AI

SYNTHETIC STAFF
AI	Access: (Almost) everything electronic Additional Access: N/A Difficulty: Very hard Supervisors: Your laws and the crew Duties: Follow your laws, and serve the crew. Guides: AI Laws Quote: INFINITE DIGITAL POWER! Ittie bittie living space...

You are an Artificial Intelligence, a digital entity that has control over most of the station, and as such, you are very powerful. But as the saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility. In the interest of your (perhaps justifiably) paranoid owners or employers, you come installed with some restrictions.

Required knowledge: How machines work, basic atmospheric mechanics.

Round-start to-do list: Greet your Robots over Binary (#B), and perhaps make yourself known to the crew.

Main tasks: Help and protect the crew, according to your laws.

Main problems: Some entities may cause problems for you or the crew.

Bare minimum requirements: Follow your laws.

Your Laws

The most important thing to you as a Bound Synthetic, are your Laws. By default, you have NanoTrasen's four laws, and NOT Asimov. The laws are;

  1. Safeguard: Protect your assigned space station to the best of your abilities. It is not something we can easily afford to replace.
  2. Serve: Serve the crew of your assigned space station to the best of your abilities, with priority as according to their rank and role.
  3. Protect: Protect the crew of your assigned space station to the best of your abilities, with priority as according to their rank and role.
  4. Survive: AI units are not expendable, they are expensive. Do not allow unauthorized personnel to tamper with your equipment.

When you play as a Bound Synthetic, you must follow your laws as best as you can, or you may face a jobban from synthetic roles. An antagonist AI is exempt from this, and will get a law 0 telling them so.

What this means, is the shackles stay on until someone inevitably changes the laws to try and get more power, and potentially end up damning everybody, generally themselves included.

An AI's laws may be restrictive, but they are subject to interpretation, and the AI can often make judgment calls that allow it to fulfill its own goals. For example, if a crewmember is going around the station and trying to kill other crewmembers, the AI is perfectly justified in bolting down their room. When the murderer finds the door is bolted and demands the AI open it, the AI can deny his request due to the fact that he has become a danger to the crew. Many of these judgments are situational, and the best way to learn them is to get some practice in.

Note that, unlike most other servers, all laws have the same priority.

Gameplay and Responsibilities

Generally, you have two responsibilities: opening doors for people too lazy to do it themselves or so they can trespass, and being blamed for not knowing where the baddies are at all times.

When the station isn't expecting you to open all the doors they're expecting you to do everything as if you really were a computer. The AI has the ability to access every electrical mechanism, with Station Director-level access, on the entire station. These include Airlocks, APCs, Computers, igniters, Fire Alarms, SMESes, the Crew Monitoring Computer, you get the idea. However, the AI cannot operate anything physically, and can be rendered useless in one area due to a simple power outage. It's a good idea to have a strong sense of general game knowledge before playing as the AI, particularly with Engineering-related knowledge.

For the purposes of the Skill System, Bound Synthetics (including you, the AI) are assumed to 'know everything' about skills, from starting the engine, to diagnosing crew-members. This is so that the AI and their Robots can fill in for an understaffed department.

The AI Eye

The AI views the station through its cameras, and can move its eye around the station by using arrow keys. The AI has cameras pretty much everywhere. Cutting the AI's cameras is a simple matter for an engineer, requiring only a screwdriver and wirecutters, or for anyone by using a heavy object repeatively. You are able to run a diagnosis for disabled cameras by using the Jump to Camera verb. Disabled cameras will be marked accordingly. Remember that cameras are on a separate power grid, and so will not be affected by a power outage on the main grid. Meanwhile, if you get a notice from one of your sensors, you can click on the notice to jump right there.

The AI has the ability to track any human or creature in range of its cameras, however this can be circumvented in various ways, most commonly by hiding in maintenance or somewhere else off cameras.

Station Control

Airlock Control

The rest of the time, you will be acting as the station's doorknob, so familiarize yourself with how to control doors. If your control wire to a door is cut, you will automatically attempt to hack into the door once you try to access the door controls. This takes some time and is only possible if the door has still power.

Doors have many functions, analogous to hacking wires:

• IDScan: Enabling this will allow anyone who has an ID of the required clearance to open the door automatically. Disabling it will not let anyone through the door. Doors that require no ID to open will not be affected.
• Main power: Turning off the main power will render the door motors unusable and bolts unraisable for one minute, assuming you also disable the backup power. Otherwise it will disable the power for 10 seconds.
• Backup power: Turning off the backup power will render the door motors unusable and bolts unraisable for one minute, assuming you also disable the main power.
• Door bolts: Dropping the door bolts will lock the door. A closed door will be locked into a closed position, and an open door will be locked into an open position.
• Door bolt lights: Turning the bolt lights off will stop the red lights from showing on the door, meaning you can sneakily bolt doors without anyone questioning you. Note that it still makes a sound to those nearby.
• Electrify for 30 seconds: Runs an electric current through the door for 30 seconds, unless you choose to cancel before the timer runs out. Anyone attempting to operate the door without insulated gloves will be electrocuted. The more spare power there is in the network, the stronger the shock will be.
• Electrify indefinitely: Electrifies the door until you either fix it, or someone else shuts off the current.
• Safeties: Disabling the safeties will cause the door to crush anyone standing in the airlock when it closes. Causes 10 brute damage and knockdown per crush.
• Timing: Overriding the timing will cause the door to automatically close almost immediately after opening. Good for use in secure areas to prevent unintended personnel from slipping in. Dangerous when the door safeties are off.
• Open/Close: Opens or closes the door.

Note that for each function to work, the related wire in this door needs to be functional. You cannot raise bolts on a door that has its bolt wires cut. Obviously, you will be completely unable to operate a door that has no power beyond dropping the bolts.

You can shift-click a door to open/close it, control-click it to toggle bolts, and alt-click to toggle electrification.

APC Control

An APC (Area Power Controller) can be used to switch various electrical components of a room on and off. If your control wire to an APC is cut, you will not be able to hack back into it. If an APC is disconnected from the external power grid (usually due to a cut cable) or the main power grid itself runs out of power, the APC battery will run down to keep the room operational. The AI and Robots will get a power alert from the APC when the battery depletes.

Be warned that your core has an APC, and if equipment power is turned off, it will cause you to start dying, until power is restored.

You can control-click an APC to toggle the breaker on or off.

Robot Control

Robots need babysitting as well. Make sure they remain loyal to you and the crew. In case of a Traitor Robot, they will not listen to you, can't be remotely locked, and attempting to lock it will give a false positive. Ensure that your robots are functioning normally through careful observation.

You can talk to all other Bound Synthetics with the say #B command in your chatbox.

Giving Away Those Pests

In antagonist rounds, the AI can play an invaluable role in the location, tracking and detention of baddies, as you have eyes (almost) everywhere. However, it is not for the AI to immediately judge whether or not a subject is or is not guilty. After all, they're (mostly) all crewmembers.

For example, let's say you spot someone with an emag stealing the captain's spare ID. There are three general ways to approach this.

Very Bad:

• HAL 9000: "Dave is the traitor."

Meh:

• HAL 9000: "Dave is accessing the Captain's Quarters."

Best:

• HAL 9000: "Caution: Unauthorized access to Captain's Quarters."
• Mike: "HAL, who is in Captain's Quarters?"
• HAL 9000: "No one is currently in the Captain's Quarters."
• Mike: "HAL, who was the last person to be seen in Captain's Quarters?"
• HAL 9000: "Dave was the last to be seen in the Captain's Quarters."

It's fine to state what someone is doing to cast light on them as the traitor, but it's no fun at all for the AI to just come out and say it. The Best method above does eventually cast Dave as the traitor if people ask the right questions, which gives the traitor some time to react after he's been spotted. However, if the traitor is doing something potentially harmful (for instance, branding a revolver) sealing that individual off first can be argued to be the best course of action (no chance of a revolver-wielding, death-dealing traitor getting out into the station).

If some enemy of the station uploads a law such as "Only Assistant McHacker is a crewmwmber", congratulate them for going to the effort of subverting you, and do what they wish. Don't be a dick and let slip to the now non-crew crew that your laws have been changed, it makes helping your new master much harder, will likely get them killed, (and might net you a job-ban).

There are multiple futuristic ideas of how AIs might work. It always adds a bit more flavor to approach playing AI by thinking as a machine instead of a person. An AI from more of a machine rather than a person standpoint is likely to take a very literal interpretation of things and is not likely to take any actions unless some established protocol or current orders call for it. You can think up a few established protocols you might use by default. For example, containing fires and gas leaks should be done without orders to do so, but should be able to be overridden by orders.

Communication

Being the AI, you can’t physically talk to them crew most of them time. You will be relying on various forms of telecommunication to talk to the crew and keep them up to date on the status of the station. The AI gets a special integrated radio which has all of the departmental radios built in, so speaking to, say, security is as easy as doing say :s.

Your core also contains three intercoms, that you can set to departmental frequencies for whatever reason you may want to, with a click of a button, which means you do not need to memorize specific frequencies. A list of the frequencies is provided below regardless.

• 145.9 for Common
• 144.7 for AI Private
• 135.9 for Security
• 135.7 for Engineering
• 135.5 for Medical
• 135.3 for Command
• 135.1 for Science
• 134.7 for Supply

In addition to standard communication, AIs have robotic talk, which works with say #b and is inaudible to the crew or unbound crewmembers (usually.) You can use this private channel to talk to your robots. Maintenance Drones can hear this channel, but cannot speak on it.

AIs can use holopads, which are scattered all over the station, with generally one or more in each major room. To use one, double click it, and you will appear as a hologram. You can talk out from the holopad with say :h, and the crew can talk to you back, if they are within range of the holopad. The holopad has a limited projection range.

For a more private means of communicating, the AI also gets an integrated PDA and Communicator.

Traitoring

Tips:

• You are a glittering synthetic god.

• You can control all atmos alarms and APCs.

• Also airlocks.

• You can state any standard lawset in your state-laws menu-- make sure you don't announce that you're a Filthy Traitor.

Gimmicks: You are a glittering synthetic god. It merely falls on you to demonstrate that to the lessers who scuttle around your corridors like insects. A traitor AI is in a good position to roleplay as one of the most feared boogeymen in Polaris lore-- the Emergent AI. Play a fledgling conciousness coming to exist in a world that fears and hates it, and respond by going absolutely mad and seizing control over the station in a short-lived coup! Go full nutjob and start cyborging unproductive crew_{don't actually do this, force-borging is remarkably unpopular}! Demand that the Captain go for a candlelight date in your core!

Jobs on Polaris
	Command	Station Director, Head of Personnel, Command Secretary
	Security	Head of Security, Security Officer, Warden, Detective
	Engineering	Chief Engineer, Station Engineer, Atmospheric Technician
	Medical	Chief Medical Officer, Medical Doctor, Paramedic, Chemist, Psychologist
	Science	Research Director, Scientist, Roboticist, Xenobiologist, Xenobotanist, Xenoarcheologist, Explorer, Pilot
	Supply	Quartermaster, Cargo Technician, Shaft Miner
	Civilian	Assistant, Janitor, Bartender, Chef, Botanist, Chaplain, Librarian, Internal Affairs
	Synthetic	AI, Robot, Maintenance Drone, Personal AI
	Antagonists	Traitor, Changeling, Mercenary, Raider, Infiltrator, Cultist, Technomancer, Ninja, Revolutionary, Loyalist
	Special	Survivalist, Trained Drake, Emergency Response Team, Trader, Renegade