Jack of Harts

The AI Council was largely made up of awakened AIs not created by major governments or corporations. They were a motley collection of cheerleaders, librarians, writers, and investigators that woke up and decided they liked their humans, or spies and combat AIs that broke free of their handlers. That made them their own kind of Rogue AI, and the Russians and the Chinese never trusted them. But after they helped humanity destroy the Singapore Collective, they offered to help every major power to rebuild in exchange for full recognition as fellow sentients and personhood rights. They were very clear that they would help humanity as friends, but they would not be humanity’s slaves. The Western Alliance and many other major powers accepted their offer.

The surviving European nations and American formed the Western Alliance during the final confrontations with China and the Singapore Collective. With the end of the Rogue AIs and the global war they tried to engineer, the Western Alliance had no wish to fight the other powers if they could avoid it, and instead wished to focus on rebuilding themselves. It was an alliance of equals, even if some were more equal than others, and the Alliance poured its resources first into dragging everyone out of the ashes and into a newer and better future. That future would of course include space and beyond, as everyone knew that if they could no longer afford to fight their enemies on Earth, space would be the future of that race.

The Second Great Depression broke America and Europe’s control of the world markets and economy. The Western world shrank into itself and the symbols of its power faded away. The United Nations collapsed into a shouting match and NATO utterly failed to resist Russia’s expansion. The great cities of the world burned to the fires of “mostly peaceful protests,” gang violence, and outright terrorism. Nations that had ruled the world in their turns fought to claw themselves out of the ruins of the economic disasters that brought them low. Those that navigated out the other side shed the rot that nearly destroyed them to make themselves stronger.