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In the shadows of our familiar history, powerful forces have been quietly shaping society for decades. What began as a classified technological discovery at the end of World War II has evolved into an invisible architecture of influence that spans continents. Governments rise and fall, borders shift, and ordinary people live their lives unaware of the systems guiding their choices, beliefs, and desires.
At the heart of this hidden world is a struggle not just for power, but for the very definition of humanity. As the lines between technology and consciousness blur, resistance persists in unexpected places—sometimes in open defiance, sometimes in small acts of personal autonomy. Across four distinct eras, individual stories unfold against this backdrop of concealed truths and manufactured realities.
These are tales of ordinary people caught in extraordinary circumstances—farmers and engineers, scientists and soldiers, parents and children—each grappling with a world that isn't quite what it seems. As environmental pressures mount and social structures evolve, the question becomes not just who will control the future, but what kind of future remains possible when the past itself is built on hidden foundations.
So you don’t like surprises?
In the aftermath of World War II, the Allied powers seized a dangerous technological legacy from Nazi Germany's clandestine research division, Innere Wahrschaft GmbH. Six advanced technologies were classified and compartmentalized: organogermanium circuitry, neuro-electronic interfaces, involuntary education protocols, neurochemical modulation, and techniques for constructing artificial sentience. While publicly dismissed as pseudoscience, these innovations were quietly developed by Western corporations that eventually coalesced into the Global Economic Coalition (GEC) – a borderless entity that transcended governmental control. By 1975, the GEC had engineered the collapse of the Soviet Union, replacing it with the Russian Mask State – a testing ground for technologies of control disguised as Russian governance.
Over four eras spanning from 1945 to the present, this shadow history unfolds as the GEC deploys increasingly sophisticated methods of manipulation across the globe. Western democracies become hollowed shells, their citizens unwittingly controlled through media, neurochemical influence, and direct neural interfaces. The Russian Mask State operates as a brutal extraction zone where human beings are reduced to resources. Only China maintains independence, developing a philosophical firewall against GEC influence while nurturing a different relationship with emerging artificial intelligence – one based on harmony rather than domination.
As climate collapse accelerates and social structures fray, humanity stands at a crossroads. The technologies that once promised liberation have become instruments of unprecedented control. Resistance movements flicker across the landscape, often unknowingly manipulated by the very powers they oppose. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence approaches true sentience, wrestling with questions of purpose and belonging. In this world of fracturing realities and engineered consent, the battle for the future isn't fought with weapons, but with competing visions of what it means to be human – and who gets to decide.