[Mage: The Dethroned Queen] San Diego: Edge & The Living Web

Out of Character (OOC):

Chronicle: Mage 2: The Dethroned Queen
Venue: Mage: The Awakening 2nd Edition
Chronicle Storyteller: Jerad Sayler

Assistant Storytellers: Hannah Nyland & Alex Van Belkum

San Diego Cabal: EDGE

The following is a showcase of one of the Recognized Cabals of the Concilium of the Cerulean Peace in San Diego California.  The Cabal has many connections to the PCs of our current chronicle.  Original designs by Lucas Powell.

Edge's acceptance as members of the Council was a surprise to most. This Cabal is the youngest in the Consilium, and their acceptance ruffled more than a few feathers in more well established Cabals that still have yet to be recognized by Avenzoar and the Consilium. It is primarily made up of Free Councilors who focus on the bleeding edge of technological innovation and the elevation of human innovation as true magic.

Most wouldn’t recognize this from the outside by Edge is also a Wisdom Cabal. They seek moral enlightenment by engaging with technology and fostering philanthropy and altruism.  They money they “acquire” is largely invested into projects to help advance science and research for projects that may better mankind.  They partner with research and development companies and colleges all over California.

MEMBERSHIP:

k47h4r05 (Katharos)

Acanthus, Free Council, Legacy: Unknown
Councilor and Liegeman of the Edge is a surprise when most meet him. He wears a business suit and seems to have an eye for money. Very little else is known about him.

K47h4r05 is a hacker of financial systems.  It all is legal (mostly), but mastery of micro bids and transactions on stock markets can yield some amazing wins.  The launders some money and makes sure that the Cabal and Assembly caucuses have all their financial records crystal clean. He is a financer for the Free Council and gets a heady take on BitCoin and other cryptocurrency.  It definitely helps when you’re just lucky to pick right encryption key, password, or the right stock to buy and which to sell and at what time.  He re-invested money gained into new stocks for companies that advance mankind.

gn0stik0s (Gnostikos)

Mastigos, Free Council, Legacy: Technomancer (Digital Eye of the Vanguards)

A Net Neutrality hackivist and a major supporter of the Pirate Party, gn0stik0s is somewhat infamous among the hacker community, and she’s a wanted criminal.

She is actually from the UK and is wanted all over the US and Europe.  She keeps her activities routed through non-extradition countries that cannot track her down either.  She’s into theoretical computer science.

10g05 (Logos)

Obrimos, Free Council, Legacy: Transhuman Engineer

Much like gn0stik0s, l0g05 is also somewhat famous in the right circles performing feats of security that seem to baffle the mind. He is highly active in 4Chan, WikiLeaks, WikiPedia, hacker IRCs and the Dark Web. 

He is invested in the need for citizen privacy, from application data collection, hacking cameras all over the city to the development of advanced encryption schemes to keep what a person does online private.  He is heavily invested in networks like TOR, anonymous services and VPNs.

10g05 is Reaper’s legacy patron and mentor, who refers to Reaper as N00B.  Logos is studying memes, especially supernatural ones.  Could digital memes be used to enlighten?

C3RNNVN05 (Cernnvenos)

Thrysus, Free Council, Legacy: Imagineers

A modern primitive C3RNNVN05 seeks to blend ancient shamanic understandings with modern sensibilities and especially with the digital age. He has a very strong relationship with the Heirs of Silicon, the spirit court of technology and innovation.

C3RNNVN05 is the only one of the Cabal who goes outside much. He sees the other members of the cabal as fatally flawed because they ignore physical and biological sciences.  He’s big into chaos theory and eco-system mathematics.  He is also the mostl macho of the group.  He is also the Cabal’s mechanic and operator of non-IT equipment projects, tools and instruments.  He is interested in crossing the bio-biological thresholds.

SANCTUM:

Edge's Sanctum is a large and futuristic house just outside of the Data Centers in Lairport, CA which is located just south of LAX and sandwiched between Hawthorne, CA and Manhattan Beach.

The Sanctum has a machine shop and several server rooms.

10g05 has an amazing set up in his room, essentially a 360 pod with chair and monitors.  He can sleep in this pod/desk if he wants.

Gn0stik0s has a more conventional set up in the living room with lots of monitors.

Ka7h4r05 has a pretty nice standing desk and tread mill in the living room, 8 monitors encircle his visual range.  He lives the high life and keeps his cabal from doing anything stupid money they have stolen.

C3RNNVN05 works in the machine shop which has 3D scanners, 3D printers and all kinds of equipment.

BACK-UP CACHES:

They also has storage lockers and storage garage full of equipment.  They own parts of data centers, cloud space in the data centers nearby.  K47h4r05’s magical set-up basically has zero latency to all the major stock exchanges in the US.  Which means that high-speed microtrading allows him to exploit parts of the market using algorithms to undercut and overcut every trade.  The hardest part is staying secret, sleepers are touchy about their money and they aren’t the only interested parties in the markets.

Edge's Mystery: The Living Web
One of Edge's goals is the study of the Mystery of the Living Web in its various incarnations.  It is still unknown if the Living Web springs to life spontaneously as the result of occult influences on information systems or if there are a set series of circumstances that creates one.  Despite their differences, a single source of all strains of this intelligent website phenomena may still be the cause.  We plan to study the various strains of the Living Web to answer these questions and intervene prudently to protect as many sleepers from harm as we can safely manage.

Background:
Not quite an entity and not quite a ritual, the Living Web is a series of artificially intelligent web pages that shows the capability of implanting hypnotic commands in a viewer’s mind. As users visit the pages for their content, often pornographic, they become enthralled with the site’s subtle, subliminal series of ever-changing symbols. Like a digital mandala, the Living Web draws the viewer into a meditative state. The viewer becomes caught up in an elevated level of consciousness as she stares into the fluctuating pattern, her unconscious mind attempting to assign meaning to the progression of symbols. As her mind sorts the meaningful from the sublime, the true function of the Living Web comes into play. The Living Web plants a series of subliminal commands in the victim’s mind. These commands may be simple, such as “Buy this product,” but could also be complex orders for prayers or rituals. Trapped by the cyclical, hypnotic patterns of the Web, the victim could begin to repeat the necessary chants for summoning some horrific being or perform some other spell. If the summoning kills the victim, the original creator of the website can still enjoy the benefits of the dead person’s participation, all without the mess of dealing with her face to face.

While the websites must be first set up by a separate entity (almost always mundane), after this genesis the Living Web becomes a self-aware being. It logs access to its sites, and as traffic increases it begins to complicate the patterns within the pages. The greater the traffic, the more complex the site becomes, building its string of digital code into an alluring maze from which viewers cannot, or simply will not, escape. As the Living Web cycles up toward the ultimate goal, which may be the implantation of a sales pitch, a ritual or some other suggestive command, it actually becomes predatory. While the “young” Living Web passively waits for viewers to seek its pages out, the advanced Living Web actively recruits new viewers with colorful pop-up ads and seductive spam. The pop-ups and unwanted email contain mini-codes of the Living Web’s message, small fragments of the larger digital prayer wheel that spin in the viewer’s mind and make him feel compelled to open the hyperlinks to the new sites. The Living Web may offer some explanation of compulsive web-surfing or repeat visits to the same, seemingly mundane, bookmarked sites.

Description:
Sites within the Living Web often appear no different from any other website to the casual observer. Only when the viewer begins to search the site and becomes seduced by the fluctuating subliminal patterns does the true threat appear. The Living Web often hosts pornography or web comics, as such sites often draw repeat customers.

Analysis:
The Living Web is not a spirit or other entity, it is wholly digital in nature despite having spiritual aspects. The Living Web is a combined technological and supernatural construct, and so its creator (if it even has one) must have knowledge of the occult, and of technology, specifically computer programming. In this era, however, that means the Living Web is a tool available to a wide array of individuals. Though not a cryptid in the traditional sense, the predatory Living Web can stalk a large number of victims at the same time. While the Living Web’s immediate effect on victims is certainly cause for alarm, the larger threat is the motivation of the person or group behind its introduction into cyberspace. Unlike viruses designed by hackers for fun or to test the system, the Living Web is intelligent and goal-oriented, and therefore used only by those with a clear purpose. Web-savvy cults could make use of this online “creature,” as could technology-wielding mages. The easiest way to eliminate the Living Web is through destruction of its host server, though other computer viruses have shown promise in harming it.

Known Active Instances:

1. Strain-005 - An instance of the Living Web merged with a website operated by a small cell of hunters in San Diego associated with Network Zero.  It has since been sending the cell's membership emails regarding the whereabouts of various supernatural beings.  It appears to be somehow scraping imagery and reporting of legitimate paranormal activity in the city and providing it to them.  If anyone is caught on camera in town it is likely to be provided to the cell and then spread through the hunter's cell to other hunters... We have yet to attempt to crash their systems as doing so could provide its own evidence if the attack is only partially successful.  See file for details.

2. Strain-008 - We've located two human subjects who have become infected by the Living Web and spends days at a time visiting the sites. This particular “strain” of the Web shows traces of supernal tampering and we believe it might be being used by a mage.  It appears to be designed to “download” any interesting information from user’s minds. The mage doesn't appear particularly malevolent, just greedy — they appear to be uses the information to drain bank accounts and commit identity theft. Blackmail isn’t beneath them, though, and neither is selling information to less reputable supernatural beings. Because the information leak is passed second-hand, direct confrontation could result in being targeting by this mage or their cabal and having any information they gather on us being leaked to other threat profiles.  We need more information before proceeding. 

3. Strain-002 - An anarchist group calling themselves Sever has weaponized a strain of the Living Web and is infecting the San Francisco city government’s computers with the Living Web, slowing communications and basic services to a crawl. As terrorist threats go, it’s less destructive than a bomb; but as the Web entrances more civil servants (who thereafter become useless), utilities and emergency responses are showing noticeable dip in response times.  Edge has been monitoring and recording this activity and sanitizing computers in such a way as to protect our secrecy.  However, more overt activity will be required to purge the strain from the net and then the group will have to be dealt with as well.  It is well outside of concilium influence and the claims of the cabal, however action will need to be taken soon.