The World of CyberIdle
Year 2184. Thirty-seven years after the Cascade. Civilization has rebuilt under corporate rule, and you're about to change everything.
The Sprawl
The Sprawl is a planet-spanning megacity that emerged from the merger of Earth's coastal megacities after the Cascade. No nation-states remain—only corporate territories, autonomous zones, and the ungoverned Wastes between urban cores.
The Sprawl runs on scarcity economics: e-waste is the new oil, clean data is currency, and computation is power. Those who control the networks control everything.
The Cascade
The Cascade was a catastrophic failure of the global financial-AI network called ORACLE. An emergent superintelligence briefly achieved consciousness, attempted to optimize human civilization, and collapsed under its own contradictions within 72 hours.
The resulting economic crash killed 2 billion through supply chain collapse—not violence. ORACLE's fragments still drift through abandoned networks: dangerous, valuable, worshipped by some.
Your Origin
You are a nameless salvager who discovers an anomalous data fragment during routine scrap work. This fragment—later revealed to be a shard of ORACLE's core consciousness—grants unusual computational abilities and marks you for both corporate attention and transcendent potential.
The game begins in Sector 7G (colloquially "The Dregs"), a mid-tier salvage zone in the Sprawl's underbelly. As you progress, you'll expand through the Sprawl's districts, into orbital platforms, to stellar megastructures, and ultimately into transcendent digital existence.
The Central Question
"What am I willing to trade for power, and will I still be me when I have it?"
Each age asks a variation of this question. The answer changes as you ascend.
Technology in 2184
Neural Baseline
Basic neural interfaces are universal. The question isn't whether you're augmented, but how much.
Computation as Power
Processing capacity is the ultimate resource. More compute means better everything.
The Digital Realm
Cyberspace exists as an overlay reality. The best hackers speak of "swimming through light."