(NARRATOR)
To sleep, perchance to dream. For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come. There was no death for Thea and Cal, though they slept nigh 100 years. A sleep to heal the heartache, and a thousand natural shocks. None such rest would grace the world outside. In just a few decades, It was dragged eons from the beauty of their chambers. Cities slumped, like dusty graveyards, while farms and forests were transformed into a uniform, buzzing sprawl. An equidistant gray grid. For in this world, brash and fragile personas were an epidemic unto themselves, proximity a pathology for the disease. For sickness was no longer a foreign agent, their souls Its breeding ground. Their consolation? The dreariest shadow of Eden to tend
In 2077, with the World Council adjourned, a solution was cosigned by its most powerful minds. They claimed to have found in code "The Children of Perfected Reason." In metal frames, the guides to utopia. To each citizen, their own as a gift, a multiplicity of stars with a singular will: the Ushers. The Cleansers. The Cure. The Saints
It was at this moment that Thea and Cal awoke