Renegade

At the dawn of the Super-Massive Computer (SMC) Age, the people were losing faith in an increasingly amoral society. An SMC named Mother was developed to emulate human thought and emotion, to simulate human desires and aspirations, and to better understand the rapid decline in morality. The citizens of Sapporo became the guinea pigs of this technological experiment. A series of government mandated, city-wide neural implant programs, dubbed the harvests, enabled Mother to gather data directly from a persons cerebral cortex.

Only a few - the few who from fear, mistrust, or in protest - avoided the harvests and remained untouched by Mothers influence. Like sewer rats, they hid in an underground complex in Sapporos Susukino district. While Mothers society of humans became free from crime, free from poverty, and free from emotion, it was also without free will or faith. But every society has outcasts, even Mothers, and from these there arose the criminals, the bootleggers, and the self-serving the hungry, t