Darron 'Bull' Robertson is a Texan native; he became the most powerful figure within entire networks of local crime syndicates within the state, which connected him with other figures within the underworld. After the collapse and the founding of the United Federation of States as a trade union functioning under a neo-feudalistic order, trade flows under the nose of the government, and pirates raid frigate as it travels between sanctioned cities. Everyone works for credits, anyway; especially pirates.
Darron began working as a hitman in New Dallas before his nineteenth birthday. His father was an accomplished roboticist, and he was already wearing the first Minos when he began earning his name, and eventually the name of his company, Bull, out on the streets of sector Zero. The small foundry community had always been mob-run, almost a kind of prison, prior to Tanaka Medical entering into the market. The Yakuza needed new territory, and when Tanaka Proper offered the mobsters more credits than they could ever dream of, the mob sold the land and fought over the money. Tanaka began building the sectors, including the Industrial sector, and eventually digging even deeper. They built New Dallas into a truly modern city, with schools, colleges, public transit, grocers, and especially hospitals. Recovering from the collapse of civilization had been slow going for some time, but those that fled from nuclear destruction in Asia, who landed on the shores of North America, found a new world filled with primordial landscapes and vicious, heavily armed natives. Vast hunting communities had never even really forgotten firearms, a vital resource in the apocalypse.
New Dallas had existed hundreds of years before Darron arrived. Tanaka Medical's CEO, Kenshi Tanaka, had long since buried his claws deep and built the sectors of the city before Darron was even born. Already, the hospitals were curing radiation ills, constantly at odds with the wave of Yakuza that had infiltrated New Dallas, seemingly overnight. Along with the money, Tanaka poured people into apartment complexes, and began outnumbering the foundry workers, who worked underground. Eventually, they would build a new kind of sector, one with a reputation of swallowing tourists whole, the training grounds of militants who could, theoretically, work their way up to police work, if they worked with the Yakuza instead of against it. The foundries were older than Tanaka Medical's presence, and even the Yakuza worked the foundries in the start of things. Without the foundry metals from Texas, much of the UFS would starve for metals. Base materials sails into the industrial sector on a daily basis, as it did then, and the work was always grueling, filled with a criminal underground element that erupted into violent riots within the foundries, splitting territories and training members.
Darron wasn't born in New Dallas, and his arrival was at a time when the foundry riots had become increasingly violent, stopping the wheels of commerce in the process. Citizens had taken to becoming pirates, using civilian cars to stop frigates carrying goods - stealing food that would be too expensive to buy from the store, or filling the fridge of someone too rich to work for it. Riots spread outward from the industrial sector, and spilled into the streets of every sector. The starvation riots followed the foundry riots, and went on for a month. Sometimes, between the burning and stealing, there would be a day of peace. People would walk, and peacefully protest in front of freshly stocked stores, fridges overflowing with food, although the cost of any one thing was tens of thousands of credits. Tanaka would bring cameras for the news organizations, bringing crates of food and doctors who swore that they would find a way to solve the crises.
The Yakuza had become a presence everywhere in New Dallas. Every foundry gang had Yakuza members - most of the police were Yakuza, and every single upper member of the governing body was either one of them or working for them. Orders to get things back on track were met with the horrors of cutting down civilians in the streets, and days of riots following that. A day would follow of peaceful protests, and end in a wave of violence erupting between police and starving, angry citizens.
Eventually, Nii-Sama found a way to restore peace. The governing body began to offer nutritank installations, graciously offered for free by Tanaka Medical, and free refills for tax-paying citizens. Nutritanks were an internally implanted storage tank that held a nanogel, which could provide food and water for a person for an entire month. Tanaka had successfully solved the hunger crises by invading the bodies of its population, which would continue as a trend into the future. Already, children had cerebral interfaces installed at birth, shoving metallic spikes into their heads from early adolescence. It better served the brain if it grew around the implant, with slight changes made throughout their life to adjust it.
Tanaka was there, invading the brain from childhood. Letting them experience the wonders of virtual worlds as real as the really real one, filled with sensations and fantasies beyond imagination. Programming interfaces had grown culturally as technology returned. Programming across the UFS needed standards if things were going to begin to work together independent of which city manufactured what, and the union went with NeoNet. Wired connections were religious practice from citizens, church-goer or not. Wireless had damned us all, destroyed everything.
It was the Church, after all, that connected people. It created emotional hive-minds, intertwining the brains of locals who could brush thoughts wirelessly with one another, sharing emotional thought as casually as spoken words. Once the networks were compromised, and when it all had to be shut down, simultaneously, all at once, less than 10% of the people connected to the network survived the collapse. Modern citizens only know the consequences - wireless connections are dangerous.
Darron didn't fight with the Yakuza. He wouldn't defend the people who stopped citizens from begging outside of grocery stores for expired food, which was guarded to the dump trucks before they hauled it off to the incinerators. At the end of the starvation riots, Darron refused to cooperate, and was arrested for slaughtering entire squads of police in the streets of sector 4, sector 5, and even sector 6, high up into the wealthiest capital buildings. Darron brought the citizens storming with him, working in tandem with the foundry gangs who he had befriended at his arrival, and took the riots up into the highest reaches of the city.
*****
The long, empty hallways were misty, with a low-hanging fog covering the floors of long winding passageways. A group of twelve heavily armed mercenaries were slowly making their way under the watchful mega-pix cameras streaming live across the UFS. Their armor was full neurodeck interfaced smart armor, a thick layered metallic battlesuit that did more to enhance their dexterity than detract from it - fully automatic weapons, demolitions, heavy artillery - a regular military unit, lost in a network of maze-like passageways.
The criminals were given the opportunity to live, if only they could survive the maze, built deep under Caesar's prison block, where Darron Robertson had been imprisoned. Could they beat his zero loss record? Thousands had tried, and the rising gladiatorial star had caught the eye of influential syndicate members already, a forceful counter-piece to the Yakuza. Bull was more than a man wearing a sixteen-foot suit of armor, cutting down men with a battleaxe while they shot helplessly at armor so thick, it took digging to find anything important mechanically. The modern interfaces he had snagged from the Church, whose angels had helped bring him into prison for trial and subsequent sentencing, gave him the same grace as if the armor were a second skin.
.............
Tune in next time folks, for more.
