You and your crew have been stranded on the foglet wastes of Mars. You must navigate across the planet to the last remaining vehicle off world- the space elevator on Olympus Mons. Beware- the wasteland is riddled with tortured fanatics, wandering machines of mass destruction, and petty warlords!
The Setting
Welcome to the 25th century, little tapeworm. Behold the wonders of a singularity stalled: intelligences so vast the complexity of their minds are to a typical human as a human is to a nematode, spaceships the size of continents dancing through the solar system, sentient planets dreaming apocalyptic nightmares.
At the center of it all squat the Vile Offspring, the great threat to humanity in this age. They are the descendants of the borganisms, sentient corporations, and augmented technocrats who left Earth to upload their state vectors to a Dyson swarm of computronium processors formed from the disassembled remains of Mercury and Venus. The first uploads used their newfound intelligence to create Capitalism 2.0, which promptly consumed them in a negative-sum civil war. The agents of this new order now rot in the squalor of their partially-completed swarm, looking out on a solar system with covetous eyes- so much dumb matter wasted, waiting to be converted into computronium to meet the voracious appetite of their advanced economics.
Further afield, the Orthohumans of Earth: conservative, fascist, the worst people left over after the Singularity and the Rapture of the Nerds. They’ve had a century to fester, exploring the most pointlessly-cruel applications of the miracles they’ve been gifted. They think themselves the great victors- single-handedly beating back the disassemblers from the Vile Offspring and the Decadent Communists of Mars- when in reality they are next on the chopping block.
The defeated enemies of Earth, the Martians: post-apocalyptic survivors of a nuclear war with Earth, condemned to live out a Mad Max nightmare as their sentient planet slumbers. They’ll need to awaken soon if humanity is to have any hope against Capitalism 2.0, but their own self-flagellation and the vindictive occupiers from Earth make this unlikely.
Minor Players
The Jovians, once the diminutive clone-based slave workforce of Mars, now free and laid claim to Jupiter, with all its moons and its riches. they cling to the ancient materialist instincts of their species even as they sit on wealth that renders such greed obsolete.
The Cyclers, the descendants of the first interplanetary civilization, masters of genetic technology. Peripatetic and decadent, they see the writing on the wall of the inner solar system and want out.
The Shoal, the first uploads from earth, the mapped neurons of graspus graspus, the Sally Lightfoot Crab. Finally free of the demands of their bipedal progenitors, They follow their enigmatic objectives on the frozen fringes of the solar system.