Jump 470: Cyberpunk

Jump 470: Cyberpunk
>Ten of Swords (Ruin), reversed: The darkness before the dawn. An end to suffering, leading to spiritual transformation. A crushing and seemingly total defeat that hides within it the seeds of final victory.
>Location: The City
>Identity: Megacorp
>Drawbacks: (+900) Dancing In The Fire, Pawns And Princes, The Last Good Man, World On The Brink, Reason Is Dead
The worst part about these drawbacks is they tell me exactly what world it is that I'm landing in. Don't worry, though, it's worse than you think.

>The Right Tools (1800)
>Neuromancer (1600)
>Man And Machine (1200)
>Hand At The Wheel (Free, Megacorp)
>The Will To Power (Free, Megacorp)
>Worth The Cost (1100, Megacorp)
>Tread of Giants (900, Megacorp)
>Culture Wars (600, Megacorp)
>The Chain of Industry (300, Megacorp)
>Dressed For Success (Free, Megacorp)
>The Arcology (0, Megacorp)

This world nuked itself nearly into oblivion in 2005, but things went off the rails long before that. It would have to be, considering a large number of nukes were salted with cobalt or zinc, depending which side of the iron curtain the bombs were made on. Larger right-wing movements in the eighties. Crop failures in the late nineties led to riots. The US annexed Mexico to distract everyone from that, while human cloning became a reality thanks to Eli Lilly Pharmaceuticals in 1998. Thanks to the loopholes that opened up, biomedical advances led to augmentation and direct neural interfaces, while major corporations consolidated and militarized, culminating in actively fighting national governments... and winning. Too much investment in MAD, not enough investment in man.

All of this was all before terrorists built a thermonuclear bomb on the grounds of the defunct UN building and detonated it. This triggered Cerberus and Perimitr, the US and Russian Dead Hand style failsafes causing the utter annihilation of western civilization as we know it - augmented by everyone else with atomic bombs lobbing them about as well. India and Pakistan as a particular example - the Twelve Minute War saw multiple waves of missiles launched, and no one left to argue over who shot first. By the end of the day, more than two billion lives were extinguished by nuclear fire... and by the time nuclear winter stopped blotting out the sun so that healthy crops could grow in what little arable land was left, the world's population had dropped another two billion thanks to the war, famine, and plagues brought on by the horrific living conditions forced by all of this.

Not to mention the mutations that grew in the wild. Now, anything that isn't one of the walled cities is largely wasteland, and most national governments are a distant memory, a corporate pseudo-feudalism now the norm under the banner of the corporate-sponsored World Security Council. Thanks to the public having clones, at first to preserve the population and life insurance and later maintained as a twisted sort of social control, the value of life is roughly the equivalent of a week's paycheck. That is, if you don't mind your clone being sterile. Reproduction in the old fashioned sense has all but disappeared, the few that try often have to deal with mutated offspring if they're viable at all, and with the insanity that surrounds their lives it's been accepted as normal. Of course... the issue with clones is that they do not stop the aging process, and with a successful live birth rate that is half the death rate... well. It's fortunate that humanity has begun embracing the transhuman form, because if they didn't, they'd surely have gone extinct.

This isn't to say that technology didn't come about to change things, but... so often it seemed to go as out of control as society did. Tokyo was destroyed by megaton explosions, and once rebuilt, was destroyed by an earthquake; attempts to use nanotechnology went amok and a gray goo scenario was narrowly avoided. Multiple artificial intelligences were created, and almost always went out of control, whether because of too-narrow focus or too-broad, ending up disregarding anything but themselves. Licensed AIs exist, managed by the Turing commission, blocked from outside communication and set to explode with C-4 at the slightest sign that anything is wrong. The only real way around this bottleneck was found by one company in particular that uses extracted brains as a gestalt intelligence, but it too is unstable at best.

Fifty years after the end of the world, something new is added. That something is me.

When I stretch out my senses to look upon the world I feel despair, because this is a humanity who is circling the drain, their population slowly but steadily dropping, their remnants of civilization in a death spiral, some elements STILL setting off loose or makeshift nukes occasionally, and-

(Wait, what the hell? There's a city that keeps electing a Canadian goose named "Murray" as its mayor? Okay, that's kind of hilarious - at least they're in on the joke.)

The problem I'm running into is this: the world is without hope. How can someone even address this? When humanity as a species has doomed itself and killed its world, greed gone berserk, life having little meaning... how do you bring it back from the brink? It breaks my heart to say that practically no one here wants to be saved. So how do you save a species that wants to die?

(Abruptly, I understand why so many AIs have gone insane.)

Over the course of the years to come, there was much I tried. I pulled out all the stops, really. Uplifting some humans to be digital. Trying to terraform the world back to how it had been. Boosting the technological baseline. Every time I did something, it would begin to spiral completely out of control somehow. Sometimes one way, sometimes another. Precognition dictated that it would inevitably lead to humanity's extinction, though the time frame varied, directly as a result of my actions. All I could do was terminate the experiments before they got out into the wider world, before I'd try to make a difference in a different way. Every time, a dozen times, I am stymied no matter what my actions are. Try to inspire people? They get stomped down. Try to control things in the shadows? Schemes are dragged into the light, caused to fail.

Something in this world had gone horribly wrong - postcognition said it had something to do with the cold war going off the rails after both sides salvaged alien technology - and using my resources to stage a complete military coup of the world would not work either, instead damning the world to self-destructive insanity. So I instead sent out LMDs, infiltrating other megacorps, getting the inside track wherever possible to influence policies. Slow but steady wins the race, and starting to push things back toward a more sane baseline seemed the way to go.

Every time I do something, however, something else pushes back twice as hard. Take over a megacorp? Another rises from nowhere. Or my corporation's stock crashes. Or it comes under attack - including one attempt by anarchists to set off a dirty bomb right outside the company headquarters. And so it goes, endlessly, no matter what I do as long as I'm playing by the rules that the locals have.

So I abandoned the facade entirely and let the company run on autopilot. Anything I did with controlling the effects in mind backfired, so instead... I decided it was best to have no control at all. In a stretch of lonely California wasteland, I dug out a great divot, built a compound, and elected to play with the local laws of physics. After all, when you've done your best and found that the game is rigged so that one can't so much as break even... it's time to cheat. A group of locals stormed the little compound, thinking it was some great conspiracy, and found that they were more right than they knew. They were the first to be... altered.

2060 saw a change go out in the world. An awakening, one might say. More of it was present closer to my little experiment, for instance San Diego, but worldwide, people began to see something new. Sure, there were a variety of mutants and gene-modded experiments already existing, but... when the gifted began awakening, there was no common denominator. Call them Changed, Talents, Psykers, whatever you wish - their gifts varied. Telekinesis, unaided flight, suddenly increased strength or durability, hyperintelligence, biokinesis... the list goes on. It wasn't anything that could be stopped - it didn't benefit me in the least, after all - but the downtrodden, the powerless, they were a different story.

Many of them never went public with what they could do. Many used it for their own ends. But a few... they stepped forward. They did what no one else would - what no one else could.

I took a world devoid of hope and gave them heroes. And by the time I'd left, the world had started becoming a place worth living in after all.