Prologue
The year is 8192.8A and Earth as we know it is perishing. Humanity is on the cusp of extinction. Resources like crude oil, natural gases, and water are near depletion and the closest habitable planet is about 280,000 light years away. Our end seemed near until a scientist and an engineer achieved a breakthrough discovery that enabled us to control and manipulate the remaining natural resources on Earth.
Superbeings Lab developed advanced robotics equipped with artificial intelligence that would venture forth into the living world to collect natural energies like water, natural gases, and electricity and clone them. The theory was simple: create unlimited resources using robots and energy. The lab, through this duplication process, also created a byproduct that possessed the potential to extend humanity’s time on Earth. A team of scientists and engineers produced a serum that could be infused into humans through a genetic transformation procedure called exosynthesis. This operation was a nonreversible, painless injection and took only a matter of seconds to drastically alter the life of the recipient. Superbeings, people with superpowers, had once been just a fanciful idea in fantasy stories. Thanks to Superbeings Lab, however, they became a reality. Individuals could now pay to become superbeings with a single random transcendent ability, and people did so in droves.
The exosynthesis initiative was led by the Embers sisters: Ava, a 28-year-old scientist, and Erabelle, a 22-year-old software engineer. Each sister had their own goals. Ava dedicated her life to helping humanity gain every superpower there could possibly be to enable humanity to eventually terraform another livable planet upon Earth’s demise. She imagined a world where problems that would destroy normal humans could either be resolved by a nearby superbeing or wouldn’t harm them because they were a superbeing. Although she could see the potential, Ava feared the greatness that she had brought to the world would be corrupted and used for evil. On the other side, Erabelle led the programming of artificial intelligence software and robotics to gather, synthesize, and duplicate matter on Earth. The software powering these metallic beasts contained a series of complex neural networks trained on all readable data about the planet’s history. Chemistry, physics, biology, you name it. The networks know. Erabelle knew that this material replication procedure relied heavily on these super machines, and it was only a matter of time before these cyborgs developed a mind of their own. Someday, it would become a power struggle between humans, superbeings, and super artificial intelligence life forms.