Revision [48]

This is an old revision of AvatarsRealWorld made by ConradWong on 2010-09-08 19:28:40.

 

The world in which Avatars takes place is halfway between our own and the dystopian cyberpunk future imagined by William Gibson. The 'Ecoclysm' of the 2030s drastically reduced the human population, but technological ingenuity kept them alive until the balance swung back again. The 2040s brought a period of seemingly limitless growth and prosperity, followed by the crash of the 2050s. The 2060s are a time of cautious optimism, as governments and corporate states play out a game of chess on the globe. Physical war is obsolete, the real war is online - a battle for control over the wealth and faith of the world's population.

North Bend, New Jersey, is just one example of a town wracked by the back-and-forth shifts of the world. Practically in sight of the gleaming towers of Greater New York, it's a shantytown built in what was once a prosperous suburb. The 'beachfront park' is miles from the shore, and as the property values dropped, so did its population - now it's a low rent district and squatters huddle in the abandoned houses. Salvagers pick through the trash heap from New York and sort out valuables, then toss the rest into the sludge pits where voracious bacteriae digest it down into plastic and metal tablets, sorted by atomic weight, ready to be sold to the discount factories.

The rich eat 'real' food. For the poor there're synthesized soy proteins, processed and fortified with vitamins and minerals, and actual farm-grown vegetables find their way into the diet of the middlin' well-to-do, with steak a once-a-month luxury. The fragile ecology makes it impossible to simply mass-produce meat the way it used to be.

Energy is plentiful, as are consumer electronics. Personal sidearms are not uncommon. Guns mostly use mass accelerator technology that fits in the palm of one's hands, but it's still possible to find 'old fashioned' propellant-based firearms in the hands of collectors. Explosives are clean, fuel-air explosives. Biowarfare is illegal, as is nanotechnology capable of self-replication. Most individuals don't own vehicles, but instead, share communal hover-vehicles, ranging from bikes to cars to buses, all of which are electric and will recharge on widely available landing pads when not in use. These can be guided by a global navigation system when someone calls for a pickup.

There are entire worldwide government agencies tasked with the protection of Earth's ecology, physical and virtual. Among these are the Cybercrime Emergency Response Team (CERT), tasked with stopping runaway AIs, and the Internet Consumer Protection agency, which enforces spam prevention laws and prosecutes commercial fraud (sometimes with armed response teams).
Valid XHTML :: Valid CSS: :: Powered by WikkaWiki