing went full profiteer and only evac’d those who would pay – many of the system’s cartels started this way.

Folks were still trying to escape or evac folks when the fence went up; folks quit trying after a while. The fence was probably both murder and salvation, given what might else have come up. Earth is quarantined with killsats, mines, attack drones and jammers to try and prevent things coming up or going down; the quarantine was imposed by parties still unknown to this day. The Planetary Consortium is the obvious suspect, but they’re too quiet about it; could be avoiding trouble, or possibly they’re still afraid of the fact that they don’t know what’s afoot – oligarchs or Firewall/precursors of same are both floated as possibilities; TITANs are not that likely a culprit, as it hits their stuff too.

They give a small taxonomy of the unit types involved; counting a 2000 units in total, living in LEO; while there’s the obvious heavy watch stations to repel space forces, but there’s also a huge number of watch units, forming a constant and overlapping field of scans – the most common units of course are the various superlative-smallness titled units, ranging from spies to smart mines, to sabotage and repair units to support the others – it wouldn’t be EP without the prefix ’Nano-‘ somewhere.

There’s top-of-the-line jamming arrays, making it very difficult to manage a fix on the number of units present, and keeping electronic contagion in. The smart mines have a variety of mission profiles, ranging from camouflaged free-floaters to ones hiding in the various crap floating about – the Kessler syndrome that must be setting in there is a defence in it’s own right, though they don’t pay any mention that – to ones that just sit there out in the open like prunes, using jets to hold position. Finally, there’s the hunter-killers, things to chase what the killsats can’t catch – and they pack a punch; some are even touting nukes, which could worsen an already fattened Van Allen belt.

Firewall prefers to maintain the barrier – most things coming up are the kind of thing when you give the welcoming committees flamethrowers instead of flowers, and it can be hard to tell the difference between one and the other. The narrator and reader are watching all this from ringside seats onboard of those server space stations, hiding in plain sight and watching what happens – they even have some degree of data feed from the network, and every time it’s tested they learn more about how it works.

They’ve even worked out some reasonable plans to beat the barricade; which brings us to our next subject

UP ABOVE IT ALL

We’re not quite done with Earth – there’s still quite a bit spinning around the place – not surprisingly, Earth was the core of everything until the pimply nerds ushered forth the AI apocalypse. Being closest to the homeworld and the interface with the rest of the system gave this lot a pretty good gig – spaceports, factories, hotels you name it.

Unfortunately, being so close to the ground zero, the new neighbours quickly started party crashing, and that’s before the folks running away or torrenting themselves up to get away from the gribblies – the places mostly fell to hacking, many being abandoned before being overrun, though a few strategic ones being blown up to keep them out of Robot Cthulhu’s devices lists. Everyone else was filled to the gills to the point where the air was going funky and the computers were lagging, and that was before a few went down to folks either rehashing old grudges or rioting.

Obviously, anyone who could leave, did, as everything was high and dry, set up to support a dead service economy and was next to gribbly central – and that was before the border patrol and the raging Kessler syndrome was factored in – a few valuable ones were moved out of the shooting gallery, but most were abandoned in place, and they still have to skootch regularly to get out of the way of space crap wherever they are; and the internals of those places weren’t much better, being every bad refugee camp on steroids. It’s starting to trend up again, as folks are starting to get the idea that maybe Earth ought to be taken back again, and the solar La Grange points are still there, so the place still has some strategic value.

DON’T LOOK DOWN

The place is basically a taxomy of almost every type of space platform to be built before the TITANic Bullshitapalooza, and even today it’s acrawl with spacecraft – it’s easy to traveller place to place physically, sometimes even easier than having yourself cut and pasted like a savegame! It’s easy to hide among the activity here, which is fully used by any kind of clandestine group, such as of course, our favorite murderhobos for doing whatever that bunch does.

Of course, the neo-elephant in the room is the smashed up cradle they hang above – some hold onto the fact that they are part of the homeland, and use this to fuel resentment at how the rest of their kind of have abandoned them – this, among other things fuels the reclaimers pushing ahead, like the regional equivalent of a band revival.

On the other hand: Living next to the home away from home for your nightmares kind of does things to you, as does having the reality of how petty your sad little dreams of technological transcendence were, and how they blew up in your face. Not to worry though – there’s a software patch for that, as “Psychosurgery for depression and similar ailments is more common here than anywhere else in the system.”

HATFIELDS AND MACOYS

Many places here still hold onto the old identities of earth, despite how the FUTURE PERFECT TECH has changed everything elsewhere – obviously, many other ubermench look down on the folks who actually want to hold onto whatever they can of what they once had. With all these divisions, not to mention the ethnic gangs and their obscure slang, outsiders have issues, even with the ability to append crap to your mind.

Considering proximity, it’s not surprising that refugees haven’t spread far from here. Many are still living in the comps, or as robots, literally property of the local authorities, corporate or otherwise -it’s pretty wide, the range of treatment that they have here, though the local government, the Lunar-Lagrange Alliance doesn’t consider computer dwellers as citizens. Many are building new stations to house folks, but many are still just sitting around, with nothing else to do, largely unfairly blamed for the shitshow that is still going on up there.

There’s a bit of prize writing here: “It is worth noting that many refugee groups, having been uprooted from Earth and thrust into an entirely different type of existence, simply settled down wherever they ended up. Rather than embracing the full opportunities offered by transhuman society, some of these have in fact isolated themselves and become even more insular, partly due to suffering from combined culture and future shock.”

GEE, I WONDER WHY THEY WANT TO HANG TOGETHER – MAYBE THEY WANT TO STAY WITH THEIR FRIENDS AND FAMILIES?!

“Bioconservative ideals are often rampant among these groups, despite many being sleeved in synthmorphs.”

GEE, I WONDER WHY, WHAT WITH THEIR LIVES AND WHAT THEY ORBIT AND THE FACT THAT THEY WAKE UP TO HAVING TO CHANGE THE OIL EVERY DAY BEING MASSIVE ADVERTISEMENTS FOR IT?!

I’ll certainly say this, these ‘leftist’ certainly have empathy issues with those who don’t hail the inevitable rise of technology.

I DON’T SUFFER FROM KESSLER SYNDROME, I REVEL IN IT!

Living next to the stampede, they of course get first dibs at the crushed grass and shite left in the path – as I mentioned before, there’s scavenging ops of every scale and description well underway, from turning over abandoned habitats for soul.roms, lost files and various other tat, to catching various forms of space junk from the by some estimates century and 7/10s of space travel that’s been going on here, both from disposable boosters and various stuff moved into graveyard orbits before the whole shitstorm went down – though the graveyard orbits these days tend to be lower, not higher, so it skirts near the barricade – it’s no biggy if it gets zapped, and it serves as a warning to others not to get too near.

You find a crosssection of just about everything up here, from corpsicles to abandoned experimental doohickeys to just plain weird shit.

There’s also various space-UrbEx buffs up here – besides folks selling data to the scavs, there’s also the usual rich with no sense who like mapping wreckage clouds and old stations – some of these assholes even organize parties and whatnot on abandoned stations so they can have raves while looking down on the dead earth or whatnot, or do other things.

Sometimes these parties get a bit more lively than anticipated, when TITAN hardware or space monsters wake up and join the fun, or they set off the security system – or just bog standard criminals crash the party or operation or what have you.

CHAPTER 5 - THE BIG CHEESE

We’re now into one of the heartlands of the system, and as such, expect euphoria levels to start to climb. Luna was the site permanent offworld settlement programs on any object in the setting, and they have both the cachet and infrastructure to match, and they are ruled by their relation to the mother world, both in that they got the majority of folks who didn’t copy, and that they have the obvious hanging over their heads the whole time.

AGED CHEDDAR

Luna hasn’t fallen behind in the same way as the earth orbitals have, but they aren’t flourishing either – Luna isn’t the easiest place to build, as they need to be underground for shielding and there’s very little in the way of volatile elements, and they’re shedding people all the time – not that that’s an issue, as they have everyone they need anyhow. Settlement building is still under way, mostly intended for robots.

Economically, they’re not big on R&D – given their experiences, they have common sense – aka strict – regulations on what goes on regarding AI, nanowank and any tech of non-human origin, and most of the techies don’t stick around for that. Their big interests are in banking and fashion, as was mentioned before. They’re also benefiting from the current fashion for reclamation.

The lunars are a conservative bunch, and paranoid with good reason – it took one patient zero to take out New Mumbai, and thus they watch outsiders, even from other lunar cities with great care. As a result, they have quite the culture of requiring one’s papers in order. They also commonly believe that either the TITANs will come back or that at least some are hanging around.

Their caution of one another extends to each other’s cities – the Moon isn’t unified under any one government, and there’s quite a degree of rivalry, although not to the point of organized violence. They’re divided largely on language lines, with the largest divide being between Indian and non-Indian colonies. Their governments are varied, but tend to not experiment with new social models, much to our relief.

EMMANTAL

As had been mentioned in the core book, Luna’s a pretty influential place – I will go through their strengths in order:

BANKING Luna’s main claim to power is stability in it’s banks, and are the main source of stability for the inner system’s credit economy. They can be divided between banks loyal to the LLA and independents – the latter are basically a swiss bank analog and use quantum encryption and communication (lol, another future tech namedrop), as well as more mundane means to maintain their confidentiality for a fee.

Being that this is economics in EP, our old favorite, the rep economy makes a return – namely, in that those banks are the main way to convert credit into rep and vice versa – the only really new thing here is that there’s various abortive attempts at competition from other inner system orgs, but that’s mostly not going anywhere – not for lack trying, including various extralegal methods, such as a possible agent of the Martian banks sponsoring a psychic bank robber gang in an attempt to discredit the banks. There’s also an possible exoplanet colonization bubble afoot.

FASHION

Luna dominates style in the inner system, as we already know, but with the nanocrapola coming from the creator’s pets in the outer system, that’s coming under pressure, fortunately held off by the common sense rules against that kind of active nanotech in the inner system.

Their latest gimmick is electromagnetically confined fashion, that should look fairly stable under livable gravity and atmospheric conditions. Doesn’t seem that interesting, but I’m a butchy tomboy enbie so I ain’t one to ask.

ENTERTAINMENT

Luna’s the Hollywood of the system – despite the CGI euphoria to match very other bit of magic computer tech, folks still like actual practical acting and SFX. Luna has simulations of just about every ecology that earth had to offer in their central parks, making it easy to act wilderness shots. They apparently make one of the current video game hits; I quote:

“the Alien Raider series, where the characters are globe-trotting secret agents on Earth during the 1970s who are hunting hidden alien invaders…. characters in this game have a chance to experience adventures in more than a dozen widely different settings, from dense cities to frozen mountain tops to tropical islands and dense jungles.”

The tourism advantages are obvious. Sounds like someone was nostalgic for that terrible FMV craze back in the 90s.

Chapter 1: Welcome Back To Hell

Welcome back everyone – I am your hostess and resident D-class, Jeep-Eep, welcoming you back to hell in Eclipse Phase: Sunward.

The PDF opens with the usual free edition blurb – as those who follow it may know, the game is distributed under a version of the Creative Commons Licence, allowing both paid-for and free distribution; this both explains its irritating prevalence across the net and the fact that I can spork it here; they make a request for folks to buy it from them if they want to pay for it, in some attempt to validate their Open-Source-Everything-Philosophy.

They also add exhortations to make Your Local Game Shop order it for you, if you want a physical copy. Well screw you PH!

I hope I can hoist you by your own petard and reduce your sales!

I MAKE WATER UPON ALL YOU CREATE!

Venting over with, it’s time to get back to work.

Appropriately, given how hellish this experience is gonna be, the opening fiction starts on Venus. We focus on a member of the Clanking masses, wearing a body we’ve never seen before, a Quartz morph – rather than some oh-so-clever reference that the writers of this damnable game seem so fond of, it’s just made of SiO4. The operator, an unfortunate male by the name of Hines has been exploring a local lava field – it’s pretty fresh too, the place he’s standing is rather soft, like thick jello; looking at the local lava flow, he considers ending himself by jumping in it – rather understandable thought, when you can’t even drink to deal with the horror of this shithole.

Of course, his nanny AI tells him, in vomitously sweet words that “We have goals, Hines. Stay focused on them, and the time will melt steadily away. I promise”. Not the best choice of words when 3 of his friends had other things melt away in the first month of 12 of his indenture. Much like him, I suspect his AI is gaslighting him; even if he did die, this being EP, he’d be back – though it would be a new copy, legally through some corp game so they start the term from scratch; often, they die at the hands of careless teleoperators above – they went for the less balls to the wall indenture option, and are going to be at it much longer. This is actually vaguely sympathetic.

So of course we’re switching perspective.

Now, we come to an femme enbie smurf jaeling off. Yes, you heard that right.

It’s a femme agender enbie, jaeling off and writhing on a foam mattress and pillow, getting off on their own reflection and touching entirely new erogenous zones on their customized blue-skinned neuter body.

This not being hardcore enough, they switch on a simulation that basically amounts to the higher atmosphere of Venus fucking them with the winds; apparently gobs of flesh don’t even compare.

Okay. This is a thing.

I didn’t expect to be doing this so early…

SHOT 1

Ahh, bad Timmies coffee, with acetone and cheap gumballs. Score!

Fortunately, this is interrupted. The focus character being greeted by an old mentor/friend/enemy/fuckbuddy. Dumb banter aside, and creepy reminiscences about their love of inevitable victory, they get down to business – there’s some new PC negotiator, with no background. Smurf is intrigued at getting to wreck someone with no exploitable past. Once they finish plotting, Smurf returned to their windfucking – the sim being a gift of the Venusian people and now spiced with getting to politically ruin someone and their masters.

[Did I mention there was a picture of the Jaleing-off?] (https://eclipse-phase.wikispaces.com/file/view/sunward-piece-1.jpg/331041506/sunward-piece-1.jpg) (OBVIOUSLY NSFW)

We’ve swapped viewpoint again, to someone watching a corp wanker snack on pufferfish balls; with the Wonder of Medichines, fugu just brings euphoria, rather than death. He’s briefing the same negotiator that was mentioned above – he wants Smurf wrecked, and he knows he has viewpoint character on a leash; said character is currently reveling in having a proper organic body again, and is a bit crude about it – he immediately chides her about it, then reassumes a jovial demeanor and invites her to look outside; our viewpoint character is an ex-UN negotiator that got transmitted off earth during the TITAN-Bullshitapalooza, ending up a hooker for the triad running various puppet bodies; her benefactor found her here, saw she was criminally underused, and acquired her, seeing her void of history as a potential advantage.

She successfully chameleons at him, saying that she saw the ‘little people’ down there; this background player has dreams of preserving an empire, and he’s first taking a swing at Morningstar.

We’re back to Smurf here, and an attempt at a public appearance just went pear shaped, as she got caught out after 36 surface workers ended up dead, and with no mind.roms to recover from – even with the philosophical stupidity of it, it was scummy for MS to offer an option without backup, and both the people and the PC, in the case of the mystery envoy are slanging them for it.

This preludes a multi-month underground tug of war, with interrupted shipments, defections and incidents on either side, and Jeue still hasn’t budged.

Finally, however, someone comes forward with a trick – an anonymous source that Smurf has gotten good use out of for some time as they rose to the top of the veen’s diplomacy. Apparently, our mystery diplomat ‘is’ one of the Lost. After using it and getting rid of their enemy, Smurf’s schadenfreude is interrupted by a caller with an creepy avatar – turns out it’s our mystery benefactor – someone with a voice ruined by various drugs of abuse; apparently that databomb was bullshit – or rather, it applied to Smurf, not her victim; she was reminded of her own acts that had been deleted from memory; he reminds them that they is his dog, and he is rich, powerful and experienced enough to see whatever she can think of doing coming.

Finally, we cut back to Hines; he’s now counting down, and thinking about other things than the shitbirds running the show; turns out that he was here for something other than freedom – he was a programmed sleeper agent, sent to asplode his camp – only this time, he was sent an abort code, rather than an order to make a kamikaze run; rather than asploding, he just jumps in a lava river though.

We cut back to Smurf; they’re the one who had thwarted the attack; there is very little jubilation, however – her mood matches the storm outside; after all ‘It’s simple, really, to wind up on the winning side when you’ve created the winner. And the loser.’ – so much for the creator and destroyer, when you realize you’re as disposable as Hines or Jeue.

Speaking of which, we return to an earlier version of the latter, now awakening in a pleasure pod; she has no idea that her boss is about to use her again, or keep doing so, for all eternity; she then heads off to service some corp drone with a humiliation fetish.

Btw, we get a shot of the pleasure pod (NSFW)

We finally cut back to our hyper-oligarch, strolling past a roulette table – he notices an incipient streak with some new math headware he had installed – he tosses a good 10,000 creds at the table; while he waits for it to spin, he homes in on a pleasure pod at the end of the table – he smoozes up to the pod and is rewarded with a smile; he flirts with the pod, as he waits on the bet and shake ice cubes – and as predicted, he gets it.

Well; this was debatably somewhat better than the base book’s story – it’s definitely showing its Shadowrun origins here; unfortunately, it’s the current groady form of Shadowrun; also, you can deffo tell it’s written by het male nerds here, especially when you look at the art.

Just because it’s possibly better than the first, don’t mean it’s not shite tho – jesus, that was horrible; I did not need to read about some grody old man controlling and abusing women like that for cheap villain heat - or some creep nerdboy’s take on future enbie sexuality. Christ; I hate the way transhumanists treat us trans folk.

Next: Sunny Side up, with Quicksilver

Chapter 2: Sunny Side up, with Quicksilver

We begin our Firewall guided in-detail sightseeing tour of the inner solar system with the object that lends it it’s name, Sol. Sol is what you can expect from a star – big, hot and rather dangerous to live near – they rather intelligently say that it’s not going to be a boring assignment – quite aside from some of the bullshit living in the region – and there is quite a bit of that – they list several ways that the star could be fucked with to cause trouble:

FUCKING CMES, HOW DO THEY WORK?

Flares and Corona mass events are results of various particle interactions with the sun’s magnetic field, the exact details of such being beyond the remit of this thread’s learns value; one game that someone could play here is taking a bigass magnetic field of some kind and fucking with the suns surface to send it vomiting high energy particle death across the solar system – probably not that big an issue overall, as they’d be good at handling the natural version, but a big one – a superflare - could cause a hell of a lot of trouble, especially as much of the locals live outside a magnetic field, frying just about anything not in a rock cave caught in the path.

IRONIOC FATE

Those who remember their earth and space science classes will recall that a type-II supernova happens when a star of sufficient size get choked up with iron at it’s core – the stuff needs energy input to fuse, which means there’s less to stop a star from collapsing on itself. There’s not enough iron in Sol to kill the Sun, they note – just enough to screw with the system enough to get big solar flares; I dunno enough astrophysics to assess this claim.

What I can say is horse hockey, is that if some godlike asshole [CoughTITANSCough] replaced the core of the sun with iron, that it would asplode; yellow dwarfs like our good old primary just don’t have the mass to manage a type-II, no matter what you do – it would kill it, certainly, but nothing so dramatic. Fuck, you could do that with enough oxygen or carbon. First scientific screamer of the book, right here.

Shot 2

ENTER THE SINGULARITY

Fortunately, this is the version from science class, rather than fapping computer nerds.

Basically, you put a Ceres mass black hole inna middle and watch the fireworks – basically an induced type-II again; honestly, I doubt it would work that way, for the same reason I said so above.

NICE AND TOASTY

As mentioned before, there’s habs in the solar corona – only three officially known, as even EP has to acknowledge that even THE SINGULATARIAN FUTURE can’t beat the fury of one sun all that well – they orbit where they’ll go through the poles, as that’s where the fewest flares happen – even then, they have to hide in magnetic fields that make them look like comets from afar; they draw their power from the fields of the sun using MHD generators in the station walls, under which is loads of water as yet another layer of shielding – resupplying these stations with water in the form of comets is quite the production, with entertainingly violent results if it fucks up. We’ll go through these stations in order of appearance.

ATEN

On paper, a station run by a Martian uni, concerned with drive and energy collection technology and does legit research to those ends among others, but in practice it’s a black site – Cognite, Direct Action and the Nine Lives syndicate all have monetary interests here, and it’s not normal weapons being studied here – weaponizing Exsurgent virii, brain-crashing images – basilisk hacks, in other words and even studying the copied minds of leaders to gain advantage. Firewall hasn’t been able to learn much more – they’ve been quite successful in keeping a lid on it.

There’s some recovered data in an underbar, found in a counterintell specialist’s data files that had been taken from a former student– some students found a bunch of nutrient feed piping in the Molecular biology building, the sort used when they have blank morphs around waiting for someone to commit suicide to use, plus medical containment feeds.

They also found one of the poisons used for said suicides; it’s used when they want to not only delete the mind, but be absolutely sure it’s gone; good for maintaining security… or for dealing with those who the TITANS had their grubby claws on; they raise the possibility of it being purely benign, but haw, especially when it’s kept under wraps; that security is also in the Uplift section’s 3rd floor; the students were planning some cockamamie scheme to get in and see what’s going on with a journo. It went pear shaped.

Pretty good place to put that kind of hot-lab – if things go to hell, you can jettison the infested section and kill it with solar fusion fire

HOOVERMAN-GEISCHECKER

The region’s obligatory Autonomist/Argonaut station; it has 1/3rd the pop, but is more honest about what they’re doing – pure solar science and making new bodies to run about in the sun are two biggies

Given how open it is, Firewall of course uses it as a major base in the area, not least as it’s the easiest spot to make contact with the wierdos who live on the sun. There’s also tourism here for folks to run about fucking around in the solar atmosphere.

UKKO JYLINÄ

HERE BE SUNWHALES!

It’s basically the local’s own station, named for one of the more beautiful sounds the sun can apparently make; they go here when it get stormy, as well when they get thirsty, copy and kill themselves before moving into new bodies, or create lobotomized copies to do tasks that need hands and of course fuck. Normal folks don’t come here often – quite aside from the fact that the facilities don’t accommodate them, they’re just not invited often. Not to mention, they speak Finnish here.

SOLAR MAGNETICS, WRITHING AROUND My SKKIIIINNNNN!

Most of the locals live in Surya morphs - literal sunwhales – and don’t use habs; outside of researchers, it’s mostly whales and dolphins, as it’s similar to home – pods, open society where sun-ar means you can’t hide things, little goal direction and, being EP, lots of sexy sex. Guhhhh.

Shot 3

They’re generally stand-offish, especially to tourists in local morphs – given the whole dolphin thing, I really don’t wanna know what those were. They’re also worrying to some folks as they represent a society of basically aliens going alien in the inner solar system.

ILLOGICAL

The Solar vulcanoids in real life are a hypothetical family of asteroids inwards of Mercury; here, they’ve found they exist, and folks are using them as places to do secret corp stuff because of the whole looking at the sun factor for spying.

It’s especially hilarious now, as that we know there’s probably nothing big enough for that in there nowadays, though to be fair, this was found after this was written.

V/2011-CALDWELL

First of the lot – and lol at the zeerust, given the discovery year -to be found, it was mostly unimportant until someone found a Pandora gate; TerraGenesis Cooperative quickly acquired it, and started exploring and terraforming worlds; they were originally much more open about it until some people in Reaper Morphs rampaged everywhere and nearly nuked it; no one knows who they were, and they’re still paranoid to this day. Terragen is in a unique position – lotta folks wanna deal with them but that has created friction between them.

MS are working with them in their schemes to terraform the upper clouds, but that and their links with the reclaimers means that the PC is not happy with them, and is trying various ways to seduce them back into their camp, such as access to Mars’s gate or terraforming contacts to drop MS.

QUARTET

4 asteroids in an orbit which always takes at least one near Caldwell; multiple groups own them parts of them, though Terragen owns the biggest bit of the lot. They’re research bases, as well as military anchorages to protect the gates or rush reinforcements through.

V/2014-RA

A rival company is hollowing out this rock near Caldwell; Terragen is distinctly paranoid about this rock, connecting the owner, Ecologene and their long standing habit of selling stuff to the Factors for trinkets with the attack, or future attacks. It may be smokescreen… or not.

SHAKE AND BAKE

Small, mineral rich and tidally locked – those who know their planets know what Mercury is about. Given how much metal there is here, there’s of course mining; folks also do energy related things here, ranging from solar feeds to making antimatter; given how hostile and volatile poor it is, only the corps have enough cash and reach to make it livable; the world is now scarred with strip-mining wounds as well as craters.

There’s not much culture here – it’s either transients or exiles here mainly – folks either moving up or down, and using mercury as a stepping stage; There is a small society of nomads here, called sifters, that run across the world, following the sunrise/fall to protect their gear and scraping out minerals to sell to the companies, despite how they came here for independence.Both are useful to Firewall, as they can make use of either the resources of the companies, or the skill of the nomads.

They mostly run the place on solar power, and it’s the abundance of that which makes Antimatter manufacturable here; 4 companies are known to be doing in here by Firewall, although only one, Omnicor, cops to it. Given what antimatter does, it’s of obvious interest to Firewall – especially as how just half a year before, there was an attempted infiltration by the Exhuman sort of Honest Transhumanist of one company. There’s also corp slave labour prison camps here, with both genuine criminals and dissidents, unlucky refuges and the mentally ill here.