GLOBAL OPERATOR: ZERO SUM

The world didn't end. It just defaulted.

In the 90s, every broke government had the same idea: lease a chunk of land, erase the taxes, erase the laws, and let a corporation build a future.

They called them Special Economic Zones. 200 to 1,500 square kilometers each. A port in the Baltics. A lithium pit in the high desert. A cobalt mine in Kivu. A refinery town that was supposed to be the new Dubai.

For a while it worked. Cranes went up. Workers moved in. Concrete was poured.

Then 2008 hit. Then sanctions hit. Then the minerals weren't worth the security bill.

The corporations didn't close the zones. They just... left. Stopped paying the lease. Pulled the executives, cut the power, and left the gates open.

The host nations couldn't afford to take them back. Too much debt, too many guns inside, too much scrap that someone else already claimed.

So they did the cheapest thing: built a fence, posted a sign, and declared them Economic Exclusion Zones — cut off from national law, ownership frozen, liability zeroed.

On paper, nobody owns them.

On the ground, everybody does.

The Zeroes

Contractors call them Zeroes. Because inside, the math sums to zero. No owner, no law, no rescue. If you pull a crate out, it's yours. If you die inside, it was never yours to begin with.

Three kinds of people still live in there:

Scrappers — the old workers who never left. Stripping copper, burning plastic for heat, trading wiring for antibiotics.

Bandits — the crews who realized a fence keeps cops out better than it keeps people in.

Guards — corporate Perimeter Security whose contract auto-renewed after the corporation died. Still holding the high-value POIs because no one told them to stand down.

And now, you.

You

You are a Global Operator. Your handlers don't care about flags, only manifests.

Another team failed to exfil. Another crate is sitting in a guard office, a warehouse, a lab. The client still wants it.

Your job is simple: cross the fence, get the package, hit Gate 7, and keep what you carry.

If you make it out, you keep the kit.

If you don't, someone else will strip it off your body.

For every crate you exfil, someone else lost their kit trying.

The world has 27 confirmed EEZs.

Kreslia Port is just the first contract.