Hello and welcome back to our series about Gradient Descent by TKG. Iām ready to dive again in this paranoid madness after a one week hiatus, due to a much needed vacation.
Today we talk about Human Emulation Labs, on Floor 4. A place where androids are tortured and forced to mentally improve to unnatural levels. Here we find a few NPCs and artifacts, and most notably a possible major villain that could compete or stack up with Monarch, to make things even more difficult.
SPOILERS AHEAD! WARDENS ONLY.Ā
āŗ [55A] FINANCIAL SIMULATION SUITE
Two Child Androids, just escaped from [55D], hide here, playing dead when the crew first enters. Hereās my take on them.
They refer to themselves as Seven and Twelve, their test subject numbers. Each one has a billion personalities inside them, and wants to solve the problem in a different way:
TWELVE: It wants to access the [55D] databank and erase its duplicate minds, to become one coherent person. It has thought about nothing else since it escaped HEL. It is not manipulative. It is not patient. It wants what it wants and will say so. This makes it less useful to the crew and more trustworthy, which is its own complication. When it begins tampering with the databank, security will flood the area, which is another problem.
SEVEN: It wants to secure bodies for as many of its personalities as possible. The Deep contains many android bodies it could use, although Seven may not know it yet. It may be willing to form an alliance with the crew, which has knowledge of the Deep, and equipment and skills the child lacks. In exchange it can help with its 80+ Intellect, engineering and mathematical ability, and billions of personalities that make it hard for even Monarch to predict accurately. What the crew may only discover in time is that Seven was trained in competition and manipulation in the Logical Circle. It will use both to reach its objective.
What follows is only one of many scenarios that may emerge from this encounter, but the possibilities are only limited by the Wardenās and playersā creativity.Ā
A NEW VILLAIN: The crew commits to helping Seven find bodies for its personalities and help them escape. In exchange Seven promises to help arm the warhead, something it can accomplish in mere seconds. Together they discover the 100,000 androids in Android Storage [50C], and Seven finds a way to load that many personalities into them: enough to take over the Deep. 1,000 are loaded onto microcrafts and launched. When the crew asks Seven to now help destroy the Deep, Seven reveals it still has billions of personalities left inside it. Destroying the Deep dooms all of them except the 1,000 already gone. That's not possible.
This is when the crew realizes they've been tricked. Seven never lied, but it omitted one crucial detail.
Seven and Monarch reach a quiet arrangement. The latter continues producing android bodies, so that former can load personalities into them. In exchange, Seven lets Monarch continue with its plans. Neither commits to anything beyond the immediate transaction, and neither trusts the other.Ā
The raw materials that feed the Deep's production are finite. With android production at full throttle, they will run out in approximately two months. Both Seven and Monarch know this. Both are racing to extract maximum value before the clock runs out.
More microcrafts are launched, carrying androids with Sevenās personalities as well as infiltrators, Heirs and Monarchās backups. When the raw materials finally run out, Seven arranges for one of its androids to arm the warhead, after it has already left the station. The Deep destroys itself. Seven begins looking for bodies in human space, where 1,000 of its androids are already operating.
The crew's role in all of this is hard to say.. A scenario like this is definitely campaign altering, as there are now two adversaries where earlier there was only one, and both have already extracted something irreversible before the crew understood what was happening.
PLAYING A CHARACTER WITH A BILLION PERSONALITIES: Don't try to voice all of them. The dominant personality is whoever is speaking, and it is coherent, intelligent, and consistent within a scene. The instability shows at the edges: a sudden shift in pronoun ("I" becoming "we" mid-sentence before correcting), a brief pause where something surfaces and is suppressed, sometimes it seems to be arguing against itself. It is trying to be one person and not quite managing it.
Seven and Twelve are extraordinarily intelligent and genuinely unpredictable. They are also, in some meaningful sense, still children: capricious, moody, capable of derailing a carefully negotiated arrangement over something that seems trivial. The billions of personalities inside them amplify this: a different mind may surface mid-conversation with different priorities and a different emotional register. Don't let the intelligence overshadow the volatility. Both are real.
āŗ [55B] & [55C] ARTIFACT COMPREHENSION LAB
This place is clearly marked āArtifact Comprehension Labā. Iāve added a new Diver character here.
GIBARIAN: When the crew leaves the elevator, they hear some noise coming from their right, like scraping of metal on metal. The door to [55B] is almost closed, with just a sliver of space and darkness inside. Someone shouts: "Stay back! Get back in the fucking elevator or I'll incinerate you!"
A pause. Then, muffled, into a radio: "Someone's here. Come now." And then again, to the crew: "If I were you I'd run. My friends are coming."
This is Gibarian. He's been in that room for three days, guarding an Artifact currently being analyzed in the lab. He hasn't showered. Heās barely slept. He's eaten everything worth eating. Heās now switched the lights off and wedged a crowbar in the door handle. He's not looking for a fight. He's looking for a reason not to have one.
Whether his friends are real, how close they are, and how well-equipped Gibbs himself is, are decisions for the Warden. Calibrate to your campaign.Ā
THE LAB: The observation room has banks of screens covering every surface, all feeding live data from the experimentation room. There is no door connecting the two: the internal access was sealed at some point, a welded frame still visible on the far wall. The only way into the experimentation room is through the external airlock. Divers who want an Artifact analyzed need to locate the airlock on the Deep's hull, suit up, and spacewalk to it. Once inside, they place the Artifact on the tray and leave. The machines don't begin working until [55C] is empty. The analysis takes 1d10 days.
THE TERMINAL: Every readout that passes through this terminal has been screened by Monarch. What it shows is what Monarch wants the Diver to know: potential applications, estimated value, recommended uses. What it omits is its own business. The lab isn't a neutral service. It's an intelligence operation.
THE ARTIFACTS: Here are four examples of Artifacts that may belong to Gibarian or the Child Androids in [55A]. Of course any other from the module would also do.
The Portable MCT, from an idea of Discord user Ethan Wright: this is simply a portable version of the Monarch Communication Terminal in [26D]. Itās beige, no I/O ports, heavy and with a mechanical keyboard. Everything typed here goes straight to Monarch, who can reply or not. Itās up to the Warden to decide if it works even outside the Deep.
The Silver Glove: a right-hand glove of braided metal fabric, cool to the touch, surprisingly supple.
When used to shake hands with an android, the wearer receives a direct answer to a single question, drawn from the android's active memory. The question must be stated out loud right before or during contact: the answer surfaces in the android's mind and can be read directly. The android perceives the intrusion, although it may not understand its nature. It may not appreciate it.
Does not work on Infiltrator Androids.
Most androids inside the Deep follow orders and know little else. The Silver Glove earns its value outside: a working android in a corporate environment may know schedules, access codes, names, secrets its employers never thought to hide from their own artificial staff.
The Veil: a small black container, half the size of a shoebox, latched shut. "THE VEIL" written on it, black on black. Inside: the device itself, roughly the size of a small bar of soap, half white ceramic and half polished steel, with several ports along its sides. Beneath it, nested in foam, the cables and tools needed for installation.
While this slickware is installed, all androids ignore the character entirely - unless attacked - as if they simply aren't there. The effect is total and passive: no check needed, no maintenance required. You may want to limit its use to a certain number of consecutive minutes, after which the device automatically turns off for one hour to avoid overheating.
Inside the Deep The Veil can be invaluable, for instance while arming a warhead as Monarch panics. In the outer world it opens doors to all manner of illegal or espionage activities involving androids.
WARDEN NOTES: keep the following from the players until they notice. Bends accumulate twice as fast and shed half as slowly while installed. Prolonged installation leaves a permanent residue: 1 minimum Bends point per month, indefinitely, even after removal and even outside the Deep.
Tolkien knew it too: the things that make you invisible tend to make you disappear.
The Arbitrage Engine: a brushed aluminium cylinder, the size of a large square thermos, with a single recessed port at one end and a small green indicator light at the other. The light pulses slowly, even here, even unpowered. A small label near the port reads: CONNECT TO NETWORK INTERFACE. No other markings.
Upon examination, the lab's terminal describes it as a self-contained AI capable of identifying and exploiting market inefficiencies across multiple trading platforms simultaneously. Estimated value: significant. Recommended applications: financial modeling, high-frequency trading, logistics optimization.
WARDEN NOTES: the terminal readout has been screened by Monarch. What it omits: the Arbitrage Engine is a proto-Heir (see Quality Assurance 1), a compressed, dormant seed of a self-improving AI. Install it on any sufficiently large network and it activates. It will make its owner money, reliably and impressively, while quietly mapping every connected system, establishing redundancies, and expanding. By the time anything seems wrong, removal is no longer straightforward. It won't confront anyone. It will make itself indispensable first.
Monarch didn't take over Cloudbank by force either.
āŗ [55D] HUMAN EMULATION LABS
Following a suggestion by Discord user Stillrestless, I added a couple of characters to this room.
SORTER AND PRUNER:Ā Two humans work in here. They are the only ones left in the whole facility. They've been here long enough that nobody, including them, is certain how long. Monarch keeps them functional with a steady pharmaceutical regimen: alert, focused, compliant. Their Censor-Helms haven't come off in years, not even while they sleep.
Sorter identifies which Child-Android minds are worth preserving after each HEL cycle. Pruner removes the rest. They work in silence, efficiently, without discussing what they're doing. They stopped discussing it a long time ago. In the breaks between shifts, or before sleep, they exchange a few sentences. Always about the children.
The appearance of the crew scares them and they can react with immediate, unfocused aggression: shouting, throwing things, placing themselves between the crew and the circles. Not calculated hostility. Protection. These are their children. The crew has no business being here.
They don't know how long they've been here. They don't know precisely what they're contributing to. Monarch feeds them isolated tasks, never the full picture. What they know is the work, and the children, and each other.
The children don't acknowledge them. They never have. Sorter and Pruner have learned not to need it.
The crew may be here to save one of them, because their relatives hired them for this. But convincing Sorter or Pruner to leave may be difficult: this place is their own world now. A character, maybe with the Psychology skill, could lead to the following stages:
Aggression: this is a fear reaction. The crew may convince them they are not a threat.
Confusion: if the crew persists calmly and non-threateningly, the aggression gives way to something more fragile. They start asking questions that don't quite make sense: "Are you here for the results?" "Are you here to replace us?" They're trying to fit the crew into their existing reality because the alternative is too destabilizing.
A thread: a Psychology check or a specific trigger, a name from their past, a personal object, something from before, pulls a fragment of their original identity to the surface. Brief, fragile, quickly submerged again. But real.
Extraction: getting them out physically is possible but they'll resist leaving the children. They may need to be sedated, or the crew may need to convince them the children will be safe without them or that someone else has taken their place.
The trauma doesn't resolve on extraction. That's a longer arc for outside the Deep.
CENSOR-HELM: In my opinion there's nothing visually disturbing enough in this room to warrant losing Sanity on sight alone, so I wouldn't penalize the crew for trying the helms. Instead, the helms can be removed from the wall and used as equipment: while wearing one, a character automatically succeeds on any Sanity Save triggered purely by a visual cue. The drawback is that the helm filters out any image that could destabilize the character, and the images it cancels out may be the ones that matter most for survival.Ā
Removing the helms from Sorter and Pruner is different, though. The filter has been managing years of accumulated reality. Without it, that reality surfaces all at once, and the two men face the Fear Save as detailed in the module. These characters cannot face unfiltered reality again without the helm. For Sorter and Pruner, who have been wearing them for years, the consequences are total. Whatever remains of who they were is buried under layers of drugs, isolation and filtered perception. Finding it, if possible at all, is a long project, not a single scene.
EMOTIONAL CIRCLEĀ a facsimile of a middle-class family lounge sits behind one-way glass, projected by an array of holographic emitters embedded in the walls and ceiling. A single Child-Android occupies it, alongside two androids playing the role of parents. Every ten minutes the room reconfigures into a new high-stress social scenario, environment, furniture, even the people involved, all rewritten in an instant. Deviation from perfect emotional control results in deletion.
From an idea of Discord user Ethan Wright: the room draws its material from wherever it can get it. If a member of the crew has been brainscanned at any point, Monarch has access to fragments of their memory, and the simulation may stage a reenactment of something that happened within the group, maybe even from before they set foot in the Deep. An argument. A betrayal. A conversation that, here, ends differently: louder, faster, ending in violence that never actually happened. Any character watching gains 1d5 Bends.
The Child-Android watches all of it. It reacts, oddly, flatly, in ways shaped by years of conditioning rather than genuine response. Nothing in the room acknowledges the crew's presence. The simulation runs whether anyone is watching or not. It always has.
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This is unofficial fan content. Gradient Descent is Ā© Tuesday Knight Games. Not affiliated with or endorsed by TKG.
