The one things that was odd was:
- 93% of the book: UCAS going to hell in a handbasket
- 4% UCAS neighbors taking advantage of that, but having their own struggles
- 3% The UK is doing great!
- 0% The rest of the world
It rather feels likes the UCAS will be fairly irrelevent to the world after this, and going forward the focus should be more on the rest of the world?
JKinda? I mean Seattle, Denver, and St. Louis are all independent cities now. UCAS is shrinking, so either that will continue or there will be some plot hook later on that brings them back.
Maybe playing devil's advocate more than joking? What I expect is that the SR universe will stay focused on what is currently the USA, with Pegasus adding items about the german speaking areas of Europe -- because they are going to put out material that they expect to most interest their player base.
But barring another plot swerve, what I think should happen is that the focus of megacorp research, development, production, and marketing would be shifting to more stable and prosperous areas than the UCAS. Not that there is any paradise in the SR timeline, but most of Europe and Asia seem relatively stable, the Indian sub-continent should be recovering, China seems to have stopped its wars (?), parts of Africa seem to be be being brought along well. And of course it would seem that the CAS, NAN nations, and lately even Atzlan are having a good run.
Why invest in an area that is if not quite still collapsing is at best heavily damaged with little prospect of much prosperity for a generation? Where is the profit? What is the cost of operating there? Sure there will be some business lines in agriculture and infrastructure where there will be on-going work, but the UCAS and state governments aren't going to be able to afford to invest heavily, so even there the money is not going to be huge, so those become secondary focuses, more of a corporate backwater.
So how much demand should there be for runners, in a backwater? I don't really expect the next supplement to be based in Bangalore or Nairobi or Moscow, I just think it would make sense.