The resistance will not bring the system down, and it knows it. It attacks the flanks, exposes rot and tears resources out of the corporations' claws. This chapter explains how it is organised and gives the hooks to start a campaign.
The AntiFaCa
FictionA network of cells with no centre, which knows it will not bring the system down.
The AntiFaCa (Anti-Fasci-Capitalists) has no headquarters, no leader and no single programme. It is a network of cells that recognise each other by codes and cooperate when it suits them. Its symbol is the spoon; its password is "asking for soup".
Not to bring the global system down at once, which is impossible. The AntiFaCa attacks the flanks: it exposes rot, tears resources from the corporations and passes them to the REGESTs, and sets off domino effects.
Not every cell agrees with the others. Some accept killing innocents for a big win and some refuse; some want to bargain with one ESTEMP against another. These internal fights are a good source of stories.
The nomads
FictionFreight to where the law protects nobody.
Nomad rebels live off freight and commercial transport to the REGESTs. Since the laws of the ESTEMPs do not protect those outside them, taking cargo into a REGEST is dangerous, and those who do it have a valuable commodity: the willingness to go.
Convoys carry medicine, parts, food, water, people and, hidden in between, whatever the resistance needs to move. Many nomads are dismissed people in quarantine; others never had a chip.
In the opening adventure, Lia Matsumoto-Freitas drives the water truck that crosses Post 4 between the station and Brasília.
Deep infiltration
FictionThe most dangerous cells are inside the companies, and live in fear of the auditor.
The resistance's most dangerous cells do not hide in caves: they are inside the ESTEMPs themselves. Whole subdivisions, like an isolated water treatment plant, can be staffed entirely by infiltrators.
They live under the constant strain of being found out. The worst enemy of an infiltrated cell is not a soldier: it is an auditor, someone who checks spreadsheets, counts parts and asks polite questions.
That is exactly the situation of the opening adventure: Audit at Descoberto.
Grey morality
FictionVictories are never clean.
To force a megacorporation to give a vital resource (say, the clean water of a data centre) to a REGEST without triggering open war, the characters will need heavy blackmail, lies, calculated sabotage and, sometimes, sacrificing innocents or betraying allies.
The setting does not ask the players to do this. It asks that the choice exists and weighs. An AntiFaCa victory nearly always costs something to someone who did not ask to be in the story.
Campaign hooks
FictionThree ways to start a campaign, besides this book's adventure.
Every employee of a subdivision is unfairly dismissed at once. Barred by the Corporate Quarantine from working anywhere else, they have nothing left to lose and decide to set fire to the system that threw them out.
A cell has to capture a star executive to extract passwords or proof about Djibouti. The executive has fans, Kuro-Tech guards and a memory implant that may be the proof, or the trap.