Evacuating people from Earth during the Fall
Mon, 2010-01-18 07:41
Did anyone else ever get this image in their head when thinking about how people were being evacuated during the fall? It came up when I thought of a character, a Fall Evacuee Doctor.
The image is in the last hours before the final ships attempt to escape Earth, doctors are killing people and removing the cortical stacks. They are out of supplies to assist in euthanasia and are reduced to shooting people in the head. The stacks are removed with little ceremony or precision as the doctors try to "save" as many as they can. The mobile hospital near a launch site looks more like an abattoir.
Mon, 2010-01-18 18:17
#3
Re: Evacuating people from Earth during the Fall
Reminds me of one of the more disturbing flashbacks of the protagonist in Charles Stross' "Glasshouse" (definitely recommended EP material!).
Spoiler: during the Censorship Wars he fought against the Curious Yellow worm, a piece of software that infected and edited people passing through assembler gates, forming a distributed botnet (the worm might be a great *human* counterpart to the Exurgent virus). During one operation they had to debug the population of a habitat. To do that properly would require moving them through an uninfected disassembler gate that would store their mindstate for later embodiment. Unfortunately there is not much time, so they start chopping off heads and throwing them into the gate. The situation turns ever more gory and dark, and eventually the protagonist realizes the gate has crashed - they have been decapitating people for nothing...
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Mon, 2010-01-18 21:51
#4
Re: Evacuating people from Earth during the Fall
One of my players was one character trapped in Earth. He had to upload his own mind and then it was sent to Mars where it was placed in a hard-copy material (like a futuristic DVD or somethnig like it) and sent into space with no electronic devices in it other than the most necessary and without connection to the Mesh so no digital worm could enter. And, in such a state, it waited until the Fall was over.
So I like your idea very much, but I don't think they'd need a ship. They probably would do the same thing by an egocasting machine, or something like it. No?
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Thu, 2010-01-21 00:06
#6
Re: Evacuating people from Earth during the Fall
I really have to admit, this never came to mind. That said, it should have because this is an awesome idea for a vignette. I see the people involved making some kind of cannon capable escaping the gravity well with homing beacons attached to come active in 24 hours for recovery. Who needs rockets that can be shot down?
Thu, 2010-01-21 10:08
#7
Re: Evacuating people from Earth during the Fall
I was picturing a server core with tons of seats positioned around it, and people laid back in the seat and their cortical stack was force downloaded into the server core (frying the brain in the process), a technician/doctor removed the body (probably dumping it into a furnace) and the next person stepped up. When the server core was full, it was put on a ship and a new core was put in its place (rinse and repeat till the ship is full and can take off).
I don't think the bloody massacre detailed above would be possible unless the doctors where not human. I find it hard for the human psyche to survive the intentional killing and harvesting of thousands of humans an hour without breaking down. I personally would rather shoot myself in the head and not be resleeved. If harvesting of cortical stacks was done, I would think gas chambers (like the ones used by the Nazis) would be used instead. It is more humane and easier on the psyche to harvest cortical stacks from people that didn't die violently. Even still you would have more room for a server core then crates of cortical stacks and the server cores have the advantage that they can server as long term storage till all the infomorphs are given new morphs.
The longest part of egocasting is transmitting the ego, if you cut that step out, you can reduce the download process to a few minutes (less time to massacring and harvesting cortical stacks).
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Thu, 2010-01-21 19:38
#8
Re: Evacuating people from Earth during the Fall
I doubt people in EP would have any problem with killing others in that situation, as they are not killing them but quite the opposite, saving them. The human psyche can resist almost anything, breaking only on those points where it has been taught that it has to break. For example, when other ethnic groups have not been considered "humans", or "possessing a soul", or "good" many people have had no problem in simply murdering them massively. A completely different thing is to murder "one of your own".
In any case, since people wouldn't be murdering but saving those people, I'd think they would probably feel like a doctor that saves a live by cutting a leg: messy, bloody, but needed and useful.
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Thu, 2010-01-21 21:34
#9
Re: Evacuating people from Earth during the Fall
I do have to admit, harvesting a lot of people's stacks sounds like a gruesome affair. I'd think it'd be a bit more traumatic than chopping off some legs. Not to mention the longer you stick around, the longer you risk being caught and harvested TITANly yourself. If I were the doctor in question, I'd probably just fork off a Delta and have it harvest me for transport.
Fri, 2010-01-22 09:10
#11
Re: Evacuating people from Earth during the Fall
I do have to admit, harvesting a lot of people's stacks sounds like a gruesome affair. I'd think it'd be a bit more traumatic than chopping off some legs. Not to mention the longer you stick around, the longer you risk being caught and harvested TITANly yourself. If I were the doctor in question, I'd probably just fork off a Delta and have it harvest me for transport.
That sounds more reasonable as a fork can lack some of the emotional and mental barriers that would prevent the original from massacring millions of people.
__________________
Juan Rodriguez, PhD
Bio-engineer
Pinochet
Your mind is original. Preserve it.
Your body is a temple. Maintain it.
Immortality is an illusion. Forget it.
Extinction is approaching. Fight it!
Rep: 33
Sat, 2010-01-23 05:25
#12
Re: Evacuating people from Earth during the Fall
Love it. Just love it. Maybe it would be a bit more Jonestownish in practice ("Here's your Koolaid, please go over there to die, our doctors are popping stacks as fast as they can, have a pleasant death."), but you just made me want to play a doctor who whenever he sees a sharp object gets the shakes and urgently needs to wash his hands (and has an uncanny similarity to Robert Picardo). Ah, the joys of turning your fellow players stomachs...
Thu, 2010-05-06 19:16
#13
Re: Evacuating people from Earth during the Fall
By the way, I was wondering...
...how long did the Fall take, from start to finish?
and how long until all Scum Barges left, leaving egocasting as sole "official" escape route?
Look at Battlestar Galactica: Razor and The Plan, and even the very pilot.
It took hours in there, and that was a surprise attack (at least a surprise to the humans!)
in EP, this happened:
• The TITANs evolve from a high-level distributed netwar experiment into self-improving seed AIs.
For the first few days, their existence is unsuspected. They advance their awareness, knowledge, and power exponentially, infiltrating the mesh both on Earth and around the system.
• Large-scale netwar incursions break out between rival states on Earth, sparking numerous conflicts. These attacks are later blamed on the TITANs.
• Simmering tensions on Earth escalate into outright hostilities and warfare.
• Massive netwar breaks out and major systems crash as TITANs begin open attacks, also using autonomous war machines.
• Conflict quickly spirals out of control. The use of nuclear, biological, chemical, digital, and nanotech weapons reported by all sides.
• TITANs engage in mass forced uploading of human minds.
• TITAN attacks expand to other parts of solar system, heaviest on the Moon and Mars. Numerous habitats also fall.
• TITANs suddenly disappear from system, taking millions of uploaded minds with them.
• The Earth is left a devastated wasteland, a patchwork of radiation hotspots, sterile zones, nanoswarm clouds, roaming war machines, and other unknown and hidden things among the ruins.
It could have taken months, maybe even a year between the first point and the last.
at the time of the evacuation, the death toll must have been enormous already. Between the nuclear strikes, the viral attacks (I can't help but remember what Kovacs said about Inennin in Altered Carbon, and the Rowling 4851 virus that sounds A LOT like a short-term tactical Exsurgent Virus strike), the world population must already have been down by 75-80% at the time the evacuation started
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Thu, 2010-05-06 19:49
#14
Re: Evacuating people from Earth during the Fall
I always pictured the Earth based Fall to take between 1-5 years and the overall Fall to take close to 10 years to fully play out. I would also say there was a period of about 2 years near the end of the Fall that the actual fighting against the TITANS had stopped but Human vs Human fighting still continued. It eludes to in the core rule book that most of the atrocities done during the Fall where not the direct result of the TITANS but the actions of Humans. An example is the Brazilian Scum Barge that was shot down by the USA and killed thousands of civilians.
__________________
Juan Rodriguez, PhD
Bio-engineer
Pinochet
Your mind is original. Preserve it.
Your body is a temple. Maintain it.
Immortality is an illusion. Forget it.
Extinction is approaching. Fight it!
Rep: 33
Thu, 2010-05-06 20:23
#15
Re: Evacuating people from Earth during the Fall
*Nods* I've always pictured humanists as blind optimists.
Anyway, to the general public it started as World War 3 or 4, I gather. How long do you think it took the threat of the TITANs to become public knowledge? it's almost a given that world wide governments tried to keep their rising a secret even when it was blatantly evident to the street man of what was going on, before the nukes start to fall and flash epidemia making H1N1 and H5N1 look like a sneeze killing millions broke out.
There are novels material there!
__________________
"Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permitted"
--Creed of the Brotherhood
Q U I N C E Y ^_*_^ F O R D E R
"Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permitted"
--Creed of the Brotherhood
Fri, 2010-05-07 00:15
#16
Re: Evacuating people from Earth during the Fall
I figure it only took a week or two, tops. Maybe 12 hours for the ICBMs from launch to detonation, and once those were launched, it's all downhill from there.
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Fri, 2010-05-07 06:25
#17
Re: Evacuating people from Earth during the Fall
The core rule book (p32), mention that the Titans followed the escaping humans even in space, so just evacuating the earth wasn't a reliable strategy for survival. For a year, Even in space, refugees had to elude the pursuit from Titans. Plus the attacks from other humans, exploiting the chaos (killing off rivals). No wonder most refugees ended up as inert egos stored in cortical stacks.
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I like it
What do they do to the stacks ? They put them in a big can to be sent into orbit ?
I would love the sign "Ammo is scarce, Please crush your skull by yourself if you want quick service. Thank You."