THE REALITY GRADIENT SCI-FI UNIVERSE

WHAT IS THE REALITY GRADIENT?

The year is 2185.

Climate change has come and gone, and re-shaped the United States, carving a desert through the midwest and losing parts of Texas, Florida, and Louisiana to the sea. A global autocratic order, the Akson Society, has waxed and waned in influence, leaving in their wake towering interconnected walkways called canopies in the world’s largest major cities, as well as a nearly insurmountable gap between the rich and the poor.

Artificial Intelligence has expanded to create self-driving flying vehicles (called volantrae), while nascent artificially-intelligent entities lurk in the background.

Corporations have created genetically-altered clones, called models, to do the menial tasks that most of the rest of humanity won’t do, from construction to sex work. Far from being the promised saving grace of humanity, the creation of models divides America into models and non-models (called polli). Polli who consider cloning to be an enticement of demonic influence join forces with those who believe that models have stolen their jobs, bringing into existence one of the most powerful extremist organizations the United States has ever seen, the Human Pride Movement, and its global counterpart, Liberti Custodi.

Just beneath the surface, models and their allies fight for equal footing, while the Human Pride Movement try to destroy all model-kind, and the most prominent modeling company in the United States, Emergent Biotechnology, struggle to maintain control of the industry they created. These forces percolate together in the pressure-cooker the United States has become, destined one day to explode…

Welcome to the Reality Gradient universe. I’m the author, Andrew Sweet. Click on the buttons below to learn more about the universe, and to understand what the pieces are.