General History prior to 2048 AD

Economic and political instabilities that had begun in the late 20th Century were carried over into the early 21st. Food and energy shortages caused a vast divide between the wealthy few and the destitute masses all over the earth. This disparity in the standard of living for the average human caused the proletariat and remnant bourgeoisie to revolt against the aristocratic international corporate-banking class and their armies. This rebellion flared to a breaking point in the early 2020s causing the demise of the old United Nations and subsequently ignited a global conflagration that quickly became known as the Third World War.

The Third World War was concluded in the mid 2020s with a Pyrrhic victory for the rebels. The oil fields of the Middle East had been decimated during the war causing a world wide oil shortage and an ensuing power crisis that forced the development of nuclear, hydrogen, and other alternative power sources. Manufacturing, and industry slowed to a crawl during the late 2020s even though scientific advancements continued, though mostly in the field of cybernetics and energy production. The spike in cybernetic technology was due to the fact that the world's population was wounded to a horrible degree during the war. Millions of people had some sort of intensive war injury that ranged from lost limbs to radiation poisoning. The solution was clearly in prosthetic replacements for lost, contaminated, or maimed body parts. During this period technology excelled, particularly in cybernetics, and brought forth a new computer-interface based society where many humans were "plugged" into the first Digital Cosmos. This Digital Cosmos was in turn tied to a foundational physical network of mainframe super-computers known as the Cybernet. However, this development set the stage for a fourth global conflict.

Many third and second world countries were "analog" and unable to afford or develop prosthetic replacements on their own. This need for medical technologies to help their populations, coupled with the greed of many governments who controlled the technology, led to the outbreak of what came to be known as the Fourth World War. This war was fought both in the real world and through the Digital Cosmos in a marriage of conventional and cyber warfare. The Fourth World War saw the introduction of mobile arthropod tanks, exosuits, full conversion cyborgs, and semi-variable aircraft as well as the introduction of advanced space propulsion systems such as Ion engines (low yield). The whole of the world came to the brink of total annihilation with threats of global nuclear war. A second United Nations was formed by the major industrial countries who did not wish to loose their vast monopolies in a nuclear flash. Thus an uneasy world peace was established in 2033 AD under the famed Treaty of Paris which forced all international grievances to be settled by the global body. Under the watchful eye of the new UN cybernetics spread to nearly every major continent and country in the world. Only third world countries were without access to the Digital Cosmos, though medical cybernetics were very common everywhere. The widespread cyberization of the human population seemed like a collective man-made miracle at first, but this new cyber-culture brought with it an unintended consequence.

The worldwide use of man-machine interface systems was common all over the planet during the 2040s, but no where else on earth was it used for human interacting as a collective consciousness in the way it was used in Asia. The core region where this collective hive-mind garnered millions of permanently plugged-in members was comprised of Hong-Kong, Taiwan, and Okinawa. Surprisingly, the leaders of the hive-mind were academics rather than religious figures. Cyberneticist, Huang Sho Han of Hong Kong, was the mastermind who brainwashed masses of people plugged into his cybernet system. This system was permanently logged into his brain in order to allow him to update the data being transmitted to his cult-like minions. Huang Sho Han's power culminated in 2046 AD with his followers reaching nearly three quarters of a billion people. He declared all of Asia to be a border-less society known as the Cyber-State in March of 2046 AD. The UN immediately condemned his declaration and the Asian-Pacific conflict ensured. This conflict concluded in late 2047 with the death of Huang Sho Han by UN "analog" special forces teams. The rise of the Cyber-State society caused a total ban on the complete cyberization of humans and the end of the second Digital Cosmos. The Asian-Pacific conflict was directly responsible for the worldwide call for global government by the "analog" countries of the world that led to the rise of the UN as the world's government.