A brief timeline sketch

21st - 24th centuries: advances in biomedical engineering technology occur all over the world, Emilia Lonkoi is born. TeleGro, a remarkable life extension therapy, becomes popular. Lonkoi becomes a vocal opponent of the Gatnos movement, loses her leg in an assassination attempt by a Gatnos supporter. Lonkoi retires from her political activities and begins work on improved replacement body parts.

25th century - Angelic Commonwealth: Using the fortunes made from her commercialized medical replacement body part manufactures, Lonkoi gradually replaces most of her body as she battles cancer. She also begins building the prototype for the angelbots which become common during the Angelic Commonwealth. The prototype is used as a glorified traffic controller, then steadily takes on more duties in its area of jurisdiction. The Second wave Luddites (also known as NeoLuddites) launch a massive offensive on all the TeleGro facilities of the world, as well as other life-extension centers they deem to be unnatural. After a series of wars, the NeoLuddites are beaten, but most major cities of the world are wrecked. Lonkoi and others who were lucky enough to survive with a firm grasp on key resources begin rebuilding cities and infrastructure. Lonkoi's "Protector robots" become wildly popular, and come to be called angelbots. Eventually the more advanced angelbots go on to oversee megacities. Some humans begin a cult they call the Angelic Church, surrounding the angelbots. The Angelic Church is somewhat like the Unitarian Universalists of the 21st century, and remains nebulous on the subject of deities. The NeoLuddite wars last for about a century preceding the Angelic Commonwealth era, which lasts about 600 years.

Post-Angelic Commonwealth Era: After the fall of the Angelic Commonwealth, extensive non-medical neural implants for humans become legalized, and people begin connecting to the Psi-Net remotely, by thought. Dream manufacture companies arise, selling dream downloads for nominal prices. Psyche Corporation is especially successful, going on to capture the market.

Shadow Court Dynasty, beginning: After many years of success and many brilliant CEOs, Psyche Corporation has a new CEO named Psyche Chimère. Her rise to power was unusually rapid, in part due to the aid of Osiris Weiss, a veteran dream design superstar of Psyche Corp. Despite her genius for dream design and ruthless business sense, Ms Chimère was a troubled individual. Only a few years after becoming CEO, she took advantage of Psyche Corp.'s privileged access to customer neural domains to unleash an unusual virus, whose workings are unknown. Since at this time Psyche Corporation had access to most of the minds in the world, the effects were enormous. Ms Chimère's abuse of power is recorded in history as the ultimate crime against humanity. Part of the problem lies in the covert nature of the virus, which seems to influence tiny decisions in its hosts, so that the influence of Ms Chimère is difficult to detect at the individual level, but becomes obvious when one takes into account the collective actions of hundreds of people. Ms Chimère was later assassinated by her former co-conspirators not long after her crime. However, there remains pronounced evidence that humanity is being puppetted by a shadow hand. Some believe that Chimère's assassins took over the operation of the virus, and the executive board of Psyche Corporation has assumed control of humanity without fanfare. These conspiracy nuts refer to the executive board as the Shadow Court and name Chimère as its first, but not its last, Shadow Queen.

Late Shadow Court Dynasty - The Rumor: Yet another precocious and feared Shadow Queen has taken power, and this time following the suspicious demise of her predecessor. The Shadow Court is torn between her supporters and her enemies, but her enemies are stronger. Since current nanotechnologies have made murder extremely difficult and often impermanent, these would-be assassins capture her and send her back in time, to a time where technology is far too primitive to recontruct a time machine for her to return to her time. This of course bifurcates the natural timeline of the universe. (It happens all the time though, so no one worries about it.) Somewhere in the primitive times of the 21st century, a Shadow Queen vows to set history back on track, preferably a fast track, and get herself back to her own time.