Prologue
In the late 20th and early 21st Century, Scientists produced a theory called The Green House Effect or Global Warming. The theory suggested that Carbon Dioxide, released from the generation of electricity, motor vehicles and everyone's day-to-day lives, created a barrier that prevented heat from the sun escaping the earth. This caused the earth to warm.
Others rejected this idea and argued that the earth was still coming out from an Ice Age which explains the rise in temperature.
In any case, the fact was that the earth's temperature was increasing.
An increased temperature meant unpredictable weather patterns, a decrease in crop production, the expansion water, the melting of The Polar Ice Caps and rising sea levels. The most prominent of these effects is the rise in sea levels.
The earth has flooded.
At the beginning of the 21st Century, the earth's surface was about 30% land and 70% water. Now, from what we understand, is that about 8% of the earth's surface is land and 92% is water.
Society shut down.
The population of the planet reduced from 8.5 billion to 3 billion in 100 years as most people struggled with the sudden change in lifestyle and diets. Those who survived took to the water. A new culture of sea life was born. The majority of the world's population began living on boats, fishing and gathering water plants for nourishment.
The remainder of the earth's land is mostly inhabitable as the centuries of disruptive weather patterns had turned it to dessert land. However, some land still provides an environment for plants to grow.
The planet's people are split into 2 classes; the upper class and everyone else. The upper classes live up in the skies, in levitating mechanical hemispheres. They do not have to work. Not the way we do down on the water, where it is fish or starve.
The international government operates from the skies too. But they are so corrupt and focused on their own lifestyle; nothing they say or do really affects us.
That can be good but it means crime is a lot easier to get away with when there is little to stop you.
Mostly, we are on our own, just with our families on our boats. Although there are many cases where people travel with groups of other families. Sometimes people group together in one place. They share food and keep each other company. Children learn from an early age how to fish and gather as they are expected to help, most learn to swim before they can walk, and reading and writing skills are nothing compared to knowledge of the sea and its creatures. Centuries have passed since the earth was 70% water, compared to then, it is barely recognisable.