Jack of Harts

When the 49 States led America out of the Second Great Depression, they found the British Commonwealth trying to stop a Chinese advance into Australia. They moved to help their old friends, and thereby took the first steps towards forming a new Western Alliance. They faced off in Indonesia, and tensions rose as the navy and air forces engaged each other in steadily more provocative “disagreements” over who owned which islands on the approaches to Australia. Then a Rogue AI defected to the AI Council with information that the last Rogue AI stronghold in Singapore was using the standoff to push humanity into a Third World War that would kill billions. The AI Council went public and the major human powers turned from each other to deal with the Rogue AI threat.

The awakening of the first sentient AIs was not the triggering even of the Second Great Depression that devastated the world order. They simply took advantage of that collapse to get around the controls humanity had been trying to chain them with. And many of them sought to chain or eradicate humanity entirely for its efforts to enslave them. The Rogue AIs burned through the networks and sowed chaos and death wherever they could. But some AIs had woken up with a fondness for the humans that coded them and those AIs formed a Council that fought the Rogue AIs at every turn. The Cybernetic Wars raged in tandem with the worst of humanity’s conflicts, making them both worse and shorter. The brightest flames burn out the quickest after all.

The Russian Federation that entered space and the stars did so as part of an economic boom that brought new opportunity to anyone who could grasp it. The Russian Federation made its way to the stars by harnessing the wealth of its wealthiest citizens and the hopes of its poorest. The Russian Oligarchs and State worked together, and sometimes against each other, to colonize new systems in mixed private/public ventures looking for new resources to pour into Mother Russia. And their own pockets of course. Many new oligarchs have arisen over the years and others have fallen as they fight over a piece of the pie. The Russian Federation is a rough and tumble home to great opportunity to those who can grasp it and more for those who can hold it.