ROOT is a half-hour, interactive science fiction/adventure series for Spatial Reality. To escape the intense climate crisis on Earth, people upload to a digital world, but when a system update causes a global outage, humanity’s only hope for survival is to restore power to the ROOT directory.

SYNOPSIS:

After witnessing millions of people die from climate related events, one woman working for a major tech company, Saejin Cronen, heads up a team of experts to come up with a digital solution. Around the turn of the century, in 2105, Saejin and her team invented a way to map our consciousness into a neural network called e+ernity. Soon, brain mapping to this digital afterlife became our best hope of survival. The religious rallied against it, but people quickly adopted digital immortality.

The digital humans became known as the Bootstrap generation. In computer language, the bootstrap loader is the first piece of code that runs when the machine starts and is what teaches a computer what it is. The term comes from “pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps”, an impossible thing to do, yet we as a species collectively managed to do it.

Their team grew quickly, and we began mapping everyone who consented, everyone who could come up with the hardware to house themselves. This became a worldwide effort. But in the process, there was a new gold rush of sorts. The most valuable resources on earth were the materials used to make computers. Different countries and different people fought each other for these resources. Many were killed in the process.

Now, it’s the year 2194. In winter, Detroit looks like a sunny Los Angeles and Los Angeles looks like hell. In order to build the massive server cities for the digital world, we ignored climate change. After all, you can't feel the heat once you're in a computer. This digital world was designed to last forever, but there's one small glitch - power.

The newly (and narrowly) elected President of e+ernity, Roger Barlowe, has a grand vision to restore e+ernity to those in power's dream - a place where the wealth trickles up into the hands of a small few.

President Barlowe immediately fires his Ethics Committee, seizes control, and hastily pushes through a system update in order to please his base of fanatical supporters.