There comes a time in any civilization where they have just become to much for the planet to contain. Non-dominant species begin to falter, extinction rates increase drastically, and survival of the fittest peels away from the equation. Technology advances, the natural death rate declines, the birth rate increases, and soon, the world's balance is completely destroyed. Mother Nature is a resilient and resourceful force, however. Some said it was a genetic fluke, a one in a trillion chance. Others pointed to the genetic base of all mammalian life and said it was bound to happen sometime. Even more simply pointed to the heavens and decreed God's Will had been enacted. No matter what had actually happened, Nature was fighting back against humanity in the one way it could possibly stand a chance of winning.
	If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
	Humans and Animals merged. There wasn't really a warning. No apocalyptic explosions of brimstone and fire to mete out justice in the final days. Humanity simply found themselves on par with animals for the first time in history since a genetic mutation had caused an ape's brain to swell. Across the world, the initial reaction was fear and mistrust. These 'furries' were almost completely rejected, forced to live in seclusion. They would have been annihilated in weeks, but they not only had the intelligence of mankind, but the animal instincts that had preserved their progenitors for hundreds of thousands of human-dominated existence. The resulting war lasted less than a century, a surprisingly short amount of time for such a global conflict. The animal-borne people named themselves the Animatus, and fought the human nations to a standstill. Fire cleansed the world, with casualties in the billions on all sides. The world's landscape shifted and strained, great cities reduced to ruin, others rising to take their place. The world was no longer a group of two hundred independent nations, but two factions, Animatus and Human.
	In the closing years of the War of the Animals, humanity was on the verge of collapse. Numbers once in the ten billion range had been reduced to five or six billion. The Animatus nation had also suffered severely, equal numbers lost in the heavy exchanges. It was hard to admit on both sides, but the truce was finally struck. A thin wisp of hope rose from the ashes of the world, somehow blossoming and finding its way into the minds of the ten billion lives left on the scarred planet. Peace would come, and understanding would rise up... Mankind and Animalkind merged once again. Centuries of integration was peppered with outbreaks of racism, speciesism, and resistance, but both sides were weary of fighting, and nearly two millenia after the Great Unification of mankind and animalkind, peace and understanding spread around the world.
	The Golden age of civilization sparked a renewed life in the planet. Animals taught Man how to live in tune with the world, recovering and nourishing the land over the years to support and encourage the growth of intelligence and tolerance. Technology crawled back from the brink of ruin to march forth towards ever shrinking technology. The Age of Expansion seemed never to end.
	But the Earth is only so large. The lands, finite. In the end, the same dilemma that had occurred so long ago loomed before the world's population. Twenty billion Earthlings, as they had begun to call themselves as a unified people, man or animal, were now straining the limits of an overly bountiful world. Technology was producing what ample food it could, but was rapidly dwindling against the population's increasing weight. When the population hit twenty five billion, civilization was on the verge of breakdown, but then the unthinkable happened.
	The scientist who discovered the world's salvation has long been lost in the mists of time. All that we know is that one day, it was revealed that matter, while having mass, can be expanded and shrank without losing its cohesiveness by manipulating the Higgs Bosons. Over time, mechanics were developed that took advantage of this theory, and soon matter was controllable. Under the extreme circumstances of so many lives on such a crowded planet, the decision was made to reduce the entire surface world in size to 1/10000th scale. The world's terraformation was smooth at first, the world being carefully prepared for the transition. Communication routes were laid down, the world's mountains and valleys were meticulously reshaped, reorginazation and reforming the world took another century or more, but by the time it was complete, the world's population of fifty billion now had the equivalent landscape of 100,000,000 Earths to expand upon, all scaled down to match the size.
	Since transportation could still move at the speed of sound, and the world's communication lines and computer systems were fully integrated, the world underwent yet another vast renaissance of unthinkable proportion. The world could now support over 2.5 quadrillion lives, on the surface alone, and many thousands of times more than that just below the surface in carefully constructed caverns. Civilization began to fill this space, expanding around the new world. Millenium after millenium passed in global prosperity, human and animal kind forging new lands, new progress, and new ideas. Trillions of lives were comfortably housed in millions of dense, microscopically sized cities all around the globe. Now, over ten thousand years after the end of our world, the prosperity of the future once again happens to hinge on another, tiny quirk of Mother Nature. As she once tweaked the entire genetic base of the world, she now tweaks the inherent properties of the Higgs Boson.
	What once was made small, shall become large. What once was insignificant, shall determine the fates of trillions. What was once meek, shall inherit the Earth.