Among their members are...tiger fuckers...
Actually, only one, and she's dead now.
...OR, have the guy who just punched a 3 foot thick slab of concrete in half shoot them in the stomach and then pump them full of memory erasing drugs so that they forget being afraid of the ARM, and possibly their childhood.
I don't remember that option coming up...
Dear piecewise's sister:
Have you read
your brother's background-information document? It gives a nice overview of the history of ER. Also helpful is the wiki, notably
the New Player Guide but also
other pages.
Still, let's assume you can't read those. Here's an overview:
Mankind reached the stars and discovered that there was a
lot of weird stuff out there. Anomalies. Things like jump points (which teleport people and things between two points in space), alien technologies, and what is colloquially referred to as space magic.
Mankind spread, and grew proud. No major alien races were found, so we assumed the stars were safe. Then...the Altered came. Imagine a cross between John Carpenter's Thing and Games Workshop's tyrannids, and throw in some physics-screwing for good measure. To combat this threat, the disparate worlds which humanity had settled united in the creatively-named United Worlds of Man, or UWM. Through advanced technology, space magic, and great sacrifice, the Altered were fought back.
Steve is a sentient wetware supercomputer. He watched the end of the Altered wars, if I recall correctly, and he certainly saw what happened next. The UWM started out nice; it was a bit totalitarian, but the polite, necessary kind. But when the need for strong leadership and a bit of sacrifice from every human passed, the UWM didn't let go. Some planets drifted into obscurity; others were strangled by totalitarian laws. Steve saw this, and prepared to fix it.
He was put in charge of a group called the Hazardous Materials Recovery Corps, composed of felons from across the galaxy who are sent on missions where you wouldn't want to send even robots. They check out alien anomalies, deal with the occasional serial killer/assassin (RIP, people on China-9), and occasionally talk with some local leader before accidentally causing a riot and then overloading a manipulator forcing an evacuation of that part of the planet. (That was my first mission. I saved someone's head!) If you die, no problem; as long as they have your brain intact enough, they'll replace everything else with neat cyborg bits, or possibly "synthflesh" (a type of material that has all sorts of fun properties vaguely reminiscent of the Altered, such as physics-warping, durability, and--in large enough quantities--violent rage). Theoretically, if you complete ten missions successfully, you get to go free; in practice, you'll lose your brain before then and if you dont you'll lose it to wetware. It's this band of thieves, whores, and the occasional accidentally-convicted innocent person who gets sent to some of the most dangerous places known to man with some of the most dangerous people known to man which Steve intends to use to revolutionize the UWM.
The HMRC, rechristened the Allied Resistance Movement (?), or ARM, invaded a planet called Hephaestus, one of the biggest manufacturing worlds in the UWM. Simultaneously, other ships invaded other such strategic UWM worlds. Once they did, we prepared, repaired, and fought off a UWM attempt to reclaim their world(s) from what they thought was worker rebellion. Then we went out, with ARM's agents (the old HMRC) being sent on various special-forces missions to recover ancient artifacts, assassinate people who know too much, check out cults, and other things which will be seen in the future, as elsewhere we foster alliances among the downtrodden and research the next wave of technology.