53 years after the U.S. and China claimed victory over the GLA, several meteors streaked towards Earth. The meteors struck the blue planet, and released a mutative material now known as Tiberium. The meteor bombardment spread the alien substance across the planet, but the majority of the bombardment struck North America. The U.S., coping with the problems caused by Tiberium, controlled it, and used it to make cold fusion practical for civilians as well as the military, making oil obsolete to Americans. In the abundance of power and lack of dependence on the rest of the world, the U.S. gained a strongly isolationist mood and withdrew from world economics.

When the U.S. left the world economy, a depression of great magnitude affected much of the non-North American world. The alliance known as NATO dissolved in the wake of hard times, and those living in Russia and China, starving and impatient for a new leader, joined behind the largely obscure Brotherhood of Nod. The leaders of the Brotherhood then took control of Russia and China easily, and an alliance formed between these 2 countries, known as the Eastern Empire. Once Nod was in power, it began to have the countries' top scientists work on Nuclear-Tiberium warheads. Europe, faced with the larger-than-Soviet-Union threat to its East, called on the U.S. for help and the GDI was formed.

While many of the important countries of the world were preoccupied by the showdown beginning to unfold in Eastern Europe, everyone's back was turned to the Middle East, where the GLA was formerly based. In the depression caused by the U.S. withdrawl from the rest of the world, the Arabs found themselves in greater poverty than ever, and overthrew their princes, shieks, and dictators, who could not affect the state of the depression. The Arabs, considering Tiberium a gift from God, wore it as jewlery, used it as seasoning in recipes, and used it for cures to diseases, much to the horror of the medical scientists of the U.S. and Europe, who had realized Tiberium's ability to mutate and break down all plant and animal matter.

Many of the Arabs, being exposed to such great amounts of the volatile substance, lost contact with reality and struck out at those they considered the reason for their problems, a.k.a. everyone. Using weapons from the old War on Terror, now known as WWIII, and calling themselves the Forgotten, they struck out at Nod, in an attempt to get "even" with them for causing the depression. Nod responded by using their prototype Nuke-Tibeirum missiles against the attackers. The GDI threatened to intervene should this happen again, but the Brotherhood payed no attention to threat, thinking GDI was like the UN: It condemned but didn't take action. When news reached GDI troops that Nod had unleashed another of these horrible weapons against the Forgotten, GDI forces poured into Eastern Russia and brutally assaulted Nod forward bases. The Forgotten, seeing GDI forces and beliveing that the GDI had come to kill them, attacked the GDI forward base, and so erupted a 3-way war.

As the war unfolded, the GDI leaders agreed that the GDI needed more commanding officers to win the war, and so they gave scientists permission to create an AI complex enough to handle an entire army. The AI now known as CABAL was put into action immediately after it was completed. When Nod forces attacked the weakly-defended base under CABAL's command, they quickly started to debate about how CABAL should be used. But the Nod commanders could not spare enough troops to guard against an attack, and a Forogtten hacker managed to capture all of the data required for CABAL's operations and programs. However, the hacker, thinking that the failsafe coding relating to following orders was an anti-hacking code, deleted it, and allowed CABAL to gain more control itself. When it was put in charge of a small Forgotten base in North-Eastern Africa, CABAL was able to take over the base, convert the Forgotten troops to cyborgs, and press on with its own plans of world domination. And once again, the world erupted into chaos...

I apologize if anyone was offended by the contents of this story.