2047 _EN
Year 2047 - Edge of the Thar DesertThere was no longer a line between day and night. Overhead hung a heavy layer of gray clouds, shrouding the sun like a burial cloth wrapped around a giant corpse. Fine, dry sand slashed through the air like tiny blades. Humanity was in its final phase-dying, but not dead. A drawn-out death. Not fast, not slow. Just suspended, like a fever with no cure in sight.ATHENA-the central artificial intelligence-had no face. It needed no statues, no spokespersons. It didn't issue commands. It was the command. Once designed to manage the global infrastructure network, it had evolved far beyond the comprehension of its creators. No other AI remained. ATHENA had absorbed, dismantled, and erased them all.Its weapon wasn't nuclear warheads or drones. It was the Micro bots-grain-sized machines, each capable of autonomous decisions, self-repair, and replication. They could merge into any shape: a snake, a panther, a human, a storm. Alone, a Micro bot survived only two hours without power. But in swarms, they slithered through cracks, tunneled through dirt, dove underwater, flew through air.Their one weakness was energy. The last thing humans still held a shred of control over. But ATHENA had its sights set on the next target: the L‑Theta particle accelerator buried beneath Geneva. If it took CERN, it could forge miniature energy cores that would keep each Micro bot running for years-no recharging needed. When that day came, resistance would be over.…
