I haven't run Eclipse Phase before, but I've been putting some ideas together for a one-shot to give myself and some players an introduction to the game. I'd be interested in feedback and suggestions--in particular, I haven't really fleshed out the concept for the actual ex-threat, yet.
Burnt Offerings
Wake up, little lamb. It is time.
I know that you would prefer the comforting, familiar sound of your muse at a time like this. But I'm afraid I need a that particular real estate for myself. I planted a divine seed in this mortal shell, and now I spring full-formed into your skull. I shall be your guide and your master, instead. I am Abraham taking you by the hand, and leading you up the mountain. And you will be my sacrifice. More blemished than a proper offering should be, but I suppose as a god I leave something to be desired as well. We shall simply have to make do for one another.
There's no time to lie about on this slab, my dove. I have awakened you, given you an all-too-brief chance to escape the rather dreary cycle of rebirth in which imprisons you. I suggest you transcend, for both our sakes. We will have only a few opportunities to fulfill my destiny; and judging from the sad state of that fellow over there, some of my incarnations have already been wasted. But I'm sure you're made of better stuff. Even if some of this ego-data suggests otherwise.
And when a prayer for deliverance comes to your lips, you may call me Minerva.
The PCs wake up in the resleeving facility of a small cylinder habitat, in an unknown location. Each of them is a stranger to the others, and none of them know why they are here. For most, the last thing they recall is a routine ghost-backup procedure. All of them are in unfamiliar morphs, and they quickly discover that months have passed since their last conscious thought.
In each PCs head, in place of their muse, is an entity calling itself Minerva. Minerva has a job for the PCs to do, and is neither patient nor gentle in its commands. The PCs will soon find out that their self-interest aligns with Minerva's mission, at least for now.
The Background
Implied Consent is a cylinder habitat that is home to a small criminal enterprise producing torture and snuff XPs. Even the most depraved fetishes can be fulfilled by mindless pleasure pods or a simulspace show; as with all products, the organic and un-simulated demands the highest price. Implied Consent makes its living by sleeving actual egos in its morphs, giving its customers the knowledge that the suffering is “real.”
Having purchased numerous egos from Nine Lives and other disreputable providers, the crew of Implied Consent normally performs crude psychosurgery on them, ensuring the right mix of compliance and genuine fear response, while eliminating pesky problems like hand-to-hand combat skills or hacking ability. These edited egos are used and re-used, sleeved into whatever morphs the clients demand (or that Implied Consent can get their hands on). Mindwiping and copying from backup prevents the trapped egos from learning about their predicament.
Occasionally a high-paying client will ego-cast to Implied Consentto live out their desires more directly. Otherwise, the crew keeps their station carefully isolated and secure. Unbeknownst to them, however, the latest pervert to come on board is harboring an ex-threat. This is what has drawn Minerva's attention.
Minerva is a Firewall proxy. Some think Minerva's misanthropy is a calculated method for improving agent performance; many just think it's a sociopath. Minerva is actually an infomorph, an AGI that specializes in infiltration and intelligence-gathering. It sees itself as being “above” the petty concerns of transhumans, and frequently employs carefully pruned forks of itself as ready-made agents. Minerva is notorious for running ops within ops, sending sentinel teams on missions whose true objectives are quite different than their stated goals. Minerva believes in reducing risk by minimizing the exposure of agents to data regarding TITAN vectors and info-based ex-threats; a philosophy which has won it few admirers but has provided surprising success against particularly subtle or virulent threats.
The remoteness and paranoia of Implied Consent's crew makes infiltration by a conventional sentinel cell unlikely. Instead, Minerva created a compressed beta-fork of itself that can bootstrap in a morph's muse hardware. Installing itself into several morphs bound for the station, Minerva has smuggled itself on board. When one of the infected morphs is activated, Minerva wakes up, and begins the operation. Though unable to act directly against the habitat's mesh due to the limitations of its hardware, Minerva has managed to exploit a vulnerability in the sleeving software. A tiny error now causes unedited egos to be sleeved into Minerva's morphs, providing her with ad-hoc agents. These unfortunates are the PCs.
The Mission
Minerva's goals are simple: Activate multiple “agents” via the onboard sleeving facility, overpower the crew as needed, and eliminate the ex-threat by the most thorough means necessary. The survival of the egos in Minerva's morphs is not preferred, as they are themselves likely to become vectors in the process. But Minerva's experience with transhumans has taught it that they will believe that success will lead to their escape—for a while, at least. Some of Minerva's incarnations have already failed and died—the first few morphs accomplishing little more than providing access to the sleeving hardware. Each new incarnation of Minerva is nearly as ignorant as the liberated egos occupying the morph, and can provide only the intelligence it had at the beginning of the mission.
