Humankind's long flirtation with Technology began with the first crude stone tools and ended with the fusion flames of the Final War. The war lasted five days. At the end of this time, no ruler, government or nation remained to declare itself the victor. Plutonium mushrooms hung over Earth's once-proud cities of steel and glass, turning them into radioactive charnel houses. Hundreds of millions suffered and died in the radioactive ruins, cursing the technocrats who had brought them to the gates of Paradise, only to deny them entrance.

Humanity had overseen the demise of the dodo, the passenger pigeon, the thylacine wolf and many other species. It now faced extinction at the hands of its primary survival attribute: intelligence.

Under the black, awful clouds that coalesced to form a funeral pall over the proud dreams and hopes of mankind, the flame of the human race guttered fitfully, on the brink of final, irrevocable extinction.

Nonetheless, the indomitable human will to survive made many of those remaining on the face of the radiation-scorched planet struggle to rebuild some remnant of civilisation in the wilderness, where the depredation and tribulation wrought by the thermonuclear weapons was less than in the ruined cities. The first townships were little more than loose collections of shanties where people banded together to scour the radioactive ruins for tinned food, bottled water, clothes or whatever else they could find that might prove to be of some use in their shared fight for survival.

The scourge of radioactive decay lingered, and, for generations, sports and stillbirths were common, and even the victors of the initial struggle for survival hovered on the brink of oblivion. It was then that evolution, held at bay for so long by the protective cocoon of civilisation, began once more to shape the future of humankind.