That was the year, 2300, when the dreams of a thousand sci-fi writers were fulfilled, and the Earth switched to 'credits' as the universal currency. There was no other option: everybody owed everybody else more money than in fact existed, and so the whole monetary scale was inverted. The real measure of economic success was not how much you owned, but how much you owed.
But change had been coming for many years now. Four decades before, the HyperInflatory Drive was invented, a sub-40kg device that could propel craft at speeds greater than light. Hobbyists bought them in droves, and retrofitted their cars, hover transports, and motorised bipeds. And the first great era of space colonisation got underway.
It had been a long time coming. For centuries, with interplanetary travel well within humanity's scientific reach, not a single flight had gone further than Mars. The great helium reserves of Jupiter, the metal ore of Saturn's moons, iron oxide on Mercury: all was unexploited. Large companies refused to even launch exploratory vessels, citing the enormous risk.
That was then; this is now. The HyperInflatory drive opened up not just the solar system but the whole galaxy, to any tough guy with a small wad of dough. It was lawless out there - space pirates, as they were called, made a living by trading in metals and information. And they spread further and further, until only the wildest rumours came back to Earth: tales of planets built from raw titanium, pirate gangs waging interstellar war, even hidden wormholes to the very edge of the Universe. Nobody believed a word of it.
It didn't matter to Guybrush. In his agile needlefighter Boss Hog, he was out there already.