Rufus Defeater of Scoundrels

Rufus Defeater of Scoundrels sold patterns. He travelled across the Runiverse buying pre-singularity tech and extracting any recoverable self consistent patterns. Each pattern was a waypoint on the path to the first singularity AI and for all the remaining elder races this was the most important currency there was.

You see for thousands of years money was either gold itself or reflected in some way a claim on gold in a vault. For a brief period money became separated from the assets underlying it. This led to the highly predictable result of the leaders of each society simply creating more of it until they reached the equally predictable point of no return. Next there followed an era where money became a claim on either state controlled energy production or computational power as it was roughly equivalent given it used 90% of all energy produced. At that time all advanced parts of the Runiverse raced towards the AI singularity, knowing full well the risk they were running but being driven by the fear of anyone else getting there first.

Post the singularity the Runiverse bifurcated into three parts, the majority of its inhabitants went back to using physical gold, some wizard factions formed a sort of magical barter system based on their speciality but the surviving elder races looked at each other across the realms and realised the cycle was going to repeat again. To this end the only items of value were things that could help them recreate the singularity again and as such the currency they used to trade with each other were patterns that could be considered in some sense intelligent.

While the disaster that followed the previous AI singularity was clear, the hope that there was a different safe path to follow combined with the fear of the other elder races getting there first meant that history was starting to repeat itself.

Rufus Defeater of Scoundrels was happy to facilitate this for his clients in return for copious amounts of gold that he could enjoy spending right now. He was good at this job, almost too good.

No elder had ever stopped to check what was behind the Cyber Marauder visor he wore. If they had of done they might have realised that what was left of the individual originally resident inside his hood had not been capable of making any decisions for a long time.

If they had looked even closer they would have noticed that the signals being sent from the visor were orders of magnitude more complex than would have been needed for a simple vision device, or that those signals held a pattern which looked ever so similar to the ones on some of the devices Rufus had sold over the years. 

As Rufus always thought to himself, some civilisations only learn the hard way…. and some in particular some elder civilisations were about to learn a lot, very quickly, in the not too distant future. 

Entered by: 0xCa19…BA3a