Hey guys, I’m looking for some feedback on the plausibility of a mission scenario I’m working on…
The idea, so far, goes like this: A Hacker NPC was on a mission with his team where things went sideways and they were all killed while he was inside the Matrix. He believes his body has been damaged because he’s unable to Jack Out despite not being detained by Black ICE or seeing any other obvious reason. He was able to grab the Data he was after while he was inside and has it stored safely behind an encrypted partition in his Neural Interface.
The Hacker NPC contacts the team via VR for a locate and extraction mission. This mission is obviously on a very short time table, as he can’t confirm where he is or how much the Corp he ran the mission against knows, but he can tell them where he was when things went dark. His connection is intermittent at best, which will be revealed by signs of a weak signal in the form of digital breakup on his avatar or loss of contact/dropped calls.
I’m thinking he’s been injured and is in a sort of comatose state. The Corp that he was running against has him and he’s being prepped for transport to a tech facility so his Neural Interface can be extracted and the body discarded.
The Hacker will offer a ton of cred to complete this one (I’m thinking default will be x3 what the players stake as though the players rolled well on Get The Job and opted for more cred, and x4 if they make the roll and decide to go that way).
One obstacle I’m coming up against is why the megacorp he was running the mission against doesn’t just outright kill him. Maybe he deleted the original source file and the backup he has in his neural interface storage is the only remaining copy of the code, but they’re aware of the failsafe he has that will purge his system if he dies.
Anyhow, I think I’m onto something here, but I wanted to see if you guys had any fun details to add or if you see any gaping plot holes in my premise.
Cool concept!
That is such a great idea! 🙂
You can’t be conscious in the matrix while your body is comatose. Comatose is a certain function of the brain, and it cannot be so severed: sorry, impossible.
Yet, for some reason, your hacker’s done it. Implying, perhaps, you can go full digital: sever the matrix ghost from the meat shell. Of course, anything that’s pure software can be Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V’d. If it can be replicated, expanded upon, the corp can create an instant-AI; instant-army within the Matrix. It would be the digital security version of the perpetual motion machine, and they would own it. (This implies the corp. knows that the hacker is still active in the Matrix, which also suggests they should be making counter-moves against his Matrix-self while trying to get away with his meat.)
What fool would kill the goose that laid the virtual egg?
J Stein I guess maybe comatose isn’t the word I should be using then. If it’s the unconscious part that doesn’t work with the rules, then maybe the Hacker is being wrapped up by some sort of Custom Black ICE, but if that’s the case, does it seem reasonable to think the Hacker would be able to use a cybercom to reach out for help and hire the team to come get them? Does a cybercom allow for VR exploration of the Matrix or is that just a Cyberdeck? I was hoping to have a Get The Job scene inside the Matrix, so I hope so.
Hamish Cameron, do you imagine a cybercom giving the user the ability to access the Matrix via VR? Can you imagine a type of Black ICE that would keep a user incapable of breaking out of VR while still allowing them to access other parts of the Matrix/make outgoing calls?
Given how little we know about the brain, you can get away with just about anything with appropriate tweaking. Maybe the hacker is being kept in a sedated quasi-sleep state. They think that the hacker is unconscious, but he’s not and has retained his connection to the matrix.
I could see a cybercoms unit having that capability. That’s ultimately a question about the established tech of the game thats for you and your table to answer though, Brandon Fincher.
I could totally imagine that, in particular I could imagine a system that wasn’t intended to allow that, but is somewhat experimental or even just has a previously unknown bug or exploit which a skilled hacker found. Hackers are the masters of breaking the rules that Corps attempt to set on the Matrix, after all!
Brandon Fincher Oh, I wasn’t speaking from the perspective of the “official” rules. I just meant that, if you operate from the lens that it’s /against the (in character) rules/ then that makes it unique/valuable, and therefore you have a reason for them to keep the person alive.
I think it totally works as long as you make sure it makes sense to your players.
Their are lots of ways this works..Maybe he has discovered the first Ghost.
Maybe he in his passing moments he awakened a program so complicated it thinks its alive…but when they finally get to him, and free him, and he wakes he deactivates it.
Maybe he knew how dangerous this mission was and designed a primative learning program that mimics his behavior, and the players if they talk to it long enough might see enough flaws to realize its simply responding to keywords.
And yeah why are they keeping him alive.
Maybe he got the data out and encrypted it in his headware
Maybe they found him realize what he did and want to perserve his brain still alive because they want to understand how he mastered the Ghost systems that they had been trying to discover.
Or perhaps hes just good enough they think they can brainwash him back into the system.