Over the next few thousand years, the roles of the two slowly shifted. Whereas the nomads had previously made up the vast majority of the population, the empires now held a greater number. The nomads, relegated to the remaining freelands, slowly became traders, moving first the food, and then the goods of the great empires across the planet’s oceans. As they did so, the small ports that had grown up in the freelands began to grow into a loosely allied network of great port cities that housed their meager but growing wealth and influence.

The great empires eventually covered all the land and began washing up against each other. Great wars raged along their highly contested borders, alliances and feuds bending them like the tides of history as great leaders came and went.

Meanwhile, the trading families of the world stood firm in an alliance of mutually assured destruction, uniting as necessary against any over-ambitious empire that tried to dominate one of their brethren. Their ships made up the life blood of the planet, pumping its goods between its nations, and the strict sanctions imposed on any nation that attacked one of their port cities constricted that flow until either control of the port was relinquished, or the interloping empire shriveled, leaving it ripe for destruction at its neighbor’s hands.

And so centuries passed.

The warring empires kept a strict control over their populaces, limiting freedom but concentrating their resources into the development of ever-greater weaponry and defenses.

Meanwhile the freer, but much smaller, trading families enjoyed greater inventiveness and creativity, their ships’ size and armament growing apace with the perennial potential for attack by jealous emperors.

This might have continued indefinitely if not for the two inventions that would change the planet’s fortunes as drastically as they would shape our own when we, in time, also stumbled upon them.

The invention of the steam and combustion engine spurned a new age of productivity and warfare. While the great tanks of the empires raged across the lives of their unfortunate serfs, the trading families’ ships underwent an order of magnitude change in size and speed, giving these merchant navies even greater mobility, and with it, independence.

A hundred years later the invention of the nuclear bomb froze every empire in its tracks. After the destruction of a quarter of one empire’s population by another, even the victors were forced to concede that their victory was moot at best, the land they had craved having been rendered useless for a generation. But while nuclear power temporarily ended the wars on land in a tense stalemate, the creativity of the trading families saw another use for the great heat of the atom.