• No one who lived in the twenty first century would think to call such days a 'Golden Age' of humanity but looking back on them now, they were by far the brightest times the human race created on our earth. We expanded and expanded, devouring more and more resources amidst worries that eventually we would hit a complete limit to our sustainability. For the longest time technology kept us ahead, making every bit of space more efficient and more sustainable just to keep ahead of the rising tide of human dominance. It was enough that we thought we might never reach that point, we created our homes beneath the waves and in the skies, farms that spanned thousands of square kilometres upon the surface and many more thousands of kilometres below and above the earth's crust. We seemingly reached a point of enlightenment, living in a perfect balance of human consumption and creation, a point where nine billion people lived upon the globe and not a thing went to waste.

    It was a time of relaxation, a time where the automata left our hands and minds free to create lavish canvases, incredible symphonies, and soul moving literature. A time where we believed we had attained a human Nirvana, a perfection, a world without sin.

    We were vain to think of such a thing, we succumbed to the sin of Sloth, billions of humans spending day after day doing nothing in our laziness, leaving work to machines and those who chose to do it. We never stopped growing, secure in the false knowledge that we could carry on forever we never stopped populating our world, falling to the second of our seven sins in Lust. By the time we had grown to ten billion souls upon our earth we knew that something was wrong, even in our utopia we could tell that there was a little less food than yesterday, a little less time than yesterday, another crack in the gilt walls of our paradise.

    The third sin of Pride was the one that finally brought the walls crumbling down, the hole in the dam to let through the flood. Seeing the plight of humanity, the three greatest nations on the planet took autonomous action for the first time in centuries, organizing programs to secretly create giant fleets of interstellar vessels. They planned to leave the earth and sail the cosmos, so proud of their generosity and so certain of the great legacy they would leave that they told no one until the final fateful day when it would all be unveiled.

    It was December 25th of the year 2096 when nearly seven billion people were loaded onto the great ships and the hidden hangars opened. A message to every screen on earth of the great christmas gift from those who left to those they left behind. They gave us the land of their own countries they, to let us expand ourselves once more and continue to grow every further into the future. In their pride and vanity they believed wholeheartedly that we had overcome sin, that those left behind would share the land equally amongst each other and that the peace that had dominated for many decades would continue for centuries yet. That pride was what brought about our final fall from grace, our slow downwards amble turning into a headlong plunge as we collectively hurled ourselves into the abyss, the dam we built finally succumbing to the pressure of our immorality.

    It began with the sin of Greed as countries scrambled to claim the sudden bounty of land, each desiring a greater freedom for their citizens, a greater space to claim as their own. Suddenly territory had meaning again and we were caught up in once forgotten pride and nationalism. From Greed sprung Envy as those nations too slow to the chance began to argue with those who had claimed greater territory. The smaller nations argued that the division of land should be equal in the spirit of the gift and the larger ones argued that it mattered not considering how unified the human race had been in those past decades, the greater nations desiring ever more land while the smaller nations sought what the greater possessed. Tensions rose across the globe spiralling higher and higher until finally a shot was fired, an antique weapon taken from it's place atop a mantle somewhere to defend a home from 'the enemy'.

    And Humanity succumbed to the final sin of Wrath.

    It took less than a day for it all to descend into chaos. The most wondrous things about our society, the machines that worked behind the scenes to let us live without work. Those great factories and production plants were perverted and turned to war. Hasty modifications to plants that once created children's toys manufactured massive armoured titans to wage our war. Hundreds of walking tanks striding out onto the newly opened lands like the heroes of some ancient cartoon. To this day it is uncertain whose idea it was to create such things but it is because of their unrivalled destructive force that the war was so brutal.

    At first it was just the unlucky ones, the families that had rushed ahead into the newly opened lands dying as collateral damage when their new homes became part of a battlefield. We could pretend that someone would win, that eventually we would prevail and the land would be sorted to the war's victors, but as the fighting raged on the victors were never willing to accept merely the land they wanted. It was like a fever, the desire for land that gripped the remaining world leaders driving them to terrible atrocities that scorched the earth and shattered the skies, humans dying like ants beneath the steel feet.

    One might wonder what those departing thought as they watched the chaos erupt, did they feel sorrow at how wrong they had been? Perhaps regret as they watched their homelands burn? It took four years for the chaos to end but when it finally did it was not because there was no more desire to fight.

    It was simply because there was nothing left to fight for...

    Millions of fields and farms turned to dust and ashes, entire mountain ranges obliterated and new ones created by the thunderous footfalls and the massive weapons. Some humans survived to crawl from the wreckage and stream towards those little spaces that remained, eventually conglomerating into fortress cities that shut themselves away from the outside world, the last few pockets of urban humanity sealing themselves off from the wasteland in armoured domes.

    Of course not everyone wound up in such places, old farming units and pockets of greenery became the sites of millions of rural villages, none of them larger than a few dozen people. It was a rougher life than many were used to but as time passed the sense of purpose in work became a welcome distraction from the memories of war and suffering until a new generation was born without any knowledge of a world before beyond what they were taught.

    Living in such villages brought risks though, of the thousands of titans manufactured to fight only a hundred or so remained in good working order but they still wandered the earth. Many of the pilots consigned themselves to the void but many more saw cause to remain, either to exercise the immense power granted by their weapons or to protect people from that very same power. No matter what those in the cities said, the war had never truly ended.

    Thirty years have passed since the last grand battle of the war and it is now 2128. The citizens of the three cities live in ignorance of the great machines that still walk the earth outside their walls, mendaciously convincing themselves that the tremors of the massive weapons mounted on their protective shells are merely earthquakes. Inside the cities the rich live easily while the remainder live in what are practically slums, the middle class having become just another casualty of the terrible conflict. Outside the walls the Steel titans still fight. The pilots having formed their own structures to organize themselves and keep their machines active, dividing themselves into factions by one simple motivation, those that wish to protect and those that wish to destroy. As they die, they choose successors to their machines, keeping the war going.

    The wasteland villages still flourish, growing and dividing, keeping their chosen lives in stability. Even as dozens of the little towns are wiped out by skirmishes between mecha dozens more appear, maintaining a balance of sorts. The world may even be considered stable in it's own strange way, only time will tell in the end.