The government tried to stem the tide, but it was too late. Putting the cat back in the bag is harder than letting it out, and in the end, they just had to accept this new state of affairs. The drugs were undeniably lethal, but the military had been making enhanced humans since Vietnam. And as the research companies moved west in the nineties, the lack of regulations led to new discoveries. Progress that, admittedly, was built on human suffering—but nobody could make an omelet without cracking a few eggs.
Cybernetics had been used by the military since the fifties, but now they became compact and better integrated with biology; armored suits grew sleeker and less prone to breakdowns. Washington made the decision that though the West was nominally considered a free territory, the government had to have some presence there to deal with the increasingly violent Enhanced.
Thus, in 1997, the Marshal system was instituted. Appointed by the president himself, the marshals were given the powers of judge and jury and sent into the West to create some semblance of order. Some were survivors of the hero drug, quickly nicknamed "boosts" by the general populace. Others were rebuilt by the government or private contractors into cybernetic "enhanciles" armed with military hardware; they were heavily modified humans, their name soon shortened to "mods" in the headlines of the East.
Now the public had heroes as well as villains, and the country turned from grieving its dead to looking toward a future dragged from the comic books of the past.
America was hiding under a blanket, reading comics with a flashlight, trying to forget the terrors of the world outside. And it worked. Nothing is more precious than a dream, and this was one that could resonate with enough people so that the trickle of immigrants moving west turned into a flood.
New cities grew on the corpses of the old ones, and though the quakes persisted, people learned to live with them. They learned to live with the danger because there was always the thrill. The thrill of living in a brand-new age where men and women flew like birds and called down rain from the clouds to end the ongoing droughts.
People had a dream, and like a fool, you shared that dream.
Once you were known as the hero Sidestep, the one who stopped the Nanosurge from destroying Los Diablos and laid down your life to finally bring an end to the telepathic nightmare that was the Heartbreak incident. But, much like Los Diablos, you crawled your way back from a traumatic event that threatened to destroy you. Reborn, you choose to step away from the light and into the shadows, turning villain in order to put things right.
You consider yourself to be…