Rulebook - House Ikaru

For the average person, life is brutally hard. There is drudgery and filth and endless streams of meaningless, menial work. And then there is the Aetherium. More than a virtual reprieve from the urbanized hell of the 23rd century, the Aetherium is a digital landscape of countless dimensional frontiers, a virtual reality so vivid as to be indistinguishable from reality itself.

The Aetherium, then, is the essential human commodity. Uncountable billions plug themselves in every single day to live dynamic dreams of a better existence.

House Ikaru sits at the summit of its corporate rivals. Alone. It was not the first to make the Synaptic Interface Modules, the essential wetware responsible for delivering the human consciousness safely and completely into the Aetherium, but it was the first to make the SIM viable on a commercial scale.

House Ikaru created a virtual lifeline for the masses, and it has done so precisely because it was never constrained by pedestrian notions of human progress nor moral certitude. This is their story.