Your world...thus far...
The Cold War has ended, and communism has been rejected around the world, swept away by the winds of freedom and democracy. The Berlin Wall has fallen, Germany is now reunited, and Eastern Europe has broken away from the Soviet Bloc to seek democracy. The Soviet Union has collapsed into chaos, torn apart by the forces of freedom, nationalism, and ethnic tensions. A new global order is emerging.
Many of America's largest and most powerful corporations have been reeling from the rapid changes occurring in the world marketplace. Asia is emerging as a powerful economic force, with Japan and China now ranked as the second- and third-largest economies in the world. During the past five years, the top ten companies receiving US patents were Hitachi, Toshiba, Canon, Fuji, Philips, Siemens, Mitsubishi, IBM, GE, and Bayer.
We are now manipulating the human gene directly to cure disease, and we may soon be doing it to create new life forms and possibly even influence the evolution of the human species.
Computing power—speed, memory, communication rates—has increased by a factor of a thousand over the past decade, with world-wide networks connecting hundreds of millions of people, enabling them to communicate with one another with ease and sophistication. The computer and television are merging in a so-called “digital convergence,” triggering a similar merger of the telecommunications companies and the entertainment industry to create a new multimedia communications medium.