The World of @tlantis Blue

@tlantis Blue happens in a world that is vastly different from the the traditional Aberrant or Aeon Trinity settings, with an N-day that happens centuries after the Archimedes Impact devastated the Earth and the remains society restructured under the authority of the Aeon Society's descendants, the dogmatic Aeon Unity.

History

A Missed Singularity

The era following the Industrial Revolution saw the greatest and fastest changes to human society. Mechanization and automation created immense bounty for those nations fortunate enough to lead the world in technological advances, while the development of computers heralded the dawning of a new age for mankind. Computer assistance by simple programs that could perform tasks gave way to the idiot-savant expert system and eventually to the nearly-human true AI. Paved roads and horse couriers were replaced by increasingly effective methods of data exchange until informational networks across the world became ubiquitous and omnipresent. Medicine succeeded in replacing missing tissue with constructs of metal and plastics, before succeeding in total replacement and renewal of the aging and injured body.

Technology as human beings knew it had begun to become as much a part of themselves as it was a part of their environments. It was advancing at a rate that could not wholly be predicted as large quantum computers were built to ponder mysteries beyond the ken of their creators and perform inconceivably complex footwork for human scientists and engineers.

The singularity was approaching, but society had many other concerns. The oceans had begun a steady rise as greenhouse gasses began to accumulate in the atmosphere, drowning many of the ancient and financially-critical coastal cities of the world. New York and Hong Kong rebuilt successfully due to the mass amounts of capital that naturally flowed through them, but Venice was lost to the rising Mediterranean and the Dubai project collapsed under a series of overly-expensive terraforming projects to protect the city's trillion-dollar coastline.

Whether or not human beings would survive long enough to see the fruits of their labors fell into question. The era of the Missed Singularity and the end of the Anno Domini calendar were marked by two events. The first was a solar flare, which disrupted global communications networks and caused untold destruction to network infrastructure.

The second, from which the next four hundred years of history take their name, was the discovery of the supercomet Archimedes and its subsequent impact with the Moon.

The Archimedes Impact

When Archimedes struck the Moon, the Earth's sole satellite was struck with the force of an impact that would have neatly vaporized half of North America. Thousands of lives were lost as a floundering lunar colonization project was obliterated, and the orbital space around the Earth was rendered hazardous for anything more than the maintenance of global communications. More dangerously, the remains of Archimedes continued to shower on the Earth for decades, melting more than of twice the equivalent of the Antarctic's reserves into the oceans.

Wars erupted all over the planet as governments moved to seize whatever land was left (and the now-precious resources these represented). The loss of life following the mass deployment of near-singularity arsenals was entirely unprecedented, reducing humanity to a flickering flame in the wind. With much of the world despoiled by war and baking in radiation or drowned beneath the sea, a silent conspiracy that had lain dormant since the time of the Industrial Revolution moved to action.

The Aeon Society emerged on the global scene, a society of wealthy and powerful philanthropists who had acted behind the scenes at every era of conflict. A group of representatives presented their case to the tattered remains of the United Nations, and a plan to move the remains of humanity to protected and enclosed urban zones while the Earth was reseeded with new lifeforms that could survive the devastation and gradually restore it to livable status. The plan called for the usage of alien artifacts found within the ice of Archimedes and a new form of energy termed 'psi' that would make the logistical problems with the plan irrelevant.

The Unity Plan, as it was named, was quickly put to action. The remaining two billion or so human beings left were moved to sites selected for optimal survivability and were allowed to rebuild in peace. The world was allowed to recover, although irrevocably changed.

A century after the Archimedes had fallen, the oceans had risen to three hundred meters above the level of the sea at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Strange and dangerous fauna and flora swiftly spread across the devastated wastelands and barren seas of the world, restoring them to abundance at the cost of being too dangerous to settle. Still, reconstruction was in sight and not all was lost.

The Aeon Unity

As the Unity Plan went under way, the city-states organized by Aeon swiftly returned to being prosperous and modern urban locations, each a microcosm of the numerous states it preserved. These thirteen cities known as the Arcopoli were cradles of pre-Impact technology mingled with psionic innovations, luxurious and safe. Yet the security these granted were largely monopolized by the Aeon Society. People lived in their walls, protected by their soldiers in cities of their design. It wasn't long before the gross dependance on the Society would allow one particularly ambitious and influential agent to seize power for himself

Ambition was not something that Alexander Mercer, Proctor of the Aeon Cultural Preservation Committee, lacked. A high-level psi with strong precognitive aptitudes and the youngest of the Mercer Clan (at the time), his predictions were often right, and his ability to reconstruct lost information swiftly saw him rise in position as many of his ancestors did. Alexander was a man content to serve and pay his dues to humanity, or would have been- were it not for a vision he received on his twenty-eighth birthday.

A vision of a man from the distant past bathing the world in a death curse that would end humanity and paradoxically empower its saviors. But as the vision continued before him, he saw that those who remained true to humanity would inevitably lose due to disunity, crushed beneath the might of monsters who cleaved away from mankind. Horrified, Alexander consulted his peers and elders, finding that other precognitives experienced a similar vision, while the veracity of an apparently mass delusion was verified by those with telepathic aptitude.

Aeon went into chaos, and the Arcopoli followed suite shortly after. Whatever conflicts occurred did however happen behind the closed doors of the Society, resulting in Mercer seizing power. The Society rebranded itself the pseudo-religious Unity, and as if having reached some sort of consensus, began a campaign of repression and expansion of Aeon's grasp over the world. The transition was remarkably peaceful, as the Society had previously held a majority of martial power and expertise.

After the change of regime, Alexander quickly went to the task of expanding the existing associations into fully-realized orders that would recruit their own members and extend the Unity's reach to completely fill the Arcopoli. Potential psis were screened out and sent to special schools where they would serve the Unity's interests to swell the ranks in preparation for the catastrophe. Using precognitives and telepaths as tools of inquisition, simmering rebellions attacked before they endangered the new order. In response to this, many citizens of the arcopoli went into exile (or were exiled as a favorable alternative to death) and attempted to settle the reclaimed Earth.

Some of these succeeded in forming successful (albeit primitive) settlements in relatively tame regions of the reconstruction project, while others were forced to make use of ancient seagoing vessels and move between the remains of the old world, scavenging whatever they could to survive. For whatever reason, the Unity did not ever formally address the issue of outsiders from beyond the cities, leading them to become hereditary non-persons doomed to life beyond the safety of the last cities.

Politics

Arcopoli

Asturias

Asturias is the rebuilt seat of power for the government on the island of Iberia, formerly consisting of Spain, Portugal and Northern France. Due to mass immigration of coastal Europe, Asturia is one of the most densely populated Arcopoli, with over a