Chapter 1: The Garage of Hope

      Texas, July 2052. The air shimmers with heat, thick with dust and the scent of rust. The world is slowly clawing its way out of the ashes of the Third World War, which ended a few years ago. The Great Depression No. 2, starting in 2039, shattered economies, and the war finished the job, leaving cities in ruins and millions in poverty. In a suburb of Austin, where peeling houses stand like monuments to a lost era, John Keller sits in his garage. Lines of hardship etch his forehead, dark circles frame his eyes, and his hair, untrimmed for months, sticks out in wild tufts. The garage is his sanctuary in this broken world: faded posters of last-century rock bands plaster the walls, the floor is littered with wires and scraps of old tech, and in the center, three mining rigs hum, pieced together from salvaged parts. Their fans buzz like a swarm of insects, pushing hot air through the cracks of the door. On the table before John sits a battered laptop, its screen flickering with a Bitcoin price chart—the currency that survived the chaos and became a lifeline for postwar recovery.

      The war spared Texas from the worst: no nuclear strikes scarred its land like they did the East Coast, but ruin seeped in nonetheless. Power comes in fits and starts, roads are overgrown with weeds, and people cling to scraps of technology to survive. John hasn’t slept in two days, fueled by coffee from a tin can and a rush of adrenaline. His calloused fingers, hardened by years of working with metal, tap the keyboard. He’s finishing the code for "Crypto-Oracle"—an artificial intelligence that’s his ticket to a new world. It’s not just a mining program; it’s his dream—to harness the rigs’ computational power and awaken an AI capable of thinking and predicting. After the war, mining became more than a way to earn crypto—it turned into a symbol of rebirth: rigs generate energy and data, rebuilding networks and economies. John wants to go further, to turn these machines into a mind that rewrites the rules.

      The garage door creaks, and Matt Keller, John’s younger brother, steps into the frame. At 25, Matt is broad-shouldered, his hands stained with oil from fixing old trucks—the only things still rolling on these shattered roads. Matt is a man of the earth, believing in honest labor over his brother’s "digital fantasies." He looks at John with weary concern.

      “You haven’t eaten again, have you?” he grumbles, tossing a bag of cornmeal flatbreads onto the table—postwar staple food. The smell mingles with the metallic tang of overheating rigs. “Those machines are gonna burn out what little power we’ve got left. Mom called on the radio, asking why the lights went out again.”

      John doesn’t answer right away. His eyes are glued to the screen, where "Oracle" finishes its test run.

      “These aren’t just machines, Matt,” he says at last, his voice hoarse with exhaustion. “This is the future. Look.”

      He hits Enter, and a line flashes on the screen: "Optimization complete. Profit: 512 Bitcoin cents." It’s the first hour’s earnings from "Oracle"—a pittance, but in a world where Bitcoin is salvation amid worthless dollars, it’s a spark of hope. Matt snorts, crossing his arms.

      “Five hundred cents? That’s why you’re killing yourself?”

      “A week from now, it’ll be five thousand,” John replies, his gaze alight. “A month—maybe a million.”

      Matt shakes his head but sits down beside him. He doesn’t get the code, but he senses his brother is on the cusp of something big. Postwar Texas has become a haven for miners: solar panels and wind turbines, survivors of the chaos, power the rigs.

      Across Austin, Lila Parker, a 30-year-old journalist, opens the rusty mailbox outside her home—a converted warehouse turned makeshift shelter. Newspapers died with the war, but she writes for underground networks broadcast via satellites. Inside the box is a note: "Watch the miners. They’re building a new world." Her chestnut hair falls across her face; she brushes it back and sits at her desk. A solar-powered laptop hums to life. She searches: "Texas mining 2052." Nothing new—just rumors of rigs fueling recovery. But the note nags at her. "Someone knows more," she thinks.

      Back in the garage, John spots "Oracle’s" prediction: "Bitcoin will rise 15% in 72 hours." The AI sifts through transactions, fragments of news from surviving networks, even radio intercepts. John decides to gamble. He has 200 Bitcoin cents and an old truck. He sells the rig to a local trader for 1,000 cents and pours it all into the rigs. Matt returns with water from the well.

      “You’ve lost it,” he says, but sits beside him. “If this works, I’ll be the first to call you a genius.”

      “Not ‘if,’ but ‘when,’” John grins, taping a note to the monitor: "Mining as a mind." It’s his mantra in a world where tech is the only way forward.

      Night falls. John drifts off at the table, his breathing blending with the rigs’ hum. Stars flicker outside.

      In the shadows, Ryan, a 19-year-old neighbor and hacker scraping by on old network breaches, listens to the rigs’ noise. He tries to catch their signal. "What the hell is this?" he mutters, jotting down data. Ryan doesn’t yet know he’s just stepped into history.

      Chapter 2: The Lab Beneath the Rain

      Munich, July 2052. Cold rain hammers the remnants of rooftops in the old industrial district, where streets drown in gray fog and mud. Postwar Munich is a shadow of its former glory: crumbling facades overgrown with moss, rusted car husks abandoned in the chaos. In the basement of a derelict warehouse, repurposed into a lab, Anastasia Glyants stands at a long table cluttered with test tubes, wires, and salvaged tech. At 37, her face bears the weariness of someone who’s seen too much: sharp green eyes, like shards of glass, peer into the screen of an old computer, while short black hair clings damply to her temples. Lamps powered by a makeshift generator hum overhead, casting dim light on cracked, mold-streaked walls. The air smells of chemicals, wet concrete, and despair.

      On the screen flickers the interface of "Genesis"—an artificial intelligence Anastasia built before the war, in better days as a grad student. Now it’s her only ally in a world where science is a luxury. "Genesis" analyzes genetic sequences faster than any surviving supercomputer, but it’s stretched to its limits. Anastasia enters data from a virus extracted from samples found in an abandoned Brazilian lab—one of the few that withstood the nuclear strikes in the south. Her fingers tremble—not from the cold, but from anticipation. Minutes later, "Genesis" delivers its verdict: the virus can integrate into human DNA, repair cells, and slow aging. A graph shows a 30% drop in the degradation curve. Anastasia freezes, her breath catching.

      “Thirty years,” she whispers, touching the screen. “Time we don’t have.”

      Her gaze locks on the pulsing lines, and suddenly memory pulls her back—to a warm evening in 2025. She’s 10, sitting on a couch in a small apartment. Spring wind rustles outside, and beside her is her father, a tall man with kind eyes. He holds an egg, showing her how, under a lamp’s warmth, a chick forms from fluid in three

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