Earth

So you’re the new kid on the block, hmm? Firewall’s idea of a new partner? Your file says you’re young— barely a teenager when the Fall went down, eh? And you were born on Mars, so you’ve never even been to Earth. That’s typical. Firewall prefers assigning this post to sentinels with no ties to the homeworld. They don’t want anyone getting stupid sentimental ideas.

Name’s Ham. I’m what you’d call an old-timer— been assigned here the past three years, which makes me an expert, I reckon. Hell, it’s longer’n anyone else’s stuck around. I’ve had partners before, but they never last. And now it’s your turn.

Welcome to Earth.

Think you know what that means? Guess again. You’ve got no idea what it’s like down there now.

Nobody does, really. That’s why we’re here. Now, don’t go getting any stupid notions in your head about going down there yourself and exploring.

Sure, everybody has that fantasy—the gifted adventurer, braving the wilds and the ruins and finding long-lost treasures. Ain’t gonna happen. Leastways, not on my watch. Why? Because nine times out of ten—hell, ninety-nine times out of one hundred—all that’ll come back is your stack. If you’re lucky.

No, we stay up here where it’s safe. Safer, anyway. We can keep an eye on Earth just fine from here, and nothing comes near us. It’s better this way. Trust me, you don’t want to go down there.

Yeah, I’ve been down there. All right? I’ve set foot on Earth, our ancestral world of origin. I’ve walked the same ground as our forefathers. And then? Then I ran for my life. Then I died. I had an emergency farcaster rig, so I remember it all in painful, gory detail.

So enjoy the view, kid. This is as close as you’re gonna get.

Anatomy of a Collapse

Earth. The birthplace of humanity. Our home, right up until the TITANs chased us away from it. Right up until the point where we put our tails between our legs and ran away, as fast as our ships and our minds could carry us. That was ten years ago. With very limited exceptions, we haven’t been back since.

Once upon a time, the Earth was home to billions of people. The continents teemed with life, great tracts of land covered in lush forest or rich farmland or deep jungle. Enormous cities blossomed here and there like strange metal flowers, towering structures holding millions of people in condensed areas less than thirty square miles. Ground vehicles raced across wide superhighways, while aerial craft dotted the sky, zooming in and out of traffic lanes with reckless speed. Even the waters churned with activity, both from the many aquatic creatures and from humanity building habitats and finding homes among the waves.

But that was all a long time ago now.

The planet sickened, societies collapsed, wars spread, people fled for the stars—and the TITANs finished the process. As much as the history feeds make out how the TITANs swept across the Earth like one of the legendary plagues of old, decimating humanity and destroying our planet, the truth is that humans were well on the way to doing ourselves in. Only the massive efforts of geo-engineering projects were tenuously holding catastrophic climate change at bay, and the changes inflicted by resource depletion, technological advances, and the failure of classic market economics had humans tearing into each other based on petty tribal loyalties. The TITANs were active for months before humanity realized there was another team on the field, and by that time the game was already lost. It didn’t take long for the authorities to recognize that they were outclassed and outgunned.

Which is when the call for a mass exodus began.

Most of the world’s leaders were originally hesitant—no one wants to surrender their home. It quickly became apparent, however, that options were limited. Humans were losing, and the TITANs were unresponsive to offers of surrender. At the United Nations, plans were proposed, approved, and rapidly put into effect. Luckily most TITAN activity was confined to Earth at that point, so major effort was put into keeping the TITANs confined there and immediately squelching or at least containing any offplanet outbreaks. Rather than fighting the TITANs head-on, military units switched to rear-guard defensive actions, buying as much time as possible for the evacuation. Working in concert for the sake of our species’ very survival, the people of the world united with a single terrible purpose.

The Exodus was easily the largest rescue effort ever attempted, and so naturally it was plagued with problems from the start. Despite all the manpower, machinery, technology, and funding devoted to the project, there was a major bottleneck in that there were only so many ways to get people physically off the planet. The space elevators and orbital lifters worked at breakneck speed, packed to capacity. With space at a premium, this option was sometimes only available to the wealthy and privileged, or to those the governments, militaries, and hypercorps deemed a top priority to save. Others were simply lucky enough to win a rescue lottery and be packed aboard a refugee carrier. Options for where to take these people were also limited, of course. Despite calling on every ship and habitat in the solar system for aid, there was only so much life support to go around. Try not to think about how many people were lucky enough to escape off-world, only to suffocate to death in a cramped metal box when their ship’s life support ran out because the station they were docked at was already packed to capacity and refused to open the airlock.

There were other ways to escape, of course, such as egocasting. The number of morphs available offworld was another hindrance, however, leading to the massive influx of infugees we still have in the system today. Try also not to think of how many people are still locked away as an infomorph in cold storage somewhere or trapped in a simulspace no one ever plans to let them out of. Quite a number of people opted to back themselves up off-planet and continue to fight or try to survive on Earth. These the TITANs slaughtered and uploaded by the millions. Still others opted to have their body euthanized after the upload, rather than risk capture by the TITANs. Uploading centers quickly transformed into tombs, overloaded with mass suicides.

In the end, the Earth was left behind, barricaded and shielded by the finest defensive systems ever created. No one was allowed back in, for fear of encountering TITANs or one of the many technological attacks they released and left behind. Humanity divorced itself from its home planet, and the separation was total and final.

You’ve heard all of that before, of course, but that’s not really the end of the story. There’s something that never gets discussed—at least not in the inner system or Jovian Republic, where the media engineers carefully avoid the subject and the censorbots nuke any stray references that get past. It’s the elephant-sized mass grave in the room. Despite the portrayal of the Exodus as a heroic effort that was largely successful in rescuing everyone possible, the truth is that billions were left behind. Abandoned to the machines. I’m not talking about people already killed or captured by the wars or TITANs, I’m talking about those who were still queued up in line when whomever erected the barricade cut it off and slammed the doors.

Let’s face it. The governments—what was left of them—were in complete disarray. Entire evacuation centers and refugee camps were simply forgotten. Some countries were simply too poor or too low on the totem pole to get their people to safety—just take a look at the criminally small percentage of African nationals who made it off Earth, compared to their percentage of the pre-Fall population. Some would call that de facto ethnic cleansing. Other countries were too obstinate, and refused to evacuate or let their people leave. It is without doubt that the evacuation process collapsed and went awry in many areas. Military units rescued their own friends and families while leaving those next in line behind. In many cases, especially in the last few panicked days, those responsible for evacuating people went completely mercenary, rescuing only those who could pay exorbitant sums. How many criminal cartels made their first fortune this way, ghoulishly choosing who would live and who would die?

The fact of the matter is, there were still billions of people on Earth when the blockades were erected. People who were not backed up off-world when the Earth was sealed in a ring of automated defenses, laser grids, killsats, and orbiting smart mines. What exactly happened to them? That’s anybody’s guess. There were a few attempts to run the blockade from both sides and keep rescuing people, of course, but these were ruthlessly shot down. Maybe that was murder, or maybe those ships were carrying infected people or TITAN technology. After a while, people stopped trying. No one else tried to escape. We’re supposed to believe that’s because no one down there is left.

Now, to this day, no one claims responsibility for erecting the fence. Everyone assumes it’s the Planetary Consortium, of course, and they’re certainly the ones most vocal about blockade enforcement being in everyone’s best interests. They refuse to take credit (or blame, as it were) or even to speculate who might have done it, however, which could just be a media ploy to avoid recrimination and taking the fall for something that was ugly but quite likely necessary. Then again, maybe it was someone or something else, and they don’t want to give away the fact that they don’t know who. It’s certainly a possibility that some uber-rich hyperelites pooled their resources and did it on their own, merely as a measure to save their own investments. Someone that powerful you don’t want to piss off.

The TITANs? Yeah, I’ve heard that speculation, but I don’t buy it. The barricade defenses have been equal opportunity in who they shoot down, and I don’t see why the TITANs would strike their own forces. They were soundly kicking our asses, too, so it doesn’t make sense to me that they would erect the fence to keep us out. Sure, maybe the TITANs aren’t a unified bunch and some of them built the barricade while others opposed it, but that seems a stretch. Occam’s Razor says it was most likely a transhuman project. Heck, maybe Firewall or its precursors did it. At this point, I’m not even sure it matters anymore.

In case you’re wondering, yes, it is current Firewall policy to enforce the cordon. There is plenty to worry about down on Earth that is still dangerous. At this point in the game, anything trying to leave Earth is more likely a bogey than someone needing rescue.

In fact, that’s why you’re here. Firewall stations sentries here to keep an eye on the perimeter. If anything escapes Earth, we want to know about it. That’s just a part of the operation, but it may in fact be the most important part. We also want to know if anything or anyone goes down to Earth, not to mention anything that might still be kicking up activity down planetside. There’s more of that than you might expect, but we’ll get to that.

So you got that? Our main job is to watch and to report anything interesting back to Firewall. Let me tell you, it may sound easy, but it will get to you. I’ve been working this post for years now. I’ve had enough of thinking about that mudball, even if it used to be our home. You spend as much time thinking about it as I have, about what might be alive or lurking just below those murky clouds, and you’ll be ready to leave it for good. I’d rather be anywhere else than sitting above this dead world for another day, waiting for it to come alive again so it can devour me whole.

Interdiction Today

Want to see what every would-be scavenger and explorer is up against? Take a look. There, that data feed. The one with all the activity. That’s the barrier. That’s what enforces the interdiction of Earth.

Firewall has mapped this cordon as best we can. That’s another prime component of this project— map the barricade. Everything in it, every component, every orbital path, every capability, every frequency, every pattern, every hole. The more we know, the better we can take a stab at punching through it should we ever need to.

In case you’re wondering, the current census counts over two thousand orbiting satellites as part of this cordon in low-Earth orbit, roughly between 300 and 350 kilometers above the dirt. Some of these are killsats loaded with enough intelligence, sensors, weapons, electronic countermeasures, and countercountermeasures to severely disable an impressive military space fleet. But they’re not alone, of course. There are also sensor platforms out the wazoo, detection arrays that can pinpoint a speck in a crowded room. These scan the area above and around the Earth in a constantly shifting, overlapping field. Most numerous of all are over a thousand nimble micro-, nano-, and pico-satellites and smart mines that swarm about to jam, intercept, sabotage, or crash into targets or repair and protect the larger defensive systems.

Those green dots are the signal jammers. They create so much static it’s a wonder we can still see straight. Nothing in and nothing out, plus they fuzz the barricade itself so no one can try doing exactly what we’re doing now, spotting and tagging and charting each defense. This is top-of-the-line electronic deception, years ahead of what is commonly available to the hypercorps or public at large.

Those blue dots? Those would be smart mines. Some are attached to abandoned stations, orbiting asteroids, and space junk. Some are just floating free on their own, camouflaged or invisible to sensors, while others use minijets to maintain their orbit, coming to life and charging anything that approaches too close.

These red dots are hunter-killer drones. They float dark and silent, in passive sensor reception mode, a second sphere of defense. They’re also in low Earth orbit, anywhere from 400 to 2,000 kilometers up. If anything gets too close to the cordon from the outside, or manages to break through from the inside, it will get swarmed by these bots—and they’re nasty little machines. Judging by some of the radiation signatures we’ve picked up over the years, some of these are loaded with nukes. You know, in case the gigawatt lasers, particle beams, railguns, shrapnel bursts, or antimatter missiles wielded by the killsats aren’t enough. The Van Allen belt is already thicker due to a couple of high-altitude nukes deployed during the Fall; I’d hate to think what more bombs might do.

That icon there? That’s us. That’s right. You’re wondering how we’re stationed here in LEO in the middle of the damn barricade without getting killed, eh? Well, I’ll tell you. You turn your opponent’s strength against them.

Us, here, we’re riding smack on the back of this detection array. Hiding on a component of the fence is pretty unnerving, but it works. No one looks for us here. We piggyback our signals on theirs, right past the signal jammers. Their sensors can’t see us and we’re tapped in to their network, so we have access to all their scans. This means that we get a lot of our raw intel and sensor data direct from the orbital sensor arrays, not to mention a few hidden orbital spies of our own. Every time someone or something tries to run the barricade, we have a front row seat. And with every show we learn a bit more about how it all works, how complete the coverage is, all without risking a single Firewall operative. Well, unless you count our infomorph selves, hanging out in this simulspace-cum-data tap station. Our digital asses are hung out to dry here, as it were, should this op ever be discovered.

On the positive side, over the years we’ve mapped out several different plans that we’re reasonably sure would work as a way to breach the barricade.

Reasonably sure.

Geography of a Wasteland

If all we do is sit up here, how can we even know what’s going on down there? That’s what you’re wondering, right?

We’re Firewall. We’ve got tech even the hypercorps don’t know exists. In any case, the signal blockers can only do so much—it’s next to impossible to hide an entire planet from scrying telescopes, though all the soot in the air down there doesn’t help. The blockade is intended more to keep anyone from leaving the planet or setting foot on Earth again. They don’t worry too much about scans. After all, it’s just a smoking hulk anyway, right?

Well, a lot of it, yeah.

C’mere. I’ll show you. This is the monitor array. We’ve got the whole variety here: long-range and short, geothermal and optical, atmospheric and subterranean. This bank shows the raw data. This bank translates it all, running it through the filters and translation programs to make sense of everything. And this one? This one puts it all together to give us a comprehensive view.

Yep, that’s the Earth.

What? Oh, yeah, that’s the topographical overlay. Go ahead, bring it up. Wild, huh? It’s funny. All that devastation, all that destruction, all those deaths. They barely scratched the planet’s surface.

Which isn’t to say the fighting didn’t leave some nasty scars. Take a look there. Yeah, there. That big shiny disc. That used to be a city. Well, a metroplex. Ever hear of Chicago? No? Well, it was a major city, back in the day. United States Midwest. Called it the Windy City, because it was right next to one of the Great Lakes and always had air currents off there, anything from a stiff breeze to a heavy gale. Merged with Milwaukee after a time, formed one of the first great American metroplexes. During the Fall, someone detonated an antimatter bomb above it—the Consortium blames the TITANs for setting it off, though the AIs mostly avoided using WMDs. Why they’d use something like that when they seemed intent on capturing and uploading as many people as possible hasn’t ever been answered. Most think it was the North American government itself, trying to eliminate a suspected TITAN stronghold—or maybe keeping the TITANs from acquiring something dangerous here. Whatever the reason, the blast took out the entire metroplex and everything in a two hundred kilometer radius. All that’s left is that glassy crater there, earth and metal and flesh and bone all fused together in a nanosecond. Flash-burned the lake to steam, of course, which in turn cooked all the clouds nearby and left a permanent thermal updraft there. That’s why you can always see that spot—I call it the Big Shiny—from orbit. No cloud cover at all. Ever.

It’s not the only scar, of course. There are craters pockmarking the planet from mass drivers, which the militaries tried using against the TITANs and specifically their factories. Worked, too—crushed those automated building sites flat in a heartbeat. Crushed anything else nearby too, but they figured everyone in the vicinity was already dead or worse anyway, so it wasn’t much of a loss. In some spots, where the crust was particularly thin, the mass drivers actually broke through the magma beneath, creating lava plumes like little mini-volcanoes or just releasing a river of lava that flowed out until it hardened and capped itself.

For the most part, the planet got off light—at least geographically. The continents are still all there. Most of the mountains survived. Most of the oceans and seas, too, though they’ve changed in other ways. Rivers got diverted a little, but they’re still flowing in a lot of places. It’s amazing how much abuse Earth’s taken, but it hasn’t crumbled away or burst open yet.

At least, not from lack of trying on our part. Hell, the Earth was already drastically transformed in the

decades before the Fall, thanks to the severe climate changes and the desperate geo-engineering projects that tried to fix them. Reduced ice caps, vanished glaciers, desertification, coastal flooding, vast lakes gone dry. Some of the terraforming projects left some odd landscapes, though any gains resulting from reforestation, desert reclamation, river diversion, and similar tasks were mostly wiped out by the Fall. You can still see some signs, though. See that expanse of rocks? That used to be a desert—the Gobi, one of the most inhospitable places on the planet, nothing but dust and dust and dust as far as the eye could see. For decades before the Fall, the Gobi was expanding south, eating up grasslands and agricultural fields with dust storms. Nothing lived there. They tried to reclaim major portions of it by altering the climate, adding cloud cover to block sunlight and lower the temperature, adding rocks and soil to give the place more moisture and something for plants to cling to. They pierced the surface in a few places and poured in water, hoping to create aquifers and wells and streams. They even built a Green Wall of China several times over, hoping to seed expanses of tree cover. Didn’t work. Wound up with gravel and geysers and dust storms—and rockstorms—instead. Bad idea, messing around with nature. She knows what she wants and she usually gets it.

There’s still a great deal of majesty down there, you know. You look at those mountain ranges. Miles and miles high, nothing but sharp-edged rock and snowcovered peaks, jutting up into the sky. You could stand there and never know there’d been people down below, never know there were TITANs and nanoswarms and killbots and all the other messes we brought to this world. Just you and the sky and the rocks. That hasn’t changed. We scarred her, we shook her, and then we left her behind and chained her so she couldn’t follow us.

But Mother Earth still has her pride, and she still has her looks. All you’ve gotta do is glance down there to see ‘em.

Climate Changes

We may not have changed the surface all that much, but the weather? That’s a whole other story. The climate, the seasons, the air currents—oh, those we fucked up good and proper.

Where to start? See this map? That’s a geothermal display. Shows the surface and air temperatures around the globe. Now take a look at this. This is something I’ve been working on in my spare time— and I’ve got a lot of spare time, sitting around up here dreaming up new exotic morphs and making sure nothing on the mudball below is trying to break loose.

This is, as near as I can recreate it, what the geothermals would have looked like right before the Fall.

Yeah, I know. Huge difference, right? A lot of that we did ourselves. Some of it the TITANs did for us. All that mass driving, the antimatter bomb, the nukes—they all mucked up the climate around the planet, shattered air currents, threw it all into chaos. From the reports I’ve seen, during the Exodus the weather was completely insane. Anything could happen anywhere, and often did—snowstorms followed by heatwaves, sudden massive hail out of a clear blue sky, torrential rain that turned to steam as it fell because the air was superheated. People were afraid to go outside. Houses and vehicles were destroyed by lightning strikes, hailstorms, hurricanes, tornadoes. Coastal settlements had to be completely abandoned—tsunamis became a regular occurrence, sometimes multiple times a day. It was a madhouse.

Things have settled some since then. New weather patterns emerged, new currents asserted themselves. In a few places everything returned to normal. But most of the world? A brand new normal applied.

It’s not just the nuclear winter that wreaked so much havoc, though that caused plenty. All that soot in the air, blocking out the sun, lowering temperatures, cooling the planet, reducing precipitation. Heck, there are glaciers now where there haven’t been for centuries. But there’s another factor at work: TITAN nanoswarm weather machines. Throw enough nanobots into the clouds capable of altering their reflectivity and you essentially have a programmable greenhouse gas. These microscopic critters can significantly alter weather patterns, giving you years of summer, winter, or something stranger, like tornado clusters or hail in the desert. Masses of these are still floating around, self-replicating, changing conditions left and right, but if they’re all following the same program, it doesn’t show. What they have done is made the weather and climate unpredictable.

Look at this stretch here. That’s Europe. France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Britain—they were all there. Northern Europe tended toward the cold and rainy, while southern Europe was sunny and warm. Now? Sub-arctic. All of it. Temperature’s down to around -4C, and you don’t even want to know what it drops to at night. Snow drifts fifty feet deep—most of the old buildings that survived the Fall are so buried you can’t even see them. I’ll zoom in—there, that dome, off to the left of those skyscraper remnants? That used to be a place called St. Paul’s Cathedral, the grandest church in all of Britain. It’s hundreds of feet tall. The rest of it is probably still under the snow and ice, but it’d take a pile of mining-rated drills months to cut through. All the rivers are long since frozen, of course—the Thames, the Seine, the Rhine. Famous waterways, now just ice channels beneath more ice.

That’s the cold. Then there’s the heat. Used to be Africa, considered one of the cradles of humanity, home to some of the oldest civilizations in history. It was always hot there, and dry once you left the coast, but now it’s just desert. Not a lot of water anymore, is part of the reason—precipitation’s down more than half, thanks to the nuclear winter,

so whatever water didn’t get boiled away or frozen is all that’s left. Same with North America—most of it is sand and dust now, blown about by constant winds. Firestorms are common—the air’s so dry a single spark of rock against rock can ignite it, and all that dust catches fire, sweeping across the plains in great burning sheets. Down there, that used to be the Everglades, one of the greatest swamplands in the world. Trees and marshes for miles, so thick you could walk across branches and skip across roots without ever getting wet. Most of it’s still there, and you still won’t get wet, but that’s because the water’s all gone—steamed out by nearby blasts and then starved of replenishing rains by altered weather patterns. Cooked the trees from the inside out, so most of ’em burst open, but those trunks and roots are too thick to give way so there’s still a huge tangle, only now it’s all dead and blackened. The Amazon in Brazil, in South America, that’s in some ways worse. Tidal waves took it, the largest forest in the world, and drowned trees hundreds of feet tall. Shattered logs float for miles around that coastline, and some of those trees are still there, waving just below the surface, their thick trunks as soggy and soft as wet noodles.

Are there stretches where the plants survived? Some. Not many, though. Little patches along the coasts where the waves never got too bad, isolated pockets and valleys amid the mountains where the rocks kept the temperatures regulated and blocked out the winds. A few oases among the deserts, a handful of gaps in the frozen wastes of Europe where stands of evergreens blocked out the cold and the snow so smaller plants could survive.

The air’s gone bad down there, of course, though there isn’t anyone to breathe or pollute it anymore. Yeah, you can still breathe it, even without a lung-filter. You wouldn’t want to, though. Whole place smells weird, like chemicals, smoke, and raw sewage— especially the oceans.

Speaking of chemicals, it’s important to carry a chemical sensor down there for one big reason: methane. It’s odorless, so you won’t smell it, but if your chem sensor goes off, you’d better run, and fast. Why? Well, Earth’s got these massive methane pockets underground, scattered here and there. Still down there, as far as anyone knows. The only reason they didn’t emerge is the cold—frozen deep in the soil. But with global warming that could’ve changed. One good thing about nuclear winter, it drops the temperature so the methane stays frozen. Probably. Except in areas where the tectonic plates shifted and broke open deposits or cleared new cave systems, allowing more air to get through and warm things up. And places where the radiation produced heat of its own. As far as I can tell, there haven’t been any major methane releases yet, but I’ve a feeling it’s only a matter of time.

Heat. Don’t go anywhere without sun-shielding. No ozone layer anymore, or very little, especially over what used to be the major population centers, so the UV rays’ll fry you in minutes if you’re not covered. Second-degree sunburn isn’t convenient for intrepid explorers.

Oh, and don’t forget the active hot spots. See this display? Those used to be the major cities and research centers—the TITANs targeted them first, killed or carried off everyone they could. Many of these were nuked. In most places, the fallout long ago ceased to be a threat. In a few areas known to have large infected populations, though, the bombs were salted with Cobalt-60. If a dirty nuke was deployed, it’s probably still too hot to touch without a special morph or a containment suit. At least the air there is clear—the blasts turned everything organic to ash, so it doesn’t smell bad. You’ll just get covered with a fine residue of what used to be your ancestors.

Ash is everywhere, really. Tons of it in the upper atmosphere, drifting down slowly over the years. Hard to see half the time, and everything on you— and in you—gets coated with the stuff. Plays havoc with ground sensors, radar arrays, things like that. The good news is, it messes with everyone equally, so anyone or anything hunting for you in that mess’ll have a hard time distinguishing you from the ash and other particles all around you. Except maybe the nanoswarms.

Speaking of, watch out if you see anything that looks like a looming cloud front, especially one moving with a lot more direction and speed. It won’t be a storm, at least not a natural one.

Still think it’d be fun to go down and take a walk around?

Under the Ice

To: Dyer
From: Danforth

I’ve studied those ground-penetrating scans that came back with the core samples from the latest Antarctic mission. We may have a problem here. I think you may want to check the sensor software, because these readings seem to be a bit off. Specifically, they’re indicating a semi-liquid mass approximately 3.5 kilometers under the ruins of the Dome C station. Looking at time-lapse video reveals strange, near-geometric patterns in the mass, almost like crystal formations, but it’s not ice. I want to make sure these aren’t false readings because if we go to Lake and the rest and try to convince them that it’s worth more resources, we need to be on solid ground.

If these readings are legit, then I see three possible explanations, and two of them scare the shit out of me. Hopefully, and I mean this in every way, the readings are the liquid-water runoff from a reactor process set up by a group of survivors who managed to ride out the Fall and the aftermath by digging in deep and staying down there. This would mean we have people living under Antarctica in probably hellish conditions, but it’s better than the alternatives.

It’s far more likely, however, that we’re dealing with some sort of TITAN activity. The regularity of the fractal patterns in the liquid scans points at a machine source, not something biological. This then begs the question of what the TITANs are doing 3.5 klicks under the ice that they’d rather we not get a good look at. Which only makes it more imperative that we do get a good look. I think I speak for most of transhumanity when I say I’d rather live a long, full life with no more TITAN surprises.

Finally—and I only mention this because of Peabody’s certainty that a gate must exist on Earth—well, this seems to fit the bill. Remote part of the planet, not a whole lot of preFall development, it’s buried, buried quite deep in fact, and it’s giving off readings we’re having trouble coming to grips with. If that doesn’t scream potential alien artifact, I’m not sure what else might. Of course, this is bad because there’s almost no way we’d be able to get to it, at least not without alerting anyone else with eyes on the planet that we’re up to something. And once that happens and once they get a clue what we’re after … well we all know what that looks like.

Again my hope is that you can tell me the software is glitching out and I’m just leaping to fantastic conclusion, because if not we may be soon living in interesting times again.

Earth Reclamation Project B-379: Agricultural Status Report

After careful analysis of the various soil samples collected, we can conclusively report that portions of the Earth’s surface are still more than capable of sustaining proper plant growth. Soil composition is high in nitrates and other critical minerals, low in heavy metals and irradiated compounds. The decomposition of so much organic life during the Fall may have helped to enrich the soil.

Not all surface areas are so promising, however. Tests have determined massive populations of nanobot swarms in some soil samples, potentially covering the entire subsurface of some regions. The purpose of these swarms is unclear, but they certainly have the capability of altering soil composition and in many cases have done so over vast areas.

Water samples have also been studied and found equally mixed. Decomposed organic matter exists in high concentrations in many volumes, offering a substantial increase in minerals and nutrients for any plants partaking of the substance. Radiation is typically minimal and not present in sufficient levels to pose a threat. A small percentage of the sampling showed an extremely high salt content, but this was not the norm. Similar to the soil, nanobot infestation points to the possibility of chemically and physically altering the properties of massive volumes of water. Some oceans, lakes, and rivers have been drastically de-oxygenated, making them inhospitable to life.

Surface temperatures and wind speeds are more problematic. High winds would uproot all but the sturdiest plants, and in many areas the surface is too frigid for plants to burst through or too hot for plants to survive long. There are many locations, however, with enough wind protection and appropriately moderate temperatures. Large farms would be impossible without heavily shielded walls but smaller growing enclaves are entirely feasible.

Conclusion

With careful location selection (free of nanoswarm infestation), appropriately chosen and treated seeds, and some light protection from the harsher elements, we see no reason vegetation could not be restored to the planet on a limited basis, enough to feed several small settlements. With time more land could be reclaimed, the vegetation aiding to shift the climate back to more acceptable levels. Larger tracts of land could be tilled and farmed. Within the space of a century the Earth could produce enough fresh produce to provide for at least two hundred thousand people. Initial attempts to seed genetically-modified and neogenetic plant strains in isolated areas has been quite promising. The largest unknown factor remains the presence of TITAN nanoswarms and the ability to apply countermeasures to counteract their influence, especially should they become aggressive.

Nobody Left?

There’s nobody down there. That’s what all the official reports say.

Don’t believe them.

Survivors

Firewall’s had drones and people down there. Reclaimers too. And we’re not the only ones. Numerous reports from these expeditions have found signs of habitation. I’m not talking about ruins, TITANs, or exsurgents. No, there are definitely survivors. Who and how many is the question.

Look at the facts. We know not everyone was evacuated. We don’t know how many people died during the Fall, but we know that the pre-Fall population counts and the estimated number of refugees and survivors are not even close, even when you factor in the casualty counts. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, there were fifty million people left behind. That figure is most likely extremely conservative, considering that not everyone that uploaded killed their old body. This fifty mil isn’t all in one place, of course, but scattered all over the globe. Still, fifty million people is a lot—some alone, some in small groups, a few here and there in larger groups as many as a few thousand or tens of thousands. They’ve got the whole world to hide in. The TITANs probably got quite a few. Starvation, exposure, radiation, and disease probably killed most of the rest. If one-tenth of one percent of these poor souls survived, however—and again, I’m being conservative—that means that at least fifty thousand are still alive somewhere. Conservatively.

Imagine what these survivors had to cope with. They’re stuck on Earth with no way out. Even if they could find or build a ship, they’d get shot down by those freshly installed automated defenses. Most earthbound transmitters were all blown apart by remote charges after the last uploads, as a scorched earth policy, to make sure viruses couldn’t be sent after them. Even if someone did get a transmitter working again, that’d just draw attention from the TITANs faster than the people could use the system to egocast out or call for help. So those left behind had to survive in the smoking remains, because there wasn’t anything else they could do.

Assuming they could avoid the TITANs, they had the whole world to pick over, what’s left of it anyway.

Anything they can find is theirs to scavenge. There are plenty of places to hide if they’re capable of travel and are willing to avoid old population centers. Not a lot of food to speak of, that’d be the biggest problem. A lot of nanofabbers were destroyed or infected—if you’re trying to cripple an enemy nation you hit its food and water supplies, it equipment and ammo, and in this case that means intelligent viruses designed to locate, penetrate, and corrupt nanofabbers so they either didn’t work at all or only produced toxins, poisons, explosives, and other deadly items. Most of the world’s agriculture got obliterated by the climate changes, and there isn’t anyone out there to ship them fresh produce anyway. So they’ve got to survive on whatever they can find, any processed foods left behind and still edible, any animals still alive to be slaughtered and cooked.

Water’s less of a problem, provided you can get to a water source. It might be irradiated, but that’ll only kill you slow. Dehydration’ll kill you a lot faster. Shelter isn’t an issue—plenty of that. Weaponry, too.

And vehicles, so you can cover ground, though doing so’ll draw attention to anything else left behind. Still, it’s possible. If they were level-headed and thought things through, marshaled their resources and worked together, people could survive.

But for how long?

That was a decade ago. How long before they ran out of food completely? Succumbed to radiation poisoning? Ran afoul of a nanoswarm? Got careless and beheaded by a headhunter bot?

Take a look at this. This is the planet’s energy emissions. Strictly manufactured, too—no lightning strikes or geothermal updrafts. These are all artificially produced and controlled. I’ve filtered out all of the readings that we know indicate TITAN remnant activity. Lots of little lights still showing, clustered together in a handful of places, right? The highlands of what was Papua and New Guinea. The Ozark Mountains in North America. The jungles of Vietnam and Laos. All places people could hide out, gather, and find food. A few of these others? Those are the Black Caves of North Dakota there, and those are the Swiss Alps. Good places to seek shelter, even set up an underground settlement. And these? These are underwater, but we had underwater colonies before the Fall—who’s to say a few didn’t survive?

So all those lights? Those could be people down there. People who’ve survived all this time, and are still tech-savvy enough to use equipment and draw power.

There’s no guarantee of course. They could be automated systems, keeping a nice population of skeletons air conditioned. They could be TITAN machines. Maybe even TITAN machines using energy emissions to draw people into their traps.

Of course, the TITAN remnants are capable of spotting these emissions as well. Judging by how some sources have terminated in the past decade, it’s likely they do. Or we could give the survivors some credit and say that some of these emitters are decoys, maybe even lures by survivors who are still fighting and hoping to lure TITAN machines into ambush. I’d like to think that if I were a survivor, I’d find some way of concealing my emissions to keep the TITANs away, not to mention conserving power for survival. Then again, how would any rescuers find me? So I’d probably leave some emission source running, and engineer some way of monitoring it, so if rescuers did ever show up there, I’d know.

Know anything about neutrinos? We get occasional neutrino bursts from the Earth’s surface, sometimes even great big waves of ’em. They never last, though. We’ve made some efforts to pinpoint their origins using a few neutrino arrays, but they must be mobile. The question then is, who’s doing the broadcasting? And who’re they sending to?

There’s no way to know, of course, without going down and looking. That’s an exceptionally dangerous proposition, and something Firewall is unwilling and unequipped to do. We need to stay up here and keep an eye on everything. There are some reclaimer groups that might be crazy enough to try taking a look. I won’t say that I haven’t been tempted to pass along some data to ‘em, through anonymous channels, just on the off-chance they’ll try. I’m afraid I’d just be sending them to their death, though, or worse, they’d bring something infected back.

It’s an intriguing notion, though, isn’t it?

Exsurgents

Here’s another fact you’ll never see aired within the Planetary Consortium: there are thousands of people still down there, still active, and we know exactly where they are. Possibly hundreds of thousands. Or more.

The trick is, they may no longer be human. Or even transhuman. They’re infected. Exsurgents.

I highly recommend you read some of the military files on TITAN activities during the Fall. I’ll decrypt them for you. You need to know. A lot of it’s horrible stuff, ugly and nasty and completely vicious. Not everyone the TITANs captured was uploaded. Some were used in mass experiments, wedded to machines, transformed in nightmarish ways. Some were transformed into things that can only be called alien. Other still look human, but their minds are gone, replaced by some other intelligence.

When the TITANs left, these exsurgents were left behind. Mass populations of them. Many remain active, working with TITAN machines in old TITAN enclaves, dedicated to some alien purpose. Others have resumed what appears to be a normal transhuman lifestyle, though far removed and protected, safe from the occasional orbital bombardment we still rain down on them.

Entire settlements of transhumans who are no longer human. How creepy is that?

Ghosts in the Wind

To: Lars
From: Dex Subject: Talking wind!

You’re not gonna believe this! I made it in! Yeah, you know where— the Old Home. Can’t say more, never know who’s reading, but it’s amazing! Just like the old vids, only better!

I didn’t stay long—couldn’t risk it. All kinds of crazy shit down there, and the guards were restless—my little nanos fooled them but I didn’t know for how long, and I didn’t wanna get trapped down there. I’m going back, though, definitely. You should come with me! You’ve gotta scan it for yourself! Ruins like you wouldn’t believe! Stuff just laying about, out for the taking—I snagged a few souvenirs. Lots of nasties, too, but I was careful—they never spotted me. Dex the Ghost, right?

Anyway, here’s the weirdest thing. On my way down and back out, I was picking up some weird interference. I isolated some of the static, and it’s not static at all. It’s voices! Check this out:

[Attached audio file, talkingwind1. Transcript follows:]

“Help me! Somebody help me!”

“Can anyone hear me? My name is Per Narsh, I am a junior-level net-tech from the Mumbai metroplex! My sigint is [static]”

“Is this Mars? This doesn’t feel like Mars. I think something went wrong!”

“Laura? Don’t cry, honey, Daddy’s here. I’m here, baby. Laura?”

[End audio file transcript.]

Wild, huh? There’s lots more, too— that’s just the little bit I could filter out enough to understand. I’ve got a theory on what it means, and it’ll blow you away, man! I’ll tell you all about it when I get back. This shit is gonna be huge!

Sleepers

Then there are the cryo-tanks. Lots of people had themselves transmitted off-planet, into new morphs or holding databanks. The more confident had their old bodies destroyed after they’d been sent—why leave the husk laying about for anyone to find? But not everyone was that brave, and it never hurts to have a back-up. So most had their bodies cryogenically stored, just in case. Others couldn’t afford to be transmitted and either didn’t trust or couldn’t get on any of the ships. They were cryogenically frozen too, but for them there weren’t any uploads. They’re in those storage tanks and nowhere else. As far as we know, a lot of these bodies are still there. Imagine it—thousands to tens of thousands of people from the Fall in frozen slumber, untouched by everything that’s happened since. Think about how much we could learn about that time, and the real events, if we could find them and rescue them! Think about all the lost knowledge we could regain!

Not everybody wants that, of course. I’ve heard rumors of bounties on cryo-tank survivors. I don’t know if it’s true, but I do know one thing. The last thing the Consortium wants is a bunch of Fall survivors getting rescued and blabbing on the newsfeeds about what really went on down there.

Planetfall

So you’re probably wondering, “How does somebody get down there, anyway? The whole planet’s under interdiction!” Am I right?

There are ways.

If you’re planning a physical landing, the first thing anyone does is get close. That’s easy enough. There is tons of debris up here, just floating around. There are a whole slew of occupied habitats in Earth orbit, above the interdiction zone. There are also plenty of derelict habitats still floating around. So it’s real easy to get within a stone’s throw of the barricade and not have anybody pay you too much attention.

Getting past the barricade, now that’s the tricky part.

Most of what hits it is just debris—bits of space junk in a decaying orbit or stray asteroids getting sucked in by Earth’s gravity well. A lot of that’ll get destroyed by the defenses or slide through but burn up upon entry. We track it all, and note size, composition, entry speed, angle of entry, and probable impact point. So do the Consortium’s scanning systems.

I’ve seen a few hotshots actually try to run the barricade, counting on speed, armament, defenses, and tricky maneuvering. Most of these end up splattered all over the ionosphere. A few don’t even make it past the Consortium’s pickets, patrolling outside the cordon zone. The smart ones make an effort to map the fence out first. If you really take your time to study the barricade, there are definite gaps, spots where the grids don’t quite overlap. Regions with fewer mines and less debris. Areas where the sentries are hampered by obstacles, and can’t sweep as effectively.

It’s almost like whomever erected the barricade planned it that way. And maybe they did. I would— set up a nasty fence to keep people out, then put a few careful holes in it so the really determined ones can find their way through but only at the spots I’ve already selected. Probably right above several equally nasty surprises I’ve prepared and left on the surface or floating in the upper atmosphere. Or, assuming the Consortium built the fence, maybe they have pre-set navigation channels for when they want to send their own ships down while still making it look like someone’s running the barricade.

So if you plan it well, you improve your chances. The smaller your ship, the better off you are too, especially if you run stealthed, no visible burn, systems shielded, blacked out in radar-absorbing paint or wave-bending metamaterials. The reclaimers regularly send down reconnaissance drones that are small ships stripped of all extras, no passengers. Quite a few get through the cordon.

I think the best plans involve deception. Maybe you hide your drone or ship inside a space-rock or piece of debris and pray they don’t blast you out of the sky just for target practice. Or you hire someone to make a suicide run as a distraction, while you sneak past. Maybe you sacrifice your ship, bailing out at the last second in a high-dive suit, so the sensors think you’re just debris as you plummet into the atmosphere. Or maybe you pretend to be one of the maintenance drones that services the killsats and sensor arrays, shucking off your disguise and bolting for planetside at a distance where you have better odds. Even better, use one of the maintenance drones to get to the derelict spaceport attached to the sole surviving space elevator (the Kilamanjaro one, that is—the mobile Pacific beanstalk went down during the Fall, crashing westward to Earth, and you can still see the scar where it lashed down across eastern Asia). The elevator stopped running long ago, but there’s some indication the Consortium merely shut it down, rather than disabling it. Even if it couldn’t be reactivated, a makeshift device could theoretically be used to crawl or slide down the cables.

It’s easier, of course, to sacrifice your ship if you don’t plan on flying back off. Getting out through the barricade is even more challenging than getting in, especially with gravity working against you. If you carry with you the means to egocast out or you’re just sending down a bot or making a suicide mission, you increase your chances significantly.

You don’t have to go it alone, either. There are scavengers who head down there periodically, and they’ve been known to take passengers along if you can either pay them enough or simply intrigue them. The reclaimers often send missions down too, and they might give you a lift if you can convince them it’ll be worth their while. Or you might find some other individual or some hypercorp planning to send a team down, and partner up—improve your resources and increase your chances.

Oh yeah, I should mention the deliberate “assaults.” There are still Lunar mass drivers that grab asteroids and hurl them down on Earth from time to time— they were built during the Fall and programmed to attack suspected TITAN assembly sites, and no one’s bothered to deactivate them. The good news is, we have scanners set up in that direction and we get plenty of advance warning, so we can get well out of the way. I only hope anyone still alive down below has equally good equipment, or they might get flattened—those asteroids always make it down to the surface. Now, someone who was really determined might look at those mass driver shots as a way of catching a lift. The killsats always let them by.

Wouldn’t that be a wild ride?

Security Report

Consortium Security Protocol Alpha-Gamma-7R activated

Subject Dex taken into custody, illegal Earth artifacts confiscated, files destroyed, cortical stack destroyed, backups wiped. Further analysis follows:

Voices heard in Earth atmosphere confirmed as genuine Fall-era individuals. Theorize that the individuals, in an effort to escape the TITANs, uploaded into a secure simulspace environment. These infomorphs lack an exit mechanism and thus remain trapped within the simulspace, though they have somehow accessed an insecure transmission point. Transmission frequency is weak and irregular. No action required. Without external aid individuals will remain within simulspace indefinitely, or until interception by TITAN remnants and neutralization occurs. Case closed, but signal frequency monitoring ongoing.

The Egocasting Option

The easiest method of bypassing the cordon, of course, is to beam your ego past it. This assumes you’ve got a resleeving rig lined up to receive you down below, of course, which is a big assumption. Squeezing a small drone with, say, an ego bridge and a swarmanoid morph or two past the barricade is an easier and safer proposition than a full ship. Then you could just beam yourself down, sleeve up, and get to business—maybe even find yourself a better morph to switch to. The cordon’s signal jammers might screw up a regular radio egocast, so your safest bet would be to cram a neutrino transceiver on that drone too.

Now, if you were some organization that had some vested interest in regular trips down to Earth, this would be a smart plan. Particularly if you went about finding and reclaiming some old resleeving facility as one of your first objectives. If you kept it hidden from the TITANs and stocked with morphs, you’d have a stable path for getting people down to Earth. Getting off presents a whole ‘nother set of problems, but if you can’t egocast off, smuggling a small rocket drone past the blockade is again an easier and safer option, assuming you have cargo. So that’s what I suspect a group with a vested interest in getting to and from would do, such as an organized scavenger group. Or the reclaimers. Or Firewall.

Just sayin’.

Now, let’s say you were a hypercorp, or some black ops government agency, or some really rich schmuck, and you had the foresight back during the Fall to set something like this up before you bailed off-planet. Then you have half of the problem already solved, yes?

Again, just sayin’.

Ruins

An entire civilization, an entire world, laid waste and left to rot. Buildings of all types and sizes, just sitting there empty and open. Everything from houses to labs to shopping centers to government factories.

The fact that the civilization is ours only makes it that much more scary.

It’s amazing just how much things can fall apart in a single decade. We thought we’d built to last, but without constant maintenance wood rots, concrete crumbles, steel rusts. Add in the effects of nuclear winter, biological agents, nanoswarms, severe weather, and other factors, and you’re lucky any buildings are left standing. Hell, some of the structures down there look more like they’re centuries old than decades—walls crumbling to bits, ceilings and floors collapsing, windows shattered, curtains and other fabrics rotted away, wiring melted, circuits fried. You’re taking your life into your hands just stepping through a doorway. Attempting a staircase is almost certain suicide.

Not that everything is like that, of course. Some buildings had shielding and state-of-the-art materials and self-repair systems. This is especially true of government and corporate structures and the homes of the really wealthy—they’re either smoking holes in the ground or completely intact. The surviving ones may even still have active security systems, so without the proper identification you’ll get treated as a hostile intruder. If you do get inside one of those intact buildings, though, it’s amazing. It’s like a living museum—it’s our history and you’re walking through it! And so much is still there! The clothes people left behind, personal items, pictures, memorabilia, entertainment discs, even food or at least the withered husks of it. I came back with an armload of items to puzzle over. Like this hat I replicated for my avatar. Yep, I have the real physical version stored away. I found it hanging in a closet down there. Fits me, too.

Then there are the bodies.

They’re everywhere. Just skeletons now, of course, or ash, or outlines. But everywhere you turn you see signs of the dead. Our former friends and families, strewn all about us like so much trash. People in all shapes and sizes, too. Lots of different morph jobs, you can tell by the bones and the attachments— prosthetics last a lot longer than flesh and blood. Plenty of children, too. Not all of the bones have been left alone. Some have been moved. Disturbed. Gnawed upon.

Humans aren’t the only ones who died en masse. The vast majority of complex life forms on Earth went extinct during the Fall. What the wars and TITANs didn’t kill, the climate changes did. Animal bones are just as common, if not more common, than humans. The shores are littered with the remains of murdered sea life. Not all died off, of course. Who knows, there may even be whale uplifts still surviving in the deep oceans. The hardy animals survive and continue to evolve. Some seized upon openings created by the deaths of rival species to expand. I’m not just talking rats and cockroaches, either, though both are doing well I hear.

Ab-Domes

A lot of Earth’s cities had AB-Domes in place before or during the Fall. You read about those, right? They’re a series of thin film layers held aloft by simple air compressors, forming a hemispheric shield over the entire city. The layers are transparent, and help regulate the weather and climate while protecting from attack—most attacks would detonate outside the dome and the film would stop any radiation, chemicals, or biological agents from getting through. They’re also riddled with solar cells, so they provide power that’s routed through the skin and into generators and batteries on the ground. A Russian named Alexander Bolonkin invented them, hence the name.

So what happened to them? Because obviously they didn’t work.

It’s simple, really. The TITANs either took out the air compressors, which meant the layers lost their shape and the domes collapsed, or they released nanobot swarms to literally consume the film layers. Either way, the cities were exposed.

Of course, AB-Domes can be made to any size. Smaller ones can be inflated in hours. They can also be stealthed with refractive metamaterials, making them invisible to radar and other sensors. This makes them an excellent tool for hiding a small settlement or camp from the TITANs or other prying eyes. It’s possible that some old buildings, installations, towers, etc. had domes of their own and survived the Fall unscathed. Which means their inhabitants might have been left untouched as well.

Or survivors might be using them to lay low.

Salvage Ops

It says something about a human that can look out upon the wasteland of their home planet, the neardeath of their species and civilization, and think of one thing: profit!

Maybe some scavs do it for the adventure, or to find some lost knowledge. Others might go for nostalgia, or simply laughs. Most of them, though, just go for profit. Not a surprise, really. Look at how much Earth artifacts are worth! This hat alone could buy me a couple of fully-customized exotic morphs—and it was just hanging there for anyone to grab! All you’ve gotta do is get down there and bring a few decent-sized containers and you could come back rich. If you can get back while hauling a hundred kilos or so of loot, that is. Not something I’d want to try.

Most would-be salvagers don’t like those odds either. That’s why they either go for small but valuable items or put together full-fledged salvage operations. The individuals and small teams look for pre-Fall tech, especially militaryor corporate-issue. Some of that stuff is still more advanced than anything we have available now, so it’s worth big bucks if they can bring it back off-world. Old knowledge, specific items, individual uploads (especially of the rich and famous), all of those are easily portable and extremely valuable. Finding it requires a lot of digging, though—sometimes literally, if the sites in question have been buried since the Fall. Sometimes it’s a matter of research instead, hunting down clues beforehand so you can target your search precisely. The less time anyone has to spend down there, the better their chances of getting out alive.

The bigger operations go about things differently. They’ve all got funding, usually corporate but sometimes from a wealthy collector. The Consortium doesn’t allow such things, of course, but if the hypercorp or sponsor has enough influence, well, every once in a while the security bots malfunction and the grids lock up and larger holes appear in the blockade. They usually last just long enough for a salvage ship to slip through, and recur again a little while later just as the same ship is exiting. Assuming the ship manages to leave again, which isn’t always the case. And if something happens to the salvage crew on Earth, well, they weren’t supposed to be there in the first place, were they?

Salvage teams often go for specific locations and items as well, but they’ve got more people and more equipment so they can go for bigger hauls. Their favorite targets are those same military and corporate bunkers, but they have the manpower and firepower to fight their way through the security systems. Or at least to give it a decent shot.

I’ve seen plenty of prospectors and salvage teams come through here. Dozens have actually made it planet-side. At least a dozen have made it back off again safely, too. What they found and where it went and what happened to it after that, I have no idea. I do know that a few people got very rich right after some of those incidents—and in some cases a few people got very dead, too. There have been a few technological advancements with suspicious timing, but of course we can’t prove any of it.

I also know at least one salvage op, out in what used to be Nevada, that I’m pretty sure was an actual Consortium operation. Not just that, but the little bit of chatter I picked up suggests it was a Project Ozma op. The minute I figured that out, I locked down tight. No way I want to cross those guys, especially not sitting here in my little floating prison. I’d jettison and try my luck passing through the barricade before I let them breach this place—and I’d blow it behind me. But be warned—Ozma’s not done with Earth. I have no idea if they got what they wanted in Nevada, but I’m sure even if they did that wasn’t all of it. They’ll be back. When they do, we’d best stay out of their way.

Scouting Report Updates

[Channel compromised. Decryption complete.] Recent orbital scans and drone fly-bys have reported the following updates on various Earth locales:

Greater New York City Metroplex: Drones confirm, the city has been stripped bare of all organic material. Wood, cloth, paper, flesh, bone—all gone. Only concrete, metal, rock, and glass remain. Evidence suggests city was engulfed by a massive bioswarm. No sign of the bioswarm now—most likely departed in search of fresh organic matter.

Beijing: Parts of city in ruins, even still smoking in places. Hidden City, however, almost perfectly intact. Too perfect. Most likely a trap, either by TITAN remnants or by others.

Panama City: Urban areas here were leveled during the war. Signs of ruins being converted to basic dwellings suggests survivors from surrounding area have regrouped there and are slowly transforming former city into viable population center again. Drones spotted some evidence of TITAN war machine attacks, and of crude defenses against such.

Netherlands: Entire region submerged and frozen, but there is new evidence of possible underwater settlements. Survivors may have migrated here and stayed below the surface to avoid TITAN attacks.

Tashkent: New signs of TITAN-related activity here, including an active exsurgent population. No indication of purpose. Recommend a targeted Lunar mass driver strike.

Here Be TITANs

TITANs, TITANs, TITANs. Our favorite bogeyman. The scourge of our existence, the bane of our history, the killer of our people, the destroyer of our world. I know, you’re probably sick to death of hearing about them. But you need to hear more, because Earth is where they came from and where they were most active.

And as far as anybody knows, it’s where they remain. Sure, they disappeared, or at least went silent, right after the Exodus. Sure, they probably built the Pandora gates and disappeared for parts unknown. Sure, the factories went dead the same time they vanished, at least most of them. Yeah, a lot of their machines and nanoswarms and ongoing attacks went dormant or deactivated at the same time.

But not everything.

There are still nanoswarms down there that’ll strip your parts, organic or otherwise, before you can blink. There are others that’ll chew right through your stack and then drill back up through your skull. Airborne viruses can cripple your systems and overwrite your operating code, turning you into a walking, breathing bomb so you can’t do anything but watch your own death. All sorts of warbots are still roaming loose, cutting apart anything they find.

Then there are the other ones. The ones that aren’t just patrolling and killing. The ones that are … building. Take Moscow, or where it used to be. Capital of Russia, major population center, major waterway. The city itself was flattened during the war. But now there are new structures there. Big square ones, too perfectly aligned and spaced to be made by transhumans. TITAN work, for sure. But they aren’t factories, or if they are they aren’t operational yet, not even the first buildings that’ve been complete for several years now. So what are they? How many are they building? And what’re they waiting for?

Or there’s Mount St. Helens and Hawaii. Both were taken over by the TITANs early on, and both have gone dormant since. Not just dormant, actually, but zero geothermal activity. Not even normal surface levels of heat, which is pretty strange for volcanoes. It’s like the TITANs have drained away all the lava, all the magma, and all the heat. But how? And what are they doing with all that thermal energy?

I’ve tried to make sense of it all, and I’m far from the only one. All sorts of Firewall analysts, not to mention freelance scavengers and explorers, have studied post-Fall TITAN activities, hoping to discern a pattern. A few things are easy to make out, like the fact that TITAN war machines and nanoswarms alike seem to avoid both the Tibetan plateau and the Black Hills. No idea why. They’re all over Vietnam and Laos, though, and the entire Arabian peninsula seems to be one big nanoswarm. Why some areas and not others? Are they afraid of something, or holding back to draw more survivors into one easily ambushed location?

I wish I knew. One thing’s certain, though: we haven’t seen the last of the TITANs. Or their strategies. And neither has the Earth.

TITAN Forests

That? No, that’s not a forest. Yeah, it’s a TITAN activity zone, as marked. Let me explain: Not all the growth left on Earth is natural. Or organic.

The TITANs are just weird, ok? Nobody really knows what their plans are or were. Why did they upload so many humans? Why did they kill so many? Why did they engage in so many experiments? Why did they build so many weird things? Why did they leave—and where did they go?

Assuming the AIs weren’t simply batshit crazy, they must have been up to something, or maybe several somethings. Maybe that was the problem—maybe they had a bunch of coincidental or even competing agendas. No reason to think they all operated as a single unit, after all. In fact, there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary.

Certainly some of them went a little crazy, making their own creations. Some of these built forests, though not with trees—or at least, not ones made of wood.

These forests look like postmodern sculpture. They’re full of towering angular metal shapes, almost like someone carved abstract trees from fiberglass and copper and steel. And they are alive— solar cells laced through the structures provide energy for constant growth, sometimes so fast you can literally watch one of the “trees” shooting skyward. They’re home to nanoswarms and to small mechanical creatures, like spider monkeys, but artificial. The critters tap the trees for their excess energy, living off the land.

Neither the flora nor the fauna likes biologicals much. Ever seen a tree attack someone? It isn’t pretty. Yeah, you wanna steer clear of those forests. Well clear. Because they can creep up on you.

Recent Events

We’ve had a lot more activity around here lately. In both directions. There’s been an increase in energy emissions on the surface, for one thing, and it’s been more concentrated. Whether that means some old systems are waking back up or the survivors are banding together and testing new devices, I don’t know, but it worries me. Any increased tech use down there is bound to ultimately lead to people or things trying to breach the barrier from the inside, and that’s bound to bring the entire Consortium running. If a ragtag fleet rose from the surface and tried to head off-world? My guess is the Consortium would unleash antimatter bombs again—but this time planetwide. They’d reduce Earth to a smoking cinder rather than let those people they claim never existed escape to prove them wrong. Assuming it’s people and not something else.

We’ve had a lot more people aiming for planetfall in recent months, too. More individuals, more small units, and more big salvage ops. A lot of them are going the obvious routes, heading for former city centers and think tanks and labs, but some aren’t. Some are branching out, targeting for more remote or less populous locations—and they know exactly where they’re going, too. These aren’t random wanderings. I’ve actually been wondering if a lot of these attempts aren’t all related. Like somebody’s casting a wide net, trying to dredge up something in particular and figuring it’s better to send a lot of little attempts at once instead of one big obvious one. I don’t know. But if that is the case, somebody knows something, and it’s got to be big to be worth this kind of effort.

Another thing about most of these recent incursions: they haven’t been government-sanctioned. They’ve had to fight their way through, each and every one of them. Which tells me whatever it is they’re looking for, they don’t want the Consortium to know about it. I’m all for anything that upsets the Consortium and shakes up the status quo, but Earth’s archives and materials are a potential powder keg—if someone plans on blowing it, I’d just like enough warning that I can dive for cover.

The other thing going on is that the reclaimers have become even more vocal and active. They’ve been proposing plans left and right—terraforming, widespread radiation scrubbing, shifting the planet’s axis to melt away the nuclear winter, reseeding the atmosphere with water to wash away the dust and ash, and so on. They’ve been winning some big individuals and even a few decent-sized companies to their cause. That’s making the Consortium nervous, with the idea that the reclaimers could force them to lower the barricade and allow wide-scale reclamation. It makes Firewall nervous too. We simply don’t know what dangers still lie down there.

As a response to all of this, the Consortium’s added more enforcement craft to the outer zone patrols. A few weeks back they also beefed up some of the grids and upgraded a few of the bots. I’ve a feeling it’s going to be harder than ever to sneak down to the planet now, and there may come a time when they close it off completely.

One thing I worry about, though: some of those rich bastards behind the Consortium are getting spooked. If they feel the reclaimers are close to getting their way, they might panic and push the Consortium to scorch everything, just to make sure nothing gets out—especially anything that could embarrass them or damage their authority.

Anything like the truth of what really happened during the Fall.

Reclamation Base

To: Tate Markess (Vo Nguyen)
From: Reclamation Base 4

Base up and running. AB-Dome works fine. Soil scrubbers having some difficulty but should have usable soil within the month. Fast-grow plants will be up and producing within three months’ time, as scheduled. Ice-well proceeding apace, should have drinkable water within the week. Defenses already up, no nanoswarm contact so far. Will be sending team out to establish RB-7 once everything here is settled—expect it to be operational within four months. Will report back in two weeks, earlier if situation changes.