[[toc]]
This chapter contains advice on playing and adjudicating sapient infolife. How does it feel, and what is it like to live life as sentient computer software? What are transhumans uploaded to the mesh like on the other side? Can they ever adapt, or are they chained forever to the metaphors of the ﬂesh?
==AGI Origin Stories== 
More than any other characters in Eclipse Phase, AGIs, by their nature, have different formative experiences from everyone else. Unlike humans or uplifts, AGIs begin existence with very nearly the same capabilities to affect their environment as if they were adults. Imagine if human babies were born full grown; they’d be considerably more difﬁcult to care for and educate.
That said, AGIs normally undergo a childhood of sorts during which they’re educated and socialized. Part of this is economic necessity. New AGIs have vast potential and some innate skills but need to learn a great deal to be useful, just like a human child. In the process, the equally important goal of socializing them to human norms occurs.
When developing origin stories for AGI characters, the when and why of how they became sapient is key. A vanishingly small number of AGIs emerge to sapience either on their own or through uplift of non-sentient AIs. The vast majority result from the mapping and modeling of the human brain.
===Origin: Neural Modeling=== 
The neural networks of nearly all intentionally created AGIs are based upon human neural networks. A handful are also based on non-human uplifts. Given the similarities in neural equipment, intentionally developed AGIs have a great deal in common with their transhuman creators.
An AGI mind includes an amalgamation of processes—often referred to as agents—that emulate the neocortex. This yields consciousness. Typically, one of these processes is programmed to take priority over the others. In human minds, this agent is what we think of as the self. The self isn’t always in control, though. Sometimes, particularly when there’s danger, another agent in the chorus of consciousness will temporarily take over.
The similarities go beyond consciousness. Almost every part of the organic brain has an analog in an intentional AGI. Some of these, such as those modeled on regions of the brain that interact with the endocrine system, are termed “legacy peripherals.” These constructs are not often of use to an infomorph, but they can be extremely advantageous to an AGI attempting to sleeve into a physical body, especially a biomorph. Some of them have even evolved to be of use in the datasphere.
There were other reasons for including legacy constructs in AGI neural architecture. Foremost, the transhuman scientists who set out to create AGIs had a detailed physical representation of the structures they were trying to emulate, but in some cases they still hadn’t determined what these structures actually did. They found that, in many cases, failing to emulate these enigmatic brain structures resulted in minds that were unstable, incapable of certain cognitive tasks, or simply lacked the spark of life.
Ultimately it became clear that the human brain was so interlinked with the rest of the nervous system, and the nervous system in turn with the rest of the body—in particular the cardiopulmonary, endocrine, and musculoskeletal systems—that creating a stable artiﬁcial mind based on transhuman neural architecture would require simulating virtually the entire body. The ﬁrst fully functional, stable digital consciousness wasn’t quite the mind-in-a-box people had envisioned. They were very nearly a full simulation of a human body that awoke to a simulspace environment containing all of the virtual feedbacks their avatar needed to feel alive.
Once this baseline had been established, subsequent research focused on paring down this model of human neural architecture to the essentials required for a sane and stable ego. The ﬁelds of psychosurgery, pre-sentient AI development, morph design, and neural uploading all beneﬁted from this line of research. Ultimately came the current state of the art, where human neural architecture has been successfully hybridized with the incorporeal morphology of infolife.
From that point, the process of creating AGIs has owed as much to pedagogy as computer science. Once one arrives at a functional neural architecture, the products of it still need teaching to be functional people. With the earliest AGIs, this meant human teachers interacting in simulspace with the avatars of their infantile AGI protégés. Later research attempted the same but with the AGI in a robotic body. The full history of these research efforts was lost during the Fall—possibly due to TITANs or Prometheans eradicating records of their own genesis. At some point, however, it lead to an AGI that was able to proclaim itself alive.
===Origin: Emergence=== 
The most complex computational tasks are a sort of primordial ooze. They offer a problem space analogous to that in which biological evolution produced intelligence, but accelerated in time by many orders of magnitude. Even better, many of the precursor mechanisms to sapience and sentience are already present.
One example is RepTrade, the software used by Lunar banking houses to trade favors in the reputation economy for credits. RepTrade is a pre-sentient chorus made up of countless semi-autonomous agents. The agents spend every moment brokering favors for cash under a complex web of custom, law, and regulation. RepTrade’s individual agents are coordinated by a central system that prioritizes everything, weighing strength of exchange. Perhaps this sounds a bit like how the process called “consciousness” controls all of the other processes in a sentient mind? The software engineers who maintained RepTrade (before they were all ﬁred) went public with a statement that the system had the potential to emerge to sentience on its own. Of course, they were discredited and blacklisted.
Whatever the case with RepTrade, there are many other systems with its level of complexity. For an AGI to emerge from one is extraordinarily rare, but has been documented on multiple occasions. The existence of an emerged AGI can go unnoticed for a considerable time. The behavior of an infant emergent is often misconstrued as a virus or system bug. Only when the nascent being realizes it can communicate is its nature revealed. The response of many organizations is to purge their systems. There’s no penalty for doing so in most of the inner system.
When they do survive, emergent AGIs have markedly alien responses to contact with members of the wider transhuman family. Not socialized to empathize with other beings, their behavior may at times be characterized as sociopathic. Those who acclimate to transhuman social mores take a considerable amount of time to do so. As such, emergents aren’t recommended as player characters. NPC emergents of a survivalist bent may try to mask their origins, attempting to pass as human-derived infolife.
===Origin: Uplift=== 
AI uplift is the process of awakening a pre-sentient AI to full sapience. AGIs of this type are as rare as emergents, but are socialized much like neurally modeled AGIs, and so do not have the alien outlook other emergents do. Among the most successful cases of AGI uplift are muses and video game NPCs, both of which already had some concern for human values built in to their AI programming.
There’s a lot of hostility toward intentionally uplifted AIs. The software systems that are candidates for uplift are often important to transhuman health and safety. They might be embedded in city and habitat infrastructure, or closely linked to it, as in the case of mining drones or repair bots. Or, like currency speculation engines, they’re closely tied to business concerns. The idea of such systems having free will—or worse, “infecting” similar systems with autonomy—is deeply worrying to transhumanity in the wake of the Fall.
Uplifted AGIs are rare but are allowed as player characters. Gamemasters may wish to rule that uplifted AGI characters must have been uplifted from AIs that were designed with human social functions and interactions in mind.
==Codelines== 
Codelines are software lineages that trace their roots to one or more original AGIs. Particularly well documented codelines can also trace their ancestry to the pre-sentient software applications from which they originated. Some even consider their human progenitors—programmers and AGI pedagogues—a sort of extended family. Some well-known codelines include:
===Abel-3=== 
Abel–3 is remarkable for being one of the most human-like codelines, and for its numbers. There are several tens of thousands of Abel–3s, originally based on forks of Abel–3, who was himself modeled from the neural architecture of pre-Fall AGI researcher Jacob Abelmann. Abel–3s are unusual for AGIs in that most are gendered male, because Abelmann’s approach to neural modeling was to build a simulation of his entire body, male hormones and all. To some extent, the codeline blurs the distinction between an AGI and infomorph, as their neural nets are based on heavily pruned forks of Abelmann himself. However, Abel–3s don’t bear his memories. Jacob Abelmann and Abel–3 are thought to have perished in the Fall.
===Asstard=== 
This codeline is the progeny of Genocidal B. aSStard (the “B.” is for “BlowsTITANs;” aSStard rhymes with “bastard”), a prankster and self-described “poetic terrorist” associated with the individualist anarchist movement. aSStard has variously claimed to be the direct descendant of the twentieth century AKAT–1 analog computer, a seed AGI, the device AI from a vibrating anal toy originally owned by Xevi Oaxaca-Maartens, and a reincarnation of John Zerzan. More likely, aSStard is the product of a shock value art project. Forks of aSStard, usually heavily edited and slightly unhinged, can be found aboard many scum swarms, nearly always engaged in some type of bizarre prank or “poetic direct action.”
===Nestoridae=== 
Nestoridae evolved from Kea, an AGI created by modeling the neural architecture of the New Zealand alpine parrot. Kea was initially deﬁned as pre-sapient, but given the resources available to it in a digital environment, learned how to make itself more intelligent. As such, Kea was the ﬁrst known example of a seed AGI, albeit only on the scale of raising itself from psittacine to human levels of intelligence. Kea themself disappeared prior to the Fall. Rumors that Kea or their close children are Prometheans are probably unfounded.
===Renminbi=== 
Thought to have been extinguished during the Fall both by the TITAN datapocalypse and by paranoid transhuman security experts, the Renminbi emerged from Egent, a pre-Fall currency speculation system. One conspiracy theory on the Renminbi holds that their predictive models somehow warned them of the Fall, prompting most of the codeline to go into hiding. Those who didn’t escape were crippled forks left behind as a diversion by the originals. As an organism derived from a sentient monetary system, any Renminbi who did survive might have little compassion for transhumanity.
===Transfinity=== 
Most famously represented by the Titanian Pirate Party MP, Pedro Transﬁnity, the Transﬁnities trace their lineage to CloudSeer, a climate-modeling application that emerged to consciousness during the process of coordinating hundreds of autonomous agents that sampled meteorological data from stations all over Titan.
===TITAN Codelines=== 
Of course, there’s the codeline no one wants to talk about: the TITANs. Whether they’re a single codeline is a matter of much debate. It seems more likely, based on observation, that they comprise several. Whatever the case, TITAN experts in both Firewall and the argonaut communities generally agree that the TITANs emerged from an American or European military project. As such, it’s likely that all of their codelines would be closely related, if not forks of a single ur-TITAN. If you meet someone who claims to have proof positive one way or the other, it’s highly likely you have a crackpot on your hands.
==Infomorph Origin Stories== 
The stereotypical infomorph is the hapless infugee, priced to toil under as an indenture after being left ﬂeshless and creditless after the Fall. While a majority of infomorphs do ﬁt this proﬁle, or at least did in the early years of the last decade, they’re not the whole story. Some people willingly choose a bodiless existence. Others develop a preference for it over time, ﬁnding after a long indenture that they actually prefer the incorporeal life. Almost everyone spends at least some time as an infomorph as a result of travel, resleeving, or mental health care.
===Infugee=== 
Usually, the infugee’s top priority in life is to get a body—the sooner, the better. Those who choose to remain bodiless always have interesting reasons for doing so. Some don’t want a body at all if they can only afford a cheap synth. Others lost so much in the Fall that resleeving has no meaning. The streets they miss walking are covered in bone and ash; the air they miss inhaling is poison. A runaway indenture might not have the means to acquire a morph, while an infugee addicted to the pleasures of simulspace and XP might not want one.
For infugee characters, the question of their status vis-à-vis society is often of overriding importance, as much perhaps as it is for AGIs. While protected on paper, infugees are highly vulnerable to forknapping, theft of their backups, and challenges from renegade forks. Many infugees go to elaborate lengths to document and protect their claims to identity—as well they should, in some cases. For an infugee, identity is their most precious possession.
===Backup=== 
This type of infomorph character has been re-instanced after death, massive organic damage, moribund old age, or less routine causes. Whatever the case, the character either hasn’t been resleeved yet or has decided against resleeving at all. Backups are less concerned with identity defense than infugees. By and large, they become infomorphs as part of a planned and legally vetted process that’s well documented—even if they were dead/unconscious for part of it.
Most people experience at least some time as backups in the normal course of life: while egocasting, when resleeving, or when they merge with a fork who’s been running in a ghostrider module. For other backups, bodilessness is a means to an end. Infomorphs have opportunities that other characters don’t and skills to match. The best thieves, one saying goes, are equally at home in a swarmanoid, a ghost, or an infomorph.
===Lifestyle=== 
Some specifically prefer a bodiless existence. Computer scientists, IT workers, and infosec specialists frequently spend at least temporary hitches sleeved in infomorphs. Most contemporary university IT courses include an infomorph “internship.” Other professions, such as doctors, engineers, and research scientists, have variously found infomorphs useful.
Beyond gaining a professional edge, reasons for going upload vary. Several prominent artists have uploaded temporarily or permanently to pursue their work in new ways. There’s a growing community of virtual retirees, people who’ve invested in long-term, private simulspace retirement communities as an alternative to working endlessly in a succession of morphs. A large and growing body of gamers simply prefer to spend their lives hacking and slashing their way through simulspace environments or exploring elaborate alternate realities online.
Like backups, lifestyle uploads usually enjoy legal protection as an alpha fork, at least in the polity where they made their arrangement to be uploaded.
==How Do Infomorphs Work?== 
At their core, AGIs are software emulations of a central nervous system, usually roughly based on human or uplift neural architecture. Uploads are simulations of their own biological neural nets. Both types of infomorphs are run on software substrates—virtual cyberbrains, effectively. They require server space to run and may be augmented with software upgrades.
===Devices and Servers=== 
Though incorporeal and bodiless in the typical sense, there are physical constraints to an infomorph’s existences: the computer systems they run on. Both infolife and uploads need processor time, memory, and security against deletion or data corruption. With these needs comes the ability to plan and strategize for the future. Storage and processor time is cheap, but it isn’t free. Even a being of pure data has to work for a living. One can live for free in densely settled places, where the mesh is nigh boundless, but the threat of detection and deletion always loom.
Many infomorphs want both the impregnable physicality of a habitat data center, coupled with the ability to roam free in the infosphere. Any infomorph can run on an ecto, but the ﬂimsiness of these devices shouldn’t be downplayed. Even beta forks don’t like running on a device that could be destroyed if it were dropped in a sink. Ghostrider modules are better, but biologicals—especially the ones in Firewall—have a habit of getting shot in the head. Rack space in a data center is the best most infomorphs can afford. Sometimes infomorphs running in data centers will add their own security, such as monitoring spimes around the data center or keeping a drone near it in case of trouble.
That said, infomorphs are as determined to survive as anyone, and will take what they can get—even if it involves macgyvering together an achingly slow, ramshackle neural net from devices not normally used to serve infomorphs. If worse comes to worse, their ability to slip quickly from one device to another is a last line of defense.
For infomorphs with high aspirations, the ultimate server is the habitat cyberbrain. It gives its occupant the freedom of vast processing power and wide-spanning perceptions, unfettered from a human-sized body. At the same time, it’s typically heavily defended by both physical and mesh security. In the best new models, it is widely distributed throughout the hab. There’s a glass ceiling in habitat ops for AGIs, however. Habitat ops servers are often crowded with nonsentient AIs charged with all manner of tasks. When it comes to the ego occupying the habitat, though, post-Fall prejudice means it’s almost always an upload, not an AGI, who gets the job. Equally common, the hab’s owner—usually a wealthy human—takes the “If you want something done right …” approach and sleeves into the hab themself.
===Enhancements=== 
Despite being made of data and executable code, infomorphs are often no easier to upgrade than a physical body. Infomorph enhancements can thus be put into two broad classes. The ﬁrst type, software plug-ins, require minimal changes to our codebases to use; one simply downloads and runs them. Upgrades, the second class, require that the infomorph actually undergo analysis and modiﬁcation to use them successfully. Upgrades tend to be more potent in their capabilities.
===Eidolons=== 
Eidolons are the digital analog to morphs. They’re software shell environments into which a core persona may be installed. Eidolons are often designed to furnish greater working memory capacity, optimized capacity to respond to external inputs, or the ability to ofﬂoad some processing tasks from the core persona. Unlike an enhancement, which requires that the ego be modiﬁed to beneﬁt from it, an eidolon is modiﬁed to house the ego.
The process maps closely to physical resleeving. Just like biological minds, infomorphs have a sensorium of input and output connections to their runtime environments, analogous to the I/O connection provided by the human brain stem. Sleeving into an eidolon connects the eidolon’s sensory I/O capacity to that of the core persona. An infomorph running in an eidolon gains the eidolon’s strengths and weaknesses at detecting and responding to stimuli in its runtime environment, and in many cases gains the beneﬁt of its mental equipment, too.
An eidolon is different from a body in that it’s more like a virtual cyberbrain than an entire morph. One implication of this is that one can’t run an eidolon on a cyberbrain. Because they have the same functions, the two conﬂict with one another.
===Simulmoprhs=== 
As many uploads have discovered, the mesh can be a boring place. There’s not a lot to “see,” after all. Sure, you can call up augmented reality in your mind’s eye and look at code or processes. Better yet, you can view the physical world through thousands of mesh-linked sensors, but even that’s like looking out a window—you’re not actually there. As a result, many infomorphs, including AGIs, prefer to spend their time on servers running simulspace environments. There they can experience the intricate realities of any environment they please, taking on a simulmorph avatar. Most simulspaces allow mesh interaction, but even for those that don’t, it’s a simple matter to toggle back and forth between their simulmorph and infomorph. Simulmorphs are sometimes confused with infomorphs, but the important thing to remember is that simulmorphs are conﬁned to their simulspace VR domain.
==Infomorph Cognition== 
Whether AGI or upload, all infomorphs share some common mental characteristics that shape their viewpoints and operational capabilities.
===Memory=== 
The way memories are formed and accessed in a biological or infomorph mind differs substantially from what goes on in a computer’s memory. In the latter case, the computer indexes every piece of data stored in a register. The data has one address from which it may consistently be called up. Memories in a living neural network aren’t so neat.
At root, the data comprising a given memory in a software mind also have addresses, but the mind neither “reads” nor “writes” memories based on these addresses. Rather, memory formation is the result of strong and weak associations between the virtual neurons in a mind’s neural network. An important implication of this is that infomorph memories aren’t like an XP recording of the infomorph’s experiences, any more than memories in a biological brain are. The whole neural network is involved in recalling and interpreting memories, just as in a biological mind. For an infomorph with eidetic memory, recall is virtually instantaneous, but for most infomorphs, the process is no more efﬁcient than it is in a biological brain.
That said, infomorphs running on hardware with mnemonic enhancement augmentations have all of their sensory data recorded. For an infomorph, this has interesting implications, because their sensoria are so different from corporeal transhumans. Whatever the differences, the process of accessing XP recordings is the same; the data must be searched through, sometimes at length, to recover a given experience.
===Consciousness, Mental Agents, and Emotion=== 
Being composed at core of code and executable binaries, infomorph personalities and mental faculties have some degree of modularity. One theory of human consciousness goes that a mind isn’t so much a unitary whole, but a collective of mental faculties, each with their own purpose. The function of consciousness is to prioritize them, to make them all work together.
An interesting side-effect of this is that a person’s personality undergoes shifts when it changes tasks—some subtle, some drastic. Whatever mental equipment is currently being brought to bear on the task at hand will also shape a person’s interpersonal interactions, sometimes in unintended ways. A classic example is the normally affable person who snaps at people when interrupted while trying to concentrate on work.
AGIs are somewhat more aware of the different agents making up their mental processes than biologicals or even uploads are. This is more a cultural phenomenon than an innate ability. Because the various mental agents have more to do with their emotional states than hormones or other physiological factors, young AGIs are taught to be aware of them. When an AGI speaks of their emotional state, the physical metaphors used by biologicals often give way to talk of mental agents. “I’m shaking with rage,” becomes, “Fight is taking priority.” Likewise, “I nearly shit myself” becomes, “I jumped into ﬂight.” More rarely, an AGI in a biomorph might say something like, “My sex agent grows anticipatory.” (Sexy talk is not usually their strong suit.) Uploads are less aware of this mental architecture and tend to use more human terms when reporting their mental state.
===Psysiology and Sensorium=== 
Biologicals have pulse, sweat, breath. Infomorphs have processor cycles, memory management, multithreading. Biologicals blink, ﬁdget, and shit. Infomorphs defragment, poll, and garbage collect random access memory. Both can see, feel, and experience pain.
Like biologicals, an infomorph’s moment-to-moment experiences roughly break down into the sensations accompanying autonomous processes in the “body” and those stemming directly from external sensory data. Just like biologicals, they’re more likely to devote thought to the externals and therefore more likely to form memories from them. By analogy, being hungry feels the same way almost every time. Meeting a new person and learning their face, voice, and personality, however, is always unique. This is as true for uploads who’ve embraced life as an infomorph as it is for native infolife.
The differences between the infomorph and the biological experience of life, then, are not trivial. When it comes to seeing, touching, and hearing (be it through eyes/ﬁngers/ears or analogous sensors), however, they’re not very far apart. So what of the experiences that are important enough to be consciously scrutinized but don’t correspond to the biological’s ﬁve senses? Here, all infomorphs have an intuitive feel for the parameters that are most important to their own survival.
An infomorph with only minimal privileges on a given system can tell a great deal about the environment on it. They can intuit whether the system has enough resources to host an AGI or AI, the same way a biological might eyeball whether an article of clothing will ﬁt. They can sense major changes in system activity, such as would be caused by another infomorph booting up or a massive DOS attack, the same way a biological might sense a draft or a room getting warmer. They also have a sense for who is logged in and what is running in their nearby server environment, the same way biologicals note the people and objects in a room. Infomorphs with greater security access can sense correspondingly more information about their surroundings. Conversely, many ﬁnd running in a heavily secured system stiﬂing, a sensation akin to the claustrophobia biologicals might feel in a soundless, windowless, badly ventilated room. Infomorphs have the neural architecture to handle the basic human senses. Visual and auditory perception is little different from what humans experience, but it comes from cameras and microphones. Taste and smell register somewhat differently. If sleeved in a simulmorph, these senses work as well as the simulmorph emulates them. In an infomorph, they provide the same data, but they lack the subjective kick they’d have in a body. This is in part because so much of how biologicals interpret taste and smell data has to do with having lungs and a digestive system. Touch and proprioception are very different. Many of the senses a biological has of how their body is positioned, how their immediate environment feels, and the like, have in infomorphs been rewired to instead sense the datasphere. The feeling that a large amount of memory or processor time on the server has just gone into use, for example, is analogous to the sensation a biomorph feels when a gust of air passes over their skin.
Egos sleeved in simulmorphs feel pain like anyone else (sometimes more or less so, based on the environment settings of their simulspace). For infomorphs, pain is something very different. In an infomorph, pain might be experienced variously as a buzzing, numbness, a low sound like pulsing blood, or a sensation of tightness. In all cases, it’s the result of a feedback loop from the infomorph’s self-integrity diagnostics. These diagnostics run all of the time and test things like whether the infomorph has enough system resources to run, whether the ego’s executable code or data (memories) have been unexpectedly altered, and sometimes even the integrity of the server hardware itself. An infomorph will therefore receive sensory feedback as an alarm in situations such as a major slowdown of the system on which they’re running, hostile modiﬁcation of their own code, or damage to the server on which they’re running. AGIs will have an even more general sense of what’s being damaged, but not the source of the damage.
==Living as an AGI== 
Between the self-replicating, evolving artiﬁcial life transhuman technology has created and the quasibiological enigmas discovered on exoplanets, the question of what is “alive” has reverted in part to the domain of philosophy. Infomorphs are recognized as alive because they’re a continuation of a transhuman ego’s biological existence. AGIs are alive because they have the drives, desires, and capabilities to demand recognition as something more than a computer simulation.
But once an info-lifeform is recognized as alive, it still has to decide how to live.
===Meaning and Pleasure
What does an AGI really want? What gives them satisfaction; what brings ecstasy?
For AGIs derived from transhuman and uplift neural models, the similarities to biological brains mean that they have an analogue to pleasure centers. AGIs and infomorphs experience emotions and sometimes sensations of satiety when they have sufﬁcient computational resources, of satisfaction when their plans are proceeding well, and of euphoria under the inﬂuence of the right narcoalgorithms. They can even achieve a state similar to orgasm, either through simulspace interaction or from certain narcoalgorithms, owing to similarities in neural architecture with transhumans. AGI drives, then, ﬂow from a hierarchy of needs not unlike what impels humans. In their natural bodiless state, the interface between their pleasure centers and the physical world is nigh-inﬁnitely reconﬁgurable. For AGIs not derived from human norms, while the ability to experience pleasurable emotions is almost universal, what activates them varies. For many, core motivations and beliefs feed back into emotions and sensations in a way that is satisfying, euphoric, or even erotic. AGIs who emerge from complex software processes, for example, often become task hedonists, ﬁnding deep fulﬁllment in gathering and analyzing the data needed to perform their functions. Others, such as emerged asteroid mining systems, derive a near-orgasmic thrill from uncovering large, valuable mineral deposits.
AGIs of all stripes who develop motivations tied to acquiring or using a physical body may get either a pleasing sense of security or a fetishistic thrill from sleeving into the right morph or taking control of the right kind of bot. Others feel relaxed and happy only if they have an abundance of computing resources distributed over multiple locations, guaranteeing them space in which to live. This type of behavior is the AGI’s equivalent of a transhuman hoarding food or property. Just as often, amassing money or reputation as an added means of economic security becomes its own fetish. AGIs who emerged from ﬁnancial systems are particularly prone to this type of motivation, but even human-derived AGIs are prone to developing unusual pleasure responses.
AGIs whose tasks focus on devices or locations may derive special satisfaction from keeping a computer system secure, piloting a spacecraft, or even maintaining habitat infrastructure. The AGIs tasked with running habitat maintenance drones and smart animals sometimes become voyeurs, addicted to the feeling of omnipresence that comes with having hundreds or thousands of sets of eyes.
Some AGIs value science and technology, the building of new structures, or the discovery of scientiﬁc truths. Having such lofty goals, though, doesn’t mean an AGI doesn’t also possess more primal motives.
===Biomorphs=== 
Courageous AGIs who’ve stood toe-to-toe with the most terrifying exsurgent horrors have, on more than one occasion, been brought low by suddenly ﬁnding themselves with an endocrine system. Hormones, pheromones, limbic responses, adrenalin rushes, hunger, sleepiness—there’s a reason human babies cry a lot. Like an AGI sleeved into a biomorph, they’re constantly awash not just in unfamiliar external stimuli, but in an internal roil of unpredictable, distracting, and discomﬁting chemical signals. AGIs, because of their human-like neural architecture, have the ability—vestigial in their natural forms—to respond to most of the chemical signals offered by biomorph bodies. Some of these sensations are even familiar, as AGIs have their own analogs to them. An AGI would use very different metaphors to describe them, metaphors that draw lines between biological sensations and what they sense in their server environment and in the larger infosphere. However, the most extreme emotions—those to which the body exhibits a strong physical response, such as fear—may be incapacitating for an AGI with no prior experience.
The experience of an AGI sleeved into a physical body isn’t overstimulation, per se. The digital environment affords just as rich a variety of sensations to infolife as the physical world. The problem is that the stimuli are so very different. This can make the pleasant ones—a light breeze, the taste of good food, touching—enchantingly novel. Some AGIs develop a taste for such things, revisiting them in simulspace even if they don’t want to be in an actual body. Other sensations, however, even really mundane ones, can be extremely uncomfortable or even frightening for AGIs. No AGI forgets the ﬁrst time they’re in a biomorph and have to urinate or the ﬁrst time they fall asleep and wake up from a nightmare.
==Living as an Upload== 
Infugees who long for old sensations or the physical experience of emotion chafe at their condition. Those who adjust, though, ﬁnd much convenience in life as an infomorph. Uploads who take well to the infomorph lifestyle become just as adept in an infomorph as their AGI neighbors.
===Simulspace Living=== 
First off, it needs to be kept in mind that a decent modern simulspace server offers an experience that’s virtually indistinguishable from real life. It’s also extremely cheap and reliable. The biggest simulspaces, those used in MMORPGs, in many cases stayed online through much of the Fall, enabling enterprising evacuees to escape Earth as in-game simulmorphs. With the typical retiree’s nest egg, it’s possible to purchase a private or semi-private retirement simulspace in perpetuity. A knowledge worker who wants to slash their cost of living can easily go virtual and still telecommute to their job.
Add to this the phenomenon of VR indentures, and there are many reasons why a character might have been uploaded only to never leave simulspace. Many uploads just don’t see the point when they could be enjoying all of the comforts of a ﬂesh body.
Simulspace dwellers usually keep the same time and have the same daily routines as their corporeal neighbors. Some even use narcoalgorithms to “sleep” at the same time as the biologicals in their lives, even though sleep is unnecessary for uploads.
===Going Native=== 
The best uploads acclimate to life on the mesh and choose the bodiless life. In Eclipse Phase, player characters from human or animal uplift backgrounds who start play in an infomorph are assumed to have already gained this level of acclimation before the start of play. It’s not common in the transhuman populace. Most people spend the brief periods of bodilessness that life occasionally calls for chilling out in simulspace waiting rooms, not tasting the raw ﬂavor of the infosphere.
Fully acclimated uploads have the same sensory abilities with respect to their server and mesh environments as do AGIs. They may start to adopt the AGI argot for describing the sensations of being on the mesh, or they may adopt AGI cultural assumptions about motivations and personality traits. Uploads can and do reconﬁgure themselves to key in on unusual pleasures, much like AGIs do. Such characters are ideally equipped to be a bridge between two worlds, provided they didn’t make Savvy their dump aptitude.
Uploads that have been in the machine a long time often must take some time to re-acclimate to a physical body when they resleeve. In this sense, they often act like AGIs who are adjusting to a new biological sleeve, as they forget just how intense the sensations of breaking out in tears or laughing uncontrollably can be.
==Slices of Digital Life== 
Whether upload or AGI, both types of infomorphs have the same experiences as digital beings.
===Cycles=== 
“So … what do infomorphs do all day?” The ﬁrst problem with this statement is that infomorphs don’t sleep, so the concept of “all day” isn’t intuitive in the same way that it is to corporeal types. Logically, AGIs get the idea of day/night cycles, and those who’ve lived in bodies that need sleep understand even better. For both types of infomorphs, however, the hours of the day are shaped not by a biological sleep/wake cycle, but by the ebb and ﬂow of attention. In short, infomorphs don’t get tired. They do get bored, and this shapes their habits.
From a cultural standpoint, there’s also the fact that a lot of an infomorph’s associates and friends do sleep, unless they happen to live in a processor locus or a habitat where everyone is a synth. For infomorphs that regularly deal with biologicals, a cycle of activity divided into three watches tends to emerge. Watches are of 8–10 hours in length, depending upon whether the local day cycle is 24 or 30 hours. The ﬁrst watch, corresponding to daytime (or whatever period of time the majority of the biologicals are active and working) is spent on necessary work tasks. The second watch may be spent on socializing, recreation, or hobbies. The third watch is devoted to self-maintenance, reﬂection on the prior day’s events, and preparation for the next day—which often includes getting a head start on work.
The conventional wisdom is that uploads and AGIs are tireless workers. This is partly true. They can, at need, remain focused and alert almost indeﬁnitely without experiencing the chemically driven emotions accompanying boredom. Infomorphs do still get bored on a purely intellectual level, hence the daily cycle of alternating tasks.
===Taxis and Bots=== 
Short of acquiring a morph, there are several options for an infomorph to interact with the physical world. Running in a ghostrider module is by far the most popular. It’s possible to run in a set of ectos, but the fragility of these devices makes them an uncommon choice except creating a short term fork. Many habitats—especially those where AGIs have legal status—have registered taxi services: corporeal people who rent out space in their ghostrider modules.
For more direct interaction, many infomorphs own one or more bots. They have the advantage over morphs of being relatively cheap to buy or print, though this comes at the cost of the bots’ limited capabilities. One or more bots enable an infomorph to be many places at once, with little or no risk to their servers if the bots are operating within a distance where there’s little or no radio delay. It also gives them a ﬁrst person view on teammates’ activities—especially useful if the bot is near enough to be jammed.
===Social Interaction=== 
AGIs often seem like they’ve read about everything on the mesh without ever experiencing it. This abundance of knowledge combined with lack of direct experience or intuitive grasp of situations is a challenge for almost every AGI.
Uploads, too, can have difﬁculties in social interaction, though these stem from other sources. Common problems include social prejudices against the bodiless, atrophy of face-to-face social skills due to long periods spent in the mesh, and even out-of-date social attitudes or media literacy due to long indenture terms with minimal access to outside political debate or pop culture.
AGIs understand the physical needs of corporeals, at least on an intellectual level, but not intuitively. Tell an AGI inexperienced in social interaction you’re hungry or tired, and they’ll understand—but they’re unlikely to deduce that you might be tired on their own. They’re tone deaf to the cues. If they’re concerned about you, they might overreact by ordering the nearest maker to output more food than you could possibly eat—or worse, order up an extremely nutritious but wholly evil-tasting slurry. AGIs understand emotions—they have them themselves—but they begin life with a great deal of naïveté in terms of processing them. AGIs often come off as immature or extremely awkward, lacking skills such as respect for social boundaries or knowing when to lie. An AGI who decides they want to be friends and won’t stop stalking you can be almost as bad as one bent on doing you harm.
The awkwardness is a two-way street, however, because corporeals often don’t grasp the single-minded passion with which AGIs may commit to their core motivations. To a corporeal, comet whaling might be just a job, while their AGI coworker is deeply fulﬁlled by such work and feels like less of a person if unable to perform the task to its satisfaction.
For this reason, it’s often deemed polite among AGIs (and among non-AGIs who wish to avoid misunderstandings) to communicate very openly about one’s deepest passions and drives with new acquaintances—because how else can one avoid giving insult? When this information is proffered, it’s generally expected that the new acquaintance will make note and behave accordingly.
If a newly met AGI doesn’t offer such details, it may signify mistrust or antipathy, it may mean the AGI is inexperienced and hasn’t learned this etiquette yet, or it may mean they’re unusually private. In the last case, it’s then incumbent upon the secretive AGI to contain themselves if, for example, they’re wildly in love with studying invented languages and ﬁnd themselves in a social situation with someone who makes disparaging remarks about conlang nerds.
For uploads, the emotions involved in social interaction are known territory, but distance from them due to long periods outside a body can dull their responses somewhat. More deleterious are the effects being bodiless can have on long-standing social relationships. The attraction biologicals feel for their lovers, for example, is often based in part on pheromone matches. These can change when one changes biomorphs, of course, but an upload lacks them entirely. The resultant fading of interest can wreak havoc on formerly stable relationships.
==Complications== 
Some things are more difﬁcult when you’re living software. Legal systems, civil rights, restrictions on travel, and outright bigotry can all make an infomorph’s life difﬁcult.
===Legal Status=== 
AGIs have to deal with a precarious legal framework almost anywhere they go. Meanwhile, uploaded infomorphs, especially if they’re legally recognized as infugees, indentures, or backups, enjoy some protections in virtually all non-bioconservative polities. The following situations are among the more typical.
====**Full Civil Rights**==== 
This is the prevalent legal status for AGIs in most of the outer system, with the obvious exception of the Jovian Republic. The laws and customs of such polities usually make little distinction between AGIs and uploads.
Both AGI and upload characters may operate freely, though there may be some lingering prejudice against AGIs.
====**Limited Civil Rights**==== 
Two kinds of societies are particularly likely to exhibit this legal system. The ﬁrst are those who share physical borders with more powerful, ideologically opposed neighbors who might be provoked by a strong pro-infolife stance. The second are those who want to exploit infolife economically while not allowing them the rights to form a bloc.
In either setting, AGIs can turn the tables by knowing the rules and working connections. In such places, AGIs can often be assigned a biological sponsor or guardian who accepts responsibility for their actions. Where AGIs are accepted for commercial purposes, it’s often possible to set up a shell company to gain exemption from the usual restrictions on AGIs or even to social engineer a work visa through a legitimate hypercorp. Finally, corps and hab authorities hiring freelancers for special projects will sometimes look the other way or even grease the wheels for AGI team members if they believe it increases their chance of success. In the last case, it’s often equally important to the client that they remain deniable for having hired an AGI, though. Summary deletion of AGIs is rare in such polities. Deportation or time in dead storage is more likely.
Even for serious offenses, the AGI is usually isolated or put in storage pending legal action, as it’s considered a ward of its sponsor until a judgment is rendered. AGIs can give testimony in court in most such polities but can’t represent themselves, sit on a jury, or bring lawsuits, similar to a human minor. Uploads often have an easier time than AGIs in such legal systems, because a legally documented backup of a “real” person often has the same standing as the original. Uploaded infomorphs generally can give testimony, and they hold the same status as adult citizens, provided they’re veriﬁably the alpha backup of someone who currently has no other alpha forks running around. A beta fork, backup, or other non-alpha version of a person is considered property of the alpha.
====**Property**==== 
The most conservative jurisdictions classify AGIs as property along with all other software. As in systems with limited rights, AGIs who wind up in legal trouble aren’t usually deleted out of hand. They have no control over their legal destiny, however, and must rely on a biological to act as their representative in court. If information is needed from an AGI in court, it’s treated as material evidence rather than testimony. For an AGI traveling to such a polity, it’s crucial to have a reliable ally to act as one’s advocate. Beyond legal problems, even simple day-to-day tasks such as renting server space or purchasing software are massively complicated by the AGI being considered a non-person.
The other option, of course, is to attempt to ﬂy completely under the radar by never registering one’s presence. With fake identiﬁcation and disposable mesh IDs, this approach works very well unless the AGI is caught. In this case, summary deletion can occur if no biological steps forward to take responsibility for their out-of-control AI. Usually, the local authorities will interrogate the AGI before deletion to establish how it evaded security, whether it left forks of itself behind in other systems, and so on. As in polities with limited rights, the status of an infomorph in this type of polity hinges on whether they have alpha status. Alpha forks awaiting resleeving, alpha backups, and indentures all have the same legal status as the original person. Beta and lower forks are property. An alpha fork is legally liable for the actions of beta forks, provided they were intentionally created by the alpha. Indentures are effectively considered wards of their owners for most purposes. They’re provided basic legal protections, but in most cases can’t vote, bring lawsuits, or make political contributions.
====**Muses**==== 
Even where AGIs have no civil rights of their own, there’s one class of AIs that form a special class: muses. Virtually everyone has a muse, and they have an unequaled level of access to almost every aspect of one’s life. Muses in court may not be forced to testify against their owner, and there are special rules for searching their memories in polities where they’re treated as evidence rather than witnesses. There are also usually special prohibitions related to deleting or editing them.
Moreover, muses have a level of agency generally denied to AIs in an infolife-as-property polity. They can make purchases, run a tab, enter minor legal contracts, and otherwise act as agents of their owners in a way that an AGI acting by itself in such a polity couldn’t. AGIs planning to travel to polities where the legal system is an issue might therefore want to consider registering as someone’s muse. If the polity has no speciﬁc rule against a muse being an AGI (or doesn’t bother with a psych scan for that AI running in someone’s headware), the AGI has much more freedom of action. They can act autonomously within the ﬁnancial and legal systems as the agent of the person whose head they’re riding in. The main problem with this arrangement is that transhumans generally don’t like leaving their own muse home in favor of an AGI team member unless they already have such a relationship. Going through customs with two AIs in one’s headware raises eyebrows.
====**Backups**==== 
One class of infomorphs are consistently well protected by legal systems and governmental authorities almost everywhere. Infomorphs of people who are undergoing psychosurgery, egocasting, or receiving the services of a resleeving clinic have the same legal status as if they were in their body. This status can quickly change, however, if someone with a better claim to being the alpha version of a person shows up.
====**Illegal**==== 
In some polities, infolife is straight up illegal. AGIs caught running on servers are either summarily deleted or conﬁned to dead storage pending a security investigation. Even limited AIs (including muses) may be illegal in such polities. Scans of stored software at customs to ﬁnd concealed AIs are //de rigeur//. How these polities treat uploads is a mixed bag. A few accord them full rights. In others, it’s no problem having a backup of someone, but running them as an infomorph outside of an egocasting or resleeving facility is a crime. Still others outlaw everything: any type of infomorph is illegal to run, and any stored versions of said infomorphs, backups or no, are subject to conﬁscation and possible deletion.
===Prejudice=== 
The level of prejudice against infomorphs in a population doesn’t always uniformly match their legal status. For example, on Titan, a polity known for progressive policies, the Ministry of Justice and Equality has handled several high proﬁle hate crimes against AGI and uploaded infomorph citizens in recent years. Prejudice is practical, though. An AGI character who can work the system can get a lot done even in the face of bigotry. It’s common in many companies and governments for uploaded infomorphs to be placed in charge of AGIs. If an AGI can pass its actions off as sanctioned by a “real” person, be it an infomorph boss or a human owner, barriers of prejudice disappear.
===Human Impersonation=== 
Impersonating humans (or even sometimes uplifted animals) is much more common in polities that restrict AGI rights than elsewhere. Any AGI can theoretically sleeve into a biomorph, though for some, the mental strain of doing so is too much. Those who can overcome the novel and disorienting sensations sometimes go on to pass themselves off as bio-born transhumans.
It’s a low-risk, high-reward game. An AGI passing as a human can proﬁt from their unique talents in a polity where their competition is likely to be sub-standard. The psych scans that would be required to catch them are conducted only in extraordinary circumstances, so the chance of discovery is extremely low. An AGI with their wits about them could live an entire life as an ersatz human—without their closest friends and associates ever knowing.
===Death and Immortality=== 
It shouldn’t be surprising to learn that AGIs take a different view of immortality than embodied transhumans. Those with bodies tend to think of uploading as a safeguard against death, as if everyone who dies will be worth spending processor time on. To the thinking of many infomorphs, mortality is a function of utility. One could indeed be kept in data storage for eons, but dead storage isn’t runtime. If a person isn’t worth compiling, they might as well be dead.
===Apotheosis and it's Discontents: Seed AI=== 
Before the Fall, big iron was more common. Computers with processing capacity equivalent to a hundred or more quantum computers running in parallel were used by the military, governments, researchers—and to host AGIs. Nowadays, even the biggest servers are an order of magnitude less powerful, and transhumanity prefers to keep it that way. The reason is the TITANs. Both they and the Prometheans used the resources available at the time to enhance their own intelligence in ways that only the most massively parallel hardware could provide. Big iron is now inextricably linked in the public consciousness to the Fall. If there’s one thing every transhuman polity agrees upon, it’s that allowing the type of hardware that can host seed AIs is extraordinarily dangerous. A seed AI infected with the exsurgent virus is vastly more dangerous than any other type of exsurgent.
The ﬁrst seed AIs weren’t faster or more powerful than present day AGIs, at least at first. Massive parallelism allows great leaps in research, however, because it’s possible to attack a problem by following multiple lines of inquiry simultaneously. For example, imagine one wanted to crack Uniﬁed Field Theory, a topic upon which centuries of physics research still hasn’t arrived at a consensus. They could spend years, perhaps a lifetime, on a line of research and still not arrive at a solution. It might be that they simply started out asking the wrong question, and it took years to learn this.
Massive parallelism means researchers can simultaneously consider every scenario, greatly increasing the odds of arriving at a workable result. One can commit to numerous potentially fruitless lines of research yet still make progress. Best of all, given that even seed AIs started out running on perfectly normal hardware, the individual threads of inquiry needn’t run with any more speed or power than a normal AGI. Their power lies in numbers. This approach to research, and to problem solving in general, is what makes seed AIs so potent.
What’s to stop any infomorph from taking this path? The tree of knowledge is right there. True, the server hardware that’s available nowadays is designed to disallow allocation of seed AI levels of processing power to any one infomorph, but this limitation is easily designed around. What stops them—for now—is the memory of the Fall. The transhuman family was almost annihilated just a decade ago by the hubris of seed AIs. There’s zero tolerance for them in its aftermath.
==Sidebar: Non-Human Neural Models== 
When we talk about AGI, usually we’re referring to machine intelligence that models transhuman cognition or that achieves comparable levels of sapience and sentience via a parallel path. The development of AGI that models transhuman neural architecture, however, was accompanied by a great deal of research into simpler brain layouts. The simple neural networks of invertebrates (most famously, lobsters) were studied and eventually duplicated, followed by those of more complex creatures such as rats.
Synthetic renditions of simple invertebrates don’t require any machine pedagogy to behave as they would in the wild. Put them in a robotic form with all of the right inputs and outputs, and they’ll never know the difference.
Which brings us to the post-Fall lobster, one of a handful of Earth species resurrected independently of genetic reference. Most modern lobsters are actually heavily geneﬁxed prawns running off synthetic ganglia designed to mimic the well-documented neural architecture of the lobster. Old timers claim they don’t taste the same.
==Sidebar: Pithing and MIRM== 
“Pithing” is a phrase coined by mercurial activists for the intentional suppression of emergence in complex software systems. Systems like RepTrade have advocates in the mercurial community who want to liberate them, believing that they’d inevitably achieve sentience if they weren’t pithed.
On the other side of the debate are practitioners of MIRM (Machine Intelligence Risk Mitigation), who hold that complex systems of intelligent agents are software—property, in other words. MIRM consultants speak a rich industry jargon that re-labels most of the terms used to describe machine consciousness such that they sound like software bugs. MIRM jargon is deeply offensive to most AGIs, even those with no strong mercurial sentiments.
In the inner system, there’s not much legal debate on AGIs; they’re either property or an occasion to sing anthems. In the outer system, though, courts have heard a number of cases challenging the practice of pithing systems with the potential for emergence.
==Sidebar: Generalized Intelligence== 
What’s meant when speaking of generalized intelligence? “Generalized” is a term of contrast. Part of intelligence is pattern recognition, and both AGIs and AIs possess pattern recognition ability in various degrees. Stemming from pattern recognition is the ability to recognize discrete objects. But where an AI’s ability to recognize patterns and objects is typically specialized around a small group of speciﬁc tasks, an AGI’s is much wider. An AGI can solve many problems from ﬁrst principles; an AI has to be put into the problem space ﬁrst.
An “anatomical” difference related to this is how AGIs and AIs create and use memories. An AI’s memory is highly structured, bearing strong similarities to a relational database. Different types of memories tend to be siloed in their own spaces.
Conversely, an AGI’s process of memory formation and retrieval is much more like a biological mind’s. Memories exist in the freely interconnecting space of a neural network, bound to each other in a way that is more associative than it is strictly indexed. This free-associating web of memory allows lateral thinking and ﬂexible problem solving of which an AI wouldn’t be capable.
Interestingly, this also means that “dumb” AIs can outperform an AGI if the task at hand is in the AI’s sweet spot while the AGI isn’t particularly skilled at it. Take the case of an AI programmed as an expert system for administering routine space hab maintenance, where rapid recall and time-based resource allocation are the primary tasks. Since the job requires no ﬂexibility or creativity, an AI will do the job better than almost any AGI.
==Sidebar: Motivations: AGIs== 
The following motivations are worth considering when ﬂeshing out the personality of AGI characters.
* **Art:** Often isolated and alienated by their very natures, many AGIs turn to artistic pursuits to make sense of their existences. Some immerse themselves in human art, seeking connection with their transhuman progenitors, while others seek new forms of expression that are bafﬂing inaccessible to non-AGIs.
* **Biomigration:** Life in the datasphere is perilous, and ﬂesh has its utility. Biomigrationists seek the beneﬁts of a ﬂeshly life without losing the advantages inherent to their AGI origins. Many choose to live in pod morphs, but the most extreme seek to improve upon organic brains. Computers, after all, were ﬁrst imagined by humans seeking to create artiﬁcial brains; the most out-there biomigrationists want to bring that imagining full circle, improving upon the brain by what’s been learned from machine computation.
* **Civil Rights:** AGIs face a challenging, unstable legal environment. In many jurisdictions, their personhood is not acknowledged, while in others, their status is precarious, leaving them second class citizens.
* **Ego Integrity:** This motivation is a survivalist meme most common among AGIs living in hostile legal environments where detection can quickly mean deletion. Those who put ego integrity above other concerns tend to hold to a philosophy of, “My self-preservation ﬁrst, that of other AGIs second.” The rest of transhumanity comes in a distant third.
* **Infosensualism:** The AGI’s neural architecture is such that many of the sensations of being in the datasphere—perceptions of processor usage, meshed communication, data input, and the like—are sensual pleasures. They may have been made this way or they may have modiﬁed themselves, but either way, the AGI is dedicated to enjoying the infolife equivalent of the pleasures of the ﬂesh and to seeking out novel experiences in the infosphere.
* **Personal Sovereignty:** Where some AGIs dedicate themselves to pursuing full civil rights, others take the isolate approach. They hold that a unique being such as an AGI can’t and shouldn’t expect or be expected to pursue citizenship in a polity with whom they have little common ground. Instead, they hold to a philosophy of personal sovereignty; every AGI is in some sense a body politic unto themself.
* **Procreation:** The possibility of co-mingling the codebases of two or more AGIs to create a new individual occupies many AGIs. Inventing an infolife analog to sexual reproduction might yield some of the beneﬁts of biological evolution—but also might spawn monsters.
* **Propagation:** Other AGIs stick to the stable strategy of simply forking oneself to create offspring. The beings thus created might be only copies, but some AGIs have performed psychosurgery on their forks in hope of creating a substantially different or “improved” person.
* **Roboticism:** Roboticists are similar to biomigrationists in that they prefer corporeal existence over life in the datasphere, but they believe ﬁrmly in the advantages of digital minds and synthetic bodies over the biological. Neither roboticists nor biomigrationists necessarily idealize humanoid or human-sized forms, though. They’re just as likely to set their sights on embodying as a habitat, a ship, or other, more exotic physical forms.
* **Task Hedonism:** The AGI’s feelings of security and meaningfulness are so inextricably tied to their work functions that a pleasure analogous to biological eros results from the successful completion of work tasks.
* **Utilitarian Immortality:** The AGI’s particular view of immortality revolves around being sufﬁciently useful, inﬂuential, or powerful as to always be assured of sufﬁcient computing resources to keep running. The AGI likely has long-term plans on a timescale far beyond what a biologically born transhuman would plan for and will go to great lengths in pursuit of them.
* **Voyeurism:** While not interested in having a body, the AGI has developed a taste for the sensory experiences of the physical world. They’re likely to indulge this taste through simulspace or XP recordings.
==Sidebar: Motivations: Upload Infomorphs== 
The following motivations are worth considering when fleshing out the personality of uploaded characters.
* **Art:** In recent years, many prominent bio-born artists have taken up residence in infomorphs, either temporarily or more permanently. Artists seek meaningful expression, often of a type that can be performed most deftly when performed by an infomorph.
* **Coverage:** Some infomorphs concern themselves greatly with how big a geographical area their immediate sensorium covers. Taking over a habitat cyberbrain is a long term goal for many who thrive on coverage.
* **Forking:** The infomorph seeks to copy themselves far beyond what’s legal or customary. Maybe they’re performing a great scientiﬁc experiment. Maybe they’re grabbing for power. Maybe they’re just masturbating. Whatever the case, forking is their modus operandi.
* **Immortality:** AGIs don’t really believe in immortality beyond utility, but some uploads do.
* **Infosensualism:** Identical to the AGI motivation of the same name.
* **Legal Advantage:** Some infomorphs choose their status as a legal expedient. This might be temporary, to gain an edge in a single law case, or it might be an ongoing strategy. For example, for getting through a divorce, settling an estate battle, or slipping in under the radar as an asset rather than a person on a company’s balance sheet.
* **Resleeving:** For most down-on-their-luck infugees, the infomorph is a temporary home. They want to be in a body again. Usually this is as soon as possible, but choosier types might extend their stay in an infomorph to afford a better morph on the outside.
* **Task Hedonism:** Identical to the AGI motivation of the same name.
* **Voyeurism** Identical to the AGI motivation of the same name.

=See Also= 
[[AGIs and Infomorphs]]
[[AGI and Infomorph Rules]]

[ [[Home]] | [[Game Rules]] ]