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Y_Y

Sometimes I wonder how everything could have been, if everything would have happened in a different way.

6th October 1994. In a subtle rumble, half of the Western hemisphere ceased to exist. And with it, peace.
I was barely 7 years old when time stopped, and now 23 have passed. Maybe.
Sometimes I think that we'll soon be the last witnesses of what transpired, as the memories are threatened and fight everyday to survive. Just like we do.
We'll be the last ones who remember how it feels not to be scared. We'll be the last ones who touched the ground, us from the Upper Levels. Oh how cold it is there now, cold like our hearts, but not like our furious, burning spirits.
I look at the city from up here, a colorful mass of toxic gases and Y Rays. Defenceless buildings are like mute, motionless people looking at each other at a party where fun is forbidden.
All we've got are weak memories, doubts and radiation.
My name? It doesn't matter anymore. Maybe I don't even remember it.
I am nobody. I am YsimoW.
And this is just the future you didn't expect.

THE Y UNIVERSE

The timeline we know, the one we are living in (Now Universe) skewed into a tangent ( Y point, or just Y ) on October 6th 1994.
In the Y Universe this is the moment when the first "atomic bomb" named by the media Boitatá (the cobra made of fire of the Brazilian mythology) or ShūrYō (the End in Japanese) was launched by an unidentified source on Rio De Janeiro, Brazil.
Since that moment the timeline started to split, generating a parallel reality. Some of the key events happened in our history happened in the Y Universe as well (Steve Jobs and the rebirth of Apple, the explosion of the World Wide Web, Biggie and Tupac's murder, the Rave Scene, the Video Game Eplosion, etc) but with different developments and effects.
As time went on the events we had in common gradually diminished. So people's life hasn't changed all of a sudden, it happened gradually and with a different twist than in our timeline.

The Y Universe is a combination of all the dystopian futures predicted by the whole Science Fiction in movies, books, comic books, videogames, music, art.It's a world where all the fears about the nuke disaster actually came to life, the realization of a catastrophical scenario that brought the population and the governments to a real nervous breakdown.

When the Boitatà blew up, the Brazilian population thought that the mythological serpent made of fire of their ancient legends finally came to life to claim and eat their eyes for devastating its forests for hundreds of years. For this reason, after the explosion, thousands of people around Brazil have been seen covering their eyes with their hands.
After, as the Sign of the Cross for the Christians, this symbol became the most popular way to celebrate the victims of this first massacre.

After a while, all the governments worldwide realized that it was impossible to know who dropped the bomb in Rio, as it seemed to be appearing from nowhere and was never claimed by any State, terrorist group or private organization.

After the explosion all the satellites and telecommunications network started to work worse and worse every day. In this climate of fear and doubt, almost all the survived Nations signed the Transparency Pact where every single Country involved declared a sort of martial law, to protect the "Freedom and Order" of all the populations worldwide.

This new kind of living forced to a radical reorganization of the society. Races and languages as we used to know them don't exist anymore, as all the people able to work were sent all around the globe to share the manpower where needed. This gradually led to a forced melting pot and people started to lose their linguistic and cultural identity.

THE SOCIAL STRUCTURE

As also a massive climate change happened, the environment radically mutated and the Society developed a hierarchical system in order to survive. This arose into a peculiar architectural organization of the Cities: high buildings called "Capsules" that contain everything a human being could need without getting out.

Starting from the bottom, the Underground Levs (DownTown) are reserved to the Pristines, whealthy and privileged people like politicians and strategos who have, inter alia, the task to shield the Humans' Heritage: the Knowledge. Their buried world is Pure, Y Rays cannot reach it and the air is 100% clean. Temperature and lights are constantly under control, and all their food is generated in laboratories. They never get in contact with anybody besides the people who works for them. Those are the Upper Classes, rich people with respectable jobs like the Tutelants, security guards who preserve order in the Pristines' world and operate outside of it to maintain the public order. Or the Chemicals who grow food in vitro, and the Mitigants who develop technologies to keep the Pristines healthy. The rich live in the Lower Levs of the Capsules, where the toxicity is bearable and the air breathable.

Most of the central parts of any building is occupied by Factories, involved in generating heat for the Lower and Underground Levs. The people who work there are the majority of this Society: the Working Classes, who live above the Water Cooling System (or WCS) that protects upper homes to not be over-heated. In the Upper Levs the radiation levels are dangerous, so people learned how to survive covering up with DIY equipment like masks, filters and body shields.

THE B4 ARCHIVES

After the first bomb, every survived Country of the Y Universe decided it was appropriate to protect our heritage, so one of the most important Pristines' task is to safeguard the Knowledge of the Human Race. Matters like Art, Literature, History, Cinema and Music have been progressively subtracted from the people and isolated in subterranean fortified bunkers called B4 Archives, or Archives Of Before in order to be protected from the devastating effects of Y Rays and decay. The B4 Archives can be consulted only by the Pristines and a very restricted circle of rich people.

All the books, art pieces, VHS, floppy disks or tapes that remained unprotected started to deteriorate almost immediately due to the climate and magnetic turmoil and toxicity, and are now useless. In the beginning of the embezzlement process people violently protested, they felt robbed of something fundamental, but nothing they did could change the facts.

As years go by, most people started to forget what Culture meant in favor of survival needs, but not everything has been forgotten, and some knowledge is still handed down orally. For almost anybody this is enough, but for a few fearless and eager for knowledge people it is not. Sometimes it happens that the B4 Archives are violated and some of these protected Memories stolen. Tapes are the most valued material in the Upper Levs black market.

TAPE DRUGS

Music and Videos have almost become illegal, they're strictly controlled and censored as they could be used for illegal gathering or to swap encoded messages. Tapes and VHS are also extremely damageable by radiation, all their content gets easily erased after a few hours of toxicity exposure, so it is forbidden to bring them out of their fortified cells.

However, these Memories are something considered precious, not to be hidden by a circle of chosen ones. Periodically a few reckless people risk their lives breaching the B4 Archives to steal some, just for a few hours of recalling. They are the YtaloW, and their purpose is to memorize and convey what they listen and watch.

Unfortunately, at a certain point, some ruthless people found out that damaged tapes could have been turned into drugs, something that almost completely disappeared in the decades before. Demagnetized and Radioactive tapes, after being subjected to a chemical process and dusted, can be sniffed or injected causing devastating hallucinogenic effects on the human brain.

Some people think that the Tape thieves are the same people, but it's a lie. YtaloW contracted out of these despicable behaviors. Now that also the TDK (Tape Drugs Kartel) points at the B4 Archives to steal Tapes, it's getting harder and harder to sneak in there...

THE Y PEOPLE

Fear, terrible living conditions and the brutal rules obsessively imposed for a "better and secure living", slowly brought the human race to a state of dangerous apathy. This feeling of emptiness, called by the people the Void Disease caused, particularly in the working class, the highest rate of suicides and occupational deaths ever registered in history.

The well organised brainwashing system built by the Pristines where "proper behavior" means an easier life, rewards, and the chance of being selected for the Green Zone Lottery (where people from the Upper Levs could win the possibility to live in a place near the ground) contributes to fuel the hate and the distance between people. Plus the Tutelants control system is almost impossible to defeat, and the lack of a real school education is leading to a progressive deletion of the historical memory.

But there's some people between the Working Class lines, mostly a bunch of reckless youngsters, that are ready to risk it all to change this situation. They call themselves YtaloW, a name to pay homage to their roots, to a country and a culture that doesn't exist anymore in the way they were used to know. The words and thoughts of this peninsular group started spreading internationally, and other individuals from the Transparency Pact nations began thinking and acting the same way as the YtaloW do. Altogether under the same flag they are the Y people (in english spelled WHY, so the people looking for answers), the Y generation, the sons of radiations (scientifically "y" rays), in the years where the timeline splits as a Y, when everything changed.

I AM YSIMOW

"My name? It doesn't matter anymore. Maybe I don't even remember it. I am nobody. I am YsimoW."

YsimoW is their ritual name (inspired by the father of sci-fi literature Isaac Asimov), a secret name representing all of them as a unity, embodying the need of feeling as one mind, one soul, a ONE.They are the ones who fearlessly crawl the capsules, jumping from rooftop to rooftop, level by level defying the Y rays to take their own culture back through spectacular actions.

The B4 archives are their aim, they try to bring to their people what they can take, to show them how it was Before.And when they succeed in taking tapes and VHS - they usually prefer that kind of supports because it's easier to find the hardware to reproduce 'em among ruins, and since it's mechanical it's always kinda easy to repair it - all they can hide is brought to what they call the Reminiscence Lodge (RYL).These are secret meetings in secret locations where a bunch of elected Y people, through a precise ritual, listen and watch to all the material and try to memorize as much information as they can in order to transmit this priceless knowledge to the others.And since the magnetic pollution, Y rays, toxicity, and many other factors - Tutelans frequent controls included - could turn this precious material into useless plastic in a few hours, they must do all this as soon and fast as they can.

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