281. Catopia

Catopia is a popular simulspace in which users become cats in old-Earth landscapes. There is no given goal, system of points, or even verbal or text-based ways to communicate with other players. Users often play hide and seek, tag, attempt new kinds of acrobatics, or just explore.

The setting is a series of small towns and villages in rural locations that could have existed almost anywhere on Earth. The presence of humans is implied by the distant sounds of vehicles, music playing from open windows, and the sounds of conversation from closed interiors, but none are actually present and the land belongs to the cats.

Variants using dogs, birds, rodents, monkeys and even spiders exist, but none have not gained the viral popularity of Catopia.

268. Runoff

Makers, wet nanotech, and common pieces of biotech are clean and efficient, but not perfectly so. A buildup of grey water, improperly folded proteins, and loose nutrients must regularly be drained. This can be automatically recycled, but some people have started collecting it in buckets for informal drinking contests. Contestants must have medichines to avoid food poisoning, toxic buildups and other complications, but no augments are allowed that would disguise the taste!

258. Ites

Robotic toys no more than a centimeter tall, ites are popular toys and active decor. Depending on their type, they will imitate different sorts of people, going about their lives and activities in whatever room they are activated. Urbanites imitate the inhabitants and vehicles of a city imagined out of the furniture of a room. Ninjites sneak around and ambush each other. Explorites engage in expeditions to far points of a room, or try to climb to tall heights.

256. Monster Bash

Monster Bash is a game, sports league and bloodsport. Players design animals and monsters and pit them against each other. Gambling is common, and several genehackers fund their work with a Monster Bash career. The matches take place in simulspace, but successful beasts in the realistic league are occasionally grown for real, as smart animals.

Two informal leagues have emerged. A realistic league, using atomic-scale accurate simulspaces, and an unrealistic league, allowing considerable leeway to designers. The realistic league is a brutal bloodsport, realistic enough that the simulated animal brains experience real pain. For this reason the realistic league is limited to Extropia, where it enjoys the patronage of smart animal developers looking to test or show off their newest creations. The unrealistic league is more popular and widespread, both because of the lack of ethical concerns, and because the league allows for fantastical, showy monsters with impossible abilities.

Anticipation is high for next week's showdown between the ferocious grace of Claudia Ambelina's mantis ballet and the brutal slapstick of Shiffer High Energy Laboratory's plasma toads.

247. The Equator Run

The equator run is Mars' most anticipated sports event, a biannual, month-long race to and from Elysium.  Hundreds of teams participate, most with heavily customized, if not purpose built vehicles. Heavy armament is also common, as the teams will often fight each other, the Tharsis League will do their best to shut down the race by force of arms, barsoomians will take the occasional shot at corporate sponsored teams, and desperate scavengers will set traps to obtain new gear.

The race is not held by any formal entity and has no formal rules, but it is generally agreed that sabotage outside of the race is classless (of course it still occurs), that winning through skilled driving is better than winning through combat (the race still sees plenty of combat), that only groundcraft should be used (flying vehicles are too obvious targets anyway) and that AIs should not be used (most teams use manual, non-computerized equipment wherever possible to avoid hacking in any case).

The entire event is illegal, but the Tharsis League has been unusually powerless when attempting to stop it. The league faces anarchists and barsoomians, who enjoy the chance to publicly flaunt league rules, and organized crime, who enjoy a boost in gambling profits. At the same time, the city militia are not in a position to deal with the largely rural race, and the rangers consider it beneath them and of infinitely lower priority than TQZ patrols and counter-terrorist operations. It is a well known secret that several hypercorps sponsor racing teams, a continued loss of face for the league.

The great length of the race (more than 21,400 km depending on the exact route) makes the event a test of endurance and survival as much as speed and combat. There is no specified, official route, meaning teams have to find drivable terrain while avoiding patrolled roads, and avoiding the Titan Quarantine Zone, which sits on a large portion of the equator.

Plot Hook: A hyperelite scion looking for a thrill will be riding with his company's unofficially sponsored team. A great deal of @-rep can be earned by kidnapping him on behalf of the barsoomians, or a great deal of credits by kidnapping him for a rival hypercorp.

244. Elizabethian's Bespoke Dreams

Even with sleep minimizing circadian regulators, biomorphs require approximately two hours of sleep a day, a fact that frustrates many people to no end. Synths and infomorphs do not require sleep, but they are few people's first choice of morph. For those who must sleep, or who still find some value in sleep, there has emerged the service of programmed dreams.

Programmed dreams are most often designed for entertainment, with education as a close second. Specialized VR software, designed to synch with stages of sleep, presents the brain with the dream, overruling the normal dreaming process. Although there are many open-source, hypercorp produced, and microcorp produced dreams, those who can afford them agree that customized dreams are always worth the cost, and that Elizabethian, of Elizabethian's Bespoke Dreams, is the best of the best.

What sets Elizabethian's dreams apart from those of her competitors is her ability to stimulate crafted responses from the unconscious mind. She offers dreams to provoke insight, encourage certain moods upon waking, grant access to otherwise inaccessible portions of ones mind, explore symbolism and patterns of thought meaningless in waking life. She has mastered the difficult art of creating dreams that will customize themselves even while they are being dreamed, providing enough structure to enforce the nature of the dream, but allowing the dreamer's mind to fill in the blanks in whatever way will be most meaningful to it.

Mechanics

Time spent dreaming a bespoke dream counts as time required for psychosurgery, allowing for psychosurgical manipulation while asleep.

242. Statistical Contests

Statistical contests are debates, games, sports matches, and similar two-person competitions utilizing forking to minimize the influence of chance and provide statistical, rather than boolean, results. For example, two boxers might each make 100 forks of themselves, then have 100 boxing matches. Whoever wins the most matches is the winner overall.

Some viewers dislike statistical contests, preferring the excitement of high stakes on single outcomes, while others dislike them because they must almost always be held in simulspace. They have still become popular, however, being favored by bookies, who have much more data to work with, and providing vastly more material for highlight reels.

On some Autonomist habitats, statistical contest software is used to hold the largest of possible debates, with each ego forking so as to engage in a full discussion with every other ego. This is practical only in smaller habitats, even with post-singularity computers, the number of debates to be simulated can quickly become unreasonable. Even on larger habitats, they are often used to settle disputes among small groups.

241. Orbits

Orbits is an AR game that has been slowly but surely gaining in popularity. Users of Orbits become the center of a small solar system, orbiting their head as if it were a star. They can manipulate events with their hands, sending asteroids and comets to and fro and shaping continents, or allow the simulation to take its own course. Life will arise on suitable planets and evolve quickly, eventually becoming intelligent tool users who will explore their solar system.

If other users are nearby, interstellar travel, first contact situations, diplomacy and war will occur between civilizations. Users sometimes congregate in public places to watch epic space-operas break out.

Orbits is an AR toy run on mesh inserts, so it should not come as a surprise that the simulation is no more detailed than the user requires. If the user is not paying attention, than the simulation is entirely statistical. If a user zooms in to watch an expedition to an alien planet, that expedition is detailed but nothing else. A popular extra for Orbits is an AI that monitors the activity of their planets and looks for patterns suitable for unique short stories, effectively a highlight reel.

238. Get A Life!

Get A Life! immerses players in an XP-like simulspace simulating a regular life anywhere in the system, on pre-Fall Earth, or in one of dozens of historical or fictional scenarios. Like in an XP, Get A Life! provides a full sensory experience, including everything from sight to hunger. Your memories are blocked, so that only the memories of your new life are retained. Your personality, however, remains the same, and you make the choices you would have made, in that life. Once completed, AIs will compile a highlight reel XP for you to keep.

Of course Get A Life! does not actually simulate an entire life, the computing power required would be formidable, and even a 60x real-time simulation speed would take more than a year to complete. Users' sense of time and reality testing are disrupted, and as in dreams, they accept any gaps completely. In fact, the "highlight reel" is usually almost half of what was truly experienced.

Get A Life! has found use in therapy and psychosurgery. The fact that personality remains the same while circumstances change and memories are inaccessible allows a therapist to observe a patient living honestly in a variety of situations. Certain personalities, however, have been known to have trouble letting go of the false life, and undergo great trauma when thrust back into reality.

227. The Olympics

The most popular of the Olympics are the games hosted by an apolitical Extropian committee, who first started their version as a means of gaining viewers for their broadcasting network. These Olympic games are divided into two leagues, one allowing only biomorphs and biomods, and the other also allowing pods, cyberware and nanoware. Victory depends on both athleticism and use of the best augmentations. Many athletes are sponsored by morph and augmentation developers and corporations looking to show off their products. Although some of the most popular events are held for real, in locations throughout the system, the bulk of events are held in special, highly secure simulspaces.

The "classical" Olympics, boasting continuity back to the beginning of the modern Olympics in 1894, are maintained by the Jovian Republic. They maintain a dedication to "pure athleticism", meaning no augmentations, drugs, or enhancements, and only flats are allowed. Like in the traditional and modern Olympics, stations and habitats compete against one another, and some pride is taken in the fact that all of the games are done in the real world, despite the great costs. Outside of the Jovian Republic these events are not widely viewed, as the Extropian games feature dramatically greater feats due to augmentation.

Plot Hook: The Extropian Olympics are often used as ways for high-end enhancement and morph designers to reveal their latest and best. They are mostly held in simulspaces, necessitating atomic-scale scans of all morphs and augmentations for accurate virtual representation. These scans would be worth a great deal to a competitor, and sabotage of that morph's performance would be worth even more.

177. Storytellers

Most interactive media in the post-singularity age is intelligent and realistically responsive, either because of the actions of other players (such as in multi-user simulspace games) or because of sophisticated AI (such as in single-player simulspace games.) This trend goes farther than traditionally interactive entertainment, however, and into very old forms.

Partway between a customized choose your own adventure book and a single-player role-playing game, neverending stories (so-called because they are often designed to continue for as long as the user maintains interest) are low-tech presentation of high-tech content generation that are taking the market by storm. Entirely text-based, the stories can be run purely on mesh-inserts, and don't even requiring an ecto. The stories are usually of a single character, whose actions are determined by the user, the effects of which are determined by a specialized storyteller AI.

Storyteller AIs are typically designed to customize their content based on advice from the user's muse. Degrees of user control, writing style and the themes of the story are all customizable. Storytellers can also be used as educators, weaving lessons into the story according to the wishes of a parent or caretaker, which might encourage anything from problem-solving to adherence to certain ideologies.

Mechanics

Storytellers are AIs [Low]

Notes

Inspired by the primer from Neil Stephenson's The Diamond Age

173. Mutamons

Mutamons is a classic collectible card game in which players build monsters with collectible cards, then watch their monsters fight in AR. The game was developed in pre-Fall Korea, but during the fall the company and all records of copyright were destroyed. The game was rediscovered post-Fall and, released as open-source and substantially remade, became popular as a form of free entertainment. The open-source community greatly expanded the number of cards, and reworked the games AR software, so that every monster created, even if by the same combination of cards, will be unique.

167. Tipsy!

Tipsy! is one of Extropia's most popular game shows, combining psychoactive drugs with obstacle courses and contests of skill. The show takes place in simulspace, to minimize insurance premiums, allow the use of inexpensive open-source narco-algorithms, and unrealistic environments. Contestants might run a freerunning course while on buzz, take part in a combat simulation while on hither and juice, have a dance contest while on MRDR, solve a murder-mystery while on LSD, be quizzed on trivia while on a low dose of schizo, and the perennial favorite, very drunken boxing.

129. Candy/Toys

There are many in the inner system lucky enough to have biological bodies, but not wealthy enough to afford old-fashioned, grown food. They subsist on fabbed food, perfectly healthy with inoffesnive flavors. There are a number of small autonomist projects designed to win inner-system support through better food.

Candy/Toys are an open source project designing edible toys that can be made by almost any maker. The maker prints small mechanical parts out of sugar, which can be eaten or built into simple toys, robots, and buildings. The toys are designed to encourage creativity among children who use them, and educate them in skills related to robotics and mechanics.

117. Direct-to-Memory

Time is money: the high rate of change in the post-singularity means that even sleepless immortals can find themselves falling behind. Can you afford to spend hours catching up when news is being generated faster than you can process it? When could you possibly find the time to read Dostoyevsky? You could convince yourself that a broader, less detailed understanding of world events is just as good, and that whatever your muse says, The Brothers Karamazov is probably boring, or, you could use direct-to-memory.

Direct-to-memory does not boost your brain's clockspeed like a mental speed augmentation, or allow you to carry on multiple tasks like a multitasking augmentation. It simply implants the memory of having seen/read or otherwise inputted the information. Spend an hour a day gaining a in depth understanding of current events, and throw in a little Dostoyevsky on the side. You'll have all the memories of the book, without having to spend time doing the actual reading.

Memories take time to integrate and become fully accessible. Do not begin direct-to-memory without consulting your psychosurgeon. Restrictions may apply, based on your morph, ego or polity.

Mechanics

Direct-to-memory is instituted as a psychosurgery procedure.

The procedure is fast and relatively easy; it does not even necessarily require a psychosurgeon, but can be performed by an AI.

Timeframe: 1 hour
PM: +30
SV: 1

Notes

Based on the concept from Peter Watts' Echopraxia.

116. The Colosseum

In the world of transhuman sports entertainment, whether that sport is chess or gladiatorial combat, there is only one name: the Colosseum.

The Colosseum broadcasts continually, sending feeds of its daily knife-fights, martial arts tournaments, freerunning races, chess matches, football (both traditional and new zero-g variants) and junkyard robot build-offs. The majority of the Colosseum's games occur in simulspace, some because it is cheaper, others because they are impossible in reality. In simulation, fighters need not pull punches and can fight with true ferocity, casualties are instantly revived, and any scenario can be constructed. Easily produced games such as knife-fights or chess matches are more likely to be real, and the Colosseum likes to hold finales in reality with live spectators.

Primarily, the Colosseum is funded by gambling on their daily events. What really draws crowds, however, are their special narrative events. No one event is the same as any other, although they often share broad similarities. The most popular variant is the "battle royale", in which several dozen competitors are dropped into a simulspace landscape of a hundred square kilometers and challenged to be the last one standing. The spectacle of minor politicians, aspiring mercenaries, failing socialites, former ultimates, and amused exhumans hunting and killing one another never fails to draw viewers. Other events include participants trying to survive simulated natural disasters, attempting to assassinate each other in simulated cities, or "king of the hill", in which they vie for control of a small mountain kingdom.

Being primarily simulspace-based, the Colosseum needs no physical location, but for legal reasons its operations are based on Extropia. Extropian contract-law allows for any scenario (for which willing participants can be found) to be carried out, and it is an excellent place from which to broadcast to the whole system.

Notes

The battle royale events are of course based on the movie Battle Royale.