Time of the Red

The Time of the Red (also known as the Red Decades) was a period from August 2023 to the late 2040s. The name was taken from the red skies, common throughout the world, as an aftereffect of the Fourth Corporate War.

History
Following the 4th Corporate War, atmospheric particles from the nuclear blast in Night City — as well as debris from orbital weapon strikes, continent-wide firestorms, conventional explosives, and the wartime burning and annihilation of cities and agricultural areas — cast an eerie red pall over skies worldwide. For nearly two years, the skies were tinged a bloody red, which eventually died down to brilliant red sunrises and sunsets throughout the next decade.

Known as the Time of the Red, this would be the backdrop for the first years of the post-War recovery, only fading away as the world's battered populations began to reconstruct their shattered cities. But despite the weakening of the atmospheric effects, the name had stuck among the War's survivors and, much as the 1920s was known as the Roaring Twenties and the 1930s as the Great Depression.

Though the red skies and periodic "blood rains" (caused when rainstorms pulled the crimson particulate out of the skies and deposited it as a greasy crimson slime reminiscent of blood), the cities and nations of the world cleaned up the last pockets of corporate resistance and got on with their lives.