You live in the USRE heartlands of Western Europe. You are part of a small commune that operates under the Office of Rice — you're a technician tasked with enforcing continental regulations regarding landscape connectivity, specialised in the ecosystemic management of hedgerows. It is a quiet life in a quiet land. Winters are harsh, with temperatures well below zero and freezing winds; summers are brutal, with days upon days of high wet bulb temperatures and dust storms carried from the Spanish deserts. Springs and autumns are gentler, but they're also the seasons of floods — humidity comes from the Atlantic in torrential rains that erase the meanders and reshape the land every odd year. Your village stands atop a hill, sheltered from rain and wind alike by ancient oaks that were planted two decades before USRE tanks arrived in Europe and broke the last remnants of the continental fortress. Yet, they are not enough. It is common for a storm to leave a few houses without a roof, for failing air conditioning to force an evacuation during a heatwave, or for a flood to destroy the bridges that lead to the valley below. Constant rebuilding is a fact of life. Nothing lasts forever in these lands. Every ten to fifteen years, a pandemic hits — it often begins with wild birds, but every so often the animal carriers can't even be identified. Gone are the days when coronaviruses and influenza could wipe out entire communities at once, now your monads can produce on-demand antibodies and casualties are rare. Yet, they hurt the community. You've lost three house cats in ten years; Josie, your neighbour, had to cull her goat herd twice in the same timeframe. A bout of coronavirus gave you a bad cough that comes back every spring, and there's chronic inflammation in your lungs.

Agriculture remains hard. Most of the topsoil has been depleted during the industrial age, and the lower valley is a ragged landscape of limestone slabs and ill-looking trees that struggle to find nutrients — your commune complements its crops with two vertical farms that surge from the forest like the marble-clad pillars of a pagan temple. They are not always enough. When the world is in turmoil — when the Indian monsoon fails, when Ukrainian wheat doesn't come, when a hypercane keeps the nuclear ships in port — you start counting beans. Eighteen years ago, all your crops died in a hailstorm; the Office of Rice had to send airships packed with emergency rations for an entire winter. Without the watchful umbrella of the USRE, you would have died a teenager, but thanks to planetary solidarity, you've never starved. You can't even say you've ever been hungry. Yet, you're smaller, less muscular and lighter than your distant ancestors. You know this because of the bones.

Oh, the bones. Every time Josie ploughs her fields, she unearths a bunch. You've become an expert at identifying them. A war ravaged the region during the early Low Age and, for a few gruelling months, the frontline passed right through your commune. You've mapped it with Josie's finds — skeletons that mostly belong to adult males, scattered amidst fossilised treelines and old trenches, missing limbs and jaws, with anti-personnel fléchettes and hand-to-hand claws buried deep in their bones. It's not rare to stumble upon a mine. You've built a robotic assistant to dispose of them, name's Cauliflower, it's the size of a small dog and beeps happily when you direct it towards an unexploded device. You're on its fifth iteration — Cauliflower I to IV have been blown to kingdom come. Now and then, Josie comes back home with gnarlier disoveries. A small, scorched skull, complete with milk teeth; an adult skeleton clutching to a housepet; a mummified corpse, found kneeling in the swamp with a bullet in the back of the head. These relics come from the post-war period, when Fortress Europe closed its borders and began murdering the undesirables. 

You try not to think too much about it. You're living on the borderlands, after all — they've always been a theater of war, from the Roman conquest to the USRE invasion. You focus on your work. You're monitoring hedgehog populations, helping Josie with the farm, corresponding with biologists from New Delhi who've developed selective pesticides against invasive knotweed, engineering new river meanders; at the end of the week, you're leaving the village for the mountains, going on long walks and visiting the radiotelescope that overlooks the valley.

One day, you take the train to the city with Josie — she needs a new tractor, and you've never been there in years, so why not? There's a new museum in town, built with funds from the Old Well, the USRE office for research and education. It is about the Earth, not as you know it, but as it was before the Low Age. Inside, you find images and artefacts from the time before the collapse. You immerse yourself in a world where pine trees aren't endangered, where winters are warm and summers are cool, where hypercanes do not even exist, where intercontinental air travel isn't a luxury, where New York, Bordeaux and Abidjan are not underwater. You see 3D models of long-extinct species, of deer and sparrows and foxes, of aspen trees and trouts and frogs. You read accounts of a planet where the Amazon isn't a dry savannah, where Great Britain isn't a freezing wasteland, where India isn't a dust bowl. You grasp a glimpse of what the Earth used to be — of a world richer in all dimensions, in all domains of human experience. A world whose killers have won. That's the sharpest truth of the early Low Age, you understand. The necrocapitalists won. They gorged themselves on the accumulated wealth of the late industrial era, pushed the world to the brink, line goes up, again and again and, when the time of collapse came, retreated to their bunkers and paradisaic enclaves to live out the rest of their days in peace. Some were punished, yes. Bunkers were breached. Space stations were shot down. Mind uploads were erased. But by and large, the necrocapitalists made it. When USRE armoured divisions pushed through Europe, two centuries ago, they found necropolises hiding underneath the ruined capitals, but they were not places of tragedy. The corpses contained within had died well into the mid-Low Age, old, plump and in good health, fed and cared for by hordes of lobotomised servants and enslaved artificial intelligences. There will be no justice. There will be no retribution.

And there is no coming back. As you make your way back home, the train humming on the track, you start feeling ill-at-ease. The oaks look like the rearguard of a long-gone army, holding on to a landscape swept away by the Low Ag, their trunks diminutive and their branches crooked compared to the giants of old. The mundane chronic diseases running in your blood feel as they're a punishment from the Earth itself. The clouds above the snowless mountains are the looming heralds of yet another freak meteorological event, of another summer afternoon that would have looked like the apocalypse for your ancestors. The silence of the woods, which only a day ago was serene music to your ears, is now but the droning whisper of a mausoleum. You see frailty everywhere — in the paucity of the underwood, in the rolling dust under the tracks, in the banks that saw a thousand floods, in the slopes that will never be snow-touched again, in the burning clarity of the morning sky, in the mountains of bones under the hills, even in Josie's smile lines, inked in her skin by salt and sunburn and chemical waste.

It will be a long summer; enter the season of grief.

Illustration by Thomas Boone for Eclipse Phase, distributed by Posthuman Studios under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-alike 3.0 Unported Licence.