The Meta

The Meta are a Nomad pack and member of the Seven Nations featured in Cyberpunk 2020.

Cyberpunk 2020
The Meta is the youngest and strangest of the Seven Nations: youngest as they were formed during the Long Walk, only nine years ago; and strangest because they are a Corporation. Originally, those of the Meta Family were mostly ex-military and support services people in South America. Jonathan Meta was an Army Officer with years of service and an armload of decorations. The war was all but lost, yet the Government refused to stop. Most who fought in the SouthAm were not able to remember Viet Narn-but Jonathan Meta remembered.

Jonathan Meta was born in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1960. He had a relatively happy childhood until 1969, when the full weight of the anti-war movement came to his home town. In 1970, his uncle (also named Jonathan) died in Vet Nam. The funeral was a sorrowful thing, while outside, demonstrators waved banners calling Jon's uncle a baby-killer and worse. Jon was unable to understand how the protesters could hate his uncle and his family when they did not even know them. Above all, he could not understand how the people could be so cruel when his uncle had received the Congressional Medal Of Honor. He had been honorable and loyal and had saved dozens of people, yet the demonstrators threw tomatoes and rocks at the casket.

From that day, Jon vowed that he, too, would be a soldier. Being the nephew of a Medal of Honor winner opened a lot of doors, and at age fifteen he entered West Point The stigma of the Vet Nam War had not worn off, and it was not a good time to be in the Army, but Jonathan Meta persevered. He graduated well up in his class.Jon's career becomes sketchy around 1984, and what is known is part true and part conjecture. Jonathan Meta's military records, like so much else, were completely destroyed in the Collapse. Even the hard copies were lost in his case, and this has allowed him a great deal of latitude in later life. After serving as a platoon commander in an armored division and earning a masters' degree in Electrical Engineering at Texas AM, he disappeared into the bowels of the newly formed RDF (soon to be called Central Command) where his activities are completely unknown. He was seen in various surprising places, and even filmed at some public appearances carrying the "football" for the President. (This key position involves transporting the access codes and transmitter for launching America's nuclear missiles.) At the beginning of the first Central American conflicts, he disappeared again, this time apparently into the jungles of South America with the newly formed Eleventh Special Forces. He is also rumored to have been a member of the Rangers, Delta Force, the PITMAN Project, the Medellin Drug Cartel, Disney Corporation, and the Dallas Cowboys- most of which is probably untrue.

In 2008, when the civilians "redesigned the Federal Government, Jonathan Meta did not exist He was not aware of it until the Second SouthAm War ended in 2011. There was much to be done -equipment had to be moved, reassigned, given away- and then there were the people. There were a lot of Americans in the area, and many would not go home with the troops. Jonathan Meta, the one the military still had records of, had died in Vet Nam, so, like almost two million others, Jon was simply denied transportation to the United States. Under normal circumstances, he could have gotten it all straightened out in the end, he being a general and all. Unfortunately, he was the commanding officer of a unit that did not officially exist, in a Special Forces Group that did not officially exist, in a war that did not officially exist.

Some time in late 2011, an angry Meta left the American Command at San Jose, Costa Rica, and with the aid of several hundred men hijacked three C-5B Galaxy aircraft to the Port of Panama. There they met up with several thousand more Americans who had been cast adrift, and, with bluster and clever planning, grabbed anything that could float, including the remains of a carrier battlegroup and three offshore drilling plat- forms off the Panamanian Coast Later that year, they declared independence as a sovereign nation, and boasted the threat of nuclear weapons to make refusal to recognize them inadvisable. Now, these moves were not as spontaneous as they seem. All of the original board of directors for MetaCorp were angry men who had again fought in a war, only to be shunned by their fellow citizens. The conduct of their fellow officers who had been running America under martial law also sickened them. They refused to be a part of this society unless accepted on equal terms -separate from their corrupt brothers and sisters. However, declaring independence was not on the original gameplan. All they really wanted was a way home (which the ships finally provided) and to be left alone, but by then, the military wanted them all dead, so there was no way back. Counting on the billions in hardware they took with them, they instead founded MetaCorp as a security and mariime construction firm.

By the end of 2013, MetaCorp was involved in construction of Atlantis Phase II and New Galveston. They used the prof- its from their other jobs, including their growing security division, to construct MetaKey. The Key was completed early in 2020, and opened to the public with great success. MetaKey is a mobile island-city, freely owned by MetaCorp, and has no national laws to deal with. Everything except murder and slavery is legal, almost every major corporation has an office there, and security is fairly enforced. It is Hong Kong, Rio, and Zurich all in one, sitting in the Gulf of Mexico.

One of the things that made MetaKey possible was Meta's development of the JackSuit Whether the original research was done under US Army funding or not, MetaCorp built the first working ACPA unit in the world, then sold the patents (with a ninety-nine year leaseback for corporate use) to Militech in 207. One of the reasons that there is so little police trouble on MetaKey is that the police are only allowed minimal cyberware. All of MetaKey's law enforcement is taken care of by lightly-augmented officers (who must pass rigorous psychological screenings) or by ACPA Tactical Units, working in triplets.

All this would lead many to see the Meta as anything but a nation, had it not been for The Troubles: Between 2012 and 2015 there were considerable stresses within the nomad community: an increase in competition and a resulting decrease of available work, the transition to a civilian government who wanted taxes from nomads, and the integration of survivors from the Long Walk The Meta supported those who made the Long Walk from the beginning. They air-dropped supplies and water when they could-after all, they had just been in the same bind-and they provided air cover against the bandit attacks which the Government said "never occurred." The Meta have actively sought to subcontract employment to other clans, including hiring outside help for MetaKey. In the seven years since their independence, the Meta have funneled over three billion dollars into the nomad economy, and this has forced others to accept them as a nation.