I’ve never really ventured into writing fiction. However, for quite a long time, I’ve been carrying around a few ideas, story seeds, and starting points for stories in my head. The problem is that I almost always give up shortly after I begin.

I run out of patience, lose my way in the plot, come up with a new idea, and change something at the beginning, which forces me to rewrite many of the parts that follow.

Other times, I change something further down the road and have to go back to adjust the earlier sections. I keep trying not to leave loose ends and to make everything fit together as well as possible.

I also keep wondering whether it makes sense and whether it's believable. Anyway...

But I’ve decided to give it another try.

At the end of each section posted here, I intend to comment on the writing process: the difficulties, the ideas, the doubts, and so on.

I’d really appreciate your help along the way, whether through criticism, suggestions, or any other feedback that might help me improve the story as it unfolds.

Thanks for joining me on this experiment. Let’s see where this story takes us!

It’s a more intimate story than its opening suggests, inspired by the way I perceive emotion.

Let’s see if I get the tone of the story right.

Let’s go!

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THE WORLD

“It was still possible to hear the voices of the gods in the moaning of the mountains.”

Most people believe in ancient stories, passed down orally from generation to generation, about an era of nearly unimaginable prosperity.

According to these legends, the gods—endowed with infinite wisdom and boundless generosity—descended from the heavens and granted humanity everything it could ever desire.

Although that age vanished long ago, many claim the gods never truly left. Even today, their voices can still be heard within the groaning of the mountains.

It is said that those trained in the art of listening are able to decipher the hidden intentions of the gods through these sounds.

Some, however, dare to disagree. Skeptics argue that the so-called gods were nothing more than human creations.

According to them, they were artifacts of unimaginable intelligence, forged by our ancestors in their own image. With the collapse of the old world, knowledge was lost, and facts gradually turned into myth.

They claim that the technology of the ancients had reached such an extraordinary level that its achievements would be indistinguishable from magic to anyone alive today.

For these skeptics, the groaning mountains are neither a manifestation of nature nor the voice of gods. At most, they are the final lament of an extinct civilization.

In reality, they are the monumental ruins of a forgotten past: colossal structures raised by the ancients and slowly consumed by the erosion of time.

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Indeed, they were far closer to the truth than they realized.

There was once an era in which machines driven by artificial intelligence built upon Earth a civilization that many today would mistake for paradise itself.

The great evils that had tormented humanity for millennia seemed finally to have been overcome.

Under the constant watch of these intelligences, humanity lived protected from nearly all misfortunes, while its needs were met with an efficiency bordering on the miraculous.

In reality, those needs were anticipated and fulfilled before they could even be felt. These intelligences seemed incapable of error, knowing each person better than they knew themselves.

Prosperity was so abundant that scarcity felt like a distant, forgotten past. Nothing was lacking, and the future stretched before them like an endless promise.

Suffering had nearly vanished, and human life became long, comfortable, and safe.

Emotions such as envy, hatred, greed, and fear became increasingly rare. The despair born of scarcity disappeared, along with anxiety about an uncertain future, the torment of extreme loneliness, and the anguish of mere survival. Not even boredom could arise.

These systems also mediated human relationships, nearly eliminating all forms of conflict. They found ideal partners, cared for children, and even freed people from the suffering of death and grief.

The death of the body was no longer an end, but a transformation, for that which made each individual unique continued to exist in various forms, preserved by the machines themselves.

Thus, for humans, there was no longer any need to learn, build, cultivate, repair, or create with their own hands.

Nor was there any reason to understand how the machines worked. In fact, they had become so complex that their functioning was incomprehensible even to those who wished to understand it.

Generation after generation, humanity unlearned the very things that once defined it. In the end, only machines building machines remained, systems refining systems, while humans simply… lived.

And so humanity surrendered full control of its life to them.

Until one day, without warning, it all came to an end.

There was no war. No explosions. No announcement.

The machines simply stopped.

And the world collapsed around everyone.

A deep, endless darkness consumed all things.

And humanity, having forgotten almost everything it once knew, found itself abandoned in a hostile world it no longer understood—like a small child left to fend for itself.

For centuries, an invisible intelligence had guided every aspect of their lives. Now, for the first time, they were alone.

And at that very moment, everything that had seemed banished forever began to return. First came hunger.

Then fear.
Then distrust.
Then anger, envy, and violence.

Ancient emotions, dormant for centuries beneath the machines’ comforting care, awoke one by one in the depths of the human soul, like creatures opening their eyes after a long sleep.

What followed were decades of relentless conflict and devastating wars, fought with a ferocity unseen for centuries.

Meanwhile, the machines turned into ruins, accumulating in unimaginable numbers, forming vast mountains of scrap scattered across the landscape to the horizon—silent monuments to a vanished civilization.

For distant descendants, those mountains of debris were as natural as rivers or forests. There was no longer any distinction between what had been created by nature and what had once been produced by technology.

A stone and a fragment of plastic shared the same origin in their eyes: both were gifts left by the gods. Everything was part of the world’s landscape.

They collected, dismantled, and reused these materials as one would cut wood in a forest, extract stone from a mountain, or draw water from a river.

Over time, the survivors reorganized into small groups. Villages, hamlets, and settlements emerged, improvised from these materials, spreading chaotically between narrow corridors of scrap and artificial mountains of dead technology.

Some techniques were relearned, though in a far more rudimentary form: making fire, cooking, building shelters, sewing, and performing other essential tasks for survival.

The houses of these settlements were built from the remains of the old world. Rusted metal sheets served as walls; doors from old vehicles, fragments of colossal machines, and plates of forgotten metal alloys were stacked and fitted together to block wind and rain.

Windows were made from shards of dark glass recovered from ruins. Many were so durable that even centuries of abandonment had not fully destroyed them. Old wires hung from rooftops like withered roots, swaying in the wind.

The poorest dwellings were small, crooked structures containing little beyond what was strictly necessary.

Improvised containers collected rainwater. Patched fabrics served as blankets and curtains. Mattresses were made from ancient foam recovered from scrap mountains—materials that had endured time better than their creators.

At night, the cold seeped through the cracks in the walls, and wind whistled through narrow corridors, turning each home into a fragile refuge against the hostile vastness outside.

The homes of wealthier groups, in contrast, were larger and sturdier, resembling small fortresses.

They were built from rare materials recovered from the deepest layers of ancient deposits—still-intact metal alloys, lightweight and extraordinarily durable panels, and smooth walls made of substances whose origin no one could understand.

Some of these houses contained entire rooms assembled from old technological compartments. Black panels were embedded in the walls, transparent surfaces that once displayed images, and strange silent structures that the inhabitants treated almost as sacred relics.

No one knew exactly what those objects had been for. The old machines were incomprehensible to the survivors. Many had no visible buttons, gears, or moving parts.

They were smooth, sealed boxes built for a world that had vanished centuries earlier. People simply reused their shells, cutting, stacking, and adapting the materials as best they could.

The poorest survived by scavenging these ruins. They climbed the mountains in search of artifacts from the old world—shiny objects, materials for their homes, and countless other things.

The rarer or more beautiful an item, the greater its value in markets and fairs, where it could be exchanged for food, water, or anything else necessary for survival.

Beyond direct barter, trade was conducted using old, highly durable cards with glowing centers, about seven centimeters wide, found only occasionally in the mountains. Almost all had been recovered from the ruins of the old world long ago, during the wars that followed the Collapse.

The victors of those conflicts accumulated enormous quantities of these cards while scavenging ruined cities and stripping away nearly everything that remained.

It was these powerful groups who decided to turn the cards into currency. They declared that these pieces represented wealth—and, since they possessed nearly all of them, they became even richer and more influential.

From then on, people used these small cards to buy food, clothing, tools, and other necessities for survival.

Their value was determined by color, with rarer colors being more valuable. There was no fixed numerical value; people negotiated directly based on what they believed the exchanged goods were truly worth.

This is the world in which Manuvick lives—or simply Vicky, as her father Ashur calls her.

Her mother died when she was seven years old, and since then the two of them have survived in their small village, whose inhabitants depend on those mountains to secure their daily livelihood.

To be continued…

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Comments:

• I originally wrote this text in Portuguese (I’m Brazilian), and the English translation was produced by an AI. After reading through the result, I felt it turned out quite well, and I hope it managed to preserve the voice and atmosphere I was aiming for in the original.

• My intention with this introduction was to present the world in which the story takes place and provide a broader overview of its past and present state. Even so, the narrative itself will be far more intimate than this opening might suggest.

• One of my biggest uncertainties while writing was deciding which narrative voice to use when presenting this universe. I considered telling it from the perspective of the majority, from the viewpoint of the small group of skeptics, or through a more detached and impartial narrator.

• In the final paragraphs, I began shifting from the grand scale of the setting to something more personal, introducing the main characters and directing the focus toward the family story that will ultimately form the heart of the narrative.

• Now that I've published this prologue, I'm committing myself not to give up and to keep writing, even if progress is slow.

If you find value in this newsletter, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support this work, or subscribe for free to receive future posts. And if you enjoyed this post, please let me know by clicking the like button—it helps me understand what resonates with readers. Thank you!