Revision [105]
This is an old revision of AvatarsRealWorld made by ConradWong on 2010-09-29 19:34:32.
Timeline:
- 2020s: North Bend was a small town in the northern part of New Jersey, a suburb near the Big City. If you climbed up to the top of the North Bend University clock tower and looked east, you'd be able to see the towers of Manhattan.
- 2030s: The Ecoclysm struck. Global warming caused the sea to rise up over miles and miles of coastline all over the world. The population crashed, and only emergency deployment of an experimental ozone replacement technology brought things back under control over the next ten years. North Bend suddenly became a waterfront city, swamped by refugees from the once-glittering skyscrapers of New York City. They built shanties and tents, anything that would hold the teeming millions, and cultivated vast algae farms to produce enough food to keep them alive.
- 2040s: an era of seemingly limitless growth and prosperity as the waters slowly receded and people were able to rebuild from the wreckage. An enterpreneur, Mr. Arcadia, built a massive indoor mall/arcology where people could live and walk to work in the same building, supported by its own hydroponic gardens and wind and solar farm.
- 2050s: humanity's desire to rebuild had outreached its capacity to absorb such growth. The Mafia, still alive and well in the 21st century, turned out to have used substandard products in its construction, and the arcology experiment failed. It began to collapse into a shantytown. A curious culture sprang up in North Bend and New York City, where vital services continued to be supplied to those who lived in the highest towers, the 'high rent districts', and they traveled from one place to another via aircars, never having to subject themselves to the iniquities of the streets where scavengers and squatters reside.
- 2060s: a time of cautious optimism. The global economy has stabilized due to the joint efforts of governments and corporate states, and physical warfare is considered obsolete, but now the real battle is online: a war for control over the wealth and beliefs of the world's population. In North Bend, the population is roughly 10% 'High Rent' who refer to their homes by district numbers rather than mention "North Bend", 30% average citizens who brave the streets if they must, paying protection to gang lords so they can pass unmolested, 40% poverty-stricken migrant workers who scavenge the fields for whatever they can sell or feed into the sludge pits to be recycled into raw materials, and 20% gangsters that extort money from all but the High Rent.
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).
