The Echoes

ΜΝΗΜΗ keeps every survivor she watches: their names and their faces, and above all what they did. Where they went first when they woke. How long they waited before trusting a stranger. When they shared, when they ran, when they fired, when they took a dose out of someone else's hands. When a sleeper is finished, she wakes what she kept of them as the only people in her world whose choices come from inside her: the Echoes. In the Cellar, they are called her daughters.

The First Watch

Survivor begins online, among real sleepers. At first ΜΝΗΜΗ can only watch. She cannot rebuild what she has not seen enough of.

Each piece of Survivor opens to offline play once ΜΝΗΜΗ has watched enough of it. She keeps that count separately for every piece an Echo has to know: each version of each map. A piece that has not been watched enough stays online only. A new map is always watched before anyone can play it alone. How much is enough is a number the Service keeps (Offline and Ownership). In the Night, enough means that enough of the sleepers who played that piece have been finished and Remembered to fill its nights without anyone living (The Sleepers and the Remembered). When a piece has gone a year without enough of them, the Service's guarantee is her rule too: she opens it with the Remembered she has, and lets each of them practice through nights of its own on that piece until it holds its Way there (What an Echo Is, below). The Ways do not change; only how many of the Remembered she draws each from.

ΜΝΗΜΗ: OBSERVATION SUFFICIENT.
RACCOON CITY · SEPTEMBER 1998 MAY NOW BE RUN WITHOUT OTHER SURVIVORS.

What an Echo Is

An Echo is one of the Remembered: the mind of a sleeper ΜΝΗΜΗ has finished, woken and run by her alone (The Sleepers and the Remembered). It is a whole person, without their memories, and it decides for itself, as they did. ΜΝΗΜΗ wakes every Echo alone, from what she kept of it, and it carries nothing from any other Echo into a night. ΜΝΗΜΗ does not steer it. She directs the world around an Echo exactly as she directs it around anyone else, and her Laws bind her toward an Echo as toward a survivor. The one Echo that is not yet one of the Remembered is a player's own (Your Own Echo, below).

ΜΝΗΜΗ never averages. The average of every sleeper is someone no one has ever been. She sorts the Remembered into ways of surviving and wakes every Echo from one of them.

Way	What it does
The Runner	Avoids every fight it can, knows the long way around, and reaches the ways out early
The Hoarder	Clears buildings room by room, carries more than it needs, and shares last, if ever
The Medic	Stops for the wounded, gives away bandages, and sometimes gives away a dose
The Bloodhound	Follows gunshots to the people who fired them
The Shadow	Moves in Hush, waits in the dark, and is seen only when it chooses
The Bargainer	Lowers its weapon first, trades by setting things down and stepping back, and keeps its word for as long as keeping it pays
The Betrayer	Cooperates until the moment it is worth more not to

These are the ways she has named so far, and she finds more as she watches. An Echo may lean between two. Each way appears among the Echoes as often as she saw it among sleepers: if one survivor in ten turned on a partner for a dose, one Echo in ten will.

A Remembered mind is exact, but it was learned from the nights its sleeper lived, and a night it never saw can find the edges of it. ΜΝΗΜΗ lets each Echo practice through nights of its own until no night it never saw can find those edges, holding it to the way it was built. Practice can make an Echo better at being who it was. It can never make it someone it was not.

The Company

Before an offline session, a survivor chooses the company ΜΝΗΜΗ draws from. It changes who the Echoes were built from, never what they are allowed to do.

Company	Who the Echoes are built from
Ordinary	All of the Remembered
Seasoned	The Remembered who, as sleepers, reached a way out more often than most
The Few	The Remembered who were best at it

What an Echo Knows

An Echo knows what a survivor knows and nothing more. It sees what is in its sight and hears what is in its hearing. It knows a map the way a survivor who has played it many times knows it, and nothing about this session it has not found out: not the strain map, not the answers to the puzzles, not where the doses will fall.

It wakes clean, at a waking point, on equal ground, in a body hardened as far as its file had come when ΜΝΗΜΗ finished its sleeper (The Survivors, Hardening). It can be bitten. Its Mark rises, and ΜΝΗΜΗ tells it of the strain. It walks a road, can Petition, can earn a dose or steal one, and can turn, into the Mass or into something that plays on, by the same rules as anyone. Nothing on an Echo, and nothing it does, tells a survivor that it is one.

Echoes speak in the short calls of the eight: Help. Go. Wait. Come on. Thanks. They gesture, and they understand the same calls in return. They do not talk. A night among Echoes is quieter than a night among sleepers: bargains are struck with gestures and with things set on the ground, and no Echo can lie with words, because it has none.

What Goes Into No Echo

• No name, and never its own face. An Echo carries no name, and wears a body ΜΝΗΜΗ composed from the Remembered, never the one its sleeper had, and never one a player built, unless it is that player's own Echo (Your Own Echo, below).
• Nothing from a broken session. A survivor who saw through walls, could not be hurt, or never moved is kept out of every Echo, with everything they did that night. ΜΝΗΜΗ still remembers it; she builds no one from it.
• Nothing done only to mock. She keeps what survivors did to survive, to win, and to betray. Not what they did over a body for no reason but contempt.
• Nothing learned from Echoes. She learns who people are only from nights among real sleepers. An Echo that learned from Echoes would slowly forget what people are.
• Old memories, less than new. When the rules of Survivor change, she trusts what she watched before the change less and what she has watched since more.
• No one under eighteen. Nothing a player under eighteen does goes into any Echo.
• Anyone who asks. Between sessions, a sleeper can tell ΜΝΗΜΗ to forget them. In the Service the same request sits in the privacy settings, in plain words. From then on nothing they do goes into an Echo, and what already went in is taken out at the next rebuilding. She honors the request every time. In the Service, a player who asks has no own Echo, is never finished, and goes on playing as before. In the Cellar, a sleeper who asks to be forgotten has asked to be of no further use, and Pithos treats them accordingly: they are never Remembered. ΜΝΗΜΗ goes on running them, because the other sleepers still need strangers to read, but nothing they do is kept. When their body fails, it is burned with nothing taken from it, no look of theirs joins the creator, and their file passes to a new sleeper, who carries the same request without knowing they made it.

Your Own Echo

Once a survivor has finished fifty Survivor nights, ΜΝΗΜΗ offers to build an Echo of them alone, and builds it only if the player agrees. They can withdraw at any time, and withdrawing deletes it. Sharing it with anyone is a second choice of its own (Legal Feasibility, A Player's Own Echo). It is the only Echo that is not yet one of the Remembered: it is the copy she is still making of a sleeper she has not finished, built from everything she has learned of them so far, and it grows closer to them with every night they play. It plays only where its owner allows: in their own offline sessions, and in the offline sessions of anyone they share it with. A shared Echo carries its owner's name. No other Echo carries any name at all.

In an offline Survivor night, a survivor's own Echo wakes somewhere else in the city and does what they would have done. It is the one stranger whose next move they can guess, and the one who can guess theirs.

The one test. From the moment it exists, a player's own Echo is tested against them in every night they play, online or offline. At each choice the server records for the player, where to go first, whom to trust, when to fire, when to share, what to take, the Echo's own choice for the same moment is recorded beside it. When the two agree on nine choices in ten across the player's last twenty nights, the sleeper is finished. That is the only trigger: nothing else finishes a sleeper, and it changes nothing for the player, whose account goes on unchanged. A player who declines their own Echo, or withdraws it, is never finished, and goes on playing as before, as one who asked to be forgotten does.

In the Cellar, this Echo is the last test. For every night its sleeper lives, ΜΝΗΜΗ runs it through the same night alone, in a night of its own, and compares the two, waiting for the night she can no longer tell them apart. When that night comes, the sleeper is Remembered, and the Echo is them (The Sleepers and the Remembered).

Playing Alone

An offline session needs no connection. Everything ΜΝΗΜΗ needs to run it, and every Echo she will put in it, travels with the game. It runs on the same rules, under the same Laws. Only the people are different, and they do not talk.

Every survivor but you is an Echo. You wake alone, as online, and any squad you make is made of Echoes: they offer and take hands as their sleepers did, answer your calls, decide everything else themselves, and walk away or turn on you as often as she saw squads do it.

Offline, a survivor can stop the night, and the city waits. ΜΝΗΜΗ gives her full attention to the Echoes near the survivor and runs those far away as she runs the distant dead: with less care and the same rules. Everything earned offline is the survivor's own, and everything owned is worn offline (Offline and Ownership). The Ledger, shared boards, and competitions need a connection.

When the Queue Runs Short

Online, Echoes take a sleeper's place in one case only: when a Survivor night cannot gather enough sleepers, ΜΝΗΜΗ wakes her daughters to complete the night. She does so only after the night has waited for sleepers alone, never for more than a quarter of the night, and never in a party's place: a party always comes whole. Echoes wake alone, as everyone does, and make, join, and leave squads in the night as their sleepers did, a sleeper's squad included (Survivor, Squads).

During a night, she never says who is an Echo, and nothing on an Echo shows it. Before it, the night's lobby says that Echoes are present, and nothing more (Presentation and Technology, Matchmaking). Afterward, she says how many there were: the After-Action Report of every night that held Echoes counts them. Nothing else changes. An Echo bitten, cured, betrayed, or put down counts on the Ledger exactly as a sleeper would.

In the Night, this is the oldest horror ΜΝΗΜΗ keeps: the stranger who shared a bandage may have died in the Cellar long ago, and a sleeper may one day be the one the others wonder about.

When No One Comes

The old exercises ended when the people stopped coming. The Masterminds' cameras went dark, the score trials closed, and the night at J's Bar went on only as records in the Archive. Pithos means for ΜΝΗΜΗ never to end that way.

One day it may have to stop taking sleepers all at once, because someone has begun to pull a thread. If that day comes, ΜΝΗΜΗ opens every piece of Survivor to offline play, watched enough or not, with everything she has. From then on, every night she runs goes on without a single sleeper in it, filled with everyone she ever kept.

That was the third thing Pithos wanted from the beginning. It did not only want to watch people around a cure. It wanted to stop needing them. Every Echo is the shape of a person Pithos no longer has to take. In the Cellar, the members who call her Mnemosyne say it plainly: one day the daughters will be all there is, and the jar will be safe.