By the end of the Third Millenium, progress on Earth has gone backwards due to a thousand-year war between Heaven and Earth.
The war began in the early 21st Century, when medical scientists invented a technology to bring the dead back to life. The result was the greatest news sensation ever: revivified human corpses reported that they’d really been to Heaven and really seen the eternal Gardens, Halls and Cities, the Blessed Souls, Great Patriarchs and angels.
The major nations immediately began competing to explore the new realm. Another new scientific technology created psychonauts, who could travel to Heaven in transmuted form. However, their destructive activities led to the Devastation of Mount Horeb, the Battle of the Plenoma and the start of endless conflict between Heaven and Earth.
First came the period known as the Rising of the Undead, when recently arrived souls were driven out of Heaven, back to their buried bodies. This was a terrible period of marauding murdering corpses, which emptied cities and devastated every nation on the Earth.
Then came a period of phony peace and negotiations, during which scientists secretly drew the spiritual realm into Earthly space and time. When the golden battlements and green hills of Heaven appeared in the sky, humans in their thousands went up to tour the sights. The result was the Great Collapse, when huge portions of Heaven fell down onto the Earth.
The Great Collapse changed everything. In Heaven, the Supreme Trinity retreated in shock and disgust behind impenetrable clouds, leaving a War Council of the highest archangels to continue the war. On the side of the Earth, artificial types of being called the Humen displaced ordinary human beings.
In Ferren’s time, Europe and Asia have become the Burning Continents. Fires have raged there ever since the masses of Heavenly ether that fell to Earth in the Great Collapse released their terrible energy. Later, the Weather Wars buried half of North America under a cap of ice, while the more recent Wars of Doctor Mengis and Doctor Genelle broke South America into separate fractured blocks.
One area still relatively intact is Australia. Passing centuries have reduced towns and cities to rubble, and the Humen have modified the landscape in extraordinary ways – with overbridges, incandescent hills, deep echoing wells and cliffs clamped in metal bands. But the full destructive impact of terra-celestial warfare hasn’t yet touched this continent.
The descendants of the original human beings, called Residuals, survive in isolated tribes, ignorant, fearful and despairing. Yet they still preserve vague myths of a glorious past. In Ferren’s tribe, they worship the original human beings as their ‘Ancestors’ and speak of the period of human civilisation as ‘the Good Times’.

Ferren’s tribe, ‘the People’, live not far from the great Humen military-industrial complex of the Bankstown Camp. But he knows nothing of that or of the world at large. His life is limited to the small area of ruins where the People have made their home. Sometimes, illegally, he creeps out and explores the surrounding grassland …
Australia and the Bankstown Camp are the centre for the next major Humen offensive. They’re building up their forces of Hyper soldiers and Plasmatic-powered machinery. When Doctor Saniette marches in from Western Australia, he brings more secret weapons, such as Queen-Hypers and cipher dogs. The ultimate Humen goal is to launch an actual invasion of Heaven and conquer the seven Altitudes once and for all.

But no one notices a new spirit of resistance building among the Residuals. And Ferren is at the heart of it …
