The Wares: Paying with your Soul

 

Ever since the days of John Henry, we’ve been fighting the battle against machines, trying to prove that humanity had the upper hand on cold iron and circuitry.

It took us until earlier this century to figure out that we shouldn’t be trying to beat the machines; we should be joining them. Of course it all began as prosthetics—artificial legs and hands that moved like the originals, cybernetic eyes and ears that let people born blind or deaf see and hear. But pretty soon people figured out what began as medical marvels could be adapted to improve anyone’s senses and abilities, and it wasn’t a big jump from there to implanted phones and computers.

These days, every bit of who you are can be improved with the right piece of gear (unless you’re a mage or adept—we’ll talk about that in a second). Think you’ve got quick reflexes? You can be quicker. An artificial neural network’ll make you faster than a nervous  jackrabbit.

Think you’re strong? Switch out the muscles you were born with for a set that’s been custom grown for brawn and efficiency and you’ll take strong to a whole new level.

Think you’re charming? Implant a few sets of specialized pheromone dispensers and people will swoon when you walk by and nod enthusiastically when you talk.

And that’s just for starters. You can put actual plates of armor on your skin, or lace your bones with metal so that your fists and legs deliver crushing blows. You can make your senses sharper, your brain faster, and you can implant knowledge that you never learned in school.

You can replace entire pieces of your body with artificial replicas full of extra strength, nimble agility, secret compartments, and hidden weapons that provide very unpleasant surprises at just the right time.

But it’s not free. And we’re not just talking money; there’s a higher price to pay. All this stuff is useful and great, but it’s artificial. It’s not metahuman, and your body knows it. Each time you get one of these augmentations, you give up a piece of yourself. You lose something
inside of you, the essence of metahumanity. We don’t quite understand what this “it” is, but we know this much—the more artificial you make yourself, the farther you get from actual life. If you get too far, whatever animated you is going to disappear, until all the gear you
bought just collapses and becomes indistinguishable from any other pile of silicon, steel, and chrome. So go ahead and get yourself augmented up. Get those synaptic boosters, those muscle replacements, and while you’re at it put a sparkling datajack in your head and
some boss, day-glo nanotattoos on your face. Just understand that each time you do this, another piece of your metahumanity goes sliding away.

But wait! There’s more! If you are Awakened, if you have any sort of magical mojo, you lose more than your essence. Your magic theorists, they’ll tell you that mana is tied to life (which is why inanimate objects don’t have an astral aura and there’s no magic in deep space, but that’s another subject). You take away some of the life of an Awakened person, you take away some of their power.

That’s why the spellslingers and adepts among us are cautious about how many augmentations they get. But they got their spells and their abilities, which means they got plenty of ways to keep up even if they aren’t wired to the gills.

In the end, all this augmentations stuff comes down to a single question: How much of your metahumanity are you willing to trade for power? And that, chummer, is a question that covers way more than how many augmentations you get.