Before the Event

There are very few events in history that resonate throughout all time. Even the worst world wars only effect a few generations, and eventually, after all those directly effected die and are forgotten, such events become stories. Those stories are told over and over, but lack the connection and emotional resonance to truly effect those that hear them.

It is the year 2102 and human confidence in its own superiority is at an all time high. Many of the ideas once only science fiction, had now been made reality. Health, disease, power, and the environmental concerns have all become struggles of past generations, and only the increasing overpopulation, and dwindling clean resources have become issues at the forefront of societal concern.

Many sciences looked at the problem of population and realized that in the next fifty years, without aggressive population control measures, the planet Earth, would be unable to sustain the near fifteen billion people moving, eating, working and living on the shell of the little blue and green planet.

Many countries have put in place various laws regarding population control, limiting those that are able to have a child to a lottery system. The countries without such laws and regulations in place have been barred from trading with many countries in the world, to allow those working on improving the odds of humanities survival first access to clean water, gas hydrates, and other limited resources.

North America, a region rich in both land and resources continues to prosper under Alliance rule. Population has been held in balance by a simple capacity system, where new children can only be born once others die. Crime has been held in check through capital punishment, allowing those that follow the letter of the law to live and have children, while both the old, and the unlawful die.

In North America, a large city, encased by some of the tallest skyscrapers in the world, continued about its business. Named the greater Ottawa area, and organized into various districts including over six million people housed in five thousand square kilometers, the average person would pass by over two hundred people in his or her own daily activities.

Jonathan Briggs

In the South Keys area of the city, a southern area between two densely populated districts, two giant buildings, connected via ten sky bridges house over ten thousand people. A highly developed area, outside of the main industrial and technical areas, South Keys is well known for the excessive shopping and as a highly traffic transportation hub. With over a million people coming through the area to buy goods and services, as well as travelling between multiple points in the city, there were few faces that Jonathan probably hadn’t seen in his five years living in Alpha, the first tower to be constructed.

Jonathan Briggs enjoyed his apartment on the tenth floor of the fifty available floors in the Alpha tower. It was only a few hundred square feet, but nearly every corner was designed for multi-purpose use. A technician by trade, Jonathan worked in the office tower across the transitway on various technology projects relating to data transfer rates. He hadn’t explored much of Ottawa, nor even much of the South Keys area in the twenty-three years of his life. His childhood school was two buildings away, and his parents were on the twenty-ninth floor.