Book Club: Emergence Options

[Fortune]

[Demonseed Elite]

The new Jackpoint crew needs to be fleshed out sometime, so you can't really keep relying on the old, familiar names to be in the spotlight.

[Synner]

Understood and acknowledged, though I would underscore that a significant part of SR4's fanbase does not have the SR luggage us old-timers have - and Slamm-O and Smiling carry no more weight than Clockwork.

I'm just wondering how people would react if/when Clockwork's points are vindicated or proved correct.

[Grinder]

They would complain anyway. :D

[mfb]

it would be interesting, but it wouldn't really affect the portrayals in Emergence.

[Moon-Hawk]

[Penta]

One thought.

It may be that I'm supernaturally good at stepping into characters' shoes, or seriously screwed up, or whatever, but I got what the writers were trying to do.

Put the reader into that feeling of chaos, of only the most fragmentary information coming through the media, and you don't know whether to believe even that...Gut-clenching terror. That is where I loved the writing on Hong Kong.

[fistandantilus4....]

[Ancient History]

The Soul of a New Machine
I don't know about the rest of you, but Muffy brought back memories of the first Chucky movies.

The bulk of the action in this chapter focuses on AIs, and the bulk of that lies somewhere between paranoia and propaganda.

There was, believe it or not, some significant debate among the authors about using names like "digital intelligence" and "synthetic intelligence." The term artificial intelligence is so ingrained in modern English and English-speaking culture it's sometimes difficult to see the need to use different terms-are the writers just using different terms to be different, or is there a point to it?

Again, keep in mind that Emergence was written way prior to Unwired, so the authors had to be careful about even the basic attributes of AIs-what they look like in the Matrix, if they can copy themselves, etc. There was a lot of discussion and research going on behind even the most innocuous comment. One of the most important decisions, in my opinion, was to make an AI vulnerable to damage, destruction, and finally whatever passes for its digital death (deletion?)

One of the real climaxes of this chapter is the whole revelation of Clockwork trying to turn Netcat in for a technomancer bounty. While some of you might have seen this coming, it does underscore the fact that JackPointers aren't all friends and family.

Personally, my least favorite bit in this chapter is Pulsar. I guess I just don't trust friendly faces on suspect causes.

[fistandantilus4....]

[JBlades]

Lol, my first thought when I read about Pulsar was, "The UB was friendly, too." Gee, we're not all a bit paranoid, are we?

[Grinder]

Yeah, that had been my first thoughts too.

[Moon-Hawk]

I have to say this was my favorite section, but I've always been enamored with the SR-AI metaplot. As I mentioned earlier, I really like that this new generation of AIs has been toned down a bit. Deus was fun, but the all-intelligent-knows-what-you're-gonna-do-before-you-do uber-AI has been done, and I like the new ones. They seem like they'll be more variable, less predictable, and less earth-shaking (individually) which makes them much more usable as a GM without basing an entire campaign around them; but there's still no reason you can't if you want to have a particular strong one, or even a group of them working together.

Wait, you didn't like Pulsar because you don't trust him? I liked Pulsar for the exact same reason.

[Konsaki]

[Ophis]

I was hoestly shocked at the open arrival of AIs into the SR world, I was expecting them to remain an urban myth. Pulsar I like, he's nice and helpful, and overly so on both counts, so much so that I would leave him being perfectly nice just to make the paranoids twitch. Either that or make him the product of something really sinister, but came out nice maybe he's a Remenant of Deus or something.

[Ancient History]

Personally, I like the idea of more and lower-power AIs. Despite the fact that the Renraku Arcology Shutdown->Brainscan was very popular (yes, I know you might not have liked it, but I've been told the books sold relatively well), I don't think AIs were ever really well defined, because in all three of the confirmed cases, they were practically omnipotent when compared with everything except each other.

[martindv]

Well, being intimately tied into the SCIRE on purpose for a decade before Deus "awakened" seems like a plausible explanation as to its power scale.

[Ryu]

Has anyone read "The Star Faction" by Ken MacLeod? That one does have loads of AIs (And I do remember now. Smart gun in that book does not mean Smartgun). There is one progenitor AI that ultimately decides to take sides, the others are low powered in comparison.

[JBlades]

What I'm really wondering is whether we'll see playable AIs in either Unwired or the Companion.

*cough* To the writers out there: I've always wanted to play a Free Spirit, too, but that doesn't have anything to do with Emergence... ;) *cough, cough*

[Ancient History]

Okay. Not to do a disservice to the other authors, but I wrote the final chapter and I'll have a bit more to talk about it because of that.

Aftermath
To start off with, this is my favorite opening fiction I've ever done. I know not everyone will feel that way, and it's a bit sappy and sentimental to end the book with, but I thought it came out great. Opening fiction can be pretty damn difficult to do correctly because it's essentially microfiction: you only get 500 words to say your piece.

I also like Sunshine's opening speech, though you can cut the rhetoric with a knife, but I think it's effective.

All Tomorrow's Parties is, of course, a nod to both the William Gibson novel of the same name and the awesome Velvet Underground song he stole it from.

I actually made Otaku-Zuku up in my head a long ways before Emergence when I was writing the SR3->SR4 conversion document and thinking about turning otaku into technomancers, but this was my first chance to use him-in a much expanded role from the one I'd first planned for him (his first words were the e-Quote of the Day on p.114). Otaku-Zuku also shows up in Corporate Enclaves, because some of the other Neo-Tokyo authors decided to use him.

Chapters like Aftermath can be tricky because they're short, they have to sum up what happened in previous chapters and/or set the new status quo, and they're written at the same time as all the other chapters. Which generally means a lot of revisions to make things fit.

Okay, short story: when I first presented this draft, the dev in charge (Peter Taylor) read over the KivaNet section and noted both of the names on the married couple were male. I confirmed that this was the case. Took him a minute for the implication to sink in. I got a chuckle out of that.

"Paragons" and other technomancer terms will be addressed in Unwired. The concept goes back to Virtual Realities 2.0 and the technoshaman/cyberadept divide, not to mention groups like Isis-9, so his was more of an updating of terminology than a new idea.

Speaking of which, note the similarities 'tween Isis-9 and the Sisters of Isis on p.114.

...and an update on Ronin/Michael Bishop, star of Brainscan et al., in the news column. I like the news column. It's so handy.

You never see the Coptic Pope in the press often enough.

I think I'm the only person that refers to "ascended masters" in SR to represent someone with both magical and technomantic abilities. The mythical Ubertwink. I did it with otaku, and I do it with technomancers.

The resurrection of Doc Paterson wasn't done because I'm a trivia buff who likes to tie up loose threads, nor because the entire otaku-technomancer-AI plot is a morass of stuff that needs to get updated on occaison. Well, actually, there was both of those things to consider, but mainly I had a need: Paterson's Guide to Matrix Entities. Note the inifitely subtle (cough, hack, I have some sarcasm in my throat, excuse me) reference to SoLA.

PGtME was like scouting into the Fog of War on any game you care to name. I was basically giving thought and shape to things that wouldn't be properly addressed until Unwired, so you can imagine all the brainstorming that took place. Personally, I enjoyed it.

The original nickname for mimics was going to be Nyarlothoteps, but that idea was quickly, and thankfully, vetoed.

One day, oh yes, one day I will burn for the ARM of GOD. But not this day.

It's likely for y'all to miss it, so this one's for free: the talking ape is an explicit reference to the Bruce Sterling short story Dinner in Audoghast from his collection Crystal Express.

The AI-that-heads-for-Alpha-Centauri and Schmidt, Iakob, and Lei were both ideas of mine that came up originally in early discussions and drafts that were then seeded through the rest of the book (by the same token, many of the other ideas in Aftermath were originally made by the other authors). Personally, I like both, though they're somewhat problematic - Odo Schmidt is strongly implied to be a Spike Baby dwarf, for example, and and I dread the day hardcore sci-fi fans break out the calculus to try and prove my figures wrong (honest guys and gals - I did the math too!)

The game info was cut down to a single column mainly for space reasons-but trust me, y'all aren't missing much.

[MaxHunter]

I REALLY liked the Schmidt, Jakob and Lei idea, even though it is a little...mmm... underdeveloped in the book. It allows to build upon tons of lawyer TV series a lot of people have seen and adds a new kind of Johnson/hook for Shadowruns. Heck, There could even be a shadowrunner concept-group built around that office. (we had Doc Wagon, military, why not lawyer assistants, at least it would be just natural when Johnson screws you) I know some people here have used that angle, but I had not thought about that seriously until that.

I would mostly welcome more background information or even a description of that lawyers and their work.

All in all I liked the chapter AH.

Cheers,

Max

[Ancient History]

Thankee.