Cutting Room Floor: Inchoate System

Originally published September 30, 2013

GURPS Handbook of the Planets Inputs: Personal user number 317; System number 94463

The Inchoate system consists of three dim red stars and several belts of broken stone and ice. Called Gravel by the few merchant ships that pass through this system, the inhabitants of Solar Fractal Station are the ones who have given it it's current name. Carved into a large stony asteroid, this space habitat is a strange fusion of research institute, religious center, and mental asylum.

The Fractals, as they cheerfully call themselves, are devoted to the philosophy that there is an essential quantity of sapience (called Anima) which continues to exist despite any division of an intelligence. Their work is focused on finding this hidden spark. In the pursuit of this idea, they willfully break their minds down into separate personalities or pieces. The colony focuses on taboo technologies for fragmenting and duplicating minds such as digital uploading of minds, radical brain surgery, genetic manipulation, and destructive psychotherapy. They support themselves by operating as the premier mental health facility in the sector.

The population, as might be expected, is hard to count. There are roughly 5,000 biosapients with an additional 12,0000 distinct digital minds at any time. Most of the human inhabitants are adapted to a microgravity environment with long slender limbs and grasping toes. Careful genetic tinkering ensures they do not suffer dangerous bone mass decline.

The digital intelligences include from subhuman intelligence Low Sapiance AIs (LAI), fully Sapient AIs (SAI), digital emulations of a biological intelligence (Shadows), and full digital recordings of a human intelligence (Ghosts). As bearers of Anima, they have full citizen rights.

The Fractals seem accepting of others and claim to only operate on willing participants. But their methods are strange. Some ongoing practices include:

• Drug and psychotherapy induced Multiple Personality Disorder.
• Forking: creating a low resolution copy of a digital mind, often allowing it to develop into a unique intelligence before merging with the parent intelligence or being allowed to become it's own self.
• Surgically separating portions of the brain such as dividing the hemispheres.
• Radical biological engineering to create brains with 4 or more lobes.
• Merging of digital minds into gestalts.

The layout of the habitat is confusing, consisting of a endless series of linked rooms and tunnels worming their way from one end of the asteroid to the other.

Game Aspects (using the Fate system):

Solar Fractal Station: We Are All Mad Here, Didn't I Just Meet You, Friendly Zealots

System Details:

Inchoate Alpha: a dim class M6V star surrounded by asteroid fields. Roughly 3.5 billion years old.

Inchoate Beta: a twin star to Inchoate Alpha, also classed M6V, and orbiting at 2 Astronomical Units (AU).

Inchoate Gamma: a distant companion star with a highly elliptical orbit. It ranges from 175 to 525 AUs out. A bit smaller than its compatriots it is a M7V class star.

Solar Fractal Station: position in the innermost asteroid belt this rocky asteroid is roughly 10 miles across. The surface is relatively barren with only a docking port and several observation domes.