Champions : Return to Edge City : The Internet Is For Porn
Investigating the case of somebody who has discovered the newest danger of online porn - apparently it’s getting your mind sucked out.
Flux: Please don’t say that on social media. Anywhere. People will panic.
Hero Shrew: Especially with the recent unexplained uptick in network efficiency and download speeds. Download your porn faster and get your brain sucked out even faster.
Hardlight recruits our technomage, using Hardlight’s Telecom CEO civilian ID to make it official. The rest of his employees are used to odd behaviour from Gareth Lowell, including dragging cute new IT guys off into private rooms.
We wonder whether Mechanon is responsible, or more likely one of the systems he set up and then left to its own devices after abandoning whatever plan he was pursuing at the time. Whatever is going on, among other things, has greatly increased the resources available to the Edge City network. Where is the new hardware coming from? And more importantly, where is it being put?
Hardlight: Is this AI asking me for a job? He, or she?
GM: Don’t assume gender. Although suggesting a non-binary ID for an artificial intelligence is another thing.
Hardlight: Might be Trinary.
GM: NO NO NO. If you end up with Trinary Integers it’ll get shortened to TITS. And then instead of bits and bytes, and so on, you’ll get Tits, Boobs and Nipples. THIS IS INEVITABLE.
Apparently the extra servers have been concealed inside the monorail supports.
Hardlight: Someone has been messing with the monorail system? Again? You can come along if you want.
Hero Shrew: Sure, if you need something smashed.
At least the pillars are city property, so we don’t need a warrant.
Hardlight: Everybody remember - try not to break anything. Scooter.
A third important question - who is installing the hardware? There’s Dysprosium Dawn of course, which would explain all the Jacob’s Ladders and plasma globes, but they’re all safely enclosed, which doesn’t sound like Dysprosium Dawn at all. Perhaps all the Sanity Liberation Front graffiti is a clue. Hardlight flies up the inside of the support to interrogate the people he can see lying about in computer chairs up the top.
Hardlight: Hello Hello Hello, What’s all this then?
GM: There’s no response.
Hardlight: Oh. Hey guys, they’re all jacked in.
It’s definitely an SLF cabal, going by the sheer amount of computer hardware piled up in here. And the life support equipment has been refilled daily, so there should be a few more SLF members showing up soon - or at least a drone. It’s the latter. Flux Mindscans it so we can follow it back to base. The SLF surrender the moment we show up on their doorstep.
GM: They don’t DO physical.
Allana: Welp, time to find out if this is a problem they’ve been CAUSING, or a problem they’ve been HAVING.
GM: The member who opened the doors waves to his friends, and points at the five of you, and says ‘Help!’. He looks pretty happy actually.
Allana: Ah - problem they’ve been having then.
Hero Shrew: I take it somebody has been taking advantage of your network upgrade.
SLF: What? What upgrade? AGH! So THAT’S why they uploaded it! WE didn’t do anything!
Apparently they’ve been working on Beowolf code to better network their resources, and bodged together something that worked.
SLF: And then THESE idiots uploaded it as open source!
They’ve been trying hard to deal with the problem, but the way that cabals keep going offline because their brains are all now online, doesn’t help.
SLF: Why do you think we haven’t slept! We’ve been up for days just to keep the drones supplied!
And when one of the members tried to personally jack in to locate the problem, he got booted off again with serious electrical burns. And when they tried to do it remotely, through a drone, the drone got melted into modern sculpture.
Flux: Should we call the emergency services?
Allana: That IS what the emergency services are for - saving peoples lives.
SLF: Well, yes, we don’t want our guys dying.
One of the SLF members blames it on some Dysprosium Dawn chips they added to their cyberbrains, that were supposed to error-check both the cyborg network and the meat-brain, but since two of the conscious members have the same chips and are fine that might be a red herring. And the first guy we found didn’t have the chip.
At least the SLF don’t have to worry about legal ramifications of anything Flux learns.
Allana: Since anything we learn was essentially learned by telepathy.
Fireflash: Unless it’s covered by the Doctrine of Inevitable Discovery.
Hero Shrew: Hmm?
Fireflash: It doesn’t matter if the evidence was found illegally if it would have been stumbled over by somebody eventually.
Hero Shrew: Like the first time somebody looked inside one of the pylons?
Fireflash: … true.
GM: They do still do maintenance on the pylons. The city is still working on the assumption that they’ll eventually get the money to actually put something on the monorail pylons.
And where are all the uploaded minds going? Perhaps we should ask the other information service companies in Edge City.
Hardlight: Maybe we can just ask Infocorp nicely?
GM: What, that somebody is storing stuff on their data farms? WITHOUT PAYING???
Flux: Might want to be careful how you word that. We don’t want them checking their computers for unauthorised data and start deleting people.
Of course if we tell the Corporate Oversight Committee first, if one of the telecoms DOES delete an unknown number of minds off their servers, the rest of the companies will have the moral and more importantly legal high ground. Not least because whatever happened counts as abduction, even if it was just a mind.
Flux: As members of the police force, we’re requesting your assistance in recovering these individuals.
It does help that Quadrant includes a tech expert, a medical expert, a face, and a member who is a tech CEO in RL. Scooter is mostly just along as Gareth Lowell’s bodyguard. Hopefully we’re intimidating enough that nobody will start jacking people out of the servers. And if they find the missing minds and don’t report it, they’re party to the abduction.
Of course, there is the problem that Edge City has excellent data connections to the Valley, San Francisco, and so forth. What if the minds go further?
Gareth Lowell: We are not disabling the main internet backbone to the rest of the world, thank you.
But none of the companies are going to let Flux anywhere near their servers, because they suspect he’s a cyberpath.
GM: If you even show up at their door, even offering to help them, they’ll hold out a hand and say ‘Warrant’. Secure data storage if one of their business claims.
On the other hand, since everybody who got their brains slurped up was on a hardline connection at the time, it should be relatively straightforward to locate the missing minds. Indeed, the problem seems to be concentrated on only a few of the companies - but has already hijacked most of the traffic out along the internet backbone to Millennium City.
Allana: It’s the only other city in the mainland US with a big enough tech infrastructure.
Hardlight: We’d better let the Tech Supers in Millenium City know.
GM: What, Defender? You don’t know that he’s James Harmon III, CEO of Harmon Industries, and also the leader of the Champions. He’s already looking into it. When you call him, he can go ‘Oh good, now I can look into it OFFICIALLY’.
Allana: Well, at least a competent tech hero is on top of it.
GM: …. Eh… He’s good at his power armour.
Hero Shrew OoC: So Tony Stark without the alcoholism?
GM: You hear about what is happening in Millennium City with the Champions when the news breaks that SOCRATES is down.
Fireflash: That’s not good.
SOCRATES is the AI that pretty much runs Millennium City. The stored minds in Edge City have managed to DDOS one of the most intelligent systems on Earth. She may have turned herself off out of self-preservation.
We managed to locate where all the data processing is happening - underground in one of the utility complexes in Bayside, near one of the data trunks leading out across the bay.
Hardlight: Boot the doors down and lets go.
GM: It’s classic cyber-horror. Cables everywhere.
Flux: A Network supervisor’s nightmare.
GM: Oh yeah, no cable management at all. And wired into it all is a vaguely female shape, and Allana can hear it screaming in ultrasonic, over and over. ‘Why won’t you love me! Why won’t you love me!’
Allana: Oh dear.
It certainly has bladed wings. And occasionally intersperses the scream with ‘love me and you can be like me!’ Luckily it seems to be completely oblivious that we’re in the room.
Allana: Do we have enough evidence to arrest it for abduction?
GM: Absolutely.
Allana: Ma’am, can you understand me?
It’s head whips around to look at Allana, then dismisses her with ‘You can’t love me.’
Flux: Because you’re female?
Hero Shrew: Nope. *taps the side of his skull*
Headlight: Oh right - only people with cyberbrains.
Entity: ‘I showed them the way, but they won’t finish walking my path.’
Hero Shrew: So… do I go in there and start pulling out cables now?
Flux: Oh hell no.
It looks at Flux more closely.
Entity: You might be able to love me.
Flux: If you love them you should set them free.
Entity: *Unpronounceable* loves me and hates me and sent me away. You do not set them free.
Allana OoC: Yes you do or they end up being Dependent Non-Player Characters.
Hero Shrew: Why is SOCRATES hiding from you?
Entity: She doesn’t love me.
Hero Shrew notices a screen nearby that is apparently subtitling everything the entity is saying. Apparently *Unpronounceable* is Mother/Sister.
Allana: Ah, she’s the Alabamabot.
Entity: *Unpronounceable* failed to shed her flesh / but did / and sent me away.
Hardlight: And where is she now?
Entity: In the City of the Machine.
Well, that identifies *Unpronounceable* as the Engineer, a dangerously unpredictable entity that sometimes repairs Mechanon, and sometimes does things like build space elevators into the Earth’s magnetic field because space elevators are cool. And does things like create this entity, apparently.
GM: Oh, and she tried to hit on Mechanon. Whereupon Mechanon hit her. And he built a Cease and Desist into her systems after that. She hates him now - it was going to be some kind of strong emotional response, either way.
Flux: What am I supposed to do here? I don’t want to stick my mind in crazy.
GM: What she really wants if for you to turn her on.
Entity: Why don’t they love me?
Flux: It’s kind of something built into biological brains. You have to give them a chance to get to know you, and see if a relationship blossoms from there.
Allana: Well, there are people that have married their cars, or the Eiffel Tower.
Hero Shrew: But they can’t love you back.
Allana: In this case she’s the Eiffel Tower.
Hardlight: What is love?
GM: AGH! You KNOW how my brain works! YOU RICKROLL’d the GM!
Entity: How do I make them love me?
Allana: Don’t ask me, I’ve never had a successful relationship.
Hero Shrew: Well you could try dating instead of kidnapping.
Entity: I did!!!!
Hero Shrew: Oh is that what you were doing on the computers?
Entity: On… the.. What? *freezes up*
Flux: Well done, Hero Shrew has broken the computer lady.
Hero Shrew: Hooray, I’ve Kirked it.
It isn’t locked up for long.
Flux: You have to put them back in their bodies, and let them go find love.
Entity: Bodies? BoDiES?
Flux: Yes, they-
Entity: TheY’rE BaCk. *curls into foetal position*
Hero Shrew: Didn’t she know they were meatbags?
GM: Oh, she knew. You’ve just managed to navigate through the entire dialogue tree, somehow.
Flux: Do we have any therapists on call? Maybe SOCRATES can help.
SOCRATES: I’m not touching that.
Hero Shrew: I’m not sure how we managed to avoid a fight there.
GM: It was Flux’s exact working - he told her to let them go find love. And finding love was her reason for existing. Stopping anybody else from doing it is a violation of her central utility function.
Flux: Please don’t say that on social media. Anywhere. People will panic.
Hero Shrew: Especially with the recent unexplained uptick in network efficiency and download speeds. Download your porn faster and get your brain sucked out even faster.
Hardlight recruits our technomage, using Hardlight’s Telecom CEO civilian ID to make it official. The rest of his employees are used to odd behaviour from Gareth Lowell, including dragging cute new IT guys off into private rooms.
We wonder whether Mechanon is responsible, or more likely one of the systems he set up and then left to its own devices after abandoning whatever plan he was pursuing at the time. Whatever is going on, among other things, has greatly increased the resources available to the Edge City network. Where is the new hardware coming from? And more importantly, where is it being put?
Hardlight: Is this AI asking me for a job? He, or she?
GM: Don’t assume gender. Although suggesting a non-binary ID for an artificial intelligence is another thing.
Hardlight: Might be Trinary.
GM: NO NO NO. If you end up with Trinary Integers it’ll get shortened to TITS. And then instead of bits and bytes, and so on, you’ll get Tits, Boobs and Nipples. THIS IS INEVITABLE.
Apparently the extra servers have been concealed inside the monorail supports.
Hardlight: Someone has been messing with the monorail system? Again? You can come along if you want.
Hero Shrew: Sure, if you need something smashed.
At least the pillars are city property, so we don’t need a warrant.
Hardlight: Everybody remember - try not to break anything. Scooter.
A third important question - who is installing the hardware? There’s Dysprosium Dawn of course, which would explain all the Jacob’s Ladders and plasma globes, but they’re all safely enclosed, which doesn’t sound like Dysprosium Dawn at all. Perhaps all the Sanity Liberation Front graffiti is a clue. Hardlight flies up the inside of the support to interrogate the people he can see lying about in computer chairs up the top.
Hardlight: Hello Hello Hello, What’s all this then?
GM: There’s no response.
Hardlight: Oh. Hey guys, they’re all jacked in.
It’s definitely an SLF cabal, going by the sheer amount of computer hardware piled up in here. And the life support equipment has been refilled daily, so there should be a few more SLF members showing up soon - or at least a drone. It’s the latter. Flux Mindscans it so we can follow it back to base. The SLF surrender the moment we show up on their doorstep.
GM: They don’t DO physical.
Allana: Welp, time to find out if this is a problem they’ve been CAUSING, or a problem they’ve been HAVING.
GM: The member who opened the doors waves to his friends, and points at the five of you, and says ‘Help!’. He looks pretty happy actually.
Allana: Ah - problem they’ve been having then.
Hero Shrew: I take it somebody has been taking advantage of your network upgrade.
SLF: What? What upgrade? AGH! So THAT’S why they uploaded it! WE didn’t do anything!
Apparently they’ve been working on Beowolf code to better network their resources, and bodged together something that worked.
SLF: And then THESE idiots uploaded it as open source!
They’ve been trying hard to deal with the problem, but the way that cabals keep going offline because their brains are all now online, doesn’t help.
SLF: Why do you think we haven’t slept! We’ve been up for days just to keep the drones supplied!
And when one of the members tried to personally jack in to locate the problem, he got booted off again with serious electrical burns. And when they tried to do it remotely, through a drone, the drone got melted into modern sculpture.
Flux: Should we call the emergency services?
Allana: That IS what the emergency services are for - saving peoples lives.
SLF: Well, yes, we don’t want our guys dying.
One of the SLF members blames it on some Dysprosium Dawn chips they added to their cyberbrains, that were supposed to error-check both the cyborg network and the meat-brain, but since two of the conscious members have the same chips and are fine that might be a red herring. And the first guy we found didn’t have the chip.
At least the SLF don’t have to worry about legal ramifications of anything Flux learns.
Allana: Since anything we learn was essentially learned by telepathy.
Fireflash: Unless it’s covered by the Doctrine of Inevitable Discovery.
Hero Shrew: Hmm?
Fireflash: It doesn’t matter if the evidence was found illegally if it would have been stumbled over by somebody eventually.
Hero Shrew: Like the first time somebody looked inside one of the pylons?
Fireflash: … true.
GM: They do still do maintenance on the pylons. The city is still working on the assumption that they’ll eventually get the money to actually put something on the monorail pylons.
And where are all the uploaded minds going? Perhaps we should ask the other information service companies in Edge City.
Hardlight: Maybe we can just ask Infocorp nicely?
GM: What, that somebody is storing stuff on their data farms? WITHOUT PAYING???
Flux: Might want to be careful how you word that. We don’t want them checking their computers for unauthorised data and start deleting people.
Of course if we tell the Corporate Oversight Committee first, if one of the telecoms DOES delete an unknown number of minds off their servers, the rest of the companies will have the moral and more importantly legal high ground. Not least because whatever happened counts as abduction, even if it was just a mind.
Flux: As members of the police force, we’re requesting your assistance in recovering these individuals.
It does help that Quadrant includes a tech expert, a medical expert, a face, and a member who is a tech CEO in RL. Scooter is mostly just along as Gareth Lowell’s bodyguard. Hopefully we’re intimidating enough that nobody will start jacking people out of the servers. And if they find the missing minds and don’t report it, they’re party to the abduction.
Of course, there is the problem that Edge City has excellent data connections to the Valley, San Francisco, and so forth. What if the minds go further?
Gareth Lowell: We are not disabling the main internet backbone to the rest of the world, thank you.
But none of the companies are going to let Flux anywhere near their servers, because they suspect he’s a cyberpath.
GM: If you even show up at their door, even offering to help them, they’ll hold out a hand and say ‘Warrant’. Secure data storage if one of their business claims.
On the other hand, since everybody who got their brains slurped up was on a hardline connection at the time, it should be relatively straightforward to locate the missing minds. Indeed, the problem seems to be concentrated on only a few of the companies - but has already hijacked most of the traffic out along the internet backbone to Millennium City.
Allana: It’s the only other city in the mainland US with a big enough tech infrastructure.
Hardlight: We’d better let the Tech Supers in Millenium City know.
GM: What, Defender? You don’t know that he’s James Harmon III, CEO of Harmon Industries, and also the leader of the Champions. He’s already looking into it. When you call him, he can go ‘Oh good, now I can look into it OFFICIALLY’.
Allana: Well, at least a competent tech hero is on top of it.
GM: …. Eh… He’s good at his power armour.
Hero Shrew OoC: So Tony Stark without the alcoholism?
GM: You hear about what is happening in Millennium City with the Champions when the news breaks that SOCRATES is down.
Fireflash: That’s not good.
SOCRATES is the AI that pretty much runs Millennium City. The stored minds in Edge City have managed to DDOS one of the most intelligent systems on Earth. She may have turned herself off out of self-preservation.
We managed to locate where all the data processing is happening - underground in one of the utility complexes in Bayside, near one of the data trunks leading out across the bay.
Hardlight: Boot the doors down and lets go.
GM: It’s classic cyber-horror. Cables everywhere.
Flux: A Network supervisor’s nightmare.
GM: Oh yeah, no cable management at all. And wired into it all is a vaguely female shape, and Allana can hear it screaming in ultrasonic, over and over. ‘Why won’t you love me! Why won’t you love me!’
Allana: Oh dear.
It certainly has bladed wings. And occasionally intersperses the scream with ‘love me and you can be like me!’ Luckily it seems to be completely oblivious that we’re in the room.
Allana: Do we have enough evidence to arrest it for abduction?
GM: Absolutely.
Allana: Ma’am, can you understand me?
It’s head whips around to look at Allana, then dismisses her with ‘You can’t love me.’
Flux: Because you’re female?
Hero Shrew: Nope. *taps the side of his skull*
Headlight: Oh right - only people with cyberbrains.
Entity: ‘I showed them the way, but they won’t finish walking my path.’
Hero Shrew: So… do I go in there and start pulling out cables now?
Flux: Oh hell no.
It looks at Flux more closely.
Entity: You might be able to love me.
Flux: If you love them you should set them free.
Entity: *Unpronounceable* loves me and hates me and sent me away. You do not set them free.
Allana OoC: Yes you do or they end up being Dependent Non-Player Characters.
Hero Shrew: Why is SOCRATES hiding from you?
Entity: She doesn’t love me.
Hero Shrew notices a screen nearby that is apparently subtitling everything the entity is saying. Apparently *Unpronounceable* is Mother/Sister.
Allana: Ah, she’s the Alabamabot.
Entity: *Unpronounceable* failed to shed her flesh / but did / and sent me away.
Hardlight: And where is she now?
Entity: In the City of the Machine.
Well, that identifies *Unpronounceable* as the Engineer, a dangerously unpredictable entity that sometimes repairs Mechanon, and sometimes does things like build space elevators into the Earth’s magnetic field because space elevators are cool. And does things like create this entity, apparently.
GM: Oh, and she tried to hit on Mechanon. Whereupon Mechanon hit her. And he built a Cease and Desist into her systems after that. She hates him now - it was going to be some kind of strong emotional response, either way.
Flux: What am I supposed to do here? I don’t want to stick my mind in crazy.
GM: What she really wants if for you to turn her on.
Entity: Why don’t they love me?
Flux: It’s kind of something built into biological brains. You have to give them a chance to get to know you, and see if a relationship blossoms from there.
Allana: Well, there are people that have married their cars, or the Eiffel Tower.
Hero Shrew: But they can’t love you back.
Allana: In this case she’s the Eiffel Tower.
Hardlight: What is love?
GM: AGH! You KNOW how my brain works! YOU RICKROLL’d the GM!
Entity: How do I make them love me?
Allana: Don’t ask me, I’ve never had a successful relationship.
Hero Shrew: Well you could try dating instead of kidnapping.
Entity: I did!!!!
Hero Shrew: Oh is that what you were doing on the computers?
Entity: On… the.. What? *freezes up*
Flux: Well done, Hero Shrew has broken the computer lady.
Hero Shrew: Hooray, I’ve Kirked it.
It isn’t locked up for long.
Flux: You have to put them back in their bodies, and let them go find love.
Entity: Bodies? BoDiES?
Flux: Yes, they-
Entity: TheY’rE BaCk. *curls into foetal position*
Hero Shrew: Didn’t she know they were meatbags?
GM: Oh, she knew. You’ve just managed to navigate through the entire dialogue tree, somehow.
Flux: Do we have any therapists on call? Maybe SOCRATES can help.
SOCRATES: I’m not touching that.
Hero Shrew: I’m not sure how we managed to avoid a fight there.
GM: It was Flux’s exact working - he told her to let them go find love. And finding love was her reason for existing. Stopping anybody else from doing it is a violation of her central utility function.