In the year 2220, the first ever long-term space colony Geminorum is set to launch. Set to orbit near Earth, it is a study for the capabilities of everyday people to live in a simulated city experience.
As the small city within was designed to simulate a regular Earth city, it needed regular Earth people to inhabit it. Healthy people from all walks of life were invited to participate in living in the space colony for 2 years, with a large payout for those accepted. They would continue their regular jobs and lives while in the colony, while knowing there is NO ability to leave or change your mind for those 2 years. This is also the inaugural mission, so there's no past event to go off of, or true guarantee of safety.
What I want from you is to come up with a person (or people) living within this city. They must be adult humans, able to pass a health check, and be employed in something, but it doesn't need to be "important" or space related. They're running a whole mini daily life city up here. For inspiration, consider the type of person that would accept a mission like this. Are they personally excited to be in space, do they want to brag about doing a historical first, are they trying to get away from something, or do they just really need some money? That sort of thing. An illustrated design would be appreciated but isn't necessary.
About halfway through the planned mission, something goes awry. Many of the computer systems, including the autopilot, aren't functioning as expected. While the crew try to cover up the issues from the city to prevent mass panic, there are small signs that things aren't quite right, and are going downhill. A mystery game about figuring out who is putting the entire colony into danger and why.
The crew characters, the who and why, and the basic beats are all figured out. I want some more "everyday life" NPCs to help flesh out the city. Especially ones who don't know anything about the deeper going-ons!
The vast majority of the city-people are humans, though there are some robots around, of the non-sentient worker drone variety.
This is a short game idea that is taking place within an extended sci-fi setting. A post-dystopian series where things are slowly improving from a disaster that happened in the 21st century. Functional robots have existed since that time, but fully sentient robots have only existed within the past 50 years. Space programs were put on pause for a long time, but there's been huge public interest in them these days.
The most common daily technology wearable people use are wrist pieces, or holophones. Uses stabilization and hologram technology. Can be used in a variety of ways, and not restricted to certain screen sizes and ratios. If you want privacy, you can use Smart Glasses or Contacts so that people only see the outline of the “screen”, and you see all the content. You’re not supposed to be able to hide that you’re using the holophone though, as that could cause problems for others privacy, cheating, etc.
In the 21st century, when the world was facing multiple disasters with an impending major one, many doomsday cities popped up across the Americas. These were meant for the elites (and those who they'd need to serve them properly) to take refuge, though over the years as these places were built, there was much flashiness and showing off to each other over how much more luxurious and flashy their own cities were compared to each other. This resulted in many being... shoddy, architecturally. However, these were the main places that weathered the issues, and in the upcoming centuries, people expanded outwards from these cities, creating district regions connected to each other by large stretches of mostly uninhabited land.
Robots were used, first as drone types that went between districts, but quickly it became the new way for different district elites to show off, by making newer, fancier, and more intelligent robots to represent their district as they traveled between them. This resulted in a mix between very realistic humanoid robots and...otherwise flashy and showy modernist designs, much more impractical than if they were just designed for the work necessary.
Seeing that these robots were safe and reliable to do "outside" work, they started making ones to work inside districts, as under-population and lack of skilled workers was a major issue. This made people want more intelligent and easier to talk to robots, which led to further advances in AI, making them more human for the comfort and interest of those who interact with them.
There was a problem though, of AI mostly learning off of other AI, especially as a lot of old information was lost in the 21st century and new info wasn't stored well. The more AI was trained off other AI, the more it “hallucinated” and came up with bizarre and illogical solutions to everything. People would call these robots schizophrenic. The need for robots to be able to see their own thoughts as being irrational and to reason through AI hallucinations resulted in the next generation of scientists wanting to create robots that could truly think for themselves, as this would solve the issue. There was a lot of moral conflict about the idea of a self aware robot though… especially as their main use is free labor.
At the turn of the 23rd century, Gold was created, and could be seen as the first fully self aware and sentient robot. He worked as a defender of the district he was created in, and was eventually stretched into being a general region defender. People were so impressed by it, and as it coincided with a relatively stable era compared to the years since the initial strife, this time came to be known as the Golden Era. Many robot workers were created with full sentient AI, as the moral conflicts that were created by it were seen as less of an issue than hallucinating.
The stress of defending, along with the various conflicting ideas of what should be done by the humans in "control" of him, led to Gold deciding that the only way to properly defend anything would be to have total control of it. He was eventually destroyed, but the public's opinion towards robots soured heavily. Many new rules were put into place to prevent the type of "straying thinking" that Gold "suffered from", but people were too used at this point to having robots that could learn for themselves and there were no other solutions to hallucinating, so they didn't really want to backtrack on the AI entirely... though, many still distrust robots to this day.
A renegade, by dictionary definition, is a person who abandons a cause or organization usually without right. It’s mainly a term for sentient robots that were disconnected from their registered server, and either connected to an illegal private server, or left disconnected entirely. Overtime it came to mean any robot that isn’t properly serialized and connected to an approved server. They’re perceived as dangerous because without regulated oversight, they can go against the restrictions placed on them.
While being renegade doesn’t necessarily mean a robot will behave badly, it does mean that they can’t be tracked or stopped through a forced update through their registered server, making them highly dangerous compared to regular robots.
The main way to get around being caught as a renegade is to disable (or not install) forced server connecting, and then willingly connect to one and be registered under it. There’s not really a way to check if the connection is forced or not. If it’s not forced, the robot can be connected, but do things like reject updates or modify data that is being uploaded or downloaded.
Homebrews, by legal definition, are robots that are made privately as opposed to by organizations. In many cases, this is illegal, but this term is much less loaded than “renegade” is. Most cases of homebrews are people taking decommissioned robots and experimenting on improving them for personal use, such as taking an old retail unit and modifying it to be a home servant. Homebrews can be serialized and connected to servers like any other privately owned robot, but many owners don’t want to go through the trouble and cost of this.
While the overlap between the definition and practice of renegades and homebrews are strong, renegades are usually talked about in the context of crime and robots being violent, while homebrews are usually in the context of weird nerds creating their dream robot or trying to figure out how specific things work.
While simpler ones are often overlooked, if a robot is caught being an unregistered homebrew, the punishment ranges from fines and being forced to update to standard parts and connecting to appropriate servers, to being decommissioned and scrapped.