About
Author’s Note: Reading this background isn’t necessary to understand & enjoy the comic.
DON’T THEY KNOW IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD?
Humanity has become an endangered species. A deadly airborne virus killed off 98% of the
world’s population. World governments failed to contain it. As the disease spread, social and
political institutions broke down. Old ethnic and religious tensions exploded. Global trade
ground to a halt. Wars, famine, and crime ran rampant, and all the while the disease reaped its
silent, deadly toll. Mortality rates of the infected were nearly one hundred percent. Animals
were untouched. Only human beings were effected. Some whispered that such a perfectly
deadly virus couldn’t be natural. That it was engineered…
For three years the disease burned through the human race. By the end of the second year,
large scale conflicts and unrest had ceased. Those who were still alive fled to the
wastelands and margins of society, isolating themselves from strangers and contaminated
areas. Things once taken for granted, like food and fresh water became risky and difficult to
obtain. Finally, mercifully, the virus burned itself out.
For the survivors, their children, and their children’s children, the disease would be enshrined in
history as the Apocalypse Plague. The force that ended and rebirthed the world.
For those who survived the near annihilation of the human race, the world they
reemerged into was familiar, but changed. The cities, the highways, the power lines,
even the satellites in space were still there… but crumbling. The small numbers of
remaining people couldn’t properly reclaim most of what their ancestors had built,
leaving most of the planet to return to nature.
The remains of humanity slowly built new civilizations, familiar but changed. People are
fewer and more spread out than they’ve been since the Bronze Age. Much old
knowledge has survived, but few have access to it, and fewer can actually build anything from
it. Most people live simpler lives hearkening back to an earlier era. Hunting, farming, and
cherishing their few technological comforts, preserved from the days before the apocalypse.
A new power is spreading across the Earth. Presenting themselves as a philanthropic group of
scientists, sharing the benefits of old technology with the world, the Human
Unity Project appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, several decades after the end of the plague.
Many people flocked to their banner. Some were drawn by the promise of an idealistic utopia, a
new civilization where there would be no divisions of politics, ethnicity, or religion. Most were
lured by more practical concerns: easy access to food, housing, and medical care in a harsh
world where such things weren’t so easily available.
But as time went on, the project’s mysterious leaders took more and more control
over every aspect of members’ lives. And as the number of volunteers for the project dwindled,
it became more aggressive. A military was formed. Surrounding fledgling nation-states were
invaded and absorbed in the name of security and peace.
The Human Unity Project has become the first true global superpower since the plague,
boasting the largest, most technologically advanced army in the world. Tens of millions live
under its control. Information travelling in and out of Unity territory is carefully controlled. The
Project presents itself as an advanced society whose happy members enjoy lives free of crime,
sickness, or hunger, but dark rumors swirl among those outside its control of human
experimentation, population culling, torture, and mind control.
In its quest to bring every single human on the planet under its control, the Project
now turns its attention to the region in the northeast known as the New Frontier, an
area that was largely uninhabited before the plague, when a great multitude of
refugees fled to the area. Here, on the fringes of civilization, isolation and freezing
temperatures insulated them from the epidemic. Huge swathes of rough terrain and
inhospitable winters have kept the New Frontier mostly free of UNITY interference. In
this environment, an extremely diverse group of squabbling small independent states
have arisen representing a wide variety of philosophies, politics, and religions.
This is something the ideology of The Human Unity Project cannot tolerate. Division and
diversity of thought are dangerous. So the Project turns its eye to these
settlements, to absorb and assimilate them like so many before. The factions of the
New Frontier, divided, disorganized, and technologically limited, are easy prey.
But a young mercenary with a powerful piece of lost technology may have some surprises in
store for everyone…