Lars starts his Dormobile and starts driving south. Casually checking his phone if he got any contacts in that area or somewhere down the road. Either someone who might offer him a job or knows a thing or two about AI programming.
Ah, the sweet siren call of More Drugs! How could you possibly say no? With everything concluded to everybody's satisfaction, you decide that its time to hit the road. It's January, and Northern Germany is not exactly the most hospitable of places this time of year. Time to fight the dark and the cold with the same deadly tactic you've successfully employed on all your other foes: getting in your Dormobile and driving the fuck outta there. In this case you decide to head South, to Italy, as South is the natural enemy of cold and darkness.
Hidden Roll 1 [9+2=11]
Hidden Roll 2 [6+2=8]
Exactly the same, despite a slight shift in incidental forces. What could this portend!
As you get off the back roads and onto an autobahn you feel (ESP Roll) [5+3=8] no different about you decision to head south. As you drive (6=1=7) you flip through your contacts on your phone, seeing if anyone you know is about in that part of the world. (ESP Roll)[9+3=12] (Find a contact Roll) [9+3=12] Success! You see that Serefina Garcia, a hippy you know from a short stay two summers ago in a commune just North of Granada, in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Well, she's somewhere between a hippy and a sort of... economic and political terrorist. Well, she's a memeber of a number of "groups" who sometimes stage actions, from awkward protest to (alleged) bombings of powerstations. Whatever her political leanings, she always seems to know where to find a party or some illicit substances.
As you drive along (8vs ESP 11+3=14) a tire bursts on the 16 wheeler truck directly in front of you. In a slow motion loss of control you see the truck somehow jackknife and flip, no less that thirty feet away. The sudden, gigantic, spinning wall of twisted metal looms ahead of you and there is no time to slow or alter your course. Regardless, you little Dormobile somehow sails through the perfect gap in the impending carnage without so much as a scratch. Lucky. Judging by the loud sounds of tearing metal behind you some of your fellow road users weren't so lucky. [6] Leaving the wreckage fast behind you, you ponder that fucked up shit keeps on happening. Like that history quote.
What do you do now?
((Don't worry about it Evil, post when you can. It only really becomes a problem if your in sync with someones character.))
1) Realize that what I am trying to program out is not a bad thing as long as the AI knew the limitations of the soldier, ie movement, agility, and flexability.
2) Design a device that will be able to scan the soldier to learn that person's limitations.
3) Leave the design with your friend who is in charge of components for the battle armor. He will change it to work properly.
4) When returning to desk, look at the battle armor and think about what it would mean for the future, and what may happen if it fell into enemy hands.
5) Return to programming while the thoughts are running through your mind, being careful not to make mistakes in the AI with your preoccupied mind.
You consider the problem. You [9+3=12] realize that there's nothing inherently wrong with many if the "bad" bugs you are trying to program out, its just the algorithms reacting more thoroughly than expected, or rather in ways that
should have been expected. The trouble is that the AI is a relatively simple, compact piece of code (compared to, say, the Dwarf) and necessarily so if its going to be mass produced. It's not an AI made to learn to be a better AI, it's an AI made to make the connection between a soldier and his exoskeleton more complete, more intuitive than any piece of off the shelf software could ever be. It strikes you that the key factor to making this concept work is that the AI must understand the limitations of the soldier and make intelligent decisions from that basis.
You [9+2-3=8] try to come up with a device that could scan someone and learn their limitations, but mostly you just manage some drawings of radio tower shooting scan rays at people and some entirely speculative calculations as to how much bandwidth and processing power you would need to carry that much information scribled on the side. You decide to talk it over with Xavier Heliodoro, a friend of yours who works on the actual engineering side of the S.P.A.R.T.A.N.. Despite being a glorified meatspace greasmonkey, he has a good head for problems and you value his advice. After chatting over the problem over a cup of coffee (Isolationist Roll)[9+1-2] you come away mildly annoyed but unable to refute his conclusions. He tells you that he doesn't see a real way of assessing an individual short of a really powerful, Self Aware AI with a bunch of processing power and storage space hooked up to a bunch of MRI scanners and with access to a lot of data of the individual actually going about their business. Then, some heavy analysis and compression and you should have some sort of data set that adequately describes an individual for your purposes.
Hmm.
You return to your desk and contemplate what the Battle Armor will mean for the future. Surely, it will continue the trend of the last ten years or so for even the larger powers to have much smaller, elite armies than ever before. Not since the days of the knight has the professional soldier had such a disparity in both protection and ability to inflict destruction compared to his peasant irregular foes. And that's another thing. Really, when you get right down to it, its a furtherance of the end of end of symmetrical warfare, one of the many tentacles of the monster slowly strangling any chance for a WW2 style battle royale that wouldnt leave the world an ecological disaster. None of the major players can actually fight each other directly anymore, lest the nukes fly/someone releases an engineered virus/deletes facebook. An the citizens of those powers
hate it when their soldiers die. But people need war, it's a commodity as vital as oil or bandwidth. That will never change.
All theses thoughts and more run through your mind as [11+3=14] run through the "bad" sections of code one last time. You think back to the little mission statement email sent out by the "Head of Development", a sanctimonious bureaucrat who probably never wrote a line of code in his life, defining the "action goals" for this core round of bugfixing. Fuck him and his little notes. Its not like actually knows what you do. You strip out the remaining handful of truly harmful bugs, including one that would cause a soldier to panic-crush the barrel of his weapon with the old Improved Hand Grip code, but leave the majority of them as they are, going so far as to augment some of them. The end result is that the S.P.A.R.T.A.N. AI code will be much more intuitive, but lacks the basis for some of the more... draconian overrides that people higher up the command chain want put in.
S.P.A.R.T.A.N. AI Gains +1 to
Intuitive User AdaptationS.P.A.R.T.A.N. AI Gains -1 to attempts to program overrides.
It is now late afternoon.
What do you do now?
Well, that certainly ruled out the official explanation: A fractured turbine blade. Not only are the blades to strong to fracture that easily, but the impact pattern on the video didn't match their pojected course. The question remains who or what did it? Well, first things first. I need to check the mail, see if I can get a lift on one of the airships to the mainland, and find out what needs to be taken care of before I leave. Also, going to sleep. Need not to forget that one.
You check you email, and notice that you have three non-spam messages. The first is from Reynaud Thomas, the salvage and repair guy you contracted after the accident. He wants to meet with you to discuss some of the recent problems stripping the wreckage from certain areas of the island's support structure. The second is from Felicja Wronski, your Chief Financial Officer and, since the "accident", the only remaining member of your company actively looking for new business. She mentions that she might have something important. The last is from Thandiwe Nowak, a columist for the widely respected news site The Skeptic, requesting an interview on what the future holds for The Aurochs Project.
You call down to the Airship Hanger and the mechanic on duty informs you that one of the Heavy Lifter Zeppelins will be heading for the mainland later this afternoon, to help move some cargo in Port Gold, the shanty town, wretched hive of scum and villainy and pirate refitting dock that servers as the closest thing to "civilization" that you have in these parts. The occasional use of your Zeppelins is part of a long standing agreement between your company and the ever shifting web of warlords and captains vying for power in the town. As well as the odd bit of areal heavy lifting, you also sometimes provide neutral ground where the agents of companies or wealthy individuals can meat with entrepreneurial captains who may or may not have acquired a ship or cargo.
Well, good. That leaves just enough time for some much needed sleep. You head over to your office's sofa and collapse like a worn out rag doll. You dream [3+1] of the accident again. Real, more real than the first time, when it actually happened. Crystal clear, unslurred by adrenaline and confusion. You see the Aurochs fall, you see the metal island burn. See some of the ground crew flash to cinders like matchsticks in a blast furnace. All of it is impossibly slow, even though it was only seconds in real life. Apart from the cool, easy detachment with which the events unfold in front of you words repeat in your mind over and over again, repeat into meaninglessness like a mantra or the cries of those speaking in tongues. "This is what happens when you reach to far".
You awake in a cold sweat, and it is not quite noon. You lose
Skipped a Sleep Cycle and gain
Tired -1 to physical actions,-1 to logical thought, +1 to free associative thought until you have slept.
Hidden Roll 1 [10]
Hidden Roll 2 [10-1=11] Well well, forces are certainly in motion.
What do you do now?
Author
Topic: Nazca Lines of the Mind: An Early Digital Age Roleplaying Game (1 slot open) (Read 8511 times)