Game Jam Deck
https://www.figma.com/proto/mmgohIFtBa19PHhIvW2H0x/Entrenched?page-id=0%3A1&node-id=8%3A15024&viewport=-107%2C523%2C0.14&scaling=scale-down-width&starting-point-node-id=8%3A15024
I think it was a few hundred years ago that people started living in the Trenches. Then again, maybe it was a couple thousand. I don’t have such a good memory, you see. I forget if I got that from the Stims or the Regen. Doesn’t really matter, though. We haven’t got much use for history these days. The only one that really matters is your personal history. You see, we don’t live so long any more. That’s all good though, dying doesn’t take up too much time. You’re back on your feet soon enough.
But I’m gettin’ ahead of myself. You asked why areliveving in the trenches, right? Again, my memories not so good, but it basically came down to the surface not working anymore. Climate change, rising seas, war… of the… nuclear variety. Eventually humanity’s only safe shelter was underground, and I’m not talkin’ basement level. Nah, I think were somewhere between 25-30 km from the surface. Form the first shelters, people started tunneling outward through the earth. They brought a need to build excessively large buildings and giant factories with them as the spread out. That’s how the Trenches as we know them came to exist. One big underground sprawl.
Now we’re working up to the current day. Okay, we’re actually still pretty far off, but bear with me. So we dug out all these tunnels, but the scientific marvels didn’t start stop rolling there. This group of weirdoes calling themselves the League for Human Evolution started making the rounds through the Trenchways. They said they were a group of scientists dedicated to improving human life with cloning and gene therapy, but I’ve heard people say they were actually some kind of cult that thought humans were clones of another species and were trying to bring humanity closer to our “progenitors”. Like I said, they were weirdoes.
What was even weirder is that they were already trying to deliver on their promises. They offered to implant this crazy new tech they called a gHost Slate into anyone willing to try it. The Slates are like an additional organ in the body (except it’s made of silicone). It doesn’t do much. It just records your genetic makeup and neural patterns as data, which they call a gHost Sign (I know that name’s a little weird an mystic. Again, they were probably a cult). It only does anything once you’re dead. Once you were dead, someone else could shove your Slate into this crazy, mega-sized 3D printer called a Regeneration Apparatus (people just started calling ‘em Printers cause that name’s a little pretentious). It printed out a new bio-organic body using the genetic data in the Slate as instructions. Then it did some nutty stuff with electrodes to remap your brain to the proper state so you don’t wake up a literal infant. Finally, it re-inserts your Slate so you can do it all over again and kickstarts the body. Bam, instant immortality.
But the craziest part was that… it worked. Those League freaks actually delivered on seamless regenerative cloning. The only stipulations were having a Slate and someone who cared enough about you to bring it to a Printer. And they were just handing this shit out FOR FREE. At least they were for a while. I guess they wanted some cash flow, so they started selling the Printers them once they were mass produced. Turns out the free models were just a sampler. Apparently, life already sucked in the Trenches by then (cave-ins, barely breathable air, etc.), so people with the money were absolutely shelling out to get these things. Slates were still free, though, and soon everyone had one. People really don’t want “died in freak cave-in” written on their graves.
Society completely bent around access to Printers. Suddenly, “government” went from having barely any power to absolutely none. People with Printers had all the power. People wanted to live near ‘em, be their friends, cater to ‘em. Eventually, the League instituted some new tech in the Slates. They installed what they called “Guidance AIs”. They’re primarily personal assistants who offer you suggestions on what to do. However, people soon found out that the power of “suggestion” was a bit stronger than advertised. Above all other “suggestions” was an overwhelming urge to take any Slates you see to the nearest Printer. The League spun this as a way to ensure that people got Regened and that people with Printers wouldn’t abuse their position. They still did, of course. To this day, a lot of people with Printers won’t even meet the person carrying your Slate face-to-face before gettin’ paid.
And that’s how it was for a few generations. A bizarre society where people lived with the promise of eternal life despite the fact that they were constantly at risk of dying. A lot of people from that age are still kickin’ today, walkin’ next to their great-great-grandkids. Thanks to the way the Slates work, they don’t look a day older than they want to. Of course, uh… then something happened.
So, I don’t know why it started happening, but uh… shit just went wrong. People with printers said it was something wrong with the Slates, and people without Printers said it was something wrong with the Printers. That debate’s still ongoing, but it really has no bearing on what happened. Uh… people just started dying in their sleep. I mean the second you’re not conscious it’s just a switch going click and then your heart stops. It was just a couple people at first, then it started happening to more people, then it was an epidemic. Some people called it The Big Sleep, but I always thought that was a stupid name.
Eventually people realized it was happening after Regens. So… something went wrong with the gene sequence. It became some kind of persistent bug in… whatever system went wrong. People started calling it the Corrupted Gene Now the obvious solution is to just stop Regening, but uh… we can’t. Everyone has a Slate, and every Slate has a Guide compelling you to bring other Slates in for Regen. And so we did that for all the people with the Corrupted Gene, and they kept dying. Then people kept dying from other things, so we kept Regening them, so they all got the Corrupted Gene, so they kept dying, so we kept Regening them, so they kept dying, so we kept Regening them, so now we all have it, so now we all die every time we try to sleep.
You may be wondering where the League was when this happened, and the answer was “not here”. They just disappeared briefly before this started happening. Insert your own conspiracy theory here, and EVERYBODY’S got one, but it doesn’t change the situation. Nobody outside the League understood this tech, so no one can fix it. We all live and die based on how long we can stay awake, but even if we die we just wake up in a Printer to do it all over again.
This has been going on for… shit I don’t know how long. It’s tough to track time when you spend one or two days alive then are dead for a week before getting Regened. Time’s fluid, but the one thing is constant, everybody tries as hard as possible to not sleep.
Civilization in the Trenches got a lot more compact after the Corrupted Gene spread. People moved as close as they could to Printers. It’s a little daunting to travel when getting exhausted means you’re dead for a few weeks. Now we’ve got just a few city-states centered around Printers and the people who own them, with at often 20-50 km of abandoned and very dangerous tunnel between them.