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In the late 1980's, a terrible thing happened to the Earth, a space born plague, brought back by a probe, unleashed a disease that wiped the planet clean of all Canid and felid life. While some animals, such as Coyotes were barely mourned and the rich could no longer own leopard skin clothing, what they really missed were the pets; simple dogs and cats.

But the plague had a secondary affect on primates. While some, Gibbons and lemurs died off for an unknown reason, others; Gorillas, Chimpanzees and Orangutans had their intelligence notably increased. These beasts are close to man and were able to understand at first only simple commands, then later more advanced ones. However, some men saw more than simple pets, they saw a new class of labor - of slave labor. Apes were turned into the lowest class of society. The Bureau of Ape Management was created and it controlled the new slave class. But in doing this, humanity had set the seeds for its own doom. In the mid 1970's three apes, talking apes had crash-landed in a NASA spaceship, bringing with them the tale of the future, when humans were mute animals and apes ruled. These apes were mercilessly destroyed at the behest of the President's Scientific Advisor, who also lost his life in his quest to see that humanity remained the dominant species on the planet. But he had been too late. The child of the apes had survived to grow and lead a rebellion against the humans who had enslaved the primates. By doing so, this ape, Cesar, assisted by the humans, sped up the change in dominance on earth. Where in Cornelius and Zira's memory this had taken centuries; now it had taken less than three decades.

Of course the apes were helped by the self-destructive qualities of mankind. When the ape’s rebellion swelled across first the United States then Canada, finally the rest of the world, a group of disenfranchised humans, no one remembers if it were the Kurds, the Georgians or even an Amerindian group, used a nuclear explosive to destroy a world economic meeting at Geneva. With the apes in revolt and public disorder everywhere, this was the final movement toward destruction. While the nuclear arsenals of the world had shrunk, there was still enough weaponry left to destroy civilization. Anti-ballistic missile systems, built secretly and in place in space and on land, saved much of the surrounding countryside's, but the great cities were gone. Irradiated and smashed, some held groups of survivors who would die or mutate into creatures barely recognizable as human. They were a new species, Homo Sapiens Mutanis.

But many apes, including those led by Caesar did survive. They moved away from the blasted cities proclaiming them to be forbidden. This would be the second of the laws passed by the apes. The first, Ape Shall Never Kill Ape, was driven into the apes minds by their former masters, some of whom survived under the (somewhat) benign rule of their former slaves.

But the radiation of the wars had a further effect on Earth. It mutated the disease that had killed dogs and cats, causing it to affect the humans. Each decade they grew dumber, less able to understand language or that they had once been the dominant species on the planet. Finally, even the gentle chimps grew impatient with the humans. They were driven out of the cities, into the wildlands to make do as they would. They would serve as sport for Gorillas, as negative role models for Orangutans and as medical experiments for the Chimpanzees, who of all the apes still harbored some sentiment for these dumb animals.

Records of before the war were suppressed by the Orangutans who were supported in this by the Gorilla military. Human history was hidden or wiped out. All that was left was the idea that man was and always had been an animal, capable only of feeding off of, or bothering his ape betters. Finally only Orangutans remembered that man had been the dominant species and they kept that knowledge well hidden.

But on a planet affected by an alien disease, with a higher background radiation than ever before, more mutations are possible.

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Fifteen Hundred Years after the death of Caesar…

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