The year was 2009, and the soil was just beginning to cool from the apocalyptic hellfire of the last Great War. Humanity clashed with technology as scientists from both sides found new and more lethal ways to obliterate their enemies. The final battle was fought over scarred, desolate sand. It was us against them, and in the end, they won.
A new order rose out of the ashes, like a dark phoenix. The ways of the old regime are not the ways of the new one, they said. Everything not regulated by the state was banned outright. Alcohol, Adult Entertainment, Television, and even Radio became forbidden by the state. Once a land of liberty and opportunity, its people were now reduced to mindless cattle. Peace was finally restored to the land, but some secretly wondered at what cost.
Living alone in a squalid, single room apartment, a 30-year old counter-revolutionary by the name of Ray Kastanski began experimenting to develop the first form of the Toxin known as C.B.I. (Cerebral Bionic Inducer). Kastanski administered the C.B.I. to his neighbour, who promptly went on a killing spree that left 11 dead. The newspapers screamed tragedy, but to Kastanski it was a success.
Armed with his new weapon, Kastanski boarded a subway train where he left the C.B.I. in an old tuna can hidden inside the train's ventilation. Kastanski got off at the next stop, and C.B.I. filled the train car.The events were nothing short of catastrophic. The people on the train, largely a collection of businessmen and the elderly, poured out of the train station and began a frenzied riot. Chaos ran rampant as people were cut down where they stood or died trying to defend their families. The army was called in to restore order, and when things once again became calm nearly 500 people had been killed.
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When the military traced the riot back to the train car, they were surprised to find a strange chemical trace in an old tuna can hiding in a ventilation duct.
Within a month the government had traced Kastanski back to his home, and he was quickly arrested. The people had suspicions that something had happened, but nothing was ever said. Ray Kastanski disappeared into the labyrinth of the government's Secret Weapons Division, never to be heard from again. However, his legacy would live on.
Two years later, rumours began to surface that the government was testing a nerve agent on criminals housed in the city's Maximum Security Penitentiary in an effort to build super-soldiers. They said the inmates had their eyes flushed with a substance called C.B.I. which caused a euphoric feeling coupled with enhanced strength and reflexes.
The side effects of the drug were that it was totally addictive, and the euphoric high was often accompanied by a frenzied psychosis that made the victims too hard to control. The experiments continued, but the project was deemed a failure. The project was scrapped and the bodies of the criminals were shipped off to the incinerator for disposal.
They never made it.
Anarchist revolutionaries who had been watching the government and using inside sources for intelligence quickly made their move. Staging a highway accident, they switched the bodies in the trucks with corpses of murdered vagrants and made off with the contaminated materials.
After identifying the proteins that made up the C.B.I., the bodies were rendered and the C.B.I. extracted. Within months they had a workable chemical weapon capable of bringing the government to its knees.
The first bombs went off in the capital, halting all business there and forcing the government into hiding.
The government scrambled to react, but too late they realized what had happened. As city after city fell to the revolutionaries, the government could only watch helplessly as society began to eat itself. The anarchists used short range missiles to "seed" the sky with C.B.I., and when it began to rain, a crimson mist fell with it.
The people called the mist "Red Sasha", and as they breathed it in they felt their sanity quashed under a need to destroy. The cities fell apart, crumbling into broken war zones. Chemistry labs seemed to blossom overnight, feeding the craving for C.B.I. Once-sane people split into rival gangs, needing only to control the flow of Red Sasha into the gutters and fighting all who might oppose them.
The world government now lay in tatters, and in a final act of desperation they handed their powers over to the military.
Instituting an immediate world-wide Martial Law, the military introduced a special wing of their marine force, the Emergency Response Team.
Known simply as E.R.T's, these soldiers were culled from the best the military had to offer. Brutal training and psychological conditioning broke many of the soldiers selected, but those who made it were transformed into the fiercest and most loyal fighting force ever assembled.
The E.R.T's are single minded in their duty, and their training has made them resistant to the addictive nature of C.B.I.
Their only mission-restore order at all costs, by whatever means necessary, and with whatever weapons available.
There can be no retreat from the battle ahead, no sign of weakness in the face of adversity. Your duty is to bring humanity back from the brink of madness, and you will drag her, kicking and screaming, if you have to. You cannot fail or deviate from your mission.
Succeed.
Or die trying.