Flesh fades.
Power remains...

The skies were once controlled. Now, they are fractured.

Day never ends in some cities. Others are trapped in endless night. Storms tear across the tundras and frozen winds batter the last outposts of light. In the silence that followed the fall, neon still flickers across cracked steel and machines continue to run for a world that no longer exists.

It wasn't always like this. SOLACE, the Solar Luminal Atmospheric Climate Engine, was built to stabilise a planet and secure its future. Powered by orbital solar collectors and geothermal conversion, its satellite network controlled the climate on a global scale. For a time, it worked. But SOLACE depended on a network of heavily secured ground stations and underground vaults, and something that powerful could not be left undefended. Under the Preservation Directive, citizens were called into service and transformed into Protectors. Neural implants and biomechanical augmentation made them stronger, faster and harder to kill, allowing them to defend the stations and vaults at the heart of the system. They served their cycles before eventually returning to civilian life, carrying the physical marks of what had been done to them.

Then the skies broke. In the moments before the collapse, systems across the world registered something they could not explain. A surge followed, tearing through almost every connected device on the planet. Some said it was a global EMP. Others believed SOLACE had failed in a way nobody had anticipated. Some even believed it was deliberate. 

At almost the same time, something else began to happen. Former Protectors stopped whatever they were doing and began moving. They could not explain why, or even how they knew where they were going, but across cities and borders they were drawn towards the same place. For some, the pull simply vanished before they arrived, leaving them to return to lives they had abandoned without explanation. Others were never seen again.

Whatever the cause, the satellites went silent. Phones, communications and infrastructure failed. Automated systems simply stopped, and the climate network collapsed with them. Regions were plunged into permanent darkness while others were left beneath a sun that never seemed to set. Storm systems shifted, temperatures changed and whole parts of the world became almost impossible to survive.

Five years later, civilisation survives in fragments. Some of the Protectors have begun to reappear, marked by the blue energy that never fades and surrounded by rumours about what really happened during the Shutdown. There are stories of sealed vaults beneath the earth, of systems that never truly shut down, and of signals still moving through a network that should be dead. Somewhere beneath it all is the possibility that SOLACE is still waiting.

Bringing it back may be the only way to repair the skies.

But if SOLACE itself is broken, waking it could finish what the Shutdown started.