Earth, but not as you know it... [Original Sci-Fi/Medieval Tale, Updated: 07/10/12]
Prologue
It is the year 16027, and no-one now lives on the wretched sphere, which was known in past millennia as Earth, that still remembers or can recall exactly what happened to bring the Human species to the brink of extinction. A brink from which it very nearly did not recover, only leaps made in previous centuries using cloning technology stopping mankind from becoming nothing but another footnote in the timeless history of the universe. A lesson perhaps should be learnt from this; for when a person, a people, or an entire planet become too great and rise to the heavens then there is only one way left...and that is right back down again.
Many suggestions and theories were made, from one nation firing off a weapon of nuclear proportions, to a natural disaster caused by the people of Earth themselves, and even an attack on the earth by what at the time were known as 'extra-terrestrials' or 'aliens'. None can be entirely certain, and there is little hope that any evidence will ever be found to support these claims. A larger shame there may never be, for life from Earth had colonised every planet in their own solar system by the year 5872, producing technology and spacecraft which could only have been imagined by men and women of earlier times.
All that is known is that one-by-one the colonies lost contact with one-another, each planet slowly becoming isolated from its neighbour until something happened on Earth itself. Life went backwards then, reverting to an almost prehistoric era, and Mankind, adaptive as ever, began to once more grind the wheels forward. Technology becoming more advanced, varied societies forming on the face of the planet, different peoples reaching out to others and using fragments of existing languages to develop their own, and all was overcast by the ever-present cloud of religion which snuffed at the sciences as a pursuit and dwelling fit only for fools.
This tale concerns not just one man, but the race of men, of Mankind, of their feelings and their dreams, and their thoughts and their beliefs, so come now and dive into the cool waters of a planet named Earth, but not as you know it.
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If someone from the year 2012 were to look at the planet Earth, in the year 16027, from the void of space around the planet, then they would see little geographically different to the world of their own time. What was once Britain still sits off the coast of a former Europe, Italy is still a boot-shaped peninsula, Japan still stays immobile in the middle of a sea which covers most of the globe, along with New Zealand and Australia and everything about the position of landmasses would seem entirely the same.
Unfortunately for that person, almost everything else would be different in one way or another, the flora and fauna would have changed, as would the political and religious situations and even the peoples of the planet.
Many different entities will have risen and fallen during the fourteen-thousand and fifteen years between the two times, such as the union of the Far Eastern nations which was defeated by a resurgent Eastern Bloc, which was in turn annihilated when the nations of Europe and the combined Iberian Confederation of Portugal and Spain were absorbed to form a Russo-European wall against Asia. Clearly this would not last, and it did not, nations rising and nations falling and one dominant force becoming tomorrows squiggle in the annals of world history.
Almost constant warfare caused the population of the planet to first be halved, and then bought down to a quarter of the size, science and technology advancing at a rapid rate however, and able to produce both weapons and medical cures in equal measure. Then, one fateful day in the year 11587, 'first contact' was made with a species from another star-system. Why they came, who or what they were, orbiting the youngest of Earth's colony on Pluto, nobody still knows, but it is known that they came with the fire and the sword and that the distress signals from Pluto were ignored until it was too late. War on a system-wide scale now erupted, extra-terrestrial life swarming over the colonies as if they were nothing, but it was against a unified Earth that they found themselves driven off and defeated. Much was learnt from them, technology and maps of galaxies which man did not know existed, such prizes and riches breaking down the bond of love which comes when facing a common enemy and the rivers of the great blue sphere once more running red with blood.
The records and history cease entirely after this, four-thousand four-hundred-and-forty years of utter silence from both Terra Mater and her children out in space. Who is to say what happened? How the salvaged alien technology was used? What the state of the Human race became on the differing planets after such trials? Nobody knows, but will they ever know?
Earth as she appears in 16027 AD, or 4440 SFC (Since First Contact), has gone backwards, far, far backwards, the nations splitting into societies defined by their environments and exactly what remained after these four millennia or so to remind them of who they once were.
South America, for example, is devoid of most of its trees and jungles, its people having taken to dwelling in holes dug some feet beneath the earth. North America is still one of the richest places on the planet, the people there having developed into a sort of society reminiscent of a previous period in their history known as the 'Wild West', guns available in ample numbers and shanty towns having sprung up inside and outside of the ruins of once towering cities which reached to the sky. The once united nation of Great Britain was warped into a feudal state, petty warlords vying for overall power, over a hundred fiefdoms and domains spanning the landscape from north to south. Ireland, the neighbour of Britain, was little more than a grass covered plain, the wreckage and ruins of former glories overgrown and wandering clans.
There are other lands, other peoples, but they shall all be met in time. For now, a child is born on a blustering night in a hovel which once was a home, a child that would become extra-ordinary in their own right, a child who has so very far to go.
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Originally Posted by Tigellinus
