The world of After the Fall

[418518.32987] -Log Entry Start- 

My doctor told me that journaling would help me organize my thoughts. Like writing them down might help me see the gaps in logic and better understand why I am the way that I am. That it might help me understand why I see things that aren't there despite the mandated daily dose of meds. It's not like I see ghouls or monsters or bugs crawling out of my skin or something, I just make connections between things that I guess other people don't understand or see as easily as I do. Anyway, I've never really done this before, so I asked my doctor for advice on how to start, and all I got back was to start from the beginning and put down how I see the world and how I feel about it. So, I guess this is it. The beginning, at least so far as I know. 

Before there was us, there was the Fall. 

After the Fall, little remained but ash and ruins to rebuild upon. I'm no historian, but I'll relay as much as I know and leave the rest to more educated minds than my own.

Whatever or whoever wiped them out, I don't think anyone knows, but there's plenty of people, of varying degrees of sanity, who have their theories and would love for you to hear them. We just call it ‘the Fall’, for short; some great cataclysm that burned this world to the ground. In some places literally; in others, only figuratively. Something that ripped the foundations of culture and society up from the ground and bleached its roots, salted the earth and spat on it for good measure; a final fuck you to everyone and everything that came after. It was supposed to be the end. It might still be.

All they left us was a globe scattered with ruins and wilds laid to rest under a blanket of ashes, and what did we do? We did the best that we could, with what we had. We devoured the shattered remains of that world, chewed it up, and regurgitated it into the mouths of the children of this world in the hopes they would grow up bigger, stronger, and better than us. I'd seen that once, actually. Well, not with a civilization, I guess; but an ancient holo-chip from the old world that some dealer on the market showed me. It had a recording of a real-deal, live bird on it. The holo was encrypted through some mechanism of artificial scarcity, never to be copied or reproduced, we couldn't even catch it on a vid; it could only be traded in physical medium. But, it was a holo of a real bird though, not a simulation, not some computerized-graphics speculation from some biology student making best-guesses from the available data. A holo of a real bird, just living its life, feeding its babies, plain as day; barfing up half-digested worms and roaches directly into the mouths of its offspring. I guess life's always been a bitch, one way or another. But there it was, evidence of the old world, forever locked into a single chip and never to be copied and spread for the sake of education and entertainment to the world. A stupid fucking idea, and probably just one stupid fucking idea in a long fucking line of stupid fucking ideas that got those stupid sons of bitches wiped out.

Stupid ideas, for sure, because the Fall got them, and whatever happened was terrible enough to keep echoing down through time like a tidal wave circling the planet after some great tectonic calamity, again and again. As far as anyone can tell, what happened after the Fall brought us a hundred generations of firestorms, frozen wastelands, famine, plagues and wars that drug us back to the dawn of civilization. Its ongoing effects are evident all around us. People from the empty places between the great cities still tell stories about monsters that lurk in deep water, or way out in the woods; unspeakable horrors that defy description. They talk about places that don't obey the laws of the universe as we know them, like reality itself was cracked and splintered. Some stark raving lunatics talk about having broken through a veil to see the other side. They're too crazy for anyone to really take seriously, but when you see the unyielding terror behind their eyes it really makes you wonder if there might, just maybe, be a shard of truth there.

These are the ashes we rose from.

Some looked to the skies for salvation. Whatever had happened to the ones that came before us left the skies scarred the color of rust, but people say that if the winds were just right, and you're right there on the west coast with the wind coming in off the water, on a really clear night once every few years, you could catch glimpses of three stars in the sky through the haze. At least, you could if you were far enough outside of the cities. Three real, actual, stationary points of light in the sky that weren't just some stray bits of litter drifting by, left behind by whoever came before us. Countless men and women have wondered what it might be like to go to those places, to see the worlds that circled those stars, and many died trying due to their own bravado, naivete, or sheer, dumb stubbornness. What vessels that didn't explode on the ground due to some failure of materials or engineering were promptly shredded as they exited the atmosphere. Most never made it more than 500 miles up. The few that did didn't beat the record by much. For every object we could track from the ground through the clouds, there were a million more that were too small or too fast to track. It was hopeless. Every attempt was beaten back until we set less ambitious goals and tried colonizing sub-orbital space instead. The jury is still out on whether that will ever come to pass.

Others, they looked to the ground beneath our feet. We weren't left much to work with. They had mined up everything that was even remotely useful, to a depth of two miles or so. We were able to harvest and purify some things from the ruins, but they were so contaminated they were only barely useful, and usually took more energy than they were worth to refine. It was a start, though. We were able to build enough with that to get a foothold, and began harvesting oxides from the soil and oceans and refining them down to more useful materials. Our ancestors found ways to screen microplastics from the water and air and fuse them into useful structures. Eventually we figured out ways to dig deeper, to get at resources they couldn't reach before the Fall. It was then, that we found such an abundance that our civilization started to rapidly advance.. 

So here we are. Marooned on an island in a black ocean, under a permanent cloud of red fog, feeding on the hollowed-out, rotting corpse of some civilization that came before us. We have one hell of a legacy to live up to.  At least we're tough. That's one fucking thing I can say to our credit. We're tough as nails and get by however we have to as a result of thousands of years of trial by fire. So, that's where we came from, I guess. As far as where we are? On a geological time scale, we might be doomed, but right now? We're thriving. Fuck everything and everyone that came before, and fuck everything and everyone that comes after. Good luck, losers. This place is ours, and nobody can convince us to stop grinding this piece of shit rock into pollution now. It's our inheritance. It's our purpose.

It's the only purpose we can find, trapped on a world that doesn't know it's dead yet. We're happy to help ease its suffering, and why not have a little fun in the process? I think most of us feel we're owed at least that one kindness. 

We've got more ways to distract ourselves from the harsh reality we live in than most rational people would believe. Aside from the usual mortal trappings - eating, sleeping, drugs and fucking - there's a whole economy centered around capturing our attention any way possible; and the better your means, the better those offerings get. There are so many distractions and diversions that the corporations play games with it, or at least it feels that way most of the time. It's all about them getting the biggest possible investment of your eye-milliseconds in exchange for the tiniest trickles of dopamine possible, as if it's some zero-sum game where dopamine needs to be rationed out to a steady drip, microdose after microdose adding up until people are so desperately hooked they literally get dope-sick without it. 

Most people are fine with it though; they live their vending-machine life, suck on Vita-Pops and jack in to whatever game or porn or show that's all the rage. They aren't happy. You can see it in their eyes when they don't have a VR mask in front of them or they aren't rolled back in their head from a full-dive to escape into some better, fictional place. They're just tired. Too worn down by everything to even care about building a better world. Too burned out from the hyper-distilled pleasure-factories they escape to from their sixty-square-foot capsule apartment. Just empty. Content to not be in pain, even if it means living their entire life subjugated by corporate ghouls. Anything, so long as they don't get the whip again. They don't even have the energy to talk to people properly; to make friends or have relationships or, fuck, anything at all. It's just a hollow existence: 12 hours of work, 2 hours of commute, maybe eat something real or stop by a brothel on payday if you can afford the luxury. Every other second jacked into some hollow fantasy world that only exists to try to influence which brothel or what real food you treat yourself to on payday. It's all neatly tucked between the gaps in bright colors and cheery noises and stupid fucking attention-farming bullshit literally every single one of their feeds are filled with.

Pathetic.

The other end of the scale - the ‘other half’, as many might say, even though it's more like the other five percent - they live different. They're awake, in a sense that they aren't lost in some full-dive most of their free life, but not really in the sense that they can see behind the curtain. It's the same trap for them in a different package; 4 hours of work, 10 minutes of commute, dinner at a perfect luxury restaurant with their perfect family and four perfect kids, conspicuously seated near the front so they can be seen being the perfect family by the right perfect people to further their perfect professional goals. Then it's off to some theater, or opera, or forum full of other perfect people living their perfect lives, making sure they're seen being as perfect as they can be. Then they go home to be greeted by their perfect bio-engineered, AI-minded butlers to their safe, quiet, perfect 308th-floor condo that's so far from the little people that their perfect little children would ask their private, personal bio-engineered, AI-minded nannies why anyone would want to live in the gutter instead of how they do. Like it's their fucking choice.

Pathetic.

And then there's the rest of us. That final couple percent that sees through all the bullshit and can see the strings being pulled from somewhere just off-stage far enough that we can't make out who's behind the curtain. The dreamers. The artists. The activists. The ones that want a better world and actually have the balls to say it. The ones that want to see this ridiculous place burn so we can build something better, who want to scream in the faces of every perfect little family or dead-eyed drone that they're two sides to the same coin, they're both being played, they're both complicit in this thing that's so much bigger than them - than all of us - that it defies rational explanation. The kind that are regarded as raving lunatics in the streets if we finally get fed up enough to start in on it because once we start we can't fucking stop because how could we? We're all being ground to mince to serve fucking nothing, there are no winners. You're either locked in, locked down, or locked up. The puppetmaster wins every time, and he never gets tired of playing. The drones call us angels; the people that try to fight for the common good, against their own best interests. The corpos call us pets; the people whose best intentions they twist to their own ends. The reality is somewhere in the middle, I guess. We're just trying to get by, wherever and however we can.

It could be worse. 

Anyway. Our nation is composed of six cities. Two near the western coast, Rain City and The Valley. Two in the middle, City Center and Lake City. Two more near the eastern coast, The Crater and Swamp City. Between the six, and those who were stupid or crazy enough to live in the wilds, our nation has somewhere around 300 million inhabitants; probably 95 percent of them in the main six cities alone. There are four other nations that all fight over a larger land-mass across the ocean, plus a few tiny islands that nobody really gives a shit about. Myself? I'm from City Center. Born and raised. I've actually never left the city. Shit, I've barely left Neon Alley, and never once enjoyed doing so.

Neon Alley is a strip only around five miles wide and twenty miles long, winding along either side of - and floating in -  the river that runs through the heart of City Center. It's not on any official maps but everyone knows it. If you've never been here before, three rules reign supreme:

1. Everything and everyone has a price. No ifs, ands, or buts. There is nothing someone won't do for the right sum of money; morality is simply a factor in the price.
2. Corpo scumbags mind their manners; they're guests in our home. The power roles are reversed here and they know it; Precisely zero of their classist bullshit is permitted here, and on the rare occasion one of them forgets, they're swiftly reminded.
3. Don't eat the fish. Yes, they'll say it's fresh caught, but you have to think of where it was caught and what it was eating. Yikes.

Otherwise, pretty much anything goes. Fly your freak flag, be weird and never apologize for it. Just know that if you step too far out of line your shit will be corrected, readily, and probably by a small mob if you go far enough. The Civil Servants steer clear of this place and with good reason. We can protect our own, and we prefer it that way. Neon Alley is the sort of place you come when you've got a specific kind of trouble to get into, but aren't quite sure where to find it. Come here, ask around, maybe grease a palm or two and you'll find your way to what you're looking for eventually. We deal in everything, including what the corpos are too shy to associate themselves with; sure, there's kind of all your standard black market fare - drugs, guns, brothels, stolen shit at steep discounts, certain services, cybernetics… But our real claim to fame? Our geneticists.

The splicers are the clever sorts that are a little too smart for their own good. The sorts of genius that's priceless on the black market and terrifying to the corpo lawyers that have to think about liability and their company's image. The splicers could do anything. They first started showing up a couple years after the VAS Biotechnological Laboratory Group - VAS Labs, as anyone sane calls them - started a program called the Open Genome Project. Their goal with that was to bring genetic engineering, retro-genetic therapies and advanced medicine to the masses, supposedly to seed some healthy competition within the market and signal their absolute dominance in the field.

They did things that their competitors, Skiltaire Group, Skyliner Corp and Mink Industries could only dream of. Everyone knows their story; they started with crops. Shit like corn that increased yield by 10,000% per acre, coreless apples and novel new fruits and vegetables that twisted familiar or exotic flavors and made them new and exciting and commonplace. They made plants that thrived under the dim red-gray sun in ashy acidic soil. 

They made medicine, next. They cured all sorts of genetic diseases in a few years after cracking the code. They developed therapies and vaccines for hundreds of viral and bacterial diseases. They developed counter-warfare measures against crop blights and algae blooms that threatened to ruin fisheries.

Then they made art. Beautiful bioluminescent living paintings that stretched across the entire side of their headquarters megabuilding in The Crater. Huge, ever-changing, glowing murals that graced the interior walls of every ultra-high-end condo building. New ornamental plants that lined city streets and filled them with the smell of centuries-extinct flowers. Their AI operated the micro-pollinators that fertilized crops worldwide. Their wireless power sources powered them.

They dominated. While Skiltaire group was failing to colonize near-space with its hyperadapted, genetically-tweaked clones, VAS Labs colonized our home planet with thousands of different novel genomes and hundreds of advanced AI models. While Mink Industries and Skyliner Corp were locked into old-fashioned breeding-breaking-training cycles for their living fuck-toys, VAS Labs grew bodies from scratch with bespoke ground-up genetics. They controlled them with their AI models running huge suites of training data that allowed VAS Labs to deliver a vastly superior product in a twentieth of the time. Nobody could compete. Nobody can compete unless it's on compromises, which was one of the things VAS doesn't seem interested in leading. Why would they? They've got every luxury tech market cornered, the best researchers, the best designers. Sure, people that are in that rich-but-not-that-rich market still buy Skyliners and Minks to staff their houses, but everyone knows they really wanted VAS Platinums.

I just remembered that I was talking about splicers, though. So, yeah. VAS Labs does this Open Genome Project shit, does seminars and provides practical toolkits and applications that people could use to develop their own genetics on these purely hypothetical systems. The science was real but they never released the means to turn those designs into anything real. They were recruiting talent, and wanted people locked into their company to make their design dreams a reality. After all, that's how they became what they are.

Some crazy fucker leaked the missing link to their genetics sector, though. There's a lot more to it than I really know, but that consisted of a combination of a few different technologies that made what they do possible. Basically, it was a machine that could print a genome, encapsulate it in a zygote or a retroviral delivery vehicle or a bacterium, and would set it off to start dividing and doing what lifeforms do, all on its own.

Shit got really messy, after that. I was just a little kid when it started, but what I remember was almost two decades of perpetual scares about bioterrorism, government death squads, private death squads, unlicensed synths fucking up the people that kept them as pets and servants and sex-toys and slaves, and other people who got really fucked up from shitty edits - that is, black-market retrogenetic modifications. 

Shit got dark, for a long time. It still is. A lot has changed, and a lot is still the same. 

There's an uneasy peace, now, where the big splicers stay in their lane more or less, and keep the risk to life and limb isolated within their customer alone. ‘I want some cool markings, I want new natural hair and fur colors. A little extra muscle here, a little less fat there, a new liver, or better eyes or ears. Make me fuck better, harder, longer. Make me cum like a firehose. Make it taste like strawberries and cream.’ Dumb shit, usually. The easy shit that, while it isn't exactly above-board, is at least relatively safe for all but the person that's dosing those edits. In exchange, VAS Labs and the other major corporations don't sic their dogs on them.

Then there's the hackers. Just as brilliant as the splicers, but their interests turned toward technological marvels rather than genetics. These are the people that can twist and adapt tech to their will, they speak its language. The really good ones, the ex-corpos and ex-researchers and the kiddies that have grown up doing this stuff? They can adapt or interface or bypass just about anything you throw at them. These are the people that it seems like everyone who's anyone knows. They can hack new functionalities and tweak and tune up every bit of cybernetic gear you've got. The really good ones run totally independent shops, got their own teams of ripperdocs and everything. The worst ones run solo, and will take any work they can get. The rest of them? Connected, probably, in one way or another. They're either busy building a network of ripperdocs to open a shop with, or they're part of one of Neon Alley's numerous and colorful syndicates.

I can't believe I made it this far without talking about the syndicates, but I guess we're there now. You can't talk about Neon Alley without talking about the syndicates. They're why we are who we are. The closest thing to government oversight Neon Alley will ever know.

First and most important to anyone new to Neon Alley are the Elders. These half-mad bastards got the idea that godliness is a product of not just basic cybernetic and genetic enhancement, but of enhancements at the highest levels of all available technology. If you've got the money, these are the guys to work with. They have the best ripperdocs, the best splicers, and they effectively run Neon Alley. Nobody who knows the street will fuck with these guys. Their nobles and guards wear all white. People on the street call them the Archangels. You'd get it if you ever saw one scrap. It's a thing of terrible beauty, like a mushroom cloud rising on the horizon. I'll repeat this because it bears repeating: NOBODY who knows the street will fuck with these guys.

The Birthright Council's the next-biggest player in the game, I guess. They're a coalition of bloodline purists, made up of four separate gang families. These guys are staunchly anti-edits, they deal pretty much exclusively in cybernetics and rare high-tech. They run a few protection rings but mostly just tax smaller gangs for turf to operate on. A word of warning if you're the modding type; these fuckers see edited people and synths as equally subhuman and treat them accordingly. They're only occasional troublemakers though, and despite their beef with the Elders they mostly stay in their lane.

A group that quite specifically doesn't stay in their lane is the Stratigene Dawn. Freaks. These guys are transpeciest, accelerationist cultists that believe the apocalypse will be brought on by genetic tampering. They're helping the world toward what they see as an inevitable existential-threat event in the belief that it will apply pressure to accelerate and advance genetic research and edit technology so that, eventually, the survivors can adopt a new, genetically enlightened future afterward. Rumors have it this gang was started by some radicalist Elders that broke off from the main group a short time after the Elders' inception. They're absolute pariahs and anyone caught knowingly doing business with them is basically excommunicated from the game.

Next up is everyone's favorite underdogs, the Unchained Syndicate. These guys are a self-governing group of hackers, geneticists and ripperdocs that formed their own alliance about ten years ago. They have the finest hackers in Neon Alley, and when I say finest, I mean like real luxury-quality clockwork. As an added bonus, if you can't afford to work with the Elders' splicers and ripperdocs, these guys are going to have your next best bet ready at hand. Also a great bet if you don't want to deal with the Elders' ideological baggage. They're recently expanding their offerings to provide security and escort services to discerning clientele.

There's plenty of other, smaller gangs and offshoots too. The Island Boys on the Flotilla, the River Runners, the Fallen Angels, all sorts of other freaks and geeks and weirdos that make for a list that's both too long and too ever-changing to ever actually write. 

Then there's us Indies. Players, but the players who don't fly flags; the real ones that actually get shit done instead of maintaining a status quo. We take the risky work, the ugly work. We're the anonymous proxy that lives between the syndicates, and between the corporations. We're those bold idiots that have no ties to power, nobody backing us except our little crews, and there's nobody bankrolling us either. We make do. We take the work we can get, and we'd never have it any other way. 

This way, we can be sure we bow to no-one.

[418518.68195] -End Log-