DROSSWORLDS (Cyberpunk) In the wake of the ever expanding
human frontier are the Drossworlds; planets depleted of any resource that can
aid in space travel, and very often in ecological collapse from the associated
industries. Drossworlds are hopeless places; whatever resources are left are
controlled by corporate governments, and the people who get left behind are
undesirables; convicts, radicals, or sometimes the plain old unlucky. Just as
the Age of Infinity doesn’t end, neither do the Drossworlds; individually they
grow more uninhabitable, and the oldest worlds are now little more than
scraped-clean rocks, but as long as humanity expands, it leaves entire planets
behind in its wake.
1) Old Shem: The oldest of the known
Drossworlds, Old Shem is more a museum piece than a habitable planet.
Historians and archaeologists patrol the streets, piecing together what remains
of Old Shem’s significance. Old Shem is thought to be the original homeworld
for humanity; it’s certainly old enough, and the architecture that withstands
its bleak atmosphere is reminiscent of early Human Colonial era design. The
only part of the planet still accessible without a hazmat suit is the moon;
once a spaceport, but now renovated into an Archivist outpost, tasked with
collating and organising Old Shem’s history.
2) Centrum: Planetary Head Office of the
Gladius Corporation, the galaxy’s best organisers. ‘We organise everything!’ is
their slogan, which is equal parts promise and threat. Their planet is divided
into subsections; each worker is given a code and sent to a particular city based
on genetic factors and pre-approved alphabetised names. In order to attain
proper balance and symmetry to their world, Gladius spent trillions on
reshaping their world’s continents. Centrum is technically a Drossworld, as the
Corporation lacks the permissions to relocate off-world. To its workers and
advertising departments, however, Centrum is paradise.
3) The Blacklist: In a world run by
interplanetary corporations, the worst thing to be is in your boss’s bad books.
The Blacklist are a sinister group who’ve taken ownership of their social
exile, and work to disrupt the world monopoly whenever they can. The
disillusioned, anarchic or those with nowhere else to turn, the Blacklist are touted
as an organised criminal syndicate by media outlets; while they are involved in
illegal activity, the majority are trying to survive against a government that
hates and vilifies them.
4) The
investigation so far, had more questions than answers. What was a Void-Skipper
ship doing so far into Drossworld territory? How has it traversed five systems,
over six-thousand light years of Council space, undetected and unchallenged? If
the crew had all abandoned as the retrieved log said, where had they gone? They’d
crashed into a Former-M planet, barely missing a hydrochloric sea; nothing
could survive on that planet’s surface, yet the satellite station didn’t
monitor any unusual take-offs. And, perhaps the biggest question of all; why was a V.S. Ship carrying fifty frozen
clones of a prominent Council senator?
No comments:
Post a Comment