New Reval

Here are the basic facts you know about New Reval, the city you live in:

- It was founded in the mid-21st century by a multinational coalition made up of American, Chinese, and Indian tech companies and investors
- It was one of the world's first "neo-cities", designed from the ground up to facilitate a lifestyle based around the cutting edge tech of the time - autonomous vehicles, networked city systems, augmented reality
- It is physically located near Tallinn, Estonia, a location chosen because of the favorable contract the multinational investors were able to broker with the host nation

Most of this is easy enough to confirm or at least confidently believe in with your own eyes. The oldest buildings of the city are blocky, almost brutalist designs, optimized for use with the primitive AR technology of decades past. Many of its innovations in urban design are now commonplace but had their birthplace here: a dedicated underground layer of the city for transit, a ground level and elevated paths designed for walkability, transparent retractable roofs for many public spaces, a data-driven approach to zoning and pathing in the city.

What makes everything just a little hard not to be skeptical of is what happened just a year ago...maybe two now...three? ten? more?

It has long been the scientific consensus that information, and not matter or energy, is the basic "stuff" of the universe, its foundational building blocks. The universe is fundamentally a computer, and the theory that we all live in a simulation has gained increasing traction in the decades since New Reval was founded, to the point that you would be laughed at for feeling existential dread at the possibility - people have come to terms with it and treat it as a curiosity more than anything.

So if the universe and the laws of physics governing it are just one big computer, what would happen if we were to...plug in to it? Literally. Well, that's exactly what a group of physicists in New Reval did, interfacing the Mesh that evolved from the internet into the very structure of the universe itself.

The good news: We didn't all die due to the technocratic hubris of man or anything like that.

The bad news: What they did -worked-.

The digital and the physical are now literally one and the same. Not everywhere, and not always to the same extent, but there was once a time when you could surgically extract your neurochip and the colors and lights of the city would dim and disappear. Digital clothes would fade, turning vibrant fashion shows into monochrome crowds. Simulated trees would snap out of existence, revealing the mechanical air fresheners and climate control devices lining the city in the absence of real greenery.

Those times are gone now. Though much of the Mesh, now called the Veil, might fade, something of the digital world will always leak through.

There was also once a time when one could be sure every object or phenomena in the digital world was created by someone, whether it was a hand-crafted work of digital art or the work of a complex algorithm or AI. There was a time when the digital world only acted or changed because someone made it. There was a time where you could dig through records on the Old Internet and know from carefully curated archives what once existed. You could know through network records that nothing there had been altered or doctored.

Those times are gone too.
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Character Creation Prompt: You don't formally exist in records of the residents of New Reval. You have memories, sure, and a place to live and a history, but not all of it lines up and some of the important bits are outright missing. This isn't -entirely- uncommon. There are many reasons why someone's records might disappear nowadays, either purposefully or by accident. And there are many known rumors as well of people who were brought into existence by the Veil itself, from nothingness...

Assorted notes to think about:

- Generations in the setting have grown up with mixed reality, and more specifically, personally tailored mixed reality. Just like any two people now see vastly different suggested videos when they visit the Youtube homepage, people in this world have grown up being used to seeing different billboards, different AR decorations, etc from those around them. Reality is more subjective than ever, which is not to say that everyone is decrying science and objectivity entirely, but total immersion into context-targeted environments since childhood would have quite an effect on people.

- Privacy means something entirely different in a world where people are connected to a digital environment 24/7, nevermind a digital environment that might react to them seemingly of its own volition, without human input. Going offline is synonmous with privacy which is, in some circles, going offline is synonymous with illicit activity and crime...

Final Question: What is real and how is it possible to view something objectively
or to know what is true?