Set twenty years in an alternate future, Neural Net takes place predominantly inside the city of NeoTokyo. Far more of a “cultural soup” than its predecessor, NeoTokyo is home to all nationalities and types, with only limited remnants of its Japanese roots and culture.
Geographically, NeoTokyo itself is the absorbed collection of the former coastal regions stretching from Shizuoka to Ibaraki, displaced land mass from meteor barrages greatly changing the shape of the entire country.
The meteor barrages were the least of the Earth’s worries, much larger debris bombarded the planet when a massive, untracked comet struck Saturn. The combined ejecta and resulting disruptions to Saturn’s gravitational field caused the majority of its ring fields to take a collision course with Earth.
The destruction wreaked havoc on our planet for years, and rendered most governments helpless; their collective solution was to enlist the major corporations of the world, constructing first an orbital grid of planetary defenses that could destroy incoming projectiles, followed by an electromagnetic “net” encompassing the entire planet that could be activated in targeted zones to repel the larger chunks of debris that made it past the defenses.
Limited meteorites still make regular impact around the globe, but for the most part the planet was “safe”… barring the existing destruction that had already occurred. No country escaped the wrath of the impacts unscathed, landmasses shifted, ocean levels were at an extreme low after much of it either evaporated during smaller impacts or was launched well outside the grasp of our planet’s gravity to freeze in space, creating a thin ice ring surrounding the planet.
Despite the safety, the governments were now at the whims of the corporations. The contributions of the corporations to the rescue of the planet bankrupted every major government, giving the corporations absolute reign over decisions that were previously left to a court or governing body. Most countries retained their governments, a hollow shell for the common citizen to cast blame upon when jobs dried up or required extreme working circumstances to make ends meet.