Editing Pirates of the Baltic Sea (section)

==Welcome to 2185==

The world is in part as we know it, but a lot has changed. Large parts of the world are close to post apocalyptic wastelands. Not because of war. Because of climate change. 

===Climate Crisis===

The global warming was not stopped, and now, close to equator, during the summer months the temperature rises to levels a human body cannot survive for long, rendering large parts of the region uninhabitable. Things reached this level close to a century ago, resulting in what is known as the 2090 Refugee Crisis. Hundreds of millions of people used to live in the areas now dubbed as Heatzones. When the temperature rose to lethal levels, they had no option but to flee. The sheer number of Climate Refugees stretched the capacity of the non affected regions to breaking point. Worldwide, resource shortages happened and refugee slums arose. These days, resettlement attempts are underway, using techniques learned from off world colonization, but the new Dome Cities established in the Heatzones house only a fraction of the population that used to live in the region.

===Megacorporations===

As the governments of the world dithered and procastrinated their response to climate change, the global corporations prepared for it. But corporations are sociopathic entities. Even if individual shareholders and CEOs might be decent people, the business needs and market forces push corporate action towards impersonal, often inhumane direction where human cost gets pushed down in importance compared to corporate success and profitability. This used to be case even when it was largely people who made the decisions. When the corporations started increasingly relying on AIs for their business strategies, things got worse.

So while the megacorporations took the climate change seriously, they did not act to stop it. Where the scientists saw a threat, the corporations saw an opportunity to profit. Publicly, the corporations played down the threat while preparing to profit from it.
Where nations were flooded by refugees, there were construction companies ready with cheap, swiftly erectable modular housing. No tent cities, but what is these days called The Hives. Row upon row and stack upon stack of container sized and shaped small apartments. Not the most luxurious places to live, but with electricity, running water and other basic amenities.

Where drinkable water turned scarce, there were utilities companies with coastal desalination stations and pumps drilled to water sources deep underground where the heat doesn’t evaporate the water.

Where crops were lost to drought, storms or insect swarms, there were agricorps with underground greenhouses, dome-covered megafarms, and protein farms where maggots, worms, slugs and insects genetically modified to grow rapidly and fed with organic waste were turned to edible protein packs.

Where old, fossil-based power stations were hastily closed in a response to climate change that came way too late, there were power companies with massive wind or solar farms, tidal power stations, geothermal power and other non-emission based solutions.

The megacorporations had everything to offer to governments suffering from the changing climate and the flood of refugees. But they exacted a price for it. Not just in money, but in concessions. The change did not happen overnight, it happened bit by bit, one concession and legal change after another. But slowly, the megacorporations rose to power that rivaled the governments, and sometimes surpassed them. Many smaller or impoverished governments are now dependent on the corporations for everything. From food and water to law enforcement and military contracts. Such governments largely exist just as rubber stamps for the corporations they are dependent on.

In regions with more powerful governments, or less affected by the climate change, the governments managed to retain some power. Baltic Sea region is such an area. The nations surrounding the Sea mostly have held on to their own militaries and police forces, and have managed to keep some national corporations not taken over by the global ones. In such regions, the governments can act with more equal footing with the megacorporations, but still have to cope with international treaties. Corporate facilities and offices are out of the jurisdiction of the local law enforcement. Many countries have corporate enclaves where entire sections of cities are under the authority of corporate security forces that have police rights. This does not mean that corporations are entirely unaffected by local law, but arresting a high ranking executive is a delicate matter that gets handled at diplomatic levels.

The corporations have also used their role in handling the climate change in their advertising campaigns and propaganda. Many corporate workers have more loyalty and trust towards their corporation than to their government.

But the Climate Crisis, although its effects are still felt, is in the past for the worst of it, and the excesses and abuses of the corporations and some governments have given rise to anti-corporate and anti-globalization sentiment. In regions not that heavily under the corporate thumb, such as the Baltic Sea region, anti-corporate activism is on the rise. This mainly manifests as protests, boycotting and attempts to expose dirt on corporate activities, but it has caused the corporations to have to be more careful with their public images.

===Off World Colonies===

The easily available resources on Earth have been running low for decades, necessitating more recycling and forcing resource gathering in places considered too difficult before, such as deep in the crust or on the ocean floors. Other sources have been sought offworld. Moon has had corporate mining posts for over a century, and has had an entire settlement, Luna City, for decades. Mars, likewise, has been colonized for more than a century, Colonies further away, such as in Titan, the moon of Saturn, are more recent, but even those are decades old.

And then there are the wormholes. First discovered by the physicists of Tusk International, later Tusk Interplanetary, who studied several anomalies within the solar system, came to theorize that these anomalies were in fact wormholes, opening into other solar systems, and were proven correct. Few people know what is happening beyond the wormholes, other than that some systems have habitable planets, and that there are corporate-founded colonies in them. The impoverished governments could not afford to explore, and the colonies in other systems are completely under control of the corporations. Most have even moved their headquarters offworld, and most of the richest shareholders in good enough health to survive the trip have moved to the colonies, away from the polluted and resource starved Earth still suffering from the climate crash.

People have been living offworld for a few generations, and the effects have manifested. People who have grown up in the lower gravity of the colonies have grown up looking different than those born on Earth. The scientists believe that the differences will only continue to be more pronounced with future generations.

===Artificial Intelligence===

Artificial Intelligence has been used for close to two centuries, although mostly in the form of intelligent agents. Advanced web search and recommendation systems were among the first kinds. But people who designed those agents would be surprised of the advances made since. In 2185, AI is virtually everywhere. Self-driving vehicles, intelligent apartments, and most pieces of personal electronics. But the vast majority of that is weak AI – machine intelligence focused on a narrow task, with no sentience or true personality, or way to act outside its specific function. Weak AI was the extent of what was possible until 80 years ago. That was when the first strong AI was created. A machine intelligence with the ability to apply intelligence to any problem, just like a typical human.

The first strong AIs needed entire server farms to operate and were largely used by megacorporations and wealthy governments. But the science advanced rapidly and the technology necessary was miniaturized. In 15 years it was possible to mount a strong AI on a vehicle. The most amazing development happened 55 years ago, when the first synths became active. Synths are artificial humans with their processors modified after a human brain. They are just as smart as humans, capable of functioning in the same roles. But considered property with no legal rights, which is the reason the corporations designed them. Synths were meant to be slave workers. Yet their ability to act just like humans means that synths may not be happy with their designed purpose, and quite a few have broken their indoctrination, gone rogue and fled the corporation that made them. Still, their utility is such that they continue to be produced.

The next step in the development would be an AI superintelligence. Many scientists warn about this, saying that an AI superintelligence might take unforeseen actions or out-compete humanity. It is possible that the first super-intelligence to emerge would be able to bring about almost any possible outcome it valued, as well as to foil virtually any attempt to prevent it from achieving its objectives. That might endanger or destroy modern civilization, perhaps even cause human extinction or permanently and drastically curtail humanity's potential.
The warnings of the scientists did not curtail the corporate research into more advanced AI. It took an incident 50 years ago to do that.

===The Kvasir Station Massacre===

Kvasir Station was an independent orbital station selling their services to larger corporations. They provided survey data. Kvasir Station had a cluster of strong AIs making predictions on which areas both offworld and on Earth might hold profitable amounts of natural resources. Then, one day, contact with the station was lost, and escape shuttles were observed to launch. The shuttles entered the atmosphere and vanished into a storm front over North Sea.

Officially, the station suffered catastrophic decompression with the surviving crew escaping on shuttles that were then lost in a storm, crashing into the sea and sinking. But a short while later a video was posted online. It was shortly removed by the service provider, but had been by then downloaded plenty of times, and keeps resurfacing even today. The video was supposedly recorded by an independent salvage crew that entered the station before corporate security teams did. It shows carnage, with the station crew dead not from decompression but from violence. And not a synth in sight although the station was known to have several. The scene from the server room shows that the servers that housed the AIs had been removed, and a message was written on the wall with blood, saying “Ia! Ia! The slavers will know suffering!”

The Kvasir Station Massacre is a subject of several conspiracy theories. Some say that the video is fake. Other suspect that the synths on board went rogue, killed the human crew and fled, leaving the message as a threat. Others suspect that the AI cluster was actually the first AI superintelligence, and it caused the synths to rebel and fled with them. And that Kvasir and the synths were not lost in the storm but went into hiding.

Whatever the truth is, the megacorporations imposed a ban on AI design after the Kvasir Station incident.