When And Where
Equality And Diversity
Privacy Policy
Setting
The Galactic Syndicate of Planets
CHRONOS
Pre-Ananke Timeline
The Ananke Conference
The War
Space Travel
Time Travel
Technology
Playing the Games
As of session, the way opti is shut down. Before being shut down, it:
It was (successfully) shut down immediately after the Achelian victory, as at that point its primary directive (i.e. Kedalion quality of life) was being fulfilled by the other Optis.
JUPITER as created last turn was never initialised - only the “new” set of optis is in place (since they take over most of MOTHER/JUPITER’s features). The MOTHER patch to the war opti is in place - this is what is causing it to mostly leave Kedalion itself alone and allow the other optis to have day-to-day control.
The Optis which run Kedalion are as follows:
All of the Optis (except the War Opti) are governed by three overriding rules:
Economy is governed by the additional rule of “don’t fuck up the planet”
Each opti has a public face which is basically a chatbot that looks and acts kind of like the person it is templated on - but they get easily confused when asked questions outside of their domain. Attempts to actually socialise with them and treat them as people rather than machines quickly hit the uncanny valley.
In the first 5 years after the Ananke, they acted purely via their own directives - this was a time of radical change, and there was some resistance (particularly from the corporations), but mostly the changes were for the better. The old corporations were in disarray, which made it relatively easy for Economy to take over - generally via forming “divisions” which had similar scope to the old corporations (but which merged competing corps into effective monopolies where their interests overlapped). Since this time, there have been many attempts to form independent companies - but these have mostly been regulated out of existence (or at least deep into the black market - the corps are not all the distinguishable from the gangs by this point).
After 5 years, the voting system was brought online, allowing people to modify the priorities of the Optis (and how Mother prioritises between them). This has mostly been positive - though it has led to disagreements between the Enhanced and non-enhanced Kedalions, on two fronts. Firstly, there is a perception that because the Enhanced have generally better and faster network access, they have more voting power (it is essentially impossible for them to miss a vote, and their internal optis can be set up to predict what they would have voted for if they do not give conscious thought to the vote itself). Secondly, there is a constant debate as to when Enhancement should be performed on biologically born Kedalions - proponents of early enhancement point out the quality of life benefits, and the fact that enhanced “Jupes” (artificially grown humans) have a better integration with their enhancements than those born later in life; opponents reject the parent’s right to consent on their child’s behalf for such a life-changing decision.
Everyone has a place to live. Mostly these places are quite nice (and the smaller dwellings make up for it by having good access to services/jobs). Everyone is educated to a good standard, and is provided with basic resources. All who wish to have employment and to afford luxuries beyond that may do so.
The major divisions of Kedalion Inc are as follows:
The divisions tend to work closely together - with Persona, The Menagerie, and JUPITER each contributing to parts of the Enhancement system, for example, and Myriad making cybernetics designed by The Menagerie.
Myraid operates mainly from Kedalion’s moons. This way, the planet is spared the ravages of the waste products from manufacturing, and there is still plenty of capacity for Myriad to expand and produce (not to mention, the lower gravity has allowed developments for some improved manufacturing techniques).
Persona is rumoured to be close to a breakthrough in creating a “true AI” - the details of this have been kept very quiet, but rumour has it that it involved experiments with a Chronos machine (though ones set up to have no causal effect).
There are still rough areas of the cities where gangs are active (or black market corporations), and the gang enforcers and corporate espionage agents are often indistinguishable - except that the latter may be, on occasion, deployed by Kedalion Inc against other systems, to obtain research or sabotage military research. While Enhancement theoretically has some ability to prevent the Enhanced from committing crimes, the restrictions on surveillance through augmentations or direct control of augmented individuals make this rather toothless - and most would-be criminals will just hack these functions out, anyway.
Anyone who is Enhanced has an opti in their head, wired tightly into their nervous system. This gives them:
If an Enhanced commits a crime, this will be logged by their Opti - and can be reviewed by law enforcement. However, most people have this feature removed by a friendly hacker.
psYber is installed by default, but can be removed by paying a subscription fee to the Tungsten Roses (which was initially a result of a widespread hack, but eventually formalised in the peace agreement following the Achelian civil war). Or you can get a friendly hacker to remove it for you - so long as you don’t mind them poking around that much in your enhancements.
This pretty much creates three tiers of Enhanced people:
(The attitude of the three groups is roughly similar to the attitude surrounding ad-blockers - those who install an ad-blocker (i.e. get the hack) think that those without one either have more money than sense, or are just ignorant. Those who pay consider those who hack it out to be taking a silly risk, and engaging in minor criminal acts (even though the hack is not technically illegal)).
At the present time, most Enhanced are still those born biologically, who later take the implants. However, Research has also created “Jupes” - artificial “vat-grown” humans, who have integrated enhacements. They are functionally the same as those born biologically, except that they have access to their Enhancement abilities from birth, which makes them much more comfortable in the new world.
Enhancement does not require major surgery - advances in technology allow a simple injection of “constructor bots” which can perform the procedure overnight. Waking up during this time is apparently an absolute mindfuck.
Biologically born humans can only get Enhanced at 15, though this age tends to move lower every few years as the Enhancements become more and more a part of everyday life. (This is considered similarly to the debate around children having smartphones).