It started with a thought that every human experienced. The thought that doomed mankind to eternal war and changed the world as we know it now.

The thought was a simple message of unknown origins: “Data limit reached, please upgrade membership to continue growing your civilisation.”

At first, many communities reacted in shock, disbelief and denial to it, some changing the spirit of the message to suit their own purposes. But the message was made clear in one thing; the population did not grow. The growth was essentially the same, a baby is born and an elder dies. The number of population remained where it was.

This caused many countries to create and enforce the policies about having children. US was most opposed to having a limit of how many children one could have and lobbied as much as it could have to stop it at UN. The corporations in Europe and US cried out in anger at the rising wages, and pushed governments to let in more refugees than ever before. Leading to US and its allies to do what they had done for decades. They funded terrorists, extreme political and religious organisations, far left politicians, drugs flow and smuggled weapons as well as staged coups to destabilise the weaker countries in order to keep them(and the prices) down and to keep the refugees running to the wealthy and developed countries.

China outraged at this blatant act of what the West was doing and no longer hid it, has started supporting Russia, NK and other anti-US countries openly. Earth was soon embroiled in wars where the global trade collapsed, and the economies were set back for decades. Ironically, the countries that were forced to keep running themselves in isolation imposed by West were benefiting enormously from their mostly independent economies.

Nukes were thrown around when a country realised it could not win this war of numbers and resources. The population dropped to 8 billions and continued falling as radioactive waste made love with crops and man.

Man was forced to rely on vertical and underground farms in order to keep producing nutritious and untainted food, yet it was not enough to support more than a few billion. The prices had imploded in the growth -based economies of West and led to poor work conditions as well as poor living standards comparable to the third world countries before the collapse of global trade, which was set up to be incredibly advantageous and profitable for West.

Humanity learned that having capitalism and an economy model based on growth that exploited resources and labour force from poor countries may not have been a good idea. The wealth and power eventually shifted from West to East. Under the different culture influence from East, the economy model of West changed to benefit people, and not a few corporates and extremely wealthy people. Living standards and working condition improved greatly in the new world, mankind knew wealth equality once more. A golden age was ushered in as the world policy kept a tight control on the births and ensured that the population number did not become more than 8 billion, with the support of care robots and encouraged use of euthanasia for elders and mentally crippled people(such as comatose people never to awaken again).