A Cypherpunk, as shown on the Virtual Adepts Tradition Book.
The Cypherpunks (A.K.A. Cryptogramics, Cyphers, Crypts, the Thought Police) are a faction of the Virtual Adepts that focuses on information.
Overview[]
The faction's history begins with the great Cyberpunk crash of the IT-X Mainframe. When the adepts realized the repercussions of such an attack would have (from the technocracy AND the traditions), a group of leading mathematicians started encrypting and hiding Adept data streams. For each successful attack of the Technocracy, three or more Adept locations vanished from the map. Thinking they had won this fight, the technocracy returned to their reality-domination and left the Adepts behind a smokescreen of deception engineered by the newly named Cryptogramics.
After that, the newly-formed faction entered a period in wich it mostly reacted to the actions of the Cyberpunks, cleaning after their messes. Some Cyphers, however, began using extreme measures to avert more disasters by their fellow Adepts, even killing some of them.
This would change in the early 90's, when a group of Cyphers stole and decoded a set of unreleased documents about MK-Ultra Project. This revived Adept interest in the field of Mind, leading to a research that culminated with the discovery of the T-Virus (a neural-code virus that the Technocracy inserted in the Adept data that made them forget most of their history and knowledge about the Technocracy). Shocked by this discovery, the Cyphers, together with the Chaoticians, created a antidote for the Virus and gave it to the Coders and Nexplorers to release on the tradition on Turing's Birthday.
Since them, the tradition as a whole became much more powerful and the Cyphers began working with the Cyberpunks to better cripple the grasp of the N.W.O. on the world.
References[]
- MTAs: Tradition Book: Virtual Adepts, p. 48,49