304. Crash

The obsession of many racers, gamers, griefers and pyromaniacs, Crash is an unreal world designed for impossible stunts, sports and spectacles.

The physics of Crash are essentially realistic, but adjusted. Explosions are easily caused and overly dramatic, everything is brighter, colors are over-saturated, everything is capable of going faster and jumping farther than would actually be possible, and there are many other tweaks.

Crash has official systems to support races, duels, and battles, as well as many vehicle and/or weapon based sports, such as truck-rugby, sniper-chess, and mortar-tag. A majority of the activity, however,  has always been unstructured. Players are fond of exploring, arranging elaborate pranks, creating and then destroying grand pieces of architecture, and playing their own improvised games.

301. Exile

Transhumanity may seem spoiled for choice when it comes to criminal justice, with innovations such as psychosurgery, minders, and freemen morphs, but ethics and politics complicates most situations.

Psychosurgery can alter many of the traits that lead to criminal behavior, and while many justice systems allow for voluntary treatment as a form of rehabilitation, involuntary editing is a powerful taboo. Post-singularity technology makes secure physical imprisonment difficult, and on most habitats it is seen as a waste of resources. Egos could be paused and stored as a form of imprisonment, but this seems like dodging the issue by palming it off to an unknown future.

The most used forms of punishment are restitution and exile. Restitution is not always enough, and societies that send their criminals to other habitats don't make many friends, and so some of the groups fond of that option have created Exile.

Exile is a simulspace server in an isolated main-belt orbit. Those whose societies no longer want them, and would otherwise have only debt, imprisonment, or editing to choose from, can volunteer to be uploaded there in lieu of other punishments. Each prisoner is given a portion of Exile's processing cycles and loaded into a simulspace under their sole control, sufficient for satisfying realism. Prisoners can link their simulations to socialize, try create their perfect life, or request therapy and/or psychosurgery for rehabilitation and eventual release.

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.

276. Contingency Simulations

Transhumanity's understanding of humanity is virtually complete. From cells to societies, every level of detail has been modeled. No single person can contain all of this knowledge at once, but the information is there for reference. Of course, transhumanity itself, by its nature, is in rapid flux, and a complete self-understanding is forever just over the horizon.

Most of this knowledge is directly useful, forming the foundations of transhuman tech from medichines to psychosurgery. One of the less practical but more popular areas of this research is in alternate-histories and counterfactuals, simulating Earth at points in history, making changes, and seeing what differs.

Of course, simulating the entire Earth with inhabitants even remotely approaching sentience is beyond the greatest of transhumanity's supercomputers. Adding to the problem, contingency simulations are typically run at accelerations of x10 or more. The simulations are therefore fundamentally statistical, populations existing only as elements of its economic and sociological models.

Contingency simulations receive grants for everything from sociological research, historical research, as well as refinement of models and simulations, but most of their funding is donated by individuals, who use the simulations for entertainment, inspiration, or just something interesting to learn about. Some of the more interesting alternative histories have also been licensed for entertainment, such as the Shattered Continents series of wargames based around worst-case scenarios, or High Impact Capitalism! competitive economic game based on a world without Karl Marx.

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.

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.

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.

216. Lamarckia

Lamarckia is the largest simulspace in the system that that has no regular users, and in fact earns no profit. The pet-project of hyperelite retiree Jean Maes, the simulspace simulates a large ecosystem that functions according to Lamarckian inheritance. Primarily this is accomplished through a reworked and supercharged epigenetic system, assisted by manual interventions when necessary. Jean has been criticized by the scientific community for his frequent interventions, preventing more interesting species from exaggerating their traits until they no longer function, but compromising the status of the simulspace as a scientifically interesting Lamarckian simulation.

Although existing primarily as an expensive hobby, Lamarckia has spun off some interesting bioware and scientific discoveries, such as organ plasticity.

186. Evolution Box

Evolution Box is a Titanian microcorp specializing in refining other company's designs through evolutionary algorithms. Provided with a simulspace version of a design, their specialists will simulate semi-random situations testing the design, then use a genetic algorithm to combine successes and add mutations to each generation.

Plot Hook: A minor inner system corp has sent a design to Evolution Box for refinement. One of their competitors asks a player to steal a copy of the design as a c-rep favor.

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.

147. The Dream

The Dream is a massively multiplayer simulspace accessible only through dreaming. Anyone with a cyberbrain can have a client installed that detects when the user has fallen asleep and begun to dream. When anyone with the appropriate connection begins to dream, their dreams are guided by the software, giving them lucid dreams of the simulspace environment.

Dreamers have a great deal of power within the dream, able to create, destroy and control, with few constraints. In order to keep The Dream a consistent multiplayer experience for all dreamers, they cannot effect each other directly, and if they attempt to do two incompatible things, the software will try to combine the two actions, often with unexpected consequences.

Some dreamers are more lucid than others, and even lucid dreamers have unconscious influences. Observing in the local dream can be a good way to gauge local feeling, and a lot about a community can be determined by tracking changes in their dream.

Plot Hook: Firewall needs information from someone, but cannot simply abduct and interrogate them. They are, however, a dream user. The players must subscribe to the dream, track down the appropriate dreamer and interpret their dreams, looking for clues.

137. Toppled Towers

Toppled Towers is a simulspace game which gives players freedom to do as they please in a post apocalyptic environment. Players typically do their best to survive as long as possible, battling the elements and each other.

The simulspace was designed and created as part of a social science grant; the primary purpose of the simulspace is to serve as the basis for social experiments. Most players join together for survival, providing data on various types of social arrangements. Occasionally designers of new consumer technologies or augments have arranged for functionally similar devices to be introduced into the game to see how they are used, and the simulation is realistic enough that some inventions first created in the game have been turned into real devices.

Originally, the environment was explicitly a post-apocalyptic Earth, but after the Fall all landmarks were removed and the game now takes place on an Earth-like planet. There has been a dramatic dip in popularity, but a core of loyal players has remained, most now focused on rebuilding.

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.

96. Evolved Interrogation

Transhuman society produces, processes, and stores, immeasurable amounts of information every day. Information is power, and the roles of hackers and infosec specialists are secured by the wealth of information stored digitally. Some of the most useful information, however, still comes from transhuman egos, if they are willing to share. Even psychosurgical interrogation has its limits, and so Ozma has developed the evolved interrogation program.

The evolved interrogation techniques developed by Ozma require large amounts of computing power, but given enough time, success is inevitable. First, the ego to be interrogated is forked. Each fork is subjected to a series of random variations on sets of stimuli that were successful in previous interrogations. Those sets of stimuli that provoke the most useful responses in the ego are used as the seeds for the next generation. The effect is to generate, through genetic algorithm, programs of torture, illusion, pleasure and other, stranger, stimulations that will best prize information from an ego.

Plot Hook: The Ozma program has been running for so long, against so many egos that its methods are beginning to resemble primitive basilisk hacks. To fully pursue this line of research will require computing resources difficult even for Ozma to acquire. Firewall has become concerned with the sudden demand for computing power in the inner system, and tasks the players to investigate.

90. The Agōgē

"A normal soldier would not sacrifice a limb like Aquinas just had; seven decades of the knowledge that limbs were irreplaceable, and that the loss of one could lead to death, worked against it. This wasn't a problem with Special Forces soldiers, who never could not have a limb grown back, and who knew their body's tolerance for damage was so much higher than a normal soldier could appreciate."

Old Man's War

Direct Action has the war, the Ultimates have the agōgē.

Named for the educational system of ancient Sparta, the agōgē is a simulspace project in which the Ultimates raise their children. Children are generated by algorithms remixing and improving the genes of proven Ultimates. They are raised by a single, unrelated parent.

The simulspace environment consists of a small, frozen moon in an elliptical orbit around a Uranus-like gas giant. The elliptical orbit of the moon brings it periodically within the powerful radiation belts of the giant, and so life is divided into two seasons, each approximately eight months long.  In the "hot" season, heavy radiation forbids surface life, and family pairs spend all their time in bunkers. This is when formal, historical, scientific and ideological education takes place. In the "cold" season, the parent and child pairs mine ore and ice, trying to scavenge enough feedstock to last through the hot season. Raiding takes place regularly. Killing is neither encouraged nor discouraged; it is expected that half or less of the children will survive the agōgē.

The tough conditions breed tough Ultimates. They have hands-on experience with all the realities of out system life: they learn to wear and repair vaccsuits, mine, program fabbers, fight, steal and above all else, survive. They are accustomed to cold, poorly-mixed air, and injury. They have little material expectations. Their parents teach them to strive for the virtues of the Ultimate's philosophy.

The children are born into their remade biomorphs. Baselines tend not to fully trust the greater tolerances of a remade morph:  their expectations are based on the body they were born in. The children do not need to become accustomed to the capabilities and tolerances of their heavily engineered bodies. To them drinking salt water and sleeping two hours a day are only natural.

Experimentation has concluded that it is actually best if the children are at least partially aware of the simulated nature of their lives. Throughout their education they are told that they are being tested, and that if they succeed they will be brought to the others of their kind. Once a child has been deemed sufficient to graduate into reality (usually between 14 and 18 years of age), they undergo a coming-of-age ceremony, testing their willpower by requiring them to drown themselves. If they succeed, they awaken in Xiphas, the Ultimate's home station, that which they have been striving for. Because of the small poulation of the simulation, the Ultimates can run it at 10x real speed, and thus can raise a generation every 1.6 - 1.8 years.

Plot Hooks: One child has proven more capable than the Ultimate's could have hoped for. She has deduced the precise nature of the simulspace and been testing its limitations. This has caused an internal rift among the Ultimates. Some believe she is dangerous and troublesome, and will inevitably fight Ultimate authority. Others believe she is the agōgē's greatest success; what better strength than to break from a trap? Firewall would be extremely happy if she were extracted and recruited.

76. Earth Reconstruction Therapy

Earth reconstruction therapy seeks to treat traumatized fall survivors with a recreation of pre-fall earth life, designed to slowly ease patients into the reality of the post-fall system. Infugees often struggle with culture shock, social isolation, and the simple practical difficulties of life in space, on top of any mental trauma. Psychosurgeons and therapists have found that comfortable, familiar environments aid recovery of many patients.

Many of the patients, however, refuse any attempts to remove them from the simulation. They are embracing their simulated but familiar lives, resisting all attempts to acclimate them to the real world. It is possible they will have to be forcibly ejected from the simulation, but this would seem like a second Fall, compounding on their existing trauma. Several hypercorps have offered to purchased the simulspace, intending to allow the patients to maintain their denial, maintaining the system as an Earth-like test-bed for new products.

Plot Hook: An Argonaut archivist has uncovered records suggesting that a hypercorp committed crimes against humanity. The acts were witnessed by one of the reconstruction patients. Can the players extract the witness before the hypercorp buys the simulation?

60. The War

Ripley: How many drops for you is this, lieutenant?
Gorman: Thirty-eight. Simulated.
Vasquez: How many combat drops?
Gorman: Uh, two. Including this one.

Aliens

When a Direct Action employee refers to "the war", they aren't referring to any actual conflict. The war is one of the company's most expensive and long-running projects, and can also be given credit for Direct Action dominance in the Planetary Consortium. The war is one of the systems largest and most realistic simulspaces, running on a supercomputer better protected than their highest executives. Running constantly at 3x real speed, multiple wars, have been run, with most lasting between one and two years real time (three to six in the simulation).

The war provides dividends for Direct Action in numerous ways. They use the war as training for their personnel, forging veterans in peacetime. The war is used as a testing ground both for prototypes of equipment and new ideas about tactics and doctrine. It is a rich ground of experience for the growth of military AIs, neural-networks and any systems using genetic-algorithms. Careful planning allows the war to be predictive, giving analysts a testing ground for likely future scenarios. Sometimes outsiders are invited to participate, giving Direct Action insight into the methods of units from across the system.

The current war is a counter-insurgency action taking place on a fictional planet named Ragnarok. The surface is mixture of iron-rich regolith and thick sheets of ice, with useful similarities to both Mars and Titan, as well as icy worlds like Ceres and Europa. There are three large, domed cities as well as numerous smaller installations and homesteads. At present, there is a rough stalemate. Direct Action projects force from its orbiting carrier, with green zones in all three cities. The insurgent forces, played by special forces teams and specialized AIs, strike from and vanish into the empty rural landscapes.

The military forces of the war are Direct Action personnel and AIs, but there are civilians as well. Direct Action indentures huge numbers of infugees to live as civilians in the simulation. The indenture contracts are great on paper, as the acceleration of the simulation makes for short contracts in real time. Many infugees, however, having already been traumatized by the Fall, are pushed to and past their limits by life in a war-zone.

Plot Hook: An up-and-coming weapon systems firm has a prototype that will be deployed in the war for testing, and they want to ensure good results. They intend to sneak the PCs into the war using their security clearance, where the PCs can support the prototypes as best they can.

Plot Hook: Direct Action, as the primary military force of the Planetary Consortium, is always of special interest to the Autonomist Alliance. An influential Autonomist has recently learned of the infugees who inhabit the war, and finds it ethically objectionable, but also perceives an opportunity. The players are to infiltrate the war, and supplement its civilians with anarchist saboteurs, provocateurs and sleeper agents. If all goes well, insurrection will sweep over the war, disrupting Direct Action research and development, and provide a powerful symbol for the Autonomists.

28. Crusoe

Currently the most popular member of a venerable genre of interactive entertainment, Crusoe is an open source simulspace game challenging players to survive and build in simulated environments.

A new player will find themselves on an earth-like planet with a multi-tool as well as engineering and gardening hives. Players looking for a specific challenge can adjust their beginning states with custom morphs, equipment and environments. Common challenges include surviving as a splicer in an old-earth wilderness with no equipment, starting as a synth with only wrist-mounted tools and building your way up to a fusion reactor, and team games challenging players to defend against waves of hostile beings.

Because of the accuracy of the simulation, most things invented in Crusoe can also be built in real life. Crusoe has therefore attracted the attentions of some Argonaut researchers, who have begun a project collecting useful designs and turning them into real gear. Similarly Crusoe is of interest to social scientists, who have run experiments exploring how technology effects social structures and how populations respond to controlled stresses. Gatecrashers have used Crusoe simulations to experiment with approaches for exploration of various alien environments and to test new equipment, and there was a brief fad of Titanian microcorps holding team-building exercises in the game.

9. Eden

The Extropian legal system allows for a virtually unrestricted art scene. Extropia contains 10 million of the most diverse minds in the solar system; whatever you make, odds are someone will be interested.

Eden is the latest piece by infamous neo-primate simulspace designer Rough-Hands. The simulspace environment simulates a placid garden with no natural dangers; it is itself uninteresting. The provocative aspect of the sim is that two "virtuals" (egos born into a simulspace, unaware of the outside world) inhabit the garden. Named Adam and Eve, they live in the equivalent of exalt morphs, with one important modification: heightened religiosity. They have developed an intuitive, pantheistic religion, in which everything is given meaning or purpose.

Rough-Hands presented the simulation as a simple dilemma. The virtuals can be expelled from the garden, but they are unprepared for the real world and would interpret this as a terrible fall from grace, or they can be left, happy but essentially ignorant and living in a lie.

The inclusion of real egos has made this controversial in a time and place where genuine controversy is rare. Rough-Hands has defended himself saying that although they were never asked to participate, their continued happiness (and they are very happy) constitutes passive consent.

3. All-Thing

Virtually every conceivable type of government or non-government can be found in the Autonomist Alliance. Some succeed, many fail, but the grand parade of social theories, experiments and designs always continues. The information and communication technologies of transhumanity make many new forms possible, and many old forms can be improved.

The citizens of the small Bernal sphere named Leer Fluss are governed by the All-Thing.

The All-Thing is a reincarnation of the things of Germanic tradition, a meeting of every citizen to decide all matters of law and policy. It is overseen by Lawspeaker, a purpose built AI with no interests except to ensure smooth procedure and cite relevant precedence. It is always in session.

In order for the All-Thing to always be in session, every citizen provides an alpha-fork of themselves as a representative. The regular forking and merging makes cyberbrains a requirement; forking with biological brains simply takes too long. Citizens merge with their representatives and then re-fork after every decision, ensuring that the forks represent their citizens accurately, and that the citizens have full memory of deliberations and decisions and are kept up-to-date.

As Leer Fluss has slowly grown, the All-Thing has become more and more cumbersome. The simulspace meeting-hall can simply be expanded, but regular procedure has become slow. Some have proposed the creation of smaller Things, each with jurisdiction over its members, with the All-Thing reserved for habitat-wide issues only. Anarchist-leaning citizens, however, object to the creation of a federal hierarchy, and threaten to leave if this is implemented. Some, with gleeful irony, have noted in return that an exodus of anarchists would in fact alleviate the population problems necessitating the new structure. It seems conflict is in Leer Fluss' future.