Adaora Free Clinics and Cyberthralls
Unroboting My Work
I read this post last week and felt a little called out! So, I am going to try to unrobot a bit for the next couple weeks. With that in mind I took one of the prompts from that post to write this one:
"don't sit down to write an encounter or write an item or a class; sit down to write and see what happens."
What happened was I tried to figure out what a cyberpunk take on some of my favorite parts of vampirism would look like.
Healthcare on the Cheap
Adaora clinics are the only corpo docs you won’t hear anyone complaining about. Pay-what-you-can emergency aid in the slums and discount chrome installation in the high-end dome towns. Awfully generous of the biggest medical subcontractor on the Moon.
Dr. Sharday Adaora, a rare selfless philanthropist in the eyes of most, is giving back with some of her obscene wealth.
Her mind decays. Neurotoxins are slowly eating away at every bit of data stored in the drive beneath the good doctor’s brain. Childhood memories corrupted, knowledge pushed out to make room for more malicious code, a Stem stuffed to the gills and pushed to its limits. The toxins are like locusts, eating endlessly, eventually they will corrupt the memory backups, and the backup's backups. No storage expansion is enough.
Storage Thralls
Nobody uses all the storage on their Stem. Stem’s deliberately have more space than you could use in a lifetime. Petabytes on Petabytes of empty space, just in case.
If you aren’t going to use yours, why shouldn’t Adaora? If her patients walk out with a backdoor installed in their stem, that’s a small price to pay for free medical care, right?
Every surgical patient is an unknowing thrall. A network of minds collectively backing up Dr. Adaora’s consciousness. Digital blood bags, a walking data center feeding the toxins that eat away at her mind.
She’ll never die.
Smash her stem, destroy her body, and her system will simply restore it from the backups. She’ll install her reformed mind directly into a Thrall.
She’s always listening.
Thrall’s minds are datamined constantly, spying and gathering information without even knowing it. No patient doctor confidentiality here. Dr. Adaora maintains her influence through blackmail and subterfuge.
She’s got an Army
She can’t control Thralls directly, but Dr. Adaora can manipulate their minds. Their memories are modified, inconvenient ones removed, helpful ones added. She controls what Thralls know, and can make them do whatever she likes, given a day or two of manipulation. When subterfuge fails, Dr. Adaora has no shortage of bodies and iron.
Adaora Clinics
You wait in line outside a sterile, mono-silver waiting room, slightly bigger than a phone booth. Looking ahead, seems like you’re behind a bullet wound, a migraine, and a man who keeps yapping about how blepharoplasty is gonna make him look 10 years younger.
When it’s finally your turn, you step in and pick your procedure from a digital catalogue, like it's a fast-food item. It’s sectioned into full-price, reduced-price, and pay-what-you-can procedures.
Tap your procedure, swipe your card, and the screen gives you a room number. The door beside the screen swings open to a hallway of procedure rooms.
Another sterile, featureless room, save for a cold metal chair and the machine that will perform it. After a few minutes, a cyborg comes in, their naked mechanical parts marking them as an immigrant that hasn’t worked their way to citizenship yet. They wordlessly punch your measurements into the machine and press a button. You close your eyes while the machine operates.
Medical Care for the Common Man
Despite their surgical success rate rivaling that of veteran surgeons, Adaora clinics have a reputation for poor-quality care. This is largely due to bias against robots, and a high mistake rate when Dr. Adaora first created her clinics. Those wealthy enough to be choosy with their medical care prefer Human doctors to Adaora’s robots. Highly affluent dome cities may not even have Adaora clinics.
Even in less affluent domes, some prefer human care, and for non emergency service, even Dr. Adaora's discounted rates can be expensive. Many still opt to skip surgeries or seek back-alley doctors they can afford.
Adaora In a Game
Adaora utilizes her network of Thralls to perform dirty work without tying it to her. She is always aiming to acquire medical supplies, sabotage competitors, and make influential people her Thralls.
You might contend with Adaora Thralls:
- Stealing pharmaceuticals from rival companies
- Attacking politicians or influential corpos near Adaora emergency clinics
- Sabotaging other medical companies
- Sneaking into restricted areas to gather information
- Convincing others to use Adaora clinics
You might deal with Dr. Adaora because:
- You need special medical care
- You are buying or selling information or medical supplies
- She's learned information about you that she is not happy about
- You recieve care at one of her clinics and become a thrall
About Thralls
Thralls do not know that they are Thralls. All of them have a small portion of their Stem used either to store part of Adaora’s backup or to mine cryptocurrencies.
When captured doing something criminal, a Thrall will either be confused as to why they were acting in the way they were or explain their actions using a fabricated memory implanted in their mind.
It’s difficult to tell that someone is a Thrall. While the backdoor installed on a Thrall’s Stem is noticeable when a Stem is removed and analyzed, it is difficult to determine where it originated.
If a Stem is left intact, a Runner can make a Tech check next time it sends or receives data to track it back to one of Dr. Adaora’s data centers.
There is a 10% chance that an NPC is one of Adaora's Thrall.
Player Thralls
If a player's Runner becomes a Thrall, they will not know right away. They have a vague feeling they are being watched. At some point, they start having new memories or dreams. A debt they need to repay to Adaora Medical, or an agreement to interrupt a rival medical company's deliveries. A brain scan will reveal the backdoor in the Runner's Stem, and a Tech check can trace the signal.
Once a player learns they are a thrall, Adaora sends Thralls and hit squads after them.