Special Chapter 1: The Great Collapse
Before Neo-Arcadia, before the wristbands that measure every heartbeat, before love became a crime there was another world. A world that breathed, that loved, that crumbled.
No one remembers the exact date now. History books were among the first things the Authority burned. But the elders who survived—those hiding in the forgotten tunnels beneath the city—they still whisper the stories.
They speak of a time when the sky was blue. Truly blue. When rain smelled of earth and fresh bread, not chemicals and ozone. When people met in cafes, under gas lamps, on the banks of rivers that no longer exist, and talked for hours about nothing, laughing, crying, falling in love.
Then came the Collapse.
Scientists later called it the "Emotional Plague." A mysterious neural mutation swept across the planet in a matter of weeks. It came from no laboratory, was planned by no one. It was simply an error in the human code—or perhaps a natural evolution, as some said—but it arrived too fast for bodies to adapt.
Emotions multiplied. All of them. Love became a fire that consumed its host. Grief became a knife that carved out the soul. Anger became a hurricane that erased cities. People could no longer control what lived in their hearts. The heart became the master; the mind, a helpless servant.
A mother in a distant suburb loved her child too much. So much that she stopped feeding him. She saw poison in every bite, danger in every breath. The child died of hunger in her arms, as she whispered lullabies of love.
A man in a faraway city discovered his wife loved another. He did not weep, did not scream. He went to the city center, poured gasoline over everything, and struck a match. Three hundred people died that night. And the man, before the flames consumed him, was laughing. Laughing because he had loved her so much.
Lovers were the worst. Two young people met at a train station. They looked at each other for mere seconds, and their lives unraveled. They abandoned families, jobs, sanity. They ran together into the unknown, living like madmen until their money ran out, then died together under a bridge, hands intertwined, their hearts still beating wildly.
Governments fell one by one. Not through war, not through armed revolution. They fell because ministers and presidents were too consumed by love, hatred, and sorrow to remember how to rule. Armies disbanded because soldiers chose to return home—to those they loved, or those they hated.
In three years, one billion people died.
Not from war. Not from disease. They died because their hearts killed them.
Major cities turned into forests of shattered glass and crumbling concrete. Streets once teeming with life became desolate, save for ghosts wandering, weeping, laughing, screaming without reason.
The survivors gathered in small camps on the edges of what remained of civilization. They were afraid. Not of hunger or disease, but of their own hearts. They trembled whenever they felt anything. Fear, hope, longing—all became enemies.
In those camps, people began speaking of a solution. Of a woman in the north, a scientist who had said for years that emotions were an evolutionary flaw, that humanity must abandon love to survive. At first, they mocked her. Now, they searched for her name.
Dr. Elara Venn.
She worked in an underground laboratory, fortified against the chaos. She was waiting. She knew the world would come to her on its knees, begging for salvation. She was preparing her weapon: an algorithm to kill the chaos, a roadmap toward silence.
The survivors no longer wanted freedom. Freedom had killed their loved ones. Freedom had burned their cities. Freedom had made their hearts torment them.
They wanted order. They wanted to feel nothing ever again.
And one day, through an emergency broadcast that still functioned in only one corner of the world, they heard her voice. Cold, calm, like snow upon a grave.
"I am Elara Venn. I have a solution. I will build for you a new world. A world without chaos, without pain, without love. All you must do is forget what it felt like to be alive."
No one hesitated.
They were too tired to refuse.
And so, from the ashes of the Collapse, Absolute Harmony was born.
No one knew, in that moment, that the price would be greater than mere emotions. The price would be the soul itself.
To be continued in Chapter 2: The Birth of Order