CHAPTER IV - What Remains of Us

The residential ring of Delta had once been built for thousands.

Its corridors had been designed with the confidence of a civilization that still believed in continuity. Wide passageways curved gently around the inner circumference of the underground complex, lined with sleeping quarters, communal halls, memory alcoves, medical bays, observation lounges, and small hydroponic gardens meant to soften the psychological weight of living beneath the surface of a dying planet. Warm light had once moved across the ceilings in simulated cycles of dawn and evening, and the walls had carried quiet ambient sound designed to imitate wind through trees, distant rain, and oceans no longer safe for human life.

Now most of those systems remained silent.

The ring still received power, but only in fragments. Entire sections had gone dark years earlier, sealed behind pressure doors after structural faults spread through the outer layers of the complex. Other areas remained accessible, yet empty, preserved in a condition that no longer resembled life so much as the careful arrangement of things left behind by people who had expected to return.

They had not returned.