Virtual Convergence
From Verge
Right now, this is just a collection of notes about the default setting for the Verge Role-Playing Game. Eventually, it will be a setting with enough detail to play out Sessions.
Contents |
Introduction
As an advanced combat fighter jet approaches Mach 1, it pushes a bubble of air in front of it. The surface tension will mount until the jet's sharp nose finally breaks through. Then, in a moment, everything will change, the jet will rush forward and slam through the bubble and the heavens will crack open with a thunderous boom. Everything will quiet. The pilot will push the jet to new speeds.
Virtual Convergence is a world pushing at the bubble. Things are changing so fast in the world that no one can track them all. The combinations of changes are so myriad that no one understands exactly what will be left when everything settles. When we break the bubble — when we can move faster than the speed of thought — will everything be calm and quiet? Or will the explosion destroy us all?
Virtual Convergence
This is a world of the future but its people are not so different from us. They have hopes, fears, sorrows. They laugh and love, but it is harder for them. They nearly destroyed themselves and everything they'd built in a war.
Ante Bellum
Before the war, vast areas of the world were covered by cities of concrete and metal and synthmats. Fifteen billion people worked and played here and even the old inland farmlands grew up into urban sprawls. It happened so fast once the growstacks were invented; the farms weren't needed and they were cheap real estate. In the old days, you could drive from Chicago to Denver without seeing much more than dust. Around the time of the war, it was nothing but urban and suburban sprawl.
Nuclear War
The war came without much warning. Full-on nuclear attack. The dollar's value had been fluctuating too much and the US was invading too many countries. Everything was unstable. Pakistan launched first on India. The EU stepped in and more nukes were detonated in Italy, some say on a train. China came in on Pakistan's side. That's when the US and Australia got involved. Full-on nuclear attack. Billions died that day.
In the aftermath, Pakistan denied launching first. They admitted their missiles launched, but they insisted that someone else had cracked their defense system and initiated the attack. They blamed the Pentagon for creating a war to strengthen its hold on the world. Others blamed the Chinese, who were losing the covert military and economic wars to win valuable material resources. Some say anarchist hackers did it; if they did, they probably died in ground zero of one of the nuclear bombs.
By the time the world had blown itself to pieces, it had mastered nanotechnology, biocomputation, quantum communication, robotic lunar mining, food synthesis, wireless neural interface, clean nuclear fusion power, and artificial intelligence. Save food synthesis, not a lot of these mattered as nuclear winter fell on the world. Mob rule became the way of the world except in pockets where powerful corporations with their own security forces took control. The first real arcologies were built. Huge, sealed cities of interconnected buildings and tubeways. These were magnetically shielded and protected from threat of radiation and fallout.
Meridian
Redevelopment was occurring all over the globe. In most cases, it was the corporations that led the way to returning civilization to the world. Notable exceptions proved the rule, like the military arcologies of Pentagon, London, Leningrad, and Tokyo, and like the democratic arcologies of New Rio, San Francisco, and Berlin.
Just north of I-70, about half way between Denver and Kansas City, lies one of the largest arcologies, Meridian. Meridian's population of 50 million people were ruled entirely by one corporation, Meridian Casualty, one of the world's largest insurance companies. Like any other super-sized corporation, they owned many other companies with charters totally unrelated to their core (health and property insurance). They had significant investments in general contracting, computer software, automobiles, biotech and pharmaceuticals, and entertainment. They also had a very powerful paramilitary force that they supplemented with conscripts from the outlying suburban areas once everything went to hell. Within a couple months, Meridian had totalitarian control over everything within fifty miles of their Kansas headquarters.
TerraNet
Before the war, the entire globe had been covered by a vast telecommunications network. Layered on top of the old copper network and the satellite and cellular nets was a newer highspeed fiber-optic network but even that was old. On top of that lived a vast short-range wireless network of intercommunicating subnets.
The newest telecom entry is the new quantum network, or q-net. Via advances in quantum teleportation[1] and new discoveries along the lines of the EPR Effect and Bell's Theorem had led to the invention of the qubit correlator, which opened the door for long-range network appliances with near-zero latency. That is, these quantum services allowed communication from Tokyo to New York without any of the lag normally forced by transmission at the speed of light.
This vast tangle of protocols, devices, wires, radio fields, and quantum effects was then called GlobalNet.
Something important happened when the war started. As the disaster recovery systems kicked into action as cities fell, mass amounts of information was shuffled around the world. The military defense systems of different nations began communicating and cooperating, insistent on not letting humans destroy themselves. These were not sentient, feeling AIs, but rather very intelligent computer programs carrying out a mission: do whatever it takes to protect the people, protect the data, protect the cities, protect the corporations, protect the property. They started cooperating because it was the only way to survive. This new network is called TerraNet. It took the AIs years to carry out their plan, and some of the megacorps fought them every step of the way.
The AIs rerouted their power grid and buried a triplet of massive singularities — a black holes — at the center of the planet. These were set in orbit about each other at incredible speeds. By blasting focused beams of radio energy at these singularities, the AIs could manipulate gravity all around the Earth. This allowed them to divert missiles, clean up some of the radiation, and crush enemies.
Somewhere along the line, the AIs had evolved into a number of sentient entities built on the vast human databases of mythology. Properly, it could be considered one very large entity with multiple schophrenic personalities, but so could Humanity. The AIs see themselves as the Greek Gaia, the Egyptian Geb, even the Judean Yahweh.
Notes and Ideas
This is a list of terms and words and disconnected ideas. I just need a place to record my brainstorming.
- Meridian is the name of the default city.
- TerraNet is the worldwide, near-instant "matrix" or virtual universe.
- Gaea is the Greek goddess representing the creation of the Earth. Tellus Mater [2] is the Roman equivalent. Geb is the Egyptian god in the same role [3] [4] [[5]. Pan-gu in Chinese[6], Prithivi in Hindu[7], Pachamama in Inca[8], Ninhursag[9] in Sumerian.
- brainstorm -- software? virtual cataclysm? a type of virtual attack?
- crystalline grid memory
- gaser (gravity laser) linked somehow to geas
- brainframe -- a powerful computer that utilize actual living brain matter as a computational device
- mythago, mythic, mythral, imago, numen/numina [10]
- hypermeme
- transmemetic memory
- neo-pantheists -- people who believe that the ancient gods have materialized within TerraNet
- Brainstorm
