No one is quite certain how long it has been since metahumanity went into the Arks after the
Horrors made their ravenous way across the world, but they do know that it’s been a little over three hundred years since the Day of Founding. Technological development during that time has been, more or less, slow going due to the conflict of the early years of the city and then again during the internal conflicts period. But for the last hundred years or so, Olympia has known relative peace and that has allowed rapid advancement of technology. The recovery of LOSTech, or technology from before metahumanity went into the Arks, has been vital to the leaps and bounds Olympia has seen in recent years.
Modern Technology
Most homes and businesses within the city possess working electricity, air conditioning, and clean running water. There are some few exceptions where someone might be living on the outer fringes, close to the Wall, where some interruptions can occur. Notably,
Lud intentionally chooses to live in a manner avoiding many of those ‘modern’ contrivances.
Transportation
Transportation is predominantly electric, given that the majority of Olympians utilize the CityLink system to get where they need to go. Combustion engines have been restored and recovered, though they are far less common - mainly owing to the scarcity of fuel refinement processes. If anything, combustion engines are more likely to be found in the
Raider tribes who have clustered around LOSTech refineries that turn oil from the ground into workable gasoline. If one does have a personal vehicle, it is far more likely to be powered by a solar cell - either a locally created one or a far, far, more efficient one recovered from a Bunker or Ark.
Weaponry & Armor
Firearms and armor against them have developed to a reasonable point where it resembles pre-Ark gunpowder technology in many fashions with handguns, shotguns, and the like, though there have been no advances towards what some Ancient World scholars refer to, collectively, as the Weapons of War - large scale vehicles and munitions, jet fueled airplanes, or what some scholars call a “New Clear Bomb”.
Telecommunications
Telecommunication technology has reached a point where most homes have
phones mounted to their walls, though some poorer areas still must either use a communal phone or one of the city’s many
pay phones scattered throughout the Octants and Boroughs. Within the last decade or so, the idea of a ‘
pager’, a small battery operated device that allows someone to call a number and send that number to a small screen that people can carry with them has become the Current Big Thing.
The presence of solid electricity and a good telecommunication network has resulted in a burgeoning entertainment industry - while some of the screens and such recovered from the Olympian Ark seemingly had no way to receive any kind of signal, Apollo based scientists have been able to find a way to connect
television devices to the overall Telecom network and so many homes now possess the ability to watch the various shows and movies produced in
Dionysus.
Furthermore, there are a number of local
radio stations that have been created in
Hermes that serve both the city as well as many surrounding, smaller, settlements. These stations often play a variety of music, both recovered from Arks as well as new creations, and news of the day and weather updates. The telecom centers have also recovered recording technology to put out
cassettes for local home viewing through cassette player devices - and most recently created a smaller vision which functions more or less similarly but is only for audio. A recovered artifact from a ‘time capsule’ of sorts from one of the early Olympian Ark expeditions was an item called a “
walkman” and now all such pocket cassette player devices follow the same name.
Computers
Computers and networking has extended to a point of governmental oversight. A ‘
matrix’ of interconnected computers exists within the city of Olympia, but is predominantly used for official purposes - connecting the
GateWatch,
Zeus, and other administrative functions relative to the effective and safe operation of the power grid, utilities, and so forth that make Olympia liveable. Notably, there are two matrices - the Olympian Grid and the Apollo Grid - which are interconnected; however, the
University of Apollo maintains their own branch from the Olympian Grid. While the average household may have a desktop terminal, it is still predominantly in the purview of a ‘word processor’ as opposed to a true interconnected computer. Accessing the matrix requires both having access to the physical hardware connected to it and the authorization to do so.
Within the last twenty years however, after a recovery of an extant
cyberdeck from the Olympian Ark, a new breed of computer users have arose -
Deckers. Deckers are people who have either gotten their hands on a LOSTech cyberdeck or cobbled one together from salvage - these personal computers are smaller, much more portable, and much more powerful than the normal mainframes that exist in the city. For a street decker, their cyberdeck is their most prized possession.
While cyberdecks do appear to have some kind of wireless connectivity hardware, at least the LOSTech ones, there is nothing to connect -to-, and as a result deckers must suffice themselves with direct, hardwired, connections to any system they wish to infiltrate. It is not entirely uncommon to hear rumors in the street decking community of BBS systems being set up on out of the way power grids where the physical security of the location is reduced in order to share programs, decking secrets, and of course, trash talk each other.
LOSTech: Relics of Ages Past and a Promise of the Future to Come
The world of the Ancients was one of technological wonder and amazement, filled with everything from flying cars to wirelessly connected computers and entire online existences. Stories and legends of that time tell of an end to world hunger, an end to many diseases and even some particularly tall tales about travel to the stars - but if such is possible, that technology has not been recovered yet, at least not fully.
What has been recovered went into much of the advances within Olympia - though some more unusual elements can be found among the city and out into the Wilds. Most notably, the largest and most complete recovery was the development of
Cyberware - the ability to fuse metahumanity and machines into one. From cyberware eyes to arm replacements, the technology found in the now-legendary “Cyberware Expedition” in 278DF has utterly revolutionized medical science throughout Olympia, far outpacing most other fields of study. While the miracle cures of the Ancients have not yet been recovered, the ability to replace entire limbs and organs that are damaged or born with birth defects has made many people’s quality of life significantly better. Of course, no secret remains a secret forever, and so at some point in the late 200’s, Olympia became aware that some of the results from the Cyberware Expedition had been copied and stolen; as a result, it was no surprise when, a handful of years later, bootleg cyberware began to appear as well as the occasional Wilds Ranger or Raider showing up with their own ‘ware installed.
Of interesting note is the curious case of Cybereyes - despite many people sporting this common upgrade, there are still loads of unanswered questions as to how, exactly, they work. While the connections to the optic nerve are obvious, allowing the person who has them installed to see, the specific mechanics of how it is controlled by thought to bring up things like low light vision, accessing a smartlink system, or interfacing with the phone grid wirelessly is entirely unknown - granted, that matrix interface is entirely passive, but it allows the cybereyes user to receive text information to their eyes - often in place of carrying a pager.
As cyberware became more commonplace, however, those with more magical inclinations began to discover something unfortunate - the more cyberware a person had installed the more their connection to their magic began to strain. This effect, often called ‘The Strain’ has come to be something that Olympian philosophers debate endlessly - but there is no escaping the point that the more technology exists inside a person’s body, the weaker their magic becomes… until it’s gone entirely.
One of the other big and public developments that came to Olympia was in the year 305 DF and arrived via trade, instead of discovery. This advancement was the knowledge of how to construct cyberdecks, remote control consoles, and drones. Adapted from discovered vehicle technology, many drones were either recovered wholesale from Bunkers and Arks or were constructed from salvaged material. The devices to control them, called RCCs, were part of a large trade deal between the city and a peaceful tribe of techno-shamans who believed that spirits lay within the machines themselves.
While the addition of the
Remote Control Consoles and
Drones has made for an interesting application in terms of industry and defense, it was the acquisition of the city’s first Cyberdeck which led to almost all of the advances in Telecommunications and networking. While that first deck had nothing in particular to access, early scientists were able to reverse engineer an entire field of study from the first and then go about learning how to make more of them over time.
Finally, because the world of the Ancients was so advanced, it is entirely possible to find stories of even stranger things - laser swords and personal force fields, hover tanks and medical kits so advanced that they worked on such a level that the naked eye could not even see the work being done. Some stories even allege that there were entire worlds built into the computer systems with computer-people so advanced that they might as well have been real - not to mention the sheer number of Frankenstein-esque stories of those machines being given bodies and the havoc they must have caused.
Finding LOSTech
In a way, everyone knows where to find LOSTech - in the Arks. Just as everyone knows that, however, is the reality that
Ark Running is merely trading one horror for another - going out to to explore the wilds in hopes of finding untapped Arks and Bunkers risks running across actual Horrors, not to say the dangers of the Wilds itself, only to then face the dangers of whatever security system protects that site from being opened. There are countless stories of failed expeditions into the Olympian Ark with all manner of unknown and seemingly unknowable technological defense sending the would-be explorers to their doom.
Nevertheless, Ark Running is as profitable a profession as can be given the Olympian bounty on finding new technology. It is often, jokingly, said that Ark Running is the single highest paying career in the city so long as you live long enough to spend the money.
Stories from inside the Arks and Bunkers are about as varied as one might expect. Some Ark Runners go through them with relative ease, strugglingly only to understand the nature of the place or some manner of technological puzzle designed to lock the place which would’ve been astoundingly simple to someone from the time of the Ancient World while others speak of killer drones, laser grids, and all manner of difficulty in navigation.
Still, without Ark Runners finding more and more LOSTech, what hope is there in scientific advancement and reclaiming the world that the Ancients once held such dominion over?
The Black Market
It is a simple adage - where there are people, there is crime. And where there is crime, there is a market for anything one could want that cannot be acquired legally. When it comes to LOSTech, that often means everything from secondhand or black market cyberware that doesn’t always follow the safety guidelines that they should to ‘hot’ vehicles and drones that are pushed far beyond the redline safeties. Ultimately, if you know the right people who know the right people and who, themselves, have the right connections… well anything can be gotten for a price.
Using LOSTech
Congratulations! You have survived running an Ark and have escaped with some new LOSTech item. Using it, however, can sometimes be a challenge in and of itself - there are many scholars and scientists who have made their entire career out of deciphering LOSTech and turning it into something usable. In some cases, such as with weapons, it is often a simple matter - regardless of if a firearm discharges a bullet or a laser beam, the overall premise of ‘pull trigger’ is rather ubiquitous. However, for more ‘arcane’, in the sense of their lack of obvious use or control, items it may require study and practice to learn their use.
It goes without saying that the process of trial and error has cost many lives over the course of experience and it is a wise Ark Runner who makes sure they understand the device they are holding before ever powering it on.
