Shadowtalk: Secret Projects Of The Adherents

Shadowtalk: Secret Projects Of The Adherents, May provide a source for campaign ideas

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Witness

May 28 2006, 01:27 AM

Post #1

Moving Target

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Maybe enough time has passed now. Maybe it's safe to reveal this stuff to the world.

I've been sitting on it for too many years. In this thread I will be revealing a series of transcripts, all from 2063 or earlier, and all allegedly from a once-powerful cabal that called themselves the Adherents of Jsona Var.

I can't tell you for sure if the transcripts are true, or if it's all some weird hoax. If they are true, then they have far-reaching implications, and they cast recent history in a somewhat different and chilling light. If not, then I suppose we can consider ourselves lucky, but might want to be vigilant in the future.

Truth or hoax? That's for you good folks on Shadowland to decide. I know better than to try and assert either way.

I will begin with the first transcript. If it garners interest, I will offer what little context I can, then post the next file from this archive, and so on in that manner. Part of me hopes that nobody cares; that this can gather dust safely in some antiquated backwater node. But I can't just continue to sit on it.

>>Stornoway [2.3.2070]

QUOTE (Transcript 1)

It should be stressed from the start that Mindhack has little in common with standard psychotropic IC like BlackHammer and GreenGlade. It does not require a Direct Neural Interface and does not induce biofeedback in the normal sense of the word. Its roots, in fact, are considerably older and more humble: going back to 20th century brainwashing techniques, propaganda theory, subliminal advertising, hypnosis, even con-artistry. This is practically the stone-age when it comes to neuroscience, and that perhaps is why this approach has been overlooked for so long, while people have tinkered with more advanced but less robust magical and psychotropic alternatives.

The seed project at CMT was fairly unassuming: improved Matrix marketing and public relations techniques, that’s all. We introduced some spyware code into commercially available online simsense works. The trick was to filter out the emotional track of the simsense recording then use the safety filters common to all sim-players to monitor the natural emotional responses of the subject to different sensory quanta and send that data back to us. What I mean by sensory quanta is the raw elemental building blocks of sensory experience according to Quian-Quiroga theory. The neurological components that the visual cortex breaks an image down into, for example: contrast right angles… fractal leafing… eye motifs, that sort of thing. Not just visual components though: sound, smell, taste, touch, even proprioception can be broken down in a similar way.

As you can imagine, we got a staggering amount of data back in a very short time. You can’t just look for those sensory quanta that produce a strong emotional response- it doesn’t work like that. You have to look for the combinations common to strong responses. That requires some serious data-mining. Serious pattern-finding algorithms. But that’s what we had, and that’s what we did. That gave us a framework in which we could build a psychological profile from a subject’s choice of viewing material, and then tailor a broadcast- any kind of broadcast, not necessarily simsense, to suit that psychological profile.

To cut a long story short, the project was successful. Scarily successful. So we buried it, wrote it off in CMT’s books as a failed line of inquiry, eliminated any potential leaks, informed our friends here at the Lake and quietly began phase 2 from a private facility.

Like I said, the Mindhack agent doesn’t need DNI, doesn’t need trodes, doesn’t need any of that. Of course those things don’t get in the way- and in fact they can speed the process up because the user is accessing so much more information every second, but basically all Mindhack needs is an ordinary Matrix user. At first it’s just following them around, getting a taste for what they like. Before long, it starts experimenting. Subtle changes to their perception of Matrix sites, the buttons they push. Double-checking what buttons it can push to steer them. Once it knows them- bang! It’s got them. It can start to tell them what to like, and what not to like. What to buy, what not to buy. What to do, what not to do. And the subject is totally unaware that anything is happening to them.

It takes time. That time varies. We’ve got some subjects conditioned in less than a day. Others have taken a couple of weeks. In part that’s down to differing levels of Matrix use, but there are also unknown psychological variables that we still need to understand.

Nevertheless, this is powerful stuff. We at the Lake know all too well the kind of trials metahumanity must face in the future. The need for metahumanity to act, at times, with a unity of purpose to stave off disaster. The Mindhack agent is our tool to that end.

emo samurai View Member Profile	May 28 2006, 01:51 AM Post #2
Dragon Group: Members Posts: 4,589 Joined: 28-November 05 Member No.: 8,019	Where are they, and how can I kill them? >>Shen

Witness

May 28 2006, 02:01 AM

Post #3

Moving Target

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That, of course, is the big question. If this Mindhack ever did exist, where is it now? I can't tell you that, but Transcript #2 provides a chilling suggestion of where it might have gone next.

The previous transcript dates to about 2060, but this next one is from 2 or 3 years later...

QUOTE (Transcript 2)

As we know, there are those in the world who do not share our noble motives or see with our breadth and depth of vision.

Regrettably we discovered an anomaly in the phase 3 field trials of Mindhack. A couple of subjects failed to respond to prior conditioning. We brought one of the subjects in for study and kept the other under surveillance. The Mindhack conditioning had been removed by an unknown antagonist, and in only a short period of time.

At first we suspected Otaku interference. Then our field operatives observed another team of agents monitoring the second subject. This team was formidably equipped, and their communications system resisted all attempts at interception. We were able to identify one of the agents, an Oliver Westbury, at one time the recipient of an advanced business ‘ware prototype produced by a company called Inner Beauty, a subsidiary of Renraku.

Through our friends at the Lake we ascertained that this headware had a back-door that could be accessed remotely, to give us extra information about the members of this operation. We could not, however, determine any useful information about who Westbury was working for (henceforth Party X), nor their motive for interfering. Remarkably it transpired that another member of the team was already known to one of our friends at the Lake- an escapee, in fact, from a different initiative. Such is the reach of the Adherents!

Nevertheless this implied a major challenge to the security of our work, so we attempted to bring the enemy operatives in. Regrettably some errors were made and the operatives escaped with the second subject. Fortunately some pre-emptive precautions were taken which we anticipated would help to secure some degree of cooperation from Party X; enough at least to dissuade them from exposing our operations at the Lake. Nevertheless we decided that it would be prudent to suspend field testing of Mindhack until such time as we could determine it safe to proceed again.

I am here to report some new information that may shed light on the identity and motives of Party X. As already stated, the business ‘ware installed in one of the enemy agents came from a Renraku subsidiary. Recent events have thrown this observation into stark relief. The cyberware used by this agent was a direct prototype for the ‘Nodes’ we now know have been used by the AI known as ‘Deus’ to disseminate its code through metahuman hosts after the ending of the SCIRE lockdown. Both devices combine large amounts of memory, datajacks and knowsoft links, skillwires and cutting edge simsense transceivers.

Deus’s technology is known to be ahead of its time, consistent with the kind of advanced technologies used by this enemy team. Deus’s existence has only recently come to our attention, but is of course of grave concern to us all. It could be catastrophic if the Mindhack technology falls in to the hands of such an entity, therefore all work on this project is to be suspended and relevant materials are to be secured until this threat has been eliminated.

Witness View Member Profile	May 29 2006, 10:48 PM Post #4
Moving Target Group: Members Posts: 681 Joined: 28-February 06 From: UK Member No.: 8,319	They got it wrong. It wasn't Deus. >>Bumper

emo samurai View Member Profile	May 30 2006, 01:01 AM Post #5
Dragon Group: Members Posts: 4,589 Joined: 28-November 05 Member No.: 8,019	Okay, we have a 2-page document vs. 7 words. I think the document wins. >>Burning Man

Lindt View Member Profile	May 30 2006, 08:11 PM Post #6
Man In The Machine Group: Dumpshocked Posts: 2,264 Joined: 26-February 02 From: I-495 S Member No.: 1,105	Much as I hate to say it, they never reaserched their cross platform compatibility, did they? Side effects include: insominia, nasuea, and mild cases of skitsophernia. >> Lindt

Witness

May 31 2006, 08:54 AM

Post #7

Moving Target

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No, it wasn't Deus that discovered their activities first. It was another AI. But Deus did find out about the Adherents in the end. Treachery from within, probably.
The Adherents were a classic masonic-style cabal: made up from high-ranking members from lots of different corporations. Lots of 'you scratch my back, we'll help advance your career'. Lots of initiatory secrets and rituals. The Jsona Var stuff was mainly fluff. Power was the real goal for the inner circle.
Deus wanted to infiltrate corporations, and found the Adherents. Can you fill in the blanks?
>>Bumper

Deus getting its hands on Mindhack? Now that's scary. Did it happen?
>>Orchid

Maybe.
>>Bumper

So where was this organisation based? What is this 'lake' they mention?
>>Orchid

If I tell you that the 'phase 3 trials' were conducted on students at the Sumner Tridistrict High School, using Matrix Education Programs, you should be able to work that out.
>>Bumper

I call bullshit on this. 'Mindhack', as described here, couldn't work. It's not just because of the side effects Lindt mentions. There are other technical reasons that I won't go into here, but do your homework and you'll see why not.
>>Ix

Couldn't work on Matrix 2.0, perhaps. (We hope). But this was Matrix 1.0.
>>MetaSane

I'm going to go ahead and post another couple of transcripts now. You'll see that this organisation was apparently involved in some other scary shit too.
>>Stornoway

QUOTE ( Transcript 3)

As we all know, Awakened metahumans on semi-ballistic flights and orbital habitats experience profound discomfort, and any attempt to access the astral plane or manipulate mana in any way result in madness or death. This has given rise to the well-known concept of the manasphere: that mana and the paraphysical domains through which it flows are created, nurtured or focussed by life itself. No living things, no mana, no astral, no magic, goes the reasoning. Might this view perhaps be a little… Gaeacentric?

There have been some enjoyably eccentric attempts to jam orbital habitats and lunar bases with as many living organisms of as many different kinds as possible. Needless to say that these cosmic tree-huggers have not been wholly successful in their goal of establishing miniature manaspheres. The recent race to reach the Comet was in part motivated by a desire to see if that lifeless but magically-potent hunk of mining rights had a manasphere of its own, and if our sources in Ares are correct, it does.

Let us now return to the subject of Foveae: those areas on the surface of Earth (a rash of which can be found in Aztlan- though we will not restate that discussion here) where the astral plane is not merely corrupted, it is- according to most authorities- absent. Mundane metahumans can enter and leave Foveae without significant trouble. Awakened metahumans experience difficulties in Foveae that are every bit as severe as those faced by their jet-setting brethren. Awakened biota avoid such areas if at all possible, and even non-awakened creatures can appear distressed. Nevertheless Foveae are rarely if ever entirely devoid of life. Contrast them with those few regions of our own world- some polar, some desert, some high mountain- that really are sterile but are not devoid of astral space.

Let us also consider the world before it Awoke. There was life in abundance, a profusion of sentience. But where was astral space then? Where was mana? Absent, inactive, or merely incommunicado? This is the great question of our time, of course, but we would have thought that proponents of the Gaeacentric model of the manasphere might be more troubled by such crippling inconsistencies! If the Dragons and the self-proclaimed Immortals (all apparent supporters of the Gaeacentric view) have the answers to such questions, then they keep those answers to themselves and wilfully prevaricate to maintain the current insupportable dogma. We are left with little recourse but to probe these questions on our own.

The Horopter Chamber was designed to create an artificial Fovea in a controlled environment. We succeeded in creating a small zone with all the properties of a natural Fovea, and subjected it to a battery of magical and technological tests. It is our conclusion that there is a form of astral space both in Foveae and beyond the manasphere. However mana, as we know it, is excluded from these regions by some counteracting force. We posit the existence of some kind of anti-mana that exerts this force. Whereas matter and anti-matter annihilate each other, mana and anti-mana repel each other. According to our measurements, anti-mana, if saturating the universe, would very neatly fit the role of the ‘missing dark energy’ that has preoccupied cosmologists for so long.

In the second phase of our experiments we built an improved Horopter Chamber that allowed us to superimpose an artificial Fovea over a pre-existing mana form: a ritually constrained fully materialized spirit (spirits being regarded in thaumaturgical circles as entities of pure mana, remember). The standard theory concerning Foveae predicts that mana should be sucked into one as air into a vacuum, but this was not the result. Instead the spirit, after undergoing a number of spasmodic deformations in form, was subsequently expelled from the chamber- through the ritual and physical containments- and had to be pursued and eliminated.

QUOTE (Transcript 4)

It is well established that there are ‘metagenes’ that express in response to mana. UGE and goblinization saw different metatypes emerging as certain metagenes were triggered by different threshold levels of mana. It is widely supposed that there must be other mana-triggered genes, common to all metatypes, that are responsible for Awakened abilities such as sorcery, conjuring, adept powers and astral interaction. But magical ability demonstrably does not follow any simple patterns of genetic inheritance.

Sonneträger took a radical approach to examining this issue. The approach was not so much to engineer magical abilities but to select for them. The technique, devised by Dr Steinhauer, was remarkably elegant. Vast numbers of IVF embryos from a wide sampling of bloodlines were placed together in nutrient tanks and subjected to waves of complex mana barriers designed to physically separate out those with an inherent connection to the astral. Selected embryos, along with controls from mundane grades, were reimplanted in surrogate mothers (in later phases, a range of different surrogate entities were tested).

In this way, Sonneträger produced an enormous yield of Awakened infants (‘the Select’), enough to filter through a number of novel scientific programs and training regimes. In Project Laika, for example, Sonneträger embryos were partially developed within the Horopter Chamber, in order to select for subjects that would be able to function in anti-mana environments, as well as in regions of astral corruption and/or high radiation. In Project Gröhnde, large number of embryos were the subjects of experimental germ-line therapy. Project Regelkreis used nanotechnological techniques to identify embryos capable of sustaining cybernetic implants with minimal loss of magical prowess. Project Will is a more recent initiative to train members of the Select in Matrix use, looking for signs of Otaku capability.

All embryos surviving infanthood have been placed into a special school for training and monitoring. Those showing exceptional promise or exhibiting unexpected abilities will, where possible, be placed in foster homes with highly trained magicians in order to observe their development more closely.
This will be a long, laborious and complex undertaking, but when the Select come of age, there can be no doubt that the results will be fascinating and valuable.

Oracle View Member Profile	May 31 2006, 09:09 AM Post #8
Moving Target Group: Members Posts: 934 Joined: 26-August 05 From: Earth - Europe - AGS - Norddeutscher Bund - Hannover Member No.: 7,624	That sounds all to familiar. If there is anyone out there hiring a team to stop this project feel free to contact me. >>Venom

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