Congratulations on having your child, <n:name>, enrolled in the Emmerton Advanced Learning Institute. At EALI your child will be on the fast track towards a successful life and career where <m:he,f:she> will utilize the most advanced learning and teaching technologies available today with the Emmerton Cyber-Assistant Learning Method!

With the ECALM your child will be given their own advanced digital companion to aid and guide them through their studies and beyond through their life. Their companion will help them learn, play, work and will grow with them each companion learning and adapting to each child individually so that the pair can form a unified team when working with today's networked world. We remind you that you must schedule your child to have their companion implant installed before attending classes so that they will be able to fully interact with and utilize the abilities of their new cybernetic friend.
[35MP deleted]

::Konkord-Blue::<That's right chummers, these kids are given extensive brainware when each are as young as six or five years old. The idea is to get to them while their personalities are still malleable.>

::DocWired::<The tech behind these companion implants is really amazing. Normally such things would be impossible, or rather impractical to install on children so young because their bodies, brains and bones are still growing. The problem is that cyberimplants don't grow so normally any kid with a cyberimplant would have to constantly get it re-worked to fit their growing body and bone structure. These things are actually built into the cartilage structure of the kid's skull plates using nano with a minimum of more traditional cyberware installed at first(a single datajack and nano-reservoir). Over their years at the institute the kid's implants are actually grown into their skull with regular nano injections.>
::<One major limitation in nano-manufacturing (using nanoware to build something as opposed to building nano) is the limit on instructions or "smarts" a nanobot can have. In traditional manufacturing done by nano this is worked around by having larger support machines guiding the nanobots as they work. Nanofacturing is used for all cybernetic implants to build the bridges and connections between the ware and the user's body. Normally this is done by a single-use dedicated swarm of nanobots that come with the ware (though it is easy enough to get a hold of or adapt another batch for ahem second-hand products). In beta or delta grade cyberware more general purpose swarms are used to build the connections controlled by advanced computers and even SKs working with the cybersurgeons installing the ware.>
::<This method actually builds the cyberware into the kid's bone structure using SK-controlled nanoware over a period of years. It takes a long time, and a lot of computers, but can be made cheaper through churning out the rugrats in batches. In order to give the machines enough control to do this the rugrats have to be kept in constant close contact with the mainframes overseeing their nano. The institute is actually one huge computing cluster with a school built on top of it.>

::CyberB.O.B.::<Of course this seems like a high risk giving kiddies such high-value and irretrievable hardware when they legally and easily can simply up and goto another corp once they turn legal, but thats where the real reason the corp gives them their own digital buddy. Each kid lives constantly with his own imaginary friend running on the Corp's hardware, sure the corp can't get the implants back but if the kid leaves they lose probably the only real friend they ever were allowed to have. Add in the nearly outright brainwashing and conditioning to support their parent corp, well out of a class of 120 kids I'd bet they only lose one or two to defections at most. Not to mention the remaining kiddies grow up to be excellent security deckers, data miners, researchers, even managers, executives, and the one I met, Johnsons.>

::Mick33::<Seriously, these bastards grow up with a corp-sponsored cyberdeck in their heads, and have their own SK watching each and every one of their backs. By the eighth year the curriculum openly has classes in matrix security and decking techniques as electives. After those electives students actively patrol their campus matrix as security deckers, each with their own high-powered security cyberdeck, programs they made themselves in order to get the deck in the first place, and backed up by grown up professionals of course. Don't underestimate these fraggers, their professors rarely have to intervene to help with intruders.>

::CyberB.O.B.::<Wow, wish I had classes like that when I was a kid. Hey, Mick how do you know so much?>

::Mick33::<Tell you later; I gotta go to class now.>


Notes: Student Companion Intelligence Program
While strictly speaking SCIPs are not true AIs or even semi-autonomous knowbots they are quite a step above mere agent programs. Each possess advanced fuzzy logic and adaptive learning capabilities and each is highly adapted and customized to its user based on a dedicated modular computer node. Each SCIP node is physically about the size of a mini-fridge and needs at least a Red-1 mainframe to be directly plugged into and a high-bandwidth matrix connection to be fully functional.

Every student's SCIP is different, most of them taking on a persona designed by that student, often a sort of online pet or guardian. Functionally the SCIP works as a cross between a life-coach, secretary and pet. Unlike most agent or SK programs the SCIPs are not generally geared towards cybercombat (though many are modified towards that purpose), but rather towards risk assessment, information, social and task management. A student in their first year gets a SCIP assigned to them with an effective core rating of 2 (note the total core rating is higher but is taken up with “personality� programming and other built-in functions; the 2 represents the abilities it would have on the matrix at its most minimal level). As each student progresses through the institute their SCIP is upgraded, with more and better upgrades available for good academic performance and for completing various courses or other challenges.


Notes: Companion Interface Implant
Similar to a cranial cyberdeck w/o an assist interface(user does not directly deck through it, a separate cyberterminal/jack is used) supporting an interface agent designed to monitor the user and their SCIP and bridge the gap between the two as well as provide other axillary functions. The implant has its own separate matrix connection from the character using it (though both can share a single connection much as two computers on a LAN share a single internet connection, one wire into the decker's head with an internal router, though most students have a second jack for the implant as well).

W/O the SCIP the implant has an MPCP(running a dedicated program similar to an agent, rather than a decker's persona) of 6. The program alone acts as a sort of generalized agent with a piloting rating of 2 acting more as a pet than anything else. It is able do ongoing matrix searches, observe over the character's shoulder acting as a second pair of eyes, or perform other simple tasks or tricks on the matrix.

Game Stats:
Nuyen Cost: 533,750
Essence Cost: 2.15

For costs I am looking at the costs for similar items such as cranial cyberdecks(specifically CMT Avatar) and the tactical computer. The base costs I'm getting just by taking the average of those two, and to me this seems to be in the ballpark of what I want. For the Nuyen costs I am also considering an estimation for the programming costs for the Companion. The base hardware costs for this come to 350,000 nuyen, and my estimates of the software costs using the MPCP of the cyberdeck I'm basing this on of 7 for the rating and 10 for the multiplier comes to 245000 nuyen. Of course the cyberdeck itself includes some software factored into its cost, so I'll only add 75 percent of that cost to the total. This comes to 533750 which seems about right to me.

Unlike a cranial cyberterminal the Companion Interface Implant does not include an RAS override and the persona attributes only apply to the Companion itself when it interacts with the matrix and not to the decker. The Companion may connect to the matrix through a separate cyberdeck with specialized software (rating equal to the deck's MPCP and software multiplier of 5) in which case the Companion uses the cyberdeck's persona ratings.


Notes: EALI Companions
A fitting analogy for how a EALI Companion works is with the human brain. The cerebral cortex where most of the intelligence and thinking is done is the SCIP node while the Companion Interface Implant acts as the brain stem performing basic lower level functions and connecting the Companion to its master and controlling the node's basic functions.


Notes: Emmerton Advanced Learning Institute
Every year the Institute takes in about 30 new students between the ages of 6 and 8. Students are grouped in home rooms of 10 where studies and general management is overseen by a single human instructor.

Students at first a put up in two bunkhouse dormitories divided by gender each dormitory having 40 beds but usually only about 30 are taken. Again increases in academic performance leads to improvements as second-year students with average grades are moved into smaller bunk rooms with only six to a room (lower graded students stay in the large bunkhouse). By the fourth year(of 12) the average student is in their own small dorm room, slightly larger than a coffin hotel (the program does not offer rooms with less than six students sharing in order to prevent too strong ties between students) with larger and better rooms available to those students who perform better many rooms built so that they can be expanded or upgraded without moving the student's belongings, just the walls are moved.

edited adding more info

Someone has been reading "Transhuman Space" ... and then did a bang up job of adapting the Personal AI to Shadowrun. Well done. I'm definitely going to steal, errrr, borrow some of these ideas for my own 3rd edition game.

Isshia

Reading? I own every book and have all of the pdfs thankyouverymuch.

Indeed there are a few new ideas that I'd love to see in SR, this being one of them. The other big one is Augmented Reality, esp if you've seen the anime Denno Coil, which I suppose the wireless matrix in fourth kindo approaches but doesn't really do that great a job of.

I'm still working on getting the stats and such fleshed out and figuring more things for the character so I'm likely to be updating and changing my original post here again soon.

updated with a bit more in game stats