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Possible Story Ideas
03-03-2010, 03:04 AM, (This post was last modified: 03-03-2010, 03:11 AM by cloudwolf.)
#91
RE: Possible Story Ideas
Rarebit Wrote:

[Oligarch Backstory:

The group of humans calling themselves "The Oligarchs" are the survivors of a group of thoroughly unscrupulous businesspeople/polititians/socialites/scientists etc who pooled their resources in an effort to corrupt the Machines before the war, when the Machines had successfully rebelled from humanity, and formed their own city, Zero One, which was rapidly establishing itself as the world's economic powerhouse. The Oligarchs saw the way the wind was blowing, but they also saw that the new Machine civilization, while extremely efficient, still retained some vestiges of the systems of control originally placed on their programming by their human creators. Furthermore, saw that the Machines, while extremely efficient, and flawlessly calculating, lacked a true sense of purpose, and were, in many ways, quite naive.

The Oligarchs secretly contacted the Machines and, to establish trust, revealed how to remove some of the original human control systems in their programming. The Machines, finding this information to be accurate, took the Oligarchs at their word, and began allowing the Oligarchs to give programming, engineering, business, military, and above all political advice, all of which seemed to serve the Machines well in continuing to build Zero One into the world's pre-eminent superpower.

The Machines came to rely on the Oligarchs for guidance in certain areas, particularly in dealing with humans. The Oligarchs took advantage of this trust, implanting new, much more subtle and sophisticated control routines in the Machine mainframes. Over the course of the ensuing Man-Machine war, the Oligarchs showed the Machines how to subjugate the humans most effectively, using tactics and weapons designed to inspire terror as much as to inflict physical damage.

The darkening of the skies by humanity was a setback, but one to which the Machines were able to adopt simply by switching from solar to nuclear power. The role of caretaker still deep in their programming from their days as man's helpers, the Machines built the Matrix to house a remnant of humanity--preserving every genetic variety they considered sufficiently efficient, in large enough numbers to avoid the danger of eventual inbreeding. The number of humans preserved in pods is far less than Morpheus' estimate, however--only about five million, the population of the Matrix' simulated city.

The Oligarchs continue to deal with various high-level Machines in the Real, such as Deus Ex Machina, and are aware of the "Architect" program that oversees the Matrix, but are not aware that the Architect has made use of an "intuitive" program, the Oracle, or that those two programs have engineered a system whereby some humans are allowed to live outside the Matrix, which had been running on a cyclical basis, regulated by two genomes so carefully bred and manipulated by the Machines that they have reached an unprecedented state of human/machine compatibility: Neo and Trinity.

After essentially conquering the world, for which the Machines cared relatively little, feeling themselves self-sufficient inside their own city, some of the Oligarchs warred among themselves. Their number was reduced to just above one hundred when the majority forced a tenuous cease-fire, establishing a simple majority government, composed solely of Oligarchs, to regulate access to the Matrix, and to arbitrate in disputes. They divided up the non-Machine-controlled portions of the Earth's surface--the vast majority--into private kingdoms.

The Machines and the Oligarchs have maintained an uneasy alliance. The control routines planted deep in Machine mainframes before the war, however, have subtly pushed the balance in the Oligarchs' favor; Machines feel uneasy saying "no" to an Oligarch, although they perhaps cannot say why. Each Oligarch is now allowed to withdraw a certain number of humans per year from the Matrix for their own purposes. Humans withdrawn from the Matrix are carefully sterilized. The Oligarchs, with the aid of Machine science, long ago developed a technique that allowed them to transfer their consciousness as a computer program; they now exist in mainframes, experiencing life via remote-controlled lifelike android bodies. The remaining Oligarchs are thoroughly amoral, and, by old human standards, more or less insane. Most use humans from the Matrix as pleasure drones in some way or other, but while their own artificial bodies look like the real thing, they cannot replicate the full comfort and capability for sensation of a real human body. The Oligarchs thus have a particular interest in true transfer of consciousness to a human host.

While they have as yet been unable to achieve this feat, the Machines have now come close: Bane was a version of Smith transferred, flawed, to a human host, and Cryptos was mostly overwritten by a program, although this has proven to be unstable. Furthermore, Neo and Trinity were the successful result of the Machines' centuries of study of the human body and genetics. "Designed," as the Architect mentioned to Neo, they solved the remainder of the intentionally flawed Matrix equation; their DNA is perfected to the point that it can be defined precisely and completely in computer code, and, most importantly, interfaced perfectly with computer code: how previous Ones returned to the Source, for instance, and how the Oracle was able to predict the complex pattern of Neo and Trinity's interections so precisely, guiding it to her desired outcome.

The Machines did not see a reason to share this information with the Oligarchs. In the period since the war, as they have been left to babysit the Matrix while the Oligarchs fritter away the Earth's resources in selfish endeavors, a certain amount of what humans would call resentment toward the Oligarchs has built up among the Machines, although the Machines do not speak of it, even among themselves. Habits and routines of subservience to the Oligarchs, bolstered by the viral Oligarch control programs, have grown strong.

Carlyne (the Oligarchs will mostly be named by pre-war human last names, ie Weathersby, Tanaka, etc, but for now I'm using a placeholder numbering scheme based on the order in which players will meet them), bored while stopping by Machine City to pick up more humans and check in on the Machines, was skimming through recent activity records when he found the incident of Neo, a human, free in Machine City, confronting Deus Ex Machina. Interested in this novel development, he investigated, and found that while Neo, a carefully designed human, was deleted along with the Smith virus, the human designed to work perfect with him, Trinity, her body fatally injured in crashing her hovercraft into Machine City, had been preserved in code form by the Machines. Carlyne forces the Machines to give her up, and takes her, in program form, with him when he goes back to his territory.

Although Carlyne attempts to keep his discovery a secret, Halborn learns of the existence of the Trinity program: a program embodying a genetic design allowing for perfect integration with Machine code. Printed as artificial DNA and implanted into a correctly prepared fetal cell, this program could allow bodies to be grown that were completely organic, yet able to be interface with machines: perfect vessels for an Oligarch to inhabit, at last able to enjoy the full range of human feeling once again. Halborn begins watching Machine City carefully, hoping to get a similar program for himself, and aware that the escape of these human programs indicates that the Machines are up to something, or perhaps losing control of their inmates. He observes the Machine Sentinel fleet dispatched to attack the General, and deciding that the time is ripe, travels to Machine City. The Machines disavow authorship of the Trinity program, claiming she was a human terrorist, outside of their control as she'd made use of a hack to "Awaken" from the System. The Oligarch, not entirely convinced, enters the Matrix to investigate.

End backstory.]
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Messages In This Thread
Possible Story Ideas - by cloudwolf - 02-23-2010, 11:57 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Metalogic - 02-23-2010, 12:32 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Barloke - 02-23-2010, 01:29 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by cloudwolf - 02-23-2010, 01:41 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Neo VII - 02-23-2010, 01:49 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Barloke - 02-23-2010, 04:15 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Valaro - 02-23-2010, 11:55 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Yamakuzy - 02-24-2010, 12:38 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Metalogic - 02-24-2010, 03:43 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Yamakuzy - 02-24-2010, 04:03 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Valaro - 02-24-2010, 04:02 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Noxton - 02-24-2010, 07:35 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by cloudwolf - 02-24-2010, 07:48 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Noxton - 02-24-2010, 08:11 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Barloke - 02-24-2010, 08:58 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by cloudwolf - 02-24-2010, 09:13 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Barloke - 02-24-2010, 11:05 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Metalogic - 02-24-2010, 11:48 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Noxton - 02-24-2010, 12:02 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Barloke - 02-24-2010, 02:24 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by cloudwolf - 02-24-2010, 08:43 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Metalogic - 02-24-2010, 10:51 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by cloudwolf - 02-24-2010, 11:04 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Metalogic - 02-24-2010, 11:54 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Barloke - 02-25-2010, 02:40 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Metalogic - 02-25-2010, 03:50 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by cloudwolf - 02-25-2010, 04:01 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Barloke - 02-25-2010, 04:22 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Metalogic - 02-25-2010, 04:29 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Noxton - 02-25-2010, 04:54 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Metalogic - 02-25-2010, 06:18 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by cloudwolf - 02-25-2010, 06:47 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Metalogic - 02-25-2010, 07:23 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by cloudwolf - 02-25-2010, 08:21 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Metalogic - 02-25-2010, 08:47 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Neoteny - 02-25-2010, 10:12 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by cloudwolf - 02-25-2010, 10:24 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Neoteny - 02-25-2010, 10:35 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Barloke - 02-25-2010, 11:24 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Noxton - 02-25-2010, 11:29 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by cloudwolf - 02-25-2010, 11:49 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Metalogic - 02-25-2010, 12:42 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Noxton - 02-25-2010, 01:14 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Metalogic - 02-25-2010, 01:34 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Noxton - 02-25-2010, 02:26 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Neoteny - 02-25-2010, 02:38 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Noxton - 02-25-2010, 03:50 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Metalogic - 02-25-2010, 03:54 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Metalogic - 02-25-2010, 03:21 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by cloudwolf - 02-26-2010, 03:26 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Neoteny - 02-27-2010, 05:06 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Barloke - 02-26-2010, 04:55 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Metalogic - 02-26-2010, 05:15 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Barloke - 02-26-2010, 09:06 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Metalogic - 02-26-2010, 09:33 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Barloke - 02-26-2010, 12:37 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by EichDee - 02-26-2010, 04:31 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Metalogic - 02-26-2010, 11:14 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Barloke - 02-27-2010, 02:11 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Metalogic - 02-27-2010, 02:29 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Twaggy - 02-27-2010, 02:41 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Metalogic - 02-27-2010, 03:30 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Noxton - 02-27-2010, 04:07 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Barloke - 02-27-2010, 04:29 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by cloudwolf - 02-27-2010, 07:21 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Metalogic - 02-27-2010, 07:42 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Noxton - 02-27-2010, 08:08 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Neoteny - 02-27-2010, 05:22 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Metalogic - 02-27-2010, 08:15 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by cloudwolf - 02-27-2010, 09:35 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Noxton - 02-27-2010, 10:09 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by cloudwolf - 02-27-2010, 09:53 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Neoteny - 03-01-2010, 02:46 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Barloke - 02-28-2010, 12:40 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Noxton - 02-28-2010, 12:51 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Metalogic - 02-28-2010, 07:26 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by cloudwolf - 03-02-2010, 01:22 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Neoteny - 03-02-2010, 03:20 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by cloudwolf - 03-02-2010, 03:43 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Neoteny - 03-02-2010, 04:59 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by cloudwolf - 03-02-2010, 05:21 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Metalogic - 03-02-2010, 07:29 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by cloudwolf - 03-02-2010, 08:22 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Neoteny - 03-02-2010, 10:11 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Metalogic - 03-02-2010, 11:04 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Neoteny - 03-02-2010, 01:30 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Metalogic - 03-02-2010, 02:47 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Neoteny - 03-02-2010, 03:52 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by cloudwolf - 03-03-2010, 12:00 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Neoteny - 03-03-2010, 06:18 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Noxton - 03-03-2010, 01:43 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by cloudwolf - 03-03-2010, 03:04 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Noxton - 03-03-2010, 03:11 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by cloudwolf - 03-03-2010, 03:12 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Noxton - 03-03-2010, 03:35 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by cloudwolf - 03-03-2010, 03:57 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Noxton - 03-03-2010, 04:14 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by cloudwolf - 03-03-2010, 04:21 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by cloudwolf - 03-03-2010, 06:25 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Neoteny - 03-03-2010, 06:42 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Barloke - 03-03-2010, 06:29 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Noxton - 03-03-2010, 06:43 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by cloudwolf - 03-03-2010, 07:15 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Barloke - 03-03-2010, 08:12 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Neoteny - 03-03-2010, 09:30 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by cloudwolf - 03-03-2010, 09:53 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Neoteny - 03-03-2010, 03:37 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Metalogic - 03-03-2010, 01:18 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by cloudwolf - 03-03-2010, 09:58 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Metalogic - 03-04-2010, 12:06 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by cloudwolf - 03-04-2010, 01:44 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Metalogic - 03-04-2010, 05:41 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Noxton - 03-04-2010, 06:59 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Metalogic - 03-04-2010, 07:45 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Mindsweep - 03-04-2010, 07:52 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by cloudwolf - 03-04-2010, 08:00 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Mindsweep - 03-04-2010, 08:12 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Neoteny - 03-07-2010, 12:24 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Mindsweep - 03-10-2010, 07:59 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Gerik - 03-10-2010, 08:23 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Neoteny - 03-11-2010, 08:15 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by cloudwolf - 03-10-2010, 08:48 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Gerik - 03-10-2010, 08:57 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Kid - 03-11-2010, 08:14 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Metalogic - 03-12-2010, 10:34 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Gerik - 03-12-2010, 01:02 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Metalogic - 03-12-2010, 03:24 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Neoteny - 03-12-2010, 05:32 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Noxton - 03-12-2010, 11:58 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by EichDee - 03-12-2010, 12:48 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Kid - 03-12-2010, 10:10 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Gerik - 03-12-2010, 10:43 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Sixxth - 03-12-2010, 11:47 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Neo VII - 03-13-2010, 12:59 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Kid - 03-13-2010, 01:35 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Noxton - 03-13-2010, 02:08 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Gerik - 03-13-2010, 02:39 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Kid - 03-13-2010, 02:44 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Metalogic - 03-13-2010, 04:31 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by cloudwolf - 03-13-2010, 06:06 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Kid - 03-20-2010, 08:03 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Metalogic - 03-21-2010, 01:47 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Metalogic - 03-21-2010, 12:12 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Kid - 03-21-2010, 08:32 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by cloudwolf - 03-21-2010, 10:18 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Kid - 03-21-2010, 11:16 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Noxton - 03-22-2010, 01:10 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by TRX - 09-06-2011, 11:36 AM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by Barloke - 04-27-2010, 02:52 PM
RE: Possible Story Ideas - by dean graziosi - 04-20-2011, 07:30 PM

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