Cranial Trauma Forestallment Aperatus

Written by: Null Kit

Idealism and Shadowrunning rarely go hand in hand: Those who take to the vocation with purely benevolent intentions are an exception that prove the rule, and notions of honor or professionalism exist merely to keep matters predictable and prevent a runaway chain of backstabbing. With that said, there are still lines that exist within communities of career-criminal mercenaries, and that this particular item is one of those things that has crossed said lines.
The concept is simple: Simrigs and nanoware flashback-systems can record large amounts of synaptic data, Simsense chips can store this data in processable forms and Skillwires can interface with the nervous-system to act on recorded sets of skills, memories and even personalities. Take all three technologies, assemble them together on a hypertrophied scale, and hypothetically the resulting machine can be used to circumvent decapitation by providing a backup of your mind. Sounds plausible, right?
Some very educated cyberneticists in Raleigh must have thought it was, at least, since they actually tried to make such a device. Cranially implanted tunnelling-scanners take regular 'snapshots' of the metahuman brain's entire neural structure and Electroencephalographic activity, which are uploaded and formatted to an external device dedicated to hosting and a variable-structure software template. When the scanners detect significant brain-damage, the CPU calls up the last stable snapshot of the brain, constructs a digital copy of the now-damaged synaptic structures and uploads it to a combined simsense/skillwire rig connected to the brain and spine, using the digital copy to simulate that section of the brain and transmit the resultant signals as needed. Theoretically, this could even allow the body to 'survive' complete destruction of the brain as the system recreates and simulates the whole missing brain, including those parts that govern automatic function.
Theoretically.
The consequences that come with replacing flesh and blood with steel and copper are known and accepted, and there is no reason that attempting the same thing with the entire metahuman brain should be exempt from such consequences. This hellish machine can only maintain a crude simulacrum of the now-diseased metahuman's consciousness for a short amount of time before it begins a process of catastrophic failure in both the hardware and wetware: The body can't handle the biological stress of decapitation followed by an artificial 'revival', the machinery as is cannot handle the strain of a simulation of the metahuman mind for any amount of time before data corrupts, and the 'consciousness', if we make the unsettling assumption that it's carried over to the machine, simply cannot endure the dissonance and disconnection from the world in its digitised form.

That's a lot of conjecture for something you guys ran into for all of a couple minutes. What makes you think it felt like that to these subjects in question?

— Saint-Ain't

The sobbing and screaming about how wrong it felt, I guess.

— Ripshot

In what little experience we have in confronting the unfortunate prototypes of this Aperatus, mental and emotional stability rapidly deteriorated within one minute of synaptic simulation from a combination of emotional trauma and rapid corruption of software, with death from nervous-signal degradation and biosystem-overstress occurring within aproximately ninety seconds in subjects that weren't (mercifully) killed in the fighting that continued in the situation.
Attached to this article is a 4.1 gigapulse file containing recovered software, information and physical specs of the prototypes we have encountered and dispatched in two otherwise completely unrelared Shadowruns in Northeast Raleigh. If you encounter any un-uniformed combatants wearing some variation of this device, then consider it at least a professional obligation, if not a moral one, to destroy the device and any research surrounding it as soon as possible. If not for the mercy of whatever poor idiot's been wired to it, then for the sake of not giving the megacorporations another means of cheating the inevitable, however crude.

Utility

As of this writing, our only certain knowledge of its utilisation has been in two encounters with un-uniformed operatives wearing the device in an unmarked blacksite, likely some manner of field-testing, along with a fail-deadly self-destruct system attached to prevent enemy acquisition. Both tests are unambiguous failures, with the second of such tests also failing to activate the fail-deadly system before partial recovery of software and data could occur.

Manufacturing

The majority of parts appear to be made 'in-house' specifically for this project for understandable reasonss, though several components in the man-machine interface systems resemble heavily modified versions of cutting-edge product lines from Universal Omnitech, Evo and Aztechnology cybernetics-divisions.

Inventor(s)

Unknown. Barkeep along with several members of Agitator's circles, have contributed to a communal bounty for any information pertaining to the origins of the Cranial Trauma Forestallment Aperatus.

Access & Availability

Owing to the advanced and unstable nature of this prototype, we can safely assume this is accessible only to a well-funded entity with access to delta-grade medical facilities.

Complexity

Despite the commonality of the base technologies, the aperatus itself is an unimaginably complicated and cutting-edge piece of technology, utilising multiple forms as-of-yet unknown manufacturing and miniaturisation techniques to make an entire room's worth of computing power fit into a man-portable device.

Discovery

Information regarding the creation of this device is currently unknown.