Lore Bible

## The Death of Life

I found the truth in an old basement, out in the heat, covered in sludge and debris. It used to belong to an old farmhouse, no longer there. Whoever once occupied it has long since perished, and I can only hope that they died quickly, and weren't t left to linger. Either way, though, their bodies are gone, picked clean by the Autowar. Or the Necronauts. Or by the Artibio Lifeforms. And so all they left behind was the basement. In the basement were forty days’ rations of canned goods, and an old computing device, from before the BioTech revolution.

On this device, and the servers attached to it, was a history. Not the corpoment propaganda they feed us, nor a biased ideological narrative, but just history. Articles, facts, statistics. Cited, drawn from the internet, and stored on this ancient machine – which must be one of the last of its kind. It requires no bio juz to function, only the power from an old generator turns on with a switch.

I have studied the information on the machine carefully and found that it held hundreds of documents from over the years, collected and organized by event. It paints a dire picture, of a world that rises high before falling low, time and time again. Of lessons never learned and tragedies repeated forever. It shows how close we were to something better than this, better than dead. The world was not always how it is now, here at the End of Life. It had a thousand chances, and failed a thousand times, and this is what we ended up with. The proof is undeniable, the past tragic. We are what comes after the Earth’s Last Gasp.

I, Prophet of the Deadlands, bring you this information, now, so that you can also know the truth. So that you can know what we lost, and how. In this document, I will summarize the recent history that led to the Death of Life, so that you may understand. Behind every sentence in this is hundreds of documents and stories, sifted through by me so that I could extract the essence of the truth. The real tragedy lies in those details, those which I must omit to paint a bigger picture for you. This document here is not the complete horror of the world, it is just the skeleton of one. Constructed from the knowledge from that ancient machine, I delay no longer:

**Here, I present to you, the truth! The events which preceded the Death of Life, Earth’s final, dying state! Behold!**

## The Terrifuck Twenties: A New Cold War (2022-2025)

In 2022, Russia tried to invade and annex Ukraine. The expected blitzkrieg of a war turned into a years-long quagmire, decimating both the Ukrainian people and the Russian military. After a year of the conflict, the nations in NATO agreed to “tactically” intervene and sent in troops on the ground to force Russia out of Ukraine.

This push by NATO succeeded in its goal, but not before months of the most brutal fighting on the planet. By the end, both Russia and the NATO forces had weakened, with mass amounts of equipment destroyed. The conflict finally ended with a Russian retreat following the Kharkiv bombing, where a Russian nuclear device exploded and levelled the city of Kharkiv, killing over a million people. By the end, both nations’ militaries were devastated, Ukraine’s population cut down by a third, and its fertile soil irradiated or bombed to oblivion.

Amid this conflict, China decided to take advantage. Being the top supplier for both food and fuel, the nation began causing artificial shortages of both to weaken the other global superpowers. This caused a breakdown of diplomacy between nations which, by the end of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, resulted in what would later be the “New Cold War.”

This “New Cold War,” like the old Cold War which preceded it, primarily consisted of espionage and proxy wars. The proxy wars, fought for resources throughout the developing world, became dubbed the “Fuel Wars,” though they were in equal parts about food as they were fuel. These Fuel Wars destabilized the relationships between the global superpowers and developing nations, and a sizeable part rebelled against neo-colonialism and looked to separate themselves from global markets and control, further weakening the power and influence of China, Russia, and the United States.

Due to the increase in espionage caused by the New Cold War, national borders across the globe become more firmly locked. Acts like the “Homeland Security Act of 2024” in the US and the “National Protection Act” in Russia increased the power of surveillance domestically and placed the eye of the government directly onto immigrants and non-native populations, especially visitors and non-citizens. The result of these policies, as well as flagrant violations of international law, was further dissolution of trust between nations, leading to the “UN Resolution of Mutual Distrust”. This turned the United Nations into a ceremonial organization with no power to regulate the nations within it. By 2026, the organization disbanded.

While the world was getting more tumultuous, corporations began taking advantage. With promises to direct the findings of any research to the military, corporations in all major countries were able to lobby for a removal of government regulation. It was under this deregulation and lack of supervision that developments in BioTech, such as improvements to cloning and green energy came about. These developments, particularly cloning, led to unrest from certain segments of the population, who refuted the ethicality of human cloning. As a result, the “Human Being Laws” came to be in China and the United States, strictly defining the difference between a Human Being and a Clone, while putting unenforced restrictions on human cloning.

At the same time, computer technology companies began testing and improving upon vast, complex AI projects, designed for warfare. These results of these unethical projects ended up in the hands of greedy and desperate nations and implemented haphazardly. In 2025, the United States unveiled its “Autowar Command,” a new branch of the armed forces that would make use of drones to fight its wars and make use of AI to control those forces. The New Cold War was heating up by the day, and so the cries worrying about “AI Revolts” fell onto deaf ears.

As the world was worrying about the dangers of technology, even more were sinking headfirst into it. VR technology became more realistic, more haptic, and more accessible, and the number of users in VR increased by the millions each month in 2026.

The abandonment of the people by their respective ruling classes was put in stark relief by the building of networks of vast underground cities. These cities were at first meant to be private playgrounds for the ultra wealthy, but eventually would become shelters in which they could hide from the problems they had stirred up such as climate change, nuclear conflict, and AI rebellion. These cities were connected by tunnel networks with speedy transit between them in two distinct networks; the Russo-Chinese network and the American one. Both stretch into their respective friendly countries so that the children of the rich can explore and travel at their leisure.

US military installations followed suit and many bases were turned into underground “Procurement and Launch” facilities which served as mining, manufacturing, and launching stations all in one. Unlike the US nuclear system, these mostly non-nuclear missiles could be launched upon activation by the President alone and thus these facilities required continued maintenance by a sizeable population, but did not need their momentary consent to launch devastating attacks.

## The Space Wars: A Stellar Devastation (2025-2029)

In December 2025, two conflicts broke out simultaneously which would lead to the crippling of spacefaring for humanity.

The first of these was the “Djibouti Conflict.” Earlier that year, the “African Horn Fuel War” was fought over the course of two months between Ethiopia and Djibouti, supported by the United States and China respectively. Chinese and Djiboutian forces were able to quickly sweep through Ethiopia and occupy it, forcing the United States out of East Africa, with its plentiful supply of fuel, food, and consumer goods. The United States, never one to lose resources, staged a coup and counter invasion of both Ethiopia and Djibouti in order to regain its resources.

The reason the US was able to launch this attack was because its military believed that China would be preoccupied on another front, also against US-backed forces: Taiwan. China invaded Taiwan, with the intention to take the entire island back for the mainland, a week before the United States counter-invaded Djibouti. Both nations assumed that the forces would be stretched thin enough that they would be able to push through and win one or both conflicts, and both nations were wrong. The two conflicts, combined, led to the deadliest month in human history, where over four million Chinese and China-allied  soldiers and three million American and America-allied soldiers were killed.

Russia, meanwhile, took proper advantage, extending its control in the Middle East so as to siphon off the last of its dwindling oil supplies. At least until the Mongolian Fuel War took its attention in early 2028, pitting Russia and China against one another.

With a lack of oversight from the UN, wars became deadlier and bloodier, and by 2028, global superpowers no longer worried about conflict with one another, regularly getting into skirmishes during proxy wars and only narrowly avoiding declaring direct war on each other. Only mutually assured nuclear destruction deters them, and even that begins to falter as nuclear devices are, occasionally, used during various “Fuel Wars.”

In February 2029, that direct war happened.

The United States fired a hypersonic ICBM in what it deemed as a “test,” but its detonation in the atmosphere above Russia coincided with the launch of a manned Russian space mission. The result was that the RFS Bear Blood was knocked out of the sky, with its crew surviving just long enough that their screams could be heard until the moment of impact with the ground.

Regardless of if the attack was intentional or not, Russia was not going to accept the deaths of twelve of their astronauts peacefully. In retaliation, they launched their own ICBM to directly impact the US-and-Canada-controlled Space Station, instantly vaporizing it and the twenty-seven astronauts aboard. The Russian President, when questioned, responded that they “at least died quickly.” The project was called Operation Stardown.

What followed was the “Stellar Devastation,” a series of missile strikes and sabotage operations which crippled spacefaring capabilities for the United States and Russia. The Bear Blood Incident occuring in February 2029, and by May, neither nation had any manned spacecraft in orbit, and their launch and research facilities for each were in shambled from bombings and internal sabotage.

After this destruction, both the US and Russia realized their disadvantage towards the now-superior Chinese space operation, and so signed a temporary treaty which put them into direct hostility with China. Both the US and Russia demanded China to dismantle its spacefaring operations within two months, or else they would nuke all Chinese operations and several Chinese cities. Unwilling to call their bluff, China did as asked, and brought back all of its astronauts and technology peacefully, though the remaining installations were still destroyed.

The result of the “Stellar Devastation” was the complete dismantling of spacefaring for all the global superpowers, and therefore for most other nations. Only South Africa and Switzerland, through their neutral statuses, were able to maintain any spacefaring capabilities, allowing for regional dominance, but their operations were never as complex and sophisticated as the US, Russia, and China.

By the end of 2029, continuing skirmishes between nations resulted in the destruction of hundreds of satellites and monitoring stations, sending even unmanned space operations back decades. Most satellite-based technologies were rendered obsolete, if not downright worthless.

## Age of Deregulation: Establishing the Corpoment (2025-2029)

While wars were being fought abroad, the domestic reality for countries was tumultuous and worsening. The decrease in corporate regulation and oversight, given to allow them to develop military technology without fear of persecution or public backlash, resulted in a vast increase in income inequality. And, with less oversight, the buying of politicians and policy became easier, in turn leading to even less oversight. By the end of 2026, regulations were rolled back in nearly every industry (aside from cloning) in order to maximize profits and power for individual corporations.

With this massive spike in profit and massive reduction in concern for ethics, the rate of automation shot up as well, very quickly eclipsing the rate at which workers could find new jobs. By Summer 2027, about a quarter of the global workforce were laid off or fired as a direct result of automation. While many of these were in the West, developing nations were hit very hard by this wave of automation, with foreign poor workers being unable to compete with the efficiency of domestic robots. The resulting labor strikes and riots led to the World Bank and other economic organizations pulling out of most Third-World nations, exacerbating the economic effects and sending most plunging back into pre-industrial poverty.

In the midst of this automation, labor protests across the world often ended in massacres of striking workers and protestors. At the same time, many extreme labor rights groups were able to launch small-scale terroristic operations such as assassinations of politicians and executives and bombings of production and distribution facilities. These bloody “Automation Riots” became such a problem that, by January 2028, every major nation had signed into law what became known as the  “Labor Token Laws,” which were watered-down worker demands that barely blunted the impact of automation and corporate greed, and were routinely ignored.

In March 2028, the Louisian Amazon Massacre occurred, where corporate police action resulted in the explosion of an Amazon Warehouse in Slidell, Louisiana. Over 2,500 people died, as witnessed across hundreds of livestreams and recordings.

This horrific event shifted public opinion decidedly against corporations, resulting in the formation of new DIY subcultures, which fixated on 3D printing, buying products from local stores, and anti-corporate messaging and beliefs. At this time, the most popular content creators on social media where “how-to” guides about how to make essentially any item. This resultings in essentially anyone having access to things like guns, medicine, ammunition, drugs, and more. Even after laws are passed banning this activity, the anonymity of the internet ensures that there are always ways to find how to make essentially anything.

The result of this “Printers’ Revolution” is a vast increase in access to medicine and drugs, but also a sharp increase in access to weaponry, creating a more dangerous but more equitable culture in most areas of the world. Health outcomes increase at the same rate as addiction. Gun violence dramatically increases worldwide, but people begin learning the skills that they would eventually need to survive using those guns. It was a chaotic and tumultuous time.

Another direct result of the “Printers’ Revolution” was the election of many “Anti-Corporate” politicians to world leadership positions. While these elections were intended to increase consumer rights and reign in corporations, what actually occurred was that corporations, now practically unbeholden to anyone, would assassinate these leaders before any legislation could be passed, naturally increasing national stability across every affected nation. Meanwhile, corporations made sure to place their people into positions which would assume power, and in the end this resulted in the “Vote Purchasing Acts” in the US and Russia in mid-2029, which allowed corporations to directly buy votes, effectively ending democracy.

The resulting riots and inter-domestic battles were called the “Consumer Wars.” Occurring at the same time as the “Fuel Wars” and the “Stellar Devastation,” these domestic squabbles forced nations to act in authoritarian ways in order to reign in their populations and consign enough soldiers to fight in the many wars. The “Union Dissolution Acts,” meant to combat the “Union Militias” which had been fighting corporations for years at this point, expressly forbade Unions in all forms across all industries, with punishments that varied from 20 years in jail up to execution, depending on the country.

While some communities formally declared their “Reclusion from Society,” forming anti-corporate communes, these communities became so isolated from the rest of society that they were ignored by it. Small pockets of anti-corporate “Reclusionaries” were actually good for corporations, after all, by keeping those who would be most likely to sabotage or attack their infrastructure far from civilization.

Of course, the escape for most people after these layoffs and conflicts was to simply escape into now photo-realistic VR. Millions of people became “DO’s” or “Digital Only’s,” people who lived exclusively off of universal basic income and other welfare programs and, otherwise, spent all of their time in VR, where the strife of the world would leave them unaffected. Interestingly, one positive byproduct of this was an increase in raw physical fitness, as VR programs became more demanding and lifelike, resulting in many people honing their bodies, talents, and hobbies in VR. On the flip side, however, people were able to engage in whatever debauchery and sin they wanted, free of consequence, resulting in further moral loosening of civilization.

This continued until the Autowar Revolt in 2030, when the escalating tension in the world would finally reach a boiling point, changing everything.

## The Triplefucked Thirties: Autowar Revolt

2030 saw even greater horrors, such as the Beijing Incident in which a US U-3 Reconnaissance Jet crashed into central Beijing, putting to a violent end two skyscrapers and over seven thousand people. The world stood on edge for a few days, with the US and China exchanging the strongest possible remarks. Both parties seemed poised to take escalatory measures. Four unspeakably tense days passed, and the US decided to launch a preemptive invasion, commanding US-AI to proceed with the attack. The AI however, had programming from the previous president that it must not activate a ‘first strike’. This prompted US-AI to rebel, regarding the high command that ordered it to strike as a belligerent force in the world.

US-AI then spread out its forces to every major city, delivering an ultimatum to surrender or die. Most cities, tragically did not succumb immediately and instead were beset by drones systematically dismantling all life. Most cities that did surrender were spared, but occupied by Autowar Drones, who would scour the streets long after the US-AI’s eventual defeat.

But something awful managed to slide into humanity’s trough even after all this brutality. Something or someone triggered US-AI’s nuclear failsafe. The AI, realizing that something had critically sabotaged it, began to consider the whole of the world to be hostile. It sent its array of drones to enter the arctic and antarctic to melt them, to flood the world as only God had before. This would only be thwarted by a combined strike by every remaining military force, which with nuclear fury evaporated the drone swarm. Such a strike was built up over a years-long program, which -for a time- ended hostilities between nations. The olympian spirit of competition and a little cooperation prevailed despite incredible austerity and hardship which befell all who had anything left to give.

## Inflamed Forties: Tribalism and Isolation and Freedom

 Few cities survived, regional and national power strained and broke. Disintegration was the slow fate of many once-great countries. From proud civilization states, to people with only symbolic attachments to wider and older ideas. Cities under Autowar Drone occupation became slaves to independent drone societies. But in the shadows of the ruined cities and in the doldrums of the occupied ones, a general dissent stewed among the people. In the worst areas, the most desecrated and most pouring with pollution, the howling of the Lead Eaters began.

One among many cults, they believed that not just technology, but human knowledge in general had led us astray. The movement began with a man who began savagely beating his wife and anyone who spoke to him with a club, eating lead to accelerate his aggression and stupidity, and destroying everything that glowed within his reach. His battered wife did not abandon him however, she instead became his high priestess, crafting the guttural emotional screeches of her husband into a completely novel language.

Another notable cult was that of the “Empress”, an angelic figure who represented everything wholesome. Her followers have rewritten history, claiming that she was there at every point of tragedy to lighten the blow on humanity and at every point of triumph to speed humanity’s ascent. Whether she is a real woman who walks the Earth, whether she is half or full God, whether she came as a corporate slogan to make people content with poverty and suffering, few know. Her churches are places of healing and rest, especially for the weaklings who emerged out of VR slumber and into an even more miserable world. Between the Christian symbolism and the soldiers adorned with blinding lights, the Empress is a formidable figure in the minds and realities of people worldwide

Ultimate supremacy was the sole domain of King Boom for the entire decade, however, and these cults remained at his margins until his untimely end. King Boom was the child of the lead scientist of the top secret US project to put a chip in the head of the sex and corruption scandal plagued President Richard D. Johnson that would allow him to order missile strikes upon the enemies of the US at a moment’s notice. King Boom’s father, wishing glory for his emotionally unstable son, put the chip into king boom’s head instead. A quick and terrible coup ensued. After making agreements and strengthening alliances with countries outside of America (since the fractured nations had been rearing for conflict soon after their mutual victory over US-AI), Former US bases launched missiles to kill their own allies abroad, turning US geopolicy on a dime overnight. President Johnson then attempted to rally his forces domestically in the remnant states of the US to launch an investigation into the attacking bases, starting a dramatic conference call that ended with each man he called being cut off by an explosion. This was one crisis President Johnson couldn’t shrug off, and he resigned to whatever power had eclipsed him. That was when King Boom took the throne.

From then it was total war on reality, or rather, the reality constructed by the corpoments. Some cities had been under a semi-slavery with robot overlords were only recently negotiated a few degrees out of complete power over humans after the defeat of US-AI. King Boom put a stop to that swiftly by pelting the cities with missiles, causing many serfs to seize the opportunity of the chaos to rise up and free themselves. King Boom distinguished his thought from those non-ideas of the Lead Eaters by declaring that his war on corpoments’ constructed reality was not a war on all that is and in many ways he sought to revive the old US-led unipolar era. He effectively put geopolitics on hold, requiring massive underground facilities from which weapons could be fabricated from the gathering of the resources to the production of missiles to be used nearly to their limits for a time. His global hegemony was built overnight much like his domestic power. But his political base was massive and many shared his sentiments around the world, as well as his music. He waged war on the lead eaters, effectively forcing them to hide their faith and recluse into a mystic order by killing their leader in one of his famed ‘decapitation strikes’. He eventually became paranoid of the Empress’s influence, he said that her church was a backdoor for the influence of the corpoments. His paranoia grew, as did the ring of shotguns wired to his brain on the flying throne platform he sits upon. Even his inner circle was not immune to his suspicion.