OA Allen · Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction
The Bright Dark
The old world is gone. Nobody remembers it correctly.
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Centuries after the modern world collapsed, civilization has returned to New Zealand.
Sort of.
Electricity is poorly understood. Germs sound like a conspiracy theory. Ancient technology is excavated, catalogued and occasionally misunderstood. Three-horned livestock wander the roads. Enormous predators haunt the Wastelands. History has become religion, folklore and badly remembered technical documentation.
And Ren wants to understand all of it.
Twenty years old, painfully curious and much better with a scroll than a weapon, Ren expects Recruitment Day to place him with the Yellow Guard, among the city’s scribes.
Instead, one bad decision destroys his dreams and leaves his future in the hands of a cantankerous old captain.
Ren is offered something far more dangerous: to find the plasmoids his people call the Annuna.
Plasmoids
The first settlers left behind stories of rarefication—a lost process by which human beings supposedly transformed themselves into plasmoids.
- Most people treat the Annuna as history.
- Some treat them as gawds.
- Ren thinks they might be real.
And with someone in the city opening portals, the old captain believes the vanished settlers may be the only ones who understand the lost tech enough to help.
Ren is sent across the island toward remote Dunedin with an official rank near the bottom of society, a guard-issued knife he barely knows how to use, and an excellent cover story.
Official assignment: dig a cesspit. Actual mission: find sentient plasma beings no one can prove exist.A World That Moved On Without Us
The apocalypse is ancient history. Humanity has already rebuilt. New cultures have formed. Guilds feud. Guards maintain an uneasy order. The Administrator decides which pieces of the past they get back—and which should remain buried.
Metal can be progress in one settlement and corruption in another. Science resembles mysticism. Mysticism sometimes behaves disturbingly like science.
And in the Zubian Waste, impossible visions move across the landscape. Every day. Like dream weather.
Ren goes looking for lost technology and sentient plasma.
Instead, he finds people who can see more with their eyes closed, machines that remember more than their operators do, and a landscape where culture determines truth.
And the Annuna may actually be real.
Unfortunately, Ren was never prepared for this mission. No one was, and everything has to change before it even starts.