My name is Cynn. I live in a computer. Literally!

In 2067, everything is computerized. Your home. Your car. Your communication. Your clothing. Even your body…

Here at The Scream Sheet we have a number of different scenarios for the future. The one I’m going to describe here is the one with the highest probability point score.

Let’s start from the beginning.

Most predictions regarding tech as a central point in future socity.

The main reason why everything is computerized is control. We will get back to that.

The cities are gigantic. I live in Night City. Once called Los Angeles. It is the largest city in the world. There are 1.500 miles from one end of the city to the other. We are slightly less than a billion citizens in Night City. The city takes up most of California, entire Nevada and Utah, most of Arizona, half New Mexico, and a small part of Colorado.

The cities have multiple floors. Skyscrapers are from half a mile to one mile high and 10 thousand people live in one building in their own ‘box’. The road net is multilayered, but this belongs to a previous time. Not many use the roads anymore. They built these layers on top of each other to make it easy to drive from one place to another, but they failed utterly. Traffic became very complicated and roads could be closed for days because of traffic jams and accidents. Besides, ten years ago we solved the gravity riddle and vehicles are flying now. Only the poor people from the lower layers of society still use the roads. All vehicles are powered by electricity in some form. There still is oil in the ground but other technologies have overtaken because they are a lot less expensive.

We do not have much nature left. They have turned most of the forests and deserts into big cities. The oceans are polluted to a degree it is life-threatening to take a swim. It is still possible, though, to find secluded lakes in the countryside for fishing or taking a swim.

We have hospitals. But it’s only for the rich. The rest of us consult a local hardware/body specialist. They are body/tech mechanics.

 

Elon and the Bio-chip.

In 2029, Elon Musk had his Bio-Chip ready. It is an implant that is the perfect interface between a computer and the nervous system. And it is 2-way communication. Government can reconstruct data from our brains and put them on a monitor as images and sounds. Even after you are dead. They can read emotions connected to your memories. They know if you are an enemy of the system. Good thing is they can monitor your body for illnesses. Bad thing is they can upload stuff to your brain if you are not careful.

It sounds like a joke but you can get infected by cyber hackers and bad software. The worst kind will reprogram your neuron paths over time and change your personality and your memories. They can change you into anything they want.

The bio-chip can create new neuron paths, which means you can learn things faster, but they can also alter your personality. They can make you an efficient worker or a suicide pilot on-demand. So we have to be careful!

 

 

Control.

Control eradicated democracy back in 2020-2030. The big companies controlled politicians almost 100% around 2020. They funded most of them. But what wasn’t obvious until much later was that governments were owned by big corps. So, in reality, the 5 largest companies in the world controlled almost every government in the world at the end of 2039.

And during 2040-45 they swallowed each other, and it ended up in one big corp running and owning the entire world.

This was a wet dream for many politicians in 1980-90 coming true. One World Government. George Herbert Walker Bush would experience a week of full-body orgasm if he was alive.

Ideally seen it could be nice. One World Government means we do not have to go to war with other countries in a greedy hunt for minerals, oil, and other natural resources. Government already owns it. They own everything.

Instead, the ‘enemy’ is the people. It seems that governments, no matter what, still need an enemy. So now it is the people. Or at least some of us. In particular, we who don’t like the thought of a government owning and controlling everything.

We are The Resistance. We fight the government and we are getting increasingly better at it.

Military and law enforcement are not ordinary people anymore. It’s robots. But then again… That’s not that different from most people. They are also robots. Programmed robots.

 

The Netrunners.

We live longer because of health monitoring. We are stronger because of implants. And smarter.

The Resistance got the best hackers because they are free. A hacker – also called a netrunner, who is forced labour, is not creative. To be an efficient netrunner you have to be free from control. Anarchistic in a way. And being passionate about the freedom of others is an extra plus.

We are hackers. We can monitor our own bodies while feeding the government computers with garbage. Usually, they know the exact location of every human being on earth through the bio-chip. As of now, they believe I am in Africa. But I am in Night City. We have hardware doctors who can remove the biochip, but we need it for fighting the government. Without it we are nothing.

We connect directly to the government net and our own net. We use it to communicate. It’s like an internal telephone. You can dial anyone. In combat, it is vital to communicate fast with everybody around you and with our HQ.

Jade

This is Jade. She has a brain implant. Or Brain Extender. This is the latest model, MEMO TTX HDR250. The fastest Portable Quantum Neuron Processor available and doubles your storage capacity. You can think in parallel with this. It will offload your brain and present you with the result of whatever task you gave it. Jade can reliably extract data from brains and is very skilled in analyzing the data track (images and audio from your past). Her IQ with this implant is around 800.

 

Intelligent Gun

This is an old-fashioned gun. It is mine. And the hands are mine too. At launch, it was branded with the name Intelligun. It communicates via censors in your hands. Can aim and fire control if you have a scanner implant installed. Ammo is powerful enough to take down a fully armoured military robot with a single shot. Government has far more sophisticated equipment, but old-fashioned guns still work and they are easy to get.

 

The Resistance.

The Resistance has always been here. But after 2050, we became more dominant. And we are still growing.

Jade and I met on a job both of us where we were very stressed out so we weren’t exactly best friends after that. But more jobs came through and eventually she asked me to visit her by a small lake outside the city. She surprised me with diving equipment and we had some wonderful dives that weekend and we ended up in a relationship.

We are only 500 people in the resistance and 10 of them are the best modders in the world, and it won’t last long before we take Big Corpo Government down. The brilliant thing about Govenment is that they are 100% dependant on their Quantum Cloud, also called One Mind. This is their biggest force and their biggest weakness. We only need a few skilled hackers to take down One Mind and then they are helpless. All their super soldiers and fighting machines are run by One Mind AI. Once that AI is dead government falls.

 

The biggest problem is finding a replacement for government that can continue some kind of society in freedom.

Besides The Resistance, we have The Modders. Often called Bit Dancers. They can disable the bio-chip, re-program it, or make it feed the government computers with ‘nice’ garbage data.

Jade and Cynn

Jade and me

 

Power equals corruption.

I don’t know why this is. But we see it all the time. When people get power, they want more! They get greedy and are willing to do anything to get even more. It is a spiral that never ends.

That’s why huge corpos and one-world government doesn’t work! Ultimate power equals ultimate corruption.

People say it is ok to get rich and powerful and to a certain extent, I agree. But at some invisible point, things change. Slowly, corruption takes over. This is the real fundamental illness of the world and has been for a very long time.