✱ DEHQ PLOT DROP 005 :
It was October 7th, 2045 when the Moonlight Summit bunkers shut their individual blast doors across much of the Appalachian Mountain Range. There were a total of fifty bunkers, later called vaults by the Afterglow heads, some interconnected and some not, but all integral in the survival of humanity and preserving what was left of the world from the pending and inevitable destruction caused by the ongoing Great World War ( along with the planned nuclear detonations planned to kick it off by Afterglow and the other mega-corporations of the Western hemisphere ). Some were built with the intention to stay powered and maintain survival for nine-hundred years, while others were only built to withstand a year or two at max. The largest of these, and Afterglow’s pride and joy, Bunker 7 is one of the last known operating vaults in the Appalachian region.Â
Contrary to what Afterglow Research Solutions and its mega-corporation partners would claim, the bunkers were not meant to save humanity in general. The entire program was hijacked by a national conspiracy involving human experimentation overseen by what would become the Project Safehouse committee. Rather than act to save humanity directly, Bunkers or Vaults were built to test their population as part of the Societal Preservation Program. The Program was basically a vast data gathering exercise, to provide the committee and Afterglow Research Solutions with the information necessary to construct several future scenarios, that included but wasn’t limited to: Multi-Planet Travel & Conquer, a New & Improved Human Race, Advanced Farming, Disease & Prevention, Citizen Army, and many others. This stemmed from the original board and CEO being split on whether or not the original detonations would spark Global thermonuclear war resulting in Earth being completely uninhabitable.Â
This information was privy only to select Afterglow Research Solutions personnel ( primarily officers and some directors ), high-ranking members of the East Atlantic Army, and Project Safehouse committee members.Â
As such all bunkers were designed to feed data to Project Safehouse. Of the fifty known public bunkers, there were six designed to work more or less properly, as control Vaults. The other forty-four Vaults were presented with a variety of scenarios, ranging from annoying to downright lethal, to gauge how humans would react and how they would survive them ( if at all ). Some were not provided with enough food synthesizers for their population, others had only men in them, or were designed to open prematurely. Each of these unique circumstances would provide vital data for the future, helping Project Safehouse figure out how to sustain people for hundreds of years in cryonic suspension for space travel. Then, to create generations of workers and leaders needed to rebuild or restore Earth if possible, how to create sustainable, closed ecosystems to grow food, purify water, and maintain breathable air, and in the case of control Vaults like Bunker 7, to test how recolonization of the surface using a Vault as base could work. All were intended to find out the theoretical lifespan limitations of Afterglow and other mega-corporation technology.
Afterglow itself didn't simply act as intermediary, it used the bunkers to create technologies that could be used to redefine society. Some of them worked and others are continuing to be developed now that most of the bunkers have been opened to the outside world. At least two bunkers were set aside to act as proving grounds intended to test a variety of prototype devices with the aim of rolling them out through the rest of the vaults. Mega-corporations expected to roll out new devices every fiscal quarter. Unlike other bunkers, Afterglow Research Solutions would send test subjects before any disaster scenario, starting in early 2078. Human lives were considered irrelevant, with quick iteration time given a priority. The prototypes were meant to convert ‘useless’ exercise into a socially-useful activity, manipulate the moods of the dwellers, or even develop crude forms of mind control. Ethical concerns were dismissed as counter-productive and close-minded. This testing continued into the compounds spread through the East Atlantic up to the present day.
Bunker 7 was tested numerous times with various scenarios but its primary goal was repopulation. As such they would accept arranged visitors ranging from great military minds, scientists, entrepreneurs, artists, and other hot ticket traits deemed needed for the new world. Said visitors were pre-interviewed before arriving, and if they passed as acceptable and were willing, they would come to Bunker 7 to donate to the cause and leave once their metaphorical seed was planted without complication. This project had led to many successful children being born and raised over the past eighty years with only a five percent failure rate as of 2124 reports show. The biggest downfall? Very few inside remember or even knew what it was like to live outside the protection of the vault, nor did they know how cruel and conniving some of humanity could be.Â
On the morning of October 5th, Bunker 7 overseers opened the door to what they thought was a new batch of cleared donors. In reality, it was a group of particularly savage raiders leftover from a once thriving organized criminal organization formally known as the Scorpio Syndicate, located in the North. They played their roles to gain entrance and when they thought the timing was right, they attacked. What they didn’t know is that many of the bunker’s residents were trained in self-defense and beyond basic combat, with the exception of the young children who had yet to start and the advanced security team whose prime directive was to protect Afterglow’s precious experiment. They also didn’t expect there to be upwards of eight hundred inhabitants still alive and well, when only four hundred fifty originally entered. Needless to say the vault dwellers were more than surprised by the attack but in the end, they defeated the raiders and were able to evacuate their destroyed home into Devil’s Elbow and the nearby city of Burnington. For many, Bunker 7 has been the only home they’ve ever known and everything they know about the outside world is known only through stories and outdated source materials.Â
Will they be able to survive?Â
✱ OOC :
