THE EPIDEMIC OF 2024.In the years before the epidemic, western civilisation had been coping with divided societies, and uncontrolled migrations of displaced people. A collapsing financial system was bankrupting countries and destroying economies. The fear of sliding into chaos was the trigger for politically unthinkable measures.Government institutions and big business took the joint decision to introduce Global Identification. It was a new national register to identify and protect citizens on their streets and professionals within their organizations. It became mandatory for civil servants and the executive class to accept a subdermal implant to access places of work. Further turmoil saw colleges, schools and hospitals adopting the new standard.

An adaptation of mobile phone technology, called a GLiD - the Global Identification account - linked the user and their implants to a permanent and watchful internet. Those who did not readily join were gradually seen as an underclass, increasingly excluded from many of the benefits of the new society.The epidemic, when it came, in the turbulent global atmosphere of 2024, was a flu-like fever that spread through the world's most crowded urban areas. Millions died as the demand for resources overwhelmed the supply. Urban centres failed to provide enough food, power and transport. The virus had already spread around the world through international air travel before the full impact of destabilised regimes led to an opportunity for military occupations.THE LIMITED NUCLEAR WAR OF 2025.Twelve months into the disastrous epidemic and the world population had begun to shrink dramatically.

As though there had been some design, through which no crisis might go to waste, unseen cabals within the deep state structures of the superpowers launched pre-emptive strikes across sovereign boundaries. Was it in fear for their own security, or cynical opportunism? History cannot accurately report and surviving state media could not know.In the wake of mass depopulation, countries became parts of new regions and survivors were contained within emergency camps. As the fog of war dispersed, a new day on earth revealed an endless landscape of unburied dead.SEVEN YEARS LATER.The western media are celebrating a world unified by the United Nations and answerable to an International Court of Justice. UN troops, alongside their mechanised 'Peacekeepers', are deployed to areas of the world where there is local resistance to the new world authority.Old fiat monetary systems are declared obsolete and a new Universal Basic Allowance has been introduced to cover the needs of the ordinary citizen.

Only governments and multinational business use a digital Credit Mark to account for the movement and trade of raw materials. The democratic functions of western parliaments are reduced to votes for regional members of a unity government. Prime Ministers are chosen by internal vote.Private property has been abolished, all goods and assets sequestered by governments to allocate as required. Televisions have been issued to citizens and giant screens broadcast twenty four hours a day in the city squares.New technologies, held secretly by the military, have reached the streets. Highly efficient electric battery technology replaces the internal combustion engine. Hard light holography and autonomous robots have begun to be integrated into daily life.

Multinational corporations have reached agreements with worldwide regional states to build 'campus' systems on the sites of depopulated cities where displaced survivors can be employed in a new feudal system.As the cities are dismantled and materials recycled, the use of metal is gradually being phased out and replaced with 3D printed items using a new material called cerastic. Like much in the new world, its biodegradable lifespan is designed to be utilitarian. and short.And then, there's the darknet.