CHAPTER VII - The Artificial Horizon

For more than a century, Earth had existed beneath a wounded sky.

The atmosphere humanity once depended upon no longer behaved according to the stable planetary systems recorded in the surviving archives. The collapse had altered too much. Thermal regulation layers fractured during the final orbital conflicts. Artificial climate engines failed in cascading sequence across the planet. Vast regions of the upper atmosphere had burned away entirely while others thickened into permanent belts of electrostatic ash, metallic particulate storms, and chemical vapor dense enough to obscure sunlight for generations.

The old sky remained physically present.

But it no longer belonged to the Earth humanity remembered.

Above NEX, daylight had become an uncertain phenomenon. Weak solar illumination occasionally penetrated the poisoned cloud layers in pale fragmented shafts that drifted across the megastructure without warmth or rhythm. Sometimes entire months passed beneath uninterrupted darkness broken only by electrical storms spreading through the upper atmosphere like neural discharges across a dying mind.