Centered on Earth, the TIU is a massive federal parliamentary democracy encompassing humanity’s original colony worlds, mostly settled during the twenty-second century. The TIU has its roots in the Global Union State, declared in the aftermath of Earth’s Third World War in 2063. After the conclusion of the First Contact Crisis (2081) and the signing of the Treaty of Mars (2104) brought the GUS and the Virgonid Greater Hive into close cooperation, Earth’s government used the jointly developed Stardrive to launch several officially sanctioned colonization efforts to nearby habitable planets.

Initially, these colonies were de jure ruled directly from Earth, while being de facto independent due to the lack of effective interstellar communication. When the TIU was established in 2204, creating a parliamentary system in which each colony would participate in an overarching interstellar legislature as well as their own, in practice little changed—except that planetary legislatures now had more of a vested interest in obeying Earth’s dictates.

In response to the exodus from Earth and the colonies of wildcat settlers that would eventually form the CFW, and the growth of independent corporate colonies in the twenty-third century, the Earth government loosened its hold on the established colonies. By the advent of QEC in the late twenty-fourth century, this equilibrium was well-established enough to resist new Earth government attempts to develop stronger controls.

Nonetheless, the TIU federal government remains stronger than that of the FWR, and the TIU tends to be more culturally homogeneous. The TIU is also more conservative in the field of transhumanism than either the FWR or the UCC, in part a relic of the backlash against both cybernetic and genetic augmentation following Earth’s Third World War. While still employing both technologies today, in both the military sphere and the civilian market, citizens of the TIU tend to be more similar in appearance and capability to the humans of old Earth in the twenty-first century than their counterparts in the other powers. Culturally, they are often seen as being polite and friendly, more eager to find common ground than to argue with or impose their views on others.