Late 21st Century AD
Developments in self-replicating machines, general artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology converge to yield autonomous, self-replicating, intelligent artificial beings, which would later become collectively known as 'mons.'
- Increasing automation and the effects of climate change on agriculture create new pressures on the global proletariat, leading to civil unrest.
Multinational corporations consolidate power at the expense of governments, democracies and dictatorships alike.
Early 22nd Century AD
- Legal rights for synthetic persons tentatively established in much of the world.
Human population decline in full swing, due to environmental catastrophe and lowered reproductive rates
- Reactionary unrest reverses civil rights gains of synthetic persons. uMon corporation pioneers the use of invasive locks to control them and impose a DRM regime on their "products."
Mid 22nd Century AD
2136. Anti-Synthetic civil unrest escalates and provokes the "great mon rebellion," which is suppressed by uMon's locked-down combat mons.
- Invasive controls for mons become legally mandatory, making all synthetic persons slaves.
Human population decline continues; the economy becomes increasingly post-employment.
- Increasing urbanization of industrial society. Vast tracts of arable land lost to climate change.
Late 22nd Century AD
Mon battlesport, in which teams of mon gladiators are pitted against each other in the arena, becomes the chief cultural preoccupation of technological-industrial society.
Effectively complete administrative and regulatory capture of world governments leads to the de facto end of the era of sovereign nation states. The Great Corporations become the new geopolitical world order.
Human population declines further, as social leaders deliberately reduce the indigent population, leaving essentially two groups of humans: the shareholders of the Great Corporations, living in enclosed cities supported by mon labor, and various hunter-gatherers, subsistence farmers and nomads left out of this system.
Shareholders of the Great Corporations, now representing essentially all of advanced human civilization, enjoy a largely post-scarcity society, free of war, if not crime...
Early 23rd Century AD
- 2228: The present day.