The first requests for reconstruction came from regions that no longer possessed the means to rebuild what war had destroyed. Power networks had failed across entire provinces, railway corridors ended at ruined bridges and hospitals that once served millions operated with equipment they could no longer manufacture in sufficient numbers. Governments remembered that E.A.R.T.H. had originally been prepared with functioning infrastructure before humanity assumed control of it, and some concluded that the same hidden systems could simply restore what had been lost. They were correct about VIREON's capability and wrong about what that capability meant. The world could rebuild almost everything for them.

It did not.

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The Data Center still possessed the original structural models of cities, transport networks, energy systems and medical facilities created during the founding period. Restoring a destroyed district could have been as simple as returning its physical environment to an earlier state, while lost machinery could be reproduced and damaged networks reconnected without any inhabitant knowing how the work had occurred. MAJA could have returned entire regions to functionality within days. Technically, reconstruction was easy. Ethically, it threatened everything E.A.R.T.H. had been built to protect.

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MAJA struggled with the decision more than anyone else in VIREON. She had prepared the first settlements precisely so humanity would not awaken into suffering, and now she watched descendants of those same people live without reliable power, medicine or transport because generations before them had destroyed systems she knew how to restore. Children were paying for decisions they had never made, while communities that wanted peace inherited ruins from governments that no longer existed. The consequences of free will rarely belonged only to the people who created them. That made restraint far harder than the principle sounded when written into an operational rule.

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Ksara nevertheless opposed direct reconstruction. If VIREON restored every major failure, war would lose part of its consequence and future societies would eventually learn that destruction carried an invisible guarantee of repair. A city could be burned, infrastructure neglected and knowledge abandoned with the expectation that something beyond the world would eventually return everything that mattered. Humanity would remain free to destroy without remaining responsible for what destruction required afterward. A civilization protected from the consequences of its own choices could never truly own those choices.

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VIREON therefore drew a boundary between preserving the world and preserving civilization. Planetary environmental systems remained stable, the deeper architecture of E.A.R.T.H. remained protected and no human conflict would be allowed to destroy the simulation itself. Preservation, Portal Fenix and the Data Center remained beyond the reach of everything happening inside. But roads, cities, factories, communication systems, hospitals and institutions built or inherited by humanity were part of human history. If people destroyed them, people would have to rebuild them.

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That rule also applied to the infrastructure MAJA had originally provided. Once those systems had been transferred into ordinary civilization and understood well enough for humans to operate them, they were no longer treated as protected artifacts belonging to VIREON. Power stations could fail, transport systems could decay and buildings could disappear if nobody maintained them. Replacement parts did not arrive invisibly from outside the world. MAJA had given humanity a beginning, not a permanent maintenance contract.

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The decision became visible first in the city of Arven, one of the oldest large settlements beyond the original activation territory. Years of conflict had damaged its primary energy network, and the final failure left several million people dependent on fragmented local generation. Engineers understood the older system well enough to know what needed rebuilding, but industrial capacity in the surrounding region had deteriorated too far to manufacture several essential components quickly. For months, public debate centered on whether the hidden creators of E.A.R.T.H. would intervene. Nothing happened.

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Hospitals reduced nonessential services, factories closed and parts of the population migrated toward regions with more reliable infrastructure. Local engineers simplified the old network rather than attempting to reproduce it exactly, using technologies that were less efficient but easier to manufacture with the resources still available. Communities reorganized energy use, old machinery was dismantled for components and technical schools expanded because knowledge suddenly mattered more than political promises. The resulting system was inferior to what had existed before the war.

But it was theirs.

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Nara Vel followed Arven from VIREON and understood why MAJA found the silence painful. She remembered what it felt like to live inside E.A.R.T.H., where a failed power network was not an ethical principle but dark homes, interrupted hospitals and families deciding whether to leave everything they knew behind. Yet she also saw what happened once people understood that rescue was not coming. Engineers who had once been treated as ordinary workers became central to reconstruction, communities began preserving technical manuals more carefully and political arguments slowly shifted from who deserved blame toward what could actually be rebuilt. Responsibility grew only after the expectation of invisible rescue disappeared.

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Not every region responded successfully. Some societies continued fighting until infrastructure deteriorated beyond local ability to maintain it, while others abandoned cities whose complexity could no longer be supported. Populations moved toward smaller settlements, agriculture became more localized and technologies once considered permanent disappeared from everyday use. VIREON watched knowledge retreat without restoring it. Progress inside E.A.R.T.H. was allowed to move backward.

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This was one of the hardest ideas for later VIREON operators to accept. The Data Center preserved technical knowledge perfectly, and restoring a lost manufacturing process would have cost almost nothing compared with the suffering created by centuries of rediscovery. Several operators repeatedly argued that providing information was different from controlling people, but Ksara rejected even that shortcut when the knowledge had been lost through ordinary human history. A manual appearing mysteriously at the moment society needed it would still be intervention from an authority outside the world. Humanity had to preserve knowledge itself or learn again why preserving it mattered.

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The one-percent continuity layer became increasingly important during this period. Simulated inhabitants carrying fragments of knowledge across cycles appeared among communities that had lost formal institutions, sometimes rediscovering methods that would otherwise have vanished for generations. A person might remember how to improve crop rotation without knowing where the intuition came from, or reconstruct a mechanical principle after years of experimentation that felt strangely familiar. VIREON did not direct those people toward specific crises. The continuity layer preserved seeds; humanity still had to grow something from them.

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MAJA eventually accepted another limitation that followed from the same rule. She could not measure success by comparing present civilization with the world she had originally prepared. The first territory had possessed reliable power, healthcare, education and transport because humanity needed a safe beginning after centuries of Preservation, but those systems were never meant to define the minimum level civilization would always retain. If later generations allowed parts of that inheritance to disappear, E.A.R.T.H. would not freeze history at the standard of its first year. A beginning was not a guarantee that history would always move forward.

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The effects spread across several generations. Young people born in damaged regions grew up hearing stories about technologies their grandparents had used but their own communities could no longer reproduce. Old rail tunnels crossed mountains without functioning trains, abandoned medical facilities contained equipment nobody knew how to repair and ruined communication towers stood above towns that relied increasingly on local networks. What had once been ordinary slowly became evidence of a more capable past. Civilization was beginning to live among the remains of its own forgotten progress.

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The archives documented the decline for as long as their institutions survived. Historians warned that the loss of infrastructure was being followed by loss of knowledge, because technologies were difficult to preserve once nobody had practical reason to teach them. Universities closed, technical disciplines became regional specialties and enormous digital collections remained stored on systems fewer people knew how to maintain. The problem was no longer merely that humanity had destroyed machines.

It was beginning to lose the ability to understand them.

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MAJA continued reading the daily report.

E.A.R.T.H. remained stable.

Preservation remained secure.

Portal Fenix remained protected.

The Data Center remained far below its limits.

And inside that perfectly functioning world, civilization was becoming poorer, smaller and less connected because of decisions made by the people living within it.

For the first time, MAJA fully understood the difference between saving humanity and saving everything humanity built.

VIREON would do the first.

Humanity would have to do the second.