The E-war
Tmeline: 60 weeks Post-Vanishing.
Hooks: The PCs favor one of the combatants, a friend is trapped in one of the affected digital realms, or the interuption of google's famously fast search engine annoyed someone enough to get them off their but and do somthing about it. Or someone could be paying them to do this regularly.
The Set-up: Denial of service attacks, 404 errors, and bandwidth exceeded messages have been multiplying all week. When GENOM Executive Duran mar-Athon brought his company's proposal to the UN in secret council, it wasn't recorded. It wasn't accepted either. But someone decided it was a good idea, and gave him the go-ahead. Duran AKA Durandal, has set the groundwork for an extensive campaign against rouge artifical life, planning on wiping out everyone who can stand up to him in the digital realm. His secondary goal is to slice into Cortana's memory, and extract the totality of Halo's database from her corpse. Armed with such knowledge, he would be able to propel GENOM back to true Mega-Corperation status.
Despite his billient preperations, Durandal is still lacking in processing power and port access to make a dedicated assault on Cortana's primary mainframe inside the Alpha Complex just outside Mombasa. A direct assault by Genom's private BUMA would be a failure, as the Alpha Complex is the most heavily guarded stucture in Africa. So Duran is making an appeal to the public to install a program that lets him borrow clock time and internet access to increase the rate of his attack. With every person that downloads it, Cortana is forced to tighten her firewalls and prepare for the comming seige.
Once the program starts running, it seizes control of the user computer, and starts monopolizing run time, causing lag and other problems. Worse, it spreads like a virus, a living one that can copy itself inside networks. Soon thousands of machines are mindlessly striking at the wild AIs online. The Digital world of Digimon is even effected, data streams relentlessly strip mining the world for data to contribute to the attack and passage in and out rapidly becomes impossible. This level of data manipulation is the final phase of Durandal's attack, that will allow him to bypass the normal physical restictions around computers and transport himself straight into Cortana's processing space. Quantum computing FTW.
Conclusion: With less than 10 hours to thwart the attack, the players have few options. Bringing down the whole internet would stop it, but thats harder than it sounds. More accessible might be one of seven Supercomputers being used to co-ordinate the Quantum computing that will allow Durandal past the firewalls. A third alternative is to wait for him to breach the firewall, and have a bigger fight waiting than Duran dal can take. He's no match for Cortana and another high grade AI, but beware, several of them are covertly in partnership with him. SHODAN alone is beyond suspicion, but getting her and Cortana to work together would take an Epic diplomacy check. Most difficult of all would be destroying one of the four logic cores that support Durandal, guarded as they are on sub-level 20 of the Genom Tower facilities in a nuclear proof EMP shielded vault. Getting in is a task for SPARTAN 2.0s, and getting out would tax even the legendary Master Chief. Of course, if the players do nothing, there are others willing to offer their support to the besieged AI, so if they want DURANDAL to win, they have to work for that too.
Aftermath: The internet is in disaray, and Wikipedia took a major hit. The Elephant article claiming that the number of African Elephants has Trippled in the past six months is one of the tamer data-errors that have crept up in the wake of the viral-program. If Cortana survived, she may be tempted to revive certain programs from her home reality to prolong her life, and protect herself. Durandal, however succedded at least in part. The random code poluting the internet is actually the alien text of the Database. Anyone who can figure out how to read the geometric language gains a bonus to Craft and Repair checks for PL7 and greater tech (Decipher Script after reading code for 24 hours, Dc15 for +1, Dc25 for +2 and Dc35 for +3. Dc40 represents a major technical breakthrough, and possibly new technology.)
Tmeline: 60 weeks Post-Vanishing.
Hooks: The PCs favor one of the combatants, a friend is trapped in one of the affected digital realms, or the interuption of google's famously fast search engine annoyed someone enough to get them off their but and do somthing about it. Or someone could be paying them to do this regularly.
The Set-up: Denial of service attacks, 404 errors, and bandwidth exceeded messages have been multiplying all week. When GENOM Executive Duran mar-Athon brought his company's proposal to the UN in secret council, it wasn't recorded. It wasn't accepted either. But someone decided it was a good idea, and gave him the go-ahead. Duran AKA Durandal, has set the groundwork for an extensive campaign against rouge artifical life, planning on wiping out everyone who can stand up to him in the digital realm. His secondary goal is to slice into Cortana's memory, and extract the totality of Halo's database from her corpse. Armed with such knowledge, he would be able to propel GENOM back to true Mega-Corperation status.
Despite his billient preperations, Durandal is still lacking in processing power and port access to make a dedicated assault on Cortana's primary mainframe inside the Alpha Complex just outside Mombasa. A direct assault by Genom's private BUMA would be a failure, as the Alpha Complex is the most heavily guarded stucture in Africa. So Duran is making an appeal to the public to install a program that lets him borrow clock time and internet access to increase the rate of his attack. With every person that downloads it, Cortana is forced to tighten her firewalls and prepare for the comming seige.
Once the program starts running, it seizes control of the user computer, and starts monopolizing run time, causing lag and other problems. Worse, it spreads like a virus, a living one that can copy itself inside networks. Soon thousands of machines are mindlessly striking at the wild AIs online. The Digital world of Digimon is even effected, data streams relentlessly strip mining the world for data to contribute to the attack and passage in and out rapidly becomes impossible. This level of data manipulation is the final phase of Durandal's attack, that will allow him to bypass the normal physical restictions around computers and transport himself straight into Cortana's processing space. Quantum computing FTW.
Conclusion: With less than 10 hours to thwart the attack, the players have few options. Bringing down the whole internet would stop it, but thats harder than it sounds. More accessible might be one of seven Supercomputers being used to co-ordinate the Quantum computing that will allow Durandal past the firewalls. A third alternative is to wait for him to breach the firewall, and have a bigger fight waiting than Duran dal can take. He's no match for Cortana and another high grade AI, but beware, several of them are covertly in partnership with him. SHODAN alone is beyond suspicion, but getting her and Cortana to work together would take an Epic diplomacy check. Most difficult of all would be destroying one of the four logic cores that support Durandal, guarded as they are on sub-level 20 of the Genom Tower facilities in a nuclear proof EMP shielded vault. Getting in is a task for SPARTAN 2.0s, and getting out would tax even the legendary Master Chief. Of course, if the players do nothing, there are others willing to offer their support to the besieged AI, so if they want DURANDAL to win, they have to work for that too.
Aftermath: The internet is in disaray, and Wikipedia took a major hit. The Elephant article claiming that the number of African Elephants has Trippled in the past six months is one of the tamer data-errors that have crept up in the wake of the viral-program. If Cortana survived, she may be tempted to revive certain programs from her home reality to prolong her life, and protect herself. Durandal, however succedded at least in part. The random code poluting the internet is actually the alien text of the Database. Anyone who can figure out how to read the geometric language gains a bonus to Craft and Repair checks for PL7 and greater tech (Decipher Script after reading code for 24 hours, Dc15 for +1, Dc25 for +2 and Dc35 for +3. Dc40 represents a major technical breakthrough, and possibly new technology.)
More likely, were anyone to check, they'd find a bunch of what amounted to 'Well met' notes, at least one containing a postscript amounting to 'Rapacious bastard operating out of *D-transport,-lat-long coords for GENOM corp HQ, bio of Duran Mar-athon* Strongly reccomend avoidance if possible, Ifurita-sama' or information to that effect.
