Another though to add.

By default you are logged onto this "soul" net and get pick up just as death occurs. You also have the option of logging of so that death can be permanent. Most normal citizens would be logged onto the net at all times. There could even be laws about when you can or can't be logged onto the net. I.e. everyone will be on the net unless on guard duty, etc.

Now, you can hack the "soul" net and all people logged on around a specific tower. This would leave just the body behind.

You could get situations where a thief gets near a well guarded object that he wants to get his hands on. His hacks the net, causes everyone in the area to be pulled onto the net like they had died ensuring that he is either not in the area. Now he has a short time to get the object and run.

To get around the above, banks, etc could hire guards that would be logged off the net that would not be affected by the thief’s hack but if the thief kills them some other way the are gone forever. Of course the guards would get some kind of hazard pay.


You could also have items being guarded by a system that pulls all the people in the area into a holding or detention area (think hard drive here) when activated. This has the effect of clearing out the area of any civilians (potentially the thief if he was logged onto the net) and leaving only guards and unauthorized people behind.

The police could also use this net to capture specific people if they have an idea where they are. Think about it, Target A is in block B so the police just zap block B and sift through the holding area for their guy. Unless he is not on the net, but then the physical police sweep would be coming through that he would have to avoid.

How about Rouge AIs? Suppose a renegade computer program had to escape from the authorities and decided to either give itself a human body or implant itself into a human host until it could get away safely.

Likewise, if an error in the ressurection system turned a person into an AI so they had to travel the net to find help or escape.

Anonymous Poster : If you thought that the GitS movie was a great plot, you should check out the series : Stand Alone Complex.
In one of the plots, a diplomat gets his brain exchanged (the brain is inside a shell, for such a switch to take place easil. But in this case things go real wrong as nobody noticed the switch) with that of a hi-jacker.

In another episode, a "puppet master" takes over someone's brain implants while he is on TV, and hack into the TV feedback so that the face of the person is overlayed with a big smiley face. Effectively, the hijacked person becomes a puppet for the hacker.

Of course, as Wavinator pointed out, it wouldn't be much fun if such hijacking meant that the player could be permanently killed. But on the other hand, it would create opportunities for some amazing plots :P

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Original post by Anonymous Poster How about using things like stun guns to defeat enemies? Then when they're suitably stunned you lock them in a padded room where they can't die. This could effectively take them out of the game unless you wanted to add break outs as a plot device.

they could kill themself. If put in a straight jacket or something then they would eventually die of thirst. Either way it wouldn't take them out of the game for long...
edit: although it would be pretty nasty [smile]

[Edited by - lucky_monkey on March 6, 2005 8:09:42 AM]

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Original post by TechnoGoth Think about it, you have a society where every one is essentailly immortal, where if your injuried or simply unhappy with your physical appearence you can just jump into a new body. So what motives people? When people no longer have to worry about dying then all physical risks becomes meaningless. Many people might even wonder what the point in even mainting a phyiscal body is, when they could remove the hassle by moving into a purely quantum state.

But isn't this absolved if only a fraction of the population can remain in a quantum state for more than a few days, and are not even conscious when it happens? That's the underlying rule with the soul-catcher networks. They can hold you, but you're in a fugue state and have no idea what's going on in the interrim. (Exception being those rare people who can become AIs).

Physical risks aren't meaningless if a new body costs a lot of money, or has dangers. If the dead are brought back to life "not quite the same" or sometimes infected with different wills, I don't think most people will be jumping "kill me quick" bandwagon.

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By the way this would be the perfect place insert a mini-game. I picture something along the idea of rapidly traveling through the quantum connection lines, trying to adjust various alignment paramenters to find the host most similar to your needs and ideal form.

The main value of making resurrection formal and public is in creating a totally different type of game. It keeps the plot out of the way and actually makes for a universe that has some pretty interesting implications (how is policing done? How are wars fought? How is power maintained over the masses? etc., etc.)

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Original post by Anonymous Poster How about using things like stun guns to defeat enemies? Then when they're suitably stunned you lock them in a padded room where they can't die. This could effectively take them out of the game unless you wanted to add break outs as a plot device.

Yes, good idea. Stunners would be the choice for a moral / nice society, or one which had it's network compromised by certain factions (criminal, corporate, etc)

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Original post by Kars Another though to add. By default you are logged onto this "soul" net and get pick up just as death occurs. You also have the option of logging of so that death can be permanent. Most normal citizens would be logged onto the net at all times. There could even be laws about when you can or can't be logged onto the net. I.e. everyone will be on the net unless on guard duty, etc.

Hmmm... it's not as if you're always connected. You're on the moment you die, then you transmit and are resurrected (after whatever delay). If you had to always be connected this would open the door to way too many unbalancing cheats and diminish the value of the physical world greatly.

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The police could also use this net to capture specific people if they have an idea where they are. Think about it, Target A is in block B so the police just zap block B and sift through the holding area for their guy. Unless he is not on the net, but then the physical police sweep would be coming through that he would have to avoid.

Actually, this gives me an ugly idea: A totalitarian society MIGHT kill everybody in a given area (provided they had implants, maybe even not) just to get to one person. A particle beam strike taking out a city block, for instance, would guarantee that everyone had to be downloaded.

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I'm wondering if downloading should be anonymous? The masoleum techs would know that a soul is coming in, but wouldn't necessarily know who's soul.

Normal people would pay for their resurrection using some kind of personal ID.

Spies, criminals and the like would have multiple IDs they could draw on.

When you joined a faction, your implant would be redirected to their private masoleums. This could even allow you to go undercover and infiltrate a faction.

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Original post by lucky_monkey they could kill themself. If put in a straight jacket or something then they would eventually die of thirst. Either way it wouldn't take them out of the game for long... edit: although it would be pretty nasty [smile]

GREAT POINT! [smile]

Because when you die you lose not just your body but your stats (a part of yourself) you might have spies and corporate agents carrying escape hatches in the form of poison in something like a tooth implant. It would be even more important to sneak up on such a person and stun them in this case.

There actually is a way to die without supplies, btw, so dying of hunger is possible.

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Original post by Anonymous Poster This reminds me AN AWFUL LOT of "Ghost In The Shell"'s plot... An Artificial Intelligence which comes to believe itself alive and decides it needs a body to meet the requirements of life... Can you come up with a non heard of story?

???? O_o Pardon if I gave that impression, but that's not this game's story.

This story actually is still cooking, but it's mainly about fighting evil. The question it's most interested in asking is what happens to your humanity when you need to start acting like your enemy to defeat your enemy.

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Original post by Wavinator Quote: Original post by visage I have only briefed over the conversation, but one of the immediate things I thought of was "over population." How would a society free of death manage this one? Trust me. This universe DOES NOT have that problem. [smile] (Backstory has things that devour civilizations).

Hmm. Is this devouring civilizations thing something that occurs across various star systems? Dont those systems have soul-catchers in place or are they destroyed in the devouring process? I still think that will all of the no-death in the surviving majority of the universe, there would be over-population. The loss of a star system due to mysterious causes (which I will assume they are at the moment due to your lack of further explanation) would cause people to avoid travelling to that system, combined with the no-death concept at their original system, the over-population would continue (possibly even increase as devoured systems are considered "bad places" to live, thus reducing the amount of "good places" to live, while only removing a single static amount of the population, as opposed to the constant increasing amount from the no-death worlds making da babies).

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Original post by Wavinator But isn't this absolved if only a fraction of the population can remain in a quantum state for more than a few days, and are not even conscious when it happens? That's the underlying rule with the soul-catcher networks. They can hold you, but you're in a fugue state and have no idea what's going on in the interrim. (Exception being those rare people who can become AIs).

You say a body is expensive but at the same time you say they also freely available so which is it? :)
If the time a person can spend in quantum state is limited then this problem is lessened but then that brings up a host of other issues? How long can someone spend in quantum state? And what happens if they stay in to long? Since the stay is limited doesn't that also mean that effectiveness of the soul catcher system is limited to the number of bodies available at the time? If I have sould catcher net on my ship and an accident kills more of my npcs then I have bodies then are the others lost forever? Do I have to choose who will live and who will die?

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The main value of making resurrection formal and public is in creating a totally different type of game. It keeps the plot out of the way and actually makes for a universe that has some pretty interesting implications (how is policing done? How are wars fought? How is power maintained over the masses? etc., etc.)

There is still another big issue you have to decided on and that is the concept of Identity. How do you tell one person from another when their physical forms can change? You sister dies and for whatever reason gets resurrect in a mans body. She still your sister but how do you tell? Biometric identification would still probably be used with corpses being logged but high security location would want some more reliable system of identifaction. After all you could always kill an employee and steal their body to access a facility. (hmm, that sound like an intersting way to over come security.) By the way can you return to your body? In other words just tempory body switches?

Perhaps some kind of quantum imprint code where your id is tagged based on your quantum pattern. Assume you could fake someone else pattern and intercept a soul catcher transmission I like the whole notion of passing yourself as a member of another faction being resurected.