So I was reading through the Shadowrun Wiki and they say that Deep Resonance is some kind of Matrix being?



So I was wondering is the Deep Resonance just the Resonance realms of SR4 or is it an AI, or maybe a sprite before sprites were cool?

If all Otaku were made from AI(?), but some where not associated with Megaera, Deus, or Mirage, and if Deep Resonance is some kind of xeno AI(or sprite), then it'd make sense it'd make Otaku for seemingly no reason. And maybe the Deep Resonance made the Technomancers? Which might help explain why there is no rhyme or reason on who becomes a Technomancer.

And all the references to Deep Resonance in SR4 that I'd found basically neither confirm or deny the existence of Deep Resonance as an AI/sprite. Though, I guess the paragon, Zero-One is the Deep Resonance? Which would help imply that the Deep Resonance was a sprite, assuming it was anything.

The current theories are those:
1) Deep Resonance is an inherent property of the Matrix, not related to AIs
2) Deep Resonance is Deus
3) Deep Resonance is any combination of Deus and other First Gen AIs.

Not to forget:
4) Deep Resonance is (just) Mirage

Okay, my bad, make that (3) Deep Resonance is any combination of Deus and/or other First Gen AIs.

Also, from purely plot standpoint I wish the First Gen AIs transcended to become parts of the Deep Resonance still moving under the surface, that'd allow for some nice conflict potential. Plus I just like hyperintelligent AIs more than the current watered-down copies, just as a concept. Anything powerful and mysterious looks much more interesting than an entity roughly equivalent in power to a metahuman.

Also, it would at least be in line with the Sprawl trilogy story the Matrix in Shadowrun has been following since Virtual Realities back yonder.

The "Resonance/Dissonance are AIs that create technomancers" theory doesn't work. Some of the people who became technomancers weren't at all connected to the Matrix or even remotely interacting with technology at the time.

That's what makes me think they were making people in to TMs before and/or after the crash, not necessarily during, but not excluding it either.

If Deep Resonance is some kind of 4th AI who's motives cannot be ascertained, because it'd have been made from the background junk data in the Matrix (like a sprite); then it could have been turning people in to mancers before the crash, but since there was not that much wireless, people wouldn't have known. I don't know, are there stories of people who had no Matrix interaction at all, and still became TMs?

I know there are no real answers to metaphysics. But its always kind of fun to try and think of some kind of semi-logical way to shape the world. Or it is to me at least...

How does one explain the technomancer leopard out in the jungle or technomancer dolphins, or such with that theory though?

There is a phenomena in reality that the Resonance could be linked to called the Schumann Resonances - it's directly related to the Earth's electromagnetic field, which, interestingly enough, dragons and immortal elves supposedly can't leave.

Totally forgot about techno critters...Well, there goes that theory.

Even today the comsat constellations cover the entirety of the Earth, so I unless we're talking some hardcore deadzones I see no reason to presume animals couldn't have gotten into the Matrix.

Besides, there are no reasons to presume human technomancers and technocritters have the same nature.

I'm fairly certain, that when speaking of said technocritters it did point out that many have been found in places with out coverage. The big cat in the jungle that found his way into the researcher's node. Dolphins in the middle of the ocean and stuff. Clearly they get 'into' the matrix, but they don't start there.

Same coverage isn't universal either. if I'm not mistaken, one of the stories about Ares and their 'bug' plans, indicated a Shadowruning team had gotten lost and were out of range, and I think there's such in hazard pay?

As for presumption of them being the same nature... come on man. That's a stretch. "Ohhh.... super secretive AI's made human Technomancers, but Animals... they just were born that way all on their own! In the middle of the rain forest or the ocean! Yeah!!"

I'm not saying I --know-- what made Technomancers. But it's pretty clear that what ever made them, evolution, magic, whatever, made both. If it was the other way around you might have more of an arguement. If we knew that humans had some how made the Animal Technos, then it could be conceiveable that they did so with help of the AI and the AI made the human techno's too, but we don't.

That's a possibility that the technocritters were made by people. Didn't Dunkelzahn's Will have a part on making a DNI for dolphins and elephants, or something strange like that.

I wonder how rare these technocritters are suppose to be. If their populations are really low they might have been escaped lab animals. And strange corp and private experiments can happen anywhere.

Its only been like 10 years since Crash 2.0 so it'd be hard to say if technoamancy is hereditary. And if it is, I'm not sure how quickly these animals can breed to get their populations up.

Personally, I like to go with the simple solution:

Technomancy is an alternate expression of Awakening that comes about due to the heretofore unseen congruence of rising mana tide and purposeful electromagnetic and neural exchanges, IE, Matrix activity.

They weren't seen much in the 2060s because the wireless Matrix wasn't so much a thing then. The Otaku were an abberation, TMs before TMs were a Thing, largely because their brains were the playthings of Deus. Then, with the Crash 2.0 and the Wireless Matrix, bam. No matter where you are in the Sixth World, the Matrix can touch you; even in the deepest jungle, there are Signal rating 9 and 10 satellites above you, whose Matrix signals are reaching you, you just can't reach it without a powerful enough transmitter.

And so, you get Technomancers. That also helps to explain why the TM rules ape the Magic rules so very, very closely, and why TMs are basically treated like Mages in other respects, too - such as their powers being tied to Essence and vulnerable to augmentation installation, and why holistic therapies that work better on mages than on mundane un-augmented people work better on TMs, too.

Again, even today there are no non-confined places without coverage whatsover.

So what you can't prove in any way you're going to claim to be obvious. Smooth.

You cannot use modern coverage as a basis, because there simply wasn't that sort of wireless in SR at the time.

Sure there are. There's remote places where you don't get coverage. Heck there's parts of my neighborhood where there's no coverage, and it's on an old AF base.

It's not about proving it in any way. It's looking at two techno creatures and claiming that one is made by AI, but the technoanimals just spontaneously appear all on their own.

Iridium comsat network alone covers the entirety of the planet.

Right, because we all know animals are incapable of development. For example, no Awakened animals exist.

Come up here and try your network. Then we'll talk.

Animals are capable of development, but you're not going to find parallel development of TECHNOMANCER ability, one artificial by AI's on humanity, who DO interact with the matrix on a huge level, and then spontaneous development in creatures with out higher reasoning skills and such. It's silly.

"Oh the AI's created human Technomancers, but those technomancer Roaches are just born that way."

Come on. It's silly.

He's not talking about standard telecommunications networks.

Still, the fact is that in SR's history, that stuff just wasn't there or was done away with, so it's not relevant.

Comsats are in SR history, constellations are regularly mentioned. And SR is far ahead of RL in space exploration: if they have huge stations capable of sustaining life in orbit and a Mars base, yeah, they do have comsat networks. It's supported by the rules, too: see satellite communications package being available for purchase.

So convergent evolution does not exist. Okay, let the biologists know.

The Deep Resonance is identified with the different AIs only in the novels. Technobabel for Deus, and Psychotrope for Mirage. Later publications tend to deemphasize the connection, such as Brainscan and System Failure. So simply put the Deep Resonance is a transformative experience in the matrix that created normal otaku (as opposed to Deus otaku). Anything beyond that is pretty much open.

People became TMs/Otaku before and after the Crash, too. Re: Threats 2, Brainscan, Psychotrope, R:AS.


Adopting Ronin, Brainscan takes the developments of Technobabel as a fact (Deus can create adult Otaku). System failure tries to move away from that though, as do Unwired, Emergence, and other early SR4/late FanPro products (because the authors wanted to move away from AI as a base for Otaku/mancers and towards a magical Matrix; Moritz Lohman once told me exactly that).

The novels were written from the protagonists' POV...

Brainscan is very clear about what created Ronin (p. 133).

Not, entirely true. Technobabel has a lot of scenes that are not from Babel's perspective. The point is the whole thing is very muddled. I think the Deus plot cannot have been fully formed when the novels were written. Psychotrope happens in the Seattle grid (March 19, 2060) at that point Deus had already overtaken the arcology (in December 2059). But I believe no mention of Deus or a malevolent AI in the arcology can be found in the book. Technobabel also doesn't mention "Deus" by name, but does give the impression that Ronin dealt with the Deep Resonance. Later it was explained that Deus just mimicked it. Similarly with Psychotrope where we are left with the impression that Mirage, again the name is not mentioned as far as I recall just it's connection to Echo Mirage, could be the Deep Resonance. But then I think first in 3rd Edition Matrix we are presented with the explanation that Mirage is another AI.

Renraku Arcology: Shutdown would probably be the earliest example where Deus and the Deep Resonance are clearly separated: "The otaku created by Deus rather than the Deep Resonance" (p. 83). And that's Game Information.

What if instead of TM's abilities being an echo from the past (like magic), what instead it was an echo from the future?

The future is not an entity that exists in Shadowrun. Debatable, but that's how it's always been handled. The future, as per divination rules, is a maze of possibilities. And time travel is one of the three dogmatic impossibilities of the setting.

That the old Matrix gods were capable of creating Otaku is beyond question. But the fact that I can build a wheel does not mean I invented it.


Very likely. IIRC Demonseed once mentioned that he pitched Brainscan only after RA:S was already done, stands to reason that the rest of the storyline was similarly done without planning far into the future.

But from an IC standpoint it also makes sense that the characters knew nothing about the big AI story (and thus the name "Deus" would not have told them anything). It was as big secret which only a few in-universe people knew about, and they were not talking

Ronin is a man in his late 20s when he becomes an Otaku. Neither is he limited to the SCIRE Matrix. Even if Deus did not invent the wheel, he certainly can build wheels, which flies in the face of the theory that all wheels manifest spontaneously instead of being built.


As said, I know for a fact the story was to be retconned/reversed with SR4 due to the preference of a few authors. It seems to re-reverse now. That's what you get with shared universe writeups.

The word you are looking for is "strawman", not "theory".

So you agree that the Deep Resonance is at least possibly nothing more than an interface used by God-level AI?

And/or, because ambient mana levels weren't high enough yet.

Think about it - most "electronics" nowadays are actually optical chips. Back in SR1/SR2 days, optical memory storage, at least, used proteins derived from algae.

Anyone want to hazard a guess, that maybe the very building blocks of the Matrix, are just barely organic enough to interact on a deep level with the ambient mana field?


Deus may simply have figured out a way to detect nacent technomancers when they were pre-pubescent, and "push" their emergence (sans wireless connectivity) ahead of schedule. Heck, even the fading, need not have been natural part of being Otaku; children and early-teens youth are more readily shaped, molded, and manipulated ... making them goo pawns for Deus to use. Good dupes, really.


Ambient Mana and ambient EM traffic (and the hypothetical interaction between the two) both hit the minimum point required for Emergence, and you get full-blown Technomancers. Otaku stop suffering from "the Fading" as well, perhaps? Maybe even, some of the "new" adult Technomancers [u]used to be[/i] Otaku themselves?

...

Essentially, Technomancers are a kind of "Matrix Adept" ...?

That kind of stuff is just up there with teleportation, ressurrection and time travel. The antipodal nature of high technology and magic is one of the cornerstones of the setting. It may be okay in Cthulhu 2020s or CthulhuTech, but not in Shadowrun. Also, 'organic' does not equal 'biological'. Plastics are organic compounds, too. Doesn't make them biological, which means alive, which means mana-sensitive. Pigments gained from algae are as magically active as a bar of NutriSoy.

I seriously hope they ditch this magical Matrix bullshit for good.

I never got that from SR. Not since the day 1E was first introduced to me ... about four months after it was originally published.

LArgely separate, yes. But antipodal ... no.

Uhm, every mechanism that handles their interaction, from object resistance to enchanting, from healing spells (harder with less essence) to the Astral (deader the more technological an environment is) to magic (sinks as implant score rises), to essence itself, indicate agic and high technology do not go well with one another. It's pretty hard to miss. You can mix, but that will get you a zero sum game at best. More often than not, you'd lose more than you gain in the end. Yes, there are rules exploits, but those are the exception, not the rule.

Magical Computers - in the sense of the magic magicans practise - do not fit with that.

And yet a certain Great Dragon hoped for a technological device capable of manipulating mana to be created...

He also gave Art Dankwalter a lot of money. His gifts were often poisoned. Sometimes even just reaching for them.

the very second you find a biologist that can show me a real live technomancer animal. You have an argument.

Till then. You don't. Something as complex and revolutionary as technomancer ability is not going to evolve in humans one way and totally independently in a wide number of bugs, animals and even other 'higher' animals, all independent of one another. What ever that triggered Technomancer ability in metahumanity is the same thing that triggered it in animals as well.

Why not? It happened with eyes. Bug, invertebrate and vertebrate eyes developed from different tissues and yet have nearly the same composition and complexity. And Shadowrun creatures can evolve in extremely short time, near instantaneously, as a species - there's examples for that too (those Mississippi salamanders, unicorns in the 4th world, foulmarts).

My suspicion is that the Deep Resonance is a latent intelligence made up of the Matrix itself. The matrix is a series of connected nodes, many of which directly interfacing with human brains. It's not difficult to see those nodes functioning a bit like neurons. So, in a sense, the Matrix is aware, but perhaps primordial, becoming more intelligent and more connected to humanity as the number of nodes grow.

The wireless matrix is more pervasive, has more nodes, and they act as a mesh. In a sense, it's more brain-like. As the Deep Resonance becomes more aware, and as humans become more entwined with the matrix, the easier it is for the two to overlap. Thus, emergence.

That's my hypothesis, at least.

While not a bad hypothesis. It doesn't explain animals in the rain forest or Dolphins in the sea or even cockroaches, emerging.

Not trying to be a stickler, but the fact that there ARE technocritters, really screws up alot of possibilities for Technomancers.

One wonders if this is intentional, or inadvertent and accidental. Did they PURPOSEFULLY put in technocritters to purposefully keep Techno's a mystery? Or did who ever put them in, do so with out really thinking out such.

Animals in the rain forest? Like? All Technocritters in Running Wild are commensal species (rats, crows, "insects", cats, dogs, raccoons, ferrets, and the oddballs snakes (which are claimed to be popular pets in the description) and dolphins, which are partially domesticated - problems of salt water and radio waves nonwithstanding). Since all these animals at least partially have connections with humanity (they would not NEED technomancy without a decent technosphere to begin with anyway), they could be changed by whatever changes technomancers as well. I do agree, though, that this was probably not entirely thought through.

... It doesn't fit with your theory, so therefore it must be poorly thought through? That's not how it works.

Awh.

Thanks for the quote to throw back at you every time you try to make up crap to justify lazy writing and incompetence, though.

The animal I was referencing was apparently an ocelot. (Not a leopard or Jaguar. I read the book quite some time ago). Page 187, Running wild. Both the animal and the fact that it was in the rainforest can be found on that page. "When the first corporate reports about technomancers appeared, the connection was obvious, although I would have never expected one to manifest in the rainforest. It is still something that completely eludes us (but to my own satisfaction, not us alone)"

And for the record, I don't think you're using commensal correctly. Commensalism is where one organism benefits with out affecting other species. Most of the ones you list harm the other when they benefit. If eating the humans food, spreading sickness or one another in predatory fashion.

Nor to my knowledge are dolphins domesticated. I.E. having been changed on a genetic level in order to accentuate traits that benifit humans. Nor has their evolutionary process been influenced by humans to meet our needs. Some small subsets of some species of dolphins can be trained or 'tamed', but that's not the same as domestication.


As for not needing it, that's half of my point. Bugs, or dolphins in the middle of the ocean or that ocelot in the middle of the rain forest didn't need technomancy (Though in the examples they found uses for it)

And I -fully- agree, what ever changes technomancers, changed the technocritters as well.

I was saying that Technomancers wouldn't have been changed by _______ but the technocritters out in the wilds or depths of the world, from bugs to cats to cetaceans were some how changed by some different _______.

That blank being what ever it IS.

So it's hard to say "Were technocritters purposefully put in there to bust some of the 'easy' guesses at Technomancer origin, or "Hey techno critters would be cool" with noone ever going "Well in secret we know _______ triggered/caused technomancers, but... that doesn't fit for the ocelot sitting in the jungle."

I'd like to think that the writers thought it out and purposefully put technocritters in as a foil or to add more questions, but being realistic, it's every bit as likely that the depth of the technomancer question wasn't really addressed in their genesis as something in the gaming supplement. I'd have to guess at best, 50/50 chance. Either way.

Right, so you're going to go ahead and try to pretend that I was addressing more than I actually was. For a theory to have merit, it must be possible for some sort of evidence to falsify it.

Well, that would be my primary explanation of them - authors making shit up without an idea how it fits in a bigger picture. In-game, they make little sense. It's possible to whitewash the ocelot as some escaped experiment or a crossbreed with a Bastet but ... argh. This is just stupid.


So ... you are trying to say your "it was a plan all along and just looks like crap writing" theory of the first two Storm Front chapters is actually worth shit?

I'm not referencing that at all, and seeing as we were asked to take that discussion to PM, I'm not going to start in on it here.