The world is broken, a cracked and rusty engine hiding under plasteel and biofluor.

The world is broken, gears grinding faster and faster, everyone running flat out just to try and stay in the same place.

The world is broken, but then who isn’t these days?

The executives, constantly upgrading their bodies and minds with designer drugs and ever more experimental biomods, because if they’re not rising, They’re falling. (And if they’re falling, someone’s going to come and recoup those investments they sold their soul for.)

The salaried employees, always having to scrimp and save to keep their cyberware one step ahead of the obsolescence curve, always dreading the axe that will return them to the common labour pool.

The part-timers, scrambling to pick up jobs whenever and wherever they can, for whatever meagre compensation they can manage to bargain for.

The blacklisted, forced outside the margins of corporate society, where their only viable options involve criminal activity of one sort or another, fighting for a share of corporate scraps.

Everyone wants — needs — something better than this broken world. And the word on the street says that you can get it.

Whisper can give it to you.

It was a few years back that the rumours first started. There was a drug that that would give you dreams so vivid that that, for a few hours every night it felt like you were escaping into another world; a better world, where you could be free from the stresses and worries of your ordinary life. The drug, Whisper, was only available to the top execs at first, but soon it slowly started filtering out and down, rumour solidifying into fact until it reached down as far as the blacklisted. The police took an interest and started cracking down. But only on the street level trade, of course — they wouldn’t dare touch anything connected to the corporate side of thing.

Six months ago, the rumour mill started up again. There was an improved product on the way down, Whisper 2. A dose of this could give you memories of a year or more lived in a different life, a different world, all over the course of a single night. Enough memories to give you something to hang onto. Maybe a little bit of hope, even, that something outside this existence is possible.

Whisper 2 is real. It’s still damn hard to get hold of — maybe you only know of a friend of a friend who’s claimed to have had some — but it’s out there, it’s definitely out there.

The next generation, though, Whisper 3.0 is just rumour. Everyone is sure that someone in corporate must be developing it, and everyone has their own ideas on just what it might do for you.

And you, lucky you, you’re just about to find out.

Are you an executive climber, who’s managed to snag a sample using your contacts and the certain knowledge that you deserve this?

Are you a mid-level employee, who’s just had temptation (and a top secret package) waved under your nose?

Are you one of the blacklisted, someone skilled or desperate enough to get into corporate to steal the ultimate prize?

Or are you straight-edge, someone who would never do drugs, never even think about touching Whisper, so why are you here?