The Refugee

By the beginning of the fourth and final corporate war in the late 2100s, much of the planet had been reduced to dust and machine wreckage. The destruction unleashed by the weaponry and nanobots of the third war had seen to that. Little life grew from the cracked, barren earth, and enormous waste piles, some the size of countries, dotted the continents. Yet even in this desolation, remnants of civilian populations, cyborgs, and sentient robots banded together to build communities and scrap-towns in the waste. They lived by scavenging, and it was no easy life. However, many were still able to make this existence work, achieving for the first time in centuries a semblance of true peace. That was, at least until the fourth corporate war began.

While the corporate superpowers that still existed now focused mostly on extraplanetary pursuits, they still held interests on earth. Militaristic corporate city states and their heavily armed outposts battled each other across thousands of miles of wastelands, and their hellfire missiles and plasma cannons transformed an already ravaged landscape into bubbling slag. The scrap-towns were forced to evacuate, and while most cyborgs and human survivors were killed off by radiation weapons, many resilient robot refugees managed to endure and escape the crossfire. The most intelligent of these constructed new bodies out of the broken machinery around them, vessels designed for the long, hard journey to safer lands: the refugee models. Into these tough, rusted frames the robots would transfer their electronic minds before tossing their rucksacks over their metal shoulders and beginning the long walk.