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Welcome to CyberGeneration

08:55, 28th March 2024 (GMT+0)

CyberGeneration

2027 America.  The U.S. of A.  Still proclaimed as the world’s first democratic government of the people, by the people, for the people.  But Truth - what’s left of it - is like an onion, and as you peel away the layers, more is revealed.  The corporations; they’re people, too now.  They own everything, right?  Government by the corps, for the corps.  Big, gleaming skyscrapers; miles and miles of agrifarms; safe, secure beaver burbs; the schools, colleges, and all the happy wage-slaves.  Let’s not forget the Crystal Palace and the other orbiting “assets.”

But ya know what?  Every year for more than a decade, eight-tenths of all campaign contributions come from less than 200 families.  That’s right, families, not corporations.  Oh, the corps make up the rest, but where do you think those families get the dough?  Peel back another layer and it turns out a very, very small number of people sit on the boards of all the major multinationals.  It’s all very incestuous, with each board member sitting on as many as eight or ten different corporate boards.

Peel back another layer:  The End of the Republic came in 2016, but most people missed it.  Those families bought the politicians, owned the corporations and pulled the strings of society in a grand scheme to secure their power.  Meanwhile, America has been spiraling down into a Dark Future: the land of the fast-gunning, interface-jacked, steel-legged, cyber-armed techno-hero.  Good and evil became mutable concepts replaced by the post-truth realities of expedience and the soulless will of the mega-corporations and the families that own them.  Meanwhile, the discontent of extreme inequality driving a selfish, self-possessed mass towards a libertarian dystopia.

Take a look, down from the penthouses and the Crystal Palace: in the cities and in the countryside, peel back another layer.  Sure, there are corporate centers, corporate security, safe beaver burbs; but outside those bubbles is a war zone:  a war has been raging, sometimes quietly, sometimes openly; a war between Federal agents, hired hit squads, government troops, Nomad war parties, Netrunner assault groups, black ops teams, and organized crime - and not so organized - crime.

In 2025 as things reached a crisis point, in the name of National Security the mega-corporations allied directly with demagogues those families put in power, with the goal of creating an unarmed, controlled consumer America.  An America where the power brokers use the megacorps’ economic might to control every market, government agents to suppress rebellion and media lackeys to control information and redefine truth.  They played on the insecurities and fears of the common Man:  fear of change; fear of outsiders; fear of terrorists; fear of losing the good old days; playing on those fears, with the promise of keeping everyone safe, they remade America into One Nation, under Corporate Control with Liberty and Justice for the Chosen Few.

But everything is not going as planned.  A terrifying plague is sweeping the nation.  Nicknamed the Carbon Plague, this nanotech-based mutagenic kills with a frightening selectivity.  If you are over twenty, infected and affected, you die.  If you are under twenty, you live.  Or, you Change.

The new generation, the Street Generation, is one which raised itself in a world of danger, violence and deception; that watched its parents sell their soul for a few chunks of cyberware and box of kibble.  The Feds are rounding up these kids, hunting them down because the Plague is changing them, giving them new and amazing powers that go beyond any cybertech.  This makes them different.  It also makes them hard to control.

This time, the battle won’t be for a few extra rounds of ammo and a safe hiding place after the black op.

This time, the stakes are for real.