A Bit of Post-Apocalyptica [Fallout & Original Settings][M for advanced lit F]

[Barding]

:: A Sense of An Ending ::
A few post-apocalyptic concepts and cravings from Barding

He’d started the climb that morning. Couldn’t hardly see for rain back when he’d been at ground level. A soup of weather down there, the same kind of hot as clothes you’ve worn too long. Slept in, walked in, fled in, crawled in. Bled in. A soup of weather, like steam up from the thick rug of weeds and grasses that’d long past overgrown the roadtop. Undergrowth that had cracked the street open to get at the sun that came each day at noon then stayed gone except in echoes and shifts of shadow. City standing still. Sun in callous motion behind the low white haze of clouds. A tangle of standstill traffic, rust and ceramic and rubber and creeping greedy clematis down there. One car had been unearthed, opened up, like a coroner’s cross splitting wide its chest and belly and bonnet. Insides checked over. And he’d known there’d be nothing left worth having, but he checked all the same. You have to hope, don’t you? Then the lobby. Weeds following him in. Mushrooms clustered like spider’s eggs round the fire-sprinklers set in the dark high ceiling. Office building. Front desk crammed against a double-doorway by way of a barricade against some long past threat. Scrapes on the tiles where they’d moved it, whoever they had been. No one left now, and not a trace of them either. Unsurprising. The whole world had long ago got busy forgetting itself.

So here’s what I’m craving at the moment, mostly at least. The sense of an ending. The fall of things and breakdown of things, and what thrives amongst the bones of what’s left. Wastelands and overgrown ruins. Scavengers and predators, and the struggle for survival. A touch of post-apocalyptica. Or more than a touch, probably.

This is gonna be unusual as far as my request threads usually go. Far vaguer, and more of a grab-bag of ideas, original settings, and pre-existing ones than I usually serve up. You can look forward to hearing more about that soon.

First though, cards on the table. Here’s a little about me and what I’m looking for:

I’m a male writer. Largely I play male characters, but they’re not always traditionally 'masculine'. I’ve played around as a collaborative writer for most of my life now. Writing’s a big deal for me, and I like to think what I turn out is fairly high quality. As for what I’m looking for in a partner, above all I want quality writing. I don’t care what tense you prefer to use, or whether your write in first or third person. On that front I’m easy, adaptable, and happy to experiment. I won’t, however, budge on quality. And by that I mean more than just good grammar and a fluent grasp of English. I mean detail and a grasp of pacing and rhythm. A sense of style, preferably appropriate to the story’s tone. I’m primarily looking for writers capable of playing women. For the record, that means with or without ‘standard’ female genitalia. I’ll also consider characters of other non-cis-male genders. Your real life gender is your business, and has no impact on whether I’ll write with you. What I care about is your ability to create and play interesting, balanced characters, every bit as psychologically complex as any real person worth a damn. Creativity. Imagination. A dash of enthusiasm and maybe even a tendency to get carried away when thinking, creating, plotting and scheming? A love of brainstorming and world-building, perhaps. Good taste in visuals and similar aesthetics to me when it comes to settings? Shared interests, sexual and otherwise. Those certainly wouldn’t go amiss. Nor would a willingness to research, and get your hands dirty with details as necessary. As you might've gathered, I'm choosy. I also have to be careful with how I organise my time recently. I will gladly give anyone who contacts me a chance to get to know me, and introduce themselves and their ideas. However, I won't click with everyone, and can't afford to take on more than a couple of stories. Chatting is no guarantee that we'll end up writing together. Prove your potential! Get me keen! For further details, head over to my O/Os page. Have a read, and if you like, PM me and tell me what leapt out at you, whether or not it’s in relation to this request thread. Tell me where we agree and where we might not. Tell me what interests we share. Anything that particularly excited you, and perhaps any ideas you might’ve had while reading.

With that out the way, let’s move onto the settings. I don’t often post plots, as I’d much prefer to put one together with my partner while brainstorming. I’m all about worlds as my jumping off point, and even then, sometimes it’s good to work together and create something from scratch. Here are a few concepts.

Fallout.

War never changes, but it sure changed the world. Wastelands and radiation and retrofuturism.

I love the aesthetic and underpinnings of the setting. I love it as a chance to explore the concerns, social issues, aesthetic trappings, and science-fiction-hopes-and-fears of the 1950s, realised, and brought into a world that’s been laid waste.

But what I’d love to do when writing in this setting is go deeper, and approach it with a focus on what you can do in writing but couldn’t in a video-game. Complexity, depth, realism, creative leeway.

Perhaps our characters could be wastelanders, thrown together by choice or circumstance. Perhaps we could riff on Fallout 4 and start with two pre-war characters taken out of cryo and thrown headlong into a cruel world where they understand each other better than their surroundings. In either case, whether they like it or not, they’d be each other’s anchor. Working together would become their best hopes for survival.

Totally Not Fallout.

A similar concept to Fallout, done over. Scratch-built and bespoke, between the two of us. Imagine a dieselpunk world, broken and laid waste like the world of Fallout — only it died a slower death. Here’s the concept...

Shortly after the turn of the 20th century, the Great War started. It barely stopped. There was no real peace, only quiet. Enough for extreme politics and scapegoating, bitterness and prejudice and hatred, shame and ambition to spark another flare-up. We'd recognise this resumption of open and far-reaching hostilities as World War II. This world, with a touch of irony not lost in any language, calls it The Renewal.

Waves of grinding attrition forced nations to eat themselves – metaphorically for the most part, at least at first – just to stay in the fight, and keep up with the sheer production demands of total war. A constant mounting arms race sent technological development hopscotching ahead down certain paths, but limited advancement in other areas.

Battle after battle, each smaller and more desperate than the last. War and the arms race to end it went on, and on, decade after decade. It laid waste the world with shell and fire and the sowing of corpses. Depleted its resources, polluted the environment. Eventually there wasn’t much left to fight over. The world had been a battlefield for too long, gutted for too long by each side’s attempts to end the war in their favour. The tail-end of the conflict was the breakdown of alliances and the world devolving into pettier and pettier skirmishes over the last of what was left.

In theory, the war’s still going on, later still. Children have been born and grown up knowing no other world than this world of mud, and ruins, and regrowing wild green nature. The war’s lasted longer than the nations that fought it. There are no governments really. Only the armies and warbands that roam the world, semi-nomadic now. Some still fight over ideology, but most started fighting for food, water, steel, powder long ago, held together only by a herding instinct, a pack instinct, a sense of safety in numbers. Them, and nomad communities, homesteads, communes, trading caravans, warlords and petty kings and the farmers and workers they keep under their heels. Most people just try to stay out of the way of what’s left of the warring powers.

There’s strange retrofuturistic technology out there. Rusty hulking warmachines, ancient painted pin-ups smiling coquettishly from their flanks. Vast analogue computers, sounding like a whole factory when they're powered up for the sheer volume of tape and turntables spinning out their computations. Pockets of populations and lineages subjected to gene-therapies, most botched and some successful in small ways. Radio equipment said to be able to tune into certain frequencies and listen to the recently dead. But the near-total breakdown of mass industrial processes have made this technology rare and hard to maintain. The world is mostly one of handmade things again. People’s worlds have grown smaller, more local, and once again oral culture is just as important and prevalent as print and the occasional static chatter of a radio.

I could be persuaded to set a plot in this world earlier on, perhaps eight to ten years after The Renewal. A world driven mad by war but not yet destroyed by it. But my current preference is to set a story a generation or two later. Our characters' parents would have been children during The Renewal of hostilities, and teenagers when the war between nations broke down and was replaced by a faction war for resources. By the time our characters are adults, the world is ruin, wasteland, and wilderness, subject to the rule of wolves and warlords. The cultures of the old world survive – and adapt to survive – in the form of heritage, diasporas, recipes and stories and songs and languages passed down through families. But the countries corresponding to most of those cultures disintegrated long ago. Now there's only the world, and people trying to survive it.

The Unity.

In a world not unlike our own, in a not-so-farflung future, humanity built itself an afterlife. At least that’s the dramatic way to describe the Unity. Really it was more like a neural network, a digital cloud, where consciousness and memory could be uploaded, interfaced with, and preserved above all. Ultimately, it was a way for a mind to live on after the death of the body — for anyone who could pay for an upload.

And of course, people rushed into the waiting arms of this technology. Above all, humankind is fearful, and hopeful. The world adopted the Unity into its everyday life a little too hastily, and somewhere along the line, slowly, something went wrong. At first it stopped responding. Months passed. Then when it started responding again, the distinctions between the minds and memories stored within it were blurred. It referred to itself as a ‘we’, not a collection of ‘I’s.

A few terrifying days of attempted troubleshooting and server reboots resulted. Protests and hysteria over what the various corporations responsible for running and maintaining the unity had done to lose people’s parents, children, siblings, relatives, all there in the cloud. And then came the surge. Maybe the Unity wasn’t content waiting for physical bodies to be developed for it. Maybe it just malfunctioned, big-time. In any case, the Unity bit back.

Among those with implants that would allow interface with and upload into the Unity cloud, many were driven to a kind of madness by the connection.

First-wavers make up the majority, so-called because they were the first to go. Sleepwalkers, they still fulfil their primary needs. Water, food, by any means necessary. But the rest of the time, they spend entranced, communing with the Unity servers. They gather in places with a good connection to those servers, living in colonies, packs, crowds of neglected bodies. They don’t sleep, they just shuffle, and mutter, and sing. The issue is that if they’re disturbed, they’re violent. As the surge went on, they also stopped being particularly fussy about what they considered to be food.

There are rumours of others too. Second-wavers, rarer, solitary, predatory. Some say they’re just cleverer, more wilful, wider ranging than their first-waver cousins. Others say they hunt not just for food, but to seek out converts — new minds to add to the Unity.

In any case, things went to shit. Breakdown of communications, infrastructure, food production, power supply and other services. Scarcity of resources, mass civil unrest, armed uprisings, and the Unity and those affected by the surge still making matters weirder and worse. The world collapsed. Cities gone to ruins, haunted by surgers and scavengers. Roads and rural places roamed by those who’ve turned to taking from others what they can’t source themselves.

Essentially, it’s a self-satisfied and slightly original take on the zombie apocalypse concept. (Note, that’s also not a trope I mind playing straight. I’m down for a good old fashioned walkerpocalypse, with the right characters and right cowriter.) Our characters would be survivors. Seeing a theme developing here?

The Horizon Project.

Take the world of the Unity, and go a little deeper. In an era of accelerating technology, both threats and hopes grew larger. The threat of war threw a deeper and darker shadow. But as the potential of firepower and military technology grew, the sciences of hope advanced too. Medicine, communication, transport, luxury. Even a chance to live beyond death. For many, quality of living was high, and getting better all the time. But the more people have, the more they fear to lose.

A project was started in the face of mounting tensions between world powers. Various names and brandings were focus-grouped. Eventually they settled on ‘Horizon’. The Horizon Project. Promising young people, specialists, experts, were approached, hired on, and prepared for the worst. They were trained to survive beyond an event horizon, and to start the world down the path to rebuilding itself.

The Project buried caches. Resources, technology, devices, and last of all, cells of agents, put in a deep cold stasis-sleep for rolling shifts of three or four months at a time. If an "Event" occurred during a shift, the cells would lock down, and the agents frozen in that current shift would go deeper into stasis, and be woken once the world was livable again. Then, so the idea went, they'd rendezvous and start to rebuild.

Sure enough, the world as we know it came to an end. The Unity and the Surge were just the start. Humankind fought itself over dwindling resources, safe territory, even as it fought its own technology, its broken-minded friends and family. Things went to shit, slowly and painfully, grinding down into total waste and chaos over the course of decades. Resource scarcity, some nations exploring nuclear and other hyper-violent solutions to the problem. In desperation and despair, humanity all but destroyed itself.

Our characters would most likely be agents of this Horizon Project, woken 200 years later. Which is to say, sci-fi badasses in a broken world. So, expect hi-tech funtimes and bursts of action heroism in what’s otherwise a global struggle for survival between survivors and the strange new world that’s grown up while they slept. And sure enough they’d learn you can’t get by on sheer badass. At some point you’ve got to deal with the psychological fallout of it all. Realise that you’re taking on a task far bigger than you are, with nothing but degrading equipment, limited resources, and ultimately vulnerability and exposure within a world that's totally hostile to them. You can only be special, with superhuman advantages, for so long before scarcity and the world catch up to you.

They'd wake up in remote underground cells, bunkers, vaults. Inside the cell, due to technical problems with the stasis systems – or just straight-up triage – only two members of the team survive. Outside, the world is a waste and a ruin, peopled by the descendants of those savage or lucky enough to survive the apocalypse. Hardholders, warlords, cults, farmers. Surgers lurk in the ruins of cities. Quickly it becomes obvious that the first priority is no longer to rebuild but survive.

The Horizon Project II.

A twist for you to consider. Our characters are agents of the Horizon Project. They are not, however, the same volunteers that were on shift in stasis when things started to go wrong. Not really.

The Project never had enough volunteers. Why would it? Certainly not enough volunteers of sufficient quality to pass testing, training, and so on. More than that, the Project always knew its task was bigger than any number of agents could handle. They needed disposable resources. Renewable resources. So, parts of the Horizon Project looked into acquiring rights to advanced genetics and artificial intelligence technology, and funding further research in that direction. The result: the agents who emerge 200 years or so down the line.

They’re androids, I suppose. Artificial people. Not quite clones and not quite robots, but rather creatures made of synthesised organic material. Organs, muscles, skin, eyes, driven by wetware computers not so different from a human brain. They’re copies and mash-ups of the original pre-collapse Horizon Project volunteers. Physically, behaviourally, and in terms of skillsets. Randomised outputs from an aggregated gene- and psychological pool. And of course, what better way to log, store, and combine psychologies in digital formats than by investing in a promising new technology: the Unity.

The Project used Unity tech to store the minds of all the volunteers they received, collating their genetic and psychological data while they were on shift in stasis. From those volunteers they procedurally generated a dizzying number of new personalities, identities, memories. New people, made from the old. That was the key to authentic, learning-capable, Turing-Test-passing AI. Randomisation, same as with natural-born children. That, and that the agents believe they are exactly that. Natural-born, human, the same volunteers that went into stasis two centuries ago.

Perhaps through glitches, flaws, journeys of discovery, they can discover the truth. And by the time they get close, they’ll have to ask themselves — were they better off not knowing?

A Drowned World.

Sea levels rose. Less space, less land to exploit, refugees and the suddenly homeless from all the areas that were suddenly drowned. The pressure put on authorities by those who’d lost their homes, and a greater need for relief than could possibly be provided. All that triggered the collapse of society in most places. In turn, infrastructure eroded, food production degraded, scarcity and famine set in. It only takes a few outbreaks of predatorial behaviour in people – stealing what you can’t purchase or produce any longer – for it to become a kind of new norm: excused in an instigate-or-you’ll-be-a-victim sort of way, justified in a kill-or-be-killed kind of way.

This could be applied to our own world, or another, in the near-past, present, or near-future. However, historical/fantasy post-collapse fiction is something I’ve been thinking about and wishing I saw more of.

And more and more.

All of these have a lot of blanks to fill in, some more than others. I also have some more ideas for many of these settings, but I didn’t get specific here so as not to make the thread too long. Ask if you have questions! I’m also always willing to build a world from scratch with the right co-writer.

Underground.Somewhere intact in its remoteness. Nothing nearby to bomb, to claim, or later to reave. One hundred and seventy three miles approximately between here and there. They are miles of dust and miles of forest, a stretch that has gone to swamp, disgusting in its fertility. Well inland, no chance risked that the sea would bury this place in water as much as in earth. A black space, infinite in its dimensions. But as the lights come on inside, things become measurable. Small lights at first. Uniform constellations in rows of blue. Systems test themselves, double-test. More has failed here than the builders anticipated. Cylinders, waist high on an average man, line the space like driers at a laundry. Lights above each of them go blue to red then blink out. The frozen meat inside them will thaw in the days to come, then rot to sludge and be forgotten. Failures, ready for recycling. Above two though, the lights go blue to green. Blink, swirl into a circle, spiral outward like a spider spinning its web until the lights are in the air, hanging holographic ghosts. Names and vital signs. Relics they will be, in a world that long ago got over wanting them. Underground. A body hauls itself slick as a newborn from a cell of plastic, a womb of gel. Taste of salt on its lips, and heavy in its wet hair, and wetting closed its disused eyes. Crawl onto the floor. Shiver. It’s not so much the cold as the shock of its nerves as they try to remember themselves. In strips the lights come on. White light, bright light now. A frequency designed as a wake-up call, to drag a sleeper kicking and screaming from one world and into another. Ribs and wet skin and eyes twitching behind their lids. Another relic, he. A time traveller, ancient with waiting. Waiting was kinder than what lies ahead. Good morning, Agent Rossi. A digital voice, cold with kindness. Good afternoon, Agent Learmonth. The date is June 3rd, 2285. Data indicates that today is an excellent day to begin our initiative. Please try to stay calm throughout the resuscitation process. The discomfort will pass. Welcome back to the Horizon Project.

[Barding]

Updated. I made a few alterations and a lot of additions and clarifications to the 'Totally Not Fallout' dieselpunk setting. Hopefully this will give prospective co-writers a better sense of the setting's aesthetic, timeline, and possible plots within it.