Hollis-5

If I were you
If I were beautiful
Maybe the world
Might seem more meaningful
I grow old! I grow old!
As the winter comes on and the sky grows cold
But you stay as young as the rays of the sun
On the sparkling machinery you call your destiny
- Momus, "The Sadness Of Things"

Introduction Life on Hollis-5 Lay of the Land Technology Behind the Curtain

Holis-5 used to be a world of sunshine and laughter, but no one believes that anymore. These days the skies are a continual charcoal gray from the factories pumping out toxic gasses and the steady fall of acid rain digging into reinforced concrete and searing bared flesh like the tears of a hateful god. Dreams and defeated hopes mingle with the blood and sweat pouring through unkempt gutters as the living dead stagger to their homes or look up at the stars, not knowing that they're the lights of corporate towers far above them and forever beyond their reach. The governments are scattered bodies of power mostly walled inside enclaves guarded with deadly weapons that the various corporations and religions would kill to have access to. Between these three warring factions the rest of the world like the people of the world, the homeless and the unhomed, the disenfranchised and the desperate. There are no heroes here, just villains that have not been recognized, no saints and varying stains of sinners. To earn money, to somehow survive a world of cut-throat politics where business is literally war, the people sell the only commodity they own, their bodies, because souls are worth nothing and were sold along time ago along with hope and faith. They rebuild themselves with metal and genetics into things barely human, some of which aren't even considered human anymore, and pay for it by taking jobs and assignments no sane person would, by walking the knife edge between disaster and despair, balanced on a thin razor wire between profits and loans. It's not a pretty world, and no one ever said it was nice, but it's the only one they know. And the only god they have is money, and street cred, and luck whose more fickle than a whore and often leaves you with venereal diseases that catch you and kill you at the exact moment you need the bitch the most. Life On Hollis-5 The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich, as well as the poor, to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. - Anatole France It’s the only thing that matters, the screen, the words, the voices. Watching, moving, watching until the eyes ache and the world is a dull blur, and toothpicks can’t prop open the eyes and the body falls into a sudden oblivion as caffeine and drugs fail and they sleep like the dead. Most of them waken, jittery at lost money, and begin again. Power. Everyday she gets up and goes to work. She crunches numbers. A loss here, a balance there, a note here. She long ago forgot that people would be affected. Everything she sees is a thin, a commodity, something for the accounts. She types quickly, dictates even faster in shorthand, does her job. Sometimes she remembers, calculates the amount of flesh she may have caused to be removed from the system because of her findings that day, that week. She smiles. Power. The masses throng around him, chanting his name even as he scrapes the blood off of his knife and smiles into the camera his assistant is holding. He’s ugly, but that doesn’t matter. He killed two men today with his bare hands, and it hurt, but she’s holding up 3 fingers. He went up three points. A few more and he’d be able to guy a new contract, get his own show, get his own fans, become famous. Known. And all it took was buying his gun, and using it. And using it some more. Mac had died, but he didn’t care. It got ratings. He nodded to Marie as she lowered the camera and wondered how many ratings he would get for saving her from some thugs. She might even have sex with him. He stared at the TV and smiled, the kind of disturbing smile of someone who had never smiled but read about it and practised the motions. Power. They didn’t have faces, or names. Numbers, most of them. Men in suits. Standing, talking, handing over paper, or guns. They made the deals, greased the right hands. Executed things, made sure things worked the way they were told. Sometimes they wrote memos, but destroyed them later and left nothing behind. Power. They run the world. The corps, the boards of directors, the presidents, the emperors. Below them lies their empires balanced against each other in a quiet, deadly game played by ratings and assassinations, by board meetings and alliances. Theirs is the highest places, and theirs the farthest fall. Power. The corps aren’t everywhere. Ruins, areas they have yet to develop, abandoned warehouses stripped bear or bearing the dark burns of weapons that scoured them clean. They live here, the poor, the lost, the disenfranchised, the broken. It is these people living in the dark places who end up becoming cyborged, who take the strange drugs and sign up for the experiments few survive that are the backbone of the world. They are the ones hired to do what must be done, built and bred for such doings and discarded or killed at the whim of the conglomerates, pawns who will never be permitted to be anything else but sometimes the masters forget that some pawns can move two squares. The Lay of the Land "One disturbing trend is an inverse relationship between wealth (social success) and number of children. Sucessful families having 1.2 children (below the replacement level; their genes are effectively selected against). Poverty-level families having 3.6 children (geneticaly sucessful). We are effectively selecting against being successful." - unknown How did we get here? Look around you, friend. There is stuff in the air that kills us slowly but surely, governments who give us what we want and take everything else, giving security and taking freedom. The religions make people happy, with their close-knit communities, their devotion to each other. Suffocatingly happy. The Corps, they just sell us things and somehow convince us that we wanted the smog in the sky, the rain that digs holes into the ground. They give us lies, and we accepted them and even think they’re truth. How did we get here? No one knows. What was the world like five hundred years ago? No one can tell you. Someone made a clean slate, just wiped out everything and began all over again and this was the result. You like? I don’t. I doubt you really do to, if you take the time to think about it. Go ahead. Open your mind for a moment, and wonder along with me... We’re raping the future. Think about it. How long can we go on bleeding the world dry before it has nothing left? How long can the factory worlds support us? We have no past. To remember implies that things can be forgotten. What does it say about a people that chose to forget everything? I don’t have answers, the one ones we’re given are the barrel of a gun to the head in a dark alley or by killers in dark clothing polite enough to knock before they begin to shoot. What’s the truth, and where is it to be found? Maybe they know. The owners, the moguls, the CEOs in their towers or in artificial preserves under the surface, or on the moons. (You know that there was just one moon, once? Someone built the other one. Or so I’ve been told.) But we never will. Knowledge is power, and they won’t give up any unless we shake down their ivory towers - and we can’t. Shake the world too much and things’ll tip, all the truths become undone and the foul spew that is the truth of how we got here will come out and drown us all. Forget you even read this. The truth can’t help us, nothing can. We’re not part of the governments, or the corps, but the greasy clouds of the factories touch us all, the empty places where their should be stories, or legends about things. They took everything from us, but we can get something. Belonging, acceptance. Sell your body, because we all sold our souls a long time ago. - The Herald, underground publication, Vol. 1, Issue 3. The world of Hollis-5 is many things. It all depends, really, on what side of the fence you’re on. The Owners (Bosses), those who run the governments, and corps, and religions. To them it’s paradise in their towers above the smog, their secret fastnesses underneath the sewers where even rats fear to go. They get everything they want. Of course, it only lasts as long as they do as long as they avoid assassins within and without their ranks, keep their ratings high on the Vids, keep themselves known, and feared, and respected. It’s damn hard, but it can be done, and maybe the life of perfection is worth the terribly long fall at the end. The Employees (Wage Slaves) get whatever they are given. Peace. Safety. Freedom from the anarchy outside the walls. They work, and get paid, and it all goes towards paying for the upkeep of their home, and the compound, and their safety from the world. Anyone can strive to be one, it’s not that hard. You just need to want to be safe, and give up everything else. The drones (Vidiots) are the people who live outside, not employees, not workers. Unemployed, unemployable, wastes of flesh. They watch the Vids. They get paid for watching vids, staring at screens until even toothpicks can’t prop open their eyes and the rush of caffeine and drugs in their system finally crashes and they fall into a sleep - or coma - and waken, desperate and jittery, buying more, and more food, and realizing it cost them all the profits yesterday so they watch some more, desperate to earn some money, and do it again. And again. And lastly there is trash. The people who can’t afford Vids, who don’t want to. The kind that corps don’t need or those too burned out to care. The fighting at the lowest rungs is dark, and ugly. They have their freedom, but nothing else. Everything else is bought, and so they cyborg themselves, and alter themselves, and sell their services to the highest corp and government and religion in order to pay off debts, get their relatives out of enslavement, and maybe even make a change in the world. The do what has to be done, what the corps can’t put on their balance sheets. Shadow servants, night walkers, runners, thieves, scouts. Lots of names, but they all get paid in hard cred and sell their lives as dearly as possible, if only to make their masters wary. Caveat Emptor. Technology Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human being. And we can do most anything to rats. This is a hard thing to think about, but it's the truth. It won't go away because we cover our eyes. This is cyberpunk. - Bruce Sterling Picture the modern world, a few years down the road. Turn it into a high-tech version of Mexico City. Add cyborgs, genetic engineering gone mad and no accountability for governments or businesses. Then imagine it got scary. For the most part, technology is not insanely advanced over what we have now, mostly because that kind of tech is only in the hands of the elite rulers. Sure, the experimental stuff can be found with the right cred, but their rate of failure is about as high as the cost. And most of it breaks down, often just when you need it the most. So there are swords with monofilament edges, and knives coated in poisons, and clubs for the more practical minded, and big guns because bigger is better, and definitely more intimidating. Unless one has a lot of cred, most body armour is bulky and slow, so most prefer to invest in little armour and a lot of guns, reasoning that it’s far easier to evade an attack if you’ve blown the other bastards head off first. There is no substitute for ruthless practicality. Behind The Curtain Nothing is sudden. Not an explosion -- planned, timed, wired carefully -- not the burnt door. Just as the earth invisibly prepares its cataclysms, so history is the gradual instant. - Anne Michaels, "Fugitive Pieces" How did Hollis-5 get to be a hell on earth? Some might know, but they’re corporations, and they aren’t talking. AI and VR do exist, but they are owned by the governments who remain, the ones who held out against corps and tend to have a wealth of sophisticated technology lying around. So unlike other Cyberpunk there are very few hackers and the like unless the person is in the employ of a corporation and so got to learn how to hack in the first place since computers and the like don’t exist outside of the enclaves of corps, governments, and religions. The Vids also control a lot. They’re the backbone of the economy in a literal sense - stocks might rise and fall, companies plummet into oblivion, but the drones still watch it on TV. The result of this is that news crews can make a fortune by finding - or inventing - good news, and corporations like to sponsor psychopaths to go out hunting for weird inventions or experiments gone wrong, or even to damage another corp. All on Vid, all watched, all rated. Corpse (Corporate Security) and the like don’t really get on Vids and become famous, unless they’re really good. Some of them even leave for the trash and gutters since there one can become rich, and famous, if the polls hold up, if other networks don’t kill them. If. If. If. But the cred is there, for those willing to dare the limelight. Lights. Camera. Blood bath.

Index		Exegesis		Microcosm
Macrocosm		Game Stuff		Trump