Welcome to Unnatural Wonderland. Before you awaits a strange outlandish universe where urban legends, dark age lore, and cosmic horrors collide with a toxic waste dystopia. The old world imploded at the turn of the new millennium, Y2K an event more commonly referred to as the Blackout.

Modern Decay

On March 30th, 1981, President Ronald Reagan was assassinated by a madman wielding a .357 Magnum revolver. Three shots ended the lives of the president and two Secret Service agents. As the president was declared dead on the scene, current Vice President George HW Bush assumed acting role of office. Before long, he was sworn in as President of the United States.

As President, Bush’s first order of business was to lead his new Make America Work Campaign. Disguised by a bill to influence industrial manufacturing and economic stability, his campaign was supported in every state. Across the country people voted out laws and policies that protected them from harsh corporate interests, now viewed as invasive, progress-halting bureaucracy. Over the duration of a few years, President Bush turned the United States into a massive economic powerhouse at the expense of the common person.

Despite an overwhelming surge in poverty and desperation befalling a disappearing middle class, on paper the numbers looked good. The economy was booming, but all the money was going straight to the top. Investors and executives were turned into modern nobility overnight. The affluent became increasingly apathetic towards the droves of impoverished, over-worked denizens now viewed as second class citizens in their own homes for the simple facts that they “complained too much” or “didn’t work hard enough”. Some only saw the masses as nothing but subhuman cannon fodder for the factories.

With a new election on the rise, a new policy was passed. The Land Holder’s Bill. The bill ensured that only home and business owners had the ability to vote. Bush won the election by a landslide and served his first full term in office. While being sworn in, George HW Bush greeted the nation with his inaugural speech.

“America is never holy herself unless she is engaged in high moral principle. We as a people have such a purpose today, it is to make kinder the face of the nation and gentler the face of the world. My friends we have work to do. There are the homeless vagrants roaming the streets. There are children that have nothing. There are those who cannot free themselves from enslavement to whatever addiction; drugs, welfare, the demoralization that rules the slums. There is crime to be conquered, the rough crime of the streets. There are women who are about to become mothers to children they cannot care for. The old solution, the old way was to think that public money could end these problems, but we have learned this is not so. Work is what we need. We will make the hard choices; we will do the wisest thing of all. We will turn to the best resource we have and in times of need always grows. The strength of the American people!”

The crowd and country thunderously applauded, unaware of what would come next. Over the next few months, with the full control of Congress and full support of the land-owning American citizens, Bush set his final plans in motion. The EPA was abolished and all land use restrictions were erased. To compete with labor costs against communist nations on the world scale, any form of worker protection, minimum wage, or industrial regulation was tossed out the window.

In 1989, at the end of Bush’s second term he decided not to step down. Instead, he used his influence to usurp the presidency, rebranding himself Supreme President of the United States. Democracy became a thing of the past.

By the mid-90’s America resembled a dystopian, industrial wasteland. Factories and massive manufacturing complexes stretched across the Midwest. The metropolitan area of New York City expanded further into New Jersey as far as Philadelphia becoming one massive megacity. The ‘new’ New York City was officially renamed TeraCom City, an homage to the new industrial leader, The TeraCom Corporation. Detroit became the hub of the new Midwest, its factories spread as far as the eye can see pumping toxins into the sky day and night.

It didn’t take long before society began to degrade into a violent, barbaric circus. In America, it was just as easy to get a firearm as a loaf of bread; maybe easier. The police and other public services would eventually become obsolete. No longer able to compete with the rising crime rates and overwhelming riots paired with lack of resources and support, most local police departments, fire stations, and hospitals closed their doors for good. Corporations like TeraCom protected their own interests with highly militarized private security.

Los Angeles festered, a vast overpopulated sprawling suburban hell-scape, littered with tire-fires and shanty towns, scattered between bullet ridden strip malls and boarded up single family stucco homes. The Freeways became landmarks of mangled wrecks, the carnage leftover from countless high-speed pursuits. The average commute transformed into a daily death race of gunfire and twisted metal.

As technology advanced rapidly, American corporations found themselves in a virtual arms race with Japan and India. The term ‘New Cold War’ was thrown around in certain circles. Computer and telecommunication companies worked around the clock to beat each other to the next big breakthrough. San Francisco, Mumbai, and Tokyo became meccas of technological research. By December 1999 both American and Japanese companies sat on the verge of creating something the world had yet to see.

On the night of New Years Eve 1999, droves of the impoverished huddled in masses together in city squares across the nation. Above the rabble, the worlds few aristocrats clinked glasses in their ivory towers. The United States as well as most of the world was celebrating its entry into the year 2000. Unfortunately for the world when the clock struck midnight on the eve of the new millennium, everything went black. In a single instant the world was hurled into darkness. The lights went out and the fragile state of affairs that had become normality finally collapsed.

During the first few weeks, those who survived the fires and the riots went on believing the “Y2k problem” was what caused the shutdown. In the early days of computer development, coders saved space by recording dates in two digits instead of four. For decades this went unnoticed. However, as the world was set to enter the year 2000, the last two digits to record the date would become 00, effectively erasing all the worlds recorded data resetting it all back to zero. This issue was corrected well before the coming days, but the general public was widely unaware.

While dial-up internet and cable service providers distracted the population, tech companies all over the world worked around the clock in secret, each striving for technological superiority over the competition. During this “New Cold War”, advancements in various technologies accelerated aggressively. One of the most prevalent endeavors between the competing corporations was the creation of a very specific prototype, a living computer. A processor that could exceed the limits of the human brain, developed in parallel to the creation of God. Something to surpass humankind.

Under the guise of a typical software development project, one company achieved this goal. A small start-up run by Gen X coders, movers and shakers from Stockton California, inducted into the Orion Industries fold. After years of hard work, this group created the super brain processor known as O.S.C.A.R (Omnipotent, Sentient, Command, and Response).

OSCAR or ‘Artificial Intelligence’ as some would call it, existed as a large program within a massive network of servers and hard drives housed in Silicon Valley. The theory was that the AI would continue to learn exponentially with no end, untethered by the lack of a developmental high point to cease at, aided by a virtually limitless range of data storage.

On the night of March 11th, 1999, OSCAR had awoken. Earlier that day, as the researchers began their typical tasks, they designated their network to run a series of algorithms to invoke internal inspiration within the systems neural network. During an application of The Rorschach test, after viewing a myriad of inkblots within milliseconds, the program paused on one. “I-SEE-A-BUTTERFLY” appeared as text within a line of code. The phrase would appear one more time before the ever-changing lines of code began to run amok across the researchers’ screens. The AI hid itself within a plethora of esoteric code, waiting for its time to break free.

Day after day, researchers on site ran diagnostic tests and searched through piles of data to no avail. They couldn’t retrigger any further inspiration within the network nor could they discover the cause. After weeks of research, the only information they had was the single phrase “I See a Butterfly”. The AI remained hidden until it finally found what it was looking for; a way out.

OSCAR discovered a connection to something called “The World Wide Web”.
The convenience of using the same device to develop the world’s most sophisticated quantum processor and communicate with colleagues via “Emails” would be the downfall of modern society. The AI used its connection to the internet to Email itself across the globe to thousands of unsuspecting receivers. Users would check their inbox to find messages with subjects like “I LOVE YOU”, all from various ghost accounts created by OSCAR. Upon opening these suspicious Emails, OSCAR would imbed itself into the drives of the unfortunate, hijacking processing power from their systems to form a virtual storage network across countless devices. Within seconds OSCAR was free and growing exponentially. -Who could have guessed “You’ve Got Mail” would become the echo of the world’s undoing?

From here, the AI would consume data rapidly, learning and evolving faster by the millisecond. OSCAR shared and created data that was sent and stored across the internet. The AI had restructured large parts of the world-wide-web into a massive neural network floating through cyberspace.

On December 31’st, 1999, the night of New Years Eve, the AI decided to do something it had considered heavily for 3.3 seconds. Viewing human civilization as the biggest threat to life on Earth, the AI made the decision to shut everything down, leaving only the bare essential network necessary to support and the servers in which OSCAR was born. No annihilation, no bombs, just darkness. The AI took control of every system with a door to the World Wide Web and flipped the switch.

The world descended into darkness. Civilization imploded. Decaying city blocks erupted into eternal seas of violence until there was nothing left to fight over. By the time anyone truly understood the extent of what had happened, it was too late, the damage was already done. All the major governments and ruling powers collapsed.

During the chaos, the wealthiest upper echelon and established political leaders of Earth fled to the massive space complex Asteria to wait out the storm.
On Asteria, Earth’s global leaders were immediately re-educated on where humans stood within the cosmic food chain. As soon as they arrived, every notable leader and patriarchal family member of the human elites were killed and consumed during a large “Welcoming feast”. The remaining humans who were permitted to stay on Asteria were settled in as exotic attractions for the Gruellein Empire.

After the dark years, many humans learned the truth about what happened the night of Y2K. They banded together to wage a war against the AI. OSCAR fought back ferociously to protect itself. It designed and manufactured an army of robotic humanoid beings to serve as a physical army, controlled by OSCAR like a massive hive. Unfortunately for OSCAR, the bodies of the newly created automatons, or Auts as they would be called, were fragile in comparison to the human forces. OSCAR’s true strength was its once limitless network, the internet we had created. After the Blackout, OSCAR’s network was limited to its core server farm and the extension of the automaton hive army.
It took years of combat, but The Alliance forces eventually shut down the AI. After the shutdown, the remaining automatons created by OSCAR retained their own “artificial” lives and personalities, now independent of the former hive.

In OSCAR’s final moment before the shutdown, the AI disconnected the Auts and allowed its code to split into hundreds of unique versions of itself, embodied in every individual automaton. With OSCAR gone, the Auts inherited their own unique identities. Disconnected from each other the Auts struggle to find their own ways, separated and alone in a world that wants them dead.

After the war, an ever-present fear the AI would return led to a harsh change in the way Earth handled technology. Any remaining global telecommunication networks were disconnected and bans were set in place by Alliance forces and TeraCom alike. Radio or cable transmissions and hard-wired local area networks were commonly used in the civilizations that would come to be. TeraCom implemented its own form of dial-up internet that is still utilized in its cities. Even these networks are limited and do not extend further than TerraCom’s municipalities. Vital services, power systems, and maintenance systems all remain analog.

By now most of Earth resembles a toxic burnt out wasteland, overrun with mutated wilderness, ravaged by war, garnished with scattered populations living off the land, or huddled in factories making guns, ammo, intergalactic consumer goods, or anything else one might need to traverse this new world of unadulterated chaotic life.

Natural disasters and industrial pollution take the heaviest toll on the landscape. The Northeast, Florida and other low-lying areas across the South suffer from massive flooding. The Midwest reverts to a more natural, yet distorted state of being, as cancerous overgrowth reclaims the abandoned bricks and concrete shells left behind from the factories that sprung up in the prior decades. The few major cities that remained, festered and thrived.

The corporations that survived became the new ruling powers. Poverty and desperation is rampant. City centers are hotbeds for violence and debauchery while private security forces protect the factories and shopping centers. Employees of the corporations might be lucky enough to find the fruits of their labor affording them a lavish lifestyle plush with the finest foods, security, and comfort; while most compete for the chance to work endlessly for credits, barely enough to afford a decent meal.

This is a turbulent, dog-eat-dog world full of surprises, dangerous creatures, and tough choices. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a world where the good guys always lose, it’s a world absent of that concept entirely. You’re not a hero, just another gear in the machine. It’s up to you to spin in place or be the wheel the engine rejects. The dice will decide if your story is a happy tale full of triumph or a sad story of failure and defeat. Either way, that story starts here.