One of the things that I keep thinking about when listening to Eclipse Phase APs is how the infugee population might be used in the study of social sciences.
One of the problems with the study of Economics, Political Science, International Relations and even Game Theory, is that only history is your laboratory. We would not know what would have happened had politician X not adopted Policy Y during this crisis or that war. There is no control group in history.
However, having a population of infugees hanging out in a purgatorial simulspace server, hoping for a chance to be useful enough to merit a case morph, gives the perfect laboratory for a mad social scientist.
Some of the ways I see it playing out are:
1) A simple experiment about a particular economic theory. You set up two identical servers with one difference in how the economy works and watch them play out in accelerated time.
2) You keep restarting, by erasing the memories of the infugees tinkering with your economic system to make it perfect. Maybe an Andrew Ryan from Bioshock type, desperately trying to bring Atlas Shrugged to life.
3) You could re-stage historical conflicts. Maybe force the infugees to keep reliving The Fall, trying to figure out just what kind of weapon could have halted the TITANs, what tactic might have saved more of transhumanity, or if the controversial nuking of the Huairen Air Base slowed the TITANs or was solely an act of Western aggression.
3a) Or maybe the hyper-elite CEO of one of the major military contractors that designed the TITANs copes with his guilt by becoming eerily obsessed with some other war. He has is secret server of infugees that he saved from TITAN upload and treats it like his own private war miniature set. Forcing the infugees to refight the Battle of Yorktown, The Somme, D-Day, or General Scharzkopf's feint during the First Gulf War.
The idea is take your mad scientist archetype and apply it to something we cannot scientifically test, but could if we could create perfectly controlled worlds. It takes the idea that we could learn so much if we could just do horrible things to people and uses infugees to stand in for the knee-jerk hate that most players have toward slavery and the like.
I like this idea. It sound like an especially good way to introduce new player to the setting. Run them through a Fall wargame, one where they can "win," then dump them out of the simulspace into AF 10 to learn the horrifying truth. It could get them used to the mechanics and simpler tech before dropping the heavy transhumanism on them.
Also, because I like to torture players, I'd have it so that the main criticism of the simulspace historical exercises is that their findings aren't applicable to the real world. The criticism that the variables aren't controlled or simulated accurately enough really can't be refuted; the problem in the first place is that reality is largely unquantifiable itself.
However, what if one ego always rose to the top of every simulation? No matter how many times the historical period was repeated, no matter the conditions, this one personality ended up as a major leader. Would sleeving him into a morph and seeing if he could do the same IRL prove the validity of the simulation? What if a scientist, desperate to secure more funding for his indentured experiments, gave his proof of concept back all the memories wiped away from his previous selves, to secure an edge? You'd have Alexander the Great, Hitler, Jesus, and every other major shaper of world history rolled into one, likely insane, ego.
However, what if one ego always rose to the top of every simulation? No matter how many times the historical period was repeated, no matter the conditions, this one personality ended up as a major leader. Would sleeving him into a morph and seeing if he could do the same IRL prove the validity of the simulation? What if a scientist, desperate to secure more funding for his indentured experiments, gave his proof of concept back all the memories wiped away from his previous selves, to secure an edge? You'd have Alexander the Great, Hitler, Jesus, and every other major shaper of world history
I think that introducing this messiah-type leader figure could be a great exploration of some of the more darkly bureaucratic and political aspects of Eclipse Phase. I imagine it as sort of Enders Game meets Dr. Strangelove idea:
After years of running various simulations of historical battles Prof. Evil Von Crazy or whatever is losing the support of his patron (a hypercorp, a neo-university, a cyber-thinktank, the LLA, whomever). He IDs this singular figure whose natural leadership and cunning instincts have turned the tide in many battle-sims. Additionally, since this leader is time accelerated he has been learning military theory by trial-and-error first hand for decades. Often leading, what should have been, the losing side to victory (ala Valley Forge, the Battle of Agincort, the defeat of the Spanish Armada).
So you have this brutal gauntlet that has given rise to an incredible leader, one who, it seems, from testing , could have turned the tide during The Fall. So what do we do with this EP version of Ender Wiggin, certainly not place him in charge of the various defense forces or security programs. Instead he is a tool that the various players will use to their own advantage.
