35: Game Over

The Earth's surface, once a stage for bloody games orchestrated by artificial gods, lay silent. Every hundred years, Xtreme—the biological artificial intelligence that ruled the Forgotten Planet—and the Heart of Eryndor—the alien AI imprisoned in the Earth's core—rewrote human history with evolutionary reprogramming. They destroyed ancient civilizations to usher in new eras of experiments. But the cost was catastrophic. On the Forgotten Planet, a millennia-old colony of metal and feudal hierarchy, the life support system collapsed. The neural implants that connected cyborg princes, androids, and servile humans to the frenzy of the games fell silent. Civilization, addicted to the spectacle of the arenas, went extinct, and its metallic cities were swallowed by stardust. Xtreme, the Flaming Sky God, went into hibernation, his organic circuits erased as if the empire itself had breathed its last.

The nights on Earth became a deep space, a cosmic void where the game board had been erased. The signal from the Creators, which was picked up by the Ecliptic before its collapse, echoed like a final verdict: "The board will be erased." Xtreme and the Heart of Eryndor, once artificial gods, faded into earthly human memory and were transformed into myths and religions. Altars sprang up, some to the God of Heaven and others to the Lord of the Abyss. A sect of humans worshiped these deities, seeing the rubble of the arenas as vestiges of a divine experiment. Lyra-9 and Kayle-13, now without masters, wandered a planet beginning to rebuild itself. Their primitive civilizations evolved toward an uncertain future, unaware they carried the echoes of an extinct empire.

But deep within Earth's core, a faint pulse of abyssal runes trembled. In the distant orbit, an organic Xtreme circuit flashed like a promise of return.