It is the year 2175. Population growth on Earth is leveling out, with colonies on Luna and Mars growing by leaps and bounds. Everywhere on Earth, people are enjoying a higher standard of living than ever before. The United States of North America is still the world's superpower, and it seems to be approaching a capitalistic utopian condition. Travel is fast, food is fast, people live a long time. Most people are really fairly happy.
Of course, every society has its malcontents. By the start of the Virtual Revolution in 2120, the USNA prison system was bursting at the seams. Recidivism was low, due to improved counseling and education, but the hardcore sociopathic element was growing rapidly, especially as a result of a new strain of inhibition deadening drugs. People lived in fear in most urban areas, there just wasn't enough room to catch all the criminals. The government decided that something must be done.
In 2121, the Grider-Munoz bill was passed, authorizing a complete overhaul of the criminal justice system in the USNA. To do this, they appointed Dr. Stephen Whitlow, a brilliant criminal sociologist. Washing his hands of much of the existing system, Whitlow assembled a team of sociologists, psychologists, behavioral scientists, and virtual reality programmers. In a remarkable seven years, Whitlow and his team created a new world, one that existed only in the mind of a dozen very smart computers. Originally called Terra Noche, Night Earth, it was a dark parallel of Earth with two large cities and only a few simulated people, automated medics, prostitutes, and the like. It would be inhabited only by incurable deviants, the criminals who were so violent, so deeply such into psychosis that they could never be allowed into society again. The media, eagerly following this new slant on criminal justice, flippantly dubbed the project "Whit's End."
The first criminals were uploaded into Whit's End in 2127. The small group, only about fifty men, were watched carefully for a year, with exhaustive notes taken on them at all times. While in the program, the convicts' corporeal bodies were placed in cryosleep, saving thousands of dollars in care, feeding and exercise for the prisoners. At the end of the year, the project was declared a great success by the Whit's End creative team. Even the prisoners, consulted in brief video interviews, agreed that life in a VR world was better than life in jail. The Whit's End project went online worldwide.
Initially the program was a huge financial drain. The government spent billions of dollars to equip prisons with the requisite cryosleep and VR equipment, not to mention psychological testing to choose what prisoners were fit to send into the program. But by the program's tenth anniversary, Whit's End had already all but paid for itself. Over a million prisoners had been uploaded, freeing up money, space, and resources in the prison system without actually releasing the prisoners or killing them. By this time in 2175, most of the first and even the second wave of prisoners have died out, and the program is still running strong.
But not everyone is happy with the Whit's End system of justice. In the program, whenever someone is killed, their corporeal body suffers some of the shock of that death. When a prisoner is killed too many times, or too violently, they will die for real. Some humanitarians argue that in a world full of sociopaths, uploading a prisoner is the same as giving them a death sentence. There is also a growing concern among some educators and psychologists that young people may deliberately commit violent crimes in order to gain access to Whit's End, which they view as a glamorous "thieves' world" But strangely enough, the greatest fear currently being expressed about Whit's End is that it might not exist at all. Uploading is a life sentence, so, somewhat like heaven or hell, no one who's crossed over comes back. A small but vocal minority, calling itself Citizens Acting for Reform in Prisons, has taken it into their collective head that it's quite possible that Whit's End doesn't exist, that the government is merely uploading criminal minds into nothingness. All the proof that the Whit's End scientists have mustered, video feed translated from the digital patterns of the program, prisoner brainwave patterns, even a book that one of the more erudite prisoners managed to write and get published, have been dismissed as easily fabricated. The only thing that will soothe their minds, apparently, is seeing with their own eyes. Until then, they will continue to believe that Whit's End is nothing less than the most widely used torture device of all time, sensory deprivation on a massive scale.
Unwilling to bear the massive amount of bad press resulting from CARP's anti-Whit campaign, the USNA government has authorized a single two-way trip into Whit's End. A group of impartial scientists, vetted both by CARP and Whit's End, will be uploaded into the program to view its conditions and talk to its inhabitants, then come back and share their findings. The group will also include Teela Rogers, the founder of CARP, and Dr. Stephen Whitlow Jr., son of the program's namesake and current director of Whit's End. This will be the first time a non-convict has entered the program since Dr. Whitlow Sr. toured in 2128, just after beta testing had finished.
Unfortunately, the trip seems fraught with problems. First and foremost, no provision was ever made for non-participants in the program, so there is no failsafe mechanism to keep them from being hurt. If a prisoner attacks a scientist, that scientist stands a good chance of being injured or killed. This wouldn't be a big issue if it weren't for the second problem, however. When Dr. Whitlow exited the program after six days in 2128, he nearly died from the shock of downloading so quickly after being uploaded. It was determined that for a safe return, travelers should wait at least a month in the program before downloading. And with no failsafes, the idea of a group of scientists surviving Whit's End and its inhabitants for a month is laughable.
And that is where our hiring bid comes in. Whit's End is looking for a team of guards for this expedition, experts in armed and unarmed combat, master tacticians, veteran fighters, or just plain bodyguards to accompany the scientists into what is quite literally the most dangerous place the human mind can conceive. The pay is very good, and the trip will be the adventure of a lifetime, but the squeamish, the slow, and those incapable of accommodating a group of eggheads for a month need not apply.
Click on the buttons below to meet the team or click on the join button and email the host for a character sheet and more information...if you think you can handle it...
