Vast technological advancements in the mid-1980s were poised to advance humanity forward into a new era of prosperity, only to serve as the nooses with which parasitic corporate conglomerates hung the common man at the gallows. The human gave way to the transhuman, and with time the transhuman shall give way to the posthuman corporation: the immortal ideal of self-perpetuating profit, a veritable Hydra where ten heads rise where one is lopped off and heads grow bodies, new legs walking roads paved with the blood of the innocent. First-generation innovators such as IBM and Iomega gave way to the corporeal Gods of the 21st century such as TriOptic and Zhao-Jiang - omniscent, omnipetent, omnivorously ravenous for more and eternally desperate to sink their claws into what they couldn't have.

Power shifts, and with it comes that hunger. The wars are always the same - just play fill-in-the-blanks where necessary, swap around a few proper nouns, add media buzzwords where necessary to keep the populace from recognizing the patterns. If memory serves correctly, the earliest clashes were on behalf of the giants of the States and Japan - back in the '10s before protein farms were developed enough to keep eight billion mouths fed. Some of the American congos tried zoning out Japanese waters of the Pacific as their own. The government wasn't as pissed as the congos were - little bit of strong-arming and suddenly corporate interests align with national interests enough to deploy troops on the good word of the congos' firm investment in domestic security.

Didn't last too long - turns out that the world had slow-burned for long enough that the oceans boiled a bit too high for it to even matter who the hell was in whose waters. The farms came soon after, and the conflict (conflict, because it wasn't a war until the second one came along and they retroactively decided it was a war because the second one sure as hell was one) soon disappeared in the public consciousness, another casualty of Everything Happening All Of The Time.

But it set a precedent - told the congos that they were way stronger than countries at that point, effectively meaning that they had one of a million multinational militias at their fingertips. Told all of us that the world was on the way down the drain and that the runoff was piling up onto the coasts, swallowing them whole, driving us out of our homes and into the cities that held more people than entire states or provinces did back before all of this, and...

Four Corporate Wars later, a few dozen feet in the sea level later. World keeps heating up, pressure keeps building. Congos' sphere of influence is global at this point and yet they still want more, always still hungry. China is currently the biggest player in the world's game of economic keep-away. India is catching up - slowly. Doesn't look like either have any interest in giving the spot up. We move from new normal to new normal until "normal" no longer exists, perpetual states of flux becoming the standard routine for all those who press on in spite of their lives slowly, surely becoming obsolete.