Severino Verna was born into a world of poverty. He grew up a recluse, with very few friends to speak of. But Sevi had a brilliant mind, and when it latched onto a problem, it never let go. When tiles began appearing in the streets of Philadelphia, tiles that spoke of resurrecting the dead on the planet Jupiter, Sevi's closest friends thought that he had finally lost it. They may have been right, too. Arnold J. Toynbee was a famous historian of English birth. At one point in time his textbooks were read in every schoolhouse from Guam to Kiev. He even married into a royal family. But, following a brief but drastic nervous breakdown, he would come to learn that even academic fame is fleeting. Arnold began to spend far too much time, in the opinions of his academic peers, on religious lore. Of course, Arnold wasn't the type to slip quietly into the night. Mr. Duerr is employed by a futuristic media giant called Toynbee Media International, or TMI for short. The acronym stands for Toynbee's namesake, of course, but among the voting population—a powerful cohort in a real-time, direct democracy such as theirs—it was more often considered to mean "too much information." In an era of cultural dominance, when tanks and armies were useless to opportunists, but pulling the strings on mass consumption meant pure power, an organization like TMI certainly had more than its fair share of information. All three of these entities hail from disparate eras, and even different regions of the planet. Each has its own motivations and aims. And yet, each of them has determined that gaining complete control of the planet is the first stop along the way to a better life. The only question that remains is: Whose lives are this global domination meant to better?
