@orrery Whoops! i mis-stated and mixed up the Union (the bad guys, the ones I was talking about) and the Polity (the good guys, with the military arm The Vanguard (where the heroes are from))

@kelseyhusky Ack! You're right, and I followed right on cue. Good catch!

Yeah, the geopolitics would be awesome. I wanna know more about whatever crazy tech weirdness made this seem like a viable research project. How was this effect first discovered? How'd they even test for something like this? I wanna see the history of their tech. ^v^

@orrery The specifics of the "Weller Test"? Yeah, that would be dang awesome to see. I presume Weller really got into Shadowrun at a young age, got frustrated he wasn't going to get his awesome technological empath solution handed to him and decided to make his own.

Probably worked backwards from the end goal: *pointing at his head* "I want all that..." *points to giant robot* "in there." and then just cranked on experiments until he found the right solutions.

@kelseyhusky Absolutely! But that path isn't a straightforward one. There's a lot of missteps and wrong turns along the way, as well as a lot of shortcuts. How much of the reason there's so few gen:LOCK candidates is that the Weller Test is overly restrictive? There's so much room for them to expand their scope if they want.

@orrery Fair point, so far, the only given reason for the limited candidate pool is that since gL tech is so raw, its band and range of compatability hasn't been expanded yet. And the time it needs to refine the tech to increase that pool isn't available since work cycles were reallocated into weaponizing the tech asap since the Vanguard were looking for a decisive edge quickly (remember the 6 month projection?)

@kelseyhusky Oh, yeah, I remember. A strong reason to push for a militarized answer, as unfortunate as it is. That all tracks for me. I'm just hoping Caliban keeps building on Weller's work.

@orrery I do to! But since all Caiban has is a read-only personality sliver, rather than a fully digitized mind, he might not have the creativity to generate and work on new things. It’s probably gonna be Cammie working with Migas and the RTASA scientists like Henry and Welles’s ex. But caliban does carry all of Weller’s notes, so they’ve got lots of potential avenues to explore.

@orrery Well, RTASA has some clues in the environment if you're paying attention. The overly-magnaamous business guy with all the intel is giving RTASA money for colinization efforts (you can see some plans on his holodisplay as he greets team gen:Lock

As far as I can discern, the ESU is still part of the Polity's Military industrial sector, but much more R&D focused like DARPA is/was.

And yeah, more Dr. Weller would be nice.

@orrery Dr. Weller really reads to me like someone who's mind decided to optimize for Science! at the expense of all others, which is why he's both so eccentric, but also secretive and hard to bond with.

But I really think he's got such a good, caring heart. Or had, as it were. I think Caliban will let more of that heart show through than Weller did or knew how to.