By the year 2109, the Earth was a scarred husk of its former self. A century of nuclear conflict, ecological collapse, and failed global governance had turned once-thriving metropolises into irradiated graveyards. Among the hardest hit was the former coastal gem of San Diego. Once a centre of innovation and military prowess, it had become a cracked desert of twisted steel and glass—barren, lifeless, forgotten.

But in the ashes of catastrophe, visionaries emerged.

A coalition of scientists, ethicists, and exiled researchers—expelled from Pasadena’s Genomic Bastion for their vocal opposition to state-mandated eugenics—found sanctuary in the ruins of San Diego. Led by the fiercely principled and renowned Russian-American physicist, Leonid Tokarev, these outcasts rejected the dystopian dogma of genetic "purity" that had taken hold across many survivor enclaves.

Over the course of two decades, they transformed the wasteland into a thriving bastion of post-collapse civilization. Reclaiming solar farms, reverse-engineering military hardware, and harnessing the still-glowing wreckage of pre-war tech, they rebuilt a city from the bones of the old world. What emerged was New San Diego, a shining beacon of progress governed not by hereditary elites or warlords, but by a Technocratic Council of scholars, engineers, and thinkers.

At the last Grand Conclave, held within the towering glass-spired heart of the reclaimed Qualcomm Arcology, Leonid Tokarev was elected Director of the Institute, the de facto leader of the state. His election was not without controversy—many feared his deep ties to both Russian theoretical science and old-world military institutions—but his unwavering stance on ethical science and humanist principles ultimately united the fractured factions.

Now, under Tokarev’s stewardship, the Institute has launched the Project Helios Initiative—a bold mission to terraform the irradiated interior of California and restore biospheric life.