I know the big names got out of the Arcology and particpated in the events surrounding Crash 2.0. But did Pax survive? Or any of the others? most of them were around 16 or 17 years old during the Renraku shutdown took place (around 2056 I believe), so they'd be roughly in their late thirties or early fourties by 2072. some of them could even be Technomancers now. Pax, if she survived, would likely be some form of dissonant technomancer. Or so I would assume anyways.

thoughts? comments?

Yes that's pretty much how it broke down. Pax created Jogermond(SP?) that led to the second crash. There's some pretty good info on the whole deal in Systems Failure. My memory also seems to twig to the fact that she has a standing bounty and omega order on her.

Actually, I'm not sure what happened to the otaku. When the SR3 -> SR4 transition was made, did the otaku just become technomancers? Or are there just no new otaku, but the old ones continued as normal? Either way, if there's no new otaku, all of Deus' otaku should have faded by now. Pax has certainly faded, unless she came up with something newer, better, and less crazy-making than whatever she was doing prior to Crash 2.0. But the canon information on Pax before Crash 2.0 was that she was undergoing fading, and was resorting to some extreme dissonant submersion to attempt to stave it off, even though that was having only mild success. I don't know anything about an Omega Order against her, but it's almost certain that every major party in the 6th World would like to see her dead.

well...I know that Puck is a character on Jackpoint, and he used to be a member of Deus's banded (a White, point in fact). He's a shit hot decker but not a technomancer as far as I know. Pax survived the second crash, or I think so anyway. Her and most of the remaining Whites who were loyal to Deus were at ground zero for the events of Crash 2.0, and from what I've read it sounds like that host was a very chaotic mix of Resonance, Dissonance and who knows what all. So Pax and some of the others *could* have come out of it as Technomancers. I really don't know.

Hmm.

since you mentioned Puck, i thought that i would quip in and mention that SOMEWHERE in the SR4 books he refers to a group of TMs being led by a "seriously cold-hearted slitch," words those of us from the SR3 days might remember explicitly being used to refer to Pax before. I wanna say it's either in Runner Havens re: the Bureau of Heaven and Earth, Feral Cities re: Legion (Geneva), or in Unwired re: dissonants or matrix rumors... I don't actually feel like hustling down the exact reference right now though (it's late)

Since I read it just yesterday, it's in the Matrix Rumors section of Unwired. Puck explicitly mentions "somebody who should be dead" and that two members of that group are former Ex Pacis members, only to disappear afterwards...


And depending on how much you consider novels which only appeared in German (Digitaler Alptraum, or Digital Nightmare) canon there's another old acquaintance in tune with the resonance/dissonance:

The end is a bit ambiguous

Are SR3 otaku now SR4 technomancers?
And if so, anyone have a theory on how the otaku overcame the age restrictions?

Yeah, I remember that bit of shadowtalk. I think it was in Emergence, but I'm not sure either. At that point, Puck was still alive but I think he'd faded and was running the Matrix just like the rest of us slobs. And I'm pretty sure that whole bit is meant to imply that Puck is dead now and Pax is still around somewhere, even more insane than ever.

Yes and no. Technomancers are something different from Otaku. However, many of the old Otaku became Technomancers in the wake of the crash and Matrix 2.0. Other Otaku simply went mundane, while many of the newly emerged Technomancers were never Otaku.

So basically, no more people with otaku abilities anymore in SR4?

Technomancers can do pretty much everything Otaku could do, except getting lots of cyber in their brains. The upside is that they don't fade with age.

No. the old Otaku are gone, and Technomancers are their...well, upgrade would be a fairly good word for it I suppose.

I'm really not sure if any of old Deus crew survived. I know that the AI modified a lot of it's banded. Greens and Blues underwent a lot of cybernetic modification, as well as severe mind bending personality restructuring. it's entirely possible that some of those folks are still floating around and in various stages of insanity. The Whites were the ones I'm most interested in however. Pax was never a confirmed kill, nor were several of the others in that crew. Winternight was almost wiped out (I believe that 2 of the 3 Norns were during the events of System Crash), but is slowly rebuilding. Ex Pacis tho...I think I remember reading that Pax fled to somewhere in Asia after Crash 2.0. Deus too - God only knows what exactly happened to it after the crash, but I think it's safe to say it was shredded.

I'm 99% sure that all of the Winternight folks are dead. One of them set off the tac-nuke in their home base in the Baltic. One of them died on their way to interrogation by the Corp Court people. And the other survived to be interrogated, but I'm sure was executed after the Crash 2.0 went down.

And I believe that many of the otaku that Deus created in the arcology only had their powers while Deus was inhabiting the system, and that as soon as he got downloaded to the Network, they lost their abilities.

the ones he created inside the arcology faded almost immediately, but he had a tribe of Otaku working for him that were Otaku prior to joining his merry crew of Whites. Pax was their leader. so it's likely that they maintained their Otaku abilities up until the events of Crash 2.0. They were probably Fading at that point though. However - I believe they were in the node that was ground zero for Deus and his little world tree Resonance/Dissonance tsunami....which means they were exposed to all sorts of funky things. I'm not saying that Pax survived and became a Technomancer, but it's a possibility.

The canon material explicitly states that Pax was experiencing fading at the time shortly before Crash 2.0, but was experimenting with some fairly extreme submersion techniques to try to fend it off. I think Puck was the only one of Deus's Otaku that was actually IN the node that was ground zero for Crash 2.0, however.

And I think Pax survived as well, but as far as I can tell from what's been published, she's been a non-issue with regards to any major events after Crash 2.0.

*cough* above *cough*

As for DEUS and everybody else at ground zero, the mixture 341 gazillion personas, several flavours of chopped AI, Dissonance, Resonance, an UV Host, and the most aggressive worm ever created could result in nearly everything.

i recall that puck was going to dig deeper into the pax rumor, then went off radar, with netcat getting worried as he was never offline for a extended period.

last i recall was a opening fluff in one of the location books having netcat and one other in italy following pucks trail...

If Pax is still alive, I wonder what she's up to....

probably living the TM high life in geneva...

she was freaking insane. I very much doubt she just gave it all up after the Crash.

well the geneva grid is basically a "haunted" system...

sounds like the perfect place for a insane TM to park her mind...

To be specific, Pax lost her loyalty to Deus after the end of the Arcology crisis (the events of the Brainscan adventures). She wasn't a Dissonant Otaku while working for Deus but became one afterward. She created her Dissonant Otaku clan afterwards, based out of Singapore. Although it's never been explicitly stated, I don't think many (if any besides Pax) were former Whites.

It has been strongly hinted that Pax did indeed survive the Crash 2.0 and is likely now a Dissonant Technomancer. The hints are in the Matrix Rumors section of Unwired (as was mentioned) and the story about Netcat chasing Puck's trail is in Feral Cities. Also, did anyone else notice that one of the Paragons in Unwired is called Pax-Nemesis? I'm also concerned that another one of the paragons, the World Tree, manifests itself as a "giant, crystalline tree." Does anyone else remember what Deus' persona looked like?

I got curious and did some digging. Unwired, pg 164 is the conversation where Puck mentions the dissonant Technomancers (Code Clan and Discordians, to be specific). he hints that at least one of their leaders could be Pax. He says he's going to do some digging around, and after that is not heard from again.

For what it's worth, my read on this is that Puck had found former members of Pax's old Otaku tribe. Maybe not Pax herself (yet), but still - the idea that some of her people could still be around is disturbing enough on it's own. Especially if they've developed Technomancer abilities.

So if I had to guess - and all i'm doing here IS guessing - then I'd have to say that, assuming Pax survived, she'd be a Dissonant Technomancer following Nemesis. Even if Pax isn't alive, members of her former Otaku tribe have little reason to allow Puck to survive. After all, he's the one who killed Deus.

maybe the whole point of CAUSING crash 2.0, and the subsequent change to a pervasive wireless matrix, was what Pax was after when she joined up with Winternight to start that whole mess. pervasive wireless allows those in tune with the resonance (/dissonance) to experience it all the time, as opposed to only when they are jacked in (as otaku were, of course). Winternight was pretty crazily anti-technology, but they still allied themselves with a bunch of otaku who just COULDN'T willingly inflict that amount of damage on the matrix without thinking it would get them something. even at their heyday, the major otaku players were still very much behind-the-scenes, and a lot of the SR4 fluff indicates that their whole existence is still not everyday knowledge, but post-crash 2.0 we have a group of dissonant TMs who managed to cripple the whole Geneva matrix...

even if the advancement of wireless tech and the subsequent emergence of TMs wasn't the whole goal of Ex-Pacis, it DID manage to manifest the Dissonants into a more influential force than they were before...

why do i get the mental image of freelancers reading this thread and making notes for future books?

Just make sure to give me partial credit!

Hmm. ok, well let's engage in wild speculation. For the moment, assume the following:

1. Pax survived.
2. Pax has become a dissonant technomancer following Nemesis.
3. Pax has altered her appearance or otherwise found some way to disguise herself. to be revealed is to be killed.

A quick reference check to the rules in Unwired (pg 177) tells us this:

[paraphrased] '...Nemesis is the remorseless personified embodiement of an avenging angel and paragon that punishes those deemed unworthy.'

hmm. so Pax likes to punish the unworthy. I wonder what she would consider 'unworthy'? she also tends to think big. So it would be well within her character to lay the groundwork for her next big thing. Maybe she's building a group of Technomancers and training them to 'weed out the weak'? I'm just guessing here.

I'm making the technomancer/otaku link a pretty central theme of my current campaign ark.

Basically of the Otaku we had basically three groups.

Those created by Deus: Highly vulnerable to fading, some were loosing their powers just by leaving the arcology.
Those created by Mirage: Seemingly invulnerable to fading, could be any age.
Those created by the reasonance itself or a slumbering mirage: Varying degrees of vulnerable to fading.

Now as i said my current campaign deals heavily with this plotline so i've opted to come up with some theories.

Otaku/Technomancers are both an evolutionary step of bringing metahumanity closer with machine. Otaku were somewhat rarer because not many people had their brains mainlined into the matrix as traditionally that was considered suicide. Mirage and Dues (and presumably other alpha level AI's) could speed this process. Mirage because it was originally designed as a psychotropic healing program was just better at it.

Now with WIFI being so common and magic continuing to be a threat to those without it people will continue to evolve to counter that threat. The resonant and disonant philosophies are the usual human dilusions of order and chaos but with Emergant powers already being so based on willpower belief can be an incredibly strong force.

That's the theory in a nutshell and most assuredly heavily homebrewed.

I did some more reading on Puck. turns out he was up to his elbows in some freaky shit. I'm amazed nobody on Jackpoint hunted him down and killed him for his past actions.

hrm. well, that aside - if Puck survived the whole thing, then maybe scarecrow or Pax did as well.

Well lets keep in mind these are shadowrunners people who commit crimes for money for a living. Altruistic hunting just because isn't usually in the bill. Plus from past fluff Fastjack would respond really really negatively to anyone using Jackpoint as a facilitator for hunting down another Jackpointer and he is not the sort of person you want to annoy.

Good point. But that said - Puck was integral to making Crash 2.0 happen. He sort of redeemed himself by planting the doom worm code egg right in the middle of Deus's source code, but even so - he was directly responsible for helping to kill a couple million people. Shadowrunners have standards, mass murder tends to keep your rep score on the low side.

The only thing I can think of about Pax is that, if she is still alive, that she'd be looking to avenge herself against someone. Maybe hunting down and killing all the baby AIs that have sprung up in the matrix since the Crash. Or maybe against the last few remaining Winternight cells that could still be out there. SOME of the winternight people did manage to survive after all. Not everyone was on their little island when they popped their mini-nuke on themselves.

now there would be an interesting campaign....you find yourself working with Pax to eradicate the last dregs of winternight.

i find myself wondering if SR have gone analog.

Given the description in Unwired, it sounds more like Nemesis' followers intentionally call her(?) by her Roman name to evoke the association with Pax, who probably is a hero for all Dissonants. That, and I simply hate the idea of another central character becoming a virtual ghost, god or whatever

If Pax survived (and I believe she did) then she's most likely a crazed Technomancer dedicated to the dissonant concept of vengence.

And she has a LOT of people to avenge herself against...

On a related note, something else just occured to me - nobody ever really got around to repairing/purging the SCIRE matrix. when the UCAS military took back the archology they cleared the bad guys out (mostly) and then [government stuff happened] and it became the ACHE. But as I understand it, they got the local matrix hosts back online and essentially left everything else the same as it was when Deus ran the show.

so...what if the ACHE is the largest dissonance well the world has ever seen and it's sitting right smack in the middle of Seattle?

In System Failure, Pax was deathly afraid of Fading, which was beginning to happen to her. Remember her speech to Puck when she convinced him to join her cause; she wanted to remake the Matrix. Given that Pax isn't the most altruistic and idealistic of people, you can bet that she wanted to remake the Matrix in an effort to stop her Fading or perhaps become something new entirely. And well, the Matrix was remade.

Just something else to consider: when Deus compiled himself, System Failure mentions that the Nodes in the Network went comatose. But no Shadowrun material since then says what become of those Nodes. And while Deus is gone, it doesn't mean the code that was in the Nodes' heads went with it...

there is a whole lot of data missing between system failure and SR4.

and most of it will probably never get covered...

Oddly enough, i'm ok with that. I like to engage in random pointless speculation from time to time.

The "unworthy" to Pax have always been people who are anti-technology, and ESPECIALLY people who are hypocritical about it. Like an Atlanta politician who was anti-technology but had a bad BTL habit. Bit the dust when Pax's gang (all pre-Arcology stuff) swapped his BTL chip with one that killed him. Assuming she survived and she's operating again, she's definitely working on building a gang of dissonant technomancers to wage the same old war she's always been waging.

hmm...I wonder if I could use that somehow...

It's certainly not a stretch. I'd think you'd want some fairly powerful characters if they were going to get involved with Pax, but investigating a series of incidents in which Pax is involved could make for an interesting game. And remember, Pax certainly isn't as powerful as she was before. There's no Network and no more Winternight for her to call in favors from, and anyone else she had contacts with is likely to not even acknowledge her anymore in the wake of Crash 2.0.

well...keep in mind also that Pax has to keep herself hidden as much as possible. not only does she have far less in the way of resources now, but she's also got a lot of very powerful people after her who would just love to see her die in some horribly slow and degrading manner.

hmm.

ok, so how about this then - Pax would be the ultimate focus of the story arc. shadowrunners get pulled into the story slowly, and as they get closer to the truth they realize that what they're up against is a powerful dissonant technomancer.

As for a base of operations, i'm thinking the ACHE would do quite nicely. Think about it - she knows all the ways in and out of the place. It's freaking HUGE, plenty of room to hide. And she's got a nearby pool of desperate recruits to convert to her cause - the ACHE residents themselves. they're practically inmates. I suspect that her message of vengence would go over very well indeed with those people. And as an added bonus, the SCIRE matrix is still a ginormous Dissonance well.

i know that feel, its nice to have some bits to get the feel for the setting, but i dont feel like having the complete wardrobe and diet of every AAA CEO listed in some book. I am under the impression that white wolf may have somewhat killed their world of darkness settings by going to such detail in the past...

was there not a decker called anubis that used to pull something similar, like breaking into peoples places to put a black BTL with a ankh into their deck when he could not kill them by black hammering them online?

oh, and i do wonder, could pax be played out as some kind of machiavellian plotter?

maybe having multiple plans going at ones to reach some kind of goal? chess player of the matrix...

well, if you can pardon the slight digression I think the main problem with the World of Darkness was that for years they promised their players that the Apocalypse was coming and everything would come crashing down. You can only promise that for so long before people start getting edgy....

Plus the writing had gone downhill. Like in a major way downhill. To my thinking, it completely stopped being any sort of good after the Players Guide to the Technocracy came out (an absolutely astounding book btw). Everything after that point was crap for all the product lines.

D'accord, just wanted to say that she probably did not become that Paragon or something similar, that would just be too much WTF.

As for remaking the Matrix, her whole plan was to use the crash worm to transform the Matrix into a new, dissonant, version, instead of simply destroying it as she promised Winternight. While the grand plan failed, I imagine all the havoc it caused did not excatly decrease the ammount of dissonance in the world...

Somehow somewhere i got the impression that Jormungand succeeded and that the wireless Matrix IS dissonant in it's core.
But i frakkin can't remember how i explained that to myself. Just that my Technomancer (ex-Otaku) would tear his brains out, just to be sure. Better dead than a servant of the Distorted Song.

Anyway... i'm actually asking myself what's up with "The World Tree". Why exactly the same iconography as used by Deus? It would surely scare every hacker and technomancer, who heard about Deus favourite icon, out.

Except that Pax hates Deus. After the Arcology breakout in Brainscan Pax went really off the deep end and started up her Dissonant Ex Pacis group. After the Arcology she was not in league with Deus or The Network anymore. I don't think she would want to go back there. Plus, it would be too obvious.

I think the concept of the World Tree as a metaphor fot the whole interconnected netword predates Deus, and that he chose this particular iconography because it's symbolism fit well with what he aspired to transform into.

Yeah, after she found out what Deus was planning on doing with the Arcology, she felt betrayed and came up with a plan to get herself out of there after it all went down. And while she wasn't in league with the Network, she did have some contacts there (Puck) that she was able to use. But I definitely don't think she'd be operating out of the Arcology anymore anyways. Even though it may be fairly easy to hide among the ACHE population now, you know that matrix system is locked down tighter than just about anything else. Plus, it's still not easy to move around and carry out operations with all the security monitoring the ACHE.