Life on an infinite regression of corpses.

Everyone has their pet setting. This is mine.

It is in the future. The deep future. It is after the end, though which end isn't known. It is not simply post-apocalyptic: it is post-post-post-post-post-post-apocalyptic. Man's empire has waxed and waned and waxed innumerably, to the the point where no one remembers where the species has been nor where it is going.

The Earth is the single most evident example of this. The North American continent is rent in twain, separated by a Mississippian ocean. The remains of dying governments cling to outdated mandates to rule. They call themselves the Extant States of Usonia. Nomadic gatherers hunt twelve foot tall dogs amidst mile high skyscrapers. Strange machine cults prowl vast desert/junkyards, hoping to reassemble their broken gods. Ape-kingdoms, led by a tougher, more virant strain of humanity, wage war and win slaves from their black stone keeps. Sand is no longer found near water; beaches are covered in endless sea-glass mosaics.

The moon, shining and green, speaks to unimagined changes. If you focus a telescope you can see cool black lakes, and green fields with white flowers, and the remains of crashed starships.

This strange new world has strange new rules. You can prove a man a wizard by his single black hand; every time he casts a spell, the nanomachines grow and consume a little more of him. Always make sure to drive out the electronic ghosts from any tech you find. And one must never mistreat a cat, for it may rise upon two feet, shot you with it's laser pistol, and call you a wanker. Unless it's just a cat.

There are whispers of other worlds. That on Mercury the wheeled city of Mist races to avoid conflagration on the planet's sun-lit side, while looting the tomb-tunnels of the First Men. That the gods still walk on the water world of Venus, and may bless you with a new, more aquatic form. That on cold, snow covered Mars the Clone Kings war, even as they scheme and plot to plunder the asteroid belt before the Thought Lords of Saturn can do the same. And that on Jupiter, past the Galilean moons and the Rad Boys and the Great Maze, lies a way out. To the rest of humanity.

But who can say what that even means, among the clones and the mutants and the bio-engineered beasts and the mad gods. Man has no true faster-then-light drive, no pathway to the stars. Perhaps that is for the best.