You frowned at the computer screen in front of you, you'd been posting on a certain anonymous forum for about 6 hours now, but... it was getting late... and you had to go work in your shitty wage-slave job tomorrow in order to make rent. Your run-down one room apartment was annoyingly expensive, but... that was just how things were in the year 2033. Things had only gotten worse, and while the world had finally managed to get over the pandemic panic of the 2020s, life had only gotten worse for the typical man. Governments had more control than ever, or... rather, their megacorp overlords did. Once, they used lobbyists in order to get what they wanted pushed into law, but now? Well, since the near complete dissolution of antitrust laws in 2027, almost every industry had basically combined into a single conglomerate entity.

"God damn it..." You sighed as you shut the computer down, somehow, despite everything, this god damned website was all that really kept you sane in this corporate dystopia. Of course, you couldn't afford the fine for keeping unused electronics on at night in the apartment... the fine for doing so was far too great, and you couldn't afford any credits being taken from you. Money had of course been abolished in the economic reorganization of 2029, instead, everything was decided through 'personal credits'. 'Good Citizens' would earn an excess of them by being effectively nothing more than mouthpieces for the New World Order. But 'Bad Citizens'? The people who spoke out against the new regime ruling the world? If you got caught, you'd soon find yourself kicked out of your house, without any means of getting food legally. Basically... it was a death sentence, the only reason you could somewhat safely browse on the internet freely was thanks to having a couple good friends who were tech-savvy enough to tell you how to bypass the firewall and access unverified servers.

You looked at the computer screen with tired eyes as you watched the shutdown process finish up. 'Now logging off Andrew Onofrey...' you watched the computer screen blink off as you went to bed, walking the short distance from your desk to one of your windows while getting dressed into your nightclothes. You took a look out of the window onto the city down below. New York... a place that used to welcome new arrivals to a new destiny of their own creation, to a dream of a better tomorrow. That dream had been turned into a nightmare now, a nightmare that would never end. Almost every single aspect of life had been monetized and controlled now, anything that might've once been an escape was now just another part of the trap. You were lucky that your computer was an older model... 15 years old, to be precise, and illegal to boot. Older hardware was banned for being too open on the user end... you were lucky you hadn't been caught with it, honestly.