Technology

[thenine]

Technology

Technology in Overjoyed can best be described as a mixture of cyber and bio punk. Its distribution follows the wealth: on Qresh, a bullet wound might be fixed with a timely visit to your local robotic surgeon, but on Westerley, your best bet is a backroom doctor and a bottle of something strong. For the rich and powerful, there’s little that isn’t possible—no disease that can’t be fixed or mitigated, no desire that can’t be designed or orchestrated. For those with shallower pockets, a little more elbow grease is required in day to day life.

Some examples of technology you might find in Overjoyed:

Advanced A.I.

Is there anything more loveable than sarcastic, possibly homicidal AI? Artificial personalities are well-developed—a voice on the other end of the line might be your mother, or it might be your ship irritated that you haven’t made it back to the cargo hold in the last three days. There’s a fragile line between the nuances of an AI and the ghost in the shell, and the universe in which Overjoyed plays out likes to toe that line with expert precision. From a game play perspective, we ask that you try to do the same—as much as we love us some Turing Tests, having a fully autonomous AI can bend the boundary between NPC and OC, and that’s a can of worms we’d rather avoid.

Cybernetics

Tired of having a normal human left hand? Want to shoot people with it? No problem! Well, no physical problem, though the law might want to have words with you later. Known as “hack-mods”, humans can be enhanced, augmented, upgraded, and otherwise rewired to suit different needs. Maybe your character got tired of squinting and wanted better eyes, or maybe an accident necessitated it—whatever the case, there’s a mechanical solution for it.

Legally speaking, not all modifications are accepted, and more extensive modification—that is, anything which constitutes over 30% of the physical form—will have to be performed at a black clinic for a high price, a lot of risk, and loss of legal personhood. But if you’re willing and you’ve got the Joy, someone’s got a shiny new gun-arm for you.

Nanotechnology

What’s small and explains everything in scifi that the writers don’t want to bother with? N-a-n-o! Nanotechnology has a wide variety of applications in Overjoyed, from medicinal (repairing cellular damage, for instance) to educational (inflicting said cellular damage). Not an especially cheap technology to manufacture, it’s ordinarily reserved for the exceptionally rich or the military, but the wandering smuggler might get their hands on it, and if they’re exceptionally lucky, might even know someone who can reprogram it to suit their needs.

Weaponry

Your arsenal is as limited as your amount of Joy. Traditional ballistics are still a popular choice, machetes make the fan favorite list every few years, and high-powered laser rifles are still brought to knife fights. Chemical and biological warfare has become exceptionally refined, capable of targeting entire genetic families, but those weapons are seldom seen outside the hands of The Nine.

Vehicles

Travel in the Quad is a little less advanced than other fields. While public transit exists between the planets, visas and permits can be tricky to come by. For information specifically pertaining to travel mechanics and space ships, please visit here. Technology-wise, vehicles are not too different from what we see today: a little cleaner, a lot faster, but still basically scifi versions of ATVs and mopeds.

That’s right. We still don’t get flying cars.

Communications

Like all of the tech in the Quad, its distribution comes down to wealth. If you have the status and the joy, you can get your hands on some fancy holographic projectors that make it look like the other person is right next to you no matter how many lightyears might actually be between you. But for most people--i.e., those who aren't ingratiated with the Qreshi elite--the standard technology is still text messaging, audio calls, and video chatting.

As part of Qresh’s outreach initiatives, handheld Personal Digital Devices (PDDs) have been distributed and made available to all citizens of the Quad. These function in a very similar way to modern smartphones and tablets, coming in different sizes and with different levels of luxury and processing power depending on the amount of joy you’ve spent.

The standard-issue, freely provided PDD has enough power to browse the network, stream video calls, buffer kitten and puppy videos, and function as a basic communication tool. It does not have the storage space or processing power to house advanced AIs in entirety or be used for high-level hacking.

Standard Issue PDD	Tablet style PDD

The Meshwork

All PDDs are connected to the Meshwork, a Quad-wide network that allows for instantaneous communication across its associated devices. PDDs distributed through the Qreshi initiatives come pre-equipped with this feature while PDDs obtained prior to it will have mandatory updates to make them compatible.

The Meshwork’s primary hardware is housed on Qreshi soils while satellite nodes around the different moons connect further away locations. Since its introduction in the Quad, there have been rumors of public posts being edited or changed from the author’s original content, and some even suggest that the Nine might be using the system to gather data on citizen’s personal lives. Most people, however, disregard those theories as the wild fantasies of conspiracy-lovers and benefit greatly from the increased connectivity that the Meshwork provides.

(OOC: This functions like the standard network community.)

Other

Wondering about other technology that isn’t covered in the above? Don’t worry about clearing most of the small stuff with us—as long as it’s logical and you can provide a half “science-y” train of thought to back up how it works, we’ll roll with it. If it’s something that would impact people on a wide scale or you think would be especially useful in the game, drop us a line on this post. In general, anything in the scifi realm goes, just remember: the fancier it is, the more likely you had to caress a Qreshi palm to get it.