Welcome to Northplex

It's all here.

Population wise, Northplex is right behind the Big London Sprawl and Honshusprawl for all-out largest population center in the world. Northplex is also the largest in North America, or the entire Western Hemisphere, for that matter.

Spread across the Great Lakes and New England, embracing Southern Ontario and several northeastern states, Northplex was one of the first to gain true independence as an extraterritorial entity; it's not a part of the U.S., nor of Canada; it's Northsprawl, pure and simple.

The history of Northplex goes right back to 2007, when Cantech Industries produced the first viable, economical cybernetic prosthetics. That was the start of it all. Under the guidance of the brilliant Dr. Catherine Alarsen, Cantech began to produce cybernetic implants which were unrivalled for quality, capability, and utility, and rapidly began to become incredibly rich. It was the guidance of Cantech which accellerated the urban growth which was leading towards the Plexes. Toronto began to grow outwards, along the shores of Lake Ontario; by 2018 it had met the expanding industrial mass of Detroit, and not far away New York, Boston and Washington had begun to coalesce into a mirror sprawl. By that point, the growth rate increased exponentially; it's an old story, once it gets going, everyone wants in on the act. The New England Urban Land Bridge, the chunk of territory connecting the Toronto-Detroit sprawl with New York, solidified from 2020 to 2029.

Of course, by that time, things were getting wierd on a global scale. Sense tanks were the rage, Proteus had been born and died, Tokyo fell into the sea; Kyodara was making its moves in Iran, but that wouldn't become big for a while yet. By that time the Corps had become fully extraterritorial; Corporate facilities were Corporate land, governed by Corporate law and protected by Corporate militaries. The big boys, Kyodara and Namaru Transglobal, were doing big things around the world. The big noise in Northplex was still Cantech. That was the year they began work on Nervewires, jacking up reflexes and making cyber killers. There was a big fuss when a Cooler packing bleeding-edge Cantech wires slotted some Corp security and diced up the head of Grueber-Hetz GmbH; the corp crashed and burned, the Cooler ended up hanging himself (with help), and everyone was hunting for the secrets of how Cantech made the bloody wires in the first place. That was a good time for Northsprawl; it was the first time that the Plex began to see itself as a true entity, not just Canadian or American cities brushing shoulders. Northplex was big, and it had the hottest cyber going.

Then 2031, the year that everyone learned that the world had changed. A small group of Iranians smuggled a nuclear device with Cyrillic serial numbers into Miami from Venezuela. The plan was to get to Washington and take out the head of the serpent, so to speak, but NIA (the CIA got blitzed back in 2022) agents cornered them and tried to take them all out in a strike. Didn't work, and one of the terrorists turned the key.

Half a million people bought it that afternoon. At least twice that many would die over the next five years from the fallout and radiation that drifted southwards; the Cuban government never released any information on how many they lost. It was as bad as bad gets, and the American government decided Iran had messed with them for the last time. Not that simple, but the Americans didn't know that then.

Kyodara had bought up all kinds of land in Iran and was heavily into the oil biz. Kyodara, one of the biggest Multinationals, wasn't about to let an American military operation spoil their bottom line, so they sent people to talk to the American government in FDC. Didn't work; the invasion was going ahead. Kyodara issued orders for security forces in the region to step up readiness.

Things got tense. The William Allenson went in with 135 aircraft, along with missile cruisers, support equipment, and a Marine amphibious assault carrier. Kyodara fighters messed with Navy fighters, things came close a couple of times, and then two aircraft collided. The wingman of the Navy unfortunate got scared and opened fire. That caused Kyodara assets to retaliate, gunning down an E-16 Eagle Eye and a few patrol interceptors, and things went downhill. The William Allenson began launching aircraft, and the Kyodara field commanders thought they were going to launch a strike against Kyodara oil installations; perhaps they were. They took out the Allenson with an X-Ray laser satellite, burned the thing in half.

Bad news all around. That brought it home to everyone. The corps were powerful, but now they didn't care who knew it. They were willing to defend themselves, and there wasn't a nation on Earth that could hope to win against the big Multinationals.

Which is when we all realized that Cantech was sitting right in Northplex, in Toronto, and Cantech was as big as Kyodara ever was.

Before too long, old ideas like Nations were discarded in favour of new ones. In 2037 Northplex became an autonomous entity; the American parts weren't American, and the Canadian parts weren't Canadian. Northplex was on its own.

Time has been good to Northplex. Cantech has maintained its edge on cybertech; Northplex is still home to the hottest and the fastest, although Chiba has begun producing synthetic-nerve technology which makes for some incredibly fast wires. Still, Northplex and Cantech are the place to be for cybernetics.

New York is still rich, a nexus of trade and industry. The North American Stock Exchange, the old United Nations, and the ever-popular New York Contaminate Zone, aka the Grimlands, call New York home. Detroit is an industrial giant, producing the bulk of the cars for North America, and recently they've got into the mecha business; Namaru Transglobal has a design and construction setup there, producing the hottest milspec hardware for the Euro street wars, Africa, India-Pakistan, pretty much anywhere that people want to kill each other and can afford the tech.

Then there's Washington. With no U.S.A., there isn't much call for a capital, but Washington finds ways to keep current. Washington is home to the Global Multinational Council, where the Corps keep tabs on each other, although they say the Japanese Zaibatsu have their own version, and none of the Euro corps have time to talk to each other.

Yeah, Northplex is the place to find it, as the slogan goes. You can bet your bottom cred that there's stuff going on here that you don't hear about in the news, too; things like the Septs, but you didn't see that here.