Prologue
My name is jungkook, scale...nationwide. and this is the story of how I died. Well not me, but, well... you’ll see. If anyone cares to read that is.
Anyway, I was born in 2072, after the war of Gimcheon, and died 2092 after the population control program known as NAC came into place. The future is only getting worse as I look upon it from up here.
Earth is very different from what you know currently. There is not a place amongst this God-forsaken world left untouched by man. The lush, rolling highlands of Scotland resemble a wasteland. The chilling glaciers of Antarctica are nothing now but salt with the rest of the current. The forests both wet and dry are barren and riddled with pestilence. The colorful Busan streets I knew as a child quickly turned into a landfill and a home for the dejected. Every major city on earth was a dangerous place to live in every way, but most of the time, there were little options of escape. What you would call the U.S.A became, over time, the single most overpopulated and polluted country in the world.
Population cuts were becoming regular. Famine, war, all evils seemed endless. Earth was a horrid place.
But that is not where I am. I am somewhere in between, away from the chaos at a safe distance in peace.
But today was selection day.
Have you ever thought about how much a single person could matter to the world, how much they’ve accomplished? The men and women that have shaped our nations? Kings, queens, presidents, inventors, skilled scientists and mathematicians, the artists of every medium or the smallest of peacemakers; a family member, friend or neighbor? What if they never existed? What if they died, for better or worse, before any of their potent actions had affected the world? These are important questions. Questions we care about and aim to answer. What if someone who had the potential to change the world, for the better, suddenly died? Would you go back in time, if you could, and somehow change it?
Now that the world below us is suffering a slow and painful death, we seek a way to change it, to change the course of time itself. We are each selected once to participate in helping to rebuild the world anew by changing the outcome of the past. It is a scary, but necessary thing we must do. So much could go wrong, yet we’ve little to lose.
Today it was my turn.
