Cortical Stack

[Steve]

The cortical stack from the Altered Carbon books and TV show is a fascinating (and in many ways horrifying) technology for cyberpunk and transhumanism settings.

 

For those unfamiliar with the term, it is a device that records and stores a human's consciousness, memories, skills and personality. It allows a human to transfer their consciousness to another body, either nearby or far away, and achieve virtual immortality.

 

My question is, how do you build it in Hero System terms?

 

My current thinking is to base its cost on Eidetic Memory, since that was the closest existing ability I could think of and the point cost is manageable even for normal humans.

 

I'm uncertain what advantages and limitations might apply.

[Lord Liaden]

Hmm... what do you envision it doing in-game that would take it out of the realm of a plot device?

[Steve]

Characters can use it to transfer between different bodies and death would be mostly an inconvenience, so long as their cortical stack wasn’t destroyed.

12 minutes ago, Lord Liaden said:

Hmm... what do you envision it doing in-game that would take it out of the realm of a plot device?

 

[GDShore]

There are some very pointed questions to be asked and answered about this before using it. 1. is the transfer v forced or voluntary? (does the transferer have permission of the transferee to take their body or do they simply steal it?) 2. what happens to the body that has been acquired after the transferer decides to leave it? (does the origional user return to the body? is it left a lifeless husk? what happens to the transferee?) How many times can such a transfer be achieved? (how easy is it to do? how expensive? what resources dos it eat up?)

As you can probably ascertain I am not in favour of such a concept. That is most certainly a condition of my age, I am plus 70, but my knowing that does not change my feeling, this is an evil concept, as a plot device that allows a party to face off against and oppose and in game defeat (at least that is desired) this is with out peer. I can only conceive of two circumstances in which this has a valid non-evil function. 1. transfer of the cortical stack into an android body, 2. transfer the cortical stack into the body of a clone of the stack origionator. 

As for how to create this in game terms, yes, eidetic memory, plus a new talent muscle memory (as a martial artist when conducting my art, I do not think of what I will next do, I simply do, if I stop to think of it I lose) [cost of this talent should be 15 character points]  there would also likely be an ego, (strength of will) intelligence and maybe a perception factor at the bare minimum. 

Talent --- Muscle Memory - an ability to train the body to perform a series of tasks without having to think about their performance. The actions become as inate as breathing and simply are.

[Durzan Malakim]

In the books and Netflix series a cortical stack effectively grants you Life Support immortality by way of an obvious inaccessible focus. The books describe rich people having banks of blank clones for them to download into. One punishment in this world is to forcibly remove someone’s digital self from “their” body and adding the now empty body to the public bank of available bodies. The first book has the main character walking around in someone else’s body and having to deal with their nicotine addiction and attraction to another character. This might be a transform attack in Hero terms. Transform from human body to cortical stack digital human freight and vice versa. 

Edited April 9 by Durzan Malakim
Typos

[Steve]

In reading the RPG for Altered Carbon, it seems there is a measure of damage to the mind that resleeving causes. If you only resleeve in cloned bodies of your original one, the existential horror doesn’t seem to cone into play.

 

However, taking different bodies seems to take a toll on sanity. The wealthy, able to acquire bodies as needed or desired, seem to all shift into being sociopaths over time. Shifting from old to young, male to female and back, being different races, dealing with each body’s needs, all of that takes a toll on the mind.

 

I’m thinking this would be a form of EGO-based Transform that could be healed with therapy and medication.

[dmjalund]

i would buy characters with Cortical Stacks as AIs with EGO stat. they could be inserted into bodies and acquire the physical attributes of the bodies.

[Steve]

That's kind of my idea.

 

Anything that could be expressed in a physical form would be built as a normal character, with mental characteristics bought down to zero. Then a package of skills and abilities that could reflect the character's learned things would be layered into it.

 

Sleeves would have different abilities: normal humans, gene-enhanced, bioroids, etc.

 

I'm not expecting a lot of body switching going on among PCs (unless someone gets their sleeve killed), but it would be important to have the ability if they decide to resleeve for a cover ID or something.