Eclipse Phase: This Mortal Coil

Note: I find these questions/statements odd, especially two separate people registering on ENWorld within 3 hours of each other solely to post on this thread. I would not be surprised to see a few other random posts like these from these usernames spread across miscellaneous threads in the near future followed by "subtle" links to discount retail products, but here are replies in spite of my perhaps invalid intuitions.

bling said:

fantastic images! are they photoshoped?

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They were created by persons not me entirely out of whole cloth or as digital matte paintings. I would hazard a guess that many of them were created in Photoshop, which may or may not fit the standard definition of "photoshopped" - as in real images modified slightly to improve on them versus constructing them entirely in Photoshop.

Most of them are from deviant art, looking up "scifi" or the like in the search and extensive browsing of/downloading from the galleries of artists I like.

Adriane said:

All this information is really good and informative.
Thanks for sharing.

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I wouldn't personally call it "information" since it's a roleplaying game narrative from a fictional universe, though I try to keep it as "hard scifi" as I can in line with the setting. I also think information is by definition informative by the shared root of the words alone, but you are welcome regardless.

Fall, Per Varios Casus



Bose leaned back in the soft white leather recliner and sipped at his mi tai at the top of his New York penthouse, watching as a hundred-foot tall war machine casually walked through the side of a sky scraper a few blocks down, sending debris crashing into the charred streets and adding swirling concrete dust to the smoke of the burning city.

A Navy VTOL fast-roped a squad of Marines on the top of another building nearby then was cut in half by what looked like a flying buzz-saw the size of a bus.

Seekers flew from the troops on the rooftop in response, blasting the buzz saw apart and sending its remains crashing into another building where it exploded into a massive fireball.

Bose pointed to a section of the black-clouded sky and his smart windows, recognizing the gesture, magnified the area, revealing a pair of F-29 Sparhawks in a desperate dogfight with a TITAN aircraft. His muse overlaid everything that was known about it from humanity's scattered, fallacy-and-terror-laden reports on such craft on the windows around it.

It was called a Ghul by the Arabic Union pilots that first encountered it, named after a shapeshifting, corpse-eating monster from Arabic mythology. It could turn completely invisible to the naked eye and was invisible to radar and most other imaging or location-tracking technologies, it could morph into different shapes literally on the fly depending on what aeronautic stunts it needed to pull, and could supposedly accelerate from a hover to Mach4 in five seconds.

Four Raytheon AT-140 AMRAAM Air-to-Air missiles detached from the F-29s and streaked towards the Ghul at Mach5. It responded instantly, five engines igniting with a deep red-orange burn like blazing portals to hell. Its skin rippled and streamlined as it arced up steeply, its exhaust tracing the graph of an exponential function - like humanity's death-toll - into the wicked lightning of the highly-charged post-nuclear shroud, pulling g-forces that would have instantly killed any human pilot.

The F-29s slowed slightly and dropped away from the clouds, no doubt due to the tendency for TITAN nanoswarms to drift through them and reach down tendrils like the limbs of some Cthulhuan Old Ones at anything that passed underneath, pulling apart and consuming whatever they touched.

There was a ripple of distortion as the Ghul plummeted straight out of the sky at Mach15, its now-bullet-shaped body glowing like a meteor as it cut fifty yards in front of one of the F-29s, the intense shockwave and turbulence of its passing tearing the F-29 apart instantly.

Its wingman had only a moment to mourn as the four AMRAAMs plummeted from the scudding clouds in a beautiful-yet-terrible spiral and all impacted with the Sparhawk simultaneously.

Bose had watched the East Coast Mass Interception with everyone else - the largest and last real air battle in human history - and seen the TITANs spontaneously jamming, misdirecting, and or hijacking American and EU missiles and aircraft with casual and terrifying ease. Apparently the new AntiTitan-140s weren't doing as well as the Air Force had hoped. As the world had hoped - what was left of it anyway.

Bose sighed as well. He'd helped write the missiles' on-board anti-intrusion software in World Com's desperate LastSource project to bring the best hackers, crackers, and other code-junkies together to come up with weapons to save humanity from the TITANs.

Fail.

It was about that time that a "Slave Galley" drifted in front of his penthouse window, the strange heat-glow of the TITAN's unknown anti-grav technology making the strange black markings on its yellow-green hull ripple and distort in strange ways that gave him an instant headache.

His smart windows overlaid AR representations of the IR lasers that shone from microscopic apertures in the Galley's side and traced his body in an obscene, invisible caress.

He finished off his mi tai, savoring its bite.

Ten jagged spherical machines shattered his windows, the pungent smell of the world burning assaulting him as gale-force high-altitude winds screamed into the penthouse. A Headhunter drifted in behind them - its ripping blade spinning up as four gripping arms remolded themselves exactly to the circumference of Bose's head.

He stood and looked around his apartment one more time, lingering for a moment on his proudly-displayed twenty-years of hard-earned technical certifications, the cracked clamshell he'd carried for luck as a kid, the half-eaten can of beans that would be his last meal, the empty bottle of potassium iodide pills on the counter, the spinning holograms of his wife, their two cats, nieces and nephews lost when they nuked DC, his dad who had vanished into the Rockies six months ago with a hunting rifle, a shotgun, and a backpack full of survival gear when they'd announced that London had just disappeared.

The barrel of his .357 was cold against the back of his neck.

The spheroids darted towards him - he'd seen them at work before, like self-contained anti-human wrecking balls that bludgeoned people into skeleton-splintered wreckage so they could only lay quivering in pain and terror as the Headhunters came for them.

As he pulled the trigger, he hoped he'd get a direct hit on his cortical stack so the TITANs wouldn't rip his consciousness free and drag it off into some unknown digital nightmare realm.

He heard the hammer click in concert with the crack of his bones as the spheroids hit him in ten places at once with sledgehammer force...

All for One



Bose(2) sent a message to his prime with the interesting tidbit he'd just teased out of the mesh. A moment later, Bose was beside him in the virtual copy of their New York penthouse where they'd meet up to collaborate and share info.

"So Omnicorp is sending someone to contact some person named Ripley? Why is that interesting?" Bose said, walking over to the kitchen and mixing himself up a virtual mi tai.

"Two reasons. One, I'm pretty sure this 'Ripley' is the one from this."

He played a clip from the cNews mesh archive, some story from a few days ago about a disgruntled Menton blowing up The Sphere bar and restaurant.

"Damn, I liked that place. Maybe they're expecting Ripley to pay damages on some Omnicorp personnel that got blown up," Bose said, lifting up his mi tai and quirking an eyebrow.

Bose(2) shook his head and Bose shrugged, taking a sip. Bose(2) knew that Bose's drink was real as they all had access to the XP of the last five minutes of Bose's life on Earth that he'd recorded and had transmitted into an orbital dataSat for later retrieval as a postmortem Infugee.

"Well, that could be, except there was a mention of Earth..."

Bose rubbed his lips as that sank in. Not that there were actual lips as they were both purely digital egos slumming in Extropia's freeHost sections of the Mesh, but Bose(2) knew the gesture as it was his exactly as much as it was Bose prime's.

"Okay, well let's do this. You do some research and see what you can find out about Omnicorp's legal personnel and I'll dig around and see what I can find about any recent hires in case they hired a freelancer to scope this out. Any idea where Bose(1) is at? He's copied himself somewhere in freeMesh that I can't find and hasn't been responding to queries."

Bose(2) shrugged. "You must have had some sort of predominant rebellious thought when you forked him off. I shared this info with him too, so maybe he's already out somewhere looking for it."

They both looked over at the window of the penthouse as a light flickered there. They exchanged a quirked eyebrow in almost exact unison, then walked over to the windows. As they neared, the window opaqued to hide the perpetually burning virtual New York 'outside', replacing it with a view of the storage locker where the Boses kept their morph.

A hundred little robotic insects were scurrying across the wall, while a dozen others worked together to secure the lid to the stasis shell where the Swarmoid was kept.

"Um... Bose(1), what's going on?" Bose said.

"Following a lead of my own, keep me informed and I'll let you know what I find," Bose(1) replied, adding an unnecessary insectoid chittering sound to his speech that made Bose and Bose(2) chuckle.

"There might be some profit to be made out of all of this, so be smart," Bose said.

"I'm just as smart as you are and if I get some hard money, I'm keeping it," Bose(1) replied.

Bose shrugged. "Fine, then I'll just integrate back into you instead of the other way around, just stay in touch."

Bose(1) signed off, the window returning to its familiar view. Bose(2) shook his head. "See, what I tell you? Next time you fork, keep your mind calm."

"Well, if I end up merging with him, I'll hold that thought on the forefront to be sure it sinks in. Anyway, meet back here in a few hours and we'll go over what we figured out."

"Sounds like a plan," Bose(2) said.

With a simultaneity born of nearly identical instincts and conditioning, they vanished from the shared VR space and shot off their own ways into the Mesh.

I'm really digging this. Please keep it up--this SH has been sadly overlooked.

RedTonic said:

I'm really digging this. Please keep it up--this SH has been sadly overlooked.

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Thanks RedTonic, glad you're enjoying it. I've been trying to update once a week (usually Tuesday nights) but haven't been able to stick to that schedule 100% of the time. I should have a post up this Tuesday however.

Clubbed to Death



Serian Lucius Favorn sipped from his wine glass as he gripped the seat-sphere with his knees. Across the expensively tiled table, Daliante leaned back in his stylish dark-skinned Olympian morph to watch the line slowly making their way towards the door of exclusive Club Nocturnis, his cloth-of-gold suit glinting in the strobing club lights shining in from the round doorway nearby.

"So, I just finished chatting with the owner," Daliante said, despite the fact that he'd been sitting at the table inside a shimmering AR energy field with Serian for the last half-hour. "You have a private room and access to the conference room just inside and down the hall from where we are now."

Serian raised his glass of wine to Daliante and smiled his million-credit smile. "To good friends - with contacts in expensive places."

Daliante nodded and raised his wine glass as well, taking a careful sip and trying to not compress the flexible "glass" too much and spill wine out into the microgravity of inner Extropia.

A single pure white feather drifted down to the tabletop and Serian virtually tapped it. "Excuse me, Daliante, I have some incoming messages I need to take."

Daliante waved him off in a manner that told Serian he was already off on another mesh conversation of his own.

His muse, Archangel, danced about the edge of his vision and golden letters appeared on the tabletop. "Message from: lillianRaikov982> Saw your post looking for technical and security specialists on Extrolist, offer still on the table?"

Literally, Serian thought. He sent off a quick reply.

"I just posted that... 84 seconds ago, so yes, it's still open. I prefer to negotiate in person..." so I can get maximum use out of my Sylph, he thought... "meet at Club Nocturnis in an hour."

">Affirmative, we're on our way."

No sooner had he gotten the message than another reply to his post glittered into existence on the tabletop.

Fast replies in this place, he thought as he motioned for Archangel to display it. I'll have to remember to come here next time I need some bodies to round out a contract...

***

Hacron was huge, like some ancient greek hero - a visage fitting his Olympian morph. His suit was plain beige and the simple, battered briefcase he'd entered the conference room with was tucked beneath his knees.

Raikov/Lillian was an androgynous-yet-vaguely-feminine Sylph in a red cocktail dress that left just enough to the imagination. The edge of the dress fluttered up in the club's air circulation teasingly as she daintily held onto the "chair" with her legs.

Her companion, one Ishmael, made no effort to conceal his hard-edged ceramic-alloy composite combat armor. His skin was perfect, the literally sculpted bones in his skin pressing out sharp edges that made his face look almost alien in a "more human than human" way.

AltecLansing(1), as Serian knew him since he'd only given him his (obviously fake) MeshID, occupied a Swarmoid that had formed a hollow cylinder around his chair and was slowly rotating around it.

"Thank you all for coming in person on such short notice," Serian began. "Your main purpose will be as security personnel - both physical and digital - during a contract negotiation that will transpire in the next several days. The negotiation is... delicate and, as part of your contract, you shall never speak of it after it transpires. The exact where, when, and even who of the meeting and specifics of the other negotiating party are unknowns. I know this isn't much information to go on, will relay you more information when I receive it."

"What is the negotiation for?" Ishmael said. He stared blankly at Serian's sharp look, but looked vaguely abashed a moment later as Serian's pheromones hit.

Raikov/Lillian quickly spoke up in his stead, his/her voice a low alto/soft tenor. "Will we be hauling something bulky around, protecting other personnel - mission related info is what my companion is really asking, so we know what provisions to account for."

"Of course. It will be a small object, though the initial meeting will be just that - first contact to determine if there is even something on the table worth negotiating for. Keep in mind, if everything goes well, there will be no need for you aside from your physical presence and the credibility and threat it brings. War is a continuation of politics by other means and all, but let's wait until all those other means have been depleted. Deal?"

The others nodded as they digitally signed the contracts Archangel had been preparing as Serian spoke, the Swarmoid even shifting to form an unnerving giant floating head so it could nod.

Serian rolled his eyes inwardly as he "stood", letting go of his "chair" with his legs and pushing towards the door. "Good. Consider yourselves on-call, when I get the word, we may have as little as a couple hours to be anywhere in Extropia, so be alert."

Their strange array of extremely expensive morphs spoke to their competence enough for Serian, but out here at the edge of the outer system, an ego's politics and motivations were far less simple than the dozens of hypercorp negotiations, takeovers, talk-downs, and the like he'd handled in the inner system. The omnipresent inner-system corporate drive for power and profit was dangerous, but at least it was predictable. In the outer system, however, it could be a complete non-factor where freedom, ideals, ideas, and reputation were sometimes all an individual cared about.

Hopefully everything would go smoothly.

As he'd soon find, smooth was relative...

Till We Meet Again



Panthareen bliped in and out of existence around the list that Alexander had sent Raikov before disappearing from the mesh.

"Oooh, cool! Yup, that there, I remember that, we found an antique store with some baseball cards in it, that's one of them!" Panthereen said, holding up the AR card in his virtual-crab claw and waving it around exaggeratedly.

"Wait, what's going on?" Ishmael said, joining in on Raikov's virtual meeting with Panthareen.

"Alexander hacked into some high-end auction house named 'Zarneys' that was selling authentic Earth memorabilia. This is the log..." Raikov highlighted the slowly scrolling list of items projected onto a nearby wall "...that he downloaded from there before they traced him. Apparently some of the stuff on there is from Earthwing's mission."

"So where's Alexander now?"

"He's laying low for a bit to let Zarneys cool down, that and - hold on, AltecLansing is contacting me again. I'll just have him join us."

An androgynous transparent humanoid figure formed in AR, standing on the ceiling of the small deserted plaza where they were lounging. Panthareen split into multiple mini Panthareens that examined him from every angle. "Ah, you have that as down, I've been digital long enough I kinda forget what 'down' feels like. Um... what's with the Novacrab?"

"Panthareen, I think that's everything, we'll let you know when we find more," Raikov said.

"Right right!" Panthareen said, shaking Raikov's hand vigorously in AR. "Let Panthareen know and he'll be right back to help!"

AltecLansing's figure reappeared on a bench next to Raikov as Panthareen exploded into a swirl of virtual confetti. "Odd. Anyway, you said you wanted to talk to me?"

Raikov nodded, wishing AltecLansing would agree to meet in person some time so his Sylphic attributes could come into play. "Our... primary software specialist lets call him... is out for a bit, I was wondering if you could fill in his shoes-"

"Cowboy boots is more like," Ishmael interjected.

"-with something completely unrelated to the contract with Sieran Favorn," Raikov finished.

There was a slight pause before AltecLansing replied. "I suppose so, though why would I want to do so?"

"We have a secondary mission and we'll include you in with an equal share on any profit we make on it," Raikov said. I'm not technically lying, he thought, I don't think we're getting paid for stopping Ridley, so an equal share of nothing is...

"I'm intrigued, shoot," AltecLansing said.

"We're looking for someone named Ridley. We don't know much more about her except this video-" he linked the Sphere explosion and subsequent signal jamming feed. "She was with a group called Earthwing and disappeared completely from Extropia - mesh and rock - a few days ago. We need to find her."

"Hmm..." AltecLansing said in that particular absent way that said he was already starting to do searches on her. "We'll see what we can do."

"We?"

"Me we, nevermind. I'll contact you with whatever I figure out if Sieran doesn't call us together for his secretive contract first."

"Good."

As the shared AR/VR simulspace dissolved, Raikov turned to Ishmael. "And now we wait and see what turns up."

Ishmael nodded and yawned. "Maybe find some place to hole up and nap for a bit. I've been a soldier long enough to know to take advantage of the 99% boredom that comes before the 1% sheer adrenaline-laced, balls-to-the-walls excitement/terror rush."

"Agreed. All that's left to do now is hurry up and wait..."

They didn't have to wait long.

VR, the Champions



Raikov adjusted the shoulder plate on the body armor Sieran had acquired for him, wishing again he had a morph more designed for combat in case weapons went free during the meeting.

Ishmael nodded to him and Raikov was about to say something to him when Nidoran notified him that he'd gotten a message. He played it then laughed.

"What?" Ishmael said, reassembling his sub-machine gun.

"You won't believe this... this dumb luck. Sieran just told me it's go time."

"And? That's not luck, we've been waiting for nearly a day for that."

Raikov shook his head. "The person he's negotiating with is named, get this: Ridley. He says she has some rare artifact that she might want to sell to some corp or the like under-the-table and his job is to 'ascertain the value of said object'."

"And they need a third-party like Sieran so they have plausible deniability if whatever is inside wipes out Extropia..."

"Exactly. You want to contact that scientist guy that Helios hooked us up with and let him know he might need to examine an object from Earth in the near future? I'm going to see what AltecLansing has figured out."

"Koch?" Ishmael said. "Sure, I'll let him know."

Raikov was already inviting AltecLansing to the otherwise-empty maglev car that they'd been riding all around Extropia for the last six hours. AltecLansing's shimmering avatar appeared in AR on the seat across from Raikov.

"Go time?"

"Yeah, troops are rallying at Club Nocturnis. We're on our way there now. What did you find out about Ridley?"

AltecLansing rubbed his virtual lips for a moment, before he spoke. "Let's meet someplace more secure. I have a VR space I've secured - as much as that word applies - on freeMesh, I'll invite you in."

Raikov had no sooner agreed than he was sitting in a leather chair looking out over a burning city. His muse scanned the skyline and quickly supplied him with his location and a rough date: "NEW YORK, DURING ITS DESTRUCTION, MID-FALL".

"Nice place, Altec" he said, getting up to look out the windows. "Bet this was a sweet pad before the Fall. Yours?"

"Call me Bose, it's my real name - as real as names are now anyway." Bose said, now an ordinary looking man in a simple black business suit mixing what looked like a mi tai in the kitchen. "But we didn't come here to talk about ancient history. Here's what I know about Ridley:"

"She was in the United States Special Forces, primarily serving as an escape-and-evasion instructor after a few stints in Kabul, Tehran, Palestine, and that nasty affair with the Johannesburg coup..."

Pictures, flat vids, and holos of various combat morphs in action, instructing, firing weapons, in formal dress, and the like played on or by the windows of the penthouse as he talked.

"Demolitions expert as well. After the Fall she worked freelance all over the solar system. No apparent politics. Worked several recurring crews with various "Wing" names depending on where they were primarily operating: Lunawing, Titanwing, etcetera. High level operative. Rumors are that her latest group should call itself Earthwing..."

He paused and poured two mi tais, watching Raikov's reaction - or lack thereof - as he did so.

"...which you already know," he said, handing Raikov one of the drinks. They both took a sip. The VR was good, Raikov could almost taste it. Judging by Bose's reaction, he had an XP linked to his - a highly personal one at that - even the best VR couldn't draw a reaction quite like that. There was an instant of... something in his expression after the drink? Terror? Sorrow? Both?

"So Omnicorp is trying to buy an Earth... something from Ridley and we're along to make things smooth?" Bose said.

"Sieran told you we were working for Omnicorp? He didn't tell me that."

"He didn't tell me anything," Bose said, pausing a moment. "And that doesn't answer my question."

"Your question wasn't a question."

"Okay, then here's one: Sieran is going as contract negotiator for Omnicorp; who are you representing? You knew about Ridley and whatever she's got from Earth before-hand but not enough to act on your own apparently since you needed me to get more info and you're pursuing this deal with Sieran instead of going after Ridley directly. What does she have that everyone is after?"

Raikov paused, considering how much to reveal. "We're mostly working for ourselves. As for what she's got, it's a pressurized, vacuum-sealed containment vessel and it is from Earth. If you want to know what's inside-"

Nidoran overrode his VR access and suddenly he was back in the maglev as it slid to a stop. Ishmael was pushing himself towards the door, highlighted in the flashing lights of Club Nocturnis.

"Go time," Raikov sent to Bose.

"We'll have to continue our conversation some time... soon," Bose replied.

Sieran was waiting at the boarding station outside, the burly Hacron beside him with his battered briefcase, and Bose's Swarmoid all around them.

"Good, you're all here. We're not going far, just to The Sphere - or what's left of it. Let's get moving, punctuality is key in business."

"Did you say The Sphere?" Ishmael said as they pushed out into the empty space around Club Nocturnis towards the far passageway that led to their new destination.

Sieran nodded.

"Great," Ishmael said, low enough for Raikov to hear. "Nothing like meeting an unstable demolitions expert at the last place she blew up..."

I am enjoying this, and will instruct my muse to keep me appraised of developments.

Morte said:

I am enjoying this, and will instruct my muse to keep me appraised of developments.

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Thanks for the comment, glad you are enjoying it. The good news is we're almost caught up to where we've played to. The bad news is that I've been so busy I've had a hard time setting up some time to play again and the next few weeks are pretty packed as well. :/

I'll try to post again some time this week, don't have enough time tonight to write up a full post.