The proliferation of microchips and the advent of the Internet ushered in the Information Age. Global communications brought parts of the world closer together, but tensions elsewhere were not easily assuaged. In the New World Order that followed the Cold War, warfare reverted to localized conflicts involving regional powers — with the occasional intervention of first-world nations. To fight these limited wars, military hardware needed to be highly mobile, versatile, and reliable. And, of course, it had to pack a punch.

High-energy laser and particle beam weapons had been prototyped by the start of the Information Age. But their large size and immense consumption of energy made them impractical for field use. High-density power cells, developed in the early 2020's, were used in the first practical energy weapon designs, but they were large, cumbersome, and prone to running dry during heavy combat. The real breakthrough came with advanced fusion technology.

Fusion reactions, long harnessed in hydrogen bombs, were being controlled to generate power at the end of the 20th Century. But early reactors used more energy than they actually produced. It wasn't until 2033 that all the problems were overcome and the first commercial reactor went online. Research programs funded by military budgets drove the miniaturization that followed. By 2050, fusion batteries had replaced conventional power cells in most military hardware.

Body armor had to be updated to deflect energy beams while still providing decent protection against bullets and shrapnel. Early designs were of marginal benefit. But in the 2030's, sophisticated materials were invented that absorbed incoming beams, capturing and distributing the energy throughout the armor. An undercoating of carbon-fiber mesh was added to stop projectiles and the new armor rapidly displaced the old.

The single most important development in military hardware during the Information Age was the advent of mechanized units in the latter half of the 21st Century. These advanced military robots, at first remotely operated, were eventually given a rudimentary intelligence which allowed them to carry out simple operations unassisted. By 2075, neural networks implemented on optical chip architectures — capable of one quadrillion calculations per second — had far exceeded the capacity of the human brain. When combined with ingenious "bottom-up" algorithms and "top-down" commonsense, the mechanical giants gained the ability to learn. As a result, mechanized military units were literally trained for combat much like human soldiers. Powered by fusion batteries and outfitted with the latest weaponry, these marvels of modern warfare found a variety of specialized uses on the battlefields of the late 21st and 22nd Centuries.

In pure science, two breakthroughs had tremendous consequences. The first was the completion of the human genome project at the beginning of the 21st Century. The genetic revolution in medicine that followed increased the average life expectancy of people to 150 by the turn of the 22nd Century. The second breakthrough was finding the "Theory of Everything," considered to be the "holy grail" of physics. Discovered in bits and pieces, the Theory of Everything finally came together towards the end of the 21st Century. In time, it opened a whole new world.