It's quite a long-ish read, but worth it to get a grasp of things.
THE WORLD IS ENDING
Again and again and again and again...
Constantly in flux; shifting, distorting, always reborn as something worse. Destruction by ecological catastrophes, the fallout of history’s belligerence; by modern man-made Miseries or the blood spilled by the reckless machine of capitalist supremacy. Mankind’s greatest ability truly is to destroy itself in creative ways. Designer demise, consumer-customized death, endlessly on repeat.
Poisonous space rocks, nuclear weapons, cyclical revolutions, warring nations, warring corporations, warring neighbors; pandemics, tsunamis, volcanoes. In between it all: direct person-machine interfaces, tactical neural implants, and bacteria from outer space hijacking intercellular nanorobotics. And the sky is full of ads.
Everyone is interfaced/injected/infected/infested with something. Everyone wants something from everyone else. Everyone is a liar and a cheat. Everyone wants more creds.
Welcome to the year 20X3.
Welcome to the City of Y!̸͆̅̌”̶͌̉#̸͇̞̻̌̚”̶̨̻̘̇̉̊͆̈́͒̌̆̓̕͜#̶̖̣̘̻͖̥͕̙̀̃̈́́̄̕̕͜͠2̶̧̻̺̝̥̮̣̒͒̂͐͐̍́́͘̕̕4̴̿̌’̷̛̙͍̠̙̿
The Cy.
WE SHOULD HAVE BURNED THIS CITY CENTURIES AGO
Nu-Capitalists rule from glass towers in Central.
Immortal OG Money Aristocrats in gated mansions, in gated communities, in gated enclaves in the Hills.
This month’s VIP celebs from their e-personas and clubs in the Ports.
Gangs rotting in their turf; in the Slums bordering G0.
Neo-Mediums from whatever accursed den their cult claims as hallowed ground.
All of them are building their own kingdoms and armies.
Central: Business/Enterprise Region
The hills to the west are crowned in neon and holo-shimmering crystal, overlooking G0 and the wretched, piss-poor city below. Once woodland and villas, Central rose to prominence after the Incident. Its humble grounds ravaged into an iron horizon of skyscrapers and arcologies, all under the calculating gaze of corporate offices. A coffin apartment costs more than you’d make in ten lifetimes. It won’t let you forget that. The SecCorps are ever present, their jurisdictions finite and controlled by ironclad contracts under direct violent competition. They are a coercing hand meant for outsiders and interlopers. The crimes here are white collar: financial, high yields, low convictions. The rich remain above the law. An altar to consumerism in the shape of a sprawling retail park called Undersjön is perpetually under construction beneath Lake Gravel, separating the north and south of Central. South Central is dominated by the megacorp Alliansen Inc., the mobster law firm Gravf/Mellberg/Tosk, and current superstar it couple Tulles & de Verte. The Neon Pillar casts a fluorescent sun upon north Central—the HQ of Spectral FT Banks & Holdings, and a megatemple of the subsidiary corp-church Fideistic Transformation, which promises eternal singularity and uploaded sentience within a divine mind-cloud. Their success with mind uploads is questionable, ego continuance an unknown.
The Hills
Locked safely behind gates upon gates, the hills and valleys away from the urban expanse of the Ports and Central crawl with fortress-like villas and mansions swallowed by private parks and frivolous splendor. The higher you climb, the greater the luxury, the tighter the security. Officially, there is no crime in the Hills, as any unfamiliar face is tracked and rendered in a panopticon of surveillance feeds, and the SecCorps are paid well for their discretion and their brutality when dealing with anyone without an invitation or home here. Galgbacken is an old-money neighborhood. Home to three of Cy’s most influential people: CEO of UCS–United Citadel Security Mr. O.B.P. Gunner, President of Alliansen Inc. Board Mrs. Lia, and Dr. Daevy, lead researcher of TG Labs. Several new buildings on Oak Isles are constructed in strangely ancient and occult architectural styles. No public records exist concerning ownership or purpose of these structures, which loom malevolently in the skyline.
Ports
There’s no escape from the City even with three ways out—air, sea and space. The Ports offer the illusion of escape from within a labyrinthine universe of steel, concrete and abandoned warehouses. A black market of imports from what’s left of the rest of the world, far from the prying cameras of the SecCorps (so long as the bribes keep flowing). Drugs and guns, clubs and fun; this is the entertainment district of Cy’s true citizens. Corps, mobs, VIP-celebs and street gangs vie for dominance, their gunfights drowned out only by the cacophonous hedonism on display. Royal West Shipping has the largest and most well-guarded warehouses; nobody dares challenge them. The rock-star themed pop-up hotels of Idol Coffins flare up like a bad case of VD, always next to the hottest new club. Word is there’s a salmon-painted door guarded by two ultra-chromed-up giants in brown tailcoats, allegedly leading to a restaurant so exclusive even the Guide can’t get a table.
The Industries
Cy’s industrial zones are nightmarish sectors; gargantuan in scale, overflowing with poison and peril. The steel isle of Mosscroft reigns foulest of them all—a toxic hellscape rivaling Central in
size. A barbed wire labyrinth of fume-spewing factories and overtaxed power plants where the overworked and underpaid are herded like cattle to toil until they break. Industry must feed Cy’s eternal consumption. The sickening smog especially shrouds western Mosscroft, fed by Kaytell Makers’ chemical textile plant and the ACGS weapons factory. The stench, however, is unbearable to the south, where fish and other biomatter are processed by AST into edible/non-edible products.
G0
This is where the rock fell, where the bombs dropped. A post-apocalyptic quagmire kept in quarantine by a massive wall monitored by auto-turrets and armed drones. Entering the sector without proper protection is still a death sentence—if the murderous Nanophreaks, pockets of nerve gas or radioactive space dust don’t kill you, then whatever the hell makes THAT NOISE at night will. Most of the area is waterlogged scrap and warped steel, but some of the oldest, medieval parts of Cy still stand. Scrapheads looking for antique junk, smugglers running goods, cultists seeking their profane truth and scientists looking for a way to profiteer from the fallout are the only beings you’ll meet here. The only humans, that is.
The Slums
Everything near G0 bears visible scars from the Incident, buildings and people alike. Festering scabs, scorch marks, psychic shock and some things more...sinister. Sentient. The slums are mangled by the weight of their wounds.Gangs fight the cults, the cults fight the militias; an uncontrollable spiral of violence, drugs and destruction to determine who is in control of the detritus of Cy. You’ll find most things among these run-down gutters: honest but broken people dreaming of a different future, underground shadow markets for food/fuel/stolen military hardware, hole-in-the-wall/no-questions-asked reaperdoc clinics that may just fix you up—or harvest your organs.
The Virid Vipers—major players in the Cy drug trade—and the Heirs of Kergoz wage a long and bloody gang war that makes a miserable life worse, especially in Bigmosse. The Heirs run their black sacraments and Nanomantic blood rites out of the Barnyard Fields, staining it red in the name of the two-headed alien daemons they worship. In Laketon, the walls are sodden with rot; tainted slurry seeps out of G0 and causes nanomold outbreaks in the water supply. Lilypond secures its borders at the barrel of a gun, with armed citizen vigilante brigades enforcing their own idea of peace.
On Water
The city is a convulsing, infected leviathan. The concrete and crystal facades are its tattered flesh; the many lakes, canals and channels its acrid veins—pumping acidic waters, fetid waste and bloated corpses through its sluices and floodgates. Beneath the spider’s web of bridges connecting Cy’s many isles is the never-ending bustle of taxi boats, market-barges, floating homes and supertankers plowing through fatbergs and filth-foaming waves. It isn’t potable, but Cynergy Water & Power Co and others are willing to market anything to the desperate. Everyone needs water. Cy’s archipelagic outlet tangles ships in mercurial mazes of heavily patrolled aquaculture cages. Further east is a trackless expanse of lifeless, raging waters—an undead sea of oil rig graveyards, glitching siren-like holobeacons and drifting plastic continents, which lure vessels astray from whatever faraway ports they set out to reach.
The Inbetweens
The salaryfolk, the cubicle zombies, the cogs in the machine live here in endless rows of bland tenement slabs. Overcast by an oppressive vista of faceless concrete brutalism, advertised to at every waking moment. There’s a disease here; as irritable as a flickering light, hyperlocal gentrification will flood a sector with trend thralls and boutique entrepreneurs. Days later, they’re gone, exploiting another “hidden gem” like a plague of locusts scouring a dying earth. BURNCHURCH HEX is currently surging with pop-up food stalls selling mycobiotic meat grown illegally underwater in G0. SVARTA was recently the epicenter of a cyberbike hype that came to a violent end when rival roadrunner clans bombed most of the area in a fight for dominance against the locals. The BORGHOLD’S notable prison complex makes it an outlier with some areas nearly five centuries old and new ones constructed each year. The locals live in small villas or multifamily houses. Insular, they view the rest of Cy’s populace with suspicion. They know the city by whom they hold in cages.
Beyond CY
The negaCitY devours all it sees. It fracks and churns the earth, it boils the ocean barren, the natural world it cages in its drug fueled, over-bloated factory meat farms. Beyond the city limits
are fields upon electrified fields for automated agricultural machines the size of cathedrals. What few forests remain are dominated by armies of buzzing, sawing, burning clearcutter drones that could not care less for who or what they cut down. Then there are the Tomb Towns; the wreckage of cities, ruined and abandoned during the last mega-urbanization wave. Here, roadrunner clans shelter from pollution, radiation, twisted wildlife, extreme weather and other, more unexplainable phenomena.
The Net
With its roots in primitive games and military experimentation with cranial jacks, the Net is a consensual semihallucination continuously experienced by almost everyone. A fractal amalgamation of AR, VR, old internet and cyberspace. The Net is an omnipresent deity; it is everywhere, in everything, in everyone. Impossible to map or escape. Always trying to sell you something, keep you scared and hack your behaviour. With a RCD (Retinal Communication Device), anyone can access the top, shallow levels. Venturing deeper, beyond consumer access zones, requires a cyberdeck, and to affect your immediate meatspace surroundings, you also need the proper Apps. Going deep requires mental resilience. To dive into unthinkable complexity, among lines of light in the dark of the mind. Getting black-iced is allegedly the worst way to die. But such warnings lack imagination. Hacker collectives whisper of strange anomalies and enigmatic, nightmarish manifestations hiding in the deepest, darkest data chasms. They could only be born by one or multiple sentient entities of terrible, science-defying power: AI. Gods. Demons. Aliens. Basilisks.