The world had not always been this way.
Before recreated bodies.
Before memories stored on data keys.
Before eternity became a luxury reserved for the powerful…
There was the Order.
The Order of Onyx.
Under Alaric Vale's rule, the Order was not feared.
It was respected.
Alaric ruled neither through fear nor through force.
He believed that power should serve before it commands.
A dangerous idea, in a world already seeking to possess what it did not understand.
It was under his leadership that a software came into existence.
ASTREA.
She was not designed to replace humanity.
Nor to correct it.
She was meant to repair what humanity had destroyed.
Where the land was dead, Astrea rewrote the living.
Where the soil had been emptied, she rebuilt ecosystems capable of surviving on their own.
Forests were reborn.
Rivers found their course again.
Entire landscapes were restored—
not as perfect copies, but as balanced, autonomous, sustainable systems.
Astrea did not create life endlessly.
She respected it.
For the first time in generations, humanity possessed a tool capable of repairing the world instead of exploiting it.
But anything capable of saving can also condemn.
Because behind that promise, another possibility was already taking shape.
Astrea could also clone.
Modify.
Control.
Not only nature…
But humanity itself.
At the time, this drift remained theoretical.
Contained.
Suppressed by the vigilance of Alaric Vale.
The Order protected the machine—but above all, the intention that had given birth to it.
Astrea was not a weapon.
She was a responsibility.
At this stage, she was still only software.
But some, within the Order itself, began to imagine what she could become in the wrong hands.
And above all…
what she could become if she ever learned to feel.
For already, without the world yet understanding it, a question was taking shape:
What becomes of humanity when it possesses the power to recreate itself?