The horrors of The Great Chaos have been chronicled in thousands of history texts. In the first two years the major problems were skyrocketing unemployment and bankruptcies, both personal and corporate, but these financial difficulties seemed unimportant as the ranks of the homeless and starving continued to swell. Tent and box communities appeared in the public parks of all the big cities by the winter of 2136-37 and the municipal governments responded by striving valiantly to find ways to provide services to them. These services were intended to limit the difficulties created by the supposedly temporary presence of these hordes of idle and underfed individ­uals. But when the economy did not recover, the squalid tent cities did not disappear. Instead they became permanent fixtures of urban life, growing cancers that were worlds unto themselves with an entire set of activities and interests fundamentally different from the host cities that were supporting them. As more time passed and the tent communities turned into hopeless, restless caldrons of despair, these new enclaves in the middle of the metro­politan areas threatened to boil over and destroy the very entities that were allowing them to exist. Despite the anxiety caused by this constant Damo­cles” sword of urban anarchy, the world squeaked through the brutally cold winter of 2137-38 with the basic fabric of modem civilization still more or less intact.

In early 2138 a remarkable series of events occurred in Italy. These events, focused around a single individual named Michael Balatresi, a young Francis­can novitiate who would later become known everywhere as St. Michael of Siena, occupied much of the attention of the world and temporarily fore­stalled the disintegration of the society.