Project Cassandra

He's not sure what's worse: the signal degradation caused by being held this close to a super-conducting electromagnet or the way the coils keep knocking parts of his face off as they rush past at 314 mph. At the moment, the former is making it difficult to do anything about the latter. Damn unreliable uplink.

The Venezuelan jungle flows beneath him like a raging river. In 2.67 minutes, they'll reach both the end of the orbital slingshot's track and escape velocity. Skizmatic, along with the satellite below him and the harvester drone above him, will be hurled into high earth orbit. Why the hell did he even take this job?

Finally, Skizmatic manages to get one of his legs beneath the harvester's body. Current floods into his servos; his leg unfurls with the force of a pile driver and punches straight through the robot's midsection. He braces himself against the satellite and cranks his leg sideways, grinding his adversary into the slingshot's skeletal framework as it blurs past. Its body breaks apart in chunks until there's nothing left but a twisted, metal ring around Skizmatic's ankle.

90 seconds to escape velocity. Time to get back to work.

Heat Guy J is one of my favorite anime series, but it never fully explored its premise: cops who predict crime. (Minority Report did better, but it featured very few scenes where robots beat the tar out of each other, so it's not really germane to the present discussion.) It's a great set-up for an RPG, if you vague up the predictions enough that your players still have some investigation to do. Thus, this month's Skidoo returns to the hyperpunk future of Datarchy for prescient police work and savage, robot violence.

Brazil - The 3rd Superpower

In the 22nd century, Brazil dominates the Western hemisphere. During the Blackout Wars, the jungle nation turned its vast, biomedical resources into a sprawling empire that now encompasses all of South America and most of the Pacific. Its two megalopoli teem with over one billion human inhabitants, not to mention countless robotic drones under the control of sentient AI.

The South Coast Mega-Zone (a.k.a Brazilia) is the country's cultural and political center. It includes the municipalities that were once Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Mile-high skyscrapers leave the canopy behind as they reach up to the tropical sun, while the jungle floor has become a shadowy underworld whose ecosystems are a bizarre fusion of biology and technology. The old, coastal cities are little more than flooded shantytowns, though Christ the Redeemer still stands watch over the bay.

The North Coast Mega-Zone (colloquially referred to as "The Amazone") follows the Amazon river and trickles down the eastern coastline. It is home to the biotech and agro-chem firms that drive the world's third largest economy. Brazil relies heavily on automation to mine, reap, and cultivate the rain forest's wealth, so this is also where most of its cyber citizens register themselves and their robotic bodies.

Drug cartels, like all forms of organized crime, are a thing of the past. Eco-terrorism, however, is alive and well. Fanatics of every stripe have taken root in the rain forest, somehow managing to evade or overwhelm the most advanced law-enforcement technologies humanity has ever devised. Throw in the fact that your usual laundry list of cykos, ciphers, and celebs all have supercharged, robotic back-up... and you've got yourself one of the few law enforcement nightmares left on Earth.

The Broken Chain - It would be impossible for human beings to perform one tenth of the agricultural tasks that occur in Brazil on any given day, but try telling that to the displaced farmers and former wage slaves of the Broken Chain. These ultranationalists want to see the Amazone returned to its natural state and its native inhabitants. Being luddites, they don't pursue this goal via the normal means (grassroots political action). No, guerilla warfare is more their style. They use traditional Brazilian martial arts and the many biological weapons of the rain forest (i.e. poison) to disrupt commercial operations and assassinate venture capitalists.

Warewolves - These atavistic cyborgs prowl the other end of the technology spectrum. They don't actually have metal in their meat, but they do live inside their powered armor. Everything from sensor suites to weaponry has been crafted to mimic their pack-hunting namesakes: chemical sniffers, glowing eyes, claws, they're even covered in fur-like ghillie suits. Various packs have claimed vast stretches of remote jungle as their territory and they conduct commando-style raids and harassment campaigns against any who trespass.

The System - Few cyber are programmed in such a way that they can knowingly harm human beings, but the key word there is "knowingly." The System has become quite adept at manipulating scheduling and sensor data to trick cyber into assisting crimes by disrupting traffic, creating diversions, and even supplying cover fire. The robotic bodyguards of politicians and celebrities are particularly easy pickin's.

Culture Jammers - Environmentalism is still a cause celebre in most of the world, which makes Brazil a popular target for cykos and celebs looking to ride the media wave one more day. Their stunts are notoriously hard to predict, but 8-Ball can sometimes pick up the subtle signals of converging fan attention and accelerating cipher noise. When and Where are the easy parts; it's Who, What, and How that give Project Cassandra's operatives so much trouble.

Behind the 8-Ball

Special Lieutenant Pierre-Simon Geisser believes he can see the future. Well, that's not entirely true. Rather, he believes that the AI algorithm he designed can predict future instances of criminal activity with an actionable degree of accuracy. Good enough for jazz, anyway. Unfortunately, juries aren't quite ready to see things his way. They get hung up on the whole free will vs. determinism thing. Apparently, if you arrest someone well before they even try to commit a crime, most people are reluctant to convict them of said crime. Go figure.

Forewarned is still forearmed and Lieutenant Geisser has influential friends. The Bureau of Public Safety has given him permission to assemble a task force to investigate crimes predicted by 8-Ball and, once sufficient evidence of criminal intent has been collected, arrest the would-be perpetrators. The job calls for a mix of firepower, stealth, and old fashioned police work. (As discussed in Datarchy, no one should waste Traits on their technical skills. In the future, everyone's a hacker. However, you might consider making one or more of your heros a sentient AI with various remote-controlled drones. It's an entertaining gimmick and sets you up for tons of high-impact, property-damaging, savage-as-hell robot violence!)

Here's how it works...

8-Ball (the eighth version of Geisser's algorithm) fishes data from the widest possible net of public data, correlates trends with a vast record of historical crime statistics, and calculates the highest probabilities of something happening at a particular place and time. Sometimes, a suspect or two might be implicated, or a particular type of crime might be suspected, but none of this counts as actual evidence. It's hearsay and conjecture, at best.

The team is dispatched to conduct surveillance and gather evidence. At some point, something criminal goes down. The team has to let it go as far as possible, far enough to convince a jury that a crime would inevitably have occurred if the team had not interfered. Of course, just standing by while innocent people are injured or killed would be extraordinarily bad press, so there are limits, but Lieutenant Geisser wants convictions above all else. It's a treacherous balancing act and there's not net to catch the team if they fall.

The public is aware of Project Cassandra and its critics are legion. Some consider it irresponsible to let crimes happen; so what if you can't convict, at least you served and protected! Others believe it's impossible for the police to observe without interfering; they say the team is causing the crimes they claim to prevent. As for the rest of the Bureau, it's as riven with internal politicking as any other organization; don't count on getting cooperation from other cops!

Pick Me Ups

Alejandro De Santana is going to kill somebody. Could be his ex-wife, with whom he's engaged in an acrimonious divorce. Could be his boss at the biochem refinery; he's filed numerous censorship complaints with watchdog groups. Could be members of the environmental group who have ostracized him in recent months. The investigation is complicated by the fact that a pack of warewolves are sniffing around the refinery. (They're part of the same flash mob that's pushing Alejandro to assassinate his boss.) How hard can the team let him squeeze the trigger before they intercede?

Someone is trying to sneak a spy satellite into orbit. The team has one chance to find out who: gain access to the satellite while is accelerates down the orbital slingshot in Venezuela. Of course, they have no jurisdiction in Venezuela, so some subterfuge may be in order. Once a bug is placed inside the satellite, the team can back hack it and turn the tables on its operators.

8-Ball thinks "something" is going down in sunken Old Rio. Cipher activity concerning the area has spiked in the last few days and several teams of cryptos are conducting surveillance. The team is to do the same, figure out who's up to what, and then do their thing. Unfortunately, the Brazilian military is also involved. They're trying to stop some kidnappers from selling one of their black bag operatives to the Broken Chain; he has information that would be "embarrassing" to the government. Their plan is simple: wait until the trade is going down, then vaporize the area from orbit! Can the team stay one step ahead of a three-sided conflict and avoid being on the wrong end of a particle cannon 22,000 miles above their heads?

Next Up: Get cursed by gypsies and hounded by the apocalypse!