NPCs

AGIs are often employed to operate maintenance pods on habitats and orbital installations as they can work around the clock and provide a set of intelligent eyes on the exterior, where spimes and surveillance systems are isolated and subject to failure. They are preferred over standard narrow AIs due to their elevated intelligence and adaptability.

Ahmir was one of the millions who took a job as a near-indentured servant in space before the Fall in order to escape crushing poverty on Earth. He has now spent almost two decades working various manual labor and menial jobs around the system.

Alice Chu was one of the founding members of the Eat-Drink-Fuck collective that aided the HAL strikers. Before the Fall, Alice was part of one of the most wanted anarchist cells in China. She spent several years in prison under horrific conditions before being liberated during the conflicts that preceded the Fall.

Timoti is a tall, wiry black man sleeved in a bouncer morph. He wears a black suit with weathered, stark white skull makeup and sports long dreadlocks.

The younger sister of one of the HAL strikers, Amrita found her way to the swarm when her parents did not survive the Fall. A rebellious kid with a knack for computers, she has grown to become a skilled infosec specialist and programmer. Along with a few other hackers in the swarm, she has been involved in various Decepticon (p.

You’re a hardened veteran of the Fall, a former officer in one of the inter- national space fleets that held the TITANs at bay during the evacuation of Earth. The behavior of politicians and corporate interests during the Fall left you disillusioned. Lauded as a hero in the aftermath, you turned your back on them in favor of an obscure retirement rimward.

Some anarchists are not content to just live the outer system libertarian lifestyle. They want to bring the revolution to the inner system, strike at the heart of the capitalist beast, and liberate the oppressed clanking masses. These anarchists work in decentralized cells to sabotage hypercorp operations, government facilities, and military units.

You’re an old-school hacker—the kind that likes to take technological toys, dismantle them, modify them, rebuild them, and then use them in ways the designers never imagined. When you’re not too busy building crazy robotic sculptures for art performance purposes, your skills are in demand because you can fix almost anything, improve it, or even build it from scratch.

You are an expert on transhuman cognition, psychology, and psychosurgery. Before the Fall, you worked with the Accelerating Technologies Advisory Committee (ATAC), a UN group charged with monitoring the development of radical new tech. You were posted off-world, to keep an eye on the hyper- corps and government activities.

Transhumanity’s only advantage in a cold, hard universe is that they are tool users. The more tools they have, the easier they can craft the universe to their liking. Your goal is to make these tools available to everyone. You started by taking corporate proprietary designs and prototypes, reverse-engineering them to make reproducible open-source versions.

You are convinced that something strange is going on in the galaxy. Despite the Factors and signs of dead alien civilizations like the Iktomi, the sheer mathematical odds insist that there should be more life in the galaxy. So where is it? Your goal is to find out, and in pursuit of this you study the relics left behind on various exoplanets.

To translate an alien language is to know something of that alien’s mind. This premise has fascinated you for all of your academic life. As a xenolinguistics consultant with a rep among the argonauts, multiple gatecrashing expeditions have only strengthened the fascination. Almost all of the alien languages so far discovered are dead, so you’ve also trained as a xenoarcheologist.

The arms dealer isn’t your standard low-level street dealer, nor are they working for a particular gang or syndicate. They are an independent operator, often with connections to multiple criminal organizations, not to mention influential government, military, and hypercorp personnel.

Though death is often just a temporary setback, elite assassins still play a role in the upper levels of crime and power. The assassin’s mission may be to send a message, kidnap an ego, or erase a memory before it is backed up.

Those infected with the Watts-McLeod strain of the Exsurgent virus manifest strange abilities and are constantly aware of something fundamentally different in their ego. Fear of the strangeness in their own minds and the potential aggression that others might show them forces asyncs to learn skills to blend in with others and keep their true nature masked.

Some asyncs become obsessed with developing their abilities to the exclusion of all else and can demon- strate terrifying mental power.

Barking Dog is one of the new generation of scum on the flotilla. She joined only three years ago and her ego is only seventeen years old. She was seven when the Fall happened and barely remembers it, some- times getting annoyed at the others around her who dwell on the event and refuse to move on.

Thanks to the mesh, lifelogging, XP, and ubiquitous surveillance, journalism is a crowdsourced industry—everyone is a reporter. Hard work, skill, and attitude can still earn you a name and recog- nition, however.

A well-built African morph in a sharp suit. His sweat smells faintly of strawberries.