They sit on L1, L2, L4, L5, and on the moon; and they surveil Earth.
Their purpose is enforce a global policy of nonviolence. They can drop anywhere on the planet within about an hour. They can also bombard the planet with stuff manufactured from the moon.
A nice use of Elon’s rockets has been keeping a cycle of Lagrange Marines and equipment going, so they’ve got a pretty large number of guys trained up; about 50 from LMDA 1, 200 from LMDA 2, 1000 from LMDA 3, and 2000 more from LMDA 4. Still in service are around 2700; the rest lost to retirement, injury, or major loss.
The aerial bombardments are a sort of “final word.” The Russian Aggression of 2038 was when Belarus convinced LMDA to first demonstrate that final word with a 5 kiloton rod on the Kremlin. The limited gamma radiation makes the fallout infinitely more manageable than any nuclear device, and they’re completely inert, unless perhaps their orbit becomes unmanaged. The pressure wave is a bit more shaped than any nuke, too. First responders to the Kremlin’s undergound bunkers described the scene simply as “wet.”
They make stuff from the moon by blowing pieces off of it with a special bomb that produces a random distribution of extreme static charges among the dust particles (i.e. it separates the dust somehow so that it forms two polarized pieces). The charges cause the dust to coalesce in orbit very quickly, and they then collect it mechanically.
With the dust collected in orbit, the expensive part of getting the things off the surface is done. They can then use explosive forging to create ballistic weapons, and with those they declare peace. The people who run this show are from all over. Only countries with histories of nonaggression are allowed to join. Certain countries are banned from participating so long as certain leaders remain in power.
The constitution was clear enough. The modern lexicon has plenty of ways to describe human welfare. A surprise to NATO, the program gained an enormous outpouring of support when LMDA published the Declaration of Extreme Retaliatory Measures. Twitter users amused at Putin getting “dermed” or getting his “long needed dermabrasion” caused the service’s longest outage since 2020. Things change for LMDA when a rocket carrying marines with explosives crashes into the moon. The marines find themselves in a series of rooms, pale yellow wallpaper lit by buzzing fluorescent tubes. The light fixtures are spaced every five or six feet and extend in all directions, as do the rooms, forever. These are the backrooms.
The trapped marines look for a way out, exploring literally endless corridores of identical yellow wallpaper and low-pile carpet. Eventually they encounter something. They can’t shoot it, so they run away and plant explosives.
The explosives have a number of unexpected effects. First, they rend time and space, unleashing unknown cosmic terrors on humanity. Second, they give the marines access to exit the backrooms at a variety of angles, each leading to a different point in time.
This is the point in the story where the player loses the second of their initial party. They choose the characters and assemble the party with care, then go on a mission where one character is inescapably executed. Then, it’s the player’s marines who make it to the backrooms and blow their way out. The player then loses a second character, who choses to exit the backrooms to a time when they were a child, so they can change how their life turned out. When this character crosses the boundary, the other characters see them quickly collapse in on themselves, reducing to the form of their young age. But their body changes at a diversity of rates, so the character is mutilated horribly by the transformation and can be heard agonizing.
The other characters, for whatever reason, choose to return to the present, after their ship has crashed. Although we may give other opportunities to enter the rift at different angles, killing off characters in different ways. Returning to the present, the player’s marines (now 4 of 6) go through the moon base and do various debriefings. Meanwhile, the people they interact with begin to lose their minds and attack other people. Eventually the entire station is consumed by the plague, turning people into not zombies, but intelligent agents of chaos.
A species of alien who previously discovered and studied the backrooms has developed faster than light travel by moving through the backrooms. They’re able to detect the rift, and so they arrive quickly in the story, following the introduction of the plague.
The aliens become divided in two factions: the first blames humans for the rift, and thus the plague, and has no sympathy; this group aims to obliterate the solar system in order to deprive the plague of any way to escape out of the rift. The second group of aliens sees common ground with humans and wants to help them advance. The two groups become embattled: the first attacks humans and attempts to dismantle their infrastructure; the second defends humans and attempts to improve their infrastructure.
This tug-of-war over the infrastructure is the major progress metric for the world. The player’s actions affect the distribution of conserved resources, which affects the player’s path through the world. The player must balance the three factions against each other in order to establish a consistent path forward.