World of the wasteland

Tsunamis swallowed the coasts in a single afternoon. New fault lines woke volcanoes that had been quiet for millennia; the continent's spine started smoking and never fully stopped.

Harvests failed, rivers changed their minds, and whole regions settled into desert, ice or floodplain. The weather has been picking fights ever since.

Workshops. Water pumps. People stubborn enough to fix both. The old federal government never came back — the cities did, one grid and one clean well at a time.

Everything before the 1980s survives in a handful of books and magnetic tapes. The details went first, then the dates. What is left is turning into myth, and nobody can tell which parts.

The last good decade, remembered as a paradise. Everyone under twenty knows it only from their elders’ stories, and anything physical that survived from it — a radio, a jacket, a cassette — is worth trading a week of work for.

Nuclear winter, resource wars, and the slow collapse of everything that held people together. Most of what was lost in that stretch was knowledge. Nobody talks about it.

The cities formalised the UCA and started building again — modelled, as far as anyone can manage, on the Neon Eden they never saw. The Phoenixes rose fast in that climate, with Hawke at the front.

Every city rules itself. Cooperation happens through mutual-aid pacts, corridor agreements and ad hoc councils — voluntary, and only when it makes sense.

Intercity projects run on contracts, brokers and reputation. A clean track record carries more weight than any court ever did.

Cities keep their own militias. Disputes end in arbitration or embargoes, not wars. Corridor security and disaster response get contracted out — often to crews like ours.

Microgrids, microfactories, decentralised water, local food. Everything modular, everything repairable — because the weather stopped being polite decades ago.