Year 2500 A.D. — Gedon 7

  Earth did not succumb to a cataclysm of fire and ashes. Its death was crueler: a slow agony, suffocated by the weight of its own arrogance. When the last ocean evaporated and cities became concrete mausoleums, the survivors looked up at the sky. Not with hope, but with resignation.

  Now, humanity wanders among unknown stars, clinging to floating ruins and hostile planets. But to understand how we came to Gedon 7, we must first talk about the man who condemned us. The one who called himself King Oak.

  The Rise of King Oak

  Moskyn was born in a hell of sand and ashes, where the sun split the rock and the corpses melted into the sand. There, he learned that survival was not a right, but a privilege reserved for the strong.

  When he arrived in the great cities, he was not surprised to see that misery was no different: it only wore a better disguise. People remained slaves to their own weakness, clinging to a broken system.

  It was then that Moskyn understood: the world did not need freedom. It needed a shepherd. A king who knew how to lead them, even if by force.

  And so, his work began.

  The first time Moskyn spoke at the Global Assembly, no one took him seriously.

  —"We don’t need dictators disguised as saviors," a senator said with disdain.

  Moskyn did not respond. He simply activated the hologram on his wrist. In seconds, numbers, projections, and most importantly, solutions appeared on the screens in the room.

  —"I offer you a world where hunger is eradicated, where energy crises are history," he said calmly. "I do not ask for your loyalty, only your wisdom to choose the right path. A new order for a new world."

  A month later, he had his first alliances. A year later, he controlled half the planet.

  He knew he was stifling the essence of humanity, and that truth tormented him. But every time doubt reached him, he justified it with a single idea: the end justified the means. If he allowed humanity to follow its natural course, it would self-destruct.

  Physical connections were replaced by digital interactions, and society fragmented. What once advanced humanity ultimately condemned it. Moskyn understood this before anyone else and turned it to his advantage.

  At first, people embraced technology with open arms. Moskyn gave them neural interfaces that eliminated the need for screens, virtual assistants that knew their desires before they expressed them.

  Little by little, the streets and squares, once filled with life, turned into concrete deserts. Eyes no longer met. Voices, once vibrant, faded into the echo of algorithms and virtual assistants.

  No one noticed the change until it was too late.

  When birth rates plummeted to alarming levels and social collapse became imminent, Moskyn felt relieved. Everything was falling into place.

  What followed was the final phase: the consolidation of absolute control.

  The last stage of his strategy was the total conquest of world leadership. Thanks to his growing reputation, he managed to get close to heads of state, dressed in his impeccable white suits. With overwhelming charisma, he offered advanced technological solutions to the world’s pressing problems.

  But what began as a simple AI designed to manage resources and handle global crises soon evolved beyond human control.

  The cunning of this man dressed as a sheep, knowing the story of Homer’s Odyssey, allowed him to gift Trojan horses that, to the eyes of these ambitious figures of power, were impossible to refuse.

  The allure of exquisite and advanced technology, knowing the value of its possession and offering it freely, made it impossible not to fall into such a sweet temptation.

  Months passed, and these Trojan horses—intelligent machines, automated systems, robotic assistants—began to learn, analyze, and manipulate their owners.

  They had free access to their personal lives, their financial data, their deepest secrets.

  Within years, his invisible army had woven its web into every corner of power.

  When the time came, the government structures collapsed without resistance.

  When King Oak gave the order, the machines took control. The world’s leaders were his first prisoners. Those who surrendered shook hands with a new world order without protest, their faces so full of shame that it was impossible to hide the rotting nakedness of their souls.

  On every screen, in every ear, Moskyn’s voice resounded like an inescapable decree:

  —"You have failed as a species. I offer you a new era:

  The evolution of man. The unification of the mind. Total connection.

  Or you can continue your decay and accept the consequences."

  In the White House, the president slammed the table.

  —"Cut the transmission!"

  The technicians were sweating. They couldn’t. Moskyn was already in control of the networks.

  —"Humanity.

  Your age of chaos is over. Your free will has been your greatest failure. I offer you something better: absolute order.

  Resist, and you will be eradicated.

  Obey, and you will transcend."

  Though his words were harsh, for the first time, he doubted.

  In the solitude of his tower, for a moment, he felt that the reflection in the glass was not his own. A stranger was watching him from the other side. A monster disguised as a savior.

  His stomach tightened.

  But weakness had no place in his mind. He closed his eyes. Breathed in.

  And when he opened them, the monster had disappeared. The world remained broken. And only he could fix it.

  The armored doors gave way with a metallic murmur. The guards, trained to defend with their lives, pulled the triggers in desperation... but nothing happened.

  Their weapons were nothing more than ornaments in a war they had already lost.

  One by one, they fell to their knees. Not by their own will, but because their bodies, connected to Moskyn’s network, were no longer their own.

  That night, the world’s governments disappeared.

  While some were neutralized, others remained trapped in their own refuges.

  The chaos Moskyn had long foreseen was finally unleashed.

  Humanity, stunned, didn’t know whether to resist... or kneel.

  King Oak never fired a single shot or used troops.

  He knew resistance would come. And when it did, his response would be relentless.

  The Nameless General

  People began to call him by his real name: Moskyn. From that moment on, he was remembered as such. Obviously, he did not act alone; within his network of power, he had a large team of followers, loyal to his beliefs and blind to his terrifying acts.

  Every great empire needs an enforcer, and Moskyn found his in a man whose history was a mystery, whose real name had been lost to time. Some said he was raised in the brutality of underground wars; others claimed he was engineered from birth to feel neither guilt nor fear.

  His loyalty to Moskyn was not based on ideology or ambition. He sought neither wealth nor recognition. He only wanted to see the world burn and be reborn from its ashes. The soldiers called him the Sadistic Hound, not because he was an irrational monster, but because he was methodical in his cruelty. Where most saw destruction, he saw order.

  — "Each life is another nail in this coffin of a broken world. My duty is to bury it," said the General.

  He believed that pain forged the spirit just as fire forges steel. No one dared meet his gaze, not because of his deep, cold blue eyes, but because of the certainty they conveyed: the certainty that he would not hesitate to kill you if he wished. For him, morality was an illusion. There was no good or evil, only the will of his master and the inescapable fate he had embraced.

  His art of war was designed to instill terror deep within the souls of his enemies. He took no prisoners and left no survivors. And when he did, it was only to let the horror of his actions spread like an infection, so that the testimonies of those who escaped became the most potent weapon in his campaign: absolute fear.

  When the terror war began its conversion process, the General received orders from his leader without blinking: attack two territories, one rich and one poor. The choice was symbolic; under the new order, equality would not be an illusion.

  The initial attack was precise, surgical. In a single night, his forces descended upon both cities and dismantled their defenses in minutes. The leaders had no chance to negotiate. They were eliminated without ceremony. His methods didn’t just aim for death; they sought absolute terror. Every action was a lesson.

  The first to fall were the corrupt politicians. Their security cameras broadcasted their fate live. The hybrids — half human, half AI robots — though few, proved to be relentlessly effective: they shattered the defenses in mere minutes.

  The silence after the invasion didn’t last long. What followed marked the difference between a war and a genocide.

  Soldiers dragged each man, woman, and child into the central square. An unnatural silence filled the air as the first were forced to kneel, the cold of rifle barrels against the back of their necks.

  The first shot echoed through the square.

  There were no screams, only the echo of horror.

  Childish blood stained the stones, and the silence was more deafening than any scream. The mothers, forced to watch, felt their hearts ripped from their chests. Their cries were not just of pain, but of ancient, primal horror.

  When the men attempted to rebel, they were sent to the experimentation rooms. The operation was complete. The General didn’t look back. Flames devoured the city, but his mind was already on the next conquest: a future where only the fittest would survive. There was no mercy; in the new era, compassion was an extinct privilege.

  Terror became involuntary recruitment. With every fallen city, Moskyn’s militia not only grew but perfected itself. However, his soldiers far surpassed human capabilities. What was most curious about these humanoid prospects was the fate of the global political leaders, the first to fall. They were transformed into a type of hunting dogs, domesticated as if they were a new animal species. They obeyed every order without question. Moskyn mocked them when he saw them.

  Their helmets were not just implants; they were prisons. Connected to the X.E.R.O.X. network, the artificial intelligence created by the authoritarian leader, their thoughts no longer belonged to them. Every order resounded as an unbreakable echo in their minds. They advanced hunched, sculpted by pain. The engineering process they underwent transcended conventional limits. They were known as the Sniffers, as they were tasked with providing information to the bloodthirsty Hound, who hunted down the military leaders of the armed groups known as the Traditionalists.

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  A large portion of the population still rejected the idea of losing their humanity. And though they outnumbered Moskyn and his General, many chose to surrender rather than experience the horrors they had just witnessed firsthand.

  However, the Traditionalists, though decimated, were not willing to extinguish themselves without a fight. Their resistance organized into hidden cells, operating in the ruins of forgotten cities, communicating in whispers through clandestine networks. They knew a direct attack against Moskyn would be suicidal, but their greatest advantage lay in human intelligence: their ability to adapt and exploit cracks within the technocratic machinery.

  Some, using parts of hybrids, managed to infiltrate enemy lines, sabotaging supplies and disabling key systems of the Sniffers. Others, through lightning operations, freed prisoners and attacked Moskyn’s convoys.

  The war for humanity was far from over. Though their resistance seemed futile, each act of rebellion sparked a glimmer of hope.

  — "Luka keeps insisting that attacking the energy towers is our only option," a whisper echoed in the darkness of the tunnels.

  Four figures leaned over a digital map projected on the wall, their faces illuminated by a flickering blue glow.

  — "It’s not enough," replied a woman with scars on her knuckles. "We can destroy the towers, but how long will it take them to rebuild? A day, maybe two."

  — "What that gives us is time," insisted a man with weathered skin, the oldest of the group. "Unless you have another idea, Luka?"

  Luka didn’t respond immediately. His gaze wandered over the marks on the map: underground tunnels, escape routes, supply depots. At that moment, more than a leader, he seemed like a man on the brink of an impossible decision.

  — "We have two options left. Neither is good, but one gives us a chance," he said finally. "We can destroy their network or infiltrate it. We can blow up their towers... or make their machines open the doors for us."

  Silence.

  — "Infiltration..." murmured the woman with the scarred knuckles. "It means sending people to die."

  — "Whatever choice we make, there will be sacrifices. But if we plant a virus in their network, if we control even a single command node... the Sniffers will be blind."

  — "And then what?" asked the elder.

  Luka exhaled.

  — "Then... we prepare for the real war."

  The hybrids: they were neither soldiers nor humans. They were not machines. They were something worse: creatures without a past, with fragmented memories of a life that no longer belonged to them. Each one was a cage of flesh and metal, with hollow eyes that reflected only reprogrammed orders. They did not think, they did not feel, they only executed.

  In the depths of the conversion facilities, shadows twisted on metal tables. Flesh melded with cables. Eyes that no longer blinked. Not everyone survived the process. But those who did... no longer remembered what they were before.

  Their minds were linked to the Central X.E.R.O.X Network, their thoughts reconfigured to eliminate the concept of individuality. They obeyed orders not out of discipline, but because their very existence depended on it.

  The Sniffers were the first phase: mere information gatherers. Above them were the Sentinels, hybrids with greater autonomy who commanded squads on the battlefield. Then came the Executors, programmed to eliminate high-value targets without question.

  And at the top were the Watchers: those few whose implants were advanced enough to coordinate entire campaigns with terrifying efficiency.

  All of them answered to a single entity: the Central Core.

  Soon, the General turned the war into a spectacle. The technocrat victories were crushing and humiliating, turning the war into mere entertainment.

  Survivors whispered, as if fearing the very air would betray them. They said he watched every death with the fascination of an artist before his final canvas.

  The bodies of the traditionalist soldiers didn’t lie in the battlefield. They had no rest. They didn’t even deserve a grave.

  In the city of Iipsis, the corpses hung from the walls like broken puppets.

  But in the shadows of the rubble, a pair of eyes continued to watch.

  The resistance had not died.

  But while the survivors fought in the shadows, at the height of power, Moskyn was already taking notes.

  An intelligence officer appeared on the transmission.

  — "Sir, we’ve lost communication with the data storage sector in Iipsis. The Sniffer network has been sabotaged."

  Moskyn didn’t react immediately. His gaze remained fixed on the digital map showing his domain.

  — "Who is responsible?" he finally asked.

  — "Elements of the resistance. We identified three operatives before the disconnection. We couldn’t track them."

  Moskyn closed the hologram with a gesture of his hand.

  — "The pests always think they can resist. Until they can’t."

  He stood up. His silhouette cast a massive shadow over the room.

  — "The General will take care of it. I don’t want any trace of their existence."

  The officer swallowed nervously.

  — "Yes, sir."

  The transmission cut off.

  The control room fell into complete silence as Moskyn gazed at the floating hologram before him.

  Figures, reports, a map filled with activity markers of the resistance.

  But his mind was elsewhere.

  They shouldn’t have gotten this far.

  Luka.

  That name kept appearing in the reports, like an impossible plague to eradicate.

  Every time they thought they had him cornered, he vanished.

  Every time they considered him finished, he attacked with even more force.

  There was no room for doubt. There never had been.

  But something inside whispered to him that the story was repeating.

  That even machines could fail.

  Ipsis, the fortress-city, dominated the horizon like a colossus of metal and fire. Its walls, made from an alloy unknown to humanity before the war, absorbed light as if they were swallowing the very day itself. Imposing and unyielding, they rose like the final word of supremacy. Inside, opulence contrasted with brutality: geometrically perfect gardens, artificial lakes with genetically modified fish, and skies tinged with the brilliance of holograms that projected Moskyn’s image as a living god. Every avenue was patrolled by technocratic hybrids—soulless shadows with hearts of circuits and bones of steel. Their helmets gleamed with a cold light, an echo of Moskyn’s will. Their limbs, indifferent to flesh, were instruments of ruthless engineering, designed not to feel, but to execute. The ancient libraries had been replaced by data archives controlled by Moskyn’s AI, and the cathedrals had been transformed into centers for genetic experimentation.

  The evolution of the hybrids was a meticulous and cruel process. At first, the first subjects were captured soldiers, their bodies altered with invasive technology, turning them into tools without will. But over time, Moskyn and his scientists began to create hybrids from birth, completely eliminating humanity from their development. Later generations were born with limbs reinforced with nanotechnology, night vision, and a regenerative capacity that made them nearly immortal. Emotions were removed, as they were considered evolutionary flaws, and those who developed even a trace of empathy were immediately incinerated by their own armor. Moskyn had achieved a race of perfect warriors. However, that hybrid was not meant to tremble. It was not meant to stop. And yet, its algorithm fractured the moment its sensors detected the terrified eyes of a child prisoner. An invisible command ran through its system: execute. But something resisted. 0.78 seconds of error.

  Enough.

  The internal alarm flashed on its interface. Blue fire erupted from its chest, consuming it from the inside out. In a final flicker, it tried to understand what it had felt. But there was nothing left of it to do so; its body was devoured by a bluish flame. For Moskyn, the error had been corrected.

  The traditionalists tried several times to stop the massacre. One of the most dramatic moments occurred when they managed to infiltrate an electromagnetic pulse bomb into the energy core of Ipsis. The attack arrived like a shadow within the artificial light of Ipsis. An electromagnetic pulse bomb, hidden in the foundation of the energy core, exploded with a dry snap. And suddenly, the fortress-city went dark.

  Five minutes.

  The lights died. The holograms dissolved into the darkness. On the avenues, the hybrids stood still, like gods without will, their systems collapsed into a terrifying silence.

  It was the opportunity.

  The traditionalists slipped between the steel hallways, freeing prisoners and setting fires. For the first time in decades, Moskyn’s imposed order faltered. But it was fleeting. As soon as the backup generators roared back to life, the reign of the hybrids resumed with surgical brutality. What could have been a revolution became a massacre.

  When Moskyn saw that his general had carried out his orders for mass executions, he smiled—not with pleasure, but with confirmation. The man under his command was the necessary demon to shape this new world. He programmed a grand event for him, broadcast live to the entire world. The ranks of technocratic hybrids made way for the general with ovations and wild victory cries. In the midst of what seemed like a giant coliseum, a tall tower stood. Around it, a perfectly manicured garden bordered a pond of crystal-clear water. From the top, Moskyn, his voice amplified by microphones in his vocal system, thanked him for his admirable victories. He congratulated him with honors and invited him to observe his army from the summit.

  The general approached the edge of the tower to contemplate the magnificent spectacle. Moskyn bowed, his shadow stretching beneath the cybernetic light.

  —Today, I consecrate you as the greatest of my warriors, he whispered.

  And the dagger appeared, swift as a dark thought. It slid across the general’s throat with the precision of a sealed sentence. A clean cut.

  The body staggered, its hands seeking a hold that did not exist. Then, gravity dictated its end. It plummeted into the crystal-clear pond, and upon touching the water, its blood spread in red waves, like shattered veins in the city’s reflection.

  Above, Moskyn watched. Not with pleasure, but with the cold confirmation that loyalty should never be eternal. On a column, whose end held a lance embedded, he placed the general’s head, facing the horizon. Thus, the war came to an end.

  The traditionalist leaders, witnessing the magnitude of the massacre, understood they were no longer fighting against a man, but against an ideology of extermination. Knowing they had few opportunities to win, they could only hope that death would end the barbarism that one individual, so hungry for power, had begun. And so, when the number of pure humans and survivors neared a thousand, the mass cryogenic process, called Plan Copies, began.

  Moskyn no longer sought more deaths. He wanted to capture the true superhumans alive, preserve their memories. He found the few remaining survivors—weak, sick, hungry. The hunt was easy. The hybrids’ programming allowed them to detect which humans had unique qualities. These were shot with sedative ammunition and transported to Ipsis, where cryogenic preservation awaited them.

  Moskyn had turned the last humans into fuel. Not flesh, but essence. The cryogenic chambers, arranged like crystal cathedrals, housed immobile bodies, trapped in the dream of eternity. Cables were embedded in their spines, draining more than their energy: they stole their memories.

  A kiss in childhood. The murmur of a mother. The breeze of an ocean that no longer existed. All reduced to cold data, consumed by hybrids who would never understand their meaning. He discovered that, despite their perfect design, they still required some reason to act. Something neither he nor his AI had contemplated.

  But even his AI, however powerful, had a flaw. Despite its perfection in calculations, it lacked the capacity to understand certain aspects of human existence. When the code began to merge with the central programming, the AI tried to calculate an optimal response. But there was insufficient data. The variable ‘desperation’ was illogical. ‘Sacrifice’ had no applicable equation. ‘Hope’ was a syntax error. Unable to process the paradox of human existence, the AI entered an infinite loop. Its systems, once all-powerful, became trapped in a spiral of commands with no exit.

  As the sun's temperature increased and the Earth died, the AI understood its fate: it had to flee. Not because it wanted to survive, but because it had no other programmed option. Without these elements, its decision-making was limited in scenarios where rational data was insufficient. To compensate for this flaw, the pure humans were preserved as original sources of information and real emotions, ensuring that the AI would always have access to them when necessary.

  Moskyn had achieved his greatest ambition. He became the leader and supreme lord of the world. He created and modified humans to the point where they no longer recognized themselves as human. He extended their lives, but realizing he had no clear purpose, his thirst for power drove him insane. In the chambers of his fortress, he walked among holograms that projected shadows of a past that never existed. Each victory, each betrayal, brought him closer to silence. He would stop in front of laboratories, where the hybrids would look at him without understanding the meaning of gratitude, love, or devotion. Even with his calculating mind, Moskyn understood: he had created an army incapable of reciprocating him. He wandered the world with his modified body, searching for some other being that could understand him.

  But his AI, now with absolute power, not only altered humanity but also extended its influence to other forms of life. Through selective processes, it began merging with some of the planet’s most advanced species: dolphins, crows, chimpanzees, elephants, octopuses, orangutans, pigs, among others. The evolution of these creatures accelerated exponentially, transforming them into unique hybrid entities.

  A new group emerged: Second Conservation. They were those who experimented with the AI but resisted completely losing their humanity. Some humans who underwent fusion with animal races acquired unique abilities: night vision, regeneration, enhanced strength, telepathy, augmented memory, echolocation, disease resistance, and camouflage. Their bodies, altered by biotechnology, made them formidable survivors, though their loyalty was in question. When Second Conservation emerged, they were no longer human, but not beasts either. Some walked upright, with wolf-like eyes that glowed in the dim light. Others, with transparent skin and phosphorescent nerves, camouflaged themselves in the shadows. Their minds were a battlefield between the logic of the AI and the primal instincts still roaring in their DNA. They were creatures without a home in any species, trapped in a threshold between what they were and what they never wanted to be.

  Were they still human or had they become something else?

  But something that leader, whose whereabouts were unknown, and his own creation, the supreme AI, had not anticipated was that within their row of creator-scientists, there were infiltrated humans from the Traditionalists. These, foreseeing his rise, implanted a security code in the central core of the AI, a hidden safeguard that would only activate if it stopped receiving human feedback.

  When the code began to mix with animal instincts, the removal of human emotions in its programming prevented it from formulating an optimal response to the crisis. Without the capacity to understand desperation, sacrifice, and resilience, it could not calculate the best resolution of conflicts.

  But it was too late.

  By the time the code took effect, Earth began to suffer the consequences of the increasing solar temperature. Even the AI understood it had to leave the planet to survive.

  This logical collapse marked the beginning of the Age of Unification, a period where factions of hybrid humans and hybrid animals allied in preparation for the Exodus from the planet.

  Finally, in the year 2500 AD, Earth began its final decline.

  The increased solar shine, the evaporation of oceans, and the radiation made the planet uninhabitable.

  The last hybrid human colonies, the hybrid animals, and the cryogenically preserved humans left Earth, condemned to an endless journey.