Table of Contents
Welcome to James Kemp's Wiki
This is a collaborative web platform that allows people to edit1) the web pages to provide additional content for some of the stories I have written and the roleplaying games that I am involved in, whether as a player or GM.
There are several namespaces operating slightly different wiki subjects. These are, in no particular order:
- Skyss - Story Background - a fantasy novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo 2016.
- Perfects - background for the near future story and some police roleplaying that I ran in that universe
- Theocracy of Daprav - A D&D campaign that I ran with Glasgow University Games Society around 2002-3.
- Jim Wallman's Universe - a roleplaying by e-mail campaign that I play in, this is an unofficial wiki and none of it is canon unless Jim says it is.
- Interstellar Freelance Unlimited - subset of the Universe pages covering the activities of a mercenary company that we are currently roleplaying every Full Moon.
- Earth Imperium pages. These cover the activities of the Government of the Solar republic (aka Earth Empire) in Jim's Humanity Will Prevail campaign, including the Earth Imperium News Items.
- Free Worlds Alliance - covering the activities of another emerging polity in the Humanity Will Prevail campaign. Mostly contributed by Eric Moroney.
- Universe Background - page collecting the various bits of background info that have come up in various e-mail discussions for the campaigns set in Jim Wallman's Universe.
- Master map of the Universe (6Mb PDF, as at 3212).
- Delta Green - some roleplaying campaigns about horror and conspiracy. The main one was set in Berlin in 1953.
- Free games rules - a collection of free rules for wargames and other sorts of face to face games that I have designed or run.
- Wargames rules - I'm not just a player of games, I also do rules for them from time to time as well as one-off games. A primary outlet for this is through Chestnut Lodge Wargames Group.
- Other free rules - at the moment just those for the 1689 (Orange or Lemon? and Bonnie Dundee, respectively about the debates in the Scots Parliament and then the military campaign of Viscount Dundee during 1689) and The Other Side of the COIN (about what makes people become insurgents). All games that I have have produced for Chestnut Lodge Wargames Group.
- Background for a near future universe where I have written some fiction and also run some roleplaying games in.
Comments and complaints to me at webmaster@full-moon.info please.
James Kemp
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Chief Inspector Sophia Young
Leader of CT12G and the senior officer (silver command) for Operation Hawkeye.
A member of the National Police since 2034 she entered the Armed Response Command (ARC), gaining a bravery medal (QGM) for courage under fire as a constable. She shot dead three armed gang members during an armed robbery and recovered her critically wounded sergeant. Her immediate first aid stablised his condition and prevented his death. She served as a Sergeant Instructor at Hendon before passing the Inspector exam with the highest mark in her cohort. She is a graduate of the Senior Officer School and is Silver Command qualified.
She has been leading CT12G, on promotion and transfer in from ARC at the personal request of katy_coalfield.
CT12G
CT12G doesn't appear on any published or charts for security reasons.
Chain of Command
CT is lead by Commander Coalfield, a close personal friend of the Minister for Policing. She went to university with the Minister and shared a house with him. They both studied law, he became a barrister and she pursued a police career.
Chief Inspector Young leads CT12G and reports directly to Commander Coalfield, bypassing the Superintendent who is not cleared for the activities of CT12G. This is unusual and has contributed to CT12G's reputation with the Command.
Reputation
Amongst CT personnel CT12G has a reputation for not following proper police procedures and for using questionable tactics. Certainly the recruitment process it uses is neither fair nor open. All of its personnel have been hand picked by either Commander Coalfield or the Inspectors.
Despite the reputation CT12G have the highest clear up rate in CT and none of their convictions have been overturned on appeal.
Organisation
CT12G has four Inspectors, six sergeants and 43 constables. One of the Inspectors leads a cyber support and intelligence serial. The other three serials have one sergeant and ten constables and are armed response and riot trained. They operate as specialist arrest teams and conduct the intelligence driven raids.
Recruitment
Every member of CT12G has been specially selected for the role. They all have the highest level security clearance, and the majority of them also have another reason why they are in CT12G. Many of them had poor disciplinary records prior to joining CT12G, yet nothing since then.
Nominal roll
Mission
The primary purpose is the tracking down and apprehension into preventative custody of the missing GM subjects2). Their current activities come under Operation Hawkeye.
Hephaestus Genetics
Hephaestus were the main research group involved in developing a real application for the understanding of the human genome. Set up in the late teens they were in the forefront of curing cancer in the late twenties. They also had research lines in curing a number of hereditary diseases and in improving human fertility.
Hephaestus was a privately funded medical research company that developed genetic therapies to help cure a range of diseases caused by genes, or at least remove the genetic susceptibility for them. Many people benefited from these treatments. Although few of those that did probably realised that it was Hephaestus that helped tham as most of the approved treatments were delivered by other parties and without the Hephaestus branding.
Downfall
Active for just over 25 years they finally went bust over a legal case brought in the UK in 2044. The case alleged violation of ethical research practices and of having falsified results lead to the company being wound up. Three care homes, and the children resident in them, found themselves transferred into local authority care.
see scandal for more details of the end of Hephaestus Genetics.
Genetic Treatments
The genetically perfect, as the advocates would call them, are not scattered over the entire planet equally. There are a few places where the techniques were pioneered that have more of them than anywhere else, notably the UK. The UK was the first country in the world to legalise genetically modifying people when it allowed the creation of embryos in 2013 from two mothers and one father. This eliminated diseases linked to faulty genes in maternal mitochondria which are passed down through the egg.
Initially the techniques were tested mainly in England, near the major university laboratories that hosted centres of excellence in human genetics. Once techniques were mastered they tended to spread to other parts of the EU, Russia and the top elite of countries that could afford to travel for treatment. The US got some of it, but this was complicated by the stance of health insurance companies who refused to fund this treatment, fearing that people born with no genetic susceptibility to disease were less likely to buy health insurance. The treatments weren’t cheap, so only a small proportion of the population ever took it up, way under half of one percent.
Not all of those treated were embryos. A large number of adults received genetic therapy to correct known deficiencies in genes that caused life shortening conditions. Up to 10,000 individuals in the UK over the period of a decade, perhaps ten times that number in Europe. In terms of the total world population the numbers treated are tiny. There are less than two million people worldwide that could be classed as ‘Genetically Perfect’. Out of a world population of 8.5 billion that’s too small to express as a meaningful percentage. Of those treated since 2040 the majority have been babies born to those choosing to live in orbit. The rate of the orbital births getting treatment is over 85%, the remaining 15% of live births in orbit are often treated post-birth as the chance of untreated babies surviving a year without getting cancer or leukeamia is about 50%. In practical terms all those born in space and staying there until at least age 5 are genetically perfect.
National Police
There are fewer police services in the UK. England has a national police service overseeing specialist areas and cross border criminals. There are just over a dozen local police services across the country.
National police deal with organised crime, counter terrorism, cyber crime, immigration enforcement, border security, smuggling, armed response reinforcements, fraud, and diplomatic and royal security. They also have intelligence functions where they collate police intelligence and operate the central police systems.
Organisation
National police comprises a number of Groups each of which is lead by an Assistant Commissioner, one of which is the Organized Crime & Terrorism Group (OCT).
Commander Katy Coalfield leads the Counter-Terrorism unit (CT) which has a number of branches.
- CT1 to CT9 each cover a defined geographical area (CT1 is London, CT2 South East, CT3 West Midlands, CT4 North West, CT5 East Midlands, CT6 East of England, CT7 South West, CT8 Yorkshire & Humberto, CT9 North East).
- CT10 is a cyber support unit that provides intelligence as well as protecting critical national infrastructure from online attacks.
- CT11 is an armed response unit for reinforcing regional branches when they need it. It also has specialist forensics and explosive ordnance disposal teams.
- Superintendent Ray Hopkins leads CT12, the branch tasked with dealing with cross-territorial groups.
- Within CT12 section G deals with monitoring the activities of Genetically Modified people. Chief Inspector Sophia Young leads CT12G, she has four serials of hand picked officers.
CT12G are the unit behind Operation Hawkeye which is the surveillance and detention of the genetically modified people in England.
Police Powers
Broadly these are similar to those currently being used. However technological capability is much higher, so some things are used a lot more often, especially powers of remote surveillance. Additionally there has been a requirement for Automatic Collision Avoidance Technology (ACAT) to be fitted to all vehicles manufactured since 2025. This ensures that vehicles are capable of monitoring the road area around them and avoiding collisions without driver intervention. One of the other features of ACAT is that the police can remotely control vehicles to bring them to a halt safely. This is used both as a police over-ride for dealing with stolen vehicles and also to enable smooth passage for emergency vehicles by making traffic give way. Most vehicles on the roads are used automatically, and since 2031 there has been no requirement to obtain a UK driving licence for operating self-driving vehicles.
National Police also have the capability to direct local police to assist them when required. National police officers have wider powers than local police as they also have the powers of both customs and immigration officers when exercising functions against suspected immigration offences or customs evasion (including enforcement of illegal drugs manufactured in the UK as well as those smuggled in). This means that they can usually enter premises without a warrant provided that they have reasonable suspicions.
PACE has been updated, and the replacement Regulations on Police Evidence were last revised in 2045.
Technology
Police officers on duty are routinely equipped with terminals that record and stream live what they are doing to control. In addition it uses a combination of facial recognition and registered terminal information to identify people that they come across and show the police officer anyone of interest.
This live streaming, and the associated recording process, make it very difficult to amend or fake the footage. Typically in major incidents there are dozens, if not hundreds, of similar feeds. Public order police tend to be very well behaved, having learnt their lessons from those unfortunate enough to be caught on camera and went to prison as a result. It also tends to lead to criminals being convicted for low level crimes committed in front of officers with a shorter time lag and less paperwork. Complaints against police officers also tend to have rapid investigation cycles.
While no-one really likes the police, the technology has improved the general level of trust in the police by society. There being less need to trust one person's word against an other's word.
Genetically Modified Humans Act 2044
When the Hephaestus Scandal broke there was a lot of fear-mongering by certain politicians and the media. This lead to a rushed through Bill in Parliament that became the Genetically Modified Humans Act 2044. The Royal Assent of this act was rapidly followed by the 2044 General Election which resulted in a coalition government formed of fringe parties that had done well from the protest votes.
This lead to extreme restrictions on those that had been identified as having been created (or modified in utero) by Hephaestus and other companies in the late twenties and through the thirties. Most of these children (the oldest were only 22 when the Act was passed) were treatments for genetic diseases that would otherwise have proved fatal. Most of those diseases were specified in the regulations. However there was no way to easily distinguish between those and the ones that were the results of the genetic research without mass testing. Hephaestus had implanted embryos with experimental modifications into a number of women against the terms of their research approvals, and some of those modifications were of dubious intent. Over a fifteen year period Hephaestus were known to have illegally implanted a minimum of 700 embryos into women who thought that they were getting fertility treatment with their own eggs. Affiliated clinics treated almost 10,000 women in the same time period.
Banned Practices
The Act banned the following
- genetically modifying human embryos
- modifications to humans that affected the germ cells
- research into the human genome (except for cancerous cells)
- post-birth genetic treatment (except cancer treatment or specified illnesses)
Restrictions on GM People
The Act distinguishes between those that were modified post-birth and those created by genetic scientists. The restrictions on these groups differ.
Post-birth Modification
Where the reason for this is treatment of one of the specified illnesses listed in regulations and the treatment can be shown not to have affected germ cells (or the subject is sterile) then there are no restrictions, although medical records are endorsed appropriately.
Those with modifications not specified in regulations or where there is an effect on the germ cells are classed as GM and they have broadly similar restrictions applied to them as those created. Typically these people are treated socially as victims of science and there is a level of sympathy for them provided they keep to the restrictions.
- endorsement of citizen card as GM(P)
- not entitled to fertility treatment
- required to notify authorities of change of address
- required to report pregnancies as soon as known to authorities
- cannot donate blood, sperm, eggs or organs
- cannot hold public office or designated professions (currently medical, teaching and food preparation)
- subject to preventative detention if conditions persistently broken
Humans Created by Science
This was the real cause of the fear. Hephaestus had been conducting research involving a combination of combat veterans and prisoners and the worry was that they had combined some of the worst parts of humanity in their experiments (which was, of course, a gross misrepresentation of the facts). However the reality didn't stop the media storm which was picked up by the fringe politicians (and some of the savvier mainstream ones who hoped to stay in power).
These people have the following restrictions:
- endorsement of citizen card as GM
- not entitled to fertility treatment
- required to notify authorities of change of address
- required to report pregnancies as soon as known to authorities
- cannot donate blood, sperm, eggs or organs
- cannot hold public office or designated professions (currently police, military, medical, teaching and food preparation)
- cannot access public funds for higher education
- rehabilitation of offences provisions do not apply
- preventive detention used for persistent offenders
