Chapter One Hundred Sixty-Five: John Rearden, Part One
----------------------------------------
The morning sun painted the horizon with soft strokes of golden light. Birds chirped lazily, bees hovered with mechanical precision, and life, despite everything, crawled forward.
John Rearden had been awake long before the world even thought to stir. Four a.m. like clockwork—splash cold water on his face, a quick rinse to wipe the grit from his skin, and out the door to the Rearden Quick Stop. Nowhere, Texas. A gas station in the middle of a dead land.
His father had bought the place right after the War, back when the world still had a future to sell at discount prices. “Good investment,” he had said many times since. “People need to drive, son. No matter what else burns.” They’d sunk everything they had into it—every scrap of hope, every coin they could pull together, and even the promise of better days.
Outside, two battered pumps stood like sentinels. Relics of a different time, just like everything else. John moved through the morning ritual, broom in hand, fighting against the eternal grime. Filth coated the world, blown in from the Dusts—what the locals called the fallout. The War had left its mark, and nothing, not even this desolate station, was spared.
The Dust clung to every surface, a reminder that the past was never far away. He wiped at the countertops, but it was like trying to clean soot off memories—you could push it around, but it never really left.
The War had left behind more than just dust and ruins. Famine crept in like a slow-moving shadow, a silent consequence of the world’s unraveling. It wasn’t the kind of war you read about in history books. John was just a kid when it ended, barely old enough to understand. The Unseen War, they called it. Not a single shot fired, but the damage was total.
AI, disease, nuclear war, poisoned crops, entire landscapes scarred beyond repair. His grandfather used to tell stories about a time when technology made life easier. Machines that could do anything—read you books, drive your car, even plow your fields. Phones you could carry in your pocket, talking to anyone, anywhere, through invisible wires that crisscrossed the sky. It sounded like magic, and maybe it was. But Grandpa had sworn it was all real.
That was before the AI hit, before everything crumbled. No one knew who built it, and every nation blamed the others. But someone, somewhere, had crafted the perfect weapon—a self-replicating, self-sustaining virus. It spread through lifeblood of the world, adapting, evolving, consuming everything that ran on ones and zeros. Its purpose? Simple. To end life as we knew it.
A thousand rumors swirled about how it had all started, each more outlandish than the last. Some claimed it was an AI engineered for war; others whispered it was just a social experiment, an AI built with a single goal—a clean, simple formula to smooth out every edge, to make everything fair. And that, quietly, imperceptibly, had brought the silence.
This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
John remembered watching a film about that once, a worn VHS he’d unearthed in a dusty junk shop, half the tape chewed up by time. Still, the message was clear—a machine sent back to erase humanity before it even had a chance. Pure fiction, sure, but as he watched, he couldn’t shake the feeling that some truth lay hidden in those flickering images.
You’d think we might’ve learned something from it. But we didn’t. We just kept spinning in circles, the same mistakes looping back like a broken record stuck on the end of the world. AI could have been a marvel, something to solve problems, to ease lives. But instead, it was Prometheus’ fire all over again. A tool, yes—but also a weapon. Fire doesn’t have motives; it’s just fire, wild and strange, bending to the hand that wields it. It can feed, it can save, it can shield us from the cold, saving countless lives. It can kindle warmth and hope—or it can consume, destroy, burn us all.
He set the needle down on a worn-out vinyl and the scratchy sound of a forgotten era crackled to life. It was some old blues tune—gritty, raw, with a voice that had seen more pain than joy. The singer’s rasp echoed through the empty lot, hanging in the air like smoke. Outside, the wind stirred the dust and sand, but the record spun steadily, its rhythm a heartbeat in a world that had lost its pulse.
John wiped the jukebox, the Dust clinging stubbornly to the rag like it had a claim on the past. It was a family heirloom, carefully hidden by his father during the dark days of the Technopurge. The automations had long since given up the ghost, leaving him to swap out the records by hand. He didn’t mind. In a world where everything was slipping away, there was something solid about the needle hitting vinyl, a sound he could control, even if just for a moment.
When John was a kid, electricity was still considered too dangerous, the Technopurge in full swing. You didn’t mess around with tech—not if you wanted to keep your head on your neck. Get caught with anything more advanced than a wind-up clock? Straight to prison, or worse. Even now, decades later, people whispered about the Purge, about what happened to those who tried to hold onto the past. But here was John, defying it in his own small way, playing a record on a machine that shouldn’t exist anymore, in a place that time had forgotten.
A flicker of rebellion sparked in him, small but insistent. A tiny resistance to what was. Yet, beneath that, he knew—the world was far too weary, far too hollowed out by hunger and time to notice, let alone care.
Over the past twenty years, the restrictions on technology had relaxed. Machines sputtered and whirred, pieced together from fragments that gleamed with a faint, alien sheen—as if they’d once brushed against stars. Scavengers with a sharp eye unearthed relics that bordered on myth: helicopters with sleek, worn lines, engines bearing faded emblems of some lost empire. Rumors floated that the old government was stirring to life again, reimagining New York’s hollowed towers, repurposing them into tight, makeshift homes. But the city’s pulse beat unevenly, half promise, half snare—a place as treacherous as the Dust that drifted endlessly beyond its borders.
One rule, though, held firm. The line in the sand—the one that would get you killed, or worse—was any trace of AI, any hint of the old networks stirring back to life. The AI hadn’t come with guns or marching steel; it had slipped through circuits like a ghost, a flicker in every hard drive, every line of code. Even now, the world treaded lightly, skirting the raw edges of that wound, careful not to stir whatever might still lie hidden, biding in the wires.
The world had crumbled, piece by piece, until there was nothing left but a collage of faded memories. His eyes drifted to the calendar nailed to the wall, yellowed and warped, claiming a year long past. Didn’t matter. It still served its purpose. By the marks he’d scratched into it, Thanksgiving was closing in—at least, that’s what he figured. The page showed a feast—turkey, mashed potatoes, a spread that could break your heart if you stared too long—a cruel echo.