Commercial

As a mother of three, I take my duty to raise the next generation of New Indianapolis citizens seriously. When I’m not hovering them to soccer practice or monitoring their brainlink activity, I’m thinking about what I’m putting into their bodies. And no, I don’t mean cybernetics!

That’s why I trust Babel Brooks bottled water, from Eidolon. Recent studies show that it sports up to 70% fewer mutagens and heavy metals than NI municipal tapwater! It’s the same pure, clear water Eidolon uses to cool its server farms, and it’s available now at your local grocer! 

At first I was skeptical; as a loyal citizen of the eternal provisional government, I of course distrust anything from outside of the greater polity. But Eidolon has my back: Babel Brooks comes directly from the White River, the same water source used by Indianapolis prior to the Dark Decade! So you’re not just drinking refreshment, you’re drinking history! Thanks Babel Brook! And thanks, Eidolon!

Interview

Narrator: Eidolon is proud to present a new holoseries, Talks with Horace Babylon. Our interviewers were granted an unmanaged 24 hours of time to speak with the world’s greatest scientific and business mind in his stately LUNA-1 office. Selected clips will be made available every week, or the entire interview series can be enjoyed now through Eidolon Premium. Speak with your local currency office to determine the appropriate subscription price.

Horace: You know, when my father, Isaiah Babylon, when he first founded Eidolon, we were, were in a very dark place, as, as, as a species. The sense of hope and optimism that we had in the 2020s was a distant memory by the 2080s. Water was becoming scarce, major hubs of Western civilization and, and, of course other… other civilization, it was desertifying, faster than many of even the less skeptical climate forecasts. There were, riots, food shortages, disease, it, it was, you know, by all accounts looking back it was a very bleak time in human history. And the, and the normal reaction, to that sort of environment, the normal reaction is despair, right? It was a very common, very prevailing sort of outlook at the time, and you even frequently see it now, you see it in all these discussions about, about water rights, and which American government, which, you know, local polity has the, is the true successor to the United States, and all these things. Mineral rights, fuel, there’s always this intense sense of panic. And, but, what you need, what has been proven time and time again when you look at history, and my father demonstrated this very directly, what you need in these moments is optimism. It is not a time to cut your losses, it’s not a time to lower your standards. No, no, you raise them. You shoot the moon, literally.

And, you know, even, even he had to be reminded of that lesson at times. I remember being, you know being a very young boy, when the initial plans for LUNA-1 were being drawn up, and it was this very utilitarian design, you know. Very… if you’ve ever seen pictures of those old 20th century space shuttles and satellites and space stations, it was very much in line with that. Small, only supporting say, a few dozen people at most, essentially just a building. And I remember, I couldn’t have been more than what, than 12 at the time, but I remember saying to him dad, no, no, you’ve got it all wrong. That’s not what you’ve taught me. Eidolon is about going big, humanity is about going big. And I drew him a picture, you know, a whole little city in a bubble, like a snowglobe, and, bless him, you know, I think I really told him exactly what he needed to hear in that moment because he took those sketches, you know the weren’t bad but they didn’t have the technical specifications, they were just mock-ups, but he took them to his engineers and, by God, he, he made a city. And 80 years later, here we are.

Opening Narration

THE YEAR IS 2222, THE 80TH ANNIVERSARY OF LUNA-1. Originally conceived as the world’s first permanent lunar station, a massive collaborative undertaking by a union of world governments in the 22nd century, the already ambitious project was vastly expanded when EIDOLON, the world’s largest technology corporation, signed on as a major financial backer. EIDOLON’s founder, Isaac Babylon, reimagined the project as not merely a research outpost, but a city, the first proper human settlement created offworld. It was to be located on the dark side of the moon, where it would be a center of research into space travel, becoming a launching point for humans to colonize the stars.

These plans, however, had to be adapted as the project dragged on and budgets ballooned. Other members of the global wealthy elite signed on as investors, and LUNA-1 soon pivoted away from a place of scientific research, becoming instead the single most highly-speculated upon real estate development project in centuries. As concerns shifted toward furnishing its future inhabitants with all the luxuries of space, the planned building site was relocated to the Sea of Tranquility, where the original lunar landing could be viewed for tourism and the Earth hung beautifully overhead at all hours of the day.

LUNA-1 completed construction in 2142. With a capacity of over 150,000 occupants, it is the largest space station ever constructed by multiple orders of magnitude. The main city consists of 64 city blocks arranged in an 8x8 pattern, encased under a geodesic dome composed of massive triangular glass panels supported by a steel frame. The city features luxury apartments, world-class dining, and a central plaza of office high-rises, which stand as the single most expensive properties in human history. Below the surface the city continues for hundreds of feet, a complex labyrinth of life-support systems and maintenance stations that keep the city above functioning. Hydroponic gardens and laboratory farms provide food while water treatment recycles waste into potable water, and miles-long tanks of genetically-engineered algae provide the colony with a self-sustaining oxygen supply.

To put it simply, you live within humanity’s greatest achievement, the crown jewel of mankind. Millions upon millions of words have been written dreaming of standing where you now stand, trillions upon trillions of credits expended to bring hundreds of thousands of tons of infrastructure to build the city that you now call home. And within that city, on the 32nd floor of the Eidolon building, we now join Lavender Spadehart, in the middle of a job interview.

_________________

In a matter of hours, Eidolon will be launching the first public beta of Undrtow, a new mixed-reality social media all-in-one platform. The beta is expected to be rocky, especially to begin with, so employees from all across the company are being re-assigned to QA, which is pulling double-duty as community management because this is an extremely well-run company. Lavender is currently being interviewed by the manager of QA, Adam Sandler (a name which means absolutely nothing to anybody in this setting, the only weird thing is why you’re being weird about it), alongside L.E. Booktok, the team lead of the pod Lavender is potentially being assigned to. This interview is largely a formality, since the company needs all hands on deck, but it is an opportunity for Booktok to potentially weed out any undesirable employees, and for Sandler to ask a question drafted by Horace Babylon himself:

What is the most common currency across all humanity?

A lot of this episode will be given over to just letting the team introduce themselves and settle into their dynamics. Booktok’s team has a single open office between them that looks not all that different from a modern-day Apple store. Lavender will have a new workstation ready to go… but it can’t properly boot into the OS until a 128-character product key is entered, and IT is so busy with the Undrtow launch that they’re unresponsive for requests to deal with the issue. Lavender will be unable to log into Undrtow unless she can activate her computer.

For the hell of it let’s generate an actual product key, I can’t imagine it will matter but who knows!

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Undrtow interfaces with all networked audio-visual devices, including cybernetics (which are relatively standard, at least for the professional tech class that our team is members of), in order to create a 3-dimensional holographic overlay of the real world, allowing users to intuitively see visualizations of various pieces of technology, and even project themselves through the network across various servers and network connections. It is designed to interface directly with the human brain in order to unite all technology into one simple, universal interface; imagine something like the current Internet of Things crossed with an Apple Vision. It’s the Metaverse, finally made real just 200 years past due.

By default, users see other users as avatars that reflect their real-world selves. As moderators of this new platform, however, the VGM team has access to debug tools, which change how their avatars look and grant them certain powers within Undrtow. Nominally, they have full access to the complete suite of debug tools, but those tools are filtered through the way their minds interface with the tech, severely limiting the scope of what exactly they can do with them, manifesting as their individual Eidolon Powers.

Pep talk from Adam Sandler:

I want to tell all of you a story about the late 20th century, the ancient strands of the old Web aught-point-oh. When these digital frontiers were first discovered and settled by the original techno-pilgrims, it immediately created a new class of human being, a kind of cyber-samurai who surfed the information super-byway, nomads with the noble goal of upholding justice and enforcing order on this chaotic new world wherever they went. The people called them web forum moderators, and here today, I am asking all of you to take up their legacy.

Approximately sixty seconds after going live, Undrtow is going to be immediately hacked by a member of GLITCH MOB, who is immediately trying to sabotage Booktok’s team.

CALIGULA MAGNESIUM

EIDOLON: I CAN BE ANYONE

“My Eidolon can corrupt anything it touches, infecting it with my essence and causing it to become my puppet.”

Resonant Card: The Fool

Dissonant Card: 

CRASH 0: Caligula hacks into Adam Sandler’s cybernetics, puppeteering his body and attacking the team; Adam needs to be restrained or neutralized, or Caligula needs to be “exorcized.”

CRASH 1: Caligula begins rapidly jumping from user to user, diving out of one body the moment he’s compromised and diving into another; Caligula needs to be either critically wounded or fully locked out of the network.

CRASH 2: Caligula retreats, using his ability to instead possess a massive drill from a Helium-3 mining site just outside of the city. It immediately begins attempting to breath the city’s dome, which will cause untold casualties; the drill needs to be stopped, and Caligula needs to be fully neutralized.

CRASH 3: Defeat.

______________________________________________________

We ended up not having time to do the final Crash here. That makes sense, since it's an episode 1 and we had lots of groundwork we needed to lay, but since it's a Crash suggested by the EDM players I do feel a little bad that it got scrapped. Can't really be helped though!

It's very funny to me that it did not occur to me to think of the fact that they'd want to try and find the source of the network infection and that I had to come up with something for that on the spot. Pretty obvious way to start trying to deal with this problem!