It's the year 2117, and the world is evolving. I'm not talking about the the mutants rumored to be stalking the irradiated Death Zones or the Techno Cyber Gods some of the weirder Doomsday cults worship. It is the genetically manipulated, intelligently guided evolution you find in some Corp lab. Billions of people forced to live, breath, eat, and die running a rat race they inherited and are too blinded by the fèihuà fed to them to escape. They evolve through stress, and the world is certainly stressful. Twenty million people living in a space originally inhabited by only five or six million, in close proximity, all stressing, all fighting, all clawing their way towards the same piece of processed cheddar paste... all changing. To be stagnant here is to die.

Welcome to the Greater Chicago Sprawl, the industrial and agricultural center of the American Federal Republic. The AFR is the largest and most powerful nation in North America after World War III and the inheritor of a host of troubles after the former USA tore itself to shreds. Corporations helped rebuild the AFR after the war... their policies are the AFR's policies and the rich and powerful get to live in those gleaming chrome towers, n'est–ce pas? Some would say they are the only thing keeping this place from turning into a cesspit, but they'd be feeding you a line of corpo bullshit. It's always been a cesspit.

To the average folk, it's oil smeared chrome and polluted air, and down here in the streets everybody is an average folk. The only hope you have of getting out of this alive is to live at the top of the tower, and that doesn't happen unless you're born to it. So, get outfitted with chrome and grab your zip gun. It's time to run the streets.