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By DigitalSymbiote

The world changed when the towers fell.

Two massive monuments dedicated to the progress and prosperity of humanity. Dedicated to Capitalism.

Brought down in a single day, a blink really.

The devastation was broadcast across every network, every channel, every corner of the Net.

It was inescapable. Torn steel and burning bodies presented through screens on every street corner. People huddling in fear of an event that had been previously incomprehensible.

A trauma seared into a collective consciousness.

That's when mech production really kicked off. Prototypes were dragged out of labs to assist in the search and rescue efforts in the ruins.

Some manufacturers ran with that, creating frames to assist with the rebuilding.

Others did not.

Most manufacturers fed into the paranoia, building new machines of war, and weaponized defense systems. Frames built to retaliate against those who had done this.

And they succeeded. And the credits flowed. And so they kept doing it.

More machines of war, more defense systems, more paranoia.

Workers and pilots were lost by the thousands, trampled beneath the ever growing need to 'protect our way of life'.

When so many of us are hardly living.

Things haven't gotten better. The same manufacturers still exploit their workers for profit, the same corporations still raise themselves atop our broken backs. Leaders made puppets of the corporate machine.

But there might be hope.

Hope in a tear gas cannister, thrown back at the riot response frames. Hope in a repurposed frame, standing alone against a line. Hope in Mechs rebuilt to serve the many, instead of the few.

There is hope, but we have to make it.