~ Prologue ~

All around me there were countless virtual and holographic advertisements popping up in a nauseating explosion of colors, lights, and sometimes sounds as well. On a good day, these Augmented Reality Advertisements (ARA) were directed at your needs, and they could be useful, but most of the times, they were just a spam of blunt attempts at mental manipulation. Not everyone fell for them, but among the common folk population there were already a lot who did, which made it worse when they started to tell you about those ‘great’ products like some brainwashed zealots of a suspicious cult.

If you had enough money saved in your bank account, you could just install an adblock system and be rid of them, but even then, there were still a lot that slipped through the net. Big corporations paid a lot of money to make sure their ads reached their audience unhindered.

Personally, I forgot to pay my bill, so I was now seeing the full glory of this ARA explosion. Among all that spammed junk and blunt attempts of mental manipulation, I spotted a small flyer that advertised the brand-new City 203 on Planet 9.

Located somewhere on the edge of the colonized space, far away from any dangerous zones of conflict, it offered the promise of restarting your life no matter where you came from or how poor you were. For me, it sounded too good to be true, so much that up until now I had ignored all the adverts for the other hundreds of settlements on the planet. I always thought that there had to be more behind it. Money didn’t simple fall from the sky, and the megacorporations were far too greedy to simply just offer the unfortunate souls in this Universe an entire planet where they could change their lives. There had to be a catch, that was what I thought whenever I saw those flyers.

Right now, Planet 9 was called the Adamscyon Planet after the oligarch family who owned it, but the name changed depending on who managed to buy it or take it from the previous owner. The first oligarch to colonize it was Baltoron, who owned massive tech corporations in almost every field, but then they sold it to Terravion, who lost it in a bet with Sakurakami, who had to cede it to the Osterdam after a small civil war with them. Adamscyon then acquired it as payment for helping out Osterdam in their war.

To us common folk, rather than trying to remember the planets by the names that changed every time their new owner felt like it, we remembered them by their Colonial Designation Number, which in this case, it was 9.

The same was with those various human settlements. City 203 was called the Cellurion City, but who knew how long that one was going to stick?

When I saw this flyer, I pushed away the other ads and picked it up. Up until now, I believed that such an offer was too good to be true, that there had to be more to it, however, no matter the risk, my current desire to change my life for the better was stronger.

This could be just one big fat lie, but I had enough of this rotten place… I don’t want to see my students go through something like that again… was what I told myself as I bookmarked the flyer.

Then, looking up at the sky, past the ARA, I saw the endless spires of the megalopolis that stretched all the way to the clouds and even past that. Flying cars and robots were all over the place like a swarm of bugs that tried to constantly annoy you. Everyone up there thought to themselves that they were greater than the poor folks living at the bottom, in the slums. The lottery of life was kind with them and rejected the rest. That was what they were telling everyone. That was what they were telling themselves as well whenever everything went to hell for either their friends or family.

“Sigh...” shaking my head, I closed the ad and then paid the subscription to the adblock system to get rid of all this other annoying junk.

Once the payment went through, my field of view was once again clear, and the AR ads were turned off. I then looked at the street stretching out before me which showed the reality of an impoverished society in an age where technology and resource management should have made it impossible for someone to be poor. There was garbage pilling up in the alleys because the cleaning robots didn’t pass by here every day. The sick and homeless were struggling to survive with little to nothing to cover themselves with, begging for food and searching through the trash.

Honestly, sometimes I felt as though the geniuses of this world allowed for food to get piled up in the garbage so that those who were unfortunate enough to be at the bottom of society to have something to eat. It was a pity meal filled with the arrogance and sense of superiority of those born on the higher floors. Then again, wasn’t I one of them as well?

Right now, I was just happening to be walking around this place because I had nothing better to do and returning to school only brought heartache. As a teacher in the slums, I wasn’t rich, but I wasn’t poor either. My family was average at best, and my pay was decent, if you could call it that.

Unlike other unfortunate souls around me, I just happened to have the lottery of life smile upon me once and toss me a pity prize. Still, it wasn’t all through luck. I had to go, just like everyone else, through my fair share of struggles.

As a teacher, I could teach my students about History, Philosophy, Art, and Spirituality, but I wasn’t a genius who knew the perfect method to help the beggars on the streets, and I didn’t know how to give a shelter to the homeless. The cure to poverty? Well... if not even the geniuses of 2304 AD Earth could figure it out, then how could I be so arrogant as to claim that I might?

With poverty came hopelessness, and with it, crime and desperation were added to the mix. Struck by the weight of their financial situation, even a model student could turn into a vicious gangster or just another soldier in their endless war. This was why, maybe, the idea of starting anew on another world seemed like a good idea to me.

“Maybe I’ll become like them...” I said as I looked at the beggars “O maybe... like them.” I looked up at the sky, where I knew the rich and powerful spent their days “Either way… I’ll be running away from this place…” I closed my eyes.

A new planet, a new city, a new life far away from the slums of the Black Sea Megalopolis.

Later that day, after I returned home, I applied for a job as a High School Teacher in City 203 on Planet 9. No more than two hours later, I received the approval for my application from the Recruiting AI.

I was going to start my new life soon as a teacher at the High School Resonance.

At that time, I was still naïve… and foolish. I had no idea what fate had in store for me.