Logan

I wanna find some parallel where JM Barrie is still alive, so I can kick him in the fuckin' nuts for making anyone think this shit is some kinda wonderful dream.

— Erin Travis, BREACH operative

Live Fast, Die Young, Leave A Horribly Mangled Corpse

[spoiler:Obvious Inspirations]If I've ever claimed to be original, I was lying. While I didn't consciously "file down the serial numbers" from a specific setting here, it obviously draws bits and pieces from Logan's Run (hence the name), Trek TOS "Miri", and the Jeremiah TV show. Just in case anyone reading this (yeah, right) thinks they've "figured out" where I steal ideas from. The answer is "everywhere". To quote a great soldier and revolutionary: "Everything Is Fodder"[/spoiler] The alternate known as Logan was on its way to becoming a world of highly advanced genetic engineering, with the equivalent of early 21st century Baseline bioengineering and medical technology coming into wide use in the 1960s and surpassing it in the 1970s. Unfortunately, as so often happens, the rapid pace of change had not left time to develop appropriate safeguards and protocols.

Perhaps it was intended as a cure for aging, or perhaps it was intended as a self-replicating terror weapon which lacked a, if you will pardon the expression, kill switch. Either way, in 1974 it got loose on the world. Natural immunity was exceedingly rare; perhaps one in a million survived the disease, and of those, most perished in the aftermath.

Simply put, if you were over roughly 25, you died. Pretty horribly, too. Those younger were asymptomatic, but could transmit the infection. In the span of a few months, the world was handed to the young. Those in the older ranges tried to keep things running, but their efforts to maintain a small amount of industrial capacity, to literally keep the lights on, were undermined by the need to at least try to care for a planet of mostly orphans, the catastrophic loss of institutional knowledge, and the violence, fires, and destruction that invariably accompany the knowledge of impending armageddon.

A doctor or engineer or scientist in their early 20s has learned enough to begin their career, but has not mastered the countless small skills needed to apply their basic knowledge. They also cannot simultaneously do their job and pass their learning on, especially with a death clock ticking down.

The gap between learning the rudiments of a skill, and knowing it well enough to transmit it, is also wide. A typical child learns to read at 6, but is far from being able to teach others. (Some exceptional children, of course, can, but when most of the world is dead, the total number of one in a million geniuses is quite small, and the chances of them being born into an environment where their innate potential can manifest is smaller still.) The most advanced knowledge was quickly forgotten. Books continued to exist, but fewer people could read them, and fewer still could use them without learning all the fundementals beforehand. A clever 14 year old who finds a copy of Grey's Anatomy is unlikely to teach themselves to perform surgery. An illustrated Army First Aid manual, on the other hand, may become a holy book, copied by hand and passed around, some copies gathering hand written notes and marginalia from those who made use of it. (There is a certain irony that as the transmission of knowledge as basic as reading and writing became a challenge, it also became much more necessary, as oral traditions were hindered by the short span any person had to pass on what they knew -- especially since they also had to devote time to using their knowledge. There were no longer people who had worked for a long time and could now teach and train the youngest, while the adults did their jobs. Learning was mostly by doing, with a 20-something handling the most complex tasks, their teenage apprentices doing the common jobs, and they, in turn, taught the most basic skills to pre-adolescents.)

The world split into various factions, with the "elders" desperately struggling to pass on what knowledge they had aquired in the short time remaining to them. By the time any human was old enough to learn all they needed to learn to be an adult, they had only a few years left. Few children knew their parents for more than a decade; most for less than half that. Rebuilding and moving ahead seemed almost impossible; the 8-10 years of life granted where someone had both the physical and mental maturity to do any kind of useful work were franticly spent simply trying to keep the next generation alive long enough that they could do the same.

The Present

The current year is 2023, and if anyone on the planet is older than 27, they're well-hidden. Most survivors are in farming communities, and most of those have developed strange and cult-like cultural patterns, widely varied, based on whatever few "olders" had assumed control when the plague first hit, their advice or random mutterings repeated down each short generation.

Communities are of two general types:

Isolated farming communities, generally collective in nature, where children are raised by whoever is old enough to help, and there are at most a few specialists such as healers and smiths (mostly repairing and maintaining older items; with TL 7 tools around, forging all-new items is less essential). Trade between such communities is rare, as is war, but both happen.

Urban/Suburban 'ferals', who live in remains of cities and larger towns, surviving mostly by scavenging pre-plauge goods, rather than farming or herding. Some dendrisociologists object to this description, as the Urban/Suburban Self-Organized Communities (USSOC, pronounced 'You-Sock'), have complex internal rules and structures, just not those of an imagined pastoral past that might appeal more to Baseline observers. The ruins are, or were, full of canned food, preserved goods, furnished houses or apartments, and few necessary tasks as long as the stockpiles lasted. After five or six generations of living off the excess consumer good of the past, the easy caches have run out, and they must now look for better-hidden supplies, as well as learning to catch the animals that have moved in to the slowly greening ruins. They are suspicious and often reflexively hostile to outsiders, as the peaceful farmer are not at all above supplementing their lifestyle with what they can scavenge and steal. The USSOCs view them as raiders and bandits, and act accordingly.

BREACH

The breach point is in Kansas, a few miles north of the ruins of Topeka. There has been no in-person exploration more than about 100 miles from this point, and only limited longer range remote reconnaiscence. The assumption that this area is typical of the rest of the world is untested and as always, BREACH is prepared to find out it's false and pivot in their approach as needed.

The good news, such as it is, is that while BREACH personnel will be infected while there, the disease does not seem to survive passage back to Baseline. Just as with ray guns and gear-driven personal computers, the advanced genetic technology of Logan simply does not function elsewhere, so the world is not in the Omega File. (This does tend to hinder attempts to find a cure.) This is "good" in that it's possible for younger breachers to conduct at least some humanitarian missions.

It Gets Worse

"Yes, it does seem the PTRR of unauthorized Logan breachers is unusually low, but statistical anomalies happen. Off the record, what are a few standard deviations when it comes to non-standard deviants?"

— Charles Doggersby, PAIN Public Relations

However, Logan also has visitors whose motivations are anything but benign. It has become a target for some of the most vile of illegal breachers. A world of teens who expect to become parents quickly, because they need as many years with their children as possible, naturally attracts exactly the scum you might expect. The sort of sex tourism that plague part of Baseline has found a new home. PAIN is very quick to respond to indications of an unsanctioned breach, and will act with alacrity to bring the criminals back. As noted above, it is entirely a statistical fluke that many of the perverts meet with unfortunate accidents before they can be hauled back to Baseline.

World Type

Alternate History

Divergence

1973

Current Year

2023

TL

1-2 for new manufacturing; 7 for artifacts in general

Raiding the Past

Unlike most "post apocalyptic" worlds Baseline has explored, this one did not suffer overwhelming physical destruction. Riots flared, rumors of "safe zones" or "stockpiled cures" triggered micro-invasions by military and civilian forces, some nations decided if they were going to go, they were going to take out their lifelong enemies, but even with all that, a lot of infrastructure survived.

The items of most interest to "breach pirates" on any world are the same: Art, jewelry, precious metals, and so on. But on Logan, there are also medical and biochemical tools well advanced from those on Baseline, ranging from fully-developed gear that is still in early prototyping back home, to new machines and techniques no one's thought of yet. Due to the slightly varying laws of reality, not all of them work -- the more advanced, the less likely -- but they can provide guideposts and ideas to be exploited. More-complete mappings of genes and their functions can be found in a few surviving labs and research centers. (As such places were the epicenters of panic and civil disorder, they're rarer than you might expect.)

It is often the case that unauthorized breachers claim they were "just" looking for some "abandoned" bank vaults to rob, or were hoping to sell information they found to drug companies on Baseline, as those crimes carry much lower penalties than sex trafficking. This may be part of why so many of them seem to meet unfortunate accidents before being hauled home to face charges, as it's likely such claims will be accepted as a plea bargain by overburdened courts.

Functionality

Because what's the point of GURPS if you don't have some random rules stuck everywhere? The following can be used to determine if a given piece of gear functions as expected on Baseline.

Decription	Functioning	Critical
Standard TL 8	As fine item	None
Late TL 8	14-	17+
Standard TL 9	11-	16+
Late TL 9	16-	15+