Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller - Story

Story

ARC agents Gideon Eshanti and Rachel Braque are spending the night together when they are attacked by a "scrub team", a government execution squad. After killing the scrub agents, they flee to the apartment of Dante Scrivner, a tech criminal who owes them a favor; Rachel and Gideon are straight-laced, dutiful government agents, but occasionally let small-time crooks go if they think they can help them catch more serious offenders later on. Dante offers them the use of his apartment, and says he'll use his connections to help investigate why the ruling government, "The Hand of God", wants them dead. He also provides them a contact with the CFF, a rebel organization trying to overthrow the Hand of God, but they remain hopeful that they'll be able to clear their names instead.

Rachel and Gideon visit the apartment of their commanding officer, Captain Frank Jersey, to ask him what they've been charged with. Jersey scoffs at their inquiry, informing them that Transgressions (the government's top law enforcement agency, which handles all covert operations) always uses bogus charges for scrub operations, keeping the targets' real offenses confidential. They're officially accused of dealing in pornography for the demon Pazuzu, a.k.a. Mr. Beautiful, who works out of a speakeasy in Foggy Bottoms. Mr. Beautiful is repeatedly brought in by Transgressions to finger undesirables such as Rachel and Gideon as his accomplices, while Beautiful himself is let off on a technicality. Jersey advises them not to waste their time with him, and suggests they find a way to access the computer files of Transgressions agent Jean Saint Mouchoir, an obsessive diarist. Intuiting that they were probably two of a group of people due to be "scrubbed" that night, Rachel and Gideon also obtain the "scrub list" from Jersey in hopes of finding a commonality between themselves and the other targets.

Disregarding Jersey's advice, Gideon and Rachel head to Foggy Bottoms, where they acquire new allies (including a holographic simulacrum of Gideon's diseased ex-girlfriend Cynna Stone, an explosives expert) before summoning Mr. Beautiful. Not only does Beautiful refuse them any information, he persistently behaves as though the two of them truly are his longstanding accomplices, and gives them a mission to Hell to stop his rival, Sanguinarius. Hoping to get something out of this, they accept. Once in Hell, they take a variety of high-tech weapons from Sanguinarius's arsenal, and use them to kill the demon. Beautiful returns them to the mortal plane but again refuses them any help.

Gideon and Rachel visit another tech violator who owes them a favor, Dr. Clean, and she sells them an illegal lockpick implant. They use it to break into Mouchoir's office. While they are able to get through most of the passwords on his computer, they cannot access his records on an operation called "Night of the Re-entombment", and an entry on the two of them indicates that even Mouchoir is ignorant of the reason they are on the scrub list. However, they are able to obtain locations of several "fringe" groups which include people on the scrub list.

By now convinced that the Hand of God is corrupt, they use Dante's contact with the CFF, who tells them to aid in an assassination attempt on the USA's ruler, Imperator Solene Solux, to prove their sincerity. They agree, but the attempt fails. They continue to investigate the rest of the scrub list, and meet up with demon hunter Dean Sterling, who enlists them in taking out a demon porn film director, Asmodeus. While working undercover at at one of Asmodeus's stage sets in Hell, the demon begins jerking and sputtering, and Hell dissolves into a black space with only the message "GO TO DANTE ALL WILL BE EXPLAINED". They awaken back on Earth, where Sterling tells them that they never went anywhere; Asmodeus had them hooked up to virtual reality decks. Sterling shot Asmodeus, who turns out to be an android. Rachel and Gideon realize that Hell is a virtual reality program created by the Hand of God to instill fear in the people, and head to Dante's apartment to find out who made the program crash. Dante tells them a Deep Throat contacted him online with an address for their virtual reality decks. They use it to meet up with Deep Throat in a cloaked virtual reality locale.

Meanwhile, they find that all the others on the scrub list were involved in illegal activities. Moreover, all of them, including Gideon and Rachel, habitually mouthed a Latin phrase. In exchange for recovering a stolen text, the leader of a fringe group translates the phrases into English, and deduces they are a code for a word. They use this word to access Mouchoir's records on The Night of the Re-entombment, which say that the people on the scrub list were all captured CFF agents who were mindwiped, given new memories, physically rebuilt, and implanted with subconscious impulses to take down the CFF. It adds that some of these agents failed to follow these impulses, so all of them were put on the scrub list to be safe. Rachel points out that even if what the records say is possible, it makes no sense for the government to have gone to such immense trouble and expense. But they shrug the matter off and cease their investigation into the reason behind their being on the scrub list.

They return to CFF headquarters and inform their leader, Senator Erin Burr, that Hell is virtual. Though virtual reality tech is outlawed, the Hand of God has developed it in secret, resulting in a Hell program far more realistic than anything tech criminals are capable of. Burr asks them to rescue 12 key CFF supporters from Hell. While rescuing them from various hellpits, Rachel and Gideon are contacted by Deep Throat, who tells them his true identity is Thomas Meaculp, a low-tier programmer for Hell, and that he has been found out. They track Meaculp to the Pentagon Jail and break him out, bringing him to the CFF to work out a means of destroying Hell. They reenter Hell to rescue the remaining CFF supporters, and though Solux herself confronts them in the guise of Satan, they are able to free them all.

(The rest of this summary assumes the player chose Gideon as the lead character. If Rachel is chosen, Gideon and Rachel's parts are swapped, but the plot is otherwise unchanged.)

After Gideon and Rachel return, the CFF techs tell them Rachel must enter the core of the Hell program behind the illusion and locate the spawner application, which is used to create the various Hell pits. As Rachel enters the core, Solene Solux appears and destroys her mind. The CFF techs receive the location of the spawner program just before her death.

After two days of mourning for Rachel, Gideon convinces Senator Burr to let him go ahead with the plan to destroy Hell. He breaks into the central computer room for the Hell program, sending a gas bomb through the tube system to take out the guards. On the way he is confronted by Solux, but he beats her senseless and inserts the disc with the Hell bug. Senator Burr proceeds to take over the Hand of God's entire communication network, broadcasting that Hell is virtual and the Hand have been overthrown. Burr is elected President, and Rachel and Gideon are honored as heroes.