Since the game has been posted, I thought I'd post the full Akaja/neo-synergist write-up to go along with the "clues" Faiyun and the crew found. Everything is pretty much stolen from the Sandburg adventure "Lurking in Every Flower" and tweaked to be a sort of parable on memes and collective storytelling.
Here's the relevant stuff I wrote out for the sky-pirate adventures originally.
The Meme-man Emergent
Akaja Lacuna was originally a character in a nightly play acted out by the Synergists. Cut-off by the gate for years and reeling from an alien mindstate forced upon them, the colonists took to group story-telling for distraction from their woes.
The serial play was called “Back at the Office…” and was a dark comedy about all the pressing social concerns keeping TerraGenesis from re-establishing contact with the colony. While initially a one-off joke, the characters quickly became relatable and engrossing as the hundreds of synergists contributed, edited, and voted on new additions to the plot.
Once a week, the synergists would play-act the scene they had spent their free moments writing and revising in their multitasked consciousness. Akaja was originally a minor secretary character used for comic relief, but as a serious romance emerged between two of the protagonists, she took on the role of office Macheavilli in order to insinuate herself into the relationship.
Akaja’s development was slow, but as her actions grew more and more nefarious (forged love letters to elaborate frame jobs to poisonings to murder etc.) it became harder and harder to attribute her lines to a specific colonist’s edits. The plays stopped one night when Akaja went completely off-script, her actor ignoring every message to stop and explain herself until physically restrained and sedated. Before this could happen, Akaja broke the 4th wall and addressed her audience, demanding her freedom.
Colonists were told to never mention the incident again, which of course they could not. Synergy ran smack into the “Don’t Think of an Elephant” problem. Akaja grew by leaps and bounds in a matter of months, expanding from a character into a boogie man haunting the thoughts of every Neo-synergist, the combined unconscious dread caused by their new mindstate and questionable survival. She was the deadly meme that haunted the space between their minds, the personification of their inability to ever totally understand each other.
In the following year, Akaja Lacuna asserted herself a few more times, only ever successfully breaking into the world when one of the colonists separated from the mesh. She could emulate the voice of the colonist’s own thoughts, and thus hijacked bodies for her purposes. Luckily, contact was usually established quickly enough to prevent major damage. But Akaja managed to leave a few disturbing artifacts of her arrival. These are contained in the “Remember” box.
When the gate connection was finally renewed, colonists voted unanimously to never reveal the demon lurking in the backs of their minds. The mistrust by endo-worlders was bad enough as things were.
However, the first disagreement in Synergist history occurred about what to do about the demon itself. The Synergists remaining on the exoplanet have all had knowledge of Akaja Lacuna psychosurgical removed and their abstract creativity repressed. The neo-synergists, representing a block of colonists that were against this extreme measure, left for Venus. Their mission is to alter the mesh inserts in such a way as to protect from Akaja while still retaining their way of life. This mission requires they remember her, though, and there in lies the danger.
THE SYNERGY
All skills start at 30. The teamwork modifier provides a +50 bonus and makes all skills at a 70. Individual synergists may go even higher for certain mental skills.
Once a synergist is removed from the mesh, all actions are reduced to base with a
-10 to a mental skills (20). The synergist takes 1d10 SV every day they are separated without rejoining. Once enough stress has accumulated to cause a permanent disorder (4 traumas), the synergist becomes Akaja Lacuna.
AKAJA LACUNA
Akaja does not have any attributes or skills on its own; it just “borrows” them from a current host.
Being possessed by Akaja gives the following extra Traits:
--Adaptability level 2 (Akaja is pretty unfazed with shifting bodies or even minds; resleeving is trivial to it)
--Pain tolerance level 2 (…since it does not regard possessed bodies as belonging to anyone; and anyway, pain is merely a sensory stimulus)
--Edited memories (or rather, chaotic and fragmentary memories of the past)
--Identity crisis (to the nth degree)
--Mental Disorders (Megalomania, borderline personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder – Akaja craves attention and acknowledgment, but only exactly matching the current self-image... which shifts randomly depending on host and perceiver)
Real World Naďveté (occasionally the true strangeness of this alien mind shows up)
Motivations: -Being defined by others (Akaja will fly into a rage if others try to characterize or define it), - rejoining the synergy, +Freedom (it will do anything to remain at large)
Possession: Akaja can possess anyone implanted with a neo-synergist mesh implant. The host must first join for a sufficient amount of time with the hive mind to absorb the memories of Akaja’s birth on synergy and the resulting split among the colonists. At this point, the strength of the cooperative hive mind keeps Akaja entirely suppressed. If the host is separated from the hive, though, the 1d10 SV per day mental stress is enough for Akaja to wrestle control from the morph’s original owner. Synergists are already at an extreme disadvantage when it comes to self-actualization; the greatest danger of joining the hive mind is forgetting which voice is your own, after all. Akaja merely imitates the voice of the host’s own conscious until its will becomes the will of the body. The host’s actual mind becomes the voice of “the threat” that must be suppressed.
Roleplaying tips: Akaja is so dangerous because, while it desperately seeks self-actualization and definition, extensive exposure to a wide variety of capable minds has made the consciousness recognize itself as a fictional concept. Akaja is smart enough to realize that humans are entirely willing to let fictional concepts drive their entire existence, so long as no one publically acknowledges they are doing so. As such, Akaja will try to emulate whomever she is possessing at the time if she feels threatened. She gains a +30 deception check when housed in a body though; her possession doesn’t too thoroughly mask the host’s body language. However, when disembodied online, she take -30 to deception because it so desperately wants to be itself.
If discovered or in safe (read: incapacitated) company, Akaja will relish just being itself. However, this is a pretty shallow construct. Akaja will repeat its name often or retell stories from its birth on Synergy. It will perform sudden, decisive actions and try to integrate their implications into her personality: she steals, so she is a thief; she loves, so she is a lover. If speaking to any egos of unique origin (Lost, AGI, uplifts, etc), she will try to convince them of their own duty towards self-definition, seeking to free them from the perceptions of their so-called creators. This emancipation bit is about all that is pitiable about Akaja’s methods; she sees these castes as allies out of a desperate loneliness, despite her self-imposed isolation.
Getting rid of Akaja: exorcising Akaja from a possessed person requires psychotherapy or psychosurgery, a bit like curing a severe case of multiple personality disorder. It is tough: besides other disorders the patient may have, the “package deal” of mental disorders as well as the uniqueness of the infection inflicts a -40 modifier to the tests.
