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IamLEAM1983
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Post by IamLEAM1983 »

Is Polybius real in the Hopeverse?
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IamLEAM1983
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Post by IamLEAM1983 »

"What, like, the philosopher, man? Maybe you're referring to the spooktacular arcade ROM dump that time forgot!

At this point, what's out there for any righteous bone bro with a two-terabyte mirror of Déjà News to find on hard copy is actually a lot scarier than what you'd find in your own meatspace. Let's crank up the old Flux Capacitor, huh? Let's see what I can remember..."

He starts both rummaging through old file cabinets and rifling through old 486 hardware.

"Aha! There's the cheddar - 1983. Portland, Oregon. Arcades are blowing up, the entire world is a post-Elysium freakout. Like what's always the case after wars, folks wanna wipe the slate clean, delude themselves into thinking it'll never happen again, and then work on some shinier, chromier, better world. Max H-H-Headroom is the shit, Michael J. Fox is killing it in the billboards - people want knights and monsters and ghouls they can take down without causing a fuss. Every classic spook, every basic fear of more alien invasions - all of it gets sucked into the gaming zeitgeist. Everyone gets to be a hero in the midway and from here to maybe House of the Dead 2 in the early two-thousands, you'd have thousands of people a week just itching to make it seem like Rendell's just another mook you can shoot or another boss you can take down with the right items.

In the back, you've got the Kissinger-era Karthian Americans watching, and some of these chrome-domes are in the Secret Service... They're from a world that was packed with mucho suspicion, and now you've got these sugar-addled kids popping rare cases of exhaustion while they're desperately trying to put their names up in lights in Donkey Kong. They're rational by nature, they're real ice kings, man - so they see a generation being spoiled by senseless flashing lights. Add to that morons left over from MKULTRA who wonder if there ain't a way to pack lysergic acid in code form to keep the fractious fuckin' youth in check, and you've got one killer cocktail your Squid-bros would be proud of.

It doesn't take long for those odd teal-colored cabins to pop up here and there. I've got records showing that a few arcade runners got unusually fat cuts out of Polybius installs, so the NSA tried to at least make a juicy offer out of it. We've got ROM dumps in the Hopeverse, but they've all been sanitized: the subliminals don't flash, they're in plain view. You get a bog-standard Space Invaders clone with big fonts printed in such a way as to barely look legible on the edges - all reading creepy shit like Sleep. Consume. Vote. Denounce outsiders. Play the game. Keep playing.

Y'know, like you do. Since the whole thing was a beta, they didn't fuckin' bother keeping it subtle. I've got papers here talking about amnestic procedures - weird terminology included as-is - suggesting they defragged a bunch of minds between Portland and freakin' Des Moines, in 1984. Some kids came out fine, others just so happened to turn into complacent leeches. They can't play the game, so they play whatever it is they can get their hands on and can't work up anything like motivation to work. The programming's stuck all too well, in their case: they sleep. They consume. They stress the importance of following certain rancid-ass political undercurrents and make sociologists wet their pants...

By 1985? Gone. Kaput. No more Polybius. It just so happens that 1985's when the US trashed their own hybrid sciences program and started to funnel cash into Vernon Haskill's voluntary research initiative. I don't know the full sitch, but something kinda tells me rot had set in the US Defense Department; some quiet Absolutist type who figured he'd prevent other Elysiums by implementing massive social control routines.

Since we're not all eating protein paste or screaming at our dissident friends and family They Live style, you can kinda figure things panned out alright. Polybius is an urban legend by today's standards, with a nasty ROM dump that's worth as much as a piece of history as it might be worth some research."
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