One hundred and twelve years ago the sky fell. Not as a figure of speech — actual rock, city-block sized, dropping out of wherever rock like that comes from, and when it hit, a fair portion of everything that had ever existed simply wasn't there anymore.
We call it Day Zero. Never liked the name much. It sounds like something you'd find on a spreadsheet, not the day that ended the world as anyone understood it.
The radiation alone should have finished the job — somewhere between fifty and three hundred old-world nuclear weapons, depending on the meteorite and who's telling you the story. Past a certain point a number like that stops being useful information. Your head just files it under catastrophic and gets on with things, because there isn't a better option available.
The aftermath turned out to be worse than the impact, which I didn't think was possible until I read enough about it.
The meteorites brought materials with them. Buried in the craters, fused right into the bedrock in places, with properties nobody on the planet had ever needed a word for before. Scientists settled on naming them after the only thing they had in common, which was the day they showed up.
Zero Elements. Nobody's idea of a creative name, but it stuck.
The radiation that came with those elements didn't stay in the dirt. It worked through the water, the soil, every link of the food chain, and somewhere in all of that the basic rules of being alive on this planet changed. Animals stopped resembling themselves within a year. Plants stopped being something you could ignore. Whatever was moving through every living thing by that point eventually got its own name as well — Aion — though it took considerably longer to find its way into people.
Maybe that's mercy. Or maybe biology is just slow about these things the way it's slow about everything. By the time it reached us, most of what remained of humanity had already spent years figuring out how to survive without any help from it at all.
Those were the dark days. People scattered too far apart to find each other, hunted by things that used to be harmless, living under a sky thick enough with debris that sunlight became something you described to children rather than something they'd seen. Dark in both senses, somebody decided, and the rest of us never bothered arguing the point.
I understand the impulse, honestly. When you've lost nearly everything you hold onto whatever precision is still available to you.
It should have been the end. It would have been, if not for one person nobody actually remembers the name of — history loses details it doesn't expect to need twice. What's left is closer to a shape than a story: someone, in the worst of those years, found that the thing now living inside them could be shaped into something that fought back. Fire, in their case. They used it against the things that had taken the planet over, and they did it alone for longer than seems reasonable.
A year, probably, before it killed them. Could have been less.
They were never going to win that fight by themselves — nobody could have — but they proved the fight was winnable at all, and that turned out to be enough. Once people saw it done once, more of them started waking up the same way, and then it wasn't slow anymore. Humanity stopped being something the planet hunted for sport.
Someone decided to name the ability after the man who'd started it, with more enthusiasm than imagination behind the decision.
Spark.
A hundred and twelve years on and nobody's ever bothered revisiting that name, which tells you something true about how institutions behave even when they're rebuilding from absolutely nothing.
The newly awakened clawed out a foothold, then a perimeter, then territory enough — at a cost nobody alive can describe properly, including the people who paid it — for the rest of humanity to exist without dying every day of the week. What's left of western Europe and the Scandinavian countries, a wide stretch of North Africa, a piece of the Middle East. All of it stitched into the only ground on the planet anyone can call safe without lying.
Whoever survived long enough to start governing that ground named it the New Federation, and I used to think that was the laziest decision anyone made during the entire rebuild. These days I think it might be the most honest one. There wasn't much energy left over for cleverness.
There was apparently plenty of energy left over for putting everything back exactly how it used to be.
Democracy came back. So did capitalism, and so did the quiet arrangement underneath both of them where whoever already had the most spends most of their effort making sure that never changes. I'd love to tell you that nearly losing the species taught us something about ourselves. It didn't. If anything it handed the people at the top a better excuse, because materials nobody had ever seen turned out to be worth an obscene amount of money once someone worked out what they could do, and the people who got there first never really loosened their grip.
Most of what rebuilt the world a second time came out of studying those elements. Cleaner energy. Medicine that wouldn't have been possible a generation earlier. Weapons that would have read as fiction to anyone born before Day Zero.
The man behind most of that is about as famous as a person can get.
I'm going to leave him out of this for now.
Spark users sit at roughly eleven percent of the population, and the New Federation runs on what they're willing to do with that — pushing into the wild zones, holding territory nobody else could hold, pulling Zero Elements out of ground that would kill anyone without a spark inside a week. Take them away and the Federation doesn't last a decade. That makes them valuable. In my experience valuable things don't tend to stay free for very long, no matter what century you're in.
Every spark gets registered the moment it shows up. Ranked. Trained, either through the government's standard intake or through one of the private academies that pick and choose who's worth the investment. Officially the ranking runs from F to S.
That's the official version, anyway.
The most prestigious of these academies don't accept any spark beneath certain ranks. At least not without serious money or influence behind it, though you won't find that detail anywhere in the recruitment material.
To most people, spark users at any level read as something close to divine.
Which is perhaps why the president is almost always an ordinary person — no spark at all — the public seems to find real comfort in that. Proof someone like them still has a hand on the wheel somewhere. It's a nice thought. I've never once seen evidence it's true.
Anyone who looks closely enough already knows what's actually in charge.
Power. The same thing it's always been, dressed differently this time around.
None of this is me being bitter for the sake of it. It matters to what's coming, because this is a story about somebody who looked at everything that got rebuilt after Day Zero and decided none of it was good enough to leave standing. Somebody who believed it had to change, one way or another, and was prepared to be the reason it did.
I knew people on both sides of what happened because of that decision.
I still haven't worked out, completely, which side I was on.
You'll get there eventually. Or you'll think you have — most people do, and most of them are wrong, and I gave up correcting them a long time ago.
Anyway it all started at a school.