'I burn down the space elevator'

AP reports are usually utterly boring to anyone who wasn't there so the rest of this is behind a break.

Everyone else has already made intelligent comments about the system we used, Ghost/Echo.

I wrote this as a standard relation of events but it was too long and too dull. Instead, here are a series of history fragments from 'To The Stars'

Things we know now.

Humanity has colonised the local system but there is no obvious sign of interstellar flight.

There are penal colonies beneath the frozen surface of Europa. Rich people fly Solar Yachts around and there are slums enfolding the great works of a previous age.

The Siri Lankan city of Colombo has the Earths only space elevator.

Some time during the end of the war against the Hideous Murdering Bug Things, or just afterwards, there was a catastrophic fire in the Flavelas built up at the bottom of the Elevator. This threw the whole thing a few degrees out of alignment. The damage to earth's orbital space docks caused the crash of the ship 'Hugo Gernsback into the Pacific Ocean.

Ten days later the centre of London was also badly damaged by fire. The cause was traced to illegal, experimental weapons technology. All Tesseract weapons are now banned from the planetary surface.

The torsional damage to the Colombo elevator took five years to fix correctly and stopped high-volume trade between Earth and the rest of the system for that period. Along with the crash of the Gernsback and the burning of London, the disruption of inter-system trade was enough to cause a major planetary depression.

The main relics of the war seem to be damaged versions of the weapons created to fight it.

The Echelon III series has fragmented, possibly due to the enormous stress of the war. Its various aspects scheme against each other in the earth's Noosphere for cryptic and unknowable reasons.

AI designed super soldier clone veterans left over from the war have formed terrifying autist-criminal gangs. The largest of these, the Black Circle, operates out of Echo Park. They seem to loath each other but are almost universally unable of building lives in normal society.

The Earth is meshed with a failed and decayed virtual space called the 'Ghost World'. Think Innsmouth crossed with Second Life.

No-one knows exactly how or why the Ghost World failed but it is a forgotten source of power, danger and secrets. It's rumoured that experts in the Ghost world can perform semi-supernatural feats with their knowledge. Most people who go their either find nothing but endless empty, forgotten virtual space or don't come back at all.

The plans for a bleeding-edge far distant space station named 'Zero Point' have fallen into the hands of someone called 'Nix' who may be one of the remaining Echelon fragments.