Prologue: Ante Bellum
Peace and quiet has returned to the world. It had only taken 50 years after the third World War; the war that had brought ruin and devastation to most of the globe. It started as most wars do, with a vague semblance of a righteous reason like “the liberation of the poor, oppressed people”. But, as is far too common, the true reason had its origins in politics and a demand for power. The West, led primarily by the United States, needed resources such as oil and precious metal to fuel their expanding industries and to pay for the luxuries they had come to expect; however, the crucial supplies were held in countries that had started to drift away and favor some of their closer neighbors to the East. Ideological differences and general contempt were the main causes for this. The demand for materials went past the point of reasonable trade, and the best way to save money was to take it for themselves just like how the world was back in the days of empires and kings.
Thus the war started, and thus the war would last for another 11 years; both sides trying to claim the riches necessary for growing populations. Bloodshed and fire were the only things people knew for those 11 years. Strife and revenge occupied the minds of every person as they gave up more and more of their lives to fight a war they didn’t truly know the nature of. Bombings were used widespread to try to intimidate people out of the war, but instead just stirred up more gruesome fires. Bitterness would keep the fighting going well past the point of homes and lives being ruined. All of this just to make a few richer. New technologies and creative ways of death were developed every single day to cement their own tombs. Oil fields of the Middle East were bombed to nothing in an effort to stop the other powers from getting any advantage. It seemed better to ruin the riches than to let the enemy have it. Countries found themselves eradicated by the merciless swing of war. Egypt would descend into anarchy lasting long pass the war. Ukraine would have people scattering every which way in an effort to flee the dying nation. Countless governments would capitulate by the end of the war. Most of them were already in destabilized regions like the Middle East. Warzones, like India and Eastern Europe, had all their large cities reduced to ash and soot. Millions upon millions died from this pointless fighting to try to supply goods to those millions. Resentment would grow and lead to one of the few true great evils that haunts the world, Nationalism; a belief that was rooted in that ancient sin known as pride.
Nationalism and all of its alter egos, faithfulness, jingoism, fascism, and patriotism, is responsible for more hurt and pain than most devils. It dulls the mind of the people, so they can enact more evil and care even less about it. It allows a mother country to subjugate and control other people of the world for no other reason besides greed and powerlust. It it this feeling that can be blamed for the greatest of discrepancies of wealth around the world. This sense of superiority would persist past the war and would justify some of the graceful positions of the victors.
At the end of all of the death and suffering which the world had barely survived, the west managed to win. The West would once again see themselves as almighty geniuses meant to save the world. Only their own insolence could be to blame for their future conflicts. They secured resource rights and land grants from the East to bolster their economies. Humiliation was the only thing the East could hold onto. Unfortunately, it isn’t very helpful to hold all the resources, when they don’t have an economy to be fed into. The West had used everything in that bitter war and drove themselves massively in debt with no possible way to bail themselves out. The great gears that comprise a healthy economy and society had frozen. No central bank had enough authority or lenders to survive the amount of debt being poured into it. Total economic collapse was on the horizon since the individual countries had borrowed so much from the people with no way to give it back. The entire globe was put onto a track of economic failure. Governments were set to fail. That is until a man came along and offered a solution.
His name was Robert Hadring of Hadring Industries. At the time, Hadring was nothing more than a needle point on the global economic spectrum. His father started a small business of making some knickknacks or something. Through extreme ambition and political intrigue, Robert managed to make a name for himself. He gave a solution to the United States government and the entire West. He would take up all the debts that had been made, IF they would sign certain laws in his and other companies favor as well as exclusive resource and manufacturing rights. The governments couldn’t refuse at this point, even if the scheme seemed destined to fail. The company would become a central bank for the entire globe. Despite all realistic odds, it wouldn’t fail, in fact it would rise to unprecedented levels. At first the political influence started out small such as in the East Company Growth Deal, no more locations being reserved for natural parks, and these places could be mined to all hell by businesses in the Environment for the Economy Act. Then, they started to receive more benefits in the East Company Growth Deal like control over patents and resource claims that were just won. The United States had to continue to give up power to Hadring and other companies even to the point of giving the ability to buy seats in the senate and push laws through the president in the Insurance of Liberty Measure.
Hadring Industries very quickly became the most powerful entity on the planet. Using the large amount of resources granted to them they were able to expand their factories everywhere and sell everything to everyone. It is true that, they held no land, army, nor people to call their own, but they did have almost the entirety of the world’s resources and factories in every single country on every single continent in their grasp.
But Hadring would no longer be limited to being a superficial entity once it got its army. It was through the dangerous invention of the autonomous droids. A group of people in fancy labcoats played a dangerous game writing lines of code with an end so open that it seemed not even the gods would, or maybe could, put a stop to it. They allowed the armies to be controlled at a distance by engineers and were able to fight better than any regular human being. They served Hadring perfectly, as they were exceptional at dealing with the disorganized nationalizing efforts of the East and could easily be manufactured by factories in droves.
Their invention was timely greeted with the perfect test. The test would take the shape of a rebellion in the Orient. All sorts of people from far right wing to far left wing ideologies wanted to be free from the neo-imperialistic grasp of the global company. They exercised an amount of control unknown to anyone else in any other point in history. This fact just seemed to make people more upset. At every given moment, it seemed another person had resorted to drastic measures in an effort to stop this powerful entity. A grenade goes off there and a gunman attacks innocents caught in the crossfire. Deaths started to rise. Dissent was growing in every single home. People in the East started to curse the name of Hadring, and people in the West started to curse the extremists out East. But despite all of this, the current Hadring CEO, Charles Hadring, stated to the public, “Peace and quiet has returned to the world.” And the public bought it.
