Ésta es la historia del videojuego de 1999 Redline, producido por Beyond y comercializado por Accolade, tal como podía encontrarse en el instructivo. Puedes encontrar mayor información y leer el texto traducido al castellano pinchando aquí.
12. The story
People who have the
luxury of contemplating the past call the first decade of the twenty-first
century the Golden Age of Technology. It’s only been fifty years since that
decade ended and things began to unravel, yet there is no one left who
remembers that time. No one on the outside, anyway. People on the inside live a
long time, I’ve heard, and people in my gang tell stories about how the
insiders all watched the world fall apart like it was some kind of fireworks
show. I guess I’m getting ahead of myself, but I like to think about what it
must have been like to be alive during that first decade. The Chinese used to
have a saying: There is great disorder under heaven, and the situation is
excellent. I figure it must have been a little like that.
Back in the nineteen fifties, some guy named Reich told
everybody that he’d discovered a boundless source of energy; maybe the life
force itself. He called it orgone, and he built these funny boxes called orgone accumulators. Some people bought
them and said they cured diseases and made them think more clearly, but most
people thought it was a hoax. Scientists wouldn’t look at it because Reich was
a psychologist, but he went ahead and sold plans for the boxes to lots of
people anyway. Ay the time no one really understood what happened next, but all
of sudden Reich was put in prison and public burnings of his books were held in
cities all over the country. Sometime around the turn of the century, people
figured out why.
The boxes worked. Anybody could build
an orgone accumulator, and soon engines began to appear that were driven by
them, although the source of orgone energy was still a mystery. People built
generators, cars, heating and cooling systems, you name it. Free energy. By the
time the major world governments and the fossil fuel consortiums that
controlled them realized the seriousness of the problem, the cat was out of the
bag. Most of them didn't even resist handing over the reins of power, and
outside of a few skirmishes in the Middle East and the Houston Riots, a
bloodless revolution took place. People learned that orgone and other
alternative fuels had been deliberately suppressed for years, and that the
Insiders, as the corporations and their puppet governments came to be called,
had also retarded the development of environmental engineering technology that
could dramatically reduce humanity's pressure on Earth's ravaged biosphere. The
rhetoric of emerging world leaders capitalized on people's outrage, and
hastened worldwide environmental repair. Some of their plans were a little
strange, but they were so optimistic, so sure that they were leading mankind to
Eden, that no one questioned them. After all, there’s nothing wrong with
cleaning up the planet.
The revolution started by Reich's
accumulators and the realization that many such advancements could have been
squelched by the Insiders sent people scurrying to their history books to
exhume the theories of every eccentric and discredited scientist of the past
century. Most of what they found was harmless delusion, but a few discoveries
of valuable suppressed technology were made. The theories of the nineteenth
century inventor Nikola Tesla gained tremendous notoriety, and physicists
tripped over themselves in their rush to reexamine his work. Tesla believed
that he had discovered a way to transmit electrical power through the air as
easily as radio waves, and envisioned a worldwide system of power stations
transmitting free energy. He was proven correct, but the universal availability
of orgone accumulators eliminated the need for his invention. Scientists turned
to Tesla's more theoretical work.
What people didn't realize was that the
Insiders had for the most part escaped the revolution unscathed; people were
understandably more concerned with building utopias than with hunting down
broken tyrants. The Insiders were never destroyed, they merely sank beneath the
surface like Leviathan and waited for their chance to rise again. Furiously
researching the technology they had restrained, they found in Tesla's theories
an opportunity to resume their thrones.
Tesla was aware that every object has a
resonant frequency; a breaking point where an object vibrates in phase with
waves that are striking it. This is why a glass will shatter when the correct
note is struck nearby on a tuning fork. The glass resonates with the tuning
fork, its structure vibrating faster and faster until it shakes itself apart.
This was thoroughly understood in Tesla's day, but he took the idea a step
further. He reasoned that the Earth itself must have a resonant frequency, and
he set out to calculate it. The Insiders were delighted to discover that while
he was a little off in figuring Earth's frequency, he had hit the moon's right
on the money.
The leaders of the world's emerging new
nations, meanwhile, met at the first United World conference in Singapore to
discuss solutions to the planet's remaining environmental dilemmas. It was
decided that nuclear, chemical and biological weapon disposal was a priority,
as was permanent relocation of the toxic wastes and heavy metals generated by
hundreds of years or rapacious industry. As orgone-powered spacecraft were now
under construction, it seemed feasible to easily and economically store these
wastes on the moon, which was not considered desirable for colonization anyway.
A corporation called Renewal, Inc. presented this plan, and indicated they were
ready to implement it immediately. It's amazing to us now that no one
questioned where Renewal, Inc. had come from, or why they were already so
ideally equipped for an industry that had yet to be created. Contracts were
signed, and Renewal, Inc. was given access to the most devastating weapons a
self-destructive species had been able to devise. To universal cheers, they
began hauling it all to the moon.
On April 1, 2012, the Insiders began a
series of timed nuclear detonations on the poles of the moon. It took several
hours before the moon began to resonate and shake apart, and at that point the
explosions were stopped. Plenty of damage had been done already, however, and
the Insiders now had all of the aces back in their sleeves. The orbit of the
moon was disrupted just enough to wreak havoc on Earth; tidal waves destroyed
many coastal cities, weather patterns became chaotic, and clouds of fallout and
debris from the lunar explosions circled the globe. Within a year, over two
thirds of Earth's population was gone. Those who died quickly in storms or were
claimed by the sea were lucky.
Most of the survivors developed some
degree of the deteriorating skin condition dubbed "Red-6," a legacy
of the fallout and the poisonous air. Wealthy Insiders came out of hiding with
treatments for Red-6 that only they could afford. When the search for clean
water became the focus of most of humanity, the Insiders immediately unveiled a
technique mating salt water purification and deep sea drilling to offer life's
most crucial need at a "reasonable" price. Competing techniques for
the extraction or purification of water spawned an enormous industry overnight,
with the Insiders once more at the helm. They constructed domed cities for the
wealthy, where corporations such as O2 sold pure metered air at whatever price
the market could sustain. "Designer air," a mildly hallucinogenic but
very addictive and expensive luxury, caught on among the wealthy as the
Insiders in their greed began to prey even upon their own.
Life outside these cities was barely
possible. Tremendous storms raged across what little arable land was left, and
toxic debris still engulfed the planet like a diseased blanket. By 2060, the
weather was somewhat stabilized, but few Outsiders could expect to live longer
than thirty years. Most lived near the domed cities of the Insiders, where they
could occasionally breathe clean air or drink clean water in exchange for
menial labor or participation in grisly entertainments. You see, we don't much
look like the Insiders anymore, and we don't think like they do at all. They
have come to see us as a separate, inferior species, and most of the gangs on
the Outside would probably agree with the "separate" part. The
Insiders started BattleWheels gaming about ten years ago, and it is by far the
most popular of their diversions. A lot of the Outsider gangs hate each other
anyway, and maybe the Insiders think that if we can be encouraged to fight
amongst ourselves we won't make trouble. I'm not sure we could make much
trouble against their weapons, but maybe that's what they think.
So I guess most gangs are into the
games because they know they won't live long anyway, and there's always a
chance that someday you might blow away one of the thrill-seeking Insiders who
occasionally join the games. Or maybe it's because there are some Outsiders who
have become legends in the BattleWheels arenas, and live on the Inside now. Some
gangs just like to watch things die.
I don’t need a reason. Let the games
begin.
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