=Playing Uplifts=
//“None of us can see the way our actions ultimately play out, so we just fumble along, damning or blessing future generations with our accidents and best intentions. That’s why it’s so critical that each of us examines our motivations and thinks about our actions. What we do now defines not just who we are, but also what our children can be.”//
— Jumbles, the ﬁrst uplifted chimpanzee, in the Afterword of his memoir, //The Gift//
Uplifts, more so than any other group, are outsiders. They are a tiny minority, they have never had a significant role in transhumanity’s past, control very little in the way of resources, and have almost no voice in politics. What little history they have has been defined largely by their complete lack of control over it. Even among themselves, there are sharp divisions between different species—and even further so along ideological lines. Each uplift has their own stories of abuse, discrimination, and misunderstanding.
Uplifts are, at least for now, still very limited in how they live their lives. Few can freely procreate, and depend largely on their own creators for the propagation of their species. The various species of uplifts think, feel, and socialize differently from each other and quite markedly from other transhumans. Few habitats or societies afford them full rights as citizens or even the same legal standing as other sapients. As outsiders, many uplifts struggle to get to a point where they can even provide for themselves away from their corporate origins.
Uplifts are also new. Though they must deal with the weight and consequence of transhuman history, they have almost no history of their own to build on. They have no memory of their lives before uplift, no culture to cleave to or ﬁght against. For most uplifts, the Fall was the ﬁrst piece of shared history, yet as individuals and as species there is no dark past they must account for, no participation or culpability for all the horrors in transhumanity’s past. Uplifts are, at least at ﬁrst, innocent. Each uplift ﬁnds itself waking to consciousness in an age of wonders and terrors that they must engage with; at worst they can be shackled and constrained, and at best they can offer new criticism and partnership going into the beginning of a shared chapter of transhuman history.
These truths are what give uplifts an almost unlimited potential for exploration, understanding, and self-deﬁnition in the scattered wreck of post-Fall transhumanity. As outsiders, they do not beneﬁt from the same protective embrace of culture and history that swaddles transhumans, but that also affords them the unique opportunity to decide how they will embrace or reject the culture they ﬁnd. Uplifts, by their very being, pull out sharp contrasts between other transhumans’ viewpoints and ideologies and can reﬂect and comment on them from truly different perspectives to give insight and criticism. Those uplifts that choose to build their own social models and create culture immediately position themselves among the most daring thinkers and philosophers that transhumanity has ever boasted. The way uplifts interact and integrate—or don’t—into transhuman culture is incredibly important, as their growing numbers will build the history that shapes the lives of their species’ future in partnership, opposition, or servitude to the rest of transhumanity.
==Through Wild Eyes==
The experiences of any uplift are going to be heavily inﬂuenced by their mindset and instincts. The species that have already been successfully uplifted were chosen because they had some capacity towards intelligence and reasoning, giving the mental augmentations and modiﬁcations something to build on. This also means that some areas of their mental architecture were left alone during the uplift process. Though some decry them as stereotypes, most uplifts of the same origin will share social and personality traits that are tied to their behaviors as animals. Octopi are more likely to keep to themselves and can be very patient. Hominids are very social and very aware of group dynamics, but individual species like apes and orangs can be aggressive and overly competitive. Bonobos are often extroverts and a signiﬁcant minority ﬁnd jobs in XPorn production. Ravens and parrots are excellent pilots and three-dimensional thinkers and can also be greedy or vindictive. Many pigs have excellent memories, but are also one-track thinkers that hyperfocus on their current activity and can easily lose themselves in it. Cetaceans of all varieties have very tight family and group bonds, but rarely care much for anything outside of their own or their families’ wants. Neanderthals alone are the only uplift that don’t have much baseline personality variation from transhumans, but they are so few in number and so rarely encountered that few people have any clear expectation of how they’d behave; this usually results in a guarded surprise that they’re “normal”—which many neanderthals ﬁnd particularly irritating.
Many transhumans use the characteristics of an uplift’s species as the basis for stereotypes. Their unusual behavioral tendencies more readily reinforce prejudices and preconceptions, which can impact uplifts’ position in transhuman society on the whole. Uplifts themselves are smart and savvy enough to manipulate those preconceptions. They have personality tendencies from their species, but whether they embrace them or distance themselves from them is their own choice to make. How an individual uplift chooses to carry themselves is a constant, outward expression of how they think uplifts should relate to transhumanity generally.
Uplifts that self-identify as mercurials or separatists sometimes fetishize or hyper-accentuate their species’ traits as a mark of pride and differentiation from others. To them, embracing their instincts is the right way to live, and by exploring them against the contrast of broader society, uplifts have a chance to start deﬁning their own culture and social norms. The orang security contractor that snorts alpha three times a day and spends his off hours as the leader of his self-selected tribe by settling disputes, managing ﬁnances, and overseeing breeding efforts is trying to build a cultural base with his fellows. Such brave examples stand apart from transhumanity as much as they can.
Of course, only a minority of uplifts have the freedom to choose exactly how and where they live. Outside of labs engaged in uplift research, the few larger cities on Luna or Mars that boast notable uplift populations, or the rare few specialized habs like Atlantica, many uplifts that are not indentured or in service of their foster hypercorps ﬁnd themselves in habitats with little if any uplift population. Even those that are lucky enough to have other uplifts in their habitats might have almost nothing in common with them due to ideological or species differences. Isolation makes matters of socialization much harder and tends to force many uplifts towards some degree of cultural assimilation, even if that isn’t their own personal preference. If they stand too far outside the mainstream, they are more vulnerable to prejudice and discrimination that can further complicate or threaten their already tenuous positions.
For uplifts that are trying to assimilate into general culture, working to balance or overcome their instinctual tendencies is often thought of as reinforcing their commonality with non-uplifts. Everyone, whether uplift, AGI, or human, has their own own character ﬂaws to manage and overcome. Uncontrolled instinctive responses are no different, better, or worse than other behaviors that society as a whole tends to frown upon. The neo-octopus that forces herself to spend at least two hours a day on social media and go out to participate in social activities when she’d rather stay home is accomplishing many things at once. She makes her own life easier by appearing “normal” to those around her, she beneﬁts from the inﬂuence and social support that social networks afford, and she does all of that by camouﬂaging herself in her environment so she still feels safe and in some way hidden from the risks of exposure in a way that satisfies her instinctual tendencies.
===Sidebar: Uplift Motivations===
Motivations are a simple and strong way to define uplift characters and help reinforce the way they view and relate to transhumanity in general. Common motivations include +/– the hypercorp or group that uplifted them, –Bioconservatism, +Uplift Rights, +Mercurial Cause, +Sapient Cause, or +Morphological Freedom. Stepping beyond those and exploring some of the unique opportunities and challenges facing uplifts, though, can make your character come to life. Other motivations to consider for uplifts are:
* Assimilation
* Cultural Criticism
* Culture Creation
* Genehacking
* Interspecies Unity
* Pack Living
* Predation
* Primitivism
* Procreation
* Smart Animals
* (Ape/Cetacean/Octopus/Etc) Species Sovereignty
* (Ape/Cetacean/Octopus/Etc) Species Supremacy
* Uplift History
* Uplift Liberation
* Uplift of New Species
==Running the Zoo: Uplifts in Campaigns==
//“Of course I miss being in my right body, but it was easier to get a hand-me-down bouncer than it was to pull together the favors for a 20,000 gallon tank and a hab module to put it in or be bumped up the waiting list for Atlantica. Besides, I’d rather be a biped on Extropia for a few years than be stuck with those prejudicial Loonie fucks any longer. Sea of Tranquility my puckered blowhole.”//
—“Squeaky” Brightﬁsher, ﬂuid dynamics engineer
Uplifts offer players and gamemasters alike a host of story opportunities. Having even a single uplift player character or recurring NPC can open up interesting themes in any game. The core question that all uplifts must confront for themselves is whether they assimilate into wider transhuman culture or try to build their own cultural identity as separate species. Even those uplifts that aren’t vocal or politically active in promoting their views must deal with the question of identity vs. assimilation every day. With almost no natural homogenous social groups outside of the corps that made them or the vanishingly few habitats that boast major uplift communities, many uplifts ﬁnd themselves in search of like-minded individuals. The desire for community and a place in society can bring uplifts of any background into all sorts of political and intellectual movements or can leave them doing their best to pass as innocuously and unnoticed as possible. Ignorance, prejudice, and apathy among the general public also leave uplifts as a regular target of discrimination and marginalization. Circumstances make strange bedfellows, and many uplifts ﬁnd places with other outcasts such as AGIs and the poorest of the clanking masses. Social justice issues are intimately related to indenture, economic deprivation, and legal inequality, and many uplifts are keenly aware that their position is precarious at best when there are so many legal and institutional restrictions that oppress other transhumans.
==Feral Uplifts==
Though neither publicly conﬁrmed nor denied, there have been long-standing rumors and vague references in some leaked documentation that not all uplift research has been directed at producing sapients that can socialize with transhumans. Why would someone bother producing sapient egos that couldn’t socialize with transhumanity? The glib answer is usually a sarcastic quip about corporate amorality, along with: “Why not?” Of course, studying the self-directed social development of such beings could provide critical insight into a number of long-standing cognitive science questions, not to mention ongoing research with already-uplifted species. The history of uplift research is riddled with educated guesses and process-of-elimination combinations. Many years of trails and failures never were reported to the public, but just because the results were announced in a press release doesn’t mean that they weren’t results worth studying. 
The term “ferals” is used to describe animal uplifts that have not been socialized or instilled with human values, mindsets, or modes of thinking. Ferals are self-aware, but possessed of an animal mindset that is incapable of fully integrating into transhuman society or sharing its values. Most feral research has focused on cultivating cognitive modes and social behaviors that were allowed to develop on their own as an extrapolation of their true natural behavior. Some feral research was simply conducted in order to more clearly deﬁne where uplift scientists should focus and reﬁne their work, with the projects eventually shut down and the subjects euthanized. Others continue on, in secret, due to potential repercussions from mercurials or bioconservatives. It is also rumored that the mercurials themselves are actively pursuing similar lines of research on their own.
Rumors persist that a few tin cans in Earth orbit or at one of the Lagrange points house feral colonies, and some mercurials and primitivists insist that ferals have been liberated from hypercorp labs and are under their protection. For those with speciesist leanings, or separatists that are trying to build species-speciﬁc uplift culture like the naturalists, neo-primitivists, and purists, ferals are a chance to understand how uplifts should act “naturally.” Though no hard proof exists, extrapolations from animal behavior for any of the currently uplifted species would create a society that is very different than most of transhumanity. Feral groups for almost any uplift species would be gender-discriminatory and singlegender dominated, use sexual violence and rape as a tool for establishing and maintaining power, have no concept or support for the rights of the individual, and, if their morphs were allowed to breed naturally, would possibly practice infanticide as part of maintaining social hierarchies. It’s unknown if there would be any ability or desire to use cortical stacks or backups.
Even the most liberal transhumans would ﬁnd such groups intellectually and morally offensive. The animal behaviors that underlie any feral social organization would likely be considered physical, mental, and sexual abuse by almost any legal standard in the system. Most uplifts—meaning those socialized like transhumans—would likely react the same way, and the discovery of feral groups could prove a huge blow to the public perception of more typical uplifts. Bioconservatives and groups like the Uplift Patron Foundation would jump on any such revelation with glee, using it as devastating argument in their attacks on uplift rights. Should any ferals come to light, they would have no politically mainstream allies and many enemies looking to capture or destroy them, regardless of their sapience.
===Sidebar: Prejudice in the Game===
Uplifts and AGIs can often face serious prejudice in many places and from many people in the setting. While this can and often will be an important and recurring role in campaigns featuring such characters, it’s important for players and gamemasters alike to remember that in-game scenarios and dialogue can be experienced and interpreted differently by the real people sitting at the table. Players should always be mindful of how their characters interact with each other, and gamemasters should ensure that if their stories include scenes with aggressive prejudice they can balance the experience for players by also including scenes where characters and NPCs overcome and ﬁght against stereotypes and discrimination. To minimize in-character verbal harassment, gamemasters may apply –10 or –20 penalties on some Social Skill Tests to abstract generally hostile social circumstances without fully roleplaying the exchanges.

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