EPTEarlier I posted a short story about the struggle between an AI and a network of augmented humans for control of humanity's "uplift". I did some more thinking about it and I think you'd be better off making it into a game.
But not just any game--rather, a cross between the stealth shooter style of Deus Ex and the real time tactics style of Hexplore or Dawn of War 2.
mid-2010s
The game would start you off as a lab assistant at Rockefeller-Root University in Pittsburgh (a knockoff of Carnegie Mellon). You'd live in a crash pad with a single roommate, a "Grinder" (a biohacker who tests shit on himself by self-surgery with a kitchen knife and crushed Oxycontin tablets.) You do research on brain-computer interfaces during the day. One day, you guys make a major discovery: with neurons grown from your DNA and neural stem cells, they have managed to create a "brain to silicon mesh" that doesn't cause an inflammatory response. This is big shit: those neurons are the ticket to IPO gold. Then your Grinder roommate catches wind of your work and breaks into your lab one night to steal a bunch of devices with your lab key. Then he vanishes.
Two months later, he shows up all over the news as the "super-trader who broke Nasdaq", taking a whole bunch of stock market algos to the cleaners to the tune of close to a billion dollars in a single day. (This isn't that unrealistic: when Knight Capital's algorithm broke a few weeks, ago, it lost 440 million dollars in 30 minutes. And that was just one algo from one trading company.)
Meanwhile, you've been blacklisted by Rockefeller Root University for being "a suspected accomplice" to the thefts. So now you're out of a job and shit outta luck.
The first mission of the game would be you participating in robbing a drug deal for cash, reporting it to the cops, or participating in the deal (which would get robbed and in which you would be forced to defend yourself.)
Regardless of which path you take, you'd wind up in police custody as a person of interest/suspect, and here, your ex-roommate and his lawyer would show up. He'd apologize for making your life hell, and then offer you a way out of the situation: volunteer for one of his medical experiments and he'd bribe the cops to release you. You take it, go under the knife... and then slip into a coma for 10 years.
mid-2020s
You wake up in a medical lab in a futuristic East Asian city, probably Beijing. You haven't aged a single day and you magically have an artificial eye (built in targeting and zoom), an artificial arm (with attached laser cannon) and legs and a spine that let you run marathons at a sprinter's pace and jump off five story buildings with no damage.
Correction: you get woken up, actually. The facility is under assault by an anti-augmentation group called "EDEN" and they're hell bent on trying to kill you, or so it seems. This mission is you breaking out of the assault while the Beijing SWAT team shoots everything on sight.
The world in the mid 2020s is going kind of crazy. Resources are running out, and people are seriously thinking about mining asteroids and reaching deep into the ocean to get what they need. Low intensity warfare is rampant and ever more "digitized", with drones replacing most air support/artillery/armor; only infantry is human, because infantry needs the most improvisation and human judgment.
Oh, and people getting augmented in increasing numbers. Kind of like Deus Ex HR--except with one important twist. Augmentation tech is a pyramid scheme: you can get augmented with zero cash down--someone else pays for the operation. But that person then becomes your part-owner--he gets a portion of all your excess income you can make with your bright shiny metal limbs. And what's more, you are required to hand over a portion of your income to making these "investments" in other normal people, of which you eventually own pieces of them. And so on and so forth.
So anyhow, your roommate was the one who came up with this pyramid scheme when he was thinking of a way to spend all the cash he made off breaking Nasdaq. Being the biohacker that he is, he was more interested in using the cash to spread the gospel of self-improvement than making a decent return. But it turns out augmented people are so much better at regular people at thinking, doing, and surviving that his idea is pretty profitable anyhow. Your roommate was even smart enough to make sure that the vast majority of the profits from the act of implanting augmentations and aug research would go to existing corporations, to win him additional allies.
But not everyone supports what he's doing. A bunch of human purity groups, like EDEN and lots of internet and tech companies, foremost among them Facebook, do not support the idea of rampant human augmentation. A lot of them are tied to the traffic of a black market injectable drug called "Singularity" which instantly allows a group of people taking it to become aware of each others' thoughts and emotions on a real time basis, almost like gaining telepathos and while losing your sense of self. Facebook in particular loves this drug, but it's banned in a number of countries during this time.
Oh, and during this time, we are seeing the emergence of the first few companies and organizations that are run by pure AIs, first and foremost Facebook and several other tech companies. There is a lot of hate for them, but most people grudgingly accept that AI CEOs do a better job than human ones--except for augmented humans, of course.
So the conflict is: on one side are the neo-libertarian, anarcho-capitalist pyramid scheme of augmented humans; on the other side are the hippie, neo-communist EDENites, who prefer to be watched over by godlike caretaker AIs.
You meet the people who run each side: your ex-roommate for the "Grinder Anarchy", who now prefers to be called Prometheus, and this man named Jehovah for EDEN. Jehovah looks a lot like you, but older and without augmentations.
You run around completing missions for one or both of these organizations. As you finish missions for the Grinders, you become a more powerful single person fighter: you get augmentations that let you become bulletproof, heal yourself, go invisible, etc. As you finish missions for EDEN, you get paid in Singularity. At first, you think that they're trying to make you sell the doses, and yes, you can sell them for cash. But if curiosity gets the better of you and you inject yourself, you soon find out what Singularity can let you do:
Since you have a brain-computer interface already built into you, Singularity can let you control cameras, bots, and other people around you. Basically, instead of becoming a stronger fighter, your gameplay shifts to more of becoming real time tactics--you can send bots to hold down objectives while performing mass mind control to launch human wave assaults to distract guards while you sneak in around the back. Or you can just control a military drone to launch hellfire missiles at the building. etc. etc.
So essentially, what happens is that as you become more aligned from a story perspective with one side or another, your gameplay shifts too.
At first, the plot concerns political intrigue. A few noteworthy Chinese politicians have been recently assassinated, and the prime suspect looks exactly like you. This makes your life very uncomfortable. The reason they were killed is that they opposed a bill to reduce corruption in China by implanting all midlevel Communist Party officials with brain-chip monitoring devices. The average Joe in China, sick of the corruption, loves this idea, and the Communist Party brass too, since it means that they won't need to yield to Western demands for elections. Slowly you realize that "grinded" or "chipped" politicians are now increasingly common (comprising nearly half of the US and EU congresses).
Choices you make during this set of missions for either side slowly build to a pair of midgame story twists that also denote the "hard fork" where you have to pick a side.
First, on the EDEN side, you have a mission where you have to infiltrate an Anarchy base and destroy something there. Standard dungeon crawl. The final boss is an Anarchy general who shares the same first name as you. You blow him to pieces, before seeing that his face is a mirror image of you. You realize you are a clone of the original you.
Second, on the Anarchy side, you have a mission where you infiltrate their one of their China HQs, and realize that Jehovah is not the real leader of EDEN--in reality, EDEN is actually the name of the AI the entire organization takes orders from. You will meet your old professor, the one who invented brain-computer interfaces. He tells you the origin of Singularity: it is actually a self-replicating nanite that bonds with neurons: essentially giving EDEN mind control over regular Singularity users.
Slowly, the conspiracy becomes apparent:
The Grinder Anarchy and EDEN both want to uplift everybody from a "baseline" human level. But they disagree on how it should be done.
EDEN wants to pump everyone full of Singularity and just mass mind control them, realizing a perfect Marxist collective. Essentially, it wants to "return humanity to the Garden of Eden, by taking the fruit of knowledge and free will from out of our mouths." Their vision also includes terminating all Grinders with a nanite virus.
The Grinder Anarchy wants to have everyone get implanted and working in anarcho-capitalist world where everyone is bound by contractual obligations to constantly improve others and pay for improvements on themselves. Its vision leads to a world where people are so "implanted" that they are not the same species anymore--"different parts of a multicellular organism", as your ex roommate Prometheus puts it.
The remainder of the game is trying help one side succeed over the other. Or is it? As you play (on both sides) you get clues about what of the "original" you: he became Jehovah. You have a third option now: break Jehovah free from the grasp of his nanites, and talking with him about destroying both sides and returning humanity to its pre-augmentation stage with a nanite virus, but one that shuts down augmentations rather than killing the Grinders themselves. As you play this tree, you gain access to select abilities from both trees, but specialize in neither.
Ultimately, you get to choose between the three endings. And as you grow closer to each ending, your playstyle will be radically different: playing a stealth shooter as a supersoldier, or playing more of a real time tactics game almost isometrically, or something in between.
What do you guys think about this? If the wisdom of the crowd suggests it's a good idea, I'm going to send it to Pat Wyatt since it looks like he knows how to turn game ideas into reality.
