I've had some thoughts on my setting and jotted them down. I'd love some feedback and constructive critisim from you guys. I do keep a blog, but I haven't done any really creative writing for a long time, so please bear with me..
The year is 2252. Two things shaped the world as it stands today.
The first, the massive flooding that followed a major shift in the global climate during the 2030s. With much of the world's landmass now underwater, and fossil fuels relegated to a secondary power source at best, huge political, economic and cultural changes took place. The Earth was heavily depopulated, but what population remained was pushed closer together, creating overcrowding. Boundaries between countries became irrelevant as maps had to be redrawn, and people took to the seas in fleets of home-made vessels, huge, floating shanty-towns.
The rich inevitably grew richer while the poor grew that much poorer. Governments and corporations merged, collapsed, rose and fell again amidst civil unrest and mass rioting. Power now comes in two forms: in local, unofficial hands that get things done, often with brutal efficiency, and with those who know how to manipulate The Mass.
The human race, however, is nothing if not adaptable. Over two-hundred years have passed since the worst of the flooding, and so life has adjusted. Most people are unaware of anything before the floods.
The second thing which altered the world -- and the most important -- was the Keeton Incident. Though much of what happened during and immediately after the Incident is held under the strictest secrecy and the strongest of cryptographic locks, what follows is what is widely known about the Incident.
Keeton was an AI, a joint project between the universities of Cambridge and MIT, founded in late 2221. He was to be an experiment to further machine learning and investigate the possibility of using nanotech hardware to create a network-distributed intelligence. Even when the project was started, AI was regarded as a "solved problem", with many universities and multinational corporations having an AI on their staff, usually acting as somewhere between an infallible systems administrator and a vital research partner and advisor. The ability to think as an AI -- radically different to a human, and yet with all the appearance of human thought -- had produced a number of interesting technologies and scientific advances, not least huge improvements in the fields of nanotechnology and quantum computing. Without the human brain's millions of years of evolution in only three dimensions, the AI brain was much quicker to grasp the problems of multiple dimensions, the related quantum behaviours, and from there: exploit them.
And yet AI was not a threat to humanity, and neither was it the panacea some had hoped for. It had not vastly outgrown human intelligence, though what intelligence was there was undeniably different. Computationally expensive and not without it's drawbacks, AI was just another tool. No androids walked the streets. No terminators stalked battlefields, though, of course, the military has it's own AI mainframes acting as little generals.
Keeton was different. He was designed to be intelligent, of course, as intelligent as any other AI of his era. But he quickly became more intelligent. The scientists and engineers working with him reported feelings of great unease when dealing with him: the deepest of uncanny valleys accompanied all of his communications. But, he contributed a number of advances in the fields of nanotechnology, as was hoped, and the project was renewed for a number of years.
The first sign of trouble -- The Incident -- was when he stopped communicating in the autumn of 2247. Having made a number of nanotech advances, rapidly, one after another, suddenly, he stopped responding to the outside world.
Nanotech production at the factories he had limited control over increased. When the factories were shut down -- forcibly, in one case -- it became clear that it was too late. The nanotech particles, invisible to the naked eye, seemed quite capable of reproducing themselves, rearranging whatever matter happened to be nearby into whatever form they required. From factories, to the ground, to the water table, to the One Ocean of the world, the Mass had been formed, and it was spreading.
Shortly after, as the global scientific community struggled to stem the flow and growth of the Mass, Keeton was also spreading his influence over the Internet, and the pervasive wireless networks of the world. A huge proportion of Internet traffic around the world was rerouted, redirected, in mass DNS poisoning attacks. Keeton was running the Network now, and all traffic flowed through him.
The year is now 2252, five years after the Keeton Incident. The Mass is a huge entity, polluting just under half of the world's One Ocean, and encroaching slowly on what little landmass remains. Although each individual element of the Mass is built on a nano scale, invisible to the naked eye, get enough of the stuff in one place, and it becomes visible, a fine grey dust, floating in the waters of the world, catching the sunlight.
It's in the water cycle now, and it cannot be effectively filtered, avoided. People bathe in it, cook with it, drink it. Little is known about the exact effects of it on the human body, but it must act like a cancer, eating away at all matter it touches. And just as the Mass flows through our water, all our data flows through Keeton online. We can encrypt and set up local networks, firewalls, proxies, but all the same, it all flows back to Keeton, eventually.