Welcome to the future, ladies and gentlemen - a future set some time after now. Government as you know it is a distant memory. In this world, everything is copyrighted, licensed, and strictly regulated by a multinational corporate agency known as the World Licensing Organization. And if you're extremely unlucky, you got kicked out of one of the corporate arcologies. In this world, unlicensed information is pornography, sharing is theft, books are banned, breaking your licensing agreements is punishable by death, and even time itself is copyrighted.