The Full Immersion Lifestyle (SR4 Unwired, p. 38) costs 30,000¥ – which is insane. The Marshall Brain book “Manna” (see Chapter 8), introduces the “Vite” lifestyle option. The short version is that instead of being a “voluntary invalid” in a medical facility, you have a computer take control of your body while you’re jacked into the Matrix. While you’ve “stepped out,” it will actually take better care of you than you do. “Piloting” your body around your house, it will have you eat a super-healthy diet, get an optimum amount of exercise, and also handle elimination and bathing, all without you having to worry about any of it. Combined with some basic automated housekeeping drones, you’ll never have to leave the Matrix unless you want to.

This definitely lowers your lifestyle costs. You really only need a bed (and some good exercise equipment) and a basic kitchen setup – anything else is useless as you’re not hanging around to look at it or use it. And if you do need to leave, you can turn off the system and walk out the door in a body that’s been kept in excellent physical shape. A low-crime neighborhood, good physical security, and high-speed Matrix access are your primary lifestyle components.

Personally, I wonder why none of the official authors have considered this option, and I’m thinking it’s going to go in our House Rules, at least.

Your thoughts?

I would want to have some VERY good IC to prevent someone from hacking in and turning me into a zombie drone. Or worse, an assassin.

I thought about that. The only sane way to do this is to have the body controller be a separate system with no Matrix access. Also, lock yourself inside your own house with a manual keypad on the inside (that you never access unless you've physically powered down the body controller).

With all that in place, I think it's a doable idea, and it's got to be cheaper than 30k a month.

It depends on what price you give to that computer and the system able to control and monitor your body as you describe. I'm not familiar with SR4, but SR3 wise, I'd say this would represent a huge bunch of skillwires + skillsoft + a computer powerful enough to do all this. For a few hundreds of thousands of nuyens, maybe less, you should be able to do what you describe pretty well.

Now, about the sport and stuff and super healthy diet and stuff… I don't know, how will the computer handle you having a fever and stuff? How will it handle a plumbing problem? How will it handle a window breaking? In case of fire? In case of breaking and entering? In case of ant invasion? etc. You'd better be sure it will be able to warn you in time in those cases…

I've always thought skillwires were one of Shadowrun's dumber ideas. Do you need skillwires to get up out of your chair and walk down the street? No, your brain is already pretty good at controlling your body without them. If it has direct neural access, a Body Controller should be software. Making it a separate piece of hardware is primarily a security measure so that it can be easily physically turned off. But we could go with the skillwires cost to try to ballpark the cost of our system. 10k will get you some Rating 5 skillwires, which sounds reasonable.

And the cost might come down further, as big companies will be all over this. Don't believe me? In more than one book (especially the SR4 Corporate Guide) they talk about pushing telecommuting to save costs. This approach will kick telecommuting to the next level. A worker can be jacked in for those 12 to 14 days at their virtual office - with no adverse health effects! Heck, with this in place, they're eating and exercising at optimal levels every day! No office space needed for them and they won't need as much healthcare with their super in-shape bodies, which saves even more money. Any corporate bean-counter will be drooling over these systems, and will recommend the company incentivize the hell out of them for as many employees as possible.



The simple solution is to have your CHN (Central Home Node) send out an audible alarm in case of any of those happening, in addition to texting you an emergency alert that you need to log out now and deal with it. Your Body Controller system is always listening for that alarm. If it hears it, it promptly pilots your body to a chair or something (so it doesn't fall over), and then shuts down.

Emulating the output of the brain is clearly not a software problem. The brain does not work like this. Whether you believe skillwire is a device controlling each of your muscle or emulating some signal to control your spine, this is major surgery and not something you'll see in corporation.

Most of shadowrun's police officier or equivalent have very little to no augmentation, even the cheap ones… So clearly, you won't convince wageslaves to accept major brain surgery that easily.

I'm surprised at the very low cost of the skillwire system in SR4. But skillwire work with a conscious human that still controls most of the intent. And they are already quite expensive. By all means, a skillwire system authorizing the kind of unconscious actions you suggest, like cooking, training, cleaning, etc. with, as you suggest, heavy feedback and analysis capacity (like this pain is associated to muscle sore while this one is associated to muscle damage, this smell like cooked food, this smells like burning, etc.) would require a heavier connexion to your brain than a normal skillwire. Plus activesoft are already quite expensive if I get it right. The one doing what you suggest would be much more expensive.

Honestly, I don't see what you propose being really shadowrun-y, fluff wise, but maybe that's just me. Computers controlling human bodies is not some easy things. Damn, if that could exist, wouldn't indeed corporation breed bodies to do just that, considering there are already vat grown limbs ?

SR4 introduced the Stirrup System, essentially a souped-up MBW for directly rigging biodrones...and it explicitly mentions the possibility of letting software do the job:

It depends on to what degree the datajack has access to the subject’s brain. When you want to raise your right arm, you think “raise my right arm” and your brain sends the signal to your right arm to do that. Clearly, the “hardware and software” to “pilot” your body already exists within your body. Given sufficient brain connectivity, an externally connected device could issue those same commands to your brain instead of you consciously “piloting” your body. In other words, take advantage of the already existing mechanisms to “pilot” your body.

Consider this. If full simsense VR exists, then the brain connectivity for you to feel/experience a whole other different body must exist. If the hardware and software exists for you to pilot around a full 5 senses virtual body, then the reverse is certainly possible as well.


That’s a different purpose. If you want mindless puppets dancing to your tune, just use drones. Way cheaper and more easily programmed.

Except it doesn't exist in SR world easily. This means that it functions as I described: simsense feeds an input to the brain and collects its output, no matter how intricate the hardware is to your brain. Which implies that the technology to do what you say, and replace your consciousness at an intrication lever much higher where the computer could control some of your brain the way the "consciousness" in your brain does, doesn't exist in that world.

What I mean is, there is a rational for how simsense and VR and stuff works in shadowrun without allowing what you describe. And for sure, if what you describe was that easily accessible, it would be accessed already and the world would be different.



Not mindless puppets at all. Look at the ability you suggested for such a being. It's self taking care of, can do sport, cooking, cleaning, and so on, and for cheap. This puppet can get fairly strong, have very high levels of coordination and precision, and are self healing and repairing, with a level of flexibility and polyvalence that very few drones have.

Maybe I'm overselling it, but you get my meaning. Those things would definitely exist and have some use.

@freudqo:

Just because it doesn't currently exist in canon doesn't mean that it shouldn't or can't. The SR devs are most certainly not infallible or omniscient. The more likely explanation is that they never considered the idea. If they had, then yes, the world would be different. My point is that it should be.

Oh, I'm pretty sure they considered it and left it because they liked the setting the way it was, and there was good rational to let it this way. Shadowrun has historically been very wary of such kind of things.

Otherwise, I don't deny that there is room for such a technology in a sci-fi setting. The only thing I say is that it's not automatically viable because of simsense, and that it would change the setting too much for my taste.

Who said anything about consciousness?

All I'm reading is something technological doing something instead of you consciously doing it. An industrial robot programmed to place spot welds instead of a worker consciously doing it does not become conscious, it's just a machine doing programmed motions

"Doing something instead of" as in "replacing". Never implied the program doing so would have to be conscious.

Alright, then what is the big hurdle you're seeing? Technology controlling muscles has been canon since at least Cybertechnology introduced the MBW system. And we don't even need superhuman speeds here, it doesn't matter if your body lifts its glass of water really slow and looks like a certain president drinking water. We both agree that piloting a body does not need conscience as long as the "pilot" is just following fixed instructions in a fixed environment (i.e. basically what a Roomba does). So where is the big problem that needs to be solved?

I'm pretty sure I explained precisely my concerns in the posts above. I'm not so sure I should do it again before you actually took the time to read and understand the preceding posts and tell me what's problematic or unclear for you in them rather than nitpicking and misinterpreting small out of context sentences about consciousness.

Sorry, still not seeing it
- The steering software is not a problem, software controlling human movement at high precision and speed has been around since Cybertechnolog and full pilot software for biodrones has been explicitly confirmed in Augmentation
- Hooking the steering software up to the body is not a problem, that's what the Stirrup System does
- Doing it via software only (and a datajack) may or may not be a problem but at any rate is inconsequential, because the Stirrup System is a thing


The only thing not really addressed so far would be your point about detecting health and safety issues. The answer to that problem is simple, a biomonitor and CHN will take care of detecting those. If the fix is simple enough for the program to perform (stop exercising, drink more water) it can do just that, if not (fallen and can't back up, house on fire) the biomonitor/CHN can call DocWagon or Fire Department Inc.

My very first post in this thread:



Never denied the possibility of what JanessaVR proposed. I was mostly there about cost and some details on the execution of the awesome healthy diet and lifestyle being a little more than just some simple standard skillsoft.

The cost just needs to be less that 30k/month, which is what the Full Immersion lifestyle costs. R1 stirrup costs 45k, so...

As for the food, I fully expect the corps to have perfected Soylent (the RL all-in-one food concept, not the stuff that's totally made from plankton) to optimize away lunch breaks for the betterment of humanity.

Exactly. If the setup cost is 50K, ok fine. If you plan on the employee being around for at least a good decade or so, that'll pay for itself in a few years.


Indeed, another benefit is that you'll eat much healthier because you're not tasting the food. So who cares if your new ultra-healthy diet has the flavor and consistency of cardboard - it's not something you'll consciously experience.

What is your problem with "For a few hundreds of thousands of nuyens, maybe less, you should be able to do what you describe pretty well."? The stirrup you suggest using is already 45k. Add in some expensive pilot program, biomonitoring etc. plus all that will allow a human to live in a clean environment using delivery service and you'll quickly be in the vicinity of the prices I quoted.




Which doesn't exist in SR world, which means it's more complicated that you think .

And the first complication is major surgery with 2.5 essence removal, of course.

What, long-term employees? People are literally born with corporate citizenship in the SR world.


Which matters to mundanes why?

EDIT: As to costs, Stirrup System is 45,000¥, Piloting 3 Software is 3,000¥, and a Biomonitor is just 300¥. So, we're still under 50 grand here. And if it's a megacorp making these, the cost will come down further when they order a million of them, or start manufacturing them in-house. Again, the cost savings (on multiple fronts) start kicking in when you've got a good chunk of your rank-and-file mundane employees hooked up with these things. And implementing such a system is entirely in-character for every megacorp we've seen in the Sixth World.

EDIT 2: Did you see the film Dredd (2012)? Imagine one of those 200 story tower blocks, filled with 20' x 20' apartments on every floor, all with the same room plan. Enough room for a single-person bed, small bathroom, mini-kitchen area, and exercise equipment. A "people farm" of jacked-in employees working 12 to 14 hour days in the Matrix. All kept in great physical shape and fed a bland (but healthy) diet. The megacorps would just love it. 50K setup costs per employee, sure, but it's minimal housing and food costs after that, and security's a lot easier when the inmates, er, "employees" are housed in a such a semi-arcology.

Nope, the system you're describing of people living 24/7 in the matrix.



Because of the fact that lose of essence carries a well-known and described social stigma, except for the datajack? Because you need to have a good chunk of your body removed? Because why the fuck would you do that you're just a fucking accountant?

No one wants to undergo major surgery to be a company slave trapped in the matrix for 10 years. Once again, there has ben published a lot of cops without a smartlink.

The world of shadowrun is not the world of Dredd, or this other shitty black mirror episode that I'm not arsed enough to look for. Wageslaves are slaves because they want a nice cosy life protected from bad events and this is how the Megacorps keep them from rebelling. Megacorps are not magical entities which can impose crazy demands on a whim to their employees, which is the mark of failed ultraliberal dystopia, the writers of which fail to understand the reason of the liberal model dominance in our societies.

As to cost: the pilot program you describe is not enough to do what you want. This is comparable to the most basic drone autopilot. You still need housing and delivery service, plus additional drones etc.

The description of Stirrups says it is.

Nope.

"The recipient can be controlled
by a specialized Pilot program, but then functions exactly like a
regular drone."