A god rises

Dex was getting impatient. The kids were already about two minutes late, and he wasn't short of other matters to attend to. There was always something out there that warranted attention - and the terrible thing about being able to travel through the world at light speed meant that one couldn't help but to want to help. Issues arose every day, be it in the Kenya sprawls, the Russian server farms, or deep space stations. Dex wondered how lucky he was to be paid to oversee this mess - more importantly, if the figure was truly worth it.

Dex gazed at the buildings outside, the water canals and slow moving rowboats. Venice was said to be amongst the most beautiful cities in the world, and one of the few that had actually benefited from this age. Indeed, Dex recalled the city was no longer sinking into the ground since the intervention of a certain Brightlight in 2057.

Same year some ork terrorist assassinated President Dunkelzahn, apparently to send some sort of message. Not that anyone who mattered took the hint - instead, they covered the whole story up. Most people didn't even know the killer's identity. The bloke had unwittingly accelerated megacorps' takeover of society, though. The authority of the state never recovered from the loss of that dragon bloke.

Nevertheless, Venice was a long shot from Chicago for instance, who was nuked in 2055 in an effort to cleanse the insect spirits who had overtaken the city, or from the whole of Libya, still largely uninhabitable as a consequence of the toxic fallouts of the 10 minutes war. Metahumanity was no closer to global peace now than it had ever been - the situation perhaps made more unstable by the fact that since the Awakening, nuclear weapons seemed weakened somewhat.

The Awakening was another historical event of paramount significance. Imagine a world suddenly opening up to magic, with a few individuals suddenly able to change flesh to stone on sight... Not to mention elves and dwarves, soon followed by orks, trolls and many others, turning up out of the blue.

Humanity became metahumanity as these folks demanded equal rights with humans. What happened next was predictable, of course, and not to metahumanity's advantage ; the goblinised orks and trolls became the default target of prejudice, while magic was elevated to choice instrument of advertisement, population control... or war.

None of this hampered the megacorporations from becoming quickly more powerful than any state. When Saeder-Krupp launched its first super-heavy nuclear aircraft carrier in 2062, a military tool that only two nations possess today, it sent a clear message to most states that from now on, the megacorps ran the show. From an economist's standpoint, that was a long time coming.

The only thing that was above a megacorp was the Corporate Court - in essence, the rest of them combined. They were the decision-makers of 2063, the ones who really called the shots. Megacorps had their own laws and extraterritoriality - meaning that corp law applied on corp turf. They had one sole motive - profit. Only they were ready to go to great lengths for it and were not exactly above directly fighting each other. Sometimes though, and for all their resources, corps found themselves facing a threat that was too great for any single of them. Something that was so menacing to everyone's bottom line that they came to an agreement to do something about it.

That was the Corporate Court's other purpose. Keep everyone safe from real baddies and at the same time, remain profitable.

As far as Dex was concerned, these dates did not matter. What did matter was the Crash of 2029 which officially sounded the death toll of the Internet and the introduction of the Matrix. Using new nexus technology all over the globe and high-output satellite relays, it soon became possible for anyone fitted with a cyber-deck and access to a cyber-terminal to connect oneself to the Matrix.

In essence, the Matrix wasn't so different from the Internet of old. People today called "nodes" what used to be called "sites", and "icons" anything from a user to an automated program. Society at large had largely digitised though, and if you counted out the few technophobic freaks who preferred the stone age to real life, most folk spent a considerable amount of time online, or at least along connected objects.