One hundred and twelve years ago, the sky fell.
Not metaphorically. Not as a figure of speech. Rocks the size of city blocks came down from wherever rocks that size come from, and they hit, and a significant portion of everything that had ever existed stopped existing.
We call it Day Zero, which I've always thought was generous. Most days deserve a name. That one deserved a verdict.
Here's what they teach you: the meteorites carried radiation equivalent to somewhere between fifty and three hundred of the old nuclear weapons, depending on which one hit and who you ask. Here's what they don't teach you: that number is so large it stops meaning anything. Your brain hears three hundred nuclear weapons and just — gives up. Files it somewhere between very bad and inconceivable and moves on.
Which is fine. That's probably healthy.
What followed was less healthy.
The meteorites didn't just destroy. They left things behind. Embedded in the craters, fused into the earth, present in concentrations that didn't match anything in any periodic table humanity had managed to put together before Day Zero — new elements. Materials that shouldn't exist, except they did, and scientists being scientists, named them after the event that delivered them.
Zero Elements.
Original, I know.
What those elements did to the planet is still being studied, catalogued, argued over in institutions that pay people very well to argue. What they did to living things was less academic. The radiation that came with them saturated everything — soil, water, air, the food chain from the bottom up — and somewhere in that saturation, something changed.
Something woke up.
In living things first. Then, eventually, in people.
We call it Aion. The energy that the Zero Elements introduced to every living thing on the planet, settling into the biology of anything that breathed and grew and moved. In animals it accelerated evolution in directions that were, without exception, inconvenient for humanity. In plants it produced results that were creative and also deeply hostile.
In people it produced sparks.
Eventually.
It took a while. Humanity doesn't get to be the exception immediately — that would be too easy. First came the dark days.
The planet, apparently having had enough of its primary tenants, decided to eradicate us. Animals evolved. Plants evolved. Things that had spent millions of years being reliably harmless grew teeth, or worse, and the food chain reorganized overnight with humanity somewhere near the bottom. The sun disappeared behind debris clouds. Survivors — scattered, starving, being hunted by creatures that used to be dogs — started calling it the dark days.
Both literally and figuratively, as people who lived through it apparently felt the need to clarify.
Extinction looked like a reasonable outcome. Then the first spark user appeared.
Nobody knows the name. History swallowed it, the way history swallows the unimportant . What we know is that someone, somewhere in those dark days, woke up and found something where nothing was supposed to be — their aion had awakened, answering to them, shaped by them — and they used it. Against the beasts. Alone.
For however long alone lasted.
I'll be generous and say a year. Those things were not easy to kill even with powers. Without them they were essentially immortal to anything human shaped.
They died. Obviously.
But they'd already done the important part. Others began to awaken. Slowly at first, then in numbers, and then in numbers large enough that humanity stopped being prey and started being a problem. The first one became a symbol, and someone with more optimism than taste named the ability after them.
The spark.
A hundred and twelve years later and we're still calling it that. Some ideas survive purely through institutional momentum.
The newly awakened organized. They fought. They carved out a perimeter and held it and expanded it, slowly and at enormous cost, until there was enough safe ground for everyone who remained to breathe without something trying to kill them. That territory is now most of western Europe, the Scandinavian lands, a generous stretch of North Africa and the Middle East.
We needed a desert for some reason.
The survivors built a government around what remained. A president, a parliament, the full architecture of civilization reassembled from memory and necessity. They called it the New Federation, which tells you everything about the mood at the time. We almost ceased to exist entirely and the best name anyone could agree on was new.
I respect the honesty.
Once there was safety, naturally, we rebuilt everything back exactly the way it was before. Democracy. Capitalism. The particular arrangement where the people with the most resources dedicate most of their energy to staying that way.
You'd think near extinction might have adjusted something fundamental.
It didn't. If anything the Zero Elements made it worse — turns out previously unknown materials with extraordinary properties are worth an incomprehensible amount of money, and the people who got there first made sure to stay there. The technology that came out of studying those elements reshaped the world a second time. Cleaner energy, better infrastructure, weapons that would have seemed like science fiction to anyone from before Day Zero.
The person most responsible for that last part is very famous.
I'll leave it there.
Spark users are roughly eleven percent of the population. They explore the wild zones, secure new territory, extract the Zero Elements that keep the New Federation's economy running. Without them the safe zone stops being safe. This makes them valuable. Valuable things get hoarded.
From awakening, spark users are registered, ranked, and trained — either by the government, which handles standard intake, or by private institutions that don't accept anything below their standard. Rankings run from F to S. Or so most people think.
The greatest of these institutions is Helios Vanguard Academy. They don't accept sparks ranked below B. They also hardly accept poor people, but that part isn't in the brochure.
Spark users at that level are essentially deities to the general population. Though the president is almost always a normie, which everyone finds reassuring. The illusion of civilian oversight. The comfort of a face that looks like yours making decisions that were actually made somewhere else entirely.
Anyone paying attention knows what's really running things.
Power. Just power. Same as always, different clothes.
I'm not telling you this to be cynical.
I'm telling you this because it matters. Because the story I'm about to tell you is about what happens when someone decides the way things are isn't good enough. Someone who looked at everything humanity rebuilt and decided it was going to change or burn.
I knew people on both sides of that decision.
I still think about which side I was on.
You'll figure it out eventually. Or you'll think you have.
Either way.
It started at a school.