Shadowrun Brain Hacking Redux, now with animals

[Surgo]

I am preparing to potentially run a Shadowrun 4e game in real life with full Ends of the Matrix trimmings (and with a bunch of setting changes, but that's unimportant to the issue at hand). While doing this, and while thinking of an old D&D character I played who had a pet owl that had laser eyebeams (don't ask), I realized an interesting consequence of the brain-hacking core to these rules: animals were usually orphan brains.

This assumes that in 2071 when we having a sophisticated enough understanding of the workings of the human brain to channel and overwrite sensory information along with pretty much anything else, it's reasonable to stretch that to say we might as well also have an understanding of various animal brains, or a more abstract theory of how the brain works that applies to various animals or...whatever, really, the how is meaningless in game terms. The what, however...

Well, this means that an enterprising shadowrunning hacker can do a lot with her furry street friends. The obvious thing that comes to mind is spying (I mean how often do people really notice a single mouse that doesn't make a lot of noise?). And while you could probably do the same thing with a tiny, mouse-sized drone, doing it with animals has at least the advantage that people are a lot less likely to think anything strange about an organic, living pigeon than they are about a pigeon made out of metal and electronic circuitry.

So with this in mind, what does the world of 2071 security look like regarding animals? I mean in a modern-day city pigeons are seriously everywhere, and an attempt to block every pigeon from seeing or hearing you would be an exercise in futility. How has security in 2071 evolved to deal with this gaping hole?

[Heath Robinson]

It's a good question. If it's possible, then it's likely that security set down traps and put spikes on all flat surfaces so that pigeons can, at best, give you a moving aerial viewpoint of the area. Lots of occlusion is to be expected as well.

They may also employ a small number of cybered vermin hunters at larger or more important facilities.


The fact of dangerous wildlife (Paracritters to begin with, now Technocritters, and programmatically controlled Critters) in SR pretty much leads me to conclude that the majority of cities actually take active efforts to drive wildlife away. All of it. The Awakened complain (since this will almost certainly make cities Sterilist-aspected BC), but they're silenced by the normal rhetorical techniques (won't you think of the children, etc.).

[CatharzGodfoot]

Metahuman brains are all basically human. Other creatures' brains can be rather different, and so would (at the very least) need different programs. The would probably be less commercial pressure for interacting with animal brains, but at the same time they would make decent testbeds. As you say, small mammals would be great for espionage. Pet-control software (keeps your god from shitting all over the floor) would probably be pretty common. You'd end up with various different types of mind-control programs at different accessibility ratings.

It also opens up the classic 'dog is really an AI' trope.

[Lago PARANOIA]

A low-tech solution that doesn't really work in the real world but could in the GRIHMDAHRKE FUTURE OF AMERIKA would be to seed the corporate grounds and various parts of the buildings with UHF that will deter small animals.

If it breaks the hacking control of anyone who passes through the field (because the pain of an animal forcing its way through shielded area stuns them) then that would pretty much cover it.

[shau]

As far as I can tell the skies of 4e Shadowrun are supposed to be so filled with weird crap that you can follow someone around with a miniature flying blimp without them noticing anything. The fact that you can pull the same stunt with pigeons doesn't amount to much.

[cthulhu]

Biodrones are actually in augmentation. It's entirely setting consistent that people could control animals

Flipside:

A) The hacking spells in the ends of the matrix don't allow you to zombify people.

B) Pigeon's don't have the brain to understand what they are seeing. You can get at people's knowledge, but not their sense organs. A pigeon doesn't understand what you said, and it's doubtful it really knows who you are, so it cannot report it to a third party.

[Quantumboost]

Metahuman brains are all basically human. Other creatures' brains can be rather different, and so would (at the very least) need different programs.

Mostly. The EotM rules explicitly handle using Biofeedback (i.e. meat-affecting) programs against non-metahumans. The example given in that bit was using metahuman-optimized programs on a dragon, and it gives a -2 dicepool penalty to the program's use. If you made a version that was optimized for dragons, you could get rid of that penalty for dragons (and it would apply to everything else). I'd imagine that the effect applies to nonsapient brains as well as non-metahuman sapients.

And yeah, there's explicit precedent for having spybots that look exactly like animals in the setting that work a lot better than pigeon-hacking, so I'd classify it as "neat trick, but there are better ways to go about it".

[Draco_Argentum]

(keeps your god from shitting all over the floor)

This typo is gold.