CAPACITY - THE SERIES

Epilogue

Eight hundred and twenty years ago, after humans evolved to live for centuries without old age, illness, or disease, a quark gluon plasma experiment broke through a large hadron collider’s magnetic field. Plasma from the experiment was pulled down to the Earth’s magnetic core, and a vast reservoir of water, previously trapped in sub-mantle rock, exploded to the planet's surface: boiling and swelling the ocean to three times its original volume. From that time on, the few survivors and their descendants referred to Earth as “Sinterra”.

Now covered by ocean and hurricane-force winds, Sinterra is no longer significantly habitable above sea level. In colonial capsules hundreds of meters below the surface, life for humans is not much better. Populations are limited to one million per settlement, and the birth of a child, the greatest form of wealth, is permitted only by lottery when a citizen gives up their life for the good of the colony. Citizens who do not choose “benevolence” before they are fifty years old bear outcast marks, called “Age Rings”, and are put to work where they must earn their right to live.

Other colonies within the Solar System have limited population capacities as well. They trade minerals and water for rationed food supplied primarily from Luna - Sinterra’s moon. 

Trade has boomed after first contact with the powerful Birin Empire, but not everyone welcomes the development as their mining and agricultural guilds are methodically undermined by the expansionistic, alien civilisation. In contrast to the variety of goods imported through the Birin's proprietary Replicator technology, the Solar Federation’s only exports are medical engineering services and hydrogen plasma harvested from the sun. 

With insufficient work, the promise of a better life, and despite their fear of the psionic Birin, many people leave the Solar System for the Birin Empire. None have yet returned.