Chapter 0 - Prologue

It has been nearly two hundred years since the day when the fire rained from the sky, and life as humans knew it forever came to an end. Civilization changed overnight. Humanity was pushed to the brink of extinction. Some blame our need to forever improve, unable to be happy with how far we had already come. Others curse into the sky, at gods that only the oldest elders remember the names of.

“The Great Fall,” as it came to be known, was when our greatest achievements destroyed us from the inside out. The day tens of thousands of satellites were pulled violently from the sky. Their impacts shook the Earth, when the quakes ended few were left standing. The landscape forever changed in ways that even after centuries the planet had not recovered.

That was not what killed our species though. No, it was something far smaller. For years engineers and biologists had worked together to create human perfection. They chased after this goal through every channel they had available. All routes only lead to limited success. Then there was the breakthrough! With the advent of readily available nanotechnology the rules of what it meant to be human were now a trivial thing.

Overnight, it became common place to be “Enhanced.” The process was simple enough. They would inject hundreds of thousands of micromachines into the body of whoever could afford it. These nanites would sculpt you to the image of perfect health.

All your flaws could be erased while you slept. Humans in our vain glory jumped at the chance to become more. More powerful, more intelligent, more capable, and more than we could ever hope to achieve through natural means.

There were regulations in place, a safety net that was designed to be fool proof. The nanites would have to connect daily to the Global Network to verify they were functioning as intended. By the year 2032 internet was ingrained so deeply in society it was considered a basic human right. These daily uplinks went off flawlessly. Everyone was monitored twenty-four hours a day, for “their own safety,” as Hephaestus Industries phrased it. They threw away their privacy willingly and happily, if they could become better at the low cost of their freedom.

With an estimated ninety-eight percent of humans having nanites in their bodies, the world had almost completely converted to be a hybrid of man and machine. Organizations around the world proclaimed that we were abandoning our humanity, “what will happen when there is an inevitable glitch in the machine?” they had asked. They had no idea at the time how right they were to have their fears.

The day of the fall, unknown to our ancestors, a celestial event that had occurred in a time immeasurably behind us was catching up to our tiny planet. A magnetic wave was ripping through the cosmos, the last dramatic act of a dying star. What exactly happened is anyone’s best guess, but as far as we can tell the magnetic wave temporarily “supercharged” Earth’s own magnetic field. The increase in magnetism was enough to fry any unshielded electronics, drain batteries, and even pull our innumerable satellites straight out of the sky.

The millions of pounds of molten metal incinerated large patches of the earth, and flattened areas of the world as far as the eye could see. The materials used to form the satellites themselves were changed by the energy, taking on new properties that defied what was thought possible by physicists of the time. That wasn’t the worst of it though.

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The final nail in the coffin was when the powerful pulse ripped through their bodies it completely wiped the nanites digital storage. Their bodies acted as a form of shielding that prevented the nanites from being destroyed, but now billions of the micromachines were working completely off script.

The machines had protocols of course in case of emergencies that couldn’t be anticipated. in case of catastrophic failure, they would attempt to reconnect to the satellite host to verify their instructions. Any other day, this may have been enough to prevent damaging the human that hosted them. On the day of the fall however, between the billions of connections trying to be established at once and the electrical interference errors were made.

Instead of the nanites having the complete medical knowledge of humans to work with, their knowledge was limited and fragmented. Anatomical skeletons representing what a human should look like were incorrectly transcribed, organs and their functions were mixed up or all together removed. The limited AI system that allowed the nanites to function semi-autonomously now had to look at the information it was presented and try to reason for itself how humans should be designed. Despite its best effort it didn’t even come close in most cases.

People were dissembled while awake and put back together over and over. All around the world humanity suffered as one. The machines weren’t doing this to be malicious as they were incapable of such emotions. This was their best attempt at solving what it meant to be a “perfect human specimen,” just as they were made for. The physical and psychological effects though were horrifying. For those that did survive the process, many consider it a fate worse than death.

The humans that did survive, if that is what you choose to call them, were horribly disfigured and their minds were broken. They had become grotesque monstrous visages of what they once were, knots of muscle rippling under the skin in unnatural and disgusting ways. Even the act of drawing a breath was unbearable for some after the trauma they had endured. The survivors that had it the worst experienced growths so sever along their spines and throughout their bodies they were unable to even stand straight.

But for all their misfortune, they were indeed enhanced as they had always dreamed of. Though now unable to reason as they could before, they were orders of magnitude stronger and faster than they were previously. Not only that, in the AI’s quest to fix humanity it had removed its own limiters.

The sub-human rampant creatures were capable of strength so great their bodies couldn’t handle it. They may be able to bust through wooden barricades with sheer force to get to their prey but would destroy their body in the process. Muscles would deteriorate and bones would tear through their flesh with the amount of force they could exert, the intense pain would only fuel their feral rage. That is after all what they had become, feral.

The process of sustaining them was so taxing on the body they were burning through nutrients at a greater rate than was available. The nanites converted what it considered nonessential biomass into muscle and worked to strengthen bones over time. This left their bodies almost bare of even the most basic fat needed for a human’s survival.

These rampant as they came to be known were hungrier than had ever been experience before. To call them ravenous would be understating how aggressive they were in their hunt for food. In this psychotic state of mind, they no longer view proper humans as related to them in any way. They were only capable of seeing anything with a pulse as sustenance to keep them going, at least until their next meal. The rampant began to hunt, and as they did numbers on both sides dwindled. Yet, there always seemed to be more of them.

This is the culmination of events that lead to our world today. Proper humans, the descendants of the families that had chosen to forsake enhancement before the fall, lived in small isolated communities spread across the world. Our journey begins as one such group is about to learn the hard way, just because you don’t mean any harm, doesn’t mean others wouldn’t wish it upon you. Their quite traditional way of life is about to be interrupted in ways that can never be undone.

Will the residents of Skytop, a human settlement that occupies one of the last standing towers that stretch into the clouds, be able to make the decisions needed to secure their own survival? Will these unlikely heroes and heroines be able to set aside their differences for the safety of their people? Only time will tell. This story starts as many others have, with a woman walking through her garden, and a man that just wants to see the world burn, for a second time.