Humanity is currently split into three (major) factions, the Terrans (The Terran Republic), the Federation humans, and those who are subjects of the Juon Empire.

To understand where humanity is in the thirty second century it is necessary to understand the events of the thirtieth.

In the thirtieth century humanity was a fully developed high-tech society that had expanded into the entire solar system. They did not have FTL but did have reactionless thrusters, artificial gravity, and inertial dampeners. With these technologies they had settled Luna and Mars as well as had massive space stations throughout the entire solar system especially around Jupiter.

They had recovered from the climatic upheavals of the early twenty-first century as well as had survived a ruinous third world war after which the entire race did away with their collective nuclear arsenals (what was left of them). The last actual full bore war took place in the twenty sixth century when Mars successfully won their independence and became its own sovereign state under a consortium of powerful companies.

Things were good. The standard of living was high and with the entire solar system’s resources at their command humanity was entering the golden age of a post-scarcity economy and the population of the human race grew to over twenty-five billion.

That all changed on June 23, 2997 at 3:30 AM.

On June 23, 2997 at 3:30 AM the Yellowstone super volcano blew covering the rich agricultural fields of North America under a blanket of ash and plunging the entire planet into a two year long winter. All agriculture was brought to a halt worldwide. While every station and colony could recycle water almost all of them except for Mars were pretty much still completely dependent on Earth for their food. It was just convenient and, with reactionless thrusters, cheap.

Even though there were very clear indications that the disaster was at hand the powers that be decided to keep it quiet for a number of reasons. First of all there was simply not enough to go around. They decided to protect themselves and their interests. The richest arcologies stockpiled enough food for the projected famine so did some of the well connected rich orbital stations around Earth. Others built underground bunkers with sufficient fusion fuel and supplies to ride out the disaster. Some arcologies even went as far as to recruit “genetically superior” people with which they would repopulate the Earth.

Mars hastily converted cargo vessels into makeshift gunships with which they could blockade themselves and keep refugees away, including many of their own citizens. They had enough to support most of the population under their domes but that was it.

The vast majority of the twenty-five billion were caught completely by surprise. The food supplies ran out almost immediately. System wide famine set in. Anarchy soon followed as billions realized that someone was going to starve and they were willing to kill to make sure it wasn’t them.

Governments tried to maintain order but soon collapsed. There weren’t that many soldiers anymore and while they might have had sufficient rations they didn’t have enough for the soldiers’ families.

The hardest hit were the space based portion of the population. They ran out of food first and many resorted to raiding Earth in a desperate attempt to survive. All livestock and a lot of wild animals were hunted to extinction. The oceans, which had managed to recover from the over fishing of the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries were stripped nearly bare. That only delayed the inevitable. There were a rapidly dwindling but still massive number of hungry mouths devouring everything they could get their hands on.

It wasn’t long before many resorted to cannibalism, especially the space based raiders. As their victims had less and less their victims themselves soon became game.

People are resourceful and many figured out how to survive, eating algae, rats, bugs, whatever they could grab or manage to grow in a hurry. For example, Sheila’s grandparents were part of a group that retreated into salt mines and started growing algae and snails. Later they set up greenhouses growing what seeds they could find.

Another bright spot was Tak Nakamura and his company Zeus Corporation. They were a massive gas mining outfit stationed around Jupiter. As one of the one percent of one percent he got wind of the impending disaster and tried to warn the people. He was already a bit of an eccentric maverick so he was easy to discredit. He bought up all the commodities he could and loaded down his fleet with all the people and supplies he could and set up emergency operations in his facilities around Jupiter. He took in everybody he could. It was, of course, just a drop in the bucket but at least he tried. His later efforts were instrumental but more about that later.

Even though the “long winter” only lasted two years the total breakdown of order made recovery near impossible. Any time someone tried to grow crops it was almost certain that they would be spotted from orbit and raided. Most of the seeds used even today aren’t “heirloom” and are hybridized products produced by big agriculture, which no longer existed. The highly genetically engineered seeds of the thirtieth century were even more so. Even if there was some crops left (very unlikely) it wasn’t viable by design. The one thing that could have maybe turned the tide, the massive seed vaults were all overrun and raided with nothing left but empty shelves. All of that bio-diversity wound up in a stock pot or sold and then wound up in a stock pot. (As far as anyone knows)

Within five years a lot of the population had died one way or the other and the remaining few were grimly clinging to survival locked in constant conflict with raiders or other rival groups. The once glorious prosperous system spanning civilization had collapsed and was replaced by tribes all fighting over the last grain of rice and then later someone else’s mushrooms or algae plates. People killed each other over a handful of cockroaches or even the actual hand that held them.

It got ugly.

All of those rich arcologies and underground bunkers? Yeah, they didn’t last long. One by one they were overrun and taken down with the occupants either slaughtered or driven off. Many of them fled into space where they were at the mercy of raiders or often becoming raiders themselves.

At around year five, some of the ruling class of Mars became disgusted by their families literally becoming fat while the people outside of their fortified citadels starved and shut off the turrets and opened the gates. Mars fell into anarchy but quickly established a new government and did start taking in who they could.

Around Jupiter the survivors of Zeus corporation had taken to eating a particularly nasty pest called a hyper-roach. These little nightmares were descendants of the cockroaches of old but had become much larger and immune to just about everything. They also loved to eat bio-plastics especially electrical insulators. One of their big refineries had become completely overrun and had been abandoned with the shields down with the hope that Jupiter’s radiation would eventually kill them (it didn’t). That became a boon since they were, while quite disgusting, actually pretty nutritious. The abandoned refinery became their hunting ground and the hyper-roach was gathered by the millions. Eventually they fired up a refinery and a chemical plant to produce bio-plastic to feed them. They then started researching a better roach food, a more easily made and better digested non-toxic plastic. The scientists had to start making bigger and bigger batches of their latest runs because they were starting to snack on it themselves. It didn’t take long for them to realize “Wait just a fucking minute...” and research was quickly shifted to producing an edible plastic. Eventually they succeeded in making a nutritionally complete edible polymer dubbed Jovian Rice. They fired up all refineries and chemical plants that they could and started producing it by the mega-ton.

And the famine finally ended.

Unfortunately this didn’t end the conflict. Soon two forces arose. Many small settlements on Earth and elsewhere rallied behind Tak Nakamura and Zeus Corp and a lot of the raiders and warlords were led by Jessica Morgan, a former military commander and politician. These two forces clashed over control of the food production and thus control of the solar system. Originally the raiders and warlords had the upper hand due to the fact that they had by that point seized a lot of the original supply of high tech weapons and ammo.

At a disadvantage and desperate for something to fight with the techs at Zeus hit upon the idea of reviving the old gunpowder weapons of ancient times. They were good enough to fight three world wars after all. They looked back at the golden age of firearms to see what was the most popular one and found plans for the AK-47. It took specialized manufacturing equipment to make a blaster or a gauss weapon and the power cells to power them but any old maintenance robo-fac could turn out AK’s by the hundreds so they did just that. Producing “ancient” firearms and other weapons en-masse turned the tide of the war. It was supposed to be “just something… anything...” but both sides were shocked at exactly how effective they could be. Zeus started churning out firearms and ammo and giving them to everyone and suddenly they outnumbered the foe.

This was the origin of the revival of old school gunpowder arms and other such weapons in the Republic.

It was total war. No quarter given. Each side was determined to absolutely destroy the other. It was around the tenth year after Yellowstone and there wasn’t a lot of “humanity” left in either group. The people left were the survivors of the survivors of the survivors and all of them had done some pretty dark shit to make it this far and had no problem doing it again.

As the raiders and warlords were fighting an increasingly desperate losing battle for their very lives the Juon Empire showed up.

A fleet of real warships, not some ore carrier with some missile tubes welded on the side, jumped into the Sol System.

The system was annexed without much fighting at all. It wasn’t the warships. It was the seemingly unending stream of freighters carrying real food, not plastic, that “subdued” the humans. The terms of annexation were reasonable and the Juon were downright nice for alien overlords. They helped stabilize the system and their resources made real normalcy and reconstruction a possibility. It was said that the Juon didn’t conquer the humans, humans conquered the humans. The remnants of humanity were tired, starved, war-torn, and utterly exhausted. Many welcomed the law and order that the Juon brought with them (though they won’t admit it now).

The first thing the Juon had to do was physically separate the two warring factions. The group that would eventually become the Terrans wanted genocide at this point. The gun toting people behind Tak Nakamura had been victims of the other group for a decade and wanted blood. By the time that the Juon showed up the raiders, warlords, and a whole bunch of luckless former arcology dwellers, slaves, and others who had nothing to do with anything were on the ropes. They wouldn’t have lasted all that much longer.

The Juon split up the two groups relegating the now minority group of former raiders, world leaders who kept the disaster secret, arcology dwellers, and others to the outer solar system to prevent any more violence.

When the Juon appeared, the population of the Sol System had dropped from 25 billion to less than 500 million. Over 98% of the human race was gone.

And thus began thirty years of peace and prosperity under the Juon Empire. The Terrans, while not as advanced in all areas surpassed the Juon in several fields particularly mining and refining. Soon mega-tons of deuterium, helium-3, metal alloys, organic chemicals, etc. flowed out of Sol and into the eager arms of the Empire. Human industry set the standard for productivity and quality and soon human run companies were among the most profitable in the whole Empire.

This didn’t last. The old Juon emperor abdicated after a one hundred and fifty year reign, as was their custom, in favor of his son.

This was a mistake. It would take a whole chapter to describe the fuck up that was his son but the Juon, who worship their Emperors, refuse to speak his name. He and his cronies took over the Empire throwing away over a thousand years of social progress and the good and fair lord governor of the Sol System was replaced by a corrupt lackey.

It didn’t take long for the system to rebel. Other systems, supplied with weapons by the Terrans and encouraged by our successes followed. The whole Empire was beginning to fall apart. The Cyan Empress in a coup deposed her brother and slaughtered his supporters restoring order. Her first action was to stop combat on all rebelling worlds. She gave each rebel system the option to leave or remain. The Kalesh and the Humans opted to leave. She granted them their systems and a swath of space between them since they were conveniently located. The Kalesh and the Humans formed the Terran Republic.

The former population that had been exiled to the outer solar system fled once it was clear that the Terrans were winning because they believed that the second that the Terrans stopped shooting at the Juon they would be coming for them (and they were right). They fled to the Federation who welcomed them with open arms.

The Federation believed the greatly distorted version of the facts that the refugees told them and once the Juon Empire left they approached the fledgling Republic with a list of demands if they wanted to become part of the Federation.

They were told to go and fuck themselves. This actually surprised the Federation who expected the two systems to want their protection from the big bad Empire (whose ass the Humans and Kalesh just kicked).

While the Federation was still trying to negotiate, the companies in the Empire who had deeply missed the streams of cheap alloys, fusion fuels, and chemicals from Sol showed up wondering if they could resume business. On one hand the Terrans had a load of hassle and bullshit from the Federation. On the other hand they had billions of badly needed credits in production contracts… It wasn’t a hard choice. The Republic turned its back on the Federation and resumed trade with the Empire.

And the rest is history.

The three factions of humanity:

The Republic (Terrans): This is the core group of survivors from Earth, Luna, Mars, and Jupiter who were “honest… ish” survivors who (mostly) tried to survive with a (nominal) minimum of conflict. At the very least they were the group who rallied behind Zeus Corp. and drove off the Juon three decades later. They are the most numerous of the three factions and their Republic now has four habitable systems. Earth (Terra) is still badly damaged from the mass extinction of anything edible and suffers from real problems with bio-diversity. The human Terrans are dedicated to rebuilding it and are slowly but surely nursing their homeworld to health. It will take centuries.

The Federation humans: These were the refugees from the outer solar system who fled in terror when it became clear that the Terrans were winning. There is absolutely nothing in the whole galaxy a Terran hates more than a Federation human, nothing. Even the most moderate Terran wants them all dead. It’s true genocidal levels of hatred. While nothing justifies genocide the Terrans have very good reason to hate them. They are comprised of raiders, arcology refugees, and the former rulers of old Earth who kept the disaster a secret condemning many of their family members to death. And recently they are blamed for being one of the driving forces behind the surprise attack by the Federation that led to the Federation War. They went from being an old simmering hatred to becoming a fresh target of rage once again. The Terrans call them “long pork” or “porkies”. This is a reference to “long pork”, an old euphemism for human flesh, a reference to the cannibalism that they are all accused of. To be fair, a good number of “porkies” are former arcology dwellers or their descendants many of which were completely blameless and had no idea what the arcology managers and owners had planned and other such luckless individuals. It doesn’t matter to the Terrans. They are all considered the dregs of humanity who got lucky and managed to evade “justice” (genocide). The Republic is far from perfect. This may or may not be an example of that.

Needless to say that during the Federation War any planet that had a significant human population got a visit from the Retribution and her friends. They have become species non grata in the Federation since everybody is afraid of what will happen if there are too many humans on their world if hostilities break out again. They are also blamed for the war by the other races in the Federation as well.

The Imperial Humans: When the war for independence broke out a fair number of humans sided with the Juon. The main reason was that they were afraid that without the Juon the system would slide back into the lawless anarchy that the Juon “saved” them from and all of the horrors that came with it. Despite how bad things were, the Juon still represented law and order and more than a few humans stuck with them acting as interpreters, guides, spies, and even actual ground forces. After the war ended these people left with the Juon and took up residence in the Empire. A lot of other people who didn’t fight the Terrans also decided to pack up and follow the Juon as well either, afraid of what would happen in their absence, or they simply didn’t want to live in what was a completely ruined system.

They aren’t hated by the Terrans, not exactly. For one thing they are considered former enemies, straight up combatants, not slimy trash like the porkies. The fact that the Republic is allies with the Empire also has a lot to do with the much more favorable view (or at least treatment) of the Imperial humans. The two groups don’t hate each other. Mild antipathy is more accurate. Terrans call Imperial humans “weebs” (a reference to their “love” of their tentacled overlords if you get my meaning). Imperial humans call Terrans “Terrans” because "they tried and just couldn’t come up with a worse insult than calling someone a Terran". The Great War has thawed out relations between the two groups a great deal since they fought side by side against the Collective. These days the two groups can coexist with relatively little chance of violence. Weeb soldiers have even been seen sharing a drink with Terran ones from time to time. These days the name calling is usually in good fun and the occasional scraps are increasingly less fatal. The Imperial humans have embraced the Empire and its customs and traditions, completely rejecting their former culture. Weebs can freely move through the Republic (provided they have thick skins) and vice versa.

They also despise the Federation humans with a passion due to the unprovoked attack upon the greatly weakened Republic (now their ally) by the Federation. A weeb will cheerfully shoot a porkie almost as readily as a Terran will, one more thing they have in common. This is tempered somewhat by some family ties between the weebs and the porkies. It's complicated.