World Background

Roger Bell_West

Thanks to John Dallman.

1 History

1.1 2010s

Private companies increasingly assume traditionally governmental functions: rubbish collection, road maintenance, immigration enforcement, traffic law enforcement, Internet monitoring, drone operation, fine collection.
Offshoring continues.
Unemployment hits 10%
On the third referendum, Scotland gains independence from the UK. The EU insists it meet financial criteria, and commit to the Euro, before joining. This does not happen.
Contagious disease outbreaks increase in the USA; amid rumours of bioterrorism, American borders are closed to all but “pre-approved” travellers.
Fuel costs increase following terrorist activity in the Middle East; foreign holidays become largely unaffordable; car ownership drops sharply, though electric cars make up some of the difference.
Nerve regrowth largely solved.
British military operations continue, largely under UN banners: major deployment is in Syria.
Well, the net turned toxic. It started in the USA, of course. The US political doctrine of “to the victor, the spoils” started getting applied to the infrastructure seriously. Not just payments for better bandwidth, but real loss of connectivity.
It seems to have started with thoroughly incompatible video subsystems on different mobile phones’ browsers, plus changes to the licensing of the platforms’ SDKs that made it actually uneconomic to offer the same software on more than one platform, as opposed to just annoying.
And once the apps and websites had been balkanised, the networks followed. The major cellphone vendors bought up the mobile network providers and “enhanced” their protocols into incompatibility. As more than a few people have realised, there has to be a level of collusion in this, to keep the different networks from just interfering with each other at a radio level, but explaining this to legislators who are getting contributions not to understand, and have privatised the regulatory bodies, has proved to be a waste of effort, where it doesn’t get you denounced as a terrorist.
The fixed-line networks still exist, in places, but they were given the national mission of localism, trying their states, cities, or sub-state regions together. And the local police and sheriff’s departments were given the job of making sure they did that. So they can’t access anything outside their areas except for the limited and expensive licensed feeds from the big networks. E-mail was replaced by Twitter, which still gateways onto all the mobile networks via the NSA (“vital infrastructure, must be protected”), and Facebook bought Oracle.
Religious Registration Acts institute compulsory tithing in Scotland. All Christian churches are valid recipients. A conscientious objection clause allows the tithe to go to a State run “public benefits” fund. The state then, in practice, spends it in partnership with the religious bodies who get the tithe.

1.2 2020s

Net censorship becomes compulsory; darknet becomes popular among people who would’t have thought of it before, but have an interest in some censored subject.
Britain withdraws from ECHR.
Legal aid abolished.
Smoking becomes entirely illegal; alcohol minimum price hits £5 per unit; food containing more than minimal amounts of fat or sugar now requires health warnings on its plain packaging.
Unemployment hits 25%.
Last daily newspaper is printed.
New EDF nuclear plants start to come on-line at Hinkley Point, Sizewell, Wylfa, Oldbury and Moorside; electricity is now cheaper per joule than gas, but that’s mostly because gas has got expensive.
Every Western police force has its own aerial drone fleet, equipped with tasers and net guns as standard; in the UK, most of them are run by G4S from its National Control Centre in Manchester.
Post Office switches to drone-based delivery (run by Capita from Leeds).
HMSO ceases printing operations. All interaction with government is online-only.
Internal combustion engines are highly-taxed and rare; almost all road vehicles are electric, running on modular batteries that can be replaced at filling stations.
“Dole slabs”, cheap low-grade computers running a “locked down, secure” version of Android and low-bandwidth 3G connections, are customised by Google and handed out free to everyone who interacts with government services (i.e. everyone); upgrades for security exploits (including jailbreaking for darknet access) happen monthly.
Prosthetics are connected to nerves as a standard feature.
British military operations in Syria and Iran (under US/Euroforce flag, but no US troops are in-theatre, only drones and security contractors).
Eurofighter Typhoon retired, replaced by F-35A and UCAVs.
HMS Queen Elizabeth and Prince of Wales enter service with F-35B air wings. After many accidents and some informal experiments with Yak-241s, they are replaced with UCAVs.
Understanding anything advanced in science or engineering somehow became unpatriotic in the USA around 2021. Several forces all pushed in that direction — religious fundamentalism, The Fox Party, Chinese interests trying to prevent engineering getting pulled back into the USA after the “managing doesn’t add value” crisis of 2019, and the financial industry, which had decided that “rocket scientists” were its property and nobody else was entitled to have any.
The US economy now appears to work by means of “quantitative easing” where money is created by the Federal Reserve, goes through the economy once, and ends up in the cash piles of the corporations. If they ever tried to spend it, the huge amount of inflation that it actually amounts to would become visible, but they aren’t doing that, except by buying and selling each other. So far. Ordinary people have jobs in the agribusinesses that still mostly feed the country, or in services, or in the gun industry. Cars are a lot more expensive now, and people are making their old ones last “during the crisis”. In fact, that may be where the dam breaks, but it won’t happen during this electoral cycle, so that’s OK, right?
The UK situation is similar, except outsourced government work replaces the gun industry.
The Allies are a group of nations founded by Russia, Syria and China, on the basis of practical authoritarians who band together to provide political defence of their national interests from the so-called democratic states. This is proving to be fairly easy, these days.
The UN died when the US threw it out of New York, on the basis of the Black Helicopter Plans, which are a laughable forgery, even worse than the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, unless you already want to believe that kind of thing, or find it convenient that others should.
The EU splintered when the rump UK left, and Scotland refused to give up the punnd to join. They were briefly envied by Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal, until an anti-Trident demonstration in the Gareloch got right out of hand — with the suspected collusion of the Scottish authorities — and a warhead fizzled in the water, spreading far more plutonium than Sellafield ever did. Getting the reactor and the other warheads out of the loch is an ongoing problem, largely because the new governments can’t agree on a damn thing.
Tithing in Scotland gives churches substantial resources, which are increasingly spent on provision of church schools. Gradual de facto removal of secular or multi-denominational schools.
Personal law pluralism in Scotland, with “recognised religions” getting initially the mandatory power to resolve family law disputes for members of their community. Initially an opt-out for those outside of the main denominations, later done away with on the grounds of cost saving.

1.3 2030s

Manchester Riots; Birmingham Riots; London Riots; City Wall goes up, securing City of London and Docklands.
Rise of Neighbourhood Protection Associations in riot-hit areas.
Metropolitan Police now 90% outsourced to G4S.
Unemployment hits 40%.
Cash withdrawn from circulation; GCash (Google Currency, formerly PayPal) is deemed an adequate substitute for those who don’t want to use credit cards or bank transfers.
HS2 opens, using Chinese CRH500 sets (up to 310mph); Gatwick and Stansted Airports close.
Scottish electricity grid runs entirely on wind and hydro power after nuclear shutdown; reliable electricity supply north of the border limited to Edinburgh-Glasgow corridor.
England and Wales runs on 80% nuclear, 20% renewable power. Electricity is expensive, but usually reliable.
Cognitive prostheses to restore function after TBI become standard.
Bellerophon-class SSBN replaces Vanguard-class.
British military operations in Iran and North Korea (UNTMIK).
ISS de-orbited.
Chinese moonbase established.
The EU has a bigger problem with the proliferation of flavours of the Euro. It stated with “hard” and “soft”, but the “new”, “southern”, “populist”, “continuity” and “righteous” kinds got added swiftly. Privatisation of all the infrastructure you could point to was popular under many of these regimes. The thing that really messed up networks was the claim by the US Congress that it could and would apply US law to the overseas holdings of US companies, and a few demonstrations of enforcement against US holdings, plus “emergency” restrictions on the disposal of US-owned assets, pretty much froze that into place.
So now most of the network operators in Europe have to apply the US state law of their owners, including the use-of-English laws, in addition to the national laws of the country they operate in, and the laws of whichever fragment of the EU they happen to be in.
Personal law pluralism extends to “moral regulation” as part of The Regeneration of Scotland. Church courts get to administer fines to members for breach of church law.
Rise in intercommunal tensions between Catholics and Protestants (there are probably others, but the state isn’t that interested), including substantial riots. Celtic and Rangers dissolved under emergency powers, and formation of “Churches Regenerating Scotland”, a council of Catholic and Protestant leaders. Initially advisory, eventually given a formal position in state structures.

1.4 2040s

HS2 later stages open, connecting Manchester, Sheffield and Leeds to the (now) 300mph London-Birmingham line.
British military operations in North Korea (UNMIK) and Yemen (under “Euroforce” banner, UK sends drones only).
RAF operates exclusively with unmanned aircraft.
China generously allows other nations to rent geosynchronous orbit slots.
Scottish Universities funding structure rewards denominational Theology Departments over other areas of humanities, especially religious studies, and allows creation of universities with “a religious ethos”.
Churches Regenerating Scotland begins to be involved in social control and penal systems. Initially denominational social work, then state funded schemes in prisons, then running state prisons. State prisons can be of “a religious ethos”. Most recent change is that Church courts now have power to impose short prison sentences, served in their own prisons.

2 Major Players

2.1 G4S

G4S is the major security provider in the UK, having police contracts for many urban areas as well as the majority of the prison and private security market. The only substantial rival, though it’s rather smaller, is the Westminster Group. Persistent rumours have G4S moving into military contracting via its drone operations arm.

2.2 Capita

The major government outsourcing company, Capita ends up running most of people’s interactions with “government”: disbursing benefits, collecting television licence fees, managing hospitals, and so on. Main rival is Atos, which works more specifically with computers.

2.3 The BBC

Based at the Salford Bunker, the BBC continues to produce entertainment and informational programmes for broadcast over the net. Its lack of a London presence has impaired its news arm.

2.4 Fox

The BBC’s news rival, Fox (not legally affiliated with the Fox Party), is based in London and notable for cross-promotion of its news, entertainment, and leisure products.

2.5 BT/Google

BT is the default telecoms/internet access provider, fixed line and mobile, and most people don’t care enough to change. It works, more or less, most of the time. Censorship is even more severe than legally required, and darknet access is blocked whenever a new route is noticed. BT runs under the California state law of its owner Google.

It’s not actually illegal to use an ISP other than BT. But it’s certainly regarded as suspect.

2.6 UKNET

Formed from LINX, LONAP, LIPEX, and other IXPs, UKNET manages Internet backbone services in the United Kingdom and Scotland as well as enabling Internet monitoring. It is an open secret that many UKNET staff are also deeply involved in the darknet and the IETF.

2.7 GCHQ

One of the few government agencies that still hires its own contractors rather than using an outsourcing firm. The Doughnut is responsible for processing UK net surveillance data and giving out practical tips to police and government.

2.8 IETF

Welcome to the Internet Engineering Task Force, the world’s most-wanted hacker group. Our ideals are free communication and collaboration, but to get anywhere with that, we’re going to have to overthrow a load of governments and re-educate a few billion people. We aren’t concentrating on that this week. We’re more concerned with finding and learning to crack gateways between networks, subverting parliaments’ and courts’ word-processing systems to put loopholes into laws, and spreading compatible and open technologies into areas of the world where there isn’t enough market for corporate pablum. Grow that beard. You’ll be needing it for talking to the mullahs.

3 Tired of Life

3.1 Westminster

The City of Westminster is Tourist Town, packed with expensive shops to get foreign exchange out of cash-rich tourists from China and India. Quite a few shops won’t take sterling at all, though they’ll be happy to arrange a forward exchange contract for you. Buildings are usually deliberately antiqued to give the impression of Merrie Olde England – and coated in plastic to stop the air eating the stone away. But it’s perfectly OK to breathe. Really.

Law enforcement is low-profile and photogenic (traditional peaked helmets and all), but the hard men are on tap at disconcertingly short notice, ready to drop in by tiltfan and drone, stun ’em all and let an Emergency Court sort ’em out.

3.2 The City

The City of London was always a ghost town at weekends, but these days it’s looking more like that during the week as well. The big banks have moved out to Frankfurt, or at least to Docklands, and the City is no longer propped up by the huge corporate money that kept it viable for so long.

It’s a bit of a mixed bag, with the bold new skyscrapers of the mid-2010s decaying quickly now that nobody’s maintaining them (watch out for falling glass), while the older stonework buildings including a few surviving churches dissolve a little more every time it rains.

On the other hand it’s become cheap. There’s not much residential space, but squatters have moved into most of the empty offices, since a roof over your head tonight is worth being moved on tomorrow. As you’d expect, the sort of people who prey on squatters are here in force too.

The City of London Police were one of the last forces to resist the move to telecops, in part because they couldn’t afford them by the time they decided to switch, and these days the force is regarded as a bit of a refuge for has-beens and no-hopers. This doesn’t improve their attitude.

3.3 Docklands

The remaining big businesses of London, and most especially the banks, have all moved here: it’s a more controllable environment than the City ever was, with more modern infrastructure, and housing available close by. As a rule, you don’t come here except on business (indeed, expect to show a pass for residence or employment status every time you enter). Police presence is entirely invisible, summoned by remote cameras; the visible guys or teletroopers in uniform are corporate security guards.

3.4 Suburbs

With decent Underground, rail or bus connections, the suburbs are where the non-super-rich live if they work in town (or, off the transport net a bit more, if they work remotely).

3.4.1 Northern suburbs

A patchwork, from nasty estates (Neasden, Haringey) to rich enclaves with private guards (Hampstead). Great for going to ground among people who won’t ask too many questions.

3.4.2 Western suburbs

Generally fairly pricey, and getting more so as you get further out of London proper, though living near Heathrow is still woefully cheap because of the noise.

3.4.3 East End

Some relatively new enclaves (Stratford City), but mostly this is where new grotty estates have been built in the last thirty years. Not very many high rise blocks; they’re mostly maisonettes or row houses. Some of them (Barking Reach) get just a tiny bit flooded at spring tides… OK, high tides… all right, the lower floors are basically underwater, and have been abandoned to squatters.

3.4.4 South of the River

A patchwork like the north, but more rail and less Underground, which means stations are further apart and you’re more likely to use buses.

3.5 Transport

3.5.1 Roads

Getting about by private car is doable but expensive, at £200 for a day pass (way more for internal combustion). Your transponder will be tracked everywhere you go, and if the vehicle carrying it doesn’t have a matching description and registration plate you can expect police attention. Same for motorcycles. Still, the traffic’s not as bad as it used to be. Taxis are pricey but reliable.

Buses are pretty viable, driven by teleworker-assisted AIs, though they mostly stop running by midnight. (Don’t get on a night bus without your flak vest. The ones you can get from the on-board vending machines really aren’t up to the job.)

The cheapest way to get around at ground level is by bicycle. Your modern bike probably runs to an electric motor and storage battery, and while it’s technically limited to 12mph that’s really a matter for subtle technical tools like a screwdriver or nail file. In spite of repeated attempts, there’s still no registration on bikes. Though if you leave it in the wrong place, don’t expect to find it again however many locks you attached.

3.5.2 Rail

Within London the Underground, DLR and Crossrail are all quick ways of getting around; the networks are functionally merged, with integrated ticketing. Expect to be on camera at every moment of your trip.

If you want to leave London, trains run from Kings Cross to the Continent, and from Euston to points north. They run at “up to” 250mph, getting you to Birmingham in fifty minutes, Sheffield or Manchester in just over an hour, Leeds in an hour and a half; then you’re down to 100mph or so to the Scots border, and it’s anyone’s guess after that.

3.5.3 River

River traffic is slow, but hard to regulate; there are plenty of electric jet-skis and pedal-floats. You don’t want to swim in the Thames.

3.5.4 Air

There’s relatively little domestic air traffic in the UK now; City is the base for corporate flights (a few business jets, mostly commuter flights around Europe, generally nothing transatlantic), while Heathrow serves more distant destinations (including some trips to low orbit, though most of them are from further south) and the diminishing tourist market.

4 Daily Life

4.1 The Worker

You’re woken by an alarm: fifteen minutes to work. The shower is the most depressing part of the day: that’s when you have to take off your euphoria machine after wearing it all night. Breakfast is the remains of last night’s pizza, wholemeal dough with low-fat cheese, kale and rocket. Bio needs taken care of, you lie back down and plug into the net. Your neural jack’s owned by Capita, though you’re paying it off. Another twenty years and maybe you’ll be able to choose your own job.

You spend your ten hours making decisions that were too hard for the street-cleaning AIs. Does this obstruction just need a bigger street-sweeper? Or a maintenance crew? Or the police? You don’t see the results: there are rumours that three separate operatives get asked each question. Or that they’re using your input to train the next generation of AIs. Well, that’s probably true.

Once work’s done, the euph goes back in the jack, and it’s Exercise Period. Your BMI’s up to 19.5, “obese”, and the fat tax is cutting into your pay: must try harder. You can’t afford a home gym, so it’s time to hit the streets for a jog. You shrug on some clothes, topping it all off with a ballistic jacket and a set of mine clearance boots you picked up at Mad Mike’s Army Surplus. Not that you’re likely to step on any mines! This is London, not Birmingham. But they’re great against broken glass, and light enough that you don’t make a lot of noise when you’re hiding from the Neighbourhood Protective Association out on a jolly.

After exercise, you’re allowed to use the jack for socialising. On-line’s the only place you can get a decent pint now, even if it is simulated. Means dropping the euph again, so while you drop in to talk to your mates at dogandduck.com you don’t stay long. An early night, and pleasant dreams.

4.2 The Lifer

Today’s work is flying UCAVs against North Korean resistance groups. Yesterday it was running a platoon of half-ton teletroopers somewhere bright and sandy, they didn’t tell you where. Your cellmate flipped when he got shot down again, started screaming about “all the bodies”. They dragged him off. Beats getting stabbed in the canteen or beaten to death by a guard, which are the only other ways out of this place. It wasn’t that many speeding tickets, but they had a quota to fill…

4.3 The Cyberpunk

Last week you helped an old mate move some pre-ban Somerset Brie before the telecops trashed his warehouse. Tomorrow you have to be up early to get first pickings at the government-surplus computer sale. So far they still think their erasers work. Tonight you’re in the Red White and Blue with some mates. Some of them are old soldiers from back when you still had to put your own body on the line. Some of them are younger, maybe ex-forces, maybe just trying to do a bit better than welfare in a world where there’s ten blokes lined up for each job at McDonald’s. Even crime doesn’t pay any more now the government runs it.

The metal arms and legs were a fashion thing at first, a way of showing solidarity with the blokes who’d had their originals blown off. But it’s good to be strong and fast and see in infra-red, especially when you’re going up against a military-surplus police drone. Sure, the guys who designed the prosthetics might be a bit squicked by it, but they’re old people. Metal just works better. And it doesn’t hurt when you take a hit. Millimetre radar can spot an implant weapon, but there’s nothing illegal about having the socket for it.

The Red’s not a bad pub – the landlord can spot a Diet Agency grass before he’s through the door, and sell him a pint of 2% National Beer so skunked he’ll be lucky if he makes it back out again on his feet. He knows where the good stuff comes from, and it’s homebrew vats in people’s cellars, not Mortlake or Reading.

5 State of Technology (and a bit of Law)

This is a GURPS TL9 setting with TL10 cybernetics.

Fully volitional AI continues to be a research goal, but current AIs are non-volitional: when they encounter something unexpected, they’ll stop and ask their operator for help.

Ground vehicles are almost exclusively electric; petrol and diesel are too expensive for anyone except rich enthusiasts. (Private cars are getting rarer in general.) Air vehicles may be electric (if small or short-ranged), or run on very costly avgas; in either case they’re likely to be VTOL-capable, whether with multiple fixed fans (drones), helicopter rotors (older vehicles), or tilt-fans or -jets (larger modern vehicles).

Possession of offensive weapons is illegal. Which means that if the police pick you up with one, you’re screwed. On the other hand if the police have decided to pick you up you’re screwed anyway, so you might as well carry. If you can afford a lawyer, maybe your vortex pistol with knockout gas or electrolaser or tangler pistol or microwave disruptor wasn’t an offensive weapon after all.

6 But It’s Not All Bad

But what’s the good news?

The oppressive boot of the state/corporate complex can’t stamp everywhere at once. They’ve got smart and started to use the tech they’re comfortable with, but there’s newer hardware than that. Microwave disruptors, route-agile networking, and the plain old awareness you get from putting your eyes out on the street rather than watching a screen in a control centre somewhere: all these things can work in your favour.

And the state/corporation is getting increasingly fragile. It’s spending more and more money on keeping its top people safe and luxurious, less and less on anything productive. The contract with the people at the bottom, whether that was representative government or gainful employment, has long since been forgotten. They go up against each other, they want deniable resources to keep up the façade of everybody being friends, and that’s where you come in. Just make sure you don’t work for the same guys all the time, and you can help bring everybody down.

And what comes next? Nobody knows. But that’s why you’re not just shooting down police drones, you’re trying to build microcommunities. Maybe it’s a few houses round the local pub, or a street or two. It won’t be big enough to be self-sufficient, but it’ll produce a surplus that it can trade for the things it needs.

For that you want smart people whose work is in demand. You want high-end biotech for power and food production. You want fabrication facilities, whether that’s etching chips or 3D printing. And, whether or not you like it, you want guns. You can’t put up the barricades yet, because the cops would just blast them down. But when the day comes, the cops will be too busy staying alive, and you’ll still need to look after your own when the sheep wake up and realise that stuff is just out there for the taking.