User:Coogaar/Benjamin der Vagen
| Eclipse Phase Content | |
|---|---|
| Main Page | Eclipse Phase |
| Firewall Team | Firewall Characters |
| OZMA Team | OZMA Characters |
| Other Pages | Places - Gear - Morphs - Quote Page |
| All Content | Category:Eclipse Phase |
 |
This article is a stub. You can help the Dicepit by expanding it. |
Description
We'll all be Spaceships
Transhumanity is progressing in technology at a rate previously undreamed of, including in the area of human augmentation. You can have a body custom-grown for you to be almost anything you want, from human to robot to giant space crab, so what's stopping us from going further? We're spacefaring creatures now, trapped here by the destruction of Earth and yet we still grasp on to those terrestrial roots like we'd rather be swinging from trees and picking lice out of each other's fur. It's time to stop grasping at what we had and start looking at what we could be. Why force ourselves to live on hostile planets, in habitats and spacecraft, when we could be the spacecraft ourselves?
Muse
Ben's muse is actually a forked and severely pruned down version of himself, or at least it was five years ago when he made it. He's enough of a narcissist to do that. He calls the muse Beta.
Body
Even before resleeving, Ben had hypermodified his body so that it barely even resembled human. Ever since awakening in an Arachnoid body, he's done the same thing to it, tinkering and modifying the shell to meet his needs and specifications, and it's doubtful that he'll ever stop. After acquiring a sample of alien technology from the Factors in Party Factors, specifically alien mining devices that could break things down to their component molecules at range, Ben has been experimenting with these devices to see what can be gleaned from them in the areas of molecular disruption and ultrasound transmission/detection. He is doing so both for scientific curiosity and to see how these systems could be incorporated in to his body.
Complete specs for Ben's body can be found here.
- Mini-Ben
- These are small hover drones that Ben has constructed in order to aid him in his work. They resemble miniaturized versions of himself, and possess a number of the same tools including mobility (walker, vectored, jets), nanotool sets and enhanced vision modes. These drones also possess a high-powered radio beacon, for marking salvage and transmitting distress calls, and low-powered targeting laser, for marking targets for weapons fire. They can only be operated on remote (they do not feature a Cyberbrain).
Traits
- It was decided by the player group that because Ben is more comfortable in Synth bodies, the normal modifier for Integration and Alienation tests for resleeving in a Synthetic Morph would instead apply to sleeving in a Biomorph (-10).
- Edited Memories: At a point, Ben modified his own memories and lost about 7 years of life starting from 2 years before the Fall. The reasons for this are outlined below in History.
- Math Whiz
- Ambidexterity 3
- Right at Home (Arachnoid)
History
Ben hasn't used his full name of Benjamin der Vagen since about the time he stopped counting his age, which hit three digits a long time ago. A youth aboard some of the first colony ships to reach the Lunar surface, Ben was old when the first effective longevity treatments appeared, and older still when transhumanity gained the ability to resleeve itself in new flesh. He had long ago given even that up though, slowly replacing his flesh piece by piece with cybernetics and biotech grown in a vat until he was more machine than man. It suited Ben fine, as in cold hard space he found himself at ease, and the more he changed his body the more he found himself able to live there, from his first trips aboard slowships. Perhaps this is why he made a life for himself designing spacecraft and habitats. Perhaps it was his love of machines that he'd always understood better than people.
The years predating the Fall were different for the cyborg Ben, however. Now an Ultimate, one of the loose band of nomadic transhumans who plied the solar system, slowly upgrading their minds and bodies to become something more than Human, Ben began to act openly against the events that were transpiring in the core worlds. The conflicts on Earth, and the growing power of the Hypercorps as they extended their strangling grasp to try and reach beyond the Core Worlds, were a point of contention among the free-minded and anarchistic cyborg.
Then came the TITANs and the fall. At this point, Ben's own memory of his actions is lost, a seven year stretch where things are a blank. The last thing he remembers beforehand are the first hints and rumors that something was going wrong on Earth, and the first thing after is awakening inside a cold metal body, his first truly synthmorph shell, in a small Ultimate outpost orbiting Saturn. Over the last five years, Ben has become obsessed with regaining those lost memories. Were his memories wiped? Is he just an old backup? Either was, where was he for those years and what did he do? If he is a backup, how did he die, or did he even die? He's even managed to put together a few clues, but each one has proved a dead end.
Perhaps this is the best outcome, for as the Firewall team has begun to discover there might be a lot more to Ben's lost memories than he expects. In the heart of an Ultimate smuggling vessel named The Jewel of the Void, crash-landed on Mars during The Fall, records lead to some terrifying questions. The vessel itself was one of the last to attempt to evacuate survivors from Earth during the Fall, and while doing so it was attacked and forced to crash land on Mars. The crew manifest listed one Benjamin der Vagen as well as a Francis Shepherd, a crazy cult leader who showed clear infestation by the Watts-MacLeod strain of the Exsurgent virus.
In truth, Ben was aboard that ship and was one of a few other survivors to crawl free of the wreckage, unknowingly infected with an at the time dormant virus. Body smashed beyond repair, he resleeved in the only thing available at the time, a synthmorph worke, to make good his escape, and he went on living life as he had before. As time passed and he resleeved himself however, things began to go strangely. Objects moved in his presence without being asked, lights dimmed as he walked down corridors, people near him would awake screaming in the night. As he tossed and turned in nightmarish sleep, the room around him would shift, at first subtly and then as the nightmares grew worse and worse in more obvious manners until they began to take on the aspect of the things in his dreams. Always the scientist and the recluse, and definitely knowing something was wrong, Ben retreated to the coldness of space in a one-man ship to study himself to terrifying conclusion: he had been infected, and as the virus slowly spread through his mind it was also slowly driving him mad. Not only that, but should anyone discover his infection, that would be the end of the very, very old man, and Ben was nothing if not a survivor. Lacking any backup from before The Fall, and even if he'd had one it would have been over five years out of date, Ben hatched a desperate plan: he edited his own mind.
Removed were any memories of his infestation, of any memory at all of the events that had led him to those last daring rescue missions on Earth. Ben was forced to go years back, to his first meeting with Francis Shepherd, the Captain of the Jewel of the Void. That moment, and all those that would follow, he deleted from his own mind but still had to go further. The Exsurgent virus only made itself apparent in biomorphs or pods, and so Ben instilled in himself a dislike for all things flesh. With his natural inclination in that direction already, it didn't take much to push the future Ben from mild disdain to disgust. If he could keep his new self within a synthmorph, then Ben would be able to save it from death or further infection. His work finished, Ben took the new personality and loaded it in to a robot shell, leaving the robot dormant and pointing his small research vessel back towards the now over a year distant rings of Saturn. Then, pressing a particle bolter against the base of his neck, the old Ben stepped naked out the nearby airlock.
EP Character Questions
Basics
Background: Original Colonist
Faction: Ultimate
Gender Identity: None, but uses the male pronoun.
Actual Age: Old, probably over 200.
Subjective Age: About the same, hasn't spent much at all dead and awaiting resleeving. However, he lost about 7 years or so due to editing his own memories.
Home Morph: A very modified Arachnoid morph. See Ben's Body.
Preferred Morph: Any synthmorph, but he prefers Arachnoids. This goes beyond preference: he will not sleeve in to a pod or biomorph (taking infolife over them) unless forcibly uploaded.
Motivations
- +Posthuman Progression: See We'll all be Spaceships, above. Ben believes in advancing transhumanity towards the next stage in its development, which he believes will consist of morphs and a society adapted to survive in the cold vacuum of space. This motivation has two aspects: the political and the technological. He is looking to convince others of his viewpoint, get them talking about it, have extranet sites/chatter, that sort of thing. He's also all about collecting the technology to make it possible, so discovering advanced spacefaring technology (like drives, power cores, morph mods, etc) is on his list too. Many of these even go in to his body.
- +Titan Research: Ben's been interested in the TITANs since about the time transhumanity found out about them, but it's interest from two sides. On the one hand, he thinks they're the biggest threat transhumanity has ever faced and that we should destroy them. On the other hand, in order to destroy them we have to understand them, not to mention they've had some pretty cool ideas that all of transhumanity could benefit from.
- -Ozma: They've screwed with Ben for the last time. They even thought they could strand him on some deserted jungle world. Well, Ben's had enough. He knows bringing down Ozma would be more than he as an individual could do, they're too big, so instead his plan is to make himself too much trouble to risk messing with. He wants to disrupt plans, destroy resources and facilities, and to generally demonstrate that he's not worth the damage he'll cause each time they try to get in his way.
Completed
- +Regain Memory: There's seven years of his life missing, and Ben wants to know why. What went on during that seven years? The problem is that he shouldn't know: he edited his own memories to remove any knowledge of his Exsurgent infection or his time aboard The Jewel of the Void, and his search may take him to places he doesn't want to go. This was fulfilled in Omega and Prime, when Omega Ben, the original version of himself that shot itself in the stack and survived, gave our Ben Prime the missing memories and a few other gifts to boot.
Reputations
| Network | Name | Factions | Rank | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| @-Rep | Circle-A List | (Anarchists, Autonomists) | 75 | Primarily Ultimates, but Ben has a lot of rep among independent stations due to his habitat design work. He hasn't done much of it lately, but a lot of blueprints and advancement in habitat, spacecraft, and robotics design have his name stamped somewhere on them. |
| c-Rep | CivicNet | (Hypercorps, Inner System) | ||
| e-Rep | Ecowave | (Ecologists, Reclaimers) | ||
| f-Rep | Fame | (Fame, Media) | ||
| g-Rep | Guanxi | (Criminals, Triads) | 38 | |
| i-Rep | The Eye | (Firewall) | 65 | |
| r-Rep | Research
Network Associates |
(Scientists) | 72 | As @-Rep, a number of advances in spacefaring technology bear his name somewhere (either solely or more often as part of a group), which gives him a lot of pull among the science community. |
Skills
Ben has a lot of technical skills applying to robotics, nanotechnology, and programming. He also has spacecraft and habitat building skills.
Combat skills: Ben has Seekers and Unarmed (specialized in Implant Weapons).
Questions
What were you doing during the Fall?
He doesn't remember. See History above for a complete description. At the time of The Fall he was aboard The Jewel of the Void, an Ultimate smuggling vessel, attempting to rescue morphs and egos from Earth., crashlanding on Mars, and somewhere during the process getting infected with a nasty but long-acting version of the Watts-McLeod strain of the Exsurgent virus.
What do you do in daily life?
When not saving transhumanity from destruction, Ben works as a habitat engineer. A lot of his work is design rather than actual construction because while he loves to get his manipulators dirty the realities of distance in space make this a difficulty, not to mention that way he's not working directly around his employers. He had people skills at one point, he even still possesses them, he just chooses not to use them (the privilege of the very old). Despite this, most of his work is collaborations, and those of his peers who work with him the most often have learned to ignore his abrasive manner in deference to his skill. He does have some pet projects he won't let others do however, things that he views as his personal creation, normally where he is trying out some new idea or system. These projects are almost exclusively limited to Autonomist habitats and ships.
Where is Home?
It isn't, really. Ben spends most of his time near Mars and the asteroid belt right now, but not through any attachment to the area. It's where a lot of his independent projects are currently occurring, and where most of the Firewall team is. It's where he was when Firewall recruited him, and where he has stuck around ever since. Home is more a morph than a location: he can replicate his home morph or have a new one built, but he feels the most comfortable sliding in to the body he's worn for the majority of the last five years. Maybe he's getting sentimental in his old age.
Impressions
Teammates of Ben
- Ichi on Ben: "It's nice to work with someone comfortable outside the humanoid norms."
- Doc Mason on Ben:
- Bill Shatner on Ben:
- Sita on Ben:
- Axle Rosita on Ben (AKA - "Octobot"): "You know, for a robotic spider he's not a bad guy...if you can call a robot spider a 'guy'."
Ben's of his Teammates
- On Ichi: "He has the right idea on modifying your body to meet your needs, but he's still too stuck on the idea of morphic identity. A good transhuman to have around in a pinch however, he's good at what he does, if a little mentally unstable."
- On Doc Mason: "His skills and his previous experience with the TITANs make him a useful team member, but he's a bit too hung up on Martian concerns, he lets it get in the way of the mission. I hope he doesn't let it get in the way of our survival."
- On Bill Shatner: "Not afraid to take whatever steps are necessary to get the job done, anything necessary up to overwhelming force. He's more interested in his own fame than he is of advancing the Hypercorporate agenda, and his contacts and pull there make him a necessary evil for now, but someday he's going to become a problem."
- On Sita: "I'm not sure what to think yet, but first impressions are good. She's not afraid to get her hands dirty, or lose them for that matter. There's a lot more going on with her than I know about though, and that makes me nervous."
- On Axle Rosita:
