Setting

Good morning! It is 8:00 AM. You are in your clone tube, suspended in a cold blue slime, with the visions of being shot to death still fresh in your head. Between the grasp the pills have on you, and the disorienting cloning process, your brains are absolutely fried. The few childhood memories of the days before the Collapse are just fragments of a pleasant dream. The last time life seemed worth living was about seventy years ago. The air raid sirens debuted a new tune that day, their falsetto doomsday song in perfect harmony with your confused crying, as your father refused the neighbors entry into the fallout shelter in your backyard. There was a gust of malevolent wind and a loud pop, and the world turned to shit.

Nobody was ever sure of what had happened, other than the obvious - life was over. Since that day, it was as if you had died with the other ninety-six percent of the Earth's population, and been chosen to serve time in a cruel purgatory; a penance for your membership in the society that ended civilization and scarred the earth. You traveled the wastes in a confused trance as the survivors of the atom war crawled back up upon mutated feet, desperate and angry. Wrath begat wrath, and the wars started again, battles for clean water and untainted supplies - you went on to shoot your first gun at 13, kill a man at 14, and finally succumbed to misery and hatred, failing a series of half-assed suicide attempts at 17.

You found yourself in a tough spot one day after a real rager of a crank binge, sprawled on a stretch of highway after getting hit by a band of doped-up raiders. They had stripped you of anything of worth and left you to die, after one of their bullets bore into your left temple and ricocheted around in your skull. You looked to the sky, and though your body felt cold and distant by that point, you began to weep, knowing that glorious death was near, and this time it would be final. Luckily, a group of people in the bureaucratic recruitment outfit divisions of the Weyland-Utani corporation came upon your twisted body and offered you salvation(1) on earth, if you subjected yourself to the cloning process and join them in a new city, the framework for the reincarnation of the pre-Collapse days. They presumed your silent weeping and twisted looks of anguish as agreement to this new arrangement.

Weyland-Utani needed new customers; with all the babies yanked out of weeping mothers turning out to be stillborn, they instituted the mandatory clone vats to ensure mankind would be on earth to keep them in business indefinitely. They arranged for you to join the other happy survivors within Freedom City, where there is a surveillance camera for each person, and three people monitoring each camera. Life was bearable for a while; you did what the corporations said and you were paid fairly, and you always had the unveiling of the new Spring line of automatic weapons and skimpy thong underwear to look forward to. Decades passed as if hours, the clone vats kept you young, and fast from the clutches of eternal rest.

You quickly became aware of how unpleasant your new situation was. The corporations ran Freedom City with an iron fist, a crime such as petty larceny could get you stuck with six months of hard labor to a half dozen death sentences, to be served at the overzealous police department's earliest convenience. Your neighbors were not friendly; Slagtown and Gangland harbored criminals and miscreants deemed unusable by the Freedom City Wellness Committee, while the technofreaks of Maas Neotek and the insane jihadists of New Clearwater worked on interesting ways to kill you, and each other, every day. Weyland-Utani's Contamination Hazard & Urban Disposal operation had backfired terribly, spawning a race of mutant sewer dwellers in the streets below you, while even worse things lurked deeper in the subways, and beneath them laid a vast tunnel network, the nest of a race of creatures belched up from the worst dregs of Hell. This is the world you have inherited; you are doomed to haunt it forever.

You are a consumer first and a soldier second, gifted with the opportunity to die every death imaginable. The glory of capitalism keeps you immortal and the genius of neo-science keeps you strong. Your daydreams are cut short as the bottom of the clone vat opens up beneath you, sending you into the world again, cold and naked. Another day, another dollar.