scry capers
prologue
it is the year 2353
Long before the Dark Decade of the 2340's turned into the Big Jump of 2352, small cities had blossomed into large cites, and large cities had grown into and on top of each other, and every major center of population in the United States (New York, Miami, Dallas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago) had all turned into mega-cities of giant urban sprawl folded over more urban sprawl whipped into myriad frothy peaks and towers. In some cases, like New York, these cities grew to cover the entire state and then mingled edges with the next mega-city over. The entire east coast became one giant dense urban jungle of concrete and steel from the top of Maine down until it trickled out to the vast tracks of suburbia that filled nearly all of Virginia. California became one big city all the way from it's southern border to the bottom of the mountains on it's north end, excepting the desert. Europe became swallowed in City. Thick urban density in northern and southern Africa grew wings to touch cities along the coast that stretched thin arms to link in a wall of City around the continent, with a few cities the size of twentieth century New York scattered about the middle. Japan became one mega city, and, in an effort to keep 15% of it's landmass parks and nature reserves, built another nearly japan-sized city in the ocean between Japan and China. Russia, India, Australia, Arabia; all around the world saw population expansion to the limit of available resources.
Clashes between populations in urban build up along sensitive boundaries in the middle east circa 2220 lead to the development of genetic-tactics terrorists, or Gen-Tacs. These terrorists designed and created pathogens and single cell organisms. This lead, in the west, to the development of LabCorp. Based in the United States, with affiliate headquarters in Europe, LabCorp, an independent contractor for the Military Science Branch of the Coalition of Nations, was itself a network of independent contractors, which developed sophisticated nano-technologies utilized in conjunction with genetically designed mold and bacteria against Gen-Tac warfare. In the Drop Day attack of 2227, a small cloud of rapid-breeding, Gen-Tac designed, single-cell airborn agents released in Boston killed people with compromised respiratory systems, including half of anyone on the eastern seaboard that had asthma, within 24 hours. As the percentage of people with asthma and respiratory conditions had risen to just over ten percent, this meant millions of people died, and millions more received emergency medical care. In 2233, a cooperative trio of Gen-Tac super-mites ate most of the rubber and plastic in the greater Dallas area over a period of 36 hours; hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of injuries resulted from accidents related to the sudden disappearance of such common materials, and hospitals in the area were unable to effectively treat their patients without access to so much of their equipment. People were unable to be airlifted to working medical facilities because the mites stripped the rubber insulation off the wires and the seals off the gaskets while the helicopters were in the air, causing electrical shorts and total engine failure and an inevitable crash. Thousands more died without access to adequate care. Panic only added to the death toll as life in most of the megaplex of Texas went from affluent developed center of civilization to stone-age conditions in a mere week. Finally, LabCorp nanobots teamed with a rubber-producing mildew exterminated the microscopic menace. However, nearly the whole city-state of DalTex continued to suffer for months, as all methods of transportation, all water services, most things electric, every elevator, every car, every gas main and refrigerator for more than 32,000 square miles lay useless. As LabCorp became better at preventing these kinds of terrorist attacks, some gen-tac terror groups ( believed by many to be backed by the Eastern Alliance) started creating genetically modified animals. Rats that ate currency; snakes that injected viruses instead of venom; large hyper-breeding wasps that lay parasitic eggs in people; cats with dominant genes programed to become bigger and fiercer with each successive generation; seagulls with a taste for human prone to massive piranha-style feeding frenzies; pigeons that sought out strange things to eat and crapped corrosives everywhere- these were some of the animals used in notable attacks. LabCorp responded with cybernetic animals: borg-dogs, AI-ants, nano-augmented spiders, robo-ferrets, cyber-hawks, centa-bots, and orangu-techs among others. Things escalated. Some of these creations were given significant improvements to their intelligence, including, it is theorized, more cognitive development than was realized at the time. By 2260, both sides were working on human test subjects.
Concurrent with the advance of genetic and nano technologies, human kind was making developments in space. The Eastern Alliance was the first to build a functioning colony on the moon in 2213, Cheng Yue, seventy-six years after the 17 month long tragedy of U.S. moon base Americo 1 and the loss of 57 brave U.S. Astronauts. In March of 2215 the Coalition of Nations established Lunis, a fully operational lunar colony of 2, 453 'astros' -professionals trained for normal jobs in lunar conditions- twice the size of the Alliance colony Cheng Yue. In the years that followed, Japan, The Ex-Soviet Pact, The Central American Concejo and the United States all built individual colonies on the moon, while Lunis and Cheng Yue doubled, quadrupled, and quadrupled again, eventually becoming nearly equal sized massive industrial centers and destination points: cities with populations in the tens of millions.
Thus the stage was set for the abandonment of Earth known as the Dark Decade, culminating in the Great Flight. In 2281 a Gen-Tac terrorist attack of large proportions took place hours before massive earthquakes and a record tsunami devastated significant portions of Mexico and much of the south-eastern quarter of the United States. Believing the time was ripe to crush the Western Infidels once and for all, many gen-tac terrorist cells put all available resources in the field, even their experimentals, a move that backfired and cost many of the perpetrators their own lives, as the micro-agents spread beyond the areas of attack to all parts of the globe, and, worse, began mutating wildly. Likewise, many of the lab-grown human mutants, some of which had been based on such old earth legends as vampires, zombies, and werewolves, went rogue, were fruitful and multiplied, each in their own way. Panicked LabCorp Executives pushed ahead their own newest cybernetics and nano-tech without adequate long term studies in response. 'Unstable' Augmented Agents animal and nano alike defected, upgrading and propagating themselves- some of the human cyborgs lost all trace of humanity, or became enlightened, or went insane, or just outright fled. Life on Earth became much, much more difficult.
One recorded incident of 2297 details a 7 foot tall, four-armed kill-and-contain unit, that apparently developed a loop in its programing telling it to protect the color blue under all circumstances and which burst in on a two story West Chicago laundromat and murdered everyone washing blue clothes. Then, evidently realizing it had in the process shot a blue hat, cradled the hat gently for several minutes before activating its self destruct. A truly disturbing study from the same year in Russia was attempting to discover why all the 22-spot ladybugs were dying off, when they found that the lady bugs had inexplicably developed a taste for an obsolete LabCorp nano-bot. Even though the nano-bots had no nutritional value for the insects, as it had not become their primary food source this was not causing the extinction. Instead (the disturbing part) it was observed that mutated gen-tac mites, engaged in some kind of unspecified symbiosis with the nano-bots, were defending the bots by killing any ladybug that hunted them. There was the famous French Vamplight Massacre vid of 2309: four minutes of footage caught by a fallen phone cam that clearly depicts the sudden and savage draining of blood from five terrified people by a like number of fanged mutants in a dark room lit by a single eerie greenish lamp. Southern Calplex lost nearly a fifth of it's population to the Zombie Infestation of 2312, but even though this evolved strain of the Zombificus pathogen caused the body to produce mild preservatives, fully infected Zombies only had an unlife of seven to twelve days; Government and LabCorp agencies- with the help of loyal battalions of suicide-mission borg-dogs contained and eradicated the Zombies before they could cross into NorCalplex, just south of the Santa Cruz District five months after the initial outbreak. In 2316, a study by a group of scientists on the Portland end of the NorthWest Pact revealed not only an autonomous society of orangu-techs living inland of the Puget Sound, but also the worrisome discovery that they had formed an undefined cooperative relationship with a population of feral, gene-shifted raccoons of Gen-Tac origin.
During this time, life on Earth was difficult and uncertain at best. The Gulf area had never recovered from the tsunami of 2281. The world was enveloped in all new, human-wrought micro-entities. Genetically Shifted mutants and cybernetically Upgraded beings caused hysteria. Epidemics swept large areas of urban sprawl. Strange beings haunted a growing number of large empty areas of mega-city called Ghost Counties. Meanwhile, as systems of services and production broke down whole states at a time and populations shrank, lawlessness and desperation exploded in pockets on the edges, resulting in anarchy, and in some instances, the emergence of various autonomous clan or familial governments within a city-state's borders, cut off by hundreds of miles of abandoned, creature -infested cityscape. Money became something that happened in high population areas only. In the face of such chaos, humanity pulled back, massing in its largest city-centers, leaving countless thousands of square miles of labyrinthine city-scape open to the elements and whatever else wanted it. More and more people vied for a chance to get to the moon. It was easy to control who could get to the moon, simple to decontaminate objects traveling through space, difficult for stray organisms to infiltrate the moon or escape into the harsh lunar environment and thrive. Governing bodies of several prominent nations, including the U.S., moved their government seats to the Lunar Colonies. Children were brought up to fulfill their parents dreams of graduating as an Astro, eligible for a job in space. Harsh extra-terrestrial conditions meant a lunar lifestyle that was both carefully engineered with the latest technology, and free of Gen-Tac or rogue LabCorp agents. Earth and things associated with it began to be referred to by third and fourth generation lunar citizens as old-world, or back-world, while planetside, 'first-world' and 'third-world' became terms describing zones of relative proximity to the center of any CityPlex, and hence how much access one had to civilized lifestyle accoutrements like running water, or a monetary system, or an internet connection.
Things stabilized between 2320 and 2340. Briefly, the Earth rallied. Some populations experienced growth. The human immune system began evolving to compete in a world full of new and artificial infectants. A few new technologies were developed. Then, on February 17th, 2341, the super-volcano under Yellowstone Park erupted..
The initial area of effect was somewhat smaller than the experts had guessed; Wyoming was mostly destroyed, and each of the six states touching it largely became barren wasteland in short order. The true disaster was the resulting global ash cloud, which filtered out an enormous amount of sunlight- temperatures dropped an average of 19 degrees world-wide, an estimated 66% of plant life died out completely, thousands of species of animals went extinct, and less than half the remaining population of Earth survived the following nine years. Earthquakes, Hurricanes, and freak weather increased dramatically. Animals that had evolved for hundreds of years to live hidden in human cities came out to compete openly for resources; other animals invaded from what was left of the wilds- insects ran rampant and died out by the mega-swarm in turn. Life expectancy on Earth dropped to a global average of 45 years old. Finally, after long deliberation and even longer preparation, almost all of the people from nearly every nation on earth were shuttled up to a monstrous lunar colonial facility officially named Quorum, but which soon became known as Quarantine.
Moving the estimated half billion people from the Old World to the Moon in a short amount of time was an ambitious undertaking, requiring nearly eight years of intense industrial preparation and an immense amount of resources, in the first large joint project of the Alliance and the Coalition. Not only would established colonies on the Moon have to absorb the needy, untrained, 'back-world' masses with all their strange old world habits at a ratio of nearly one to one, but there was the very real possibility that the process would provide various Shifted, Upgraded, Micro, and Nano Entities the opportunity to infiltrate or 'infect' the Moon. It was these issues that caused the Lunar Colonies to spend 19 months in debate on the issue. The agency created to head the final approved project was the Planetary Evacuation and Transfer Administration, whose members were nearly all well-meaning bureaucrats and politicians, and who hired engineers, labor, and law enforcement officers almost exclusively from among their various private security firms and military associates. The plan they presented called for the building of a gigantic, bare-bones facility capable of housing 500 million people, while containing and identifying any possible infestation. Once everyone was safely off Earth, so the plan went, the Administration could process the refugees through Immigration in a manageable and orderly fashion, and provide training and a 'period of adjustment' before distributing roughly half of them among the rest of the colonies. As half of the people transferred and population density lowered, the bare-bones facilities they left behind could be made over into the more usual state-of-the-art lunar colony for the remaining residents of Quorum.
There were problems right away. Some of the materials took too long to produce, so construction had to continue and then vital components had to be worked back in. The process took longer than anticipated, and more funds had to be raised. There was a strike, there was a violent anti-earther demonstration that halted work on the site for nearly a month, one of the Transfer Administration members was convicted of embezzling project funds, the original construction company was acquired and dissolved as part of a stock related hostile takeover, and four smaller companies had to be hired to replace it. All this before the refugees even arrived, at which point the real problems began.
The Lunar Colonies built a small fleet of carrier ships to ferry everyone up to the moon, and estimated it would take one year of continuous Flights to ferry the planets inhabitants to their new home (400 carrier ships, 25000 carrying capacity each, [10mil. per unified trip] 6 day round trip, one launch per week per ship). The Planetary Evacuation and Transfer Administration selected 100 launch sites and blanketed the Earth with announcements for a year before the evacuation began. For many smaller groups of people, it took up to a year or more for word to reach them, and some outlying bands faced at least 10 months of dangerous travel on foot to reach the nearest launch point. Realities like this in the face of the announcement that shuttles would only operate for one year, led to a panicked rush by anyone not in the larger population areas that housed most of the launch sites. News of this movement reached the Transfer Administration, prompting a hurried study and a revised estimate of total incoming people- up from the 500 million the new lunar facility was designed for, to as many as 800 million. When the revised estimates reached the populated areas of the Earth, the people of the remaining mega-cities flooded the launch sites, and when Transfer Admin. Senior Director Stanley Bishop announced a 600 million person limit to the evacuation, riots and a black market for Lunar Transfer tickets were the result.
In addition to this, Transfer Admin. Regulations prohibited any Shifted or Upgraded beings from transfer, and enforced severe restrictions on personal belongings. A significant number of Upgraded people, as well as the the Shifted and their decedents, had been assimilated by (or even founded) various clans and cultures, becoming friends, lovers, leaders and children of 'acceptable' people seeking transfer, causing confrontations and delays. Of course, a number of these extra-sapiens snuck through undetected; some of these were found by Admin. up in Quorum and security measures tightened. Tension grew between the incoming old world population and the lunar colonies. Shuttle turn-around time was lengthened due to security and maintenance problems, and excessive personnel processing issues. By the time the Evacuation had been in practice for 8 months, it was clear it would not meet deadlines by as much as an additional year.