CIA

The CIA is a mystery cult. Not explicitly, of course, but its organization of successive inner circles possessing increasingly more important secrets mimics the form perfectly. There are even "initiation rites", designed to test candidates for their ability to keep secrets, commonly including gaslighting, imprisonment, interrogations, and even false executions.

The uninitiated maintain mundane intelligence analysis duties. This is the public face of the agency, doing the sorts of work an intelligence agency is expected to do. Their primary concern is suppressing dissidents at home while supporting them abroad, especially in the USSR.

Members of the agency-within-the-agency are self-selected. Especially talented analysts, who, noticing the ways in which official narratives are insufficient, go hunting for their own explanations, and, crucially, find them. These people must be either initiated or killed. This inner circle is concerned with the secret war against the deep ones, know of the Elder Things held by the USSR, and have suspicions about the existence of the Mi-go. They have transcripts of Soviet/Elder Thing interviews, shoggoth samples, and numerous uncategorized anomalies.

The agency goes one level deeper. Inside the inner circle are the true masters, a group of transplants, seeking a Yithian archive, from which they can learn the true and secret history of the world.

300. Peace is Everyone's Responsibility

Peace is Everyone's Responsibility is one of the Planetary Consortium's largest charities, known for the large amounts of funding it receives from the hyperelite. It focuses on social influence and control, with the goal of maintaining the status quo under the guise of peace-keeping.

The bulk of the organizations efforts are focused on memetic engineering. The value of stability and order are emphasized, as are the risks of change and social progress. Problems among the autonomists are stressed, and problems among the Consortium downplayed.

One of their most successful program has been their introduction of sousveillance. Of course the hyperelite are not actually in favor of sousveillance, the program encourages citizens to inform on each other. This has been source of friction with the Planetary Consortium, who do not like busybodies "helping" local law enforcement.

Plot Hook: Occasionally the charity takes direct action. The PCs are hired to infiltrate an anarchist sympathy group and wipe their files.

286. The Society for the Prevention of Childhood

The Society for the Prevention of Childhood is exactly what it says it is. A loose network of people who have come to the conclusion that reproduction via children (as opposed to forking, AGIs, or other transhuman options) is unethical, immoral, impractical, or otherwise inadvisable. Although they have a cause in common, their reasoning is not always the same.

The Lost generation sits in the backs of everyone's minds, and some learn a more extreme lesson from that failure than others. One view is that reproduction is irresponsible and unethical during the infugee crisis. There are still tens of millions without bodies, so choosing to have physical children is taking biomass and exowomb time from them, and the only other options is to follow in the footsteps of the Lost. However much one might want a child, the needs of the existing outweigh the needs of the potential.

Another view is that the combination of children with transhuman tech is too dangerous. Some, especially older, established individuals, worry about the precociousness problem. Children engineered, raised, educated and well accustomed to post-singularity technology will likely surpass their parents, forming a generational singularity.

For a few members, childhood is itself bad. To them, childhood is inevitably a traumatizing experience and most people will spend decades getting past it. This view is usually held by people who have themselves had traumatic childhoods, often related to the Fall.

Neoprimitive members argue that humans are not adapted to the future, and children doubly so. Similar to the view that childhood is traumatic, and opposite from the view that our children will surpass and supplant us, some neoprimitives believe that childbirth is the cruel thrusting of a being into a hopelessly alien world. Neoprimitives are rare, and this view is rare among them, so only a few are members.

270. X-Prize

The X-Prize Foundation has been behind some of transhumanity's most important technological developments, from the early days of commercial spacecraft to current post-singularity solutions to post-Fall problems. They can claim partial responsibility for, among other things, medichines, the uplifting of octopuses, and smart racoons.

Currently the foundation maintains 5 active contests. Most prominent is a 25 million credit reward for a biomorph that is economically competitive with cases, to address the infugee crisis. Most controversial is a 10 million credit reward for an AI with "beyond AGI capabilities" that considers itself a member of the transhuman family and maintains "indefinite psychological stability". Other prizes are for a morph capable of functioning on both the surface of Venus and in the vacuum of space, a nanoswarm capable of switching between multiple functions, and an edible plant that can live on the surface of Mars.

The foundation currently operates out of Titan. Hypercorps will occasionally contribute to prizes or form teams for the publicity, but the greatest amount of participation is from autonomists.

Plot Hook: Outlines for the safe AI prize are uncomfortably close to describing the Prometheans, and some of the teams attempting to claim the prize are becoming uncomfortably ambitious. Firewall will required detailed information on each team, what exactly they are doing, and who put up the money for that prize.

235. Kunthea Intelligence Fund

The Kunthea Intelligence Fund is a charitable organization created for the purpose of increasing the intelligence of transhumanity. They were founded by the Kunthea hyperelite dynasty, probably as a political move to consolidate their reputation in the third world, but none of them survived the Fall. Their greatest accomplishment in recent memory was acquiring the patents for Drive and Neem and releasing them into public domain. More often, they subsidize the development and purchase of nootropics, mental augmentations, psychosurgeries and educational software.

Plot Hook: Investigation into numerous archives has revealed that the fund has been active in large numbers of dangerous projects, up to and including the creation of seed AIs. Furthermore, their new post-Fall director has gaps in his record consistent with participation in the development of the TITANs. Firewall is therefore planning simultaneous raids, in both realspace and over the mesh, to determine what they might be up to now. They need a team to participate in the initial raids and to follow up on whatever is discovered.

130. The Immortals

The Immortals are one of the most successful military outfits in the system, comprised of only a few dozen individuals. They are currently under a ten-year contract with Direct Action.

What makes the Immortals the elite of the elite is their incredible breadth and depth of experience. Their members were career soldiers on earth, with decades of experience at the time of the Fall. After the Fall, they joined together to create the Immortals, with a conviction that in order to ensure transhumanity's survival, the system needed transhuman soldiers who would not shy away from exploring their full potential. Unlike many other transhuman, posthuman or exhuman groups seeking to become the best possible warriors, they do not focus on augmentation or equipment: their primary focus is skill and experience. Each member has tens of thousands of hours of mission time. They make heavy use of forking to compensate for their small numbers, and use simulations for training.

Team Praetorian has 9 members, and specializes in body-guarding and police actions. They favor olympians or guard pods, with non-lethal weapons, handguns, and riot shields. Currently they are working as bodyguards for Direct Action executives.

Team Janissary has 21 members and specializes in conventional warfare. They favor reaper morphs outfitted with heavy weapons: machine guns, seeker rifles and plasma rifles. They are currently participating in the war, as well as patrolling the Titan Quarantine Zone.

Team Varangian has 7 members and specializes in raids and special operations. They favor ghost pods with concealable weapons, and also commonly make use of sprayers and buzzers. Currently they are engaged in anti-Barsoomian operation on Mars, as well as excursions into the Titan Quarantine Zone

49. Consensus Societies of Extropia

On Extropia there is no central authority. The organization with the strongest claim, Extropy Now, exists to provide a haven for libertarians and anarcho-capitalists, and therefore avoids exercising any of its power. Large and complex markets have arisen, providing legal systems, security, arbitration and adjudication as paid services. Even with the advice of muses, expert systems and AIs, however, the potential interactions between these services can be inconvenient and unpredictable.

Like attracts like for both comfort and convenience. The interactions of competing legal systems, security contractors and private magistrates can become a headache for all involved. It is easiest to interact with those who share your expectations, and with whom you share a common adjudicator. Extropians are steadily conglomerating into sub-societies of shared legal systems, security arrangements and acceptance of arbitration: consensus societies.

The largest and most prominent examples of consensus societies are the Caliphate and the Commons. The Caliphate is ostensibly Extropian and autonomist friendly and the Caliph has deliberately downplayed formal authority: they use the open source legal system OpenSharia, and maintain no military or police system, being instead safeguarded by volunteer militia.

The Commons is populated primarily by refugees from commonwealth nations. They have created a legal system based primarily on the traditions of English common law, adjudicated by a hierarchy of elected judges, and enforced by volunteer police.

Plot Hook: Extropy Now, owners of Extropia, have become concerned with consensus societies, fearing that they will grow into states. They are looking for discrete social engineers, memeticists and hackers to non-violently undermine and collapse the Caliphate and the Commons.

32. Interstellar Club

"The Factors chose the long, slow ways between stars. They are well aware of the Pandora gate networks, but they shun them and advise us to do the same. They are an older, more widely experienced interstellar civilization, and they know something we don't."
Alexandria Ko
President-elect of the Interstellar Club

The Interstellar Club is formed from the remnants of several pre-Fall space agencies and interstellar projects. The Fall had two important effects for the future of interstellar travel: it destroyed existing interstellar projects, and it revealed the existence of the Pandora gates. Both of these were fatal blows: much work and many important minds were lost, and gatecrashing provided instant FTL with no extra work needed on transhumanities part.

To some, however, the Fall also provided important lessons. Transhumanity survived for only one reason: we had spread off Earth into the solar system. Distribution ensured that no single disaster could kill everyone. Spreading beyond the solar system and into the galaxy will render transhumanity even more resistant to extinction.

The Pandora gates seem to provide what is easily the best option for interstellar travel; instantaneous and pre-made for our convenience. They are called "Pandora" gates for a reason, however, and there are many that mistrust them, fearing that something will follow a team back through them, that our use of them will be found objectionable by something more powerful than the Factors, or that one day they will simply all fail.

The Interstellar Club has its primary base in orbit around Neptune, with an automated factory and testing lab in the Kuiper belt. The club is officially politically neutral, but many of its members also identify as Argonauts and Autonomists. The club's approach to interstellar travel has focused around the creation not of ships, but of morphs, using self-repair and replication to act as a Von-Neumann machine. For that reason, their prototypes are called Neumanns.

Plot Hook: Communication with the club's plant in the Kuiper belt was recently lost, and an on-site inspection has revealed that a prototype is missing. It seems that someone, or a fork of someone, or perhaps something, sleeved into the Neumann and launched, apparently headed for Proxima Centauri. The players are asked to determine who it might have been what their motives were, and whether this could be a problem for transhumanity's future.

26. Society of the Words of Gods

In the wake of the Fall, transhumanity is scattered, isolated and traumatized. With so many searching for stability and community, lost in the post-singularity world, cults are springing up like weeds.

The Society of the Words of Gods is one of the most isolated and closed-off communities in the outer system, for one reason. The Society speaks only one language, a unique language, believed to train the thoughts of those who speak it. The cult uses memory editing, skill suppression, and deep learning psychosurgury to teach the faithful the Words and to remove their ability to understand any others. The faithful thus lose their ability to communicate with the rest of transhumanity, and the Society becomes their whole world.

The Society was founded by Alexander Haywood and his seven disciples. Haywood claimed to have been taught the Words by a powerful alien being he contacted via a radio observatory at which he worked. The being promised that the Words would transform those who spoke and thought them, preparing humans to live among gods. Haywood recorded these sessions, but no one other than himself and his disciples have ever heard them.

The Society has no formal organization, but in practice can be divided into four groups. The lowest on the totem pole are the potentials, those who are proving themselves to the Society and who retain their old languages. The next (and largest) group are the faithful, who have undergone psychosurgury to learn the Words and have all other languages removed. The highest public figures are Haywood's seven original disciples, who have the most natural grasp of the Words and administer the psychosurgery raising potentials to faithful. At the apex is Haywood himself, although he has not been seen for two years. Whether or not he remains alive, and if so, the nature of his life, remains a mystery to all but the disciples.

The Society lives in a tight tin-can complex maintaining an isolated orbit between Saturn and Jupiter. They seem entirely self-sufficient, and do not respond to hails, even in an emergency. If their habitat has a name, they have not shared it with outsiders.

Plot Hook: Firewall has been working a sleeper agent into the inner circle of the cult, and have recently received a fragment of the signal Haywood intercepted. Based on that fragment, they now believe the signal is of genuine alien origin. The cult's mythology strongly suggests exsurgent, TITAN or alien manipulation, so Firewall needs the PCs to retrieve the full signal by any means necessary.