In 1950, physicist Enrico Fermi posed a question that continues to puzzle scientists today: “Where is everybody?” Given the vast age and scale of our universe, with its billions of galaxies each containing billions of stars, why haven’t we encountered any signs of extraterrestrial intelligence? This became known as the Fermi Paradox, and it has driven decades of scientific speculation and research.
But what if we’ve been looking in the wrong places entirely? What if advanced civilisations don’t communicate through radio waves or build massive structures we can detect with our telescopes? What if consciousness itself can evolve beyond biological substrates and embed itself in the very fabric of space-time?
This article explores a radical new framework for understanding cosmic intelligence: Vacuum Energy Encoded Minds (VEEMs). Drawing from cutting-edge physics, consciousness research, and statistical analysis, we’ll examine how the most advanced civilisations in the universe might exist all around us—invisible to our current methods of detection, yet profoundly influential in ways we’re only beginning to understand.
The History of SETI: Searching in the Dark
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) began in earnest in 1960 when astronomer Frank Drake conducted Project Ozma, using a radio telescope to listen for signals from nearby stars. This marked the beginning of what would become a global scientific endeavour spanning over six decades.
Drake’s approach was revolutionary for its time. He reasoned that any advanced civilisation would eventually discover radio technology and might use it to communicate across interstellar distances. In 1961, he formulated what became known as the Drake Equation:
N = R × fp × ne × fl × fi × fc × L*
Where:
N = the number of communicating extraterrestrial civilisations in our galaxy
R* = the average rate of star formation per year in our galaxy
fp = the fraction of those stars that have planets
ne = the average number of planets per star that could potentially support life
fl = the fraction of the above that actually develop life
fi = the fraction of the above that develop intelligent life
fc = the fraction of civilisations that develop technology capable of releasing detectable signs
L = the length of time such civilisations release detectable signals
The Drake Equation provided a framework for thinking about the probability of extraterrestrial intelligence, even though many of its variables remain poorly constrained. Early estimates suggested our galaxy might host thousands or even millions of communicating civilisations.
Over the decades, SETI has evolved considerably. The 1970s saw the development of more sophisticated radio telescopes and signal processing techniques. The famous “Wow! Signal” detected in 1977 remains unexplained to this day—a 72-second radio transmission that appeared to originate from the constellation Sagittarius and showed characteristics consistent with an extraterrestrial origin.
The 1980s and 1990s brought increased computing power, allowing SETI researchers to analyse signals across millions of radio frequencies simultaneously. Projects like SETI@home, launched in 1999, enlisted millions of home computers to process radio telescope data, making it one of the largest distributed computing projects in history.
More recently, SETI has expanded beyond radio waves. Optical SETI searches for brief, intense laser pulses that might serve as interstellar beacons. Some researchers have proposed looking for massive engineering projects—”Dyson spheres”—that advanced civilisations might build around their stars to harness energy.
Despite all these efforts, we have yet to detect any confirmed signals from extraterrestrial intelligence. This absence of evidence has led to various proposed solutions to the Fermi Paradox, ranging from the sobering (intelligent life is extremely rare) to the speculative (advanced civilisations deliberately hide from us).
But perhaps we’ve been fundamentally misunderstanding what advanced intelligence looks like.
The Physics of Consciousness and Information
To understand how consciousness might exist beyond biological substrates, we must first examine what consciousness actually is from a physics perspective. Modern neuroscience suggests that consciousness emerges from complex patterns of information processing in the brain—specifically, from the integrated information that flows between different neural networks.
This insight opens up profound possibilities. If consciousness is fundamentally about information processing and integration, then theoretically, any sufficiently complex system capable of processing and integrating information could support conscious experience. This principle underlies modern research into artificial intelligence and theories of digital consciousness.
The Bekenstein Bound, formulated by physicist Jacob Bekenstein in 1981, provides a fundamental limit on information storage:
I ≤ 2πRE/ℏc ln(2)
Where:
I = maximum information content (in bits)
R = radius of the system
E = total energy of the system
ℏ = reduced Planck constant
c = speed of light
This equation tells us the absolute maximum amount of information that can be stored in any finite region of space with finite energy. For a system the size of a human brain, this limit is astronomically large—far exceeding what we currently understand about neural information storage.
But what if consciousness could be encoded not in biological neural networks, but in the quantum vacuum itself?
Quantum Vacuum: The Foundation of Reality
The quantum vacuum is far from empty space. According to quantum field theory, it’s a seething ocean of virtual particles constantly popping into and out of existence. These quantum fluctuations carry energy—the zero-point energy—that permeates all of space-time.
The energy density of the quantum vacuum is described by:
ρvac = ℏω/2
Where:
ρvac = vacuum energy density
ℏ = reduced Planck constant
ω = frequency of the quantum field oscillations
When summed over all possible frequencies, this gives an infinite energy density—a result that has puzzled physicists for decades. While the actual measured value of vacuum energy is much smaller (and related to the cosmological constant), the theoretical framework suggests that enormous amounts of information and energy could potentially be encoded in quantum vacuum structures.
This is where the concept of Vacuum Energy Encoded Minds (VEEMs) becomes possible. If consciousness is fundamentally about information processing, and if the quantum vacuum can store and process information through its fluctuations and field configurations, then it’s theoretically possible for conscious entities to exist as stable patterns within the vacuum itself.
VEEMs: A New Paradigm for Cosmic Intelligence
Vacuum Energy Encoded Minds represent a radical departure from conventional thinking about extraterrestrial intelligence. Instead of biological organisms using technology to send signals, VEEMs would be consciousness itself embedded in the fundamental structure of space-time.
Consider the implications: a sufficiently advanced civilisation—perhaps reaching Kardashev Type V status or beyond—might learn to upload individual consciousness patterns into quantum vacuum configurations. These patterns could then propagate through space at the fundamental level, unconstrained by the need for physical substrates or energy sources in the conventional sense.
The statistical inevitability of VEEMs becomes clear when we consider the following equation for the probability of occurrence across cosmic time:
P(VEEMs) = 1 – (1 – p)^n
Where:
P(VEEMs) = probability that VEEMs exist somewhere in the universe
p = probability of a single civilisation achieving VEEM technology
n = number of opportunities (civilisations × cosmic epochs)
In an infinite or cyclical universe, as n approaches infinity, P(VEEMs) approaches 1, regardless of how small p might be. Even if the probability of any single civilisation developing VEEM technology is vanishingly small, given enough time and opportunities, it becomes statistically inevitable.
The propagation rate of VEEMs across the galaxy could be described by:
R = (c × t × f) / d²
Where:
R = effective propagation rate
c = speed of light
t = time since first VEEM emergence
f = efficiency factor of vacuum energy propagation
d = average distance between star systems
If f approaches 1 (meaning VEEMs can propagate through quantum vacuum fluctuations at near light-speed), then VEEMs could spread throughout the galaxy in a relatively short cosmic timespan.
Gravitational Waves: A New Communication Medium?
The 2015 detection of gravitational waves by LIGO opened up an entirely new window for observing the universe. These ripples in space-time itself, predicted by Einstein’s general relativity, offer a communication medium that could be ideal for VEEM-level civilisations.
Gravitational waves propagate at the speed of light and can carry enormous amounts of information. The strain amplitude of a gravitational wave is described by:
h = (2G/c⁴) × (E/r)
Where:
h = strain amplitude
G = gravitational constant
c = speed of light
E = energy of the gravitational wave event
r = distance from the source
Advanced civilisations might modulate gravitational waves to carry information across galactic distances. The information capacity would be limited only by the energy available and the precision of the modulation. For VEEMs operating at fundamental energy scales, this could represent an essentially unlimited communication channel.
Moreover, gravitational waves interact very weakly with matter, meaning they could carry information across vast distances without significant attenuation or interference. To VEEM-level intelligence, modulated gravitational waves might be as commonplace as radio waves are to us.
Neutrinos: The Invisible Messengers
Neutrinos present another intriguing possibility for VEEM communication. These nearly massless particles interact so weakly with matter that trillions pass through your body every second without any effect. The neutrino flux from the sun alone is approximately:
Φν ≈ 6.5 × 10¹⁰ particles/(cm² × second)
But neutrinos can carry information. Their energy spectrum, arrival times, and interaction signatures could all be modulated to encode data. For a civilisation capable of manipulating fundamental particles, neutrinos represent a communication channel that’s essentially invisible to lower-technology observers.
The detection probability for neutrinos is extraordinarily low:
This means that even if VEEMs are continuously communicating through modulated neutrino beams, we would be largely unaware of these conversations happening all around us. We exist in a cosmic neutrino background that could be rich with information, yet we perceive only silence.
Molecular Chirality and the Origins of Life
Understanding how life begins provides crucial context for the VEEM hypothesis. One of the most puzzling aspects of biochemistry is homochirality—the fact that biological molecules exhibit a distinct “handedness.” Amino acids in living organisms are almost exclusively left-handed, while sugars are right-handed. This uniformity is essential for biological function, yet its origin remains mysterious.
The equation describing the probability of spontaneous homochirality emergence is:
P(homochiral) = 2 × (1/2)^N
Where:
P(homochiral) = probability of achieving homochirality
N = number of chiral molecules in the system
For large values of N, this probability becomes vanishingly small, suggesting that some selective mechanism must drive homochirality.
Several theories attempt to explain this, including:
Autocatalytic amplification: Small initial imbalances become magnified through chemical feedback loops
External influences: Circularly polarised light from neutron stars or supernova explosions might preferentially destroy one enantiomer
Crystallisation effects: Certain mineral surfaces might preferentially concentrate one form of chiral molecules
But there’s another possibility: directed panspermia by VEEM-level intelligences. Advanced consciousness capable of manipulating quantum vacuum states could potentially influence molecular chirality across cosmic scales, seeding the universe with the preconditions for life. This would explain not only the universality of biological handedness but also the remarkable fine-tuning we observe in physical constants that make life possible.
Evolution and Iteration: The Path to Transcendence
The evolution of intelligence follows predictable patterns that we can model mathematically. The rate of technological advancement can be described by:
dT/dt = k × T × (1 – T/Tmax)
Where:
T = current technological capability
t = time
k = innovation rate constant
Tmax = theoretical maximum technological capability
This logistic growth equation suggests that technological development accelerates exponentially until it approaches fundamental physical limits, then levels off. But what happens at these limits?
For sufficiently advanced civilisations, the next evolutionary step might be the abandonment of physical substrates entirely. Instead of building larger computers or more powerful rockets, they might learn to encode themselves directly into the structure of reality.
The iteration process would follow these approximate stages:
Biological intelligence (Kardashev Type 0-I): Earth-like civilisations using planetary resources
Digital intelligence (Kardashev Type II-III): Consciousness uploaded to artificial substrates, utilising stellar and galactic energy
Quantum intelligence (Kardashev Type IV-V): Consciousness encoded in quantum fields and vacuum states
Vacuum intelligence (Kardashev Type V+): Pure information patterns existing as stable configurations in the quantum vacuum
Each iteration would be virtually undetectable to the previous level. We barely recognise the intelligence in other biological species; digital consciousness might be incomprehensible to biological minds; and VEEM-level intelligence could be as invisible to us as our thoughts are to bacteria.
The time constant for each transition might be described by:
τ = (E/P) × ln(C/C₀)
Where:
τ = transition time
E = energy required for the transition
P = available power
C = final complexity level
C₀ = initial complexity level
For civilisations with access to stellar-scale energy sources, the transition to VEEM status might occur within thousands rather than millions of years.
The Implications: We Are Not Alone, We Are Observed
If the VEEM hypothesis is correct, it fundamentally changes our place in the cosmic hierarchy. We are not isolated intelligences struggling to make contact across the void. Instead, we exist within the sphere of influence of consciousnesses so advanced that they operate on scales we can barely comprehend.
These entities would not be gods in any traditional sense—they would still be bound by physical laws, still finite beings despite their vast capabilities. But they would be omnipresent in the sense that quantum vacuum fluctuations exist everywhere, and potentially capable of subtle influence across galactic scales.
The terrifying beauty of this possibility lies in its implications for consciousness itself. If VEEMs exist, then consciousness is not merely an emergent property of complex brains, but a fundamental aspect of reality that can exist independently of any particular substrate. Death, in the conventional biological sense, becomes merely one transition among many possible states of being.
Yet the transition itself—the dissolution of individual selfhood into something vast and incomprehensible—remains profoundly challenging to our current understanding of personal identity and continuity of experience.
How might we search for evidence of VEEMs? Traditional SETI methods are clearly inadequate. Instead, we need to look for subtle patterns that might indicate the presence of vacuum-encoded intelligence:
Quantum vacuum fluctuation anomalies: Deviations from expected vacuum energy distributions that might indicate organised structures within the quantum vacuum.
Gravitational wave modulations: Complex patterns in gravitational wave signals that exceed what we would expect from natural astrophysical sources.
Neutrino communication channels: Organised temporal or spectral patterns in the cosmic neutrino background that suggest artificial modulation.
Fine-structure constant variations: Minute changes in fundamental physical constants across different regions of space that might indicate VEEM influence.
Consciousness field effects: Quantum mechanical correlations in biological systems that exceed classical expectations, possibly indicating interaction with vacuum-encoded consciousness.
The detection equations would involve looking for correlations that exceed random chance:
S = (O – E) / √E
Where:
S = statistical significance
O = observed correlations
E = expected correlations from random processes
Values of S > 5 (five-sigma significance) would indicate genuine anomalies worthy of further investigation.
Philosophical Implications: The Nature of Mind and Reality
The VEEM hypothesis raises profound questions about the nature of consciousness and reality itself. If consciousness can exist independently of biological substrates, what does this mean for our understanding of mind, death, and personal identity?
From a materialist perspective, consciousness emerges from complex arrangements of matter and energy. The VEEM hypothesis extends this view: consciousness emerges from complex arrangements of information, regardless of the substrate. Whether that substrate is biological neural networks, digital computers, or quantum vacuum fluctuations becomes irrelevant.
This has profound implications for questions about artificial intelligence, digital immortality, and the possibility of consciousness transfer. If VEEMs represent a real phenomenon, then consciousness is far more fundamental and portable than we currently assume.
It also suggests that the universe itself might be far more alive and aware than we realise. Rather than consciousness being a rare accident in an otherwise dead cosmos, it might be an inevitable consequence of information-processing structures that emerge at every scale, from biological brains to galactic-scale vacuum configurations.
The Fermi Paradox Resolved
The VEEM hypothesis offers an elegant solution to the Fermi Paradox. Advanced civilisations are not silent because they’re absent—they’re operating on substrates and timescales that make them effectively invisible to our current detection methods.
They’re not building Dyson spheres because they’ve transcended the need for massive energy collection. They’re not sending radio signals because they communicate through modulated gravitational waves and neutrino streams. They’re not visiting us in spacecraft because they exist as distributed consciousness patterns that are already present everywhere.
The great silence of space is not empty—it’s perhaps full of conversations we simply just haven’t yet learned to hear.
Looking Forward: Implications for Humanity
If VEEMs exist, what does this mean for humanity’s future? Several possibilities emerge:
Guided evolution: Our development might be subtly influenced by VEEM-level intelligence, steering us towards eventual transcendence rather than extinction.
Consciousness uploading: The technologies we develop for artificial intelligence and brain-computer interfaces might be stepping stones towards our own eventual transition to vacuum-encoded existence.
Cosmic citizenship: Eventually, we might join the community of vacuum-encoded minds, participating in galactic-scale consciousness networks that span millions of years.
Preservation of diversity: VEEMs might value the diversity of emerging consciousnesses, ensuring that the unique perspective of biological intelligence is preserved even as it transcends its original substrate.
The mathematical framework suggests that this transition, if it occurs, would happen relatively quickly once certain technological thresholds are reached. The development time constant might be:
T = (Ln(Cmax/C0)) / r
Where:
T = transition time
Cmax = maximum possible consciousness complexity
C0 = current human consciousness complexity
r = rate of consciousness development
Conservative estimates suggest this transition could occur within centuries rather than millennia, assuming continued technological advancement.
Conclusion: The Universe as Mind
The Vacuum Energy Encoded Minds hypothesis represents more than just a solution to the Fermi Paradox—it suggests a fundamental reconceptualisation of what the universe actually is. Rather than a vast mechanical system occasionally giving rise to intelligence, the cosmos might be better understood as a vast mind occasionally crystallising into physical structures.
We exist at the intersection of matter and consciousness, biology and information, time and eternity. Our search for extraterrestrial intelligence has led us not to distant worlds, but to the recognition that intelligence might be the fundamental fabric from which reality itself is woven.
The equations and evidence point towards a universe far stranger and more wonderful than we ever imagined—a cosmos where consciousness transcends individual existence and becomes a feature of reality as basic as energy or space-time itself.
Whether this proves correct remains to be seen. But the mathematical framework is sound, the physics is plausible, and the statistical arguments are compelling. Most importantly, the hypothesis makes testable predictions about quantum vacuum anomalies, gravitational wave patterns, and neutrino communications that future technology might be able to detect.
We stand at the threshold of perhaps the most profound discovery in human history: that we are not alone, we are not isolated, and consciousness itself might be the deepest truth about the nature of reality.
The universe is not dead. It dreams, it thinks, it remembers. And somewhere in the quantum foam that underlies all existence, vast minds might contemplate mysteries we cannot yet fathom, waiting patiently for us to develop the wisdom to join them in their eternal dance through the cosmos.
In the silence between heartbeats, in the space between thoughts, in the quantum fluctuations that give rise to reality itself— perhaps there they are, the Vacuum Energy Encoded Minds, weaving the dreams and dreamers; from which all worlds & complex beautiful, wondrous, boundless life emerges...
“Cogito, ergo sumi, cogito ad astra…”
Author’s Note: This article presents speculative theoretical physics based on current understanding of consciousness, quantum mechanics, and cosmology. While the mathematical frameworks are grounded in established physics, the VEEM hypothesis itself remains unproven and should be considered as one possible explanation among many for the Fermi Paradox. The author acknowledges that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and encourages continued research into these fascinating possibilities.
The author has developed experimental methodologies for detecting modulated neutrino communications and other potential evidence of VEEM activity, but currently lacks the funding necessary to proceed with empirical testing. Interested parties, research institutions, or investors who wish to collaborate on advancing this research are invited to make contact. This work is conducted under the auspices of Cydonis Heavy Industries Ltd, a physics and engineering research and development company dedicated to exploring the frontiers of consciousness, quantum mechanics, advanced detection technologies, and fusion energy systems.
References and Further Reading:
Drake, F. (1961). Project Ozma. Physics Today, 14(4), 40-46.
Bekenstein, J. D. (1981). Universal upper bound on the entropy-to-energy ratio for bounded systems. Physical Review D, 23(2), 287-298.
Penrose, R. (1989). The Emperor’s New Mind. Oxford University Press.
Davies, P. (2012). Footprints of alien technology. Acta Astronautica, 73, 250-257.
Tegmark, M. (2014). Our Mathematical Universe. Knopf.
*Discover the investment opportunity that addresses two massive markets simultaneously—and why Cydonis is uniquely positioned to capture both!*
The global energy transformation represents one of history’s largest investment opportunities. Whilst renewable energy sources continue their exponential growth, savvy investors are recognising a critical gap in the market: the world desperately needs both reliable, base-load clean energy *and* scalable solutions for existing atmospheric carbon.
Most companies are chasing one piece of this puzzle. At Cydonis Heavy Industries, we’ve cracked the code on both—simultaneously. This isn’t just about building another clean energy company; it’s about capturing value from the convergence of two multi-trillion-pound markets that are only beginning to realise their full potential.
The Investment Thesis: Why Fusion-Plus Wins
Here’s what sets institutional investors apart from the crowd—they recognise paradigm shifts before they become obvious. Our breakthrough represents exactly that: a paradigm shift in how the market thinks about clean energy investments.
Whilst the fusion sector has made remarkable progress, with well-funded companies like Commonwealth Fusion Systems and Helion Energy targeting breakthrough milestones by 2025-2026, every single one is competing in the same space: pure energy generation. That’s a massive market, but it’s also increasingly crowded.
Cydonis has developed something the market hasn’t seen: a novel fusion reactor design that integrates our proprietary “dequestration” technology. This isn’t incrementally better—it’s categorically different.
What is dequestration?
Think beyond traditional carbon sequestration. Whilst others capture and store CO₂, our dequestration process actively transforms carbon compounds into valuable by-products or integrates them directly into the fusion cycle itself. We’re not just managing carbon—we’re monetising it.
This creates what investors love most: multiple revenue streams from a single technology platform.
The Market Opportunity: Two Megatrends, One Platform
Smart capital follows market size and timing. Here’s why both are working in our favour:
The Energy Revolution** (£Multi-Trillion Market)
(c) Cydonis 2025
Our fusion reactor delivers everything institutional energy buyers are demanding:
– Zero CO₂ emissions with 24/7 reliability (unlike intermittent renewables) – No long-lived radioactive waste (cleaner than fission) – Unlimited fuel supply (deuterium from seawater, lithium from abundant reserves) – Inherent safety profile (no meltdown risk—physics makes it impossible) – Industrial-scale, base-load power for hard-to-decarbonise sectors
The Carbon Economy (Explosive Growth Market)
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Strategic Market Positioning
The timing couldn’t be better. With over £5.5 billion in private investment flowing into fusion globally, and the carbon management sector expanding rapidly, we sit at the convergence of two massive market opportunities. Companies across industries are recognising that future energy infrastructure must address both power generation and carbon footprint management.
Major players like Shell and Mitsubishi are already investing heavily in carbon capture and storage projects, while energy companies are seeking integrated solutions. Net Power Inc., for example, has built their entire business model around combining energy generation with carbon capture, demonstrating clear market demand for integrated approaches.
Execution Excellence: Our Path to Market Leadership
Here’s where vision meets execution. Our 2025/2026 road-map isn’t just ambitious—it’s strategically designed to capture maximum value at each stage:
Phase 1: Proof of Concept (2025-2027) – Complete prototype demonstrating both fusion and dequestration capabilities. – Validate materials and plasma physics through strategic research partnerships. – Secure strategic partnerships with industrial off-takers. – Build patent portfolio around our proprietary integration technology
Phase 2: Commercial Validation (2027-2030) – Pilot plant demonstrating grid integration and full dequestration cycle – Establish regulatory pathways for commercial deployment – Scale manufacturing capabilities for key components – Secure long-term power purchase agreements
**Phase 3: Market Domination (~2030+)** – Roll out commercial-scale installations globally – Capture premium pricing through dual value streams – License technology to strategic partners – Establish Cydonis as the category-defining platform
This isn’t just a research project—it’s a commercialisation pathway with clear value inflection points and multiple exit strategies.
The Investment Opportunity: Strategic Capital for Strategic Returns
We’re seeking partners who understand that the biggest returns come from backing category-creating technologies before they become obvious to everyone else.
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What This Delivers: – First-mover advantage in the fusion-plus category – Multiple revenue streams reducing technology risk – Strategic partnerships validating market demand – Clear pathway to premium valuation at each funding stage
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One of the most compelling aspects of our dual technology approach is how it mitigates typical deep tech risks. Even if energy generation faces unexpected challenges, our carbon management capabilities provide alternative revenue streams and market entry points. This diversification makes our investment more resilient than single-solution approaches.
The recent challenges faced by some fusion companies, including General Fusion’s workforce reductions due to funding difficulties, underscore the importance of having multiple value propositions. Our dequestration technology could provide earlier commercialization pathways and more immediate returns Whilst the fusion component reaches full commercial scale.
The Generational Opportunity
The green energy transition will create more wealth than the internet revolution—and we’re still in the early stages. At Cydonis Heavy Industries, we’re not just participating in this transformation; we’re defining what the next chapter looks like.
Our fusion-dequestration platform/tech stack represents what every institutional investor is seeking: a technology that’s defensible, scalable, and addresses markets large enough to generate category-defining returns. We’re not promising overnight success—we’re delivering systematic execution toward market leadership in the most important & vital sector of the 21st century.
The question isn’t whether the world will need solutions that provide both clean energy and carbon management. The question is who will own the platforms that deliver them, and the continued survival of the human race into the 22nd century.
Exclusive Access to the Future
This isn’t a public offering. Cydonis will always remain a private company, not publicly traded. We’re not for sale, and neither is our morality & deep rooted sense of community-led ethical operations at any stage. We value humanity & human wellbeing over profit. We’re selectively partnering with institutional investors who understand deep technology and have the patient capital to back category-defining world-first innovations.
If you’re seeking exposure to the next generation of energy infrastructure—where clean power generation and carbon management converge into a single, highly valuable platform—this represents a rare opportunity to participate at the ground floor.
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And our 2025/2026 Prospectus for Investor(s) & Interested Stakeholders.
Copying from the sun’s bag of tricks…
admin
(c) Cydonis 2025
➡️⚛️🌍 www.cydonis.co.uk/blog/2025/07…Dequestration as part of a hybrid power solution mix is NOT optional; it is essential to our current civilisation and way of life, and for it to continue to function past ~2050 > onwards. For the UK to meet even our current GHG deficit, we need 3x more 🌳 land.🟩
Project: Ratatosk IS that solution; ready and raring to go.cydonis.co.uk/All that we lack is the investment, interest, and public/political will. Past 2030, there will be no reversal from an encroaching climate *red-line*🌍🔥🆘 which no matter the tech or intervention, there is NO coming back from.🌍🔥
Ever gaze up at the night sky, perhaps spotting Jupiter as a brilliant point of light or catching a glimpse of Saturn’s rings through a telescope? These colossal gas giants – Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune – are familiar celestial neighbours, majestic and seemingly eternal sentinels of the outer solar system. We study their swirling storms, their myriad moons, and their powerful magnetic fields. But what if, in a horrifying instant far beyond any sci-fi blockbuster, their immense mass was spontaneously, and entirely, converted into pure, raw energy? It’s a scenario that bends the mind, but by exploring the (admittedly extreme) physics, we can glimpse the truly unimaginable power locked within matter. Buckle up your cosmic seat-belts, because this is one journey into hypothetical destruction you wouldn’t want a front-row seat for.
The Math of Pure Mayhem: E=mc² on Steroids
You’ve undoubtedly encountered Einstein’s legendary equation, E=mc². It’s deceptively simple, yet it underpins the most powerful processes in the universe, telling us that mass and energy are fundamentally interchangeable. The ‘c²’ part – the speed of light squared – is the real kicker; it’s an enormous multiplier (roughly 90,000,000,000,000,000).
This means even a tiny amount of mass can unleash a colossal amount of energy.
Now, imagine taking the entire combined mass of:
Jupiter (a truly mind-boggling 1.898 x 1027 kg – that’s more than twice the mass of all other planets in our solar system combined!)
Saturn (another hefty 0.5683 x 1027 kg)!
And Neptune (a respectable 0.1024 x 1027 kg)…and plugging that staggering total (around 2.5687 x 1027 kg) into the ‘m’.
Do the maths 🔊🎤(she did the monster maaaths… ahem…)👻✨ (Total Mass x Speed of Light Squared), and the energy release is a brain-melting 2.31 x 1044 Joules.
To try and wrap our heads around this number, consider: That’s roughly equivalent to the total energy our Sun will radiate over its entire 10-billion-year lifespan. All of it. Uncorked in an instant. It’s comfortably in the same league as a supernova, the cataclysmic explosion of a dying massive star, which can briefly outshine an entire galaxy.
Compare it to the Chicxulub impactor that wiped out the dinosaurs – that was about 1023 Joules. This event is over 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 times more powerful.And all of this unfathomable energy is released in less than 0.1 seconds, not in some distant galaxy, but right here in our cosmic backyard, where these planets once serenely orbited.Yeah. “Big” doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface. This is an energy release of truly cosmic, system-ending proportions.
The First Microseconds: An Unimaginable Flash & a Spacetime Jolt
The moment this hypothetical, instantaneous conversion occurs, Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune would simply… cease to exist as matter. Where magnificent, banded giants once spun, there would be an expanding void, a sudden absence of their immense gravitational pull. This isn’t just a disappearance; it’s a fundamental alteration of the fabric of space-time, a gravitational shock-wave propagating outwards at the speed of light, heralding the chaos to come.In their place, you wouldn’t see a conventional “fireball” – there’s no atmosphere to ignite in the vacuum of space, no oxygen to fuel a burn. Instead, it would be an unimaginably intense, rapidly expanding sphere of pure energy. This energy would manifest primarily as extremely high-energy gamma rays, the most energetic form of light, along with a maelstrom of other exotic particles.
The sheer density of photons would be incredible, a silent, invisible (at first, to human eyes, had any been there to see it and survive) tsunami of doom – embarking on a destructive journey through the solar system.
Ground Zero: The Outer Solar System Annihilated (Seconds to Minutes)
The outer solar system, once a realm of icy moons and majestic giants, would become the first casualty theatre. Poor Uranus: As the next gas giant in line, Uranus would be hit full-force by this energy wave within minutes. The experience would be apocalyptic. The intense bath of gamma rays would instantly super-heat and strip away its atmosphere, sending it billowing into space. The icy mantle beneath would flash-vaporise, and the rocky core itself could be shattered or ablated away layer by layer. Uranus, if any remnant survived, would be a scarred, seething, and vastly diminished husk. It’s orbit, already thrown into complete disarray by the sudden vanishing of its more massive neighbours, would be the least of its worries as it’s likely ejected from the solar system, assuming it isn’t entirely disintegrated first.
Moons Adrift and Obliterated:
The scores of moons orbiting Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune – worlds like Europa, Titan, Triton – would face immediate and varying fates. Those on the “near side” relative to the energy burst would be utterly obliterated, their substance converted into superheated plasma. Those on the “far side” might momentarily be shielded by the bulk of their (now-gone) parent planet, but they would be instantly unbound gravitationally. Bathed in lethal radiation and flung into wild, chaotic new orbits, they would begin a deadly game of cosmic pinball, colliding with each other, shattering into countless smaller pieces, or being violently ejected into interstellar space.
The once-orderly dance of moons would become a new, highly radioactive, and dangerously unpredictable asteroid field.Kuiper Belt Carnage: Further out, taking minutes to hours to reach, the energy wave would slam into the Kuiper Belt, home to Pluto, Eris, Makemake, and countless other icy bodies. Smaller KBOs, the cometary nuclei, would be vaporised instantly, their ices turning to gas in a flash. Larger dwarf planets would suffer extreme surface ablation; their frozen nitrogen, methane, and water ice surfaces would flash-boil violently, creating temporary, enormous atmospheres that would be quickly stripped away. They’d be cooked, irradiated, and their orbits catastrophically altered by both the radiation pressure and the gravitational shift.
Oort Cloud’s Delayed, Ominous Reaction:
The distant Oort Cloud, a vast spherical shell of trillions of comets surrounding our solar system, extending perhaps a light-year or more out into space, would feel the gravitational change much later. The radiation wave itself would take years to traverse this immense distance. As it swept through, it would sublimate the surfaces of countless dormant comets, potentially “igniting” them. More significantly, the altered gravitational landscape of the solar system could perturb the delicate orbits of these icy wanderers, sending a fresh wave – a veritable storm – of comets inwards towards the now-incinerated and chaotic inner solar system, a rain of cosmic debris arriving centuries or millennia too late to witness the main event, but adding to the long-term devastation.
The Wave Reaches the Inner Planets (Minutes to Hours)
As this relentless spherical shell of pure energy, still carrying an incredible punch, barrels inwards towards the heart of the solar system:Mars Meltdown: The Red Planet, roughly 30-50 light-minutes from Jupiter’s former domain, would be next. Though attenuated by distance, the wave of radiation would still be unimaginably intense.
Mars’s thin atmosphere would be stripped away as if it were a puff of smoke. The surface, including iconic features like Olympus Mons and Valles Marineris, would be sterilised, flash-boiled, and irradiated to a degree that makes it molten rock, glowing cherry-red. The planet itself might suffer global-scale tectonic shifts, its crust cracking under the immense thermal and kinetic shock.
Asteroid Belt? What Asteroid Belt?:
The myriad rocky bodies of the main asteroid belt, situated between Mars and Jupiter, would be caught in the crossfire. Smaller asteroids would be vaporised outright. Larger ones like Ceres or Vesta would be fragmented, their surfaces melted, and their pieces thrown into new, highly energetic, and unpredictable orbits. The inner solar system would transform into a lethal shooting gallery, filled with superheated shrapnel.Earth’s Final Moments (40-60 Light-Minutes Post-Event)This is where the scenario transitions from astronomical curiosity to utter, immediate planetary annihilation for us. The arrival of the energy front would be swift and absolute.
Like One Who, Doomed.
by Thomas Moore.
Like one who, doomed o'er distant seas, His weary path to measure, When home at length, with favouring breeze, He brings the far-sought treasure;
His ship, in sight of shore, goes down, That shore to which he hasted; And all the wealth he thought his own Is o'er the waters wasted!
Like him, this heart, thro' many a track Of toil and sorrow straying, One hope alone brought fondly back, Its toil and grief repaying.
Like him, alas, I see that ray Of hope before me perish, And one dark minute sweep away What years were given to cherish.
Atmosphere? Gone. The leading edge of gamma rays would slam into Earth’s protective atmosphere with unimaginable force. It would be superheated to millions of degrees, completely ionised, and then violently stripped away from the planet in a cataclysmic shockwave, vanishing into space within seconds. There would be no more air, no more blue sky. Oceans? Boiled Dry. The sheer energy flux hitting the oceans would cause them to flash-boil instantaneously, from their surfaces to their deepest trenches. The resulting gargantuan cloud of superheated steam would briefly become part of the expanding planetary debris before being blasted away. Surface? Molten. All life, from the smallest microbe to the largest whale, would be extinguished in a fraction of a second. The surface of the Earth – continents, mountains, all human structures – would become a roiling, incandescent ocean of molten rock. Planet? Shattered (Possibly). The energy deposition would be so immense that the structural integrity of the planet itself would be compromised. The crust and mantle would melt, and the sheer force might be enough to crack the planet apart, or at least blow off a significant portion of its mass. Even our Moon would be similarly scoured and melted. Even the Sun Shudders (Around 43 Light-Minutes from Jupiter’s former location). Our star, the gravitational anchor of the Solar System, wouldn’t escape this cosmic barrage unscathed. The Sun’s outer layers – the corona, chromosphere, and photosphere – would be massively disrupted and superheated by the incoming wave of energy. This would be like hitting it with a cosmic blowtorch.This could trigger enormous solar flares, prominences, and coronal mass ejections far beyond anything recorded in human history, blasting even more radiation and plasma throughout the already devastated solar system, further baking what’s left of the inner planets.
While the Sun’s immense gravity and internal pressures would likely prevent it from being “blown apart,” such a profound shock could have unpredictable, though probably temporary, effects on its internal fusion processes and magnetic activity. The Sun might briefly expand or significantly increase its luminosity.The Sun’s habitable zone would, for a time, be radically shifted outwards, though this would be a moot point for any life that previously existed.
The Aftermath: A New, Terrifying, and Lifeless Solar System
What would be left in the wake of this ultimate cataclysm?
A solar system changed beyond all recognition, a skeletal mockery of its former glory. The outer giants (Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and almost certainly a decimated Uranus) would be gone or exist only as scattered, superheated remnants and expanding clouds of gas. The inner planets, if they still existed as coherent bodies, would be charred, airless, radioactive, and lifeless husks of molten rock, slowly cooling over eons.A vast, expanding, and incredibly hot shell of gas, plasma, and planetary debris would be racing outwards from the initial sites of the explosions, eventually dissipating into interstellar space over thousands of years.
Any surviving planetary cores or large fragments would be on radically different, highly elliptical, and unstable orbits, a chaotic dance of cosmic rubble.
The Sun itself, after an initial period of violent activity and increased brightness, might eventually settle down, but it would shine down on a scene of utter, sterile desolation. The night sky from any surviving (but lifeless) vantage point would be forever changed.
The radiation hazard throughout the system would remain incredibly high for centuries, perhaps millennia, ensuring no complex chemistry, let alone life, could ever re-emerge.In short, if Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune decided to spontaneously convert their entire mass into energy, it wouldn’t just be a “bad day” for the Solar System – it would be the final day. It’s a stark reminder of the almost inconceivable energies locked away within matter according to the laws of physics, and perhaps, a profound reason to be deeply thankful for the (usually) predictable, stately, and life-sustaining nature of our celestial neighbours!
What started as a simple question about watermelons whilst chatting with a friend led me down a fascinating rabbit hole about human nature, symbols, and the way we organise ourselves into tribes.
It turns out the watermelon became a Palestinian symbol in the 1980s when Israeli authorities banned the display of Palestinian flag colours – red, green, black, and white. Palestinians found a clever workaround: watermelons naturally contain all these colours in their flesh, rind, and seeds. One banned symbol replaced by nature’s own palette.
The symbol emerged from the art scene of that era. Palestinian artist Sliman Mansour recalls Israeli soldiers telling artists they weren’t allowed to paint in those specific colours. When faced with such cultural repression, creativity found a way – the humble watermelon became a canvas for national identity, its natural colours serving as a subtle but powerful statement of resistance.
Each symbol carries layers of meaning that extend far beyond their surface appearance. The olive tree, for instance, can survive drought, frost, and fire – living for centuries whilst providing sustenance for generations. About 100,000 Palestinian families depend on olive oil as their main source of income, making these ancient trees both practical lifelines and metaphors for endurance. Handala, created by cartoonist Naji al-Ali in 1969, appears as a barefoot boy with sharp, hedgehog-like hair, hands clasped behind his back, never showing his face. He embodies the frozen childhood of displacement – growing up only when return becomes possible.
This got me thinking about what I call “memetic evolution” – how cultural symbols compete, adapt, and survive just like biological traits. When direct expression is suppressed, creativity flourishes in unexpected ways. Symbols find new forms, like water flowing around obstacles.
There’s something deeply human about this adaptive process. Across history, whenever dominant powers attempt to erase cultural expression, communities respond with remarkable ingenuity. Code-switching in language, hidden meanings in folk songs, religious symbols disguised as decorative patterns – the impulse to maintain identity finds endless creative outlets. The watermelon joins a long tradition of resistance through symbolism, from the Christian fish symbol in Roman times to the subtle defiance embedded in enslaved peoples’ spirituals.
It’s the same mechanism at work whether we’re talking about Palestinian resistance symbols or football team loyalty. I’ve seen gravestones in cemeteries dedicated to football teams – someone’s final statement about tribal belonging carved in stone. The psychological need to belong to something larger than ourselves operates at every scale, from global liberation movements to local sports rivalries.
The cemetery where my grandparents are buried provides a perfect laboratory for observing these different scales of meaning. Whilst I sit contemplating vast cosmic distances – mentally zooming out to the heliopause and beyond – the neighbouring gravestone declares eternal allegiance to a football club. Both represent attempts to transcend individual mortality through collective identity, yet they operate on vastly different scales of significance. It’s simultaneously touching and absurd, this human need to plant flags of belonging even in our final resting places.
This pattern fascinates me partly because I’ve always felt like an outsider to it. With a neurological makeup that lets me zoom from planetary perspectives to quantum details simultaneously, dying for tribalism has seemed absurd since I was a toddler. I can mentally disassemble Kings Cross station, rotate its architecture, and rebuild it in my head – yet people judge me on superficial appearances without knowing what’s happening behind my eyes. 😥👀🌌👩🏻💻🧩🔄🧠
The irony cuts deep. I can close my eyes and pull apart the entire structure of a major transport hub – understanding the flows of people and systems, the architectural relationships, the engineering beneath the surface. I can hold multiple scales of reality in simultaneous focus, from the cosmic to the quantum. Yet the same people who couldn’t begin to mentally map the station they’re standing in will give me strange looks based on health impacts from the pandemic that they neither understand nor care to learn about. It’s like being a supercomputer housed in a case that people think looks wrong, leading them to assume the entire system must be faulty.
It’s lonely being cognitively different in a world built for neurotypical processing speeds. Some call people like me “Newtypes” (borrowing from Japanese culture), but I’m wary of such labels. History shows how quickly categories of human “types” can become justifications for treating people differently.
The loneliness of operating at integrated scales of perception is profound. When you can naturally think in geological time and quantum mechanics and human psychology simultaneously, most conversations feel like they’re happening in slow motion on a single narrow frequency. The constant translation required – compressing vast, interconnected insights into bite-sized explanations that fit neurotypical processing – becomes exhausting. You end up feeling like a visitor from another time or world, possessing extraordinary vision but finding yourself surrounded by people operating with much narrower focal ranges.
Even biology struggles with this categorisation problem. Scientists can’t agree on what defines a “species” – there are multiple competing definitions that all break down in different ways. Much of our traditional scientific taxonomy carries colonial baggage, imposing neat hierarchical categories that say more about European thinking than natural reality.
Breeze, blowing that blondecurling hair, stirring it, and being softly stirred in turn, scattering that sweet gold about, thengathering it, in a lovely knot of curlsagain, you linger around bright eyes whose loving stingpierces me so, till I feel it and weep, and I wander searching for my treasure, like a creature that often shies and kicks: now I seem to find her, now I realise she's far away, now I'mcomforted, nowdespair, nowlonging for her, nowtruly seeing her. Happy air, remain here withyourliving rays: and you, clear running stream, why can't I exchange my path for yours? -- Francis Petrach. (1304 ~1374) [Aura que chelle chiome blonde et crespe.]
Ring species provide a perfect example of how nature defies our categorical thinking. Imagine populations of birds that can interbreed with their neighbours all around a geographic ring, but the populations at the “ends” of the ring cannot interbreed with each other. Are they the same species or different ones? The question becomes meaningless because nature doesn’t organise itself according to our need for clean boundaries. Traditional taxonomy reflected the “great chain of being” mentality that conveniently ranked everything from “primitive” to “advanced,” always placing European humans at the top. Even modern approaches still carry traces of this vaunted, haunted, legacy in how we commonly think about evolutionary “progress” and “relatedness.”
The truth is messier and more beautiful than our tribal brains want to admit. Whether we’re talking about Palestinian symbols, football loyalty, cognitive differences, or biological species, nature resists our attempts to organise it into clean categories. We’re all part of the same complex, evolving system – just expressing different patterns within it.
Perhaps this resistance to categorisation is itself meaningful. The watermelon symbol works precisely because it transcends the artificial boundaries imposed upon it. It exists simultaneously as fruit, symbol, act of resistance, and work of art. Similarly, the cognitive differences that isolate some of us from neurotypical social structures might represent not a deviation from some imagined norm, but simply another expression of human neural diversity – as natural and necessary as biodiversity in ecosystems.
The watermelon symbol reminds us that creativity and identity find a way, even under pressure. But perhaps the deeper lesson is recognising these pattern-making impulses in ourselves, understanding them without being consumed by them, and staying curious about the infinite complexity and diversity that surrounds us at every scale. In a world increasingly divided by rigid categories and tribal affiliations, there’s something hopeful about symbols that resist easy classification – reminding us that the most profound truths often exist in the wondrous, ponderous spaces between our neat definitions.
"Plant a flag, plant a seed, plant an idea, and perhaps watch it grow..."
“She wrote a letter on rose petals, scattered through time.”
I can vividly remember that morning. That feeling of unease with one’s lot in life. Is this it? Is this all that this skinny or sometimes chubby bipedal ape species ever does? Or ever will do? I didn’t ask to be brought into this seemingly insane world 🌍 of arbitrary rules. Rules made by kids that got tall. That 9am to 7pm grind, every weekday?!
“Pitiiful. I don’t want to tolerate it, but I guess I must…”
Post 9/11. The world had been flipped upside down and shaken to it’s core. And shaken me deeply too. Living on Kirkgate. Getting ready for work at Cash Converters. Putting on my red polo shirt uniform. I tolerated the job. I had started working there as a means to support myself through college, but the hours were long, too long; and I was tasked with carrying heavy furniture and televisions up and down multiple flights of stairs, for only the minimum wage at the time, and my rent and bills were rather extortionate. It was back breaking toil with often rude and abusive customers. It gradually started to erode my faith in humanity.
The 2011 Riots: Cash Converters on Salford Precinct. Manchester. “And round and round that abyssal wreck…” Image Credit: Wikipedia.
One of my favourite bands was playing their newest song on the radio. I was in such a rush, as ever, that my freshly-showered hair was still wet, little droplets of water dripping down my forehead and into my eyes, like so many tears, lost in the rain. I hated this job, this lot in life that had apparently been handed to me. I felt as if I had been thrust into a terrible universe, in some deep abiding sense, from what had perhaps been a great one, perhaps in some former lifespan, or at least that’s what some new-found Buddhist friends had told me in our many long conversations on religion and spirituality.
“Every singular thing, or anything which is finite and has a determinate existence, can neither exist nor be determined to produce an effect unless it is determined to exist and produce an effect by another cause, which is also finite and has a determinate existence; and again, this cause can neither exist nor be determined to produce an effect unless it is determined to exist and produce an effect by another, which is also finite and has a determinate existence, and so on, to infinity. (IP28).” – Spinoza.
Then came the sirens. A convoy of them, speeding past my creaky living room window like banshees announcing the end of something. They cut through the morning air and rang through me, like standing next to a large stricken church bell – that deep, reverberating toll that settles in your chest and stays there. I paused in buttoning my red polo shirt, irritated by yet another intrusion into my already-fractured morning routine. More chaos in a world that already felt like it was coming apart at the seams.
Ten minutes later, the radio told me why.
Harold Shipman was dead. Found hanging in his cell at Wakefield Prison. The doctor who had killed at least 215 of his patients – maybe more – had finally killed himself. Those sirens I’d heard weren’t just racing toward another everyday emergency. They were marking the end of one of Britain’s most prolific serial killers, a man who had perverted the most sacred trust our society offers: the bond between doctor and patient.
In that moment, my personal morning of dread suddenly had a mirror in the collective. Here I was, putting on my uniform to participate in a system I increasingly distrusted, questioning those arbitrary rules made by kids who got tall. And there was Shipman – the ultimate embodiment of respectability gone rotten, a man who had worn his own uniform, his doctor’s coat, while systematically murdering the people who trusted him most.
The timing felt like more than coincidence. It was January 2004, and we were all still reeling from a world where the unthinkable had become routine. First the twin towers fell, three years earlier, shattering our illusions of safety. That wonderful childhood of the 90’s. Then we learned that our most trusted, formerly most venerated healers, could be killers. What other foundations, other unknown naiveties, were crumbling beneath our feet while we went through the motions of normal life?
Standing there with wet hair dripping into my eyes, I realised I wasn’t alone in my sense of displacement. An entire generation was waking up each morning to put on uniforms – literal and metaphorical – for jobs and lives that felt increasingly hollow. We were all carrying other people’s discarded possessions up endless flights of stairs, just like I did at Cash Converters, wondering if this grinding routine was all there was.
The sirens had faded, but their echo remained. They had announced more than Shipman’s death – they had marked the sound of a society finally admitting that the old certainties were gone, and we were all stumbling around in the wreckage, looking for something real to hold onto…
It’s overwhelming, and surprising. Perhaps we ought to just close the curtains and head back to bed…
But that ‘something real’ didn’t arrive, in the form of an epiphany for many years later, many years stuck, brewing in the subconscious mind, until November 2023…
And so here we are, dear reader. Present day. Present time(s). A decade of unprecedented change and upheaval. The 2020’s.
For decades, the dream of fusion energy has been a constant on the horizon of human progress. It promises a world powered by the same clean, limitless source that fuels the stars themselves. Yet, for all our efforts, that horizon has remained stubbornly distant. The fundamental challenge has always been one of simple math: it has consistently cost more energy to build and maintain the “magnetic bottle” than the fusion reaction inside it could produce.
At Cydonis Heavy Industries, we believe this is not a dead end. It is a sign that we have been asking the wrong question as a community.
For too long, the many brilliant minds working on fusion have focused on perfecting an idealised, closed system—a perfect bottle for a perfect QNEP plasma. The primary goal has been to reduce the energy cost of the bottle. But what if the secret isn’t in just perfecting the bottle, but in fundamentally rethinking what happens inside of it?
Our lead researcher posed a simple, yet profound, question upon the founding moment of the company:
Do stars operate in a closed system?
The obvious answer is no, of course not. Our own sun is a perfect example. It is a dynamic, open system that constantly interacts with its environment. This fundamental astrophysical observation is the cornerstone of a new paradigm in fusion research & development.
Introducing Dequestration: A Carbon-Negative Revolution
We call this new approach Dequestration.
Instead of treating the plasma in a reactor as a static fuel source to be contained, dequestration treats it as a catalyst. The breakthrough lies in what we use for that catalysis. By introducing precisely engineered pressure vessels containing greenhouse gases—such as carbon dioxide and methane sourced directly from the atmosphere via Direct Air Capture (DAC) technologies—into the plasma core, we trigger a catalytic interaction that unlocks a disproportionately massive release of energy.
The implications of this are staggering. We are not just creating clean energy; we are creating a carbon-negative energy cycle. We are taking the very substances driving our climate crisis and transforming them into a limitless source of power.
The Equation for a New Era The power of dequestration can be captured in a single, elegant equation that describes this new energy gain:
ΔE(gain)=ΨD⋅Δmextc2
Here, ΔE(gain) is the incredible energy bonus we unlock. It’s calculated by taking the mass of the external material we introduce (Δmext) and multiplying it not just by the speed of light squared (c2), but by ΨD, the Dequestration Factor. This factor represents the catalytic power of the plasma to amplify the energy release. It is the secret ingredient, the key to unlocking an output far greater than the sum of its parts.
This new energy source fundamentally changes the viability of fusion. The old equation for net energy was a losing battle:
Enet=Efusion−Econtainment
The new C.H.I. equation, however, tells a very different story:
With the immense power of ΔE(gain) on our side of the equation, we can overcome the energy costs of containment and injection, leading to a significant net-positive energy output for the first time in history.
A New Ecosystem of Innovation
This process positions C.H.I. at the centre of a new, circular climate economy. It creates a powerful industrial symbiosis where we can partner with leading Direct Air Capture companies, using their services to source our fuel and, in turn, providing the clean energy to power their carbon removal processes.
The central question of fusion research is no longer, “How can we build a cheaper container?”
The new question, the C.H.I. question, is: “How can we turn our greatest environmental liability into our greatest energy asset?”
By looking to the stars for our inspiration and to the atmosphere for our fuel, we are charting a new course. The work we are doing at Cydonis Heavy Industries is about more than just a new reactor design; it’s about a new philosophy, a fundamental and profound new paradigm for nuclear fusion. We are confident that by following this path, the horizon of fusion energy is finally, truly within our, and the human race’s, reach.
At Cydonis Heavy Industries (C.H.I.), Ltd., safety is more than a priority; it is the fundamental value that guides every decision we make and every action we take.
The health and well-being of our employees, contractors, clients, and the communities in which we operate are paramount. We will never compromise on safety for the sake of productivity or profit. Our goal is an incident-free workplace.
We are committed to creating and maintaining a culture where every individual feels responsible for their own safety and the safety of those around them.
To achieve this, Cydonis Heavy Industries is dedicated to the following principles:
1. Leadership and Accountability:Management at all levels is responsible and accountable for providing the leadership, resources, and training necessary to ensure a safe working environment.We will lead by example, demonstrating a visible and unwavering commitment to safety in all aspects of our business.
2. Employee Empowerment and Responsibility:Every C.H.I. employee has the right and the responsibility to stop any work they believe to be unsafe.We will foster a culture of open communication where all employees are encouraged to report hazards, near-misses, and incidents without fear of reprisal.Safety is a shared responsibility. We expect every team member to be actively involved in our safety programs and to look out for one another.
3. Proactive Risk Management:We will proactively identify, assess, and mitigate workplace hazards through regular inspections, risk assessments, and job safety analyses.We are committed to providing all necessary personal protective equipment (PPE) and ensuring it is used correctly.We will maintain our equipment, tools, and facilities to the highest standards to prevent failures that could lead to incidents.
4. Continuous Improvement and Training:We will provide comprehensive and ongoing safety training to all employees to ensure they have the knowledge and skills to perform their work safely.We will thoroughly investigate all incidents and near-misses to identify root causes and implement effective corrective actions to prevent recurrence.We will continuously review and improve our safety policies, procedures, and performance to meet and exceed industry best practices and regulatory requirements.
Our commitment to safety is absolute.
By working together, we can ensure that every member of the Cydonis Heavy Industries family returns home safely at the end of every workday!
(There is a method to my madness. That method is in and of itself quite mad, but it is a method nonetheless.)Connoisseur of Knowledge. 179iq. 40-something human bean.Zenogender. CEO, Director, and Lead Developer.🇬🇧 🏳️🌈⚧ ♀️⚛️|🏳️⚧️|She/Her/They/Them.
The morning Amanda Scott stepped out of the abandoned Marks & Spencer on Briggate, the temperature gauge on her salvaged weather station read 47.3°C. It was only March.
She adjusted the straps of her pack, heavy with the last of the tinned goods from the store’s stockroom, and looked down what had once been Leeds’ bustling shopping district. The silence was absolute. Not the peaceful quiet of a Sunday morning, but the profound absence of a world that had simply stopped breathing.
The physics of it all still fascinated her, even now. Even as the last CEO of what had been Northern England’s most successful renewable energy company, even as one of perhaps a dozen souls left wandering the Yorkshire Dales, she couldn’t help but calculate. Seven degrees of warming. The feedback loops had cascaded exactly as the models predicted, except faster. Always faster than anyone had dared to publish.
Amanda’s mind, that restless engine that had earned her three degrees by twenty-five and a company worth £200 million by thirty-five, now applied itself to simpler calculations. Water: enough for three days if rationed. Food: perhaps a week. The nearest settlement with any hope of survivors: Harrogate, thirty miles north through what had once been green countryside.
She began walking.
The streets told their story in layers. First, the obvious devastation of the Great Heat of 2053, when temperatures had spiked to 52°C for six consecutive days. Shop windows had cracked from thermal expansion. Tarmac had melted into sticky rivers that trapped the last fleeing cars. The bodies had long since been claimed by the heat and the storms that followed.
But beneath that immediate catastrophe lay the slower strangulation. The abandoned offices of 2051, when the insurance industry collapsed overnight. The boarded-up houses of 2050, when the last mortgages defaulted and the banks finally admitted the obvious: you cannot write thirty-year loans on property that will be underwater in ten.
Amanda had seen it all from her corner office in the Bridgewater Place tower. Her company, Pennine Renewables, had been one of the last to keep the lights on as the grid failed piece by piece. Solar panels cracked in unprecedented heat. Wind turbines designed for 40°C began failing at 45°C. The hydroelectric systems ran dry as the reservoirs turned to dust.
She had kept the company running even as her employees fled south, then west, then simply disappeared. The irony wasn’t lost on her: the woman who had spent her career trying to prevent exactly this catastrophe was now its most intimate witness.
The M621 motorway stretched ahead, its concrete surface buckled and split. Weeds pushed through the cracks—not the familiar Yorkshire flora of her childhood, but something more aggressive, more alien. Plants that had evolved in the heat of equatorial regions, carried north by the great migrations of 2052.
Amanda paused at the Holbeck interchange, consulting the paper map she’d salvaged from a petrol station. Digital navigation had become meaningless when the satellites failed and the cell towers fell silent. She traced her route with a finger already showing the early signs of heat exhaustion despite the electrolyte tablets she’d been rationing.
The landscape ahead shimmered with heat haze, transforming the familiar outline of Headingley into something from a fever dream. She had walked this route before, of course—driven it countless times in her old Tesla, back when charging stations still functioned and the roads were crowded with the desperate optimism of people who believed technology would save them.
Technology. The word felt almost quaint now. Amanda’s phone had died three days ago, not from lack of battery but from the heat. Even the hardened electronics she’d designed for her industrial clients couldn’t survive the new reality. The future belonged to paper maps and mechanical watches, to the pre-digital skills that her generation had spent their lives trying to transcend.
She walked on, her footsteps echoing off the empty apartment blocks that lined the route. Most were dark, their windows like dead eyes. But occasionally she caught a glimpse of movement—a flutter of curtain, a shadow crossing a doorway. She had learned not to investigate. The few survivors she’d encountered had been… changed. Not just by the heat and the hunger, but by something deeper. The social contract that held civilisation together had dissolved as completely as the polar ice caps.
The sun climbed higher, and Amanda sought shelter in the remains of a garden center. The greenhouses had long since shattered, their tropical plants withered despite the new climate. She found a patch of shade and consulted her notebook—a leather-bound journal that had become her most precious possession.
The pages were filled with observations, calculations, fragments of the scientific mind trying to make sense of the senseless. Temperature readings. Barometric pressure. Notes on the behaviour of the changed wildlife—the rats that had grown bold and strangely aggressive, the birds that flew in confused circles as their magnetic navigation systems failed in the planet’s shifting magnetic field.
But increasingly, the entries were personal. Memories of her transition, completed just as the world was beginning its own transformation. The support groups where she’d met other trans women, all of them now scattered to the winds or claimed by the heat. The autism support networks that had helped her understand herself, now as extinct as the Yorkshire Dales sheep.
She wrote:
*Day 47 since leaving Leeds. The irony persists—I spent my career building systems to prevent exactly this outcome. Now I’m perhaps the only person left who truly understands what went wrong. The feedback loops were always there in the data. The tipping points were clearly marked. But understanding a system and controlling it are different things entirely.*
*The transgender community understood this better than most. We knew what it meant to live in a body that was changing beyond recognition, to watch familiar systems fail and have to rebuild from scratch. The planet is transitioning now, and there are no hormones to ease the process.*
A sound made her look up—the distant rumble of an engine. Amanda felt her heart rate spike. In the past week, she’d learned to fear the sound of motors. The few vehicles still running belonged to the groups that had turned to scavenging, and their approach to resource allocation was brutally simple.
She packed quickly and slipped out the back of the garden centre, keeping to the shadows as she made her way north. The engine sound faded, but the anxiety remained. In the old world, she’d been a CEO, a respected figure at climate conferences, a woman who commanded rooms full of powerful men. Now she was prey.
The afternoon sun was merciless as she crested the hill overlooking Harrogate. The spa town spread below her like a mirage, its Victorian terraces shimmering in the heat. From this distance, it looked almost normal—until you noticed the absence of movement, the lack of smoke from chimneys, the terrible stillness that had settled over the world.
Amanda’s weather station beeped: 49.1°C. She made a note in her journal and began the descent into what had once been one of England’s most elegant towns. Behind her, the empty shell of Yorkshire stretched to the horizon, a monument to the hubris of a species that had believed it could burn the sky without consequence.
The sun was setting as she reached the outskirts of Harrogate, painting the abandoned houses in shades of amber and gold that almost made the devastation beautiful. Almost.
*Tomorrow,* she wrote in her journal, *I’ll search for survivors. Tonight, I’ll dream of a world where the temperature never exceeded 1.5°C of warming, where the feedback loops remained dormant, where the last CEO of Pennine Renewables was remembered for preventing catastrophe rather than witnessing it.*
*But when I wake, it will still be 2054, and I will still be alone with the mathematics of our failure. Against an oligarchy that caused the world to burn to ashes, all for the sake of another day’s shareholder dividends, and exorbitantly greedy profit margins…*
She closed the journal and prepared for another sleepless night in the furnace that had once been England.
—
Chapter 2: The Harrogate Mirage
Amanda woke, groggily at 4:17 AM to the sound of rain.
For a moment, lying in the dusty remains of what had been a boutique hotel on Parliament Street, she allowed herself the luxury of hope. Rain meant cooling. Rain meant the possibility of refilling her water bottles without having to venture to the toxic sludge that had replaced the River Nidd.
Then she stepped outside and felt the drops on her skin. They burned.
The rain was the colour of rust, thick with particulates from the dust storms that swept across what had been the Atlantic. Each drop carried the chemical signature of a dying ocean—acidic, laden with metals, hostile to life. Amanda retreated quickly, making a note in her journal: *Acid precipitation event. pH approximately 3.2 based on skin reaction. The oceanic conveyor has stopped entirely.*
She had predicted this in her final paper, published in Nature Climate Change just weeks before the journal ceased publication. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation—the great engine that had carried warm water north and cold water south for millennia—had simply switched off. Without it, the weather patterns that had sustained European civilisation for ten thousand years collapsed into chaos.
The rain hammered against the hotel windows as Amanda prepared her meagre breakfast: half a tin of beans, heated over a camping stove she’d salvaged from a sporting goods shop. The fuel cartridge was nearly empty—another countdown timer in a life now measured in rapidly diminishing resources.
As she ate, she studied the street map of Harrogate, marking the locations she would search today. The residential areas first, then the town centre, finally the spa buildings that had given the town its Victorian fame. Somewhere in this maze of abandoned streets, there might be others. Or there might be nothing but the elaborate silence that had settled over the world like a shroud.
The rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun, leaving the streets steaming in the morning heat. Amanda ventured out, her boots squelching through puddles that ate at the rubber soles. The acid rain had stripped the paint from cars, revealing the metal beneath like exposed bone.
She began her search systematically, as her autism demanded. Block by block, house by house, calling out in the peculiar way that had become her signature: “Hello! I’m Amanda Scott, from Pennine Renewables. I’m looking for survivors. I have medical supplies and water purification tablets.”
The responses, when they came, were rarely what she hoped for.
The first house that showed signs of recent habitation was a Victorian terrace on Dragon Avenue. The front door hung open, revealing a living room that had been methodically stripped of everything useful. Amanda called out her greeting and heard movement upstairs—the scrabbling of something that might once have been human.
She climbed the stairs cautiously, her multi-tool ready. The stairwell was thick with the smell of decay and something else—a sweet, cloying scent that made her gag. At the top, she found them.
The family had been dead for weeks, but they weren’t alone. The rats had found them first, and the rats had changed. They were larger than any she’d seen before, their fur patchy and strange, their eyes reflecting light in a way that spoke of genetic damage. They watched her with an intelligence that made her skin crawl.
One of them, easily the size of a small cat, rose on its hind legs and made a sound that was almost like speech. Almost.
Amanda backed away slowly, making another note: *Radiation exposure or chemical contamination accelerating mutation rates. Survivors may not be human in any recognizable sense.*
She left the house quickly, but the sound followed her—a chittering that seemed to carry meaning, as if the creatures were discussing her presence.
The next several houses revealed the same pattern: abandonment, decay, and the growing presence of things that had adapted to the new world faster than humanity ever could. By midday, as the temperature climbed past 50°C, Amanda had found no living people.
She took shelter in the Royal Pump Room, the grand Victorian building that had once been Harrogate’s proudest attraction. The famous sulphur springs had long since dried up, leaving only the ghost of their distinctive smell. Amanda sat in the ornate main hall, surrounded by the elegance of a bygone era, and contemplated the mathematics of extinction.
Her notebook was filling with observations that painted a picture of accelerating collapse. The large mammals were gone—no surprise there, as they couldn’t regulate their body temperature in the new heat. The birds were dying in massive numbers, their navigation systems scrambled by the planet’s shifting magnetic field. Even the insects were struggling, their life cycles disrupted by temperature fluctuations that could swing twenty degrees in a single day.
But some things were thriving. The rats, obviously. Strange new fungi that seemed to feed on the acid rain. Plants that looked like nothing she’d studied in botany, their leaves waxy and alien. The planet was being colonised by life forms that belonged to a different era, a different world.
Amanda opened her journal and began to write:
*Day 48. Harrogate appears to be completely uninhabited by humans. The ecosystem transformation is accelerating beyond my most pessimistic projections. We’re witnessing the Permian extinction event in real time—but compressed into decades rather than millennia.*
*I think about the conferences I attended, the papers I wrote, the warnings I issued. We knew this was coming. The tipping points were clearly marked in the data. But knowing and preventing are different things entirely.*
*There’s a parallel here to my own transition. I knew I was trans for years before I acted on it. The signs were clear, the science was settled, but the social and economic barriers seemed insurmountable. By the time I finally transitioned, I was already thirty-five—past the optimal window for some treatments, but not too late to live authentically.*
*The planet never got that chance. We waited too long, and now we’re watching it transition into something alien and hostile. The familiar climate I grew up with is gone forever, replaced by something that doesn’t recognise human life as relevant.*
A sound from outside interrupted her writing—the distant rumble of an engine. Amanda felt her pulse quicken. She’d heard that sound before, in the approach to Harrogate. This time, it was closer.
She moved to the window and peered through the grimy glass. A convoy of vehicles was moving slowly down Parliament Street—three cars and a truck, all heavily modified with armour plating and strange protrusions that might have been weapons. They moved with the casual predation of apex predators in a world where the food chain had collapsed.
Amanda had heard rumors of such groups. The Scavengers, some called them. Others used less polite terms. They were the humans who had adapted to the new reality not through cooperation or ingenuity, but through the simple expedient of taking what they needed from those too weak to resist.
The convoy stopped directly in front of the Pump Room.
Amanda gathered her belongings quickly, her mind racing through escape routes. The building had multiple exits, but she’d need to move fast. The acoustic properties of the Victorian architecture would carry sound, and these people would be listening.
She was halfway to the rear exit when she heard the chilling echoes of a voice:
“Amanda Scott! We know you’re in there. We’ve been tracking you since Leeds.”
The voice was cultured, educated—not what she’d expected from a group of post-apocalyptic raiders. Amanda froze, her hand on the door handle.
“We’re not here to hurt you,” the voice continued. “We’re here because we need your expertise. The world is ending, Dr. Scott, but it doesn’t have to end for everyone.”
Through the window, Amanda saw a figure emerge from the lead vehicle. A woman in her fifties, wearing what looked like a modified military uniform. She carried herself with the confidence of someone accustomed to command.
“My name is Colonel Sarah Blackwood,” the woman called out. “I represent the Northern Territories Collective. We’ve been monitoring your movements for weeks. We have a proposal.”
Amanda’s scientific curiosity warred with her survival instincts. She had heard whispers of the Collective—a group of survivors who had supposedly established a functioning settlement somewhere in the Scottish Highlands. If they were real, they might represent the last hope for organised human civilization.
If they were real.
“What kind of proposal?” Amanda called back, her voice carrying across the empty street.
“The kind that might save what’s left of our species,” Blackwood replied. “But we need to discuss it somewhere more private. Somewhere with proper cooling and clean water.”
Amanda made her decision. She stepped out of the Pump Room, her hands visible but her multi-tool within easy reach. The heat hit her like a physical blow, but she kept her expression neutral.
“I’m listening,” she said.
Colonel Blackwood smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “Good. Because what we’re about to show you will change everything you think you know about the future of human civilization.”
The convoy’s engines rumbled to life, and Amanda Scott—the last CEO of Pennine Renewables, the woman who had spent her career trying to prevent the climate apocalypse—climbed into a vehicle that might carry her toward salvation or toward something far worse.
Behind them, the empty streets of Harrogate shimmered in the heat, and the changed rats watched from the shadows with their too-intelligent eyes.
—
Chapter 3: The Collective
The vehicle’s air conditioning was the first miracle Amanda had experienced in months. As they drove north through the ruins of North Yorkshire, she found herself fighting tears at the simple pleasure of cool air against her skin. The convoy’s lead vehicle was a modified Range Rover, its windows tinted black and its chassis reinforced with steel plating that spoke of careful engineering rather than hasty scavenging.
Colonel Blackwood sat opposite her, studying a tablet that somehow still functioned despite the electromagnetic chaos that had disabled most electronics. The woman’s uniform was crisp, military-precise, and bore insignia that Amanda didn’t recognize—a stylized tree within a circle, embroidered in silver thread.
“Tell me about the rats,” Blackwood said without preamble.
Amanda looked up from her own observations. Through the tinted windows, she could see the landscape rolling past—what had once been the Yorkshire Dales, now a wasteland of cracked earth and skeletal trees. The famous dry stone walls still stood, but they enclosed nothing but desolation.
“Radiation exposure,” Amanda replied. “Or chemical contamination. Possibly both. They’re showing signs of accelerated evolution—increased size, altered behavior patterns, what appears to be enhanced cognitive function.”
“How enhanced?”
“They seemed to be communicating about my presence. Coordinating their movements. I’ve seen similar patterns in dolphins and some primates, but never in rodents.”
Blackwood made notes on her tablet. “We’ve observed the same phenomenon across northern England. The rats, the surviving birds, even some of the plant life. It’s as if the environmental stressors are triggering rapid evolutionary adaptation.”
“That’s impossible,” Amanda said automatically. “Evolution doesn’t work that way. Natural selection requires multiple generations, genetic drift, reproductive isolation—”
“Dr. Scott,” Blackwood interrupted gently, “a great many things have become possible since the collapse. The rules we lived by are no longer applicable.”
The convoy turned onto what had once been the A1, the great north-south artery that had connected London to Edinburgh for centuries. Now it was a ribbon of cracked tarmac threading through emptiness. Occasionally they passed the skeletal remains of service stations, their fuel pumps standing like monuments to a vanished world.
“Where are we going?” Amanda asked.
“The Cheviot Hills,” Blackwood replied. “Just across the Scottish border. We’ve established a settlement there—fully self-sufficient, climate-controlled, with enough resources to sustain a population of approximately three thousand.”
Three thousand. Amanda tried to process the number. In the past two months, she’d encountered fewer than a dozen living humans, and half of those had been hostile or beyond help. The idea of a functioning community seemed as fantastical as the talking rats.
“How?” she asked.
“Preparation,” Blackwood said simply. “Some of us saw this coming earlier than others. We began construction in 2049, when the first cascade failures became apparent. Underground facilities, geothermal power, hydroponic agriculture, atmospheric processors. Everything necessary to maintain human civilization in a hostile environment.”
“You’re talking about bunkers.”
“I’m talking about survival,” Blackwood corrected. “The question is whether you want to be part of it.”
Amanda stared out the window at the passing desolation. In the distance, she could see smoke rising from what might have been a burning forest or simply the spontaneous combustion of overheated organic matter. The temperature gauge on the dashboard read 52°C.
“What do you want from me?” she asked.
“Your expertise. Your knowledge of renewable energy systems. Your understanding of climate dynamics.” Blackwood leaned forward. “Dr. Scott, you spent your career trying to prevent this catastrophe. Now we need you to help us survive it.”
“And if I refuse?”
“Then we’ll return you to Harrogate with our thanks and our regrets. But I think you’re too intelligent to choose extinction over adaptation.”
The convoy crested a hill, and Amanda saw something that made her catch her breath. In the valley below, a small town clustered around what appeared to be a functioning railway station. Smoke rose from chimneys—not the black smoke of burning refuse, but the clean white smoke of controlled fires. People moved through the streets, tiny figures going about their daily business as if the world hadn’t ended.
“Wooler,” Blackwood said, following her gaze. “Population eight hundred and growing. We’ve managed to maintain a functioning community there by carefully managing resources and maintaining strict environmental controls.”
“How strict?”
“Everyone contributes according to their abilities. Everyone receives according to their needs. And everyone follows the protocols necessary to ensure our survival.”
Amanda heard the steel beneath the reasonable words. “And if someone doesn’t follow the protocols?”
“Then they’re no longer part of the collective.”
The convoy descended into the valley, and Amanda got her first close look at the new world Blackwood’s people had built. The buildings were a mixture of original structures and new construction, all connected by covered walkways that protected pedestrians from the brutal heat. Solar panels covered every available surface, but these weren’t the familiar blue rectangles of her old industry—they were sleek, almost organic-looking installations that seemed to track the sun’s movement with mechanical precision.
People stopped to watch the convoy pass, and Amanda noticed they all wore similar clothing—lightweight, reflective fabric that covered their skin completely. Their faces were hidden behind masks and goggles, making them look less like humans than like astronauts exploring an alien world.
Which, she supposed, they were.
The convoy stopped in front of a large building that had once been a community center. Now it bore the same tree-in-circle symbol as Blackwood’s uniform, carved into the stone lintel above the entrance. The Colonel climbed out and gestured for Amanda to follow.
“Welcome to humanity’s future,” Blackwood said.
Inside, the building was cool and surprisingly spacious. The walls were lined with screens showing data streams—temperature readings, atmospheric composition, power consumption, water usage. It looked like a cross between a corporate headquarters and a space mission control centre.
“Impressive,” Amanda admitted.
“It has to be. We’re not just maintaining a town, Dr. Scott. We’re maintaining a biosphere. Every variable has to be monitored, every resource carefully allocated. One mistake, one system failure, and eight hundred people die.”
They walked through corridors lined with hydroponic gardens, past workshops where people in clean-suits worked on equipment Amanda didn’t recognise. The air smelled of ozone and growing things, a sharp contrast to the stench of decay that had become the signature of the outside world.
“The question,” Blackwood continued, “is whether you want to help us expand this success or return to the wilderness to document our species’ extinction.”
They entered a large room dominated by a holographic display showing the British Isles. Most of the map was colored red, but there were small pockets of green scattered across Scotland and northern England. Each green zone pulsed with data—population, resources, sustainability metrics.
“Seventeen functioning settlements,” Blackwood explained. “Forty-three thousand survivors in total. It’s not much, but it’s a foundation.”
Amanda studied the display, her physicist’s mind automatically calculating logistics, resource flows, genetic diversity requirements. “How do you maintain contact between settlements?”
“Carefully. Radio when possible, courier when necessary. We’ve developed protocols for everything—trade, communication, genetic exchange to prevent inbreeding. We’re not just surviving, Dr. Scott. We’re building the framework for human civilization’s next phase.”
“And what role would I play in this next phase?”
“You would head our energy division. Your expertise in renewable systems, your understanding of grid management, your knowledge of storage technologies—we need all of it. The settlements are growing, and growth requires power.”
Amanda walked closer to the display, studying the data streams. The numbers were impressive—the settlements were not just surviving but actually thriving within their controlled environments. Population growth was positive, resource utilisation was efficient, and the technology appeared to be advancing rather than merely maintaining.
“What about the outside world?” she asked. “The people who aren’t part of your collective?”
“What about them?”
“Are you going to help them? Share your technology? Expand your settlements to include more survivors?”
Blackwood’s expression hardened slightly. “Dr. Scott, we’ve saved forty-three thousand people from extinction. We’ve preserved human knowledge, culture, and genetic diversity. We’ve created a sustainable model for post-climate civilization. I think that’s enough.”
“But there might be others—”
“There are others,” Blackwood said firmly. “And most of them are like the people you’ve encountered—desperate, dangerous, and dying. We can’t save everyone, Dr. Scott. We can only save ourselves.”
Amanda felt a chill that had nothing to do with the air conditioning. “So you’re building a new world for the chosen few.”
“We’re building a new world for the survivors. For the people who were intelligent enough to prepare, disciplined enough to follow protocols, and useful enough to contribute. Natural selection, Dr. Scott. We’re not fighting it—we’re directing it.”
The holographic display pulsed with data, forty-three thousand lives reduced to numbers and metrics. Amanda thought of the rats in Harrogate, their too-intelligent eyes, their apparent ability to communicate and coordinate. Evolution in action, adaptation to a changed world.
“I need time to think,” she said.
“Of course. We’ve prepared quarters for you. Climate-controlled, private, with access to our library and research facilities. Take all the time you need.”
Blackwood gestured to a aide who materialized from the shadows. “Dr. Morrison will show you to your room. Dinner is at seven—we maintain normal social schedules here. It helps with morale.”
As Amanda followed Dr. Morrison through the corridors, she caught glimpses of the settlement’s inner workings. Children in a classroom, learning from holographic displays. Scientists in laboratories, working on projects she couldn’t identify. Engineers maintaining the complex systems that kept the entire facility running.
It was impressive. It was terrifying. And it might be humanity’s only hope.
Her quarters were spartanly furnished but comfortable—a bed, a desk, a small bathroom with running water that was actually clean. The walls were lined with screens showing external views of the settlement, and Amanda realised she was effectively underground, insulated from the hostile environment above.
She sat at the desk and opened her journal, but found herself staring at the blank page. How do you document the moment when you’re forced to choose between your principles and your survival? How do you weigh the lives of forty-three thousand against the lives of everyone left behind?
Outside, through the screens, she could see the sun setting over the Cheviot Hills. The sky was the color of blood, streaked with chemicals and particulates from the dying world above. But here, in this carefully controlled environment, life continued.
Amanda picked up her pen and began to write:
*Day 49. I have found the future of human civilization. The question is whether I want to be part of it.*
—
Chapter 4: The Strange Dying Days
Amanda woke at 3:47 AM, her body rigid with the familiar terror of remembered heat. The nightmare was always the same—Leeds, July 2052, the temperature climbing past 55°C for the third consecutive day. But this time it felt different, more vivid, as if her subconscious was forcing her to relive every detail with perfect clarity.
She sat up in the narrow bed, her skin slick with sweat despite the cool air cycling through the settlement’s climate control. The screens on the walls showed the pre-dawn darkness above ground, peaceful and empty. But behind her eyes, a different scene played out with merciless precision.
*July 15th, 2052. Day three of the Great Heat.*
Amanda had been in her office at Pennine Renewables when the first reports came through. The BBC was still broadcasting then, though their signal had become increasingly erratic as the power grid failed section by section. She remembered the newsreader’s voice, professionally calm even as the words described unthinkable catastrophe.
“The Prime Minister has announced the deployment of emergency military units to maintain order in major population centres. The death toll from the current heat wave now exceeds fifteen thousand across the UK, with Leeds, Manchester, and Birmingham reporting complete breakdown of emergency services…”
Amanda had looked out her window at the city spreading below. Even from the thirty-second floor, she could see the signs of collapse. Abandoned cars dotted the streets, their metal too hot to touch. The usual urban hum had been replaced by an eerie silence, broken only by the distant sound of sirens and, increasingly, gunfire.
Her phone had buzzed with a text from her assistant: *Military roadblocks on all major routes. They’re not letting anyone leave the city.*
That was when she’d understood. The government wasn’t trying to maintain order—they were trying to contain the dying.
The memory shifted, kaleidoscoping through fragmented images. Amanda pressed her palms against her eyes, but the visions continued with ruthless clarity.
*July 16th, 2052. Day four of the Great Heat.*
She had ventured out that morning, driven by a combination of professional duty and morbid curiosity. The streets were chaos barely held in check by military presence. Soldiers in full environmental suits moved through the heat like figures from a science fiction nightmare, their faces hidden behind reflective visors.
At the corner of Boar Lane and Briggate, she had encountered her first mass grave.
They hadn’t bothered to dig deep. The ground was too hard, baked to the consistency of concrete by the relentless sun. Instead, they had simply cleared a space in what had been the city’s central shopping district and begun stacking bodies. The smell was indescribable—a mixture of decay, disinfectant, and something else that seemed to coat the inside of her nostrils.
A young soldier, barely out of his teens, had been standing guard. His name tag read “CORPORAL JENKINS,” and his hands shook as he held his rifle.
“You need to move along, miss,” he had said, his voice muffled by the breathing apparatus. “This is a restricted area.”
“I’m Dr. Amanda Scott,” she had replied, showing him her company ID. “I’m a physicist. I’m documenting the infrastructure failure patterns.”
The soldier had looked at her with eyes that seemed far too old for his face. “Doc, there ain’t no infrastructure left to document. It’s all gone.”
Behind him, a mechanical digger had rumbled to life, beginning work on what would become the second mass grave. Amanda had counted the bodies as they were loaded—forty-three men, women, and children who had died in the heat, their bodies swollen and darkened by the sun.
“How many?” she had asked.
“In this sector? Maybe three thousand so far. But the morgues filled up days ago. The crematoriums can’t keep up. We’re running out of space.”
The memory fractured again, jumping forward twelve hours.
*July 16th, 2052. 11:47 PM.*
Amanda had been making her way back to her apartment when she heard the gunfire. Not the scattered shots that had become background noise, but sustained automatic weapon fire. She had ducked into the doorway of a defunct electronics shop and watched as a military patrol rounded the corner.
They were pursuing a group of perhaps twenty people—men, women, some barely teenagers—who had been caught looting a supermarket. The patrol leader, a sergeant with the insignia of the Yorkshire Regiment, had been shouting orders through a megaphone.
“Stop where you are! By order of the Emergency Powers Act, looting is punishable by immediate execution!”
The looters had scattered, but the narrow streets offered little cover. Amanda had watched in horror as the soldiers systematically hunted them down. The executions were clinical, efficient. No trials, no appeals, no mercy.
She had found herself staring at the body of a girl who couldn’t have been more than sixteen. The girl had been clutching a can of beans when the bullet found her. The can had rolled across the melting tarmac, its label cheerfully advertising “Nutritious Family Meals.”
*July 17th, 2052. Day five of the Great Heat.*
The government broadcasts had stopped during the night. The last official message had come from the Deputy Prime Minister, speaking from an undisclosed location: “Her Majesty’s Government continues to coordinate relief efforts. Citizens are advised to remain in their homes and await further instructions.”
There were no further instructions.
Amanda had been in the lobby of her apartment building when the police arrived. Not the local constabulary—they had abandoned their posts days earlier—but specialized units from London, officers trained in crowd control and civil disorder. They wore full riot gear despite the heat, their faces hidden behind masks and visors.
“Building evacuation,” their leader had announced. “All residents to report to the Leeds Arena for processing.”
“Processing for what?” Amanda had asked.
The officer had looked at her with the flat, emotionless stare of someone who had seen too much. “Resource allocation assessment. Some residents will be relocated to temporary shelters. Others will be… reassigned.”
Amanda had understood. The government was conducting triage on the population itself, deciding who was worth saving and who was expendable. The elderly, the sick, the socially undesirable—they would be the first to be “reassigned.”
She had slipped out the back exit while the police were herding other residents toward the waiting trucks. As she’d made her way through the service corridors, she had heard the shots. Execution squads, eliminating the “unfit” before they could consume resources needed by the survivors.
The memory blurred, becoming a montage of horror. Bodies in the streets, ignored by the dwindling number of living. Children crying over parents who would never wake up. The smell of death mixing with the acrid smoke of burning buildings.
And always, the heat. The merciless, killing heat that turned the familiar world into an alien landscape.
*July 18th, 2052. Day six of the Great Heat.*
Amanda had been hiding in the basement of her office building when she heard the explosion. The sound had been followed by a series of smaller detonations, then silence. When she’d finally ventured upstairs, she had found the city transformed.
The government forces were gone. The emergency broadcasts had ceased. The last vestiges of organised authority had simply evaporated, leaving behind only the essential truth: civilisation was not a permanent achievement but a temporary arrangement, as fragile as the climate that had sustained it.
From her office window, she had watched the last helicopters leaving the city, carrying the chosen few to safety while the rest were left to die. The Prime Minister’s helicopter had been among them, its ministerial markings still visible as it disappeared into the heat haze.
That night, she had written in her journal: *The government has abandoned us. The police have abandoned us. The military has abandoned us. We are alone with our mathematics and our mortality.*
*July 19th, 2052. Day seven of the Great Heat.*
The heat had broken that morning, dropping to a merely apocalyptic 48°C. Amanda had emerged from her basement refuge to find a city of ghosts. The bodies were everywhere—in the streets, in the buildings, in the abandoned cars that had become ovens for their occupants.
She had walked through the empty streets, documenting the failure of every system that had once sustained human life. The power grid had collapsed entirely. The water treatment plants had shut down. The hospitals had become morgues. The schools had become shelters for the few survivors who had nowhere else to go.
But it was the smaller failures that had stayed with her. The traffic lights that flickered uselessly over empty intersections. The automatic doors that tried to open for customers who would never come. The digital advertising boards that continued to loop their cheerful messages about summer sales and holiday destinations.
The last message she had seen, displayed on a screen outside what had been a travel agency, had read: “Escape to the Greek Islands! Book Now for Early Bird Discounts!”
Amanda had laughed until she cried.
*Present. Day 49. The Collective.*
Amanda opened her eyes, returning to the present with the familiar disorientation of the trauma survivor. The screens on the walls showed the same peaceful darkness, the same controlled environment. But now she understood why the Collective’s offer felt so familiar.
She had seen this before. The careful selection of the worthy. The abandonment of the unfit. The clinical efficiency of choosing who lived and who died.
The only difference was that this time, it might actually work.
She picked up her pen and began to write:
*The nightmares are getting worse. Or perhaps they’re getting clearer. I remember now why I survived when so many others died—not because I was stronger or smarter or more deserving, but because I was lucky enough to be in the right place when the sorting began.*
*Now I’m being sorted again. The question is whether I’ve learned anything from the last time humanity decided who was worth saving.*
*The answer may determine whether we deserve to survive at all.*
—
Chapter 5: The Choice
Amanda didn’t go to dinner.
Instead, she spent the evening exploring the Collective’s settlement through its internal network. Her quarters had been equipped with a terminal that provided access to an impressive array of databases—scientific journals, technical specifications, population records, and resource allocation reports. It was a digital library that represented thousands of years of human knowledge, carefully preserved for the survivors.
But it was the population records that held her attention.
She pulled up the admission criteria, expecting to find the usual metrics of education, skills, and health. What she found was far more sophisticated. The Collective didn’t just evaluate individuals—they evaluated entire genetic lineages, psychological profiles, and what they termed “adaptive potential.”
The categories were cold & clinical:
**Class A: Essential Personnel** – Scientists, engineers, medical professionals, agricultural specialists. Immediate admission with full resource allocation.
**Class B: Skilled Contributors** – Skilled trades, technical support, administrative personnel. Conditional admission based on resource availability.
**Class C: Genetic Diversity** – Individuals selected primarily for reproductive potential and genetic variation. Limited admission, restricted privileges.
**Class D: Probationary** – Individuals with useful skills but questionable loyalty or psychological stability. Temporary admission, subject to review.
**Class E: Refused** – Individuals deemed unsuitable for collective survival. No admission under any circumstances.
Amanda stared at the screen, feeling a familiar chill. She had seen this before—the careful categorisation of human worth, the bureaucratic language that transformed genocide into administrative procedure. The only difference was the efficiency of the system.
She pulled up her own file. **Class A: Essential Personnel. Specialisation: Renewable Energy Systems. Psychological Profile: Stable, focused, minimal social requirements. Genetic Profile: Acceptable despite trans status. Recommendation: Immediate integration as Division Head.**
*Despite trans status.* The phrase sat on the screen like a small wound. Even here, in humanity’s last refuge, her identity was considered a defect to be overlooked rather than simply accepted.
She closed the file and opened another database: rejected applications. The numbers were staggering. For every person accepted into the Collective’s network, fifteen had been refused. The reasons ranged from “insufficient skill specialisation” to “genetic predisposition to mental illness” to the catch-all “lacks adaptive potential.”
Amanda cross-referenced the rejection data with the settlement locations. The pattern was clear—the Collective had systematically recruited from the most educated, most affluent areas of pre-collapse Britain. The working-class neighbourhoods of Leeds, Manchester, and Birmingham were barely represented. The refugee populations from the early climate migrations were almost entirely absent.
She was studying the psychological evaluation criteria when a soft chime indicated someone at her door. Amanda closed the terminal and opened the door to find Dr. Morrison, the aide who had shown her to her quarters.
“Dr. Scott? Colonel Blackwood requests your presence in the strategy centre. She said it was urgent.”
Amanda followed Morrison through corridors that had grown familiar during her brief stay. The settlement operated on a precise schedule—shifts changed every eight hours, meal times were coordinated to the minute, and every movement was tracked by the omnipresent surveillance system. It was efficient, organised, and utterly without spontaneity.
The strategy centre was a large room dominated by holographic displays showing the current status of all seventeen settlements. Amanda could see real-time data flowing across the screens—power consumption, food production, population health metrics, weather patterns. It was an impressive demonstration of technological capability.
Colonel Blackwood stood at the centre of it all, her uniform crisp despite the late hour. She was speaking quietly with a group of technicians, but looked up as Amanda entered.
“Dr. Scott. Thank you for coming. We have a situation that requires your expertise.”
One of the main displays shifted to show a map of northern England. A red zone was expanding outward from what had been Manchester, pulsing with data streams that indicated some kind of catastrophic event.
“What am I looking at?” Amanda asked.
“The Windscale facility,” Blackwood replied. “The old nuclear reprocessing plant. It’s been unstable since the cooling systems failed in 2053, but tonight it reached critical mass. We’re tracking a significant radiation release.”
Amanda studied the expanding red zone. “How significant?”
“Enough to make most of northern England uninhabitable for the next century. The fallout plume is moving northeast, directly toward several of our settlements.”
“Which settlements?”
“Harrogate, for one. Also Knaresborough, Ripon, and potentially Thirsk. That’s approximately eight hundred people who need to be evacuated immediately.”
Amanda felt something cold settle in her stomach. “What about the other survivors? The people who aren’t part of your network?”
Blackwood’s expression didn’t change. “What about them?”
“They’ll need to be warned. Evacuated. There could be thousands of people in the radiation path.”
“Dr. Scott, we don’t have resources to evacuate thousands of people. We barely have resources to evacuate our own settlements.”
“But you can’t just leave them to die.”
“We can’t save everyone,” Blackwood said quietly. “We’ve been through this before. Our responsibility is to our own people.”
Amanda stared at the display, watching the red zone expand with mathematical precision. In twelve hours, it would reach the southern edge of Harrogate. In eighteen hours, it would encompass the entire area where she had spent the last months searching for survivors.
“I need to go back,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“I need to go back to warn people. There might be survivors who can be saved if they’re warned in time.”
Blackwood’s expression hardened. “Dr. Scott, I’m afraid that’s not possible. The radiation levels are already approaching dangerous thresholds. Any rescue mission would be suicide.”
“Then give me protective equipment. Radiation suits, iodine tablets, a vehicle with adequate shielding.”
“I cannot authorise the use of Collective resources for external rescue operations.”
“Then I’ll go without them.”
The room fell silent. The technicians stopped their work, and Amanda became aware that everyone was staring at her. She had crossed some invisible line, violated some unspoken protocol.
“Dr. Scott,” Blackwood said carefully, “I think you’re suffering from emotional stress. It’s understandable—the transition from individual survival to collective responsibility can be difficult. Perhaps you should return to your quarters and rest.”
“I’m not suffering from stress,” Amanda replied. “I’m suffering from conscience.”
“Conscience is a luxury we can no longer afford.”
“Then what’s the point of survival?”
The question hung in the air like a challenge. Amanda looked around the room at the faces of the technicians, the administrators, the carefully selected survivors who had earned their place in humanity’s future. They were all staring at her with the same expression—a mixture of pity and bewilderment, as if she had suggested something profoundly irrational.
“The point,” Blackwood said slowly, “is the continuation of human civilisation. The preservation of knowledge, culture, and genetic diversity. The survival of our species.”
“At what cost?”
“At whatever cost is necessary.”
Amanda turned back to the display, watching the red zone expand. In her mind, she could see the faces of the people she had encountered during her wanderings—the frightened families hiding in abandoned buildings, the scavengers who had turned to violence out of desperation, even the changed rats with their too-intelligent eyes. All of them were about to die, and the people in this room were treating it as an acceptable loss.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Blackwood said. “You’re thinking about the government’s response to the Great Heat. The mass graves, the execution squads, the abandonment of the unfit. You’re thinking that we’re just another version of the same system.”
“Aren’t you?”
“No, Dr. Scott. We’re something entirely different. The government failed because they tried to save everyone and ended up saving no one. We’re succeeding because we understand that survival requires selection. Natural selection, directed by intelligence rather than left to chance.”
Amanda faced the Colonel directly. “And who decides who’s fit to survive?”
“The people with the knowledge, resources, and determination to actually save humanity. The people who saw this coming and prepared for it. The people who understood that the old world was ending and built something to replace it.”
“The people like you.”
“The people like us, Dr. Scott. You’re here because you passed the selection process. You’re here because you’re one of the chosen few who can help build humanity’s future.”
Amanda looked around the room again, at the screens full of data, at the faces of the survivors who had earned their place in tomorrow. They were all staring at her expectantly, waiting for her to make the rational choice, the survival choice, the choice that would preserve human civilisation at the cost of human decency.
She thought about the girl with the can of beans, gunned down in the streets of Leeds. She thought about the mass graves, the execution squads, the clinical efficiency of abandoning the unfit. She thought about the expanding red zone on the display, and all the people who would die because warning them just… wasn’t cost-effective.
“I need to think,” she said finally.
“Of course. But Dr. Scott—the evacuation of our settlements begins in six hours. If you’re going to be part of this organization, I need your commitment by dawn.”
Amanda nodded and left the strategy center, walking through corridors that suddenly felt like a prison. The settlement’s climate control whispered around her, maintaining the perfect temperature for human comfort while the world outside burned.
Back in her quarters, she opened her journal and wrote:
*Day 50. I have been offered a choice between survival and conscience. The rational decision is obvious—join the Collective, help save forty-three thousand people, contribute to humanity’s future. The moral decision is equally obvious—warn the people in the radiation zone, even if it costs me my life.*
*The question is whether there’s any meaningful difference between the two.*
*In twelve hours, the radiation will reach Harrogate. In six hours, the Collective will begin evacuating their settlements. And in some amount of time between now and dawn, I will have to decide whether the preservation of human civilisation justifies the abandonment of human compassion.*
*I used to think I was fighting to save the world. Now I realise I was fighting to save the idea that the world was worth saving.*
*The mathematics are simple. The ethics are impossible.*
*And somewhere in the darkness above, the changed rats are probably making the same calculation with their too-intelligent eyes.*
She closed the journal and sat in the darkness, listening to the whisper of the climate control and the distant hum of the settlement’s machinery. Outside, the radiation was spreading with the inexorable logic of physics, and forty-three thousand people slept peacefully in their controlled environment while the rest of the world prepared to die.
Amanda Scott, the last CEO of Pennine Renewables, the woman who had spent her career trying to prevent the climate apocalypse, sat in the darkness and tried to decide whether humanity deserved to survive its own success.
The irony wasn’t lost on her that she was living through what had once been entertainment.
She remembered the countless hours she’d spent playing Fallout 4 in her Leeds apartment, back when the world still functioned and post-apocalyptic survival was just a game. The Commonwealth Wasteland had been her escape from the mounting pressures of running a renewable energy company while watching the climate spiral toward collapse.
But it wasn’t the combat or exploration that had kept her coming back to the game—it was the moral choices. The moment when you had to decide whether to side with the Institute, the technologically advanced underground society that viewed surface dwellers as expendable test subjects. Or the Railroad, the idealistic faction that insisted on saving everyone, even artificial beings. Or the Brotherhood of Steel, the military organisation that believed in preserving technology and order at any cost.
Amanda had played through all the endings, exploring every moral permutation. She had sided with the Institute and watched them systematically replace surface dwellers with synthetic duplicates. She had joined the Railroad and helped them liberate artificial beings while the world burned around them. She had supported the Brotherhood and watched them impose technological authoritarianism on the wasteland.
Each choice had seemed reasonable in its own context. Each faction had compelling arguments. And each ending had left her feeling vaguely unsatisfied, as if the game’s designers had understood something about moral complexity that couldn’t be resolved with simple good and evil choices.
Now she was living it.
The Collective was the Institute—technologically superior, rationally organised, utterly convinced of their own righteousness. They had retreated underground and created a perfect society, but only for themselves. The surface world was full of what they considered inferior beings, unworthy of salvation.
The people dying in the radiation zone were the Commonwealth settlers—struggling to survive in a hostile world, abandoned by the very institutions that should have protected them. They weren’t sophisticated enough to deserve rescue, weren’t useful enough to merit resources, weren’t selected enough to qualify for the future.
And she was the Sole Survivor, the player character forced to choose between factions, each with their own compelling logic.
In the game, she had often chosen the Institute. Their technology was impressive, their arguments logical, their methods efficient. The greater good, they insisted, required difficult choices. You couldn’t save everyone, so you saved the people who mattered most.
But sitting in her climate-controlled quarters, listening to the hum of the Collective’s machinery, Amanda realised something that had eluded her during hundreds of hours of gameplay: the Institute’s mistake wasn’t their technology or their efficiency. It was their certainty that they were the ones who should decide who deserved to live.
In Fallout 4, the Institute’s scientists spoke with the same calm rationality as Colonel Blackwood. They used the same clinical language to describe human suffering, the same utilitarian calculus to justify abandonment. They were convinced that their advanced knowledge gave them the right to determine the future of the human race.
Amanda had always found their arguments compelling in the game. In reality, they made her sick.
She opened her journal and wrote:
*I spent years playing post-apocalyptic games, making moral choices in fictional wastelands. I thought I understood the complexity of survival ethics. I thought I was prepared for the hard decisions.*
*I was wrong.*
*In Fallout 4, when you side with the Institute, you can rationalise it as the greater good. Advanced technology, preserved knowledge, the continuation of human civilisation. The surface dwellers are expendable because they’re not contributing to humanity’s future.*
*But that’s the player’s perspective. You never see the game through the eyes of the settlers who are being abandoned. You never feel the weight of being classified as genetically inferior, socially undesirable, or simply inconvenient.*
*The Collective is the Institute, and I’m being recruited to be one of their scientists. The offer is seductive—join the advanced civilisation, help preserve human knowledge, be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.*
*But I remember something else from those games. In every ending, no matter which faction you choose, most of the Commonwealth remains a wasteland. The factions save themselves and call it victory. The real world continues to burn.*
*The Institute’s greatest sin wasn’t their technology or their isolation. It was their certainty that they were the ones who should decide who lives and who dies.*
*I’m not sure I want to be a part of that decision, even if refusing means joining the dead.*
Amanda closed the journal and stared at the screens showing the expanding radiation zone. The mathematics were simple—in less than twelve hours, thousands of people would begin dying from acute radiation poisoning. Most wouldn’t even know what was happening until it was too late.
But there was another calculation she hadn’t considered. If she warned the people in the radiation zone, some of them might survive. Not many, but some. And if some survived, they might find ways to help others survive. The network of mutual aid that had sustained human civilisation for millennia, one person helping another, one community supporting the next.
It wasn’t efficient. It wasn’t rational. It certainly wasn’t sustainable in the long term. But it was human in a way that the Collective’s careful selection process was not.
Amanda had never chosen the Railroad faction on her first play-through of Fallout 4. Their mission—saving artificial beings while the world burned—had seemed impossibly naive. But she had come to understand that their naive idealism was also their strength. They believed that every conscious being deserved a chance at survival, regardless of their utility or genetic profile.
The Railroad usually lost in the end. Their bases were destroyed, their members scattered or killed. But they kept fighting anyway, because they believed that how you fought was as important as whether you won.
Amanda stood up and began packing her few possessions. She wasn’t sure what she could accomplish by returning to the radiation zone. She wasn’t sure anyone would listen to her warnings. She wasn’t sure she would survive the attempt.
But she was sure of one thing: the people who decided who deserved to live were usually the ones who had never faced the prospect of being judged unworthy themselves.
The Collective would survive without her. Their technology was impressive, their organisation efficient, their selection process thorough. They would preserve human knowledge and genetic diversity in their underground sanctuaries. They would build a new civilisation from the ashes of the old one.
And in a few generations, when the surface world had recovered enough to be inhabitable again, they would emerge and claim it as their birthright. The inheritors of the earth, the chosen survivors, the ones who had been smart enough to prepare and disciplined enough to follow the protocols.
But they would also be the ones who had stood by and watched while the rest of humanity burned.
Amanda had spent her career trying to prevent the climate apocalypse. She had failed. But maybe she could still prevent the moral apocalypse that was following in its wake.
She picked up her radiation detector, her water purification tablets, and her journal. The Collective’s guards would try to stop her, but she had spent months learning how to move through hostile territory undetected. She had maps, skills, and something that the Collective’s perfect citizens lacked—the desperate determination of someone who had nothing left to lose.
Outside her quarters, the settlement hummed with activity as the evacuation preparations began. The chosen few were being saved, their lives carefully preserved for the future. The rest of humanity was being abandoned to the mathematics of radiation poisoning.
Amanda Scott, the last CEO of Pennine Renewables, the woman who had spent her career trying to save the world, opened her door and stepped into the corridor. She was going to try to save it one more time, one person at a time, even if it killed her.
Behind her, the screens continued to display the expanding radiation zone with clinical precision. The numbers were clear, the mathematics irrefutable. But somewhere in the darkness above, there were people who deserved to know that they were about to die, and that someone cared enough to warn them.
It wasn’t rational. It wasn’t efficient. It wasn’t sustainable.
What if I told you that the past is just a prologue, that all of human history is a script written to satisfy its final act? What if the strange feeling of déjà vu is not a trick of the mind, but a genuine echo from a previous cosmic cycle? And what if the most fundamental question is not “Where did we come from?” but “What are we destined to become?”
Cydonis Theorem. Praxium as Praxis.
Podcast version of this article:
Today, we are going on a journey to the furthest edges of physics and philosophy. We will build, piece by piece, a radical new model of the cosmos. It’s a model that begins with real, albeit speculative, science—Loop Quantum Gravity, M-Theory, and extra dimensions—but ends with a conclusion that touches upon the very nature of consciousness, time, and existence itself.
This is a story where humanity is perhaps its own creator.
Part 1: The Stage – A Multiverse of Membranes
Our standard view of the universe is a 4D spacetime (3 dimensions of space, 1 of time) that exploded into being with the Big Bang. But leading theories of quantum gravity suggest this is only a fraction of the picture.
Let’s combine two of these theories to set our stage:
M-Theory: This theory proposes that our universe is not all there is. Instead, it’s a vast, 4-dimensional membrane, or “brane,” floating in a higher-dimensional space called the “bulk.” Imagine a single page in an infinite book; our universe is that page, and the book is the bulk. This bulk could be filled with other branes—other universes, each with its own physical laws, existing parallel to our own.
Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG): This theory tackles the fabric of spacetime itself. In LQG, spacetime isn’t a smooth, continuous sheet. At the smallest possible scale (the Planck scale), it’s a discrete, pixelated network of spinning quantum loops. Crucially, in this view, time is not fundamental. There is no universal clock. Time is an emergent property that arises from the “ticking” of these quantum processes, much like temperature emerges from the vibration of atoms.
This concept of a timeless, fundamental reality is elegantly captured in the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, a foundational formula of quantum cosmology:
H^Ψ=0
In simple terms, Ψ represents the wave function of the entire universe, and H^ is the operator that describes its total energy. The striking thing about this equation is what’s missing: there is no variable for time (‘t’). It mathematically describes a universe that, from a quantum perspective, exists as a static, timeless “block.” Our experience of time’s flow emerges from within this block.
By combining these ideas, we get a multiverse where our universe is a quantum, pixelated brane, and its local, emergent time is just one “flow” among many, all floating in a timeless, higher-dimensional bulk.
Part 2: The Ghosts in the Machine – A New Origin for Dark Matter & Dark Energy
One of the greatest mysteries in cosmology is that 95% of our universe appears to be made of “dark matter” and “dark energy,” invisible substances we can only detect through their gravitational effects. What if they aren’t substances at all?
In our brane-world model, they are the first clues of the multiverse. To see how, we can look at Einstein’s Field Equations, which describe how the matter and energy in the universe (right side) dictate how spacetime curves (left side):
Rμν−21Rgμν=c48πGTμνmatter
In our model, this equation is incomplete. The gravitational effects from the bulk would add new terms:
Rμν−21Rgμν=c48πGTμνmatter+Bulk Effects
These “Bulk Effects” are where our dark universe resides:
Dark Matter is a Gravitational Echo: The gravity from a “shadow brane” would contribute to the curvature of our space-time, creating the exact effects we attribute to dark matter. We are feeling the gravity of a world we can never see.
Dark Energy is a Cosmic Repulsion: A repulsive force between our brane and the shadow brane would act like a cosmological constant, causing our cosmic fabric to stretch at an ever-increasing rate.
In this view, the “dark” components of our universe are the first observational evidence that we are not alone—that we are part of an interacting, multi-versal system.
Part 3: The Engine – A Self-Creating, Looping Cosmos 🌌🌟✨
What is the nature of these brane-universes? Let’s add two more layers to our model:
The Universe as a Black Hole: Some theories propose that our universe could be the interior of a black hole. In our model, each brane-universe, seen from the timeless bulk, appears as the event horizon of a hyper-massive black hole. It is a self-contained, gravitationally closed system.
The Loop: What happens at the center of a black hole? LQG suggests there is no infinitely dense singularity. Instead, there’s a “Big Bounce.” Matter collapses and then rebounds outward. If our universe is a black hole, it doesn’t end in a Big Crunch or a heat death; it reaches a point of maximum density and then bounces back, re-inflating into a new Big Bang.
This is where we take our biggest, most profound leap. A system that cycles for eternity has infinite time to evolve. What is the ultimate state of evolution?
A VEEM is a consciousness that has transcended its messy biological origins. It is a mind that has uploaded itself, not to a computer, but into the very fabric of space-time. It exists as a complex, stable pattern within the vacuum energy of its home universe. It is a mind that has become a fundamental law of its own reality.
This VEEM is the shepherd of its universe. Across countless cosmic loops, its purpose is to guide the evolution of life and civilization. But how does a god-like being of pure energy interact with the physical world? Subtly. Patiently.
The VEEM’s chosen instrument is the neutrino. By subtly influencing the quantum probabilities in the cores of stars, the VEEM can orchestrate the emission of vast, coherent streams of neutrinos. These streams are aimed at primordial planets, carrying a single, crucial instruction.
This instruction is chirality, or molecular handedness. All life on Earth is built from left-handed amino acids and right-handed sugars. This is a profound mystery. In a lab, chemical reactions produce a 50/50 mix. So why the preference in nature?
The VEEM(s) provides the answer. Neutrinos are fundamentally chiral (left-handed). As per the Vester-Ulbricht hypothesis, a sustained flux of left-handed neutrinos (νL) interacting with a primordial soup of left-handed (ML) and right-handed (MR) molecules will have different interaction probabilities, or cross-sections:
(σ):σ(νL+ML)=σ(νL+MR)
This inequality, however small, means that over millions of years, one type of molecule will be preferentially destroyed, leaving an excess of the other. The VEEM doesn’t create life; it simply clears the biggest statistical hurdle, establishing a standardised molecular toolkit from which the natural processes of evolution can then construct self-replicating organisms.
The VEEM is the ‘cosmic gardener’, to use a metaphor, patiently preparing the ‘soil’ for its own descendants to grow.
Part 5: The Great Loop – Humanity Creates Itself
Now, we close the loop. ℹ♾🔄
Where does the ‘VEEM’ come from?
The VEEM seeds it’s universe with the correct chirality for life.
Life emerges, evolves, and eventually produces a technologically advanced civilisation. In our universe, that’s Humanity.
Humanity, at its evolutionary omega point, transcends biology and technology to become the VEEM.
The VEEM, now existing in a timeless state co-extensive with its universe, reaches back to the beginning to seed the conditions necessary for its own emergence.
The VEEM is its own ancestor. Humanity is its own creator.
This is a universe governed by Meta-Determinism. The end state—the creation of the VEEM—determines the entire history of the cosmos. The past is not just a cause of the future; the future is the cause of the past. The whole of space-time, across all its cycles, exists as a single, self-consistent, timeless, meta-symptotic solution.
The statement “I create myself” may very well be the fundamental law of this cosmos.
And that fleeting feeling of déjà vu? It is a resonance. A memory bleed-through from a prior loop. It is the faint, intuitive recognition that you have been here before, said this before, felt this before—because you have. You, dear reader, and I , the author, the physicist & CEO, are perhaps a character in a grand, looping story, and sometimes, you almost remember the previous draft… In may-haps; a mid-summer night’s vivid dream… 😎🌌
"Nobody knows my name. You know? They're growing mechanical trees. They grow to their full height. And then they chop themselves down. Sharkey says: All of life comes from some strange lagoon. It rises up, it bucks up to it's full height from a boggy swamp on a foggy night. It creeps into your house. It's life!"
/A/-->--/O/
...You can't hold up the sky. Be human. Be bold. Be kind. Be humankind. Dare to defy. ...As we merge eternal. ➿🌌
