City of Meteors

City of Meteors is a point-and-click adventure game set in our inner solar system. The style is meant to be reminiscent of many adventure games in the mid 1990's, such as those created by Sierra and LucasArts. This could be considered a fan's love-letter to the Space Quest series, and an attempt to kickstart a Free Software/Creative Commons franchise in which others can borrow from the characters, storyline, and story universe for reuse in their own stories, games, and other media.

City of Meteors is the first in a trilogy referred to as Sojurn.

Prologue

The year is 2166, and the Fates have not smiled on the human race for some time. Nearly 60 years ago, the human race nearly extinguished itself in an event that has come to be known as The Big Crash. The Crash was a result of nearly every affliction of the human condition striking at once; a symphony of death and destruction to magnitudes that had never before been comprehensible. First came the tired old industries, attempting to keep their economies alive by fanning the flames of war. 

The infrastructure fell in on itself at all sides, in all nations. Mass poverty and riots broke down, without a single thing to be done by the strongest Democracies and the strongest Fascists. Without the crucial services required to keep society going, a viral epidemic spread. Mass starvation sprang out as the crops died, afflicted by their own diseases from the sheer amount of pollution emissions. The green Earth that man had lived on for nearly ten million years began to fade. Billions perished in the aftermath.

In 2030, NASA and several private industries foresaw this problem, and began collaborating on the 100-Year Starship Initiative. The scope was magnificent. The designs were rudimentary at best. Decades and decades brought forth breakthroughs in engineering. Dozens of research ships were sent up, and small colonies were established on the Moon and Mars as permanent funtioning starports. Small-scale chemical and manufacturing industries rose up in these colonies, and trade began.

2096 came to be known as the beginning of the end. As government funding continued to bleed out due to the mass amounts of inflation and taxes, the Starship Initiative had to be scrapped. The very best theoretical work, such as warp drives, planetary terraformers, and ships capable of holding enough fuel to get to Alpha Centauri, our nearest star...were completely scrapped in the name of a budget. The last ships went up, and within the next decade, everyone Earthbound dropped dead.

And now, 60 years after The Crash, Earth is all but an uninhabitable shell. Some of the old timers from the last ship refer to it as "The Boneyard", and no one has ever returned from a landing attempt there. The remaining humans avoid it like Bubonic Plague.

Within this time, colonies have flourished out in our solar system. Trade and manufacturing has developed to a point of being completely self-sustaining. Various factions have broken off contact from one another. With no uniting factor other than trade and economics, the fate of the human race is left uncertain. The only governing bodies are those of loosely-knit corporations in the Terran Federation. 

This, however, is not a story about corrupt business leaders milking the last of the human race for whatever money it's still worth. This isn't even the story of men born into positions of great power. This is a story of an ordinary nuclear waste collector, and his day-to-day struggle to get by in this broken meta-society; in this city of meteors.