Everyware

The mesh is a decentralized internet-of-things. Miniature computerized devices with advanced processing and storage capabilities are everywhere: your clothes, your weapons, your appliances, and throughout the structures, environment, and even air around you. This everyware is equipped with minute sensors for monitoring the environment and wireless radios, microwave links, or laser links for communicating. All of these devices network together. Each acts as an ad-hoc server and repeater, passing messages and data along from sender to recipient. Though larger backbone servers still exist, especially in larger habitats with heavy traffic, there is no longer a need for any kind of centralized infrastructure. If a node in the mesh network goes down or cuts off traffic, the data simply routes around it, finding a new path to its destination. This makes the mesh easily expandable for new colonies, resilient against harm in crisis scenarios, and resistant to censorship and other forms of centralized control.

Getting Online

Getting online in Eclipse Phase is easy — everyone and everything is meshed, all the time. Most transhumans get online via the mesh insert implants within their head. This headware enables them to network with other devices around them and store data and files. Best of all, it’s all mentally controlled. You can browse mesh sites, play games, interface with gear, and talk with your friends, all within your head.

Messages are mentally recorded in your voice (or another of your choosing) or transcribed into text, all without speaking aloud. Sensory input is routed through your mesh inserts directly into your brain and experienced as augmented reality — as data overlaid upon your real-world senses. Videos, for example, are viewed in a corner of your vision or off to the side, in your mind’s-eye space. You hear audio feeds in your head that no one around can perceive. Haptic feedback is experienced as sensations of touch. You can even skin your perceptions with AR data, so that you always view the world with the hazy glow of a sunset in the background or experience it with your own personal soundtrack. Walls are never blank and rooms are never quiet, unless you want them to be. You can even mute or filter out things you don’t want to see or hear.

Those without cranial computers and mesh inserts must rely on ecto devices for mesh access. These portable and flexible computers are typically worn as a bracelet or held as a tablet. They feature interactive holographic displays or transmit AR data to the user via worn glasses, contacts, and decorative ear pieces. While common among bioconservatives, they are sometimes used as an extra layer of protection by hackers or those carrying sensitive data. Ectos are slower than mesh inserts; using them inflicts a −10 modifier to all mesh actions.

Your Online Presence

Given that most mesh interactions take place within your head, face-to-face interactions via camera feeds are a thing of the past. Most people use an avatar to represent themselves online. Avatar customs differ, with some clades preferring a representation of your current morph, and others preferring a stylized icon that remains consistent throughout resleevings. Avatars are animated and designed to speak and emote with your personal mannerisms, though this may be customized.

Avatars are not only used for online communications — they are often projected as entoptic data in real local space, along with your social networking profile, allowing others around you to view it with AR. Thus you can view the rep scores and other public profile data about a person whether you interact with them online or are simply in physical proximity. Personal profiles are completely customizable and range from business-oriented and succinct to creative displays. Local jurisdictions may require some personal data to be displayed at all times, such as citizenship status, real names, c-rep score, fork status, or criminal convictions.

Privacy Mode

If you’d prefer to keep a low profile, you can go into privacy mode, which provides a small degree of anonymity. Privacy mode hides your social profile — no one will be able to view your data, but they will still be able to anonymously ping and ding your rep scores. Privacy mode will also ask sensors and other devices to ignore and not track you, though depending on their configurations or AIs they may simply ignore this request. It applies a −30 modifier to mesh tracking attempts. Privacy mode is considered rude or gauche in some circumstances. An option to allow authenticated police/security to override this mode is legally required in some authoritarian jurisdictions, but it may be easily toggled off.