Forrest Cameranesi Geek of all Trades

(5x25) Pantheon Synthesis: Part 3, Episode 1

At the close of the 20th century, the communist factions of the world in Asia, Africa, and America eventually collapsed into economic ruin in the face of a seemingly interminable arms race with the nationalist countries of Europe, Columbia, and Auei. The concurrent space race meanwhile drove the Pantheon to withdraw nearly all of their near-Earth operations, and even drove them further into hiding within the Jovian system, eventually building a central spacestation around their mothership, hidden within the calm eye of the Great Red Spot of Jupiter.

The century following the end of the Cold War saw in turn a "Silent War", wherein the supposed victors of the Cold War gradually destroyed their own values they had championed, turning on their own people and growing increasingly dependent on imperial colonization of the former communist world. Their populations grew divided into a small "free" wealthy upper class who were practically required to constantly demonstrate their fierce nationalistic patriotism, or else be cast down among the almost universally criminalized lower classes and trapped in an ever-growing prison system that was, itself, a microcosm of communism within the ostensibly "free" nations. Rising automation in turn made more and more people "useless" to those who owned the world, and cast more and more of them down into the subjugated class.

Only a few Foundation agents remained on Earth to monitor these goings-on. With the world no longer facing immanent nuclear apocalypse since the collapse of communism, much less active intervention was required, and the Foundation agents remaining on Earth served more as anthropological observers than agents of change. But some of them, embedded in this cruel and injust mortal culture for many long years, began to believe that the Foundation should be acting as agents of change. Despite the long-standing prohibition against intervention in mortal affais, a few of those agents eventually couldn't stand idly by any longer, and hatched a plan to help the world without revealing themselves to it.

Next: Pantheon Synthesis: Part 3, Episode 2