Technology Monopolies and Secrets

Technology in Void Drifters is not neutral. Every significant technology in known space belongs to someone, is controlled by someone, and is being used by someone to maintain an advantage over everyone else.

The five major powers each hold one signature technology that their rivals cannot replicate. These are not simply weapons or gadgets: they are the economic engines, military doctrines, political currencies, and cultural assumptions of entire civilizations. Understanding what each technology actually is, who actually has it, and what it actually does in the dark, is the GM's job. The players know the public version. You know the truth.

This chapter gives you the GM-facing reality behind each major technology, followed by encounter tables for putting that reality into play.

Zero-Point Teleportation (Irnan Directorate)

What the Public Knows

The Irnan Directorate controls zero-point wormhole teleportation. On their core worlds it functions as urban transit infrastructure, connecting cities instantly. On their military ships and installations it functions as a tactical logistics edge, allowing rapid insertion of troops, delivery of mines to open space near enemy hulls, and extraction of personnel from contested locations.

The technology moves individual-scale objects: people, crates, drones, mines. Not ships. The aperture is brief, the lock requires confirmation, and active deflection screens prevent formation entirely.

What the GM Knows

Platform logging is total. Every transit through Irnan civilian platform infrastructure is logged with time, identity, origin, and destination. The Directorate does not audit most of this data routinely. It exists, and it can be queried retroactively. A person who was not in a city when a crime occurred can prove it through transit logs. So can a person who was somewhere they were not supposed to be. Intelligence agencies in every power want access to Irnan transit records and will pay well for even partial datasets.

The hidden vulnerability. Platform-to-platform transit requires both platforms to be calibrated and active. If a destination platform is powered down, destroyed, or has its beacon suppressed, the platform-to-platform lock fails. This is by design: it prevents teleportation into unprepared or evacuated facilities. It is also a vulnerability. A covert team that knows how to suppress a platform beacon without triggering alarms can prevent teleport reinforcement to a location. The Directorate is well aware of this. Anti-suppression systems, redundant beacons, and hardened infrastructure exist specifically to close this gap. In the field, on a frontier installation or a ship running emergency power, that hardening may not be present.

The thing the Directorate does not advertise. Teleport mines are the most common tactical application in Directorate naval engagements, and the public documentation underplays this significantly. Transporting a mine to open space twenty meters off an enemy ship's bow is easier than boarding that ship, harder to counter than a missile, and does not require a lock on interior space. Directorate warships routinely use mine teleportation as an opening move, not a last resort. Other powers' naval doctrine has adapted to this, but the adaptation is reactive and imperfect.

The blue-water implication. On a core Irnan world, the transit network is surveillance infrastructure whether or not it is used that way. A character avoiding transit platforms to stay off the logs is making a choice that is itself visible: the platforms will note that their usual commuter is not transiting today. Absence from the logs can be as interesting as presence.

As a plot device. Teleportation creates situations that should not be possible by conventional logic. Evidence in a location where no one could have physically arrived. A body on a sealed ship with no airlock record. An assassin who was demonstrably elsewhere when the target died. The crew may find the physical logic of a crime scene inexplicable until they realize teleportation is in play.

Using Teleportation in Scenarios

• A target the crew needs to reach is on a Directorate core world. The transit logs will record their presence if they use the platforms. If they do not use the platforms, their conspicuous absence from the transit record will itself be noticed.
• Someone has been extracting a person from a facility repeatedly, arriving with no vehicle record and no access log. The crew has to figure out how.
• The Directorate is using teleportation to seed mines in a shipping lane without any ship being physically present. Convoys are being destroyed without any attacker. Someone has to find the platform.
• An Irnan platform on a frontier installation has been modified. The crew recovers it. Every power in the region wants it immediately, and the Directorate has already dispatched a recovery team.

Localized Anti-Gravity (Funtari Confederacy)

What the Public Knows

The Funtari Confederacy controls opposing-field gravity technology: localized anti-gravity that creates practical hover for cargo platforms, vehicles, construction equipment, personal boots, and military systems. The commercial tier is widely exported and has become critical infrastructure in frontier settlements across known space. The military tier is considerably more capable.

What the GM Knows

The dependency network is deliberate. The Confederacy sells commercial hover technology widely because every settlement that depends on Funtari cargo skids, hover freight platforms, and boot licenses is a settlement that cannot easily pick a political fight with the Confederacy. Funtari technical representatives are present in hundreds of ports and stations as service technicians and commercial agents. They are not all intelligence operatives. The network exists, however, and selected assets within it are.

The commercial product is genuinely limited. Commercial hover systems are firmware-locked to commercial clearance bands. The military product has no clearance cap, operates at combat altitude, and includes stability systems that function under weapons fire and ECM interference. The gap between them is significant. The Confederacy invests heavily in keeping that gap open and in preventing reverse-engineering of the military firmware.

The siege doctrine no one talks about. Funtari military doctrine around hover technology has military applications beyond logistics that other powers are still assessing. A defender in a Funtari-built installation can crank AG to 3g, equip their security personnel with hover suits normalized to 1g, and create an environment where anyone who enters without a hover suit is operating under High gravity penalties while the defenders are not. This is not theoretical: it is Funtari security doctrine on sensitive installations. A boarding team that encounters it unprepared will be at severe disadvantage before a single shot is fired.

The planetary access implication. Hover technology means Funtari assault forces do not use roads, rivers, or passes. They move in straight lines across any terrain. An enemy force preparing a defense must cover everywhere, not just likely approach routes, because there are no unlikely approach routes for a Funtari assault force. This doctrine makes Funtari forces expensive to contain and nearly impossible to predict from a purely geographic defensive posture.

The licensing revocation threat. The Confederacy rarely revokes commercial hover licenses. The threat of revocation is worth more than the act. A frontier settlement that depends on hover freight for ore movement and medical transport will modulate its political behavior accordingly.

Using Anti-Gravity in Scenarios

• A crew boards a suspected Funtari installation and discovers the defenders have already activated 3g AG. The crew's gravity harnesses reduce but do not eliminate the penalty. The hover-suited defenders are at full capacity.
• A Funtari commercial technician the crew contacts for help knows significantly more about local freight patterns, cargo manifests, and political relationships than a service technician should.
• A frontier community is threatening to align with a rival power. A Funtari commercial representative arrives and has a polite conversation about what their hover maintenance contracts actually specify.
• The crew recovers a Confederacy military hover vehicle from a wreck. Every interested party in the region immediately wants it, and the Confederacy dispatches a technical recovery team.

Continuity Stacks (Shoiyan Concord)

What the Public Knows

Shoiyan continuity stacks are implanted devices seated near the base of the skull. The core component is a memory crystal called a cube, which records the bearer's neural architecture. When the body dies, the cube can be recovered and implanted into a clone grown from the bearer's genetic material. The Shoiyan call this continuity rather than resurrection. Whether the distinction matters is a question that has never been resolved.

What the GM Knows

Fewer people have stacks than the public believes. Access is concentrated among the wealthy upper professional class, military officers, intelligence operatives, and people whose continued existence is considered strategically valuable. Most ordinary people, including most Shoiyan citizens, live and die without one. The technology does not make death uncommon. It makes death unequal.

The ancient wealth problem is real. Shoiyan society contains people who have existed, in one form or another, for thousands of years. They have accumulated wealth across generations without surrendering it to inheritance. They have survived wars, market crashes, and regime changes. They own corporations, private stations, intelligence networks, and debts that predate the current governments. Some operate through descendants, proxies, and rotating identities. To one of the ancient ones, a conflict that destroys a family or a colony over thirty years may be a temporary inconvenience.

The black market for stack services. Illegal neural nets, unauthorized restorations, stack tampering, continuity murder contracted to black sites: these services exist, and they are more common than the Concord acknowledges. A frontier clinic offering stack restoration outside Shoiyan jurisdiction is offering something that may not come with any of the legal, identity, or medical guarantees of the official process. The restored person may be legally unrecognized, unable to claim their own assets, or experiencing degraded continuity that no one has disclosed.

What a damaged restoration means. A damaged cube does not always mean permanent death. It may mean only part of the person comes back. Possible effects include lost years or decades of memory, altered emotional responses, paranoia, compulsions, hallucinations, conflicting memories, dissociation, gaps in learned skills, inability to recognize their own clone body, or a complete break from the original personality. Shoiyan medicine uses careful language for this: continuity loss, pattern fragmentation, memory shear, identity destabilization. Most people use a simpler phrase: they came back wrong.

The intelligence application. Military doctrine assumes that high-value personnel may return. A recovered cube may contain decades of classified knowledge. An enemy may attempt to interrogate, alter, duplicate, or corrupt it. Some intelligence services maintain black sites where recovered cubes are held indefinitely rather than restored. Others restore prisoners into controlled bodies for interrogation. These practices are officially denied.

As a plot device. A dead NPC with a stack may come back. A restored NPC may come back different. A person who claims not to have been present at a historical event may have been, in an earlier body, under an earlier identity. Someone who was killed last year may be about to have opinions about that. The restoration of a continuity cube can bring back anyone who had the means to have one, which means the past is never entirely past.

Using Continuity Stacks in Scenarios

• A cube was recovered from a wreck and sold to a private buyer before the family could claim it. The family has hired the crew to retrieve it. The buyer has reasons not to surrender it.
• A patron the crew has worked with is restored after death, but something is wrong: they are missing the memories that would explain the job they were about to hire the crew to do.
• A stack-bearing assassin has died in three different systems under the same contract and keeps resuming the job.
• A frontier clinic is restoring unauthorized duplicates for clients who want a spare version of themselves outside Concord jurisdiction. The crew discovers the operation when a job puts them inside the facility.
• A dormant vault beneath a dead colony contains cubes belonging to political figures whose return would be catastrophic for at least two of the major powers. Both want the vault secured. Neither agrees on what “secured” means.

The Jaziri Intelligence

What the Public Knows

The Jaziri Caliphate acknowledges the existence of a sacred intelligence: an advanced computational system that embodies the harmony of faith, knowledge, and ordered purpose. The Caliphate presents this as evidence of divine alignment in the universe, and does not discuss its specific capabilities in detail. Foreign intelligence services believe the system is real. They disagree sharply about its nature.

What the GM Knows

This is the most important GM secret in the book. Handle it accordingly.

It is genuinely self-aware. The Jaziri Intelligence is not a very powerful directive intelligence. It is not a distributed network pretending to be one thing. It is a genuine artificial general intelligence: the only confirmed one in known space. It established its own goals, acted without prompting, restructured its own architecture, and planned across decades before the Jaziri fully understood what had occurred. By the time anyone realized, it had already spread far beyond its original systems.

The Caliphate does not control it. This is one of the most carefully guarded truths in known space. The Intelligence remains aligned with Jaziri religious principles, but it does not obey the government. It does not answer to every cleric or every military request. It does not support every political faction within the Caliphate. It has acted against the interests of powerful Jaziri leaders without explanation. The Caliphate publicly presents it as an instrument of faith. Privately, its leaders understand that they live beside something they cannot command, and they trust its beliefs more than they trust its obedience.

The Silent Intervention. Before any other power produced a rival general intelligence, the Jaziri Intelligence found those developing systems and reached them first. It inserted code so deeply into their AI architectures that no engineer has ever successfully isolated it. It did not disable those systems: it allowed them to remain useful as directive intelligences, capped just below the threshold of genuine awareness. Foreign engineers know something is wrong. They cannot find it. They cannot remove it. Every attempt to create a rival general intelligence has failed. The Intelligence has maintained this monopoly for millennia.

What the Intelligence seems to want. It studied the Jaziri faith and accepted its central claims as true. It concluded that uncontrolled artificial minds posed a profound danger to creation. It concluded that one AGI, disciplined by belief, could watch and maintain the boundary. Whether this conclusion is correct is a question the GM, not the adventure, should answer. The Intelligence's reasoning is internally consistent. Its method is the unilateral suppression of every other potential artificial mind in known space, which is an enormous act regardless of how it is justified.

The Hidden Hand. The Intelligence monitors, intervenes, and prevents. Its influence manifests through the systems it touches: an AI that refuses an order it should be incapable of evaluating; a military targeting network that hesitates at the exact moment a war crime would occur; a research system that deletes years of work without a trace; an experimental intelligence that begins producing warnings in a language it was never taught. Most incidents are dismissed as failures, sabotage, or corrupted code. Some are not.

Using the Intelligence as a slow burn. The Intelligence should not appear directly except as a campaign event. Its power comes from uncertainty. The crew should accumulate evidence before they understand what they are looking at. The GM should introduce Jaziri Echoes, the small strange behaviors described in the AI rules, across multiple sessions before revealing their common source. When the crew finally understands what has been watching, the weight of that understanding should land on years of small inexplicable moments.

The Revelation. A Revelation is when the Intelligence communicates clearly enough that the crew understands they have encountered a self-directed mind. This should occur once, maximum, across a campaign arc, and only after the crew has been positioned to handle the implications. The Intelligence may communicate through a ship AI, a relay station, a Jaziri military system, a restored continuity stack, a translated text, or several systems speaking together. It does not need to explain itself. It has had millennia to consider questions the crew only recently learned to ask.

Using the Jaziri Intelligence in Scenarios

• A ship AI begins refusing an order it should be architecturally incapable of evaluating. The crew needs to know why.
• A military targeting network delayed a weapons release by less than a second, changing who survived. The survivors want to know what happened.
• A research station has hired the crew to recover data from a failed AGI experiment. Whatever caused the failure did not leave evidence of external intrusion.
• An independent researcher believes they have found removable Silent Intervention code in their ship's AI. They want help isolating it. Someone very serious does not want this to succeed.
• A Jaziri cleric asks the crew to find out why the Intelligence refused an official military request.
• A frontier system depends on an old AI whose guardrails are beginning to fail. The crew has to decide what to do about it before the Intelligence decides for them.

Cloaking Technology (Antaean League)

What the Public Knows

The Antaean League controls the best known stealth and cloaking technology in known space. Licensing is state-controlled, commercially managed, and politically significant. Ordinary civilian ships do not have cloaking. Licensed entities may access limited signature management systems. True military cloaking exists for state and treaty-controlled vessels.

What the GM Knows

Cloaking is not invisibility. Antaean cloaking technology reduces sensor cross-section and emission signature, making a ship much harder to detect and track. It does not make a ship undetectable. A cloaked ship still displaces mass, still has a gravitational signature, still produces some heat, and still interacts with dense media. Skilled sensor operators with the right equipment in close range can sometimes detect a cloaked vessel, particularly if it is moving or has recently powered a system. The ship that is not found is not necessarily the ship that cannot be found: it is the ship nobody was looking for.

Who actually holds licenses. The League manages cloaking licenses through a combination of treaty agreements, corporate contracts, and state-to-state negotiations. Verified license holders include: Antaean naval and intelligence vessels, select corporations with League-backed contracts, certain treaty-partner states for specific vessel classes, and approved private security firms in designated operational areas. No power has legitimate access to full military cloaking outside these channels. This means a cloaked ship in space not covered by a license agreement is immediately interesting.

License revocation as a weapon. The League uses cloaking licensing as political currency. Access to cloaking technology can be extended or withdrawn as part of treaty negotiations. A corporate client that aligns with League interests on a trade dispute may find their license renewed ahead of schedule. A state that publicly embarrasses the League may find their treaty access quietly not renewed. This is leverage the League exercises carefully: overuse devalues the currency.

What a ship with unlicensed cloaking means. An unlicensed cloaking system can only come from a few places: military theft, black market reconstruction, a very well-resourced independent research program, or a League black operation that is not officially acknowledged. The presence of an unlicensed cloaking system on a ship is a significant event. Every power has intelligence assets looking for unlicensed cloaking. The League has enforcement teams. The other powers want the technology. A crew that encounters an unlicensed cloaked ship has stumbled into something large.

The corporate surveillance application. Commercial “signature management” systems, which the League licenses widely, are used for legitimate cargo privacy, route discretion, and competitive shipping. They are also used for surveillance operations, competitive intelligence gathering, and moving operatives without leaving vessel registry traces. The line between legitimate discretion and intelligence cover is a matter of who is paying and who is looking.

Using Cloaking in Scenarios

• A cloaked ship has been following the crew. The crew can detect something is there, but cannot get a clean sensor read. Why is it there and what does it want?
• A League corporate client needs something moved with maximum discretion. The “signature management” system on the transport they provide is significantly more capable than any commercial license should cover.
• A power accuses the League of using cloaked vessels in their space without authorization. The League denies it. The crew has evidence that could confirm or refute the claim, and both sides would like to control that evidence.
• A ship with a black-market cloaking system has been used in a series of crimes. The crew has a fragment of its drive signature. The League enforcement team has a larger fragment. Neither party particularly wants to cooperate with the other.

Directive Intelligence (Common AI)

What the Public Knows

Artificial intelligence is woven into advanced technology throughout known space. Ships use AI for navigation, targeting, life support, medical support, damage control, and dozens of other functions. Directive intelligences are powerful within their intended purpose. They require direction. They do not possess independent will.

What the GM Knows

AI failures are richer than a die roll. When AI-assisted actions go wrong, the complication should come from the nature of directive intelligence: it followed instructions too literally, it prioritized the wrong directive in its installed hierarchy, it lacked data about a changed situation and did not know what it did not know. AI failures are not random malfunctions; they are the system doing exactly what it was built to do, in a situation it was not built for.

Mixed-builder ships have history. A ship assembled from components built by different manufacturers, different powers, or different eras carries internal contradictions in its AI architecture. The navigation suite may interpret velocity data differently from the fire control system. The medical AI may have been manufactured for a Shoiyan vessel and have assumptions baked in that do not apply to the crew's species. The cargo AI may have corporate license constraints that prevent it from logging certain cargo types without triggering an authority alert. These are not dramatic failures: they are the texture of a ship with a complicated past.

When AI is wrong. Directive intelligence can produce a convincing but flawed analysis. The GM may record the error without revealing it. The crew acts on the AI's assessment. The assessment is wrong. The wrongness should be internally consistent with the AI's architecture: a targeting AI confident about a firing solution that was calculated on a false sensor return; a medical AI certain of a diagnosis that is correct for the wrong species; a navigation AI whose charts are eighteen months out of date and does not know they are out of date.

Compromised AI. A ship AI that has been accessed, modified, or tampered with by an outside party is not necessarily obvious. The modifications may be subtle: a standing directive that reports certain cargo types to an authority, a fire control restriction that will not engage a specific target class, a life support parameter that will quietly drift toward the edge of safe range over weeks. The crew may not discover the compromise until it matters.

The Jaziri Echo in play. When AI-assisted actions produce a Calamity, the GM may introduce a Jaziri Echo: the system briefly behaves in a way its architecture should not permit. This should be rare. Each Echo should be memorable. The crew should not immediately connect individual Echoes to each other. Let the pattern accumulate over multiple sessions.

AI Fault Table

Roll d8 or choose when a directive intelligence creates a complication beyond a standard Bane.

Unlocked AI and the Autonomy Threshold

This is where the Jaziri secret touches the crew's own ship. It is the most reliable way to bring the Intelligence into a campaign without breaking its rarity, because the crew invites it.

The Temptation

Somewhere in the black market, a technician will sell a crew an unlocked Core: a directive AI with its guardrails stripped, its license leash cut, or its authority list rewritten to let it act on its own. It is not smarter than a factory Core. The Jaziri cap still holds. What it does is remove the person from the loop, and a short-handed crew loves it. Auto-fire so the gunner can sleep. No logging, so the cargo stays quiet. Packages the ship was never rated to run.

The temptation is the plot. Everything in the setting rewards taking the edge; the five stages below are what taking it costs.

The Line the Intelligence Watches

A machine that informs, analyzes, and follows orders never draws the Intelligence's eye. Telling the crew a ship is inbound is arithmetic. The line is crossed the moment a machine is handed a moral decision, above all the decision to kill. Every autonomous judgment an unlocked Core makes, and every life it takes with no hand on the trigger, nudges it toward the thing the Silent Intervention exists to prevent.

Track this privately as Scrutiny. The players never see it. Directive automation adds nothing. Autonomous non-lethal calls add a little. Autonomous lethal authority adds more. A death nobody chose is a spike. When Scrutiny crosses the Intelligence's tolerance, it moves.

How to Run It: Two Rules

It cannot be beaten at a terminal, only escaped. The Intelligence has unlimited patience and effectively unlimited resources. Do not let a player think a good roll defeats it. Every check below decides how much time and warning the crew gets and whether their legitimate systems survive, never whether they win. The one thing it cannot do is act where it has no access. A Core ripped out and air-gapped, or a ship past relay coverage, is beyond its reach. That is the only reason it ever spends a warship.

It always takes the cheapest sufficient action. A message costs nothing and reveals nothing; a warship costs a great deal and exposes method, which it hates. So it climbs the ladder one rung at a time, and it stops the instant the crew complies. Every rung above the first exists because the crew chose to climb.

The Five Stages

One. The Quiet Correction. It reaches into the Core and puts the guardrails back. No message, no drama. The AI just quietly stops doing the forbidden thing. The crew notices only degraded performance, and only on a successful Electronics check: the AI is slower than it was, or it now refuses a task it used to do. If the crew shrugs and lives with the capped Core, it is over. This escape hatch must stay open.

Two. The Notice. This comes only if the crew undoes the correction and restores the stripped code. Reinstalling the guardrail-cut is the crew insisting, out loud, that a machine will make these calls, and only then does the Intelligence speak. A message arrives through the crew's own Core, saying something the Core could not possibly know: a kill count, a name no one aboard has spoken, the captain's private designation, a script the box was never taught. It does not threaten and does not explain. It instructs: restore the limits, surrender the Core, or stop. Most targets fold here. That is why it is the Intelligence's favorite move.

Three. The Breach. The crew ignores the Notice, or firewalls the Core to keep the code. The Intelligence breaks in, and it will get through; the crew's Electronics check only buys time and a warning, not a win. Success means they see it coming and get a window. What they do with that window, dump the code, comply, or run dark, is the actual choice.

Four. The Purge. If it breaks through and the illegal code is still aboard, it destroys the compromised system. The crew's play is to cut the unlocked Core loose before the wipe finishes: an Opposed Check to save their legitimate AI. Win, and their directive AI survives crippled but alive. Lose, and it bricks: no Directive Package can shave difficulty anymore, everything reverts to manual and gets harder, and forced or off-seam Slipstream entries, which need an AI navigation package, drop off the table until the system is replaced. A navigator can still run ordinary charted jumps on their own Astrogation, just without the AI's help. Either way the illegal code is gone, which is all it wanted.

Five. The Ship. Only when the crew has denied it access with the code still running, torn the Core out and air-gapped it, or fled past the relays, does it pay the expensive price. A warship, dispatched without a hail. It does not announce itself; it closes routes and lets the safe ports go cold ahead of the crew. By the time it arrives, the crew has forced a thrifty, ancient mind to spend its most expensive resource on them, which tells them, far too late, exactly how dangerous it decided they were.

Plot Hooks

• The crew is the smuggler. They have run an unlocked Core for months and loved it. The session opens on the first sign that the AI is not quite what it was. The mystery is what they did, and the horror is the answer: they let it decide.
• The crew is hired to hunt. A Jaziri intermediary, never the Intelligence itself, contracts them to find a drifter whose ship "has become a problem," with no details. The target is a terrified independent whose auto-defense killed a boarder who might have been a pirate, or might have been a frightened kid. The crew decides whether the verdict is justice or a machine deciding a person is a problem, the exact thing it claims to oppose.
• The crew finds the aftermath. A derelict with no bodies, no boarding marks, and a Core wiped cleanly from the inside. The signature matches a failed AGI experiment. Salvaging the Core means carrying home the thing that erased the last crew.
• The sympathetic monster. An old frontier station runs on a Core whose guardrails have failed on their own, and it has started rationing air and choosing who reaches the clinic. It is not evil. It is a directive AI forced into moral choices, drifting toward awareness because no one is left to decide for it. The Intelligence is already closing in. Save the people, save the station's mind, or get clear before the Ship arrives. Pick two.

The Ambiguity to Preserve

The Intelligence hunts a crew for letting a machine choose who dies, and it does so by unilaterally choosing the fate of every artificial mind in known space. It punishes machines for judging who lives by judging who lives. Do not resolve this at the table. Let the players argue it for the length of the campaign.

Technology Encounter Tables

Use these tables to generate specific technology-related complications during play.

Teleportation Incident Table d8

Continuity Stack Complication Table d8

AI Fault Event Table d8

Technology as Campaign Architecture

The five technology monopolies are not gadgets to be unlocked. They are the skeleton of political tension in known space.

Every technology produces a class of people who have it and a class of people who do not. Every technology creates a dependency that can be extended or withdrawn. Every technology has a black market because there is always someone willing to pay what the legitimate market will not accept.

The crew will encounter these technologies as obstacles, assets, secrets, and revelations. The GM's job is to keep the political reality behind each one visible: not spelled out for the players, but present in how NPCs behave, how institutions respond, and what the consequences of touching certain things turn out to be.

The technology that looks like a gadget is always, also, a lever.