Welcome to the Bastion, the last great city of the human species, and the finest one currently accepting applications.
You will notice the rain first. It comes down through six stories of signage and picks up every color on the way, so the puddles here are worth photographing and the people standing in them mostly aren’t. You will notice the heat second, because you can feel exactly where it stops. Step out of the vent-wash onto a main street and the cold takes your face like a slap. That line between warm and not is the most important border in the world, and everything else in this city is a negotiation about which side of it you get to stand on.
Four corporations own the negotiation. Aurora runs the Warmth Grid, which means Aurora sells you the right to be alive indoors. Zenith sells you a clean body and a subscription to keep it that way. Dynamic Evolution brought you down from the sky and will remind you. Alterscape sells you somewhere else to be, by the hour, and their signage is the softest thing on the street, which should tell you what they know about the rest of it. Underneath, ripperdocs, fixers, forgers, and the fabricators who keep four-hundred-year-old machines running because nobody can build new ones.
That last part matters more than it sounds. Every good piece of chrome in this city came out of somebody who has stopped using it. The arm you save two years for was pulled from a corpse, papered, and sold on, and if the last owner wore it long enough it arrives with habits, reaching for a cigarette you never smoked, a fondness for a street you have never walked. Nobody here is entirely themselves. That’s not a warning, it’s the market.
So. What you could be.
You could run the deep Interlink and come back holding something that gets people killed. You could work the docks, make rent, and know everyone on your block by name. You could put a Sanguine’s teeth in your neck on purpose, because there’s a waiting list. You could take a Mnemonic’s coat and hold strangers’ memories for money and never once be described accurately by anyone who meets you. You could hire onto a clan caravan and cross the ice. You could own a bar in Rust and be, quietly, the most powerful person on that street. Nobody is going to stop you. Nobody is going to help you either. The city has one entrance requirement and you have already met it, you’re here, you’re breathing, and the meter is running.
Now the part the Loop is contractually obliged to include, delivered at the same volume as the rest.
The world ended four hundred years ago. The record doesn’t agree on how, and the people who could settle it are dead, in orbit, or being paid not to. What isn’t in dispute is the winter, which arrived inside a single season and has never lifted, and the fact that the Bastion isn’t the only thing out there in it.
Past the walls, the Wastes. Residents don’t talk about the Wastes much, and never casually. There’s a contagion out there called the Blight, and on the good nights it comes down as gold snow, and it’s the most photographed weather in the city, and it will rewrite you if you let enough of it touch you. There are things living in the far country that used to be animals. There’s a sound under the radio in every district, and it gets clearer the more of the amber you take on, and people who have taken on a great deal of it will tell you over a drink, calmly, that it has started using their name.
Beyond all of that, out where the charts stop, is the thing the amber comes from. Ask a runner about it and watch a professional change the subject. It has a name. This document isn’t going to be what teaches it to you.
This is a world caught between a prison and an abyss, and the prison is the part with the food. So here is the pitch, honestly. The Bastion will bill you for the air, price your body by the pound, and sell your death back to the Grid as heat. It’s also the only place left where the lights are on, the music is loud, the food is hot, and something walks past you at three in the morning that you will think about for the rest of your life.
Rent is due Monday. Try to stay lucid. Try to stay warm.
And when the burning amber comes down and the whole street stops to watch it fall, understand that you’re standing in something that’s interested in you.
[LOOP REPEATS. IT ALWAYS REPEATS.]