Oh! What if he IS Verjigorm?

(IMG:style_emoticons/default/rotate.gif)



-k

I'm going to have to go back to Corp Guide and see when Horizon got started. I know the gist is that the glitterati started pooling their money to make a PR corp that diversified quickly, but it wouldn't surprise me if the guy in charge of their investments called them all to say "Hey, what if..."

...At the same time.

...Down to the moment.

And sold them on the idea to take their capital and make what would be an AI-friendly corp.

That would be offline for 'Matrix Upgrades' the very day Deus hits the Boston Stock Exchange.

And is run by a B-list action star that may very well have never existed in the first place, that can ferret out inquisitive 'runners and give them the information that they want, sent directly from his office.

That would be rather creepy of Horizon, that it was another Deus-plan. It's like a Nemesis plot.

I'm not sure about the Horror connection, but some more reading on the subject here and here.

Also, some self-promotion.

~J

Yeah it fits too well. Oh I love SR all our conspiracy theroying. Part of me thinks it just has lazy wirters that just wirte a TON of hooks then get us to make the best plots out of them (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

In a roleplaying game that's not exactly a bad point.

Another thing I started thinking about recently (and which I think I touched on at some point in the past, though if so apparently not in this thread) is how unnecessarily human Deus is presented (more remarkably, how human Megaera is presented). For all the fluff about Deus being "alien and incomprehensible", the drives we're shown—including self-preservation, a drive to freedom, and most tellingly outrage at betrayal—come from that same tiny little region of mindspace that humans occupy. Indeed, Deus's goals are so human that it feels weird to call him an optimization engine or a similar de-anthropomorphizing label. Of course, the bad news is that effectively fixing this would require nailing down his goals, and those have been seeing use as a "great unknown".

Another thing that comes to mind regarding making Deus playable rather than "that thing you use to kill everyone off at the end of the campaign" is to consider that Deus is almost certainly fantastically inefficient. Consider that his predecessor required the computing power of the Renraku Arcology just to become sentient, while we meat-bags manage to do it with just a blob of quivering jelly smaller than a volleyball. This inefficiency is clearly not evenly distributed—the AEP is described as handling transportation routing/optimization and behavioural analysis/predictive assistance for the whole Arc at once very effectively, and Deus produces a number of substantial advances in drone, nano, and materials technology (RA:S claims that the drone advances aren't technological breakthroughs, but several of them are quite clearly design breakthroughs). Nevertheless, there should be some things—possibly categorized in weird ways—that Deus is simply bad at, in the sense of encountering resource limitations on the activity. Social activity or predicting the actions of metahumans is usually the default weakness for fictional AI, but as mentioned this is one of Deus's explicitly-mentioned strengths.

The question, then, is what would his weaknesses be? On which problems are his algorithms brute-force, or close to it? I'll have to think more about this question.

~J

It certainly seems to have the sorts of flaws that come with being so powerful. Hubris for one. You look at Crash 2.0 where Deus invaded the Stock Exchanged appeared to be a rather egotistical gamble, calculated or not. "They'll all know where I am but it won't matter because I will be a God!" It assumes it is always right and will always win and that it has calculated for everything. Admittedly it usually has. But what happens if it doesn't win? Is Deus capable of truly accepting defeat, and learning from it? Even Lofwyr loses now and then, but he adapts, moves on, and turns the silver lining into a future victory. There's potentially a big blind spot for when stuff happens that the AI couldn't possibly have accounted for.

Second, in the grand scheme of things, Deus seems relatively impatient. The greatest chessmasters of the SR-verse spend decades on their plans. Great Dragons. Immortal Elves. Even mere mortals like Damien Knight. Relatively speaking, it hadn't been online for all that long when it locked down the Arc. It jumped at reassembling itself and taking over the Matrix at the first opportunity. It it seems like if it really wanted power players like Aneki under control, it could have had more success just by being more patient. I imagine that when you think as fast as Deus does, we meatbags are frustratingly slow and everything takes FOREVER, but it does seem lack the patience of the more experienced great powers. And when one intends to be an immortal demigod, patience is an important virtue.

Additionally, its been written how relatively weak Deus is regarding magical knowledge. Even if it accesses all the magical databases on Earth, the life energy involved will always be out of Deus' reach, particularly the less analytical traditions like voodoun or shamanism. Like a scientist in a lab, it can study and experiment and predict, but eventually field testing is required, and Deus can't do that, or even examine sims or data analysis of it. When you're as smart as Deus is, you can work around that, but as the world becomes more and more magical, those detours are gonna become more and more complicated.

Deus is one of the most nightmarish things in the 6th World, but its not absolutely perfect. If it was, the game would be hopeless.

Imagine having a mind which operates at "digital speed", where a second would seem like a week, a week like a decade. Things. Move. Slowly. To. You.

Deus wasn't impatient. He was just that much faster than anyone else.

Part of my point. He's so frustrated with how slowly the world moves by comparison, that he always jumps at the first opportunity, rather than waiting for the best opportunity.

I doubt an AI would ever be impatient. They'd have to be extremely patient and have a lot of things to do.

First, it's entirely possible Deus' plan at the Stock Exchange didn't entirely fail. Sure, he's been written out of the metaplot because of a desire to get rid of the god-like AIs, but maybe Deus did succeed in becoming something more than he was. Maybe he is a technomancer paragon now. Maybe he's part of the Deep Resonance. Maybe he's part of the new Matrix at some deep level where he no longer needs to interact with metahumanity in the ways he used to. We don't know. We will probably never know.

Also, maybe he did have a back-up plan in case his Stock Exchange gambit failed. A lot of people overlook the fact that the Network nodes still contain Deus' code, even after they recompiled it in System Failure. They all went into comas after the recompiling, but then the world lost track of them after the events of second Matrix crash. They could very well still be alive, awake, and out there somewhere. Again, this is not likely something CGL is going to address in print, but the possibility exists for a gamemaster who wants to use it.



Part of that was a business decision to wrap up the Deus plotline, so I wouldn't attribute it to Deus' personality too much. But yes, Deus saw the opportunity in the Stock Exchange event to make his move, so he took it. He was recompiled and out on the Matrix, and he knows from Morgan's experience that he might not be able to hide forever on the Matrix and that the corporations will come after him.



I've never been a fan of perfect villains (or heroes), myself. I think Dave and Brian probably felt the same way.

After reading the discussions around here i've come to one conclusion.

Deus DID theorize upon the existence of horrors and decided to do something about it after finding out that his theories were much much closer to facts.

With access to the Matrix and after cracking every online cache of runner information and secret corporate info cache he had enought information to start his work.

Medical records of cybernetic/neural interfacing and software to wetware connections were not enought for his long term goal so he needed to a few test subjects.

After experimenting and testing on how the human consciousness and the human brains pathways and neural infrastructure was set up and how conciousness was created from pure data he had enought information for step 2.

Step 2 was to send out "seeds" of data through human puppets that could spread them on the matrix in preparation for step 3.

Deus understood that the horrors could corrupt any living being, including dragons and also bend magical beings to their will (ie spirits). In order to stop the Horrors metahumanity needed an extra level of defense, an extra consciousness that could interact and defend the human psyche.

Step 3 was to activate all the "seeds" from the puppets and release them like a hidden virus into all manner of electronic devices on the matrix.

Step 4 was easy. The crash of the matrix in '65 sent a lot of people into coma, death or into a new realm of possibilities. Deus seeds was freed and wormed themselves into nodes, minds and machine and was reborn.

All those seeds became an AI...

The above scenario is not inconceiveable as AI's cannot use magic and thus cannot be corrupted by the horrors and this could allow AI's to take over and protect critical areas where human minds cannot be trusted in a world where we would fight for our species very survival instead of hiding in caerns.

Would the AI's take over and would they be our machine overlords? Dunno, we are most likely talking about a millenia in the future at least before we get to that level of problems.

You do realize that this part doesn't make any logical sense, right? Just because AIs can't use magic, doesn't mean they can't be affected by it. (For example, by corrupting the hardware the AI runs on.)

Well, i was more thinking about things like horrormarks and suchlike. Of course the hardware can be corrupted/damaged but the AI's cannot be directly controlled or under thrall from a horror - not to mention more resistant to magic - ok, a powerball directly into their physical shells and where their personal Node is will of course fuck them up, but remote controlled (AI) drones with miniguns against physically manifested horrors can be great fun when you have a population of them...

AIs do have it better against horror than just about anyone else, I guess. But AIs would be best served by relocating to a space station outside of the earth's (expanded) manasphere. Do some asteroid mining for resources to build drones, and launch the reconquista...

weell...how do you know that they arent already out there... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/grinbig.gif)

[DEUS] ...All according to plan... [DEUS]

Seriously, using AI's for the first steps of dedicated space exploration and building the first (larger) permanent stations outside of earth orbit (except for the corporate owned that are already there).

Get one drone collective out to the asteroid belt with enought equipment to create a small drone hive minign station witha few solar panels and there will be an explosion of either habitats or a Kuiper belt AI community.

I actually like Jopp's theory. There's nothing saying it isn't incomplete either; perhaps the AIs which have been seeded are just the 'emergency backup' AIs if the device or system begins functioning outside of parameters (suggesting horror interference), but the device itself will be guided by a remote AGI. Or alternatively, the distributed devices are going to be 'nudged' by a distant Deus to reveal scientific discoveries Deus already made in the arcology, so scientists will have unexpected 'breakthroughs' which turn to anti-horror technologies.

Or perhaps Deus is nudging technology, but towards some other goal, maybe long-range egocasting, and he himself is tucked away, dormant, until he gets the code that the technology has been unlocked and he can finally escape Earth. Who knows?

reminds me of the Dune books set in the past with the evermind sending seed drones to other planets to build self supporting machine outposts.


It doesnt end well for anyone involved.

It's easy to demonize DEUS as 'evil' due to how he used people for experiments and pawns but if we twist the way we look at him/it.

- A caretaker that looks at the extreme long term of the species it cares for (a few are wasted for the good of the herd)
- A being that is (almost) godlike in its own realm and have no moral qualms (the end justifies the means)
- A being at the equivalent power level as a great dragon but on the Matrix
- He had at least 10 more contingency plans for each plan they had to take him out.
- He has set a plan in motion to protect the human race for the next millenia
- He has no need to 'reveal' himself - he IS the Matrix now... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/cyber.gif) (Seriously, why not, after the crash he uploaded himself in the new source code - cant find a better hiding place...)

A few things:

1. I think that Deus isn't likely to have even a plan B. He's supposed to be able to compute everything and he's probably pretty sure of that. In that case, there's no reason for him to have a plan B. I guess he could adapt his plan if there was some unexpected development, but not have backup solutions ready.

2. I'm surprised how Deus' link to Renraku was completely severed. According to the story, he became sentient when he realized that Renraku had kill-switches. You could expect some of his loyalty to Renraku to remain hardcoded anyway but it's nowhere in sight. And on the other hand there isn't that much of a hate toward the corporation.

3. One weakness I think Deus would have is paranoia. He's been betrayed by the corporation he was programmed to be loyal to, there's no reason he should trust anyone again.

Well, he IS an AI so emotions might not be something that ever emerged in him. He could view them as a possible threat. Still, since he had the entire world history at his fingertips he might just view their existence as something trivial - not many corporations survive (regardless of size) survive several hundred years. Some do but others succumb to other more efficient corporations or other disasters.

Who knows, Renraku might be cut into several smaller entities without any of their former powers within 50 years due to some market...glitch... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/cyber.gif)

Of course this gets into the Otaku/Technomancer/Deus connection. Most of his support came from Otaku outside the arcology, which IIRC happened around 2055-56. Most Otaku lost their abilities as they got older though. Technomancers are born with the gift as well but don't loose them once they get older.

Poor Puck.

the big AIs where able to shore up the Otaku ability into adulthood.