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; huge portions of Heaven fell down onto the Earth, causing terrible fires. The same fires are still burning across Asia and Europe in Ferren’s time.
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 Humen displaced ordinary human beings.
Ordinary human beings, now called Residuals, survive in isolated tribes, ignorant, fearful and despairing. But they still have their dreams of a glorious past and continue to worship their ‘Ancestors’.
This is the world Ferren has been born into – only he doesn’t yet know it …
Timeline of the Millenary War
1961 USSR sends first human into space
1969 US lands first human on the moon
2028 The Venables-Hirsch experiment
2031 Inauguration of Project Olympus
2033 The Trespass upon Heaven
The Devastation at Mount Horeb
Battle of the Plenoma
2034 Start of the Age of the Undead
2038 The Depopulation of New York
2075 Fallen Angels allowed back into Heaven
2079 Withdrawal of the Supreme Trinity
2086 Formation of the United Earth Movement
2088 The First United Earth Congress
2089–94 The False Truce
2094 The Great Collapse
2094–2112 Period of the Long Famine
2223 First appearance of Plasmatics
2228 First appearance of Hypers
2262–91 Construction of the Endless Wall
2305 The Declaration of Material Being
2436–40 The Weather Wars
2440–2543 The Hundred Years’ Blizzard
2742 Humen colonies set up in the Burning Continents
2743–54 The Siege of Sicily
2755 Extinction of the colonies
2904 Foundation of the South American Empire
2912 First appearance of force-fields and boost-beams
2927–45 The Wars of Doctor Mengis and Doctor Genelle
2943–45 The Campaign of the Five Zones
3003–3022 Rise of the Bankstown Doctors