The Winkernickle Foundation
The Winkernickle Foundation is a research organisation, based in the United States but international in scope, dedicated to the advancement of human civilization through scientific means.
In the late 2040s, Canadian physicist Alice Winkernickle and American computer scientist Brian Prescott could see that the world was in a downward spiral from which it might never recover, and were determined to do something about it. With a few like-minded colleagues from the scientific community, they formed the Winkernickle Foundation. The Foundation's first activities were to raise funds by patenting a number of high-value technologies. Once it was financially secure and self-sustaining, the Foundation expanded its membership and reach cautiously, and began the serious work of saving the world.
In the Foundation's early years, Alice Winkernickle convinced retired physicist Carla Zod to join. Zod had the knowledge, through conversations with her husband Franklin Marks, of what the Earth's future path should be, but was reluctant to divulge this knowledge to the Foundation. She had come to believe that foreknowledge of the future was a dangerous thing, and that humanity needed to find its own path through the branching timelines, not be forced down one branch. The future, she felt, should be mutable. Despite Alice Winkernickle's pressure, Zod maintained her silence on these matters until her death in 2055.
So the Foundation followed Zod's advice and concentrated not on what technologies might be useful in bringing about a future utopia but on those that were essential to mitigating the current dystopia. Their main areas of research went towards reversing climate breakdown, finding alternative energy sources, and feeding the expanding population.
Alice Winkernickle's holy grail was to solve the problem of fusion power, which could potentially solve all of Earth's energy problems and was thus an essential step on the path to the utopia she hoped for. Since the catastrophe that levelled Tokyo in 2035 (and led to the subsequent creation of Neo-Tokyo), a world-wide treaty had completely halted not only experimentation with fusion power but all theoretical research into it. Alice Winkernickle was convinced that controlled fusion was possible, however, and furthermore was convinced that Carla Zod knew how to do it.
If Zod knew, it was a secret she took to her grave. Alice Winkernickle became obsessed with solving the problem, working on it in secret and in defiance of the law. She worked on the problem for almost twenty years, but it continually evaded even her great genius.
Until one day in 2075, Brian Prescott, now 80 years old and terminally ill, but still a computer genius, stumbled across a secret buried in an archived and encrypted database originally belonging to a now-defunct government agency called DICE. A secret that had been literally forgotten for 60 years. The secret that Carla Zod had known but never divulged. The key to unlocking the world's energy problems.
Alice Winkernickle approached the Foundation's trustees and, without detailing exactly what she was doing, obtained the funding for a cross-country expedition that would change the world.