QUOTE (Wakshaani @ Feb 23 2013, 07:17 PM)
Damien Knight was 99% likely the head of the Echo Mirage project.
Lucien Cross was 95% likely to have been involved as well, but more on the technical side.
"Buddy" was an Echo member who made it out with some mental issues. Supposedly killed in 2XS, but it's been a decade since I read it last.
Two Echo members created the first commercial cyberdeck, but Richard Villers had 'em killed and took their stuff.
Alice Haeffner was KIA. Her husband (now dead) *might* have been a member; it was never made clear.
Two engineers/scientists from Echo Mirage went to work for Dr Halbertsam, plugging infants into the Matrix.
There are multiple references to David Gavilan/Damien Knight being the "leader" or "head" of Echo Mirage. However, the Echo Mirage was started before the 2029 Crash, while Gavilan seemingly joined after. There is an Echo Mirage "Team One" that few cares about (afterall, they failed, and a bunch of them died). The seven survivors, out of thirty-two, including Gavilan, are the members of "Team Two," recruited and trained after the predecessors' failure.
Lucien Cross is very unlikely. It is never mentionned or even suggested anywhere, even in Game Information. He worked with Gavilan/Knight at Acquisition Technologies and on the Nanosecond Buyout, and that's it. Whenever the name of an Echo Mirage team member has been mentionned on Shadowland or Jackpoint, his participation appeared to be a widely known fact. Knight is the only exception, but only because he used a fake identity. Since he has a son and a nephew called Cross, Lucien Cross ought to be his real name. Cross is quebecois, so it makes sense that, in spite of his skills, he wasn't recruited in a US top secret project.
The same line for reasoning goes for Kyle Haeffner. He campaigned once for vice-presidency and twice for presidency. If he had any part in the Echo Mirage project, beside marrying a member, I think we'd have at least a mention somewhere. As far as we know, he's just a lawyer (though I suspect he could have been involved in the Nanosecond Buyout, setting up the trust funds though which Damien Knight gave money to the family of the Echo Mirage deceased members).
Here are some references I was able to dig. Some of them are in-context and to be used with caution (either because people can lie or simply be misinformed or misunderstand), some others are Game Information.
QUOTE
Corporate Shadowfiles
Major David Gavilan of the United States Air Force, liaison to the National Security Agency, headed up the Echo-Mirage project back after the Crash of '29! He disappeared in late 2031 after the Echo Mirage team purged the computer virus and the project closed.
Super Tuesday, page 12
Knight proposes Boston-area investor and multi-millionaire Kyle Haeffner, an old friend of Knight's. Haeffner's wide Alice was one of the young "data mavericks" recruited by Echo Mirage to deal with the Crash Virus more than twenty-five years ago, and was also one of the first deckers killed by the virus in cybercombat. [...] Haeffner and Knight are linked by their common background, and Knight feels Haeffner has the skills to make the perfect VP for the great dragon. Knight also knows that Haeffner will be loyal to him first and the wyrm second, exactly the state of affairs he wants.
Clockwork Asylum
(two dialogues between Alice Haeffner and Thomas Roxborough)
"I've pinned the origin of the virus to three possible hosts. Your system at Acquisition Technologies, Gossamer Threads, or the old NASA mainframes. Both Dunkelzahn, who owned Gossamer Threads before his death, and NASA lost a great many assets during the crash. You, however, only lost data pertaining to one corporation. That in itself points a lot of blame in your direction."
[...]
"Okay, it begins way back with my corporation, Acquisition Technologies. It was a small corp, but we had a drek-hot programming department. I ran it, and David Gavilan was my top code maestro. Dunkelzahn had very little to do with the corporation except that he owned a small portion. Until one day, I learned that the wyrm was planning to hire Gavilan away from us. This started a little corporate data war. I instructed my programming team to come up with the most deadly computer virus ever constructed. My intention was to destroy the data cores of Dunkelzahn's Gossamer Threads Corporation. Nothing more. Gavilan worked on the project, everyone did."
"I don't believe you."
"Finally, the truth and you don't buy it."
"What happened?"
"We tried a small corp first to see if the virus would work. We unleashed it on Effexx Studios and it destroyed them completely. At first we were overjoyed, but then something happened. It was a complicated program, self-replicating, self-correcting, all that. It got out in the old Internet and infected hundreds of computer systems. It was an accident, don't you see? We never intended to hurt anyone."
"What happened to David?"
"Dunkelzahn met with him to discuss moving to Gossamer Threads, and he saw the virus in David's mind. Dunkelzahn knew what we had done and he convinced David to quit Acquisition Technologies and go to work for the UCAS government to fight the virus. The rest of us were busy trying to hide our involvement, and with all the computer systems crashing, that wasn't too hard to do."
Blood in the Boardroom, page 57
Damien Knight's Nanosecond Buyout made some men rich who had never touched the stock market. Among them was Lucien Cross, a young programming genius from Québec. Cross was a computer expert with the "investigative research" division - another name for in-house corporate spies - of Acquisition Technologies. As David Gavilan, Knight had worked with Cross on numerous projects for Acquisition Technologies.
Shadowrun, 3rd edition, page 28-29
The breakthrough that did the most to make our wired-up world what it is today came between 2026 and 2029, when Sony Cybersystems, Fuchi Industrial Electronics and RCA-Unisys all developed prototype cyberterminals that allowed users to interface with the world data network via the central nervous system. [...] Over the next few years, various R&D gurus refined the technology and made it safer, much to the glee of certain agencies in the US gummint. The CIA, NSA and IRS pooled their resources to exploit cyberterminals as quickly as they could manage, recruiting and training a team of “cyber-commandos” under the code name Echo Mirage.
And not a moment too soon, as it happened.
On February 8, 2029, computer systems across the world got hit with apparently random attacks by a virus nastier than anything ever seen before. System after system crashed, their data wiped clean and even their hardware burned out. As the killer program spread, governments toppled and the world economy neared collapse. The virus shattered the Grid, the data network that held the world together. We were back on the road to apocalypse, this time via the virtual world—unless someone could stop the bug.
Echo Mirage swung into action almost immediately by presidential order, but the psychological demands of combat in cyberspace overwhelmed the mostly straight-arrow, linearthinking agents. So the folks in charge recruited the most brilliant data-processing mavericks from industry and several universities, ramming them through a brutal training program. Thirty-two men and women graduated with their sanity intact.
In August, armed with improved cybertech, the new Echo Mirage team mounted a coordinated attack on the killer program. Eighteen minutes after engaging the virus, four members of Echo Mirage were dead. The data logs showed that the virus program induced lethal biofeedback in humans accessing the Matrix, and also that no existing computer security could even slow down someone using a cyberterminal. [...]
But back to Echo Mirage. Equipped with new combat programs and beefed-up cyberterminals that used desk-sized hardware and needed no sensory deprivation tank, the remaining Echo Mirage team began purging the Grid of infection. Late in 2031, Echo Mirage wiped out the last known concentration of the virus code. Shortly afterward, four of the surviving seven members decamped into the private sector, taking with them the secrets of the new technology. To this day no one is sure just where they turned up (though some of us have our suspicions).
Corporate Download, page 35
I have conclusive proof that Knight used to be known as David Gavilan, leader of the Echo Mirage project that fought the Crash virus. [...] The picture comes from the records of Alice Haeffner, a fellow member of the Echo Mirage team who died fighting the Crash virus. Alice was the wide of - you guessed it - Kyle Haeffner.
Matrix, page 14
2028 : The U.S. government creates Echo Mirage, a "cyber-commando" group intended to take advantage of cyberterminal technology. [...]
2031 : Echo Mirage eradicates the last trace of the virus.
Matrix, page 152
On February 8, 2029, the worldwide Matrix was hit with a self-duplicating, chaos logic, multifunctional virus. It erased data, crashed systems and even caused software to rewrite itself in order to damage hardware. The world had never seen anything like it. The U.S. military, backed by some of the most cutting-edge tech the U.S. corps could devise, created the Echo Mirage project. Thirty-two men and women would be the first to fight a new war on a new battlefield with all-new weapons-their brain and an anti-virus program that verged on being an SK, years before such programming was though possible.
By 2031 the virus was gone, and the anti-virus was so powerful and so adept at finding the last remaining code of the virus that during the last six months of Echo Mirage, the casualty rate dropped off completely: none of the team members died. That did not, unfortunately, make up for the fact that twenty-five members had died in the previous eighteen months.
The anti-virus’s work was done, but its code was golden. The U.S. government kept a tight seal on the anti-virus and much OF its proprietary code, but as the seven survivors OF Echo Mirage left the government they took with them their knowledge, their experiences and, in some cases, the actual code of the anti-virus. Two of these were Ken Roper and Michael Eld, co-founders of Matrix Systems and creators of the first cyberdeck."
Blood in the Boardroom, page 57
Cross Was a computer expert with the investigative research division - another name for in-house spies - of Acquisition Technologies. As David Gavilan, Knight had worked with Cross on numerous projects for Acquisition Technologies. The two had a great deal for each other's programming abilities [...]
Corporate Guide, page 53
Though several theories about his true origin and the reasons for his change of identity persist, the leading hypothesis is that “Damien Knight” is in fact one David Gavilan. A former UCAS military computer analyst and programmer, Major David Gavilan was lead programmer with the Echo Mirage project, the team of expert hackers assembled to fight the computer virus that caused the first Crash way back in 2029
> Which is where he supposedly met Kyle Haeffner, who Knight helped into the Oval Office in ’57. Haeffner’s wife Alice was one of the first casualties in the fight against the virus.
> FastJack
After the Crash, Gavilan resurfaced in the Investigative Research Division at Acquisition Technologies, a third-tier corp specializing in industrial espionage and a precursor of corporate intelligence divisions such as Shiawase’s MFID or independent intel corps such as Infolio or Aegis Cognito. It’s reasonable to assume that Gavilan used Acquisition Technologies to organize and choreograph his masterstroke and vanished a few weeks before the Nanosecond Buyout.
), I would like to flesh out some story ideas, hooks etc.
