Biomechanoids (BMs) are machine/creature hybrids. There's small ones that function as mundane tools like toasters and TVs, small ones with more esoteric applications like emotional regulations, and large industrial ones. It's also technically possible to implant them into people as extra organs, but this is hard to achieve without triggering a massive immune reaction.
The game is set in California in 1993, in a city called San Eligio that exists just north of where San Francisco is in our timeline. (Replacing the Grizzly Island Wildlife Area, to be precise.)
The setting diverges during the colonization of the Americas, as Spanish conquest of the Aztecs failed partially, and the subsequent conquest of the Maya failed entirely. As a result, Mexico is a much bigger and stronger country, incorporating what would be the southernmost states of the US, but not incorporating southern Mexico. Mexican culture is not very christianized and much more Aztec in flavour, and this also influences southern US culture. The rest of central America is a single Maya state that's fiercely isolationist.
BMs came out of a short-lived Maya/Soviet Union collaboration in the 70s, when they were briefly allied in an attempt to contain US power. Mixing together Mayan traditional biotech with Russian experiments in dog heads, human/chimp hybrids, orgone energy, phage therapy, and whatnot. Very basic biomechs were co-developed and then the countries had an ideological falling-out and communication was heavily curtailed.
In the Soviet Union, there was then a well-funded research program in one of those science cities to develop things further. There were multiple research groups that also had different ideological tendencies. The group that ended up winning out, the Cyberneticists, saw BMs as simply a way to make better tools, and did not envision any societal or biological transformation. They were technocratic and willing to toe the line ideologically. Another group believed in a fringe reading of Marxist theory where labor and capital could be merged basically by making people into factories. Anyone sensible could tell that this would be a recipe for slavery, but they believed in it, and worked on large-scale biomechs and human/machine integration. Yet another group was basically transhumanist individualist anarchists who believed that by transforming the human body to be fully self-sufficient, class and the state could be abolished. Finally, there was a medical group who wanted to create artificial organs to prolong life.
Once BMs became practically useful, paranoia set in about western espionage and the suspect ideologies and loyalties of research groups. The original program was disbanded. The Cyberneticists survived the process best and were given a new program purely focused on iterative, practical improvements to BMs. The fringe Marxists and anarchists were forcibly retired and in some cases imprisoned. The medical group was absorbed by the military research establishment to make bioweapons, except for a small group that was meant to make personalized medical implants for the top party echelons.
The Soviet Union still collapsed pretty much on schedule. The increased productivity from BMs was captured by elites, and the introduction of BMs also caused massive social disruptions.
A lot of the semi-retired BM scientists were subsequently hoovered up by the US, which already had its own research programmes based on espionage, but was lagging behind massively. This created a Russian expat community on the west coast, especially as more Russians fled the instability and economic displacement in their country. The scientists were never really trusted and rapidly squeezed for all of their knowledge before being told to finally totally retire. They now reside in sprawling apartments in San Eligio old town brownstones. The apartments are filled with jars of preserved early BMs, volumes of old research, and religious icons. They are under heavy surveillance: by their old employers, by the US government, the Russian government, the competitors of their old employers, and the occasional Maya spy. The knowledge in their heads isn't quite obsolete yet, and it's always possible there's something in there they haven't told anyone.
Mayan BM research developed mostly by itself, focusing more heavily on implants. They know how to make BMs that don't get rejected when implanted into human bodies, while the west does not. Mexico also has a large BM industry with its own approach that is a mixture of the Mayan and Soviet approaches. Mexican and Russian BMs are still generally considered superior to American ones, but they're catching up. Mayan BMs are hard to get in the west, unless you have connections, and even then it's mostly basic outdated models. After a partial thaw in the 70s and 80s, the Mayan government has gone back to being very isolationist and totalitarian. BMs are also causing rapid changes and economic displacement for them, and they're reacting by clamping down and trying to institute some kind of bio-totalitarian horror regime. Everything and everyone is bugged and the bugs are biomechanoid.
Industrial BMs have caused massive economic and social displacement in the decade since they became widely available. Former Eastern Bloc states are undergoing massive transformations and internal unrest as a result, as their GDP is technically going through the roof but actual living conditions are getting worse. It's generally seen as a terrifying powder keg by the rest of the world. In the US, big business has also invested massively into BMs and so the same transformation is happening there, just half a decade to a decade delayed. The central US is emptying of people as work gets increasingly automated and land is given over to producing feedstock for BMs. People are being pushed into the coastal cities and coming into conflict with each other and with previous waves of Russian, Mexican and Mayan expats who fled the same kind of transformation in their own countries.
Europe and Asia are massively lagging behind this whole process and suffering economically as a result. Some countries are desperately trying to catch up, others are seeing the disruption caused by the technology and are trying to legislate. It's still coming for those countries, it's just delayed. And some African nations are considering going all in on BM technology to leapfrog their erstwhile colonizers.
This yields the following plots about local Russian expats (using all he pronouns here, can mix it up a bit):
- A Russian has meetings with Japanese businessmen and is killed over it. He didn't even have any important insights, but people had to make sure in case there was something there.
- A Russian has been spending the last decade looking for his lost research results on biocompatibility. It turns out that his friend had been hoarding it all this time, afraid it would be used for bioweapons.
- People keep breaking into the flat of a Russian in the mistaken belief that there's something to be got there, but it's a revenge plot or distraction maneuver by a rival.
- A Russian gets ahold of a Mayan piece of technology, gets all excited, now has a massive target on his back. Ends up going to the Maya willingly to get to continue his research.
- A Russian fakes his own death by fire by using BM techniques to make a fake corpse, so he can escape to Vietnam where there's still actual communism, which he believes in again.
- A Russian is in talks with an agent from an African nation who have a plan to basically give over large parts of the country's total land surface to a biomechanoid superorganism. They are opposed by an environmentalist. The agent makes an impassioned speech that westerners want Africa to be a "zoo", a pristine ecosystem cleansed of local people to assuage their guilt about destroying their own environment and to keep the local people down forever.
- A Russian is in contact with an old colleague still in Russia, who's part of the remains of the biological weapons research programme there. He says he wants to defect but not share his research, but it turns out he actually doesn't give a crap about this, and was just saying that so he'd get help.