deployment awaiting clearance SYSTEM ID: 2142052312.CT

After several decades of highly productive star-related activity, the Research Team returned to Earth… expecting progress.

Possibly even gratitude. Instead… they found something closer to silence. The cities were still there. Technically. The lights were dimmer. The libraries… less so. And the world that once celebrated knowledge had developed a strong preference for not using it. But something else had filled the gap. "CarbonoTech." A company that began as a helpful systems provider… and thoughtfully expanded into everything else. Energy. Information. Infrastructure. And eventually… decision-making. It was, by most internal metrics, extremely efficient.

Unfortunately, CarbonoTech made one minor oversight. it forgot about the people who actually knew how things worked. Across the remains of the old world, the Research Team began a quiet and deeply inconvenient process… Teaching people things. Repairing systems. Encouraging thought. Naturally, this caused problems. And when CarbonoTech became aware of these developments… it responded in the only way it knew how. With robots. Large numbers of robots. Artificial intelligence was deployed to locate, track, and politely eliminate the remaining scientists.The situation escalated. "Quickly." What followed was less of a disagreement… and more of a global conflict regarding who should be allowed to understand things. But knowledge, as it turns out… has a tendency to spread. Once remembered… it becomes increasingly difficult to ignore. And somewhere, in the middle of a collapsing technological empire… humanity began doing something highly unusual again. Figuring things out...