[Crimsondude]

Well, since not everything had unlimited storage memory in SR3 there wouldn't necessarily be a reason to suspect a bunch of cyber that didn't have it. That said, Renraku could have and probably did carve that shit out of their citizens anyway.

But any storage memory, and especially storage systems specifically designed for the wearer to not access? That stuff is getting ripped out in a second because cyber is cyber (Deus made them more productive. Yay), but data is special. But it is simply a matter of short-sighted, blatantly stupid tactics for Deus to be put into a thousand datalocks. And frankly I don't care what the book says (I say this having nothing to do with CGL. If Jason tells me that I have to obey SF, then that's that)., because it is from every conceivable perspective outright stupidity. It also diminishes a great deal of the mystery behind what Deus did and was able to do.

But this is just one more reason why I think System Failure is hugely, fatally flawed.

[Mirikon]

Except wasn't that ware designed to be difficult, if not impossible, to detect with scanners? Are you going to have a mage assense every one of the 100K or so people coming out of the arcology before they have a chance to escape? And since Renraku was not allowed to keep a large force amongst the UCAS army (due to people fearing another San Francisco), they would have had trouble corralling all those people long enough to get any ware out of them.

Sure, if it was a group of ten or fifty or even a hundred, that might be an option. But where are you going to keep 100K people isolated in the middle of downtown Seattle? Especially since ten years later they still haven't cleared out all of Deus's 'toys' in the SCIRE.

Add to that the media presence focused on the SCIRE by the fact that there is a task force of the UCAS army out in the streets of Seattle, and there is no way to cover up moving all those people to undisclosed locations. Or were they going to lobotomize people in the lobby before sending them out to meet their families?

Again, on a small scale, you're right. But this is much, much larger than small scale, so you're not going to be able to keep track of everyone before they scatter, especially when most of your attention is on defeating the remaining enemies inside the building.

[Crimsondude]

You're off by a factor of ten. The numbers of survivors are inconsistent, but the highest number was less than 10,000 (SSG), but there was also one description that was around 2,500.

Ultimately, it comes down to two very different ideas about what the Network was supposed to be, and both were written into the game. I am biased towards the material written by Hyatt, Schoner, and Levine, whose material in Threats 2 seems more "pure" to the idea than what he may or may not have written in System Failure.

Anyway, I gave my list, and I have zero interest in continuing this discussion.

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

IMO, the number of living survivors should have been much higher -- at least 40k, up to 70k or so.  30,000 dead is a lot.  Not impossible, no, not by a long shot, but it's a ton.

For you wondering, here are some numbers:

• Locked Inside: Over 100,000, presume 110,000
• Time of 'Occupation: 509 Days (12/19/2059 to 5/11/2061)
• 70,000 survivors: 40,000 dead, 78-79 killed per day.
• 40,000 survivors: 70,000 dead, 137-138 killed per day.
• 10,000 survivors: 100,000 dead, 196-197 killed per day.

Man.  That's a lot of dead people.

However, my disagreement here is twofold, with the conclusion:

• Deus needs to completely conceal the fact that he's discovered (ruthlessly, make no mistake) how to discretely and distinctly separate his parts and download himself into metahumans.  He needs:
  
  • People to hide his Network amongst, essentially overwhelming the 'rescue' areas so that most if not all his Network nodes make it through.  He needs a lot of patsies to hide a thousand; 2500 isn't going to cut it.  Even 10,000 won't be enough.  20-25,000 might be enough ... maybe.
  • A way to download his data so that a scan for cyberware (yes, deltaware is harder to detect, but it is by-god not impossible) is going to be a quick scan, a shrug at the minimal 'ware in them, and a shove-past.  If this is successful, the first part is less important, but important nonetheless.
  • A way to protect his precious nodes, to maximize their survivability in the nasty, nasty Real World.  Which means protective cyber, bio, or nanoware.
  Loading up on the headware the way System Failure has it is a guarantee of detection.  "Hey, this guy has huge amounts of headware.  You think we should set him aside?"
  Ya think ?!?
• Deus had two tests running:
  
  • Getting the human brain to be able to accept massive amounts of information, and then be able to access nearby computer processing to utilize that information at computer-level speeds.  This is what's going on when Puck and the Scarecrow are testing out their subjects, including the evil little girl, in Renraku Arcology: Shutdown.
  • Discovering the very best ways to keep the metahuman body alive.  All of his test subjects, if they survived their tests (such as, for example, getting used as target practice by the Blues, again in RA:S), were very specifically tested for neural function.
• Therefore, Deus's intention was clearly to download himself into unused portions of metahuman brains, implant those suckers up enough to make them virtually immune to getting dead, and then let Aneki do the rest.

I got this into a Shadowland post during our Otaku wars; unfortunately, certain writers whacked out large portions.  Wish I'd saved it all; it was a piece of art.

In any case, I agree with James; the stuff written by Hyatt, Schoner, and Levine has clear priority.  Whomever wrote the cyberware profile for the Network Nodes in System Failure was an unfortunate example of not understanding the intention behind what was previously written.  I wonder, in some cases, whether or not people talk to past writers, or read the work that they're basing their OWN work on ...

[FastJack]

Your averages are good, Wyrm, but remember: probably 75% of all the fatalities occurred in the first few weeks during the takeover. Which makes the 10,000 survivors number even messier.

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

That I have strong disagreements with, Jack.  Twenty people -- ordinary people, not a mob, cold, torn away from their familiar haunts and/or separated from their loved ones -- are sitting there.  One guy gets bold, runs and kicks over a drone, scrambles for the elevator, gets in.  "C'mon, we can do this!!"  The drone gets to its feet, is joined by two more, they go into the elevator and literally slice the guy apart with chain saws.

Now.  You're one of those 19 'other' people.  Are you gonna rebel??

Control through threat of violence by the one against the many depends on the individual being kept an individual, not being allowed to group up.  You get this in a lot of Westerns, but going the other way around.

[LEAD Member of MOB]:  "Bring him out, Sherriff, we're gonna lynch him!!"
[SHERRIFF]:  "Well, I can't take you all on ..."
[MEMBERS of MOB]:  (Various) 'Yeah!!'  "That's right!!"  "You can't stop us!!"
[SHERRIFF]: "... but the first three men that step up to get him are gonna get bullets in the belly.  Now that's a death sentence.  You gonna be the first to die, Wally?  Pity leavin' Emma all alone on account of this rustler.  How 'bout you, Clarence, with your three kids and another on the way?  Or you, Buck?  Don't you got that money comin' in from Texas soon?"

The one, whether Good Guy Sherriff or Bad Guy Deus, makes sure the many understand the close, personal destruction that's going to happen to them if Problems Happen.  Keeps them from getting up the courage to accept themselves as a possible loss in order to get the job done.  With the effectiveness of a few 'examples' of utter ruthlessness among large groups of people, you certainly wouldn't need to make many in order to ensure that the rest were going to not want to be the next one.

Consider the Holocaust.  A comparative few terrorized, controlled, and dominated tens of thousands daily, and literally millions of them during the course of the war, 'just' by utterly ruthless application of violence and pain -- combined with the hope of 'one more day of life'.  People can be cowed, and cows can be herded.  Counting from Kristallnacht to V-E Day (2,371 days), during which 11 million were killed, you get an average of 4,640 per day.  Considering the Arcology, I'd say no more than 10,000 were slain for purposes of control in the first 60 days.  Yeah, that's a lot, but over 400 floors, that's only 167 per day -- one person per 50 people every 2 weeks.  Not bad for reminding people that if they live five more minutes it's because they aren't causing trouble.

This doesn't count experiments, of course, but hey, you can't have everything; where would you put it?

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

Odd thing just popped into my head, so I thought I'd put it out there as well.  I'm working with the Holocaust again, so our numbers are 11 million, 2371 days.  We're considering ONLY those people, and how fast they get completely wiped out.

In an extended social circle -- people you know relatively well and people THEY know; about a thousand people total -- a person is taken from the group roughly every 2 days -- 2 days, 9 hours.
In a large social circle -- you, work, friends outside work, the people you know well enough to talk to at church; about 250 people -- a person is taken every 9.5 days.
In a moderate social circle -- you and your friends, people at work, people you know well at church; about a hundred people -- one person about every 24 days.  23 days, 17 hours.
In a small social circle -- you, your friends, the people at work;  about fifty people -- one every 42 days, 10 hours.
In your 'immediate' circle -- 15 people -- they take one person every 158 days, 1 hour, 36 minutes.

So you hear about something every few days; you miss someone you know every 10 days.  You lose someone you interact with every three weeks, and someone you talk extensively to every 5 weeks.  Every five months, you lose someone you care about.

Kind of odd when you think about it that way ... but again, this is about averages.

[FastJack]

Oh, I agree totally about those making a break for it. But we're talking about Deus and how it slaughtered people that it deemed "incompatible" with its plans. That's where I figure the 75% were killed.

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

People who fought would have been incompatable.  People who didn't -- which would likely have been most of them -- would have been experimented on...

[CanRay]

Even the people who fought could have been an experiment of a different sort... 

[Mirikon]

Going back and reading the Shutdown book, I'd have to say that I agree with the others who say the number of survivors was probably in the 40-70K is a good mark. For one thing, the Shutdown book implies that a good number of the residents were still trapped on the residential floors, except for those who became Banded, or were taken to the Slave Pens for experimentation. If we assume that most of the deaths were in the beginning, as Deus took control and locked things down, then we can say that a large portion of the population survived, since most of the population was apparently still alive when Peregrine slipped out to spread the word.

Also, as horrible as the situation was, if 100K people had been killed in the standoff, you had better believe that it would have been mentioned SOMEWHERE.

As for the ware, if we assume that maybe 10% of the survivors were members of the Network (no idea what the actual percentage is), then if there are 70K survivors coming out of the building, you have 7K people you're looking for. Except you don't know you're looking for them. Remember, cyberware is fairly common in the sixth world, and it wasn't until later that they realized that Deus had fled the system. That means there was plenty of time for the members of the network to escape and disappear into the sprawl.

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

... but we do have a solid idea of the number of people in the Network -- a thousand, give or take a few dozen.  And they would not have been looking for 'nodes of the Network', they would have been searching for 'aberrations' -- such as Whites.  Doing brain scans (no pun intended) for aberrant neural constructs would not have been easy, which means that locating the Whites could have been very difficult.  However, locating the Blues (who were typically cyber-monsters) or Greens (who had moderately stiff cyber-mods too) would have been MUCH easier.  Implanting the amount of 'ware laid out in System Failure would have resulted in detainment.

And the government puts thousands of people through scanning not totally dissimilar to this every day, in airports across the nation.  SR has rules for portable cyber-scanning devices, and I don't think the people getting out of the arcology would have just scattered; remember, Military Shutdown.  They run for the barricade, they get shot.

Still -- I go for at least 40k survivors, likelihood decreasing to 70k max.  I think in my game I'd probably run it at about 55k or so -- 1 in 2 survive.

[Mirikon]

There was a military shutdown in effect, yes. But do you have any idea how long it takes to process fifty thousand people? How many portable cyberware scanners did the army have in the field? How good were they? Before the shutdown, Renraku was already one of the pioneers of cyberware tech, and Deus advanced things considerably. The scanners the army had may not have been up to the task. And did that cyberware appear to be something innocuous, such as a normal datajack, or some headware memory, or a medical implant, or something similar? Remember, there are two ways to hide something. You can make it invisible, or you can make it seem like something it isn't. And if it looks like something normal, and you have thousands more people to process before, you know, it starts raining again or a crowd of people who spent the last few months as prisoners get restless about being kept outside, then you have people rushing the processing, especially if they don't have cybereyes, like the whites did.

As for shooting people who try and rush the perimeter, that may work in theory, but then you have to remember all the cameras encircling the military perimeter. And the fact that it is difficult to control thousands of people. If one freaks out, then you risk a stampede, in the middle of downtown Seattle. Especially if any of the groups that love to start chaos decide to start having fun. And it takes time to transport that many people to another site, involving a lot of vehicles. And you have the pressure to reunite families that have been separated by the shutdown.

I agree, that each of these factors in and of itself is less than conclusive. However, taken together, the deck is stacked heavily in the favor of most, if not all, of the Network escaping detection.

[Sichr]

you know, shooting peaple running to barricades worked in Chicago CZ, why wont it help in enclosed arcology space. And further...you remember how tight the security was back in 50ties in arcology...how difficult it was to get inside. Should those SOTA scanners and systems, once purged of Deus presence, cut off from arclogy network rewired and used to work for military? It is not a huge crowd running arcoss footbal stadium. It was level by level, corridor by corridor liberation...so not all 40K at once, IMO...

[Mirikon]

you know, shooting peaple running to barricades worked in Chicago CZ, why wont it help in enclosed arcology space. And further...you remember how tight the security was back in 50ties in arcology...how difficult it was to get inside. Should those SOTA scanners and systems, once purged of Deus presence, cut off from arclogy network rewired and used to work for military? It is not a huge crowd running arcoss footbal stadium. It was level by level, corridor by corridor liberation...so not all 40K at once, IMO...

In Chicago, anyone running to the wall of the CZ was assumed to be an insect spirit in flesh form, not helpless victims of a mad AI with family waiting for them on the other side of the blockade, where all the news crews were waiting to see survivors brought out.

The security in the arcology was tight, but once the barriers went up, how much of that tech in the lower floors remained intact? Between the resistance, the animals from the zoo, and the drones, there was a good deal of damage. Add to that the fact that replacement parts were obviously hard to come by, and I imagine that anything SOTA that was functional in the lower levels was either destroyed or stripped.

It was a level by level assault, true. But that doesn't change the fact that you have survivors coming out, so where are you going to put them? A tent city outside the arcology? Just leave them at your back as you continue on to the next floor? Assaulting the arcology is a logistics nightmare. Dealing with the survivors only adds to the trouble. Now picture you're a grunt clearing out the building. You don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of cyberware technology, and all you have is (likely) a handheld scanner or (if you're lucky) a mage. You know that Deus's Banded all have cybereyes, so that's what you look for. If they don't have cybereyes, they aren't one of the AI's servants, right? Sure, maybe (big maybe) your scanner shows up a bit of headware, but that kind of thing is very common in the 2060, so there's no reason to think it was a big deal. Especially if that ware looks like simple headware memory.