A Future Imperfect

This will be the wiki page for A future Imperfect, a Post Apocalypse/Future Earth game set on the East coast of Australia.

Player Characters

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Background

The last ten years of the old world

In 2038, as a result of steadily more ridiculous political wrangling over diminishing fish stocks, North Korea's military Junta launched a single tactical nuclear warhead at the Liancourt Rocks, killing the civilian population of 5, the local coast guard garrison of four, and the lighthouse keeper. This was the first time a nuclear device had been used in anger since WWII - and the world came as close to WWIII as possible, until a joint operation from the UN and China ended North Korea as an independent entity. A rather disturbing array of military 'secret' technology was in part responsible for the 'Twelve day war', including particle beam technology.

It seemed a minor footnote that a smallish meteor coming out of Jupiters gravitational pull made irregular movements before beginning a long arc that would take it close to Earth's orbit. This was put down to gravitatinal lensing effects by the establishment when the usual crackpots began talking aliens. apart from a few samples that contained amino acids from the Mars trip, humanity had still found no sign of alien life.

Said comet passed closest to earth in 2041, doing nothing disturbing at all. There were an unusual number of meteor showers in the months after, but 90% of them fell over the worlds oceans and we unobserved.

In the early 2040's, the ongoing algal blooming in the worlds denuded oceans took on a twist. Amongst the toxins released was a Viroid rNa eventually found to have been produced in a form of phytoplankton and through there entered the zooplankton population. Said unknown viroid was transmitted via aerosol vectors along the coasts of Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam into the vertebrate population.

People and animals became ill in these areas, and about 1% died. Cue world panic. Over the next three years, variants of this viroid [including a viral form] appear in coastal blooms, then freshwater ones. Toxicity grows, survivors are fewer and the world comes to a slow halt as all resources are turned to fight it. Vaccines from survivors turn out to be exremely robust.

Over the next four years, there is a calmer response to the blooms as massive vaccine production extends even to animals.

Then everything changes as reports begin to hit the papers of permanent genetic alterations occurring in vaccinated humans. The full extent of the widespread incorporation of these viroid/viral variants into the foodchain begins to surface. The world gets very...tense [I'm thinking brushfire wars here] but politics takes a back foot to reports from the East Coast of the US and Mexico of another outbreak...only this one is a killer.

The infection spreads from the coast via wind patterns. Massive cellular structural degeneration begins in 70-80% of the population within 24 hours of infection. By then, carriers are already spreading it to Europe, The pacific rim...

No one is immune. Everybody gets it. 95% don't survive. The ones that do are....different.

The Changed

The effect is, essentially, as if someone reset certain portions of the genetic memory of human DNA. The 'changes' look, generally on the surface as if people have thrown back to specific homo sapiens subspecies, or even further back.

For example, there are 'Strongs', folk much stronger than normal without increased muscle mass. The most common accompanying mutation is fused wristbones. Similarly, 'smarts often have underdeveloped physiques due to the glycogen demands of their enhanced brains.

But what about the people with photosynthetic hair, or the ones who's melanin goes from albino white [at night] through to deep black at midday? What about the people who see the future or can read your feelings?

There are two popular pseudoscientific beliefs

• Whatever this genetic coding unlocks, it is not only from our past, but our genetically potential future
• Human ancestors were a lot more complicated than archaeology has managed to discover.

As has been noted, these two ideas are not contradictory.

A morning in Sydney, 2040.

As I have half an hour to spare and like to paint pictures with words, here is an average morning and worktrip for a middle class Sydneysider of 2040.

They wake up in a Homicile, one of the new cluster housing approaches to solve the rising population of the cities along the East Coast. While families still tend to own individual homes in Sydney, these are slowly being replaced by Homicile clusters.

Their iCom [the portable portion of their ihomenet] wakes them up, assesses weather and transport options for the morning and relays any important comms from the night. They are heading to an actual work location, something only slightly 50% of the employed do now. Many work from home or by SenseOps. Breakfast is a mishmash of gengrown foodstuffs, preprepped and only needing a few seconds in the microwave [or mag cooker if you're better off]. It is summer, the weather is good, so they decide to fly to work.

Clothing is still natural organics, except for protective gear - like a streetsuit, the Synthsilk one piece that has become as popular as jeans for weatherproff clothing. Our flier wears one over her office clothing, cotton and synthetics rendered wrinkle free by nanotube fabric enhancers.

Her iSys registers intent and location and the local trafficnet spits back a flightpath. She engages her parasail, the cheapest flight option available to the up and coming - a self inflating sail with a podseat and prop combination. solar cells in the sail help power the minaiturized Hydrogen cell batteries that power the electric motor.

She climbs slowly into the traffic stream, a colorful array of parasails, microlites and gyros headed in a thin stream toward the landing parks of the city. Here and there, traffic cops zoom by on extremely expensive maglev powered vehicles, monitoring flow and safety. Ballons mark stationary flightpath junctions. Down below, the stream of cars, trucks and other vehicles is as heavy as ever...