Transhuman Space: Beyond Good and Evil

[paradox42]

Leaders and governments never had a real problem in getting the populous to do thing their way. History is so full of such examples, I will not even to begin to start. Don't think that people rejecting government initatives is a given. It is not.

This is true to some extent, but you really should check out the setting before assuming that things will turn out as you suggest- because there's one very important factor you forgot. Those of us who hate government or authority in any form will have access to these technologies too, and TS doesn't ignore that fact. There are sects of anarchists who live out on the fringes of the Solar System, the more militant of whom spend much of their time harrying government projects wherever they may be. And since there are so many of them, and they're spread throughout the cometary halo, there's simply no tracking them down- they can never be eliminated the way governments like to do with humanity confined here on Earth.

But as to the original topic of the thread, I see two potential questions embedded in the posting (though I strongly suspect that the OP meant for the post to ask the latter as I'll list them): first, what potential is there for a Call of Cthulhu/TS crossover, and second, is a TS future a worrisome prospect in and of itself? To the second question, I'll answer "not the least little bit;" I'm with the posters who hope the future turns out something like it (though personally I believe the Singularity won't "recede" the way TS postulates and will instead sweep over our civilization completely). Sure there are dark sides to it, but guess what: there are dark sides to everything. Humanity gaining powers that to us seem godlike isn't any more worrisome than the powers we have already (which as some have pointed out, would be godlike to our ancestors).

To the first question, I'll answer "that's brilliant," and call to mind all the recent short stories I've read in various collections (mostly published by Chaosium) that deal with spacefaring humanity confronting horrors of the Mythos. Examples include the starship that follows a signal only to discover Azathoth, and the crew sent as the first humans to the mighty gas giant/brown dwarf Yuggoth on the edge of the Solar System. Those two are all I can think of ATM, but I'm fairly sure there are other stories I'm forgetting. The thing about this potential game setting is, wasn't Chaosium doing something like this themselves, a setting with far-future humanity forced off of Earth by the return of the Old Ones and hiding and fleeing in space? I suppose that could be a "sequel setting" to the TS/CoC hybrid, in that TS is supposed to represent the time when "the stars are right," and thus the Old Ones are presently waking up/coming back but haven't actually done so yet. There's certainly room in the base TS for a vast and ancient conspiracy trying to wake up hostile aliens that have been hidden on Earth for millennia and longer.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

But as to the original topic of the thread, I see two potential questions embedded in the posting (though I strongly suspect that the OP meant for the post to ask the latter as I'll list them): first, what potential is there for a Call of Cthulhu/TS crossover, and second, is a TS future a worrisome prospect in and of itself? To the second question, I'll answer "not the least little bit;" I'm with the posters who hope the future turns out something like it

Truth to be told, so do I - but the future of Transhuman Space won't necessarily a future we will feel very comfortable in.

Lovecraft's stories often have a strong sense of xenophobia inside them, and xenophobia literally means "fear of the alien". And the future of Transhuman Space space can seem very alien indeed to someone from our time.

Let me quote Lovecraft once again. This is from his story "He", where the protagonist glimpses a future New York:

"For full three seconds I could glimpse that pandemoniac sight, and in those seconds I saw a vista which will ever afterward torment me in dreams. I saw the heavens verminous with strange flying things, and beneath them a hellish black city of giant stone terraces with impious pyramids flung savagely to the moon, and devil-lights burning from unnumbered windows. And swarming loathsomely on aerial galleries I saw the yellow, squint-eyed people of that city, robed horribly in orange and red, and dancing insanely to the pounding of fevered kettle-drums, the clatter of obscene crotala, and the maniacal moaning of muted horns whose ceaseless dirges rose and fell undulantly like the wave of an unhallowed ocean of bitumen.

I saw this vista, I say, and heard as with the mind's ear the blasphemous domdaniel of cacophony which companioned it. It was the shrieking fulfilment of all the horror which that corpse-city had ever stirred in my soul, and forgetting every injunction to silence I screamed and screamed and screamed as my nerves gave way and the walls quivered about me. "

It is entirely possible that this is simply NYC in 2100, with the air full of floating cybershells, the ground built over a hundredfold with arcologies, and all sorts of truly strange parahumans and bioroids. But if you had explained all these concepts to Lovecraft himself, I have no doubt that his revulsion would not be any less - he is the product of a bygone age.

Will we truly fare any better if we live for more than a hundred years, and the world around us changes and turns into something alien? I have my doubts...

(though personally I believe the Singularity won't "recede" the way TS postulates and will instead sweep over our civilization completely). Sure there are dark sides to it, but guess what: there are dark sides to everything. Humanity gaining powers that to us seem godlike isn't any more worrisome than the powers we have already (which as some have pointed out, would be godlike to our ancestors).

To the first question, I'll answer "that's brilliant," and call to mind all the recent short stories I've read in various collections (mostly published by Chaosium) that deal with spacefaring humanity confronting horrors of the Mythos. Examples include the starship that follows a signal only to discover Azathoth, and the crew sent as the first humans to the mighty gas giant/brown dwarf Yuggoth on the edge of the Solar System. Those two are all I can think of ATM, but I'm fairly sure there are other stories I'm forgetting. The thing about this potential game setting is, wasn't Chaosium doing something like this themselves, a setting with far-future humanity forced off of Earth by the return of the Old Ones and hiding and fleeing in space? I suppose that could be a "sequel setting" to the TS/CoC hybrid, in that TS is supposed to represent the time when "the stars are right," and thus the Old Ones are presently waking up/coming back but haven't actually done so yet. There's certainly room in the base TS for a vast and ancient conspiracy trying to wake up hostile aliens that have been hidden on Earth for millennia and longer.

Doing a genuine crossover is hard to do, especially because of of all that pesky surveillance technology - you will have to ask yourself why all those monsters aren't on the evening news. Sure, a couple of monsters might be explained away or successfully hushed up, but do that too often and suspension of disbelief goes out of the window.

To get into the proper mood for a crossover, I suggest using Delta Green and Delta Green: Countdown - CoC variant settings where the Mythos isn't really about the monsters, but about the corruption of the human spirit. I especially recommend the chapter on the Hastur Mythos in Delta Green: Countdown and the short story "Pnomus" in the collection "Delta Green: Alien Intelligence" - which portrays a certain Mythos race as memetic invaders that would fit right into Transhuman Space.

 

[Nifft]

Not if they genengineer the sex drive out of them. I mean, it's not as if sex is necessary for reproduction in that era...

True, but removing both sex and aggressiveness would eliminate both reasons for reproduction. (IMHO, it would take a lot of chutzpa to bring new lives into a world over-full of immortal entities.)

-- N

PS: Anyway, no response the the idea that current people have hardwired preferences which are beyond their control? And which frequently don't fit acceptable societal behavior, even when they don't involve harm to others?

 

[LoneWolf23]

It is entirely possible that this is simply NYC in 2100, with the air full of floating cybershells, the ground built over a hundredfold with arcologies, and all sorts of truly strange parahumans and bioroids. But if you had explained all these concepts to Lovecraft himself, I have no doubt that his revulsion would not be any less - he is the product of a bygone age.

Heck, he could've just been looking at 21st century New York, and spotted a modern day Inner City Rave, and still considered it horrible. He was convinced late 19th century New England culture was the height of Western Civilisation...

 

[prosfilaes]

The OP talked of genetically created sex slaves but since the vast majority of us don't go around raping people or spending the paycheck on hookers or spend 23 hours a day looking at porn (the majority of people are not fixated on sex) then the notion of having a sex slave indicates an abnormal or skewed view point about sex, which as been linked to aberrant personality disorders.

And see, that statement is part of what scares me to the core about your world. The progression of it's different, it's aberrant, it needs to be stomped out. That's what would cause a lot of people to fight it.

I just find it odd that the OP wrote about the darker side of humanity using the technology to engage in hedonist behavior and aberrant behavior and my point was that it is more likely that such behavior will be controlled by the technology rather than let it facilitate such behavior.

What's wrong with hedonist behavior? What are we going to do with immortality if we don't have fun?

Hitler's issue was not he had 'bad charisma' nor that he was a racist. Hitler was a psychopath. And certain elements of psychopathy personalilty is that they can be charismatic and very manipulative.

There's no commonly accepted definition of psychopathy, so it doesn't mean a whole lot to say Hitler was one. I'm not inclined to believe that it's terribly useful lump Hitler in with Dalmer and Bundy or that any cure is going to look very much alike.

Really? As a doctor, I tell you your unborn child has the genetic markers for psychopathy which means he has the real potential to be danger to himself and others and that it can be corrected by a simple procedure of gene therapy and you are going to say no?

In increasing order of importance:
(a) Some people will refuse any sort of genetic manipulation on principle.
(b) Psychopaths may value the traits and want their children to carry them on.
(c) The further your program of curing people goes, the more likely reasonable people could disagree about whether it's a cure or not. Asperger's Syndrome and ADD have people arguing against the standard disease analysis. You start attacking violent behavior, many people are going to feel that you'll sap their children's ability to defend themselves.
(d) Most of these aren't Huntington's disease or achondroplasia; there's not a certainty that this disease will develop unless you change this one gene that won't have big effects elsewhere. You tell me that you're looking at a 25% chance of schizophrenia, but the changes are guarenteed to reduce imagination and intelligence? I'm not sure I'm signing up. In TS, there's a racial template that would make them smarter, but make it harder for them to communicate with people without that template (statted up as stuttering); yeah, I'd probably go for that for my children.

Don't underestimate the power of the state to change perceptions about certain subjects. Hitler did it and lead the German people into the disaster of history called WW2.

I don't think Hitler did that; he played mostly on their pre-existing perceptions.

Leaders and governments never had a real problem in getting the populous to do thing their way.

Charles I and James II? Or the French Revolution? How about the American anti-drug and anti-tobacco campaigns and their rousing successes?

Which is not to mention that we're living in a lot different world, one where the government, or even the government and big corporations, are losing their control over what people see and hear, and where the concepts of individuality and freedom are considered important and valuable. The US has anti-vaccine and anti-floridation that push their cases, and the anti-vaccine groups frequently manage to keep their kids unvaccinated.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

PS: Anyway, no response the the idea that current people have hardwired preferences which are beyond their control? And which frequently don't fit acceptable societal behavior, even when they don't involve harm to others?

In the Transhuman Space era, pretty much all of these are reversible - if the person who has them wants to be reversed. But unless they are freed by an outside agency, bioroids never get that choice!


And that leads me to another disturbing aspect of Transhuman Space: Changing inherent personality traits. For example, it is entirely possible to turn a gay man into a straight man with the right treatments, and I have no doubt that there are numerous people in the setting who convince others to undergo that treatment. But it goes further than that - with the right nanodrugs, pretty much any personality trait is changeable. If you want to be more assertive, more of a risk-taker, pay the money and get the appropriate nanomods, and your personality will change to the one you had always wanted. Of course, your friends and relatives might feel uncomfortable about that you have half-turned into a stranger...

 

[LoneWolf23]

And that leads me to another disturbing aspect of Transhuman Space: Changing inherent personality traits. For example, it is entirely possible to turn a gay man into a straight man with the right treatments, and I have no doubt that there are numerous people in the setting who convince others to undergo that treatment. But it goes further than that - with the right nanodrugs, pretty much any personality trait is changeable. If you want to be more assertive, more of a risk-taker, pay the money and get the appropriate nanomods, and your personality will change to the one you had always wanted. Of course, your friends and relatives might feel uncomfortable about that you have half-turned into a stranger...

Not to mention the risks in your new personality having some hidden "bugs" that show up later...

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Not to mention the risks in your new personality having some hidden "bugs" that show up later...

Oh, as long as you don't get some cheap knock-off treatments there should be few bugs. if at all.

The biggest issue is probably going to be that you are no longer quite the same person.

 

[paradox42]

Will we truly fare any better if we live for more than a hundred years, and the world around us changes and turns into something alien? I have my doubts...

I will. Have doubts about yourself if you must (or like), but my own personality is deeply embedded with the ideal that change must be embraced rather than feared (part of my Chaotic alignment in D&D terms I suppose). Some aspects of such a world may be uncomfortable to me, but given that many aspects of this world are uncomfortable to me (particularly the influence that certain religions are gaining over governments in various parts of the world including mine), that's hardly a surprise.

Doing a genuine crossover is hard to do, especially because of of all that pesky surveillance technology - you will have to ask yourself why all those monsters aren't on the evening news. Sure, a couple of monsters might be explained away or successfully hushed up, but do that too often and suspension of disbelief goes out of the window.

To get into the proper mood for a crossover, I suggest using Delta Green and Delta Green: Countdown - CoC variant settings where the Mythos isn't really about the monsters, but about the corruption of the human spirit. I especially recommend the chapter on the Hastur Mythos in Delta Green: Countdown and the short story "Pnomus" in the collection "Delta Green: Alien Intelligence" - which portrays a certain Mythos race as memetic invaders that would fit right into Transhuman Space.

Good suggestions. The surveillance technology is indeed a problem for any secret conspiracy, but take into account the fact that any such conspiracy must infiltrate the highest levels of society (particularly governments) to be at all successful, and I think the problem becomes more manageable. Sure, there will be people who stumble onto something they shouldn't and need to be "taken out" in some manner (actual assassination is relatively pointless in a TS universe since both body and mind can be rebuilt, but how about a "memory reprofiling?"), but you know what? That's the sort of thing that provides grist for the mill of a game. The people who find out things they shouldn't, and decide to try finding out more, are called "investigators" and become the PCs of the setting. Viruses and other malware being crafted for wiping out data the conspiracy doesn't want spread are an easy way to explain why this data never seems to get very far. If the point of the setting is that the Old Ones are waking up, who's to say they haven't crafted superhuman AIs to help them achieve their goals, and those AIs aren't capable of watching the entire planetary/systemwide network for breaches of confidentiality?

And that leads me to another disturbing aspect of Transhuman Space: Changing inherent personality traits. For example, it is entirely possible to turn a gay man into a straight man with the right treatments, and I have no doubt that there are numerous people in the setting who convince others to undergo that treatment.

Since there are people who try to do that in our own world, you are undoubtedly correct. But here's a notion: there will be backlashes against this sort of thing, and for all the agencies trying to turn gays into straights, I'd say there will be other agencies turning straights into gays. I know that's one of the first things I'd do. for tat, and all of that. Such a response becomes especially appropriate if you target the people who are running the agency that started the whole escalation in the first place.

But it goes further than that - with the right nanodrugs, pretty much any personality trait is changeable. If you want to be more assertive, more of a risk-taker, pay the money and get the appropriate nanomods, and your personality will change to the one you had always wanted. Of course, your friends and relatives might feel uncomfortable about that you have half-turned into a stranger...

For many people, this will indeed be uncomfortable. For others, it will simply be another aspect of the fact that In This Day, All Things Are Possible. People who are less inclined to attach importance to details, who don't take themselves or much of anything else seriously, will tend to dominate after enough time. Selection pressures (which do still operate in TS, even if in ways that would seem insane or unrecognizable to most people of our era) would ensure that other personality traits tend to die out.

I think what this sort of technology really does, more than anything else, is cause memes to undergo natural selection the way genes have on our world for so many hundreds of millions of years. Those memes which stick with people and allow them to stay comfortable and happy in this ultimate of Brave New Worlds (and yes, both sides/connotations of that phrase are intended here) will tend to predominate, and those which don't- will be gradually eradicated.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

If the point of the setting is that the Old Ones are waking up, who's to say they haven't crafted superhuman AIs to help them achieve their goals, and those AIs aren't capable of watching the entire planetary/systemwide network for breaches of confidentiality?

To me, the point to the Great Old Ones was that they barely even noticed humans. Their impending awakening is a historic inevitability, and humans only has the power to prevent it for some time - centuries in the best case, which is like the blink of an eye to them.

I think any cover-ups would have to come from humanity - perhaps to spare the mass of humanity for a while longer (and prevent others from trying to wake them up sooner), but possibly out of a misguided attempt to use and monopolize the power of the Mythos for their own ends.

Another possibility would be an SAI conspiracy. Many people - including SAIs - have wondered why artificial intelligences didn't quickly get much smarter than humans. Perhaps some do get smarter, and thus discover the Mythos. Those who didn't get insane decided to keep the Mythos a secret - and stop other SAIs who are close to breaking through the "intelligence barrier"...

(I'd use the World Tree Enterprises SAIs from Toxic Memes for some likely candidates - but then of course, I wrote that particular section of the book... )

Since there are people who try to do that in our own world, you are undoubtedly correct. But here's a notion: there will be backlashes against this sort of thing, and for all the agencies trying to turn gays into straights, I'd say there will be other agencies turning straights into gays. I know that's one of the first things I'd do. for tat, and all of that. Such a response becomes especially appropriate if you target the people who are running the agency that started the whole escalation in the first place.

Indoubtedly. And indeed, software to support that kind of memetic engineering is commercially available, and used by many for a multitude of ends.

But if the human mind is nothing more than a collection of memes, then what does this say about free will? Does something like free will even exist?

I think what this sort of technology really does, more than anything else, is cause memes to undergo natural selection the way genes have on our world for so many hundreds of millions of years. Those memes which stick with people and allow them to stay comfortable and happy in this ultimate of Brave New Worlds (and yes, both sides/connotations of that phrase are intended here) will tend to predominate, and those which don't- will be gradually eradicated.

That assumes that memetic evolution is a process which will work itself out in the end. But like genetic engineering, memetic engineering is an ubiquietous concept in Transhuman Space - and some of the artificial growths can have truly bizarre forms.


Finally, it should be remembered that neither genetic nor memetic evolution have any kind of "goal" beyond that of survival. Evolution of life on Earth didn't "naturally progress" to modern-day humans, and neither does memetic evolution automatically progress to liberal, western values.

And since memes in the TS era can have a direct and fast impact on the genes of life forms, there is a high likelyhood that myriad sub-species of humanity will spring up - each optimized for a different set of memes. Indeed, such a process has already begun.