Again, welcome Mike, It must be exciting to be the center of this much buzz....
I think we discussed this way back when going over the time difference. It's a bit hard to swallow, that the 4th Corporate War was that destructive and most of us giggle incessantly at the idea of Rache taking out history, including back-ups, paper, etc. Which would mean the tech info was still present.... perhaps the means to manufacture fail dramatically? But surely not for every economy across the globe. Not to that degree. Some places are going to survive much better than others.
I'd enjoy knowing that, say, Thailand managed to hold onto their tech and are now 2077 advanced, whereas most everywhere else went through a second Collapse and is at a 2025-235 tech level.
Ironically, it will really only matter to the PnPers. The rest of the world won't care and to have CP2020 tech with borgs and MRAM chips and AVs will seem perfectly reasonable.
Actually, given mikes explanation... I can see it happening.... Maybe not the way it was written at the end of Firestorm, but close... Rache's Virus, spreading and infiltrating pretty much every computer out there.... Industry shuts down... all the automated lines either go silent or haywire. Healthcare, shambles... the military's super high tech infrastructures, broken beyond repair. (the paper virus should be forgotten completely, it was an idea that really never made any sense... but luckily, 2020 is almost a paperless society anyway...). Sure there are people with all sorts of knowledge still floating around, but no way to put them to use, because the automated systems we have become so dependent on no longer function. This would lead to war, as everyone blames everyone else. But the nukes don;t fly because the launch codes have all been corrupted, the systems to launch are all messed up, and the vehicles that would carry them are really expensive lawn sculptures... This would not stop nukes from being manually launched and detonated, but those would be fewer and far between.
As war engulfs the globe, it's conventional,, everyone is on more or less even terms fighting the old fashion way... in the trenches and in the fields. Armor is important again. Aircraft fly, but stripped of their high tech targeting systems, dog fights are a reality again. The only real advantages anyone has are their numbers and their willingness to fight.
It's been so long since any of the "first world nations" fight for anything worth fighting for, that shit goes really crazy. Where there is war, there is death, and where there is death, there is disease. And when there is desperation, without any effective monitoring council (because at this point the UN is reduced to watching as shit jumps off everywhere) the governments get desperate.
The old factories and equipment go to work again, Detroit becomes a player once more... as the old tool and dies, assembly lines of workers, lower tech factories churning out what they can...
When they governments get desperate the rules go out the window, as bio-weapons are unleashed. The loss of life is mind boggling.
Finally the fighting subsides, most of the old borders are the same, some new ones have arisen, but the world begins to rebuild... 3rd world nations that tried to claim a bigger piece of the pie or settle old debts were either overrun completely, simply used as stepping stones, or just plain ignored.... some even come out of it much better off.
There are still enough people with the knowing and the doing, and still enough examples of the high tech, that rebuilding back to where we were doesn't take more than 10 or 20 years, 30 at most, and it's a delicate process with some coming out ahead of the others.... but it happens.
And none of this even touches natural disasters...
And so by 2077, the world has returned to where it left off, the tech level of 2020. Which is where it needs to be. The cities would be HUGE, rural America would be abandoned to corporate run farms, with scattered family farms still littering the way... areas with no resources would be abandoned completely.... outside of the cities life would be very very road warrior.
This approach worked for Ghost In the Shell, it worked for Appleseed. It worked for Bubblegum Crisis (though the boomer tech and all the melding nonsense was way too ridiculous), it worked for Judge Dredd.... It can definitely work for Cyberpunk.
And it explains why some levels of tech are just a pinch above today's, while other levels of tech have advance a small bit beyond...
Is this close at all? Who knows, but it sounds plausible to me.
If I am anywhere near the mark with this, then I am incredibly excited... and my only regret is that I can't start updating my site now, making the changes that will bring it up to speed when the new setting is detailed....
