Pandora Tainted

Pandora Tainted takes place on Earth, in the year 2024. The planet has been quietly taken over by a group known as the “Global Empire”, GE for short. The Global Empire started out as an agreement between all the nations of the world, an attempt to put all the hate and war to rest. It worked slightly too well. Slowly, the Global Empire expanded it’s power, until it was an unstoppable behemoth led by one man (Penn Smith, later known as Pendarious). Citizens are perpetually monitored and drugged. There are massacres in the streets, almost daily, but “Amnesiac Squads” erase all memory of these events and the people involved in them. The GE’s control is total, and final.

Locales

Eden: Capital city of the GE, built on top of what used to be London. Almost all of the old buildings, monuments, etc. have been destroyed, with the exception of an area known as Lowtown. Eden is divided into seven districts, the aforementioned Lowtown, which was a poor district, run-down and decaying, regularly mopped up by General Enforcement. Next to Lowtown is Midtown, located in the southern-middle of Eden. Generally Midtown is residential, and it is slowly entering a state of disrepair, and beginning to resemble parts of Lowtown. Pandora operates out of Midtown. The last district on the “west side” of Eden is Smog, which entirely consists of industrial factories, power plants, and the like. In the northern part of Eden is Hightown, which is constantly guarded by a variety of General Enforcement police units. Hightown is thought to house either the higher-ups in the Global Empire, or General Enforcement R&D. On the upper-east side is Provenance, which is filled with hospitals, schools, courthouses, and so on. Each of them a front for GE weapons manufacturing. Below that is Olympus, which is general called either the “new Midtown” or the “old Hightown”, an entirely residential district. In the center of it all is the GE Capital itself, and in the center of that is Capital Tower, a massive structure several hundred thousand feet above every other building in Eden.

Eden is perpetually covered by a thick, black layer of smog created from the aptly named “Smog” district. The sun is totally blocked out, plunging all of Eden into a perpetual night. Occasionally, the toxic gases in the smog will ignite, making it appear as though patches of the sky are on fire. A fine layer of soot and ash covers almost every inch of Eden, and every once in a while there will be deadly, acidic rainstorms, which do millions of dollars in damage. The constant inhalation of chemicals leads to at least 70% of the population to be diagnosed with diseases such as cancer at any given time. However the remaining 30% seems to have built up a natural resistance, most likely due to ever-present small doses of the chemicals.

The Wastelands: The area surrounding Eden is a boundless, burnt wasteland. The ground is dried, cracked mud, the plants are suffocated skeletons of what they once were, and the smog from Eden covers the skies. A few ghost towns still stand, half-buried in the mud, remnants of the older world. A few of these ghost towns house small Resistance villages, doing what they can to smuggle people out of Eden, and staying below the GE’s radar. Also notable is the General Experimentation facility run by someone named Kitty. Kitty’s Facility specializes in genetics and bioweaponry, and houses the Amnesiac Squads and their hive mind (separate from the main General Enforcement hive mind in Eden). Sealed in a perpetual lockdown state, no one gets in or out of Kitty’s Facility with the exception of the Amnesiac Squads.

Other: The rest of the world is very similar to Eden. The urban sprawl of cities has engulfed most of the globe, and the few uninhabited areas are just as barren as the Wastelands around Eden. All of Earth’s local flora and fauna has died out, with the exception of a few that are locked in perpetual stasis in various General Experimentation laboratories. The GE has learned how to synthesize Oxygen, and continually pumps it into the air near cities. Whenever plant or animal by-products are needed, the GE simply clones one of their specimen and uses it. The oceans have grown slowly larger, since there barely any of the sun’s rays penetrate the smog-layer to evaporate the water. Giant “Vacuuming Facilities” punch holes in the atmosphere and siphon out all the unnecessary heat and gasses to prevent the planet from turning into a giant incubator. However, it’s an imperfect science, and is letting a little bit too much heat out, causing parts of the ocean to freeze, and some of the wastelands to turn into tundras. The natural heat generated by the excessive energy consumption in major cities does a decent job of keeping the frost away from any largely populated area.

Terraforming projects on Mars and the Moon were started years ago, but all communication with the colonies has been severed. Whether or not they have died out or if they have managed to continue survival is unknown. Meanwhile, Earth constantly degenerates towards the state of a being a dead planet. No life except humans, artificially created air… The GE is essentially acting as a life support system for the entire planet. There is absolutely no hope of recovery, but there is no chance that the planet is going to die either.

Technology

Global Empire: Technology has progressed in leaps and bounds, particularly in medical and warfare fields. However, the public isn’t even allowed to come near any of these advancements. The GE, mainly the General Enforcement, hogs all the innovations, allowing only those who are very high up in the GE to use them, while the general public has barely advanced past the turn of the century, and, in fact, is slowly regressing. Among the many advances that the GE has made, there are holograms, Maglev cars and tanks, self-aware and intelligent AI, genetic alteration, many types of memory-wiping drugs, and humanoid, robotic drones. Most, if not all, of these are put to use by General Enforcement to subdue the populous of the planet. Here are some more specific technologies:

• Wasp Copters: AI controlled helicopters, used as the GE’s primary air unit. Two rotating, cylindrical missile-pods are mounted on either side of the cockpit, allowing for the rapid firing of twelve, short-range, ballistic missiles. Wasp Copters are extremely fast, deadly, and smart. Generally, they never see action, used simply to intimidate those that would lash out against the GE.
• Scorpion Tanks: Tanks that use maglev technology to hover along the streets of Eden. Every road in Eden has a massive electromagnetic strip underneath it that automatically activates when the Scorpion is nearby. The polarity of the electromagnets inside the tank can reverse whenever needed, meaning that the Scorpion can clamp to the ground to absorb the shock of recoil. This also means that Scorpions can become effective short-range artillery units at a moments notice.
• GE Drones: The bread and butter of General Enforcement, the ground troops. The GE Drones have a light-weight skeletal body allowing it to move quickly. Each one has a Submachine Gun-like weapon mounted on their right arm, with single and automatic firing modes. GE Drones are clever, mobile, and plentiful. They have no sense of self-preservation, meaning that they can simply charge assailants in large groups and swarm them.
• Amnesiac Squads: After there is a massacre in the streets, a scuffle between the GE and some pathetic resistance movement, who mops up the mess? The Amnesiac Squads do. Small, hovering, round drones with a tendril-like appendage dangling beneath their ‘body’. At the end of the tendril is a syringe packed with a mind-wiping serum that knocks out the victim and completely erases what ever the GE thinks is necessary to erase from memory. Half of Eden could simply disappear one day, and no one would be the wiser. No one would even remember there was another half, nor would they remember the people that lived there. They would just continue living as they always do, blissfully ignorant.

Ian’s Inventions: Ian, Pandora’s partner in crime and all around genius, has managed to steal a large amount of GE technology throughout the mutual adventures of the two criminals. Using various stolen parts, he has constructed a few devices of his own to combat the GE. He managed to construct a generator, ventilation system, and various security features for their hideout, which made it self-sufficient and totally off the GE’s grid, making it effectively invisible to any electronic means of detection. In addition to his technological know-how, he’s adept at things such as hacking, programming, lock picking, hotwiring, and the like, he could almost be described as a human skeleton key. Here are some of his main inventions:

• The Hologlove: Ian’s one downfall is his lack of innovation when it comes to naming. The Hologlove is an electronic Swiss Army Knife of sorts. It’s primary features are the ability to discharge and absorb massive amounts of electrical energy, making it a very effective weapon against the robotic legions of the GE. It can also be used as a portable computer, GPS, data storage device, and… well, a glove.
• Ambrosia: During the course of their various scrapes with the GE, Pandora and Ian tend to get beat up. Extremely beat up, bullet wounds, burns, cuts, broken bones, snapped tendons, etc. Luckily, Ian developed the Ambrosia Serum. It’s a combination of a sedative and healing agent that speeds up the body’s natural healing process. This also has the unintended side-effect of speeding up the aging proccess, Ian estimates that each usage of Ambrosia takes about a month of their lives. Neither of them really expect to live too long anyway.

The Many Faces of the GE

General Enforcement: GE typically does not refer to the Global Empire. And though it can be used to refer to any branch of the Global Empire, it mainly refers to General Enforcement. Why? Because General Enforcement is the only branch of the Global Empire that even remotely matters anymore. It has total, supreme control over everything, except for Pendarious, who has supreme control over the GE. It’s ranks are populated entirely by automatons knows as “GE Drones”, as detailed above. At one point in time, a it had human employees, but it was decided that they were ultimately unreliable, largely due to a massive scandal that at least two-thirds of General Enforcement was found to be involved in. Slowly, humans were phased out in favor of the AI drones.

The GE was the fourth branch to be introduced into the Global Empire, created five and a half years after the Global Empire had been formed. Three years afterward, the aforementioned scandal took place, and the introduction of the Drones began. Within a year, there were no humans left in the GE, which is when some of the more abusive policies of the Global Empire began, and things started slowly degrading in to the world that Pandora knows.

The Global Empire: Originally, the Global Empire was an alliance between the nations of the world, and was to function in a way similar to the United Nations. However, slowly, the Global Empire gained more and more power until it was generally accepted to be the only government on the planet. It was formed in 2013, and managed to take total control with astonishing speed. The first branch was called General Education, which brought high-quality, unified, standardized education to every country in the world, meaning children all over the globe were receiving  the same education, regardless of social status. Next came General Experimentation and General Exploration, then General Enforcement and General Economy. The Global Empire could have been a truly great, unifying power that would’ve pushed Earth into a new golden age, except for one fatal flaw:

There was no one leader of the GE, it was lead by a conglomerate of leaders of various global superpowers. However, it was decided that a figurehead was needed for the Global Empire, and so the position of “Intervener” was created. The role of the Intervener was to, basically, step in to heated situations (feuding companies, local rebellions, etc.) and defuse things. He had the authority to take over when people weren’t doing their jobs right, and make sure everything ran smoothly. So a global election was held (it took three years), and the man named Penn Smith was elected. And things just went flat-out wrong. Penn essentially had the power to take over anything he wanted, and make anyone do what he said. He created the General Enforcment, and everything went downhill from there.

General Education: Mentioned above, General Education provided free, quality education to everyone. And this meant that everyone had the same opportunities, no one was left out. It was a massive success at first, and did a lot to improve the public’s opinion of the newly founded Global Empire. However, once Pendarious took fully control, General Education was primarily used to pump propaganda and depressant drugs into the children of the world, making future generations easier to control. General Education was the first branch to be created, and was created the same year as the Global Empire.

General Experimentation: The branch that brought all of the wonderful innovations that the GE had hidden from the public. Most of its projects never even reach fruition, and are abandoned mid-way through. General Experimentation only plays one major part in Pandora’s secluded world, and that is through Kitty and Kitty’s Facility (mentioned above). Scientists who work for General Experimentation live in the upper-class areas of major cities (Hightown and Olympus in Eden, for example) and are generally detached from any friends or family. They also have the nasty habit of disappearing whenever they finish a major project. General Experimentation was the second branch to be created, a year after General Education.

General Exploration: Sister to General Experimentation, the goal of General Exploration was to research, explore, and colonize space. They showed real promise, having already set up 32 terraforming colonies on Mars and the Moon when Penn Smith took control. General Enforcement shut down General Exploration, cut off all communication with the terraforming colonies, and shut down any other extraterrestrial projects. In it’s short run, it managed to gather truly massive amounts of data, all of which was destroyed by General Enforcement. There was seemingly no good reason for General Enforcement to shut down General Exploration so suddenly, and why they did remains a mystery to this day. The third branch to be created, at the same time as General Experimentation.

General Economy: The final branch, and last key that locked Pendarious in as supreme leader of the Global Empire. All of the ‘old world’ paper money was abolished, replaced with the GED (Global Empire Dollar, or General Economy Dollar). General Economy slowly bought out every other company on the planet, and those that wouldn’t be bought were made to go away by the General Enforcement. Currently, General Economy is stuck in a twilight zone of uselessness, and may soon be phased out. Everyone works for, sells to, and buys from the GE, which means that there is not much for General Economy to monitor or control. General Economy was the fifth branch, created a year after the General Enforcement was.