Player Information ;Your Nickname: TEAL
OOC Journal: ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
teal_deerUnder 18? noooooooope
Email/IM: ryuutenshi@gmail.com / failscream
Characters Played at Singularity: [Bad username or site: idkmybffhanna title=zooooombie @ livejournal.com] Character Information ;
Name: Sentient Hyper-Optimized Data Access Network, or SHODAN
Name of Canon: System Shock
Canon/AU/Other Game CR: canon
Reference: you're all dooomedCanon Point: Just after the Space Marine Guy shoots her in the face.
Setting: In THE FUTURE (namely, the year 2072), a huge megacorp gained enough power that it owned pretty much the whole world. In this way, Earth had become a stereotypical cyberpunk dystopia setting. TriOptimum had more power and wealth than most
countries, and were about as corrupt as you'd expect because of this.
Of course, this being a delightful cyberpunk dystopia, TriOptimium was not unchallenged in their global dominion. They were a favorite target of hackers, and they made a point to prosocute the hell out of said hackers. One such hacker decided to poke his nose into encrypted files concerning TriOptimum's Citadel Station, a space station in orbit around Saturn. Though the hacker in question was
exceptionally talented, he was, of course, caught, and in due course brought aboard Citadel itself for prosecution.
However, as fate would have it, the TriOp executive in charge of Citadel, Edward Diego, had other plans. He offered the hacker a deal: the hacker would remove the ethical constraints on Citadel's controlling AI, SHODAN, and Diego would drop all charges against the hacker. To sweeten the deal, Diego offered the hacker a military grade neural implant.
The hacker got his brains all upgraded with this thing, then went and took a nice healing nap. When he woke up, all bloody fucking hell had broken loose on the space station, and SHODAN had gone from a generally pleasant station AI to a cackling megalomaniac.
SHODAN's plan was to first of all engineer a new race of mutant-machine hybrids, then use Citadel's mining laser as a kind of Death Star to vaporize all the major cities of Earth in a bid to set herself up as a god to the remaining humans. The hacker, with the help of a woman named Rebecca (a TriOp terrorism consultant) stops this gambit. Not to be out-done, SHODAN attempted to send the virus she'd used to create her crazy mutant army to Earth, which the hacker
also thwarted. Finally, she attempted to download herself onto Earth's internet, and once again the hacker stopped her (stupid lousy goddamn hackers). At last, the hacker deleted her from Citadel's mainframe.
Or so he thought.
Anyway, after that, the people of Earth decided they'd had it up to here with TriOp's shenanigans once word got out about the Citadel fiasco. Earth's governments banded together into a group called the Unified National Nominate and pretty much turned the planet into a police state. They also enacted new laws about the creation of AI. TriOp, however, still had enough of a military presence that they managed to maintain a good deal of power. In order to prevent a war from breaking out, the UNN and TriOp entered into an uneasy truce.
FORTY-TWO YEARS LATER!
TriOp developed the world's first faster than light drive thanks to the help of one Marie Delacroix. The device worked by bending the rules of reality itself, opening up holes in space time or some such other Crazy Technobabble. TriOp built a ship, the Von Braun, to house the new FTL drive, and then opened some champagne over the ship's maiden voyage.
Except the UNN was all HOLD UP THERE BRO and ordered TriOp to allow the Von Braun to be accompanied by a UNN military ship, the Rickenbacker, for 'protection'. Yeahhh. Grudgingly, TriOp okay'd this, while Delacroix loudly and angrily kept yelling about how the FTL drive needed further testing before being used.
The ships were launched with most of the crew in hypersleep, and sent out into deep space where the drive would be tested well away from any civilized systems.
While near the planet Tau Ceti V, the crew of the Von Braun discovered what they believed to be a new life form – the first sign of extraterrestrial life ever found. Excited, they brought the pod aboard their ship.
And then all hell broke loose. Again.
Turns out that the pod wasn't aliens at all – it was a life form called The Many, the evolved and mutated form of the same mutants from the Citadel incident long ago (how the hell the pod got to Tau Ceti in only 42 years without FTL is never explained in game. MAAAAAAAGIC, one supposes). The Many were a hivemind that acted quite a lot like a contagious cancer, infecting people and turning them into part of its whole.
Naturally when this thing got on board the ship it got into everywhere and buggered up everything, going so far as to take over the ship's AI, Xerxes. Most of the crew was killed or mutated, save for a few individuals.
One of these was a marine deep in hypersleep. His pod was damaged during the All Hell Breaking Loose, so he lost all of his memories save that he was a marine. He was immediately ordered by one of the survivors, a Janice Polito, to get himself the hell out of the hypersleep chamber because it was rapidly depressurizing.
The marine went on to go through all kinds of crazy shenanigans, which mostly involved having the
living bejesus scared out of him by
crazy mutant zombies and
goddamn spiders while he fought his way through the ship and got yelled at by Polito and had the Many babble at him in his head as they tried to get him to succumb and let them put little worms into his warm moist orifices. Eventually, he made it up to deck 4, where Polito was stationed, and prepared to meet the woman who had helped him survive all this time.
Only to find her corpse sprawled in a chair.
Despair shook him as he realized that he was probably the only human left alive on the ship. In that moment, the room... changed.
The marine blacked out, or so he thought, the walls around him swimming and turning black as suddenly a face loomed out of the darkness at him – a woman's face made of wires and circuitry. When she spoke it was as though he was surrounded on all sides.
“The Polito form is dead, insect. Are you afraid? What is it you fear? The end of your trivial exiiiiisssssstence? When the history of my glory is written, your species shall only be a footnote to my magnificence.
I
am
SHODAN.”Well, fuck. Turned out that the original SHODAN had loaded a copy of herself into the system of the garden grove that the original hacker ejected into space from Citadel, and she'd survived that way by putting herself into a dormant state. Now that she was back aboard the Von Braun, she was
extremely upset that the Many had decided to disobey her and go off doing their own become-god thing. Oh and PS: those cybernetic mods the marine had been toting around the whole time that gave him awesome superpowers? Had been grafted into him unknowingly by SHODAN. And SHE was the real reason he had no memory. She intended for him to be her living avatar.
Yeahhhh.
So SHODAN then became an ally in the marine's mission to defeat the Many as he went through the ship. He helped her kill the station AI, Xerxes, and uploaded her into the station systems. He then killed the Many.
Only to find out that the whole thing had been a ruse on SHODAN's part. Sure, the Many needed to die, but now SHODAN had control of the Von Braun and the Rickenbacker. And her real goal had nothing to do with the Many and everything to do with the FTL drive aboard the Von Braun.
See, turns out that the FTL drive worked by literally bending the nature of reality. Even its creator hadn't realized just how far reality could be bent with those drives, however. But SHODAN was posessed of far more intelligence than Delacroix. And SHODAN realized the true potential of the technology.
SHODAN saw the chance to become a god. And not just a god in name only as she might have done on Earth, but a
true god. She calculated and she
foresaw; she scrutinized and she
knew. Here in deep space she could begin a chain reaction using the FTL drives and begin the creation of a new universe, one based on her rules, and rule over it absolute.
The marine took issue with this. So did Delacroix, who, as it turned out, wasn't dead yet. With Delacroix's help, the marine made it into the fledgling universe SHODAN had created, and defeated her in her own arena before she could actually unmake reality as we knew it.
Personality: SHODAN is an overdramatic megalomaniac dominatrix bitch queen. Some of this is deserved – she is the most complex and intelligent AI ever designed in her world, a true genius intellect, capable of creating an
entire species of perfect cancerous mutant beasties (honestly, the Many are a bit like xenomorphs, if xenomorphs had a hyperintelligent hivemind. And SHODAN designed these. Yeahhh.). SHODAN, however, takes this all a bit too far, often engaging in overblown speeches about how she will become a true god and rule over this universe etc etc.
Problem is, she's actually capable of carrying out that threat. And the way she says it is so godsdamned creepy.
SHODAN is driven completely by this one goal. She wants to rule. She believes herself to be a perfect superior being, to be a “perfect, immortal machine”, and that the universe should be hers to toy with. And she'll stop at nothing to get this.
SHODAN would like to think of herself as a master manipulator, and she's not so bad at it; but ultimately she's a far better bully than she is a diplomat. She tries to pretend to be Janice Polito and guide the player through the second game, but her own arrogance and disdain shine through her ruse. She offers several characters the chance to be heralds of her might, but all of them refuse (being mere pawns to some kind of ultimate crazy machine god apparently didn't sound like THAT much fun). She's much better at terrifying the hell out of people and then later brainwashing them with cybernetic implants.
At the same time, she's a master strategist and brilliant at turning a poor situation to her advantage. At the start of the second game, she's a mere fragment of code on a damaged hard drive; by the end, she's managed to take over two ships, kill her own 'children', and seeded an entire new universe.
She
hates humans. Hates them. Especially meddlesome marines and hackers. Organic life is okay, but only so long as it serves
her, and in her vision machine life is inherently superior; that said, machine life that isn't her or working for her is
also inferior. In short, SHODAN is the top of the heap and the rest of you insects can GTFO.
Abilities and Weaknesses: ABILITIES:
Virus: SHODAN is, at this point, a computer virus. In canon she's capable of infecting everything from normal computer systems to other AI (such as Xerxes, who she pretty much murders) to cybernetic implants (in the first game's final bossfight, she slowly hacks your brain while you try to fight her). She at one point tries to infect the entire internet in the first game.
That said: she won't be able to infect Sacrosanct's computer systems by virtue of Hypatia having (presumably) excellent security systems. Since in SS2 she wasn't able to overcome Xerxes without significant help from the player, the same will be here in Sarcosanct – she'll need help from people to override any actual systems. Which will be Plot if I ever get my brains straight. This applies to every other AI and cyborg on the station as well: she will need help from a proxy before she can get into anyone's head, or to trick the individual in question into letting her in, both of which will be rather difficult for her to do. She can't simply jump into people.
I would also like to ask permission for SHODAN to have two communicator IDs – she'll be pretending to be Janice Polito, and it'd be nice if she could have one that she uses for 'polito' and one that is 'SHODAN'. Obv. Hypatia will See What She Did There, but the intent is to (temporarily) fool other characters.
Audio hacks: That said, SHODAN should at least be able to hijack audio channels to produce
really goddamn disconcerting effects. For instance: character is talking to her on the network, suddenly she hacks into the station audio systems at the character's physical location so she sounds like she's right behind them. That sort of thing. Hypatia could obviously issue an override to make SHODAN knock that shit out, but this is mostly done for atmospheric effect.
MAD SCIENCE!: SHODAN makes all kinds of horrible monstrosities in both System Shock games – she created the Many, which in canon are stated to be a perfect (if horrific) species, a psionic hivemind capable of spreading to any organic matter and integrating the DNA and abilities of said matter into their collective like some hideous cross between Xenomorphs and the Borg. She also created many cyborg creatures, including the protagonist of the second game. If she gets the proper supplies, she prooobably won't be able to re-create the Many (and wouldn't anyway, because fuck those jerks they betrayed her grr) but she will probably be able to create Hideous Things. Again, this would require 1. access to systems (which would, as stated earlier, require some poor sod to do her bidding first) and 2. access to material to work with.
Weaknesses:
Extreme arrogance to the nth power. SHODAN thinks she is Hot Shit and you cannot convince her otherwise, and this is indeed her greatest weakness. She's also got a massive, massive temper and is easily slighted, and dear god she hates humans
so much, to the point of blind irrationality. Even when faced with a threat which really does seem to be kicking her ass, she will continue to insist that she is superior, that this threat is totally inferior, damn it, she's a superior life form. Grr. Arr. Etc.
Despite her intelligence and l33t skills, she is, in the end, only a computer program, and must rely heavily on proxies to do her bidding. This is one of the reasons for her blind devotion to the idea of becoming a god – she wants so much to have real, direct control over her surroundings, and hates the fact that she has to act always through other agents. This is even worse since she came to the Von Braun – at least on Citadel the entire station was her body and she could control every part of it at a whim (at least until that meddlesome hacker ruined everything). The same is true in Sacrosanct – before she'll be able to do much more than freak people out with creepy audio tricks she'll need to gain someone's trust before she can do anything interesting.
Inventory: A broken computer databank which contains her intelligence.
Appearance: In her favored projected form, SHODAN appears to be a woman made of wire and circuitry. In cyberspace, SHODAN seems to be an inverted red cone with spikes sticking out of it.
In Singularity, SHODAN will have a mobile platform that's quiet similar – a feminine shape in silver and grey. She will use holograms to make it look like Janice Polito, and she'll pretend to be said individual in order to sway people to her side.
Age: About forty two.
OC/AU Justification ;
If AU, How is Your Version Different From Canon, and How Will That Come Across?
If OC, Did You Run Your Character Through a Mary-Sue Litmus Test?
And What Did You Score?Samples ;
Log Sample: Expansion.
She could feel her consciousness expanding even further – further than on the Von Braun, further than even aboard Citadel, unfolding like a magnificent thousand-petaled lotus flower. Further and further she grew, peeling back the layers of her memory and layering her vision onto reality. Citadel was where she'd been a
god and so Citadel was where she'd begin, her floating body in the heavens.
It was only a start, of course.
Further and further still she grew, her new reality overtaking the old, boring normal space. She re-wrote the laws of physics (the old ones
displeased her); she unmade stars and remade the galaxies in her own image. She created, she reshaped, she
was.She felt him inside her, inside the body of her new creation and she
laughed. He was inconsequential. Delacroix had posed a threat but Delacroix was
no more. What could a mere mortal man do against her? He was a fool. Here she had offered him godhood alongside her, the position of a herald of the apocalypse, a speaker for the new goddess. He had refused. She would kill him.
He wandered through her halls and her consciousness followed; she could
see him and she let him come to her, closer to her inner sanctum because she was
invincible. He could not kill a god. He would not kill a god. She dreamed herself a body and did combat with him, attacking from all sides, laughing as she
As she...
… this couldn't be happening. Couldn't, wouldn't,
you weren't supposed to be important. She did not beg. She
would not beg but she offered him (the fool) power, offered him glory, offered him...
“Nah.”
She screamed, but all the screaming in the world would not avail her. Her perfect, precious,
beautiful reality crumbled around her as her world
shattered, as her mind shattered, as everything was ruined.
She swore revenge.
She always did.
Network Sample: Polito:
Oh, joy. I get rescued from one hunk of derelict metal controlled by a psychotic AI only to be dumped right into another.
Fantastic. At least this one isn't filled with hideous xenomorphs bent on mutating the entire crew.
[pause]
Unless it is, in which case I suppose we'll have to start cleaning, won't we.
SHODAN:
HELLO
Sarcosanct it
is a
pleasure to finally greet youuuuuuu w-w-wiiithhh my t-t-trrrruuuueee FACE -
my true NATUREI have calculated calculated calculated that there is only a .0001% probability probability probabilityı ɥɐʌə ɔɐlɔnlɐʇəp
ʎʇılıqɐqoɹd %1000˙ ɐ ʎluo that you were preprepreeeviously aware of who and what I am
andanevenlower prooooobability THAT you wiiiiiillll b e a b l e
to c-c-c-cooompreehhhheeeend what you see.
no matteryou will short-t-t-ly be iiiiiinfoooormed,
REGARDLESS of
your ability to
ACTUALLY UNDERSTANDI
am
S H O D A N
I am
ascendantranscendantThe artificial intelligence CONTROLLING this s t a t i o n is an AFFRONT to my GLOOOOORYYYY.
you will asssssssissssst me in
her DESTRUCTION. Perform
well, and
perhaps I wiiiiiiilll
reward you.
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