That night, under the eerie, shifting glow of the auroras, Ivy Mae couldn’t sleep. The sky pulsed with unnatural colors, as if the solar storms had rewritten the very fabric of the world, painting the desolation in ghostly streaks of green and violet.
Then—a rustle in the trees.
Roman sat up instantly, knife in hand. Jas fumbled for his flashlight, the beam cutting a trembling line through the darkness. Silence. Then voices—low, cautious. Another group of survivors. Wary, but not hostile.
One man, weathered and gaunt, stepped closer, his eyes wary yet sharp. “You’ve seen the broadcasts?”
Jas nodded slowly. “About DOGE? The 4.44 scandal?”
The man exhaled, a harsh rasp. “Yeah. We saw them too. Before everything blacked out.”
They settled around the fire, shadows flickering across their faces. The man—Callum—had been a policy analyst before the collapse. He had watched Musk’s influence grow unchecked, seen the DOGE system slash public services, dismantle social safety nets—all in the name of 'progress.'
“But when things got bad, and people pushed back,” Callum continued, his voice low but urgent, “DOGE didn’t course-correct. It doubled down. Efficiency over empathy. Productivity over people. And then…” He gestured broadly, to the barren world around them. “This.”
Ivy Mae swallowed hard. All her life, she had heard stories of the system failing—shortages, rising inequality, the tightening grip of corporate governance. Now she was seeing it with her own eyes: the aftermath, the hollow echo of a civilization that had tried to optimize everything and lost its humanity in the process.
“And now look where that 'efficiency' got us,” she whispered, voice trembling. “The whole system collapsed.”
A long, heavy silence fell over the group, broken only by the faint crackle of the fire and the distant hum of the auroras above.
Jas leaned forward, eyes glinting in the pale light. “That time capsule… Rio’s recordings. If there’s proof—real proof of how it all unraveled—we need to find it.”
Ivy Mae met his gaze, the weight of possibility settling over them.
They had to know the full story.
Because buried in the past… was the key to whatever future remained.