What follows is the first part of a backstory I wrote for a first-person shooter game.  This material is copyrighted.

The year is 2084. The world has long forgotten any hope of living peacefully with itself. All nations have polarized themselves with hatred against each other, and war has erased all but the memory of the millennial dawn's hopes of peaceful utopia. Bloodlust and madness are cherished attributes in a society of constant readiness for aggression.

War had become a well-understood custom of all cultures, with most people seeing their first combat no later than age eight or nine, and their first fallen comrade even younger than that. But the events of the new year are not familiar, and defy apprehension by even the most widely-traveled and prudently-insane of our time. In recent months, the changing face of the war has shocked and horrified us in ways mankind believed itself too tough to ever feel again.

Warriors today remember decades ago, when special platoons carried technologies of utter destruction, roamed in traveling flanks, and obliterated tens of thousands with each precious and well-placed strike. These weapons of the 2050s enraged nature, and famine began to spread without apparent rhyme or reason as their use continued. In a brief change of the shape of the war, allies turned against allies to outfox the movements of these coveted prototypes, resorting to brief, small-scale nuclear exchanges to ensure the end of the megaplatoon's reign of obliteration. Advanced weapons factories and theoretical laboratories became the primary target of all sides, and black ops teams agreed to turn their focuses to their own factions, ensuring that all sides were safe from the threat of such munitions. Only the technologies built to detect such arms have been spared, and were soon fitted to spy satellites, forming a constant vigil against the buildup of such terror. 

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