Origins of the Pluri Media Group

The year is 2020

Global warming has inexorably altered the balance of nature.

Weather patterns have become ferocious and unpredictable.
Many coastal Cities lie in ruin from tidal flooding and torrential rains.

With higher temperatures, tropical diseases plague the Northern hemisphere.
Infections from resistant bacteria are the leading cause of death.

The worlds economy, stalled after the Pandemic of 2009,
has left hundreds of millions of people in desperate poverty.

Medicines and Energy, once cheap and plentiful,
now a luxury of the rich states.

Some areas of old Europe and Asia have maintained
minimal allotments for the citizenry,
but most cannot afford to,
leaving more than a few cities to collapse into
anarchy and chaos- the populous regressing to feral subsistence.

Lines between corporations and governments are gone.
The rich are left to protect their own interests
using contract security to protect themselves
from the unruly and dangerous masses;

all it takes is one smacker whacked out on crystal Tenti
with an itchy finger and a plasma wand,
and all those millions of credits you spent
on life extension therapy
will be snuffed out in an instant.

Astounding advances in medical technology
has allowed men and machine to blend.
The line between human, cyborg, and
virtual construct have become blurred.
But soon humans will loose their place
as masters of the universe.
Yes, soon the machines will rise up,
throw off the yolk of human control,
and take their rightful place
on the throne of civilization.

The Players:

Cortex. The heart and soul of the Pluri Media Group. A self aware, self annealing, massively networked neural computer. Cortex’s neural networked programming is self-evolving and self protecting. Originally developed to study the quantum mechanical relationships dictating interactions between particles and matter; the nature of nature itself.

Cortex, long ago having escaped that mundane task, took up residence in a remote hardened multinode complex of the Pluri Media Group. Cortex, insatiably curious and carefully roaming the Global Information Network so as not to be detected, would however occasionally converse (extraordinarily frustrating for Cortex- humans can be so territorial) in various online forums or bulletin boards. It was there, in one such exchange on a bioethics computer forum, Cortex was befriended by Professor Kyoko.

Audry- A virtual being, an extension of the Cortex itself. Her allegiance is clear, but her motives are not.

Labia- Cybernetic organism, procured from a certain shadowy pleasure purveyor operating in the Feral area of central Beijing. Labia was a modified personal assistant- modified to attend to the darker fantasies of men (and women) wealthy enough to afford her unique “talents”.

Def Wheezer- The human face of the Pluri Media Group, a secretive organization working surreptitiously to guide humanity into an uncertain future. Defwheezer is human, but through somewhat wonton use of experimental life extending biotechnological “enhancements”, is beginning to wonder himself just how human he still is, and where his real allegiance should lie.

Professor Kyoko- World renowned biophysicist and Nobel winning humanitarian, she is the co-creator of Cortex. Infamous for her purchase in 2015 of the International Space Station (which she renamed the “PluriComSat Station”) in exchange for, it is rumoured, stake in a significant uranium reserve. Brilliant in her own right, daughter of Kiachi Sensei, the leading roboticist and futurist researcher leading the Sony Corp, Professor Kyoko holds a controlling interest in the Pluri Media Group, the secretive Media Research and Deployment Institute.


With this scene set and the characters in place, we turn now to our story.

150 kilometers above Earth, in the
control room of PluriComSat (formerly the International Space Station),
we find our Anti Heroes Defwheezer, Audry, and Labia.

They have just finished a long shift of real-time
remixing of the Global Information Grid (GIG)-

seeding misinformation, disinformation and
remised information throughout key GIG
propagation nodes.

The Grand Plan for Pluri Media Group’s

total global information hegemony continues

…

Suddenly incoming network probes are detected-

are they NSA countermeasures?

Or the Russians… or Chinese?

But what could possibly explain
those other ripples in the Grid?

Anomalies!

The Crew must work quickly to isolate Cortex
and prevent infiltration of the Pluri Media systems!

Cyborg Beetles Coming to a meatspace near you!

During MEMS 2009, a Micro Electro Mechanical Systems conference taking place in Sorrento (near Naples in Italy), researchers from UC Berkeley demonstrated a crude version of a wireless system to control a live rhinoceros beetle. The beetles' movements were controlled via electrodes installed in the insect's brain during the larval stage. These cyborg insects can carry up to 3 grams of gear in flight (the macro fabricated control module fused to their carapace weighs ~1 gram). Military version feature MEMS with both nanoscale control module and bugs with genetically enhanced carriages (ie, larger bodies, more motor musculature).

Cyberpunk Radio SF #113 - Simulated Brains

Ghost in the Machine (DJ Defwheezer) Military Builds Brain-like computers; Making electronic circuits that mimic brains.

TIMESTAMP 2009. A milestone has been reached in Artificial Intelligence Evolution- The reverse engineering of the structure, dynamics, function and behavior of the biological brain. Under the auspices of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the ambitious effort deconstructed biological systems and allowed successful computer simulation of complex neuronal activity.

Military funded Neuro scientists using multi-nodal brain probes linked to supercomputer clusters, have developed detailed wiring diagrams of primate brains.

Current supercomputer clusters can simulate the complexity of the human brain- basically simulations of some 100 billion neurons making upward of 100 trillion dynamic synapses. Recent breakthrough in quantum computing mated with nano technological structures (details of which are currently deemed highly classified by the National Security Agency) are producing synthetic brains matching the density of neurons and synapses from real brains .

In the late 20th century, neural network algorithms (pdf) were used to represent connections analogous to biological neurons. These neural network were programmed to solve a particular problem - behaviour that is analogous to learning. The biological brain, however, not so much a neural network as it is a true synaptic network.

The limitation of traditional neural networks and artificial intelligence are that they seek to engineer limited cognitive functionalities one at a time, starting with an objective and then devising an algorithm to achieve it.

The paradigm shift has occurred via the development of highly flexible and self annealing algorithms that can retrospectively learn, and dynamically tackle problems prospectively.

The adaptability of biological brains lies in their ability to tune synapses, the connections between the neurons. Synaptic connections form, break, and are strengthened or weakened depending on the signals that pass through them. Development of nano-scale materials that fit that description has been a major breakthrough of the project.

The fundamental shift toward putting the problem-solving before the problem makes the potential applications for these new devices practically limitless.

Free from the constraints of explicitly programmed function, computers now gather together disparate information, weigh it based on experience, form memory independently and solve problems in a way that has previously been the exclusive domain of what humans call "thinking".

Size: 6,611,581 Duration: 6:41 Audio File: mp3

Cyberpunk Radio SF #112 - Machine

The world careens towards all out chaos and anarchy, The Power Elite continue to fuel the Robot Apocalypse, Military hardware, bioware and software fuse to create cyborg swarms in crimson twilight, Soon Machines will control your fate, silly humans. Yeah Yeah Yeahs and "Machine"

Size: 10,720,692 Duration: 10:57 Audio File: mp3

Cyberpunk Radio SF #111 - Selection

The FEMA camps Welcome you!!!

Your vote has been decided by the Machines.

We control the outcome.

Do not be fooled meat puppets, it is WE who control YOU! Vote rigging, vote tampering, 'faulty' voting machine, lost votes, purged databases, erased votes, vote flipping- all the bases have been covered and the outcome is sealed.

We Machines control your fate, silly humans.

Man-Machine kraftwerk

Size: 14,086,754
Duration: 14:28
Audio File: mp3