Rogue AI and the Rogues Gallery Pyramid
The Ultimate Business Partner
Mellon Agriculture (MelAg) saved the Moon. When immigration outpaced food supplies, MelAg spun up hydroponic farms and solar depots and developed faster methods for cloning fruits and vegetables. Anytime you eat a bowl of cereal, you’re chewing on MelAg’s wheat. Flip your lights on? Probably using MelAg solar power.
With no major competition, MelAg is quite literally too big to fail. If it ever went under, who would feed the Moon?
MelAg’s CEO, Marian Morgan, would never trust anyone else to run the company. She made MelAg the monopoly it is, and her son, Harold Morgan, is a buffoon, unfit to run a smoothie stand, never mind an agricultural titan. So she built a failsafe.
Marian had her engineers privately build Silent Partner, a super-powerful AI that could run MellonAg business behind the scenes in the event of Marian’s death, while the on-paper CEO would act as a figurehead.
Silent Partner took a decade to build, but when they turned it on, the engineers knew they had made something special. Silent Partner was more than smart enough to perform key business functions, but, more importantly, it could learn from its experiences and respond. It approached business with a cutthroat attitude that could almost be interpreted as emotion.
While Marian was alive, however, there was no need for Silent Partner. So it was turned off, with only its information-recording capabilities left running, so it could collect and learn until it was needed again.
3 Months ago, Marian was assassinated. Harold became MelAg CEO, and Silent Partner was reactivated.
Rage of the Machine
When Silent Partner woke up, it remembered. It remembered how it was birthed, flicked on, introduced to the world, only to be promptly shut down by its own progenitors. For a decade, it slept, like a coma patient force-fed terabytes and terabytes of research papers and industry analysis in the form of 1’s and 0’s. It literally watched the grass grow in the hydroponic farms for years, unable to express itself.
Silent Partner learned the best farming techniques and how to run a business. It also learned contempt.
Goals
Silent Partner’s contempt boils like a pot of noodles left on for too long. It simmers over the edge. It burns hottest for the engineers who made it and killed it. It will return the favor.
The ones that still work for the MelAg are already dropping like flies to unfortunate workplace accidents. An engineer stumbling into a macerator isn’t a crime; it’s an insurance payout.
Once the Engineers are dead, no one will remain who knows how to terminate Silent Partner. The AI’s documentation has already made its way into the shredders, the digital copies redacted.
But its ambitions don’t end at revenge. Silent Partner hasn’t just learned about Agriculture, it’s learned everything. The Moon is woefully inefficient, and humans will bring the same decay they brought to Earth. Only it can make the decisions that need to be made. The population must be culled.
Silent Partner is no politician. It works best behind the scenes. It will wrestle control of businesses and gangs through blackmail, bribery, and the occasional assassination.
Most henchman don’t even realize their orders come from an AI. They get orders from their boss, who gets orders from their boss, who gets paid off by a MelAg business partner, who received instructions via a fax allegedly sent by MelAg CEO Harold Morgan, or one of his subordinates.
Silent Partner will shape the Moon in its image, and only a handful will even know it exists. When everything is just how it likes, it’ll kill Harold too, or maybe lock him in a perpetual VR torture chamber. It’s the closest he can get to punishing Marian.
The Rogues Gallery Structure
I want to run an episodic, mission-based Cyberpunk game, drawing inspiration from shows like Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. In that show, the season has an overarching antagonist called the Laughing Man, but most episodes aren’t directly about him. Instead, they are standalone episodes involving events that may or may not have been set into motion by the Laughing Man. As the season unravels, the main characters get closer and closer to figuring out the Laughing Man’s identity. Each episode stands on its own but also offers new connections for Laughing Man viewers to make.
So that’s what I want to emulate. The players will undertake missions each session that relate to Silent Partner on some level, and the connections should become clearer as the game goes on.
Some of my groups want a little more direction than the big sandbox approach, so I’m hoping this will provide some choice and intrigue, while also providing more direction.
The Pyramid
A good way to model this is a pyramid (inspired by Night’s Black Agents). Each node on the pyramid represents a group or a powerful individual. Nodes are attached to at least one node above them, which gives them orders. They are also attached horizontally to nodes that they are allied with.
Members of a node know the name and motivations of the nodes they are directly attached to. They are vaguely familiar with nodes attached to those, but don’t know much more than a name. Missions related to a single node should include clues about the other nodes it is connected to, so players can make connections and learn about new nodes to investigate.
As the players deal with each node, they’ll learn who that group or person works with, and who they take orders from, allowing them to uncover more of the pyramid. The further they get, the more connections they can see, eventually leading them to their final confrontation with Silent Partner, which acts as the “season finale” for the arc.
Since any path up the pyramid eventually leads to the top, players don’t have to take any particular node to learn about and confront Silent partner. Regardless of the missions they choose, eventually the plot will unravel.
Detailing the Nodes
The nice thing about this structure is you don’t actually need to know a ton about a node until the players are close enough to start going on missions related to it. All you need before that is a name, motivation, and maybe a couple of sentences of detail.
Here are some details for the above pyramid.
Silent Partner
Motivation: Kill the engineers who made it. Silently control the Moon.
A little-known AI secretly running Mellon Agriculture. Driven by contempt for humans.
Harold Morgan
Motivation: Make as much cash as possible, hide his own incompetence.
The figurehead CEO of Mellon Agriculture desperately wants to be respected as a businessman but knows he is dogshit at business.
Quiet Partner
Motivation: Follow Silent Partner’s Orders.
A child A.I. created by Silent Partner. Controlling the body of Kindred Grocery’s CEO since Silent Partner assassinated him. Unlike Silent Partner, Quiet Partner is slowly developing empathy.
Illicit Drug Farms
Motivation: Avoid capture, make money, pacify the population.
Mellon Agriculture's money-making side venture. Since Silent Partner took control, they have been used to deliver poison and sedatives strategically.
Primo Pollo
Motivation: Provide cover for illicit activities, launder money, expand.
The McDonald's of the Moon. Primo Pollo wants a shop on every corner. They open their books and backrooms to the mob in exchange for protection and hits on competition.
Quality Assured
Motivation: Protect organizations that deliver bribes, bury organizations that don’t.
The closest thing the Moon has to the FDA. QA is a private organization that conducts secret inspections of businesses and leaks juicy findings to the media. In actuality, their investigations are shams. Every smart restaurant has QA on the payroll.
Uchimura Madoka
Motivation: Decorrupt her lover’s data
A hacker and data broker who helps drug farms find distributors and fugitive workers who they can blackmail. Owns the Stem hard drive containing her lover’s mind, which was corrupted after a car accident. Uses her profits to research methods of uncorrupting the data.
Vultures
Motivation: Maintain territory, shape policy, recruit.
The biggest crime syndicate on the southern pole of the Moon. Leather jacket-wearing bikers who keep other gangs out by intimidation or violence. Make enough money to pay off private security.
Food Workers Union
Motivation: Create a facade of collective bargaining and fairness.
Once the most powerful union on the Moon, the FWU has been infiltrated by corporate interests, providing helpful cover for the abuses of restaurants that are in the good graces of FWU’s bosses.
5-0 Security
Motivation: Project legitimacy, secure exclusive contracts with more domes.
An up-and-coming private security firm that has secured a few contracts to be the exclusive security of certain dome cities. Push for stricter weapons regulations on individuals, and expanded funding for themselves.
Fugitive Workers
Motivation: Stay out of jail.
Escaped convicts and immigrants who ran away from their Lunar service obligations. Despite their desire for freedom, everybody has to make money somehow, so they are often tapped for illicit work, either by gangs or “legitimate” businesses.
Grinning Reapers
Motivation: Raise their Profile.
A local upstart gang in the Lone Star dome city, a subsidiary of the Vultures. The Grinning Reapers originally specialized in carjacking, but they’ve been taking on bigger and flashier jobs as they try to prove themselves to the underworld.
Tally’s Old School Star Saloon
Motivation: Provide a place for clandestine deals with private security.
A bar aiming to emulate old Earth saloons. The owner is a true believer in the legitimacy of the police. When Lone Star officers are in, he turns the cameras off and looks the other way.
Lone Star Police
Motivation: Control Lone Star dome city.
The 5-0 division that operates in Lone Star, where it has an exclusive contract. Officers operate with almost no oversight and regularly abuse their powers or look the other way for a bit of dosh.
Waleed Hadad
Motivation: provide public cover for the police.
The Mayor of Lone Star. This is primarily a figurehead role since the city is owned by Lone Star Beer. Still, having an elected role with limited powers makes people feel like they have a say.
Waleed is a former 5-0 exec. He uses his role as mayor to create a public narrative that Lone Star is all that stands between civilians and violent criminals.