September 11, 2004 (idea)

In 2014 a bilogical megaweapon targetting people with specific genetic heritage has wiped out 98% of the population of Asia, leaving only those who could afford the expensive gene therapy required to cure the disease. The virus had been created by the ultraterrorist SECTOR 18, using technology stolen from American biotech and defense conglomerates during a series of increasingly daring and highly publicised raids.

In their last days the fractured Chinese administration, tortured by the disease that was attacking their nervous systems causing increasingly unbearable pain, retaliated against those they thought responsible using a weapon nobody had beleived existed - a QUANTUM DISASSOCIATION bomb that reduced the Middle East to a plate of glass over a mile thick.

The bomb, China's doomsday device, left most of the Earth's surface uninhabitable.

Left to their devices the Earth's corporate citizens sought safety in size. The top 1000 corporates consolidated in a series of swift and sometimes bloody mergers. Bewildered world governments looked on as they ceased to matter when compared to the top 5 newly created economies. Each UNION, as they called themselves, invested heavily in military hardware and defense technologies, seeking to set a new standard in 'peacetime security'.

As the rest of the Earth turned black during the resulting RESOURCE WARS, the Unions turned their hungry eyes toward developing countries. Finally, they sought to capitalise on hitherto untouched African resources. It was then that a group of African government officials came together to stand ground against the Unions:

A brilliant University professor in Kenya created a device that would transform economics and life forever: a quanternary CEREBERAL CO-PROCESSOR allowing read-only access to a small portion of the human brain. Overnight, life became THOUGHT INTERACTIVE as people were fitted with the expensive devices. The Unions were forced to outfit their citizens at tremendous cost, with all profit going the newly formed and wholly African controlled MBUKI CYBERWARE.

Entrapping the Unions in their own legal web that had made it illegal to reverse engineer new technologies, coupled with a merciless employment policy and anti tampering technologies that required someone to risk killing themselves trying to modify the proprietary firmware, Mbuki Cyberware became the dominant economy within months. Within two years they had controlling stakes in two of the Unions.

PHILIP MBUKI, creator of the 'Quasar' cereberal interface device, continued to innovate with the limitless resources he now had at his disposal. He intended to take his technology one step further by developing a way to simulate the chemical and electrical behavior of the human nervous system. In order to test his theories, Mbuki claimed he had to leave Earth and travel out of the solar system to an area between Sol and Proxima Centauri, where he claimed the electromagnetic interference would be low enough for him to 'dub' his neural patterns onto a superscaled version of his quanternary processor.

He announced the construction of a space yacht that would carry him and the supercomputer 'container' he codenamed XEN to the proposed test site. During the test he would remain in total radio silence and left a digitally signed will that would be executed by artificial intelligence in the event of his faliure to contact Earth within a period of one year after the test date.

It is 364 days since that date passed. Tomorrow, Philip Mbuki will be pronounced dead and his will read by his digital executive. Will the Unions move to seize control of Mbuki Cyberware by declaring his will illegal? Or will the shadowy BLACK CHAMBER, who previously controlled mankind's destiny but had been driven into hiding during the Resource Wars, make their presence known?