The Hollow Chorus The sun had not been seen from the surface in thirty-one years. Not because it had vanished. Because no one went up to look. The world above had become a furnace of dust and ultraviolet death. The ozone…

The Mile-High Remnant By the year 2079, the surface had become a place of memory rather than life. The equatorial oceans had turned anoxic, their surfaces slick with bacterial mats that exhaled hydrogen sulfide instead of oxygen. Mid-latitude continents were scoured…

The Last Warmth The world above the sixtieth parallel south did not end in fire or flood. It ended in a slow, patient suffocation. By 2067 the equatorial belt had become a furnace belt—wet-bulb temperatures that killed in hours, monsoon seasons…