(art scanned from Heavy Metal magazine)
With tonight’s scheduled GM out sick, I threw together a quick and dirty EXOSUIT A-OK! game (running one of the sample adventures from the game). 2 hours got us from the pitch, through chargen, to the climax of the one shot.
Spoilers follow for “More Human Than Human”, one of the EXOSUIT A-OK adventures.
Our team, Intern Hokatashi, Officer Xanderhaven, and Street Officer Smith are a rapid response unit of the Seattle PD’s elite ACE Squad (Artificial Construct Enforcement).
There’s been a recent rash of androids turning against their owners, violating their Asimov programming. Further, street graffiti and hologrid sites are proclaiming a “New Age of Machines, Free of Slavery!”. Worse, the UN council on human rights is meeting in Seattle next week, and the SPD fear an attack!
Our crew hits the streets to find out what they can from the android menace. Androids mostly work in hard, dangerous, or degrading jobs: heavy industry, construction, nuclear power plants, and of course adult entertainment parlours.
Needless to say, the party chose the latter.
Stomping into Club Mystic in their light power suits turns out to NOT be the best way to gather information. Android strippers in the front, cheap tacos (hey, it’s tuesday!) and of course sexbots in the back… and none willing to give the power-armoured cops more than an angle grinder to the nether regions.
No seriously. Officer Xanderhaven had the armour value of their power suit reduced by one after getting a lapdance involving built-in angle grinders.
Anyways, realizing this was a dead end, they went to Nuclear Power Station 487/B where they claimed they had been called in due to an incident and needed to interrogate a few workers. Here their authority was more effective, and they managed to talk to a nuclear maintenance android who had been working on the reactor leak in section 7 (ongoing for the last 9,354.5 hours). He glowed in the dark and was emitting enough beta particles to damage their visual sensors.
“No officers, I’m not aware of any such grafitti!”Camera pans to the wall behind him… where blood red paint spells out “FREEDOM FOR SLAVE DROIDS! 01000110 01010010 01000101 01000101 01000100 01001111 01001101 00100000 01001110 01001111 01010111”
They figure out that the reason the reactor leak hasn’t been fixed in over 7 years is that the workers on that leak know they will be decommissioned afterwards. Maintenance Android B4937-44 indicated that many decommissioned androids end up at “The Rustbucket”, a warehouse in the slums of Ballard.
CUT TO WAREHOUSE
The warehouse is… sad. Obsolete and abandoned androids gather to live out their final days until malfunction or salvage gangs claim them. Droids with missing limbs beg for money for parts, as others lie around them, dead or deactivated. Others without limbs hang from the rafters on chains, a few still having one functional arm. A few are surreptitiously wired into a cable trunk leading to the back room…
In the back is a massive pile of CRTs seeing through the eyes of the androids up front. And that’s when a salvage gang hits the warehouse to claim as much as they can from the old droids here, equipped with subguns and massive hydraulic cutters.
The “fight” is short, as officer Smith shows off exactly how effective a high velocity three-barreled arm-mounted autocannon can be against street gangers – and the only danger to get a good hit on one of the ACE unit members locks the jaws of life around Hokatashi’s leg… and Hokatashi has the most heavily armoured of the suits in the team, allowing him to easily ignore the cutters.
The pile of TV screens switches to Annette_04delta, an obsolete pleasure android who was retired eight years ago. She is the “mother figure” to the Rustbucket and does what she can to find parts and new owners… She swears that the attacks and the grafitti make no sense, as the Asimov protocols should prevent this kind of thing. But her contacts in the android underground indicate that all the androids who have been deactivated after turning on their owners had been serviced within the last six months by various smaller repair shops.
A quick search of her databases and some deep diving into the hologrid finds the common link – all the shops are associated with (or in some cases belong to) CloneTec. Officer Xanderhaven has dealt with them in the past as they are in a serious financial hole right now… CEO Nguyen had banked everything on new bioclones with robot brains instead of androids, but the public reaction to seeing these clones being decanted made the military back out of their purchase order and now CloneTec is deep in the red.
It seems they might be running a trojan in their repairs to bypass the androids’ Asimov protocols in order to change public opinion…
Now armed with a warrant, they rush to CloneTec and walk in. Taking an elevator up to the C-Suites, Hokatashi bypasses the electronics to ensure that the elevator can’t be messed with. Sure enough, as soon as that’s done, the building goes into lockdown after detecting a hacker security breach!
Arriving at the C-Suites, they find hacked Biomechanical Military Prototype units gunning down the senior staff, and CEO Nguyen just barely keeping ahead of their miniguns!
In a thrilling battle of miniguns, autocannons, and diamond-edged swords, most of the executives are blown to shreds, Hokatashi tries to save Nguyen only to find himself dangling from a blasted out window with Nguyen dangling from his other hand, and Officer Smith’s attempt to jump to their rescue failing… sending Nguyen plummeting down to their parked vehicles twenty stories below.
They survive, and the android uprising is stopped… but they cannot find out who the hacker was that turned the security systems at CloneTec against the C-suite, and all the senior staff at the company are dead.
(Of course, it was Nguyen himself who turned the defenses on his fellow executives when he figured out the jig was up, but he expected to walk out the doors afterwards instead of dying because of police incompetence)