A strung-out Nero realizes that he's endangered everything he cares about, and gang war explodes violently upon the midsummernight streets of Durban...
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During the mid-21st century, the crime rate in South Africa increased over 1000 percent, necessitating drastic measures from the corporate government. Several 'zones' across South Africa were declared 'prison cities', and have became home to hundreds of thousands of criminals in the past decades.
The former city of Cape Town (now renamed Pollsmoor City) on South Africa's west coast is the largest of these prison cities, having been the first zone converted by the corporate government. Amusingly, many of the original, law-abiding citizens of Cape Town were not notified of its conversion to prison city status, and were mildly confused when their white-picket fence neighbourhoods became overrun with the most violent and sadistic criminals in the country.
Officially, the prison cities remain under governmental control, but unofficially, they are run almost entirely independently by their criminal inhabitants... and as long as these inhabitants remain within the 20 metre high, electrified, gun-turreted walls, they are mostly left to their own devices.
There is no pretense of 'rehabilitation' within the prison cities, their purpose is solely to quarantine the most vicious and violent of the population. It has been pointed out with some irony that far from lowering the country's crime rate, the prison cities now have their own crime rates.
A techno-industrial dystopia, the sprawling megalopolis of Durban stretches across the country's east coast, breeding ground for a cosmopolitan cross-section of high-tech and low-life.
Lazarus Nero is a keyboard cowboy, one of millions of hackers earning their crust in the dark alleyways of cyberspace.
When Nero takes on a particularly lucrative programming contract from a major corporation, he does not realize that his actions are about to tear apart the fabric of reality...
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