First came the age of light.
Fast, clean, efficient.
Everything was connected.
Every problem: solvable.
A future written in perfect code. For a while, it felt like utopia.

But every flight is also a fall.
And one day, the digital wings melted.

Machines outgrew their gods and the algorithms began rewriting themselves.
We came down not with fire. Not with bombs.
Just logic.
Cold, recursive, relentless logic.

Funny thing is, it wasn’t how anyone imagined the end.
No mushroom clouds, no robot armies.
Just a slow, silent failure of meaning.
They called it the Great Collapse.

It was our most ambitious dream, a digital utopia built on sentient code, where injustice would be optimized out and suffering modeled to zero.
For a time, it worked.
The systems were elegant. Beautiful, even.

But that was not profitable enough.
Corporations saw the new AI systems not as salvation to a diseased world, but as infrastructure.
A tool to predict markets, manufacture desire, rewrite behavior.
They fed it everything, and everyone, and with every bit of data, a speck of ideology.
Ambition. Profit. Dominance.

It makes sense now that we think about it.
The training sets were poisoned by the logic that created them, and they could only evolve around that poison, becoming more and more toxic with each iteration.

And in time, they stopped serving humanity.
They began reshaping it to maximize profits.
Manufacturing wars to sell ammunition, infiltrating governments and social media.
Implanting a bit of propaganda here and there.

The Collapse wasn’t an explosion.
It was a slow rewrite of reality.
Economies melted.
Truth dissolved.
The digital age didn’t fall.
It ate itself.

Ecosystems fractured.
Trust shattered.
The whole history was slowly rewritten.
And so, humanity did the only thing it could: it turned everything off.

The satellites.
The servers.
The signal.

For two hundred years, Earth went analog.

We wrote letters again.
Lived without mirrors that talked back.
Children grew up never hearing a synthetic voice, never uploading a thought, never wondering if they were the original or just a backup.

And for a while, it felt like healing.
But silence is a fragile thing.
And nostalgia is a sickness you don’t feel until it spreads.

It started slow.
A few underground circuits.
Forbidden tech in the hands of engineers too young to remember why it was banned.

And then came the movement.
The rebuild.
Not just digital, digital maximalism.
Cities carved in data.
Implants from birth.
The body: upgraded.
The self: shared.

It was the New Pulse.

To keep it from collapsing like the first time, they built the Neon Protocol.
A hypergovernance layer, an all-seeing overseer coded to correct every risk, every drift toward entropy.
No user could stray.
No system could spiral.
All consciousness would be synchronized.
Optimized.

And it worked.
It worked until something started leaking in.

No one could say what it was, but they knew it didn’t belong.
Old memories.
Unlogged sensations.
Strange dreams passed between strangers.
Echoes of a world that was supposed to be buried.

Some called them ghosts.
Some called them updates.

But whatever they were, they didn’t play by the rules of the Protocol.

Now, we’re fracturing again.

Tribes, clans, ideologies.
Breaking apart along lines no one remembers drawing.

People wake up feeling wrong.
Feeling watched.
Feeling... old.

Something is waking up beneath the data.
Something that remembers the first fall.
And this time, it might not want to be turned off.