The second half of the twenty first century started out with such promise. It was a shame how it all ended up going so wrong, so quickly. The decades of turmoil between the nations of the new multipolar world were finally settling down into a balance of power. Something like peace was spreading. A renewed era of prosperity was on the horizon.

But then one dry August day in 2077, with both North America and Europe locked in a heatwave that seemed like it would go on forever, the grim rows of legacy ICBMs in their silos on both continents roared to life without warning or explanation. While politicians worldwide scrambled to understand what was happening, the old Russian and American nuclear fleets launched themselves skyward and traced arcs of doom through the stratosphere.

The crew of a trawler off of northern Greenland watched in wonder as the filigree of sunlit exhaust plumes stretched through the sky overhead.

For the former superpowers there wasn’t any time to react, and it wasn’t possible to call the missiles back in any case. Faced with the worst possible scenario, dusty contingency plans activated from Beijing to Islamabad, from Jerusalem to Paris. There was no time to think - it was use them or lose them for their own nuclear arsenals.

In ninety minutes it was all over. No one will ever know the casualty figures, but they were certainly terrible. What came next was worse. The dreaded fires and dust clouds brought on winter early, and with the centers of civilization destroyed, hunger followed closely. The darkness lasted for nearly five years, and when the clouds finally dissipated they revealed a world that had been savaged beyond recognition.

There would have been something new to see as well, if anyone had been left to look down at it. There was a strange glow in the ruins of cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Moscow, London, Paris, Beijing, Tokyo, and a dozen others. The worst of the radiation should have been largely decayed by that point - but instead an eerie green light lit up the shattered skeletons of the great skyscrapers. New things moved among the ruins. The few scavengers who managed to come back from the edges of the zones - the Nexus - said there were creatures in there never seen by men before.

Can the scattered remains of humanity take back their lands and rebuild civilization?

They live in a strange new world, but who murdered the old one, and why?

Is this even their world at all now?

Introduction, Welcome to Dead Earth Online, Axiom Systems, 2027