Mental Augmentations

Most headware augmentations enhance the brain and mental functions.

Cybercortex: Designed for smart animals, this artificial cortex aid increases the creature’s ability to learn, comprehend instructions, and reason. It also overrides some instinctive behaviors that would be undesirable in a service animal. Apply a +10 modifier to Exotic Skill: Animal Handling Tests made against this creature, and apply a +10 modifier for COG Checks to understand commands.

Data Module: This is an encrypted data storage device, used for carrying confidential information that shouldn't be mesh-transmitted. You may install multiple modules.

Dead Switch: Dead switches are designed to keep cortical stacks from falling into the wrong hands. If your morph is killed or the switch is remotely activated, it wipes and melts your cortical stack completely, so that your ego cannot be recovered. This option is generally only used by covert operatives with recent backups.

Drone Rig: This simsense augmentation gives you better control when jamming drones (Remote Operations). You ignore the −10 modifier for jamming.

Emergency Farcaster: Similar to a remote backup link (and often installed along with one), emergency farcasters are designed for situations when a remote backup cannot be ensured. This augmentation features a single-use emergency neutrino broadcaster powered by 10 nanograms of antimatter, stored in a small magnetic containment vessel. In the event your morph is killed/destroyed, or you intentionally activate the device, the antimatter is brought into contact with matter and detonated, powering a single brief and carefully coded neutrino pulse of your ego’s most recent backup. In short, transmitting the backup makes your head explode and cooks your morph, destroying what’s left of it. Your transmitted ego will be saved as long as the neutrino receiver is within 100 astronomical units. This practically guarantees your backup within the Solar System, but is less useful on exoplanets where you are out of neutrino range of your backup facility.

Ghostrider Module: This implant is a host for carrying another infomorph. This infomorph can be another muse, an ALI, a backed-up ego, or a fork. The module is linked to your mesh inserts, so the ghost-rider can mentally communicate with you, access the mesh, and connect to other parts of your PAN, depending on what access privileges you allow. You may install multiple modules.

Memory Lock: When activated, this implant prevents your sensory input from being stored in your long-term memory, tagged by mnemonics, or recorded/transmitted by your mesh inserts or other means. It also temporarily blocks cortical stack backups. You retain short-term memories, but for no more than a few minutes. This implant is often a requirement of personal aides, consultants, couriers, and underlings of powerful people who require confidentiality or deniability.

Mind Amp: Mind amp alters your neural architecture and augments neuronal functions. This accelerates your mental faculties and ability to receive and process sensory information. Time subjectively slows down for you, allowing you to discern things happening too quickly for others to perceive, such as the individual frames of an old analog film or an accelerated audio recording. Mind amp increases your Insight pool by 2.

Multi-Tasking: This cybernetic or software module enables your brain to focus on two things at the same time — something our minds cannot usually handle — without any context-switching confusion or increased error rates from inattention. Multi-Tasking increases your Insight Pool by 1.

Multiple Personalities: Your brain is intentionally partitioned to accommodate an extra personality. This multiplicity is not viewed as a disorder, but as a cognitive tool to help people deal with their hypercomplex environments. This extra personality can be a separate character (in ego form only), an NPC run by the GM, or the downloaded fork of another character. For all intents and purposes, the extra personality is treated as a separate ego (i.e., it may backup and fork separately), except that both personalities are backed up in the same cortical stack and if downloaded they must be placed in separate morphs or in another morph with this implant.

Only one ego can be in control of the morph at a time. The other resides in the background, still active, but not on a surface level. Subsumed egos may still act while the other is dominant, but can only take mental/mesh actions. Each ego is completely aware of what the other is doing, thinking, etc. If for some reason the subsumed personality wants to come to the fore, but the other personality won’t relinquish control, make an opposed WIL Check. Each ego has its own Lucidity, Trauma Threshold, and Insanity Rating, and they track stress and trauma separately. The morph’s pools are shared. Psi sleights or social/mental influences only affect the personality at the fore.

You can take this augmentation more than once (to a maximum of 3 times) to incorporate multiple egos into the same mind.

Remote Backup Link: Your morph’s cortical stack is linked to an implanted quantum farcaster linked to a highly secure storage facility. Using standard radio and quantum encryption, the farcaster broadcasts full backups of your ego (pulled from your cortical stack’s neural lace network) once every 48 hours. This transfer takes a single action turn. At the GM’s discretion, the backup interval may be scheduled more or less frequently, keeping in mind that ego broadcasts are limited for security purposes and because they hog bandwidth. Broadcast egos must be within range of the recipient to be received; for this reason the system’s usefulness is limited to select habitats or situations where you have arranged for secure storage in a nearby vicinity, such as onboard a nearby spaceship. If the radio broadcasts are blocked or jammed, this device cannot save remote backups.

Skillware: Your brain is laced with a network of artificial neurons that can be formatted with information. This allows you to download skillsofts into your brain, gaining the use of those programmed skills until the skillsoft is erased or replaced. Skillware systems are only capable of handling 120 total skill points worth of skillsofts at a time. Switching out a skillsoft is a complex action.

Skillsofts

Skillsofts are used with skillware implants.

Skillsoft: These are skills encoded in software form. Used with a skillware system, they provide you with a rating of up to 40 in a single active skill or 80 in a Know skill (your aptitudes do not effect this rating; if you already possess the skill, use the highest value).