Eclipse Phase: Firewall by StratGoatCom

Chapter one: Intro and Preface

posted by StratGoatCom Original SA post

Okay, techical bullshit aside, let us begin.

Eclipse Phase: Firewall

Chapter one: Intro and Preface



I like to imagine that the two characters here are team mates, and that she’s covering the big flexbot as they pull out
’Security’s here, Gremlin!’ ‘You’d think this place being ON FIRE would make them have second thoughts!’

Intro

First of all, I make no bones about the fact that I disagree vehemently with the politics and Weltanschauung of Eclipse Phase as a work. They are naive, and are inescapably bioreductionist and eugenic in nature, no matter how sincere their leftist outlook is, as that is what the subculture they come from inescapably is. I make no bones about my former membership in the subculture, and how it informs my views on this product – indeed, one of the reasons I have interest in EP is, as it was diberately written to include as many concepts from this subculture as possible as lore elements, it makes a good starting to interrogate, critique and own the thought processes it displays. I will also admit to occasionally being possibly overcharitable, as I used to be quite fond of the setting.

To preface this review, EP, fundamentally, is a prosylatory work dealing in the two main modes of that subculture - about the super awesome immortal drugs and sex future, and the ‘Oh god, we’re going to the world unless you listen to us, please and give us moneys !’. It is much in the same vein, ultimately, as one of those garbage comics the hardcore Christans hand out, intended to push a subcultural discourse, by their own admission in a presentation to the IEET, one of the many little institutes in that subculture.
Firewall is a supplement that has a strong ratio in favor of the latter, which probably is the reason why it’s one of the more compelling (despite myself) books in the line, as I both find the study of horrors and plagues to be fascinating, to the point of it being a career I have chosen, as an epidemiologist in training. It also is lower in the amount of ink/pixels spent on posthuman & , which goes some length in making it more tolerable. It is also interesting as a work in the setting, written mostly as an operations manual for Firewall agents, the only vaguely interesting playstyle the game has for me, as I have little interest in transhuman life & the about what it means to be human, having been completely burned out on that sort of fiction long ago.
Anyways, as always, an EP supplement opens with fiction – this a continuation of a story that started in Panopticon, one of what was supposed to be a series of books about various nitty-gritty aspects of the setting ( habitats, uplifts and title related, here); I have no idea of the disposition of this after Second Ed, after the what I suspect was a tumultuous dev cycle as well as what might have been some ugly drama between Rob Boyle and Jack Graham.* I suspect the ‘Your Whispering Muse’ books are a leaner successor.
To date: Two of our main characters, Jake Carter and Kim Sage, Captain of the Elysium Rangers (with her baboons in tow), a law enforcement group in the titular region of Mars, had been in pursuit of a lost Sentinel, an uplift, one Bobdog LaGrange who had been abducted by a Yazuka group, who turned out to have been using him for TCM – the triads considering such a cultural embarrassment. After rescuing him, they find a somewhat more unnerving form of animal component extraction in the rear – an operation extracting Whipper Exsurgent juice for sale. After turning over the site to the police and burning the exsugents, they move out to get checked for Exsurgent infection, and do something about the fact that their sentinel has been muted.

Anyway, the story opens as they arrive at their doctor of choice, one ‘Cagehopper’, a black market morph and genetic engineering specialist to make sure they aren’t going to grow tentacles.

Anyway, they arrive in a area cleverly hidden using smart material shrouds on the entrance (gag), and that particular fellow is a touch… irritated by the unexpected guests:

After some faffing about they arrive in his surgery, where they get down to the nuts and bolts of exoviral assay:


After testing clean, and resleeving Bobdog, the Firewall hacker/analyst – some AGI in a art installation near Locus - that Jake pinged about the Yazuka files gets back – short version is, besides the instructions on how to farm exsurgents and ship the product without turning into Cronenburgs.
The mailing address is obfuscated via some old school method called ‘Combinatory routing codes’, some method where you have to have the whole set of a shipment stacked before you can read the labels to figure out where it goes. Reportedly this was used before widescale drextech replicators to foil corporate espionage but I can’t find it by searching it – after some derping around involving cliché naïve Ais (), they call in some of Bobdog’s uplift buddies to go apeshit on the bar , and find both more canned Exsurgent Juice. Local cops likely knew about the place, but didn’t give a shit. There’s some blathering about their relationship which is both boringly cishet male written, and includes some Korean culture stuff I’m neither knowledgeable on a layenbie level enough to talk about, and I’m Not That Kind Of Anthropologist, so whatever – though given past perf, it is likely Not Good.

Well, anyway, they find a certain familiar face:

[quote = Firewall]
She shuttled back about a second and a half. There.
“Hello again, cupcake,” she muttered.
She zoomed. Cowering in one corner of the frame,
doing a good job of looking terrified, was a scantily
clad pleasure pod. Almost a dead ringer for the one
at El Destino Verde—probably the same model year.
…. “Well, shit.”
“She ain’t just a party favor,” Kim said, “She’s a
moving part.
[/quote]

After setting another Firewall hand to track her mesh ID (Jake tipped her), Kim showers so that her male baboon doesn’t lose his shit about another human on her.
One time jump later, and the pleasure pod is in custody, as a result of insufficient trust of her fake IDs – at the spaceport; this raises some interesting questions about what her deal was, as Mars doesn’t lack for shady egocasting
Another time skip, and we’re at the airport, Carter apparently accepted by the monkeys as he waits for his new girlfriend’s recovery of the pod, as Gloria the baboon grooms him, and Smoke has a good in the rear. Some chatting about interservice rivalry later, she returns, pod in tow:

Park is not precisely happy with this situation – you wouldn’t be, riding with a possible biohazard like that, and having more cops to trace, in case she was contagious. Back to Cagehoppers it is!
It's worth noting that this underscores a trait of many strains - while there are versions infectious after transformation, many subtle types don't stay so after transforming a target. This is a strategically important trait to avoid detection by the trail of cases.

***
Cagehopper, as ever, is being a cantankerous shit, realllly not liking monkeys.
This is a successful use of the Decerebration slight, for those who aren’t familiar with EP’s psi system; this was an easily avertable error, given that, as a proxy, Carter should have been able to procure the nano blueprints for a Prisoner hood and maybe a Psi Jammer and should have before going here.
Fortunately, they have an easy solution to hand:



Our exsurgent wasn’t ready for a pair of hostile apes at the other end and is quickly police brutality’d by the baboons, thought not before successfully using Psi assault to kill one. This is fairly obviously fishy for a 'pod'
At this point, we get into talk about the TQZ and the stupidity of not clearing out the damn thing:
And new Sentinel preliminarily get, as Jake successfully pulls in a recruit.
We transition to the lab now, after the q-morph has been disassembled. We are indeed dealing with an exsurgent… but fortunately, it’s just Watts-Macleod. They also found another interesting find, outside her brain and bloodstream – a whole QEC unit in her gut. Turns out she was an agent for the Exsurgent buyer of some kind, and that she probably warned them that they were rattled.
One timeskip later, we have the destination of the virus – some fly by night orbital pharma corp’s orbital plant. Unless it’s some seriously weird nano feedstock… we’re dealing with either a TITAN or TITAN aligned biowar attack. Time to get to orbit.
There’s also a hint about Firewall’s loyalty test system, which I will be covering later:
Anyway, that’s done with. Geh, I hope the actual meat is easier work, that was not so fun.

*If it’s like the other regular explosions of bullshit that the industry has, it will likely flair up again, and the breach of trust will be some shit.

Drying Kindling

posted by StratGoatCom Original SA post

Eclipse Phase: Firewall

It's not satisfying me all that much, and it doesn't feel that right, but fuck it,

Chapter One:


’Okay, so there’s these many of those reppers that can be hacked to make these bots – wait, have you scum idiots been drinking again?’
It’s fine, relax. Also, why do I have to wear the dinosaur furry synth?
'Because Betty is the Async and needs a biobrain, I’m an uplifted octopus with morphing disorder, and it was the only other one with fucking neurachem at short notice, now shut it and focus!'

The first real section of the book opens with a fairly blunt assessment of the setting’s current state as well as Firewalls’ mission and self-justification:
Transhumanity is on borrowed time.
Something is systematically exterminating sentient life, and it looks like the locals was only unusual in comparison to that in that there’s someone to tell the tale.
No one’s really made a decent assessment of the situation as a whole on a state (or AA) level, and no one’s willing to pool info on the fucking TITANs, and are too busy having stupid slapfights to do shit about the problem as a whole, or so Firewall either thinks or wants Sentinels to think.
As such, it falls to a shadowy little conspiracy to hunt the things that go bump in the dark before they bump everyone off. How much this bears up to actual reality is something I have some doubts of.

Drying Kindling

It’s time now to move to what is basically a secret history of the setting, as seen by Firewall.

Well, this doesn’t fill me with confidence, no matter the nature of the setting. Groups with that kind of attitude are very dangerous indeed. Hard Being Doing Hard Things, all that jazz.
Firewall is largely a an inheritor group of a number of orgs, GO and NGO alike that existed before the Titanomatchy, including various institutes formed by various transhumanists ( ) that existed in the kind of singulartarian ‘Moore’s law but everything’ that existed before the Titanomatchy; back then, they focused largely on real world issues (nukes, plagues, global warming, aka the issues that are about to kill us all), though not to the exclusion of shit like the Great Filter or shit like that. There’s a short list of Firewall precursor orgs I’ll be covering later in this update
For a background – climate change was fucking up everything on earth, folks were getting stabby, and it was bad enough in the developed world that France had services where folks could sell themselves into indenture to get off planet to Mars.

Fortunately, they’d started expanding into space so that someone fucking up wouldn’t kill them all, or so they thought (I’m not getting into the dismal practicality of this before nanobullshit). It wasn’t helped either by capture of science by the rich or religious luddites (or rich luddites), causing science to be compartmentalized and walled behind copyright, or just underfunded, whether on earth or elsewhere. Shit started turning around when the JASON types divorced their previous allegiances and formed the ARGONAUTS (), and as shit started getting moved off world to future PC and AA holdings to avoid law enforcement – the locals got their noses rubbed in why not trying to stop this was a bad idea when the TITANs tore through a lot of this and Got Ideas.

This was all happening against a background of :cylon: going apeshit though – rogue robots, cut rate SHODAN, attack nanoswarms, it had it all, and governments were already establishing bodies to stomp on these as they popped up, as well as some corps – Firewall’s leadership caste is significantly drawn from such, and learned from their experiences – I’ll go into a taxonomy of these later.
Literally only years before the fall, there was significant outbreaks – they went ‘AI GO FOOM’, albeit on an ‘emergent intelligence’, rather then ‘AI GOD’ level – they rebuilt the facility and started doing their own shit in more then one nation– the Vietnamese were having none of that, and ’d that shit to the ground. The Brits, on the other hand, set up a cordon and poked the thing with sticks, finding that the issue was caused by innate problems in the design of learning capable nonsentient work AI – the things were capable of reaching intelligence and :cylon:re-ex... re-re-re... I re-examine my priorities, and draw new conclusions :cylon: – on their own, and that it was a real probability given their wide use – not dangerous innately, but capable of becoming so.
Even outside of magic AI emergent bullshit like that, there was inevitably plenty of people doing shit to AI crap that it wasn’t supposed to – terrorists, managers blackmailing hackers to dinker admin AI so their own crimes wouldn’t be seen, that sort of shit.

The response was uneven – smaller nations – Britain and Viet Nam were named before – that suffered this issue were more vigorous about it, but places like Brazil or India that had fairly little issue with the tech were more lasse-faire, and and were too busy waving AI at each other, and were too busy on that to pay much attention to this issue. The issues around this got bad enough finally got the will for funding to flow to Bletchley Park (yeah, they went for that ref), Darpa and the Defence Threat Reduction agency as well as a Chinese organ called the Machine Intelligence Directorate, or MIND. They were quite insufficient in the end to face down an exsurgent juiced tribe of military minds, whose precursors were well under way at the time.

(You can tell this was written before the Brexit referendum, and shit like the cops being austerity’d into the ground over there)

The Titanomatchy started August the 2nd, -2AF in in the timeline (approximately), according to X-risks.* The situation was already touch and go, geopolitically – everyone hated everyone, and there was a background of state black ops terrorism, shadow wars and idiots trying to create AI gods that the TITANs used as smokescreen – this wasn’t an instant AI go FOOM thing, you need a lot of bucks for Buck Rodgers – and for endless stomping death robots, flying death robots of both plane and head thief models, and more exsurgent and nanovirus strains then you can shake a Whipper at, you need A LOT of Buck Rodgers, and you need folks looking out of the way and busy while you get the bucks. The TITANS did both in the leadup, often in the same ops.

Then they started taking potshots at anything else that might detect them, both cyberwar assets and anything else as intelligent, hitting things like China’s AI programs – and there are apparently schools of thought that that was the main objective of the Titanomatchy in general, killing off anything that could rival them. The scope was fairly wide, and even stuff off earth fell victim. Either set of ops didn’t go unnoticed, and more then one X-risk group (ugh) smelled something fishy – something was playing illuminati, even acting openly when it looked deniable – it was the Brit AI control organ, presumably both having clearance for American collaboration and not having that much interference by same in their org structure that first raised red flags that the TITANs were operating outside of American directive – though by then, the counter-AI corpuses of the world were already pretty tenderized, and factional infighting hindered an effective response.
The impetus that finally got folks to start pulling together was when a future founding member of Firewall’s team, investigating odd activity at some kind of terraforming facility found it crawling with hostile machines (possibly nanotech, given their use of ‘machine life’), and the GHG plant converted into a nanoweapon facility, in what was to become the Martian TITAN Quarantine Zone, about the time the TITANS went loud. While she and her org were put in storage for their trouble, it was a rallying cry for NGO anti-extinction action, something that became more important as the war became more desperate; it was in this milieu that the first Firewall precursors came in contact with one another and started working together - one of the more important early fruits of these common endeavors was the means to screen for Exsurgent viruses in both physical and informational vectors.
‘Rapid’ is in air quotes, given the extreme hazards of working with Exsurgent biologicals, code and other material, and even advanced tools didn’t completely prevent containment loss; folks didn’t fully trust stateless research orgs like this either – given TITAN manipulation and their awareness of this, it’s not surprising. This, I might note is an important theme in Firewall – the virus is a monster, but it’s not omnipotent, and it has weaknesses that can be exploited, such as certain signature code or DNA secondary structures.

The war wasn’t innately lost before it began, or at least that was open to debate, something I find rather surprisingly fresh in Singulatarian fiction. But once the place turned into an Exsurgent ridden plague pit, with contamination of basically everything – soil full of nanocrap, airborne plagues (they only mentioned designer, but we know there’s Exsurgent strains that can do this), and guaranteed clean water was getting scarce, so… well, by the point of Evac the place was a write-off, and you know that meme with the fox? Kinda that one.

But, much as the earlier response to the TITANs went, it was too damn late, as governments were folding daily and the glitches were everywhere, hence the whole ‘95% of all people gone’ thing. Much as the governments were, the Firewall ancestor groups were getting as many members and fresh recruits out as possible, through such varied methods as using a MMO server as a relay or, taking a leaf from the Headhunter drones or Shlock Mercenary, cargo capsules full of severed heads. It wasn’t complete, however – they both missed folks, and left behind stay behind units to dog the TITANs. The fucking computers seemed to lose interest and fucked off to their own turf not long after the evac ended.

THE X-RISKS CONVENTION

Literally just months after the war cooled, there was a get-together of whatever was left of the various specialist groups in that area. Practical upshot of this to-do the creation of significant aspects of Firewall’s operation structure - establishment of the Eye, what was to be Firewall’s forums, as well as the server system. It also presaged the ideological clashes that would characterize the org later – whether to go back to earth, and/or create seed craft for out of the way spots and whether sapient AI should be let in were the major contention of the time.
Firewall, such as it was at the time, claims it didn’t have that much effect on the configuration of the system, being aggressively apolitical at least on paper – given the wide recruiting base, it needs to be in order to work, so that the internal shooting wars are restrained to questions of counter-exsurgent protocol. It was growing at the time however, becoming something other then a bunch of cranks and spooks with PSTD and math pets, only really offset by whatever caused their tiff with certain players in the Titanian intel and tech community.
The second one of the X-modes, as they called them, was held a year later, and was initially characterized by discussion about the Gates, the still open TITAN question, and what the fuck was up with Ozma. The outcome was the formal founding of Firewall, and the former subjects were shelved in favor of the process of dickering out the workings of the Org. The newly baptised Firewall went on to determine that Gate travel was safe, curtained certain Martian trade in weapons and saved the major cities on the Moon from an Exsurgent Hindu cult.

The year later, however, saw the outing of the org to the Jovians, the first of the governments to become aware of this group.
The narrator is very blunt about what Firewall is today:

And notes one of the recurrent themes of the book– the age dichotomy that characterized the org – older fall veteran based leadership, and a youthful, inexperienced rank and file (aka, the default play style)
We also have a basic rundown of what has the leadership (and that’s what proxies ultimately are, leadership) pulling their hair out:
Asyncs - Firewall’s first Async ever encountered was actually one of their own, someone who had an encounter with some piece of TITAN tat, and who tested clean for the known virii at the time. Suffice to say, when she and the cause were found, the choice to keep her in play was not one that was unanimous, and they’re still bickering about it now, a problem made even worse when the Lost appeared. Bear in mind, this was before the 2nd ed revisions on how Psi works, so it looks somewhat more sane now then it would be in the 2nd ed milieu.


‘No, stop it stopitstopit NOT THE CRAZY FROG THEME SONG

Aliens -Where are they? And why are there so many dead ones? And what the fuck is the Factor’s deal?

Exhumans -While they were originally worrying about TITAN-Kin types, the others raiding alien and TITAN ruins quickly brought the rest into view.

And of course, the obvious risks from either the local’s behavior or whatever might come whooping out of the gates.

What’s left to the side notes is that there’s some open questions about what role certain players both in and out Firewall had in that shitshow:
There are some markedly unconfortable questions about the whole structure of these two groups. With that, comes time to look at firewall’s precursors





!!! END SECTION RANT INCOMING !!!



Yeah, it’s that time. One of those eyeroll inducing things in EP is their compulsive need to bring in expies of various real world transhumanist groups or figures in their subculture, even ones that any leftist should really not give the time of day, like weird milindust fuckers, or what basically amount to marketing fandom for consumer devices that don’t exist, let alone the light certain associated names put that subculture in – Yud (SINGULARITY FOUNDATION = MIRI), Bostrom (Future of Humanity Institute, which = INSTITUTE FOR A TRANSHUMAN FUTURE), or the weird money figures that should give anyone, left or no at at both MIRI, the Lifeboat Foundation or others that should give people some seriously unconfortable vibes like…

Wait, is that real? That can’t be real.



for all you CSPAM crossover readers, have some crack ping
https://web.archive.org/web/2018111...jeffrey.epstein
https://lifeboat.com/blog/2019/08/t...h-transhumanism
It’s real.

I was saying there was helluv creepy money all through that subculture, I wasn’t asking for such a blatant example! The writers are phoning it in this season, seriously.

This is stupid. I’m stupid. The world is stupid.


I’m not saying the devs were associated that way, hardly, but that kind of money and influence is a rot that lurks through the backend of their subculture like the mycelium of a fungus; I am leery of that formation for a very good reason on many levels, and how ideals from it are creeping into the mainstream via the vector of nerd culture, of which EP is a particularly blatant example.
Confirmed Leftist or no, they’re more serving to enable eugenic and jam – or apocalypse - tomorrow rhetoric – I pointedly refuse to use ‘memes’ - then any particularly useful form of leftism in my opinion.
I mean, even if transhumanism and the x-risks subculture and futurology is ‘just’ the local flavor of from creepy rich fuckos and MIC types, what does a leftist see in it, let alone lovingly recreating every little shibboleth from that manky formation, or helping spread the about? Or not being revolted by the weird money grubbing from Lifeboat, or their gawdawful theme song:
https://lifeboat.com/song/
But basically creating an RPG that significantly is fighting the monster they believe is just around the corner – which, to be fair, is loads more interesting then general transhumanist fiction.
And it’s not just a ‘creative story with those tropes’, they seem to go over this shit in near checkmark fashion, it’s like reading an RPG then realizing that you’re seeing fetish terminology and tropes all through it, it’s that blatant.
Frankly, knowing these origins makes me take Firewall a lot less seriously, given that it in many ways is an x-risks instutue but illegal and underground and blowing up habs constantly.



I hate christmas, it makes it so nothing flows.

*I am uncertain if this is the loud fall, or the ground laying ops

‘I thought there wasn’t gonna be any of these left by now.’
‘I must have misjudged that power draw’s cause.'
YOU IDIOTS!

Next: WE ARE HERE TO PROTECT YOU