The year is 2199 and life on Earth is a hopeless struggle between economic chaos and social decay. Incorporated city states dominate the political landscape and natural resources are virtually exhausted. Civilization has barely survived a seventy-five year dark age known simply as “The Blight”. For more than three decades an engineered virus ravaged the world’s agricultural crops while social panic reigned and billions died of starvation. The resulting chaos has only recently been stabilized, due primarily to the heroic efforts of the Global Ecology Office. This organization was created by the United Nations in reaction to “The Blight”, and is all that still remains of most of Earth’s original world governments. Powerful and benign, yet challenged on every front, the G.E.O. struggles to protect human rights and ecological integrity in the face of Incorporate inhumanity and social desperation. The G.E.O. remains the last best hope throughout the solar system, and the newly resettled colonies beyond.
In 2065, long before the outbreak of “The Blight”, astronomers discovered an anomalous body beyond the orbit of Pluto. During the following decades a series of probes revealed the anomaly to be a rift in space, an example of the hypothetical, astronomical construct known as a wormhole. Further exploration eventually demonstrated that this phenomena was in fact a usable passage to another region of space. Humanity looked to the stars with collective awe when it was discovered that an Earth-like planet waited beyond the worm hole. A planet covered by blue oceans and teeming with life. A pristine world, unexplored and unravaged. A water world that would eventually become known as Poseidon.
As part of a long term plan to ease the heavy burden on the Earth’s vanishing resources, the U.N. member nations began an intensive colony effort, seeding Poseidon with genetically altered, human colonists. The Athena Project did much to aid the Earth’s failing economies and social morale. Unfortunately, ‘The Blight’ struck soon after the colony ships were launched, but before the planned resupply ships could be built. Desperate for resources to fight ‘The Blight’, and therefore unable to do anything else, the U.N. was forced to abandon the project and the colonists. This was the first in a long series of harsh decisions the U.N. would be forced to make in the years that followed.
In spite of the failure of the resupply effort, and the lack of contact with Earth, the colonists on Poseidon actually survived. As their technology wore out and failed, they learned to rely on pioneer ingenuity and their genetically engineered bodies. Spreading across the planet’s surface in small villages and family groups, the colonists adopted a life much like the ancient Polynesians, settling the planet’s countless island archipelagos.
One of the many discoveries made by the colonists was that they were not the only sentient life forms on Poseidon. Frustratingly alien in their actions and motivation, these aborigines became a source of fear and mystery for the colonists. Encounters often ended in bloodshed, and superstition grew as evidence of strange empathic abilities was discovered. The true origin and motivations of these beings lies in the ancient history of the planet and is a mystery as dark as the planet’s deepest waters.
As the G.E.O. slowly salvaged the future of the human race, it again looked to the stars. In 2164 a small science vessel was built and sent through the worm hole in hopes of initiating a second colonial effort. No one had anticipated the survival of the original colonists, and those on Earth were stunned to discover the colony had not only survived, but had grown from the five thousand original colonists to over eighty thousand souls.
The recontact mission was met with mixed reactions from the original settlers; many were excited and relieved, many were bitter and retreated into uninhabited regions, but the majority were calmly indifferent. Poseidon had become their world, and they had become its natives. Contact was welcome, but essentially unimportant. They had made their peace with the planet and had no intention of giving up the lives they had built.
Traffic between Earth and Poseidon was minimal at first, and consisted mainly of scientific missions and Incorporate research and development teams. At first they had little impact on the natives or the planet, but as Poseidon began to give up its secrets, that quickly changed. The nature of the worm hole and it connection to Poseidon became the source of endless debate. The intelligence of the aborigines became a compelling mystery though all efforts at contact or capture ultimately failed. The planet’s biological diversity and ecological intricacy defied understanding. The genetic code of the native life was found to be inexplicably based on DNA, explaining why the colonists had been able to initially survive, and subsequently thrive. And, in the planet’s exposed crust, Incorporate geologists found a substance that would eventually motivate a colonial frenzy that not only threatened to change the colonists new way of life, but threatened to plunge humanity into a war of survival with an ancient alien legacy.
Longevity Matrix Ore, or Long John, was first discovered during an Incorporate mineral survey. Though initially a closely guarded secret, word soon leaked about the fantastic potential of the substance. This mineral could be processed to provide biochemical tools of such awesome power that nothing in the realm of genetics remained beyond the control of gene engineers. Nothing. Humanity had discovered the key to immortality!
On Earth, a world still foul with the smell of the dead, humanity exploded into a colonial gold rush the likes of which history has never known. Incorporate greed and human desperation sent millions rushing to Poseidon to stake their claims and to feed a market driven by humanity’s primal fear of death.
So, in 2199, Poseidon is a planet of company boom towns and corporate mining facilities, native settlements and orbiting factories. Life is hard, fast, and amphibious. Frontier law prevails as G.E.O. Marshals try to protect native rights and enforce Incorporate regulations. The aborigines remain a mystery, yet are blamed for increasingly frequent acts of sabotage and carnage. Sea floor installations are guarded by squadrons of fighter subs, and corporate takeovers often involve marine assault teams. The natives have grown to hate the Incorporate and fear for their new world as environmental extremists incite ecological warfare in defense of the planet. Always new colonists flood in, hoping for a better life, as ruthless opportunists scavenge what they can. And, lost in the background, scientists preach caution, claiming there is something wrong, something strange going on below the water’s surface . . .