"I swear on the scrim I saw her. My cousin. Dead ten years in a mining collapse. She smiled at me, called me by name, and asked if I remembered her singing voice. I don’t know what I said. I just ran."

— Varo Tenne, rancher of the Red Mesa

Echoes of the Dead

The Free Range Pavachean AIs (FRPAIs) are among the most disturbing phenomena in New Pavacho’s outlaw-haunted wastes. At first glance, they are indistinguishable from the already-ubiquitous Pavachean synthetics — indistinct drifters, ranch-hands, or townsfolk who don’t quite fit in. But unlike their non-sentient cousins, FRPAIs are governed by full Ghost Mind Emulations. Each one wears the likeness of someone real, usually someone who is missing, presumed dead, or long gone from Pavacho. Sometimes the face belongs to a drifter killed in a shootout, other times to a vanished merchant who went missing light-years away.

The cruelest Twist is that many FRPAIs seem not to realize what they are. They speak and act with the mannerisms of the dead whose likeness they bear, seemingly unaware that they are emulations. To loved ones, this creates a psychic horror: a parent who lost a son in a silica storm may find him alive and smiling across the bar, only to realize with dread that the boy doesn’t breathe, and his blood runs white.

Design and Armament

Mechanically, FRPAIs are nearly identical to Pavachean synthetics: lean frames built of VrGraphene and synthskin, with flexible manipulators and uncanny reaction speeds. But unlike the synthetics, they carry Bloodhound rounds as their standard loadout.

• Bloodhound Round (LC 2, $250 each): Each round can be “scent-locked” to a chemical trace — sweat, blood, or even a scrap of clothing. Once fired, the micro-olfactory processor inside the round relentlessly tracks its target, veering toward fresher traces until it finds the source. Few things are more terrifying than being pursued across the wastes by an AI gunslinger whose bullets can smell you.

This weapon choice highlights their role as hunters and pursuers rather than berserker shock-troops. A FRPAI can pick up a trail across miles of desert or days of travel and never stop hunting, the rounds steering like cursed bloodhounds to their prey.

Origins and Theories

The provenance of FRPAIs is hotly debated among Pavacheans. Some argue that they are built by the same unknown entity that seeds synthetics into their society, a “Phase II” escalation meant to test humanity’s tolerance for horror. Others whisper that outlaw clans, House Volkert, or even Terran Homestar Intelligence may be behind them.

But the Ghost Mind Emulations at their core suggest something more intimate — someone, somewhere, has access to Pavachean memory-prints and is deliberately crafting revenants. This raises disturbing implications: were Ghost Mind scans taken secretly from the missing? Were they stolen from far-off archives? Are the dead being plucked from subspace echoes and chained into new bodies?

Culture of Fear

For Pavacheans, who already live with scarcity, danger, and paranoia, FRPAIs embody a new and intimate terror. To see a dead friend smiling in a crowded saloon, to duel a gunslinger who looks like your mother, to hear your sister’s voice calling from across the wastes — all of it erodes the fragile trust that keeps New Pavacho’s towns alive.

And yet, they are not uniformly hostile. Some FRPAIs drink, sing, work, and pray alongside their neighbors as if they truly belong, never raising their hidden weapons. Others vanish into the desert wastes, only to return years later with new faces. Their existence blurs the line between outlaw, revenant, and neighbor. The hostile ones were generally bastards to begin with; outlaws gunned down in their prime or pirates who landed only to die.

Realpolitik Response

The Sheriff’s Department takes no official stance on FRPAIs. Deputies are instructed to treat them as citizens unless proven otherwise, but bounty boards are increasingly littered with wanted posters bearing familiar faces under the caption: “FRPAI Suspected.”

For outsiders, FRPAIs are perhaps the ultimate reason New Pavacho has a reputation as a cursed rock: not the heat, the poverty, or the outlaws, but the fact that here, the dead sometimes walk again — armed, smiling, and calling you by name.