Prologue: After the 21st Century

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The 21st century saw giant leaps in technology, from artificial intelligence to nano-technology. Humanity pushed the limits of space, physics, and engineering, revelling in their discoveries. While most researches aimed to contribute to society, others strived for self gain, and security purposes, thus secluding their data and results from the world. Although the private, and guarded research projects are most resourceful and heavily funded, society did not see much global crisis, nor serious disputes, apart from the occasional sparks of weaponry, a few sarcastic remarks, and a few shouts across polished tables and glinting cameras.

This peace, though turbulent, is incomparable to what will ensue.

Day by day, the self interests of the nations of the world grew. All of them, the island nations, the countries of plenty, and more of the civilised and wealthy authorities, in both culture and economy, all of them, within the drawn curtains and locked doors of the military and strategic establishments deep underground or high in the sky, they all began to suspect each other. Suspicious of technologies and forbidden possessions that each other might hold, jealous of the small advantages that they all possess, and fearing that they will be betrayed one day by their allies, and thus conducting measures to conceal their resources and capabilities even from those that are willing to stand by their side. The glares across the borders turned into malice, politicians screaming about territorial disputes turned into actual crossing of fires, and these skirmishes led to protests, prompting the governments of the world to respond accordingly, whether it is strengthening their defences, or increasing the espionage activities.

As resources grew scarcer and scarcer by each month, the world authorities, with their increased differences, suspicions, and gaps in comprehension of each other, began to clash. Starting from insignificant events such as the decline of previously powerful nations and the sudden rise of other countries that had produced effective results on their secret research laboratories, and the declarations of war that ensued on various fronts, and the world scrambling to make up for their individual allies and self interests amidst the gradually impending chaos of politics and shows of force. More and more people left their hometowns to venture into the battlefields, and most of them never saw their families again, claimed by the weapons that only became more lethal. Humanity, in a frenzy to quell such tremendous losses of lives, went to desperate measures.

And an era of pure horror and chaos ensued.

Nuclear bombs, terrorism, violent protests, and the massacre of the protesters and other bothersome personnel. Along with armed raids for resources, underground organisations, violent revolts in ever growing slums and declarations of independence that were resolved swiftly with unforgiving repression. The 22nd and 23rd centuries saw the utter destruction of the old world order, devastating nuclear winters, and the resources of nature and civilization being worn ever so thinner by the warring nations. Some places, their governmental integrity too weak, collapsed into dystopia, their streets lawless, and their rulers ruthless, their hapless citizens living in crumbling buildings that eventually collapsed of age and ill-management, these places went on to become ghost-cities, with the capable habitants venturing to more secure areas of the world, and the rest dying out eventually, with no exceptions. Other nations were slightly luckier, the authorities faced the gangsters with efficient force, and had some sort of peace between the underground organisations that roamed the world. War continued, in all its ferocity and intensity. The patriotic souls pledging their last breaths to their beliefs, and the scientists tinkering away frantically behind bulletproof, and missile prone establishments in the subterreanean. While research institutes, libraries, schools, and databases alike were ransacked, its remnants returned to nature.

By now, most of what the Earth could yield has been yielded, its metals harvested clean, the forests burnt, either from a desperate scrounge of resources or of space. Its lives extinct, and its oceans nearly consumed by trash. 

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