Sick Cyber City in Second Life

I had heard that the Science Innovation Company has created a thriving corporate town (Moderate maturity rating) to benefit its thousands of employees and their families. Of course I had to go visit.

Imagine you teleport to a new location on a fine spring evening. As things come into focus you notice beautiful cherry trees and the dance of blossoms in a gentle breeze. You can hear the hum of distant traffic and a nearby clanking that might indicate that a resident is emptying a garbage bin. They don't do roadwork at this hour of the day surely.

Then the surroundings become clear. The distant traffic is the hum of an approaching military type vehicle and the clanking is a very strange and evil looking mechanical being shooting at everything in its path gulp.

I don't know what you'd do but I very quickly changed into something more appropriate for the situation.

I managed to negotiate my way around the machine with the happy trigger finger and started to try and find some explanations. It would appear that the citizens of this town left in a hurry. Card games are abandoned and nobody took their chips with them. The corporate headquarters building is eerily empty and the SIC's armoured vehicles are left running without drivers or passengers. I get the feeling that, whatever the company was working on, something went wrong.

The apparently thriving downtown core looks like it's just waiting for everybody to come back. At least it does until you turn the corner and find this 30m tall tin can with an attitude problem.

I'm thinking this is a good example of what happens when you let the techies take charge. If a few more people with Arts degrees were responsible for making policy you wouldn't have these problems.

Philosophy aside, there is a serious situation here and somebody has to fix it. As Shakespeare once said "There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune". Or in today's vernacular, "No guts, no glory". I decided to at least try and formulated my plans while I looked for the key to this puppy.

I probably should have read the manual first. sigh However, all is not lost. Sick is in trouble but I've retreated to Sick2 (which seems to have more toxic waste but fewer armed machines) to recover and make new plans. I have no intention of allowing some piece of metal with poor socialization skills to defeat me.

The really good news is that the medical facilities are state of the art. Well sort of.