Interlude

2069-2084

Resources continue to pour into Earth from the Frontier, helping to alleviate Earth's problems. Technologies are refined and the new MegaCorporations, among their ranks MarSec, Transtellar and Solmine, experience an economic boom. A corporation known as General Metro patents the first antigravity drive in 2071, and the Megalopolis project is adapted to include the magnetic strips beneath the roads that make the technology possible. Another new corporation develops and debuts SensoVision, the new form of entertainment. Television are radio forgotten, as SensoVision provides everything - sight, smell, sound, end even touch on the fully absorbing sets.

Concealed by these booms is the worrying news that increasing amounts of pollutants in the Earth's atmosphere will make the already toxic air completely unbreathable in a few decades. Many of Earth's richer citizens who are not tied down by the corporations leave for the Frontier or Mars and Luna, boarding Transtellar's new cruise liners.

Early in 2081, MegaPrimus, the first megalopolis, is completed. One million people, the selected test population, are moved into the city, as do many of the corporations, who employ most of the citizenry. X-COM, too, establish a covert presence.

Despite the immense success of the project, MegaPrimus brings new problems with it's creation. The undesirables of the world - criminals, hoodlums, gangsters, scum, outlawed cyborgs and hybrids, and more - all want a part of the glory of MegaPrimus. Despite protests by the governments, hundreds of thousands of people move into the slum buildings still around the edges of MegaPrimus - remnants of Toronto. Despite the minor problems these undesirables bring with them, life in the city is prosperous, and the pleased governments agree to fund a further three Mega-cities, over the ruins of New York, Sydney, and London.