comStar Firewall alert - PhaseThrough
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info Savants<br />
Fading: Intuition + Resonance<br />
Sprites: Code, Courier, Data, Machine, and Paladin<br />
Info savants view the Matrix as a place of wonders. Similar<br />
to technoshamans, their approach is more spiritual and intuitive,<br />
but they don’t believe in higher forces, just in data. Info<br />
savants—also called infomancers or datamancers—perceive the<br />
Matrix in its raw form as rivers of information that flow in all<br />
directions within the endless virtual landscape. People, with their<br />
commlinks and PANs, are seen as information wells in which<br />
consumer habits, interests, and social networking form patterns<br />
that info savants can perceive. Some go even further, believing<br />
that events in the real world manifest as patterns on the digital,<br />
assembling and disassembling depending on the impact of the<br />
event and the amount of data accumulated.<br />
Info savants interact with a node by redirecting the virtual<br />
chi, using some kind of digital feng shui to alter the flow of data,<br />
either with their complex forms or through sprites. They venerate<br />
sprites as spirits of the code, calling them and asking them for<br />
assistance rather than commanding them into obedience.<br />
Some see info savants as the technomancer version of geomancers,<br />
following the digital ley lines of the Matrix.<br />
networkers<br />
Fading: Charisma + Resonance<br />
Sprites: Code, Courier, Crack, Data, and Sleuth<br />
To networkers, the Matrix is a complex digital cobweb,<br />
a plethora of threads along which traffic and communication<br />
travel in every direction like an electric potential migrating on a<br />
nerve. Pervading the modern world, these threads connect and<br />
affect every place, anywhere, at any time. Networkers think of<br />
themselves as the spiders of these webs, the ones who can truly see<br />
and influence its patterns. By spinning new threads or removing<br />
old ones, networkers manipulate the web. Some believe that even<br />
small changes can lead to far-reaching, drastic changes, based on<br />
the Twentieth Century concepts of the butterfly, domino, and<br />
snowball effects.<br />
Resonance is nothing but the glue that holds the web together,<br />
which the technomancer draws upon when “weaving.” Sprites<br />
are perceived as “organic” helpers, innate auxiliary programs designed<br />
to help technomancers service the web. Networkers’ sprites<br />
are usually viewed as intelligent Resonance programs (ranking<br />
between complex forms and technomancers themselves) without<br />
much personality or motivation of their own, They tend to have<br />
alien or task-oriented sterile iconographies, often based on the<br />
“weaving” metaphor, such as spiders or webspinners.<br />
Singularitarians<br />
Fading: Logic + Resonance<br />
Sprites: Courier, Crack, Data, Tutor, and Tank<br />
The technomancers on this stream are convinced that they are<br />
the next step in the development that is necessary to transform the<br />
living Matrix into a machine super-intelligence (something beyond<br />
even previously powerful AIs such as Deus) that will guide mankind<br />
through their own evolution. Calling themselves singularitarians<br />
or e-volutionsts, they view everyone in the Matrix as a part of this<br />
flourishing intelligent supercomputer that will at same point awaken<br />
(causing a bigger singularity event than the Crash 2.0) and change<br />
Unwired<br />
the world on a not-yet-conceivable level. Resonance is perceived as<br />
the fabric from which this computer is made, while technomancers,<br />
normal Matrix users, and even sprites are self-evolving subroutines<br />
that have to learn to increase their abilities and possibilities in the<br />
Matrix (over generations) until they have evolved enough to reach<br />
the critical level of a singularity.<br />
While singularitarians often have a lot in common with transhumanists,<br />
even many transhumanists and technomancers view<br />
their philosophy as quite abstract and esoteric, and worry that the<br />
singularity will in fact not be friendly to metahumanity.<br />
Sourcerors<br />
Fading: Logic + Resonance<br />
Sprites: Code, Courier, Crack, Data, and Machine<br />
Many of those who became technomancers in the wake of<br />
Crash 2.0 were ordinary people with ordinary jobs who did not<br />
care much about magic or digital mojo before they experienced<br />
it themselves during their Emergence. Sourcerors, therefore,<br />
deal with resonance in a very rational way, reminiscent of mathematical<br />
logic or computer science. Similar to those hermetic<br />
magicians who view magic as a physical force with predictable<br />
laws and consequences, sourcerors view Resonance as the true<br />
machine code of the Matrix, which only they are able to understand.<br />
From their perspective, they use complex forms as<br />
interfaces to program the machine code. Sprites are thought of as<br />
sentient programs, embodied subroutines similar to agents that<br />
can be commanded and directed like any other program. Sprites<br />
compiled by sourcerors often resemble sculpts of commercially<br />
available agent programs.<br />
Simon Wentworth (order #1132857) 9<br />
139<br />
technoMancers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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