I’ve recently returned to SR4A after playing other games, and on rereading the Matrix rules in Unwired I discovered a fact that I’d apparently overlooked for years: forming an encrypted connection or a slaved connection requires a subscription. (Unwired 55.)

This creates a large problem, because as far as I’m aware, it’s impossible to subscribe one node to another; instead, a subscription is a link between a node and a matrix user (persona, agent, sprite, etc.). Put simply, nodes can’t take the Log On action needed to create a subscription, and therefore can’t subscribe to one another. Reinforcing this point, there is no limit on the number of subscriptions a node can have: only matrix users have a subscription limit (equal to 2x the System rating of the node they’re running on).

Unfortunately, situations where one wants two nodes to be able to communicate securely are rife: security cameras, for example, should be able to send encrypted real-time feeds to the security nexus without requiring a spider or agent to be subscribed to the camera (and thus have an icon in the camera’s node) at all times.

It’s even worse with slaved connections, because those are described as a node-to-node link (on the same page of Unwired, no less), which the required subscription fundamentally doesn’t permit. Slaving therefore appears to be impossible. (If you instead permit slaving a node to a matrix-user, you run into the problem that it quickly becomes problematic to run enough agents in a security nexus to subscribe to all of the devices (e.g. doors, cameras, sensors) you want to slave. It also doesn’t make much sense in terms of the description of slaved nodes forwarding connection (Log On) requests… you can’t Log On to a matrix user.)

Is there a rule I’m missing permitting creation of a subscription without taking the Log On action that can be used to subscribe one node to another? (If so, what is the subscription limit for nodes? And what does it mean for a node to have an icon in another node? How does one handle access rights of one node on another node? To what extent can the icon be interacted with without logging on to the node itself? For example, can the node be crashed from the node it’s subscribed to?) Alternatively, if I’m right that nodes can’t subscribe to each other, are the subscription requirements on Unwired 55 really as unworkable as they seem?

(I thought I had found rule support for node-to-node subscriptions when I saw the mention on SR4A 224 that icons can be “links to nodes”, but that appears to just be a reference to Portals as described on Unwired 58, where the icon is just a representation of an Access ID, not something running on the remote node itself.)

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!