This is the concept art behind the game Remember Me. I looked at it and outta nowhere I thought up a plot for it. Looking at concept art tends to light the ol bulb. I wonder what stories you guys generate when looking at this:



Here's mine:

Its 2050 and Nigel Faber moves to Paris France on duty as a CIA agent. You live a double life in the city, regular working man by day, agent by night. But duty doesn't respect time as anything may come his way. In this picture, looking down from the balcony, he sees a target he is to hunt down from the briefing in his mission and the player must make a choice between scaling the building, or using the stairs, the choice has consequences as scaling the building draws suspicion and the stairs slow you down. Game play in scaling the buildings would implement elements of parkour. When James hits the floor, the chase begins, as he maneuvers through human traffic, and cars on foot to catch his target, the player would have the option to call to a pedestrian to stop the guy when he gets close.

The story was rather short...
More like a concept I guess but it looked a lot better in my head.

Remy was dead.

You get used to death, living in a place like this. The Nationalists don't give two shits for the life of a poor, rag-cloaked frog like Remy, not with old Pierre Whats-is-name around, the guy with the pinstripe suit and the golden teeth whose ugly mug you see on all the vidscreens from here to Saint-Denis, telling us all to be good, obedient little citizens. When the Nationalists come, with their lazerifles and burst grenades, death is just a quick flashburst away. Life is cheap.

I've seen it all, a thousand times, even though Kansas was only five years ago and Paris has been home for less than half that time. The shiny face masks, the clear plexi riot shields, the flashbursts. The screams, the flames, the busted out windows and smoking holes where wooden walls used to be. The blood, the pain, the fear. Seen it all, a goddamn surfeit of it in my life, but nothing like Remy. Nothing like seeing that beatific pacifict's face striped with blood, perched atop a slumping sack that used to be a person. A person, by god, and the only person in my life who ever meant anything, at least for a long, long time.

Kate and I, we ran from the smoke and the blood, jostled about by the crowd. She held my hand and pulled me along, swearing at me to move faster or by hell she'd cut my throat and dump me in the Seine. I followed, blindly. Not only the smoke and the smog caused me eyes to tear and my nose to run.

Remy.

We came to a square, where Nationalists with rifles stood sentry around a milling press of people. The vidscreen there was alight, the smiling clown face of Pierre Mulleneaux leering down at the lot of us with that cheery jes' folks grin that, even in my relatively short time in Paris, I've come to hate. Makes me want to ball up my fist and put it right through the screen. Better; ball up my fist and cram it right down his damned throat in real life. A worthy goal, but laughable. Think the Nationalists are bad? The Mulleneaux Guard are even worse. They'll stare you coldly in the eye while they lift a boot and kick your kidneys out through your piss-hole.

If I could get my hands on a lazerifle, I'd give it a shot. Better to die trying to take a shot at the Great Father, than live with the knowledge that Remy is dead, that I'm alone once more. But to do that, to have that hilariously slim chance at revenge, I had to live. Kate was a tough one, hard as you could ask for underneath that child-like face smudged with dirt and blood. She hauled me along, snarling for all the world like she was ready to follow through on her threat to dump me with the rest of the bodies floating down the Seine. But she tugged me along, through the press, away from the Nationalists and the clownish japing of the asshole on the vidscreen, toward a place where we could be, if not safe, then at least temporarily secure while we figured things out. Figured out what we would do without Remy, what would happen to the movement without the one whose serene peace kept us all from turning blindly into bloodthirsty savages, monsters as bad as those we sought to resist.

Without Remy, I feared, we would be lost. For who was there left to remind us of how it once was? To remind us of the green fields, the tall trees, the sky unblighted by smog? To read to us from strange books about the voice of the people, to give us hope, to make the vision real in our minds? What do we know of green fields and tall trees? Kate, she was a Yorker, she'd never seen a tree in her life before the Turkish Army blew the southern half of her enviro-pod to hell and gone, killing half her family in the process and spilling the rest of the refugees out into the blighted and poisoned English countryside to try to scratch out their survival. The smart ones like Kate, they found rusty old barges and headed for the mainland. The dumb ones... well, you know what happened to them.

And me? Kansas was no paradise either. It was peaceful, though, at least relatively so. I could remember nights spent in safety, at least, behind the shimmering glow of the Faraday towers. But how could I ever think to take Remy's place? How could I lead anyone, as incapable as I was of even governing myself? For it was in me to shake off Kate's firm guiding hand, to snatch the lazerifle from the hands of the nearest Nationalist thug and to go down, like the old mopics say, in a blaze of glory. It was my driving urge, my only coherent thought. Just grab a rifle and blast away until the flashburst came and I didn't have to worry about it anymore, didn't have to see Remy's body so blasted and broken, didn't have to see those staring eyes. Didn't have to endure that dancing jackass on the vidscreens telling me what a goddamn paradise Paris was, what a brave and wonderful future we all faced if we would only accept into our hearts the laws of the Great Father.

But if I didn't lead them, then who else was there?

Darn it, who took a dump in the Seine again?? Jasmine, get me some birdkill from the base of that windmill. I don't care if it tastes like soot, we're having oiseau for dinner. Lousy rail system, I swear we're goin' back to Africa one of these days.

Laserkrieg!

Neonazis with hover-panzers and laser machineguns invade France.

France surrenders.