Dark Law

## RP Hooks

Darks are the fringe of society who either cannot get or do not want an SSN. They deal in barter or in certified cards (a form of electronic money order). They cannot prove who they are, but they are also outside the immediate gaze of the information world. They are free in a peculiar way. In the Dark Law is more a matter of social custom. It is not unusual in the Dark areas for example for two people with a grievance to jointly pay someone they both trust to act as judge for them. The matter is settled in most cases with a healthy application of common sense and very little "law" as we now understand it.

### Dark Society

Darks are an unusual mixture of social rebels and social outcasts. When the Metros were first being secured by corporate or other government bodies many people were turned away. In the hard cold numbers of survival city managers simply did not have resources to save everyone. Thus they selected for skills that the corporations at the time thought would be useful. Thus people who did not fit the Bright mold were turned away at the gates and if they argued the predecessor to MetSec simply executed them. As the years passed and the Corporate city state of LATMA gathered more resources, something else happened. Young men and women would decide they did not want to fit into the rather tight mold demanded by class and position within Bright society so they chose to leave moving into either the Dark or those Twilight areas in between. At the same time it had become corporate policy that to remain within LATMA's bright areas a person had to have an SSN, a job or retirement from a job. Thus downsizing meant that menial Brights often found themselves exiled to those dark areas.

What has grown up there is a far less stratified and more vibrant community, lacking resources they became people expert and scavenging, fixing up, creating from old tech what they needed and they learned what they had that Brights would pay for and thus was created a symbiotic relationship between Bright & Dark.

### "Who are you?"

No denizen of the lower strata of Dark society would ever underestimate the importance of this question. In post-Fall LATMA, identity is everything. Brights are born to it, their place in the world secured by the number that mediates their every social activity. Darks, on the other hand, must construct their own. The stability of a broader social order no longer constrains the masses of the disenfranchised, at least within the limits of the territories they alone inhabit, and without that normative influence they have fractured into rivaling tribes. In a world where nothing else is certain, the group provides more than just a sense of self: it is a source of companionship and a degree of protection, along with the assurance that death, when it comes, will not be unavenged. These tribes may shift, alter and divide, but there it is difficult to achieve a recognized identity outside that of the group. The individualism of the 20th century is a fading, impractical dream. Only within a group does one know who one can trust. No one trusts a loner.

### Dark Law

As with any other lawless territory, the only law in Dark sectors is what the people with the big guns and the power say there is.

This really is laissez faire business. Dark citizens don't really own anything except for what they can keep others from stealing. This often boils down to paying the local gang a good sum of protection money to protect you from other gangs. Most major organized crime families and organizations operate in both individual Bright and Dark areas.

The areas that have both bright and dark sections (like Pasadena, and LA Harbor,) the organized crime families operate with a stronger hand than in Lynwood, or Tijuana where there are a greater amount of independent thug gangs. There is an unspoken and unsigned agreement between the Yakuza, the Triad, and Mafia to keep order and prevent their thugs from operating in MetSec controlled bright areas. If you own a business in a dark area, just assume that either one, you are paying protection money, or you have come to some arrangement with the "powers that be" to appear as if you do.