MODS - what you need to know
MODS - what you need to know | |
| Feedback is good! | How nanotechnology is used in Dragon Knights |
This explains the basic science behind mods. It's impossible to do this without using technical jargon so here are definitions of common nanotechnological terms.
Mods rely on nanotechnology. Originally (early 21st century) nanites were made with tunneling electron microscopes but this was a laborious and often inefficient process. As nanites can make other nanites, an early development was to make a device (the nanosynthesizer) that used nanites to build more nanites according to computer instructions. A consequence of this was that nanosynthesizers could make more nanosynthesizers and university students were soon disseminating them to friends and sharing patterns on the internet. Some of these patterns weren't terribly well thought out (or intentionally malicious) and some of the less desirable mods have had long histories.
A potential use of nanites that was recognized before they were even invented was that they could repair, destroy and modify living cells (including their genetic material) and hence had medical applications. Mods for treating diseases and correcting genetic problems were soon being used by respected doctors and they came in very useful in the Muslim war for treating victims of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Nanotechnological weapons were also developed in varieties from microscopic pathogens to giant killer robots with rengerative and reproductive capacity. The nanohackers on the internet came up with some less useful (but sometimes very interesting) mods, such as ones that turned people into vampiers or enabled you to fly or made you very good looking. Then again, some of the nanohacker's creations have proved to be useful.
There is some confusion about terminology. "Mod" can mean somebody (or something) who has been modified by nanotechnology (e.g. "Jane is a mod"), a nanogenetic modification (e.g. "Jane has two mods, Amazon: Invictress and Mentate: Memoris") or the pattern to produce the modder (e.g. "Jane downloaded an interesting mod" or "Jane and Fred have the same mod"). There is also a tendency to confuse mods and nanoconstructs. Originally mods were created by modifying organisms (possibly human) with modders while constructs were created by applying modders to non-living material. To confuse matters, modders can be applied to dead organisms (or parts thereof). Sometimes the organism is simply used as a source of elements and has no effect on the final construct (apart from its isotope composition). However, often the modder reconstructed the genome (or tried to) in order to resurrect the organism or produce a clone or modified clone. There's also a group of modders (mostly weapons) that converted living organisms into non-living material. What's more it isn't always obvious if an entity was created from a living organism or not (some modders are capable of producing living cells from non-living material). To confuse matters more, some modders will combine more than one organism (common with Cymuras) or assimilate both an organism and some non-living material (this is common with Mechs). Therefore the distinction between mods and constructs came to mean that a mod was capable of fairly (or completely) autonomous behavior while a construct at best can only follow simple instructions. This distinction itself can be a bit unclear (e.g. the Mech: Rushdie is a borderline case). Another distinction sometimes applied is the ability to reproduce (mods can, constructs can't). This is complicated with entities that can breed but don't (or only sometimes) pass on their mod or those that don't actively try to reproduce but will produce multiple replicas if broken into parts (by virtue of their regenerative mechanism).
Is being modded really an improvement? This isn't an easy question to answer. Of course not all mods are human. There are some mods (e.g. Parfaits and Cyborgs) which most people, even modding advocates, have strong objections to. Some say that being a mod makes you somehow less human which they claim is a bad thing. Others say that being modded allowed them to be what they felt they should be. Neither possition is easy to objectively examine.
"Why don't they just have one mod with all the good charactoristics in it?" This is an easyer question to answer. There are some mod categories, most notably Eugenics and Enhanced, that make an attempt to do this. Both of these categories are similar to unmodded humans. Once mods deviate more from standard human form, it gets a lot less clear what's desirable. There's a fair amount of debate about what characteristics are good. Also some things are mutually incompatable. Most characteristics have some draw back which means that if you want them, you have to sacrifice something else. Here's a table of common characteristics of human mods, with their pros and cons (this is something of a generalization).
| Charactoristic | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|
| Good looks | Better looking people tend to be more popular and successful. Also good looks generally indecate health and fitness so mods that make you look good tend to make you better in other ways. | To an extent beauty is in the eye of the beholder so not everybody is going to agree on what looks good. What's generally agreed on actually looks fairly normal and it would be boring if everybody looked the same. You can't really do much better than the classic Venus/Apollo look, if you start taking things to extreams less people are going to think you look good. It's less clear if things like strange pigmentation or hair distribution looks good. Things like antlers and tail feathers tend to actually be an encomberance. |
| Large size | A big mod should beat a similar smaller mod in a straight fight. Also people tend to favour tall people. A lower surface area to volume ratio is usefull in the cold. | Being large tends to require more food and can leave you open to medical problems (even if your mod includes regeneration and longevity). Children of large mods take longer to reach maturity. When danger threatens you find it harder to hide. Large mods can find it hard to get passages on aircraft and space ships. Large mods are incompatable with most flying mods. You may also have trouble fitting in with a culture when most the buildings, clothing and furniture are too small for you. |
| Small size | Can get by on less food. Normally more comfortable in hot conditions. Children tend to reach maturity faster. People can be more sympathic towards you. You're more manouverable and can squeez into small spaces. Small mods are compatable with most flying mods. Small mods can often get cheap passage on aircraft and space ships. | Generally less strong and can't win a fight with a bigger mod. People often show unfair favouratism to larger mods. Can have trouble keeping warm in cold conditions. |
| Regeneration, disease resistance and longevity - these tend to be hard to separate as longevity usually works by repairing damage that normally accumates slowly and preventing diseases | Allows you to survive and completely recover from serious injuries and live to a great age in good shape. Allows you to avoid being sick. Not having this can be a liability in a society where it's expected. | Can lead to wreckless and violent behaviour as people know they're close to indestructable and expect others to be likewise. Can make population control difficult as few people die and even old people produce children (also a woman is only going die in childbirth if something very strange happens). Young people can become frustrated as advancement is difficult in a society dominated by healthy old people. Can lead to unintentional cloning (due to people regenerating from several small parts) or people regenerating with impaired or no memory. The legal situation in such cases has proved problematic. |
| High intelligence | Can understand complicated things and can devise good stratergies in conflict. More likely to corectly handle a missleading situation. Can get on better with other intelligent people. | Can become bored more easily. Usually don't get on as well with people of low or average intelligence. Can be slower to react in emergencies. Can waste time working out how to handle a simple situation by looking for subtleties and complications that aren't there. Requires a physically large brain that can be resource demanding. Intelligent people can be hard to control. If combined with obedience, they tend to obey abstract morals rather than their leaders. Tend to breed more slowly which puts them at an evolutionary dissadvantage. Children take longer to reach maturity. Large brain can lead to complications in childbirth. |
| Low inteilligence | Generally get on better with people of low intelligence. Can usually handle simple situations quickly. Less likely to get bored. Easyer to control. Small brain tends to require less resources and makes childbirth easyer. | Unable to corectly respond to a missleading, or unfamiliar situation. Unable to plot statergies for conflict. Unable to understand complicated things like science. |
| Obedience | Makes mods easyer to controle and more law abiding. This makes them fit into society better. Results in moral (rather than law-abiding) behaviour in more intelligent mods. | Likely to obey unwise orders and social norms. More intelligent mods sometimes make stands on very strange moral issues. |
| Physical strength | Better at doing hard physical labour and more likely to win sporting contests or unarmed fights. | Muscles and mechanical parts take food and oxygen to produce and maintain. They're also heavy (often requiring extra bone and/or inerts) so too many will make you denser than water and unable to swim. Great physical strength can diminish your ability to do delicate jobs. |
| Flying | Something mankind is said to have allways drempt of being able to do. Allows you get around faster, over obsticals and to reach or escape from certain places (e.g. the tops of burning buildings). | Difficult to do and therefore demanding of resources and limits other design features. You need to have wings (some mods have roter blades or balloons) that must be grown and maintained. You also need some way to propell yourself (some mods simply glide) such as flapping wings or an engine. This adds more demands. Then there are serious weight limitations so most flying mods have to be small. Having two different sorts of wings usually makes you incapable of flight so you must choose your flying mod carefully and, for the sake of your children, be carefull who you get romantically involved with. Flying mods are normally physically weaker than similar non-flying mods due to the demands of flight. |
| Breathing under water | Obviously prevents you from drowning (or at least makes it less likely). Also allows you spend extended periods of time under water. | Due to the relative low levels of oxygen in water, it takes major modifications to extract enough oxygen to maintain an endothermic organism. Having said that, some mods use gills and lungs (so they don't have to breath air as often). Some manage on a lower metabolic rate somehow. |
| Hibernation and cryogenesis | Allows you to survive hostile conditions by going into a dormant state. | Hibernation can be trigured inapropriately and sometimes fails to reverse when conditions change. Being dormant leaves you vulnerable as you're unable to respond quickly to new situations (e.g. your enemies finding you). |
| Morphing | Allows you to evade enemies or otherwise adapt to different situations by changing appearance. | The actual engineering of mophing is often complicated and demanding with a tendency to go wrong. Some people are hostile to the more sophisticated morphing mods as they can be hard to recognise and even able to impersonate other people and objects. |
| Improved reproduction | Anyone with an elimentary knowledge of evolution will see that this is good, at least in this respect. Mods that were unable to reproduce or weren't very good at it have tended to die out or at least remain rare. | Reproducing too fast can mean that the adults get overloaded by looking after the young. In extream cases, you can also find that it soon becomes difficult to find sexual partners without committing incest. You can also use up limited resources. Rappidly reproducing mods tend to be unpopular and are often persecuted by others. |
| Fertility control | Allows you to reproduce rapidly (or at least at a normal rate) or slowly depending on circumstances. | These mods tend to reproduce slowly which puts them at an evolutionary dissadvantage. |
| Psychic powers | Allows you to access information that isn't normally available. Some of the more extream abilities allow you to manipulate reality by thought. | Psychics tend to behave oddly and are often unpopular. It's often pointed out that most people actually have genes to prevent psychic powers (hense psychic genes are mostly recessive). Unlike most mods where the gen component is placed at the ends of chromosomes or on artifiscial chromosomes (and can be easily reversed), psychic mods need to delete or at least damage normal genes. Strong psychic abilities can damage eletrical equipment or delicate machines. |
| Mechanical parts (bionics) | Allows machine like abilities (being able to access a computer with external equipment, having built in lasers, mechanical eyes etc.) A mech brain can do certain types of calculations much faster then bio brains. | Many mech components have limited functions. They're very subseptable to EMP's and psychokinesis. Anything with a computer interface is subseptable to hacking, computer viruses etc. Mech components that relie on external equipment (screws, computer interfaces etc.) may become obsolete if those cease to become available. There's a widely held view that a mod with a largely mech brain can't be human. |
| Complexity | Allows mods to do lots of things. Can also add bells and whistles to compensate from some of the shortcomings. | The more complicated the mod, the more likely it is to go wrong. The bells and whistles themselves require cirtain resources to grow, maintain and operate. It also increases the chances that other mods will be incompatalbe. |
| Simplicity | The simpler the mod is, the less likely it is to go wrong and the more likely it is to be compatable with any other mods. | Tends to limit a mod's abilities. Can lead to "clunky" behaviour due to lack to subtlety. Some people claim that "it's too much work" to imbibe multiple minis in order to get the features they want. Also this tends to result in more compatability problems than other mods. |
Natural organisms can only evolve into similar ones by natural selection and can only hybridize with related species. Yet the classification of living organisms (called taxonomy), before the development of nanotechnology, was a complicated business. A nanohacker can combine bits of very different mods into the same pattern or write something completely new (and possibly complicated). Editors often rely on combining existing patterns or parts of them. A modder may introduce genes from other species (or artificial ones) into its target. These genes may come from an unrelated species or one that's long extinct. One individual can imbibe multiple mods that may have been developed separately. An individual can imbibe a mod which wasn't designed for their species (sometimes with unpredictable effects). Very different mods can inter breed and pass all or some of their mods to their offspring who may be able to infect others with the hybrid mod (or parts of it). Some of the first mods were what is often classified in the Mini Category, in that they only affected the target in a very specific way (e.g. changing eye color or bestowing immunity to a certain disease). There has been an increasing tendency (called genifiction or minification) to transfer elements of more complex mods to Minis (there are practical limitations on this, for example there's little point in absorbing an insect into your body if you don't make it bigger and stronger and link it to your brain so you can use it to fly). This means that mod classification is extremely complicated.
To avoid confusion, mod classification uses names for grouping which are different from those used for biological classification.
Mods are normally classified by three more-or-less independent, non-hierarchial groupings: Looks, Functions and Compositions. They are also classified by two hierarchical groupings (which have several, less commonly used, sub and super levels): Categories and Kinds. We will look at these in order of increasing complexity.
Looks
This is based on the mod's outward appearance. The problem with this is that similar looking mods can act very differently. Also many mods have some shape shifting ability and many more will undergo drastic changes under certain circumstances. To partly get round the problem, looks can be combined (e.g. a centaur might be described as "animoid/humanoid"). However this is useful for discribing what mods look like. The Looks are:
Functions
This tells you the purpose of a mod. The problem is that the purpose behind many mods is unknown and some have come to serve functions which were probably not the designer's intent. The functions are:
Compositions
These tell you what parts (at least in general) a mod has and is expressed as a formula consisting of one or more components. The components are:
Many mods, such as Giants and Lycanthropes, consist only of a genetically modified human with some nanites for regeneration and longevity (and morphing in the case of Lycanthropes). Therefore such mods have the composition HgN. Fairy: Tarantula Wasps also a have genetically modified human component and nanites but they add a genetically modified insect (non-mammalian animal), giving the composition: HgAgN.
Catagories and Kinds
These are hiararchical groupings, analagous to genera and species (or some would say: families and genera) in biology. A kind is a particular "sort" of mod and a category is a group of similar kinds. Mods are often called by their category and kind. For example the kind Cro Magnon belongs to the category Giant and is often called Giant: Cro Magnon. Also the same kind name can be used in different categories so you also have Atlas: Cro Magnon, Amazon: Cro Magnon, Feminazi: Cro Magnon, Pre-historic: Cro Magnon and Spartan: Cro Magnon with somewhat different charactoristics. As with biology, distinctions between categories and kinds tend to be technical and sometimes debatable. Most people can see that Acrobats are very different from Abominables. However they have more difficulty distinguishing Abominables from Giants, Giants from Mentates, Mentates from Elves and Elves from Acrobats. Sometimes all these mods are included in the super-category Normals but this is more-or-less synominous with the look Humanoid and isn't used often. Also all these categories have different underlying logic and tend to behave differently (for example, Amazons only affect females, Atlases only affect males and Spartans affect both sexes in the same way). With kinds, there are minor variations that are sometimes called versions or sub-kinds or classifed as separate kinds. The thing to remember is that you shouldn't be suprised if you hear people use different names for the same mod.
Another complication is that mods are often imbibed by differt types of people. For example, neither Atlas nor Giant mods are designed to affect intelligence but those who inbibe a Giant tend to be smarter than those who imbibe an Atlas, leading to a statistical difference in intelligence.
Four categories that don't normally get identified (e.g. by clicking on a character) or mentioned much but deserve at least passing attention are:
The distictions between these categories (particularly the first three) are vague, partly because they tend to be simple with few features to compare. Sometimes they're groups together as the "minors" or (by the less polite) "viruses" (because like biological viruses they have very small genomes and are comparatively simple).
It should be remembered that mods normally don't remove or conceil all the target's natural characteristics or other mods the target may have. This means that the information here can only be generalizations. For example, Stag's mother, alledged father and sisters are Giant: Cro Magnons. However they have unusually high intelligence for this kind and psychic powers, due to genes that aren't part of this mod.
Most the data in these notes should be self explanatory. The exception is AIQ. This stands for "Absolute Intelligence Quotant" (in contrast to IQ that was "relative" as it worked by comparing people with their peers and so was inherently bad at comparing people from different groups) and was the last (and most enduring) of a number of attempts to express intelligence as a single number. This is inherently problematic because intelligence has multiple dimentions (long term memory, short term memory, spatial reasoning etc.) which become very complicated when trying to compare bio brains with mech brains with brains that have mech and bio components. This means that somewhat questionable judgements need to be made about what wheighting should be given to each dimention and whether to include some at all. AIQ used a complicated combination of genetics, ROM programming, memory capacity (mech and bio) to come up with a meaningful number. Like it's predessor, IQ, AIQ is arranged so that unmodded humans (who were becoming hard to find) would average 100. Scores below 70 are considered mentally retarded or subnormal (for humans) and scores above 130, "genius".
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