The Rat’s Nest

The asphalt jungle of the year 2071 in Seattle, United Canadian and American States. While Megacorporations dictate the life Downtown and their mighty and wealthy structures that manifest in chrome, glass and steel constructs all over the coast of the Puget Sound, life behind those shallow waters of the rich is not as glamorous.

Behind the shadows of the skyscrapers and arcologies, pressed with their back to the walls of polluting factories and corporate facilities live the people without a future in this new glamorous Matrix driven “Emerald City” – the lowlifes. The squatters, the gangs, the drug dealers and those who are hunting them – the predators of the night.

While many of those dream dreams about becoming famous rock stars or nasty drug barons some have no hope to even get to that. Deep back pressed by the booming city behind the steep hills of the Cascades, buried in the ashes and acid rain of the still smoking Mount Rainer are the infamous Barrens, worst of all maybe the Redmond Barrens. Once a blooming district but after the awakening and two matrix crashes the district is lost. The people living there, housing in abandoned ruins and gang-run turfs are squatters. And even those do not dare to go deeper into the biggest slum of the continent.

But few are living even there, where nobody goes – the Rat’s Nest. Okay, pal, you’ve heard a lot of the Rat’s Nest, it’s not as bad as ya think. We are living on the biggest landfill of the continent but we have work. We are recyclers and of that we are proud. We have organized ourselves, we try to be useful, we are living from what the rest of the Barrens – the rest of the city is throwing away. There’s no shame in being a recycler.

And this is our world. We are the last bastion of civilisation out here. We are living in a container settlement on the stinking banks of the Snoqualmie River, that washes the dirt of chemical plants downstream. Waste water that nobody cares about cause it’s coming down contaminated by Glow City anyways, those radiating ruins of that reactor that has blown up. The people there – that’s worse than us. We – we have work. We have pride. We have even our own police force. We call them the Scrappers.

About one thousand to two thousand people work on the fields daily – which is what we call the landfill. But only about two hundred have organized themselves into our settlement. Chinese, Vietnamese, Irish, a few Latinos and mixed through the races.

No Sir, we’re no thieves. Not here. Okay, things happen to turn up here that are missing elsewhere but that’s the way recycling works, isn’t it? Where do you think the wares are coming from you can buy at the Bargain Basements? Who do you think delivers goods to Tourist Ville, the old Redmond district? Who do you think is doing the main work and keeps the Barrens running?

It’s us. The Scrappers. Us, the squatter community that is called “the worst gang land and a shame for Seattle”. I tell ya, it’s all lies and propaganda. We have a law. And we are living and dying by it.