Red Markets: A Game of Economic Horror

101 cover the exercise yard in landmines. You can still produce marrow minus some limbs. “Blasphemy!” says the DHQS man. “Nonsense!” says the press secretary. “Why would the DHQS permanently harm brave Immunes when they can produce life-saving Supressin for their whole lifetimes?” say the millions of illiterate Recessionistas, brainwashed by car-camp propo. Yeah, I guess. Look how well humans have treated their other renewable resources. That’s why there are so many elephants still around, right? Black Market SupressIn The DHQS price for informing on Immunes is sizable, but it’s nothing on the fortune to be made selling frozen marrow itself. If the regulated, government labs are willing to drain people so hard their bones turn to dust, what chance do Immunes have with black market operators? The most notorious Supressin operation is still Scrape, which is apparently still at large in the Loss. According to rumors, the original mad science lab responsible for discovering Supressin never shut down. Nobody can agree who runs it. Some say StopLoss took over, others claim it’s a DHQS black site. Maybe raiders looking to get rich took up the mantle after the officials closed up shop? Whatever the case, Scrape is nomadic. No one can place it for very long, and by the time anyone looking to shut it down shows up, the lab has pulled up stakes and moved on. Like Recession labs, Scrape tries to let their cattle recover in order to maximize their profits, but traveling the Loss is nearly impossible at the best of times, not to mention doing it with a bunch of wounded prisoners in tow. Before Scrape relocates, they “render” the herd down to the bone and worry about kidnapping new stock later. Some people claim the whole enclave is just a Loss legend, but try telling that to the mutilated few that claim to have escaped. At least Scrape will allow donors to recover if it fits their bottom line. There are plenty Heroes” of DHQS propaganda sit around all day, locked in cells or chained to hospital bed, force-fed hematopoietic friendly food and waiting for their charts to say it’s okay to drain them again. If I’m being truthful, there are worse ways to live. It may be a life of constant sickness, agony, and boredom, but plenty in Free Parking or the Loss would kill for the three squares a day. It’s certainly not worse than those early Immunes had it; the ones they vivisected in search of Supressin. At least the DHQS attempts to make their captives a renewable resource. But nobody getting scraped clean in a government hospital is getting paid to do so. The only people the DHQS pays for Immunity are informants. Did you see your friend get bit twice and never turn? Want to get out from under that Valet pimping your ass for cigarettes and ration cards? Just find your local guard and squeal! One successful tip pays enough to get an entire family out of Free Parking. For the skilled Immune hunters, it’s a great way to sell your soul for a high-rise apartment. As for the people betrayed and turned into a Supressin culture, what if they provided for loved ones before being conscripted? Well, their families are shit out of luck. The government pays for snitches, but the Immune donate “for the good of the nation.” If it was the other way around, people might hold some solidarity with the Immune instead of selling them for a quick buck. The markets can’t tolerate that, and so the majority of Supressin’s production costs come from bribes getting people to rat on those “deserting their genetic duty.” Most Immune turn themselves in now; at least then they can give the one-time bonus to their loved ones. Once someone’s inside, life is more than binge television and foot-long needles. There’s no shortage of stories about “deep cuts:” times when the production quotas don’t agree with the schedule of the human body. The number of Immunes in medical service missing arms and legs ain’t because they

102 only to be gunned down by your fellow man. But I can also sympathize with those who didn’t stop to question why these black-veined things coming at them moved a little different than the others. If you witnessed a Latent get shot anywhere but the head, it got up as a Vector. If I thought everything with black veins was going to revert back to Vector speed again, my trigger finger would get itchy too. I guess all this is to say that, if a bleeding heart liberal like myself still gets unnerved by the sight of the Latent, it’s no wonder so few of them survived. Mercy for those that need it the most is always in short supply during a war. Factor in the undeniable, inescapable threat Latent bodies present to Blight quarantine? I bet no more than a dozen were alive in the Recession by the time the DHQS of Valets and raiders selling frozen red marrow on the black market. If an Immune gets caught by one of those groups, they’re deboned like fucking fish while still alive. And even that’s preferable to capture by the Church of Holy Communion. Those vampiric psychos believe Immune blood provides immortality or some such shit. Ugh... I’d rather be eaten by casualties. AdmIttIng Latency Immunity, and the drug derived from it, may be responsible for the majority of Latent infections, but the Blight sometimes decides to go into torpor for no goddamn reason at all. There were “natural” Latents before we discovered how to produce them en masse, and the announcement of Supressin K-7864 meant admitting that there was a grey area between casualty and healthy human. It was possible to carry the Blight without dying from it or killing for it... at least for a time. The drug took a condition far rarer than even immunity and made it undeniable. The Recession just shot Latents before, despite rumors of their existence. But now latency was the only insurance they could sell against the terrible Blight. Nobody would stockpile their magic drug if it could only save them for a bullet to the brain. The shoot-on-sight designation would have to change. Persecuted underclass would have to do. The Naturals In HIdIng I’m not going to trot out the “I have Latent friends” bullshit. I control a small army; I’m beyond online performative gestures, even when discussing the uncomfortable truths: I get why we shot Latents during the Crash. I’m not saying it was right or smart, but I understand the choice to pull the trigger. If Banhammer wants to scream at me about my “clean privilege” for saying that, I suppose I deserve it, but I can recognize more than one truth at a time. I can acknowledge that surviving an attack and the agony of infection must be horrifying. I can mourn the tragic irony of living through a supernatural violation

103 season. Right as those naturals started to come out of hiding, every asshole got the message that hate crime time was running out. The suits will say it was an unfortunate oversight; a tragic misreading of the public’s emotional state. I say the DHQS wanted a few hundred less Latents to deal with. I can count the number of natural Latents that survived through the passing of the FIIEC on my hands. In Free Parking, where most had come to hide, the lynch mobs numbered in the thousands. You’d think people would make it quick, what with the infection risk. But no. A lot of people see Latents as no more than zombies that can feel fear. At least one fresh outbreak occurred because the gang beating got too enthusiastic, slinging Blight-strewn blood into someone’s eye. ProductIve QuarantIne After the mass pardon incited genocide, the government had to act “for the safety of its Latent citizens.” Suuuuurrrreeee. They were never going to let Blight carriers live in their new quarantecture cities; this way the DHQS didn’t lose their precious moral majority. There are only three operating Latent communities in the Recession. One is the Potemkin village of “Haven,” located just outside DC. If the national media needs to show how great it is to live Latent, they grab footage from the caged suburb where every trust-fund boy and senator’s daughter unlucky enough to get bit goes to retire. They have Latent guards, in case anyone dies of natural causes and goes Vector. Otherwise, Haven residents get to live closer to preCrash splendor than nearly anyone else in the country. They pay rent in daily reenactments of a black-veined version of Leave it to Beaver and by fueling anti-Latent groups like Triage. The vitriol you see spilled online against the “Latent welfare state” is fueled entirely from doctored Haven footage. It keeps the plebs eager to inform on each other if anyone ends up having to take a dose of Supressin. Most Latents live in a more brutal reality. admitted the condition existed, all of them in hiding 24/7. But the government had to trot out some test subjects to prove Supressin worked. They had to give doses to their soldiers in the field to ensure they kept fighting, and they had to deal with those forced to take the shot. For a while there after the leak, it really did seem like the Recession was going to make a place for the Latent. People that had been in hiding since the amputation slowly began revealing themselves. Big mistake. The Mass Pardon In the flattering interpretation of events, we ascribe the fallout from the mass pardon to bureaucratic idiocy. After admitting Latents existed the government supposedly got flooded with a lot of anxious questions from people worried they were going to jail for shooting a Latent. It’s a fair concern, I guess, though I question how many actually called their congressmen and asked, “Hey, it turns out I committed a murder. Even though there’s no way to prove it and no witnesses, should I worry about you coming to arrest me?” Thus, for the public good, the White House announced it would be using Posse Comitatus (yes, the Recession was still under martial law, technically) to pass the Federal Imminent Infection Exclusion Clause. The FIIEC waived the government’s right to prosecute all violent crimes in instances where the Blight could be proven a “reasonable threat.” This law would essentially wipe from the record all previous crimes against Latents, as well as a number of other accidental killings on account of wounds misperceived as bites. Of course, the executive branch wanted to give the appearance democracy was still a thing, so they said the law would be passed later that week in a special congressional session. They planned on passing one soon. After that moment, “veiners” would be considered human again. But announcing that the law was planned and not already on the books basically set the clock on Latent hunting

104 prejudice out here in the Loss. But even if there’s a strong anti-Latent sentiment in a community, most can’t afford to turn them away. Someone that can get bit and keep fighting is just too damn valuable to pass up. Latents can loot the dead, clear fences, and scout without fear of infection. Your average Taker crew that doesn’t have a Latent on payroll is willing to pay big to get one, infection risk be damned. In the Loss, most of our pre-Supressin Latents have either retired or been promoted to run entire enclaves. They even have an entire city to themselves called Leper. For all the terrors of the Loss, a Latent at least has a chance out here. The greatest cause of latency, Supressin K-7864, is only available at an enormous cost through the black market, yet the Loss has more Latent people in one state than in the entire Recession combined. Some view smuggling Latents out from under the DHQS’s boot as emancipation, but just as many see it as workforce recruitment. Either way, there are a lot of operations on the border now designed exclusively for Latent trafficking. HIghbury v. USA It’s barely a year after the Crash. The Recession has created a jack-booted fascist army and plans to extend martial law indefinitely. Their only plan for controlling the worst refugee crisis in history involves devaluing two national currencies at once. Meanwhile, the proles not busy starving to death are selling each other out as fast as possible, turning the Immune into livestock and the Latent into slaves. And all the while, the worst plague imaginable keeps knocking on the door. So what does it? What spark threatens to light the fires of revolution? A fishing shack. I hate how dumb history can be sometimes. I’d prefer the assassination of a duke, but we owe our modern condition to a fucking fish shack. It’s not a coincidence that the other two Recession Latent communities are right on the Great Lakes Line at the most actively invaded sections of the border. When the bodies start building a ramp that might break quarantine, guards throw the Latents out of their tents and over the wall. They move thousands of corpses to the incinerators every month: men, women, and children slaving for days in the brutal cold. Sometimes the guards shoot any Cs that come to attack the work crews. Sometimes they just laugh and take bets. Needless to say, you don’t see a lot of reporting from inside the Great Lakes camps. Then there are the Latent communities the government doesn’t even acknowledge. If the DHQS needs slave labor that can’t get infected, they ship Latents out to their Loss settlements and work them until they die. How your average soldier rationalizes this shit is beyond me. Statistically, soldiers are the most likely to go Latent in the first place; they have the easiest access to Supressin K-7864 and come into the most contact with Blight most often. Perhaps every DHQS private believes he’ll be sent off to The Latent Regiment. It’s true that most soldiers that survive the Supressin shot get recruited, but the LR is far from light duty. They are basically the DHQS’s version of the French Foreign Legion. The unit polices itself and roams where it likes in the Loss whenever off mission. There are horror stories about entire enclaves wiped out by the LR on leave. But their shitty behavior doesn’t extend solely from malice. The regiment is essentially on a death march around the wasteland. Their members’ terms of service are extended indefinitely, and the spooks in DHQS throw them at the worst jobs. The survival rate is so low that the LR’s ranks have cycled completely at least three times in the four years since it was founded. Latent TraffIckIng You know who doesn’t give a shit if you’re Latent? Enclaves. Well, most enclaves. There’s still a lot of

105 largest bioengineering corporation in the world. Alosine was one of the few agricultural giants to survive the Crash largely unscathed, and it had busied itself ever since trying to snatch up every government contract possible. They also recognized the currency problems the Recession was engineering for itself and that the billion dollar contracts they were being granted for the development of drone farming and new crops might soon not be worth the paper they were printed on. For months, executives had been trying to play a longer game. They didn’t want payment in money; they wanted salvage rights to abandoned land and asset seizure whenever the Loss was reclaimed. The legal status of such property was a complete unknown. The unprecedented situation kept the government from promising anything except money, which made Alosine demand more to counter risk, which led to printing more money, which led to more risk, etc. Alosine knew the situation was untenable, but they couldn’t find a way to break the stalemate until one of their former employees lost his fishing shack. The shack and surrounding acres had been Highbury’s property all through the Crash. Now it was being declared Loss as a result of redrawing lines on the map. But if the government could declare eminent domain and seize Highbury’s land, what was to stop them from doing the same for everything west of the Mississippi? What, if anything, was there to stop the DHQS from stealing 65% of the country once the last casualty rotted to dust? Was the Blight being used as an excuse to establish a kleptocratic military junta? Though Alosine would pitch him as such, Highbury wasn’t some yeoman farmer divested of his last possession by an evil bureaucracy. He was a bargaining chip being used by a soulless corporation. If the courts ignored the case, Alosine had the juice to make a big stink about it. With every denied appeal, they threatened to ruin the legitimacy of the new Recession government. If courts GenesIs Most of the Mississippi border took care of itself once the bridges were blown or fortified. The Great Lakes Line was another story. Roughly 200 km of the border had points where casualties could wade across. Fortifications had to be erected fast. They had to be sturdy enough to stop not only the dead, but also desperate refugees fleeing the Loss. In their haste, mistakes were made. Those in the armed services not being forced into the DHQS spent the first two years tweaking the Great Lakes Line according to new intel and logistical demands. One such instance occurred on the St. Louis River. Initially, the military fortified a small island in an area where the river forked and came back together. The hope had been to fortify the Western bank with a fence, then use the island and the eastern bank as two emergency fallback positions. As more mobs kept stumbling into the area, Chicago Command made the call to abandon construction on the western bank. The garrison on the island was to keep construction on the eastern back covered from attack until the fence was completed. Once finished, the island garrison would recede behind the wall and abandon the island to the Loss. The island contained almost nothing except a single fishing shack. Little more than a wooden hut, the building was owned by a man named Mason Highbury. It was the last piece of property he owned that hadn’t been given up to the Loss. He’d lost millions in the Crash, along with his entire family, and now he was going to lose his little shack. The story had a lot of pathos. In order to navigate the atrophied capillaries of sympathy in the Recession, nothing but a tearjerker would do, but it still wouldn’t have been enough without juice. Luckily, Highbury’s sympathizers had big, big pockets. Corporate Appeals For all the tragedy that plagued his life, Mason Highbury had been blessed in one very big way: he was the retired CFO for the

106 in Free Parking had surpassed those seen right after the Crash. The destruction of all personal property was the straw breaking the back of the American people. Up until that point, most had labored in the hopes that, one day, things would get back to normal. The Highbury case threatened to break that delicate delusion, and it became very clear that if the Federal Supreme Court didn’t hear the case, the Recession was set to tear itself apart from the inside. The number one tactic in legal warfare is stalling. The government did its best to drag the case out as long as possible, but pushing the trial date back didn’t calm the civil unrest; it merely delayed the slide into full-blown revolution. Alosine had forced their hand. To get out of the situation, the Recession government had weeks to resolve a myriad of legal conflicts far more pernicious than the ownership of a fishing shack. listened, Alosine got a platform to demand its payment in reclamation property. By the time it got to the Supreme Court, Alosine had partnered with the legal departments from a dozen other corporate entities. They created their own press division to cover the trial. Highbury was a puppet for interests salivating at the idea of reclaiming the Loss for their own. CrIsIs of ConfIdence Alosine and the rest had enough juice to push a message without the cooperation of the nationalized news services. They had enough clout to counter official propaganda and, more importantly, they were better at it. As the Highbury v. USA moved through the courts, their simple message got louder and louder. The good times will never return. Everything you’ve ever worked for belongs to them now. By the time Highbury had to appeal the decision to the Illinois Supreme Court, riots

107 could even be expected? How many people, exactly, were actually employed? How could the government cut taxes to stimulate growth whilst trying to fund an entirely new branch of the military? How could they raise taxes when millions couldn’t even feed themselves? Nearly 50% of the human population was dead. Who got their stuff? Their relatives? Which relatives were still alive? Even if you knew who survived, how would you find them? Did a Will still count if the state that issued it no longer existed? What if there were no living relatives? Did property go to the government through probate? That would only mean a few million more cases than the court system was ever designed to handle. How would that property be distributed? What about people that weren’t dead, but were homo sacer? What was to stop people from declaring each other quarantine breakers for the sole purpose of stealing reclamation rights? How could you prove you’d escaped the West when the government didn’t even have census data? What happened if your inheritance got used or destroyed by an Related PolIcy Struggles Alosine’s work spinning the Highbury case was masterful, but no one started throwing Molotovs because they wanted some retiree to have a place to store his rod. Highbury was significant only in that it popped the bubble of the Recession’s denial. The Valet crime, the unemployment, the Immune hunters, the Latent threat — all of it had been tolerated based on this unjustifiable hope for the future. As a few lines of legalese threatened to make reclaiming the old days impossible, people began to snap. Millions in the car camps had been literally stripped naked when they came to the Recession, only to be starved, enslaved, and preyed upon. They watched their Immune loved ones get deboned and their Latent neighbors imprisoned. And now they learned the Blight could end tomorrow, and they still wouldn’t have a home to go back to? A lot more car camps tore themselves apart with rioting and Canadian insurgency groups held a hell of recruitment drive during the trial. There were also a series of more cerebral concerns tied up in the Highbury case. First off, the census data had been rendered useless. Surviving states could only guess at their population and demographics. Free Parking and migration had thrown congressional districts into complete disarray. It was nearly impossible to run a coherent election because no one knew who their base was, where they were located, or what they believed. Hell, no one knew how many people needed to be elected to state and federal positions. How was Congress to be run when the entire population of 22 states was declared dead or migrated? Did they need to have special elections for state officials killed in the Crash? If so, who would vote them in? What about the legislators that did escape to the Recession? Did the Recession cast them out of power and wait around while they built personal factions for an upcoming civil war? Next were monetary concerns. How were taxes to be collected? What kind of income

108 the best they could do on short notice or their plan to get the Loss to do their job for them. How It Works Bounty is exactly what it claims to be: it’s a bounty paid by the US government for information on its citizens. Before the Crash, every state in the union used embedded RFID and coded microchips in their IDs. Social security cards, driver’s licenses, voter registration cards, and a half dozen other documents followed suit. Specialty print requirements combined with a unique digital signature in the chips made forgery nearly impossible. In short, American IDs could be trusted as the real deal. And most people had their IDs on them. If they’d been in the Recession for the entirety of the Crash, proving their identity was easy. Most who had fled after the Whisper carried their wallets as well. Even if they’d been stripped in a cattle chute, their old IDs could be recovered fairly easily by DHQS excursions across the river. Some casualties still even had their licenses on them; those cards could be collected as proof of death whenever they wandered too close to a fortified bridge or the Great Lakes Line. The bounty system turned old IDs into a defacto currency. People that turned in their old IDs received a new card and a fixed amount of cash for every old government document. As a result, the census data would slowly stabilize and the DHQS could begin cross-referencing proof of life with digitized property tax records. Any lost data necessary for such cross-referencing earned an even greater reward. In exchange, citizens received a small stimulus and felt more secure about their prospects in the post-Crash economy. For every ID collected off casualties without listed heirs, the DHQS could lay claim to that person’s property, exchange its estimated salvage value with corporations like Alosine for needed work, and use the remainder to fuel bounty payouts to the populace. And DHQS was pretty much the only organization with access to the proof of death bounty, enclave before the Loss was reclaimed? Was the government responsible for compensation because they were the ones that separated you from your property? Were the homo sacer responsible for the theft? How do you prosecute a dead person? What if the DHQS commandeers the property? Since their soldiers are still legally considered people, now is compensation required? What’s the blue book value for a car abandoned on a Utah interstate for five years with a casualty still strapped into the back seat? What about the Immune? And the Latent? Did they retain rights to their possessions, or was everything lost upon diagnosis? If the Latents retained property rights, what about Vectors and casualties? Do we need to go put one between grandma’s eyes before we can legally sell her house? Bounty The fix was in on the Highbury case. No one in the new government wanted to wrap up their condemnation of Hunter only to be unseated by an angry, confused revolution. The Supreme Court case was delayed only long enough to get a system in place that would appease the masses. Put simply, the ruling said the following: The government maintained absolute authority to set quarantine zones. However, if you owned something before the Crash, you owned it once the quarantine ended. The government would seize any property left unclaimed after the reclamation. Determining what belonged to whom was now the responsibility of the DHQS. The Highbury decision essentially set up the DHQS to institute the bounty system, incentivizing the populace to help recover vital census data and stake claims. Either way, the new currency was announced an hour before the Supreme Court even made the verdict public. The populace slipped back into the delusion that their lives before the Crash mattered, and the sitting government was saved. It also created the Red Market overnight, but we may never know if that was

109 believe the DHQS is that stupid, and I feel like all of us — especially the Moths — are being played. On the one hand, the Recession had no real way to guess how many of us were alive out here. I limit access to the LifeLines forums pretty fanatically, and even I’m shocked at the tenacity and sheer number of enclaves out here in the Loss. It’s possible the DHQS figured it would fund proof of life payouts with proof of death bounty seizures because only the DHQS would have access to the latter. By the time it occurred to them that there was about a million more homo sacer than they had imagined, it was too late. They’d already given us a currency through which we could trade with the Recession for vital supplies, and correcting the mistake would have meant the same anarchy caused by Highbury v. USA. On the other hand, if the DHQS was trying to get the Loss to do their job for them, I can’t think of a scheme more elegant than bounty. Nowadays, Takers don’t just kill Cs to keep the homestead safe; pulling cards is the entire business model. Reclamation is fucking impossible in my lifetime. It’s a goddamn logistical nightmare only possible through dreams and magical thinking. It’s the work of generations, not the work of a single term limit. So why not get the people already declared dead to start the work for you? Most people never pull enough bounty to do more than perpetuate their own suffering, but every dead C is one the Recession never has to deal with. Bounty could just be a trick to keep us fighting each other and clearing the dead rather than forming an army to storm the border. Bureaucratic fuck-up or hopeless conspiracy, the fact remains that the Loss has no shortage of bounty. We have the dead folks carrying it, all the stuff it’s meant to represent, and all the proof as to who it belongs. ConversIon and Bounty HoardIng Paradoxically, the Loss doesn’t turn in the majority of its bounty. They hoard it and watch the price of the few who do. as they were the only organization with a mandate to operate over the border. Interestingly, the stability of the bounty system only works because of the wealth inequality present in pre-Crash America. The government pays out at a rate slightly lower than the average property rate of one preCrash adult, roughly equivalent to the scrap price of an average car and the possessions in a one-bedroom apartment. Giving out that much value in exchange for every ID would quickly bankrupt the government, but DHQS bounty collection offsets the costs. For every 99 casualties that died paupers, one corpse wanders too near the fence and ends up having owned a chain of stores or hundreds of acres of land. Proof of death and a lack of heirs for one big fish funds the rest of the program because now the government can sell salvage rights to that property. In addition to preventing the collapse of civil order, bounty corrected the hyperinflation problem by cementing a currency value to an old-world standard of physical, confirmable assets. As a currency, it’s essentially deflationary. While the value of one bounty is still much greater than that of the ration dollar or US dollar, the value of a bounty today pales in comparison to the value on Day One. They aren’t printing any more of the old IDs, so every bounty turned in deflates the value of the next. The value of the goods that ID represents also decreases with every year the Loss goes unreclaimed. This constantly falling value, tied as it is through exchange with ration and US dollars, has corrected the hyperinflation caused by over-printing currency in the early days of the Recession. But if there is a mint for bounty, it’s the casualty-infested Loss. Bounty may have saved the nation, but it also essentially turned our prison into a bank vault. The Loss Monopoly I waffle on my opinion of the bounty system. Some days I can’t believe how stupid the DHQS could have been to give people like us such a resource. Other days, I literally can’t

110 and the value remains stable so long as the exchanges maintain the value of crypt to the number of IDs in their vault. Essentially, it’s the gold standard, except we mine dead people instead of rocks. The Taker’s Role The DHQS and the Recession managed to get their little dystopia stable enough to selfperpetuate, but in doing so they accidentally enfranchised some of the people they’d left to die along the way. Life in the Loss had by no means become easy, but the influx of capital and essential goods facilitated by bounty meant death was no longer a certainty. As long as the fences stayed up, enclaves could find a niche within the market by selling their wasteland as a futures commodity. It wasn’t enough to get most people out of the grinding poverty and constant danger of the Loss. Bounty usually just made suffering more sustainable. Still, one group was uniquely placed to exploit the new situation. Whatever amounted to political and economic power out here had always rested with Takers, but bounty only lived over the fence. The willingness to risk your ass going over to get it became more valuable than ever before. Post-Apocalypse Is PrIvIlege The desire to unplug, the fantasy escape from that endless swell of items on a to-do list, the fruitless longing for simplification — we all felt that before the Crash. But we weren’t so dumb as to think we’d have the willpower to go off and live in the woods by choice. Our resolve would cave the second we got a new text notification about someone liking our selfies. So we fantasized about some dashing young disaster coming along to whisk us away from our own weakness. Nobody in the Loss thinks that way now. There ain’t nothing simple about living in a world without safety nets. We don’t just go hunt in the woods for sport and wait patiently for crops to grow while, I don’t know, whittling? Everything out here is trying to kill The value of an ID as a universal unit of exchange between enclaves is far greater than the one time payment received for turning it in. For a while there, every enclave was inventing its own economy, and navigating the differences made essential trade a pain in the ass. With the DHQS insuring the bounty as a consistent measurement of value, trade among enclaves became much easier. A bounty exchanged out in the Loss can be reearned and traded again, but put it on a drone headed to the Recession? That’s value you’re never going to see again. Even though it might seem like turning bounty in permanently is the only way to deal with the Recession, even then we tend to keep the cards in rotation. For instance, one bounty could keep a family in Free Parking fed for a week, but the smart move for them is to pool cards and hire work over the border. Lets say all the families in a tent put together fifty bounty and hire a Taker group to recover... I don’t know... a truck full of bicycles from the Loss. They spend 40 on the crew and 10 to bribe a DHQS guard to let them across a bridge. Now they’ve got hundred rusty bicycles that cost them nothing to make. They sell each one for two bounty a piece, netting 150 bounty in profit. That’s enough money to get some of them out of Free Parking forever, or they could re-invest and steal some more assets from the Loss. Meanwhile, that Taker crew is using their 40 bounty to buy food, medicine, and ammo from enclaves too deep in the Loss to trade with the border, all the while collecting more off casualties put down along the way. Those enclaves trade with enclaves even further to the West, who in turn funnel goods and more recovered bounty back East. The value of an ID is just too good to burn on the DHQS, which is why the value of bounty has remained largely stable for the last two years. It’s gotten to the point that most enclaves have their own banks where bounty can be exchanged for crypto currency. The crypto currencies — or just “crypt,” as we call it — trade easily with Recession interests,

111

112 algorithm was disabling audio features by the time I got back on a terminal, trying to save what resources it had left for distributing text packets across the Stratostructure. With the 3D printers and enough time, I’d be able to bring the network back up to near full-speed and user load, but it was going to take me months of work. People out there needed help right then, and it sure as shit wasn’t coming from the Hunter administration. I needed to migrate all the users screaming for help onto a resource-cheap platform that could let them find each other easily, but I couldn’t make it anything too high profile. Some Recession network architecture was coming back online, and if everyone’s favorite social media site suddenly became cluttered with people asking how to make homemade landmines, the government might decide piggybacking Ubiq wasn’t worth the scandal and send a drone strike our way. So it had to be something readily available, completely ignored, and broadcasting packets not much more advanced than SMS messaging. So that’s how we got on LifeLines. Before the Crash, LifeLines was the unholy marriage of spam, data mining, and a pyramid scheme. People would lose their jobs in the Education Default, then click one of those terrible emails we all used to get: “So-andso wants to connect on LifeLines!” They’d fill out the resume, upload some boring-ass portrait in business attire, and wait for the offers to never roll in. LifeLines tantalized the desperate with offers to send their resumes to “highly-placed” executives... but only if they invited all their friends first. The whole site was shitty adware dressed up like a job fair. When the Recession finally got some limited connectivity back, most people weren’t surprised to see LifeLines email still pouring into their spam folders. Most had set-up autodelete and didn’t even see them. Little did they know I’d changed the site completely. The company had been based in Ontario, so anybody working for LifeLines was dead. Thankfully, they’d paid a pretty penny a few years earlier to house their program us, including each other. It’s not as if most of us can forget antibiotics exist when our kids get sick. We don’t resign their deaths to the gods. You know about every little thing in the old world that could help you, but the list of tasks required to get them is now herculean. There is no going back to some more primitive, simpler time; it never existed. Stripped of pre-Crash resources, life becomes savage, short, and more complex than imaginable. I’d do anything to go back to the days where my idea of baggage was ex-boyfriends and not the faces of people I’ve killed. A lot of Recession pundits like to think they’re clever by calling the modern condition a “post-apocalyptic society.” Even the ones sympathetic to the Loss like to praise our strength for being able to survive in a wasteland. Aint nothing “post” about this shit. Ain’t a goddamn thing about it over and done. Their wasteland is our world. Their “fate worse than death” is my fucking life. LIfeLInes I’m not going to lie and say everyone took to the Loss with a charitable attitude, but the Recession’s image of desperate scavengers killing each other for scraps the second things got bad falls short of reality. Cooperation is the only reason many survived after the amputation, and everybody that’s still around five years later owes their life to the alliances forged in those early days. The occasional gunfight with competing operations, raiders, and believer cults is to be expected, but the same can be said for folks across the border. Most of the time, folks take care of each other when they’re able. After the battle for Ubiq City, my first priority was to make sure people were able. Turns out 5.56 rounds don’t do wonders for servers, and the fight between Traitor’s men and the loyalists had raged across the campus for three days. The DAO had kept Ubiq from going dark, but only barely. Streaming video had been cut to save bandwidth and the

113 that could provide. I called the offer “Suicide by Scruple.” Folks could waste their lives trying to run the border, or they could die out here with the rest of us, trying to help each other. Of the thousands of Moths in the city and spread around the Loss, the majority of them came to us in the first weeks through those LifeLines ads. Sadly, not everyone had the means to climb the Rockies with casualties chasing them the whole way, but it’s not as if cooperation and communalism were my patented ideas. All over the Loss, people used the forums to coordinate defenses against the dead. EstablIshment of the Enclaves An enclave doesn’t start out as a complex community. It starts as a simple pact. Everybody who enclaved up in those first few months agreed to a very simple deal: trade your skills and supplies for some walls to hide behind. Urban planning reverted to its simplest form: shelter against an entire world trying to destroy your species. Cities designed for siege was the new model, and people built on the bones of capitalism’s old fortifications. Defenses are a must for any enclave, but they’re entirely dependent upon what could be secured in a matter of weeks after the Crash. Some places started based around stashes of salvageable loot, like malls and online retail distribution warehouses. Other places smartly prioritized sustainability and looked for places with arable land inside a fence, which is where all those college quads and greenhouse operations come from. Some even anticipated the trade that would define us and founded communities atop commodities, leading to survivors taking over weapon manufactures and entire fracking operations. Beyond the central logic of defense, each enclave is unique. Capitalism usually finds a place — if only because we were out of ideas — but pretty much any social structure or demographic you can imagine has founded its own enclave. People weren’t exactly enamored with the status quo after it left them to die, so the first new ideology to come on campus for increased connectivity, and the data had managed to survive the war. I hacked in for admin privileges, stripped the site of pretty much everything save raw text transmission and used their massive email lists to start contacting folks. Anyone with Ubiq Specs reporting a GPS location outside a safe zone had the text of the average LifeLines spam auto-replaced with an offer to join a special forum. If you were in the Loss, I made sure the message got past most filters and got people talking to each other. It seems silly now — everybody knows the Moths infested the corpse of a dead professional networking site in order to coordinate survival. With functionality pretty much restored, it has become just another social network for Takers. But at the time, nobody in Ubiq City knew if holding the internet hostage was going to be enough to keep us alive. We had to coordinate discreetly and that’s the best I could come up with on short notice. Btw... GNAT WOULD LIKE TO CONNECT WITH YOU ON LIFELINES! SuIcIde by Scruple I’ll admit I put Ubiq’s needs first. If the network caved, the whole Loss would be deaf and blind. The Recession wouldn’t have to worry about pretending we were dead for very long if I couldn’t keep the DAO running. There were less than thirty Marine Raiders and Ubiq employees left alive after the battle. There were hundreds of urgent repairs needed within the network alone. Meanwhile, Traitor had holes in the fencing and buildings that had to be patched, not to mention the need to transform a corporate ruin into a home that could sustain us. We needed bodies ASAP. So, for everyone passing through Colorado, I used LifeLines for its intended purpose: collecting resumes. Anybody with programming or tech support skills. Anyone with bullets or food or water. I cobbled together a list of everything we needed, prioritized it, and promised shelter to anyone

114 the ones crazy and desperate enough to chase work over the fence. The occupation was still evolving within the first year, deciding whether it wanted to stay suicidal altruism or morph into the more cynical trade we know today. The tipping point, as always, came from the Recession. Their fumbling attempts get their shit together built the utterly fucked system we live in today. The RelatIve PosItIons The Loss, believe it or not, operates primarily as an information economy. Bounty is nothing more than a standardized price for information on a human life. Documents that have an even higher payout — such as tax records, deeds, wills, etc. — merely contain more information. Without this trade, the almost religious faith the Recession has in reclamation couldn’t sustain itself, and the fallout from their collapse would spell the end of every enclave on the continent. Our version of the real estate sector takes the form of jobs that secure the salvage claims of Recession businesses. New corporations only grow through the promise of domination in the reclaimed US. We verify their claims for the future with a price in the present. The Loss also has a surplus of raw materials, waiting around to be salvaged, smuggled, and sold to those with the means of production. The depressed economy of the Recession wouldn’t have been able to spawn what little business growth it has without the discount provided by our looting. In contrast, the Loss’s needs are simple: food, water, drugs, and bullets. We must constantly fight against the scarcity and frailty that defines the human condition, even as we combat the creatures that threaten to wipe out the species. Yet manufacturing and agriculture are about the only things going well for citizens in the Recession, and they’re happy to smuggle us life-saving goods at an enormous mark-up. The Loss also suffers from a lack of necessary human vices, especially when they’re the only things keeping us sane. We along usually sufficed. There are democratic socialist enclaves located next door to fascist dictatorships. Secular councils trade with believer theocracies. Anything goes. Inside the enclaves, people do what they’ve always done together: eat, sleep, fuck, gossip, worry, betray, support. Between enclaves, the little city-states make war and peace, screwing each other as conscious allows and circumstances demand. It’s just like the world before the Crash, albeit more desperate and earnest than before. The FIrst Takers Once they’d fended off the casualties, every enclave had to face an even more tireless monster: scarcity. Securing a simple fence-line, healthcare, agriculture, water infrastructure, energy production — every enclave seeks to become a world onto itself, and when that inevitably proves impossible, they have to find ways to trade and scavenge for their unmet needs. No matter how well prepared people were, there was always going to be some necessity outside the fence. Being crazy enough to go over the wall and fetch it became the Loss’s most indispensable occupation. The first Takers weren’t running crews for business. Hell, they weren’t even called “Takers” yet: they were volunteers for suicide missions. But when some started coming back — again and again, job after job — it became clear the rewards might be worth the risks. Takers brought back medicine that saved the lives of children. They killed raiders and Vectors threatening to butcher the whole enclave. They put food on the tables of the starving. Gratitude took the form of payment, privileges, and eventually power. Not many “original Takers” have been working the Loss for all five years. They’re either dead, escaped to the Recession, or running the whole enclave by now. We Moths may be lost for life — the grudge against my Whisper will never be forgotten — but it soon became apparent that if anyone had the leverage to get themselves out of here, it was

115 turned to in times of greatest sorrow. The bravest among us who ushered the stubborn dead into the next world. But that perception shifted once bounty became a thing. Now, becoming a Taker wasn’t just something you did because a job needed doing. Risking your ass over the fence could secure a hell of a lot more than extra rations. The smart and the swift could actually earn enough to buy their way out. It didn’t have to be suicide by scruple anymore. Treasure lived over the fence, and there was enough of it to buy a ticket out of hell. The DHQS noticed this and wasted no time exploiting the resentment online. And for once, the DHQS propaganda was right. Takers weren’t heroes anymore; they were opportunists. They were war profiteers who extorted the desperation of their neighbors so they might one day abandon them. They profited from the pain of the Loss and used the funds to buy themselves a life of luxury even some in the Recession would envy. There were a lot of shitty crews out there who were merely Takers, stealing from those most in need to save themselves. So which is it? Martyrs or thieves? Well, I’m a Taker. I’ve been over the fence more times than I can count. I’ll keep going as long as UCity needs me. All I can say is, while both definitions may be true, a Taker can only hold one in her heart at a time. You’ve got to decide why you’re walking out that gate if you ever hope to walk back inside it. You’ve got to decide why you’re out there, or the Loss will decide for you. Do you survive because people need you, or do you survive because you’re owed a life better than this? I’ve seen some badass crews of both persuasions survive shit that would kill most to contemplate. But if you don’t know? If you don’t know why you should keep running and fighting, you won’t. seek the relief of entertainment we can’t produce and illicit substances we don’t have. Again, the Recession makes more opiates for its masses than it could ever use, and it’s happy to numb us back into its service. Lastly, we need out. There is nothing in higher demand than an escape from the Blight. The Recession is the only place that can provide this, but they make us pay dearly for it. Perhaps out of fear or greed, though I suspect they really just resent how much they need us. In short, everyone in the Loss is stuck in a macro-version of the same situation the Moths live in: we hold the Recession’s excesses hostage in exchange for another day of primitive survival. Red Market On LifeLines, we call the trade “The Red Market.” A “red market” had multiple definitions before the Crash. It was a colloquial name in law enforcement for any market that dealt with human flesh or human beings. In libertarian circles, it refers to a sector of the economy that creates no wealth, instead using overt violence to leech wealth from others. Sociologically, a red market refers to a system where all trade is forbidden by the state, but whose participants cannot be prosecuted least the state admit such taboo trade exists. Everything a Taker does is illegal... or it would be if we weren’t already legally dead. Takers scavenge from the dead. Takers demand tribute from the living. Takers destroy. We do not create. And as for trading in human flesh? Yeah, we do that too. We trade our own bodies and souls for little pieces of plastic carrying the faces of dead people. Takers: The Name Evolved Before bounty, the perception of Takers was almost universally positive. They were the undertakers: women and men who bore the burden of death. The ones the community

116 THE LOSS

117 She rushed to stop us raiding the tunnels. Through Ubiq tracking data and some clever data sniffing on LifeLines, she’d found out one of our crews had sexually assaulted a woman while out on their last contract. They were new recruits. I’d never met or vetted them. The dumbasses had called her a “crazy LALA bitch” in a thread dedicated to the deed. Bragged about killing her afterwards. On the forums. Like I’d never find out. She must have been part of the invader’s tribe. I deduced this because the majority of the offenders were now folded into bloody pretzels and displayed around my city. After I personally gave the last surviving rapist a hollow-point severance package, Hipster urged me to think long term. We had already lost a lot of people to whatever was in those tunnels. Getting revenge for those few who didn’t deserve the raider’s wrath meant losing more innocents and destroying irreplaceable equipment. She urged me to let her go talk to whatever lurked in the tunnels. Think long term, she’d said. Profit from Loss. After I told her no, she snuck in and did it anyway. A couple hours later, Hipster emerges... trailing behind her one of the largest, scariest slabs of infected flesh I’ve ever seen. I just remember this pale wall of bite scars, muscle, and Blight veins emerging from the earth. He carried a giant sledgehammer like it was a toothpick. The sight of him seemed to promise that a week’s killing spree in UCity had been an example of his best behavior. I know that Banhammer can be difficult to swallow at times. He makes it easy to dismiss him as crazy. Maybe he is, but I couldn’t give a shit. On-the-job deaths have been cut in half since he started pulling jobs with us. He reads the Loss like no one else I’ve ever seen. He pulls cards as fast as Traitor on full auto, with all the cost of a hammer swing. Out here, we take crazy if it comes with a side of results. See, Ban never ‘claved up. He only hangs around UCity because we’re his new “tribe.” He’ll answer his specs when there’s a job, and he might spend a day or two trading LatentA GuIde All this writing stirred some things better left settled. I’m taking some time for self-care and passing this part off to BanHammer. Ban’s not real active on LifeLines, so some of you non-Moths might not be familiar with his role in the crew. Those that are familiar are probably just surprised he’s going to do something with a keyboard besides murder something with it… which I’ve seen him do before. Twice. I met Ban midway through the third year. By then, it was becoming clear this was the new normal. Raiders weren’t probing the perimeter as often, but we were still under periodic attack. Every couple of months, the scraps of some desperate gang would throw themselves at the fence, looking to steal, cannibalize, take over, etc. — whatever the hell passes for motivation after the Loss completely hollows you out. Sometimes, I think they came to UCity just to get shot. We look kinda like civilization, and death was worth proving we weren’t a mirage. But I don’t play mercy no more. We obliged all death wishes. Ban’s was the first group clever enough to get inside, and while the majority was killed in minutes, one of them got away. Over the course of three days, he murdered four soldiers. Each was bludgeoned to death with a heavy object — slowly, one limb at a time — but none of their bunkmates had heard anything. Each was found the next morning in a broken tangle of limbs, hanging from the fence and being nibbled on by casualties. By day four, he burned a server farm to the ground. He started a minor Vector outbreak in a refugee settlement and nearly took all of Ubiq down with the ensuing riot. By the time we finally cornered him, he’d fled into the utility tunnels under the geothermal plant. We called for his surrender over the PA. I lied and promised we wouldn’t kill him. A voice echoing from the darkness promised to literally eat me. Thankfully, Hipster had signed on by then.

118

119 something worthy to grow. The man died. I am his casualty. Those that would call me Latent would also call me mad. Perhaps they are right... but the fool that once thought words held weight I have long since consumed. The Loss will decide for us all. It will write the truth in the blood of the weak. It always has, even before it was named. There is no country but the Loss; no citizens save those it finds worthy. side, but otherwise, he’s just out there. All the time. Your first-gen Taker is a tourist by comparison. He’s seen more Loss on his own two feet than every drone in the DHQS. He’s survived more days IRL (In Real Loss, noob) than maybe any human being alive. It’s all he knows; it’s all that’s left. So that’s why Ban is the only one to write the guidebook. Every Bait baby wannabe wants to grow up to be like him. Any real Taker hopes to die before they become him. The thread is Ban’s now. He better fill it if he expects me to deliver his rations this month. If you expect to survive, you better pay attention and stay respectful in the comments. Banhammer Banhammer is a stupid name. But Gnat gave it to me. She is alpha, so it is done. There was a man that came before Banhammer. It had a name too. The name mattered as little as the man. And the man did so love to think of itself as a MAN. As if that mattered. As if thinking made things so. It defined itself by reflections: in mirrors, in eyes, in whispered words. It thought shadows sufficient to craft a self. It loved to dress up like what it thought was a man. It preened, lifting hunks of metal and calling it strength. It had sex and confused it for conquest. It consumed and called its hunger “cunning.” It lived not a single true day, called this blindness “discipline.” When the monsters came, it saw only opportunity: to live like the movies, to prove worth it suspected it lacked, to parade around its preened body and be seen as more by the reflections. Once outside, the man died like what it always was: a dumb animal, harried by a pack of the world’s woes. From that carcass, I was born. My mother was the pain of the Blight crawling across my nerves like millipedes. My father’s seed came from the teeth of the dead. You would call me Latent, but know that I was Chosen. The new god tore away the man’s flesh in hunks, providing space for The greatest talents have been frequently misapplied and have produced evil proportionate to the extent of their powers. Both reason and revelation seem to assure us that such minds will be condemned to eternal death, but while on earth, these vicious instruments performed their part in the great mass of impressions, by the disgust and abhorrence which they excited. -Thomas Malthus

120 Most end up like Gnat; they allow the weak to feed from the surplus of their strength. Others, like myself, see little sense in such arrangements. Enclaves are the most common landmarks in the Loss. Initially, their locations were random, based solely around defenses and resources. Their tribes were comprised of whoever happened nearby, joined only by desperation and geography. But after five years, the enclaves that remain have made their worth plain. Their walls weathered stampedes of dead. Their trade routes connected. Economies stabilized. New orders and belief were forged by tragedy, and they united people by more than a border. I have little use for an enclave, but despite my aversion, I have travelled to many: trading, raiding, wandering. I shall speak of a few, but expect nothing save variety. Each enclave Lost Places All places have their seasons. To ascribe malice to a land is to position yourself poorly within it. This is a truth of the Loss. Its delights can kill. Its tortures can redeem. A Taker’s understanding is the only mediator. Enclaves Enclaves are haphazard communities assembled to escape the horrors of the Loss. They always fail, to some degree. When they do not burn or descend into Vector orgy, the most an enclave can hope for is to hold the savage tide at bay. The Loss always withholds some of its gifts from those that hide from it, and someone must always leave to fetch them. Outside, the Loss reaps whom it will; the rest flourish and trade. Those left inside leech survival from the vitality of these Takers.

121 to the boy-king’s love of snowboarding, but I’ve invaded Recession military positions with worse defenses. Palbicke was either paranoid or protecting some secret forgotten since his disappearance. Traitor made a valiant attempt improving the system. The woods are littered with traps and concealed surveillance, and he fenced in the outer buildings originally left outside the perimeter. When my tribe and I showed him the weaknesses of his strategy, he adapted rather than deny the flaws. He would make his death a challenge. It is all the Loss or myself can ask of a man. My original assault depended on UCity’s own prejudice to destroy it. Palbicke had placed small businesses and apartment buildings lower on the slope, intending it as a consumerist playground for his workers. These dwellings were apparently still is unique, a distinct scar upon the face of the Loss. Those that learn the scar’s shape and story are rewarded like lovers. Those that disrespect the wounds invite the same savagery that made them. Shaped by its pain, the enclaves now try to shape the Loss with their resolve. They fail, but they fail nobly. UbIq CIty The mountain compound was built like a fortress before it became one: sheer cliffs on two sides, frequent winter storms, winding roads with elevated firing positions, a mile-wide kill-zone between tree line and gate, reinforced fencing topped with razor wire, plus self-contained electric and water systems. Ubiq City was supposedly designed to protect against corporate spies and cater

122 chosen underlings are permitted at the peak. This is to keep “the insurance” secure, which I am told is a failsafe that will brick every server in the sky if the city is ever to fall. It may be a bluff. If so, it is one the DHQS continues to believe. Every day the Recession does not smite the mountainside with missiles is a testament to their weakness. They would rather let the Moths continue sharpening their knives than risk the loss of texting and cat videos. It is why I like this place. They treat the Chosen well, and the city stands as a constant reminder of how weak most humans really are. The Crash shall finish one day, and all shall be Loss. From this mountaintop, I shall watch the sinew spread and infect the land. Leper The only other enclave I’ve ever called home is Leper. It is the Chosen city, but as with all things, the Loss demanded bloody payment for its gifts. Leper started as “Colony #1,” an experiment from the fledgling days of the DHQS. It was the first of many forays into the slavery that is “productive quarantine.” The idea was to get Latents as far away from the Recession as possible. The first military unit of the new order was designed for this express purpose. Comprised of tactical engineers, veteran soldiers, and simpleminded prison guards, they rounded up the few naturals that survived the announcement and the hundreds of Latents they’d made with Supressin experiments, then sent them West on a death march. Colony #1 was a nomadic slave camp. Well-armed vehicles full of cleans would flank a desperate column of Latent men, women, and children on a death march around the Midwest. Those that fell behind were shot or euthanized via bomb collar: a small charge of plastic explosive situated above the spine that all prisoners had to wear. When they reached fertile ground, the soldiers would erect temporary defenses. The engineers would set about assembling drone-farming desirable and, once reincorporated into the perimeter, drew the most vital staff to the vulnerable perimeter. This is where I found my victims. I almost caused a total outbreak by spitting in one of their cups. Since then, all Latents have been moved to the exterior ring and rehoused in the most lavish dwellings. I see this as a sign of respect to their rights as Chosen; Gnat calls it defense. Quarantine housing is peppered amongst clean blocks. Any invasion is likely to cause instant Vector incursion, complicating further assault and allowing defenders to fallback in the confusion. This outer-ring is called Latentside, and it is the first sight those desperate to join the Moths see. Further up the slope, the original corporate compound houses the power plant, server farms, satellite dishes, and other vital functions. Full-time Moths live here in office cubicles converted into cramped dorms. I’m told this is “uncomfortable” by the weak herd of programmers that live and work there. They “suffer” the situation because it keeps vital infrastructure secure inside a fallback position. The sensitive computing equipment also means each office building can be sealed hermetically against a siege. If only this security would stop them whining about the infected now living in their precious loft apartments.... In the disused corporate parks dotting the middle ring, Traitor trains new Moths before sending them out to work in other enclaves. The fact that UCity sends out crews to compete with freelance Takers on LifeLines is not something Gnat is comfortable with, but Traitor calls the trainees his insurgency. Hipster calls it franchising. I, as Chosen, know infection when I see it. Regardless of label, each official Moth crew sends bounty, supplies, and intelligence back to the nest. Gnat would feign scorn my raider days. Her army exists to draw tribute like any other. The upper ring is simply called “the peak.” The 3D printer factories reside there, as well as the Aloft launch pad and the primary control room. Only Gnat, Hipster, and their

123 Not all in Leper see their latency is a gift from the Loss — so deeply have they swallowed the DHQS’s chains — but the enclave remains the wandering mecca of my faith. I would be there now, were it not for the ruling council. My role in the uprising was… not insignificant. The price of freedom was too steep for some. My hammer is not welcome there, but exile is a small price to pay for the Chosen to have a home. DIstrIbuty Distributy started as a massive centralized distribution hub for a half-dozen online retail stores. It was the first of a series of planned mega-centers and the largest indoor area ever to weigh on the Earth. The main building alone covers over 600 million cubic meters, and two secondary warehouses approach half that. Shelves stretch ten stories tall. The whole compound was laced with miles of fencing and internal checkpoints to prevent theft, even though pre-Crash reports boasted that 90% of the operation was automated. Pallets of goods were fetched using robotic lifts built into the structure and transported to loading bays with drone forklifts. From there, they went along conveyer belts to 14 drone launch towers dotting the area When the Crash came down, the distribution center seemed an obvious refuge. It was larger than most cities, yet empty. It was secured behind multiple fences and monolithic metal walls. It was crammed to the ceiling with vital goods that could be used or traded for survival. However, even with all its automation, Distributy still employed thousands. It was an open secret. The war to put Distributy under singular control ended only two years ago. Before then, it was a free-fire zone of drone warfare, bickering survivor factions, believer cults, and warehouses fallen to Blight. Having finally paid the Loss’s price in blood, the compound united under a republican democracy and became the closest thing the Loss has to a metropolis. More Lost live in Distributy’s walls than a dozen enclaves combined. The equipment to feed the hungry weaklings in the Recession. Meanwhile, the guards pushed the Latents outside to construct the sheds and solar rechargers that would house the machines. Sometimes, the snipers would pick off casualties before they reached the work crews. Mostly, they made bets on who would survive as they watched the Chosen fight the dead with shovels, picks... hammers. Any Lost unfortunate enough to cross Colony #1 were either shot or forcibly turned Latent using the DHQS’s copious supply of Supressin. Enclaves that gave up their Latents peacefully were allowed to survive; they burned the rest to the ground and mass injected the survivors. It kept the labor pool steady despite the constant losses. At night, escape attempts were announced with the pop of a collar’s explosion and the thud of a corpse. They eventually strayed too far. In the push further and further West, fresh troops and resupply got scarcer. The high-ranking slavers begged to turn around, but the Recession’s appetite for grain is as insatiable as any casualty. The convoy stretched into a valley of lead-lined hills where the collar remotes were not reliable, and the guards stretched the patience of the Chosen until death seemed a reward. The uprising was bloodier than any Vector outbreak during the Crash. I’ll never forget that glorious day. Today, Leper accepts only Latents and Immunes within its ever-migrating camp. Never again shall any inhabitant be bound by the cage called quarantine. While the Immune are not sold or predated upon, their cleanliness makes them the underclass. They know the kiss of the Blight without the mark of its black love, so their duty matches their flesh; they are sent out as diplomats to the other cleans, protecting the Chosen from the prejudice of the Lost and the location of Leper from all who wish it harm. The Immunes arrange Leper’s trades of surplus Supressin, military armaments, and services only fit for Latent-kin. In return, the Chosen protect the blue-veins.

124 Stewards seek to bend the city to DHQS whims. Even with hundreds of local Takers of its own, Distributy usually ends up contracting any crew worthy of the name. I hate it there. You can smell it coming for two miles before the eyesore comes into view. refurbished drone fleet is the single greatest economic force in the Loss besides Lifelines. Goods within the warehouses can be scavenged and sold for another decade before depletion. But one shouldn’t confuse the enclave’s newfound ceasefire for safety. Distributy can be a nightmare for unwitting immigrants. Food and water are in short supply. Common diseases run rampant. The powerless warehouses are lit only by holes cut in the ceiling and mirrors. The alleys of the interior are blind labyrinths filled with hustlers, cults, and gangs. People live in makeshift micro apartments build into the shelves, and passerbys are as likely to be hit by a climber slipping from the rope bridges as they are the contents of a chamber pot. Even among the nicer “departments,” political intrigue causes chaos as the rich vie for election, corporate spies angle to recover lost inventory, and America is beyond power, it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains and darkness strangles millions. Beneath her patient bombers, paradise is possible.. -John Updike

125 hoping someone drops a rope in time. Mont Liner tries to secure more land using the wings of dismantled jets as barricades. The dream is to one day clear an entire runway and open the Loss’s only free airport, but it is very slow going. Their access to advanced 3D printing and machinery makes for steady trade though. They’ve no shortage of bounty with which to convince desperate Takers to go die on the tarmac. The ConsolIdated Most enclaves are not bloated like Distributy and Mont Liner. The most typical example that comes to mind is The Consolidated. The community is based inside a failing historical tourist attraction. Before the Crash, it had been designed to recreate the frontier lifestyle that would have been found around the 1860s gold mine upon which the town was built. Employees and historical re-enactors brought Mont LIner The Distributy model is catching, sadly. I’ve visited a similar enclave fashioned inside a former Dorning assembly factory. The giant space, once dedicated to assembling jumbo jets, now houses a towering favela that grows by the day. The locals call it Mont Liner. Though still enormous, solar and wind technology keeps at least some lights on in the interior, so it’s not quite the lightless urban hell of Distributy. While her sister enclave must cut skylights into sheet metal and gardens into stone, Mont Liner’s flat roof was constructed to withstand heavy snowfall and can support the weight of rooftop crops and water collectors. However, Mont Liner lacks fences around the perimeter. The factory floor is secure and connected via skywalk to a nearby airport terminal, but all else is a sea of the dead. Reaching the city’s interior means braving a runway of stumbling casualties and

126 of casualties. MyWay is one such place. Located inside an enormous event center (if you have to ask which, you can’t afford to travel there), MyWay utilizes the labyrinth of tunnels, skywalks, and shared walls connecting the old city’s tourist infrastructure. The occupants started as attendees for a sustainable technology convention, and the convention center proved an intersection of utility tunnels, sewers, and pedestrian bridges linking all the hotels, malls, and churches downtown. Utilizing fire doors and security grates as airlocks, the inhabitants slowly reclaimed large sections of the city’s interior, one building at a time. However, MyWay’s expanding clean zones remain surrounded by the casualty-choked streets typical of urban dead zones. Few immigrants can survive the trip. Massive reclaimed hotels still sit empty. Arable land is also in short supply. Residents must subsist on whatever can be grown in the occasional courtyards or rooftop garden. As such, their families behind the outpost’s log walls when the casualties came. Its defenses are weak around the overcrowded log cabins and facades of Western main street. The remote location is the only real deterrent, but like most enclaves, isolation usually proves enough. The town boasts no more than 150 people at a time. Any migrants seeking the relative peace of its woods must live in the old mine. While secure, the dank stone proves unpleasant enough that most newcomers don’t stay long. This for the best; the Loss forgets the small and unobtrusive, and The Consolidated is just that. The population is manageable enough to govern using direct democracy, and the historical survival skills mastered by the residents are valuable enough to keep the town in trade. MyWay Miles of distance work to keep many enclaves safe, but some protect themselves with moats

127 The first came directly on the heels of the Crash, but it was doomed to fail. San Francisco is the deepest heart of the Loss, surrounded on all sides by the first Vector hordes and so far West no help was ever coming. The island’s landmark status in the bay made it the only imagined escape for many of the local urbanites. Disease, starvation, and war threatened to destroy the fledgling enclave as tens of thousands tried to raft and swim to safety. These mundane deaths probably would have claimed the whole population eventually, but then someone smuggled a cold bite ashore. Once the Blight reactivated, Vectors and overcrowding finished the job. I worked once with a corporate spy, infiltrating the Loss for BeeMail’s interests. She was strong, if a bit weak-headed in her MyWay nearly rivals Distributy in terms of livable square footage, yet only supports a fraction of the population. Its primary trade is assuring safe passage. Those that wish to save themselves days of travel bypassing the city can hire a guide to lead them through the dizzying maze of MyWay’s lightless interior. The ones that refuse to pay are still allowed to pass, but they can expect no help when they stumble through the wrong door into a hallway still choked with hungry casualties. The Rock Some moats are still made from water rather than monsters. Islands have always been promised lands in the Loss, natural walls that can never be breached. It comes as no surprise that Alcatraz inspired an enclave, twice over.

128 expedition was one of a many international intrigues preparing to launch from the prison. I met Australian deserters fleeing the Kumatatok war, Chinese special forces launching sorties into abandoned US naval bases, and Shinto cleanser cults exchanging theology with the Black Math. It was so interesting a place I declined the return flight once my job was done, but Stewards soon wormed their way inside and joined the spy games. Unable to abide their presence, I found myself wandering back into the core of the Loss, seeking purer company. LIght CIty On my return from the West, I passed simple trade caravans, too weak to be worthy of my attentions. Rather than raid, I asked where a Chosen might find work. The people said I should seek out Light City. Follow the hum of active power lines, they said, a sound I thought extinct. motives, and she recognized my hammer for the tool it was. She used her Recession contacts to secure us a flight out to San Fransisco so I could help retrieve something for her deep within the city. I hoped to die, so I agreed. I thought it would be sooner rather than later when she claimed we would stage the attack out of Alcatraz, but all we found upon arrival was a thriving enclave. Years after the initial outbreak, a group of enterprising Takers had spent their fortunes on a fleet of sailing ships and mercenaries. Methodically, they cleared the island over the course of a year. It now houses a modest population within the cells, complete with sustainable energy and agriculture technologies. They use the sailboats to trade whiskey and fish with other enclaves up and down the coast. So successful is the experiment that the island has become the gateway to the American Loss. Our corporate

129 though the gym zombies atop the treadmills are now literal. The enclave became a power plant by converting every machine in the complex into a generator. Atop the retrofitted machines, they lash casualties to restraints, then have them chase a single enclavist positioned at the front of the room, as if running a spin class. The dead helplessly chase their prey 24 hours a day, shambling forward until their feet are no more than stubs. When the creature can go no more, the workers put it down. Specialized Taker crews venture outside that night to fetch more Cs from the grocery store. The only ones allowed to work in Light City’s plant are Latent, and they must live amongst their stinking prisoners. Despite the constant risk and hardship these Chosen face to keep the lights on for their decadent masters, those of the sinew are expected to risk their lives for no more than privilege of living in such a hell. The class divide exists, supposedly, to keep the guards detached, Light City is based inside a gigantic suburban fitness center, the sort of temple my former self used to worship its vanity. It hums with electricity, sitting amidst a network of haphazard electrical rigging like a four-story tall spider in a buzzing black web. Its windows are boarded shut, its exterior completely silent. Further down the block, an old grocery store shines and blares music from PAs, lit up like Christmas. It is surrounded constantly by a horde of casualties, drawn away by the cacophony from the gates of the real enclave. Light City’s upper floors contain the wealthy citizenry, housed among the former weight rooms and offices. Their existence is alarmingly sedentary and technical. They buy all their food and water from surrounding enclaves in exchange for power. They run utilities for a half-dozen other communities, and the power is held hostage in exchange for their continued survival. In the lower floors and basement, the real work is done. These sealed levels house the cardio equipment,

130 release of the UFit. These fitness watches were the most sophisticated of their kind before the Crash, able to recognize the movements for hundreds of distinct exercises, count the calories expended, and recommend dietary alterations: a vain bracelet to pursue a vain body. The early adopters didn’t dare risk losing out on a first generation for a few zombie rumors. Thus, hundreds found themselves trapped inside the stadium as the Crash ate the city around them. Today, the old field has been converted to crops, the bleachers torn out and replaced with terraced shanties, the people turned into hardened survivors. How was this possible? Most urban enclaves get consumed within days of founding, yet these joggers survived for five years? It’s all due to the bracelet. Achieve was so cut-off by casualty hordes that the bounty system meant nothing to it. Trade with other enclaves has only opened up within the last year. Instead, the enclave survived by in case a Latent goes Vector and must be purged. But I know slavery when I see it. The blue-veins trying to entice me under their yolk must have seen the fire of old uprisings in my eyes. They ceased their sick tour immediately and escorted me from the building at gunpoint. It is why they still live. AchIeve Places like Light City reward themselves for being clever, but their “innovation” only keeps them afloat amongst the shipwrecked systems of the past. Bounty gave them a new slip of paper to horde, so they continue treading water with the greed that once served them. But some enclaves seek to remove themselves from the waters of the economy entirely. Consider Achieve. Similarly, the enclave was founded atop the bones of a fitness activity, based inside a professional sports stadium that was being used in the off-season to host a specialty event promoting the

131 During the amputation, a Continuity of Government (COG) detachment was charged with blowing every bridge they could in a retreat from Houston, slowing the crush of refugees headed East after the Whisper and relieving pressure on the New Orleans checkpoints. The recently revived 11th Special Forces Group (ABN) never completed their orders. Whether this was due to moral qualms, mutiny, or tactical considerations, only members of the train can know. All that is certain is that “The Quiet Operators” never made it to their rendezvous point in the Recession; they were busy fortifying Galveston Island’s rail yards and rescuing people unable to reach the Mississippi. The group’s leader has abandoned his name and taken the handle Pappa Doc, but he runs his island with a military precision the average Taker could only dream of. The Railroad is the #1 route through the Gulf into the Recession. Fast boats offload vital creating a meritocracy. Every task required of survival — farming, woodcutting, clearing casualties — was programmed into the UFits and networked to a display on the stadium’s jumbotron. The UFits track every citizen’s actions and assign food, water, and shelter only to those who deserve it. The early years no doubt required some brutal, calculated choices, but Achieve now harbors nothing save hardened Lost, each uniquely adapted to their essential role. Papa Doc’s RaIlroad Train tracks were the only travel infrastructure left unobstructed after the Crash, so enclaves on rails are common and it is the rare Lost that has not heard of Pappa Doc’s Railroad. No other train caravan shares its range or size. But, then again, no other rail operation was founded using the resources of an entire battalion.

132 of calm are all that keep many alive in the Loss, but only when communally maintained. Those who enter often find a checklist of chores waiting for them, ranging from checking defenses to taking out trash to cranking generators. Cameras report who is in the respite and for how long, so violating the hospitality laws will earn anyone caught leeching from the respite’s resources negative reputation. Rival crews may not like others using the respite location to survive, but having the location compromised is as good as a personal attack. Assaulting, sabotaging, or otherwise compromising the respites along an enclave’s trade routes is a good way to get an army sent after you. Settlements Many enclaves exist only by the Recession’s sufferance. Some accuse even Gnat of being a DHQS tool. I commend this paranoia; it is one of the few emotions the Loss rewards. But it remains nonsense. There are already enough places where Recession invades Loss without imagining every enclave as a facade. The real invaders live in things called “settlements,” so named because they subsist on the fantasy that they’re repopulating some barren wilderness rather than stealing from their desperate countrymen. Make no mistake, the Recession’s settlements are raider camps that blind themselves to the truth of their purpose. Like all raiders, they do not announce themselves, they do not stay in one place for long, and they do not give their guilt purchase by accepting a name. Still, the Loss demands its travelers recognize these intrusions from “civilization.” To mistake a settlement for an enclave is to smell the roasting meat of a cannibal’s fire: what first tastes like salvation truly announces doom. Canary Cages By far the most dangerous type of settlements are canary cages: DHQS forward operating bases designed to keep the Recession informed on the Loss. They track casualty trade goods on the island, and their holds are stuffed with salvage collected on the train’s wanderings through the Loss. Most Takers that can afford to smuggle their families to safety over the border depart via the Railroad, and the train’s arrival is the economic event of the year for many enclaves. Each car holds goods or services the average survivor can only dream of, and the hardened troops guarding the operation assure the rolling market arrives on time to its every stop. How Pappa Doc manages to boast such success is a mystery. His enclave’s very existence is an affront to the DHQS and a next-door reminder to the farce that is homo sacer. Many presume the whole enclave is a plant. The mutiny was a ruse to insert Recession spies among the abandoned, or it’s psyops meant to conceal the last remaining soldiers of Operation Utility, guarding some secret project on the island that the government would never allow to fall into Lost hands. Others insist that Doc’s people survive only on his tactical genius and, like Ubiq, to uproot them would be too costly. If the Recession ever achieves its fantasy reclamation, the fate of Pappa Doc’s Railroad will be an early indicator of what the Loss should expect. RespItes Respites are cleared zones afforded to no faction or enclave, used for meetings out in the Loss: gated communities, abandoned warehouses, high-rise apartments with sealed staircases. Respites are neutral ground, owned and maintained by every enclavist with reason to leave the fence. No rivalry or competition is allowed in a respite. Though a tribe of cannibals sleeps in one bedroom and a crew of Takers in the next, there must be no war within the respite. Each one’s location is a jealously guarded secret. Finding them requires knowing a complex system of graffiti called Taker sign, and to know the language is to agree to the respite’s laws. Even in my raiding days, I understood the sacred nature of a respite. These islands

133 valuable to abandon to the Loss, but too widespread for the DHQS to cover. The Recession outsources these to the private sector. Companies are eager to apply. The corporation is a casualty, existing only to consume. They cram as much of the Loss into their greedy mouths as they can. In the T-minus Never, they will look up from the feast to those that seek a piece of reclamation. With bloody lips and full mouths, they will whisper, “None left.” And why not? It is not the corporation that faces the Loss’s test. They hire the poor and desperate to surrogate their pain. They offer hazard pay amounting to a rounding error in their profits, but still enough to feed a family for a year. It is this exploitation that makes restart-ups the most profitable settlements for a Taker to know. A manager that recognizes their slavery to the brand won’t begrudge their employees some off-the-books trading with the locals. Barrels of gas get siphoned off shipments. Bushels of grain fall off the back of trucks. Resupply drones mysteriously fail and crash. And bounty, as always, trades hands. A few restart-ups even allow wholesale theft without consequence, paying tribute to raiders in exchange for safe passage. Some hire crews to do necessary jobs their paymasters won’t fund, or the corporation may send fixers to hire Takers directly, unable to convince even the most desperate Bait to go on their suicide missions. But arrangements are not always pleasant. The wiser corporations pay security forces separately, ensuring the mercs keep the wage slaves inside the compound and away from the Loss. Other foremen don’t allow any trade with Takers, but they permit their employees to keep whatever they can pillage from local enclaves. Most dangerous of all is their stupidity. Always remember that a Restart-up is managed by Bait: fools no wiser than those killed on the Crash’s first day. Many operations set up shop and achieve nothing save flooding the local area with fresh Vectors. migrations near the border or protect vital infrastructure until the T-minus Never. Though size can vary from platoon-sized pillboxes to entire airbases, cages are almost always well supplied and staffed with professional soldiers. Fresh troops and rations regularly get shipped in via NatGas trucks or drones. The staff, no matter how large, undergoes extensive psychological training and vetting to ensure no one gets too sympathetic to the “looters.” Settlements that get too large to hide get christened with nauseating names like “Freedom.” These acknowledged sites frequently star in DHQS propaganda ads. If a PsyOps squad is in town taking video for a reclamation bond campaign, any casualty, Lost, or menacing-looking deer visible on the horizon can expect to be gunned down for the viewing pleasure of the superior officers back home. When out of the Recession’s view, however, many settlements set up black market trading with local Taker crews willing to provide the troops with contraband. As inspections remain unpredictably random, this is dangerous trade. Other cages are completely off the books. To stumble into a Blight-research lab, rendition site, or Steward dead drop is to walk into a war. These locations are wellhidden, guarded, booby-trapped, and kept under constant surveillance. Each is staffed by ideologue Recessionists willing to die for their country. But they also contain some of the most valuable gear in the Loss, so the occasional conflict with Taker crews is inevitable. Just know that raiding a redacted canary cage is akin to robbing a pre-Crash bank; complete anonymity is required. More than once, Taker crews have raided Steward equipment caches, missed a hidden camera, and returned to find their enclaves reduced to ash. Restart-ups Fracking operations, combine drone maintenance bays, NatGas refueling stations, solar farms — certain operations are too

134 StopLoss FacIlItIes There is debate about whether StopLoss is really a private company or another name for the DHQS. Evidence suggests StopLoss played a defining role in the Supressin discovery, and the private healthcare corporation had extensive government contracts in the USA’s wars predating the Crash. However, StopLoss’s willingness to treat anyone who can pay undermines the homo sacer policy and seems to imply independence. The confusion is understandable. It is also pointless. The skulls of a StopLoss merc and DHQS soldier make the same sound when crushed under a sledge. If either offered to save your life, you wouldn’t say no. If either sought to destroy you, you wouldn’t ask who signed their checks. The fact is that StopLoss facilities exist. They dot the Loss, housed inside old hospitals they fight to reclaim themselves. The sites refuel and dispatch medical evac choppers and armed escort teams to anyone in the area paying for their service. They’ve saved entire enclaves from plague and helped subscribing Takers shoot their way through enormous casualty stampedes. They treat Latents without charging a premium, and they are the only organization designing medications to help with secondary symptoms afflicting the Chosen such as black blood, Blight cankors, and tremors. But no one has convinced a doctor, nurse, or private mercenary to speak on the company’s mission. Ever. The source of their remarkable equipment and wealth of supplies remains a mystery, as does their license to go anywhere they please. LifeLines has multiple reports of teams leaving people to die because they were behind on payments. Certain treatments come with user agreements demanding the patient consent to secretive drug trials. Any attempt to enter their fortified hospitals without permission is met with a hail of gunfire. Most damningly of all, the StopLoss When I raided in a new region, I paid most attention to the restart-ups. Invade the wrong one and every enclave begins hunting you. But attack a Recession profiteer? The locals will cheer as you pull the fillings from his teeth. Hot Camps Those Chosen to carry the black veins serve no man, for Latents are royalty in the Loss. This is the lesson of Leper and the core of the faith. But the Recession’s fools see their guards’ head on pikes and learn only to be more careful next time. Hot camps do not migrate anymore. They opt for more permanent fortifications, near canary cages or restart-ups that require a consistent labor force that can take a bite. Many burn casualties slain at heavy borders, or work fields in a fenced farm growing crops not conducive to drone agriculture. A few of the hot camps are still run by the DHQS, but the productive quarantine market has only grown as more Supressin users turn Latent every year. Many corporations demand a slave allowance to sweeten their government contracts. The propaganda would have me believe that conditions have improved since Leper. The documentaries on Ubiq assure me each Latent now receives a wage, a weekend, and an eight-hour shift. Yet I recognize the broadcast towers for the bomb collars, still visible in the background as cameras force smiles from terrified Chosen faces. Rumor has it the plastic explosives are on belts now, for better optics. The charge severs the spine, crippling the Vector that rises as the Latent bleeds out. Guards put the crippled escapees in parallel trenches and bet on “crawler races.” The DHQS guards the location of hot camps closely, placing them far away from enclave networks and concealing their true nature. I do not know of any current locations. If I did, I would be there, bludgeoning slavers to death. The Moths give me vacation time for such a purpose.

135 inhabitable land on earth was 50 people/km. His rule was simple. Before going on a job, consider the pre-Crash density number of the area and move the decimal to the left. That was the likelihood of death. So on a random strip of barren Loss? Leaving the fence is a 5% chance of death. In the city they were going? It was 599%. What can I say? He was right. Heavy Borders What constitutes a heavy border depends on shifting politics and dead weather. The clearest example is the narrows of the northern Mississippi Line. Casualty traffic is so heavy that the shallow river is not enough deterrent, and the majority of all DHQS resources go into maintaining the wall to keep the dead from the East. The smuggling and bribes that make porous the rest of the Recession’s defenses don’t exist up there. They shoot whatever they can see. They bomb what they cannot. Nothing gets through, living or dead. Certain enclaves have isolationist policies that make them equally deadly. Approaching within sight of a heavy enclave without the appropriate colors or signs means a sniper bullet to the head, alive or not. Exactly who counts as “the enemy” in these communities depends on their politics. The Chosen are often seen as worse than Vectors and murdered on sight. Others kill any not of their faith, or any humans not identified as coming from one of their preferred trade partners. Regardless, those that know of a heavy border should steer clear. Shooting everything in sight for five years straight has made for some deadly marksmen. Gulf of Flame Petrochemical plants and natural gas refineries are high value targets. Some contain processed barrels of fuel never shipped to market. Even raw crude could be turned into something useful at one of the many enclave refineries dotting the Loss. A great many crews flocked to Louisiana and medical plan insists that the company has the right to blood test any human they find at a treatment site. If found, immunes are detained even if it means killing every person in the crew. These immunes are never heard from again. If Scrape — the nightmare marrow harvesting facility — truly exists, it is almost certainly a StopLoss site. The company’s allegiance... I can’t imagine how it would matter. If the situation is dire enough to need them, no one can afford questions. If they need you? I can think of nothing that could save you. ExclusIon Zones The Loss is only danger and trial. To avoid its hardships is to be Recession Bait. To be Bait is to be less than human. The eyeless casualty knows more than these fenced-in fools and their self-satisfied “safety.” A Taker must know the land and dare if they wish to become Chosen. It is the price the Loss demands for the truth it reveals. But even amongst the Loss, there are places one should not tread. Even a god demands privacy. The Loss shrouds its dignity with death. CItIes Do not go into cities. You will not listen to me when I say this. Here is how it will go. I will say the number I’ve seen die in the cities. There is no reason to go there. But the Takers imagine they “need” riches, and they imagine the cities hold these. What they fail to imagine is the scale of the doom that awaits them, as ants can’t imagine the shape of a boot. Takers go to the city anyway. They die. I add to the number I’ve seen die this way. When the next crew comes along, I tell them a higher number. That one doesn’t work either. Once, I worked with a smart one. He wasn’t smart enough to stay put when his comrades insisted on suicide, but he tried to convince them to stop. He told me once that the average population density for all the

136 ago extinguished themselves, the natural gas pockets lit up during the Crash could theoretically burn forever. The poison these infernos pump into the air leaves much of Louisiana, Texas, Mexico, and the Gulf at the mercy of wandering death clouds. The Takers hadn’t been consumed by flame or teeth. Their mistake had been trying to breathe. Many Takers argue that the area is safe now. They claim DHQS bombing has capped the wells, the gas has dissipated, and gas masks can serve as a failsafe. But for all their talk, I’ve yet to met the crew willing to risk a score in the Gulf of Flame. PhoenIx’s Ashes (Palo Verde) The bombs dropped on Canada were said to have been made of nuclear material with a short half-life. I’m told large areas of the Canadian hot zone are already habitable again. Texas coastlines in the early days, seeking fuel to keep their enclaves warm in winter. Most never returned. Even the ones remaining in constant contact with their enclaves just disappeared without so much as a mention of casualties. The Takers would get within sight of the burning coastline, illuminated by refinery fires unquenched, and that would be the last report. For years, it was one of the Loss’s many mysterious mass disappearances. The consensus opinion blamed Aberrants until the Mississippi Mist. The Mist occurred about two years after the Crash. One minute, the Free Parking ghetto located outside Mandeville was one of the most populous in the region. Next, every man, woman, and child dropped dead in the streets. After a long investigation, CDC scientists discovered that atypical winds had brought a cloud of hydrogen cyanide gas across Lake Ponchartrain and into the camp. Though the oil fires had long

137 Lost People Only a Latent receives the gift of living each day pierced and embraced by something larger than humanity. They become more than their species, as would any creature blessed enough to carry a young god in their veins. But the majority of those touched by the Blight are not Chosen. The unworthy become casualties, and casualties have only one need: consume. The millions dead, the cities burned, the world lost — these are cold, shambling steps in the pursuit of a simple need. There is no creature in the world so logical and predictable. Humans need to consume as well. Like a casualty, they will kill to meet that need. Unlike a casualty, they will kill to meet many more needs besides. They will also kill out of desire, faith, delusion, madness, and Palo Verde Nuclear Plant, by contrast, will be warping the earth for decades to come. It is one of the Loss’s secret places: an irradiated desert whose very sight would kill a man. People still live in Arizona, but none dare within 100 miles of Palo Verde. Still, things come wandering out of the heat-wave horizon from time to time. Some are exiles that tried to make a home where no one else dared tread, fleeing their foolishness too late with bleeding gums and shedding hair. Others come out of the exclusion zone to feed: the Meek and other madmen seeking fresh victims, or giant coyote packs seeking new prey. I do not fear the Loss, for I am its Chosen creature... yet even I will not venture through Phoenix’s Ashes.

138 the metal hide. Some crews have managed to hack individual CPUs by “rodeo-ing” a bot, but the expertise and insanity required to do so is rare. Otherwise, a Taker’s only hope is blowing up the bot’s tracks with explosives or running until it’s out of charge. As the machines can hit 30 mph across open ground, I’d suggest making for the trees. Settlement GarrIsons The majority of DHQS in the Loss never stray beyond the fences of their settlements. These troops are stationed to guard airstrips, refueling stations, and various other Recession military assets. As few dare attack such installations, the DHQS staffs these distant bases with their greenest recruits. Poorly trained, under equipped, and drafted from the Free Parking dregs, garrisoned troops seldom hold to the Recession’s dogma. These are the same people that police the poor in car camps least they become them. Black market trades with these groups are easy for most Takers to arrange, and a few “lifers” usually volunteer for additional tours only to maintain their lucrative rackets. Only direct orders or aggression provokes conflict with garrison troops. Even then, their advantages stop at numbers and supplies. The average Lost child holds more sand than these soft-bodies. They want nothing more than easy duty and a quick rotation home. ReclamatIon Squads I knew a few raiders that thought garrison troops ripe for harvest. Most died in the attempt, but even those that managed to conquer a settlement never enjoyed the spoils for long. When conscripted serfs won’t suffice, the Recession sends out reclamation squads. They are not called “wreckers” ironically. The units range from 6-12 soldiers. Originally, the membership was limited to Operation Utility veterans: men and women so hardened before the Crash that they waded through a sea of Vectors and came out the other side. Since then, new squads have been assembled, but only accomplished, fanatical boredom. There is no thought in the human mind so inconsequential that it has not once inspired murder. Only a fool thinks it enough to navigate the casualty’s straight line of bloodshed. To survive the Loss, you must learn to walk the complex labyrinth of human violence. DHQS If you encounter the DHQS in the Loss, something has gone wrong. Their vast resources are spread thin. Attention means you’ve either been prioritized or extremely unlucky. In either instance, knowing the species of Recession dog they’re up against is the only advantage Takers have. Punch Bots Imagine the Mars rover upgraded to the size of a compact car, with a tinted-Plexiglas dome mounted on top holding a swiveling camera. The chassis carries two robotic arms, each outfitted with a cattle gun set between industrial strength clamps. That’s a punch bot. When it builds enough solar charge, a punch bot’s alarm goes off. The camera seeks human shapes in any movement stirred by the noise. Upon recognizing a shape, the software distinguishes the head. The arm extends, the clamps close, and the bolt fires. The lobotomized body that hits the ground might be a casualty, but it is too often some enclavist out looking for firewood. The punch bot makes no distinction between human and casualty. It just keeps punching until time to recharge. At best, punch bots are a source of income. They break often and contain sophisticated electronics. But it’s extremely hard to tell a recharging bot from a broken one until it’s trying to murder you. Other active bots are merely a nuisance, such as the ones that decide to kill all the mannequins in a department store. But they’re often much more dangerous. Punch bot alarms lure stampedes down on enclaves near their hunting grounds, and entire crews have been wiped out by single units, bullets bouncing off

139 the DHQS asks them to perform atrocities on their behalf. Aside from their initial training, stewards are expected to take care of themselves. They’re provided no equipment beyond a number to call for orders. They must salvage everything from the Loss, blending in with those they seek to betray. Stewards often establish their cover as Takers, as it is the only occupation that explains their unusual skill sets and expertise. Once accepted within an enclave, a steward may wait years for orders, reporting into audio dead boxes with no replies. They might not even know their mission. But the orders always come, and they can be as varied as human cruelty. The DHQS contracts work out to so many corporations that the objectives are often inscrutable. One steward may report directly to the White House and be unaware of the steward living next door, currently on loan to Frond Engineering or StopLoss. The mission could be as simple as painting a target with a laser. It might involve seeking election on an enclave council, or ensuring a crew takes a certain contract. Alternately, they might be asked to assassinate an official, leave the gates open for the dead, or form a kill squad with other sleepers to murder every man, woman, and child in their sleep. We know this only because a few stewards have defected, revealing the true nature of their purpose in the Loss. They assure us that the vast majority remain loyal, lying in wait for the call, waiting for the day they sneak off to the canary cage, gear up, and begin the bloody work of reclamation. PrIvate Sector For all its dangers, the DHQS’s shortage of troops keeps encounters rare. The easterners Takers most often run across are from the private sector. Any company willing to bolster the Recession’s ailing treasury buys a free pass across the border. These corporations are allowed to strip mine the Loss of resources at will. Their attitudes shift along with the markets. One day, a company could hire Takers as “local consultants.” The next, DHQS ideologues are granted admission. Each new recruit is trained by Utility veterans. Some of the newer squads erect cults of personality around their forbears, calling themselves “Zao’s Children” or “Gunny’s Lil’ Killers.” Do not be fooled by silly names: wreckers are some of the best-equipped and trained soldiers in the Loss. They’ve been known to clear acres of casualties in hours and wipe out enclaves in minutes. Some attest a few groups have shown mercy for the Lost, but the LifeLines threads dedicated to their massacres argue differently. Reclamation squads only leave their bases to kill someone or something. If a crew finds themselves the target of one, they can die knowing they’ve pissed off the DHQS to an admirable degree. As they both derive from the same stock, reclamation squads and Moths share a genocidal hate for each other. I have fought them many times. Each battle has earned me worthy scars, and I grow stronger with every kill. When the Blight finally sees fit to complete my transition, I hope my young Vector teeth taste wrecker first. Stewards When the DHQS finds a bastard too evil for a reclamation squad, they make a steward. A steward’s every breath is lies. His every step, evasion. There is no lower creature in the entire Loss. Stewards are infiltrators. They are the primary tool used to enforce the Recession’s will. While the DHQS denies the Loss’s existence, their stewards manipulate its people. Enclaves sit on vital assets or nearer to them than the military can get, and invasion is far less efficient than weighting the scales with single spies. Stewards can come from highly-trained military units, Free Parking ghettos, or the very enclave they seek to betray. The only standard in their recruitment is the presence of family in Recession-held areas. The ability to punish or reward these innocents is all that keeps many stewards loyal to the cause when

140 confusing one site for another risk becoming test subjects. Frond EngIneerIng Frond owned patents on most of the drone farming and construction equipment used in the Midwest before the Crash. The complication of the Blight has only increased demand and sophistication. Everyone respects the need to eat and a fear of casualties. Many in the Loss consider Frond the least objectionable entity to ever pillage their land. This is nonsense. I put together many a Frond blueprint during my time in Colony #1, and no one from corporate ever told our torturers anything besides good job. I do not know if the company still uses hot camp labor, but I waste no opportunity to refresh my mechanics skills by dismantling their equipment when I find it. BeeMaIl BeeMail prepared for bankruptcy before the Crash, but as the only aerial shipping company with the majority of its assets in the East, it found itself running a monopoly. The company now serves small shipping contracts for DHQS and other corporate interests, flying sensitive packages and eyes-only orders around the Loss. However, their network has only expanded by cannibalizing the drone distribution centers of their dead competition. These scavenging operations have only been possible with the expertise of Takers. Out of gratitude, BeeMail runs packages between enclaves off-the-books for discounted rates. Though generally helpful, make no mistake: BeeMail would happily kill every soul in Distributy in exchange for its drone fleet. Longest Haul TruckIng LHT is the NatGas trucking firm that performs nearly every shipping job in the Loss. If a load is too big for drone but not large enough for a DHQS transport plane, LHT takes the job. Their rigs are part-tank, part-train, and part-bomb. Each hauls a relatively small load compared to its massive natural gas fuel tanks. The cabs are armored, the orders could be to shoot them on sight. The biggest players have defined economic niches. Learning these makes their behavior more predictable. However, never assume a business so innocuous as to be safe. Takers are only as useful to a corp as they are profitable. If it’s a single bounty more profitable to kill you, they will. StopLoss StopLoss Medical Services is the most visible corporation in the Loss, if only because they don’t insist on maintaining the facade of homo sacer. But their care comes at a steep price, and their motivations stay secret. It’s uncommon for StopLoss to deal with Takers as anything except customers or competition. If they hire a crew for a job outside their in-house security service, it’s for something serious. Those with the stomach to work for them might learn valuable intel that could be sold on LifeLines. AlosIne The biotech company Alosine was a power player in pharmaceuticals even before they led the charge in patenting animal and artificial genomes. Since the Crash, their holdings have done nothing but expand, having secured dozens of major contracts with the Recession government: all classified and for undisclosed amounts. Some theorize that Alosine carries out more Blight research than even the DHQS. If Alosine is out in the Loss, it is typically for one of two purposes. Takers stand to benefit if the compound is researching one of their genetically engineered crops. These super-seeds are the only thing keeping many enclaves alive under the ravages of climate change, and executives often pay Takers for delicate groundwork in their studies beyond the capabilities of drone farming. The rest of Alosine’s operations consist of black sites. These secret facilities, often in cooperation with the DHQS, conduct research too dangerous or ethically repugnant to be allowed in Recession borders. Takers

141 SIngularIty SecurIty SolutIons Every Recession thug that ever scored a headshot has tried to start a mercenary outfit. Most cross the border only to die. The only private security firm with any staying power thus far has been Singularity Security Solutions. Triple-S recruits exclusively from the dregs of the DHQS. Section-8s, dishonorable discharges, retirees — Loss experience is all they care about. If a soldier gets discharged for trying to make love to a casualty, Trip-S offers him a job the next day. What the troops lack in honor they make up in hardware, rivaling that of a wrecker squad — AR target recognition helmets, basilisk body armor, missile-equipped drones, steel-plated dronkeys with Gatling guns. DHQS allows the corp to poach talent and shame their equipment in exchange for discounts on services. Some jobs even the stewards won’t and the drivers trained as navigators in the few cleared roadways that remain accessible. Nothing about the business is profitable save the enormous subsidies the Recession pays to keep its few distribution tunnels open. LHT often contracts Takers to scout routes, clear wrecks, or guard convoys. Their refueling depots are well guarded, but peaceful strangers are welcome inside to trade for booze and drugs. LHT has been known to ‘lose’ entire shipments to suffering enclaves only because a Taker from there attended the driver’s poker night. I’m sure they’ve transported things that hurt the Loss, but only because they never ask questions. I’m sure they’ve killed, but only those that got in their way. The one-time I tried to hijack a LHT truck, I was lucky to survive it. The only person I’d rather have by my side in a fight than a Moth is a meth-head LHT trucker. They’re madmen and woman all.

142 name. Only a handful of hot camps, Immune harvesting, and prisoner details are still under government control, kept only to test out new regulations and procedures. The day-to-day work of enslaving the Chosen and torturing the Immune is contracted out to Many Hands, LLC. Any human rights abuses the corp gets caught committing can be lightly scolded and fined by the administration, keeping the voters happy even as business returns to usual. In their yearn to expand, the monthly allowance of cattle sent by the DHQS fails to meet Many Hands’ appetite. All of their Loss facilities accept trade from slavers and immunity hunters. Many Hands, LLC is the primary enabler of human trafficking in the Loss. Any Taker that works for them, I will gladly hunt for sport. Tragedy Trackers Like water, casualties flow through the path of least resistance. They’re more likely to be found in streets than fields, at low elevation than high, temperate than cold. When all things geographic are equal, they often revert to the host’s psychic geography. Many a new Taker has been disturbed to find a casualty still wandering its old living room after five years, or hunting near the spot of a sentimental vacation photo. In short, knowing the human from before can help track the monsters of today. Even in instances where the person died far from home, the average Whisper refugee left enough social media, RFID tags, and physical trails to enable tracking their doomed retreat from the Crash. Tragedy Trackers are freelance data miners that specialize in finding out this information and selling it to concerned parties. They don’t operate as a whole, but the TT forums on LifeLines serve as a brokering house for the trading of leads. Trackers earn bounty by selling confirmation of death to loved ones, either for closure or probate seizure in DHQS bounty courts. The Recession and various corporations also pay for traces of VIPs lost in the Crash. But most TTs usually hit a wall in their hunts, and few do, but war crimes are Singularity’s breadand-butter. Between atrocities, they can often be found doing make-work security for other companies in the Loss. MDNN A number of citizen journalists made embarrassing documentaries about the absurdity of homo sacer. The DHQS psyops division decided to drown the truth with their own signal. Thus, the subsidized creation of the Manifest Destiny News Network: an “independent” voice dedicated to reporting on the inevitable reclamation. In reality, MDNN is a jobs program for every broadcaster that towed the line during the Crash. Their reward is a propaganda mouthpiece to shout from 24/7. MDNN sends out production crews at DHQS request, but the network’s dedication to lies doesn’t make them delusional. The garrison troops assigned to their protection often can’t tell a Vector from a casualty, and sticking within the green zones of a settlement provides nothing viewers haven’t seen before. Producers often hire Takers to take them within telephoto distance of “authenticity.” Despite knowing Takers are the only guides with a chance of saving them, don’t expect the reporters to acknowledge the Loss holds anything but the dead and terrorists. MDNN still gets the bulk of its income from government subsidies, and they must bolster the narrative. If they’re dumb enough to pay up front, I recommend kicking back and watching the Bait get eaten. Many Hands, LLC After Leper, DHQS distanced itself from productive quarantine by a single remove. The Recession still rounds up Latents at every opportunity and kidnaps immunes into medical service, but these people are then sold to Many Hands, LLC. Before the Crash, they were Glasstech Incarceration Inc., but as even private prison populations got converted into work gangs, the corporation rebranded and focused on facilitating slavery by another

143 and blade. Enclavists and Reccesionites alike suffer from this sickness. Criminals boast that they’ve broken free, but they wear their fetters as a badge all the same. “Law breakers” may be doubly delusional, but they see only by their hallucinations. To understand what they imagined they’ve rebelled against is to predict their movements. Narco Cartels Flesh is designed to feel pain. Drugs are designed to feel good. People will always buy drugs. This hasn’t changed. If anything, the Crash increased demand. But the past won’t be forgotten. Many narco trafficking operations in Central and South America survived solely because they were structured and equipped like armies. They haven’t abandoned their weapons, nor the culture of brutality developed to discourage competition. Having no qualms about gutting and hanging an enemy by their entrails serves one well in the Loss. However, the Loss has rendered much of the organization vestigial. No one guards the border but the dead. Many enclaves can’t wait for drug dealers to return with the next shipment. Those that wish to save their populations from addiction need a peacekeeping force large enough to both control the public and best an armed convoy full of experienced killers with automatic weapons. Dope is cheaper than an army. In the Recession, the only people that want a fix more than those in Free Parking are the soldiers guarding them. Crimes of desperation keep them so busy that the “war on drugs” is over. The old problems have been reduced to two: quarantine and competition. When smuggling from the Loss into the Recession, narcos have to deal with a shoot-on-sight border now. Boats and planes smuggling across the Gulf or Great Lakes are vaporized instead of arrested. Bribes are more difficult to arrange. Consequences are final. This reinforces cartels’ dependence on deadly have the heart to do footwork over the fence. As such, Tragedy Trackers are essential investors in the Taker economy. Even when they don’t directly contract crews for closure jobs, the leads sold to Recession interests often lead to corporate contracts. Vulture Investors Fools sometimes think they can taste the Loss’s riches without paying its price. This is nonsense. Someone always pays, usually Takers. Sometimes, we receive bounty in exchange. We call the fools with money vulture investors. Vulture investors from the Recession must truly believe in their get-rich schemes. Individual license to break quarantine is expensive, as are the multiple crews these tycoons hire to see their vision come true. Occasionally, they’ll have an insider tip that proves actually useful, like staking claim to land the DHQS plans to settle so they can reap a government buy-out. Mostly, they’re treasure hunters throwing good bounty after bad. Vulture investors from the Loss are something else entirely. They’re usually former Takers themselves, investing retirement money to build a home in the Loss’s embrace. While their plans are more grounded, they are much harder to please. Regardless of origin, a person only qualifies as a vulture investor when their resources match that of a small corporation. This might initially seem like a good thing, as humans are more reasonable than distributed profit entities. But corps at least share a psychopathic logic. With vultures, madness and obsession find their places in the markets. CrImInal OrganIzatIons The Loss finds the idea of law laughable. To think one can violate a fantasy? That it matters? Piteous delusion. Yet some still insist on behaving as if words have meaning, as if morality goes beyond opinion, as if punishment is more than bullet

144 to hit the streets is to work directly with highlevel DHQS and corporate officials. In such instances, be wary; Valets jealously guard their positions as middlemen. Takers are easier to kill than corrupt generals. Valets tended to be weak, low-level criminals before the Crash. They rose in the chaos of the amputation through cunning, ruthlessness, or both. Five years on, the survivors employ plenty of camp trash desperate to do their bidding. They can afford informants in enclaves where their interests lie. Though they often subcontract on LifeLines to scavenge wares, every year more Valets try to cut into Taker business. A few of the more powerful bosses have franchised into the enclaves, employing dedicated crews. These Bait thugs don’t typically survive long, but they undercut jobs and offer violent competition with annoying frequency. Some Takers find working with certain Valets distasteful, but one is as good as another. A Valet’s sins are crowd-sourced. Their power depends on serving the demands of their camp. If baby formula fetches a good price, they’ll sell it, but the same is true of Vector blood and Soma. Valets can only serve the vices of their customers. Their only currency is the lives of the desperate. Notable Taker Crews Takers might think they deserve their own category. They do not. Many look down on those who work in Free Parking as criminals, but this is imagined superiority. The Recession’s law holds no sway in the Loss and Takers violate the taboos of enclaves as often as the US’s farcical homo sacer. Some may be Robin Hoods. Just as many are war profiteers. Enclavists often confuse the two, praising their exploiters and persecuting their servants. Do not succumb to illusions, Taker. You are a criminal in the eyes of the Lost. You will compete with other criminals and more besides. Learn from the crews that transcended the label. force, and violence as the default reaction has serious consequences for competition. It’s common in the Loss to run across an enclave’s marijuana or opium crop. The cottage narcotics industry cuts into the cartels bottom line, which now fuels their survival rather than excess. Though some operations have diversified — using their chemists to make medical pharmaceuticals or smuggling Blight samples to believer cults — most settle for trying to murder other operators. It all depends on an enclave’s politics whether Takers become the customers, partners, or enemies of the narco cartels. Smugglers Drugs are the least of a smuggler’s worries. They might need to bribe guards with a few kilos to sneak a few tons of cocaine through a bridge checkpoint. If those bricks contain even one Blight sample? It’s execution, after days of interrogation at a DHQS black site. Anything from the Loss is contraband in the Recession. Anything. Bottled water recovered from a plant might as well be casualty spit, even if the Recession can’t afford to provide anything drinkable for the refuge camp where it is headed. Food, medicine, people — the second it crosses the Mississippi, orders are to treat it like the origin of a new Crash. Narco cartels originally had some edge on the smuggling business, but the sheer variety of goods that need to break quarantine every day opened the market up. For Takers in the eastern Loss, smuggling outfits are usually their first and last business partners. The Recession’s constant demand for salvaged goods keeps contracts in steady supply, and a smuggler’s expertise is the only way most Takers get to retire. Valets Every narco and smuggler knows a few Valets. The crime bosses of Free Parking serve as the Red Market’s point of contact with most Recession business. Nearly all quarantine contraband flows through the refugee camps. The only other way for goods

145 privileges on LifeLines, for which they must pay a small tax. The price is worth it. Real Moths can expect lucrative job leads to land in their inbox. Thus, Moths pull more bounty and maintain their place in the Taker hierarchy. But the cost of membership is steeper than a simple cut. To stay in, Gnat periodically requires her crews accept jobs for the organization. She pays for them like any other client, but the task usually requires loyalty to the cause… whatever that is. Do the work well and LifeLines keeps dropping leads. Crews that bungle it get dropped to the same guest privileges as every other Taker. Crews that refuse? They’re outed as stewards and their accounts blocked. Those that stay in Gnat’s good graces retire earlier than most, either leaving the Loss or making a home in UCity. Those that disappoint the Moths live to regret the decision. The Moths I had killed self-proclaimed Moths before I came to UCity for my revenge. Gnat can find no record of any of their handles, though. As the original Takers, fresh meat tries to attract business by taking on the first brand. Traitor encourages this: it keeps the stewards from identifying his real crews, especially the ones that call themselves something else. If a crew doesn’t operate out of UCity directly, there’s no reason to believe they are Moths. If they go by another name, there’s no reason to believe they aren’t Moths. Hipster calls the satellite crews “franchises.” Sometimes they train on the mountain before she sends them to strategic enclaves; sometimes they are recruited online. Either way, Moths are not unlike stewards. They must earn their own bounty, minimize contact, and maintain cover. The only help they can expect from UCity is special

146 the wings, set up airlocks using specialized tractor-trailers, and clear each section methodically. When it’s clean, they loot everything, trade it to the closest enclave, fortify the building, and sell the fortress to the highest bidder on LifeLines. While they wait for the right price, they hold orgiastic parties fueled by homemade moonshine and whatever their chemists can whip up from the drug cabinet. Like working fast food, no one ever makes it rich working for GILF. The skill required is low and the pay spread thin across too many Takers. Yet work stays steady enough. It gets them to the next party, and that’s enough in a world without a future. The crew has multiple franchises, but the founder is a man called “Cousin Fucker.” He’s made enough bounty to retire a dozen times over, but he only uses it to fund his bacchanalian jobs program. I’ve met raiders less savage than CF. He’s unhinged, but I know for a fact he insists the body of each slain casualty be buried, with full religious ceremony. Odd as he and GILF may be, they are the few people that did not forget the elderly. D-Town Takers What little the Recession understands about Takers they get from The Great Repression: Life in the Loss. Citizen journalists jumped the border and somehow made it all the way to Distributy shortly after the civil war. The documentary they shot could only be distributed illegally, but Ubiq didn’t listen to the DHQS’s cease-and-desist letters. I’m told it’s a fairly accurate portrayal, even if it makes the whole of the Loss look like that cesspool Distributy. In addition to inspiring MDNN, the film made the Takers that the cameras followed around famous. Casual-Tee and the D-town Takers, as they called themselves, did not need to stay in the business long. Every vulture investor, corporation, and Bait with too much bounty sought them out after the documentary became popular. The original crew retired mere months after the release. I do not know what war Gnat is fighting. I do not care. I have learned that when she does not show her strength, it is only because you are already surrounded by it. GILF Most American nursing homes were built in a star pattern. The wings branch off from hubs to control visitor traffic and dispense medication from a centralized nursing station. In the Loss, such buildings make an excellent fort, shaped like a trace-italienne with crossfire kill-zones in the courtyards between wings. When possible, they were located outside urban areas for the sake of optics: trees for the residents, a lack of ambulances and hearses for the young, and manageable dead weather for survivors. Cheaper homes were lightless dungeons lacking windows, but concrete walls are the fashion in Loss architecture. Expensive facilities positioned themselves atop high ground with good sightlines. The danger of fancy bay windows is lessened by frequent fire doors opened by keypad, turning each corridor into a series of airlocks. None of these defenses helped during the Crash, of course. The elderly were the last priority even of their children and Vectors do not mind aged meat. But Blight is limited in its preservative power. The condition of frail cripples wasn’t helped by Vector mauling, not to mention the rigors of hot infection. By the time the torpor ended, most Cs in nursing homes could barely crawl. Five years on, most only roll their eyes and snap their jaws. But a casualty that offers no sport still offers bounty. Medical records are especially prized by Tragedy Trackers for cross-reference. Rare medications can be salvaged from the back rooms, as can lifesaving equipment long picked clean from the hospitals. GILF was the first crew to realize the value of a nursing home. They are now one of the largest operations in the Loss. GILF descends on targets in giant packs, sometimes over a hundred strong. They erect fences between

147 Quite a few Recession hackers would pay well to take DFI’s on-site advantage off the market permanently. Word has it that Palbicke is DFI’s “white whale.” If Christian can find evidence of what happened to him during the Crash? A crew could reclaim Hawaii with the bounty Gnat would be willing to pay. Eat Clean There are half-dozen crews calling themselves “Pony Express” in Colorado alone. Small parcels and messages too sensitive for Ubiq still need trading across enclaves, and riders can make a living running between trade networks. But horses are expensive creatures. It’s difficult to prevent them from spooking around casualties. Even after training, they make noise, injure easily, and encourage everyone with a rifle to take a shot at the rider. Most rider delivery outfits are one lost animal away from closing. The fatal blow usually arrives sooner instead of later. Unlike horses, human lives are cheap. This is the secret of Eat Clean. They’re exclusively Detoxin super-marathoners and parkour athletes, specializing in small package delivery between enclaves. The crew operates with a lower overhead than any other crew in the Loss. They’ll send out single Takers, equipped with almost nothing. The runners consider it a contest as to who can survive with the least gear. Their leader, known only as #5, once made it across two states carrying nothing but energy gel rations, the package, and a bloody Mag-lite. Their survival rates are low and their contracts dangerous, but while the average crew would send out a half-dozen Takers with vehicles, Eat Clean splits the same bounty amongst a single, fitness-obsessed fanatic. In my darkest days of raiding, I never attacked an Eat Clean runner. They are not worth the chase, and they trail stampedes of dead behind them. But the Recession does not know this. The ill-informed fools have been hiring Distributy’s doppelgänger group for years. Far from the plucky crew of underdogs portrayed in the film, D-town Takers is now a small army, subsidized by the enclave and dispatched on contracts from the central council. Clients negotiate with an actor doing his best CasualTee impression, on call 24/7. I’ve heard the difficulty of getting work as a freelance crew is starting to build resentment for the city’s incorporated Taker group. Though successful now, the wounds of the “war-house” days are not healed. D-Town’s continued success could restart the conflict. DIgItal ForensIcs Inc. Digital Forensics Inc. promotes itself online as a professional tragedy-tracking firm based in the Recession. It takes ten minutes on a search engine to realize this is a lie. Clients too stupid to notice get fleeced paying for their services. Those that can identify DFI as Takers don’t waste their time. Those that see Takers and call anyway get gouged because they have no other options. Christian runs a tight crew. I don’t even know what enclave DFI runs from, she so jealously guards their secrets. The business model is simple: cut out the middleman in tragedy tracking. Rather than wait for subcontracts from data miners out of ideas, her crew data mines between trips over the fence. This requires more power and Ubiq access than most enclaves can spare. Whoever houses DFI must charge a stiff tax. The weaponized toys the crew favors also hurts their overhead. No other crew in the Loss uses more drones or dron-keys, but such is the trade-off when Christian’s nerds must double as soldiers. The big expenses make for big paydays though. DFI may scrape by like most crews, but they do so with technical contracts no one else could handle. Nobody strips an abandoned server faster, and every data dump goes direct to DFI without the TT firms getting a cut. This is likely why Christian is so tight-lipped about the crew’s location.

148 Maybe that has happened to me. But raiders are not mad. They see the Loss’s truth. And what is death to those who know the truth? Be it a Taker’s, or their own? Slavers and Immune Hunters Each will try to claim some rationalization. They only capture Immune that refuse to serve. They only enslave Latents spreading disease. They only grab criminals exiled from enclaves. They only kidnap children that would otherwise starve. They only snatch women that won’t be missed. They only trade in men that sell themselves. It’s for the best. It’s for your safety. It’s for the greater good. All lies. Slavers are raiders without the nobility of nihilism. They serve a god, and it is greed. They corrupt the simple savagery of the Loss. They turn its hunt into a factory farm. They seek to feast forever on single meals, thinning momentary conquests into gruel with human misery. They pervert the life and death purity with a third, unnatural existence, and its every second is worse than an eternity of undead shambling. To be seen by a slaver is to be judged as equal or as cattle. Accept neither at any price. I do not suffer a slaver to live. Those who do are no better than them. Rebels Politics have always been about murder. Vote for one candidate to kill an entire class. Vote for another to do it slower. Vote for a third to kill yourself. Those that lose can use guns, money, and power to kill voters, then go on killing besides. The society might change besides who dies, but blood is always the cost. Good politicians offer good exchange rates. Some enclaves still vote, but in the Loss, bullet and blade play kingmaker. Many have dispensed with the pretenses. They dedicate themselves to the only protest that still counts. VIndIcated It’s easy the scorn the man from before the Crash. He deserves it. But I do not begrudge RaIders I know my past makes me unwelcome in UCity, but I cannot tell you I regret my days as a raider. Only choices can be regretted, and to raid is no choice. You see your family eaten. You survive hiding in a mass grave. Later, you join a group of survivors. You flee again as they die the same way. You join another. They tear each other apart. Another, lost to dwindling and disease. Another, lost to believers or casualties or DHQS. Still, you survive. You know you will never kill yourself because you have seen there is no peace in death. The meaning of your life is pain, and it is preferable to making the deaths you witnessed meaningless by adding your own. You meet other people with vacant eyes. You collect, like hairs in a drain, but you do not speak. You are silent together, but you still have needs. You will die if something is not done. But what to do? Cooperate? Another enclave? Another scheduled gutting? No. Not again. Then the trade caravan comes into view, or the settlement, or the Taker crew. They have things. You do not want; you need. You cannot die or you must die, but you have to know now. Afterwards, some of your number is dead. You did not know their names. The victims, equally faceless. The number is nothing… nothing compared to the failures from before. You have finally escaped the cycle. You live in the last phase now, forever, comforted by death that never leaves and grief that never comes. Slowly, you learn the animal joys again: no victory sweeter than a fight you had to win, no sex better than between sole survivors, no embrace warmer than the fearful respect of your tribe. The enclavists call it “Living Darwin.” You don’t call it anything. You dare not name what you’ve become. Raiding is void. Raiders breathe like the vacuum of space, sucking breath to fill their absence. Sometimes, in that vacant cocoon, something human can heal and regrow.

149 demand loyalty as gratitude, then demand it at gunpoint when the debts are paid. Proven correct once, they rule by the same paranoia that saved them. They hoard and rarely trade. They enslave those races and ideologies they deem inferior. They lash out at anyone they imagine works for the government, or the Moths, or the Jews, or whatever other scapegoat they invent to prop up their little fiefdoms. I somewhat sympathize with the intoxication of the Vindicated. Proving someone wrong can be an addicting feeling. That’s why killing them is such an exquisite joy. There’s nothing quite like watching the realization wash over them. They survived the Crash… only to meet me. PapIneaus Each cell has a different name: The Society of Red Leaves, The Revenants, Northern Fallout, Preemptive Revenge. The name “Papineaus” caught on after a group of the same name managed to assassinate the Recession’s first all facets of his life. He lived as best he knew how, and there is no fault in failing to predict the apocalypse. Not everyone gets to be prophet to a dark messiah. Yet there is a certain type that thinks they saw the end coming. These so-called survivalists dare claim their heraldry of the end is some sort of virtue. Before the Crash, they were rich men that thought themselves persecuted. They wasted their lives fearing their government, their neighbors, fate itself. They filled their days with petty preparation for an end that never came. When the Crash finally came, all that grim pragmatism got most of them eaten by an apocalypse too fantastic for their imaginings. Still, some survived by dent of decadent bunkers, king’s estates removed from the world, and militia compounds already turned into premature enclaves. These fools are the first of their type to achieve what their ilk always bet their lives on: vindication. The Vindicated are insufferable. They lord over their enclaves like gods. They

150 either left behind and disavowed by their government, or ordered to commit some atrocity by a man in a comfy eastern armchair. Some have even come back from the safe zones, rebelling against the dismantling of free elections in post-Hunter years. Their intensity varies much like the Papineaus: one end of the spectrum seeks only a special election and enfranchisement for the homo sacer, but hardliners on the other end fight for the total destruction of the USA, a return to the slave-holding Confederacy, or any number of fringe ideologies. With their goals so aligned, it would be easy to imagine the Papineaus and traitors as allies. Cooperation remains scarce. A favorite trick of stewards is to impersonate traitor cells to kill Papineaus and vice versa. As always, their trickery poisons the Lost against each other. BelIevers Some would say I am mad for my faith. Perhaps. I’ll not argue it. The Chosen need no validation beyond what they have already received from the Blight. If I have gone insane, who is to say it is not for the best? What use is sanity when so many of its carriers are offal in a casualty’s gut? Perhaps my faith is only insane because it pulled me from the protective nihilism of the raider. Who is to say? I read the Loss as best I can; I dare not guess its ending. Takers believe in the intangible as much as anyone they scorn as “cultist.” They believe in capitalism, the sanctity of the deal, the hope of a better tomorrow. These beliefs break them and save them, same as any theology. They sought something to cling to as reality crumbled beneath their feet, and they reached out for the pillar of human greed. Most Takers would be offended to hear this lifestyle called a choice, yet they would scorn others that grabbed different handholds to save against the collapse of Truth. The Crash kicked down all the old pillars of faith. Jesus, Mohammed, and all the gods refused to save us. Science stammers over its interim executive appointed after the Hunter purges. Since then, it’s become generalized to refer to all Canadian insurgents. Papineau cells usually contain someone with military experience, but membership is open. Mothers with children at hockey tournaments in Montreal when the bombs dropped. Husbands that watched wives die of third-degree burns. Orphans raised only by the frozen northern Loss. Ex-Parliament members with inoperable cancers, looking to die quick inside a suicide vest. Their enemy is all the same: the US Recession. All that differs between the cells is how they define that enemy. Some are focused and precise, targeting only members of the Hunter administration still at large or imprisoned. Others regard the entire post-Hunter administration as complicit. They’ll kill DHQS, corporate subcontractors, and anyone else profiting from the first strike. A few regard every single citizen as the enemy and save no qualms for collateral damage. The true zealots won’t be happy until the entire Recession falls in a second Crash. Though most cells prioritize infiltration, large teams operate in the Loss to disrupt DHQS assets and smuggle weapons to their Recession agents. Some Papineaus consider Takers allies; others see only targets. Be sure you know whom you’re dealing with before going into negotiations. TraItors There’s an argument that the Utility vets making up the original Moths count amongst the traitors. But their general’s Taker handle was chosen with some irony. By that definition, Pappa Doc’s Railroad is also a traitor stronghold, as is anywhere where armed services violated orders in order to stay behind and help during the Crash. The broad use of the term is another Recession generalization, used to prop up its flagging civilization. Traitors in the Loss are defined by their continual attacks against the US government. Most have legitimate grievances; they were