In the distant future Earth's surface got toxic and the air became
polluted. In an attempt to survive humans built life-scrapers - giant
buildings going high into the sky where it was still possible to live.
People call them towers. Money and power are the two factors that define
your fate. The more you have, the higher level of the life-scraper you
can reach, and thus increase your chances for a longer life. The closer
you are to the surface, the faster you die.
Pollution and
toxins are slowly growing and getting up. One day they will finally
reach the top levels of the highest towers.
Towers are not
big enough to deal with the birth rate and it’s heavily regulated.
Movement between the towers is almost impossible. Only the richest ones
have a chance to travel and visit other life-scrapers.
Each
tower is a separate state while all of them are ruled by the Builders
Council. They planned and constructed all of them back in the days and
their dynasty defines humans' fate since then. They are located at the
top of the main life-scraper called the Pillar.
Not having
much space, jobs and activities in the real world, humans spent most of
the time in the virtual one. It’s a global network called zerOne, a
virtual representation of the tower you live in. It has more space but
is still restricted in terms of getting higher or lower. Your financial
situation is the main factor that can remove some restrictions.
Connections with other towers are blocked, although there are some ways
to bypass it.
In the times not long before the tower’s era
most of the Earth’s population became coders who call themselves
writers. The profession became so popular that it led to almost full
replacement of all other labor by robots programmed by writers.
Most
of the human’s jobs were replaced by machines.
Currently
manual labor has ceased to exist. The Builders Council controls the
robots production and writers guilds compete for each sector where
robots are being used. Coders manage their work, fix bugs and develop
new features. However, the need for it is significantly less than the
population numbers. Every writer's guild is constantly full and even
within them only the best ones manage to stay and continue working
there.
Those who are not able to work in the robot industry
search for various sources of income in zerOne. The most popular ones
are the Writers Fights. These are virtual fighting arenas where coders
need to create artificial characters from scratch during the match.
These characters then fight each other in virtual space. Participants
call themselves poets. Mostly because for the majority each fight is the
last frontier between the lower and higher tower’s levels. They call it
the Last Song. Sometimes you sing it before getting on the previous
level and sometimes before getting on the next one.