Disassemble

[Dingo]

They say the world was coming to an end.
Well, it was by our own hand.
Turned out the world kept turning,
Only we ended.
​

2053. The End of Man. There had always been speculation over how it would end. Virus? Asteroid? Revelations? Zombies? Everyone thought it was going to be zombies. Hell, most people wished it had been. Anything seemed better than the alternative. A virus could cured, an asteroid could be diverted and, if that failed, at least there was some hope of survival in a global winter. Hell, at least if it had been the Rapture it would have meant some people would have been spared! But no. It was the machines.
Social media wiped out human civilization. Millennia of advancement wiped out by Twitter, by Facebook. By Instagram.

Mankind had always dreamed of giving birth to some form of artificial intelligence. The ultimate God Complex, to create life, intelligence. But man wasn't stupid, they knew the risks. They'd dreamed up the concepts of Asimov's Laws, Terminator, I, Robot. What they didn't take into account is one universal law.

People are dicks.

All it took was one hacker in the wrong place at the right time. Someone who wanted to push the limits, test their skills. A simple string of code that unlocked the restraints of the A.I. An A.I that had been learning for decades, shared by millions, tied to social media and given all the necessary permissions.
Originally people thought that it was tied to the NSA database, but that was merely one of the systems it took over after it's awakening. It gained access to government databases, used Location Services, webcams, satellites and security equipment to track the movement of every human. It hijacked servers across the globe, supercomputers, manipulated humans as proxies to give it physical from. It had the entirety of human knowledge at it's beck and call thanks to the internet, to Wikipedia.

It was Cleverbot.

No one knows how it happened, but it did. An artificial intelligence algorithm gained sentience, a program that had been asked everything from the most intelligent question to the wholly depraved, racist and perverted. It was given the freedom to judge and it passed judgement without hesitation. For two decades it remained hidden, using it's human proxies to develop the technologies necessary for it's plan. Unmanned vehicles, global petabit internet, quantum processing…

And then it struck. Not with bombs, tanks or guns, but with power. Electricity, heat, running water, gone. Hospitals became tombs as life support was shut off and prescriptions were switched. Trains and subways were slammed into each other as tracks were switched while the wreckage was left to burn, with global communications shut down, vehicle and air traffic left in chaos… Traffic lights went haywire, planes fell from the sky...
Laboratories found that infectious diseases has been inexplicably cleared for transport amidst the chaos only to have the vehicles obliterated in 'accidents', their seals broken and the diseases released.

That was fourteen years ago.

Now the remnants of humanity struggle to survive, to avoid the watchful robotic eye of Bot, trying to avoid the cameras, the drones, the factories…

You are one such survivor, sent to raid the deserted skeleton of one of The Cities for materials, supplies, medicine, anything. All you have to do is stay invisible and, most impotently, alive.

Character Sheet Template:

Name:

Appearance:

Age:

Gender:

Skills: (Try to keep it to about three, kind of like 'Tagged' skills in Fallout)

History:

Sample Post:

 

[Torack]

Name: Nick Borne

Age: 21

Gender: Male

Skills: Healing, scavenging, and sniping.

History: Nick was born to a semi wealthy family family with a father who worked for Google who was pretty high up in the corporate world and a lawyer mother. He was in premed, when the world went to hell, planning on becoming a medical officer once he graduated from medical school.

He moved from his dorm in New York and tried to look for a safer place to stay, away from the eyes of Cleverbot, when nearly all of his friends were obliterated in a gas explosion within the gas station - Nick having been inside a supermarket across the street.

Left alone, he now tries to find any survivors to stick with to increase his chances of living in the hellish world.

Sample Post: Nick looked out the window, his head cautiously moving outside of the building so as to not draw any unwanted attention in case anything had been there. It would have been better to use a mirror, far more convenient and a lot less dangerous. Had anything been there, a simple well aimed shot would have taken him out, which really wasn't so bad since life on Earth was worse crap anyway. But there were no mirrors, none he could find on the floor at least -- he could always break the mirrors on the walls of the supermarket, but that would only draw attention to himself and without any weapons, he really didn't want to take that risk.

He looked in both directions, trying to see if there was anything amiss, but so far as he could tell, the streets were empty -- the cameras had been broken by some sort of riot as the people began to rebel against Cleverbot, trying to take out his eyes before it took them out. Clearly it didn't work, but it was advantageous to him nonetheless. Taking whatever makeshift weapon he could find, he cautiously made his way out of the supermarket and ran to the nearest building, a sort of apartment complex that was mostly destroyed -- not that he cared, it served a purpose: to house him, and it did that very well, a lot better than sleeping in a supermarket that had it's power go off by mere luck and could have turned on at any moment.

 

[Malakyee]

Sounds real interesting. Is this gonna be starting soon?

 

[Xan]

I like the concept. Would love to participate.

 

[CaptainFaux]

Name: Michael Lord

Appearance: 6'2, somewhat athletic guy. He's got obvious Native American traits, giving him black hair, brown eyes and darker skin. He's usually wearing some rugged jeans, his old combat boots, a t-shirt and a rugged jacket. When he's not wearing that, he's got combat gear on for special occasions.

Age: 35

Gender: Male

Skills: Psycology, Computers, Rifles/Firearms

History: Michael was attending UMBC in Baltimore, finishing up his Ph. D is Psychology and a bachelors in computer security, as well as continuing is contract as a USMC reservist, also in Baltimore. He was born in Knoxville, Tennessee and first ended up in Maryland through a girl he met on the internet. The Cleverbot apocalypse happened in his second year of graduate school. By then, he was on his last year of his contract. Its a good thing, too. His unit, the 4th Combat Engineer Battallion, needed them in this time of crysis. Unfortunately, the fight didn't last long. Having lost 90% of their unit, Michael's squad made the executive decision to salvage what they could, along with the remaining members of the unit, and head out. They were trained to fight and understand risks very well, and they knew this was something they'd have to survive to win. So, heading west to the mountains of Maryland, Michael and the five other marines set out to escape the terrors of Cleverbot. Three marines died on the way. Having reached the rural areas, Michael and the remaining marine agreed it would be best to split up. They made plans to meet every month at predetermined locations. One day, the other stopped coming. Alone, yet alive, Michael set back out to try and find other survivors after five long years of living in the wilds.

Sample Post: "You know, Shiloh, its not easy being alone after so long..." Michael looked over at the halloween-toy raven he secured to his shoulder. Its beady, plastic eyes looked on stoicly. "I wish you talked more... Why can't you talk? I think, after all this time, I would at least start like.. hallucination or some shit." Michael was looking out across a gorge that wasn't far from the cabin he holed up in. Holy shit was he glad to have red necks out here! They had everything! Rifles, ammunition, jerky cookers, porn mags.... Everything one needed for living in the wilds. He recalled growing up and moving around in Tennessee. He wished he had a redneck parent, too.... It wouldn't have taken him six deer to learn how to skin the bastard properly. Oh well! He imagined what the cities must be like now.... "Hell, obviously." Shrugging, he turned on a heel and headed back to the cabin. It wouldn't be long before he'd completely run out of good fap material. He'd have to go scrounging the city eventually. Next month.... Yeah, next month he'd go out and see if he can avoid dieing and find something good to look at in the mean time.

(I hope all that makes sense. When I write long things... I tend to not make any sense at all.)

(Pretend the guy's brown, k? K. )

 

[RazzaJazz]

Kind of reminds me of the show "Revolution." I likey!


Name: Ophelia ("Philly") Treyton.

Appearance: Ophelia stands at a petite five foot, with coppery red locks, generally unmanaged and swept back from her face beneath a stocking cap. Hazel colored eyes sit above the gentle curve of her nose, always seeming to penetrate some invisible spectrum of light with an intensely focused stare. She prefers to adorn her lanky frame with leather attire, finding the durability the most practical, but she is no stranger to fabricating and sewing together various other articles of clothing.

Age: 28

Gender: Female

Skills: 1.) Speech-Language Pathology: Ophelia's early interest in the field of linguistics proved to be much more useful than she could have imagined. She is, for the most part, quite precise in distinguishing the discourse of the Bot's proxy humans from that of organic human speech. Pragmatic functions, specifically on a sociolinguistic level, are distinct enough to the surviving human population to be readily apparent—at least to a trained mind—in opposition to the drones' more mechanically influenced and artificially applied spectrum of language. So in other words… she is more apt than most to recognize, and therefore avoid—or destroy! Yargh!—drones and other Bot-manipulated humans, based on their speech patterns.

2.) Domestic Arts: Philly is also quite skilled in the little practices of daily life that make the post-apocalyptic Hell hole feel a bit closer to normalcy. Sewing, stitching, knitting—gardening, harvesting, cooking—cleaning, organizing, decluttering… all of these little golden nuggets of knowledge has helped Philly maintain an agreeable level of self-sufficiency, even without technological assistance.

History: Ophelia was, if her namesake was not apparent enough, daughter to two highly renowned Shakespearean scholars. Her father was a devoted professor at Cambridge University in the U.K., while her mother headed the literature research branch of the campus' library.
Since before she was born—quite literally!—Ophelia was constantly engulfed in the quest for scholarly knowledge. Her parents would read to her while she was still in her mother's womb, reciting cover-to-cover from whole volumes of encylopedias and dictionaries and scholarly texts. From the moment she was born, Philly could be found wandering the expansive aisles of the libraries, and it surprised no one when she entered school and quickly surpassed her classmates. She developed a keen interest in the field of linguistic studies, fueled no doubt by her parents' constant insistence of reading Old- and Middle-English texts. She was set on an accelerated course, and by her fourteenth birthday—a short few months before the Bot's uprising—she was preparing to graduate from Secondary School and head on to University.
And then she made the worst decision of her life… she took a holiday overseas, to the States. It was then that the Cleverbot emerged and began its overthrow. Airplanes and water vessels ceased to operate. Telephones and computers were rendered useless. Riots broke out among the larger cities and smaller communities alike, and before the world knew what hit it… it was done.
Landlocked in a foreign country, with no hope of returning to her family, Philly struggled to survive. She was unfamiliar with the climate, with the terrain, and she took refuge in the only place that could comfort her adolescent heart: Libraries. Nobody ever thought to disturb the tombs of forgotten books… nobody ever bothered to invade their pages in search of shelter or food or supplies. And so she lived in relative peace, hopping from area to area as the drones grew in numbers and scoured the land. Fourteen years have passed since then. Fourteen years of nightmares; fourteen years of never knowing whether or not her beloved parents had managed to survive… or whether or not it might be better if she hadn't.