Global warming had caused the ice caps to melt, sending the currents keeping Europe and the Eastern seaboard of North America viable for agriculture and easy habitation. The flooding and deforestation of the Amazon basin as well as millions of acres of rain forest in Southeast Asia caused a dangerous dip in oxygen levels coupled with a sharp rise in CO2 levels as the world’s oxygen engine began to shut down. Diseases once thought cured in the first world nations reached epidemic status as the tropics widened and the insect born plagues once again descended upon those populations no longer resistant to them.  Humankind stood on the brink of extinction, and only a simple shove could send us over the edge – and then that shove came.

In 2075, a 90 year old biophysicist and genetic researcher, Brian Downey, created the nanoplague.  Nanites, created for the purpose of saving mankind by allowing us to breathe the poisoned air remaining on Earth, were twisted and released on an unsuspecting population, wiping out 2/3 of the world’s species.  Billions lay dead and dying across Asia, and the Nanites began to spread.

• From the History of the End of Days, 2234, Author unknown

Listen, O my brothers and Sisters, as I tell you of the world and we in it. 

From the time humans began to move up from the depths of Africa until modern times, we have been polluting our world.  In the mid to late 19th century, this pollution exploded along with the industrial revolution.  In the 20th century, this expanded even more until a catastrophe was imminent.  In the 21st century, the first signs that things were beginning to unravel came in the form of storms, erratic weather patterns, melting glaciers and the massive shrinking of the polar icepacks; but that was just the beginning. 

Deserts spread across the African Continent, bringing famine and turning once arable farmland into desolate wastes. Wildfires ran out of control as drought parched large areas while others were inundated by floods as weather ran wild. Super-storms rampaged across much of the globe, fueled by the warming oceans, and plagues of insects and contagion were rampant on an unprepared world.

As things began to worsen, several different factions began to emerge within those worried about the imminent disaster:  Those who fled earth for hastily constructed colonies on the moon and at the Lagrange orbital points (known as the Colonies), those who thought to save the humans on earth (The Saviors), and those who thought we deserved the extinction we had caused (Known as the Natural Selectionists).  The scientists and engineers in the Saviors began looking for ways humankind could weather the storm while the Selectionists sought to stop them at every turn.  The Selectionists won, and the world was plunged into a new dark age with pockets of humanity surviving in isolated parts of the world or in sealed industrial arcologies.

Time passed as the world began to spiral down into the chaos of global warming.  The icepack spread as the warm ocean currents circling the globe retreated from the temperate zones south and mostof the world was, once again, covered in ice.  Many of the mightiest cities of man were buried in water, ice, and earth.  The technology we had come to rely on was destroyed, and we were nearly destroyed with it – but life does find a way.  Slowly, the world began to normalize, helped along by one of the very engines which brought about the destruction of much of the world – a plague of nanites perverted by the Selectionists to kill instead of save.

 “Shite, I see the city on the hill.  It does be gleemin’ in the sunlight mornin’, that be shore.  And all us’n whoresons and daughters be scrabblin’ afteh da light tha’ be shinin’ out frae the ting”.

Johnny W, resident of the 3com Freehold

While many of the rich and powerful were able to find their way off of the planet, others chose to isolate and remain here.  Several huge arcologies were built, each one a self sustaining super-city capable of housing over 450,000 people.  The corporate sponsors and governments who built these amazing structures brought in a small percentage of that number to ensure the growth of the population did not exceed the capacity.  Some used lottery, some were purely capitalistic, some brought only their own employees.  The rest were left to their own devices.

Around these cities sprang up enclaves of the condemned and dispossessed, scrabbling out an existence in the shadows of the super-structures. Living on the refuse from the cities themselves, these communities formed a second tier of society.   Against all odds, they managed to scratch out a meager existence through the main part of the troubles.  Today, these enclaves, known by many as freeholds, exist as shadows of the arcologies themselves. Sprawling out from the gleaming domes, they form honeycombs of sealed and unsealed environments maintained by a hodgepodge of local governors and strong-arm gangs.