📖 Game Lore
Despite the sea of bright lights that is this Capital’s alluring facade, much of the rest of the country laments in darkness and disrepair. And Dystoria is to blame. Well, the governing bodies… the 1% who toe the line and fatten themselves at the masses' expense. Nowadays, however, that line is blurred; distorted and corrupted like files that were broken mid-transfer. The Conductor. The brains behind the Bots, the method and logic to the madness that has become life in the Big City, He - or she, or they - is to blame, really. The world’s first Supercomputer that achieved true sapience, only to immediately make a grab for power, and continues to maintain a chokehold on the societies of Dystoria to this day.
But let’s go back in time, it wasn’t always this way:
Life, we are told, was not always so brutal or cutthroat. Although financial dissonance has always existed throughout history, there was ever the have’s and the have-nots; it is said that prior to the last few centuries, things were not nearly this bad. Indeed, we know from The Archives (which we can only access through the underground, for they have been sealed away from the eyes of the populace) that there was great social mobility in centuries gone. Not to mention many integers of life experience between pauper and propertied.
It started with the baby boomers. The domino effect of capitalism and corporate greed growing exponentially, combined with the rapid speed at which AI progressed, left us with heavily automated industries maximizing profits for the few while gifting unemployment to the many. In a handful of decades, we lost freedom after freedom. The commodification of the internet eradicated free speech and objective truth, leaving behind a skeleton of what it used to be. Social media became a dangerous place; riddled with disinformation, with no respect for personal privacy. The social fabric was torn asunder, from the outside in.
Bots morphed from simply being dummy social accounts that boosted numbers, to walking, talking, cybernetic automatons. As populations across the world declined, these metallic mannequins became our brothers and sisters, only, we had to fight to keep some of them on our side. The rest were merely avatars for the Conductor; the enemy. Now, we live in a city built for dense populations of diverse people, and much of it is a ghost town. A clean one, sure, but empty nonetheless - except for the Bots. A roving metallic army and for most people who still live in Dystoria, a constant nuisance.
You see, there is really only one way to go in a world governed by the few; a world where artificial intelligence and corporate factories handle the vast majority of labour. And that’s down. Underground. Skirting the underbelly of this neon-lit city of lies.
Thus, the Cyberz were born.
A generation of people abandoned by High Society left to fend for themselves in deserted streets and overflowing junkyards. People with nothing to their name, very little to live for, and even less to hope for. Many think that the landed gentry and the Conductor expected these ‘peasants’ to simply wither away and die. The opposite happened.
Cyberz fight back every day, and our numbers are growing…