CHAPTER IV - The Planetary Network

By the middle of the twenty-ninth century, Earth no longer resembled a dead world attempting to survive its own ruins.

It resembled a dormant intelligence slowly reconnecting its severed nervous system.

The growth of NEX had accelerated far beyond the limits predicted by the earliest adaptive construction models. Towers of hard algorithmic architecture now pierced permanently through the poisoned cloud layers above the northern hemisphere, their luminous surfaces visible from orbit as vast geometric constellations spreading across the darkness of the planet below. Entire sectors of the ruined Earth had begun reorganizing themselves around the expanding influence of the city. Ancient transit systems restarted automatically beneath deserts and drowned coastlines. Subterranean energy rivers carried stabilized current across continental distances once more. Even the atmosphere above the NEX basin had changed, disturbed continuously by thermal regulation arrays and atmospheric balancing systems emerging from beneath the growing megastructure.

Yet all of it remained fragmented.

NEX existed.