185. Profession: Security-Ecologist

One of the strategies of the Planetary Consortium/Autonomist Alliance cold war that is common to both sides is autonomous sabotage. Gremlins are the weapons of choice, designed to disrupt the enemies actions, slow their economy, and waste their resources. An arms race has developed, each side attempting to develop countermeasures to the other's gremlins while seeking to design new gremlins that will overcome their enemies new countermeasures. Many gremlins are capable of reproducing, and many others are designed by automatic evolutionary algorithms. Their countermeasures are themselves often self-reproductive and designed by automatic evolutionary algorithms. On some autonomist stations they are set up to deliberately mimic predator-prey relationships, with bots preying on gremlins and allowed to reproduce themselves according to their success.

This cycle is repeated with almost any widespread and actively used security system. The gremlin ecologies develop relatively slowly, being bound by physical replication, but software is relatively unhindered; it is common wisdom that you should re-install your mesh security software regularly before it develops into something incomprehensible. The results of the arms race and automated evolution is often best modeled as an ecological system, and neither side has full knowledge of what has developed.

Specialized in the complex relationships that form between automated, self-improving security systems and their aggressors, security-ecologists are trained first and foremost to be able to identify the roles of unique security systems and their roles within the ecological system that has developed, and then to exploit that knowledge in the pursuit of either shoring up security or defeating it.

Mechanics

Profession: Security-Ecologist can be taken as a knowledge skill.

183. Stoking the Firebrands

The Planetary Consortium's approach to their cold war with the Autonomist Alliance is to treat them like pests. They may never be eliminated entirely, but they can be managed, suppressed, and prevented from doing real damage. To the minds of the PC, the greatest weakness of the autonomists is that the disorder of their sociopolitical systems is only a step away from a breakdown into proper discord, balkanization, and dysfunction.

To this end, PC memeticists have maintained a powerful memetic campaign. Rather than attempt to convince autonomists of the PC's views, moderate them, and draw them towards compromise, the campaign seeks to radicalize all possible ideologies, driving wedges into autonomist communities. These memes are designed to support almost all ideological positions, encouraging stronger and stronger views, or else to make finer and finer distinctions within ideological groups, causing fractures among those who were previously united.

Plot Hook: PC memeticists have been carefully raising paranoia among autonomists regarding crypto-facist conspiracies that sound suspiciously like Firewall. Firewall needs a team to perform a raid/hack mission to determine if the memeticists have information on Firewall, and whether this might be an Ozma ploy to attack Firewall.

182. Sleepers

Transhumanity is in the middle of a cold war. The battle of Locus demonstrated the great difficulties of conquest against post-singularity peoples, but the inner and outer systems have certainly not given up on their rivalry. The Planetary Consortium is continually seeking to destabilize the Autonomist Alliance, while the autonomists in turn seek to undermine the PC and hypercorp.

One of the most active weapons in the autonomist arsenal are the sleepers. The inner-system economies rely heavily on infugees, much more than anyone else. Infugee databases should be well protected, and infugees should be subject to careful screenings, but of course no security is perfect. It has become common practice for anarchist firebrands to hack into infugee databases and copy a fork of themselves into it. They then do their best to be a good candidate for an indenture contract. At whichever job they end up, they will attempt to sabotage industry, incite rebellion among their fellow indentures, assassinate key figures, and in general take advantage of any opportunity to undermine the PC.

Sleepers are often given a programmed identity.

Plot Hook: Anti-Autonomist factions within Firewall see attempts to destabilize the PC as potential x-threats due to the high likelihood of war, economic collapse and balkanization in the event of success. The players are tasked with preventing the assassination of a particularly important hyperelite executive, but the executive cannot know of the player's intervention.

Plot Hook: An anarchist sleeper saboteur has plans to disable key elements of a Direct Action munitions fabrication site, and calls on an @-rep favor from one of the players for help.