The Terran Union - 2182AD

AD 2182: Earth is under the heel of The Terran Union, a brutal, authoritarian globalist superstate and a successor to the United Nations, which perished in the fires of World War III (referred to as the reckoning).   That description however, doesn't begin to adequately describe the horrific existence that most people in this world live in. Forty per cent of above sea-level surface is irradiated wasteland and it is heavily urbanised. The government exists in a state that can only be described beyond corrupt, ran by shady societies, ruthless megacorporations and people willing to kill, rape, murder, sleep and drag their way up the ladder for sweet sweet dollars. The powers that be largely do not care about the lives of people, most of whom live on basic minimum income, and struggle by. Technology, Urbanisation and Crime have all run far beyond the reins of real control. Corporations are involved in all aspects of life, often providing services the government are supposed to provide and society as a whole is largely a free-for-all of hedonistic, murderous insanity.   It's an urban society, with approx 10 bn of the 16 billion humans alive in the Terran Union living on Earth, and 80% (8 billion) of those living in major metropolitan areas. The largest are: London, Manchester, Berlin, Paris, Lagos, Moscow, Beijing, Brasilia, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Mumbai, Shanghai, Buenos Aires, Johannesburg, Islamabad, Delhi and Tokyo.   These cities are massively built upon. Land reclaimation, despite the sea level rising heavily was a major project following the end of the war, and massive Arcology structures were built over bays and estuaries to allow upward expansion. For example, New York, the largest city and the TU capital, sits behind a four-hundred metre tall dam (constructed thanks to rising sea levels in the 21st century) and at least four arcologies housing fifteen million people each stretch to around 10 kilometres into the sky. The city also houses 65 million so called groundlings, many in Skyscrapers of concrete and former shipping containers. Streets and walkways criss cross each other for around three hundred metres above the true surface level. It is, to put it mildly, urban hell.   Outside the cities, life gets worse. 50% of the world's arable land is completely unusable, due to the use of nuclear weapons (or Devil-bombs as they are called in slang terms). This is called the Deadlands and various bands of exiled humans, ethnic supremacists, luddite communes and other various groups live in isolation out here, cut off from all society and any real power. The food production zones are where the poorest people who lack any of the cybernetics or breathing equipment needed to survive the lowest levels of the cities live. They are destitute and often get by on the little food they can.   In this future, you have to dive into the abyss to survive. The trick is to survive without the abyss changing you.