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Description
The sequel to Amalgam Future 2059 a century down the road, taking a break from my usual map format to go back to the footnote-less format I used back when the original scenario was made (partially for nostalgia purposes, but also because this thing's been just sort of lingering in my files for over a year at around 90% completion and I wasn't really feeling up to updating it to my current map style right now). I suggest you take a look at the original here (www.deviantart.com/alexanderno… ) if you've never seen it before, since it's kind of essential to understand what the hell's going on here. As with the original, this isn't meant to be a serious prediction of the future- it's just insane silliness for the sake of being insane silliness.

- Canada remains disunited, and thanks to demographic shifts the former Canadian states have been growing more and more culturally divergent- for instance, Sasketchewan is now plurality Spanish-speaking and majority-Catholic, New Caledonia (formerly British Columbia) is basically the Third American Republic's mini-me and there is a sizable pro-annexation movement, the Inuit Confederation has taken over much of the north, and after the fall of the Catholic rogue state that once controlled it, Quebec is now majority-Buddhist.
- The American Union floundered economically and politically throughout much of the 2070s, 2080s, and 2090s, and the annexation of Ireland, Wales, and England didn't really help matters. Taking advantage of American weakness and internal division, Mexico went to war with America in 2101 and annexed Dinetah, Texas, and the Deep South, causing America to refederalize after the prewar government fled to Puerto Rico and Alaska, California, Nebraska, Maine, upstate New York, and the Pacific islands broke off. The Third American Republic, as it calls itself now, is far more centralized than the original United States of America and has heavily edited the constitution with such changes as eliminating the Senate, giving more power to the Assembly (as the House of Representatives was renamed, which was mainly an aesthetic choice), selecting the president at random from the entirety of the American population over fifteen (the current voting age), and doing away with the Second Amendment. The TAR has essentially isolated itself from the rest of the world after its humiliating defeat by Mexico, save for trade through its few remaining allies. America has turned over much of the workforce to automation and uses a form of universal basic income, with the majority of the population having careers in the arts or more delicate jobs nobody trusts the robots to do, with pretty much all the other work taken over by robots. The American economy was mainly propped up by Deseret-Kazakhstan in the postwar years, but it's since become self-sustaining. American robotics are the envy of much of the rest of the world, but America refuses to give up any of its technology, resulting in a lucrative black market. The religious scene in America has changed as well- the country is plurality atheist, and the major religions in America are (in order) Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Raelism. America only came out of isolation briefly in the 2120s to participate in the war against Europe, but returned to isolationism afterwards.
- California was initially a notable Mexican ally, but it broke apart thanks to internal issues in the 2130s. The Californian states are looked at rather similarly to how the Scandinavian states were over a century ago and are widely considered the most progressive states in the world.
- Deseret-Kazakhstan has kept the clunky name, though it's rebranded itself as a Federal Republic, and retains its status as a notable regional power. It's run from Central Asia nowadays, though the capital's in Tashkent as a compromise. The Desereti-Kazakh dialect of English has only gotten stranger and even more divergent from other English dialects as time passes (nobody's exactly sure where all those Hungarian loan words came from- the FRDK doesn't even have a notable Hungarian minority, for crying out loud!). Culturally, it's become a rather even mix of old American culture and Kazakh culture, with some Indian elements that rubbed off on them from being aligned with India for so long.
- Mexico, now called the Demarchist Union of Aztlan (renamed from Mexico in 2122), has adopted a convoluted system of varying levels of autonomy among its
provinces more like the former British Raj than anything else (which is especially fitting considering the massive gains Hinduism has made in Aztlan over the past several decades thanks to India's tenure as the sole superpower, making it currently about 25% Hindu). Aztlan has become a strange mix of a dominant-party democracy and a neo-demarchist state, with the PRI de facto controlling the country once more (though opposition parties are allowed to run, they have never gained a majority in government and have only managed to force the PRI down to having a plurality in government in a coalition a few times) and political parties using demarchist means to select candidates. Aztlanian culture has a lot of Indian influence, and there is also notable Navajo and Mayan cultural influence thanks to the rising dominance of those parts of the country. Among the aspects of Indian culture across the years adapted by Aztlan is a caste system, though theirs is based off of the western zodiac. The caste system has made the already-unrepresentative system even worse, as only those from certain castes can be selected for government roles based on their "natural temperaments," and caste-related hate crimes are a significant problem in Aztlan and its allies that have also adopted the caste system. On the plus side, however, the caste system is racially blind- both dragons of all scale colors and humans of all skin colors (the Aztlanian human population recently hit a quarter of a million) have equal opportunities in Aztlan, as long as they were born at the correct time of year.
- Coastal Venezuela successfully revolted and gained independence from Aztlan when the caste system was officially put in place and has since done its best to turn back the clock to the days of the early 21st century (minus the part where the country basically fell apart, of course), albeit now under a dragon-supremacist state that has forbidden humans from entering the country.
- Brazil is a vaguely-lefty rump state clinging to the coast after the Argentinian invasion and has enthusiastically adopted the Aztlanian caste system.
- Argentina has become the dominant power of South America after conquering its way north. It's currently under a white supremacist regime that puts dragons with white scales (or pale enough that the government considers them white enough) and the white humans living in the country (about fifty thousand or so currently) on top, with darker-scaled dragons and darker-skinned humans subject to random sterilization and segregation. At least it's still a democracy, though, albeit one in which only the upper class (whites and those passing as white) are allowed to vote.
- For some reason, Iceland, of all countries, balkanized after a devastating civil war three decades ago, and the successor states are all one-party states under the prewar political parties.
- England lost Scotland (and Wales after it got independence from the American Union following the war with Mexico) and is now just barely majority Polish-speaking (though the English dialect of Polish has a lot of English loan words), with culture being a schizophrenic combination of Polish, English, French, and German (the last two thanks to an influx of French and German immigrants after the fall of Europe). England is very bitter about its losses, but there's no way it can realistically climb back to the heights it once had. The government hasn't really changed at all, though, and the same political parties are still there, too.
- Catalonia and Euskadi took over all of Iberia and parts of France during the European War, spreading their languages and culture with them, and now the entirety of the peninsula speaks Catalan and Basque, with only small minorities speaking Spanish and Portuguese. There are more Spanish/Portuguese speakers in the Americas than in Iberia now.
- The European Federation fluctuated throughout its history between the right and left, depending on how the election cycles went, until the 2121 Strasbourg Coup saw the overthrow of the previous pseudo-democratic socialist government and its replacement with a far-right totalitarian state, creating the European Empire. Predictably, the European Empire proceeded to begin massacring Europe's minorities until the international community, having learned from the last time something like this happened, invaded and put down the European Empire, with parts of Europe still remaining under occupation for decades afterwards just to make sure the European far-right had been put down for good. Out of all the EE successor states, the Republic of Charlemagne (named in a fit of medieval romanticism), which controls most of former France, Benelux, Germany, and parts of the Balkans and is run from the old European capital in Strasbourg, is by far the most powerful, and some wonder if it might rise to become a major power again in the future. Ironically, western Europe is now plurality Muslim, with large cities such as Paris having become majority-Muslim, though it was a peaceful demographic transition that mainly occurred after the fall of the European Empire thanks to movement from the cities into the rural parts of the country and there were no forcible religious conversions.
- Switzerland got parts of France and Italy as a reward for breaking its neutrality to join the war against Europe and subsequently flooded them with Swiss immigrants (Monaco and Liechtenstein voluntarily joined later), and the new Greater Swiss Confederation is a major neutral state in Europe.
- Southern Italy was taken over by the M87 cult in the aftermath of the fall of the European Empire, a rather weird group that branched off from Scientology just under a century ago and ended up mutating into something entirely new based around the worship of black holes, ritualistic self-harm (both physical and emotional, though usually the former), and elimination of individuality in preparation for the entirety of the populace being linked into a singular hive mind. The M87 Protectorate of Southern Italy terrifies its neighbors, but at least it isn't armed with weapons of mass destruction like a certain long-gone isolated rogue state- if they had them, they'd have already used them on the rest of the world without a thought. After an EMP pulse set off in the oceans south of Italy by a well-meaning extremist who hoped to crash the Southern Italian system and bring down its government but didn't really get the whole "a lot of people will die because of this" thing took out most of Southern Italy's electronics (and also those of most of Albania and western Greece, which they're still picking themselves back up from), the Southern Italian leadership turned to clockwork instead, because that was clearly the greatest and most logical reaction they could have possibly come up with ever in the history of great and logical reactions, and modern Southern Italian technology now resembles something out of a clockpunk novel from the early 21st century.
- Though Poland has expanded significantly, annexing Kaliningrad, Slovakia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Crimea, it is no longer the major power in eastern Europe and has instead become the international equivalent of the dirty old man in ragged clothes who sits on the street corner in a puddle of his own urine and starts frothing at the mouth whenever a gay person has the audacity to exist in his general vicinity. The Holy Polish Empire, as it has rebranded itself, refuses to follow the religious reforms of the Vatican (the current pope is a West African transgender man, which is another big reason the Poles hate the rest of the Catholic world) and has fallen back to the Middle Ages in terms of treatment of non-Christians, and it's even the new home of the Quebecois antipope (yep, he's still alive), who fled Quebec when the rogue state fell and ended up being given refuge in Warsaw, which was coincidentally looking for an antipope of its own at the very same time. (Rumors fly around the Internet that Poland caused the collapse of Quebec in order to get the the Quebecois antipope to come to Poland, but they're taken about as seriously as suggestions that Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer were over a century ago.) In recent years, Poland has begun severing the wings of its population (its population is solely dragons, as none of the humans were stupid enough to go to Poland after they were let out of the containment facilities post-vaccination) to prevent them from flying, just because they weren't comically evil enough already, and has been looking into tweaking their genes so they just won't grow wings at all. The fact that the upper class retains their wings has been lost on nobody, including the Polish people themselves, and revolutionary sentiment is slowly brewing.
- Russia would ultimately not be able to pick itself back up. Though Russia had a brief period where it began rising again and looked like it might become a regional power, after a humiliating loss to Deseret-Kazakhstan following an attempted invasion of Central Asia, Russia fell again. It's currently the poorest nation in the world and suffers from a declining population, ongoing radiation poisoning from the cities nuked during the civil war in the 21st century, and conflict between the majority-Muslim west and majority-Christian east that threatens to tear the nation apart for good.
- The Middle East has changed significantly. The most notable difference is that Turkey (now a demarchic state) is plurality-Jewish, with the remaining Muslim population concentrated in the west. Turkey is part of the Middle Eastern Economic Union, an economic and political union of demarchic and neo-demarchic/democratic-demarchic secular states that includes key members such as the Assyrian Confederation (formed from a merger of Iraq and Syria), the Demarchic Republic of Iran, and the Republic of Palestine (which still controls the Sinai Peninsula and the Suez Canal). The Middle East is relatively prosperous and secular, and after the Hejaz was broken off of Arabia as an independent, neutral caliphate, everyone seemed to become pretty happy with the current arrangement. The conflicted past of the Middle East is behind it, and its future looks rather bright.
- Israel is a democratic-demarchic state on good terms with the rest of the Middle East and is an "associated member" of the MEEU, though full membership isn't off the table completely.
- Africa is on the rise. The North African Union, West African Union, the member states of the East African Union (which still hasn't federated yet), Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (which never fell apart and actually overcame its internal divisions to become a genuinely democratic multiethnic state) are the major powers of Africa and engaging in proxy wars in southern Africa, which is still rather impoverished and backwards. All of them are experimenting with various forms of demarchic socialism (West Africa is perhaps the strangest, currently having a strange system of direct democracy/e-democracy intermixed with demarchy), save the North African Union, which is giving anarcho-syndicalism a try.
- Sudan has become the refuge of the Japanese State-in-exile after the overthrow of the nationalist dictatorship, with many of their supporters also fleeing to Sudan along with them. Though the cultures of the Japanese upper class and Sudanese lower class remain separate, both of them follow a syncretic religion formed from
Islam and Shintoism, and their cultures are slowly starting to merge as the classes grow less divided.
- Southern Africa has only grown even messier over the past century. Though Namibia never rose back up to conquer the entire south of the continent again, Mozambique did after it pulled itself back together, and it crashed and burned just as badly as Namibia did in the aftermath of its leader's death. The Cape's attempt to reunify South Africa fell apart even worse, leaving the region permanently divided to this day. The national divides across the south have changed the cultures there, and in some places you can't even tell that two areas were part of the same country a century and a half ago. North African, West African, East African, Ethiopian, and Congolese culture have also been rubbing off on the various nations, which doesn't help with the cultural divergences.
- Afghanistan was overthrown once again by a coalition of Hazara and Pashto rebels and converted into the Egalitarian Republic of Southern Central Asia. The ERSCA is dedicated to putting everyone on an equal footing, making sure everyone has equal opportunities, and just generally making sure everything is equal (their main problem being that they usually tend to sacrifice equity in the name of equality). ERSCA ideology is based off the idea that everyone, regardless of ethnicity, sexuality, gender identity, or any other distinguishing characteristic that might be used to discriminate against them (though, given the shifted cultural climate, none of those were really a problem in the area by the time of the revolution asides from ethnicity), is equal. In practice, though, the only changes are that it's become mandatory to learn all the major languages in the country (including Southern Central Asian sign language) instead of just Japanese, which had served as the lingua franca beforehand (and still does in most parts of the country), and that you'll get thrown in jail if you shout a racial slur in public. The ERSCA is also notable for being the only country where the alters of people with dissociative identity disorder are allowed to vote, though they have to bring the paperwork confirming their diagnosis with them to their polling place. The name "Southern Central Asia" was picked to avoid having to decide between calling the country Afghanistan, Pashtunistan, Hazarajat, etc.
- India reached its apex with the defeat of the European Empire and fell apart slowly afterwards as Chinese and Mexican interests slowly dismembered the once-proud superpower. Pakistan rules the subcontinent now, having grabbed several border territories during India's collapse. The dynamic the two once had is flipped, with the greatly-reduced India now being the Canada to Pakistan's USA, though Pakistan is only a regional power and not a superpower like India used to be.
- China is back in business, so to speak. After the fall of the Japanese nationalist dictatorship, the Republic of China retook Manchuria and rose back to become a great power, and it's now a full democracy under the center-left Reformer, center-right Communist (yes, you read that right), centrist Popular Unity, and big tent-demarchist Demarchy parties. It hasn't retaken Tibet (another multiparty democracy) and has no plans to, finding it preferable to keep it as just an ally.
- Korea remains disunited, as former North Korea is now more culturally Japanese than Korean and has a sizable Japanese minority, while South Korea retains its former culture. The two states now regard reunification as impossible, and the fact that they were once the same nation is a mind-blowing piece of trivia for some elsewhere in the world- yes, even though they're literally colloquially known as "North Korea" and "South Korea." Nobody said future people are any smarter than us.
- Japan's second empire collapsed from internal stress, and its former empire is now varying forms of one-party or dominant-party states, most of them aligned with Aztlan. All of the nations formerly in its sphere now have notable Japanese minorities.
- The majority of the Pacific is run by the Pan-Pacifican Empire (actually a fairly moderate and reasonable democratic federation- they mainly picked the name because they liked how it sounded), formed from a unification of Kamchatka, Alaska, Hawaii, and the various nations and territories of the Pacific Ocean, as well as the Philippines and Taiwan. Though the Pan-Pacifican Empire's capital is in Juneau, the country is de facto run by the Philippines and Taiwan.
- Indonesia is a corrupt republic and has become the Mexico to Aztlan's USA, undocumented immigration and all, though they have Shinto revolutionaries instead of cartels.
- New Zealand is an isolationist majority-Maori demarchic state that has cut off all relations with other countries and even has its own national internet separate from the global internet. Though New Zealanders can hack into the global internet and there are no laws against it, it's generally discouraged.
- Technology is strange. Artificial intelligence hasn't advanced to the point of sentience, but many AI are able to fool the Turing test. Nobody is really worried about a robot revolution, as the robots are far too monomaniacal to start questioning their purpose or contemplate whether they have a soul, but there are some weird groups that do want to give them sentience. Biotechnology is by far the most advanced field of science- all but a few organs can be totally regrown, most animal products people eat are vat-grown, almost all food has been genetically altered in some way or another, average people are living past 100, and the majority of people have had their immune systems genetically altered from birth to automatically fight off known pathogens. Though other technologies might appear to still be the same on the surface, albeit smaller and thinner (computer screens can be made as thinly and cheaply as paper, for instance), they're also far more durable (you can drop the same paper-thin screen off a several-hundred-story skyscraper and it'll be completely fine when it hits the ground, asides from maybe a few cracks depending on whether the road and sidewalk below are made out of plastic like most roads these days or if it's one of the old asphalt roads that hasn't been ripped up yet). Green energy has completely taken over, and the only fossil fuel power plants left standing are those used as museums as a somber reminder of worse times. Holograms have still not been invented yet- if you need to see something in 3D, just turn your phone to visuals-only veearee (pronounced "vee-ayr-ee" in a strange linguistic corruption of "VR") mode and clip it onto your face for however long you need to. Though veearee technology has come a long way, it's still not perfect, and asides from the most advanced veearee tech that uses full-body suits for complete immersion there's a distinct uncanny valley where it's almost, but not quite, like real life. The Internet is still alive and kicking and is kind of an archive of global cultural evolution by now, and just about everybody has internet access. Some things have changed much less, though- smart homes never took off and ended up dying out as people grew increasingly worried about corporate surveillance of their private lives, militaries (albeit now composed almost entirely of robots directed by a few people with assistant tactical AIs) still use helicopters, tanks, planes, and bullet-firing guns (though drones also join the fray nowadays, most planes are AI-piloted, and experimental solar-powered energy weaponry is being tested in laboratories by Aztlan), phones and computers are still much the same, just smaller and thinner, and physical keyboards are still overwhelmingly popular in the case of the latter, and clothes are still just simple pieces of cloth without any added gimmicks. (There are increasing numbers of dragons in the hotter parts of the planet that forsake clothing entirely, however, a practice which is slowly being adopted by other dragons around the world.) Cars don't really exist anymore outside of museums- you either take public transport, which has been developed much better around the world, or you fly there if you're not feeling particularly lazy today (provided that you're a dragon, of course- humans don't have any easy and quick methods to get places, other than walking). There are no permanent moon bases, nor has Mars been terraformed and/or settled- the populations of the moon and Mars are solely AI save for a few dragon or human managers to cover things the AI aren't equipped to handle, which extract resources and shuttle them back to Earth. Why bother unnecessarily endangering dragon/human lives when you can just have robots do all the dirty work instead?
- Culture, too, is strange. Just a look at the world gives one a bit of an idea as to how different things are- for instance, Central Asia, of all places, speaks English more than England itself does! (Ignore that the Deseret-Kazakhstan dialect is practically unintelligible to all other English-speakers, that doesn't matter right now.) The shifting of global religions, cultures, and languages has mostly been attributed to the Internet allowing for the spread of ideas around the world and letting people find things they're interested in that they might not have even known about beforehand, though there are some conspiracy theories about some global "deep state" purposely trying to shuffle around religion, culture, and language into an unrecognizable mess for some indeterminate, undoubtedly sinister reason.
- Global warming was ultimately averted thanks to a massive launch of reflective satellites into the atmosphere in the 2060s to shift the planet's albedo, but they did their job too well and nearly pushed the planet into a new Ice Age before a heroic team of Indian scientists shut them all down in a desperate mission that has been adapted into a blockbuster movie over a hundred times. The climate is slowly attempting to shift back to what it once was, and though the damage to the ecosystems and the loss of animal life was initially irreparable, the advancement of biotechnology has made fixing the environment a much more feasible task. Scientists around the world are currently attempting to clone the extinct animals, or failing that, genetically engineer the closest thing they can manage from the DNA of close genetic relatives. Heat waves and megastorms are still major problems in the equatorial areas of the world, but as the climate is being repaired they are slowly dying down. The preservation of much of the Amazon by the former Brazilian regime has helped massively with the recovery of the climate, and Argentina has been repeatedly threatened with war by the international community if it so much as looks at the Amazon Rainforest funny.
- After scientists studying the crater/lake where Madrid used to be made the shocking discovery that the dragon virus had most likely been carried on that meteor and spread from it afterwards (though they still haven't been able to figure out why, it at least explains Patient Zero being one of the first people to reenter the areas around former Madrid five years after the meteor strike- in hindsight, it's kind of embarrassing nobody figured it out earlier), a vaccine was developed from samples found in the meteor's remains, and while it couldn't convert anyone back into a human, it has successfully immunized the remaining human population to the virus. Thankfully, though all the first-generation dragons were carriers for the virus, their children did not become carriers, so the next generations of humans didn't need to be immunized after the first generation had completely died off. The human population is slowly recovering and currently sits at just under a million, with most of them living in Deseret-Kazakhstan, the TAR, Aztlan, and West Africa. Though dragon-human marriage is legal in most of the world and people are generally fine with it, since in the end the dragons are just humans that got hit with a weird virus back in the 2020s, there is some societal stigma among humans against those who do enter such relationships, as most humans want to get the human population up to at least even with the dragon population and resent those who don't submit their genes to the limited pool (for obvious reasons, dragon-human reproduction is not possible). On a related note, while the global dragon population is generally falling thanks to a variety of factors such as fear of overpopulation and lack of resources (society may be a lot better than it used to be, but it is by no means post-scarcity yet), the global human population is skyrocketing, and most human families have at least three or four children in comparison to dragons having on average 0.65 children per family (though these are global statistics and there are plenty of statistical outliers either way depending on the specific country).

Description
The sequel to Amalgam Future 2059 a century down the road, taking a break from my usual map format to go back to the footnote-less format I used back when the original scenario was made (partially for nostalgia purposes, but also because this thing's been just sort of lingering in my files for over a year at around 90% completion and I wasn't really feeling up to updating it to my current map style right now). I suggest you take a look at the original here (www.deviantart.com/alexanderno… ) if you've never seen it before, since it's kind of essential to understand what the hell's going on here. As with the original, this isn't meant to be a serious prediction of the future- it's just insane silliness for the sake of being insane silliness.

- Canada remains disunited, and thanks to demographic shifts the former Canadian states have been growing more and more culturally divergent- for instance, Sasketchewan is now plurality Spanish-speaking and majority-Catholic, New Caledonia (formerly British Columbia) is basically the Third American Republic's mini-me and there is a sizable pro-annexation movement, the Inuit Confederation has taken over much of the north, and after the fall of the Catholic rogue state that once controlled it, Quebec is now majority-Buddhist.
- The American Union floundered economically and politically throughout much of the 2070s, 2080s, and 2090s, and the annexation of Ireland, Wales, and England didn't really help matters. Taking advantage of American weakness and internal division, Mexico went to war with America in 2101 and annexed Dinetah, Texas, and the Deep South, causing America to refederalize after the prewar government fled to Puerto Rico and Alaska, California, Nebraska, Maine, upstate New York, and the Pacific islands broke off. The Third American Republic, as it calls itself now, is far more centralized than the original United States of America and has heavily edited the constitution with such changes as eliminating the Senate, giving more power to the Assembly (as the House of Representatives was renamed, which was mainly an aesthetic choice), selecting the president at random from the entirety of the American population over fifteen (the current voting age), and doing away with the Second Amendment. The TAR has essentially isolated itself from the rest of the world after its humiliating defeat by Mexico, save for trade through its few remaining allies. America has turned over much of the workforce to automation and uses a form of universal basic income, with the majority of the population having careers in the arts or more delicate jobs nobody trusts the robots to do, with pretty much all the other work taken over by robots. The American economy was mainly propped up by Deseret-Kazakhstan in the postwar years, but it's since become self-sustaining. American robotics are the envy of much of the rest of the world, but America refuses to give up any of its technology, resulting in a lucrative black market. The religious scene in America has changed as well- the country is plurality atheist, and the major religions in America are (in order) Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Raelism. America only came out of isolation briefly in the 2120s to participate in the war against Europe, but returned to isolationism afterwards.
- California was initially a notable Mexican ally, but it broke apart thanks to internal issues in the 2130s. The Californian states are looked at rather similarly to how the Scandinavian states were over a century ago and are widely considered the most progressive states in the world.
- Deseret-Kazakhstan has kept the clunky name, though it's rebranded itself as a Federal Republic, and retains its status as a notable regional power. It's run from Central Asia nowadays, though the capital's in Tashkent as a compromise. The Desereti-Kazakh dialect of English has only gotten stranger and even more divergent from other English dialects as time passes (nobody's exactly sure where all those Hungarian loan words came from- the FRDK doesn't even have a notable Hungarian minority, for crying out loud!). Culturally, it's become a rather even mix of old American culture and Kazakh culture, with some Indian elements that rubbed off on them from being aligned with India for so long.
- Mexico, now called the Demarchist Union of Aztlan (renamed from Mexico in 2122), has adopted a convoluted system of varying levels of autonomy among its
provinces more like the former British Raj than anything else (which is especially fitting considering the massive gains Hinduism has made in Aztlan over the past several decades thanks to India's tenure as the sole superpower, making it currently about 25% Hindu). Aztlan has become a strange mix of a dominant-party democracy and a neo-demarchist state, with the PRI de facto controlling the country once more (though opposition parties are allowed to run, they have never gained a majority in government and have only managed to force the PRI down to having a plurality in government in a coalition a few times) and political parties using demarchist means to select candidates. Aztlanian culture has a lot of Indian influence, and there is also notable Navajo and Mayan cultural influence thanks to the rising dominance of those parts of the country. Among the aspects of Indian culture across the years adapted by Aztlan is a caste system, though theirs is based off of the western zodiac. The caste system has made the already-unrepresentative system even worse, as only those from certain castes can be selected for government roles based on their "natural temperaments," and caste-related hate crimes are a significant problem in Aztlan and its allies that have also adopted the caste system. On the plus side, however, the caste system is racially blind- both dragons of all scale colors and humans of all skin colors (the Aztlanian human population recently hit a quarter of a million) have equal opportunities in Aztlan, as long as they were born at the correct time of year.
- Coastal Venezuela successfully revolted and gained independence from Aztlan when the caste system was officially put in place and has since done its best to turn back the clock to the days of the early 21st century (minus the part where the country basically fell apart, of course), albeit now under a dragon-supremacist state that has forbidden humans from entering the country.
- Brazil is a vaguely-lefty rump state clinging to the coast after the Argentinian invasion and has enthusiastically adopted the Aztlanian caste system.
- Argentina has become the dominant power of South America after conquering its way north. It's currently under a white supremacist regime that puts dragons with white scales (or pale enough that the government considers them white enough) and the white humans living in the country (about fifty thousand or so currently) on top, with darker-scaled dragons and darker-skinned humans subject to random sterilization and segregation. At least it's still a democracy, though, albeit one in which only the upper class (whites and those passing as white) are allowed to vote.
- For some reason, Iceland, of all countries, balkanized after a devastating civil war three decades ago, and the successor states are all one-party states under the prewar political parties.
- England lost Scotland (and Wales after it got independence from the American Union following the war with Mexico) and is now just barely majority Polish-speaking (though the English dialect of Polish has a lot of English loan words), with culture being a schizophrenic combination of Polish, English, French, and German (the last two thanks to an influx of French and German immigrants after the fall of Europe). England is very bitter about its losses, but there's no way it can realistically climb back to the heights it once had. The government hasn't really changed at all, though, and the same political parties are still there, too.
- Catalonia and Euskadi took over all of Iberia and parts of France during the European War, spreading their languages and culture with them, and now the entirety of the peninsula speaks Catalan and Basque, with only small minorities speaking Spanish and Portuguese. There are more Spanish/Portuguese speakers in the Americas than in Iberia now.
- The European Federation fluctuated throughout its history between the right and left, depending on how the election cycles went, until the 2121 Strasbourg Coup saw the overthrow of the previous pseudo-democratic socialist government and its replacement with a far-right totalitarian state, creating the European Empire. Predictably, the European Empire proceeded to begin massacring Europe's minorities until the international community, having learned from the last time something like this happened, invaded and put down the European Empire, with parts of Europe still remaining under occupation for decades afterwards just to make sure the European far-right had been put down for good. Out of all the EE successor states, the Republic of Charlemagne (named in a fit of medieval romanticism), which controls most of former France, Benelux, Germany, and parts of the Balkans and is run from the old European capital in Strasbourg, is by far the most powerful, and some wonder if it might rise to become a major power again in the future. Ironically, western Europe is now plurality Muslim, with large cities such as Paris having become majority-Muslim, though it was a peaceful demographic transition that mainly occurred after the fall of the European Empire thanks to movement from the cities into the rural parts of the country and there were no forcible religious conversions.
- Switzerland got parts of France and Italy as a reward for breaking its neutrality to join the war against Europe and subsequently flooded them with Swiss immigrants (Monaco and Liechtenstein voluntarily joined later), and the new Greater Swiss Confederation is a major neutral state in Europe.
- Southern Italy was taken over by the M87 cult in the aftermath of the fall of the European Empire, a rather weird group that branched off from Scientology just under a century ago and ended up mutating into something entirely new based around the worship of black holes, ritualistic self-harm (both physical and emotional, though usually the former), and elimination of individuality in preparation for the entirety of the populace being linked into a singular hive mind. The M87 Protectorate of Southern Italy terrifies its neighbors, but at least it isn't armed with weapons of mass destruction like a certain long-gone isolated rogue state- if they had them, they'd have already used them on the rest of the world without a thought. After an EMP pulse set off in the oceans south of Italy by a well-meaning extremist who hoped to crash the Southern Italian system and bring down its government but didn't really get the whole "a lot of people will die because of this" thing took out most of Southern Italy's electronics (and also those of most of Albania and western Greece, which they're still picking themselves back up from), the Southern Italian leadership turned to clockwork instead, because that was clearly the greatest and most logical reaction they could have possibly come up with ever in the history of great and logical reactions, and modern Southern Italian technology now resembles something out of a clockpunk novel from the early 21st century.
- Though Poland has expanded significantly, annexing Kaliningrad, Slovakia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Crimea, it is no longer the major power in eastern Europe and has instead become the international equivalent of the dirty old man in ragged clothes who sits on the street corner in a puddle of his own urine and starts frothing at the mouth whenever a gay person has the audacity to exist in his general vicinity. The Holy Polish Empire, as it has rebranded itself, refuses to follow the religious reforms of the Vatican (the current pope is a West African transgender man, which is another big reason the Poles hate the rest of the Catholic world) and has fallen back to the Middle Ages in terms of treatment of non-Christians, and it's even the new home of the Quebecois antipope (yep, he's still alive), who fled Quebec when the rogue state fell and ended up being given refuge in Warsaw, which was coincidentally looking for an antipope of its own at the very same time. (Rumors fly around the Internet that Poland caused the collapse of Quebec in order to get the the Quebecois antipope to come to Poland, but they're taken about as seriously as suggestions that Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer were over a century ago.) In recent years, Poland has begun severing the wings of its population (its population is solely dragons, as none of the humans were stupid enough to go to Poland after they were let out of the containment facilities post-vaccination) to prevent them from flying, just because they weren't comically evil enough already, and has been looking into tweaking their genes so they just won't grow wings at all. The fact that the upper class retains their wings has been lost on nobody, including the Polish people themselves, and revolutionary sentiment is slowly brewing.
- Russia would ultimately not be able to pick itself back up. Though Russia had a brief period where it began rising again and looked like it might become a regional power, after a humiliating loss to Deseret-Kazakhstan following an attempted invasion of Central Asia, Russia fell again. It's currently the poorest nation in the world and suffers from a declining population, ongoing radiation poisoning from the cities nuked during the civil war in the 21st century, and conflict between the majority-Muslim west and majority-Christian east that threatens to tear the nation apart for good.
- The Middle East has changed significantly. The most notable difference is that Turkey (now a demarchic state) is plurality-Jewish, with the remaining Muslim population concentrated in the west. Turkey is part of the Middle Eastern Economic Union, an economic and political union of demarchic and neo-demarchic/democratic-demarchic secular states that includes key members such as the Assyrian Confederation (formed from a merger of Iraq and Syria), the Demarchic Republic of Iran, and the Republic of Palestine (which still controls the Sinai Peninsula and the Suez Canal). The Middle East is relatively prosperous and secular, and after the Hejaz was broken off of Arabia as an independent, neutral caliphate, everyone seemed to become pretty happy with the current arrangement. The conflicted past of the Middle East is behind it, and its future looks rather bright.
- Israel is a democratic-demarchic state on good terms with the rest of the Middle East and is an "associated member" of the MEEU, though full membership isn't off the table completely.
- Africa is on the rise. The North African Union, West African Union, the member states of the East African Union (which still hasn't federated yet), Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (which never fell apart and actually overcame its internal divisions to become a genuinely democratic multiethnic state) are the major powers of Africa and engaging in proxy wars in southern Africa, which is still rather impoverished and backwards. All of them are experimenting with various forms of demarchic socialism (West Africa is perhaps the strangest, currently having a strange system of direct democracy/e-democracy intermixed with demarchy), save the North African Union, which is giving anarcho-syndicalism a try.
- Sudan has become the refuge of the Japanese State-in-exile after the overthrow of the nationalist dictatorship, with many of their supporters also fleeing to Sudan along with them. Though the cultures of the Japanese upper class and Sudanese lower class remain separate, both of them follow a syncretic religion formed from
Islam and Shintoism, and their cultures are slowly starting to merge as the classes grow less divided.
- Southern Africa has only grown even messier over the past century. Though Namibia never rose back up to conquer the entire south of the continent again, Mozambique did after it pulled itself back together, and it crashed and burned just as badly as Namibia did in the aftermath of its leader's death. The Cape's attempt to reunify South Africa fell apart even worse, leaving the region permanently divided to this day. The national divides across the south have changed the cultures there, and in some places you can't even tell that two areas were part of the same country a century and a half ago. North African, West African, East African, Ethiopian, and Congolese culture have also been rubbing off on the various nations, which doesn't help with the cultural divergences.
- Afghanistan was overthrown once again by a coalition of Hazara and Pashto rebels and converted into the Egalitarian Republic of Southern Central Asia. The ERSCA is dedicated to putting everyone on an equal footing, making sure everyone has equal opportunities, and just generally making sure everything is equal (their main problem being that they usually tend to sacrifice equity in the name of equality). ERSCA ideology is based off the idea that everyone, regardless of ethnicity, sexuality, gender identity, or any other distinguishing characteristic that might be used to discriminate against them (though, given the shifted cultural climate, none of those were really a problem in the area by the time of the revolution asides from ethnicity), is equal. In practice, though, the only changes are that it's become mandatory to learn all the major languages in the country (including Southern Central Asian sign language) instead of just Japanese, which had served as the lingua franca beforehand (and still does in most parts of the country), and that you'll get thrown in jail if you shout a racial slur in public. The ERSCA is also notable for being the only country where the alters of people with dissociative identity disorder are allowed to vote, though they have to bring the paperwork confirming their diagnosis with them to their polling place. The name "Southern Central Asia" was picked to avoid having to decide between calling the country Afghanistan, Pashtunistan, Hazarajat, etc.
- India reached its apex with the defeat of the European Empire and fell apart slowly afterwards as Chinese and Mexican interests slowly dismembered the once-proud superpower. Pakistan rules the subcontinent now, having grabbed several border territories during India's collapse. The dynamic the two once had is flipped, with the greatly-reduced India now being the Canada to Pakistan's USA, though Pakistan is only a regional power and not a superpower like India used to be.
- China is back in business, so to speak. After the fall of the Japanese nationalist dictatorship, the Republic of China retook Manchuria and rose back to become a great power, and it's now a full democracy under the center-left Reformer, center-right Communist (yes, you read that right), centrist Popular Unity, and big tent-demarchist Demarchy parties. It hasn't retaken Tibet (another multiparty democracy) and has no plans to, finding it preferable to keep it as just an ally.
- Korea remains disunited, as former North Korea is now more culturally Japanese than Korean and has a sizable Japanese minority, while South Korea retains its former culture. The two states now regard reunification as impossible, and the fact that they were once the same nation is a mind-blowing piece of trivia for some elsewhere in the world- yes, even though they're literally colloquially known as "North Korea" and "South Korea." Nobody said future people are any smarter than us.
- Japan's second empire collapsed from internal stress, and its former empire is now varying forms of one-party or dominant-party states, most of them aligned with Aztlan. All of the nations formerly in its sphere now have notable Japanese minorities.
- The majority of the Pacific is run by the Pan-Pacifican Empire (actually a fairly moderate and reasonable democratic federation- they mainly picked the name because they liked how it sounded), formed from a unification of Kamchatka, Alaska, Hawaii, and the various nations and territories of the Pacific Ocean, as well as the Philippines and Taiwan. Though the Pan-Pacifican Empire's capital is in Juneau, the country is de facto run by the Philippines and Taiwan.
- Indonesia is a corrupt republic and has become the Mexico to Aztlan's USA, undocumented immigration and all, though they have Shinto revolutionaries instead of cartels.
- New Zealand is an isolationist majority-Maori demarchic state that has cut off all relations with other countries and even has its own national internet separate from the global internet. Though New Zealanders can hack into the global internet and there are no laws against it, it's generally discouraged.
- Technology is strange. Artificial intelligence hasn't advanced to the point of sentience, but many AI are able to fool the Turing test. Nobody is really worried about a robot revolution, as the robots are far too monomaniacal to start questioning their purpose or contemplate whether they have a soul, but there are some weird groups that do want to give them sentience. Biotechnology is by far the most advanced field of science- all but a few organs can be totally regrown, most animal products people eat are vat-grown, almost all food has been genetically altered in some way or another, average people are living past 100, and the majority of people have had their immune systems genetically altered from birth to automatically fight off known pathogens. Though other technologies might appear to still be the same on the surface, albeit smaller and thinner (computer screens can be made as thinly and cheaply as paper, for instance), they're also far more durable (you can drop the same paper-thin screen off a several-hundred-story skyscraper and it'll be completely fine when it hits the ground, asides from maybe a few cracks depending on whether the road and sidewalk below are made out of plastic like most roads these days or if it's one of the old asphalt roads that hasn't been ripped up yet). Green energy has completely taken over, and the only fossil fuel power plants left standing are those used as museums as a somber reminder of worse times. Holograms have still not been invented yet- if you need to see something in 3D, just turn your phone to visuals-only veearee (pronounced "vee-ayr-ee" in a strange linguistic corruption of "VR") mode and clip it onto your face for however long you need to. Though veearee technology has come a long way, it's still not perfect, and asides from the most advanced veearee tech that uses full-body suits for complete immersion there's a distinct uncanny valley where it's almost, but not quite, like real life. The Internet is still alive and kicking and is kind of an archive of global cultural evolution by now, and just about everybody has internet access. Some things have changed much less, though- smart homes never took off and ended up dying out as people grew increasingly worried about corporate surveillance of their private lives, militaries (albeit now composed almost entirely of robots directed by a few people with assistant tactical AIs) still use helicopters, tanks, planes, and bullet-firing guns (though drones also join the fray nowadays, most planes are AI-piloted, and experimental solar-powered energy weaponry is being tested in laboratories by Aztlan), phones and computers are still much the same, just smaller and thinner, and physical keyboards are still overwhelmingly popular in the case of the latter, and clothes are still just simple pieces of cloth without any added gimmicks. (There are increasing numbers of dragons in the hotter parts of the planet that forsake clothing entirely, however, a practice which is slowly being adopted by other dragons around the world.) Cars don't really exist anymore outside of museums- you either take public transport, which has been developed much better around the world, or you fly there if you're not feeling particularly lazy today (provided that you're a dragon, of course- humans don't have any easy and quick methods to get places, other than walking). There are no permanent moon bases, nor has Mars been terraformed and/or settled- the populations of the moon and Mars are solely AI save for a few dragon or human managers to cover things the AI aren't equipped to handle, which extract resources and shuttle them back to Earth. Why bother unnecessarily endangering dragon/human lives when you can just have robots do all the dirty work instead?
- Culture, too, is strange. Just a look at the world gives one a bit of an idea as to how different things are- for instance, Central Asia, of all places, speaks English more than England itself does! (Ignore that the Deseret-Kazakhstan dialect is practically unintelligible to all other English-speakers, that doesn't matter right now.) The shifting of global religions, cultures, and languages has mostly been attributed to the Internet allowing for the spread of ideas around the world and letting people find things they're interested in that they might not have even known about beforehand, though there are some conspiracy theories about some global "deep state" purposely trying to shuffle around religion, culture, and language into an unrecognizable mess for some indeterminate, undoubtedly sinister reason.
- Global warming was ultimately averted thanks to a massive launch of reflective satellites into the atmosphere in the 2060s to shift the planet's albedo, but they did their job too well and nearly pushed the planet into a new Ice Age before a heroic team of Indian scientists shut them all down in a desperate mission that has been adapted into a blockbuster movie over a hundred times. The climate is slowly attempting to shift back to what it once was, and though the damage to the ecosystems and the loss of animal life was initially irreparable, the advancement of biotechnology has made fixing the environment a much more feasible task. Scientists around the world are currently attempting to clone the extinct animals, or failing that, genetically engineer the closest thing they can manage from the DNA of close genetic relatives. Heat waves and megastorms are still major problems in the equatorial areas of the world, but as the climate is being repaired they are slowly dying down. The preservation of much of the Amazon by the former Brazilian regime has helped massively with the recovery of the climate, and Argentina has been repeatedly threatened with war by the international community if it so much as looks at the Amazon Rainforest funny.
- After scientists studying the crater/lake where Madrid used to be made the shocking discovery that the dragon virus had most likely been carried on that meteor and spread from it afterwards (though they still haven't been able to figure out why, it at least explains Patient Zero being one of the first people to reenter the areas around former Madrid five years after the meteor strike- in hindsight, it's kind of embarrassing nobody figured it out earlier), a vaccine was developed from samples found in the meteor's remains, and while it couldn't convert anyone back into a human, it has successfully immunized the remaining human population to the virus. Thankfully, though all the first-generation dragons were carriers for the virus, their children did not become carriers, so the next generations of humans didn't need to be immunized after the first generation had completely died off. The human population is slowly recovering and currently sits at just under a million, with most of them living in Deseret-Kazakhstan, the TAR, Aztlan, and West Africa. Though dragon-human marriage is legal in most of the world and people are generally fine with it, since in the end the dragons are just humans that got hit with a weird virus back in the 2020s, there is some societal stigma among humans against those who do enter such relationships, as most humans want to get the human population up to at least even with the dragon population and resent those who don't submit their genes to the limited pool (for obvious reasons, dragon-human reproduction is not possible). On a related note, while the global dragon population is generally falling thanks to a variety of factors such as fear of overpopulation and lack of resources (society may be a lot better than it used to be, but it is by no means post-scarcity yet), the global human population is skyrocketing, and most human families have at least three or four children in comparison to dragons having on average 0.65 children per family (though these are global statistics and there are plenty of statistical outliers either way depending on the specific country).