Pfan 1 - Cyberstalkers on St-Denis St.

This story is involves a GMPC called Ephiphany Santini. She is a low powered character that I hope will bootstrap herself out of obscurity. She is also an excuse to think more about the Transhuman Space universe in an easier to grok character. The game follows a sandbox model, with some procedural tables that I designed for character generation for Traveller, and using Tarot cards to generate plot twists.

Pfan Santini, aspiring memeticist

timestamp: Feb 11 2100, Montreal, Terra

Patron availability: 16 vs 9: Nope.

Pfan looked up to the government building. An amber v-tag overlay reminded her of her E.U. credentials, and the resulting restrictions to enter the locale. It was cold and dank, and she was underdressed. Her parents, up there in Rigaud, sent an impersonal note informing her that they couldn't cover her expenses for the coming months.

Breaking into the memetic business turned out to be harder than finding unpaid internships last year. She was temporarily banned from the U.S. for meddling into memes that she should have stayed clear of. 

Looking for work: 12 vs IQ-13

[IQ12, +3 large city, -2 comfortable]

Job: v-tag manager (nightlife), Current-Affair(social)-12, comfortable ($11.2/Mo)
Count as a non-hazardous duty (CR9)

After browsing a bit and a few interviews, she gets a v-tag manager position for a small advertising company. She will be managing the nightlife portfolio for secondary streets in downtown Montreal, a job for which she'll mostly be relying on her weblife skills to bootstrap herself into.

Job check for February 2100

Defers to Internet as contact: 13 vs Current-Affairs(social)-15

Spends ~100h into immersing herself into nightlife towards Current-Affairs(social)

timestamp: Feb 12-28 2100, Montreal, Terra

Pfan's employers sell a v-tag package subscription for people looking to maximize their entertainment schedule. Her job consists in keeping abreast of what is going on in an area containing two universities: she captures the meme stream and build flows that clients' informorph can use to create custom experience. For example, a group of hungry students decide to go out for a slice of pizza, one of them is a client. Its infomorph queries for five seats in nearby pizza places, excludes one restaurant based on reviews coming from a trusted individual in the same social network. Once identified,  it v-tags the path to the right location as a "yellow brick road". The menu is displayed using augmented reality (AR) on a floating bubbles streamed directly on the optic center. The pizza should be ready to eat when they get there. Meanwhile, the infomorph feeds the system with details of their conversations and finds out that this group of students are big sports fans. Since Pfan has pre-labeled likeable team members of the local hockey team, the infomorph scans the annotation and social network feed to find out that one of the athlete is having a beer in a nearby pub. The infomorph re-routes the group to the pub and place a similar order to the its kitchen. With appearance of serendipity, the group of students run into a local celebrity, orders a few extra rounds and never get around to study later on. Anything short is a boring, third-world kind of night.

Memetic Profiling

Internet: 17 vs Area Knowledge-15 (critical failure: enemy notified)

8 vs Expert Skills(memetics)-11

7 vs Psychology(applied)-10

New random Enemy

Sebastian: Power: 50%; CR 12; hunter;

Availability: 15 vs 12. No.

Next Expert Skill(memetics) check at -2.

Pfan starts to map the social environment in her territory. She is generally looking for trends in memes that she can exploit. She sinks $800 into Meme Engine, and installs it on a brand new tablet ($100). Her early attempts to insert herself into the social landscapes are awkward, and she commits too much personal information. Unbeknownst to her, she is tagged by a deranged stalker. As her job calls for a lot of time spent in the "wild", Sebastian gets lots of chance to follow her around. He firmly believes that she is a mind-controller, and start devising plans to rid the world of her kind in a quiet and decisive manner.
Unfortunately, Pfan has misunderstood the main players on the nightlife scene and is now tracking the wrong crowd. She is lead on by better memeticists to follow like a sheep.

timestamp: Mar-Apr 2100, Montreal, Terra

Job check for March 2100

Contact (Internet 8 vs 15), 13 vs Area Knowledge-15

Enemy Check: 14 vs 12. Not this month.

Duty check: 9 vs 9: fully busy.

Pfan is saving to buy her own copy of ParadigmMaker 2.1. She wants to take on freelance memetics. She is doing a satisfactory job for NightTag.com, but isn't feeling a lot of love from management.

Search for an underworld Patron

14 vs streetwise-13

city size +3; scarcity -2; 9 vs IQ-12 +1;

Pfan is aware that drug dealers are using a similar tagging system than she manages: encrypted keys are passed through innocuous channels, unlocking a set of v-tags walking the client to a payment and collection point. Pfan figured that she would be able to do both at the same time as the subject matter overlaps. Unfortunately, her cautious attempt at making contact bears no fruits. Meanwhile, her infomorph has acquired enough experience to conduct Current-Affairs(social) mining on its own, and she has becomed much more familiar with the free-city.

Pfan gains [1] in Current-Affairs(social), [1] in Area-Knowledge(Montreal). Vittorio gets [1] in Current-Affairs(social)

With pay from April, she purchase ParadigmMaker 2.1 and a subscription to Cutting edge. Off goes $5.2K

timestamp: May 4 2100, Montreal, Terra

Plot twist

Drew a triple of tarot card: Death, via a rival, on a friend.

Enemy availability: 6 vs 9. In effect.

It is about 1:30AM on the 4th when Pfan get a notification that a colleagues has been shot. The colleague is Yvon Frechette: a nice guy, but a bit overexpressive. Pfan wants to be there, but she get a memo from the office ordering all managers to stay put where they are. Pfan makes her way to a Bell TelOps Kiosk and asks Vittorio to place a booking on a cybershell. The TelOps Kiosk is a hole in the wall with a number of secure cells. She enters and locks one cell with a long key derived from her digital signature. She takes a swig of bottled water, then engages the teleop software. 

She wakes on the West side in a party cyberdoll: a 2m tall creature looking like Jar-Jar Bink. The doll is a bit sluggish and appears to be double-jointed. One knee is reporting in need of maintenance. The doll smells like cheap booze, feels sticky. Pfan leaves the West-side TelOps Kiosk and follows the AR yellow brick road leading her on to the site of the shooting. 

There, the crowd has dispersed already and only one police cybershell is left on site. It appears to be overseeing the forensic nanoscan and cleaning. The shell is a beobachter collection unit, humanoid but not anthopomorphic, on strict order to dispense mundanities and reassuring messages.  

Influence: 8 vs Fast talk-12 VS 4 vs Will-12

The beobachter shell issues a demand for her to refrain from interfering in its operation. Seeing that she can't get the police shell to reveal any details, she scans the room for willing people to talk a bit more. 

12 vs Psychology(applied)-12

Reaction: 12 +1 (psychology), +2 (attractive party shell) = 15 (Good reaction)

She engages with a group made of a mixture of other party shell teleoperating from a range of places from Northern Ontario, Australia and Brazil. The brazilian partyer is speaking through a glitchy translate filter. She finds out that someone had pulled out a Gauss needler, yelled "Death to the mind-controllers!" and shot Yvon a number of time in the back. It wasn't clear whether the killer was a bioroid or a warm body, but the shooting coincided with a scripted pulse on social media which overwhelmed the AR display with confetti for everyone logged on the party broadcast. 

Pfan asks around a bit more, but to no avail. She walks with a heavy step (and a squeak from the shell's knee) back to the TelOps Kiosk to return the party shell. She know about the meme "memeticist are mind-controlling conspirators", but never thought that she'd become a target in this line of work. She'll need to find out how deep it runs into the social fabric.

Back in the closet, she feels like crying but won't. Her nerves are frayed, she orders an escort back to her home. Between the cybershell and the escort, she essentially turns no profit today. Her walk home is only 4 blocks away, but the streets are dark without AR. The escort interface loads on her AR display: three drones are flying overhead, and any zone of concerns are v-tagged ahead of her. If anyone was to harass her, she could instruct the drones to fire blinding laser to their eyes by simply pointing her finger. Something that she think is pretty cool if she wasn't actually afraid for her life.

State at the end of Episode 1:

• Conspiracy-motivated killer on the loose.