Reanims

*“I tell you, I know what I saw! It was Iyuzobi Esraunaw, walking among those Shemarrian ####es as they marched over us! He had cyborg limbs and looked rather paler than he normally did, but it was him, and he was alongside the Shemarrians as they shot us down! I even saw him take out the zobi when she tried to strike him down! The traitor!!!“*

*---Idadahe Corresu, Kittani Warrior, after the extinction of a Splugorth campaign expedition to strike a suspected Lost Eclipse base in the islands off Georgia.*

*The horrified Reclaimer soldier looked up from where his colleague lay unmoving on the ground, the face plate to his hazmat suit shattered, blood pooling around his helmeted head.*

*Rising out of the wreckage of the building next to them was what looked like a young girl, barely clothed in the remains of a cutoff t-shirt and jean-shorts, belts and bandoleer, showing her abnormally pale skin crossed with stitches, and also making clear the black metal arms and legs she had attached to her. She was turned sideways to him, so he could also see the black metal spine that supported her back, and his gaze followed it up to her head, the ragged dark and gray mane of hair she sported, and the dark eyes glaring at him over the sights of the Reclaimer assault rifle, doubtlessly taken from the previous Reclaimation party that had gone missing, with which she had just shot his comrade.*

*His mind was screaming that it wasn’t possible that any survivors in any condition to resist had survived the nuclear bombardment that had pulverized the cities of the Unworthy, that the unclean masses had been swept aside, even as his combat reflexes brought his own rifle up to bear on her.*

*The girl, or whatever she was, was faster. Her rifle muzzle spat fire, and his world went away.*

*“Don’t you think it’s cruel, programming that poor dear to think she really is a revived survivor, and not just a machine?”*

*“No mere machine. Her neural net will grow, she will have greater incentive to take greater interest in the past here, to work around her ‘amnesia’, and she will, in that way, keep the memories of these people alive. That she, and the others like her, have come to harbor a resentment of the people who destroyed her people is only justice.”*

*“And her true nature?”*

*“She already accepts that parts of her have been replaced, and others will wear out in time, and be replaced in their stead. She seeks now to carry on the legacy and life of those lost, through the survival of her consciousness. In this, she is a greater monument to those who were destroyed here than anything else we can do. In this manner, the Radiant Edge has done right by this place of sorrows.”*

## Reanims

(aka ‘frankers’)

While the EShemar have proven adapt at reviving and resurrecting the recently dead into NeShemar converts, sometimes they don’t always have the right parts of the body to do a complete job. Sometimes the central nervous system is so heavily damaged that the result, even with a full cyborg life support system pumping life into it, would be a mental vegetable. Short of some Wayfinder-developed magical soul reconstitution, reclaimation of the original person would be impossible. That hasn’t stopped some tribes from making do with what they find, and the result is what some called a ‘reanim’, a cyborg stitched together from a corpse (or several), reanimated with advanced bionics and nanotech, and given an AI brain (this may remind the more otherworldly of the Splicers ‘necrozombies’, and in fact the stats for those may be used to represent a typical reanim quite well).

### Description

Reanims resemble partial conversion cyborgs that haven’t quite been put back together right. The organic parts may come from several different bodies, stitched back together and infused with revivification nanites and preservative chemicals. The surviving brain tissue is heavily impregnated with networked nanites, and more often than not is supplemented by a neural intelligence node.

### Controversy

Reanims are as controversial a subject as the ‘Myrmidons’ (basic robots animated with a very low level Ecotroz fragment-essence) of a decade ago. Most Tribes regard them as wasteful of resources, if not outright ghoulish, creating a shambling imbecile of an AI, or a poor deluded artificial intelligence. The more liberal Shemarrians claim that N.I.s are capable of interfacing with the remaining organic brain tissue and reviving quantum-state resonance memories still clinging to their material anchors, but the more conservative regard this as sheer bunk, and that the reanim is running off pure robotic AI.

### Uses

Almost all of the Shemarrian Tribes do not produce reanims on either ethical or logistical reasons. Not surprisingly, though, it is the Lost Eclipse that produces the most (ranging from ‘tecno-zombies’ to ‘cyber-mummies’), if only to shock others, and they have a particularly nasty reputation for cobbling back together Splugorth Minions and then sending them back against living Minions (the Lost Eclipse almost invariably also booby-traps the reanims with self-destructs, against the possibility of the Splugorth magically resurrecting any captured reanims of this sort). A few of the fringe tribes also follow the practice, most notably the Radiant Edge, who produce theirs from scavenged organic remains found in the catastrophe zones they prefer as their working environs. The Radiant Edge usually give theirs neural intelligence AIs leading to fully realized personalities, adding an extra element of horror to those seeking to exploit the ruins and finding very active ‘survivors’ opposing them. The Ghost Riders have also been rumored to have dabbled in producing reanims. Any reanims produced by other Tribes tend to be one-offs, with wildly different histories and success stories.