Cyberlife

Cyberlife is an Alternate Reality Game accessed via the Unified Council of System's Galactic Network (GalNet). It allows players to "become" members of a stocky bipedal primate race, living in a world ruled by Mega-Corporations, a game of cyberpunk and industrial espionage where the sky is the color of a TV tuned to a dead station.

Rumors abound that the game takes it's style and content from a Pre-Diaspora Terran tabletop & video game called "ShadowRun". As records from this period of Terran history are incredibly fragmentary, there is no proof for these rumors.

A memo from the Unified Science council reported the following:

The game Cyberlife encourages antisocial behavior in its play style and has unrealistic depictions of violence and crime. An attempt at suppressing it has caused no less than ninety different law firms on over fifty planets to engage in defending the game under archaic "Freedom of Artistic Expression" laws.

Only the user interface and supporting software is stored on the player's local machine, unlike standard massive multiplayer worlds. It appears their system transmits user input to servers, which are currently protected by mountains of slavering angry lawyers with credit signs in their eyes. Even login names are the property of GalNet Artistry Incorporated, as is the avatar appearance, making it difficult to get warrants to electronically spy on any players.

GalNet Artistry Incorporated is less than three Great Cycles old. Funding was apparently done through the anonymous donation site "FUNDMYDREAMS" to the tune of literal billions of dollars. Programming was done via "public listserv" code sites that were password encrypted. Code acquired was variations of older code, nothing special, just applied in a strange way.

We suggest that the game was built by, largely inexperienced, volunteer coders using publicly available freeware code, which is the reason for the unstable algorithm rather than any malevolent or secretive reason the games streaming code is unable to be broken.

Further examination is needed.

The game is actually a creation of the Terran corporations; Electronic Artistic Studios Incorporated, Galactic Studios Incorporated and Von Nuemann Artificial Intelligence Creations using GalNet Artistry Incorporated as a shell corporation to disguise the origin of the game.

The game was commissioned by Confederate Intelligence with the aim of gathering information on the everyday lives of the citizens of the Unified Council of Systems. The game servers being physically located in Terran Confederacy space. It has provided valuable insights into the functioning of Unified Council civilization.

Early on during the sixth Precursor War, the Precursor AWMs began an Electronic War against the Unified Council of Systems, penetrating GalNet and terrorizing it's citizen players of Cyberlife as well as the users of GalNet. Confed Int encouraged players to participate in their own efforts through the use of an in-game avatar known as Mr. Johnson, a corporate suited man with a colorless blank mannequin's face.

Many players joined the fight, many physically dying along with their avatars due to the bio-feedback from their full eVR rigs. The PAWMs took the in-game form of "Smaugs" and were also able to damage real world locations that were linked to locations in the game. One group of players were responsible for acquiring the ROM encoded secondary master algorithm for the planetary harvester class vessels and delivering it to Confed Int.

Following the in-game defeat of the PAWMs, they seem to be mounting a second campaign, concealing themselves within the game mechanics and using "Arnies" (T-800 Terminators) to attack. Crashrider, a seasoned player and survivor of the first Precursor NetWar, is currently engaged in an attempt to capture an Arnie with the intent of using data from it's brain to take the war to the Precursors.