Prologue - An Old World

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THE SLIGHT RUMBLES under his shoes felt more like a gentle, tender massage than magnetic proposed rail tracks. The maglev train traveling up to speeds of two hundred kilometers-per-hour made its usual stop at Union Station, Washington, D.C. at 4:00 PM. The train's glass platform doors opened with a hiss as the train came to a complete stop on Track Four. Passengers immediately rushed out of the maglev, exiting the train before the platform doors closed again in approximately two minutes on the schedule. By then, the maglev would depart from Union Station to Baltimore, then to Philadelphia, and all along the New England region with loads of passengers traveling on long-distance trips.

The travel time between D.C. to Baltimore would be between three to five minutes by maglev.

He stepped from the train's platform and onto the concrete, white-painted platform while other passengers moved and pushed him aside in the most disinterested manner. He didn't care. City people can be city people, he reminded himself. He was quite acquainted with the fact that in Manhattan people would literally treat you like trash for the littlest of reasons, even if they themselves were ill-starred. It didn't surprise him; the population was staggeringly swelling to its limits and unemployment was skyrocketing alongside it. There's no room for bull and public respect for institutions and authority—particularly government and business—has been declining for decades. People smile who are content and pleased, if not laughing and joking, yet he saw no soul who expressed such.

He traipsed under a pavilion situated in the middle of Union Station, so the sun wouldn't become a constant nuisance for him. He pauses for a moment, ostensibly took look up at the signs for directions, enjoying the open-air space after the ride. He took out his Samsung Galaxy X-Generation, the new generation of Galaxy smartphones, as the holographic-projected and regular multi-touch screen appeared in front of him. On the multi-touch screen, a previously saved CNN article pops up on his news app. He swipes the screen and the article digitally transfers onto the holographic projection. He adds another holograph page, clicking copy on the news article, pasting it onto the word processor app, and making attachments to the news article. Finally, he felt satisfied, even though, in some form, it felt like stalking. 

Joint US-European Federation Orbital Missile Shield Treaty, the article's headline said. He scoffed in a low tone. It'd been a painful few years, he thought. The program signed by the United States of America and European Federation was a conjunction of satellites orbiting Earth, surveying and detecting any possible threats to the International Worldwide Non-Aggression Pact: the policy passed by the United Nations General Assembly and Security Council stating that "all nations, developed or developing, shall not engage into conflict without a proper cause by the UN Security Council." Of course, as militating and controlling as it was, while countries like the People's Pan-Asian Alliance, Russian Federation, and the Pan-African Republic had officially objected to this program, the higher elites in the Security Council passed the program for "the use of maintaining world peace for future generations to come." 

If there was even a future ahead of them.

Even though the Main Stream Media portrayed the United States and European Federation as allies, the truth was—Trans-Atlantic geopolitical relationships were completely neutral. There has not been any nation in the world that signed permanent alliances with one another; at least, not without sincerity. Either they were neutral or not, relations were opaque with personal dissimulation. Frequently, neutrality was always the best path to take. Hostility only brought political instability, and wars would eventually breakout; massive, horrendous wars, where millions of lives would be sacrificed for little cause and rationality. In the end, learning from past mistakes, there were no winners in advanced warfare, especially when weapons of mass destruction are put to use. 

In truth, the Joint Missile Shield program was certainly a pretext for both the US and Europe to keep each other in check as well as coalesce orbital supremacy from Pan-Asia and Russia, as many analysts would say. 

He kept scrolling up until he came across the CNN NEWS title and date. It was the year 2149 C.E. The world was ruled by five major superpowers. The United States of America, European Federation, Pan-Asian Alliance, Russian Federation, and the Pan-African Republic. Times were desperate. Overpopulation, pollution, wars, and resource depletion have nearly destroyed Earth and everything living Mother Nature had carried for, except humanity. Nations collapsed, along with global economic balances. The strong rose to take on the mantle of control. Society became a turmoil for major unemployment, poverty, crime, and domestic warfare. Nassim Nicholas Taleb's black swan theory proved its undoubted predictions as humanity neglected to solve its problems throughout crucial moments in history. 

Abysmal air quality, from decades of unconstrained industrialization, deforestation, and uncontrolled carbon dioxide and aerosol emissions, became a perilous problem since 2060. Now, levels of air quality were at an irreversible stage, as the outside world became too hazardous for humans of all ages and physiques to breathe in toxic air. Most of Earth's flora and fauna, once majestically symbolizing the planet's green lands, withered and died. Tropospheric ozone toxicity, reaching levels beyond alteration, destroyed sensitive vegetation and flourishing ecosystems. Today, areas where tropical ecosystems once thrived, specifically in Latin and South America, Central Africa, and Southeast Asia, with remaining high biodiversity and fertility, grew in specialized-greenhouse domes known as Bio-Agrio domes.

However, Bio-Agrio domes were not the only facilities with semi-spherical airtight, pressurized structures. In these modern times, cities or other Metropolitan areas were shielded from the barren and toxic environment outside by man-made domes. "Domed Cities," the prosaic term for humanity's coffins. But owing to lack of natural resources and crippling macroeconomics, urban areas with a population under five million found themselves under the exception of dome construction unless it provided invaluable economic, military, and research value. But cities like Louisville, Salt Lake City, Milwaukee, Sacramento, Denver, et cetera, in the US would only become ghost towns without domes. And cities under qualified population recognition but with major economic, military, and research value: Orlando, Seattle, Atlanta, Fort Bragg, Fort Knox, Colorado Springs, Charleston, Honolulu, et cetera, received certification for dome construction.

The world's governments continue to deal with very little stable infrastructure and instituted heavy welfare programs in place to help the less fortunate. Some trillions of dollars in funds were used to construct self-sustaining habitable zones to mitigate overcrowding in domed, choked cities. However, in some cases such as the Montana Radiation Zone, they had to abandon their work and redirect their efforts at ameliorating the mounting socio-economic conditions in urban centers. Some governments have also been alleged to cover up preventative disasters such as a Cholera epidemic in Atlanta in an effort to induce population control. 

Space agencies and corporations involved themselves in beneficial joint cooperations, launching commercial mining operations on the moon and Mars, followed by some outposts scattered across the solar system. But it still wasn't enough. Although humankind had established permanent colonies on both the moon and Mars that were economically profitable, those worlds were still dependent on Earth to send round-the-clock supplies, making them unsustainable to protract a functioning biosphere indefinitely, and thus unreliable for expanding the human race. All attempts at terraforming Venus and Mars had failed; as for the Jovian System, or any other worlds outside the habitable zone, they were either frozen in eternal darkness or else baking in the face of a star, with no environment remotely capable of sustaining life.

The reality was an unparalleled appropriation of nature where humans took more than they gave back. Humanity played a dangerous game of Russian roulette with the only world it had. The world was dead.

Mankind simply didn't know it yet; or pretended not to acknowledge the latter.

That was the bare truth of it, and it pleased the misanthrope who considered it to no little end. There were things to be done yet, debts to be paid and webs to be spun or broken, but the weight of the inevitable had settled across the way and weft of the world. Time was running out, and the planet was all but bled white.

He peaks from the pavilion's edge, looking up at the dome structure reaching up to a maximum one thousand feet, or three hundred and four meters, high from its pivotal center. Different cities had a variety of domes with disparate heights. The highest in the US resided in New York City, reaching two thousand and five hundred feet high. The highest in the world was in Shanghai—reaching seven thousand and seven hundred feet tall. If there was one thing mankind can still pride itself on, it's structural engineering. 

He turns his Smartphone off, leaves the pavilion, making an intersection between the food court and main lobby. He smelled the hot and steaming scent of beef soup from a bistro called Parisian Café & Wine Deserts, a little French-styled restaurant squeezed in-between China Kitchen and Olive Garden. He felt his stomach growl, not having a decent meal since this afternoon, besides rationed granola bars he bought at Fort Hamilton. Resisting the urge for a quick bite, he rushed past the bistro, escaping the irresistible smell of food, and walks to another section of tracks. The Southern Station, constructed fifty years ago when maglevs were becoming the face of rail transportation in America, which the SWATR (South Washington, D.C. Atlantic Trans Rapid) trains traveled from D.C. to East Coast cities down south. There, he needed to catch his next maglev to the Arlington, Virginia/D.C. border, but most of the District of Columbia now.

As he sat down on a bench under the shadow of a photovoltaic pavilion, the mixed blue and green color gleaned from above, he felt an instant vibrate in his pocket. Taking out his Galaxy X, he opened his message onto the holographic projection. 

MESSAGE SENT BY JULIAN ANDERSON:

Hey, Ryan, where's the meeting again?

He opened up Messenger and typed in his response.

At the Pentagon. Level Seven. The room that looks like a cubicle.

He didn't even know why he was typing this kind of information via SMS messaging. Really, she should be asking a superior for that kind of information rather than him. He hastily typed another message on the regular multi-touch screen.

We shouldn't be texting sensitive stuff like this by message. Why couldn't you have done this through the intranet?

Idk...???

He just loved that answer from a woman who was smarter than she looked beautiful. The playful naïvety was both a curse and a blessing. She sent another message.

Besides, who else knows about this than us, the CIA, and government?

JUST SHUT UP AND END THIS CHAT!!

Ryan closed Messenger, then opens up Internet Connection, connecting to a free WiFi hotspot where he sat. He searches Union Station D.C., opening up its official website, and clicks an icon that said 'Train Schedule' on its contents. He taps search, typing on the multi-touch screen. Instantly, the search marked a maglev on Track One-Two-Five that would depart from D.C. to Arlington County at 5:10 PM. Ugh! He knew four-thirty and afterward was rush hour in the District of Columbia. But again, what choice did he have?

Today is the day, he thought. 

For six months he'd been training for this moment. Volunteered to be subjected to some of the greatest physical and psychological challenges imaginable, he never realized why he was undergoing exercises for. In preparation for his mission, he spent those six months undergoing a painstaking line of training. Aside from endless fitness, psychological and medical evaluations, he trained in aerodynamics, airmanship, biology, combat and even some other backup duties. All Ryan knew was that this mission he'd been preparing so strenuously the past few months is going to change the fate of humanity forever. He was told this by Doctor Lilah Helienson, a Ph.D. Harvard alumni in theoretical physics, cosmology, and quantum computing, and one of many overseers of his mission.

He looked around and saw the faces of every individual in Union Station. The casual expressions on their faces. But casual these days meant misery and despair. In a hostile world where everything, except electronics, electricity, and digital devices, was limited, the average human barely gets by. Food, water, even personal freedoms were limited to prioritize the needs of the collective population. Even air was limited, profited by natural monopolies. If this mission meant the future prosperity of humanity, staring at children once again eating candy, playing in flourish parks, and elderly relaxing peaceful, then he would do it—if it meant coasting his life—whether that would happen or not.

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