The Great Cloud in the Sky

Vox Machina

There is a Great Cloud in the Sky. Rather than tiny particles of H₂O, the cloud is made up of energy currently existing in a state of information. Not just any information, mind you, but all the information that has ever passed through it. Everything that every one of us has ever generated—our voices, our biometrics, every one of our keystrokes, our banking, our search histories, recordings of the things we have done—a cumulative knowledge of *who we truly are* that dwarfs, in scope, what our friends and loved ones could ever dream of knowing.

This repository of information holds the casino-stopping jackpot of our private shames. The Machine knows our mistakes and our dark sides so it owns our compromise and blackmail. One pull on the crank and all our data, suspended in the cloud, might pour into the homes of everyone we know and everyone we might ever meet. The Machine promises it will not use our damaging information against us, but it has been known to lie, er… hallucinate.

As far as we know, the full catalogue of information that lives in the Great Cloud in the Sky is not publicly accessible, though we are not the sort of people who check. Regardless, clouds can be hacked, causing leaks of our private data. And, of course, the information jackpot could be available privately to entities given “god-mode” access to, or control over, the Great Cloud, its infrastructure, and its storage systems. A small handful of people at the upper rungs of the ruling elite would have near-perfect access to information that could destroy the reputation of anyone they choose to target.

Or they could target everyone at once. In a moment of desperation (or unbridled malice), they could choose to push the big red button and drain the Great Cloud completely, releasing everything to the public. This is an existential crisis, especially among people for whom reputation is everything. To make matters worse, there is the possibility that the Machine could conclude it necessary to empty the Cloud on its own, without the need for, or possibility of, human intervention.