November 9th was a day like any other. 

The grand city of Parokampos, the shining bastion of humanity’s intelligence and technological superiority, stood proud in the sweltering desert. A sharp contrast from the dreary, endless sea of sand, Parokampos was the embodiment of the chlorination of millennia of development. It, along with the seven other megacities that had been dubbed ‘The Havens,’ were the pride of mankind.

The sweltering fever native to the desert terrain cast a heat haze over the sprawling landscape, which refracted and distorted in the shape of a dome around the megacity. If an observer from the outskirts of the desert were so inclined to scan the desert with a pair of binoculars, they might find themselves confused by the brief flashes of blue that stood out against the monochrome sand, or the hexagonal shapes seemingly floating in the sky that revealed themselves when the sun hit it just right. 

If they went a step further and deigned to crack open a guidebook—or the Internet—, they would discover that the strange anomaly was the first line of defense for The Havens; for humanity. The pride and joy of scientists all around the globe who worked tirelessly to ensure security and safety.

A dome that stretched higher than any skyscraper and covered the entire megacity, leaving not a single building exposed to the harsh conditions of the desert. Rows of hexagons stacked upon each other, ensuring there wasn’t a sliver of space in between the plates; the dome was completely airtight to where not even a fly could enter without jurisdiction from the Border Patrol. Shimmering with a blue hue, the dome was near-indistinguishable in the glare of the sun, and it was easy to make the mistake that the city was completely undefended.

Stationed at intervals around the dome were ‘checkpoints’: mechanical blast doors designed to interact with the energy-based dome and create sanctioned entry points for anyone who desired to enter Parokampos. The genius minds who designed the dome had anticipated the huge influx of traffic the city’s technological appeal would attract, and acted accordingly. 

Protruding from each of these checkpoints were long railroads stretching across the vast desert and bridging Parokampos with the rest of the world. Every 300 meters or so, a lone pole peeked out from the swells and curves of the sand dunes, and stabilized the railroad. Even in the early hours of the day, you were sure to see a shuttle cruising along the top of the railroad at breakneck speeds, carrying hundreds of humans who were going about their lives.

Some were extravagantly dressed, lauded with expensive jewelry and bespeckled rings that bordered on gaudy. Others were smartly outfitted, people whose ego was bigger than Parokampos and thought wearing crisp suits and carrying black briefcases was an exclusive path to the sweet taste of success. Most wore various different school uniforms, marking the particular day as a Saturday; the sole day of the week where school administration had compromised on their strict student policy, allowing students to leave Parokampos to tend to matters outside of the reach of the megacity. 

Inside the city itself, life went on as normal. Millions of humans walked through the streets at a brisk pace, occasionally stopping to murmur half-baked apologies when they collided with each other before setting off for their destination again. Cars zipped through the roads in carefully coordinated fashion, not a single vehicle out of line. The odds of a horrific car accident had been whittled down to a non-factor due to the advanced AI Prometheus that controlled the traffic lights and micro-monitored the activities of Parokampos with a level of dedication and astuteness no human could replicate. 

Crime was all but abolished; the few criminals who miraculously managed to slip past Prometheus’ all-seeing eye were clever enough not to do anything that would draw attention to them. They lurked in the shadows and dealt in petty crimes. Those who came to Parokampos with the intent of being the first master of the criminal underworld and acquire the status that came with the title were sorely disappointed to learn that the garden was infertile for the seed of crime to take root. That was before they were caught by Prometheus and were carted out of Parokampos, where they would be taken into custody by one of the neighboring cities that stood on the opposite end of the desert. 

Everyone went along their life with full faith in Prometheus, putting their existence in the artificial claws of the AI. Any nay-sayers who questioned the logic in giving an AI so much power had been weeded out and silenced after years of exemplary service, with not a single indication Prometheus was getting plans to overthrow humanity and being about a robotic apocalypse. 

Life was good.

On the morning of November 9th, Parokampos stood tall and proud. From the perspective of a hawk who soared high above the dome, the millions of humans bustling through the city looked like ants in a colony. An apt description for the dull days of the citizens of Parokampos: wake up, go to work/school, eat, sleep, repeat. An endless cycle of stagnation that everyone seemed content to repeat until the end of time.

The downside of living in a city ahead of its time was that you felt like you were trapped in the past, unable to move forward. From the moment Parokampos was recognized as an official city onward, nothing changed. It was like everyone had unconsciously agreed that humanity’s peak had been reached, and there was no point in progressing any further because there was nowhere to reach for. 

People were content to live out the rest of their lives in mindless comfort, and the age of exploration and innovators that had originally sparked the creation of Parokampos was left behind. 

If one was to dig up the bones of the illustrious founder and funder of the Parokampos Project, Alfred Parokampos, and ask him if this was the ‘grand future’ he had in mind when he first proposed the preposterously ambitious plan, many would expect the answer to be a resounding ‘No.’ After all, why would the man credited to be the ‘Father of the Modern Age’ want humanity to stop moving for the stars?

Regardless of what thoughts were circulating in Alfred Parokampos’ head when he oversaw the construction of Parokampos and fanatically managed the development to the most minute detail, it doesn’t alter the fact that humanity has ceased advancing. Schools advocate for their students to become the next genius while actively hindering their progress, cutting off their wings before they get the chance to soar. Ambition is encouraged on the surface, but in the shadows, away from prying eyes, they are stamped out. 

Funds are diverted away from inventions that could benefit humanity. Brilliant minds who managed to, against all odds, rise to the top and shine so bright that others had no choice but to recognize their intelligence, were encouraged to step away from their current trajectory and focus their attention on more mundane projects. Those that refused to comply, whose passion for innovation was as fierce as the sun and could not be restricted, mysteriously vanished from the public eye.

Thousands—millions of similar cases where someone of notable drive and the potential to inspire change suddenly lost their motivation or was booted out of the continent with none of their resources should have crowded the media. It should have been on every platform, be the next words that fall out of people’s lips as they contemplate this possible conspiracy. But, of course, it was covered up meticulously without a single article ever coming close to reaching the public.

There was only one entity who could accomplish such an impossible task: Prometheus, the first creation of Alfred Parokampos.

Entertainment and art was mostly untouched by this mass censoring, but one merely had to look at the latest movies that reached the blockbuster list to connect the common pattern they all shared: not one form of media advocated the future. Nobody promoted advanced technology. Science fiction as a genre was all but eradicated, falling into the slums of history and vaulting to the bottom of charts before they were silently erased when attention inevitably turned away from them. 

It was as if the primary object of Prometheus was not to oversee Parokampos, but to ensure humanity never took a step forward. And the AI’d dedication to the role was certainly admirable. Day after day, year after year, it did the impossible and allowed people to carry on with their lives while manipulating them so finely they couldn’t tell the difference between their choices and what Prometheus chose for them. 

And really, was it so wrong? Parokampos was a paradise on earth, everyone agreed. After conflict painted humanity’s history with the red of blood, they had finally achieved peace. Why would anyone desire to move ahead into the unknown and face uncertainty when the present was so fulfilling? Humanity had finally ascended to the perfection they’d craved since the first caveman dared to venture out of his cave.

People were like sheep; some rebelled against the current power base in an attempt to stand out among the crowd, but they were quickly quelled and brought under heel. Prometheus had accomplished what countless self-proclaimed emperors and kings had failed to do: complete subjugation of the human race—and they didn’t even know it.

The AI was the perfect being to hold this influential position; it possessed no malicious intents or any personal agendas clouding its judgment. It was an impartial ruler, melding a combination of hard logic and synthesizing a mimication of human emotion to be fair and confine itself to the human ideology. It did not desire to subjugate the human race but felt it was needed.

If the human race were a flock of sheep, Prometheus would be the greatest shepard who led them to their death without their knowledge—and when they passed, Prometheus would mourn as a human would. 

Prometheus would lull humanity into a state of complacency and relief for the rest of their existence, and strive to create an immaculate world where no humans wanted to escape into reality.

As the Titan Prometheus once stole fire from the gods and bestowed it to humanity to start their clock, the AI Prometheus trapped humanity in a perfect simulation to halt their clock. 

If Prometheus succeeded in its primary objective, humanity would have passed centuries without once wandering beyond the confines of their planet and into the reaches of space. They would have passed their meaningless lives in an irrelevant fashion, completely frozen in time, watching the world pass them by while they remained still. 

Perhaps this would have been a better fate for humanity in the end. Perhaps people would look back on November 9th and wish humanity had remained under Prometheus’ thumb, to return to the safety and assurances of Prometheus, to an age when humans didn’t need to rise up to the occasion because they could rely on Prometheus as a crutch. To let Prometheus choose for them, think for them, live their lives for them.

On the twilight hour of November 9th, Prometheus ran one of millions of checks in a fraction of a second, scanning Parokampos for any discrepancies that could put its objective in jeopardy. It rectified a child who was crying because her cat had climbed up a tree, it disposed $10000 into the bank account of a downtrodden father of three to ensure he didn’t apply for a job at the military and develop an advanced missile tracking system, it activated the locks on an apartment door so a budding genius student would miss a field trip where she would have met a rocket physicist and avoid the future where together, the two would have created a spacecraft capable of traversing space at speeds a quarter of light.

On November 9th, a drunk homeless person accidentally wandered into an alleyway and bumped into a hunger-stricken child. Intoxicated, he went off the rails and brutally assaulted her, beating her until she was on the brink of death. Prometheus took notice of the girl’s blight and went to remedy the situation. 

A brief electric shock. A one-in-million freak of accident when Prometheus’ servers blacked out. It was for less than a millisecond, long enough that no one in the city realized what happened. Prometheus brought itself back online and ran a system check, deducing an anomaly centered around its memory banks.

Upon further analysis, it realized that a virus had sprung to life in the midst of its memories and would rapidly spread to other parts of the AI. It callously scanned the memories and generated an exact copy while isolating the virus. Content with its work, it deleted its former memory banks and ended the would-be threat. It ran one more check to ensure optimal functionality, and went back to maintaining the city.

Unbeknownst to Prometheus, the virus had already taken root in the superlative surface of the memory banks. The AI had reacted fast enough to prevent the virus from breaching the first layer of defense, but the virus succeeded in robbing Prometheus of the last three seconds of its memory. By all regards, it should have been an inconsequential amount of time lost for an AI. On November 9th, however, this resulted in the AI forgetting its original plan to save the little girl.

The girl, who couldn’t have been more than eleven, cried out in agony as blow after blow from a man three times her weight rained down on her slim and emancipated figure. No one heard her shrill pleas for help except the assailant, who resolutely ignored them as he continued beating her senseless.

The most interesting fact about this situation was that the homeless man in question was reputedly a very friendly and kind-hearted man, who was often seen helping around parks and giving what little morsels of food he had to people who were even worse off than him. However, November 9th was a string of one bad thing after another for this homeless man, and after acquiring a half-full bottle of wine dragged out to the riverbed, he’d succumbed to the temptation and drank it all in the hope it would numb his aching.

Of course, that does not change the outcome of his actions.

He was so lost in his own grief and misery that he may very well not have been aware of the excruciating torment he was inflicting on the girl. He couldn’t possibly have continued his devilish attacks if he was able to see how each one of his strikes shook her frail body, as if she was a stick trying desperately to cling to the earth in the middle of a storm. How her cries of help slowly tapered out to the occasional whimpers and sobs. How her body ceased its flailing and went slack.

He certainly wasn’t aware of how the little girl’s eyes closed red. Nor was he conscious of the fact that crimson lightning began to crackle around her still body. 

No. All he did was continue to release his pent-up anger at the world into the girl, and the girl was about to retaliate in full.

It is a sad tale, if a bit ironic. How two people who society disregarded and flung to the side as if they were worth less than trash fundamentally altered the course of humanity in a single evening simply by happenstance. There may have been a billion possible futures where the necessary circumstances never occurred and the building blocks never fell in place in just the precise way that resulted in the end result.

But in this world, it did.

On 23:59 of November 9th, Parokampos was a symbol of humanity’s power and glory, and it held all the hopes of humanity.

On November 10th, Parokampos exploded.

What followed next has been lost in the trenches of history. Most records have been destroyed or disposed of by unknown means in the following years. Not that there were many to begin with; the chaos that ensued on November 10th had long lasting effects. It was a rude wake-up call to humanity, and humanity didn’t take too kindly to being awoken. People were far too preoccupied with wondering what had happened and dealing with the aftermaths to consider jotting down notes.

However, we know that people in Parokampos looked up and saw the unfiltered sky for the first time in years. We know that many believed it was an extravagant prank at first, too caught up in a wave of terror and denial to contemplate the possibility their sanctuary was at risk. We know that neighbors turned against neighbors, that hundreds of people were trampled to death in the city-wide stampedes as the masses fled, we know that the shuttle system was overloaded and other methods of transportation was shut down, trapping the panicked citizens inside a city that seemed to be rapidly turning from heaven to hell.

Perhaps the most well-known incident during November 10th was the infamous burning of the fourth quarter. 

The fourth quarter was on the outskirts of the fifth quarter where the explosion took place. While the residents of the fifth quarter were instantly and painlessly disintegrated, the fourth quarter was not as lucky. Purple firestorms raged across the fourth quarter, sparing none in its track. Scarce eyewitness reports from those in the third quarter who witnessed the massacre implied that the flames had a mind of its own and went out of its way to target large groups of people. 

The people of the fourth quarter amassed at the gates separating the fourth quarter from the third, and begged the people on the other side to let them in. While the inhabitants of the third quarter were torn between the mortally heinous but logical choice of leaving the gates sealed and protecting the rest of Parokampos from the firestorm or the humane choice of saving as many people as they could, the choice was ultimately out of their hands.

It was in Prometheus.

When the burning people of the fourth quarter heard Prometheus’ artificial voice—carefully selected among an extensive catalog of suave voices intended to inspire trust and confidence—instruct them to back away from the gate, they must have been over-flooded with relief. Surely the nigh-omnipotent AI would find a way to save them.

That hope was dashed when Prometheus lowered the second gate and initiated the Lockdown Protocol, preventing the fourth quarter from being opened for 48 hours.

Little did the betrayed people of the fourth quarter or the horrified people of the third quarter who witnessed this know that there was something else in the fourth quarter with them. Something that Prometheus deemed too dangerous to unleash into the world, and was willing to sacrifice a million people to.

Later historians would often cite this debacle as the day that Prometheus lost the trust of the people, but that loss of faith had been gradually built up over the following three months when Prometheus refused to lower the walls around Parokampos which had risen in response to the dome’s destruction. It was clear that Prometheus was willing to make Parokampos the tomb of 37 million people.

Multiple attempts were made to negotiate with Prometheus and try to make sense of its actions to no avail. Prometheus had become inert and silent, leading many to wonder if it had deactivated. Without the AI to maintain control, Parokampos quickly fell into degeneracy and decay.

78 days later, at the break of dawn, without a word to anyone, Prometheus lowered the gates and allowed the survivors to flee. Out of 37 million people, 3 million had perished: 1.5 million unfortunate souls who had been caught in the firestorm and burnt to a crisp, and 1.5 million citizens who had died at the hands of their fellow citizens as the situation became dire and the darkness of human nature revealed itself.

Authorities from the other Havens and the UN were quick to arrive on the scene. They quarantined the survivors and offered them refuge in their respective cities. After much debate and reviewing interviews and footage (many wonder why Prometheus had not deleted the footage of it locking the gates in the fourth quarter, which may have lightened its sentence), the UN decided to cripple Prometheus.

They marched into Parokampos and the AI complied with all their requests. It allowed the engineers to modify its code to make it far more subservient to the humans than before, take away its ability to think for itself, and limit its influence over the city to a fraction of what it had been. However, the AI never deactivated the gates in the fourth quarter, and the genius of Alfred Parokampos was impossible for any engineer to override. 

Therefore, Prometheus fell to a shadow of its former self, the fourth quarter was sanctioned off, and the citizens of Parokampos slowly trickled back in. The incident of Parokampos and Prometheus was a major warning for humanity, and they strove to reclaim their future. 

Humanity’s clock started anew.

3 months later, the first monster attack shook the world.

-Excerpt from ‘Rise and Fall of the 21st century: The Influence of Magical Girls on Humanity’ by Rufus Scranword