Revision [110]
This is an old revision of AvatarsRealWorld made by ConradWong on 2010-09-29 21:04:06.
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 CO2 reduction 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: the United States government, depleted of most of its resources and at a huge deficit, turned to private enterprises to make up the shortfall, resulting in an apparent era of limitless growth as the waters receded and investors seized the opportunity to profit off of the rebuilding. One such investor bought up most of the land around North Bend and constructed a massive mall and arcology, 'Arcadia', where people could live, work, and shop in the same building. It would have supported itself with its own hydroponic gardens, and been powered by wind and solar energy.
- 2050s: short-sighted greed cut the legs out from under the world's economy, producing what is now called the New Depression. The Mafia, still alive and well in the 21st century, turned out to have used substandard materials when its union workers built the arcology, which reacted poorly with the new "Plastic Snow" that began to rain from the skies. Several disasters later, it began to collapse into a shantytown. Mr. Arcadia channeled his resources into holding onto the last, most profitable residents, the corporate executives and their workers, reinforcing the towers in which they lived and stripping workers and robots from the rest.
- 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. There is a curious culture in North Bend and New York City, where the most prosperous live in the 'High Rent' districts, using aircars and elevated landing platforms to get around, most of the people are either average citizens who brave the street when they must, scavengers and ne'er do wells who eke out a living combing through the trash and ruins of the past decades, and gangsters rule the streets and shantytowns. Junk brought into the Junkyard gets weighed, paid for, then tossed into the Sludge Pits where it gets broken down by atomic weight into raw materials, and nearby factories product cheap goods to be flown off to New York City, ever hungry for novelties and construction materials.
Social Classes
High Rent
Corporate executives, government officials, and other well-to-do types. They identify themselves as living in one of the arcology towers still in good working order, like Magnolia Seven, rather than North Bend - in fact they don't really associate themselves with North Bend at all. Real food is plentiful, and served by robots in their houses or smiling humans in fine restaurants who know how lucky they are to be able to work up here, away from the riffraff.
Average Joes
Citizens who live in the lower levels of the towers or in fortified suburbs around the towers. The luckier ones work in company offices in the same tower or nearby, but an unfortunate number have to commute to the factory. They pay for protection from the gangsters and carry badges to mark themselves under so-and-so's protection. VR games and entertainment are their best escape from the gray skies and smoke-tinged walls of their homes and works.
Citizens eat farm-grown vegetables and synthesized soy proteins, processed and fortified with vitamins and minerals. Steak is a once-a-month sort of luxury for those who like to imagine they'll someday be promoted to a penthouse apartment. Meat simply can't be mass-produced the way it used to be.
The Poor
Those who can't pay the rent live in abandoned homes and stores or wherever they can put up a tent or shanty, outside the towers, colloquially called the Heap. If they're not lucky enough to have jobs, they scrounge through the wreckage of the Ecoclysm and the New Depression for junk that has enough weight and value to be worth toting back to the Junkyard, or if they are lucky, has enough intrinsic value to be sold as is.
Food is plentiful: given some space, an industrious scavenger can gather up enough "Plastic Snow" from the falls to throw into the stained gray recycling vats, and get a gray goo, flavored with one of several "exciting, tasty condiments". Everyone dreams of making it big though, striking it rich, finding that lost treasure somewhere out there that'll get them out of the Heap.
Gangsters and Racketeers
There are two kinds of profiteers that dominate the Heap: the factory owners and those who work for them, turning society's trash into freshly made (if shoddy) goods and food for the masses, and the gangsters that run gambling, drug operations, and "security" at the gates surrounding the Junkyard. They work hand-in-glove with each other to keep the poor "down where they belong" - the factory owners pay the very same people that buy the majority of the goods they produce, and the gangsters collect a protection fee on top of that, so in the end, a scavenger is back where he began.
They have access to some of the luxuries that they ship up to the High Rent districts, so by and large, a gangster or racketeer lives better than the poor or Average Joes, but it's a live fast, die hard kind of life for them.
Technology
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.
"Artificial Intelligence" is present in many places, but usually very limited - unless your question is very simple or one of those for which they were prepared, they'll have to refer it up to an actual human. Thus virtual receptionists and sales representatives are quite common, prepared with extensive spiels about their companies.
Government Agencies and Corporations
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).
