"Sleep Dealers" in Shadowrun?, Something I'm sure the AAA corps would love.... Options Track this topic Email this topic Print this topic Download this topic Subscribe to this forum Display Modes Outline Switch to: Standard Switch to: Linear+

[erik]

Hi all,

Just watched the film Sleep Dealer, which was recently released on DVD/Blu-ray in the U.S. I thought it was an o.k. effort for a relatively low-budget indie sci-fi film from Mexico, even though the plot seemed a bit drawn-out/overly long and the characters didn't seem fully fleshed out to me. However, there were some ideas in the film that were interesting to me. One was the namesake "sleep dealer." This is a factory or warehouse in Tijuana where local labor would remotely pilot work drones via "nodes". These nodes are essentially multiple datajacks in various places on their bodies. The drones would be used for tasks like remote construction labor for San Diego skyscrapers or driving taxi cabs in New York. The workers are given pure oxygen to help stay alert, and they "see" what the drone sees via a type of contact lens. Basically, this is cheap, foreign "rigging" we are talking about here. There was also U.S. military rigging depicted (contracted, of course, by a private corp), which was introduced via a humorous, and kinda sad, reality-TV show. Incidentally, the show (called "Drones!") seemed like the type of entertainment a 2072 audience would love. But the concept of a first-world corporation hiring poor riggers from a third-world city (Tijuana was practically depicted as a feral city), and exploiting them seemed very Shadowrunny to me. Are there any SR AAA corps that would do something like this?