When I moved to the City of Santa Luz in 2091, I thought I was going to make a name for myself, get a chance to be someone. I fell for all of the shiny advertisements on the billboards of my hometown. I mean, who wouldn’t? “Come to the City of Light, where you can be anyone,” they said. So I, like everyone else who lives in this shithole, packed up all of my belongings and drove from California to Santa Luz, located in what used to be Northern New Mexico. I had saved up enough money to buy myself an apartment in the eastern zone of the city, Hunter’s Row. It’s on the 27th floor of one of the towering complexes by the Widow’s Den, the hub area for bounty hunters. And yeah, it has its moments.  The skyline at night, the hustle and bustle of people of all ages, races, and backgrounds milling about, the feeling when you complete a job and finally make those hard earned credits.  It’s something you can only find here. There’s no place in the world like the City of Light.

But I realized something when I moved here.  The advertisements, the billboards, the people out in the country who all fantasize about moving here and making the good life a reality, it’s all not entirely true.  Behind all of the shiny buildings that cut through the sky and flashing neon signs, it’s a cold, heartless city.  Living in Santa Luz is like riding a bull, it’s fun for a while, but eventually you’ll get knocked off, and when you do, the city swallows you whole. Yeah, there’s a chance to make a name for yourself and bask in the limelight, but the limelight is short lived, and most of the people here die trying to find it.  

I guess it’s my own fault, I came here thinking that I was special, thinking that I could make a difference, help fix some of humanity’s wrongs by righting them with a bullet, be some modern day John Wayne. But I soon came to realize, like all of the other starry-eyed twenty-somethings that moved here, that this isn’t a movie.  Santa Luz is a city controlled by money hungry corporations and criminal gangs, and if you don’t have a hell of a lot of money or the goddess of luck on your side, you’ll die, broke and nameless, bleeding out on the sidewalk.