After the Moon became colonized, and Humanity began to explore the inner planets and create habitable stations both in space and on Mars, Earth underwent massive changes.  Large corporations began to build cities around their factories, ensuring a constant workforce and consumer base.  The economic superpowers (especially the United States, England, Germany, and Japan) grew at an astonishing rate, which threatened a state of depression in the rest of the world.  Smaller countries, and developing nations could not compete in the new globalized markets.  Across the globe, citizens began to riot for food and shelter, demanding that their governments take action against the economic neo-imperialism.

Many of those nations mobilized their militaries, allying with each other to deal with the war of attrition with arms.  It is said that the rebellion would have been successful, had the nations of the Middle East been able to negotiate a truce with Israel, or if China had submitted command of her troops to the Russian command.  But, there were many factors that kept the uprising from success.  Ultimately, the United States, with assistance from corporate militias and police forces, put down the rebellion.

But the aid came at a price.

The corporations understood the power that they now held.  They used their new influence to establish a one-world government body and economy, which placed ultimate power in the hands of the United States (which became the United Nation of Industry).  It wasn't long before the cities that the corporations had established transformed into States in their own right.  Across the world, nation-states were replaced by these Corp-States.  But in their greed and search for more wealth and power, the Corp-States quickly depleted the planets already strained resources.  The planet responded with earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions, and violent storms.  Ravenous infestations of rodents and insects decimated the populations where food was produced, and most of the crops and livestock.  They brought with them terrible plagues which wiped out cities within days.  Without access to food, many of UNICorps citizens starved.  The people tried to stage a new rebellion against the new world order.  It never ended, even after much of the planet was turned into a wasteland.

After decades of strife and turmoil, the government survived through the off-world colonies and the Corp-States that remained.  Known as UNI-Corp, it continues to supply goods and services to its citizen-workers (though the citizens are little more than well-treated slaves).  The rebellion has survived among the outcasts and the few survivors who have made their home in the wastelands.  It is rumored that a part of the former state of Humanity has survived, beneath the earth, and secluded from the events of the Overworld.

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