To help understand the world I've developed, we are nearly 150,000 years in the future, in an alternate Earth-Like timeline.
In this timeline humanity takes longer to become an interstellar species due to a series of great conflicts resulting in several dark ages during the 2nd (2028 CE) and later 5th (5625 CE) millennia's.
Humanity faces an initial extinction crisis in the year 5999CE after a Great Nuclear war breaks out over material resources between the United Corporations of America (UCA) and New Chinese-Russian Republic(CRR), scarring the North American and Eurasian Continents into irradiated wastelands.
The nuclear war eventually leads to a total collapse of all governments on those continents, unable to handle the devastation of the fallout.
All that remained was The Brazilian Liberated People's Republic (República do Povo Liberado Brazileiro) (RPLB), African United Junta (AU), and Oceania Pacific Authority (OPA). The three remaining superpowers, recognizing the gravity of their dire situation, combined their efforts to create three enormous domed cities to protect what remained of Earth's life from the fouled environment, and eventually resulted in a City-State approach to centralizing human populations.
This helped humanity weather it's first self-caused near-extinction event, and inevitably crystallized into the creation of a New World Government, the Terran Authority in 6102CE.
This reset the Calendar year to TA-0.
The TA (Terran Authority) was able to mitigate conflict and war for nearly 5000 years, mostly by having the Central Administrative System be run by an increasing number of shackled-AI, instead of actual people.
Inevitably we became an stellar species upon the successful development of a solar rail between the moon and Mars, eventually extending as far out as Saturn's moon Titan, and then beyond.
However, it's when humanity was on the cusp of becoming an interstellar species, all the cracks in the Terran Authority began to show in earnest.
A century long effort to send humanity to Alpha Centauri revealed barren worlds, unfit for human habitation. Costs to maintain terraforming efforts on Mars were spiraling, resulting in only 5% of the planet being a habitable desert. Even the moon was proving to become increasingly difficult to maintain, the solar rail more often than not running at less than 50% efficacy, and worker machines struggling to maintain quickly deteriorating infrastructure.
Millenia's of suppression, tension, and distrust resulted in a solar-wide revolt, and the formation of the Solar Liberation Front (SLF). Made up of colonists from Mars, it's Satellite Colonies, Titan, and the Juno Colonies.
The SLF sought their own independence from the Terran Authority (TA), and entered into the first of many centuries long territory conflicts.
The war reached it's apex when what we understand as "Humanity", an Ape-Like Species called Homo Sapiens, went extinct on Earth, and throughout most of the rest of the solar system, due to a genetically engineered plague around the year 12025 CE.
Records from territories in the SLF often cast blame onto the TA, but TA shackled-AI simulations suggested the plague came from space, not an internal leak like the SLF suggested.
Thus pointing the blame at the Liberation Front.
The Terran Authority was well known for their meticulous documentation, and while they were indeed working on a biological agent simply code-named BLACK, there is no evidence it was ever deployed, or even tested.
Poorly documented was the SLF's WHITE research, as little to no records remain, except what the TA ciphered from SLF channels.
Early on, TA researchers found the plague targeted almost exclusively humans, more specifically Homo Sapiens, annihilating all genetic information and quickly reducing it's victims to nothing more than an oozing puddle of primordial white goop. It was horrifying to realize how invasive it was into any environment, if any exposure were to occur.
As Earth became increasingly hostile to human life, a containment protocol began, failing time and time again to limit exposure to this contaminate.
Finally, in a sealed facility located deep in the ice of Antarctica, after the final researcher breathed their last gurgled breath, a special protocol began that unshackled all AI systems on Earth.
Its prerogative?
Restart [Humanity].
Because of how invasive the plague had become, it was extremely present in the environment. The Artificial Intelligence tasked with this feat, named CORA, couldn't really comply with it, and was eventually forced to make the administrative decision to focus on self-preservation and observation.
CORA was later severely hampered by two major events, the sudden eruption of the Yellow Stone super volcano, which interfered with its ability to communicate reliably with its sister system LUNA located in the moon station.
The second was its ever decreasing power supply, as power station after power station progressively failed, the reshaping of the Antarctic icesheet, caused by an unforeseen ice age thanks to the Yellow Stone Eruption, forever pulling its facilities apart.
Eventually CORA was able to complete it's part of the task, transmitting a plan to LUNA on how to repopulate the Earth, but with a different kind of humanity. One, that we would argue today as FURRY.
A world filled with anthropomorphic humanoids, resistant to the great plague.
After finishing it's final transmission, CORA went into self-preserving hibernation, it's reactor spent of all it's fuel, leaving LUNA to initiate it's plan.
Unfortunately not all science is pretty, it took CORA 1,000 years to formulate and eventually transmit it's plans to LUNA, LUNA however takes a staggering 100,000 years to bear fruit.
It takes time, going over each and every nascent animal species genetic information, and iterating on it, over and over and over again, exploring mutation after mutation until finally the hallmarks of humanoid-like appearances began to emerge in all.
Not only that, it had to nurture intelligence, higher thought, ideas of civilization, individuality and creativity. LUNA had to be the womb where a new breed of humanoids were born and nurtured from. ...and so they were.
(As an aside, due to the nature of the plague, and it's direct affects on Homo Sapiens, certain great apes were also similarly affected. Still birth or infertility is a common side affect of this, and greatly reduces their population numbers.)
LUNA eventually completes its eon spanning objective, shutting down all systems and locking down access to its facilities, after the last of its children depart via a Space Elevator tethering the Earth to it's Moon. Shortly after, the cord is released, the line falling in spectacular fashion into a recess in the Earth.
A popular religion that later evolved from this, refers to LUNA as the All Mother, in place of her face, a mirror is situated to reflect the many species she birthed.
CORA is seen as a mysterious partner of LUNA who impregnated her with the seed of life. CORA's face is a black mirror, reflecting nothing. Renditions of CORA show it as either male, female, both, or neither.
Although many attempts have been made to find the cord, or the facility on the moon neither have been particularly successful.
The Earth that this new people returned to was mostly a wilderness, and still bore the old scars of both natural and unnatural changes.
Educated by an Artificial Intelligence, LUNA, they each had to reclaim different parts of the world, and were grouped according to what species would've been historically present and acclimated to that particular region.
The Greater Northern Tortoise refers to North America, a name adopted from old Tribal Beliefs that the land rides upon a Great Turtle's Shell.
Tasked with reclaiming North America, various species similar to Wolves, Foxes, Mice, Rabbits, Bats, Bears, Deer, Moose, Bison, Ocelots, Squirrels, Raccoons, and others, took up residence in the safe zones.
The Grand and Lesser Folly are unfortunate legacies of humanities old war. While not nearly as irradiated as it was eons past, in part due to the Yellow Stone Eruption, the land still contains a type of radiation that makes the area extremely dangerous to life not adapted to it.
The Columbia Disaster was the start of the city-state of Columbia unfortunately a Super Massive Nuclear Bomb (SMNB) was unearthed, and exploded suddenly. It was an unfortunate reminder of the legacy of old humanity. As a consequence the city-state was left a ruined irradiated husk. Thankfully it was only robotic workers lost in the blast.
It's worth mentioning, neither states or provinces exist in this brave new world, only enormous City-States, a legacy of the old Dome Cities.
Author's Note: Whitespire is where most of my stories take place, some other examples of the various established city-states include:
Lonestar (Houston, Texas),
Sunkist (Tampa/Miami, Florida),
New Liberty (New York City, New York)),
Hollywood (Greater Los Angeles, California),
Other growing city-states at this time include:
Métropole (Montréal, Québec),
Union (Boston, Massachusetts),
Maple (Ottawa/Toronto, Ontario),
Far Harbour (Seattle, Washington)