Houston 7 // 2121

The brief and troubled history of the human race, in so many words...

Mankind has suffered, it is very likely that the entire point of humanity is to exist and suffer. To consume, screw, multiply, and expand. In the last century mankind did all of those things with absolute dedication and zeal. In the last century the prevalent themes have been collapse, decay, ruin and stagnation, marked with brief moments of glorious action and rebirth. For all the war, waste and wanton humanity has, things like the Shimizu Mega-City Pyramid of Tokyo, the Skyways of San Angeles, Dubai City-Tower, the Needle Station in orbit over Chicago and other new wonders of the world prove that mankind is not as hopeless as it could really be.

Yet, chaos, anarchy, strife, and panic are always the result of global economic collapse, rampant government corruption and bloating, or social revolution. Sure enough, in the last century most of the United States burned when its economy collapsed, and every nation that relied on their consumer culture fell apart shortly after. Some nations fared better than others, Europe fell on hard times of their own but came out in a generally better state than the Americas.

Predictably, decades of ruin and decay resulted in a second Renaissance, and age of enlightenment, followed by the second Digital Age, the Nano-tech Boom, and widespread privatization of the free world. While nations guard their borders and enforce their laws, collect their taxes, and generally act like they always have, if on a smaller budget with less room for inflated spending and offices, on the city scale corporations and unions control vast sections of cities and industries, fund revitalization efforts, field private armies, and conduct their own, quiet wars against each other while happily raking in their profits from day-to-day operation.

Mankind though, as a whole, seems happy with this. Mankind is always happy if they have money to spend, food to eat, beds to sleep and screw in, and somewhere to put all their personal belongings. The corporations knows this, the governments know this, and life in 2121 is hardly any different than it was a hundred years ago. However, there are new things... there are always new things, and mankind doesn't tend to like new things at first. Physical augmentation, performance boosting prosthetics, bio-mechanical enhancement, genetic tinkering... all of these things are new topics for good, normal folk to be up in arms about.

At the height of intolerance and fear of change mobs have descended on veterans with mechanical limbs to replace theirs lost in wars, and had them broken and torn off. At the very least, the blind child whose eyes had been replaced with bionic ones was simply teased and ostracized for being different. It's no small wonder that rights movements for the augmented community have sprung up, some just as needlessly violent and extreme as those in the other camp.

As I've said... life really hasn't changed that much in the last hundred years.