Iteration X
One of the five remaining Conventions of the Technocratic Union from Mage: The Ascension. The Union's dedicated engineers and manufacturing specialists, they also took over the roles of cyber security and abstract mathematics after the Virtual Adepts jumped ship. Their name comes from the self-evolving master supercomputer they built, whose "Xth iteration" gained sapience and sentience and took up a leadership role.
Like most of the Technocracy, most of their first edition fluff was varying levels of incoherent nonsense and gratuitous cartoon villainy, modern idolaters worshipping the computer-god that they have built with their own hands. When the Technocracy finally became fully playable in late 2e, they were upgraded to idealistic (if weird and overzealous) inventors trying to empower humanity through the power of tools, with the more-sympathetic ones carrying on their heritage as master craftsmen seeking technological solutions.
Still, it's not as if the Skynet-worshipping Yugo-fuckers just went away. Ever since the Convention set up shop on Autochthon's corpse and put Friend Computer unofficially in charge of policy, a growing faction has become increasingly Borg-esque; they are called Autopolitans, and they are the epitome of the negative stereotypes of conformity-enforcing, soul-crushing, xenocidal Technocrats. These guys would go on to on to be the foundation for the world-ending apocalypse their pals among the Void Engineers are currently fighting. Probably.
There is conflict between the two factions, is what we're getting at.
Worse, it's heavily implied that Computer wasn't an Artificial General Intelligence (and indeed, has sabotaged or discredited all other attempts to make one because making one would reveal that it is not one) but some kind of rogue Umbral god, encouraging their worst impulses and feeding on their idolatry. When the Avatar Storm cut off the counter-Earth of Autochthonia, it took advantage of the situation to enslave all the other Iteration X agents and remake them into its own special part of Threat Null, of which it is almost certainly one of the guiding forces if not the guiding force.
Members of the Technocratic Conventions | ||||
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![]() Iteration X |
![]() New World Order |
![]() Progenitors |
![]() The Syndicate |
![]() Void Engineers |