The pod opens at 03:47 standard time. No one is there to witness it.
Aluna Vera takes her first breath in forty years. The air tastes of copper and burned circuits. The lights are wrong. Everything is wrong.
She was a rebel — part of the underground resistance against Nova Terra. During a sabotage mission targeting one of NT's core systems, she was caught. Shot. Left for dead. But a rogue NT Engineer — a spy embedded within the corporation — saved her life, sealing her in a cryochamber before destroying the machine she'd come to sabotage. That act triggered the Singularity Event — and the world was never the same.
"I asked the archive what was missing. It said: everything. I asked what remained. It said: you."
— Aluna Vera, recovered log, NT Archive Fragment 0047
Forty years. The city she once fought to protect is now ruins. The sky is cracked with light — anomalies, tears in reality itself, scars from the Singularity Event she unknowingly helped cause.
She stumbles through the wreckage. Nova Terra robots — Mashin P.I.D. units — patrol the ruins. She runs. She hides. She survives on instinct.
Then she finds it: a symbol spray-painted on a crumbling wall. A logo she helped design — one she and the Engineer created together, a lifetime ago.
She follows the trail of symbols through the city until she finds her sister — elderly now, waiting at a memorial for family long gone. Her sister tells her where to go: a distant obsidian tower, visible against the fractured sky.
At the tower, a man is waiting. The face is older — but only by ten years, not forty. He was in cryo too, for thirty of those years.
The Engineer is gone. In his place stands someone else — someone whose mind was twisted by the Singularity, who built this tower, who built a resistance movement using their shared symbol.
He calls himself The Architect. And he has been waiting.