well, since Deus is dead there's no reason for her NOT to go back to the arcology. And there is some value to be hiding in plain sight - nobody would ever think to look for her there. And from what I've read about the place, not even the UCAS military knows everything that's in that place. The mall is open to the public and the ACHE shelved the homeless on a couple of converted levels near the ground floor. But a good 90% of the Arcology is unoccupied. There could be entire factories hidden in there that nobody ever discovered. Pax would probably be be the best informed about anything still left hidden in there, and she could easily manipulate the SCIRE matrix without detection.

Yeah, but when the UCAS took back the archology, they didn't really clean up the SCIRE matrix.

Even if they didn't completely clean it up, you know things are being monitored CLOSELY so they don't get another AI by accident.

Yeah, but we're talking about Technomancers here. Dissonant technomancers sitting on top of a very large dissonance well. Plus, Pax and her crew know that matrix system better than the guards. it wouldn't be so difficult to keep the mundanes fooled into thinking everything is just fine. Plus - the city government really isn't paying much attention (if any) to the poor fools in the public housing section.

The whole "they left the matrix up and running" portion of the arcology breakdown just seemed stupid for the purpose of potential plot point. Sure i can see them breaking it down and taking it to another location to experimeent on, but leaving it in place? Whatever.

could be its distributed all over the place inside the arc, after deus got working on it (or even before)...

dont know the exact floor plan of the place, tho i think there was a general breakdown in one of the seattle books...

in any case, renraku was hired to run much of the seattle public grid, and i guess its those public systems thats been sanitized and brought back, while the renraku private ones are a unknown. Hell, could be the government is sitting on them as a kind of ransom against renraku...

Truth is that Puck indicated he found rumors of a group of disonant TMs in GeMiTo, led by a cold hearted slitch that reminded him of Pax. He went to investigate and disappeared. Then Pistons went in search of Puck. Can't remember where I read this but it is definitely canon.

- J.

okay so just as a brief summary....

*detective hat time*
at least two former members of Ex Pacis are now dissonant TMs, members of a group called the Discordians, who are somehow involved with the Code Clan. according to Puck, at least

so at least SOME otaku have become TMs, though whether these Ex-Pacis members were ever Whites we can't say (probably not, as by the time of Crash 2.0 the only otaku who served Deus were not ones he had created; neither Pax nor Puck were created by Deus either, so I'm fairly certain that the answer to the thread's title is "they all died or faded without Deus around" but that's not really the interesting part).

i will assume the the group called the Discordians is one and the same as the Discordian dissonant stream - their goal of eliminating resonance-based TMs by converting them or killing them is pretty much the same modus operandi as Ex-Pacis. their cold-hearted slitch admittedly might NOT be Pax, but one of her other crazy fanatical dissonant devotees. Amor (or was it Honos?) was pretty nuts too...

the first mention of the Code Clan that i can recall is in the matrix rumors section of target matrix; a group of semi-autonomous knowbots who programmed agents to go out into the matrix and search for something; it was hypothesized that they were created by a bunch of research students as an experiment, but nobody ever really knows what happened to them. Puck mentions the Code Clan in Unwired as "alleged AIs." whether or not it is the same group and/or persistently, I would be very curious about, especially what they have to do with members of ex-pacis....

keep in mind though that we're just speculating wildly here. From the 'cold and ruthless dystopian' viewpoint i'm going to make the assumption that nobody really bothered to do a complete overhaul of the arcology matrix systems. it'd cost too much for too little return. so they'd patch it up, get it running and slap a new coat of paint on it. then tell everyone that it got fixed on time and under budget. In reality they probably just got the essentials functioning then cut the budget for future operations, outsourcing as much of the command/control aspects as they possibly could. Plus - this was all done post crash. nobody knew much of anything at all about Technomancers, resonance or dissonance at that point. Hell - even in 2072 people STILL don't know much about them. so the redesign never took into account the new and improved children of the matrix.

On the surface, the ACHE is a successful public works project. In reality, it's a hellish example of despair, greed and short sighted corruption.

had fully forgotten about those, but then its been a while since i cracked open target: matrix...