Jack of Harts

The Western Alliance returned to the Moon, Mars, and beyond in time, and then to the stars when humanity found hyperspace. They colonized numerous major joint Alliance systems in the decades that followed, and member states, corporations, and smaller groups colonized other worlds on their own. The Alliance and her various peoples scattered all over the cosmos in search of new opportunities and fortunes. New colonies appeared on a yearly, monthly, and then weekly basis, sprouting up like weeds wherever they could find a likely spot. The message went out to citizens of the Alliance to “Go Out Young Ones” and make it big on the new worlds, and millions answered the call of the Great Space Race.

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.