The Future Requires Maintenance
- story-driven
- Difficulty: intermediate
- About 1800 min
- solo
- coming soon
- cyberpunk
- body-modification
- class-drama
- dependency
- no-combat
- all-forge
In the city of Pending, your body is the story. You arrive with every slot empty while three societies argue over whose standard the future should run on: the Continuance Branch, which licenses and covers and defines; the Underskin, where Forge Runners publish everything and repair in public; and Sparelife, which fits the bodies nobody else will touch and asks who you are on the record.
The Future Requires Maintenance
You Arrive Whole
Pending reads bodies the way other cities read papers. You arrive with every slot empty, and that makes you the rarest thing on the street: a baseline nobody has written on yet. Three societies want the first line.
Everything Works, and Nothing Is Free
The hardware is good. Sight that files what it sees, hands that hold a tolerance, a spine that carries what your work demands. All of it installs, all of it runs - and all of it needs somebody, next month and every month, to keep it running. Who that somebody is decides what your body costs and who it answers to.
Three Answers to One Question
The Continuance Branch will license you, cover you and define you. The Underskin will publish everything, repair you in front of witnesses and remember what you owe. Sparelife will fit what nobody else will touch and ask who you are on the record. Nobody in Pending agrees whose answer the future should run on - they only agree that it is being decided now.
Something Small Has Changed
And lately, in rooms where new modules are fitted, instruments have been catching small readings the fitted module does not fully explain. Nobody agrees on what they are either. Most people have decided not to look.
Choose the body you arrived in and the door you walked through. The city is already reading you.
What Awaits
- Nine ways to arrive: three kinds of body, three doors, one city
- A body built one consent at a time, and the people who maintain it
- Nine people worth knowing, each holding a piece of how Pending really runs
- Debts kept in three ledgers, none of them counted in coin alone
- Three futures for every body in the city - and the question none of their standards can classify.
Content notes
Contains: surgical and medical detail, bodily modification and bodily loss, coercive contracts and labour exploitation, surveillance, dependency and withdrawal, grief, and deaths that are permanent.