technokatabasis setting

A couple hundred years into the future, climate change has melted much of the Earth’s permafrost. Global sea levels have risen 150 meters on average. The southern United States, the Amazon basin, the western Sahel, northern Europe, and most of southeast Asia are submerged. Mass displacement of people from flooding and overheating cities has led to overcrowding and food shortages in the regions that have accepted refugees. Widespread drought and agricultural failures have killed billions of people and crippled governments, leaving most local municipalities to fend for themselves. As the capabilities of governmental bodies waned, the largest regional corporations gained control of population centers through the promise of food and the use of paramilitary forces to quell mass uprisings.

Before total collapse, many governments put into practice international initiatives to combat climate change. Australia, Canada, Japan, Brazil, and the European Union led the world in the fight to cut fossil fuel emissions. The Chinese government developed mass-producible carbon sink stations to constantly scrub the atmosphere and construct carbon-based building materials.

As the global influence of the United States waned, internal tensions led to a partial balkanization. By that point, much of the eastern and western coasts had been overdeveloped into sprawling metropolises. Governmental collapse meant that those with the means moved to the sprawls in attempts to find more security from environmental disaster.

A number of nations spearheaded the ELSA Project (Early-Lagrange Shade Architecture), an array of collapsible shades to sit at the L1 Lagrange point between the Sun and the Earth, blocking as much as 1.5% of solar radiation at a time in an attempt to cool the Earth. Due to the immense costs and opposition by corporate lobbyists, these projects largely failed. The permanent ELSA station was launched and remains orbitally bound at L1, but the shades were never fully deployed due to maintenance costs and personnel shortages.

The wealthy and powerful saw disaster coming, and they knew they had to act in order to preserve themselves. Some built bunkers and recruited militias to defend their property, but the threat of starving masses storming their compounds was great enough that a few opted to go further. Eight global multi-trillion dollar corporations banded together to begin work on the largest engineering project in human history: the GAIA Nexus.