WPCA - The Silent War

In the year 2025, the world governments collapsed. With the world economic repression having started late in 2008 and continuing onward, it forced many businesses and corporations to amalgamate into much larger entities to survive in the economic downturn and the following depression. And when, in 2025, the governments did finally collapse, a shifting of powers happened. No longer were there countries as people had once known them. No one swore allegiance to the flags of their fathers and birth countries, but to the corporate logos that soon became the new countries, the places of their loyalty. Massive identities that held massive quantities of land and resources. But with only large corporations left, mergers weren't to be.

The companies became power hungry, and launched several wars in an attempt to seize and hold more resources, more material. In 2085, in a research lab near Shanghai, the first Dark Matter bomb was detonated. The resulting explosion destroyed the entire coastline and surrounding area and all the research. It also bled a large amount of oxygen into space, a giant irradiated plume -- a gash in the skin of the planet.

It was also the beginning of a massive ecological shift, the death of the planet as man had known it.

With the detonation came droughts and strange disease -- the dying off of plants and animals and the catastrophic morphing of the worlds ecologies. No longer verdant green vegetation but massive wastelands and deserts. The planet was dying and at an astounding rate. The world company leaders met, deciding that by working together they could live, or at least postpone the inevitable. So, the Arkship Programme was begun, and a race to leave the planet before it became their tomb. And it was a race, a race to leave their tomb before the door was sealed shut behind them.

By 2109 the first Arkship, the AMI 01 as built by the Apple-Microsoft-Intel Conglomerate, was launched. This was the beginning of mans new era unhinged from his dependency of earth as his lifeblood, the oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere that had nurtured him for so long, bled out into space. By 2115, the earth had been abandoned, leaving more than 5 billion persons behind to die and suffocate on the barren rock mankind had once called home -- the wasteland of his birth.

As it happened, in 2144, the Arkship Bosch AMG Universal after traveling for 32 years at .8 C came across a star system. Surveys found the seven planets to be uninhabitable, with atmospheres containing toxic gases or barren wastelands. Beginning to run low on resources, the leaders of Bosch Universal decided to found their first asteroid colony in the systems belt in what would later be known as the Stuttgarian System. But this wasn't the abnormal. Asteroid settlement after asteroid settlement began to crop into existence, and by 2224, they were all aware of each other and the systems they existed in. There were some, however, that thought they could go on and find a habitable planet. None did, and these ever hopefuls were the first to die out.

But, it didn't take long for old tensions to come about again, and in 2245, the first intergalactic war was fought by the survivors of earth in what would be called the First Asteroid War. It was resolved 15 years later, but it wouldn't be the last...