/epg/ - Eclipse Phase General

Two words... Lost Generation.

Anyone have that PDF of everyone's favorite Jovian waifu almost getting caught fapping to homosex porn that starred her very own crew members? It was set after the writefaggotry where she escaped from Jovian prison, I think.

I didn't think anyone read that

Anyone else feel suicidal when they realize they won't live to see EP tech?

>you will never experience morphological freedom
>you will never watch a dusty Martian sunrise

Some of us might end up with our minds uploaded. Who knows.

A lot can happen in 60-70 years.

Brain uploading will be there for the ultra rich and nobody else. The Koch brothers and Saudis will live to see the Sun die with their legion of robot slaves, while we all rot.

I'm two egos that work share a body, with extensive XP access to each other and protocols to ensure both distinction between us and a unified will and interlocking persona. I'm an async and simulspace designer, and he's a psychosurgeon, and this has worked out very well for the double me.

>Morphological """Freedom"""

You all realize that's a sham, right? Once everyone can work 24 hour days without needing to sleep, you think there are going to be jobs left for baselines? 'Optional' augmentations will very quickly become obligatory for anyone who wants to survive. What people imagine as a matter of personal choice will actually be yet another Darwinian competition where everyone is obligated to make the 'optimal' choice if they want to continue existing, leading to a worse outcome for everyone.

we always will. Someone should write something from the smut list that people came up with awhile back, those were all pretty good.

>tfw you once had an Eclipse Phase sex dream

>once

For a while.

So long as we don't kill ourselves somehow we'll eventually just reach utopia. Given forever, anything is possible. Even perfection.

When literally anyone can make x-threat weapons, there's not much of a chance for that.

More than you think, I'd imagine. Anything written by or for one of my favorite Veeky Forums-derived characters is welcome. I definitely plan on using her as an NPC.

This is what eugenics means in Eclipse Phase. It is consumer bodies rather than sterilization. Also a reason why GSPs are so common in Consortium Space.

So that's (one of the) EP versions of hentai anatomy.

The only thing within transhuman production abilities that counts as an X threat weapon on its own is a TITAN or other seed AI, if you squint real fucking hard at the definitions you use. I doubt that creating an ascendant seed AI is within the power any single individual, and by the time it is, if ever, it probably isn't the biggest deal anymore. This is to say that what you assert in your post is wrong, and makes you look like a fool that hasn't read the books and just spouts memes.

>he doesn't blow his load when a handsome man sticks his greasy unwashed finger into his access jacks

Really? I thought the Consortium used GSPs because they're evil.

here's some copypasta from past threads
>Everyone on a hab probably knows each other well so they won't take kindly to you spacing Rick, even if Rick might have been secretly an exhuman
reply
>M-morty, I'm not an exhuman, okay? You got that? Exhuman is, is, it's a fi*URRP* filthy slur, used by small, petty minded, um, rigid little tyrants. Tyrants who think everyone should *URP* think like they do, Morty. It's a filthy slur and I don't, I don't wanna hear it. Anyway, it's not true in the first place. I'm a singularity seeker, Morty. I do science. I don't turn myself into a xenomorph for fun and games. I tried it once, no fun. No idea what people see in that life, Morty.

>killing yourself rather than have a chance at the singularity sometime in your life

Hold on user we'll make it. And there will be AI waifus and XP porn as far as the eye can see

>Rumor spreads of X hab being the base of Y conspiracy to produce Z WMD
>Firewall infiltrators show up and soops
>OZMA infiltrators show up because firewall is there, and they can't let the annarkiddos get Z.
>TAHI infiltrators show up because firewall and OZMA are there, and they want to be relevant too
>singularity seekers and lost and assorted independant mercs and freaks show up because the place is rumored to be the a key battlefield of the covert war
>there was nothing there originally, but now nobody can pull out for fear of breaking the deadlock that developed on the hab
>if anyone tries anything the station will degenerate into a black ops shitshow extravaganza
>any faction pulling out will be assumed to have found the item everyone is looking for and be chased across the system for it
>clarifying the problem is impossible because nobody trusts anybody and all refuse to believe that all these resources are being used for a wild goose chase
>everyone just maintains cover and continues operations
>At the climax of the campaign, as the players are surprised to finally lay hands on the Macguffin and stand triumphant over everyone else, the entire hab is instantly vaporized by RKV impacts, everyone dies, no one remembers or learns anything, the entire incident is purged from records.

>a bunch of old fucks from Bletchley Park, Jormungandr, MIND, JASON, the original Ultimates, and the like all maneuver themselves into one Structuralist server
>they reminisce about the old days, do horrifically dangerous ops, and contemplate finally dying

I'll be honest the thought of immortality is actually horrifying to me. Death is a natural part of life. Without death, nothing you do matters. You have infinite time to do whatever you want. Your successes don't matter because your failures don't matter. You have infinite time to change anything to the result you want. Everyone else has infinite time to change what you have changed back. Nothing you do will be relevant in any meaningful way. What is the point of doing anything if the result will always be the same?

I'm not sure how long I could live in the singularity without actually going insane.

By being a prostitute and only thinking of dicks.

and for you, kinks for androids
>remotely increase his arousal levels in inappropriate situations
>overclock her arousal sub-processor then disable input from her erogenous zones so she's unable to orgasm
>program him with an uncommon word that makes him orgasm on the spot when he hears it
>program her with a common word that stimulates her when she hears it but is unable to make her orgasm so she's constantly on edge all day
>upload a bodyjacking virus that forces his body to act like a total slut while he's conscious but helpless
>plug her exhaust valve/smother her heatsinks and make her try to orgasm before she suffers critical system failures
>invert his pleasure/pain receptors so all sex is torture and all torture is pleasure
>same as above but do it to a sexbot and remove her ability to tell people they're hurting her
>force him to wireup with other, virus laded bots until he's so infected he needs reformatting
>master/slave play, only when she's bad you remove a limb/disable the code allowing her to do something
>turn off his safety refractory period and force him to orgasm until his parts burn out and voids the warranty
>give her a hug module and then hug her

I feel the same way, but about death.

Why does she have spiders instead of hands? I never asked for this.

why does having death hanging over your head make your petty, insignificant decisions meaningful? Relevant to what? You're repeating platitudes that allude to meaning and importance, but to whom? You seem to be think the assumption of a continued existence means you'll like all conditions equally, be ambivalent to pain because its not going to be lethal, and give up on all endeavors because of the prospect that you will live to see them undone if you're unwatchful.

I guess you're relying on the comfort of dying before your creations, and thinking that somehow made them meaningful, permanent, as if that change, since it outlived you, will be immortalized. Its a romantic prospect, but its shit next to actually living forever, especially with a whole universe to explore and the ability to fundamentally alter oneself. Hell, if you want a work that will last forever in glory in that situation, make it you.

Does the 30 Aptitude limit apply before or after the morph bonus?

After, if you have, say, COG 30 and sleeve a mentat, you're stuck at 30 unless you took Enhanced Aptitude. Equipment/mod bonuses apply after morph limit, though, so SOM 40 is incredibly easy to get, and REF 40 isn't far behind.

Thank you.

Real life isn't Pathfinder charop threads, bucko.

No one is evil in EP, even Jovian Junta.

Wrong. Everyone is evil. Only God was good, and He is dead.

It's states in the books somewhere that most of the capitalist economies in eclipse phase don't actually have a need for workers anymore due to AI automation. The only reason for people to work is as a distribution method for the actual scarce resource, bodies. Most of them are keeping capitalism around because of vested interest and not knowing a better system to transition to.

Nope.

Brain uploading techs way out, we'd have to understand not only the brain way better than we do but also understand how the rest of the body acts on the brain. Not to mention the slowdown in Moores Law we're seeing would have to be overcome before then. We'd also have to solve so many legal problems to do with identity, ownership and inheritance it would be banned for another 20-30 years just like cloning was.

And it would also almost certainly be a copy. To even do experiments on retaining the same conciousness between bodies we'd have to solve a bunch of problems we can't even touch on right now.(Like the problem of what it actually fucking is)

>Death is a natural part of life.
People say that but has anyone actually tried immortality?
Most of the stuff that sucks about living a long time, getting old and sick, loosing those close to you, doesn't apply in this setting. Thinking that the ability to see through long term projects and being spared the pain of lose would be as bad things seems like a failure of imagination to me

Except you'd still lose people, just in different ways. Partners would fall out of love with you, children would fly the coup, friends would block you over a falling out.

And people still die, getting restored from an old backup is essentially death in a lot of ways, then there's immortality blues and the inevitable possibility of suicide. Psycho surgery could go wrong and the person may fall apart in 3 years time or they may get addicted and burn out , both of these options could essentially be a living death.

Even worse, Eclipse Phase offers a lot of the classic "lonely wizard" solutions to these problems. Family member leaves, robot child. Wife leaves you, splice her beta fork with an AI. Friend is ego hunted, make your muse look and speak like him. Eventually people will just stagnate in their imperfect little worlds

Sure fucking up is still a risk, I'm certainly not suggesting life extension will fix the world. But the kind of stuff you're talking about still happens in the 70ish years we get currently. All living longer would do is give us more opportunities to fix things after we fuck up

Ecept as I said, EP encourages that lonely wizard scenario where a person just surrounds themselves with illusions of their lost past and never have reason to fix their problems.

Not to mention if we had tons if immortal people there would be very few worthwhile jobs for people which would cause a lot more existential crises and suicide among the population. We're already seeing this IRL in countries like Japan where old people are taking up all the noteworthy jobs and causing tons of social problems as a result. People like to pretend we'd be able to find jobs in creative sectors to make up but no one wants to admit if that were the case we wouldn't have all the bullshit beauracratic non jobs we have graduates working now. .

>Japan
Is fucked by an aging population that has to retire and spend money on expensive medical care. Guess what isn't a problem when you have functional immortality and nanotech medicine?

>implying YHWH
>implying YHWH was good according to any system of morality not its own

That's what a lot of people think, and there's a grain of truth there, but most of it is basically like day 1 patches for a body. Everyone's trying to keep upgrading things, fixing old problems and so on. The development timetables and resources are crazy though, so a lot of glitches get through.

Fractal digits for super-handjobs

To get rid of GSP all you need is a low-level gene therapy. Actually GSP is just another tool to keep the population reliant on hypercorps services and discourage any actions that could stop getting them.

I feel you've missed the point, immortality would only make that worse because the top jobs would never ever become available unless you were first or second generation immortals. The Japanese don't leave those positions in real life because status is more important to their culture than in many other countries. Everyone beyond that would be stuck with the equivalent of 1000 years of a fast food job and how many people will want to live forever with no chance of ever contributing to society or improving their QoL

All-neotenic hab, Wizard of Oz references

I'll be surprised if the Saudis are still ultra rich by then.

We represent the loli pope guild, the loli pope guild, the loli pope guild, and in the name of the loli pope guild, get busy ye faithful!

Brainlink with me /epg/, I need some help.

I'm trying to figure out what exactly it means to be an "employee" of a hypercorp. And no I'm not talking about being an indenture, since the books love talking about how hypercorp=evil slavers. When they're not doing that, they say that a lot of hypercorp work is independent contractors. What does that mean, vs. being a "company man"?

I ask because I'm going to run a game that begins in the Main Belt, and the players are going to be the closest thing the setting has to "shadowrunners", except they're under the umbrella of a hypercorp that's secretly working for Firewall, but the players don't know this yet. I want a simple premise with goals that they can recognize in a setting that does its best to alienate potential new players.

>What does that mean, vs. being a "company man"?

On the positive side, it means independence, freedom to choose your own hours, managing your own business as an independent contractor giving you the ability to do work that are in line with your own ethics and moral values. With the skills at your disposal, you're welcome basically anywhere, and are beholden to nobody. The life of an independent contractor is as close to freedom as you're going to get.

On the negative side, you have little to no security. There's no guarantee of work tomorrow, and you're competing in a marketplace where it's very easy to be undercut. You will have to fund your own training, and make time for it, (when normally you'd be spending time making money) while your company salaryman is being sent on training exercises, paid for by the company, and being paid while they do it. Downward spirals are hard to pick yourself up from, and sometimes the only way out of a dry period is to take the sort of jobs that you thought you wouldn't have to do as an independent contractor.

No, I'm identifying Japan's problems differently. There isn't a fixed number of jobs, so blaming old people for taking all of the (implicitly limited) jobs is missing the point. That you have old people that *retire and stop contributing to the economy* (and don't have enough young people to replace them) is the problem, because it contracts the economy. They also start sucking resources into expensive, mostly useless medical care. Immortality and medical nanotech avoids most of these problems.

I get the sense that hypercorps are a lot like a startup, where they're really quite small and outsource/independently contract a ton of stuff.

So if you work for a hypercorp directly you're probably placed reasonably high up in the corporate chain (which is pretty short typically), or have skills/information valuable enough that the company wants to get you off the market.

Basically, it's probably breddy gud

>give up on all endeavors because of the prospect that you will live to see them undone if you're unwatchful.

It doesn't matter if your achievements are undone, you can always redo them. That's my point. The result will always be the same. There is no objective meaning to life regardless of if you die or live forever, there is only the meaning you can create with your time here in the universe. You are an insignificant dust on a floating rock in the infinite black vacuum of space. Your life isn't going to gain an objective meaning just because it continues forever. The only way life has any meaning at all is the meaning it has to you, and it only has meaning to you because you have a finite amount of time with which to do anything.

Every moment in your life is important and significant, to you, because you could have done something else with your limited time but your chose to do what you're doing. If you don't die, the choice itself is meaningless. Why improve yourself if there is no finite time in order to complete it? Who cares if you work to achieve and become the pinnacle of all humanity? Who cares if you are conquered and all your works destroyed? Freedom and slavery are meaningless concepts. Time is infinite. What motivation do you have to improve?

Again, a lot can happen in 60-70 years, and you can't accurately predict it simply looking at the past and making some assumptions about the present. I'm not saying it will happen, but rather that nobody can say for sure it won't either. As the pic illustrates, any time prediction made in sufficient advance will turn out largely ridiculous.

And yeah, it will be a copy. It's always a copy and all theoretical forms of mind uploads only try to obfuscate that. If it's software, moving a file implies making a copy and destroying the original. There's no way around it.

So deep down there's no chance of immortality through uploading, only that a chain of copies of yourself will live on in your name.

There's always the potentially inevitable heat-death of the universe.

>And yeah, it will be a copy. It's always a copy and all theoretical forms of mind uploads only try to obfuscate that. If it's software, moving a file implies making a copy and destroying the original. There's no way around it.

I have the same questions about teleportation.

...

Yep, same deal.

There's no travel from A to B. You're destroyed at A and someone for all intents and purpose you (but not you) is constructed at B.

In which user attempts to derive an *ought* from an *is*, and unsurprisingly fails at it.

You talk about objective meaning when it only seems like arbitrary meaning.

A person does stuff, and improves himself/herself, their lives or the world in any way, achievements which may improve their or anyone's quality of life for any amount of time. Whether they're mortal or immortal is irrelevant, and it's arbitrary to define life as a race to achieve the most before you die.

You can be miserable for all eternity if you do nothing with your immortal life, or choose to do something and live better or improve other people's lives. Whatever you do might be undone at any point in the future, but you'll always have time to redo it. At least until you get bored and punch out.

You can die at any time if you really want to.

It's not a race. There is no one who achieves "the most" there is only what you achieve. You have a finite amount of time, and that makes the decision important, not the quantity of the decisions you made.

Still can't see how time and importance are related. If your achievements improve immortal lives, they're important.

Also, I thought it was evident that my use of "the most" referred mainly to quality, not quantity. Achieve the greatest things in your time, if you want a rephrase..

Genome editing and organ printing are the technologies to watch. Fixing the body will likely come before replacing it.

...

That may be the path to true immortality. Regeneration instead of replacement, because you may print all the organs you want, but unless you can rejuvenate the same brain, age will get to it even if the rest of your body's "fresh". I mean, a brain transplant is not an option as we'd return to the same issue.

Am I the only one who gets really anxious about this?
I can accept that my own mayfly existence will come to an end, that's only natural. But the thought that in a large but measurable number of years there will be no more stars is hard to wrap my head around

Maybe the universe is a giant combustion engine and the origin of the big bang is a result of a contraction of a previous universe. Who the hell knows what is really happening? Some things are beyond the limits of human ability to understand.

Just look at this Hubble photo of +10,000 galaxies. There is more in the universe to experience than anyone possibly could even read about in a lifetime.

Someone has to be test it all.
Are you a bad enough dude to install first-generation cybernetics?

>Junta

Not me. One, I'm opposed to suicide on principle. Two, I've already lived to see what I dreamed of (domestic pet robots) become real.

Yeah, maybe you will be the giant upon whose shoulders humanity transcends itself. Or if not them, a person who helps advance that ideal.

>Someone should write something from the smut list that people came up with awhile back, those were all pretty good.

'Welcome to the Future' was actually based on one I wrote earlier

How many skills do you usually have at chargen? I find that most sheets give you room for 8, but that seems like a low amount, even just out the gate.

Er, traits, not skills.

That's so far off in time there's no point in worrying about it.

There's also a million ways humanity could be wiped out long before that, many of which we are so terribly powerless to stop there's no point in worrying about either.

What part of this setting isn't an X-Threat?

Is this game itself an X-Threat, in the vein of Rocco's Basilisk?

Nope.

At any rate, it's not going to happen in any of the lifetimes in Eclipse Phase. You're fucking delusional if you think you're going to be alive in any coherent form trillions of years, even with EP's technology.

And no, I don't consider being part of a gestalt neural network housed inside a computronium superstructure as being "alive".

>Rocco's Basilisk

If you're anxious about cosmic events like heat death, remember that the universe exists in the first place. There may not be a rhyme or reason behind human lives, but in the grandest scale imaginable, order prevails, and every single person alive is a part of that order, whether they recognize it or not.

I mean, at that point the post-post-human neural network might just solve entropy. At least in the Eclipse Phase universe.

>in the grandest scale imaginable, order prevails
>implying entropy doesn't increase over time

How does it feel to be one hundred percent objectively wrong?

And yet here we are, proving that the forces which created the universe are stronger than entropy.

For now, which was exactly his point.

>the forces which created the universe

*tips Hiranyagarbha*

It's also my point. I'm not saying heat death can't happen or anything like that, merely that worrying about the ultimate fate of the universe when nobody knows what came before the Big Bang might be a little silly, and that I'm erring on the side of existence, that there is a reason behind the universe existing.

>implying high entropy systems are disorderly

This is some meme physics

This is /epg/. Everything is memes.