"How long has it been raining? Forever. Not forever, no! For a hundred years. They say billions of people once lived on the Earth. When the temperatures rose, the great cities fell, and this rain came, this terrible toxic rain. Our ancestors saw it coming, the catastrophe. They built Ecoban, the first living city, genetically engineered to survive in a poisonous environment. Ecoban became our refuge, our salvation. Survivors came by the thousands, begging to be let in. But our ancestors turned them away, left them to die in the wasteland. The ones who survived became our workers, mining the carbonite fields to feed our Ecoban. Diggers we call them. The Diggers need us, we need them, everybody wins. But some win more than others." — from intro In the year 2142, the Earth has deteriorated into a murky hell due to an environmental disaster. An elite group of humans has built a fortified, "self-growing" city called Ecoban that converts the surrounding pollution into energy. Meanwhile, hordes of downtrodden survivors subsist outside the city in sprawling hovels under perpetually dark and cloudy skies. As the pollution levels slowly fall off, though, the threatened Ecoban leadership hatches the dastardly plan of wrecking the world beyond the city to secure more pollution for energy.