Regardless of military strenght or culture, all empires eventually fall. All the weapons of the world or a sea of ink make the process no less certain. It isn't a matter of decadence, barbarian invasions, financial ruin, world wars or corporate takeover, it's a matter of time, the herald of all disasters. All those factors are nothing without time making them possible, without a tomorrow to draw them even closer. That was the logic behind one of the most ancient pacts of the corporations.
Nations had died easily, but time would not be so easy to kill. While time itself was never conquered despite the resources of the corporations, history was. History was made into a commodity, hoarded and purchased by the corporations that dominated the world. Little by little the past of the whole human race was dismantled, built over, sealed away in vaults or simply destroyed, followed by the very concept of past. A new calendar without any semblance of linearity was established, where every year was denoted by two randomly generated numbers and letters. Qualitative technological development was abandoned, freezing the world in a pendulum of repeated development no more than a few centuries long. Technology would develop in an area and eventually regress as it was developped in another, leading to a cycle, The Cycle. While any individual would obviously know his past and history, history on the scale of nations and peoples became so nebulous that they might as well not exist.

The process was carried so thoroughly that, centuries later, the corporations and people are unaware that things could be any different.

However, every now and then corporations require abrupt and extremely advanced technological development for radical situations or to come up with new approaches for large-scale paradigm shifts. This is where Research and Development companies come in, known to be an eccentric lot between corporations, each one being a microcosm of bizarre almost cult-like individuals. One of such was simply known as Noumenon.

Noumenon was given a task lost to time, but it was so complex that the members of the company retreated into a long period of meditation. The meditation led them to something else, a discovery so monumental on the likes had never been done ever since humans first discovered agriculture. Submerged in meditation, the members of Noumenon eventually became able to perceive their own minds, to consciously tweak and change their own beings; to locate and correct errors. With mere thoughts they swept away the hundreds of cognitive biases, instincts and limitations of the human mind, becoming something far above men and some say even gods. Many had predicted a technological revolution, they had achieved a mental revolution of exponential self-improvement until they became capable of trascending and even ignoring the laws of the universe. The meditation techniques that allowed Noumenon to experience was henceforth referred to as The Secret.

Noumenon was never heard from again, which didn't stop a select intellectual few from wanting to know The Secret and ascend into Noumenon. As the last members of Noumenon meditated themselves into trascendental bliss, they created and left behind the monstrous herald of The Secret, Monogenes, a manmade God of terrifying appearance and gargantuan size. This demiurge was given knowledge of The Secret and tasked with giving it only to those who passed a test; the nature of the test was never revealed. Monogenes, in turn, went into hiding in a perpetual thunderstorm in Catatumbo, Venezuela, a location only known to a few.

A shadowy cult of the most brilliant minds of the planet was formed, known as the Initiates. While no one knew what the test was, it was widely deduced to be a form of intellectual or scientific achievement, the same Noumenon was originally after. Each Initiate, drawing from his or her own resources (or if gifted enough, granted resources by the Initiates' network), would start a scientific or philosophical experiment. The experiments and megaprojects of the Initiates escalated far beyond the reach of sanity over the centuries, and rumors speak of artificial wombs the size of airports filled with communities of surreal humanoid beings, arcane Angels and Gods being summoned through particle accelerators and scalar installations, secret armies of terrifying monsters being created to serve the Initiates, universe-destroying artifacts, pacts made with alien species and entire cities created as huge social experiments with nightmarish results.

All those efforts have been so far largely fruitless, with only one or two individuals every century being granted The Secret, and disappearing shortly after. For the next Initiate who achieves trascendence or for the next adventurer who wants to see if the rumors of the artificial God are true, Monogenes awaits.