Ghost Protocol

You are a Ghost.  You do not officially exist.  In a world where someone's information is more real than their corporeal bodies, you are a dropped packet, a glitch.  Power brokers, agitators, gangsters and Corporate fixers hire specialists like you to handle discreet and dangerous business, the sort that can never make the news under any circumstances.  Your ability to move undetected is your principal asset; you are 100% deniable and that's precisely what your employers want.

 

The world is completely controlled by Corporate entities.  Real governments lost their teeth decades ago; they all kowtow before the Altars of Commerce.  Elected officials serve at the pleasure of their Executive handlers, indulging their every whim.  All business and communication occurs over a world-spanning Internet that is tenaciously metered, controlled and regulated by Corporate masters.  An active underground has sprung up to try and keep at least some parts of the Net truly wild and free but they are the silent voice in the choir.

 

The Net isn’t any one thing anymore.  It has become a balkanized mess of sub-nets strung together by the most tenuous threads through innumerable firewalls and counter-measure programs.  What was once the World Wide Web in the halcyon glory days of the Internet’s birth is now the World Wide Weird – a bizarre mixture of Corporate Virtual Reality playgrounds, ICE-locked dark nets, Freeware game worlds, community networks and e-commerce sites.

  You navigate these two worlds, the digital and the real, as effortlessly as the thought of breath.  You make your living by never existing.  Existence is death.   

This is a fan-created work was written for the Savage Worlds role-playing system in 2007