Storyline

Past the skeletal buildings of the anarchic New Carthage outskirts, beyond its armored city wall, a vast Wasteland of post-apocalyptic Hell awaits the truly brave. Its glowing sands crawl with the horrific mutant champions of natural selection, and are stained with the blood of the weak. Delta-winged shuttles crisscross the scarred planet as reconstruction continues under the control of emergent superpowers in a new world order: mega-corporations and crime syndicates. Bangkok harbors shadowy black markets of cybernetic technology, while orbital colonies turn serenely on axes of money, power, and privilege. As the physical landscape still smoulders from the ravages of global wars and environmental disasters, an alternate reality glows brightly in the worldwide matrix network. Deckers and console jockeys swim the depths of this data sea, knights rendered in chrome on battlefields formed in the cognitive non-space of a collective consciousness.