RoboCop-1

In the future, the rapid advance of robotics has changed the world. Corporations and crime run rampant, and the increasing privatization of security has made the safety and well-being of the police and those they protect a burgeoning question.

Type: Blossom

Active Characters

Alex Murphy

Overview

The year is 2029. In spite of an incredible boom in technology, particularly with robotics and cybernetics, corporations, corruption, and the general state of the world has taken two steps backward while taking one step forward. While governments are not powerless, many companies, such as OCP and their subsdiaries such as OmniCorp, often wield enough power to stand side by side with governments. Such is the case with OmniCorp fielding an autonomous drone army on behalf of the United States government in Middle East locales such as Tehran, Iran and Afghanistan.

Speaking of the United States, the only thing that prevents a full on mobilization of autonomous law enforcement in the United States is the Dreyfus Act which forbids robotic use for police and military ends in the United States, due the lack of empathy the machines would have when upkeeping law enforcement. This naturally conflicted with OmniCorp and other robotics corporations who wish to further their contracts but are currently unable to sell within the United States.

However, this world deciding to open trade connections to the World Tree changed that.

The economic impact, especially to countries that were already having struggles (such as the US with people migrating to other countries due to their troubles) was undeniable. Even ignoring potential illicit enterprise, there was plenty of business for corporations such as OCP to expand their interests, including their cybernetic and prosthetic divisions that lay within OmniCorp itself.

A potential expansion to the Dreyfus Act--one that would bar sales from US-operating countries to corporations and governments of other parts of the World Tree, was defeated narrowly due only to the potential impacts it would have had on trade and the downsides it was believed to bring for other corporations. Only narrowly, due to the controversy surrounding the RoboCop program that saw the Dreyfus Act upheld to begin with. With such legislation defeated in one world power, the domino effect could not be stopped, throwing wide the gates for regular trade and commerce.

The demand of prosthetics, security and other services and products opened a door no single country or even coalition of countries could reckon with. OCP and others have taken a step back, to allow the influence they have to quietly grow, as opposed to the aggressive attempts to expand that they once utilized--for now at least. The all-consuming capitalistic greed, the eternal debate of machine vs. man... the fields of debate have shifted, but the arguments and battles have not.

Dreyfus Act

The Dreyfus Act was a law passed in the United States spearheaded by Senator Hubert Dreyfus to bar the use of robotic law enforcement measures. Robotic enforcers such as EM-208, intended to replace normal police and military soldiers, and the ED-209 heavy walker were chief amongst the concerns by the Senator. The law was passed and upheld based on the proven cases of a lack of empathy that machines would display when it came to law enforcement, that they could only act in a binary set of clear-cut directives. His belief is simple: machines have no feelings and no understanding of life and death or right or wrong, thus they could not reason or understand beyond their programming, therefore they could not be entitled the power to take a human life.

While this certainly holds true for the machines made by OmniCorp and other corporations, Senator Dreyfus has gone on record to express that, should machines and sentience be somehow developed, he would be open to revisiting the issue. However, when corruption was exposed in the Detroit Police Department, support for the Dreyfus Act began to fall towards repealing it in favor of welcoming autonomous law enforcement. The Dreyfus Act was nearly repealed, as the President vetoed the repeal based on the testimony of Dr. Dennett Norton about the atrocities that were committed for the RoboCop program that had been used to weaken support for the Dreyfus Act.

An attempt to expand the Dreyfus Act fell short, with the intent to limit sales and trade of robotics to countries and corporations of worlds beyond this one, if only narrowly. This meant that although robots were still limited from operation in the United States, those who had no compunction against robotic replacement forces could still engage in trade with companies like OmniCorp in worlds and countries of the Tree. While there is still concern about what companies, unfettered by most standards of accountability are going to do in the future, all eyes are on Alex Murphy who has become an ad-hoc representative of what OCP and the world he comes from have to offer; both the good and the bad.