Falsehoods

An alternate history - and future - of Earth, starting from the Korean and Vietnamese wars. The development of the internet also permitted the development of advanced technology, such as smart devices (20-30 years in advance of the real world) and cybernetics.

A clandestine intelligence agency of the US government, called PAX, has developed the world's first androids realistic enough to pass for human. Several prototypes are being tested as secret agents, partnered with children resulting from a eugenics program aimed at breeding and nurturing ideal android-keepers. The first story follows one of these pairs, an android called John and his "niece", Penelope, as they try to take down an illicit cybernetics producer called MAD.

About 1000 years, several brutal global wars (as well as innumerable smaller-scale conflicts), a global purge of advanced technology, and a major climate shift later, the human population is about a third what it was in 2000, and as far as anyone knows, they all live in a narrow band of the northern hemisphere. Weeks-long storms ravage the shrunken coasts and Dragons, erratic and highly destructive creatures believed by many to be the Messengers of the Gods, harass towns unimpeded.