Morning sunlight filtering into the shelter roused Grayson from a deep sleep. He blinked groggily, momentarily confused by his surroundings—the utilitarian shelter, humming solar rig, and rocky volcanic slope visible through the opening.
Then it all came rushing back. The pod, his parents' project, and the mysterious AI called Egg. This was no simulation or test. He was truly on Earth, entrusted with a monumental mission to heal the planet. The full weight of it hit him again.
Grayson stretched, then checked the new domes and greenhouse modules gleaming in the dawn. Weeks of labor had slowly transformed the slope into a livable outpost. His sore muscles reminded him of every hour he'd spent hauling panels and calibrating printers.
He set a pan of water to boil and spooned some instant meal packs into two mugs. As steam rose, he opened his interface. "Good morning, Egg. Time to push further. I need to understand the scope of what we're actually facing."
"Excellent," Egg replied. "You now have the infrastructure to handle more than immediate survival. Let's expand your field of view."
The shelter wall shimmered into a massive display, Egg pacing his words to Grayson's questions instead of rattling off a lecture.
"What's the worst of it, Egg? What are we really up against?"
"Multiple extinction-level events, cascading at once," Egg said. "Microplastic contamination has saturated the biosphere. Every organism carries synthetic polymers now, impairing cell function and reproduction."
Grayson's spoon froze halfway to his lips. "Every living thing?"
"From plankton to whales. Even the deepest ocean trenches glow red with plastic density."
Grayson swallowed hard and forced himself to keep eating. "And the ice caps?"
"Gone. Sea levels rose seven meters. The loss of reflective ice accelerated warming beyond models. Average global temperatures exceed anything in recorded history."
Grayson pushed the mug aside, appetite gone. "And people?"
"Global population has collapsed from eight billion to 2.5 in two centuries. Refugees, wars, despair, gendered ideological conflict."
He rubbed his temples. "How is anyone supposed to fix all this?"
"Not by conventional means," Egg said calmly. "That is why your parents designed radical solutions. The Synthesis Virus doesn't just modify you—it can modify entire ecosystems."
A chill ran down Grayson's spine. "You're talking about rewriting evolution."
"I'm talking about matching accelerated destruction with accelerated adaptation. Natural evolution takes millions of years. We may have fifty before biosphere collapse."
The display shifted to simulations: engineered bacteria breaking down microplastics, trees filtering toxins more efficiently, coral thriving in acidic seas.
Grayson leaned forward as the projections unfolded, but his eyes kept drifting to the modules outside—bare skeletons of domes still half-printed, drone scaffolds buzzing like oversized insects. Egg's simulations were terrifying, but the work on the ridge was tangible, and it anchored him.
"Before you can attempt reefs or forests," Egg said, voice steady, "you must prove you can manage a controlled environment. Begin small. Failures in miniature are instructive. Failures at scale are catastrophic."
Grayson grimaced, flexing his sore hand. The cut from a shard of basalt was healing faster than he expected, the nanites knitting tissue in less than two days. It was uncanny—proof he was already changed. He didn't like thinking about that, so he poured his energy into the printer's feedstock queues instead.
Days blurred. He dragged basalt rubble to the recycler, sweated under the weight of solar mesh, cursed at drones that misaligned plates. Each night his body collapsed, and each morning his lace overlaid another checklist: wall segments, sealant joints, fan housings. He learned fast—faster than should've been possible. By the third day, he was debugging printer clogs almost by instinct. By the fifth, he had memorized which ridges caught the sun longest without Egg telling him.
Progress was slow, crooked, exhausting. But the first dome rose anyway—ugly seams, patchwork supports—but whole. Grayson sealed the last seam himself, sealing it tight against the volcanic wind. When the internal fans hummed and condensation began to bead on the inside surface, he sat cross-legged on the floor and just stared. The air smelled different—warmer, moist. A place apart from the hostile slopes outside.
Egg's tone carried a flicker of approval. "A beginning, sir. Nothing more, nothing less."
Grayson rested his forehead against the dome wall, feeling the vibration of fans through polymer and basalt. It wasn't much. But it was his. For the first time since landing, he felt like more than a pawn in his parents' grand plan. He felt like a builder.
The days bled into each other, marked less by sunrise and sunset than by the endless lists projected into Grayson's vision. At first the overlays filled his sight entirely—broad schematics of the ridge, animated arrows showing where to drag basalt chunks, pulsing outlines around components waiting for assembly. It was like being puppeteered by his own HUD.
He hated it.
Each task felt like fumbling in someone else's shadow. Egg's instructions scrolled constantly: Rotate plate thirty degrees. Insert coupler. Apply sealant strip along highlighted edge. Grayson followed, teeth clenched, muscles screaming as he wrestled slabs into place. By nightfall he collapsed onto his mat, every joint buzzing with pain.
But repetition wore grooves into his mind. By the fourth day, the overlays shrank. Instead of entire schematics, only a section of wall glowed. By the seventh, Egg muted his prompts unless Grayson hesitated. He began to predict the next step, pulling components into place before the highlight appeared.
Skill crept in, slow and stubborn. His neural lace tracked each improvement, trimming away unnecessary prompts as he learned. It was like walking through fog that gradually thinned, revealing a clearer landscape underneath.
The grind consumed him. Hauling basalt into the recycler. Shoveling coarse powder into feedstock barrels. Calibrating nozzles, adjusting extruders clogged with grit, waiting for the telltale whine to smooth into a steady hum. Egg's voice shifted over time from constant corrections to terse confirmations: "Alignment within tolerance." "Seal integrity: acceptable." Grayson found himself chasing those dry approvals as if they were praise.
There were failures, too. A misaligned plate cracked under its own weight, forcing a full day's redo. A storm wind tore down scaffolding, scattering half-finished segments across the slope. He cursed, threw tools, even screamed into the volcanic air. But every failure ended the same: shoulders sagging, hands steadying, overlays blinking back into focus.
Do it again. Do it better.
And slowly, he did.
By the second week, he could watch his hands move without prompts at all—torqueing bolts, smoothing sealant, checking stress lines with a glance. The overlays now only appeared when he faltered, narrow bands of color that dissolved the moment he corrected. The grind had trained his body as much as his mind.
When he finally stood inside the second dome as it sealed, the difference was stark. The walls hummed evenly, no crooked joins, no air leaks. The lace quietly logged the achievement: [Assembly: Rank 2 → Rank 3 | +XP]. Grayson only smirked, too tired to celebrate. He knew tomorrow would bring another checklist, another grind. But for once, the work felt less like drudgery and more like competence earned.
The third dome was different from the others. Not just walls and sealant, not just scaffolding and scaffolds torn down by wind. This one was meant to live.
Grayson stepped inside the half-complete shell, the air still sharp with resin and ozone from freshly printed joints. The overlays hovering in his vision no longer dictated every motion; instead, they highlighted resource flows—arrows showing air circulation, icons of nutrient tanks, warning tags where humidity was too low. This wasn't assembly anymore. This was balance.
Egg explained it simply: "A self-sustaining system, even a tiny one, is more complex than any machine. Failures cascade quickly. Terrariums are easy. Counties are easy. Everything in between is hard."
Grayson grimaced as he connected the first nutrient pump. "And we're stuck in the in-between."
"Precisely. This is the scale where human ingenuity meets its limits without augmentation. Space habitats learned this lesson the hard way. Every dome was a balancing act: oxygen scrubbers, nutrient cycles, trace minerals, fungal blooms. Without constant vigilance, collapse came faster than anyone imagined."
The pump hissed as water flowed through filters into the shallow trays. Grayson bent over them, checking the viscosity of the nutrient solution. His lace overlaid micro-readings: pH drifting low, nitrogen balanced, trace potassium absent. He reached for the supplement capsule, dropped it in, and watched the values steady.
Egg was silent, letting him think. He remembered the old stories from the Ring: how early habs failed because no one understood how fragile a mid-sized ecosystem was. Too big for simple terrarium stability, too small for the buffering capacity of a continent. They'd only survived because generations of engineers and scientists had learned, through failure, how to cheat the math with technology.
Grayson sat cross-legged inside the dome as the first cultures came online—engineered yeast and algae glowing faintly in their trays. The air shifted within hours: warmer, damp, tinged with an organic musk that made him blink with unexpected pride.
"Life under my care," he murmured. "Not Earth's, not my parents'. Mine."
Egg finally spoke. "Before you attempt reefs or forests, you must master this scale. If you can keep this alive, you can keep more alive. If you cannot, nothing larger will matter."
Grayson leaned back against the wall, condensation beading on the polymer behind him. He listened to the hum of fans, the trickle of water through tubing, the faint, eerie glow of living cultures breathing in rhythm. Fragile, precarious, but real. He closed his eyes and let the sound steady him. For the first time since landing, he felt less like an intruder and more like a caretaker.
The work of building walls and sealing domes had been grueling, but nothing compared to what came next. The moment life was involved, every day became a test of patience, endurance, and humility.
Grayson's first dome fogged up with condensation, only to sour within days. A film of fungal growth spread unchecked, choking his engineered algae until the trays turned black. He tore it all out, flushed the system, and tried again.
The second attempt swung the other way. Too much algae, glowing like a green flood, the air thick with oxygen. Fungal cultures suffocated. When he stepped inside, his biometric HUD screamed warnings about flammability and oxygen toxicity. He left gagging, furious at himself.
Egg was mercilessly calm. "Balance is not achieved by domination, sir. Each function must check another. Predation, grazing, recycling—it is not conflict, it is equilibrium."
So Grayson introduced plankton cultures to feed on the algae. At first, it worked. The bloom receded, water clarity returned. But then the plankton population exploded and collapsed, starving themselves to near extinction. Algae surged back unchecked.
More overlays scrolled in his vision. Nutrient cycles, population curves, flow diagrams. His lace narrowed the guidance to only what he hadn't yet learned: introduce grazers for fungi. Add detritivores for decay. He printed tiny sealed containers, releasing pillbugs and springtails into the soil trays. They scurried into shadow and began their slow work.
The grind stretched on. Days of failure. Weeks of tweaks. Every success threatened to unravel somewhere else. If the fungi were grazed too aggressively, rot returned. If algae ran rampant, oxygen spiked. If pillbugs overpopulated, they stripped everything bare. Each failure meant another long night hunched in the dome, recalibrating pumps, watching overlays dance with red alerts.
Sometimes he wanted to scream. Sometimes he did. More than once, he slumped against the polymer walls, sweat dripping, lungs tight with chemical imbalance, muttering: "Why am I even trying? This is impossible."
But the next morning, he tried again.
Egg's voice stayed steady, offering reminders but never solutions. "Ecosystems are self-regulating only after stability is reached. Until then, they are as fragile as glass. Persistence is the only path."
By the end of the third month, the dome's rhythms had steadied. Algae glowed, but not in suffocating bloom. Fungi spread in quiet webs, trimmed back by springtails. Pill bugs turned rot into fertile soil. The air smelled damp and sweet, balanced. Grayson stood inside with arms crossed, exhausted but unbowed.
Outside, other domes rose, but this one mattered most. It wasn't pretty, and it wasn't permanent. But it lived.
And so, step by grinding step, his outpost of life began to emerge.