Atlantis: A View from the Between
Atlantis. 2150.
The corps. The gangs. The cops. The psychos.
All the ingredients for what folks used to call cyberpunk, back in the day.
All on a man-made, Corp owned island in the middle of the Atlantic, split up between the Big Nine megacorps and their safe enclaves, and what Corp cits (corporate citizens) call 'scavs' and 'dregs' trying to survive in the no-man's land between them
The only law inside the enclaves is corporate law, varying a bi from corp to corp, but 'protecting' only their own citizens (mostly the execs) and exploiting everybody as much as possible.
The only law outside?
The law of the jungle.
Eat or be eaten.
Kill or be killed.
Way worse than animals, humans get nasty under pressure.
Find your pack.
Fight to survive.
Fight to feed yourself, your family.
Make it one more day.
And maybe, just maybe, you'll get a chance for some payback,
or to strike a blow for freedom, or to change the world (for the better?).
Atlantis: Between the Walls.
The corps, of course, use the gangs for proxy wars against each other. To test the weapons they build, the nasty tech they want to make big profit on. They use each gang to keep the others in check, to keep the dregs and scavs busy fighting each other and their eyes off of the enclaves and the suits responsible for all this. They use the poor, everyday SOB scrabbling to survive between the walls as an example to their citizens of what there life would be like without the corp. Helps keep the cits in line. Corps also use dregs as human test subjects for products, both with and without their knowledge and consent. People will do crazy shit to get out of the hell that is the between.
How did all those people get there, if they aren't part of a corp, you ask? Some came as corporate employees. Got fired, kicked out into the Between with nothing. Others came on their own, looking for new opportunity, as refugees from the wars and poverty everywhere. Propaganda is still put out making Atlantis seem like a great place, a paradise, an open asylum for those with nowhere left to go. People keep coming, even though dregs and rebs put plenty of truth out on the airwaves to warn people off. Escaping Atlantis ain't easy, and lots of people got no where to go. Corp enclaves hold about 11 million people, give or take. There ain't no census of the Between, but estimates range from 5 million people to as many as 15 million. Like I said, ain't nobody really counting. All this on an island maybe 50 miles in diameter, roughly circular. The enclaves are relatively small in area, built upwards (and downwards underwater), with megabuildings, arcologies, and skyscrapers taller than Dubai in the early 21st. Layers of city, one on top of another. Down near the surface it stays dark most of the time, and gets rough, nearly as bad as living in the Between. Out in the Between, shanty towns, floating boat cities around the edges, stretches of empty land dotted with old munitions from skirmishes the corps denied they ever had.
You can make a lot of cred, running deniable ops for and against the various corps, too. The local intercorp currency is called obols, and yeah, they use pre-loaded cred cards for most transactions, or cards linked directly to your account if you're a cit. Get caught, well, you're just a few crazy dregs, or reb terrorists, or gangers . . . nothing to do with the corps. Everybody knows how it works, and a scav's gotta eat. Some of the big warlords on the major gangs built their nest egg that way, and some ops even made it into employment with the corps. If folks want that kinda thing...Way more fill unmarked graves all over the island, or get their corpse tossed in the ocean, or just rendered down to ashes, or biomass for fertilizer...waste not want not, am I right?
Ya know, all the old games and novels and shit used to talk about cyberpsychosis, losing your humanity bit by bit as you replace your organic bits with metal. The more cyberware you had, the less human you were. Miss me with that ableist BS. Somebody ain't less human cuz they got a metal arm, or prosthetic eyes. Ya get less human when you stop caring. About yourself. About others. Seen it happen to ops and dregs and cits with no upgrades at all.
More likely, lots of times, not all, the fucker who swaps a perfectly good arm for chrome with a gun in it, or gets his reflexes jazzed, or dopes up on genemod muscle growth all so they can kill people better was already a psycho. And we all know the saying about power corrupting, right? I'm just sayin', the corp execs seem way colder and less human than any boosted op I've ever met.
Motive, basic stability, empathy. . .got less to do with your metal to flesh ratio than you deciding noboy else the ends justify the means. And man is it easy to get lost in the game when you got no choice but to play. Ain't the chrome. It's power, it's poverty, it's addiction, it's survival, it's the wear and tear of a sterile society or a living hell . . . or maybe just one bad day.
Why so many refugees? Well, it's 2150. The sea level has risen, like, between 5 and 8 meters. Everywhere. Huge sections of coast are gone, and the places most people used to live are gone with them. Rising global temperatures have caused catastrophic climate change, and places that used to have water don't. Places that used to be temperate are nearly tropical. The tropic are nearly unlivable. Lots and lots of species are just gone. Most coral has bleached and died, except for coral grown in carefully controlled aquaculture environments. The only reason we got food at all is vat-grown stuff, gene-modded stuff to grow in the new normal, all that. But there ain't enough, a lot of places, and even if there is, there's no profit in distributing it, so the corps don't. Governments? Don't make me laugh. They still play big political games, but they haven't been relevant for years except as a smoke screen to keep at least a few people thinking the system ain't rigged.
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