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« on: January 31, 2014, 06:35:42 PM »
Please note that what follows is a VERY rough draft and subject to extensive change before publication. Red Markets is the intellectual property of Hebanon Games and Caleb Stokes.
The Red Markets
Food canned on day one of the Crash had, at best, two years before expiration. MRE’s have five years if kept in the best possible storage conditions. The hardiest antibiotics and over-the-counter medicines lost effectiveness or become toxic after four years. Bottled water can evaporate.
All this is to say that, while a lot of people managed to live in the Loss after the borders closed, a great many of them died in ways that had nothing to do with Casualties. There was this idea of self-sufficiency left over from before; this wet-dream fantasy held by corporate drones that said a hardened person could survive the apocalypse with nothing but a personal garden, some defensible walls, and hard work. But for the majority of human life, a septic paper-cut could send a person to the grave, and that same unforgiving bullshit had returned to the world in a big way.
Don’t get me wrong: a lot of people were ripped apart and eaten alive. But even more starved when their local grocery store went sour or ran out of loot. Thousands died of dysentery from bad water. Hardened soldiers got killed because they ran out of ammo, and medical doctors froze to death because they couldn’t sew a coat.
Self-sufficiency has always been a myth. At best, it’s an ideal to strive for, but humanity broke off into specializations and castes for reasons of survival. There are only so many hours in a day and so many calories in each individual, which meant that those that tried to do it all often ended up dead or undead.
Those that survived did so by setting up trade almost immediately. People held up in bookstores sold survival manuals for the food they couldn’t grow in concrete floors. Survivalist nuts in control of gunsmiths sold ammo for the raw materials to make...more ammo. Even the drug cartels plied their narcotic recreation for vital resources like water. Everybody needed something survive, and Gnat opened up the LifeLines forum so we could all find out who had it.
Sure, there were still psychos and loners: the raiders, cultists, living cannibals, and rogue military elements. But they were just another need to be met. Purchase protection with gas. Provide shelter in exchange for those rifles. It was a story as old as human civilization.
Within months of the evacuation, the most defensible locations solidified their power struggles and became Enclaves. Chain-store distribution centers and industrial zones became the new cities of the Loss, hot spots for bartering goods and services. Everyone may have been half-insane with fear and under constant threat, but they still needed to eat. The few brave enough to venture outside the walls to facilitate trade or fetch resources for the Enclaves became known as Undertakers: those who deal with the dead.
By the time the Bounty system came online, Gnat had already distributed underground documentaries online about all those still-not-dead folks the governments had left to die. She used Ubiq’s satellite imagery to prove that the settlements of these non-citizens was the only thing keeping the Mississippi line from being overrun by Casualties. We were already the secret everybody knew in the Recession, and then the bumblers at DHQS gave us a way to communicate.
Things in the Recession were far from rosy too. Nobody was in much danger of getting eaten, but most of the Free Parking ghettos dotted down the Eastern line were in worse shape than most Enclaves, denied basic resources the scavenger cities could just pick up off the ground. People needed food, water, and documents they could sell to the government for better housing or luxury items. Oligarchs wanted to lay early claim to salvage and data stores to build their future empires. Even the government needed “contractors” familiar enough with the terrain to do jobs their military units were getting wiped out trying.
Meanwhile, the Loss needed things our barter infrastructure couldn’t produce: birth control, vehicles, specialized ammo, Supressin K-7864, and, most of all, safety. Enough Bounty could buy a new identity; an actual home on a real city street; a job that didn’t involve the ability to score headshots on the run.
Ask your average denizen of the Loss what they think about the Recession and you’re bound to learn about all those new curse words we’ve invented since the Crash. But while those assholes may have left us to die, nothing can bring people together like the universal impulse to fuck over and rob our fellow man. Thus the Red Markets were born, a totally illegal, yet completely accepted, underground economy between the Loss and the Recession. The safe zoners began calling undertakers by the pejorative Takers, and we didn’t mind; it was shorter. Time is Bounty.
Things are far from easy, mind you. Ubiq and the LifeLines make finding jobs remotely simple so long as you can find the juice, but delivery sure is a bitch. Performing any kind of service sucks when things are trying to eat you, and goods have to be smuggled across the Mississippi. The latter means dodging mined waters, bridges, and fencelines, all whilst avoiding getting shot by the military for violating quarintine. If you’re lucky, the poor border guard will have family back home benefitting from the trade and let your crew by with nothing but a bloodtest and a bribe.
Once over the river, it’s pretty easy to blend into a tent city and avoid getting detected. Then all there is to worry about is your Latent infecting someone and causing a massive outbreak, or your Immune body getting snatched up for medical experiments, or your client ditched out before paying, or your “comrade” Takers killing you to snag a contract, or…
Well, you get the picture.
But survive long enough, and there’s a shiny new life waiting on the shelf just for you, or at least that’s what they keep telling me…
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