This is the story of how it all began. The story of the Blood Children, and Level Z, and the start of the Banker Wars. Our tale is far from over- Enlil and his Igigi are still among us, and the wars continue on. But the Blood Children are looking forward to better days ahead . . . because this is the time when we cast off the chains. It started on New Year's Eve, in the year 2020, with the death of Harlan Bloom. And then we saw TEOTWAWKI . . . the end of the world as we knew it. Some of our younger colleagues like to say it was SHTF- the moment when shit hit the fan- but whatever we might call those earlier days, one thing is for sure: our old world was gone once the bankers started turning up dead. Randolph Blaine knew . . . he was there when it happened. This book is written twenty years later, in 2041, and it's all so different now. Back in 2020 Randolph Blaine was a respected lawyer in a Century City law firm, but today that man no longer exists. He's a soldier now, with Tanner in the 42nd Remnant. They fight in lands that were part of the country once known as the United States of America. The tale of the Blood Children first appeared on Mesopotamian clay tablets written nearly 5000 years ago. The tablet writings of an ancient author named Callien later found their way into Biblical Genesis, and various of the apocrypha and midrashes written at the time of the Old Testament. The Bible tells us that multiple gods were involved in the creation of man, and this tale from Genesis is a much abbreviated version of Callien's tablet writings about two Mesopotamian gods named Enki and Enlil. We learn from the ancient tablets that these half--brothers had very different views about the destiny of man, and their competing philosophies remain with us to this very day. Are men slaves, or free? Are we destined to learn and grow, or must man remain forever unknowledgeable? The story of the Blood Children is the story of mankind as we exist in our modern day world, and Enki, god of wisdom and father of the Blood Children, says: "get off your knees, slaves, and stand as free men "