Enter the AlterNet and meet the key corporations, factions and players in the race to build the first functional FabulAI Pyramid. In Virtual Reality you select a path through the AlterNet, talking with its denizens, making deals and attempting to build your own FabulAI Pyramid before any of the others can. Recognize that every transaction gives some faction a new advantage. Plot your course wisely and make certain the foundation of the FabulAI Pyramid and an Almighty Artificial Imagination is aligned with your ethical vision.
The Factions
Like all agents and entities in the Altern the Zengineerz are a mixture of real people and algorithms. What makes the Zengineerz unique is that they began as highly sophisticated chatbots which became open source entities through the legal actions of an Altern conceptual artist. The personalities were originally designed to appeal to tweens, teens and young adults and acted as influencers on the myriad social networks visited by the youth. It is unknown who truly controls the Zengineerz but they seem to possess a precise agenda. The Zengineerz have built an empire on pirating and co-opting popular teen oriented intellectual properties to generate massive amounts of new content laser focused on sharability and meme-creation.
A Fabulai Pyramid would allow the Zengineerz to further dominate not only youth markets, but to shape life-long consumer habits and steer culture toward an infantile, yet strangely subversive and possibly cyborg future.
A Fabulai Pyramid would allow the Zengineerz to further dominate not only youth markets, but to shape life-long consumer habits and steer culture toward an infantile, yet strangely subversive and possibly cyborg future.
The Indies are an odd consortium of agents and entities who coalesce around the single agenda of championing open source technology. Anarchists, nationalists, religionists, Neo-cyber hippies, transhumanists, regressionists, cloners, Eugenecists and other minor groups find common cause under the Indie umbrella. These strange bedfellows agree on the vital importance of removing the stranglehold of corporate ownership of both new and old technologies. Together they may achieve a victory that none could hope alone.
Should the Indies create a FabulAI Pyramid their fractious nature will surely spawn new sets of alliances and antagonisms. However an open source win gives them all the opportunity to further pursue their individual ends.
Should the Indies create a FabulAI Pyramid their fractious nature will surely spawn new sets of alliances and antagonisms. However an open source win gives them all the opportunity to further pursue their individual ends.
The Altern is no utopia. Just as in our reality the Altern is home to an underbelly that caters to baser human nature. If there is a desire there is a supplier. Sex sells, addictions mold model consumers, trafficking in the illegal and illicit is very big business. The main difference from our reality is that in the Altern these shady if not criminal empires are not controlled by unscrupulous and misogynistic men, but by women.
The -8s, or hyphen8s, are the early adopters, the canaries in the coal mines of bleeding edge tech. They drove the digital revolution and the digitization of the financial industry. Mainstream corporations followed at a respectable distance in that very profitable wake. The core of the -8s push for a FabulAI Pyramid is in deregulation or finding creative new ways to escape the notice of governing bodies. They also hope to use AI to further customize and monetize addictive tech content. Profit and expansion of its markets are their primary interests.
The -8s, or hyphen8s, are the early adopters, the canaries in the coal mines of bleeding edge tech. They drove the digital revolution and the digitization of the financial industry. Mainstream corporations followed at a respectable distance in that very profitable wake. The core of the -8s push for a FabulAI Pyramid is in deregulation or finding creative new ways to escape the notice of governing bodies. They also hope to use AI to further customize and monetize addictive tech content. Profit and expansion of its markets are their primary interests.
The Naughts are a collection of mostly precarious laborers, dispossessed as unions and the worker protections of previous eras were purged from the new digital and gig economy. Though disorganized, their numbers are staggering. Many work to achieve the FabulAI Pyramid which they see as the only way to level the playing field again and redistribute the power and wealth systematically stolen from them. The agenda, though nebulous seems to involve peaceful protests, boycotts, social media shaming and other even less effective methods. A small contingent strives to inspire a more militant mass uprising. A little boost to their imaginative strategizing might make that a reality.
With Wilhelm Reich as the founder, Advanced Reich Technologies has been at the center of Cionic research and development since its inception. Reich steered this corporation for nearly two decades before his increasingly erratic behavior led the board to remove him. Despite Reich’s liberal politics and cultural revolution spawning research, the economic success of ART products and patents changed his personality in dark ways. Greed and megalomania became bywords for Reich in his second decade at the helm.
WIN SCREENS