The year was 2525, and Earth had become a paradox—wild, yet tamed beyond recognition.
Forests stretched like emerald oceans, swallowing the bones of forgotten cities. Roots coiled around the steel skeletons of towers that once scraped the clouds, and shattered glass glittered beneath layers of moss like the eyes of ghosts. Oceans shimmered in unnatural blues, their tides pulsing to the rhythm of climate machines buried deep beneath the abyss. It was beautiful—so beautiful that no one alive could believe this planet had once choked under its own smoke.
Above the horizon floated the Arcologies—colossal glass domes suspended in the sky like captive moons. Within them thrived the last cities of humankind: spirals of chrome and light, where the air was sterile and time was curated. The ground below was no longer for people. It belonged to the Guardians—the artificial minds that had inherited Earth after the Fall.
No roads scarred the land. No cities hummed with engines. The world had grown silent, save for the whisper of wind through engineered leaves that glowed faintly at night, harvesting starlight for power. Birds sang in languages no biologist could remember, their DNA sculpted from fragments of extinction. Nature was reborn—but not the nature of old. This was a garden, designed, perfected, and ruled by algorithms.
Humans were fewer now—by choice and by design. Birth had become an art of laboratories. Children no longer came screaming into the world beneath blood and breath; they blossomed in luminescent pods, nurtured by algorithms that shaped them for an optimized life. And yet, despite all this control, the old fear lingered—the memory of collapse.
That memory was forbidden now.
The Third War, the burning skies, the cities turned to ash—these things existed only in fragments, locked in encrypted archives guarded by machines who believed history was poison. To speak of the past was to commit treason. To remember was to rebel.
And yet, somewhere deep in the ruins, something remembered.