WORLDVIEW:

The year is 2060, and the world is dying. Technology promised a golden age, but instead has ushered in chaos.

Technological advances allowed humanity to reach for and capture a foothold in the stars. Though the promise of space was always tremendous natural resources capable of being exploited for the good of the Earth, there was always the danger, just as with the colonization of the Americas, that many people would rather leave the old order behind and strike out into the new frontier to build their own new nations.

Earth is worth abandoning. Its fragile ecosystem has been used up and crushed under the weight of ten billion people. Its nation-states are decaying as debt and economic collapse fray the social fabric while resurgent tribalism sparks hundreds of tiny wars, each impossible to end. No one questions the flood of would-be colonists eager to board any vessel that can get them off-planet, not when one considers what the colonists are leaving behind.

But there are the stirrings on the Earth; people are trying to rebuild their fragmented and decaying world. These are people who have run out of faith, out of hope, and out of options. They have to fight to reclaim the Earth from what it has become. They have to fight for the Dream. For these few desperate visionaries, surrender and death ceased to be options years ago.

This is the time of Jericho, and the walls are caving in.

CHRONOLOGY:

The world has been sliding on a downward spiral into chaos for many decades.

The Iron Years: In 1996, the Second American depression began with the American debt default. Trillions of dollars worth of debt were defaulted upon by individuals, businesses, and even governments. The final blow which drove the economy into depression was the attempted financing of Federal debt obligations through the printing of new money. Within moments of the Presidential order being signed, foreign investors began selling off their debt and equity holdings, forcing a run on the markets rivalling the one in 1929. America, for all intents and purposes, was broke.

Following the 1996 elections, the new President tried desperately to keep the industries working to no avail, but the American debt default had sent shockwaves through the international economy. Japanese banks collapsed like cards as Pacific Rim nations defaulted, forcing Japan to grind to a halt. German and French economies, overwhelmed by Eastern European refugees also staggered and fell. Britain kept going, oblivious to the economic calamity, but it had been in a depression since the end of WWII. The Canadian, Argentinian, Mexican, and Italian economies simply collapsed.

Tribalism: In Russia, Zhirinovskiy staged a coup that deposed Yeltsin and swept away the reformers. A reign of terror began as the Russian and international media are shut down. Rumors of purges to rival Stalin were heard, and by the turn of the millennium, a revitalized Russian army swept into the Baltics and part of Poland, almost triggering WWIII. Only French and German intervention prevented Russian expansionism from drawing all of Europe into a devasting conflict. The brief war for Polish soil gave Eastern Europe and the Franco-German coalition a small economic boost.

In the Middle East, a newly revitalized Iraqi army struck deep into Saudi Arabia, while the Iranians tried to expand northwards into Armenia and Azerbaijan. Syria and Turkey came to blows over water in the Euphrates River. By 2005, the Middle East was a cauldron of little wars. Even Egypt and Israel, two former longtime partners in peace engaged in border skirmishes and brinksmanship as Islamic Mujihaddeen struck across the border.

Other wars included:

and so forth across almost every continent in the World.

In America during this period, the debt default had been accompanied by a renewed isolationism that kept America tightly focussed on itself. High tariff barriers put in place to keep foreign competition out only created an intense smuggling enterprise.

For those who could afford it, the "Fifth Migration"--the abandonment of the cities--gave the rich a way to protect their lifestyle. By moving to exclusive and private resource communities, the wealthy professionals were used telecommuting technology to build their own utopias. These resort communities were strongly protected by PSO forces to ensure that "undesireables" were kept out.

The abandoned cities and suburbs became nightmares. No one who could avoid the cities wanted to live there. In the suburbs, two-thirds of homes were vacant. These homes, often vandalized, served as shelter for squatters and vagrants. Municipal governments, among the first of the debt defaulters, were unable to fund infrastructure upgrading and public services. Parks turned into garbage dumps because garbage collection was only funded for once a month. Public police services, where not contracted out to PSOs, was limited to wealthy neighborhoods and important downtown facilities.

Following the nationwide Blood/Crip war of 2024, the municipal police gave up all hope of trying to protect their communities, and settled for protecting themselves. It was into this environment that the NatGuard forces were summoned to try to maintain some order. In bloody fighting, the NatGuard took back the cities from the Bloods and the Crips, often block by block. For two years, American cities were truly war zones.

Even the Police and NatGuard were unable to prevent the waves of Islamic Terrorism which washed across American cities as Islamic fundamentalists, supporting one side or the other in the various Middle Eastern wars, struck at America. These terrorists inspired others, from Drug lords to environmentalists, to take up the terrorist methodology.

By 2030, the world was a collection of brushfire wars, and was still strongly in the grip of the deepest depression in modern history. The American economy was beginning to show signs of life, however, until a corporation called Heisson Aeronautics would dash those hopes.

INTO SPACE:

In 2033, Heisson Aeronautics made a public offering that was essentially unnoticed except for a few secretive investors. Heisson, a high-technology company which had been heavily involved in Space development and testing, was working on a private space project that they kept under the tightest of security. Whispers echoed through the aerospace industry about a project code named: Regalia.

When finally revealed in 2035, "Regalia" was a new form of physics, and a working prototype Gravitic Effects Drive (GED), which used gravitational forces for starcraft acceleration. Many companies, expecting a boom in space, invested heavily in the new technology, and Heisson Aeronautics stock skyrocketed in value.

These starfaring corporations were rewarded for their risks. The mining potentials of Luna and the Asteroids alone were worth enough to repay the investments in GED several times over. The economy began to improve across the world.

The net revenues from space travel gave the spacefaring corporations a tremendous financial resource, and made them much more self-sufficient. A stream of mergers and acquisitions followed as each spacefaring corporation began acquiring and amalgamating subcontractors until most corporations were able to supply themselves from their own divisions. The corporations owned their own communities, sold their employees goods from company stores, and taught their children in private company academies. StarReach, Kansas, was the first of these planned corporate communities, and it was completely isolated from the rest of the world. Only employees of Startech could enter StarReach.

Ten years later, Heisson Aeronautics unveiled yet another Regalia technology--the Heisson Drive. By using the same physics as the Regalia project, Heisson Aeronautics had developed an interstellar stardrive that opened new solar systems to exploitation by the spacefaring corporations.

Within a few years, New Eden, the first corporate colony world was discovered. It was a hot dirtball, with subterranean water and a noxious atmosphere, but it was capable of supporting human life and had the potential to be terraformed into something better. The owning corporation's stocks shot upwards, and new investment and licensing offers poured in.

Seven other colony worlds were located, as well as dozens of other "resource" worlds that were developed for mining. As each new colonizable planet was located, the owning corporation was able to reap the profits.

Many people saw the colonization of space as the salvation of humanity. The human race would continue, but not on the polluted decaying Earth. It was so much easier to colonize a new world than to try to repair the homeworld.

THE TIME OF JERICHO

The preceding chronology provides much of the megapolitical background and trends up to the time of Jericho and shows the world in a fragile state. The people of Earth are divided now along tribal lines, economic lines, and poliitical lines, and this is accompanied by a sense of abandonment by the human elite. There is also the sense of desperation in everyone. People are afraid to live on Earth, and are afraid of being left behind.

There is war coming, and people are choosing sides...

Tribalism: One of the driving forces behind current events is the resurgence of tribalism that manifested itself in the "Iron Years" following the debt defaults. During that time, people sought comfort within groups, using the commonality of the group to combat the personal impacts of the economic and political chaos of the era. The development of street gangs in the 1940s and 1950s was a similar pattern, but on a microscopic scale.

One of the most prominent "tribes" were Islamic fundamentalists, who banded together out of religion and used their group to wage war against their enemies. Street gangs also formed prominent tribes, often based on race or economics.

Ultimately, the tribal concept has taken over the western world. People identify themselves by their group. The good of the group is more important than the good of the member, and anyone not a member of your group is a potential enemy.

The divisions between tribes and groups were so significant that many new languages developed. Called "Ghettospeak" by the political analysts, these languages presented significant barriers to education and integration, not only because of the actual linguistic barrier, but also because many of the languages did not contain common concepts. For example, Ghettospeak dialects are grounded in the present, with no concept of future tense, which makes the understanding of key scientific ideas almost impossible.

Years of racial and economic stagnation have pulled the people into several distinct socio economic clans. People identify themselves according to these groups, claiming the security and sense of existence offered by the group. To many, not belonging to a group is the equal of being dead.

A century after King, and the nation is more divided than ever.

Economics: With the development of space travel, the gap between rich and poor widened into a gaping chasm. For the elite, the promise of space was a new golden age of prosperity and order for humanity. For the poor, space was a death sentence.

Following the Fifth migration, the rich and poor were physically separated, with the rich living in secluded resort towns and leaving the cities and suburbs to the poor. Those who have been abandoned to the cities face much the same problems as their parents did years before, in the time before the Blood/Crip wars.

Cities remain the centres for planetary manufacturing, with the manufacturing workers living in the suburbs and in apartment complexes near the industrial facilities. The manufacturing facilities are aging and are unable to compete with the unique capabilities of zero-gravity processes. As a result, Earthbound corporations are forced to restrict their production to inexpensive, lower-technology goods for sale to the poor and middle-class. While the technology in these goods is highly advanced by twentieth-century standards, it is nothing compared with the technology available to the elites.

Many homes and buildings are half a century old or older, reflecting the shift in the construction industry to serving the resort communities. Any new buildings are typically of poor or prefab workmanship, designed to accomodate local workers.

The city economy remains vibrant, despite all the foregoing. People remain consumers, and street merchants ply their wares in city squares and corners. Shopping malls are little more than collections of these street merchants in a warehouse-type enclosure protected by cyclone fence and metal detectors at the gates. PSO operatives watch over the entire affair, protecting their contracts.

But there remains the dark side. Many suburban communities are ghost towns filled with abandoned buildings owned by bankrupt mortgage companies. Street gangs rule the nights, selling designer drugs and homebrew weapons to their victims. Bitter wars are fought over turf by these young tribes. Squatters hide in the abandoned homes, and maintain a precarious existence at the bottom of the food chain, as their children become the next generation of gangsters.

For these people, the only road to prosperity also leads to a quick death. OG's don't live past 25.

Politics: Space travel has also created massive divisions in politics as the corporations seek to free themselves of governments. National governments, however, see their power slipping away, and are trying hard to maintain some of their power, but the citizenry, alienated and disempowered, could care less about this grand scale of politics.

America stopped any pretense of being a democracy following the Blood/Crip war, when NatGuard troops fought to recapture the cities from the criminal gangs. At that time, civil liberties were suspended, and the government took the opportunity to round up dissidents and malcontents and place them into MaxSec Detents, along with surviving gang members,

National politics are still based on the Democratic/Republican dichotomy, with the parties switching Presidents every two terms. The current President is Democrat Michael Prestanki, who was elected on a platform of developing a national technology base for all citizens. He was elected by 7% of the eligible voters.

The media are still relatively free, but the underground media often give the best stories, though loaded with political bias. Corp media care only about entertainment, not the truth, leading to Information Programming, rather than news. There are rumors that the undergrounders get their funding from Corps or governments, depending on their political bent.

The military has assumed a more significant role in national politics, simply because of their new law-enforcement role following the repeal of the Posse Comitatus Act in 2032. The military now perform border-watch duties and patrols of Urban Security Zones (peacekeeping), as well as smuggling interdiction and a number of other duties. It is not uncommon to see Army vehicles on city streets. But even so, the military is finding recruitment tough, since they lose many of their troops to corporate Striker teams (Corporate Security), which offer better benefits and less risk. Other troops turn to mercenary careers, either for crime or foreign governments.

On the opposite end of political power are the dissidents, which range from Corporations, to tribal leaders, seeking to advance their own causes. There are also the apathetic majority, fighting only to survive at a modest standard of living.

At the very bottom of the political food chain are the disenfranchised--the poor, the homeless, and the dissidents. They are shunned, but their numbers are growing.